After reading Max Stirner's, The Ego and Its Own
The God Delusion may be the spookiest thing ever. Dawkins is still a based asshole and witty as fuck.
>>822268
>The God Delusion
Dawkins isn't scholarly qualified to talk about religion. It's like a dude writing a book 'the third trimester and what to expect'.
Dawkins is spooked by 'evidence'?
>>822275
Do you even know who Max Stirner is?
The guy was atheist
Unfortunately, other atheist hated him
Looking at you Marx and Engels
>>822298
From what I remember Stirner didnt like the atheists of his time because they had some spooky ideas too.
>Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the
eye; or than meets the all too limited human mind, evolved as it was to
cope with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds through
medium distances in Africa. In the face of these profound and sublime
mysteries, the low-grade intellectual poodling of pseudo-philosophical
poseurs seems unworthy of adult attention.
What are spooks?
>>822344
Belief in science is a spook.
Science is not objectively the truth. You can't prove it.
>>822405
>It is simply true that the Sun is hotter than the Earth, true that the desk on which I am writing is made of wood. These are not hypotheses awaiting falsification; not temporary approximations to an ever-elusive truth; not local truths that might be denied in another culture. And the same can safely be said of many scientific truths, even where we can't
see them 'with our own eyes'. It is forever true that DNA is a double helix, true that if you and a chimpanzee (or an octopus or a kangaroo) trace your ancestors back far enough you will eventually hit a shared ancestor. To a pedant, these are still hypotheses which might be falsified tomorrow. But they never will be. Strictly, the truth that there were no human beings in the Jurassic Period is still a conjecture, which could be refuted at any time by the discovery of a single fossil, authentically
dated by a battery of radiometric methods. It could happen. Want a bet? Even if they are nominally hypotheses on probation, these statements are true in exactly the same sense as the ordinary truths of everyday life;
true in the same sense as it is true that you have a head, and that my desk is wooden. If scientific truth is open to philosophic doubt, it is no more so than common sense truth. Let's at least be even-handed in our philosophical heckling.
>>822404
It means you think God, family, gender, nation, morality and race don't exist, they're just made up to control you, and that only the self matters. "Spook" is a term coined by the German philosopher Max Stirner, whom Karl Marx (and consequently most Marxists on /lit/) loathed so much he wrote more work arguing against Stirner, than Stirner actually wrote himself. The reason Marx hated him is because Stirner thought all ideologies, including communism, appealed to spooks.
>>822436
This is what you think to be true. Popper's falsifiability is also a spook.
>>822405
Last I checked science doesent tell you to do anything so how is it a spook?
>>822461
>So much for cultural relativism. A different type of truth-heckler prefers
to drop the name of Karl Popper or (more fashionably) Thomas Kuhn:
There is no absolute truth. Your scientific truths are merely hypotheses that
have so far failed to be falsified, destined to be superseded. At worst, after the
next scientific revolution, today's 'truths' will seem quaint and absurd, if not
actually false. The best you scientists can hope for is a series of
approximations which progressively reduce errors but never eliminate them.
The Popperian heckle partly stems from the accidental fact that
philosophers of science are traditionally obsessed with one piece of
scientific history: the comparison between Newton's and Einstein's
theories of gravitation. It is true that Newton's inverse square law has
turned out to be an approximation, a special case of Einstein's more
general formula. If this is the only piece of scientific history you know,
you might indeed conclude that all apparent truths are mere approximations,
fated to be superseded. There is even a quite interesting sense
in which all our sensory perceptions - the 'real' things that we 'see with
our own eyes' - may be regarded as unfalsified 'hypotheses' about the
world, vulnerable to change. This provides a good way to think about
illusions such as the Necker Cube. The flat pattern of ink on paper is compatible with two alternative
'hypotheses' of solidity. So we see a solid cube which, after a few seconds,
'flips' to a different cube, then flips back to the first cube, and so on.
Perhaps sense data only ever confirm or reject mental 'hypotheses'
about what is out there.
>>822464
>Belief in science
>>822272
Religious scholars are not qualified to talk about universal truths, the origins of the universe, creation, etc. Dawkins as a biologist is actually more qualified to discuss the bible than a theologian.
>>822508
Spook gonna spook
>>822440
>>822404
>It means you think God, family, gender, nation, morality and race don't exist, they're just made up to control you, and that only the self matters.
This is not true. Family, nation and race and whatever you want to name can exist perfectly fine. The idea that you should do x because of family/nation/race/etc is what Stirner is against, not the label of family/nation/race/etc itself.
