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.
Ok, that was kind of funny. Cheers!
Yes. Don't tease me, show me!
Because I was responding to narby's overreaching statement, "Science will admit what it does not know". While many scientists throughout the ages, in particular Max Planck, experienced when science did not admit it does not know.
I got a kick out of the headline. That was the best part of the essay.
Is she a "good"witch or a "bad"witch?
HAHA! Great!
Are you serious? This is your evidence? Maybe you need to check the link, all I see is a story about genetically altered wheat. Please tell me how this shows intelligent design.
Sorry, you got trapped in your own language. You said "SHow me evidence that an intelligent designer is the mechanism for a change in allele frequency." and he showed you humans genetically altering wheat.
There you go.
Oh ok, you're talking about man made design. Nice trick! And I fell for it.
Still doesn't saying anything for or against evolution or ID. It is actually more damning to ID. It is the understanding of evolution that is the very foundation of the biotech industry.
Nice trick though.
Yeah, neat little trick, but that is all it is a "trick". It doesn't negate one iota of the Theory of Evolution. It actually bolsters it.
I'd say Narby is closer to right. Science will admit what it does not know. Individual scientists may or may not immediately, but that does not disprove the assertion. You can make an unfair assesment of theology (and some do) by picking out the foibles of some well-known theologians, and I'll take issue with that just as well.
BTW, the ToE encompasses both the Plant and Animal Kingdoms.
Food for thought. Yuck, yuck.
Dawkins cocksureness -- a trait evident in all his writings -- is the signature of a second rate mind, a second rate scientist, and a second rate polemicist.
Wow, you really can't go toe to toe with The Theory of Evolution. Nice trick though.
Actually a few of us are still here. Many gave up in disgust. I'm an archaeologist, so I have lots of patience.
They may be back, but clearly they were frustrated that their agenda wasn't making much headway here.
Agenda? You mean science?
I don't have to go "toe to toe" with the ToE, I just have to go "toe to toe" with you. It's like the bear thing. You know, two guys, one bear and a race?
I don't believe in the supernatural in any form.
If there is a God I am prepared to be judged upon my deeds, I would doubt any kind of God would make me suffer for not choosing teams. If there is a God he will make all knowledge available to me.
Most religions believe if you choose the wrong "team" your in for a pretty crappy afterlife.
I'll give you that only with a *long* "eventually" added to the end. Science as a whole will hold on to popular theories long after they have outlived their usefulness, and stridently attack those who prove the theories wrong. Wait a few centuries, and everything seems to be ironed out.
"Most religions believe if you choose the wrong "team" your in for a pretty crappy afterlife."
Actually, you'd be surprised how many give you second chances or even more. Christianity, of course, doesn't. But as long as you do better in the next life or have some distant relative pray for you after you die, you're in good shape in most religions. Some even don't have any hell or suffering at all.
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