Dawkins and why he is right. One of a random series of comments/thoughts from Dawkins from "The God Delusion".
Why there is almost certainly no God.
The Priests of the different religious sects...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivisions of the duperies on which they live'
Thomas Jefferson
The Ultimate Boeing 747
The argument from improbability is the big one. It is the traditional guise of the argument of design., it is easily today's most popular argument offered on favor of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, argument - but in the precisely the opposite direction from the theist's intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving the God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit.
The name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure if Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chanra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater then the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard would have the luck of assembling a Boeing 747. Others later have borrowed this metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where is has been a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse or beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling it's parts are up there in 747 territory This, in a nutshell, is the creationists favorite argument - an argument that could only by made somebody who doesn't understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense of chance - it is the opposite.
The creationists misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of 'intelligent design' (Intelligent design has been unkindly referred to as creationism in a cheap tuxedo). Some observed phenomenon - often a living creature or one of it more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself - is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometime the language of informational theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all of the information of living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or 'surprise value'. Or the argument may invoke the economist's hackneyed motto: there is no free lunch - and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only know solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have it's free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the ultimate 747.
The argument from improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define 'come about by chance's as a synonym for 'come about in the absence of deliberate design'. Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world - cosmology, for example - it raises our consciousness in areas outside of it's original territory of biology.
A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance., and teaches us to seek out growing ramps of slowly increaseing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn't imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we should all feel deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeed with all of us.
Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion. Beginning of chapter four.
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I plan on copying some portions of Dawkin's "The God Illusion" in hope to bring about an intelligent controversy between the people who believe in creationism (or if they prefer 'intelligent design') and people such as myself who believe all life as designed on Earth, no matter how complex, can be explained by natural selection over 10's of millions of years and that there is no master designer. Or god who brought the Earth and it's life here into existence.
And you intend to prove we just "happened" by whatever means how?
I plan on copying some portions of Dawkin's "The God Illusion" in hope to bring about an intelligent controversy between the people who believe in creationism (or if they prefer 'intelligent design') and people such as myself who believe all life as designed on Earth, no matter how complex, can be explained by natural selection over 10's of millions of years and that there is no master designer. Or god who brought the Earth and it's life here into existence.
Dear Friend Randy: Interesting article.
Real food for thought.
Thanks for sharing.
Hope this fall goes well for you and yours.
I plan to go with Mrs. E. our good local friends Tim and Susan around the eleven finger lakes, and enjoy the majesty of the fall foliage.
Thereafter, to constantly curse having to rake the leaves in our front and back yards, and clean the roof gutters until the snows fall.
Peace and Abundant Blessings.
Enoch.
Thank you my dear friend Enoch. I am afraid that some of the upcoming posts may be upsetting to you as they deal with some of the more graphically violent parts of the Old Testament and the idea of if a person would want to use the Old Testament of the bible to teach their children morals. Not to worry though, even though some will be very distressing and even thought derogatory to some (though strictly from scripture) they will not make up the bulk of many posts of his book. I am only going to include them because some people insist on taking parts of the Old Testament literally and they, unfortunately, pick and choose which parts they'll use and ignore the rest. That hardly seems fair and was not the way I read the Old Testament myself. I took almost everything except creation quite literally, when I was studying it on my own. I had no one to guide me as to the literal, historic parts, and the parts that were only to be taken as an allegory.
I hope for nothing but good blessings for you, your family and your home always,
Randy
Darwin and Dawkins both are fascinating, highly knowledgeable, skilled scientists, and provide us with many clues. Forgetting about deism or design though for a minute, they both have gaping flaws also in their theories. Darwin nearly completely ignores the role symbiosis has played in evolution (not a fault, he was also a product of his time as well as not having the exploratory technology we have today) and even doubted many of his own theories by the end of his life. Dawkins' ontology simply dismisses whatever evidence or questions it can't fully incorporate into his scheme, outta hand.
I am not providing this opinion as an argument for deism or even intelligent design. It is an argument for purpose and sacredness though. Let me ask this question. Does sacredness and purpose, of necessity, mean "deity" or "God"? In other words, why do we think that the only thing capable of sacredness or creativity has to be a "God"?
Darwin nearly completely ignores the role symbiosis has played in evolution (not a fault, he was also a product of his time as well as not having the exploratory technology we have today)
It is unfortunate that details like this are left out of the teaching of evolution at the high school level . They add tremendously to the topic . Biology is a very complex subject ...
Part of the problem is that this is new, not widely understood, and flys in the face of many of the ontological presuppositions that science relies on to continue promulgating it's own belief system. In other words, the conclusions may stand science right on it's darn head!
I'm guessing that it is harder to "prove" the micro-biology than the macro-biology . But actual living things are a lot more mysterious and non-obvious than what the first glance seems to imply . And we haven't even gotten to recent theories of epi-genetics ...
Does sacredness and purpose, of necessity, mean "deity" or "God"? In other words, why do we think that the only thing capable of sacredness or creativity has to be a "God"?
I don't think so. I believe that many of the forces and changes that are attributed to a God or Designer are natural selection at work. There is no evidence and there never has been of an ultimate designer. Ever. All changes in the species, no matter how fast or slow, are explainable via natural selection. We see it in micro-organisms and bacteria everyday. Diseases develop resistance to antibiotics on a regular basis. It's because the diseases are changing because of the conditions they find themselves in. They are evolving to protect themselves from the newer antibiotics, proving the work of Darwin, even though he was unaware of it at the time.