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.
Really its not so difficult; they celebrate their own Perfectability; their ability to achieve godhood by their own bootstraps. That is why they prop up evolution; they wish to believe that all is improving, rather than decaying as is evidenced by everything around us.
“If I knew God I’d be Him.”
Though it seems from the first few seconds of the creation event when nuclear strong and weak forces, the latter of which electromagnetism segregated from, and somehow also therein gave rise to gravitation, from which there gradually coalesced various galactic types and structures.
And as we live in one spiral galaxy out of billions, two thirds of the way out from its dense center between whirling arms which are relatively debris and dust free; where metals are fairly well concentrated, but rarer in the Milky Way’s outer reaches…. Where too, were we further in, we wouldn’t be able to see the universe outside.
That we live in the habitable zone of a single G2V star, in a system with a large outer planet to sweep up a considerable amount of debris that might otherwise be drawn to the inner solar system and collide with Earth.
That we have a magnetic field which protects us from too much cosmic and solar radiation, and allows us too – geometrically by the more distant stars – to navigate around our planet.
That we have a moon massive enough to stabilize our planetary axis, and which perhaps also couples gravitationally to assist plate tectonics in recycling our oceanic crust and mantle, yielding a balance of nitrogen/oxygen and carbon dioxide to our atmosphere.
That the laws of physics at both the macro- and micro levels should be so fine tuned - and unified! - allowing these processes to be carried out at all.
That we are alive!
It seems inconceivable that there isn’t that God who – being God sets the values of good and evil, and cares that we should prefer that Good.
I'll take Pascal's Bet, thanks.
If I had a cure for cancer, I'd want to share it with people. This is not much different in the Christians eyes. One cure takes care of physical death, the other cure takes care of spiritual death.
If you truly believed that someone without Christ was going to hell for eternity when they died, wouldn't you want to warn them? And really, what kind of Christian would they be if they DIDN'T warn others?
I can appreciate that some people's approach is less than desirable. I've been on the receiving end myself and so understand the offense taken. At that point, I guess you just have to figure some people don't have much in the way of people skills. But don't discount the message because of the messanger. There's too much at stake.
Not fair....this title.
I'm a conservative, evangelical pastor and retired Army chaplain, and I guarantee you that the atheists I've run across have all been on the intelligent side.
I think they're wrong, but I don't think they're "dim-witted" by any means.
That's one reason I'm interested in talking to them and discovering those on whom God has written the word "Christian," and they just don't know it yet.
Dawkins, I think, is into his "shtick." I think he goes overboard for attention and money. Apparently, he succeeds.
Bravo! - You have therein captured the essence of Evolutionism.
Only to idiots who throw over the benefits of modern science, such as medical advances, simply because it interferes with their religious worldview.
Of course, YMMV.
No one stormed off in a huff. However, the loss of so many folks with scientific knowledge and training from FR is appalling.
PhDs in Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Math, Astrophysics, Computer Science, etc.
Huge loss to FR.
No, the folks to whom I refer are those who basically condemn everyone who does not believe exactly as they do -- and condemn them in a loud and public manner. Anyone who has been on a Religion Forum thread, or any of the science threads here knows exactly the person to whom I am referring.
Lighten up, Francis.
LOL!! Nice one!
LOL!
That works for me too.
But whatever happened to Opie? He's gotten weird in his old age. ;)
Neither can the mere injection of God into the question, for it is contrary of the nature of God as he has made himself known. God is not a passive, lassez-faire creator; he has declared his love for all of us,and never given any indication of a willingness to discard billions of generations of evolving, almost, but not good enough beings until Adam arrived on the scene, nor is Adam himself good enough; he sinned.
They drift towards Hedonism.
Indeed. I know many like that, too. The Holier-Than-Thou types one encounters in one's daily business have done more to turn folks off to religion than anything cooked up by the most scheming concept of Satan.
I give it about 90-95%.
Amen.
The ACLU got a hold of him!
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