The irony is astounding to say the least.
No...it's just showing what hypocrites and phoneys they really are.
No...it's just showing what hypocrites and phoneys they really are.
Your interpretation of the article isn't warranted by its substance. Paul Johnson is a Catholic--- he is not a fundmentalist. Catholicism buys into Biblical inerrancy, not literalism. Literalism was used by the Manichaeans as a strawman interpretation of scripture to make it easier to attack; Augustine decided it as a strawman when he became a Christian.
Surely you've seen or met an actual Christian fundamentalist before. Ask them what their opinion is of Catholicism. At the least they will assure that the two are different.
What Paul Johnson calls "Darwinian Fundamentalism" can be encapsulated by Daniel Dennett's description of Darwinism-- which Dawkins wholly agrees with--- as an acid that eats through everything but itself, thus superceding every other belief-- the very definition of fundamentalism:
Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea -- Darwin's idea -- bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.
Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers -- welcome or not -- to question in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own "real" minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.
Johnson is in no way criticizing this interpretaion of Darwinism becuase it resembles religion as such--- he is criticizing a specific sort of Darwinism to a specific sort of religion.
Come on. Is Jerry Fodor, whom he quotes, supposed to be a fundamentalist or somehow narrow minded as well? Paul Johnson is a great writer and thinker--- anyone who's read his historical work, even if they take issue with what he's written here, must admit this. And in fact the main point he is making here is a very moderate one-- that Dawkins must be a Darwinian "fundmentalist" to think that Darwin's theory, if true, holds the power Dennett attributes to it and thus outright disproves God's existence, as Dawkins holds it does. His secondary point is that some books he considers thoughtful and well written have appeared, criticizing Dawkins and also making some criticisms of Darwin's theory of natural selection, much as respected scientists and thinkers such as Lynn Margulis and Stephen Wolfram have. Again, a rather moderate point. I assume you've never read Paul Johnson. His book Birth of the Modern which describes the influence of new technologies such as steam power, is one among many of his classic works.
I must also say I also don't think it's correct of you to say as you do in post 28 that Darwin's theory as it then stood somehwo fit the later discovery DNA or even Mendel's laws of inheritance. As I'm sure you know, William Bateson, who insisted on the truth of the rediscovered Mendelian laws in the face of opposition in the Neo-Darwinian biometric community and Sir Ronald Fisher, who by helping to resolve the controversy helped create the neo-Darwinian synthesis, a synthesis that had been required precisely because Darwin had not predicted anything like Mendel's laws and his theory, as he had originally stated it, was not consistent with them.
Dawkins had a rather famous debate with Gould on the subject of levels to which selection applied and the role of forces besides natural selection in evolution. Dawkins lost that argument on the merits, but did not budge. It is perfectly accurate to call that dogmatic.
The reality is, evolution is a fact but the relative role of natural selection within it remains a topic of considerable dispute among scientists. Professonial controversialists focused entirely outward on religious literalist opponents have entrenched themselves in dubious propositions and raised their hyperbole to new heights, all the while pretending that anyone who disagrees with a jot or tittle of their views is a raving moonbat trying to defend Genesis.
Which is nonsense.
The formal evidence suggests NS is a relatively weak force. GAs fail to find global optima because complex fitness terrains are not well explored by local improvement schemes. Considerable complexity is seen in systems other than life - where there is no question of hundreds of millions of years of NS - and better understood all the time. The range of phenomena being traced to other purely formal causes is therefore growing. Causes of the variation step that preceeds NS are more important. Species are formalized as clouds in sequence space not selfish genes. Etc.
Anybody expecting any of it to dethrone evolution is being silly. But Johnson isn't expecting that. Evolution is bigger than Darwin.