Today, information travels very fast. With the internet, television,cellular, sms and chatting, come rumors and myths. Do we have to believe them or not? In the paper Good and bad Reasons for believing, Richard Dawkins writes a letter to his daughter on her tenth birhday to explain her the right way of reasoning whenever new information would be presented to her. In this following guideline I’ll summarize, explain and critically evaluate Dawkins’ way of thinking.
What Dawkins tries to do by writing to his daughter is to encourage her to reject three bad reasons for believing anything: tradition, authority and revelation. He tends to only accept beliefs that are supported by evidence. Tradition beliefs, are beliefs that come from generation to generation. Religious beliefs come from tradition. They usually start from nothing and people make them sound better. People often believe these, simply because people have thought of it for a while. Authority beliefs, are viewpoints that people believe because they are told to by the authority. Science may look like a kind of authority but it isn’t. You are free whenever you want to look at evidence. Then there are revelation beliefs witch are, when religious people just have a feelings inside them that something must be true but they don’t even have evidence that it is. Dawkins is totally in disagreement with these three ways of thinking. He thinks that we should only accept as true the things that we can actually see, hear, feel or smell in other words evidence.
What Dawkins thinks it’s that we should only base our beliefs on evidence, things that can be seen, heard or feel. We can call this an observation. For Dawkins, tradition, authority or revelation must be avoided in any case. First of all, tradition beliefs are values that have been handed down from grandparents to parents and to child. They obviously have been modified since their first apparition. They have been stated a long time ago. People didn’t had the...