Quote from: Leapfrogger on October 24, 2012, 12:53 amQuote from: uuSanders on October 22, 2012, 01:10 pmHe's a biologist, but he's not very interesting as a philosopher or physical theorist.Quote from: chil on October 23, 2012, 05:34 pmAnd worse, for someone puts rationality before everything, he makes a lot of fallacies.Ah, glad you guys could finally make it. ;)You hear it all the time: "Dawkins is a philosophical philistine who should stick to biology." * There's a name for this kind of attitude:QuoteNon-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is the view advocated by Stephen Jay Gould that science and religion each have "a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority," and these two domains do not overlap.Gould is, of course, wrong. The domains do overlap. Scientific ideas have philosophical/religious implications.While domains do overlap all the time (it's not like the universe is actually constructed from a field of discrete mathematics), it is also true that "asshats" from one field will mouthflap away on topics they haven't an inkling about. Just because one guy is good with, say, mathematics, doesn't make him a good chemist or historian, and visa versa. Fields of academia in particular tend to be highly compartmentalized, expertise in one area doesn't predicate expertise in another no matter how confident the speaker sounds.A classic example of this is economics and sociology. Sociologists are usually quite confident they know something about economics. They are almost always wrong. This is for the above reason, but it is also that sociologists in particular have an especially strong illusion of competence in this field from a political perspective, when people's collective opinions don't actually have a whole lot to do with economics, it's literally a different level of organization, they are living in the moment when what they are bladdering about takes place over decades or even centuries. It's like biologists finding political repercussions they dislike from the rules of chemistry, it's actually lubriciously inane, it just doesn't sound like it because of scientism. e.g. the way a lot of people know a whole lot of tech jargon from using a particular corporations products e.g. Mac, but don't get the fundamentals of tech.However I don't think NOMA is quite the same thing because religion does (or did) make certain claims that are scientific in nature. e.g. the age of the universe or earth in some cases. I think people today sometimes forget that Science used to be called "Natural Philosophy", and was in fact part and parcel of "Religion" several centuries ago. All the major scientists in history were religious, being very religious was (for some genuine individualists, it still is) a higher motivation to learn what we today call Science. People laugh at the 'household gods' of the Greeks/Romans and others, e.g. the god of wine, dancing etc. But I think we're forgetting that such 'household gods' have their roots in concepts that today are not considered religious by either scientists and/or the faithful. A 'house god' was a particular way of thinking about the world, not necessarily religious in the sense we think of it today. It would be more accurate to think of some gods, I'm thinking of finance, as being mascots or corporate logos for a way of seeing the world, rather than literal metaphysical entities that people really believed existed. Consider the idea of the 'Market' or 'State' in this context. Are these gods worshiped? In a way, yes they are. So my point is that many seemingly metaphysical concepts were actually rooted in practical memeplexes, and thus what is newer is the idea that NOMA exists. That religion is completely separated from science or philosophy is a very new idea, not an ancient one. People seem to think our ancestors were complete godbothering twits with the simplest possible frame of reference. Actually that's not quite right... we have probably about the same per capita amount of twits per hectare as we always have done...As long as people, yano (word theft from Limet), think, we should be happy. It's anybody who accepts the status quo overly so that concerns me, and that can be any ideological framework, including my own which is capitalism, which is why I have read the works of Veblen and Marx as well as Smith and Hayek. It is similar to the deal where you purchase a copy of the New York Times and the Economist, and compare and contrast, that is a way to aggregate more meaningful information, that is what it really means to be a skeptic. You're not necessarily a skeptic just because you think religion is dumb. Being an skeptic is an activity, not a fixed position.