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.
Take a close look at your baby or little child. (If you haven't got one, borrow a grandchild or a close relative's baby. Younger the better.) Give the child a "receptive" gesture, e.g. hold gently in arms. Then think of this:
Mark 9:37
“Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me.”
If you are into taking a look at Jesus, there are clues all around. (While you're at it, read that whole chapter 9 from Mark --- do you have a New Testament? Or if not, it's online here.)
I mean it: do this experimentally. It's absolutely worth an experiment. There are clues all around, and this is one of the easier ones.
That would constitute 'cultural imperialism' towards inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere ;-)
Cheers!
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.
Oh; I 'understand' it just fine: I just don't BELIEVE it.
Poor ol' Charles... Look what it did to him!
He died an old man, is buried in Westminster Abbey near Sir Isaac Newton, and is one of the most honored men of science. Evolution treated him pretty nice.
You might live as long, but almost certianly no one will remember Elsie in 100 years, and you'll be just as dead as Darwin despite whatever fantasy you have otherwise. I know that because you convinced me so.
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.
No, I *didn't* understand your meaning. A parallel would be if Richard Dawkins said that "All scientists are atheists, as they should be."
Maybe in his crowd.
Cheers!
They floated.
(And what about Freshwater Fish? How can they survive in saltwater?
A worldwide flood means saltwater and freshwater mixing. And I'd like to see you raise freshwater fish eggs in saltwater.
It doesn't mix that fast.
Furthermore, where did all this water come from? And how did the animals distribute themselves around the world? And how did they build a sustainable population with just one male and one female?
The atmosphere.
And what did the predators eat all the time they were on the Ark?
They hybernated.
(They floated.)
So ant larvae can survive on the water? And just what did the larvae do for food?
(It doesn't mix that fast.)
But it eventually does mix right?
(The atmosphere.)
You do know that the amount of water in the atmosphere is constant right? "Extra" water is not produced. Where did all the water go after the flood?
(They hybernated.)
Lions, TIgers, WOlverines, Eagles, Hawks, etc hibernate? News to me.
Thanks for your patience...I hate not being able to keep going on the spot!
Cheers!
How constant do you think it is over what time period. It is commonly believed that before the flood the earth's atmosphere was thick with water. The whole earth was more like a giant terrarium which is why tropical vegetation existed way up north, like Siberia.
The science is squirrelly. Don't make a science argument here. A miracle would be an appropriate answer. Think of how high up mountains are. To flood everything in sitting water, think about 30,000 feet above sea level filled with water around the globe. It didn't happen with science. I am not insulting you as to say God couldn't have done it as a miracle, and then dissapeared the water, but the volume of water just doesn't exist, even in a humid atmosphere. There is only so much water air can hold. Not 30,000 feet high across the entire surface of the planet.
I think that the miracle of the flood was done without creating and uncreating new water though. The bible says that existing water was released.
That’s what I told a few atheists on youtube this last April 1st.They didn’t get it!
Does this mean the Lamark may have been right?? At least a little bit?
Actually, epigenetics tells us that Lamarck was right ~ kinda!
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