Point of Inquiry

Congrats DJ. I am confident the organization made the right decision. You will d wonders!

Cool, good position for Grothe.

While Colbert's mocking is parody, I often see an actual anti-science streak running through Stewart.

D.J.'s interview was about much more, of course.

Evan, I don't know if Dawkins being a leading intellectual is less controversial than Jesus being the Son of God, and neither do you. How do we decide such a thing? By book sales? By opinion polls? Certainly there is more important work than Dawkins' being done by other intellectuals all over the world which goes largely unnoticed since they don't ... See Morepublish best-sellers. All we know is that the sort of people who answer "top intellectual" polls in certain magazines think Dawkins is a leading intellectual. This argument from authority (or, rather from public opinion) as you pointed out, proves nothing. It certainly doesn't prove my comment was fatuous. The only way to prove my comment was fatuous would be to engage me in debate on each issue where I think Dawkins has gone badly wrong. But neither of us (I assume) wants to do that.

When I said Dawkins was dumb I wasn't formulating an argument. I was merely stating my conviction. If I would have said that Dawkins is dumb because a certain group of people who read a certain magazine said so, that would have been a poor argument on my part. But that, of course, was not my argument. The reverse of it, however, was your argument (hinted at however darkly).

PS: I would like to concede something. I do think Richard Dawkins is intelligent--highly intelligent. On this particular point, however, I think he's being rather dumb.

Feel free to message me and/or friend me if you want to carry on the conversation. I'd rather not afflict the other readers with any more of my ramblings.

Interesting.. so far, no comments...

I'm for it. Aside from billboards, and law suits, ridicule seems to be one of our best point gainers lately. And since reasoning with 'the believers of nonsense' certainly doesn't work, poking a little fun at the silliness of belief-based thinking is possibly a step in the right direction.

Hey DJ.. skimming through ETFF's past guests? Gregory is cool, yes? I am glad POI is expanding it's horizons.

I'd like to buy this, but it's too expensive at Borders in Australia.

Can't ever go wrong with Ann!

Great read...