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07/13/2005 Entry: "Richard Dawkins, agnostic?"
Richard Dawkins, agnostic? Of course, you can only work with the software/hardware you have. Arguably, an intelligent race can overcome such barriers with technology and strict methology, but that's the old "knowable vs. unknowable" universe argument. I'm surprised to see Dawkins on the unknowable part, which always seemed to me to be erring on the side of caution and the knowable universe argument to be pretty presumptious.
"Are there things about the Universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, in principle, ungraspable in any mind, however superior?" he asked."Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe."
Each species, in fact, has a different "reality". They work with different "software" to make them feel comfortable, he suggested.
Because different species live in different models of the world, there was a discomfiting variety of real worlds, he suggested.
Replies: 1 Comment
Well, pardon my saying so, but "duh." Why would you expect Dawkins to be on the "knowable" side? He's a scientist. Sceince is about coming up with a model (a set of theories) that describe the universe. It doesn't purport to say what the universe actually *is*, it says that the universe follows a certain model to the best of our knowledge. There is no absolute truth in science, because there cannot be. Nothing can ever be proven through science, and so science makes no claims about absolute truth. If you want truth, you have to create it in your own mind (see religion).
I'm personally pretty comfortable with the fact that the universe cannot be completely understood. We can't see it from the outside, so we have to work from within to describe it as best we can. What *is* the universe? In order to answer that question, you would have to know what's *outside* the universe, which is undefined. Agnosticism isn't erring on the side of caution, it's accepting the fact that some things are logically impossible to know.
All of that said, agnosticism doesn't imply that there is a 50% chance that a particular claim is valid or not. It means that *any* description of what the universe is is equally probable. One particular hypothesis (like "we're in the matrix" or "God made everything") is lost in a sea of infinite possibilities. A true agnostic would say that a particular religion's creation myth is certainly possible, but infinitely unlikely.
Posted by Slart @ 07/14/2005 10:04 AM CST
