I asked where was the "God protein" that was produced by this gene or genes and the evidence that tied gene, protein, tissues and religious "behavior", only there is none. I also asked how "religion", its alleged product, a belief in God or gods, or, in some assertions, Nibbana or Nirvana, etc. was so variable. "Religion" is far more varied than the color of sheep or wrinkles in peas. There really isn't one "thing" that we're talking about when we talk about religion. The category "religion" is an artificial construct, not an actual thing with an independent existence. It would be as possible to include things or exclude things from the category. One atheist I had an argument with a while ago, "SLC" wanted to include Marxism in the category, something I'm sure many true believing atheistic Marxists would violently reject. Not to mention many other religious folk. His definition "a set of assertions based on no evidence" would make what Dennett assertions of "god genes" which he peddles to atheists, religion.
For example, among the most extreme of such assertions are the heaps of evidence free belief in Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". In that book his extension of natural selection based on his assertions of "substrate neutrality" undid the Mendelian synthesis of the 1930s in order to make the most extravagant claims for natural selection, even outside of biology. The assertions quickly became quite irrational since Dennet ignored that it was exactly the specific "substrate" of discrete genetic inheritance which, literally, saved Darwin's idea from impossibility. Natural selection won't work unless there are specific units of inheritance that can be passed to offspring, intact. Dennett, ever so eager to make all things Darwinian doesn't seem to have a very good understanding of the concept and history of Darwinism, or its logical and scientific, as opposed to ideological, substance. He should look at the period from the last two decades of the 19th century up until Fischer glued Mendelian genetics to natural selection, when there was a large amount of scientific skepticism about natural selection. And as he looks he should put aside his constant weapon of accusations of betrayal of materialism. Dennett always brings that tired old accusation out, accusing even atheists he deems to be insufficiently wedded to Dennett's extreme Darwinian makeover of reality of looking for "sky hooks". That kind of rhetorical tactic is a sure sign of someone unprepared to seriously confront countering arguments.
I think that Dennett's book is a modern day recreation of Haeckel's insanely expansive monism, though it wouldn't surprise me if Dennett hadn't really read Haeckel or to have understood that what he did was infect evolutionary science with what was, in fact, a metaphysical, ideological virus, that is still a pox on science, one of its major sources of disrepute.
Oddly, enough, considering Dennett's trashing of the idea that genetic inheritance is what makes natural selection even plausible, he's always inventing genes to explain things about human thought which he doesn't like. He doesn't like God so he figures if he can convince people that God is "merely an incidental result of the instinct*" - to borrow a phrase from Darwin - to reproduce, they'll give up God. I dare say that Dennett, Dawkins, and other biological determinists proably hold a record for attempts at modern alchemy, trying to make their words into flesh, or at least locations on chromosomes. Only not being especially interested in actually finding them.
Like all biological reductionists I'm aware of, Dennett figures if he can only get everything down to a molecular level, he can prove that God is a delusion and he will have made his name as a father of the great new atheist future. Or, at least, he can get the kind of attention religion bashing gets during this period when atheism is a fad among the middle-brow intelligentsia. He'll definitely get on the chat shows.
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But Dennett's flawed thinking is just symptomatic of a more pervasive misunderstanding by atheists of how billions of religious people think of God. The absolute refutation of their misunderstanding is contained in the first sentence of Genesis, before the debunkable assertions about how the diversity of life came about. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth" or as it's put in the Creed, "God created all things visible and invisible".
No matter how much atheists must hate the idea, their entire effort to use science in all its levels of focus to dispose of such a Creator is futile, at least if intellectual coherence is the requirement instead of appeals to sloppy thinking and prejudice. The belief is that God created all things, everything in the universe, everything that science is capable of discovering about the physical universe, the objects and forces within it, is held by people who believe in the Creator God to have been as created by God as trees, stones and water. That would include the largest definable structures that scientists posit to what we can see without telescopes, to what we can only intuit from the wreckage of super colliders to objects at the Planck scale which may or may not be there but which are very likely to ever escape physical verification. It certainly includes genes and the all of the chemistry within cells. There is no other level of matter or energy, the exclusive domain of science, that isn't covered by that idea that God created everything. There is no alternative universe for science to study that is not covered by that idea asserted in the first few words of The Bible.
You don't have to believe it but there is no argument that you can make in science that overcomes that inclusive statement of belief. The best science can do is to clarify understanding of that creation, it can do what it does internally, clarify understanding of the physical universe overturning misconceptions, whether those are held by an atheist or a believer. But it can't touch the idea that what it finds is a part of the actual creation believed in by religious people. The men who invented modern science, all of them Christians, believed they were making exactly such discoveries about that creation, they believed they were attaining a deeper understanding of God's thought. Almost all of them more philosophically sophisticated than some very famous scientists today, understood that. Apparently they also had a level of philosophical discernment that some professors of philosophy can't deal with, as well.
One of the invariable features of atheist polemics, from the beginning down to today, is atheists taking pot shots at is one or another of the the gods of primitive fundamentalism. In Western discourse that is a god who stands or falls on the basis of the fidelity of scriptural assertions about the creation with contemporary geological and fossil evidence. That god is one that is easy to knock over but that isn't the God that I believe in. Atheists are frequently telling me that I have to believe in that God when I tell them I don't. Some of them get quite angry when I say that because that's the only God they know how to attack. But God doesn't depend on human conceptions but whenever human beings talk about God, held to be infinite and beyond the physical universe, it has to be out of our limited conceptions. Any too defined articulation of God is liable to debunkery but not the God who created the heavens and the Earth, the God who surpasses human understanding, human conceptions of logic and the natural laws we discern. the God whom people believe in even as every attempt at comprehension and imagination is bound to fall infinitely short.
When I first heard Daniel Dennett expounding on his genetically based God, one of the things that occurred to me was that if there was a Creator who wanted to be known to people, it wouldn't be surprising if such a God made peoples' physical bodies their brains, able to believe. It's no more startling an idea that natural selection produced our minds. Why unthinking molecules would care about their reproduction seems to me to be much more far fetched.
And for natural selection to be relevant to "God genes" not all members of a species could have had them. Natural selection can't select for a trait that is universally possessed. Some people would be religiously deficient, so to speak. Perhaps that accounts for there being people who are atheists. They are genetically unable to sense what religious people do or, perhaps, to process their experience in order to sense another aspect of reality. Perhaps a nagging sense of their inability to percieve God is what makes so many atheists so very angry and resentful. I can imagine that predestinarians could make a great deal of there being people genetically unable to believe in God. Perhaps they are chosen for eternal damnation. At least that's how I put the possibility when I want to annoy people silly enough to pretend there are God genes. I don't believe a word of it, myself. Perhaps I don't have genes that lead some people to make up stories about genes without any evidence, whatsoever, to support them.
You might enjoy this John Cleese podcast, The Scientists
* Whenever a Darwinist wants to dismiss an idea they don't like or which is inconvenient to the universal potency of natural selection, they will come up with an expression that makes it accidental or an illusion. It's a habit that began with Charles Darwin, himself. That those assertions demoting ideas and phenomena are without any, actual, basis in data and evidence is one of the things that has made me doubt that natural selection is likely more than an artificial construct, an acquired and required means of expression and mode of thought, itself.
A personal note: I have had a death in my family today, no, not my very old mother. I will not post more of this series again until next week.
One legitimate reading of the first words of Genesis, given the innate multi-ambiguity of written Hebrew: "When God began creating the Heavens and the Earth." Nothing after that indicates that God ever stopped creating us.
ReplyDeleteWhen people tell you what "The Bible" "means", they've generally got no idea of how much divers wheat & chaff is in there. Which can be sorted only by the ongoing work of God.
All of us mere children of God, atheists as well. It seems to be a phase, like running away from home, that some people need to go through. Given eternity, what's the rush?
A poster I saw once on a friend's wall. Small, bratty-looking child. Caption: "I love him, not because he is good, but because he is my little child." A God's eye view of us. We poorsouls would do well to stop beating up our fellow poorsouls!