Your complaint about me pointing out that it wasn't Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or their ilk who first talked about a physical coding for morality within our bodies but some of the Jewish prophets, those "bronze-age goat herders" they and their idiot boy-fans love to mock, led me to look for the first time I said something like that in this public writing and found this post from my first blog where I said exactly that in a somewhat different way, saying that if there was their idiotically conceived of and much on the talk-shows "god gene" then that would reasonably lead a believer to to find that among the strongest possible physical evidence that the God of Avraham, Yitzhah, and Yaakov was the true God and much as described in the Scriptures (been reading the Everett Fox translation this week).
First, the proposition, most often associated with Daniel Dennett, is glaringly lacking in rigorous analysis. It assumes that a proposed creator god who created the entire universe, planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters, dark matter, energy, the entire shebang, and who also keeps it in motion, wouldn’t have any say in what happens in the puny little molecules that make up our genetic inheritance. Perhaps they think that such a god would just have to grow forgetful under the burdens of considering the big picture.
Not only COULD such a creator god’s role be proposed in any such genetic basis of belief, but to leave out that possibility is entirely dishonest in a PHILOSOPHICAL* discussion of the matter. It is hard for me to believe that doing so could be just a rather astounding oversight for a philosopher to make. If you’re talking god, you don’t get to leave the possibility of god out of the picture just at a point when doing so best suits your conclusion. It certainly wouldn’t be by a careful philosopher who was thinking about the subject. When talking about “god”, god isn’t an unimportant detail in the argument.
Rather charmingly, Dennett and his cubs seem to not realize that even if they were to conclusively prove that faith was controlled by genetics that could lead someone so disposed to take that as the strongest physical evidence ever found that there was a god. Not only a god but a god who wished that people should know of his existence, or at least to have that option open to them as a recessive or latent possibility**. They could be handing the I.D. types, not their death sentence, but fulfilling their greatest desideratum***. I say charmingly only because Dennett, one of the proponents of that other PR disaster in the making, “The Brights” idea, seems to have a bad habit of handing ammo to the other side.
I don't remember why I spelled "god" with a lower-case "g", I think I was trying to do the nice, non-committal, "objective" thing, still figuring that we could make common cause with people who might have their feelings hurt by too much honesty. I don't know if my leaving out what Ezikiel Jeremiah and Paul said was my stupidity or a similar inclination to futile niceness and am inclined to think I just didn't think of it. Oh, and "I.D." means intelligent design as a formal theory, as I recall my intentions. I have come to think that intelligent design, though not something that can be confirmed or refuted with science, is far more supported in actual evidence than the atheist-materialist faith in their unadmitted creator god, "random chance" because I don't think ol' random had the time to make all of those necessary things just happen at random, in the right sequence in the nick of time in which those would have all had to come together just right to create even one organism. But that's not a scientific conclusion, it's a rational one and one which, unlike the atheist theory of it, is open to being wrong. It is ironic that among most reasoning believers I know, that openness to being wrong is far stronger than even in the most moderate atheists of my experience. Among the reason I was referring to them as "atheist fundamentalists" a lot back then, another was that I knew it would piss them off.
Well, the intervening years have led to me thinking that non-commitment was a mistake so I don't make it anymore. And I'm not feeling much like being nice and stupid about that.
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