The God Delusion (mythology, churches, Vatican, doctrine)

[Deb in VA]

Originally Posted by cncracer

I read it somewhat differently. He stated a fact. The respect was unearned. I think to start with that on the table was the only way to set the plot in an accurate method.

His in your face method of writing works well in a book. It might be offensive if it had been in person, but in the written word I can cut through the arrogance and appreciate issues we had that were different and the ones we had in common.

I still like his approach, and think it is time to have facts put in the face of the religious. The change is needed, and it will not be easy or gentile.

Sorry, haven't read through all of the posts....can you tell me what change it is you're speaking of?

[cncracer]

Originally Posted by Deb in VA

Sorry, haven't read through all of the posts....can you tell me what change it is you're speaking of?

The change from a religious based society to a non religious based society.

[The Matrix]

I haven't read this book, but I've glanced at, read parts of it (and I've read some of Dawkins's other books). Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, smart guys all. But when one looks at their actual arguments against "religion" (whatever that word is supposed to mean), there is more smoke than fire. There is a lot of passion. There is a wonderful flair for rhetoric. Their words can be convincing, but their arguments are not. And this sort of debate reduces to philosophy (analyzing justification for belief, evidence, morality, metaphysics, the relationship between science and metaphysics, etc.), and, unfortunately, these thinkers are at best popular writers--ernest, sincere writers, to be sure, who at the moment are having some cultural impact. I don't see anything terribly strong in any of their arguments against Christian belief. That's my opinion. But maybe I should read more of what they say.

[happynoodleboycey]

I have it but could only manage four chapters before I had to put it down. It's very interesting but I don't like his attitude towards believers. Calling them misguided is one thing but he acts as though they're complete idiots which I think is wrong and the whole book has quite a hostile tone. It raises a lot of good questions and makes you think a lot but it's a hard slog through the wall of negativity.

[Cirbryn]

Originally Posted by Mozart271

Obviously you are not a Gould fan, and since he was my friend, I am biased toward him to some extent, although I disagreed with some of his ideas. If you read the Origin of Species, you will note that Darwin's theory was indeed gradualistic, and he attributed the relative lack of intermediate forms to the fossil record being sketchy. You describe something much closer to Punctuated Equilibrium, not Darwin's original theory of Natural Selection.

I’m a Gould fan to a certain extent, but I do tend to favor Dawkins in areas of their disagreement, and I think Gould’s writing style was much more “arrogant” than Dawkins’.

Regarding gradualism in the Origin of Species: What do you think of the distinction Dawkins makes in The Blind Watchmaker (p 250 1996 paperback edition): “The meaning of ‘gradual’, in the context of those times, was ‘opposite of saltation’. Eldredge and Gould, in the context of the late twentieth century, use ‘gradual’ in a very different sense. They in effect, though not explicitly, use it to mean ‘at a constant speed’, … In the sense of the word in which Darwin was a passionate gradualist, Eldredge and Gould are also gradualists.”

Originally Posted by Mozart271

Darwin was Gould's hero. He was most pointedly not disputing Darwin, although the general interpretation (and I don't say it wasn't due to grandstanding on Gould's part) was thus. Gould (and to a lesser extent Eldridge) brought up other possible mechanisms of speciation (such as pure chance, catastrophic events, morphologic or genetic restrictions to change, "spandrels" etc) but they did not ever dispute natural selection as being of primary importance. And if they were really close-mouthed about the alternatives, how did I come up with the list of them?

I’ll grant that it’s hard to tell whether Gould and company were actually disputing Darwinian evolutionary theory or not. I think it depends on which day of the week your Gould quotes happen to come from. When I wrote that he was doing so in my last post, I was basing it on my memory of Michael Ruse’s book “The Darwinian Paradigm”, in which Ruse argues that punctuationism is a legitimately new paradigm because it claims large populations tend to resist natural selection. Since then I’ve re-read Dawkins’ chapter on punctuationism in The Blind Watchmaker, and Dawkins doesn’t consider even that to be outside the Darwinian tent (though he still thinks Gould was wrong about it).

As for Gould’s mechanism, I was specifically looking for a mechanism to explain why large populations would resist natural selection, but small disrupted populations would not. Of the list you provided, only “genetic restrictions to change” really applies, and this is the explanation Gould eventually offered. But I personally think he was short on the details and on the supporting evidence. As I recall, he claimed that shortly after speciating the community of genes becomes so intertwined and networked that even if a new allele shows up that can do the primary job of an existing allele better than the original, the other existing genes in the population won’t be able to work with it as well, so it won’t be selected. In a small population Gould argued that there might be a smaller complement of existing genes, and thus fewer genes to “protest” the new arrival.

Assuming I’m correctly relating Gould’s argument, I can see a lot of what I’d consider problems with it: small populations tend to have less genetic variation, but genetic variation is just a bunch of alternative alleles for particular genes, all of which work roughly as well. There shouldn’t be much genetic variation anywhere if Gould is correct and it’s rare to find new alleles that can work with the existing complement. I actually think Gould could have made a much better case by pointing out that: 1) small populations are more likely to hybridize with other subspecies or even species, thus providing more genetic variation with which to work; and that 2) in the absence of such hybridization, genetic drift is more likely to drive mildly deleterious alleles to fixation in small populations, thereby potentially providing access to paths of genetic change that natural selection would tend to prevent in larger populations. Possibly Gould did make those arguments and I just haven’t heard about it. The problem for Gould here being, however, that those mechanisms would show why evolution might be faster in small populations; but wouldn’t prevent it in large populations.

I realize I’ve already gone on a long time on this, but I wanted to add a sort of summary of Gould’s position written by Phillip Johnson, a leading creationist. It may be the only thing Johnson ever said about evolution with which I’d agree:

“The difficulty of saying whether Gould really is a Darwinist or not stems from his habit of combining radically anti-Darwinian statements with qualifications that preserve a line of retreat. When Gould loudly proclaimed "the return of the hopeful monster," for example, he seemed to be endorsing the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt’s view that large mutations create new kinds of organisms in single-generation jumps—a heresy which Darwinists consider to be only a little better than outright creationism. If you read the fine print carefully, however, you’ll find that Gould surrounded his claims with qualifications that allow him to insist that he is at least somewhere in the neighborhood of orthodoxy. Even when Gould bluntly announced that neo-Darwinism is "effectively dead," it turns out that he only meant . . . well, nobody seems to know what he meant, but certainly not that neo-Darwinism is effectively dead.” (http://www.arn.org/ftissues/ft9801/opinion/johnson.html).

After reading that you can see why Dawkins found Gould exasperating.

Originally Posted by Mozart271

You missed one of my original points that their arguments involved complicated concepts that could be simplified into "straw men" either way and minimized as insignificant. They may have both been guilty of that to a degree.

Well the strawman Gould established of neo-Darwinism was of a theory that required evolutionary change to proceed at the same speed pretty much all the time. I’d be interested in what strawman you think Dawkins made out of Gould’s position.

Originally Posted by Mozart271

I don't expect him to do anything! As an agnostic, I basically agree with him. I've read nearly all his books, and I know he doesn't accept atheism on faith. But the believers he would convince see him as touting "another religion". The thing he could do, if he wanted more widespread credibility, might be to speak in a less condescending manner. To be completely honest, the likelihood of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens or any other vocal proponents of atheism converting True Believers through logic and rational arguments is essentially nil. Religion is here to stay (Lionel Tiger says there's probably even a "God" gene, God forbid.), and we might be wiser to figure out more conciliatory strategies for defusing dangerous religiosity than to try to logically argue 'em out of it.

Well you’ve got two points there – his condescending manner and his strategic wisdom. Regarding the former, as you say perhaps we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I haven’t actually read The God Delusion yet, so maybe he’s more condescending there. After re-reading Dawkins’ measured and clear arguments in his Blind Watchmaker chapter on punctuationism, however, and comparing that with the following quote from Gould offered up by Johnson (http://www.arn.org/ftissues/ft9801/opinion/johnson.html), I have a hard time picturing how anyone could find Dawkins more arrogant than Gould:

“[Dennett’s] limited and superficial book reads like a caricature of a caricature—for if Richard Dawkins has trivialized Darwin’s richness by adhering to the strictest form of adaptationist argument in a maximally reductionist mode, then Dennett, as Dawkins’ publicist, manages to convert an already vitiated and improbable account into an even more simplistic and uncompromising doctrine. If history, as often noted, replays grandeurs as farces, and if T. H. Huxley truly acted as "Darwin’s bulldog," then it is hard to resist thinking of Dennett, in this book, as "Dawkins’ lapdog." (Stephen J. Gould as quoted by Phillip Johnson).

Regarding Dawkins’ strategy of attacking religion in general, I agree it isn’t likely to reap much benefit for science, and it could potentially alienate religious supporters of evolution (which means most supporters of evolution). That’s why I’ve said all Dawkins really cares about is the truth. He’s telling it as he sees it, strategies be damned, and I think there’s a certain purity there that’s worthy of respect, whatever else you might think of it. I picture Dawkins and Harris and the others playing a role similar to Joan Baez and the anti-war protesters of the 60’s. They even make similar arguments: “by appealing to people’s logic and better natures we will convince so many people to adopt our position that war (or religion) will become socially unacceptable, just as happened with slavery.” That never happened with the anti-war movement, but one might argue they shifted the balance a bit and made people think a little harder about the need for war. Maybe Dawkins’ brand of “militant atheism” will do the same. I just wouldn’t count on it. The primary message on that issue has got to be something closer to Gould’s position: that science and religion can coexist - that one need not supplant the other. And that if religion comes to supplant science we’ll find ourselves right back in the dark ages, to which much of the Islamic world has already descended.

[Mozart271]

Wow, Cirbryn, good answer! I have to admit you are well-read.

As for gradualism, maybe I'm incorrect, but my thought was that it implies a more or less constant rate of change. In any case it implies a slow rate, and saltation of course would be the absolute opposite. Gould never claimed to be a saltationist, and the "hopeful monster" if I recall, alluded to an example of a fruit fly that had one gene mutation that caused it to have legs in place of antennae, or something--thus one tiny gene change caused a huge phenotypic anomaly. So by that example, Gould made a case for single mutations possibly causing very large changes in an organism, but he would never have said a whole new species springs into existence like that.

Gould's difficulty may have stemmed somewhat from his use of terminology or his allusions to saltation, catastrophism, etc, that could be interpreted as his literal stand on evolutionary subjects--when he was really using these historical examples to illustrate a far more subtle punctuationism.

Gould formulated a hierarchical synthesis of evolutionary theory which he explicated at length (and I admit I have read only snippets) in his last huge tome, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory". He was a very complex man who thought on so many levels, it is hard to pigeonhole him. He had a lot of influences, even his father who taught him Marxism (He himself was not a Marxist). But Marxism even has inklings of punctuationism, so was Steve cooking this interpretation of Darwin with Marx in mind?

As for the populations and genetic drift, etc--I think your point about small populations having a smaller gene pool is the basic answer to why a small population may undergo speciation more readily than a large one. If the small population gets isolated, individuals with a beneficial mutation would increase to a higher percentage because one outta 10 is a lot more than one outta 1000.

I would say Dawkins made punctuated equilibrium a straw man of sorts by making it into a tiny blip on the huge sea of Darwinian gradualism, and then saying, Ok, so it's true, but it's so unimportant as to be all but ignored.

I had never read Gould's review of Dennet's book, so I can't comment on that. I did read Dennet's book, and he is not especially kind to Gould, describing him as desperately seeking "skyhooks" and not properly looking for "cranes". Tit for tat.

Some of my opinion comes from personal conversations with Stephen Gould (I was very fortunate to be able to have a few of them). If you had had a chance to speak with him, you would have seen even more of the subtleties of his thinking. He was not arrogant in person. He was truly a genius (so is Dawkins). These guys, as arrogant and professionally jealous as they may have been toward each other, were/are masters of their trade, and I respect them greatly even while disagreeing with some of their ideas.

Thanks for your post--very stimulating!--You obviously have done a lot of research and deep thinking.

Teresa

[Fighting For Air]

BEWARE OF DAWKINS.

He is the epitome of arrogant ignorance. The type of pseudo-scientist that likes to convince himself and everyone else that he is smarter than he actually is.

I have close friends that are experts in their respective scientific fields (geology, volcanology, physics, bio-chemistry, microbiology, and genetics). With the exception of one, none of these guys are religious zealots, nor do they have any religious agenda.

Oh, but how they love to rip on Dawkins. The best is where I recently saw a speech by Dawkins regarding the dating of fossils. He went on and on about the best way to accurately date fossils found in sedimentary layers of rock would be to locate the largest and closest igneous rock deposits and use a number of radiometric dating methods to determine the age of the fossils.

Anyone with basic high school understanding of geology knows just how silly Dawkins's suggestion is.

[Tricky D]

The thing is that I am already very wary of science becoming the new 'Christianity'.
The pessimist in me already tells me that science (economical & political science especially) has always controlled humanity since the beginning of time.
Then again, it is a fact that religion and science are equally vulnerable to greed & corruption.
I see no difference between Dawkins' The God Delusion or my own opinion about the human delusion.

[Tesaje]

Originally Posted by Tricky D

The thing is that I am already very wary of science becoming the new 'Christianity'.
The pessimist in me already tells me that science (economical & political science especially) has always controlled humanity since the beginning of time.
Then again, it is a fact that religion and science are equally vulnerable to greed & corruption.
I see no difference between Dawkins' The God Delusion or my own opinion about the human delusion.

Junk science is a danger and is indicative of lazy or politicizing science. Following the scientific methodology is still the best way to tease out the truth, but like any human endeavor, human failings or agendas can corrupt the results.

I do not see why gradual evolutionary theory and punctuated evolution have to be mutually exclusive. Conditions can favor one thing over another at differing times. There are plenty of evolutionary scientists who believe both modalities are in play at different times.

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by Tesaje

Following the scientific methodology is still the best way to tease out the truth

True.
But like Einstein already said:

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

and

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Albert Einstein
US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)