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.
With apologies to the “three blind men and the elephant”, these discussions remind me of the “three smart guys and the diesel engine”, or maybe its just two smart guys and my Uncle Harry.
The first smart guy tries to explain, sometimes patiently, sometimes less than patiently, that diesel engines are made from materials naturally appearing in the earth, that their operations are governed by the laws of physics, that there clearly is nothing magical about them. The proper response for a man of science would be to try to pull them apart to see how they work, and then to try to imagine the processes by which they might have been formed originally from nature.
We have, after all, earlier examples of diesel engines and even gas engines we’ve dug out of the land fill, which by extrapolating in reverse we ought to be able to guess what the first crude engines might have looked like.
Uncle Harry will have none of it. They were made in Detroit. He’s never been to Detroit, he’s never met anyone from Detroit, but he’s met people who claim to have met people from Detroit, and that’s good enough for him.
The smart guy ignores Uncle Harry, who is actually proud of the fact that he’s never studied diesels, and proceeds to try to calculate how long it would take for iron to become steel, and the natural forces it would take to shape the first crudely shaped pistons, considers arguments that comets striking the earth might have sped up the process, but in the absence of clear evidence (and its hard to re-create such an extra-terrestrial process) prefers the longer slower time-table.
Uncle Harry tries to convince him, there is really a Detroit, and a place where they stamp these babies out like cookies, but the only proof he can come up with is a Diana Ross album. The smart guy doesn’t even like Diana Ross, and clearly Diana Ross knows nothing about diesels either.
Along comes Betty, who is fascinated by the inner workings of diesels, loves to talk about compression ratios and firing orders. Uncle Harry is annoyed with her, because she seems to be denying his “just-so” Detroit story, to which she swears that she too loves Diana Ross.
The smart guy is annoyed with her for even allowing Diana Ross to be brought into the conversation, no one who even owns a Diana Ross album should be allowed to talk about diesels. He is further annoyed when she points out the wiring harness and the on-board computer, and suggests that it would be difficult for either to have been formed by comets or subterranean heat and pressure alone.
Earlier engines, the ones we dug out of the land-fill, don’t have on-board computers, and so obviously there is a progression over time, and just as obviously computers aren’t necessary components to diesel operation (since the earlier ones don't have them), and her computer theories are just the ravings of a Diana Ross fan. She might try to deny it, but the tape in the eight-track is all the proof that we need that she’s out of her league.
A crowd eventually gathers, some arguing that Diana Ross is really Michael Jackson, others pointing out that these recordings of recordings are insufficient proof that Diana is even a real person, and mocking anyone who would dream of doing engine maintenance from the lyrics of “Stop in the Name of Love”, I mean the whole idea is silly, isn’t it. So at some point Uncle Harry leaves to go and finish his Christmas shopping, and to pray for the godless commies who don’t even like Motown, and for Betty for even listening to their stories about pistons and alloys. Betty tries to wave me over to get into the conversation, but diesels scare me, and so does Motown, and enraged crowds in general.
I’m not going there.
I want the smart guys to keep digging engines out of the land fill, and taking them apart to find out how they work. I agree that Diana Ross looks strangely like Michael. But I’m also pretty curious about those chip things Betty keeps pointing at.
Merry Christmas all. I’ve got to make one more mad dash to Walmart. I’m putting on a couple of extra layers of clothing to soften the blows, shopping the day before the day before can be dangerous. You don't want my opinion of diesel engine design, if I'm not smart enough to have finished my shopping by now, I'm not smart enough to come in out of the rain.
Well you know that second only in importance to the formulation of the problem or the hypothesis under consideration, is the problem of the qualification of relevant sources. The object of the game is not to rely on a single source, but to have corroboration from at least one other, and more would be welcome.
Baxter is a main source so far — but I’m early into the research. He raises some interesting points in regard to the “who” who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. More to our point, he compares the historical/social attainments/condition of one Wm. Shakspear of Stratford-on-Avon vis-à-vis what we would expect of a world-class author whose works are to this day considered foundational to Western culture in general, and to the English-speaking world in particular.
Trying to keep it short and sweet, Baxter raises issues about the basic fitness of the historical Wm. Shakspear of Stratford-on-Avon to be the author of the sublime poetic and dramatic works nowadays unquestionably attributed to William Shakespeare.
Shakspear was a born at Stratford-on-Avon, then a village of some 1400 souls. Shakspear’s father, a butcher by trade, could barely sign his name, and his mother couldn’t read or write at all.
The community was comprised of a mainly illiterate peasantry, farmers and crafts people. They had a church, and this was the glory of the town. They also had a “free school,” which W.S. attended as a boy; but didn’t stay in for too long, for his father got into financial difficulties, and required his son as a trade apprentice, so to help the family business.
Yet even if W.S. had stayed in the free school, he would not by any means have received a classical education there — and this is key, for the magnificent plays of William Shakespeare evidence the mastery of classical sources, plus facility in many languages, ancient and modern. Not only that, but they evidence a moral philosophy that it is difficult to conceive this W.S. of Stratford-on-Avon shared. He contracted a marriage with Anne Hathaway under highly unusual circumstances, and shortly thereafter effectively abandoned her and their twin daughters. He fled to London, for he got into difficulty with a local aristocrat for poaching deer on his lands. He was known to be a carouser, and is said to have died as the result of a binge.
Moreover, the plays attributed to William Shakespeare reveal an intimate knowledge of court life, of English legal customs and conventions, of international diplomacy and institutions, etc. How could the Wm. Skakspear of Stratford acquire such knowledge?
Then skipping over the middle part of W.S.’s life we get to his last will and testament. The person who wrote the plays was evidently a person of enormous culture and scholarship. Such a person would likely have books (very valuable commodities in those days). Plus if Shakspear were the author of the plays, you would think that the copyrights would be the most valuable part of his estate. Yet according to his will, Shakspear left no books, and there were no plays. His estate was a very small one, the most valuable item being a silver bowl, and a couple of beds. The “second best” bed he willed to Anne; but evidently she got nothing else.
So it’s a real puzzle, Cicero! On the basis of the documentary evidence, one can’t help but wonder who it was who “really” wrote Shakespeare’s plays. To me it’s understandable that Baxter is drawn to the theory (hotly contested now as ever) that the author was Francis Bacon. For Bacon was a man of soaring intellect, of immense education and culture; he was a courtier, an “insider” at Elizabeth’s court; he was a diplomat; he was highly educated in the law; he had Latin, Greek, French, Italian; and he was reputed to have a strong moral character.
Bacon, to me, is one of the most fascinating characters ever to grace the world stage, and his influence on future ages has been immense and profound.
Just have to leave it there, I guess. We’re not going to solve this puzzle today, and that’s for sure!
Thanks so much for writing, Cicero. And thank you so very much for the book recommendation — Vickers’ Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose.” Sounds like a must-have to me!
No, it doesn't. (or didn't)
Don't you think that farmers and shephards would KNOW that 'fact' and not believe this stuff when it was written??
You seem to forget that this Earth is in a FALLEN nature now - because of sin.
ANd you would not be able to account for the huge racial diversity throughout the world.
Why not?
Do you think that GOD did NOT put the neccessary stuff into Adam and Eve when HE created them?
Like who did Cain marry?
Sigh......
His sister - the unnamed one.
For someone who wants ALL the little details on how GOD created all that we see around us, you are sure willing to accept gaping holes in what 'science' can tell you.
Not if you want to keep your HEAD very long!
Remember the tower of Babel?
The LANGUAGES were mixed up; NOT the collective memories of the people speaking them.
How do you account for the DIS-similarity of the languages on Earth today?
I don't even use all my brain cells.
Dang! That's just TERRIBLE!
NIV John 3:36
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him."
NIV John 12:48
There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day.
"And extremely scientific!"
--EvoDude
Ah... critical thinking; where would we poor fools be without it?
https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?&Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SS&Product_Code=b120HB
Suggestion: write a book pointing out all the errors in the Bible.
It should be a best seller.
"Like who did Cain marry?
Sigh......
His sister - the unnamed one."
Actually, Elsie, Cain married his niece. (But you were very close -- good thinking on your part *__*)
regards
Question: will the following 'work'?
NIV Genesis 30:28-43
28. He added, "Name your wages, and I will pay them."
29. Jacob said to him, "You know how I have worked for you and how your livestock has fared under my care.
30. The little you had before I came has increased greatly, and the LORD has blessed you wherever I have been. But now, when may I do something for my own household?"
31. "What shall I give you?" he asked. "Don't give me anything," Jacob replied. "But if you will do this one thing for me, I will go on tending your flocks and watching over them:
32. Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-colored lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages.
33. And my honesty will testify for me in the future, whenever you check on the wages you have paid me. Any goat in my possession that is not speckled or spotted, or any lamb that is not dark-colored, will be considered stolen."
34. "Agreed," said Laban. "Let it be as you have said."
35. That same day he removed all the male goats that were streaked or spotted, and all the speckled or spotted female goats (all that had white on them) and all the dark-colored lambs, and he placed them in the care of his sons.
36. Then he put a three-day journey between himself and Jacob, while Jacob continued to tend the rest of Laban's flocks.
37. Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches.
38. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink,
39. they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.
40. Jacob set apart the young of the flock by themselves, but made the rest face the streaked and dark-colored animals that belonged to Laban. Thus he made separate flocks for himself and did not put them with Laban's animals.
41. Whenever the stronger females were in heat, Jacob would place the branches in the troughs in front of the animals so they would mate near the branches,
42. but if the animals were weak, he would not place them there. So the weak animals went to Laban and the strong ones to Jacob.
43. In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and maidservants and menservants, and camels and donkeys.
He's happy with his faith!
The Dehydrated Frenchman; I believe...
I love it!!
"And on that quote, why God conceal himself and then punish people for not believing he exists? Whats with all the mind games? What a jerk!"
HE does not conceal Himself to those who seek Him.
Mt:7:7: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
But you must do so with a contrite spirit, and a humble heart.
Obviously, you have not tried to seek Him with these qualities. I am sorry for you. Repent and do so *__*.
regards
Betty, as I said in my last, you can't do better than to consult Spedding's great edition, or the ongoing Oxford edition, reading Bacon first hand with copious notes.
Or, for a slightly more manageable book (810 pages) there's Brian Vickers' well annotated Francis Bacon in the Oxford Authors series. When I have taught Bacon to undergraduates I have used the shorter Odyssey Press edition or the edition by Sidney Warhaft. Not sure if they're still in print.
Two good critical books to start with are Brian Vickers on FB and Renaissance Prose and Paolo Rossi, FB, From Magic to Science. There's also the Cambridge Companion to Bacon, with good recent essays and bibliography.
But just a curious question: Do any of these sources reference James Phinney Baxter's research, or reference Shakespeare's will?
I admit that in my qualification of potential sources, James Phinney Baxter had three things going for him (in my book). (1) He flourished in an educational milieu that predated the establishment of John Dewey's philosophy of education the as orthodox model. (2) I read his obituary, in which was pointed out his absolute insistence on documentary sources as necessary to establishing one's case, among other things. (3) He's a "local boy." :^) That is, he's from Downeast Maine (which used to be a part of Massachusetts, where I live). Given the historical public culture of these parts, it seems that Baxter might just naturally be attuned to the local custom of assessing the character of subjects surveyed. Of course, he died nearly a hundred years ago. But to me, that doesn't make him irrelevant.
Thank you so much for writing, Cicero, and for sharing your thoughts and references with me.
MERRY CHRISTMAS to you and all of yours! Thanks so much for writing!
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