January 16, 2007

• I had seen a few articles about the famous atheist, Richard
  Dawkins, in the past few months and he made some statements that made me
  wonder: Is he a charlatan or a fool? Can an educated person really make such
  statements and believe them? Or is he just trying to manipulate people? So I
  checked his book out from the library. He’s a fool.

  One of my favorite ludicrous assertions he makes is when he
  talks about the probability of God being small. God is a supernatural being and
  therefore beyond the laws of probability. There cannot be such a thing
  as the probability of God. It’s inherent in the definition of “supernatural.”
  If Dawkins doesn’t understand the basic concept of a supernatural being, how
  can his arguments have any validity?

  I also love it when he talks about the “enlightened
  consciousness” of scientists. These are the same people under whose nutritional
  guidance millions of people were led to believe that margarine was better than
  natural fats, that a low-fat diet was the best, and so on, and who have been
  slow to correct these mistakes, even as Americans grow ever more obese and
  unhealthy. They’re the same kind of people who in the last century wouldn’t
  stop to wash their hands between touching cadavers and delivering babies, and
  pilloried the man who insisted that they were responsible for maternal deaths.
  “Enlightened consciousness?” We can barely trust them with our bodies, how much
  less our eternal souls?

  Dawkins summarizes his arguments with 6 basic points:

  1. “One of the greatest challenges…has been how to explain
  how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.”

  2. “The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of
  design to actual design itself.”

  3. “This temptation is a false one, because the designer
  hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.”

  4. “Darwin and his successors have shown how living
  creatures…have evolved… We can now safely say that the illusion of design in
  living creatures is just that – illusion.”

  5. “We don’t have an equivalent crane [explanation] for
  physics yet… But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck
  than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.” (The anthropic principle
  basically says that since we’re here, such an explanation must exist, we just
  haven’t found it.)

  6. “We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in
  physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.”

  Therefore, “God almost certainly does not exist.”

  Ok, I can admit the first one, and the second, but the third
  is illogical. The existence of the question of who designed the designer does
  not prove that a designer does not exist. (Dawkins’ treatment of Aquinas on the
  question of an unmoved mover is equally nonsensical.)  The fourth is based on the assumption that Darwin and his
  successors actually have shown how evolution works. Since there are no known
  instances of a genetic mutation resulting in an increase in genetic
  information, this assertion is a stretch at best. (His treatment of Intelligent
  Design is also completely superficial.) The fifth and sixth points are just
  wishful thinking.

  When Dawkins calls himself a deeply religious
  non-believer, he is quite accurate. He is passionate, emotional and full of
  faith, but short on logic and details. His book is incredibly boring and shows
  a complete lack of understanding of Christianity. If he’s the best the atheists
  have to offer, theists have nothing to fear.

  • 6:31 am
  • 6 Comments