FREE WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS A : DOUBTING DAWKINS PDF

Keith Ward | 160 pages | 01 Apr 2009 | Lion Hudson Plc | 9780745953304 | English | Oxford, United Kingdom (Aquinas) - Wikipedia

In order to utilize all of the features of this Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins site, JavaScript must be enabled in your browser. Richard Dawkins claimed that 'no theologian has ever produced a satisfactory response to his arguments'. Well-known broadcaster and author Keith Ward is one of Britain's foremost philosopher- theologians. This is his response. Ward welcomes all comers into philosophy's world of clear definitions, sharp arguments, and diverse conclusions. But when Dawkins enters this world, his passion tends to get the better of him, and he descends into stereotyping, pastiche, and mockery. In this stimulating and thought-provoking philosophical challenge, Ward demonstrates not only how Dawkins' arguments are flawed, but that a perfectly rational case can be made that there, almost certainly, is a God. Find this product and thousands more on ebooks. Bible Software. Books and Courses. Download . Publisher: Lion Books. ISBN: Be the first to rate this. Format: Digital. Add to cart We'll take you to your cart at ebooks. About Keith Ward. Associate Faculty, St. Why There Almost Certainly Is No God | HuffPost

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Richard Dawkins claimed that 'no theologian has ever produced a satisfactory response to his arguments'. Well-known broadcaster and author Keith Ward is one of Britain's foremost philosopher-theologians. This is his response. Ward welcomes all comers Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins philosophy's world of clear definitions, sharp arguments, and diverse conclusions. But when Dawkins enters this world, Richard Dawkins claimed that 'no theologian has ever produced a satisfactory response to his arguments'. But when Dawkins enters this world, his passion tends to get the better of him, and he descends into stereotyping, pastiche, and mockery. In this stimulating and thought-provoking philosophical challenge, Ward demonstrates not only how Dawkins' arguments are flawed, but that a perfectly rational case can be made that there, almost certainly, is a God. Get A Copy. Paperbackpages. Published August 22nd by Lion Books first published August 1st More Details Original Title. Other Editions 6. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Apr 30, Natalie Vellacott rated it did not like it Shelves: christian-hot-topics. I gave up on this book. The author argues for the , but accepts that the world is billions of years old. I don't understand how people can do this. If God exists then He is capable of anything and everything including ensuring the Bible accurately represents history. Surely, we have to either accept our limitations as created beings, or deny God altogether and suffer the consequence when He comes as Judge The mental gymnastics required to understand what the author is attempti I gave up on this book. The mental gymnastics required to understand what the author is attempting to Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins were too much for me. The truth is so much more simple I don't recommend this book unless you want to be confused! View all 17 comments. Jul 18, Mark rated it liked it Shelves: . Ward is a philospher and theologian who, in fact, Dawkins misquotes a couple of times in his book. It is quite interesting to see a rigourous mind at work and although his grasp of the philosphical niceties is far and beyond mine he does express himself clearly and concisely. His humour and ribbing of Dawkins' approach is far more respectful and open than that of his opponent but he still manages to make his This was a response to Richard Dawkins' ' The God delusion' which I found quite helpful. His humour and ribbing of Dawkins' approach is far more respectful and open than that of his opponent but he still manages to make his points well. In gently pointing out that in Dawkins dismissing in three pages the work of centuries with his pronouncement of Acquinas' proofs of God as vacuous Dawkins himself is perhaps being a little lazy and failing to actually understand to what the proofs refer is a clever piece of analysis. He is genuinely explorative and seems quite able to handle the fact that perfectly intelligent and morally upright men and women do not share his point of view, this is something Richard Dawkins singularly failed to do. His over-riding point is an obvious one; if you dwell in a universe in which you Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins to contemplate the possibility that there might be a God, however you may envisage that, then no amount of arguing is going to make a difference. However, if Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins mindset is such that you are open or at least not totally closed to discovering hints or glimpses of such a possibility then this book could be for you. It is a rational, analytic approach to the God hypothesis. Enjoyable, amusing in parts and, as with Dawkins' own book, i found it thought provoking. View all 9 comments. Jun 17, William rated it it was ok. Reading this book I was reminded of the line in Frasier where his production assistant Ros calls him "the dumbest smart guy I ever met". Reverend Professor Keith Ward is an Oxford lecturer in philosophy, logic and ahem theology with a career spanning decades, and yet he begins by claiming that Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins is an irreducible feature of reality, and bases much of his subsequent reasoning on this claim. Now to most people, or non-philosophers at least, it is evident that consciousness can be redu Reading this book I was reminded of the line in Frasier where his production Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins Ros calls him "the dumbest smart guy I ever met". Now to most people, or non-philosophers at least, it is evident that consciousness can be reduced by sleep, medication, injury or afternoon meetings, and "semi-conscious" is a useful term describing a frequently observed state. I am sure that animals such as my adorable cat experience their own existence richly, but they do seem to have a less acute sense than we do of their own personal circumstances, of history, of what is likely to happen next and much else. They can't generally follow TV shows, play video games, take philosophy courses, or in my cat's case, use catflaps. This reduction in consciousness becomes more marked as you go down the scale from chimp to cat no disrespect to ant to amoeba. Of course we can't measure this directly or explain the precise brain mechanisms, which lends consciousness a certain mystery and allows philosophers to speculate about what it all means, but to say that it is irreducible is fairly obviously wrong. Update: Chris pointed out comment 7 below that Ward may be using the word 'irreducible' in a philosophical sense of a basic feature of reality, rather than simply 'incapable of being reduced'. While this would allow semi-consciousness to make sense, I am still not sure what it means as a claim about our natural universe. Did they both Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins from the Big Bang? Does consciousness really not require energy? Can such a fundamental building block of reality really be discovered only by philosophers with no formal training in physics or neurology, armed with little more than a pipe and an armchair? Update again: Chris has left the building, leaving only gaps from which we can deduce his existence. Ward also jumps straight from the animal brain to his vision of a disembodied supreme consciousness with little more than a cheerful "why not? Where would it store information without cells? How would it recall it without connections? Anyone familiar with Laurence M Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek will recall that the Transporter is far-fetched because amongst other reasons the information storage requirements are so astronomical, not to mention in breach of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The mind of God would suffer the same practical difficulties, with further problems from the laws of relativity and thermodynamics. And while we're at it, the idea that when setting the parameters for the Big Bang, God could predict specific events later on is hard to swallow on several levels. Is Ward not familiar with chaos theory? You can't just set off a complex iterative process and accurately predict what it's going to do, at least not without knowing the starting values to an infinite degree of accuracy Heisenberg problems again and having infinite processing capability. And if God just set it off in the right general direction and then gave things a nudge here and there to keep them on track, how is that possible, especially for a disembodied being? Many people born from the late 20th century onwards won't have too much difficulty in visualising software states that exist in memory at a level above hardware, foreground and background processes coordinating to produce them, and the idea that it can all end when powered down if not saved to persistent storage in a way that can be recovered later. However, the great majority of philosophers who have ever lived did not have the advantage of that model in front of them, and as a result they have tended to be rather mystical about consciousness is a thought a real thing, is my mental commentary actually me, and so on but surely Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins time we moved on. It's like a software state, Aristotle, get over it. I felt that the great thinkers of the past, for all their brilliant insights into meaning and existence, had left Ward somewhat ill-equipped to speculate about neuroscience. And then there is his requirement for a "personal explanation" as an element in any explanation of the cosmos. Despite claiming to come from a "world of clear definitions, sharp arguments and diverse conclusions", Ward is never quite able to articulate what he means by this, but it seems to refer to something teleological that is, the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes - apparently popular amongst theologians in which things have to fit into a lovely story. He is not satisfied with a merely factual account of how things Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins have come to be as they are, but seems additionally to want to fit them into some sort of fable in which there is a point at the end, to which they were drawn all along. At least I think that's what he's talking about - it's a bafflingly backwards way of looking at things and, I can't help thinking, worryingly indicative of some sort of mental condition. Well, because there is an environmental niche for them, because they can live and reproduce, because they are good enough at surviving not to all die at once but not so good that they wreck their entire environment like humans, because life will find a way - hasn't she seen Jurassic Park for 's sake? I think she knew all this and was not really expecting a Wardian personal explanation about wasps being there to teach Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins about life or remind us to close jam jars or something, but that seems to be how Ward wants us to think about the cosmos. For a lecturer in logic and philosophy to be Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins fundamentally confused about causality and in Dawkins' words what it means to explain something is frankly worrying. The trouble with Dawkins, apparently, is that he is a Materialist. Materialism is a school of philosophical thought with a substantial Wikipedia entry in which reality is seen as arising from matter - common sense to most of us in the 21st century you might think, although as Ward points out, many, indeed most, philosophers of the past held various more mystical and to us far-fetched views, and indeed matter itself is not straightforward when you start thinking about quantum physics and string theory, so Ward remains unconvinced by Materialism. Once again I felt that with all due respect to Plato we need to get real now that we know more about our physical universe. The discovery of n- dimensional Hilbert space and the rest of it does not make it the slightest bit more likely that we are living in a supreme being's virtual reality construct like the unwitting citizens of The Matrix, which in the end seems to be the view of existence that Ward considers "almost certain". Anyone skimming this book and awarding it a bunch of stars because he seems like a smart guy arguing rationally for God should be aware of what they are signing up to. Ward's discussion of multiverse theory and the convenient basic settings that provide a universe capable of supporting philosophers number of spacial dimensions, Planck's constant and so on is also frustrating. If they were different we wouldn't be here. So what? Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins - Keith Ward - Google книги

America, founded in Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming. Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nationhits the bull's-eye as usual:. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U. Does Bush check the Rapture Index Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised? My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education - and hence the whole Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins of science in this country - is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity' Judge John Jones's immortal phrase of '' continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban. Scientists divide into two Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement' school focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease 'moderate' or 'sensible' not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do. Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between supernaturalism on the one Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins and rationality on the other. For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased. The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to the point of muddying the waters. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse wrote:. We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist. A recent article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean quotes the Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating evolution and , 'Dr Dawkins "probably single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists". Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:. To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time from college bull sessions to learned treatises : science simply cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis - by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation? Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared. To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium. You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies. Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any - and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all . Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it - an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today. The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against 'intelligent design' creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus . But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other. If, by 'God', you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the of humanity, or Planck's constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked her professor Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins he had a view about me. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives , wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises you Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied. As the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said, "If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal. When Einstein said 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe? Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a . But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. So am I. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason. Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why. First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen ; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other ; and this we call God. That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That's theology. The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the , sometimes called the Argument from Design although - since the name begs the question of its validity - it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative. In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too - fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design. Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins in science's future ability to Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins everything else.