“Only the most radically doctrinaire atheists would deny that effects MUST have a cause and have the nerve to character that concept as "plucked out of thin air". OTOH: that is a very good description of atheistic ethics.“
Your feeble insults and ad hominems against this Philosopher and great Humanist merely reveal a churlish belligerence and a persistent flaw in your character. What you have NOT demonstrated nor displayed is an understanding of the article or an argument to refute any part of it.
I will try to simplify for you what the learned gentleman was saying--as you seem destined to forever “misunderstand” simple concepts (and I know you will never "get around" to reading any of his numerous publications) :
The “argument” that everything must have a cause except for something that doesn’t have a cause (LOL!)..and therefore somebody named Fred or Joe or Allah or Yahweh or a three toed invisible frog exists and VIOLATES this law of cause and effect (LOL!)…displays no explanatory value. It merely says in different words: My argument for the existence of God is that I believe God exists. “Null, vacuous, and empty.
If complex life IS the consequence of an Intelligent/Complex Mother Goose, then one obviously needs to track down the builder of Mother Goose and so forth. OR...one can say in a null, empty, and vacuous fashion: I believe in Mother goose, therefore Mother Goose does not need her complexity explained by any cause!
“In short, the explanatory value of an arbitrary, plucked-out-of-thin-air idea of a designer to “explain” the universe and the complexity of life in it is null, vacuous, empty. What possible sense do the votaries of such a pointless view think they are making? Well, of course, their entire effort is devoted to finding premises for an antecedently accepted conclusion; they know in advance the answer, and are trying to fabricate the right questions to get to it; they know what they wish to prove, and are scrounging around for evidence, or for ways of twisting evidence that points to different conclusions, to do so. They subscribe for non-rational reasons to one of many creation myths from the infancy of mankind, and are scrabbling for justifications in support of it. This is as far from science, rationality and intellectual honesty as you can get."
newhumanist.org.uk
Professor Grayling has nothing to fear from your form of criticism! LOL!
Positions held
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Fellow of the World Economic Forum(2000–2004)
Member of the editorial boards of Reason in Practice and Prospect
British Academy visitor to the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1986
)
Director of the Sino-British Summer School in Philosophy in Beijing (1988, 1993)
Jan Hus Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (1994 and 1996)
Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (1998)
Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society (1993–2001)
Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow (2005)
Past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China
Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society
Patron of the British Armed Forces Humanist Association UK
Armed Forces Humanist Association (UKAFHA)
Representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union
Vice-President, British Humanist Association
Member of the C1 Group on relations between Islam and the West
And thanks for making my day--LOL!! |
