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.
You don't understand what mumerology is.
In any system of numerology, whether Biblical, or otherwise, each number is assigned a particular meaning, and multi-digit numbers are added together to find a single number, and thus its meaning.
There's no need to; you can tell them by their comments.
"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,"
That is EXACTLY what they say. The only thing I would quibble with is the use of the word "Darwinism". There are no "isms" in science. It is THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION.
No one is insisting that "Darwinism" (what is that?) is a proven "fact", but EVOLUTION is as observable as gravity.
I'd hate to be wrong about something like that. Humor me. Which ones are they?
Yea, sure will.
Should be one hellova power struggle too what-with so many vying for the distinction.
Of course never ones to let opportunity pass by, Hollyweird will resurrect the old quiz show, "What's My Line".
At the end all our questions will be answered when the MC asks from among millions, "And now will the *real* Antichrist please stand up?".
...Merry Christmas, tl.
Nothing in Sherman's book strengthens the argument for the bible codes. I wonder if Sherman looked for rambling, semi-cohertent sentences that could be twisted positive messages about Allah. Because if he had looked with the same zeal that he looked for such things about Jesus, there is little doubt he would find them.
Relying on such obvious nonsense as the bible codes cheapens Christianity. It is of no surprise that few, if any, Christian organizations have adopted this "evidence". Bible codes is simply crass numerology, wrapped up in a pretty but insubstantial parcel of impressive-sounding statistics.
Only to those with a very fertile imagination.
Merry Christmas, Landru.
You obviously have not read the book.
It is scholarly in the extreme, and deals with all aspects of the question. The proof is irrefutable to any mathematician that uses statistics.
It has been observed in Fruit Flies and bacteria among other things.
How do you explain the ability of some bacteria to feed on synthetic material? (One example of many).
So, in numerlogy, there is no analysis based on enumeration of the characters, only the assignment of meanings to numbers found within the literal text itself?
If you can't tell for yourself, how can I help you?
Simple, just tell me who they are. You claim to know, as their identities are apparent to you. It should be a simple thing to do.
Where the numbers are found is up to the observer; that is why few put any trust in it.
With all due respect, in my view, the people you speak of (I think we all know who you mean) were never here for friendly discussion and debate. They seemed to descend on evo/crevo threads in packs, and in doing a search of some of these folks within FR, most of them only posted to the evolution-related threads. Despite protestations that they are "conservatives," it was curious to me that most of them never showed any interest in anything on FR other than the evolution threads. Frankly, my conclusion is that they were here to push an agenda, not to engage in "friendly discussion," and they got frustrated because the "luddites" turned out to be more knowledgeable than they assumed. They didn't make any headway, and so they beat a hasty retreat. They withdrew by their own choice, and apparently have withdrawn as a pack. I don't necessarily miss the participation of those who were here in an attempt to hijack FR into their cause. Certainly, this thread proves that the evo side has some able proponents among FR's regular participants. We don't need professional evolutionists seeking converts to their mystery religion.
Can the numbers be found by enumerating the characters of the text?
How do you explain your ability to feed on synthetic material?
I don't recall any attempt to do that, but try a google on it. People will try most anything.
My observation is that every piece of evidence is shoe-horned into the theory to make it fit. In other words, "Evolution is a fact. Every new piece of evidence must, somehow, confirm the theory. So, every new piece of evidence will be interpreted in such a way that it will bolster the theory." The theory provides an intepretation of the evidence; the evidence doesn't actually reinterpret the theory. And the fact that one cannot go back eons to check the intepretation is a convenient shortcoming of the theory. That appears how it actually works.
Okay. Is that the process by which you find these long equidistant sequences?
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