Thursday, February 13, 2020

That's just a silly question!

I made a joke today that I suspect the other person didn't get because it was kind of an inside joke with myself and possible a few random on-lookers being on the inside.

Several years ago, Richard Dawkins participated in a panel discussion/debate in Mexico about whether or not the universe had a purpose. His whole argument was that it was a silly question. He likened it to asking what the mountains are for. If you ask children, they'll say it's so the animals can scratch their backs (or something like that), but if you ask an adult, they'll say it's a silly question. Then he said, alluding to Bill Craig and the other theist, that some people never grow up.

This person on reddit asked what reddit was for, so I ran Richard Dawkins' argument. The joke was that it was a silly argument because obviously reddit isn't like a mountain. Reddit really does have a purpose because somebody created it for a reason.

And that illustrates the circularity of Dawkins' argument. Dawkins' argument can be run with a pair of scissors. If somebody asked what a pair of scissors are for, we could say, "That's a silly question," then go into our analogy with mountains and children, then accuse the person asking the question of being childish and refusing to grow up.

Whether the question of what something is for is a silly question or not depends on whether it actually has a purpose or not. Dawkins was attempting to make an argument against the universe having a purpose, but instead, he assumed that it had no purpose and went from there. His argument was about as circular as you can get.

What Bill Craig and the others should've said was that Dawkins had made a silly argument. You know who makes silly arguments? Children. But when people grow up and acquire good critical thinking skills and learn to reason logically, they stop making silly arguments like circular reasoning. But apparently, not everybody.

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