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.
Right, and that's why I can understand why people are turned off to certain (or all) organized religions. But to immediately conclude that there is no God based solely on the fact that certain organized religions are made up of bad people...well I don't think that's wise. The question regarding the existence of God, a philosophical question, is separate from any question regarding the correctness/incorrectness of a particular religion.
Anyone who attempts to outlast someone who is willing to take the time to excavate a tyrannosaurus rex buried in a rock formation in the middle of a desert with little more than a dental pick and a small brush is doomed to failure! ;-)
None of us except new-age whackos can remember our past life though, so I'm left to assume we're all on our first, and last.
"Wow, that is a HUGE leap. Because you don't know something, the supernatural is the only answer? Why study anything at all? What if aliens implanted the first living cell?"
What if they did? All it would mean is that the origin of life is pushed off to a different location. The basic problem of *how* it happened would still remain.
And you still don't get the basic idea. The problem is not just that we "don't know how life originated." The problem is that we know with near certainty that it couldn't have happened by purely natural processes. If it couldn't have happened by purely natural processes, how else could it have happened? You only get one guess.
If you're saying that it takes several hundred years for scientific theories to be revised once objectively verifiable evidence is available that the current theory is wrong, I say you're full of it.
Not because the "Luddites" were more knowledgeable than assumed. – Far from it.
It was because the same “Luddites” would come back thread after thread with the same "dumb as a stump" previously refuted arguments who then proceeded to hijack every science thread that remotely could have shaken their worldview.
That's the real reason.
I don't think anyone has a problem with the change in alleles part of evolution. I think people have a problem with the postulation of near-infinite plasticity of evolution, and the moral implication of humanity's purpose if we have evolved from lower life forms.
I won't deal with the second, but is there any evidence that there is anywhere close to near-infinite plasticity within any species? Evolution depends on this. Imagine a map of evolutionary paths on a map of craters and mountains. There are pools of paths that intersect for each crater, which represents a species, but there would be few that go from one species to another, or over a mountain. Otherwise we would not observe the stability of species we see today. Or do you see things differently?
Flapdoodle!
This is why:
This is what the scientists who used to be on FR were trying refute. Like it or not, this is becoming the mainstream perception here in the US.
Actually. My post deserved to be pulled. I basically told off ES.
The great divide?.. LoL.. So TRUE..
I don't know about Adam and Eve that story could be a metaphor or not.. but I do wonder where the (3rd)third human being on this planet came from.. If not from two other humans now THERES a newsflash, a blockbuster of a story.. A human coming ((NOT)) from two other humans but born in some other fashion.. Its absolutely DNAilicious.. would rival the birth of Jesus..
But I don't wish to argue about/against evolution. It is clear to me that the universe and all its constituents evolve in time and space.
What I want to know is: What is the ordering principle or natural law that accounts for this?
This is precisely the question that modern-day neo-Darwinism refuses to engage. Even though there are voices in other scientific disciplines that strongly suggest that such an accounting must be made -- in order for science to be science, consistent with the integrity of its own methodology.
The life sciences cannot shut its doors to inconvenient facts as adduced by other sicentific disciplies without putting blinders on, and "braces on its brains." FWIW
Science is never a "done deal." It never reaches conclusions that may never be challenged. If it did, it wouldn't be science anymore, but something else entirely.
Karl Marx specialized in that sort of thing: that is, the forbidding of questions. But this sort of thing is not appropriate for people who claim to be scientists.
I honestly lost your argument as I read your post. Not one of us (AFIK) ever said science was static and TOE was an absolute. I do see that from the creationist side however.
If you say so, fine shuckmaster.
I frankly haven't seen many scientific conservations over at DC in my recent visits. The site transparently promotes itself as a place where the like-minded can gather, construct straw-man arguments, and abuse people who dissent from the DC-accepted views. In short, it gives every impression of being an "interest group," not a place where scientific issues are actually discussed.
People over there at DC who relate to that sort of thing probably don't have much to contribute here.
Jeepers, RA. if that's all you saw, you really missed a lot.
So, as you have stated, we have the atheists and agnostics and then all the rest, the idiots.
Is that what you meant?
LOL.I see where you might get that, but no. The atheists and agnostics are the idiots I was referring to.
Guess I better work on my skills of putting thoughts on paper.
I agree.... but then there would have to be more involved for we all observers.. All of us.. Even those of us that think they/we are totally objective.. To be totally objective you would have know everything.. You know like God.. {LoL.. snort}..
Unfortunately I did not miss it. I was there. I am not trying to stir all this up again - far from it actually. However, this thread was designed to do just that and I hate seeing folks get hammered who no longer have a voice here.
Interesting. One of my very good friends was an F-15 fighter pilot for 6 years and is now a staff scientist with a PhD in physics who happens to be an agnostic.
Do you really think he is an idiot?
I miss Ichneumon's posts. Brilliant guy.
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