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.
I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder, Junior, because those eminent folks to whom you refer were not "run off by luddites" -- though that might be their perception, their complaint. (Sometimes it's easier to blame others for our misfortunes than to examine our own behavior and take responsibility for it....)
One could just as easily say (depending on your point of view) that most chose to absent themselves because they were frustrated with the difficulty of "winning arguments" against "luddites."
Personally I think they should all come back. At least here at FreeRepublic, you can have a discussion about science. Which, based on my limited acquaintance with Darwin Central (just lurking), is not something that happens around there very often. Mostly it looks like a place to schmooze with like-minded cronies, and to make fun of "luddites," particularly "certain" luddites.
The "observer problem" is alive and well on both sides of this great divide....
BTW FWIW: this Christian luddite (that would be me) is an evolutionist; but just happens to think that Darwinian theory is not so much "wrong," as simply incomplete. It hardly can be said to be complete since it doesn't deal with origins. And possibly without accounting for origin, it is difficult (as best) and maybe even impossible to account for the source of information in biological life.
Such as, for instance, DNA itself: how did that "evolve," and from what? According to Hubert Yockey and many others mathematicians and physical scientists, amino acids have as much chance of "evolving" into proteins and DNA as a perpetual motion machine has of being successfully built).
With the departure of our friends, the Evo/Crevo debate suffers because the "opposing side" (i.e., the side that thinks neo-darwinism has the complete answer to every question of biological evolution) has simply withdrawn from the field....
In other words, all that is left for "luddites" like me to do is to "preach to the choir." Not very illuminating!
Everybody loses.
Thanks for your insights!
No. it has never been 'debunked' in any way shape or form. In fact the long sequences do absolutely prove God's authorship of his word.
"Equidistant letter sequences can be found in the text of just about any book, especially if it is written in Hebrew, where vowels are omitted making the text more open to interpretation"
That idea is what has been thoroughly debunked. R. Edwin Sherman's Bible Code Bombshell has eliminated any chance of equating the small random sequences with the multi sentence, surfact text related messages found in God's word. You should read it; it would strengthen your shallow faith
The Christians that you know apparently have little capacity to understand the kind of protection and assurance that The Lord saw fit to give his own regarding his word, due to their lack of understanding of the laws of probability. They should get educated, as it is a powerful tool in refuting the dishonest mumblings of the antichrist among us here.
Care to point him out?
That is true. But I predict a time will come, and I predict it will be within our lifetime, that Darwinism will be rendered defunct at a theory, primarily because of the siege mentality its proponents have adopted. It is perhaps the only "scientific" theory that does not condone challenges to its orthodoxy.
"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has." -- Malcolm Muggeridge.
So, can you explain why RadioAstronomer's post #71 was pulled?
HA!!
...which one.
I see, people who are not evolutionary biologists but have their areas of expertise in other fields. No different from any non-evos.
BTW, a simple google search of *Luddite* will lead you to information about what Luddites were really against and why so you can properly use the word from now on.
There's more than one?
They are literally messages embedded at equidistant spacing through most of the Old Testament. The content of the sealing messages is in each case directly related to the content of the surface text, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that they are not in any way random occurances. Read Ed Sherman's "Bible Code Bombshell" to get the full impact of the protection these seals place on the word. They make the Bible scientifically unassailable.
Them, not him. Those that are here to halt the spread of the Gospel.
By what measure? If it's a simple enumeration of the characters, then it does seem to fall squarely in the realm of numerology.
Sure, must be millions.
There's the Democrat Party pols and their supporters & then the quisling mediots and...well.
...you get the idea. {g}
RA wasn't *run off by Luddites*. If you look, he posted after 71 and still has an account on FR.
Would you care to provide a list?
What are you talking about? First of all the first living cell CAN be explained without recourse to ID. THere are a few very plausible and likely explanations. But they have nothing to do with EVOLUTION.
"The fact that abiogenesis is "outside of the scope of the Theory of Evolution" is simply an artifact of man's classification of fields of science."
This makes no sense. Lassie is a dog because man classifies him as one. Evolution is a scientific theory defined by men. The men who came up with the Theory of Evolution did not include the origin of life. No matter how much you wish it to be so, it just isn't true.
ABIOGENESIS is a FACT. It is a FACT that non living matter has formed to make living organisms. Do you not agree that you are made up of Carbon and various other elements? Now we can argue how those elements formed life but abiogenesis IS a fact.
How can we have a debate if you won't even agree that a word means what the word means. Read my above OJ SIMPSON analogy.
I think the basic problem with the Darwinian theory is that it is held by people who, at least in the most public of arenas, are too arrogant to admit to your point. If they would simply say, "Darwinism is the best theory that science has produced to explain the diversity of species in the world, but that we don't claim that the theory answers every question, and some questions may never be answered," they'd really end much of the debate. It's their insistence that Darwinism is a "proven fact" and any claim to the contray is "luddite" nonsense, that fuels the fires of controversy.
And I know for a fact, because I've had scientists tell me, that many confirmed evolutionists, while presenting a united front in the public relations battles, in the privacy of their own research and hearts, have doubts about the theory.
cont.
Having a post pulled because it violated posting guidelines is not being *run off*.
(It is perhaps the only "scientific" theory that does not condone challenges to its orthodoxy.)
If scientists are presented with a better way to explain the mountains of evidence pointing towards evolution they would accept it with open arms. But every new piece of evidence bolsters the Theory.
Indeed. When he finally does show up, he's going to find that a convenient arrangement.
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