Here.
'Luthon64
I can understand Dawkins’ arguments, but not those of Will Hutton. This doesn’t mean that I disagree with Hutton, it means I don’t understand him. Perhaps this is because I did not receive a liberal arts education at varsity? To me, his statements just seem like directionless rambling; a sort of post-modernist pastiche in which English words are used, and the structure is in the form of sentences, but actual meaning is absent.
Agreed. It is a trademark of the postmodernist mind that the meaning of words is held to be fuzzy rather than distinct. That way, you can be a bit fluid and slippery with the meaning of what you said or wrote. A tonic to this worryingly pervasive habit is found in the words of WV Quine and JS Ullian (from their book The Web of Belief): “Instead of construing special occurrences of certain words in special ways in order to count a man’s statement true, we find it simpler after a point to count it false.”
It’s of course also a disgrace that a leading UK academic repeatedly conflates atheism with secularism and clearly does not understand what secularism actually is. Several commenters pointed out this failure of understanding on Hutton’s part, which becomes obvious when one considers that there is no conflict in a religious person defending secularism. Hutton also seems unaware that for liberalism to thrive, it requires a secular disposition.
Hutton’s bugbear, like that of most accommodationists, appears to be a morbid discomfort with any form of vocal criticism of religion. He objects to it and so partly undermines his own claims to liberalism.
'Luthon64