I hear he’s quite a different guy in his books. So which Dawkins is the real one?

Dawkins games the question in his favor. And he is entirely too convinced of how scienterrific he is.

For a counter to Dawkins, see Mary Midgley on how he talks out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to science and religion. (E.O. Wilson too.)

Comte and other early social scientists assumed that human behavior must obey laws just as strict as Newton’s laws of motion, and that if we could discover them, we could eliminate moral evils — in exactly the same way that medical scientists were then discovering how diseases worked and were eliminating much of the physical suffering which had always been an inevitable part of the human condition.

http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/comte.html

It seems in a lot of ways that Dawkins may consider himself an heir to some of this type of thinking. In addition to neurotheology which I mentioned above, I also realize that memetics, sort of the brainchild of Dawkins, is another attempt to catalog and replicate interior states.

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/06/15/neurotheology/
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005...6/26/persingers-neurotheology-busted/

As you’re pointing towards, we are getting closer and closer to being able to “objectively” catalog and replicate interior states - which I think will utlimately be the crux of this issue.

One other thought based on a comment above. Somebody said something about how religion doesn’t use the scientific method. Ken Wilber had some interesting points on that - saying in essence that “the best” type of religion DOES make use of the scientific method. I expanded on it a little here:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005.../27/evangelism-the-scientific-method/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6782237207349223370

hehehe

The Scientific Method is not relgious. It is a ritual that requires the premise to be defined and the outcome to be hypothesized when variables change, and then proven correct or incorrect based on experimentation. No faith required.

Scientists, however, are required to possess esoteric knowledge. My mathematics stops at High Algebra: Anything else looks like magic. I know as much about the inner workings of a star as I do about summoning a demon (layman’s knowledge, probably incorrect). This certainly qualifies them as some sort of gnostic.

I could learn about the insides of a star, just as I could learn about summoning a demon, but without the background knowledge (chemistry, physics, mathematics) I’m lost, and I have to take the scientists word ON FAITH.

That’s where scientism comes in. I think many of the people claiming “a scientific worldview” and writing articles don’t actually know that much about how science works. I’ve tried to wrap my head around calculus, quantum mechanics, and certain other terribly difficult scientific topics, and I just don’t get it. But I understand that my computer processes electrical charges in such a way, due to the properties of materials that make up the computer, to allow me to talk to you. However, I couldn’t DO it, and if it breaks, I have to go to a specialist. I take it on faith that they know what they are doing.

The Scientific Method is great for hard, material, physical, mathametically modeled things. It gets less good at the extremes (Beginning, end) and when dealing with, for lack of a better term, ’squishy sciences’ like economics, psychology, or sociology.

That said: To a true scientist, science is not religious, and science will lead them where the scientific method leads them. To the layperson, science might as well be magic, beyond a certain point. And many people who aren’t scientists cling to it with a relgious fevor I rarely see except in Fundamentalists. Dawkins may be a scientist and understand the ‘fact’ of evolution, but I have to take it on faith.

And science too relies on esoteric internal states which can’t really be completely shared with others: the processes of mentation, acting on hunches, deeply thinking about ideas, the act of discovery - just to name a few.

This argument seems to be deliberately missing the point. Sure, many of the most important scientists in history were nutjob occultists who applied their crazy experiences to scientific advancement, but it’s the output -> independently replicable and independently verifiable results - that is the sole concern and sole domain and sole defining factor of science. None of those esoteric mental states really matter, from within the analysis of the domain, because they are not available to review and replication by another under the same set of guidelines that define the domain.

The only way I ever see this changing is if there is developed a technological device for the recording and playback of subjective experience, probably requiring complete real-time simulation of an entire brain. Hell, that may not even cut it.

This leads to a funny paradox though: to be a brilliantly innovative scientist (as opposed to just a technically proficient one) one might have to have a mind blowingly transcendent experience of one sort or another; however they had better remember to leave it the fuck out of their thesis papers and peer reviewed journals!

And in the case of religion just as in the case of science, those internal states give narrative explanation to those outward external data which are available to all.

That same nutjob occultist could have instead applied their visionary experiences into religion, but once again, that’s just a different output or application. And, in my opinion it’s pretty silly to compare the narrative explanations of religion to that of science. Which one made our remote electronic conversation today possible?

Probably both, actually, if you look at the sociological guidance of organized religion throughout history, but my point is, they operate in entirely separate, though not mutually exclusive domains. Personally, I’d add the third domain of spiritually, between them, overlapping both slightly. Most religion is emphatically not spiritual, just as most science isn’t either.

I think this third domain is actually what you speak of.

Science doesn’t have to be religious. Come to think of it, religion doesn’t have to be religious either. One group practices idolatry and calls it religion. Another group practices idolatry and calls it science.