Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Yes please. I respect Dawkins in his field of expertise, but his opinions on things such as cosmology are invariably tainted with his religious mission to promote physicalism, which he does naively, without apparently having understood the requisite philosophical context.
The same thing can be said of Lawrence Krauss. In fact, I think that Krauss is even worse than Dawkins in that regard. Like Dawkins, he's another of the "new atheists" and seems to have produced his 'A Universe from Nothing' book in hopes of demolishing what he believes is the last redoubt of theism. That's why Dawkins was so effusive in his praise, comparing Krauss to Darwin. Darwin knocked theism's design argument back on its heels in Dawkins' estimation, and Dawkins believes/hopes Krauss just did the same to the first-cause argument. Unfortunately Krauss has never studied philosophy, believes that the entire subject is bullshit, and makes elementary logical and conceptual blunders as a result. Most notably, he's confusing physical vacuum and all the quantum-field-theory processes that are supposed to occur there with non-existence. That results in his whole argument being little more than petitio principii with lots of physics jargon attached to obscure his argument's fundamental circularity.
Here's David Albert's rather scathing New York Times review of Krauss' A Universe from Nothing. Albert is a very prominent philosopher of science (with a PhD in theoretical physics) who teaches at Columbia University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html
Here's Krauss' response to Albert, in which Krauss makes a thorough fool of himself in my opinion, while revealing his anti-religious motivations.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/
And here's some comments on the controversy by Cal Tech physics professor Sean Carroll who seems to mostly agree with Albert and with the points that I've been making in this thread.
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/04/28/a-universe-from-nothing/
Apparently Krauss holds grudges and didn't take kindly to Albert's review. Both Albert and Krauss were scheduled to speak later on the something-from-nothing controversy at the Museum of Natural History's planetarium in NYC and Albert was suddenly disinvited and told not to come by the planetarium's director and event-organizer Neil Tyson. Albert believes that Krauss told Tyson that it was either 'him or me'. (Professors behaving badly, it's nothing new.)
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