Dawkins on Evolution

Perhaps (I believe) because they realise (as far as I can tell) how boring (in my opinion) and weak (ditto) arguments sound when they are made with the (relatively) hardcore phenomenologists (assuming they actually exist) in mind (I reckon).

Now we are talking.

Everyone has their own belief system.

Dawkins, on the other hand, takes the scientific point of view, that belief systems are unwarranted and then states his own.

Can you be sure?/QUOTE]

Nope. But so far that is what I have observed.

Question: Where did life come from?
Scientist: The Universe (God) created life.
Question: And who decides what we do in life.
Scientist: The Laws of Physics (God, The Creator) decides.
Questoin: No Free Will?
Scientist: No Free Will. The Laws of Physics (God, The Creator) decides it all.
Question: The Universe (God) is beautiful, isn't it.
Scientist: Yes, the Universe (God) is beautiful.

The only difference between a scientist and a theologists is the words they use. Both however exhibit very strong faith in what they believe.

As for me, I just keep exploring on my own, and let the true believers duke it out on which faith is better/stronger than the other. Dawkins is an evangelist, just like Billy Graham, and he preaches to the faithful.

Rich

Same strawman again. Even if this wasn't a gross simplification of Dawkin's point of view, and it is, Dawkins is a scientist, not "Scientist(s)".

Fine, we can replace the word Scientist with Dawkins in my above post.

What do you think faith is?

What is the point of saying that evolution 'does not violate the laws of physics'? It is like saying that chess 'doesn't violate the law of gravity'.

Substitute 'God or Nature' for 'Universe' and nothing in Dawkins contradicts Spinoza, does it?

In fact, I wonder whether at the end of the day, Dawkins 'philosophy' is actually rational.

Everything is just the manifestation of the same underlying Logos which appears everywhere in the Universe. So when Dawkins says 'where is the evidence', the response is 'it is all a matter of interpretation'. If you see it the right way, the universal order is itself of divine origin. But you won't see it because you hate religion.

If religion was as Dawkins understood it, then I would certainly agree with him.

Well actually, paganism may be fashionable again, but the term actually means 'spiritually unenlightened'.

It si kind of interesting that biologists seem to have adopted determinism en mass and point to physics for justification.
At the same time the physicists are beginning to have doubts (about determinism that is).

"Those who are worried about conflict between faith and reason on this issue fail to distinguish between cause in the sense of a natural change of some kind and cause in the sense of an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever. "Creatio non est mutatio," says Thomas [Acquinas], affirming that the act of creation is not some species of change. So, the Greek natural philosophers were quite correct: from nothing, nothing comes. By "comes" here is meant a change from one state to another and this requires some underlying material reality, some potentiality for the new state to come into being.
This is because all change arises out of a pre-existing possibility for that change residing in something.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something's existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a taking of something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe. Rather, creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.


Strictly speaking, points out Thomas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something. On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist-it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates, not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all.

In this way, one can see that the new science [i.e. Aristotleanism] of the thirteenth century, out of which our modern science developed, was not a threat to the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. To come to know the natural causes of natural beings is a different matter from knowing that all natural beings and operations radically depend on the ultimate cause for the existence of everything: God the Creator. Creation is not a change. Creation is a cause, but of a very different, indeed unique, kind. Only if one avoids the Cosmogonical Fallacy, is one able to correctly understand the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo."

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws-it's happened often enough in the history of science).

Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex-statistically improbable -and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe-the miracle-free zone that is physics.

"Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

So here, he is (1) misunderstanding the difference between 'reality' and 'existence' and (2) then appealing to the very believers he has labelled as 'deluded' to turn them against the 'sophisticated theologian' (the hypocrisy is exquisite).

The subject of the essay is actually not evolutionary biology, it is theology and philosophy, and it is clear that about these subjects he knows very little.

Karen Armstrong, I think conceeds far too much.
Her essay could be read as saying that "god,Tao,Brahman,etc." are entirely human constructs and that religion is a form of psychotherapy for man trying to deal with the awful truth (i.e. there is no transcendent purpose or value).

Dawkins on the other hand conceeds far too little.
Promoting a vision of reality in which everything (subjective experience and material properties) will be explained and eventually predictable according to the laws of physics. Although he does not dwell on the apparent or possible indeterminism in current physics he basically promotes a mechanistic and deterministic view.