4.09.2008

Believers Among Us : Darwin, Dawkins et al

7 comments:

boneman said...

since I don't believe in censorship of any sort, unlike the Republican Guard, I have moved all of your ranting to the Real Sin blog.

I do have a reply, but, I shall condense it to a single sentence so that you can understand it.

Enemy of the Republic said...

I do accept evolutionary science and I also believe in the Bible. But I don't accept Dawkins. He's got his nerve. He is a scientist with no knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramiac and yet he can critique religion. I have taught Darwin and as impressed as I am with his findings, I don't think he has identified his source of natural selection--nature itself is naive at best. The only athesist who is at least readable is Sam Harris. He understands what he is good at and what he is not. The rest think that can disprove God through science, but science proves God. So Darwin doesn't scare me--none of those guys do.


I actually have to teach Dawkins next year. I am not pleased. I will have to work hard to maintain objectivity. Since I cannot speak about religious faith, I suppose the same rules should apply to science, but they don't. But that is not the fault of science, but secularism. If I need to understand atheism, then they can bother to learn religious thought of all kinds--reject it, go ahead, you have free will.

Sorry--bad day at work and I'm frustrated.

Aunty Belle said...

Hey Enemy of the Republic!

Sweet Thang, Aunty is sorry about the bad dy but happy for the Front Porch -cause that meant ya brought us a reasoned rant! Great points--every point is insightful and yes, science proves God.

I'se curious, if ya gotta teach Dawkins, but ya can keep it objective, can ya also mention his many critics? I mean scientific (not religious) critics?

The big trouble it wif' Dawkins may be that the fella can actually write well. he can spin a persuasive hypothesis.

Thang is, he is a fervent evangelist fer the Big Soup. He is not objective.

Fear I find him and oily huckster. He ain't conversant enough wif religion to critique it, so he sets up religious straw men that he easily swats away, and then claims hisself the "reasonable" one.

(heh heh, I know a lady scholar of constitutional law who refuses to let first year students speak in class until they have read the constitution twice--her point is, if you ain't familiar wif' what it really says, rather than what ya heard it says, you cain't speak cogently on it)

Thas' Dawkins--he doan not even know that reason is required of Faith, but is not the totality of faith. Further, he rejects God when his own published concept of what/who God is, is a hilarious childlike cartoon version of "God."

Faith and Reason are not in competition (as Dawkins would have it). They are complementary, can and ought to serve one another.

Aunty is intrigued that, as a loose generality,science flourished and made the amazing strides we now enjoy primarily in Western nations.

This is on account of the Judeo-Christian belief that God created the cosmos to have exquisite order. That order is not capricious (as is Allah, who according to Islamic teaching is not bound to permit the sun to rise in the east every morning).

IF God 's order is a message to man, an invitation to man to discover what God wrote in the cosmos, the religious man sets out to discover all that he may about WHO GOD IS. In short, this search to learn more of God and his creation is what gave science and reasoned, orderly investigation it impetus.

Oh Enemy, ya got me yakkin'!

Have a better day today. I'se at Georgetown U. today meself --met an interestin' British bio-ethicist --so I may soon be yakkin' on that.

Ruela said...

hahahha ;)

this is so cool!

boneman said...

....about "natural"....
if you talk the talk about what you consider to be natural, then I can assume that you don't wear make-up? buy a new car every 4-7 years? fly on an airplane????....
because none of those things are "natural"....

You do have it over most of us....
You have HeeHaw (?) and possibly a wagon.

boneman said...

....and, dang!

I made a decision while back to NOT have negative on my blog, and here I went and got all feathered up (it's an Indian term) and made a new blog for negativity....politics and the like

but, screw that.
If politicing ain't right, it ain't up to me to change it.
Wish I could. It would be a whole lot different than that confounded circus we see every four to six years!
Big people up there looking down on us little people making the judgements that are going to yoke us for the future....
Danged extreme on the right, like your buddy troll and extreme on te left like ardlair (heck, I dunno....he's about the quietest liberal I ever did see.) but then the middle...Theodore Roosevelt's turf is what I call it....

But all hese people looking to write a law today to hang over the heads of our grandchildren's children? That IS tyranny. It's the worse kind of tyranny.

It is tyranny from the past.

Aunty Belle said...

Boney, please--the topic on this post is the Dawkins parody.