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.
(Look at Jesus - you'll see 'God'.)
Ok, I'll try that. So...
Where is Jesus? I'll gladly take a look at him.
It is funny how you bring up the loaves and fishes story as if it was fact. The whole argument is that the story of Jesus is mostly myth. If a man fed 5,000 people with 3 fish and 5 loaves of bread, why isn't that in any other historical documents from that time? That seems like a pretty significant event to me.
Common sense will tell you that it is impossible. THe only time we're not allowed to use common sense is when we read the bible. Right?
Christopher Hitchens
Ever hear of foreshadowing in stories? Why not do the same thing writ large across history, as it happens?
I think there are multiple problems with the interpretation of sacred writings according to contemporary standards--the entire mindset and worldview of humanity has been changing over time. Not just the words in languages, but the concepts, degree of abstraction or personalization/anthropomorphism attributed to items, confusion (or even fusion) of categories which are now considered distinct.
Try reading for example Owen Barfield (not a Christian at all, by the way) for more of the intertwining of thought and language.
It all depends on what God was trying to communicate; and whether he was interested primarily in stroking the intellectual pride of late 20th century / 21st century self-annointed cognoscenti rather than reaching the mass of humanity with things they could easily grasp.
On paper, it is easier for an intellectual to temporarily set aside insistence on using the intellect *exclusively* to grasp a truth, than it would be asking a dunce to follow quantum mechanics. So that is more likely why God spoke in simpleton terms, to make it accessible.
The paradox is that God enjoins humility--and by a strange coincidence, allowing something other than your intellect to be used, in order to grasp the truths, just happens to *require* humility.
Funny how that works out.
Minor quibble: When you quote me, please don't alter it, I don't want those comments attributed to me. It would be better to quote my original paragraph as is, and comment below it.
Reply: It is a common technique to copy and italicize a statement with which you disagree, strike out the text with which you disagree, and then substitute your favored wording.
Most people follow up with a variation on the theme of "There. All fixed."
Haven't you seen this before? I assumed it was standard practice.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas!
No, you are conflating a number of different issues.
Not that I blame you, most atheists tend to do the same thing.
But the necessity of rejecting the supernatural tends to override all other considerations.
The whole argument you made *at first* was that religion was based on emotion and therefore untrue.
I am quoting the New Testament story of the loaves and fishes to point out that there were episodes in the life of Jesus which could NOT have been explained away as autosuggestion or as psychosomatic effects on transient illnesses, which the peasants in their primitive states of knowledge merely mistook for a wondrous happening.
As to whether the miraculous stories are true or untrue, you are committing a logical fallacy somewhere between circular reasoning and begging the question--perhaps the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
If miracles are untrue, all accounts of miracles are false.
[Here BTW follows a surfacy-plausible account of how the legend got propagated.]
Therefore this account of a miracle is false.
Therefore there is no evidence of miracles.
Therefore all miracles are untrue.
You have to find out *first* if there is a supernatural, and *if* you can allow for or control or regularize its interactions with "everyday life".
Scientific empiricism is based upon "uniformity of causes in a closed system."
But the problem is, even among purely natural causes, real life outside of the laboratory has enough conflicting factors that scientific laws *seem* like they are broken, hence the presence of control groups in experiments.
So you don't have the conditions in historical areas for a rigorous test of whether the supernatural occurs.
And Judeo-Christian religious tradition explains "you must not put God to the Test" -- that is, it has been claimed all along that God reserves two rights:
1) God does not have to participate in any given experiment.
2) God does not even have to tell us whether he is participating or not, on any particular day.
It's damn frustrating when one is used to an ansatz which depends upon reproducible, subservient, *regular* natural phenomena.
But general statements of a particular law, always assume *no interference*. But Miracles claim to be interference, they claim to *be* an exception. So just quoting the law does nothing--if the event followed the law, it would have been ordinary life, and nobody would notice.
IF the Bible claimed that "bread always multiplies to feed the hungry" that is a regular statement of what always happens, and can be put to rest pretty quickly.
But saying "just once-holy cow!--the loaves and fishes *were* multiplied" then that is a very different thing.
If a man fed 5,000 people with 3 fish and 5 loaves of bread, why isn't that in any other historical documents from that time? That seems like a pretty significant event to me.
How extensive was the documentary coverage of events back then, and how many people would have dismissed the account out of hand just as you did?
Even many ordinary events of antiquity are "single-sourced."
For the nonce, try Googling "Mons Angels" and then ask why YOU never read about it in any secular accounts of...
...well, that'd give it away ;-)
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas!
Was 'Luke' an apostle?
So if there was a ancient story about a Hindu prophet feeding 5,000 with 3 fish and 5 loaves of bread, would you be inclined to believe that?
I think not, your belief of that story comes from you presumption that the bible is inherently accurate. Looking at that scripture in a detached, neutral manner, the logical thing to do is dismiss it as myth. This axiom is used when looking at EVERY OTHER HISTORICAL document whether it be The Iliad or the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Sure, I guess anything COULD happen, but Occam's razor comes into play. The burden of proof is on the one making the outrageous claim, and no ammount of philosophical hoop jumping will change that.
(What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.)
Exactly. I'm going to ask everyone in this thread to prove to me that Asgard and Valhalla doesn't exist.
Thanks, Betty. Yes, my daughter and son-in-law are here for Christmas. Evidently the President of Williams was the same-named son of your author and brother of the governor. I asked my son-in-law about it after posting.
The family goes back to the father mentioned in the article who invented a method for automated canning. As a result, Maine became a center for canning fish and other food. Also, the Union victory in the civil war may owe something to this invention, since the Confederates never had the same advantage that comes from canned food in the supply line.
I agree with you about the problems of professional orthodoxy. After all, I'm the one who keeps mentioning Thomas Kuhn. Nevertheless, I think the orthodox position has overwhelming evidence to support its position in this instance. Just about the only contrary evidence I've seen offered is wishful thinking and the snobbish attitude that those plays couldn't have been written by anyone less than a blue-blooded gentleman with ancestors going back to the Conquest.
Extremely. We have several contemporary Romans who basically recorded everything weird that came down the pike, so we have oodles of stories of "miracles" from this era -- but the only place the miracles of Jesus are mentioned is in Scripture. A dispassionate scholar would take such a lack of corroborating evidence as a strong indication the Scriptural miracle stories were made up from whole cloth by some long-forgotten author.
Oh, you mean the never-corroborated bit of allied propaganda:
The sudden spread of the rumours in the spring of 1915 six months after the events happened is also puzzling. The stories published then often attribute their information to mysterious anonymous British officers. The latest and most detailed examination of the Mons story by David Clarke suggests these men may have been part of a covert attempt by military intelligence to spread morale-boosting propaganda.
Circular reasoning.
The problem is that some insist that angels submit themselves to a rectal probe, biopsy, and samples taken for GC/MassSpec and other tests, or else "they don't exist."
There *is* such a thing as varying degrees of evidence, varying degrees of reliability of witnesses, and the like.
History is *full* of uncorroborated accounts, and just to say that "the evidence is weak, therefore this didn't happen" is not logically sound.
The reason people do it is to exclude many false positives -- you know, the null hypothesis, and all that.
But nobody ever addresses the possibility of false negatives, because they combine the approach with naturalism implicitly.
Hence, circular reasoning again.
The canonical response seems to be, "FSM".
But just because you allow for the possibility of anything "rum" or "uncanny" does not mean that you are required to admit or accept all of them.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
You sound a bit like a UFO conspiracy theorist.
No, because they claim "it's all a conspiracy."
I admit freely that there are different types of evidence, and that different methods of inquiry are appropriate to different disciplines. Read the late Richard Feynman in his autobiographical books about "cargo-cult science" and psychology.
UFO theorists imply that the aliens (while belonging to the same physical world) do things which commonly violate the know n laws of physics, without allowing for the supernatural.
Those who believe in miracles say that miracles are interference with natural processes (in ways which therefore *seem* arbitrary) by something which is not subject to those laws in the first place.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
Well certainly I don't have that prejudice at all. For me, it's just the problem of how a totally uncultured butcher-and-skinner apprentice managed to transform himself into the Bard. I don't think that's an unreasonable question. As to any wishful thinking on my part, I really don't have a dog in this fight, just a lot of curiosity about alleged facts that don't seem to add up.
And I'd be very glad to take instruction on this matter!
Maybe you'd enjoy consulting your ancestor about what he found? James Phinney Baxter's book, The Greatest of Literary Problems, was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1915. So it must be out of print. But I'm reading it at www.questia.com, a subscription service. It's pretty fascinating. And I haven't even got to the alleged Francis Bacon tie-in yet. Among other things, he presents an interesting description of the Elizabethan Court and the intellectual tenor/climate of the time.
Have a wonderful, blessed Christmas, Cicero!
The most complete and objective life of Shakespeare I know is Samuel Schoenbaum's magisterial summary of the known evidence, "Shakespeare's Lives."
There is plenty more detail and speculation, of course, in hundreds and thousands of books, including whole industries on whether Shakespeare was Protestant, Cathlic, or agnostic, but that's a good one to start with, if you don't mind reading 800 pages. It's very well done.
P.S. I've been re-reading Schoenbaum's book. It really is marvellous, wears its incredible researches lightly, most witty and readable.
I noted from one of your posts that you've learned of all kinds of libels against the Man from Stratford. Forgive me, but that could be a sign that you've been reading one the many cranks who've made this subject their life's work, and hopelessly muddied it in the process.
Here's the last bit I'll say on the subject, because, to be honest, I find it tiresome. Ben Jonson died in 1636. He'd known Shakespeare well ever since his fellow playwright first came to London at the end of the previous century. All the candidates to replace the Bard, including Bacon, were long dead by 1636. Jonson went to his grave praising to the sky the boundless genius of one William Shakespeare from the little English countryside town of Stratford-on-Avon.
For what reason would Ben Jonson seek to praise a fraud? Why would Jonson want to deny de Vere, or Bacon, or Marlowe, the rightful credit they deserved for great works of art, if indeed they produced them? The cranks contend that Jonson was corrupt, bought off by de Vere or some other special interest, or that he was too stupid to know his friend really couldn't write worth a lick. Similar charges on all manner of Shakespearean data fly all over the anti-Man from Stratford literature.
That's why Occam's razor must be applied. The cranks must devise enormous conspiracies and acts of skullduggery to make their case. But the simple answer, that a remarkable once in a millenium genius sprang up and blossomed in the English countryside, satisfies Occam's test, and has about it that delicate, elusive sound, the sweet ring of truth.
My original point was the religious faith was spread primarily through young people. One example of an adult who finds faith is not sufficient to refute my claim. If it were the norm for adults to find faith, then they would change faiths regularly, but that is rare. Faith is primarily taught in the home, and it sticks to people like their language does. That's why faith is associated with geographic regions, like language.
you will find a number of pro-Evo posters who stated that their knowledge and acceptance of Darwin's model and subsequent refinements to it did not interfere with their faith AT ALL.
I was one of those, up until the day it did interfere. I've been in these threads a long time.
I therefore have shown that you HAVE no intellectual honesty
Insults do not put your arguments forward. You have shown nothing but that is possible for someone in the dark to see the light of truth. Christianity is like every single other religion on Earth, a fantasy. (that was one of the arguments that swayed me, in that it was unlikely that I was one of the minority lucky ones that had the *right* faith, and all the others were wrong). Those who think they are above other faiths with the one true knowledge of God are the arrogant ones. I no longer have any knowledge of a *true* God to be proud of.
I know that most all of the fun was *feeling* superior to believers
I feel no superiority. I've lost an ability I once had to have faith. If I feel anything, it is anger at those who forced me to face reality, because an imaginary faith is a more satisfying way to live a life. I'm not advocating you rethink your faith, only cease attacking science.
If I have a goal on these threads, it is to persuade believers to leave evolution alone. Attacking science from a position of ignorance only makes Christians appear foolish, and drives away people like myself. Have faith in Jesus if you can, but stop preaching creationism, because no good can come of it.
If that is the sum of your argument, and your faith, then you my friend are in trouble.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.