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The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.
The Magic of Reality
for the iPad
Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
Clarity. I see.
Though this guy clearly doesn't.
He makes a big fuss of separating out various ways of talking about ethics, and says it is important to get them straight, but then goes right on to confuse meta-ethics with metaphysics.
He seems to be utterly incapable of realising that other people base their ethics on something other than his stupid divine fiat model. To him morality is a metaphysical absolute, a real property of the universe, and he can't go beyond that. If someone says it's something else (like, for instance, an intersubjective social coping strategy) then he hears that as "it isn't anything at all". What all this boils down to is "Richard Dawkins doesn't have the same beliefs about where human morality comes from as I do, therefore he has no justification for being moral".
What any rational person would do at this point is to say "well we disagree on where human morality and ethics comes from, why don't we look for some evidence that might settle the issue". But of course he knows full well that his posiiton is woefully unevidenced, so that option is out.
Permalink Tue, 22 May 2012 10:30:22 UTC | #942791