1. How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results

Comment #216889 by Frank Grimes Jr on July 23, 2008 at 3:49 pm

A quick comment on the discussion about the fact that anecdotal observations somtimes actually turn into proper scientific facts: It is possible to view it in the same way as William K. Clifford did in his "The Ethics of Belief" way back in 1877 (naturally causing quite a stir as I understand).

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html

If you believe something without proper evidence and it later turns out to be true, your moral position was in no way better initially than had you been dead wrong, you were just lucky.

Nevertheless I can certainly see how anecdotes feed scientific thought and could pave the way for researching different topics that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.

2. There is no God and Dawkins is his Prophet

Comment #66537 by Frank Grimes Jr on August 30, 2007 at 10:49 am

Well, I've been reading more or less every news item and feature article (along with comments) on this site for a long time now and I guess the time has come to dispose of my silence and post my first comment.

Being Swedish and having read TGD about a year ago (just after having picked it up after a visit to Oxford where I was recommended it by a friend doing research in the Department of Zoology) I have since then had the joy of recommending it to a lot of friends, most of which have really come to like it.

In fact, for the last year there has been an ever growing number of people that I've that has been talking about TGD, as well as other related books (Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, etc). Even though Sweden is a very secular country, there certainly are lots of people that tend to lean towards religion, astrology, spiritual healing, and other sub-rational learnings.

As the interest for these books have been steadily growing, especially for the last six months, I was actually expecting some media attention. During the last two weeks, that is exactly what has happened. (Now, I'm sure there's no connection to TGD having been translated into Swedish just now, right?)

The article above had my blood boiling out of frustration at the Sunday breakfast table, while at the same time I realized that this is _exactly_ what we need here as well - a rational debate (well, at least our learned father is trying to be, or is he?) about god.

Earlier this week, the largest morning newspaper in Sweden, DN (liberal) had an editorial published by the well renowned journalist Göran Rosenberg - someone I actually thought pretty well of before I read it. It actually makes father Ulf's article above look amazingly well researched and thoughtful.

The editorial, entitled "Gud är inte död" (God is not dead) is available (in Swedish) at http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=578&a=685652 and contains a pretty much complete collection of all the tired arguments against RD. I could attempt a translation should anyone be interested?

Altough the article almost made me sick with it's poor arguments and lack of clear thinking, I guess I should be happy that this is actually on the agenda now. What surprises me is that none of the two persons arguing on the side of god seems to have been reading much of the debate that has been going on for such a long time now - after all, I'm pretty sure both of them know enough English to read, for example, comments on this site. But then again, it's not a bad thing that they haven't done their research before debating - all the easier it is to argue with them.

Sorry for the long first post. I'll try to be more concise in the future (realizing now that this last remark made the post even longer).