Vrae oor God Deel I

Interessante artikel raakgeloop van 'n onderhoud wat 'n joernalis van The Mail and Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead, onlangs met Richard Dawkins (van The God Delusion) gevoer het. Die titel van die onderhoud is Science is losing to religion en ons gebruik dit as inleiding vir ons gesprek rondom Vrae oor God.


Hieronder enkele uittreksels:

One evening in 2006, at a colleague's house, I met a friend of her teenage daughter. He was intellectually curious and obviously bright - but implacably loyal to his parents' born-again Christian faith. We spent pretty much the whole evening arguing with the poor boy, appealing to his logic and reason - all to no effect. There must, we despaired, be some seminal atheist text we could refer him to. We just couldn't think of one. But lo - ask, and ye shall receive. Not a month later Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a scorching manifesto for secularism. Even by the standards of Dawkins's 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, it was a spectacular success, with sales exceeding 1,5-million. As Dawkins retires from the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, the Oxford post he has held for 12 years, you might expect him to feel that the secular scientific cause to which he has devoted his career is winning. Late last year campaigners ran an atheist advertising campaign on the side of British buses with the message: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Within days the campaign, launched by TV comedy writer Ariane Sherine, brought public donations of more than £96 000. In the same week record numbers of new maths and science undergraduates were reported. Even in America, the religious right seemed to be losing its grip. But when I ask Dawkins (67) if he feels public understanding of science has improved during his career, he looks doubtful. "I would say that when my academic career began there was probably just as much ignorance - but less active opposition [to science]. If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to."

Does he attribute that to lower standards of scientific education, or to the rise of religious fundamentalism? "Oh," he says without hesitation, "I think it's due to greater religious influence." In Dawkins's view, there is a battle taking place in Britain between the forces of reason and religious fundamentalism and it is far from won. He is one of its most famous and prolific combatants - but the question might be whether he is among its most effective. The The God Delusion's stated aim was to "convert" readers to atheism - but he admits that as a proselytising tool it has broadly failed. "Yes," he smiles. "I think that was a bit unrealistic.

Aitkenhead beskryf Dawkins se eie beskouing van waarheid en die bron daarvan verder aan in mooi detail.

Like most rationalists, Dawkins tends to invoke people's innate intelligence, and attribute their flawed ways of thinking to ignorance rather than stupidity. "But I don't have any evidence," he concedes. "I could be wrong. It's a kind of ideal. It's a sort of bending over backwards." People might just be stupid, I suggest. "They might be, yes," he cautiously agrees. "But at least my saying that ignorance is no crime is my defence against the charge of arrogance. Because if you tell people they're stupid, that certainly isn't the way to win friends and influence people."

Dawkins once described the British Airways employee dismissed for wearing a gold cross to work as having "the stupidest face". Did he regret saying it?

A slightly naughty smile flickers over his face.

"Well ... well ... yes, I do really. Yes. That was an unguarded moment. Although I think I said stupid-­looking. Did you see the photograph of her? I think if you look up the story, and they've got the photograph ... " He checks himself, and stops. "But this is unkind."

Before meeting Dawkins, I'd ­worried that he might be so intellectually impatient as to be crushing. The impression instead is more like that of a lion who has given himself strict instructions to behave like a pussy cat - which is both a relief and just slightly disappointing.

Does he ever, I ask, envy people who believe in God?

"No." He shakes his head firmly. Even though faith is said to be so famously comforting?

"You see," he says, "I'm so eager to say well maybe it is comforting but so what? I suspect that for every person who is comforted by it, there will be somebody else who is in mortal fear of it." Does he not envy those who manage not to find God mortally fearful?

"If I envied them that, then I'd have to envy people who are on some drug, which just makes them feel good. So to the extent that religion's comforting, it's probably not ..."

Dawkins likes to joke that old ­people go to church because they're "cramming for the final". He never worries that one day in old age he may wake and find himself feeling drawn towards faith, though. If he did, he would put it down to senile dementia. He seems much more worried about spurious reports of a fictitious deathbed conversion being put about by his enemies after he dies. He is probably not joking at all when he says: "I want to make damn sure there's a tape recorder running for my last words." -- © Guardian News & Media 2008

Not to be confused with these guys...

Ons bedoel dit!

Moet ons asseblief nie met die ouens verwar nie!

Van BBC se News Magazine

In the 21st Century, the term "flat-earther" is used to describe someone who is spectacularly - and seemingly wilfully - ignorant. But there is a group of people who claim they believe the planet really is flat. Are they really out there or is it all an elaborate prank?

Nasa is celebrating its 50th birthday with much fanfare and pictures of past glories. But in half a century of extraordinary images of space, one stands out.

On 24 December 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 mission took a photo now known as Earthrise. To many, this beautiful blue sphere viewed from the moon's orbit is a perfect visual summary of why it is right to strive to go into space.

Not to everybody though. There are people who say they think this image is fake - part of a worldwide conspiracy by space agencies, governments and scientists.

Welcome to the world of the flat-earther.

Our attitude towards those who once upon a time believed in the flatness of the earth is apparent in a new Microsoft advert. Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the "edge of the world", the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.

Satellite era

But are there any genuine flat-earthers left? Surely in our era of space exploration - where satellites take photos of our blue and clearly globular planet from space, and robots send back info about soil and water from Mars - no one can seriously still believe that the Earth is flat?

Wrong.

Flat earth theory is still around. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the "conspiracy" that the Earth is round.

"People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers," says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial.

"Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism."

Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after "coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago".

"I came to realise how much we take at face value," he says. "We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses."

Mr Davis now believes "the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite - it stretches horizontally forever".

"And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep", he adds.

James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion website, has a slightly different take. "The Earth is, more or less, a disc," he states. "Obviously it isn't perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. It is around 24,900 miles in diameter."

Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been "raised a globularist in the British state school system", says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from "sheer incredulity to the conviction that it's all just an elaborate joke".

So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say.

Disappearing ships

Mr McIntyre estimates "there are thousands", but "without a platform for communication, a head-count is almost impossible", he says. Mr Davis says he is currently creating an "online information repository" to help to bring together local Flat Earth communities into a "global community".

"If you will forgive my use of the term 'global'", he says.

And for the casual observer, it is hard to accept that all of this is not some bizarre 21st Century jape. After all, most schoolchildren know that ships can disappear over the horizon, that satellites orbit the earth and that if you head along the equator you will eventually come back on yourself.

What about all the photos from space that show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the Earth is round? "The space agencies of the world are involved in an international conspiracy to dupe the public for vast profit," says Mr McIntyre.

John Davis also says "these photos are fake".

And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our supposedly disc-shaped world?

Mr McIntyre laughs. "This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked questions," he says. "A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well explains the reason - the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth."

Ultimate conspiracy

Mr Davis says that being a flat-earther doesn't have an impact on how one lives every day. "As a rule of thumb, we don't have any fears of aircraft or other modes of transportation," he says.

Christine Garwood, author of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, is not surprised that flat-earthers simply write off the evidence that our planet is globular.

"Flat earth theory is one of the ultimate conspiracy theories," she says.

"Naturally, flat earth believers think that the moon landings were faked, as were the photographs of earth from space."

Perhaps one of the most surprising things in Garwood's book is her revelation that flat earth theory is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Ms Garwood says it is an "historic fallacy" that everyone from ancient times to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of this "mad idea" once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America without "falling off the edge of the world".

In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc didn't emerge until Victorian times.

Theories about the earth being flat really came to the fore in 19th Century England. With the rise and rise of scientific rationalism, which seemed to undermine Biblical authority, some Christian thinkers decided to launch an attack on established science.

Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884) assumed the pseudonym of "Parallax" and founded a new school of "Zetetic astronomy". He toured England arguing that the Earth was a stationary disc and the Sun was only 400 miles away.

In the 1870s, Christian polemicist John Hampden wrote numerous works about the Earth being flat, and described Isaac Newton as "in liquor or insane".

And the spirit of these attacks lives on to the present day. The flat-earth myth remains the outlandish king in the realm of the conspiracy theorist.

And while we all respect a degree of scepticism towards the authorities, says Ms Garwood, the flat-earthers show things can go too far.

"It is always good to question 'how we know what we know', but it is also good to have the ability to accept compelling evidence - such as the photographs of Earth from space."