The God Delusion (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Saturday, October 25, 2008, 19:38 (5871 days ago) @ David Turell

DT: "It is so easy to refute Dawkins." - You've really got it bad with Dawkins haven't you! - Wolfe: "There's neuroscience the science and there's genetic theory. They are two entirely different things." - True. No-one ever said they were the same. - José Delgado: "The human brain is enormously complicated. We have made only a few small steps in finding out how it works. All the rest is literature." - True. I'm sure Dawkins would agree. - Wolfe/DT?: Delgado mentions no names, but if he has noticed them at all, "all the rest" probably includes some of the best known genetic theorists, such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, a zoologist and a philosopher. They are not neurologists. They know precious little about the human brain. - So Wolfe, a novelist and journalist knows more? Sam Harris is a neurologist, or at least is a PhD student of neurology. - Wolfe/DT?: Their theory is that the human brain is nothing but a machine, after all, a form of computer, and therefore it has no free will. - Total rubbish. Straw Man. - Wolfe/DT?: In any situation we find ourselves we can only do what our evolutionary software /// meaning genetic makeup /// has programmed us to do. - More Total Rubbish. - Wolfe/DT?: So at a recent conference on the implications of genetic theory for the legal system—five distinguished genetic theorists are up on stage—I stood up in the audience and asked, "If there is no free will, why should we believe anything you've said so far? You only say it because you're programmed to say it." You've never heard such stuttering and blathering in response to anything in your life." - So who were these idiots? Postmodernist professors no doubt as portrayed in Wolfe's novel reviewed here: - http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/love-in-the-age-of-neuroscience - If these people have captured the campuses on American universities as Wolfe depicts, the state of America is indeed parlous. - Fortunately Dawkins is at Oxford and is far from being a postmodernist. - I'm not going to answer for Dawkins, but my own view is that "will" and its degrees of "freedom" make up a very complex notion, and that explanations in terms of "soul" are far too simplistic to contain.