Quotation from Darwin (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 02, 2008, 18:24 (6079 days ago) @ George Jelliss

My thanks to George Jelliss for his detailed, helpful and gallant defence of Richard Dawkins. - I agree with much of what you have said. The problem, however, is not Dawkins' advocacy of evolution (and certainly not any desire on my part to redefine Darwinism), but his insistence that one must choose between Darwinism and God. You have summed this up yourself : - "The compatibility of evolution with religious beliefs is indeed argued by other people, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, Polkinghorne, etc. [You might have mentioned Darwin himself.] But the contrary thesis is the whole point of Dawkins's book." - And that is the basis of the distortions. By making it appear that Darwinism and natural selection turn God into an unnecessary hypothesis, Dawkins also makes it appear that science supports the case for the origin of life through chance and for the ability of chance mutations to create complex new organs and systems. It is these two areas ... not the process of natural selection ... that have no scientific basis and therefore demand a quasi-religious faith.
 
 When faced with this problem, as once again you have quite rightly pointed out, he falls back repeatedly on the question of where God came from (i.e. the "endless regression"). This is part of the dilemma that faces the don't-know category of agnostic (my position). Even though I can happily go along with natural selection as the logical method by which some species survive and others don't, I do not have faith in chance to invent life or complex new systems. Not knowing the origin of a designer does not (a) make the chance theory any more believable, or (b) even invalidate the design theory, since eventually all theories come up against the same impossibility of knowing the first cause. But of course it is no basis for faith either, which brings us back full circle to the last statement of mine which you quote and which ... mysteriously ... sounds to you like Creationism: - "Either you believe in chance [i.e. abiogenesis and innovative mutations], you believe in design, or you admit you don't know." - I don't know. That's what makes me an agnostic. And although it is none of my business what other people believe ... and good luck to them if they can derive comfort from their religion or quasi-religion ... I find it objectionable when atheists (or theists) try to impose their beliefs on me, denigrate other people's beliefs, or juggle with scientific terminology in order to give their arguments an unsubstantiated ring of authenticity.