Hee Haw!
We be a new specie!!!
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.
Honey, repetition only works if it's FOR 'E', not against it!
--EvoDude
The Old Elsie and the Young Elsie has a great MANY variations!
Moooooving right along; when the Evo's (some of them) discovered my TRUE gender, they were quick to point out some possible 'confusion' on MY part about sexual identity.
It was quite fun to watch the attitude change in their responces back to me.
No more kid gloves... ;^)
Time flies like an arrow;
fruit flies like a banana.
its not a leg, is bone(s) that anchor muscles that stabilize the gentailia
I had quite a debate about that one with a Baptist friend. He believed that we existed before we are born and thought the bible indicated so with the verse you quoted. I don't agree. I think other verses say otherwise. But God is eternal.
Strange indeed! :^)
Here's an observation from Robert Jastrow [God and the Astronomers. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 116] that puts this matter into perspective:
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.Got to get back to work! Thanks for your excellent insights, metmom!
To God, who is outside time, it would be a simple matter to look in at any point He wished.
Lunch is more fun.
When you are born what happens?.. Your spirit inhabits flesh or... WHAT?.. When you(your body) dies the reverse happens.. right?
If not... learn me something new..
Indeed time (to God) could be as pages on a book/Bible..
Mearly reference points.. to be pointed to as Proof..
Human books could be 3rd dimensional metaphor of Spiritual Dimension reality..
This is equivalent to "speculating" about whether or not two plus two equals four.
It is obvious on the face of it that creatures that effectively defend groups that include their relatives will propagate their genes into future generations more effectively than those that don't, all else being equal.
So that's why in the wild male animals like lions kill the young of their competitor when they run off the male and take over a pride?
Certainly. The question we debated was if your spirit is created right before it is merged/assigned to the body or if it had existed forever. The bible doesn't say that it existed forever so there is no reason for me to think that.
He felt that Job 38: 21 "Do you know it, because you were born then, Or because the number of your days is great?"
proved that we are older than our bodies. I believe that it proves just the opposite. I tend to think that adding something that isn't stated is as evil as removing something that is there. Therefore if something isn't stated, it isn't true or it isn't the least bit important to the edification of the Church in the opinion of the Holy Spirit.
(Well they are still fruit flies you know, and no is really sure the different fruit fly 'species' cant breed together either just because some evo says so.)
Ok, now you are being willfully difficult. Even when scientific evidence is presented you just simply refuse to believe it.
Once again, an animal does NOT have to change genus for evolution to take place!
By the way, I don't particularly like Dawkins, but I accept the mountain of evidence in support of the Theory of Evolution.
One big difference between me and you is that if scientific evidence or observation emerged that totally discounted the ToE, my whole world or belief system would not come crashing down. It would actually be pretty exciting!
But you guys CANNOT accept the ToE no matter what logic, observation or evidence tells you because it conflicts with your pre-established belief in a 6,000 year old collection of books. Science seeks to find answers to questions and to ask more questions. You guys have a pre-established answer and are only looking for validation. No matter what the facts are, they have to be shoehorned into your pre-conceived notion.
Science doesn't purport to have all the answers. That's what religion does. Science is trying to find the answers to their questions. Science's fondest wish (if one can anthropomorphize an intellectual discipline) is to find more questions from its answers.
(For "evolution plain and simple" I would expect to see proof of a fruit fly evolving into a bumble bee or some other completely different animal.)
How many times have I answered this? If that is your thinking then you don't understand the Theory of Evolution. Period.
An animal does NOT HAVE TO CHANGE GENUS IN ORDER FOR EVOLUTION TO OCCUR.
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