split from:
Why are you religious?
I assume you’ve read Richard Dawkins’ The blind Watchmaker?
No I have not…
The main reason being the fact that it was written 19 years ago, and a lot has changed and been discovered in the scientific field en in the field of DNA research etc… I am not implying that the book is dated, and will read it if I can get hold of a copy…
I do know this about what was said in the book…
The world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof. Richard Dawkins, states:‘We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed” to have come into existence by chance.’Thus, even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all around us. To a Christian, the design we see all around us is totally consistent with the Bible’s explanation that God created all.
However, evolutionists like Dawkins reject the idea of a Designer. He comments:
‘All appearance to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind … . It has no mind … . It does not plan for the future … it is the blind watchmaker.’</blockquote>
For a brief summary of the book, see here: The Blind Watchmaker - Wikipedia
It is a common misunderstanding of natural selection that it is a random process or happens by chance. That is in part what is discussed in the book. And although it is written almost 20 years ago, the arguments still hold and is as strong as ever.
To quote from the book - and with a little more context 
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin's answer, is by gradual, step by step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point. The cumulative process is directed by nonrandom survival. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of this cumulative selection as a fundamentally nonrandom process.
BTW. You don’t have to be an atheist to believe in natural selection.
Also, not reading Dawkins’ book because it is supposedly out of date is a case of (self-)deception. The principles of evolution have not changed since the book was published, only some of the finer details. As with all well-established scientific facts, the only thing that changes as time progresses is the depth of our understanding. The Blind Watchmaker conveys the operation of evolutionary processes, i.e. random mutation as the source of “raw material” and natural selection as the “shaping force” that works that material, to the lay reader with great clarity and lucidity. It is still an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the topic.
'Luthon64
I could not agree more…that’s why I said
I am not implying that the book is dated,
Whilst on the topic of Dawkins and “(self-)deception”
Impediments to the Ascent of Mount Improbable by Hugh RossIf Richard Dawkins’ popularity as a defender of atheistic evolution soared with the publication of The Blind Watchmaker in 1987, Dawkins’ latest book, Climbing Mount Improbable, has boosted it even higher. The book has stirred the attention of BBC, PBS, and print media worldwide. It has also generated a flurry of activity on the Internet, where enthusiasts say Dawkins, better than anyone else, has “proved” evolution needs no supernatural input.
Dawkins responds to critics of his earlier work with an acknowledgment that life and life molecules do indeed contain an enormous body of information, but he argues that this information can be accumulated in small steps through natural processes.
An analogy he uses in both books is that of a monkey at a typewriter keyboard. We know that the probability of the monkey’s typing a meaningful sentence by banging randomly on the keys is utterly remote. However, the odds change if we talk about just one letter at a time. The monkey now has a good chance—not quite as good as one in twenty-six because of the number and symbol keys and possible repeat hits on wrong keys, but perhaps as good as about one in a hundred—of getting the first letter correct (especially if we let go of the capitalization rule) in a relatively short time. A busy monkey might generate that character in just a few minutes.
Now, if that first character could be preserved, the monkey would then start working on the second character. In only a few more minutes that monkey should randomly generate the correct second character. If that character could also be preserved, the monkey would then begin working on the third character. In this manner, the monkey need only bang on the typewriter keys for a few hours or days before producing an intelligible sentence. According to Dawkins, mutations are the busy monkey, and natural selection is the preserving agent.
Can you see the flaw in this analogy? Whether or not a given letter is “right” to convey meaning in the sentence becomes clear only to an observer who knows in advance what the sentence is supposed to say or who knows what constitutes a sentence. In either case, the observer must know the typewriter’s alphabet and the language the monkey is randomly selecting. Unless the observer anticipates what words a sentence, or the desired sentence, contains, no basis exists for determining which of the monkey’s random selections should be preserved. Someone with greater intelligence than the monkey and a knowledge of what constitutes an intelligible sentence is really doing the selecting—or must give the monkey a pattern to follow and train the monkey to match patterns. Otherwise, expect gibberish.
Another problem with the analogy is that the monkey does have some the intellectual capacity. The monkey has a brain, a central nervous system, and a muscle-skeletal structure with which to reason and respond. “Natural selection” denotes a process, not a living entity. As far as anyone can tell, natural process has no apparatus with which to think or choose or act. Thus, I see no basis for crediting natural selection with the remarkable achievements necessary to construct even the simplest building block, a tiny word, say, of the simplest living thing, a lengthy and complicated sentence. Only an intelligent guide with the end result in mind could determine which components to keep or replace for the benefit of a more complex system.
http://www.reasons.org/resources/faf/97q1faf/97q1resn.shtml
Both of the objections to Dawkins’ use of the monkey-and-typewriter allegory to evolutionary processes were, in fact, mentioned by Dawkins himself in The Blind Watchmaker. They were not pointed out afterwards by someone else.
The reason Dawkins chose a monkey was to banish any notion of teleology (purpose-orientedness) from the picture. The objection that there is an observer who knows what the monkey’s phrase should come out as is, as Dawkins himself noted, an apparent flaw in his analogy. But if you take a step back and let that “observer” be natural selection rather than a conscious entity that knows what the outcome is supposed to be, then it is clear that whenever a suitable letter is typed in the correct place it will have a strong tendency to remain so.
Think about a colony of bacteria in the presence of an antibiotic: some of them, through their existing genetic diversity, will have a greater resilience against the antibiotic; most of the bacteria will die, but those few that do survive will multiply, some of which descendants will have lower and some even higher resistance to the antibiotic. As the cycle continues, the population will eventually become stably adjusted and continue to flourish despite the presence of the antibiotic (this is why one is always advised by doctors and pharmacists to complete a course of antibiotics - to root out any possible survivors, and keep the population small so that the body’s defences can take care of those bacteria immune to the antibiotic). The only discernible “purpose” in this scenario is the survival of the bacteria. But there’s no intelligence in it.
'Luthon64
He used the monkey analogy because of this:
As with all analogies, the monkey one only serves to make the concept clearer. And indeed it is not perfect. But that does not matter, because it’s trying to convey the idea that it does not need to be one highly unlikely event, but a lot of very probably events. It says nothing about the actual workings of natural selection and that is why Dawkins pointed this out. That reviewer either did not read/grasp the rest of the argument, or chose to ignore it.
Again, the reviewer is ignoring parts of the argument.
Quoting from the book:
Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining the distinction between single-step selection and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective ‘breeding’, the mutant ‘progeny’ phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress towards some distant goal seems, with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of short-term selection. The ‘watchmaker’ that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal.
You really should read the book, it really is fascinating and explains the concept adequately and elegantly.
I have just finished reading The Blind Watchmaker and have started with The God Delusion.
Absolutely love the way he thinks and writes.
;D Dawkins shows the nonsense of using God as Alacoluthon64 also shows here and I try at the ignostic and Occam thread. Contrary to theistic evolutionists,including Keith Miller and Francisco Jose Ayala, natural selection is a power in its own right.Furthermore, teleology is backwards causation and thus conflicts with natural selection.
Has anybody read the book “God’s Undertaker - Has Science Buried God?” by John C.Lennox where he apperantly debunks Dawkins???..to quote a xtian adversary of mine: “Prof Lennox completely demolishes Richard Dawkins’ arguments that blind chance and unguided natural processes are responsible for life, the universe and everything”…if so could you give a brief assessment before I go and waste money on the book. thnks
Sounds like typical apologists’ obscurantist fodder where they resort to their usual deceptions, distortions and fallacies in dressing up what is no more than wishful thinking as deep and meaningful argument. Here’s a short critical review. In any case, the argument that all indications point towards life, the universe and everything being the result of blind, undirected laws didn’t originate with Dawkins.
'Luthon64
You might also want to read up on the straw man fallacy of which this statement is a good example.
Some scratching around on the ’Net indicates that perhaps Lennox’s favourite argument is that science, like religion, proceeds from a basic position of faith, namely faith that the universe obeys fixed laws that can be rationally apprehended. He says that without such faith you can’t even begin to do science, sometimes citing Einstein’s apparently concurring view on the issue.
Note first of all that Lennox commits a tu quoque fallacy here because even if it were true that science requires such basic faith, it would not diminish or refute the eminent fact that religious belief is wholly founded on faith.
But is Lennox’s position/analogy viable? I don’t think that it is. Through direct sensory experiences of the world starting in very early childhood already, we discover that many things in the world behave regularly: Drop something and it falls. The sun comes up every day more or less at the same place and time. Heat usually burns. A dip in the pool cools you down. Water quenches thirst. Our favourite brand of sweets or snack always tastes much as we remember them. In the morning our toys are where we left them the night before. Going uphill on a bicycle is hard, downhill easy. We rarely, if ever, experience reversals or jarring anomalies in these and many other things, and so we recognise regularity and continuity in the world as a general principle by deducing from such experiential particulars. Religious faith does not do this because it posits its conclusions well before starting to argue towards them.
It is of course true that our supposition of universal law-bound regularity and uniformity is a generalised inference we make, and as such, it is bedevilled by the philosophical problem of induction. But so is every other inference we can make about the world. There simply are no exceptions, and if this is what Lennox is actually driving at when he proposes that science requires faith, it’s hardly clear how that would serve in defence of religious faith. They are two very different kinds of faith. The one is grounded in direct, objective and repeatable experiences of the world, whereas the other is at best based on a fuzzy intuition propelled by cultural momentum. They are furthermore different in that one accepts regularity as a fundamental property of the universe while the other ascribes that regularity to a most remarkable agency that is beyond our physical and intellectual grasp, one that we can allegedly only experience fully if we accept a priori that it is what lies at the heart of those selfsame experiences.
It’s sophistry, no more and certainly no less.
'Luthon64
The tl:dr version of the eloquent, elegent post above (your loss)
Science. It works, bitches.
Point, though I think it might be more accurate to say that the contra-TL;DR (I had to look it up) rendition is:
Lennox ignore roots of science & religion faith not samey-samey, so he make weak argufy.
'Luthon64