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.
BTTT.
And an even sadder consequence is - some people apply the same principle to their spiritual lives.
When God doesn't give them whatever they want, or they don't get their way, or when God doesn't answer their prayers just like they designed them, they are disappointed and want something else.
But that doesn't work.
Whatever Simeon expected the Messiah to be, he accepted Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of God's covenant with His people.
Simeon accepted what God chose to provide - which happened to be His perfect plan of salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Human Beings, Chimpanzees, Orangutans, Gorillas are all in hte Hominidae (sp?) or Great Ape family. Are Lions and Pumas cousins? If you consider them cousins, you would have to consider Humans and Chimps the same. Surely you dont disagree with scientists putting humans in the ape family right?
Sorry, missed this post in the midst of talking with others--narby, accygirl, reignoferror, Hank Kerchief and the now-departed donh, for whose demise from FR I am being excoriated on Darwin Central. Try reading more of that thread, particularly posts 173, 175, 178, 179, 184, 241. Donh kept posting to me after my complaint, and (it appeared) reached an agreement of some kind, as he asked what he *should* do when atheism was conflated with Nazi-ism. I thought removal of the offending post, or a warning, was all that was necessary, not a banning. Which is why my complaint said "Do we have to put up with this crap on Christmas Eve?" in post 105. I even included and italicized the offending remark explicitly, and made my complaint public instead of behind his back.
I read the site and disagree; although I can't at the moment recall the quote I'd like to use in response, I think it was from J.R.R. Tolkien.
The point being your source seems to dismiss all miracles as fabrications, mistakes, the willing self-deception of the gullible, and as typical of "the times".
From that mindset it is understandable that one would seek for any further anomaly to undermine or discredit much of the New Testament writings.
I am able to form and entertain the mental construct, but I deny its *universal* applicability, not being a materialist; and having other reservations which would probably be misunderstood at this point.
But it is interesting which you are committing a parallel of the logical fallacy attributed to creationists -- "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
The relevant considerations are whether you would consider single-source knowledge *alone* to be disposative, absent the subject matter of miraculous or divine intrusion in to history, or whether it is the conjunction of those two circumstances which presses your buttons.
The answer to your question, actually, in a roundabout way, is "Flying Spaghetti Monster."
And finally, my question about "how many people would have dismissed the events" referred to contemporaries of the disciples--e.g. Festus saying to Paul, "Your great learning is driving you mad" and the like.
Cheers!
'Scientists' can do what ever they want; can't they?
Who am I to disagree with them??
HOWEVER.......
1 Corinthians 15:38-39
38. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.
39. All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.
The point being your source seems to dismiss all miracles as fabrications, mistakes, the willing self-deception of the gullible, and as typical of "the times".
NIV Matthew 11:2-5
2. When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples
3. to ask him, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?"
4. Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see:
5. The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.
NIV John 10:37-39
37. Do not believe me unless I do what my Father does.
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."
39. Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.
NIV John 3:2
He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him."
NIV John 4:53-54
53. Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, "Your son will live." So he and all his household believed.
54. This was the second miraculous sign that Jesus performed, having come from Judea to Galilee.
NIV John 6:1-2
1. Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias),
2. and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick.NIV John 6:14
After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, "Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world."
NIV John 7:3
Jesus' brothers said to him, "You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do.
NIV John 7:21
Jesus said to them, "I did one miracle, and you are all astonished
NIV John 7:31
Still, many in the crowd put their faith in him. They said, "When the Christ comes, will he do more miraculous signs than this man?"
NIV John 10:24-26
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.
NIV John 11:47
Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. "What are we accomplishing?" they asked. "Here is this man performing many miraculous signs.
NIV John 12:37
Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him.
NIV John 14:9-11
9. Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father'?
10. Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.
11. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.
NIV John 20:30-31
30. Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.
31. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Oh come on! You can't be serious. Not only is the ToE wrong because of the bible, but now you're saying basic TAXONOMY is wrong?
We are mammals because our mothers produce milk. Are you saying that humans aren't mammals? A Platypus is a mammal so I guess that means humans aren't.
Are human beings even animals? Or are we a whole new thing? Where do I make the cut off?
This is getting laughable.
LiberalGunNut wrote:Oh come on! You can't be serious. Not only is the ToE wrong because of the bible, but now you're saying basic TAXONOMY is wrong?
Or even to include a reference, like this: Re: Your post 848. I don't always do it, but every little bit helps.
Cheers!
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Or even to include a reference, like this: Re: Your post 848. I don't always do it, but every little bit helps. Cheers! 849 posted on 12/27/2006 6:38:30 AM CST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.
Don't read more into it than was said.
What a charming, even romantic thought!
I'll definitely read the Harold Bloom, and thank you for the book recommendation!
Sounds like a great read, Cicero! Thank you so much for the book recommendation!
(All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.
Don't read more into it than was said.)
I can't read anything into it because it doesn't make sense. According to taxonomy we ARE cousins with Chimpanzees because we are part of the Great Ape family. You're saying that is wrong because the bible says so. I'm saying that is laughable.
So are humans mammals?
You are wasting your time.
Thank you so much for the pings to the book recommendations!
;^)
I like to use those; but when one is responding to one or two sentences from a longer post, just the post # is not enough.
Cheers!
...oh, and Happy New Year!
You are wasting your time.
It's your own words that are 'bothering' you; not mine.
Why isn't 'new year' on December 22 - the day when the Sun begins coming back North again??
I don't post under the name "Elsie", so your logic that it is my words bothering me is a bit confused. Perhaps your problems with logic are why you find it impossible to understand evolution.
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