July 30, 2007
Scott Adams on Atheism
I think Scott Adams (Creator of Dilbert) needs a bit of an atheist education. In his post “The Atheist Who Thought He Was God“, he makes two common misunderstandings/fallacies relating to Atheism. Can you spot them?
Perhaps there are more, but I think they boil down to the following:
- Few, if any, atheists claim to be 100% sure that God does not exist. (99.99999% IS good enough)
- Pascal’s Wager (which Adams’ post is based on - although perhaps not knowingly) doesn’t account for the multitude of beings which claim punishment for non-belief. Of course the other fallacies of Pascal’s wager are equally present in Adams’ post.
Posts
Flavio said,
July 30, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Yep, strange post by Adams. Perhaps just thought-provoking?
The claimed non-sufficient 99.999…% certainty is indeed something we consider good enough in real life about other phenomena, such as the laws of physics.
Children are pretty confident that Santa Claus exists, then they just quit believing in fairy tales…
Comments to that post on Dilbert blog are really interesting.
kumarei said,
July 30, 2007 at 11:59 pm
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-atheist-who.html
He’s made another post on Pascal’s Wager. Whee.
kumarei said,
July 31, 2007 at 12:00 am
Gah, sorry, wrong link.
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/pascals-wager.html
Feel free to delete my last post.
Badger3k said,
August 4, 2007 at 5:24 am
(personal admission - I like Dilbert - have all his books), but….
Yep, ol Scott is pretty clueless when it comes to both religion and science. His rather terrible misunderstanding of evolution is claimed to be a “joke”, although this is only brought up after his defenders can’t win against real scientists. The same here. Personally, I think his book “God’s Debris” (available free over the internet as a pdf) was telling - such mind bogglingly stupid arguments and misunderstandings make it a headache to try to read. Of course, Adams says at the beginning that it is a “thought experiment” and that he doesn’t believe everything in it, or anything, or, well, he doesn’t want to say. I always liked thought experiments that went beyond “I saw the flaws in this argument when I was three years old.”
Bah. You know, as PZ Myers learned, if the fanboys catch a whiff of this, you’ll be inundated with trolls defending their genius.
Richard said,
August 4, 2007 at 8:26 pm
if the fanboys catch a whiff of this, you’ll be inundated with trolls defending their genius
Crap. Guess I should watch out for them!
That said, I think most of the comments on that post were telling him how he’d completely stuffed up that time…
And anyway, like you, I am actually a fan of Dilbert, and I generally like Scott Adams’ blog posts, cause they often do make you think. This post, however, did not. Like you, I prefer thought experiments that actually require some thought.
20 gram Soul : Scott Adams, Again said,
August 8, 2007 at 8:50 am
[...] Sometimes he actually comes up with some really good thought experiments. As another commenter on my blog wrote: I always liked thought experiments that went beyond “I saw the flaws in this argument [...]