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.
Your post will be carefully read and digested before replying--I just wanted to prod you a couple of times to find your buttons.
Generally that gets reticent posters to explain what their mindset is, which then allows conversation. :-)
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
Overgeneralizations are bad form, unless you use them merely to give a "broad brush" intro to a topic.
Again, I'll reply later, probably tomorrow.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas!
He doesn't conceal Himself. He's done everything possible for you to find Him. If you won't, that's not His fault, but He certainly isn't concealing Himself.
I rejected God because I came to agree with you that the Bible insists that it must be taken literally. Since I cannot honestly do that, I was forced to reject all of it.
It appears that EVOLUTION is bad for Christianity...
"By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported,—and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become,—that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us,—that the Gospels cannot be proven to have been written simultaneously with the events,—that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye witnesses;—by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many fake religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct."
( Charles Darwin in his Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Dover Publications, 1992, p. 62. )
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
"I think that generally (& more & more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."
( Quoted from Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, p. 636. )
Someday, most Christians will return to their attitude from the 40's through 70's,
that attacking science does more damage to the faith than good. But I'm sure you will never change.
I sure hope not!!!
Now you've done it! ;^)
You've opened a path for Him to work with you!
Lord, open the eyes and heart of LGN and others this Christmas season.
Show yourself to them in a way that only You can.
--LC
You are absolutely right!!!
NIV Mark 6:2
When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. "Where did this man get these things?" they asked. "What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles!
NIV Luke 19:37
When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:
NIV John 10:24-26, 38
24. The Jews gathered around him, saying, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly."
25. Jesus answered, "I did tell you, but you do not believe. The miracles I do in my Father's name speak for me,
26. but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.
38. But if I do it, even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father."
Well.....
Matthew 24:24-25
24. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect--if that were possible.
25. See, I have told you ahead of time.
While you are at it, give data PROVING that chimps are our cousins.
And you expect us to believe that this is where the present day items we see at the checkout counters at the grocery originated??
"Elvis lives with Aliens" indeed!
Because if THAT crumbles you've NOTHING left???
(BTW - it's not SCIENCE that's being 'attacked' - but EVOLUTION)
(While you are at it, give data PROVING that chimps are our cousins.)
Even if you DONT believe in Evolution you'd have to admit that Chimps were our cousins right? Humans and Chimps are both primates. If Lions and Tigers are cousins, so are Humans and chimps.
(If you won't, that's not His fault, but He certainly isn't concealing Himself.)
How convenient.
I misspoke. I should have said "all the Christians I know who are in the community I once was associated with". I'm sure you understood my meaning, but picked at my wording anyway.
When you descend into legalisims and sentence analysis, your argument is dead.
Sometimes the truth hurts.
Because if THAT crumbles you've NOTHING left???
Science can never "crumble", because it is a method, not a particular set of beliefs. Evolution theory, or gravity theory, or any other component of modern understanding could fall, but the scientific method cannot.
Narby:When you descend into legalisims and sentence analysis, your argument is dead.
grey_whiskers (to narby): No, it turned out you really *had* misspoke, and the misstatement was a gross generalization.
grey_whiskers to all: Please be patient--I am working on conversations with Narby, ReignofError, Hank Kerchief, and AccyGirl all at the same time; and working on Christmas Day stuff with my family.
I cannot walk on water but I am skating on thin ice--or at least stretched thin.
Will get back to you most likely tomorrow.
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas!
Do you REALLY think this; or is your research shoddy?
No.
What would be the 'science' that proves this?
When one does not type what they mean they WILL be judged one what they say; NOT what they 'mean'.
Translation: we ain't mind readers.
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