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To: AmericanMade1776
He wrote a very readable intro to logical thinking some years ago that it well worth picking up. I'm a bit stunned by this article and intend to research his current position I just find this hard to swallow.
10 posted on 12/11/2004 6:37:26 AM PST by Dysart
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To: Dysart
He wrote a very readable intro to logical thinking some years ago that it well worth picking up. I'm a bit stunned by this article and intend to research his current position I just find this hard to swallow.

This 'conversion' appears to be a lot of wishful thinking on someone's part. I did some searching online and found a piece by him at:

http://www.thewonderoftheworld.com/Sections1-article227-page1.html

Which states:

First, a substantial case of agreement. Richard Dawkins has famously asserted that “Natural selection … the blind automatic process which Darwin has discovered … we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life.” Against that claim I pointed out, after quoting a significant sentence from the fourteenth and final chapter of The Origin of Species, that one place where, until a satisfactory naturalistic explanation has been developed, there would appear to be room for an Argument to Design is at the first emergence of living from non-living matter. And, unless that first living matter already possessed the capacity to reproduce itself genetically, there will still be room for a second argument to Design until a satisfactory explanation is found for its acquisition of that capacity. You have in your book deployed abundant evidence indicating that it is likely to be a very long time before such naturalistic explanations are developed, if indeed there ever could be.

Our disagreements begin with any shift from the God of natural theology to the God of a Revelation. For the writings of Aristotle, which ultimately supplied Aquinas with most of his arguments for the existence of his God, contain no definition of the word ‘God’ and no concept of an omniscient and omnipotent personal Being unceasingly observing human thought and human conduct, much less a concept of a Being demanding our obedience and threatening us with an eternity of extreme torture for what He insists on perceiving as our unnecessitated and unforgiven disobedience. So the five Aristotelian arguments which Aquinas famously offered as proofs of the existence of the Christian God as surely today more appropriately to be seen as arguments for the existence of a Spinozistic or Deistic ‘God of Nature’ who or which leaves Nature and its creatures (including its human creatures) entirely to their own devices. The nearest which Aristotle ever came to the God or Gods of Christianity or Islam was when in the Nicomachean Ethics (X, viii, 8) he argued that ‘if as is generally believed, [not God but] the gods exercise some superintendence over human affairs, it is reasonable to suppose that they take pleasure in that part of man which is best and most akin to themselves, namely the intellect, and that they recompense with their favours those who esteem and honour this most because these care for the things dear to themselves and act rightly and nobly. Now it is clear that all these attributes belong most of all to the wise man. He therefore is most beloved by the gods, and, if so, he is naturally most happy.”

He does not appear to be embracing religion at all, on the contrary, he is simply pointing out the obvious, that we don't know everything about the world and until we do, we should not make up things to support our case.

37 posted on 12/11/2004 7:10:41 AM PST by killjoy (My kid is the bomb at Islam Elementary!)
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