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.
"Actually it is a split in information. Fruit fly abcdef has branched off into fruit fly abcd and abef without enough information to any longer reproduce with each other. In a sense it becomes a case of devolution, whereas, information is being reduced rather than added on."
"Often the word mutation is loosely applied. For evolution to take place new information would have to constantly be added to organisms bringing them from the very simple"
Go read up on the Theory of Evolution as you obviously don't understand what it is. Let me write it again for you:
In biology, evolution is the change in the heritable traits of a population over successive generations, as determined by changes in the allele frequencies of genes. Over time, this process can result in speciation, the development of new species from existing ones.
The fact that the fruit fly populations were no longer able to reproduce is called SPECIATION. That is evolution.
ANd I was just WAITING for someone to bring up Irreducible Complexity, an idea that has been thoroughly debunked time and time again, most recently at the Dover Trials.
(There weren't millions of species that needed to go on the ark.)
Well why is the earth now populated with millions of species?
Also, what about plant life? Did Noah collect seedlings for every plant species?
Also, what about plant life? Did Noah collect seedlings for every plant species?
Fish and insects didn't need to go on the ark. Also a lot of people think there are hundreds of species of things like dogs, they are wrong.
You had the right answer in #619, above.
Some folks can't accept the theory of evolution no matter what evidence there is.
Looking at you waiting to see which one of us busts out laughing first.. after this statement..
That appears to be the current church spin. the catholic.com web site says this:
[When Galileo met with the new pope, Urban VIII, in 1623, he received permission from his longtime friend to write a work on heliocentrism, but the new pontiff cautioned him not to advocate the new position, only to present arguments for and against it. When Galileo wrote the Dialogue on the Two World Systems, he used an argument the pope had offered, and placed it in the mouth of his character Simplicio. Galileo, perhaps inadvertently, made fun of the pope, a result that could only have disastrous consequences. Urban felt mocked and could not believe how his friend could disgrace him publicly. Galileo had mocked the very person he needed as a benefactor. He also alienated his long-time supporters, the Jesuits, with attacks on one of their astronomers. The result was the infamous trial, which is still heralded as the final separation of science and religion. ]
In other words, if Galileo had merely discussed the subject of heliocentrisim pro and con, he would have been fine. But since he dared to claim it as truth, the church retaliated.
When the church put Galileo in prison for teaching heliocentricity, they were taking a position on the matter. Internal church politics or who Galileo insulted because they refused to believe the truth is irrelevant.
My original point stands that people who interpret the Bible literally on scientific issues can risk their faith when they're confronted with contrary facts they cannot ignore. With regard to evolution, the phenomenon that humans have the ability to ignore obvious truths while they continue to hold their faith, makes me seriously doubt the validity of that faith. Were they attempt to witness their faith to me in order to save my soul, I would laugh at them because it is obvious that their judgment on matters of fact is seriously flawed.
"I'd like to think I'd get the same level of respect from them."
You certainly do from me. I don't care what you believe. I'm a Christian, but I don't have any wish to convert you - I support your right to do as you please.
(Fish and insects didn't need to go on the ark.)
Are you saying ants, grasshoppers, cockroaches etc etc can survive underwater?
And what about Freshwater Fish? How can they survive in saltwater?
As eggs.
And what about Freshwater Fish? How can they survive in saltwater?
Either as eggs or in water that is not normal ocean water. The water landing over land was fresh.
uh....
(As eggs.)
So how can grasshopper eggs, ant eggs, etc survive underwater? And what about spider eggs, etc etc. And it usually takes less than 40 days for insect eggs to hatch. So where did the larvae go once they hatched?
(And what about Freshwater Fish? How can they survive in saltwater?
Either as eggs or in water that is not normal ocean water. The water landing over land was fresh.)
A worldwide flood means saltwater and freshwater mixing. And I'd like to see you raise freshwater fish eggs in saltwater.
Furthermore, where did all this water come from? And how did the animals distribute themselves around the world? And how did they build a sustainable population with just one male and one female?
And what did the predators eat all the time they were on the Ark?
"You certainly do from me. I don't care what you believe. I'm a Christian, but I don't have any wish to convert you - I support your right to do as you please."
Nice to hear. Similarly, I have no particular interest in dissuading anyone away from their religious beliefs. In fact, I sometimes envy those who have faith in a higher power, as it is clearly a source of comfort and support to them. But I can't make myself believe in that which I don't believe, even if it would benefit me.
I, likewise, disagree.
I feel that GOD is OMNI-everything, so HE knew (knows) what is in the future.
Future for us humans, anyway.
I think the fact that HE knows what WILL happen leads some to believe that HE MAKES it happen; thus we descend into the Calvin vs Armenian 'discussion' and never get anywhere ;^)
I now have four gold ones!
I'm sure dentists have invented hard candy!
LOL!!
As soon as I get hit, I'll buy a Lottery ticket!
THIS is an LDS teaching. (It ain't found in the BoM, either!)
There is a big difference between 'evidence' and the interpretation of it.
(Ya get more grants this way ;^)
Then why are there so MANY of them?
Maybe FF abcd thinks that the FF abef are just plain...
Rush said this about pandas yesterday.
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