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I couldn't agree more. There's nothing more painful than watching Dawkins vs <some random theologian> and thinking the whole time that they are both talking com

I couldn't agree more. There's nothing more painful than watching Dawkins vs <some random theologian> and thinking the whole time that they are both talking completely past each other. I don't remember which debate it was, but Dawkins at some point went(and this is from memory but I think accurate) "I could believe in God if you'd told me he was evolved from something else, I just can't believe in complexity that arises without evolution". I stopped watching at that point because it was clear that they weren't even talking about the same thing when they said "God" and neither of them seemed to notice that! At least on matters of (a)theism, by far the only (famous) atheist I've seen who actually knows how debate without using tacit knowledge and can actually understand the opponents views and debate them on that level was Christopher Hitchens.

omegant 13y ago
Also about Dawkins, while I agree with all that he says, I don´t think he is behaving in a scientific way with religious people. I mean that if he wants to make people see how the scientific method is vastly superior to religion, I don´t see that pushing them and calling them "dumb" (not literally, but you can feel that´s what he is thinking) is not having just the opposite result, and is making creationists more active in their positions.
- kansface 13y ago
  While you write that you want to avoid alienation, your language is inflammatory. Beyond that, the scientific method is not vastly superior (morally?) to religion. The one is a system for examining that which is discoverable while the other attempts to relate to that which is not. In other words, they are orthogonal.