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Topic: Peter S. Williams: The Big Bad Wolf, Theism and the Foundations of Intelligent Design
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posted 01. February 2007 17:03
The Big Bad Wolf, Theism and the Foundations of Intelligent Design:
A Review of Richard Dawkins’, The God Delusion, (Bantam, 2006)
by Peter S. Williams (MA, MPhil)
Summary - The man described as ‘Darwin’s Rotweiller’ (by supporter Charles Simonyi) has evolved to metaphorically resemble the big bad wolf of nursery rhyme fame, and he is on a mission to liberate the pigs (the analogy is mine, not his) from what he sees as their prisons of straw. Indeed, Zoologist Richard Dawkins is so intent on blowing down straw houses that he not only acknowledges the existence of firm foundations that might be used for permanent constructions, but he fails to notice that some of the pigs are building on just such a wolf-endorsed foundation with bricks and mortar more than adequate to the task of withstanding all his huffing and puffing. Dawkins, who is Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, has been described as ‘materialistic, reductionist and overtly anti-religious.’ Nevertheless, The God Delusion – which is descended by design from Dawkins’ two-part television series The Root of all Evil? - is Dawkins’ first book to make a direct attack upon religion (especially theism, and most especially Christianity): ‘If this books works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’
To read the entire paper, click here click here.
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NorcoJam
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posted 22. July 2007 06:40
ill go ahead and read the book soon. but like many before it that claim it will change my faith, it will most likely strengthen it. him being a scientist, he will probably throw a bunch of scientific observations out there to try to disprove the existance of God and destroy ID. but he needs to realize that ID is bassed on those same Scientific Observations.
i dont understand why some people, who are aparently smart people, wish to destroy a person's faith. why not just let them be. bringing him to the "side of the athiest" does him no good. so why? to stop the ID movement? hes gona have to do a lot more than that to destroy ID.
very intresting analagy though.
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NorcoJam
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posted 22. July 2007 07:03
also...
i find it intresting that Dawkins would refuse to see the possability that evolutionists could have had a "resistance build up over years of childhood indoctrination..."
the only thing i could think of when i read this was that i grew up going through high school classes learning that Macro-Evolution was fact. in biology, cheistry, earth sciences, even History. after graduating high school i learned of the ID movement and its validity. i felt like ive been lied to all those years when no teacher of mine ever mentioned the possability of anyother theory besides Evolution.
whos being indoctrinated?...... the youth of ou generation.
personaly, i think it is an insult to high school kids everywhere. the way they are being sheilded from any, and i mean any, other theory that might counter evolution. its an insult to thei intelligance... and they do have intelligance.
Dawkins thinks that if his book failed, that its because people were raised in a christian home and have been brain washed? wrong. he book will fail because kids are smarter than that.
besides, a lot of people who grew up in christian homes end up not leadning christian lives afterwards. living in a christian home is not brainwashing. that is evident by the number of "pastors kids" that go off of the path of christianity.
k... im done rambling... = )
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nosivad
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posted 23. July 2007 03:34
Richard Dawkins is a transparent charlatan, a helpless victim of his fate, comparable to Paul Kammerer, his Lamarckian counterpart of eighty years ago. Both exposed themselves through the ideological prisons in which they voluntarily placed themselves. Neither was a scientist, although Kammerer at least made the pretense of experimentally testing his convictions, something Dawkins has never done. Dawkins' only source is Dawkins. His world is entirely self-generated, based on a series of imagined constructs which began with the absurd "The Selfish Gene" and proceeded through book after book, each more bizarre than its predecessor, and all based on an assumption for which no evidence has ever existed. That assumption is that natural selection was the CAUSE of evolution. The only verifiable role for natural selection is to prevent evolutionary change just as Henry Fairfield Osborn, Leo Berg, Reginald C. Punnett, Pierre Grasse and others all recognized and vigorously declared.
The real issue with which we are faced hinges on the demonstrated reality that we are all victims in a determined universe in which chance has played, at best, a trivial role.
One of the most significant books of our time is William Wright's "Born That Way." It has become inescapable that EVERY aspect of the human condition has a heritable element, including our convictions concerning a creator. Richard Dawkins and his New World ally P.Z. Myers are extreme examples of a congenital irreversible atheism for which, I am now convinced, there is no intellectual remedy.
My own position, summarized in the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis, has been profoundly influenced by the insight of Albert Einstein who characterized the human condition as follows.
"Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling, and acting ARE NOT FREE but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
Statement to the Spinoza Society of America, September 22, 1932, my emphasis.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable"
John A. Davison
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NorcoJam
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posted 23. July 2007 21:27
aggreed... = )
i just finished reading the review of Dawkins book. very well put together. i enjoyed it.
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nosivad
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posted 24. July 2007 05:42
If Richard Dawkins and his New World protege P.Z. Myers weren't congenital cowards, they would come here to "brainstorms" and defend their shared dogma in civil discourse. I have already invited them both. Others should do the same, if for no other reason than to savor their refusal even to acknowledge the invitation.
"Conscience doth make cowards of them both."
after Shakespeare.
I love it so!
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable "
John A. Davison
[ 24. July 2007, 08:35: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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