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.
wyattearp just found out that he has been banned. He was studying for finals, and hadn't even posted at FR in three weeks. Reason for banning: trolling. He was inactive for three weeks. How could he have been "trolling"? That is why people are leaving FR. Right there. About the only posting that he was doing was on blam's and SunkenCiv's threads. Courtesy ping to blam and SunkenCiv.
I do as well. An indeed he and others here were brilliant.
Thanks! :-)
(Me??? - not so brilliant) LOL!
An agnostic is someone who claims to have no religion. This itself is a religious view, so yes.
One would have to have more faith in nothingness than most do in God to be a real agnostic.
I guess if he believes he is nothing then I guess he can be an agnostic and that is my definition of stupidity.
Sorry, but you're another of the local stars.
He would shred you in a debate. So what does that make you?
Awww shucks! Thanks!
You incorrectly assume here, that faith, is itself, not a deed.
When it was asked of Christ, which is the most important commandment, he said to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy mind, and all thy soul...for this is the first and greatest commandment.
You're free to believe what you want, but don't assume to know the mind of God, for it is written that your ways, are not my ways; and your thoughts, are not my thoughts.
A Believer. In fact I know God and he knows me.
And if I needed to debate this guy I know where to find the arguments for my beliefs from people who can put ideas into words better than I.
I just find it rather petty for you to think anyone who does not believe the same as you is an idiot. This guy flew fighters and earn a PhD. Idiot he is not.
I appreciate his service and I don't just believe, I know and have witnessed God at work in my life and the lives of many others.
A lot of these so called atheists are really just liars. They act more like they hate God and religion, than not believing at all. I do not believe in the tooth fairy, mermaids or pots of gold at the end of the rainbow(not going to bring up Santa here, since it is too close to Christmas,, just in case). I would think, to a true atheist, God is no different than any of these. I have met cute little liberals that believe the animals talk, as well as believe in little fairies. I've never been threatened by them at all. Just thought they were cute. Why would a true atheist not think the same about my belief in God and the Bible? Why not attack every other "myth' with the same zeal?? Why not a crusade against Leprechauns? A true atheist should look at "In God We Trust" as silly and harmless. A true atheist would give no more thought to the pledge of allegiance than one would to the luck associated with a four leaf clover. Their hatred exposes who they really are. They are bitter. They do believe in God, and they hate Him. They hate those who worship Him. They want to wage war with Him. They are no different than all the others who have come before them. And they will fail as well.
The devil believes, and trembles.
I will pray for him and he can't stop me. If God chooses to act in his case that would be great.
God speaks and the earth melts.
The Republican War on Science
This is what the scientists who used to be on FR were trying refute.
If they were trying to refute it, then they wouldn't have come here. In actuality, and to use the correct operative term, what they were trying to do, was purge Free Republic.
I know it, you know, and everyone else knows it.
Great response. I had the verse, but didn't connect it with the holiday joke.
I'm not assuming to know the mind of god, just hoping that if there is one he won'd send a nice guy like me into an eternal pit of fire.
You, on the other hand assume that your book IS the word and thoughts of God.
What if the muslims are right, and you die and meet Allah?
What if the Jews are right and you die and God tells you you've been worshipping a false prophet, he is not my son?
You're taking the same chance I'm taking, I'm your religious equal.
No one is belittling your beliefs. Especially me. If I came across that way, my apologies.
I will let him know you offered up a prayer. I think he would be glad.
Thanks.
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