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.
Easy!
That's when the Table of Contents takes over!
Wasn't Compartive Religion 101 a whole lot of FUN!!?
Was he stabbed in the side?
Did blood flow out of him?
Was he wrapped up in cloth and sealed in resin??
Was he buried for 3 days?
Who's been duped?
Seems like THIS guy agrees!
You...you Scoundrel(ette)!
Beat me to it, you did.
Cheers!
I bet that typo ends up on DC or a "fundies say the darndest things" site...
Full Disclosure: Doesn't your keyboard have a "backspace" key? Or is your TERM shell variable set wrong? ;-)
Cheers!
????
Do you mean strong and weak nuclear force, or weak molecular forces such as vanderWaals?
Cheers!
Believers in gravity do NOT follow their belief when walking on the edge of a cliff, or climbing a stairwell! Believers in gravity should just allow themselves to fall down the stairwell, or fall of a cliff. They're messing with gravitational force and downward acceleration right there themselves.
I "believe" you're dealing in a mixed metaphor there, Quark. The allegation is that the proponent of evolution is being hypocritical in that one of the drivers of evolution (along with drift and survival of the fittest) is the culling of the un-fit. And if you go to the doctor rather than lingering where other predators can feed off of you, you are interrupting the typical progression of evolution.
(Although given that homo sapiens is usually considered to be near the top of the food chain, except when visiting the bears in Yellowstone National Park, or surfing off the coast of Australia, the execution of this is a bit more problematic...)
Gravity, on the other hand, is not intrinsically connected to fitness. Although I vaguely remember an example from the "legendary post #xxx" of the now-gone-from-FR Ichneumon which listed falls as a possible influence on the development of wings in some animal or other.
If anyone has a copy of that post with the links working I could try to find it.
Cheers! This adjuration not valid in Hawaii, California, or Puerto Rico. Close Cover Before Striking.
There might be evidence which is in the favor of "life after death" but which you don't accept; or you feel is not strong enough.
For specific examples which have influenced the opinion of a practicing MD pathologist, click this link and then search for the phrase "autoscopic near-death experience".
No, I do not claim that they are *disposative*, but they do refute your statement that there is *no* evidence.
Cheers!
www.godlessinamerica.com/numbersgame
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/okeefe112603.html
Mutations are harmful (degenerative)and don't result in improvements...
Geneticists have been breeding fruit-flies for sixty years or more in labs all round the world...flies which produce a new generation every eleven days-they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme.
As a blanket statement, this is patently false.
*scoundrel*
It's that danged time warp you enter when you log onto FR.
Blessings...
We just need to give it more time, dontcha know?
Are you the moderator? The obvious point is not that the fruit flies turned into gazelles but anything even remotely other than a fruit fly. The question is important, logical and well taken.
Ask the person who wrote that metmom what she meant.
(The obvious point is not that the fruit flies turned into gazelles but anything even remotely other than a fruit fly. The question is important, logical and well taken.)
Fruit Flies can evolve while remaining a fruit fly. The fact that one group can no longer breed with another group derived from the same parent means we have a new SPECIES. That is evolution.
Did you even read the post? The fruit flies in the particular experiment were unable to breed with another group of flies from the SAME PARENT. So a new SPECIES of fruit fly appeared. This is an example of OBSERVED EVOLUTION.
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