{"id":3107,"date":"2006-12-04T10:53:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-04T10:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=3107"},"modified":"2006-12-04T10:53:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-04T10:53:00","slug":"questions-for-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=3107","title":{"rendered":"Questions for Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Independent has an interesting collection of questions to Richard Dawkins from readers, with answers from him, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is a reprise of an exercise that they did six or seven years ago (and which I quote from in the beginning of my book<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I would want to ask a different type of question. Dawkins has a daughter, to whom he writes some advice at the end of his ‘Devil’s Chaplain’ book. I would want to ask something along the lines of: if your daughter was unhappily in love, is there anything that you would want to say to her as a scientist<\/span>? In other words, is there anything in science which could be drawn from in order to be of human use to someone loved?<\/p>\n

I don’t believe that there is. All scientific knowledge is ultimately trivial and useless (that is – what is of interest is how to use the knowledge – the knowledge itself is, by definition, meaningless<\/a>). The widespread acceptance of the opposite is the tragedy of our time, and the doom of our civilisation.<\/p>\n

“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.52)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Independent has an interesting collection of questions to Richard Dawkins from readers, with answers from him, here. It is a reprise of an exercise that they did six or seven years ago (and which I quote from in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-O7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}