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.
All men have been created equal. What some have done with that is their own problem. Unfortunately, they force the rest of us to put up with them.
This week's Science News reports on birds supposedly changing their inherited, hard-wired, deep in the DNA coding to adjust to Global Warming.
Now this raises some real questions in my mind concerning the degree of adherence your Global Warming types have to maintaining the coherence and integrity of evolutionary theory.
On the other hand, if birds can just change their DNA, where does that leave us? Possibly over there with the New Testament and St. Paul asking us if any of us can change our height by thinking real hard~!
What an amazing place for evolutionary theory and understanding to end up.
I've concluded there is no Allah based upon the actions of Moslems, and that Islam is based on nothing more than the heat-stroke-induced ravings of a 6th century desert bandit. Would you consider my conclusions faulty?
This place is turning into a religious site with little room for anything else. It's wearing very thin.
I'm not hammering anybody. Plus some of the people who "no longer have a voice here" have chosen to absent themselves of their own free will. If their voices are "no longer heard here," don't blame me for it. Some of these people are my friends. And I miss them.
And not only that, but also you would have to abstract yourself from the "everything" in order to comment on it as if it were an "object" separable from yourself. Logically, this is what "objective" means.
Of course, this is impossible for human beings, who are both parts and participants of the whole they observe.
Thanks my dear brother hosepipe for you insights!
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that only one of the three can be correct, when in fact, they all are. The only real distinction is that Allah is the God of death and lies. He is the great deceiver. The evil one.
Hahahahaha!
Could you spot anything that wyattearp wrote that might constitute a violation of the rules of civility/hospitality here?
One thing I do know: people don't get banned around here for nothing.
BTW, what's your definition of "trolling?" And if wyattearp was studying for finals, how did he find the time to do that, whatever it is?
People will leave FR for reasons that make sense to them. I stay, for reasons that make sense to me.
Different strokes for different folks I guess.
I appreciate and honor your defense of your friends, shuckmaster. Thanks for writing.
I know for a fact you are not.
Others on this thread were. I was not meaning you!!
So all religions are correct except Islam?
God won't be the slightest bit upset with you that you accepted a false prophet (Jesus) to worship. If he's not the son of God and he was just an old fashioned loony-tune like all the "second comings" we have popping up all the time, how do you think God feels about him.
Jews will have a lot of explaining to do if you're right too.
How come God only appeared to people before camera's etc. he's had a lot of years, do you believe that God used to appear before these mortals? Really?
Through all these wars, etc., he's never appeared. All these children molested and mutilated and he's never made even the briefest of appearances. All those Jews being stuffed into ovens and he couldn't pop his head out ONCE.
In the handful of exchanges I've had on this thread I've seen accusations of various unnamed Freepers being the antichrist, and an assertion that it takes several hundred years to revise scientific theory in light of new evidence. If this has come to be representative of the "Premier Conservative Poltical Website" on the internet, we're in trouble.
Rades? Time to bail from this thread.
I'm outta here.
[singing] "Are you there? Say a prayer for The Pretender..."
Good article. Devastating criticism of Dawkins.
Moderated public forums like this one may favor conservatives over libertarians inherently. The latter tend not to conform as easily and to self-destruct more readily. I suspect conservatives are more religious / theistic than libertarians so the site population skews that way. I well could be wrong, of course--it would be an interesting sociological study. But sociologists are generally liberals and soft sciententists, so they likely would politicize the results. So never mind.
blam, I enjoy your threads. Please continue, and add me to your ping list.
Thanks Shuckmaster. I've been suspended myself, for cussin', but hey, I don't make the rules here. I've had some FRiendships here that wound up interrupted because the other people were banned. I've experienced one thing (at least twice, maybe three times, maybe more) that I found annoying and felt like leaving; also, I've been called a moron (the creep's exact words to me were, "You are a moron." I can't recall what thread, or what it was about) with no consequences to the insulting party. But the fact is, I enjoy it too much to leave. If that were to change, I'd be gone in a hot second, plus whatever time it would take to set up a link on my profile page. ;')
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1732037/posts?page=125#125
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/user-posts?name=wyattearp
Anyone else get unsolicited FreepMail from Junior trying to get them to go to DC?
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