A rchive Date
[ 28-05-2000 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Richard Dawkins ]
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[Building the bridge between science, theology
By RORY LEISHMAN
May 19, 2000
How can we know the difference between right and wrong? Don't ask a scientist for an authoritative answer.
Writing in Free Inquiry, a publication of the Council for Secular Humanism, Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford biologist, states: "'What is right and what is wrong?' is a genuinely difficult question that science certainly cannot answer."
In Dawkins's opinion, philosophy also offers no answer. "Given a moral premise or a priori moral belief," he says, "the important and rigorous discipline of secular moral philosophy can pursue scientific or logical modes of reasoning to point up hidden implications of such beliefs, and hidden inconsistencies between them. But the absolute moral premises themselves must come from elsewhere, presumably from un-argued conviction."
Un-argued conviction? What about moral theology?
For Dawkins, this option is out of the question. In his influential book, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, he contends the existence of God is a scientifically unnecessary and absurd hypothesis.
In brief, he argues that unlike a man-made watch, life is manifestly not a product of intelligent design. Instead, he maintains the Darwinian theory of evolution has conclusively established that all life on Earth, including human life, has spontaneously evolved over the past three billion years through a combination of chance and necessity.
If that is so, how did the process get started? How did the laws of nature come into existence?
As a biologist, Dawkins says he is not competent to answer such questions. Yet, he is confident that physicists like Stephen Hawking, his atheist colleague at Cambridge, will come up with plausible answers that also do away with the need for God. On all these points, the great majority of scientists and mathematicians agree.
However, there are some notable exceptions. One of them is William Dembsky, a prominent intelligent design theorist who holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois.
In his latest book, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, Dembsky argues the theory of evolution as propounded by dogmatists like Dawkins is implausible because nothing so complex as a single cell could conceivably have evolved over so short a period of geological time as a mere three billion years. Dembsky's work has been endorsed by Michael Behe of Lehigh University and Robert Kaita of Princeton University.
There is no point, though, in drawing the publications of young scholars to the attention of most scientists and mathematicians over the age of 30. The dogmatic minds of these aging academics are closed to radically new ideas.
In his scientific autobiography, Max Planck explained that, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die. And a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
In this way, a young generation of Copernicans once displaced their Ptolemaic seniors. So today, Dembsky is confident that in his generation, intelligent design will prevail over dogmatic Darwinism. Meanwhile, consider the moral implications of this debate.
As a "scientific rationalist," Dawkins asserts that "not all humans are equal."
Humanness, he says, "is a complicated mixture of qualities that evolved gradually. Absolutist moral judgments founded on the 'rights' of all humans, as opposed to nonhumans, seem to me less justifiable than more pragmatic judgments based, for example, on quantitative assessment of the ability to suffer."
Peter Singer, the humanist philosopher at Princeton University, agrees.
On the basis of this premise, he comes to the horrific conclusion that the law should allow physicians to kill off a mentally handicapped, but otherwise healthy, infant at the request of the parents. In sum, Dawkins and Singer tell us there is no creator and that human beings, as such, have no inalienable rights.
The intellectual leaders of a more enlightened generation proclaimed: "We hold these truths to be self evident: That all men are created equal; that they have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
We, in our time, reject these timeless truths at our peril.
Write Rory at The London Free Press, P.O. Box 2280, London, Ont. N6A 4G1 or fax 519-667-4528 or E-mail. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com]
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