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 that is happening is that a gene(s) that give the bacteria the ability to digest nylon was incorporated into the bacterial DNA. It's not as if the bacteria suddenly developed the ability to digest nylon on its own - and it is still bacteria."
So a gene mutation gave bacteria the ability to digest nylon? Thank you! You just described evolution!
Evolution does not say that bacteria has morph into "something else". Please stop with that "its still bacteria" "its still a fruit fly" argument! The mutation that allows that bacteria to digest nylon is what EVOLUTION is.
That's the point, LGN: None of them would affect the ToE. It is impervious to the questions raised by your a), b), and c). And yet arguably, each of these sources would produce a distinctly different universe.
So our question of the day is: Empirically speaking, which of these putative universes would come closest to comprehensively describing your own direct observations and experience?
It seems to me: ToE comes under the category of "the life sciences." But it doesn't start with "life"; it presumes life already exists, and then gives an account of how it develops over time.
Which reminds me of my dear astrophysicist friend, who confidently tells me that the origin of the universe (which predates the origin of life as you know) was "a random fluctuation in a false vacuum."
I don't even have to go into the futility of "randomness" as any kind of explanation of anything to find problems with this idea. For one thing, as my dear friend Alamo-Girl is ever fond of reminding us, there is no "fluctuation" absent time; no event can occur absent space.
This "origin myth" does not account for the origin of space and time, which it absolutely requires in order to be valid.
That is to say, this "origin myth" does not get to the real origin. Like Darwin, it already assumes a "going concern" without much troubling over the nature of the ultimate foundation of the "going concern."
Now you may tell me, LGN, that this is not a problem for science. Okay. I'll accept that, provided you will grant me equal courtesy so as not to condemn all questions not amenable to the scientific method as "unreal," "supernatural," or otherwise illegitimate.
Thanks for writing!
Kiddo, I'm not in the "stawman business." I feel I can leave that venture up to you. Thanks for writing.
wouldn't this "eating" ability that can be produced in a short as 9 days in Pseudomonas aeruginosa from non producing populations. tend to suggest this ability is more a pre-existing switch. as opposed to random mutation and selection.
Not really... ToE states that species HAS/have changed over time into other unrelated species.. and probably will again.. This assertion is totally unproven.. Not only that but that followed all the way back in reverse specieation can arrive at a base.. ultimately simpler and simpler to single celled organisms... simpler and simpler to the start of life.. i.e. some kind of protein "soup"... Some "EVOS" easily become Soup Nazis(Seinfeld)..
Note : there are some other variations in this scenario like "God started it" or "Aliens started it" but the result is the same there is NO HOLY SPIRIT and man ultimately does not have a spirit.. ToE is a practical assault against the HOLY SPIRIT as an entity... and by inference Jesus the Christ(Messiah) and "the Father"..
Note : there are some other variations in this scenario like "God started it" or "Aliens started it" but the result is the same there is NO HOLY SPIRIT and man ultimately does not have a spirit.. ToE is a practical assault against the HOLY SPIRIT as an entity... and by inference Jesus the Christ(Messiah) and "the Father"..
Can, or must?
8. Consciousness-raising. Feminists and homosexuals have taught us the value of consciousness-raising. A phrase like “One man one vote” either causes you to flinch, or is uttered with intent to make you flinch. It is nowadays almost impossible to hear the phrase with its original innocent meaning of “One adult person one vote.” Some atheists and freethinkers try to raise consciousness about, for example, the phrase ‘under God’ in the US Pledge of Allegiance. I am more interested in raising consciousness about something else: the habit, practised not only by religious people, of labeling children by the religion of their parents. This is a Catholic child. That is a Muslim child. I want everybody to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, That is a Marxist child. It is immoral to brand young children with the religion of their parents. At present, hardly anybody’s consciousness is raised to this. I would welcome suggestions, perhaps from those with experience of the feminist and gay campaigns, for the most effective ways to raise consciousness. I would like such consciousness-raising to be a particular project of this foundation.
Dawkins is also a founding member of the 'bright‘ political movement that has goals such as:
The movement's three major aims are:
A. Promote the civic understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements.
B. Gain public recognition that persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance.
C. Educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such individuals.
How any freeper can defend this guy is beyond meÂ… He is a sad parody of himself and all that he despises. But thereÂ’s more:
I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.
-Dawkins
Both Christians and atheists in the US teach their children that there ‘is’ actual consequences for their actions according to both the laws of the household and the laws of the state. Are the laws of the household and/or the laws of the state also child abuse? Furthermore, if this charlatan met a child in a Christian household that ‘he’ actually believes is being abused, would he do what ‘he’ believes is right and immediately remove the child or call the authorities to enforce the laws ‘he’ now is trying to legislate? Somebody get this guy the brown jacket and jackboots ‘he' deserves.
All in the name of neo-Darwinism (the current ‘turd‘ in the punchbowl).
I find it interesting that the principle behind the practice of medicine is directly opposed to evolutionary theory. According to evolutionists, the idea of human nature is an illusion. What we term human beings is only a name for an arbitrarily determined number of interbreeding creatures with various and perpetually varying characteristics. In principle, it is impossible under the rubrics of evolutionary theory to describe human nature.
Conversely, the object of medicine is the restoration of the proper operation of the body. This obviously presumes the fact that there exists such a thing as the proper operation of the body and various bodily systems, and that all people know this. When you go to an eye doctor you expect him to fix your eyesight, not to tell you that your eyesight is evolving into a higher life form bent on preserving its genes.
Dawkins has reasoned himself to insanity...
I was being "nice"... Must!.. probably..
Lots of confusion, of course, as to what constitutes the proper function of sexuality and reproductive organs in the context of human nature. And I've even seen FReepers dispute as to whether hermaphroditism, deafness, blindness, etc. are to be called "abnormal" or, alternatively, "normal variations."
Submitting that it can happen, and then drawing conclusions base on a premise that it must happen is not "nice".
For the sake of argument, let us say that darwin explanations are true… Explain how human consciousness is ‘ultimately’ the result of mindless mechanisms. No, actually… Explain how ’you believe’ your brain (morality, ethics, etc..) ultimately came from mindless mechanisms (stupid design).
True but I'm a bad bad man.. a sinner really.. ;)
I think you've got something there. I offer John sKerry, and William Buckley. You could store furniture between those guys gray cells.
You being a sinner is between you and God. Your debate tactics are fair game. ;).
She is a wiccan. They consider themselves to be good, but I never could figure out why.
No, the opposite of science: evolutionism.
That's why you don't stand a chance.
"If there is a God he will make all knowledge available to me."
He did, the Bible, and you chose to ignore it. You must be an apprentice word warrior.
No, I described a gene mutation - nothing more.
Evolution does not say that bacteria has morph into "something else". Please stop with that "its still bacteria" "its still a fruit fly" argument! The mutation that allows that bacteria to digest nylon is what EVOLUTION is.
That's microevolution at best. For example, virulent E.Coli is still E. Coli. In fact, there are also back mutations in which a mutated bacteria can revert to its previous form (which is problematic for Darwin's theory).
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