Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, is subsidizing a five-day retreat for kids that is intended to provide an alternative to faith-based summer camps normally run by the Scouts and Christian groups. I find the rationale of Dawkins’ “neutrality” interesting:
I’m very keen on not indoctrinating them with religion or creeds. I would rather equip them with the tools to learn how to think, not what to think.
Would not a camp for kids who are atheists betray this sentiment? Isn’t his goal to further this belief since it is a belief he shares and wants to promote?
One more reason to understand that a worldview is not neutral. It is either advancing or losing ground depending on the vigilance of those who adhere to it.
Read the whole story.
Exactly right. Believing in nothing is believing in something. Teaching them to not believe that GOD exists is teaching them WHAT to think. To truly have a “open” camp, you’d have to invite folks from all religions.
My .02 cents.
“Teaching them to not believe that GOD exists is teaching them WHAT to think.”
Also note that Jeremy’s statement can be reworded to say:
“Teaching them to believe that GOD does not exist is teaching them WHAT to think.”
In the words of Koukl, “…science, by its very nature, is never capable of proving the non-existence of anything, one can never accurately claim that science has proven God doesn’t exist. That’s a misuse of the discipline. Such a claim would require omniscience.”
Science deals in natural explanations for the natural world but has no explanation for the existence of nature itself.
Either way, belief is being taught.
The point of this camp is to provide an alternative to religious summer camps. As a matter of practicality, it would probably be difficult to invite those of various unfounded faith-based beliefs if the goal is to provide an environment in which those without religious indoctrination can feel comfortable.
But, for more ideal purposes I believe it would be great to have a camp open to all that encourages rational, skeptical thinking like this one. Of course the goal isn’t to demonstrate that God doesn’t exist any more than the goal is to prove that invisible unicorns don’t exist. That’s just one of countless superstitions in the world. The goal is to promote rational, skeptical thinking. Lacking a belief in God (which of course I should point out is not the same as “denying” the existence of God, which even Dawkins doesn’t do) is just a natural consequence of skeptical reasoning.
Regarding your commenters, I’d like to quickly dispel the common misconception that atheists “believe in nothing.” This is akin to saying that people who don’t believe in unicorns “believe in nothing.” No, they just don’t believe in unicorns. They believe in many other things. Similarly, atheists just don’t believe in a deity. They believe in many other things, though.
And to reiterate what I said earlier in reference to quiroo, he’s absolutely right: Science doesn’t deal with non-falsifiable claims. Until you make a deity/religious claim that is falsifiable and testable (which many are), you can’t disprove it. This is something Dawkins himself reiterates constantly.
Further, he/she’s correct that science doesn’t have an explanation for everything, and it readily admits this — otherwise why would we be doing any research at all? This of course doesn’t mean that we can invent an answer and call it reliable. We used to lack explanations for the sun, stars, volcanoes etc. but inventing deities to represent them didn’t gain us any knowledge; it just held us back and led to the same sort of harmful behaviors so commonly stemming from unfounded belief systems.
The point here is that not that it is offensive to have a atheistic summer camp, but that establishing an atheistic summer camp is just as much teaching kids what to think as so called religious summer camps. I think all kids, and adults, need to learn how to think rationally about issues and take all evidence into account. Radical skeptics, such as Dawkins, ignores whole lines of evidence, namely historical and phylisophical, because of presupposition. This is not rational by definition.
It is funny you said theism held us back, when it is the results of protestant theists that have brought us much of what we know of science today. They were not looking to explain into creation a god, but they endevered to know the mind of God through his creation.
Further, irrational harmful behaviors are rampant. They exist in all walks of life, not just theistic. It is called sin and is one of the reasons rational people will see that christianity is true. Not that there are good guys and bad guys, but deep down, we are all bad guys. We all seek to fulfill our own desires regardless of how harmful it is to ourselves, our neighbors, and most importantly repulsive to God.
I will grant you all faiths are not rational, but Christianity offers the best explanation of the the world around us and the reason for things being such as they are. And if it is rationally true, we need to make it personally true. Recognizing we are all created to be in relationship with God, and that we can not because of our own guilt. Guilt that God himself atoned for on the cross. Allowing us to know who we really are, who he really is, and what creation really is.