philosopher wrote: ↑Tue Aug 21, 2018 3:08 pm
The world's most briliant minds like Richard Dawkins (he's my equivalant of a prophet, had it not been for the fact that prophets are entirely a religious thing) says free will is an illusion. Why don't you agree with him?
Two good reasons. One, he's far outside the limited area in which he has any competence at all to speak. He's a biologist of some modest note. He calls himself a "communicator," not a researcher. More importantly, he's not an ethicist, not a philosopher, and no kind of theologian at all; yet he deigns to speak in those areas as if he were some kind of expert. His extreme limitations become manifest every time he does. Two, he's just wrong. And that's the big one.
Additionally, I note that his "brilliance" has gotten him into some interesting jackpots lately.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... reputation
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 89396.html
I'd like to hear Dawkins explain why he achieved his tremendous intellectual insight at age 13, which is when he says he became an Atheist in the first place. A more plausible account is that it may well have something to do with his dislike of his father -- that was the case for a lot of the famous Atheists, actually. But whatever the case, I'm not the only person (as you can see from the above articles) that regards him as a rager motivated more by his antipathy to God than by reason.
No. But they're strongly incentivized to be angry with the God they deny exists. You can probably figure out why Hawking was angry. In any case, it didn't really qualify him to drift away from physics and make metaphysical prognostications out of his work, did it?
Moreover, expert consensus is that he reached his peak with
A Brief History of Time, which put forth an elegant but purely theoretical universe model, which was ultimately criticized as being merely speculative in its mathematics, permanently empirically untestable, and in any case, incomprehensible to the general public -- not that that last fact stopped many Atheists from rejoicing that they regarded it as some kind of proof from a great scientific mind.
It looks like the jury is still out on Hawking, and it's likely to stay out. He's no longer prognosticating: so if he was right...he'll never know. If he was wrong, he knows it now.
My advice is this: be careful when somebody always seems to tell you exactly what you wanted to think in the first place. They may not be adding value to your life.
