Clearly I have been letting my annoyance get in the way of clarity. Bad Liz, no biscuit!
What I meant was that -- and I don't know if this is what Dawkins is trying to say, but it is how he has come off to me, so it is not what he means, he has also failed at clarity -- if you deny the possibility of other ways of experiencing and making sense of the world, you are limiting yourself. And while science can show us all sorts of connections and the scope of the universe, science cannot tell us how to react to that knowledge. Science is not a moral system. So what you are doing when you react to the amazingness of the universe is having a religious response. Granted, it's not a deistic response -- I would call it pantheist or animist, actually; a reverence and respect for all things around you, as if they are all important and all connected, whether you couch that connection in terms of spirits or atoms -- but it is still a religious response.
Dawkins seems (to me) to miss that completely. He talks about religion in terms of God-or-no-God and religion-as-authority, which is, to my mind, utterly missing the point.
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Date: 2009-10-28 05:57 pm (UTC)What I meant was that -- and I don't know if this is what Dawkins is trying to say, but it is how he has come off to me, so it is not what he means, he has also failed at clarity -- if you deny the possibility of other ways of experiencing and making sense of the world, you are limiting yourself. And while science can show us all sorts of connections and the scope of the universe, science cannot tell us how to react to that knowledge. Science is not a moral system. So what you are doing when you react to the amazingness of the universe is having a religious response. Granted, it's not a deistic response -- I would call it pantheist or animist, actually; a reverence and respect for all things around you, as if they are all important and all connected, whether you couch that connection in terms of spirits or atoms -- but it is still a religious response.
Dawkins seems (to me) to miss that completely. He talks about religion in terms of God-or-no-God and religion-as-authority, which is, to my mind, utterly missing the point.