I suppose that you can say that I have an affinity for Glen Beck characters. You know, the type that says outrageous and controversial things on a consistent basis just to rile up backlash? Well, I think that Richard Dawkins is the “Glen Beck” of the new atheist movement. For those of you who don’t know, Richard Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet, and Chris Hitchens, is considered one of the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Apocalypse.” These leading intellectuals are for the first time evangelistic in their message of atheist, actively seeking converts in the same way that Christians and Muslims might. Dr. Dawkins, who teaches at Oxford, is by far the most famous and outspoken of the four.
Last night, Dr. Dawkins delivered a lecture in the middle of enemy territory at the University of South Carolina. Unfortunately for me, while Dawkins was in form during the lecture, there was less back and forth between radical fundamentalists and the radical atheists (each, I might add, as dogmatic as the other). The entertainment value of the lecture was not as high as it could have been.
On a more serious note, Dawkins was essentially at USC to challenge theistic belief, and this he did. As my friend pointed out, Dawkins’s most compelling challenges to Christianity were not his theoretical or high minded ones, but rather his simpler anecdotes and stories. For example, he challenged the historical record of Noah’s Ark. According to Dawkins, if such an ark did exist, then how did all the animals leave from Mt. Ararat and find their way to South America or Australia or the South Pole? It certainly seems like a stretch of the imagination to think that all animal life and diversity can be related to a giant boat thousands of years ago and even harder to think that today’s distribution of animal life can be derived from that. The Christian answer to that objection is twofold, one answer theoretical and the other historical. First, the existence of the Biblical God includes anything in the realm of possibilities. Put simply, if God exists and is who He says He is (all-powerful and all-knowing), then it is totally believable to think that He directed the motions of the animals from the ark. God led, either directly or indirectly, the penguins from the ark to the Antarctic. If God is really as powerful as the Bible says, then this and many other objections fall away. Second, as my campus minister pointed out, it is curious that Dawkins would be willing to challenge the story of Noah’s ark, since this miracle is widely attested to outside of the Old Testament. Noah’s ark isn’t only a story found in the Bible. Most every major religion has a flood story, including even small religious communities. Evidence for a global flood is found in all sorts of religions and histories, even in Native American stories. It seems then that Dawkins is fighting against the historical record.
I did mention that Dawkins was in form on Tuesday night, and this of course meant that he contradicted himself many times, the most blatant of these in the realm of morals. During the Q&A session, a lady asked Dawkins how evolution affected issues like gender discrimination and sexism. His answer was clearly contradictory. Dawkins implied that the reason men do not try to dominate woman anymore or rape them is because we have in our minds the ability to override and control those instincts. This makes no sense however. The purpose of life in an evolutionary framework is to spread your genes as much as possible (maximize reproduction). If this were the case, then it would be to my personal advantage to reproduce as much as possible, and this includes (excuse my crudeness) dominating and raping as many women as possible. How in the world would men have ever evolved a moral sense of right and wrong that tells me not to do harm to women? I would think that the men who evolved that trait would not spread as many genes as they should and be wiped off the face of the Earth.
Clearly, Dawkins fails to see that evolution cannot explain all of human behavior or experience (particularly consciousness, as he openly admitted). For this reason, we should all be very wary of the evolutionary theory. If evolution were indeed true, it follows that it could consistently explain the world, all about mankind, and how things work. But there are obvious flaws and holes in evolution. It cannot explain all of life and all of experience. In that way, belief in evolution takes just as much faith as belief in Jesus Christ. Both worldviews require faith (Christians have faith in the authority of the Bible, evolutionists that life somehow came from nothingness and so on). I submit that the Christian worldview is the one way of looking at things that is totally consistent and true. It seems that evolution finds itself entangled in far too many philosophical, historical, and scientific contradictions to be held as a viable and consistent worldview. Christianity, on the other hand, has none of those things, and that is a testament to the character of the One who made it that way. We would do well to remember that.
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5 comments:
My boyfriend actually read two of his books recently. I'll have to see what he thought of them. But I think it's really coincidental that you mentioned him :D
Interesting post, Brian, on the visit of Dawkins to "the middle of enemy territory" :). Here are some thoughts of mine, going in order of your post...
I appreciate the mention of my comment that Dawkins's most banal jibes at religion were also his most convincing ones. On the issue of Noah's Arc, the question of "how did all the animals leave from Mt. Ararat and find their way to South America or the South Pole?" is far from the only one that a review of the scientific evidence raises. According to Wikipedia (a lousy source so correct if this is wrong...), the flood that prompted Noah's Arc killed every living thing that wasn't on the arc. If this happened, there would be massive amounts of evidence in the fossil and geologic records to support it. After all, we still have buckets of evidence of meteor collisions from the Mesozoic era. The Noah flood, which would have been tens of millions of years later yet would have been equally cataclysmic, would have left unmissable footprints.
Also in the Noah paragraph, you use the fact that lots of religions talk about a massive flood as a defense of the likelihood of there having been one. But if I remember correctly, you have posted previously on the arbitrariness of looking for truth in harmony among faiths ("pluralism"). I found your earlier argument convincing, so I'm not sure why you try to bring a pluralistic argument to the defense of the flood.
I found little to disagree with in your next bit on morals. I should point out, though, that there is a field of evolution that claims to use the principles of evolution to explain moral behavior. For example, these evolutionists may say that you don't go around acting like a rapist since if everyone acted like a rapist society would collapse and there wouldn't be much reproduction to speak of, so crazy rape behavior would be selected against. A gene for rape would not confer additional reproductive ability for society in the long run. However, I don't buy the work that suggests that evolutionary principles (that is, the preferential transmission of heritable traits that increase the likelihood for reproduction) can explain moral behavior. So I'm also probably not the best person to summarize this work.
Before analyzing your last paragraph, it may be helpful to list a definition of evolution, from my biology textbook (with some tinkering). "Evolution--descent with modification; the idea that living species are descendants of ancestral species that were different from the present-day ones due to changes in genetic composition from generation to generation [as heritable traits that increased the likelihood of reproduction were preferentially passed down]." You're correct in that "evolution cannot explain all of human behavior or experience." For evolution to be true, it need not "explain the world, all about mankind, and how things work." The only thing it really explains is the variation of life on earth. But that's quite a lot. Dawkins and others diminish the power of the theory when they employ it to explain things it cannot, like the development of morals.
Evolution also need not say much about the origins of life (it doesn't say that "life somehow came from nothingness"). The evidence of evolutionary history suggests one common ancestor to all life on Earth, but evolutionary theory has nothing to say about how that ancestor came into existence.
You claim that evolution finds itself entangled in lots of contradictions, but I've been studying it for years and haven't found any yet. For this reason I don't think "belief in evolution takes just as much faith as belief in Jesus Christ." There is nothing I can look at or touch to undermine the view that species developed as their ancestors passed down genes that conferred increased reproductive potential. There is, however, a lot that supports it. In order to believe all of Christian doctrine, it seems I'd have to accept that there was a flood since the dawn of man that was so deep that all the mountains were immersed in it, and though we can't find evidence of the story that I could see or touch it's true since "the existence of the Biblical God includes anything in the realm of possibilities."
I don't mean to conclude in a tone so dismissive of religion. And maybe that's not even the right way to look at the Noah story. Perhaps I should re-emphasize that I don't think science can explain the development of morals. And I think it's a cold world indeed if the differential transmission of traits conferring reproductive advantage explains everything. Either Dawkins disagrees, or he's just a cold, cold man...
Jeet,
By way of response, I'll make two brief comments.
First, speaking of the evidence for Noah's ark, you said that:
"According to Wikipedia (a lousy source so correct if this is wrong...), the flood that prompted Noah's Arc killed every living thing that wasn't on the arc. If this happened, there would be massive amounts of evidence in the fossil and geologic records to support it. After all, we still have buckets of evidence of meteor collisions from the Mesozoic era. The Noah flood, which would have been tens of millions of years later yet would have been equally cataclysmic, would have left unmissable footprints."
Could it not be the case that the answer to the Noah question is literally right under our noses? Could it not be the case that all the massive amounts of fossil evidence on the earth are actually left over from the flood? Conditions created by a global flood would have been ideal for the creation of fossils. My answer is that using modern scientific epistemology and presuppositions, we've interpreted the fossil record and its origins wrong.
Second, you mentioned that you've never come across a real contradiction in evolutionary theory. I would contend that evolution itself is a giant contradiction. Consider C.S. Lewis's self-defeat argument against naturalism:
1) Evolution is a system of thought.... Read more
(2) If evolution is true all thoughts are ultimately the result of certain irrational (chemical reactions in the brain, etc) causes.
(3) No thought (and so no system of thought) can be reasonable if it results from irrational causes.
(4) Therefore, if evolution is true, the thought that it is true is unreasonable.
(5) Therefore, evolution is either untrue or unreasonable.
(6) So, we ought to reject evolution.
Basically, Lewis argues that if this world is totally naturalistic, then the thought "evolution is true" (along with all thoughts) cease to have any moral or truth value. The statement becomes neither right nor wrong, but just is. In fact, they have as much truth value as whether or not I move my arm left or right, since both are naturally processes determined by chemicals in the brain. All thoughts are therefore irrational and have no objective truth value.
Granted, this still leaves room for theistic evolution, but if Lewis's argument is successful, then it does not leave room for a universe without a God.
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