a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
johnnyFive  ·  2156 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Ignominy of Hitchens’ “Razor” Failure

This isn't really anything new. There's a cottage industry of people like Hitchens or Dawkins who write nonsense about religion to the enjoyment of neckbeards everywhere. After all, it's easy to take something you don't understand and then write about it for a target audience made up of people who also don't understand it. It's also easy to refute something when you create your opponent for the sole purpose of refuting it.

    [Hitchens' Razor] is presented as universal, and it is taken that way by Atheists who intend to deny any responsibility for giving rational reasons for their rejection of theist evidence (either disciplined deduction, or material empirical evidence).

My favorite discussion of this comes from this review of Dawkins' The God Delusion by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It begins:

    Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.