A Classic Error

Picking up on something Mitch said (see comments to last post):
I believe Richard Dawkins has made a classic error. (I can't really say for Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, but it may be the same.)
Dr. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and a very good one from what I'm told. Fascinating stuff, his work. But where I see evolutionary biology as a limited field, he apparently does not. It looks like he has closed his universe around his discipline. What cannot be explained in terms of EB, or learned from it, is out of bounds, even absurd. Empirical evidence is all there is (see discussion of Logical Positivism).
A Dawkins argument re: God -

1. Let's assume for a minute there is no God.
2. I'm okay with that.*
3. Therefore there is no God.

Hmm - maybe we better make sure -

4. Let's assume there IS a God.
5. Oops! That would contradict #1, above.
6. Therefore, there is no God. QED.

I have read some of his stuff, and heard a radio interview with a very friendly interviewer, and honestly, his argument doesn't amount to much more than that. Absence of evidence is taken as evidence of absence. How ironic that I'm referencing Carl Sagan.

Let's use this as an example of a closed-universe philosophy. Anyone can do it, even a Lutheran Pastor. All you have to do is assume your own discipline is the center of all things and all else revolves around you(r knowledge). I've seen it done with politics, education, and of course science and religion.
Trying to avoid this sort of thing . . .

*Everything around me can be explained without reference to a God, and anything that can't is not important or not knowable or will be discovered by science in the future.

Assumptions

When I was in logic class, I remember learning something fundamental about truth finding, notably that logic could not do it. Logic is a tool for argument building, and an argument could be valid or invalid, not true or false. Every argument starts with assumptions. If the assumptions are true and the argument is valid, then the conclusion must be true. But a bad argument could still have a true conclusion and a good argument could still result in falsehood. The assumptions are the key.
How do you prove an assumption is true? You need another argument with other assumptions to back it up. Even if you use the negative argument and conclude to an absurdity, you have to be sure the absurdity is itself false and not just unusual.
The science-religion discussion is full of logic, and therefore full of assumptions. Those who are most deeply committed to their beliefs have made assumptions not shared by the rest of us, certainly not shared by their opponents. Their logic is perfect, of course, leading to conclusions which are obvious to them, false to others.
Example of an assumption: "The Bible is the Word of God in the literal sense."
It's easy to imagine the conclusions reached from this assumption. They are not difficult to find in spoken form. When the base assumption is challenged, a number of circular arguments are readily available to back them up. But that is just what they are - circular arguments. Those who don't share the assumption find the conclusions puzzling.
Another set of assumptions was popular about fifty years ago. A short time later, they were thoroughly discredited, and a short time after that, universally adopted. That assumption set is called logical positivism. (I am simplifying here, but it seems that the simplified version is the one in popular use.)
The assumptions of LP are that truth can only be found by what we learn from our five senses, from logic, mathematics and memory. (Thus statements of religion can never be true in any meaningful way.)
Think about that for a short time, and you will reach the same conclusion that Karl Popper did - LP is self-defeating.

We all start with assumptions. Can any of them be validated in a meaningful way, or is this where we must live and let live?

The God of survival

The October 1 issue of Newsweek has an interesting letter in it. It raised a challenge that I'm still thinking about. The letter to which I refer is the one that starts on page 18; it is signed by a Kevin Paulson of New York. The problem posed is on the nature of a God who would use natural selection as a means to create. Many of us religious types believe in a loving God, especially one who favors the weak. How then could such a God use a method of creation that overtly favors the strong?
Mr. Paulson says there is no middle ground. Either you believe in a God, as he does, who created the world pretty much as the Bible says, or you believe that species developed by a process (evolution) where only the strong survive. What do we say to that?
The answer must lie somewhere in the greatness and inscrutability of God. This question is in the same bucket as, "Why did God create so many dead-end species?" or "If human beings are the pinnacle of creation, what took God so long to get to this point?" Does God have a playful side that makes no sense to us? I remember reading a paragraph from G. K. Chesterton that speculated that God has a childlike interest in this creation.
This is not entirely satisfactory. Nor is the idea that creation is broken because of human sin. I guess we'll have to think more on this.