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> I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere. You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah,

> I don’t know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere. You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah, don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should have said something apologetic about religion because of metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial. In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here. For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance. [0] https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstition-a-refutation-of-the-new-atheism https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstiti...

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

I think you have a good deal of odd baggage that's clouding your judgement. You seem to believe that anyone who is critical of any kind of intellectually flaky stance toward "religion" must therefore be an apologist for intellectual flaky religious views. This is childish. I encourage you to develop more intellectually rigorous and less tendentious habits of mind. An intellectual horizon where Sagan and Dawkins are intellectual heroes is highly parochial. In the case of Dawkins, that he was whiggish and philosophically weak is not some novel criticism. His criticisms of Aquinas, for example, were laughably uninformed. And unlike Aquinas, who charitably advised people to attack an interlocutor's views at his strongest points, Dawkins happily sought out the weakest and their weakest for cheap show. He didn't seek out highly regarded scholars who disagreed with him, but ones he could easily ridicule, and he found them. It is buffoonish to think Dawkins et al. have some kind of intellectual high ground here. Only someone ignorant of philosophical work of the last two millenia could find Dawkins impressive here. For you and others here, I would recommend beginning with Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism" [0] to begin to grasp how crude, unsophisticated, and incoherent their intellectual positions are. The author wrote this book during the height of the New Atheist craze when the polemic of the "Four Horsemen" was particular aggressive, and so he rightly returns some of those polemical barbs, though unlike the New Atheists, his comes from a position of intellectual substance. [0] https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstition-a-refutation-of-the-new-atheism https://archive.org/details/edward-feser-the-last-superstiti...