Muslim Author Slams Richard Dawkins - Why SHE Is the One Oh So Wrong.

Richard Dawkins: author of The God Delusion. When are clueless religionists - of whatever stripe - going to learn that he's basically correct as regards human evolution and the conflict between science and supernaturalist religion?


Salon.com contributor Sana Saeed in a ridiculous article ('Richard Dawkins is So Wrong It Hurts: What the Science vs. Religion Debate Ignores')  takes Richard Dawkins and other "New Atheists" to task for basically engendering a conflict between science and religion which is exaggerated.

Of course, this is nonsense. The conflict is real and pervasive, whether between Evangelical creationism and Darwinian Evolution or between the latter and any Muslim sect's claims - as I will show.

As I pointed out in my (March 23) blog post, science - based on naturalism and Materialism - is counterpoised to ANY system based on supernaturalism. It's like trying to mix oil and water. It is a fool's errand. Since ALL the monotheistic religions - whether Judaism, Christianity or Islam -  are based on supernaturalism, then science must be fundamentally opposed to the theological claims and doctrines of each.

ALL the monotheistic religions (and by extension their derivative cults, sects)  encourage and indeed, DEMAND one sacrifice one's mind to their respective beliefs and dogmas. Dogma is part of religion, at least most of them, as is "sacred revelation" (e.g. in "sacred scriptures")  which religious types are obliged to accept and do so unquestioningly. This is one of the reasons I left the Catholic religion behind.  I couldn't abide their ridiculous dogmas, whether virgin birth, immaculate conception, transubstantiation or whatever. None of it made sense, and given the Church's hierarchy didn't allow 'free thought" I had no choice. Either one is honest with himself or not.

Thus, from the outset Saeed is on shaky ground. This despite, writing a truly naïve sentence:

"It never once occurred to me during those years, and later, that there could be any sort of a conflict between my faith and science; to me both were part of the same things: This universe and my existence within it."


Well, if indeed this "never once occurred"  to her, it means that either: a) she didn't appreciate or accept the supernatural basis of her religion, or b) somehow believed science is invested in supernatural bunkum.

This is highlighted with her additional claim, pertaining to evolution, that :  "In my own religious tradition, Islam, there is a vibrant history of religion and science not just co-existing but informing one another intimately"

Maybe so, but this is more a matter of pragmatic mutual exploitation than anything else. The same has occurred in the Christian Western tradition, but that doesn't mean astronomers and astrophysicists as well as chemists and geologists, accept "souls" and life after death, or "heaven and hell".  Nor, as Saeed later admits (see below), does it mean religionists accept an ape-human common ancestor .In other words, cross-fertilization serves pragmatic purposes but doesn't alter the basic oppositional frame of reference, which often manifests as religionists cherry picking what they'll accept and what they won't.

This may be why Saeed can also state - presumably with a straight face:

"Muslims, generally, accept evolution as a fundamental part of the natural process; they differ, however, on human evolution – specifically the idea that humans and apes share an ancestor in common. "

But here, her whole thesis collapses, because if  Muslims don't accept the evidence of ape-human common ancestry then clearly they don't accept evolution as a whole. Human common ancestry with the ape is part and parcel of the whole theory, as I pointed out many times before on this blog, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-are-fundies-so-averse-to-accepting.html

As I noted therein the evidence is overwhelming for common ancestry between apes and humans, including:

- BOTH  human and ape have the exact SAME cytochrome –c protein sequence! If evolution is false we’d expect the human and chimp cytochrome-c sequences to vary dramatically given that it exhibits 10^93 variations in functionality with other organisms. That is, 10 followed by ninety three zeros!

- Photographic evidence exists for the telomeric fusion of the ape 2p and 2q chromosomes to become the single ‘2’ chromosome in humans. In other words, prima facie evidence of a common ancestor. (See, e.g.: Yunis and Prakash, 1982, Science, Vol. 215, p. 1525, 'The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy')

If Saeed or her Muslim sect doesn't accept common ancestry then they don't accept the science behind evolution. One cannot willy-nilly cherry pick which parts of evolution they will accept and which they reject.  Richard Dawkins, contrary to what she claims - is exactly correct regarding the antagonism and conflict between supernatural religion and science. Those who try to sweep differences under the rug or minimize them do neither science or religion any favors.

And supernaturalism, for Saeed's information, would be the only reason to reject common ancestry. The reason is simply that the supernaturalist demands his point of origin be from a supernatural source, as opposed to a common ape-human ancestor. Philosopher Daniel Dennett ('Darwin's Dangerous Idea') compared the two versions of origin to skyhooks and cranes. Supernaturalists, whether Christian or Muslim, embrace skyhooks because they originate humans from the sky as it were, at the 'hands' of a Sky Daddy.  Cranes, by contrast, have to hoist from the ground up to effect their constructions. They're prosaic, dirty material-mechanical flotsam and jetsam like cells, electric signals and chemicals.

Embrace your faith and skyhooks, if you must, but please don't try to portray it as compatible with any realistic science!  Not unless you're prepared to accept your origin via the 'Crane'  paradigm!

Can We Hope to Educate Fundies on the Different Types of Atheist?

In approaching the fundamentalist brain, one thing one must perpetually keep in mind is its inherent simplicity and the incessant demand for simplicity. Thus, rather than acknowledging the Big Bang as the source for inception of the cosmos the fundie will invent 'young Earth' and 'young Sun' nonsense because it's simpler. After all, you needn't learn about the physics of the Big Bang including the significance of the 2.7 K isotropic microwave radiation  -- you need only invoke the fairy tale of 'Adam & Eve'.

In a similar vein, in approaching evolution the dumb, semi-educated fundie will usually cherry pick one aspect to try to make hay out of (like the 98% chimp-human sharing of DNA) but entirely ignore the more difficult aspects such as that: 1) chimps and humans share the exact same cytochrome-c protein sequence despite 10^93 different possibilities for variation, and 2) the fact that the ape 2p and 2q chromosomes underwent telomeric fusion to become the '2' chromosome in humans. 

But this is what we've come to expect from  a lot that still believes ancient fables such as that a man could survive 3 days in a whale's belly (or 'great fish') despite it being full of hydrochloric acid, or that an 'Ark' could have been constructed to carry pairs of all the critters then on Earth including dinosaurs.

So it's not a surprise to learn that most also lack the intellectual capital or ability to appreciate the distinctions between atheists.  After all, it's simpler just to assume ALL atheists are of one type, e.g. "militant" if they even write something negatively about Xtianity.  Their pea brains fail to understand that writing something negative, say in a blog, is NOT the same thing as demanding the extirpation of religion - even fundy-ism.

Nor do these clowns grasp the distinction between agnostics and atheists. So we are obliged to help them out, and try to express some sympathy too.

Author George Smith[1] notes that the most vernacular usage confuses the meaning of agnostic, usually asserting it is “somewhere between belief and outright unbelief.” The way it is usually framed is that the agnostic “isn’t sure whether or not God exists.”  In fact this is an erroneous interpretation of the term.


What it actually, technically means is someone who asserts there is not yet adequate evidence to make a decision if one were possible. In other words, the issue must remain open-ended and unresolved until such time evidence appears. Thus, true agnosticism is not some dithering or fence-sitting between belief and unbelief, but rather acknowledgement of the impossibility of knowledge as it pertains to any ability to address the question in the first place.

But mayhap this is far too complex for the simplistic gray matter of fundies.

Smith himself (op. cit., p. 9) splits and parses the agnostic position even further, according to whether one is an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. The first avers that all supernaturalist propositions or claims are inherently unknowable (because they are untestable) by the human mind, and so not worth discussing any more than pink elves, unicorns or fairies. In this sense, unbelief isn’t really even necessary, since who would actually believe in a pink elf or unicorn? Well, then there’d be even less merit to arguing over an invisible Being! Thus, without any capacity for knowledge about it, it’s redundant.


The theist agnostic meanwhile, maintains a firm belief in the existence of God, but asserts the precise nature of this God is unknowable. On this basis, no attributes are assigned to try to define God’s nature.  We cannot say that any divine nature is “eternal”, or “omnipotent” or “omnipresent” because one simply doesn’t know. Thus, it makes no sense to use words to try to describe a deity. Belief is as far as one can go.

Related to definitions of atheists is the ability to distinguish between implicit and explicit atheists. In many ways, the implicit atheist is similar to the agnostic atheist except for the fact the kmowability or otherwise of supernaturalist propositions is not gone into. Thus, the implicit atheist simply avers to be withholding belief in any kind of deity already on offer by the theist. (The explicit atheist, by contrast, rejects it outright.)

As I noted in an article published in the Mensa Bulletin, March 1994:

"Let's be clear about what constitutes Atheism and what doesn't. The Atheist - to put it succinctly, absolutely withholds investing intellectual/emotional resources in any supernatural claim. Indeed the word Atheism itself embodies this definition: a-theos, or without god.”

What is happening here is not active disbelief, i.e. in making a statement “There is no god,” but rather simply passively withholding belief in a statement already made. Hence, the deity believer has made the positive claim. The ontological   (implicit) atheist’s  response is simply an absence of belief in it. No more and no less. It does not and never has implied  active disbelief, aggressive rancor or a vehement and militant opposition to the beliefs.


Let me quickly add here that this withholding of belief is the more natural position, as opposed to advocating belief, which is unnatural. Consider a different context: a neighbor runs over and informs me that aliens have landed in his yard in a spacecraft. Until I actually go over and try to verify his claim I am under no obligation to accept it as a statement of fact. Thus, the default intellectual position is always skepticism, irrespective of the claim made. This again is because the onus is always on the claimant to make good, not the skeptic to “disprove” it.

It isn’t difficult to see from the above context that the more conservative (and reasonable!) position is withholding belief until a claim is validated. One does not, after all, accept a claim then do further research. One ab initio doubts the claim and then sets out to devise tests to ascertain the validity!  And in the case of extraordinary claims (which certainly include “God” and visiting aliens in spaceships), “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence” as the late Carl Sagan used to emphasize.

 

It also isn’t difficult to see that this is exactly analogous to the atheist withholding belief in a deity. After all, If God genuinely exists, why is he/she/it not uniformly perceptible,  at least in basic features, to all peoples? As we saw in previous blog posts (from 2011, mainly), there are nearly as many different versions of deity as there are people. (Or at least, religions!)

Another error made by the wayward fundie is assuming that a negative belief, i.e. that there is no God, is the same as being a positive belief, 'there is a God'.  An example of this would be what Lisa Kennedy spouted on a Bill Maher Real Time show in January, 2012, i.e.  if an atheist simply doesn’t believe in the supernatural or God he is expressing a belief, albeit a negative one. If expressing a negative belief, then it's the same as a positive belief such as invoked in religions, ergo he is professing a religion. This is utter nonsense.


It would be akin to asserting that if I decline belief in ghosts I still have “negative ghost belief” and therefore am a Ghostologist ! The error inheres in asserting that an absence of belief is the same as a belief. This error repeats the canard that the onus is on the non-believer to disprove the believer’s claim, instead of acknowledging it is impossible to prove a negative. Some sophists attempt to get around this by claiming it  "isn’t impossible to prove a negative". They argue that they can prove “there are no black balls” in a box by simply emptying the box out and finding all white balls. But this misrepresents the example, since the possibility of “all white” balls was never in question! The analogy is specious because the existence of God IS in question, and isn’t objectively verifiable, unlike counting real balls. The analogy trivializes the deity existence question while not validating the sophist.

In the end, it may be that because the brains of fundies are unable to perform ACH thinking - or what James Cheyne  has called abstract, categorical and hypothetical thinking (such as integrated into standard I. Q. tests, e.g.  the Raven's and Wechsler Similarities tests) then they cannot also be expected to discriminate between subtle differences in definitions, say for 'atheist'.

Why are believers, fundies especially,  missing this crucial component of thought which also, by the way, is essential for critical thinking? There are a number of reasons. For example, one may be that the honing of such skills was never possible, for example if they came from a home schooling environment. Another, more controversial, is that the very neural pathways that predispose them to belief or faith, are also the ones that inhibit predictive ACH conceptualizing. Lastly, it's feasible they may have suffered head injuries, maybe from a DI - using a pugil stick-- in the Marine Corps at Parris Island, and they never got their senses back together.

Sadly, if any of these is true we can be sure they will always take the simpleton path in their thinking as regards atheists and atheism.

---

[1]  George Smith, Atheism - The Case Against God, 1989, Prometheus Books, p. 9.

Why Are the Fundies So Averse to Accepting Human Evolution?

Having had over a dozen debates with creationists and ID fundamentalists, I'm still at a loss as to why they so vehemently reject human evolution. Even when presented with the hardest evidence, they tend to bury their heads in the sand like ostriches. It's as if their heads are ready to explode.  What gives with them?

My own theory is they suffer from what I call grandiosity syndrome, the belief in human exceptionalism -and that humans are somehow "fallen angels" as opposed to being risen apes. But apes these people don't want to be. NO, they aspire to sublime, supernatural greatness - which no ape will ever attain. Thus, when they look at an ape, or ape ancestor face in relation to a human, they go batshit crazy in denial, because they can't handle the similarities.

"No, dammit! That ain't me! I am special! I got a soul, and free will and all that, you damned commie atheist!"

But the hard facts belie their desperate protestations, because in the end, they really are risen apes! One of the best evidences for this is at the micro-biological level.  This is from the DNA (genomic) sequencing of the human and chimpanzee which discloses the remarkable fact that BOTH have the exact SAME cytochrome –c protein sequence! If evolution is false we’d expect the human and chimp cytochrome-c sequences to vary dramatically given that it exhibits 10^93 variations in functionality with other organisms. That is, 10 followed by ninety three zeros!

Yet the fundies either reject or refuse to process this data! They absolutely want no ape cousins!

Then there the fact is we have actual photographic evidence assembled for the telomeric fusion of the ape 2p and 2q chromosomes to become the single ‘2’ chromosome in humans. In other words, prima facie evidence of a common ancestor. (See, e.g.: Yunis and Prakash, 1982, Science, Vol. 215, p. 1525, 'The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy')

People who know next to zippo about Darwinian evolution (they haven’t even read Darwin’s Origin of Species) constantly complain about perceived “problems with evolution” but most of these are McGuffins, red herrings, straw men or false issues.  You can generally quickly tell their specious basis on account of the near hysteria with which they're interjected into debates.


A choice one is the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.

By “micro-evolution” we mean minute evolutionary change, involving a small proportion of DNA. For example, as observed in changes in haemoglobins, histo-compatability antigens, and biochemical environmental adaptations (e.g. formation of blood chemicals which confer some form of resistance to environmental toxins or agents). The main point to bear in mind is that micro-evolution, whatever the changes, still preserves species' mating ability - whereas macroevolution generally does not.

 

Macroevolution, by contrast, entails a proportionately large change in the DNA underlying it that probably reflects ongoing natural selection, over significant time. For example, the change from a cold-blooded dinosaur to a warm-blooded dinosaur that’s a precursor of modern birds would be a case of macroevolution. Similarly, the change from an ape-human ancestor to Homo sapiens (by telomeric fusion of the 2p and 2q chromosomes to the ‘2’ chromosome in humans) would be a case of macroevolution, despite the fact the evidence is available at the chromosomal level.

 

 Thus far we have assembled more than 29+ evidences for macro-evolution all of which were originally set out in the context of falsifiable hypotheses, and then accepted because they passed those observational tests. See more at:http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Another key fundie-creationist dysfunction,  showing his lack of education,  is mixing up the origin of life (or the origin of the cosmos) with evolution. The origin of life falls under the theory of abiogenesis :i.e.  the theory of the original inception of life, as opposed to its later evolution by natural selection. The origin of the universe, meanwhile, falls under the theory of cosmogenesis.- or how the cosmos originated, e.g. in the Big Bang.  If the fundie can't tell either of these theorie from Darwinian evolution - how can anything else he writes be trusted?  He really isn't fit to be in a serious debate, but perhaps he can engage in discussion concerning which  water colors a Kindergartner might use!


Then there is the old complaint concerning "gaps in the fossil record". As if a few transitional layer gaps can refute an entire theory.  But as Richard Dawkins has put it ( 'The Blind Watchmaker’, p. 240):

“The reason that the transition from ancestral species to descendant species appears to be jerky is simply that, when we look at a series of fossils from any one place, we are probably not looking at an evolutionary event at all, but a migrational event. The arrival of a new species from another geographical area
”

I mean, after all, there’s no law that commands all species remain fixed in one place their entire lives! Even today, as water holes dry up or food reserves dip, African animals like Wildebeest, antelope and others will migrate to new areas in search of resources to support them. 

Not mentioned by Dawkins is how many other ‘holes” or gaps may have been created by virtue of tectonic plates (which make up the Earth’s crust) slipping or crushing key fossils in distinct layers. Obviously, if such tectonic traversal displaced a fossil layer, then it likely won’t be found when it may well have harbored intermediate forms.

Another question from the perpetually clueless:


If Evolution’s true then why don’t we see apes evolving into humans?

This nonsense propagates because they purveyors fail to recognize that humans, apes and monkeys are all distant cousins, as opposed to species in the same SINGLE evolutionary path. Humans don’t come from apes but from a common ancestor that was neither ape nor human in the distant past. Also, it overlooks the algorithmic branching basis of evolution, see e.g. http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/04/clearing-air-on-missing-links.html

Thus, multiple evolutionary offshoots (as shown above) confirm no (single) primate evolution is based on a single path. Thus in the past seven million years there have evolved multiple hominid species including Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, and Homo Neanderthalis- all of which went extinct along the way- except modern humans or Homo sapiens. Meanwhile the idea of current apes evolving to humans totally turns this algorithmic-convergence on its head, and proposes a singly determined evolutionary path!

 

Another widely disseminated but misbegotten and misinformed trope:

 

Evolutionists claim the process occurs by random chance

Not so. Natural selection is not “random” nor does it operate by “chance”. What happens is that once a particular mutation is stabilized, then natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes (to enhance better adaptation). Meanwhile, "chance" would be like me sitting a monkey down in front of a type writer or computer keyboard and hoping there is some "chance" it will type out at least one page of coherent script. But since a monkey will likely not recognize any key - or even if it does, then make a connection to words, or how to compose them into articulated thoughts - this isn't likely. It all rests on CHANCE!


Meanwhile, natural selection rests on preferred steps each of which consolidate former steps while advancing the adaptation. Thus, the eye evolved from a single light sensitive spot in a cell to the complex organ we behold today not by chance but rather by thousands of intermediate steps – each preserved because they assured better adaptation if incorporated, and hence a better eye. Many of these steps can still be observed today in simpler organisms.

Richard Dawkins perhaps put it best (op. cit.):


"What natural selection does is to consolidate particular random mutations into a more stable, adaptive adjustment – governed by deterministic factors and inputs. Thus, that while the selected trait often appears at random, its preservation in the gene structure cannot be relegated to randomness”

 

What does all this show? That most of the alleged "problems of evolution" are confections or simple red herrings which exist only in the minds of those who insist on seeing problems - perhaps because "problems" with evolution assuage some doubts that their good Book gives them the whole truth.

But I still suspect the core problem is that those who reject human evolution, refuse to see humans in any biological fellowship with the likes of the chimp  - despite the fact we share 98% of the same DNA and exhibit the same  cytochrome –c  protein sequence. So literally, we are "brothers" under the fur, or skin...as the case may be.

Human exceptionalism is unwarranted until such time we can show ourselves to be absolutely above the chimp in every way - including making war and killing our fellows. But don't hold your breath!