Posted on 12/18/2006 8:12:55 AM PST by SJackson
Reviewers have not been kind to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, professor of something called "the public understanding of science" at Oxford. Critics have found it to be the atheist's mirror image of Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism - long on in-your-face rhetoric and offensively dismissive of all those holding an opposing view.
Princeton University philosopher Thomas Nagel found Dawkins's "attempts at philosophy, along with a later chapter on religion and ethics, particularly weak." Prof. Terry Eagleton began his London Review of Books critique: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the British Book of Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."
Dawkins's "central argument" is that because every complex system must be created by an even more complex system, an intelligent designer would have had to be created by an even greater super-intellect.
New York Times reviewer Jim Holt described this argument as the equivalent of the child's question, "Mommy, who created God?"
Nagel provides the grounds for rejecting this supposed proof. People do not mean by God "a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world" but rather a Being outside the physical world - the "purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world."
He points out further that the same kind of problem Dawkins poses to the theory of design plagues evolutionary theory, of which Dawkins is the preeminent contemporary popularizer. Evolution depends on the existence of pre-existing genetic material - DNA - of incredible complexity, the existence of which cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.
So who created DNA? Dawkins's response to this problem, writes Nagel, is "pure hand-waving" - speculation about billions of alternative universes and the like.
As a charter member of the Church of Darwin, Dawkins not only subscribes to evolutionary theory as the explanation for the morphology of living creatures, but to the sociobiologists' claim that evolution explains all human behavior. For sociobiologists, human development, like that of all other species, is the result of a ruthless struggle for existence. Genes seek to reproduce themselves and compete with one another in this regard. In the words of the best-known sociobiologist, Harvard's E.O. Wilson, "An organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."
THAT PICTURE of human existence, argues the late Australian philosopher of science David Stove in Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution, constitutes a massive slander against the human race, as well as a distortion of reality.
The Darwinian account, for instance, flounders on widespread altruistic impulses that have always characterized humans in all places and times. Nor can it explain why some men act as heroes even though by doing so they risk their own lives and therefore their capacity to reproduce, or why societies should idealize altruism and heroism. How, from an evolutionary perspective, could such traits have developed or survived?
The traditional Darwinian answer is that altruism is but an illusion, or a veneer of civilization imposed upon our real natures. That answer fails to explain how that veneer could have come about in the first place. How could the first appeal to higher moral values have ever found an author or an audience? David Stove offers perhaps the most compelling reason for rejecting the views of those who deny the very existence of human altruism: "I am not a lunatic."
IN 1964, biologist W.D. Hamilton first expounded a theory explaining how much of what appears to us as altruism is merely genes' clever way of assuring the propagation of their type via relatives sharing that gene pool. The preeminent defender of Darwin - Dawkins - popularized this theory in The Selfish Gene.
Among the predictions Hamilton made is: "We expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but that everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers [or offspring], or four half-brothers, or eight first cousins," because those choices result in a greater dissemination of a particular gene pool.
To which Stove responds: "Was an expectation more obviously false than this one ever held (let alone published) by any human being?" Throughout history, men have sacrificed themselves for those bearing no relationship to them, just as others have refused to do so for more than two brothers. Here is a supposedly scientific theory bearing no relationship to any empirical reality ever observed. Stove offers further commonsense objections: Parents act more altruistically toward their offspring than siblings toward one another, even though in each pair there is an overlap of half the genetic material. If Hamilton's theory were true, we should expect to find incest widespread. In fact, it is taboo. Finally, the theory is predicated on the dubious proposition that animals, or their genes, can tell a sibling from a cousin, and a cousin from other members of the same species.
SOCIOBIOLOGY, Stove demonstrates, is a religion and genes are its gods. In traditional religion, humans exist for the greater glory of God; in sociobiology, humans and all other living things exist for the benefit of their genes. "We are... robot-vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes," writes Dawkins. Like God, Dawkins's genes are purposeful agents, far smarter than man.
He describes how a certain cuckoo parasitically lays its eggs in the nest of the reed warbler, where the cuckoo young get more food by virtue of their wider mouths and brighter crests, as a process in which the cuckoo genes have tricked the reed warbler. Thus, for Dawkins, genes are capable of conceiving a strategy no man could have thought of and of putting into motion the complicated engineering necessary to execute that strategy.
Writing in 1979, Prof. R.D. Alexander made the bald assertion: "We are programmed to use all our effort, and in fact to use our lives, in production." And yet it is obvious that most of what we do has nothing to do with reproduction, and never more so than at the present, when large parts of the civilized world are becoming rapidly depopulated. Confronted with these obvious facts about human nature and behavior, sociobiologists respond by ascribing them to "errors of heredity."
As Stove tartly observes: "Because their theory of man is badly wrong, they say that man is badly wrong; that he incorporates many and grievous biological errors." But the one thing a scientific theory may never do, Stove observes, is "reprehend the facts."
It may observe them, or predict new facts to be discovered, but not criticize those before it. The only question that remains is: How could so many intelligent men say so many patently silly things? For Dawkins, the answer would no doubt be one of those evolutionary "misfires," such as that to which he attributes religious belief.
how think work if they think about it = how they think the world works if they think about it
I wish I had time right now for this conversation - it's very interesting. I'll just add my tiny .02 for now. You said:
"Creationists, on the other hand, act as if the Bible was designed as a science textbook, which it most emphatically isn't. I don't recall God explaining atomic structure to Moses, for example."
I am a Hindu and a creationist. Religious people of all stripes are generally creationists (if they believe the teachings to which they supposedly adhere). There are undoubtedly Christian creationsists who have their own belief about how God created; the Vedas describe God's creative process in a different way.
I wish people would focus just a little not on what the exact creation teachings of various religions, but the flaws in TOE. The flaws highly interest me. Cicero's comment #27 addresses my POV precisely.
I think the truth interferes with your worldview. Science reveals more and more the lies of evolutionary philosophy. God created science. Without God , there would not be a universe . God gave us order so that we may actually systematically study science. Evolutionists believe in chaos and yet the order of our world defies them.
The theory of evolution does not state that insects evolved into humans. That is just not how it works. It DOES state that all life has a common ancestor in the distant past.
Tell me what is the difference in so called "micro and macro" evolution? There is NONE! If you accept micro-evolution then you have no problem with the basic tenets of the Theory of Evolution.
not ok............you see, from your primitive Wikipedia definition of evolution, it's again made obvious that atheistic evolutionists make up their ow rules and then adjust their own rules to any new discovery that conflicts with their old rules. It's a circle that goes around and around, meaningless.
The mixing of chemical compounds to form a living organism is NOT evolution, it is ABIOGENESIS.
These are the conditions needed for Evolution to work:
A living organism that is able to reproduce.
PERIOD. That's all you need. That is ground zero for Evolution. How that living organism appeared is NOT A CONCERN OF EVOLUTION, it falls in the realm of A-B-I-O-G-E-N-E-S-I-S. Abiogenesis is not a path to "species" or "species-creation".
What do you mean by this?:
"It would also mean non Evolution species creation must happen before any Evolution can happen..."
Do you know the difference between "species creation" and the formation of a chemical compound? It is not the same thing.
Once the first living organism appeared, evolution started. You can't use the word "EVOLUTION" to describe the events that happened before the first living organism appeared.
heh heh. The Catholic Crutch.
Is that anythign like antidisestablishmentarianism?
In college I took a Philosophy of Religion class. The prof told the story of a defender of the idea that the earth is on the back of a giant turtle. The story goes that one day a precocious student asked what the turtle was perched upon. The teacher told him it was on an even larger turtle. The student, of course, kept on pressing. Finally the exasperated teacher said; ”Look, it’s turtles all the way down!”
So do you believe in the Judaeo-Christian account of "God Spoke, and it was" or the Native American account, or early Celtic accounts of Odin and Thor, or the Hindu account?
And if you believe in the Judaeo-Christian account of the creation, do these beliefs come from a 6,000 year old collection of books from various sources around the Middle East and Mediterranean?
And do you believe god gave man logic?
Assertion without evidence.
Science reveals more and more the lies of evolutionary philosophy.
Really. And where's your evidence that this is the case?
God created science.
No. Man created science. Until about three centuries ago there was no "science" as we know it today. It developed slowly as more and more researchers shrugged off the shackles of Medieval thinking.
Without God , there would not be a universe.
Other than your blind faith, do you have any empirical evidence to support this?
God gave us order so that we may actually systematically study science.
Other than your blind faith, do you have any empirical evidence to support this?
Evolutionists believe in chaos and yet the order of our world defies them.
Evolutionists accept the validity of the theory of evolution. You just pulled the above out of your tuckus. Unless, of course, you actually have evidence to back up your claims.
I'll wait while you dig it up...
I love that line, too bad its not apropos.
Perhaps my gentle jibe was a little too close to the bone.
A gentle jibe would've been something along the lines of "oh ye of little faith."
Evidently I do not rate witty opponents.
That's strange, because you don't post here every day.
But let me guess, are they like the intellectual *holier-than-thou* types who disparage everyone who doesn't agree with them about certain aspects of science, and make snide comments about those being janitors to clean the offices of the intellectual elite, or post derogatory comments like *IDiot* and *creatard*? And then back-slap and high-five each other over their witty retorts?
elastolution again.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1754064/posts?page=22#22
Of course, you wouldn't know anyone like that, right?
Of course, you wouldn't know anyone like that, right?
You mean like evolutionists who are computer technicians, or business admistrators, or those who when asked to provide some credentials of scientific training never even bother answering?
And your scientific training is in what field?
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