“Enemies Of Reason” (1)
I’m a fan of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He talks immense sense and is not afraid to challenge arrant nonsense. In January 2006, I watched his television programmes entitled “The Root Of All Evil?” when he attacked the falsity of religious belief [my blog posting here]. More recently, I read his book “The God Delusion” [my review here].
So this evening I really enjoyed the first of the two-part series on Channel Four television entitled “Enemies Of Reason”. In this programme, he demolished the causes of such pseudo-science as astrology, card reading, clairvoyance and dowsing. This was a calmer, less arrogant, but no less incisive Dawkins than we saw in his earlier series and even more impressive and convincing for it.
My own modest contribution to this debate can be found in my web site essay on “The Reason For Truth”.
August 15th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Richard Hawkins comes from a 5 sense perception. You need to open your 6th sense to understand anything that is beyond what he calls reason. Of course there are lots of fraudsters, then you get this in every area of life.
Once upon a time people didn’t believe in bacteria because they couldn’t see it, we had to use our creativity to find a machine to show us. Once upon a time we believed that the world was flat, till people sailed around it to see it was round and now of course we have pictures from outer space to show us the world is round.
People can have all the evidence of something put in front of them and they still will not believe it.There are groups of people that still believe the world is flat and people that believe the landing on the moon was staged. I know from my own experiences there is much more then our 5 sense perceive, as I have had the wonderful experience of beyond. If you are not open you will not see, but hey, one day we will pass away from this world and then we may wake up to what is really real
We are all hypnotized by 3 dimensional reality, thinking this is all there is. When really this is one big dream we all agreed to participate in, then we have to leave the dream, now that is for certain. If something is vibrating faster then the speed of light then we won’t see it, now would we? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Mr. Dawkins should read more quantum physics and stretch his wee mind a bit. time to think out of the box and go right brained. And isn’t it so that we only use a portion of our brains anyway?
There is a wealth of evidence for more then meets the eye, if we are open we would first see then experience the wonder of this big mystery called life.
I might just add too how he uses the word ‘enemy’ How sad that us humans have to always have enemies? I think perhaps Richard Dawkins is afraid of things he doesn’t understand so he attacks them. It’s a narrow world and a boring one, when all you believe in is what your 5 senses will tell you.
To use our imagination and stretch our thinking makes for great minds, like Albert Einstein, who understood the universe and how it works. How we all are co-creators of all that happens good and bad. All great minds knew this, shame RD doesn’t.
LL
August 16th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Laura has e-mailed me with further thoughts and agreed that I can post them on this blog to stimulate discussion:
Hi Roger,
I quickly read your essay on Truth,
I’ll re-read it later and digest it…but I had to write and say to you, as a ‘truth’ seeker all my life that,
The only truth as I believe it to be is “we create our own reality” and altogether we create the world we live in on Earth.
Everything is from the inside, the outside reflects this.
This world we have created is an illusion that we all ‘buy into’ when we come here.
The amnesia of where we came from makes for our curiosity on who we are , where we came from and where we are going after death.
As I mentioned in my blog, we cannot and never will, understand things of paranormal nature from ‘personalty’ 5 sensory perception.
So we need to come from 6th sensory perception, the third eye as some people call it.
I mean, who are ‘you’ Roger? That is where the truth starts. It’s never outside of you.
Are you one personality, or many, fighting for attention in your mind. The skeptic part of you is winning, finding, as you would, all sorts of books, other people to support your thinking.
The personality is multidimensional. Many parts. And when a person is mentally ill it’s fragmented, the parts lose contact with each other.
But who is the real you? It’s the part of us that is bigger/higher/ well, it’s our soul.
You may ask, but what is the soul?
For me, it’s the part that comes from the heart. In fact it’s ‘known’ by scientists that the heart has cells that are like the brain.
It processes thought like the brain.
The challenge for me, and all people all a new path of being, is to balance the left and right brain and come from the heart too.
I’ve had too many experiences of other dimensional stuff to go back to any cynicism.
I wouldn’t ever expect anyone to believe in anything unless they ‘felt’ it deep within them or indeed experienced it.
It would be like trying to tell a blind man what the colour orange is.
To understand God, is to experience the God energy. In fact ‘energy’ is all we are. Quantum physics explains a lot. The ‘space’ that seems empty, is not empty. how we are all connected. I don’t know if God is a Godhead, all I know is I’ve experienced the feeling of the god-energy in my mediations. and yes, meditation is one way to find the depths of your being, your soul, not the ego part of you that wants to reason and convince everyone else your thinking. I don’t mind that people are non- believers like yourself. The reason I’m writing to you, was I ‘felt’ I would like to share my views and understanding of truth and the world.
For every one person that is lifted up to 4th dimensional thinking the whole world benefits.
It’s the 100 hundredth monkey phenomenon.
How do you think we arrived at the internet? This is a direct reflection of how we are as humans. All connected. That is how telepathy works.
As for homeopathy, it is pure energy, that matches the energy of the person. It has worked for me, and before you go into ‘placebo effect’, how does that work for animals?
And many farmers and pet owners, including myself use this method to great effect.
The world IS changing. And a sweep of new consciousness is coming to light. Some people will resist this, as change is scary and want to stay with old systems, other people will be more enlightened and grow in the evolution.
Science IS catching up with the new consciousness, There are many books on Quantum Physics and people that have written on their own experiences of paranormal. Of course there are fakes, there always will be. But for every one fake there is a genuine person who has something to say about their experiences that is valid.
As for Astrology, in the west people think of it as a snippet in the paper saying what your day is going to be like. The ‘Science’ of astrology has been diluted and used as a flakey tool for gullible people to believe in.
But if you look for the history, you will find where it started and the validity of it.
If you are interested, I would recommend the book The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life. by Drunvalo Melchizedek
IBS 1891824171
This is written by a man who, is a physician, and a mystic, a nice combination of the 2 sides of the brain in harmony.
The maths are hard going for me, but its full of interesting and well researched stuff.
There is everything in this book, from sacred geometry, astronomy etc.
I’m sure you will love it.
And to sum up, yes, truth is a perception, there are some universal truths, but as humans from each and everyone of us we are co-creators of our immediate world and the world we share with others.
This is what I believe to date, unless something in me shows me other.
August 17th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Generally, I like what Dawkins says. He is doing an important job in challenging muddle-headed thinking. However, I find his confrontational style unfortunate.
At one point he called astrology ‘irrational nonsense’ (or words to that effect) before he had shown the experiment which (rather weakly) demonstrated it’s dubious accuracy.
Titles like “The Root of All Evil” and “The Enemies of Reason” are inflammatory. People under attack tend to rush to the barricades, not engage in calm dialogue.
I’d like him to take a much more “dispassionate scientist open to being convinced” approach – which he has at least moved nearer to since his last TV outing.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I’m with you on this Roger. Richard Dawkins may not to be to everybody’s taste, but this programme was I felt very balanced, and gave plenty of space for the practitioners he was confronting to air their side. Such arguments as they tried universally failed to stand up. I’m looking forward to the second part.
The distinguishing view on the part of rationalists is they simply require one thing: evidence. From that we can draw conclusions and refine theories. New evidence is always welcome, and new theories can be produced which improve on existing theories. Evolution. Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. Quantum mechanics. Standing on the shoulder of giants.
Where these ‘alternatives’ universally fail is that they can neither produce verifiable evidence, or withstand sceptical scrutiny.
Your other commentator seems to be convinced in her own mind. I suspect she was a fan of ‘What the bleep is it all about’, and other such twaddle that make a ham-fist attempt to bring new theories into half-baked world views that simply – like all religions – don’t stand up to scrutiny. That oh-so-ridiculous ‘homeopathy works in animals’ argument is tired. I’d suggest she take a look at a retort to this frequently quoted tosh.
All that these various explanations need to do – be it religion, dowsing, homeopathy or astrology – is put forward their ideas in peer reviewed scientific papers. This hasn’t happened yet. Indeed, your other commentator seems content to move the goal posts and talk about ‘experiences’ and ‘what we can’t understand’. It’s a frankly childish argument resorted to by so many of religious people that there’s “something that we can’t measure, that science can’t observe”. It’s the God of Gaps all over again. Enough already!
Let’s go right back to basics. Richard Dawkins started the programme with a list of the achievements of science that I think are beyond doubt. It’s an impressive list. We can put men on the moon, send robots to other planets, detect distant planets, we’ve cured many horrific diseases, we can fly around the world in hours when it used to take months, we have a higher standard of living, and are able to communicate instantly with people on every continent, and we understand more about how the universe works than we have ever done before.
What has religion achieved beyond a few delusional and angry fools, and a far large number of similarly deluded people who seem to want to put it all on the hands on some complex and mythical sky-fairy? Nothing.
It’s game, set and match as far as I’m concerned. Put it together with a Humanist outlook on life, and I really don’t know why so many people still seem keen to rely on ideas that haven’t moved on in any meaningful way in thousands of years.
August 17th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Science requires both creative thinking (“outside the box”) to generate new hypotheses for understanding the world, and critical analysis to decide which hypotheses fit. Einstein had imagination, but without the ability to critically evaluate the theories he generated he wouldn’t have been a great scientist. Lots of very creative theories have bitten the dust because the evidence didn’t support them; e.g. the phlogiston theory of burning. Another way in which a highly creative theory can fail is if the evidence suggests the phenomenon it seeks to explain does not actually exist! If homeopathy doesn’t work (better than placebo), there’s no need to develop a theory of how water can retain a “memory”. (Re homeopathy working on animals, as far as I’m aware this is not the case. Ms Lian’s dismissal of an animal placebo effect shows a distinct lack of imagination!)
It’s not true that we only use a portion of our brains; see e.g. The Ten-Percent Myth.
Another common misconception is that quantum theory somehow “shows” (or suggests) that paranormal phenomena actually exist!
November 22nd, 2007 at 10:23 pm
er Nick,
there is the whole thing of a ‘pattern’ imprint that is in the homeopathic remedies.
If you delve into physics and sacred geometry you will find everything has a pattern.
this is how the remedies work. The pattern fits the persons pattern of being/thought /emotions and then like treats like, and IF the remedy is the right one and right dose then there is a chance for the body to heal on all levels.
well, the proof is in the pudding…it works so well for thousands and placibo is a lame theory, you can use this with orthodox meds as well.
Anout the animal placibo, very funny…animals may have some imagination? not sure about this one, but they are very ltd. and work on a collective consciousness.
Actually we have this as well, BUT most of us are too into our egos to tap into it..
LL