Dawkins

The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson recently wrote: The latest findings of the Pew Forum’s massive and indispensable U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reveal some intriguing confusion among Americans on cosmic issues. About 13 percent of evangelicals, it turns out, don’t believe in a personal God, leading to a shameful waste of golf time on Sunday mornings. And 9 percent of atheists report that they are skeptical of evolution. Are there atheist creationists? Well, there probably aren’t any atheist creationists, although, if Richard Dawkins can be an “Atheist for Jesus,” anything is possible. Yes, these folks may be severely confused (“deluded,” if you prefer). However, perhaps many of these atheists, while not being creationists, are simply skeptical of the Darwinian mechanism. (Gerson Read More ›

Dogmatic materialist Dr. Steven Novella, assistant professor of neurology at Yale, president and co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society, and my interlocutor in an ongoing debate on the mind-brain problem, has issued a challenge to me regarding his theory that the mind is caused entirely by matter:

Prove me wrong, Egnor.

A bit of background helps explain Dr. Novella’s pique. In an earlier post arguing for a pure materialist understanding of the mind, Dr. Novella made this astonishing claim:

The materialist hypothesis – that the brain causes consciousness – has made a number of predictions, and every single prediction has been validated. Every single question that can be answered scientifically – with observation and evidence – that takes the form: “If the brain causes the mind then…” has been resolved in favor of that hypothesis.

I noted:

A bit of advice: whenever a scientist says of his own theory that “every single prediction has been validated,” you’re being had. No scientific theory has had “every single prediction” validated. All theories accord with evidence in some ways, and are inconsistent in others. Successful scientific theories prevail on the preponderance of the evidence, not validation of “every single prediction.” Real science lacks the precision of ideology.

Dr. Novella replied:

The January 2008 issue of Christianity Today contained a letter from Randy Isaac titled “Providence and Evolution.”

In his critique of Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion? [“The CT Review,” November], Logan Paul Gage fails to distinguish between scientific randomness and metaphysical randomness. By insisting that these two concepts are inextricably linked, Gage concludes that McGrath (and Francis Collins) maintain a position that precludes divine providence. Evolution is not a purely random process,

Ahem: something I never denied. But I interrupt.

You cannot fairly pit the educated views of Darwinian scientists against the opinions of students. To be honest, you need to hear from scientists who doubt Darwinian evolution and have the evidence to defend themselves. To merely stigmatize skeptics of Darwinism as “fundamentalist Christians” and “creationists” is to serve the cause of propaganda, not objective discourse.

Have you ever spent time pondering the intellectual pedigree of scientism–say, of the Dawkins variety? It would be nice if folly really were an orphan, but unfortunately he is not. And Herbert Spencer was only one link, though an important one, in a long chain of Western scientism.

Consider this Spencerian quote from Steven Shapin’s recent New Yorker article “Man with a Plan: Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Everything“:

Perhaps the most striking feature of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is its lack of science. I had thought that this was an anomaly, but Dawkins’ New York Times review (out Sunday) of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is the same patchwork of fallacies devoid of science as The God Delusion.

Let me count the ways…

Over at the First Things blog On the Square, Francis Beckwith carefully shows how even Professor Dawkins cannot escape the common sense perception that the world is filled with agency, and those agents have a proper function. To get at all this, Beckwith describes Dawkins’ lambasting of Kurt Wise, the young-earth creationist who did doctoral work under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard.

Dawkins writes:

Since 1998, Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson, Jonathan Wells, William Dembski, and Paul Nelson have all spoken at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Now UCSD is striking back. Tonight, anti-ID philosopher of science Robert Pennock is being paid by UCSD’s Council of Provosts and the Division of Biological Sciences to speak against intelligent design in a lecture that is free and open to the public in UCSD’s RIMAC Arena (which holds about 5000 people). Of course, these groups are all taxpayer-supported. Not only is this free event open to anyone, but TritonLink, the UCSD student website, on its main home-page, reports that Professor Pennock’s lecture is mandatory attendance for all freshmen: “All first-quarter freshmen are required to attend Read More ›