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.
Likewise...
Some folks can't accept Jesus as Savior no matter what evidence there is.
So; what kind of Scriptures could a believer in C use to witness to a believer in E, in order to get him/her to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ?
The can survive floating on debris...
And what about Freshwater Fish? How can they survive in saltwater?
I imagine that 'fountains of the Deep' would be fairly fresh; don't you?
The Book says more...
And how did they build a sustainable population with just one male and one female?
Gosh, I don't know. Get a couple of hamsters, or guppies, or rabbits....
Yes, I am narrow minded. Enough to believe what is recorded here:
John 14:6
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
So then, if someone wishes to believe in a 'higher power', go ahead; but the ONLY One that has any say so over your soul is Christ, the Messiah, the Salvation of Israel and the Light to the Gentiles.
The Reason for the Season!
I wrote:
We can speculate all we want about whether or not altruism is consistent with Darwinian evolution.
steve-b replied:
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.
I reply:
When a fireman with no siblings and no children risks his life to save a stranger, he is taking the chance of letting his own genes die off. Yes, he is helping the survival of humanity in general, but last I heard humanity in general is not yet in danger of extinction (and if it were, I doubt the life saved from the fire would make a difference).
So altruism is not as obviously consistent with Darwinian evolution as you seem to think it is. Like so many evolutionists, you have allowed yourself to be fooled into letting superficial plausibility harden into "fact" because it is consistent with your belief system.
The other thought is that if the fittest individuals in a species survive, it's more likely that the species will survive and be more fit as a group, because they'll be able to pass that fitness on. So altruism really doesn't benefit the species because if the strong saves the weak, it damages the species as a whole. The most likely scenario is that the strong let the weak die off to strengthen the species. It would result in a ruthless, hard hearted, selfish pattern of behavior.
People have faith in something because someone of authority, often a parent, convinced them that a it is true, despite the total lack of evidence for it. Someone educated about how the world works, cannot be convinced with a literal interpretation of the Scripture, because it is obviously false in a literal sense.
A knowledgeable person might come to have faith that Jesus is the Saviour, as I once believed, as long as their foundation is that the Bible has many unknowable mysteries and the details of Genesis is one of those. But once it is demonstrated that the Scriptures themselves demand a literal interpretation, then the house of cards falls apart and the knowledgeable person can believe none of it.
To answer your question, no Scripture can be used to witness to someone who accepts the facts of science, if the person doing the witnessing insists that every word is literally true.
And just how many people are the *every word is literal* bent? I don't know any who would take poetry as literal, or the parables where it's clearly stated that they are indeed, parables. Prophecy is difficult, and there are places where it is stated that there is symbolism.
Where is it demonstrated in Scripture itself a literal interpretation of Scripture is demanded? What groups demand this? This sort of thing keeps getting posted by the evolutionists as an argument against accepting the creation account as true, but nobody seems to be able to back it up.
"Gosh, I don't know. Get a couple of hamsters, or guppies, or rabbits...."
What?
"Some folks can't accept Jesus as Savior no matter what evidence there is."
Please show me extra-biblical evidence that Jesus is "The Savior".
Evolution is an observation. Observations don't morally compel us to do anything.
A lot of creationists on this very website demand a literal interpretation of scripture, no matter what the scientific evidence may be to the contrary.
Translation:
Try it yourself.
The old 'you can't get a viable population from just two critters' is accepted as true by lazy people.
It is designed to blatantly call the Adam&Eve story a lie.
Results:
There is an elephant in the room called Western Civilization: built upon a Judeo-Christian foundation.
Why does it exist, if there was scant evidence for 'Christianity'?
A lot of creationists on this very website demand a literal interpretation of scripture, no matter what the scientific evidence may be to the contrary.
Most Christians 'believe' Evolution because they do NOT know what their Bible says. If, as they say, they 'believe' the words of Jesus and the New Testament writers, they have to decide what the following verses mean:
Acts 17:26-27
26. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
27. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
Romans 5:12-21
12. Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--
13. for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.
14. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
15. But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
16. Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
17. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.
19. For just as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20. The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,
21. so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
If there were no
one man, that means SIN did NOT enter the World thru him.If
Adam was NOT the one man, that means SPIRITUAL DEATH did not come thru him.If SIN did NOT enter the World thru the
one man, that means Jesus does not save from SIN.Are we to believe that the
one man is symbolic? Does that mean Jesus is symbolic as well?The Theory of Evolution states that there WAS no one man, but a wide population that managed to inherit that last mutated gene that makes MEN different from APES.
Acts 17:24-26 24. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. Was LUKE wrong about this? 1 Corinthians 11:8-9 1 Timothy 2:13
If so, is GOD so puny that He allows this 'inaccuracy' in His Word?? |
NIV Genesis 2:18
The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
"I am amazed how much atheism is growing around the world.. Many say they are fed up with organized religion, but denying GOD out of exsistence is pure travesty for the human race..." ~ TaraP
Ain't gonna happen - fear not.
"... They’re just leftist counterfeiters trafficking in reflected light." ~ Robert Godwin
The same point is made in paragraph three (excerpted from the thread linked below)
A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics. ..... [snip] The Rev. James Halstead, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at Chicago's DePaul University, says the phenomenon is really "a ripple caused by the book publishing industry."
"These books cause no new thought or moral commitment. The arguments are centuries old," he told Reuters. Some believers, he added, "are no better. Their conception of God, the Divine-Human-World relationship are much too simplistic and materialistic." Too often, he said, the concept "God" is misused "to legitimate the self and to beat up other people ... to rehash that same old theistic and atheistic arguments is a waste of time, energy and paper."
Dr. Timothy Larsen, professor of theology at Wheaton College in Illinois, says any growth in interest in atheism is a reflection of the strength of religion -- the former being a parasite that feeds off the latter. That happened late in the 19th century America when an era of intense religious conviction gave rise to voices like famed agnostic Robert Ingersoll, he said. .." http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1722230/posts
4 posted on 12/20/2006 11:45:37 AM EST by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1756237/posts?page=4#4
The Integral Embrace of Lies and Truth (Robert Godwin)
OneCosmos ^ | Dec. 20, 2006 | Robert Godwin
Posted on 12/20/2006 9:24:05 AM EST by Yardstick
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1756237/posts
(The old 'you can't get a viable population from just two critters' is accepted as true by lazy people.
It is designed to blatantly call the Adam&Eve story a lie.)
Hahahah, I'm lazy for accepting simple science.
I wouldn't call it a lie. I would call it a story or myth. Either way it is a scientific impossibility.
(There is an elephant in the room called Western Civilization: built upon a Judeo-Christian foundation.)
THe Roman Empire lasted longer and it was not founded on Christianity. The Greeks had democracy before Jesus was even born.
The Japanese are doing pretty well without it.
But either way, that isn't extra-biblical evidence of Jesus being "The Saviour". If it is, please explain it to me.
*Scripture* or the creation account? BIG difference. The terms are used interchangably by the evos without basis.
What happens here is that someone states that the creation account is literal and the evos immediately extrapolate that into all creationists must believe that ALL Scripture is literally true, kind of like they do with evolution. Evos see variation within species and immediately conclude that speciation occurs; *microevolution* occurs so we have to conclude that *macroevolution* occurs. Well, just because evos do it, doesn't mean that everyone does it; they're just projecting onto creationists.
So they then go on to mock and ridicule creationists for that. That's putting words in people's mouths. Creationists stating that they believe the creation account is literal does not immediately mean that they mean all Scripture has to be taken literally. At least creationists are capable of recognizing narrative, poetry, metaphor, simile, allegory, and other literary style. Something the evos seem to be somewhat challenged in.
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