Reflectorites
Here is an interesting op-ed piece by one Rory Leishman, bagging Dawkins
and praising Bill Dembski!
That Leishman does not get Dembski's name right, only adds to its
genuineness as a non-partisan opinion (I had never heard of him
before this).
Darwinism has been protected by the media for decades. As it
gradually wakes up to the idea that Darwinism is more a philosophy than a
science, and that there might be a good story in it, Darwinism's glory days
will be numbered!
Steve
PS: As to Darwinism being more a philosophy than a science, I can't resist
this quote from one of The Third Culture web pages that Berthajane kindly
posted:
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/r-Ch.10.html "Richard
Dawkins: I think of Dan Dennett as a great fountain of ideas, and he's like a
fireworks display for me. On every page of his you read, you constantly put
ticks in the margin. I'm never quite sure why he's classified as a philosopher
rather than as a scientist; he seems to me to do the same kind of thing I
do..." :-)
Steve
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http://www.canoe.ca/LondonOpinions/14n1.html
The London Free Press
[...]
Opinions
[...]
May 26, 2000
Building the bridge between science, theology
By Rory Leishman
How can we know the difference between right and wrong? Don't ask a
scientist for an authoritative answer.
Writing in Free Inquiry, a publication of the Council for Secular
Humanism, Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford biologist, states: "'What
is right and what is wrong?' is a genuinely difficult question that science
certainly cannot answer."
In Dawkins's opinion, philosophy also offers no answer. "Given a moral
premise or a priori moral belief," he says, "the important and rigorous
discipline of secular moral philosophy can pursue scientific or logical
modes of reasoning to point up hidden implications of such beliefs, and
hidden inconsistencies between them. But the absolute moral premises
themselves must come from elsewhere, presumably from unargued
conviction."
Unargued conviction? What about moral theology? For Dawkins, this
option is out of the question. In his influential book, The Blind
Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without
Design, he contends the existence of God is a scientifically unnecessary and
absurd hypothesis.
In brief, he argues that unlike a man-made watch, life is manifestly not a
product of intelligent design. Instead, he maintains the Darwinian theory of
evolution has conclusively established that all life on Earth, including
human life, has spontaneously evolved over the past three billion years
through a combination of chance and necessity.
If that is so, how did the process get started? How did the laws of nature
come into existence? As a biologist, Dawkins says he is not competent to
answer such questions. Yet, he is confident that physicists like Stephen
Hawking, his atheist colleague at Cambridge, will come up with plausible
answers that also do away with the need for God.
On all these points, the great majority of scientists and mathematicians
agree. However, there are some notable exceptions. One of them is William
Dembsky, a prominent intelligent design theorist who holds a PhD in
mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in philosophy from
the University of Illinois.
In his latest book, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science &
Theology, Dembsky argues the theory of evolution as propounded by
dogmatists like Dawkins is implausible because nothing so complex as a
single cell could conceivably have evolved over so short a period of
geological time as a mere three billion years.
Dembsky's work has been endorsed by Michael Behe of Lehigh University
and Robert Kaita of Princeton University.
There is no point, though, in drawing the publications of young scholars to
the attention of most scientists and mathematicians over the age of 30. The
dogmatic minds of these aging academics are closed to radically new ideas.
In his scientific autobiography, Max Planck explained that, "A new
scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making
them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die. And a
new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
In this way, a young generation of Copernicans once displaced their
Ptolemaic seniors. So today, Dembsky is confident that in his generation,
intelligent design will prevail over dogmatic Darwinism.
Meanwhile, consider the moral implications of this debate. As a "scientific
rationalist," Dawkins asserts that "not all humans are equal."
Humanness, he says, "is a complicated mixture of qualities that evolved
gradually. Absolutist moral judgments founded on the 'rights' of all humans,
as opposed to nonhumans, seem to me less justifiable than more pragmatic
judgments based, for example, on quantitative assessment of the ability to
suffer."
Peter Singer, the humanist philosopher at Princeton University, agrees.
On the basis of this premise, he comes to the horrific conclusion that the
law should allow physicians to kill off a mentally handicapped, but
otherwise healthy, infant at the request of the parents.
In sum, Dawkins and Singer tell us there is no creator and that human
beings, as such, have no inalienable rights.
The intellectual leaders of a more enlightened generation proclaimed: "We
hold these truths to be self evident: That all men are created equal; that
they have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
We, in our time, reject these timeless truths at our peril.
Rory Leishman is a London freelance writer. His column appears Fridays.
[...]
Copyright (c) 2000 The London Free Press,
a division of Sun Media Corporation.
[...]
Copyright (c) 2000, Canoe Limited Partnership. All rights reserved.
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"No one has yet witnessed, in the fossil record, in real life, or in computer
life, the exact transitional moments when natural selection pumps its
complexity up to the next level. There is a suspicious barrier in the vicinity
of species that either holds back this critical change or removes it from our
sight." (Kelly K., "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines," [1994],
Fourth Estate: London, 1995, reprint, p.475)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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