Richard Dawkins and stuff

[Wings of Fire]

Yeah, that's the good atheist stance. I didn't say it was wrong, just the reasons a lot of people have for accepting atheism are flawed.

I'm agnostic by nature.

[Bullet Magnet]

Oh yes, I know many atheists who have stupid reasons. I consider them a different group (ie those without the adjectives "rational skeptic" attatched). I often find that I care more about someone's reasons for their beliefs than what their beliefs actually are.

But I am also agnostic. Atheist and agnostic are not two different points on a scale of belief (as commonly believed) but answers to two different questions. Atheism is about belief, agnosticism is about knowledge.

[Wings of Fire]

We believe in the past, other people and enduring physical objects, these are neither analytical truths nor empirically falsifiable. We can't 'know' these exist.

[Bullet Magnet]

When you break everything down philosophically, reality becomes impotent, and so does consciousness (this makes me wonder about philosophy's usefulness, at least when it treads this path). Of course, what you say is true. But it is neither useful nor practical to the understanding of anything*. It reminds me of Justnowism.


*Except in understanding the senses and how the brain uses such inputs. We know that the world we see, hear, taste, feel, smell etcetera is not what the world is like. Our brains and senses don't give us an accurate perception of the universe, but they do give us a useful one.

[Wings of Fire]

Yeah, pure philosophy is the second* most useless discipline in the world. The point of Philosophy, I believe is to stand outside the self imposed boundaries of accepted beliefs and knowledge and criticize it from an outside viewpoint, that's why you have all these sub-disciplines of it. Up the Marxists!

*Pure Mathematics beats it by miles.

[Bullet Magnet]

I must take up opposition to your quip that pure mathematics is more useless than philosophy. I am reminded of a pure mathematician whose ambition was to devise a theorem that was completely and utterly useless. "But always some tiresome physicist would come along and find a use for it." He may or may not have been G. H. Hardy, nevertheless, this was an ambition he shared.