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This is a familiar pattern; Nature with a capital N, Chance with a capital C etc.
Indeed, he claims unequivocally, "There is no 'me' inside my brain, there is only an ever-changing set of brain states, a distillation of history, emotion, instinct, experience, and the influence of other people -- not to mention chance."Let me swat the good doctor on the knees with a hammer a few times. Perhaps his impression of himself as an ever changing set of brain states will assume a more coherent, more continuous character. Perhaps he will even discover evidence of a "me" inside of him--as in, STOP HURTING ME!
Quackery <== evolution // ideology (( manmade )) - knowledge (( philosophy )) - technology // SCIENCE ==> creation !
Splifford the bat says: Always remember:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste; especially on an evolutionist.
Just ... say no to narcotic drugs, alcohol abuse --- and corrupt ideological doctrines.
I just read this review last night in NR; I'm so glad you posted it here, Heartlander. Thank you!
Chance -- all is "chance." Samuel Butler -- who G. B. Shaw regarded as the greatest English writer of the second half of the 19th century, was a very early critic of Charles Darwin's -- but not of Darwin's father, Erasmus Darwin's -- evolutionary theory. There were other notable theories as well; e.g., Lamarck's. Evolution had been one of those "big ideas" hanging in the air during the 18th and 19th centuries; but Charles Darwin's take on it was, to Butler, beyond the pale for he considered it hopelessly irrational -- because it relies entirely on Luck; i.e., random chance. Regarding Butler's criticism of Darwinian evolution, Jacques Barzun (in From Dawn to Decadence, 2000) writes:
"...it 'banishes mind from the universe,' while experience shows mind acting for results that it foresees. Mind is seconded by habit, which starts conscious and becomes unconscious. This composite cunning was the agency that Erasmus Darwin had proposed in his work on evolution, and Butler espouses it.... Butler also pointed out that to account for the origin of new species one must account for the origin of variation from the old, which nobody so far knew or has said anything about." [Emphasis added]
To my knowledge, nobody has yet done this. Instead, evolutionists want to talk about incredible abstractions, such as Richard Dawkin's "selfish gene" as the driver of "natural selection."
Darwin wants to avoid engaging in teleology -- that is, he maintains that there is no purpose or goal in view as the terminus of the evolutionary process. But then he goes and contradicts himself by saying that evolution serves the "survival of the fittest" -- which implies a goal or purpose.
If this is true, then what does material nature or selfish genes (which seem to lack conciousness, or at least the higher consciousness of moral -- willing, choosing -- thinking agents) have to do with working toward a goal of "fitness" or any other kind of goal? How did material nature or the gene get sufficient "mind" and "will" to work toward that "fitness" of species that is the supposed purpose of the evolutionary process? "Random" and "fit" are quite antithetical ideas. So how can the achievement of "fitness" be squared with a random process, which supposedly produces it? More dumb Luck?
It doesn't wash: For in Darwin's theory, "Luck" explicitly stands in the place of "Mind" -- its explanation banishes mind, so nature or selfish genes cannot be said to "have" mind, or purpose -- for purpose presupposes mind.... And yet we have nature ineluctibly moving toward "fitness."
I'm still waiting for Darwinists to explain this paradox to me.
As a scientist, Ridley has been shown to be way behind the curve. In 1999, when already there were plenty of indications that it was not genes who controlled an organism, but the DNA which materialists call junk, he wrote the book Genome which claims that genes determine everything we do.
This book just shows, that ideologues do not change their views when proven wrong, they just make up new, more convoluted stories.
No. Darwinism posits that any random changes that happen to enhance survival are passed down to the next generations, and any random changes the don't enhance survival lead to the death of the indivdual, minimizing the number of chances it has to be passed into descendants.
Selection isn't random, and anyone writing a review that doesn't recognize this shouldn't be writing the review.
Near the end of the Middle Ages, a few theologians (the "scientists" of that time) persuaded a king of France to give them permission for an experiment that had been forbidden by the Church. They were allowed to weigh the soul of a criminal by measuring him both before and after his hanging. As usually happens with academics, they came up with a definite result: the soul weighed about an ounce and a half. We laugh at such things of course...We ought at least consider the possibility that a few centuries hence people may laugh at the pretensions of some of our scientists, as well as at our gullibility at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first....
My argument is not simply that is it is not given to human beings to explain or know everything, including the universe. When human beings recognize that they cannot create everything and cannot see everything and cannot define everything, such limitations do not impoverish but enrich the human mind...p 113
At the End of an Age, John Lukacs
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Bingo! Materialists always exempt their thoughts and ideas from the rules of materialism - as if the mateialist somwhow rises above his genetic material annd is able to have some sort of supernatural insight. It's laughable.