Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!
But because contemporary antitheist Gnostics (i.e. Lewontin, Dawkins) demand that God’s foot not be allowed in the door, they do what they must and brazenly foist a great deception off onto a gullible public. Make them believe a lie. Make the lie credible by dressing it up as modern science. Force everyone to partake of the lie by teaching it as science education. And destroy anyone who questions the lie. Destroy their good name. Paint them as insane, authoritarian, fundamentalist, antiscience, backwards, superstitious-—say anything so long as they are utterly destroyed.
For the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" - which documents the persecution of scientists who offer alternative explanations to evolution theory - Ben Stein interviewed Dawkins and asked him point blank under what circumstances intelligent design could have occurred. Dawkin's answer put him in the same ballpark with Crick, i.e. panspermia (alien seeding.) After-the-fact, Dawkins tried to minimize his own remarks in this essay (emphasis mine and notice the egomania of the first sentence):
Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.
The underlined part is his statement of faith (Dawkins is a notorious atheist.) Lewontin's remarks were made in reviewing a book by Carl Sagan:
Billions and Billions of Demons Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
Again, I have underlined the atheist statement of faith. And to quote the article I linked in my previous post to this thread, historical sciences (like evolution biology) improve their respectability among the science disciples when they proliferate and seriously entertain alternative explanations for the historical record:
Insofar as they are concerned with identifying particular past causes of current phenomena, historical researchers cannot directly test their hypotheses by means of controlled experiments. They can, however, proliferate alternative explanations for the traces they observe and then search for a smoking gun to discriminate among them.
But scientists entailed in the sphere of evolution theory based research dare not do this - because alternative explanations (e.g. panspermia) open the door to supernatural intelligent designers, i.e. God - and very often herald the end of their careers or reputation ("Expelled.") God's Name is Alpha and Omega.
Thanks
A-G. Illuminating as always.
You quote Lewontin quoting Lewis Beck to the effect: “To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”
A few questions from a scientific illiterate:
From a Materialist’s perspective would not a “miracle” be viewed as an unexplained natural phenomenon?
Are there not, a great number of unexplained natural phenomena?
One such example being the Cambrian Explosion? A very large example?
Does not the Cambrian Explosion offer the prospect of a falsification of the Theory of Evolution? Subject as always, of course, to further discovery?
Would not the term “a sudden burst of evolution” amount to a contradiction in terms?
Could not the hostility of Science to the term “miracle” be explained as a negative reaction to the suggestion represented by “miracle,” that Science can’t reasonably claim that it holds the promise that ultimately nothing is beyond its comprehension?
Are not alternative explanations (be they “miracles” or something else) consequently a threat to Materialistic orthodoxy?
Your posts are an unfailing blessing.