so there goes that idea :D i was going to make a bunch of themes to submit to try and get a free link to increase my google ranking but WHATEVER

In other news, I was going to write a short something on each chapter of The Irrational Atheist as I read it, but on second thought if I’m not even really that interested in it, why should I expect anyone else to be? And I’m not really writing for other people to read anyway, so HUMBUG!

Anyway, quite disappointed. “The Irrational Atheist is not a theological work nor is it a conventional religious defense of faith. It contains no arguments for the existence of God and the supernatural, nor is it concerned with evolution, creationism, the age of Earth, or intelligent design. …” So what is it then? So far, it has been a bunch of statistics such as “atheists tend to be democratic” and etc.

At the end of chapter one and the start of two, he starts defining what science is and means. I’m not there yet, but I have the feeling he’s going to then say what the atheists are claiming is not science. I don’t know, after experiencing the philosophy and spirit and attitude of the joyful science, this defining of science by a nonscientist so that he can say what is and is not science seems rather childish and missing the whole picture. It’s evident from his attitude towards Dawkins’ book Unweaving the Rainbow, which he criticizes for being a book about science without a clear definition of what science is. I could quote the whole thing but it’s kind of long, it’s on page 29.

Just as disappointing as the ‘empirical evidence’ is Mr. Vox Day’s rationality; it could really use some work in my opinion. Instead of more rigorous reasoning and analysis, he seems to get around by stealth. An example is his reasoning that leads up to the conclusion, “In any event, the falsifiability definition is nebulous enough to be pretty useless.” Assuming everyone understands what ‘falsifiability definition’ of science means.. but maybe I shouldn’t assume that. Anyway, this is worth quoting:

“But can the concept of falsifiability really be taken seriously as a dividing point between science and not-science? It appears more than a little flawed to me. Let’s begin with postulating that a study of the language of the gods is not proper science, whereas a study of the color of swans is.

I base this premise on the classic example of a falsifiable proposition, the statement that ‘all swans are white.’ The fact that one could prove this proposition to be wrong by observing a black swan makes it falsifiable and therefore a proper scientific matter. It is not the truth or untruthh of the proposition that is important, only the fact that the truth or untruth could be determined by observation.

The problem here is that the proposition ‘all gods speak Aramaic’ is equally falsifiable, given that the theoretical observation of a monolingual Greek-speaking god would suffice to falsify the proposition. This would therefore make divine linguistics a legitimate matter of science, the current difficulty of observing gods notwithstanding….”
-Chapter 2, Defining Science

Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of the nature and attitude of science. (which is where the point of falsifiability comes from. science does not come from some set of conditions that must be met, but the criteria from science) As I’ve already said above, it really seems like Day misses this “spirit” of science.