Bill Gates Kingmaker to Richard Dawkins god Maker

First, I should explain something which has apparently caused some consternation among some atheists who believe they are paragons of scientific reasoning, more about that in a minute.   Since I have comment moderation on my blog, when a comment is posted for inclusion here a notice is sent to my e-mail with links making it possible for me to publish or reject the comment from my e-mail Inbox. Which is why I call the posts I do answering points, well that's a kind way of putting it, answering the contents of those e-mails,  "Hate Mail".   Since that appears to have bothered some of those posting hate mail to my blog, maybe that will ease their troubled minds.  Not that that's something I generally would choose to do.   Such minds could use more troubling, they don't seem to get much else in the way of a work out.

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One such commentator thinks it's going to bother me that Bill Gates recently revealed that he is planning on reading a book by Richard Darwkins as "summer reading".  Why he thinks that would bother me is not stated.   I could hardly care less what Bill Gates is reading at the beach this summer.  The title at The Independent apparently thinks it's noteworthy enough that he "outs himself as a comic fan" ( apparently because he reads the geek cartoons of xkcd ) that it includes that in the title.   I wonder if he read Doonesbury a number of years back when Garry Trudeau used to joke about his "minty green" complexion.  As to Gates' comments, I differ with Gates' idea of the quality of Dawkins' thinking on science, which I think is more of a symptom of the degeneration of the link between logical coherence and what people are persuaded of through writing technique.  Here's an old piece I did on that point.   I don't find some of his other work to stand up to inspection any better than that.   Asking why the summer reading of a man who is, pretty much, a business man should interest me is my response.   I'm about as interested in that as I am in what Lena Dunham's latest bid for attention is.  

Another hate mailer is bothered by my observation that to believe that natural selection, "DNA"* is the cause of our consciousness and our ideas, that those exist in their real form as physical constructs in our brains only makes sense if  DNA has, effectively, universal knowledge that allows it to understand, entirely the nature of what it is recreating in our brains, the means to do that with total accuracy and that it gets it right an astounding number of times.

But that is the the only logical conclusion that you could draw about the quite Dawkinsian concept.   How else would "DNA" do what is claimed for it?   I would like to ask chemists who have tried to synthesize or even analyze DNA if they thought they could do that without a huge amount of hard gained knowledge.  And that's just an act of replication of a known type of molecule, it's not the creation of a physical entity that is, in effect, a totally unplanned and, often, entirely unexpected external phenomenon or an internally generated inspiration in excruciating detail and subtlety.  What such sciency materialists demand of DNA is far, far more an impressive act of knowledge and technical virtuosity than anything even the most accomplished of scientists has ever done in creating such entities and fitting them with absolute precision into an existing, working, massively complex "mechanism" where they function perfectly, instantaneously.   It makes the entire collective achievements of computer science look like nothing in its relative simplicity.  And it does so hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times a day in each and every being who has a brain.  What accounts for the clear behavior of organisms without brains, I've asked before.  Why...... why, it's downright god-like in a far more impressive way than such guys are supposed to believe can possibly exist!  

And what you can say when someone with no real answer when asked to account for our minds as material substance pulls "DNA" out of their hat would have to go for any other proposed physical origin of our minds.   All of them would have to have those same abilities which far surpass the known abilities of the entire world of science and scholarship.**  As I mentioned so controversially, their mechanism for constructing such physical entities would also have to be precognitive, clairvoyant and telepathic because they would have to know what they were creating BEFORE it existed in the brain, in the locus in which it was being created or they would never possibly get it right.  

As I mentioned in a comment, atheists are always creating god-like entities while denying that's what they've done.  Others in the henotheist pantheon of materialism is the recently popular "quantum vacuum" or "quantum gravity". The fact that Richard Dawins and other atheist polemicists have recreated the material and entirely all too humanly self-interested, "selfish" gods of pagan mythology as "DNA" is too much of an irony, too much of a revelation of the dim-wittedness of this attempt to explain away our minds to not point it out.  In the new atheism, I think, we don't see atheism, we see the creation of these unadmitted substitutes for God with these omniscient, omnipotent entities while denying that's what they're doing.  And there are lots of them.   I think that a lot of the cult figures of neo-atheism, such as Carl Sagan, can count among those with a lesser potency, though not different in kind.  And maybe you don't have to be dead to join that pan-atheon.   Perhaps Richard Dawkins is one.  He created memes out of nothing, afterall. 

*  When such people use the term "DNA" they are talking about a shallow and at times entirely superstitious entity with magical powers that the actual molecule doesn't possess.   That's the reason I'm putting it in quote.  I would suspect that easily 95% of what gets said about "DNA" is said about this imagined version of the molecule, not the actual molecule and what it actually does in association with some rather complex and not completely understood cellular chemistry.

**  Update:   When I said, "All of them would have to have those same abilities which far surpass the known abilities of the entire world of science and scholarship"  I should have noted that this is literally true BECAUSE EVERY KNOWN ASPECT OF SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP WOULD HAVE HAD TO HAVE BEEN CREATED BY "DNA" OR ANY OTHER THING ORIGINATING THE PHYSICAL, MATERIALIST "MIND".   If you reject that, you would have to reject Dawkins' rather silly idea about the creator having to be "more complex" when he is trying to debunk God.   Only, since his conception of "God" is certainly of a God who has the attributes of things in a universe, the similarly physical gods assigned to create our minds would doubly have to have effective universal knowledge.

Update 2:   OK, the longer I think of this the more obvious it is that the atheist-materialist "brain-only" brain does, literally, involve that whatever model of that they present, it would, actually, have to have universal knowledge,  it not only would have to have a prescience of science and scholarship but of every aspect of all possible future knowledge.  The promissory notes of materialism, the eventually promised Theory of Everything, would already have to have their answers in such a model or, at least, the ability to construct those in our brains which, before the requisite knowledge was present in them, could hardly be held to contain that knowledge.  Or, at least, I'm throwing that in as a proposal for discussion.  Now,  my experience tells me, the atheists will be prepared to talk about my cooties or some such thing as they pretend I haven't said what I did here.   Apparently their god-like minds aren't prepared to discuss that.  The gods of atheism are false gods.