Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The Process of Non-Thinking: Dr. Richard Dawkins

This is some of the comments I gathered from a documentary of Dr. Richard Dawkins titled " The Root of All Evil". These are being documented here as I have some free time to write about what Dr. Dawkins thinks about this topic.

There seems to be a profound contradiction between science and religious beliefs. The idea of divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe. The assault on the senses (by faith based philosophies) appeals to humans and encourages them not to think, not to doubt, not to probe. Its partly due to the feeling of group solidarity that gives implicit reinforcement to the common thought that might be beyond reason.

Isn't bracing truth better than false hope? This of course is the epitaph of this documentary.

The author says people lean on faith as a crutch as a support mechanism. He mentions that as science and faith are deeply opposed they cannot possibly live together. I am not sure of this past statement, I have seen many scientists who have their respective faith-based belief systems and they seem to have some equilibrium possible between these apparent diametric paradigms.

Science is a process on looking for logical proofs and reasons to draw conclusions, faith by definition demands the suspensions of critical thinking faculty. A scientist is constantly asking questions and being skeptical about his findings and scientific models. Faith is in turn, about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time as in traditions. Faith thrives on unsolved mystery.

Today we know that the Sun instead of being an alpha male Sun male-god on a chariot is indeed a nuclear reactor producing heat and light. In past times humanity had no choice but to resort to unexplained supernatural entities.

Every body needs at the center of their life, some sense of the meaning of their existence (life). Do people of intellect have arrogance about their rational thinking? or is it the way they are perceived by others who don't want to change their belief-system? Its an interesting thing to think about.

Betrand Russell's analogy: there are a number of things one cannot disprove, does it mean that they exist?

Imagine there is a tea pot in an orbit around the sun, one cannot disapprove the existence of this pot around the sun because our current equipments are not sensitive enough to detect the presence of this small tea pot. Nobody but a lunatic might say that he/she might believe in the tea pot because they are not able to disprove its presence. Now suppose that every teacher, and the surrounding elders, politicians, etc have faith in this tea pot. And that the stories of the tea pot have been handed down from the generations, there are written documents talking about the existence of the tea pot. In such times if one disagrees to the existence of the tea pot can be thought to be an eccentric. There are infinite number of such things like tea pots that we can not disprove at the current time, does it mean that they can be perceived and believed to be existing?



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