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.
By definition of the language, this guy is not an "a-theist", that is, having no real desire to have theism. What he should be called correctly is an "anti-theist". As I have said before, an anti-theist would be the kind of person who, having decided volentarily to have no breakfast of his own, would come over and whizz in your Wheaties.
Sure they do. Communist groups all the time. Left-wing environmentalists have meetings. Universities have dozens of meetings all over the country. The ACLU has an enormous following.
They're everywhere.
That's just pitiful jr. But then I suppose you didn't have much faith to begin with.
I am amazed how much atheism is growing around the world..
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Atheism. like liberalism, has become a religion.
We can speculate all we want about whether or not altruism is consistent with Darwinian evolution. I agree that the widespread existence of altruism does not by itself "disprove" Darwinism. But I also think that attempts to depict it as consistent with Darwinism are speculative at best.
Speculation is fine, but the problem is that too many evolutionists take that speculation as tantamount to additional corroboration of Darwinism. As long as any Darwinian explanation is *plausible*, they are contented. In other words, they simply believe what they want to believe and belittle anyone who does not see it the way they see it.
Okay I get what you mean here....
That's why I like to watch The Andy Griffith Show reminds me of the days when no one ever heard or spoke of the ACLU, The Taliban, ISLAM, Atheists or botox..:)
Nagel succinctly makes the point I have tried to make on numerous evolutionary threads. There is really no satisfactory way of explaining how something so incredibly complex and interlinked could have evolved, even over billions of years of time.
It was possible to imagine lower forms of life developing from inanimate matter and gradually evolving into higher forms until cell biology came along and the true complexity of even simple life forms was understood. Now, if you look at the facts, such a simplistic view is simply impossible.
That's why Darwinists tend not to work in these innovative scientific fields, but rather to spend their time pontificating or going into the teaching profession so they can brainwash young students by maintaining their monopoly in the educational field with the help of corrupt judges and the ACLU.
I find Darwinism impossible to credit not because of my religious beliefs, but because it offends mortally against my scientific and mathematical training. The ONLY way you can justify evolutionary theory is by introducing God into the equation, or, if you prefer to put revealed religion aside for the moment, by introducing an unknown Intelligent Designer, and arguing that He chose to create life through a guided evolutionary process. Mere chance cannot explain the supposed process.
It's difficult to imagine what an atheist would celebrate.
Wow, this was posted at 11:13 and here it is 12:00 and the Darwinists are yet to get going on this thread. Maybe they don't like to be put in the position of having to defend atheisism. Maybe, I dunno.
Are you sure those are all really atheists?
And no doubt, far smarter than Dawkins. But after reading some of the things he's been credited with saying, that isn't too much of a stretch.
Absolutely!
We keep hearing that accusation all the time and I don't know ANY that make that claim. Could you provide us with some examples of those who have stated that? And could you then explain why you make a blanket statement about all creationists based on your perception of what some have allegedly said?
I take it you fail to see the hypocrisy of such a statement in a thread titled "'Mommy, why are atheists dim-witted?'"
We're all figments of God's imagination, in some sense.
I take it you did not see the episode of "South Park" the quote is taken from.
LOLOL!!! Exactly how I feel!
If just loved this: "If Hamilton's theory were true, we should expect to find incest widespread. In fact, it is taboo." Evidently, Steven Pinker is particularly incensed to find a taboo here. It puzzles him.... That is, he can't explain it.
But here is the piece de resistance:
"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."Great post, SJackson! Thank you so much!
Thanks for the head's-up!
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