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.
Betty, I confess I hadn't heard of Baxter until you mentioned him. I looked him up and see that he was president of Williams College and played an important role in scientific development during the Second World War. Amazon has one of his books.
Bacon is an interest of mine, but I am not really that familiar with all of the secondary literature, so I don't know what kind of reputation Baxter has among Baconians. I can fairly say that Shakespeare critics have no use for theories that Bacon or Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays.
I wonder if he is related to Percival P. Baxter, after whom Baxter State Park was named? I'm curious because my youngest grandson, Nicholas Baxter Reed, was given his middle name in recognition of this ancestor.
Instead of continuing this circular argument I suggest you ask any livestock breeder if a healthy, sustainable herd can be raised from one cow and one bull. Ask a dog breeder the same question.
Care to elaborate? I don't understand...
Nevertheless: Merry Christmas!
(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?)
That doesn't answer the question. It has nothing to do with language. There are at least three myths that are strikingly similiar to the story of Jesus as the son of god. All three PRE-DATE the birth of the historical Jesus. The obvious extrapolation is that the life of Jesus was mixed with other ancient myths.
You should read the works of Joseph Campbell on comparitive myths and religion.
(You seem to forget that this Earth is in a FALLEN nature now - because of sin.)
My whole argument is that Genesis is MYTH! What does "fallen" in nature mean? That is as plausible to me as Zeus, Poseidon, Thor and Odin.
So tell me, how does God look if he revealed himself to you! This should be really interesting...
"Acts 17:26&27 "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. 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."
</sarcasm> Well that just settles it! We can throw out all we know about genetics, that scripture explains it all!</sarcasm>
Very cute.
Ok let's try this. I've decided to believe in a God!
I think I'll believe in Thor, Odin, Asgard and Valhalla. I've always wanted a VIKING funeral anyway!
On what grounds do you say that II Peter is pseudepigraphical?
...given that lots of folks call a lot of the Pauline epistles pseudepigraphical ;-)
Secondly, it doesn't surprise me that the other N.T. writers don't talk much about Paul.
If you actually read the epistles for content, you will realize that the subjects were generally not those in which you would go about name-dropping about other early evangelists; they were talking about other things.
And you also have Acts 19:14.
Cheers!
Says Paul.
No sense of humor PING!
Full Disclosure:Did Paul write Acts 1?
Cheers!
...oh, and Happy Chanuka.
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
I'm not big on Odin, but I agree with you on the Viking funeral. That would be cool.
It sucks to know that when I'm dead, I'm dead.
As usual, the Creationist misses the point. I became convinced that the Bible was fiction when Creationists on this forum persuaded me that I must believe the Bible as literal, or not believe it at all. Since it is impossible to believe a literal Genesis because the facts are obvious, then I had to reject it.
That message I received from a Creationist. The message of death, that persuaded me to reject God.
It's not the fault of science that the evidence says what it says. Many Christians of scientific means searched in vain decades ago to prove Genesis literally true, and they failed utterly. Sorry.
The message of Christianity may not be death. But the result of believing in Creationism is.
Science can be abused, just as religion can. For example, the Jim Jones mass suicide.
Much of environmentalism is BS, and many scientists reject it. Unfortunatly, they don't get much press. And they don't get much money to do studies that will conclude that "everything's OK".
However Evolution is on very solid ground, and the Creation Science attacks on it are completely laughable.
Words that are completely meaningless to me. There's no reason to even read them. I may as well read of Budda.
Until I became convinced that I must believe every word of the Bible, or none of it. Literalism is dangerous for Christianity.
I would hazard a guess that you already held a literal interpretation of Genesis, especially given your statement that you " studied in college with the intent of becoming a missionary."
Actually no. My studies were in the 70's, before the relatively recent "Creation Science" movement of the 80's. I was actually taught in a Southern Baptist Church retreat that there were no conflicts between science (evolution) and Genesis. I was taught that all you had to do was read Genesis correctly, and all was well. My Old Testament history class in college backed that up. After studying the questionable sources for Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament, it was no problem to ignore a litteral interpretation of it
That doctrine has since changed. The same Church that taught me that science and Genesis were compatible, now teaches literalism and fights science every way they can. That left me wondering, were they wrong in the 70's, or are they wrong now? And if church doctrine can be so utterly wrong depending on when you attend, then was it ever right? My conclusion was that it never was.
No, It is not this person you are angry with...it is God.
I know who I'm angry with. They post on this forum. God does not.
Christ said blessed are those who believe without seeing.
Jesus was a very bright man (yes, I believe he existed, just as Oral Roberts exists). Even he knew that he could offer no objective reason to believe in God. Only emotion. Emotion can lead humans to any number of things, both good and bad. Which only demonstrates that it cannot be relied upon to offer truth.
I'm sure you feel that way. Your un-serious, and un-Christlike attitude was the major component that woke me up.
Perhaps, if you accept that fact that somehow, maybe, the total story of 'E' is not as it seems, you can experience the Joy of your Salvation again.
Just ignore the facts and pretend, and everything will be OK. Sorry Elsie, I can't unlearn what I know, as I'm sure you well understsand.
Having fun?
Survey says...........
Evolution is a scientific observation, supported by a wealth of consilient evidence.
A religion? Please. Do some research. Try some normal science books & sources, not the propaganda printed on creationist websites. It's not accurate.
Your first words back on the forum, and they have to be condescending. I tried to reach out an olive branch to you, and discuss things civilly and seriously, in the hopes that it may lead somewhere, but it's obvious you simply don't want to do that.
Fine, we'll play it your way.
For now, I'm not interested in whatever else you have to say on this thread. We will though, meet again on another.
Oops.
Matthew 9:4-6:
Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, "Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your heart? Which is easier: to say 'Your sins ar e forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up and walk'? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins..." Then he said to the paralytic, "Get up, take your mat and go home." And the man got up and went home. When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to men.
Matthew 14, the miracles of the loaves and fishes.
Look at verse 14:20 -- they all ate and were satisfied. You might be able to psychosomatically rid yourself of an ailment, but you cannot psychosomatically generate an extra hunk of bread to do the eating *on*.
Nice try, though.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas!
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