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.
Hopefully we're not relying on her for anything!
If I want to chit-chat about various gods, I go to the Religion forum.
If you say so.
I'll concede your "fact," LiberalGunNut, but with this reservation: The validity of the second statement (with which I agree) does not logically depend on the validity of the first, for which you give no validating evidence (and neither has anyone else, BTW).
Obviously life forms have a physical basis. But it appears life is more than its physical or material basis.
Science is supposed to be about explaining nature. Or at least it used to be about explaining nature.
So, what does this "fact" explain about how non-living matter bootstrapped itself into living matter?
You know, the mathematician Chaitin has found that the information content of the physical laws is amazingly low. Where do the amino acids get the information they would need so to evolve into proteins, and then DNA, if the physical laws alone aren't "competent" to do that? Yockey says -- and he has plenty of company these days -- amino acids simply don't have the "right stuff" (sufficient information) to originate life -- and Nobel laureate Crick (who with Watson discovered DNA) seems to share this view.
Until this question is settled, your allegation that abiogensis is a "fact" appears to be mere hand-waving, a "just-so story," a myth....
FWIW.
I'm all for leaving her out of it.
I don't want to.
Have the flies changed to birds?
You're missing the point. I am SEPERATING evolution and abiogenesis. This all started when a previous poster combined the two.
Let me say once more EVOLUTION DOES NOT DEPEND ON ABIOGENESIS. That is my point.
"Any theory that claims that life was created from non life is not falsifiable by the very nature of the claim. "
Life IS MADE UP OF NON-LIVING ELEMENTS. Do you not agree that we are made of Carbon and a few other assorted elements? Do you not agree that carbon is non living matter?
But hey, I haven't heard a totally convincing theory of the origin of life. I am open to the fact that a supernatural being created the first cell. (I doubt that it would be the same as the one depicted in the Hebrew bible).
But once life got here, the overwhelming mountain of evidence points to the Theory of Evolution.
Do you believe in the Judaeo Christian creation story as depicted in The Bible? Do you believe that earth is 6'000 years old? I'd love to pick that apart as you all are vainly attempting to pick apart evolution.
Immune to reason bump
I completely agree, My2Cents. Thank you so much for the insight!
FWIW, there seems to be something more involved in this attitude than scrupulous devotion to the scientific method -- that is, some kind of "personal stake" or other, professional, emotional, or psychological/spiritual.
Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
How would anyone know they were gone? They rarely if ever posted outside of an evolution thread. They didn't bring anything here except their ego. They certainly did nothing to advance conservatism (unless making snotty comments about Christians counts).
LOL!!
MIcro evolution is not a one way street. The changes that occur were designed into the creature at the beginning, and allow the subtile changes that are necessary due to the constantly cycling environment. They change back. An example is the remarkable way that wooly caterpillars seem to "predict" the coming winter; the change is never permanent, nor does it ever lead to a new species; only an adaptation for the species to continue reproducing.
You are not alone in that view. Of course, we are speaking only of "some," not "all" on this point.
Thanks for your keen insights, My2Cents!
Because it's posted in the News and Activism Forum, where, on a political web site you would expect to find political discussions.
Somehow, somewhere, non living matter formed to make the first living organisms. Is that agreed upon? Whether it was done in a lab or in space or by GALACTUS it happened at one point.
Please tell me how that has anything to do with evolution. That was my original point. I'm not going to get sidetracked by these side arguments. I am not convinced when it comes to any of the theories of abiogenesis, but I do accept the Theory of Evolution. Ok? Arguing abiogenesis is a safe haven for you guys because you cannot credibly argue against the mountain of evidence supporting evolution.
No one would feel diminished, except Richard Dawkins, I guess. I'm sure what terrifies him more than the possibility that Darwinism is a fraud, is the possibility that there is a God to whom he (Dawkins) is accountable.
Is there more than one scientist?
"They change back. An example is the remarkable way that wooly caterpillars seem to "predict" the coming winter; the change is never permanent, nor does it ever lead to a new species; only an adaptation for the species to continue reproducing."
You obviously have no understanding of what evolution is. Nothing "changes back". Here is the definition of evolution:
In biology, evolution is change in the heritable traits of a population over successive generations, as determined by changes in the allele frequencies of genes. Over time, this process can result in speciation, the development of new species from existing ones.
All contemporary organisms on earth are related to each other through common descent, the products of cumulative evolutionary changes over billions of years. Evolution is thus the source of the vast diversity of life on Earth, including the many extinct species attested to in the fossil record.
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