On Mon, 6 Nov 1995 12:54:59 -0600 (CST) you wrote:
DD>Dawkins gave away the farm when he labelled Darwinism a
>"world-view." Perhaps without knowing it, he unveiled the
>philosophical, indeed, metaphysical character of Darwinism's basic
>claims.
I think Dawkins does know it. He simply dismisses God apriori on
philosophical grounds:
"I know of only two alternatives to Darwinism that have been offered
as explanations of the organised and apparently purposeful complexity;
of life. These are God and Lamarckism. I am afraid I shall give God
rather short shrift. He may have many virtues: no doubt he is
invaluable as a pricker of the conscience and a comfort to the dying
and the bereaved, but as an explanation of organised complexity he
simply will not do. It is organised complexity we are trying to
explain, so it is footling to invoke in explanation a being
sufficiently organised and complex to create it." (Dawkins R., "The
Necessity of Darwinism, New Scientist, 15 April 1982, p130)
and
"So, cumulative selection can manufacture complexity while single-step
selection cannot. But cumulative selection cannot work unless there
is some minimal machinery of replication and replicator power, and the
only machinery of replication that we know seems too complicated to
have come into existence by means of anything less than many
generations of cumulative selection! Some people see this as a
fundamental flaw in the whole theory of the blind watchmaker. They
see it as the ultimate proof that there must originally have been a
designer, not a blind watchmaker but a far-sighted supernatural
watchmaker. Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the
day-to-day succession of evolutionary events; maybe he did not frame
the tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set
up the original machinery of replication and replicator power, the
original machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection,
and hence all of evolution, possible.
This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-
defeating. Organized complexity is the thing that we are having
difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate
organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/
protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a
generator of yet more organized complexity. That, indeed, is what
most of this book is about. But of course any God capable of
intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein
replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized
as that machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him additionally
capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and
forgiving sins. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by
invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for
it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say
something like 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that
kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always
there', or 'Life was always there', and be done with it."
(Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", Penguin: London, 1991, p141).
Dawkins seems to be one of those supremely self-confident individuals
who believe they can define in advance what did and did not happen in
the beginning.
Johnson says:
"Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker...is brilliantly argued, but
Jane Hawking's criticism of Stephen Hawking's thinking is equally
applicable to Dawkins: whatever does not fit into his narrow logical
system is expelled from reality" (Johnson P.E., "Reason in the
Balance", InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1995, p227).
God bless.
Stephen
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