malcd1 wrote:
I quite like Dawkins. Speaks an awful lot of sense.
Bacon however gets right on my nerves.
Dawkins's "sense" is scientific reductionism – a type of faith in itself. A scientist with intellectual integrity is a scientist who ackowledges that a vast portion of the human experience cannot, and will never be, reduced to scientific explanation. Erwin Schrödinger, for example, who won the Nobel prize for physics, and compared to whom the likes of Dawkins are exposed as the hacks they are.
Schrödinger:
“Let us assume that in a particular case you eventually observe several efferent bundles of pulsating currents, which issue from the brain and through long cellular protrusions (motor nerve fibres), are conducted to certain muscles of the arm, which, as a consequence, tends a hesitating, trembling hand to bid you farewell—for a long, heart-rending separation; at the same time you may find that some other pulsating bundles produce a certain glandular secretion so as to veil the poor sad eye with a crape of tears. But nowhere along this way from the eye through the central organ to the arm muscles and the tear glands—
nowhere, you may be sure, however far physiology advances, will you ever meet the personality, will you ever meet the dire pain, the bewildered worry within the soul..."
I have no religion myself—at least no religion that can be placed within a particular creed—but I despise the kind of smug atheism represented by Dawkins et al.