Sawing off the branch on which it sits

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_Analytics
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Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Analytics »

A blogger of no particular significance has posted some notes from a “manuscript”. It appears this is for a chapter in a forthcoming book that critiques evolutionary psychology based on hostile readings of mostly hostile sources, and little else. The result betrays his ignorance on the topic.

It is inspired by the writings of Nancy Pearcey of the Discovery Institute.

The basic premise of Nancy’s “insight” that the blogger finds worthy of spreading is the belief that since biologists believe that the brain and human thought processes are the result of evolution, they must necessarily dismiss all human thought as being equally pointless and invalid. But biologists are too stupid to realize that by doing this they are undermining their own argument—since this alleged argument of theirs is the product of a faulty human brain, it must be invalid too. In this way, they are “sawing off the branch upon which they sit.”

The blogger says:

As Mary Midgley points out, if we accept the concept of memes as Dawkins and his co-believers seek to propagate it, we must conclude that the only reason they “campaign so ardently for neo-Darwinism must be that a neo-Darwinist meme . . . has infested their brains, forcing them to act in this way.” After all, she says, “if you propose the method seriously you must apply it consistently.”
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterso ... hUuJrd2.99


This completely misunderstands what Dawkins actually says about memes. Presuming that this misunderstanding is not deliberate, I’ll offer some constructive clarification on Dawkins so that he may improve the manuscript.

First, memes don’t force anybody to do anything. The idea of memes is that certain ideas can take on a life of their own. Certain ideas spread and evolve. The ideas themselves spread based upon the survival characteristics of the ideas. If an idea tends to stick in somebody’s brain and they tend to share it with others, then the idea spreads. The ideas can mutate over time, and the mutations with the best survival characteristics are the ones that survive.

If we applied this to Mormonism, we would look at how, for example, rationalizations for the priesthood ban spread and evolved over time. Or how Mormon thought about homosexuality vs. homosexual behavior has evolved and spread. About how any idea evolves and spreads, really.

Calling an idea a “meme” in no way implies that the idea is good or bad, inisghtful or a lie, a fascinating insight into the truth, or a totally irrational superstition.

So, the concept of a meme is itself a meme. Dennett says that Dawkins was criticized pretty severely by psychologists and sociologists for his idea about memes, because, according to them, the ways ideas spread and evolve is something that they’ve been studying for decades in a body of research that Dawkins hadn’t read. Regardless, the idea of “memes” caught on and has spread.

Dawkins never said, “Since any particular religious idea ia a meme, it can be discarded as being false.” That isn’t how the concept works and is not the point. A meme isn’t a bad idea or a false idea. Rather, it is simply an idea that has the capability of spreading and evolving.

Human thought processes are subject to all sorts of cognitive bias. But that doesn’t mean that it is somehow fundamentally impossible to think rationally. Evolutionary psychology isn’t in the business of cutting down branches the way the blogger imagines.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_Lemmie
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Lemmie »

(Analytics, I'm happy to move this post if you'd rather I start a new thread)

This is the second blog post in which this blogger of no significance has taken his full set of ideas from Dembski's book, in this case Nancy Pearcey in her essay: "Darwin meets the Berenstain Bears." It's been published in several locations, one is as chapter 4 of:

Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism UnconvincingBy William Dembski.

Every single footnote our insignificant blogger uses is from that essay, except of course for the ones where he quotes Pearcey herself. Note that he doesn't give a full reference for the Pearcey essay, but he does give page numbers, which correspond exactly to the pages of pearson's chapter in Dembski's book.

Here's how Pearcey starts her idea that our blogger lifted:
Not only is evolutionary psychology an incoherent patchwork, it is also ultimately self-refuting. Consider: If ideas are products of evolution, then that includes the idea of evolutionary psychology. Like all other ideas, it is not true but only useful for survival. Proponents Of the theory are eager to use it to debunk traditional theism, but fail to see that it debunks itself.


She continues; here is another example of how our blogger simply lifts her ideas and footnotes directly:

Dennett's trademark metaphor is that Darwinism is a "universal acid, ' that "eats through just about every traditional concept" of religion or morality or social order. And yet, it is the height of wishful thinking for Dennett to presume that the acid will dissolve only other people's views and not his own. As philosopher Mary Midgely .....


Not only is our blogger not an original thinker, he's not even an original bad thinker.
Last edited by Guest on Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
_Dr Exiled
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Dr Exiled »

If only this blogger could look at Mormonism as critically as he thinks he is looking at science ....
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen 
_Philo Sofee
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Philo Sofee »

Exiled wrote:If only this blogger could look at Mormonism as critically as he thinks he is looking at science ....


Gawd I would be more than satisified if he bothered getting science correct in the first place and quit quoting the ID-iot twits he uses. But alas, his bias prevents him from examining things in full light, and thus he must be always wrong and unfortunately grossly wrong for most of his "science" thinking.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
_MrStakhanovite
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _MrStakhanovite »

Exiled wrote:If only this blogger could look at Mormonism as critically as he thinks he is looking at science ....


The functional equivalent would be Ed Decker.
_DrW
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _DrW »

Analytics wrote:A blogger of no particular significance has posted some notes from a “manuscript”. It appears this is for a chapter in a forthcoming book that critiques evolutionary psychology based on hostile readings of mostly hostile sources, and little else. The result betrays his ignorance on the topic.

It is inspired by the writings of Nancy Pearcey of the Discovery Institute.

When it comes to science, the blogger of no particular significance (or no significance whatsoever) exhibits understanding and logic that is almost on par with that of the best flat earth apologists.

Quoting an author from the Discovery Institute in a effort to defend religion against science is about as absurd as quoting Albert Camus to ---- oh, wait.

As you were.
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."

DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
_Gadianton
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Gadianton »

Well, this thread was hand selected by our debate committee for a formal debate between the apologists and Gemli, and an official transcript is forthcoming. I looked this over last night with the usual head shaking, but I didn't realize how profoundly bad it was until I read the OP carefully this morning, as I am required to do as part of the judge's panel.

To a point, it's not that bad. Had the author reigned in his hatred of science with its criticisms of things like, man and dinosaur walking together foot-by-foot as the Bible tells it in the Book of Job, a reasonable inquiry into New Atheism could be opened.

Plantinga says that our cognitive faculties are reliable. He is a presuppositionalist who thinks our sense of Godly design is as basic as taste or sight. At least, our senses are reliable when it comes to God, the most important part for survival in the raw, but surely, something must go wrong to produce atheists*. Dawkins and Darwin appear to believe our senses aren't very reliable and for Dawkins, this means ideas can spring into their own lives and get passed around for centuries as memes with little to stop them. Surely, Dawkins believes that memes can be countered by science.

So we have two persons who disagree. One sees the other as broken, therefore wrong, and one sees the other as too indiscriminate, and therefore wrong. The problem for Dawkins is less that science is wrong -- if the successful construction and apparent operation of the Large Hadron Collider is one mass delusion, boy, it's a good one -- and more that memic theory isn't science.

Has Dawkin's ideas on memes been peer-reviewed? Has sociology and religious studies been reinvented thanks to Dawkins? What "testing against reality" as Gemli puts it, has Dawkins done to substantiate his theory of memes? Was it even intended to be a scientific theory? Maybe, in typical meme fashion, it just kind of got away from him and spring into its own life? When New Atheists dismiss religious ideas as memes, with nothing else to back it up, are we really beholding the rational answer to religious dogma? The fact that Dan D. wrote one (controversial) book on the subject hardly establishes anything.

Had the author stopped there, I'd agreed. It's hard to tell to what extend his sources intend to carry the severity of the charge, but the author reads the most sever case possible, "we must conclude that the only reason...", which is basically false, given Analytics' explanation. Then he takes it into the stratosphere with, "Consistent materialism seems to saw off the branch upon which the materialist sits."

WTF? He pulls this quote out like every other month. In this case, Plantinga has his (lame) EAAN argument but that wasn't developed in the post or even alluded to in the post, and so extrapolating wildly influences the reader to take the body of the post in the most extreme way possible, and thus, the post ends up having no merit.

*I've seen it attributed to Plantinga that atheists lack this sense of God, literally, blind, but I can't say if this accurately represents Plantinga's position. I think I can assume it does just to make this minor point.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Chap
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Chap »

Gadianton wrote:<A blogger of no significance said:> *I've seen it attributed to Plantinga that atheists lack this sense of God, literally, blind, but I can't say if this accurately represents Plantinga's position. I think I can assume it does just to make this minor point.


Umm, scenes like this do not occur in delivery rooms:

Exhausted newly delivered mother: "Is the baby ... OK ... doctor?"

Obsetrician: "Well ... your son has all his limbs, and the checks show he is physically normal. [Pauses and takes deep breath] ... but I am sorry to say that he is what we call theotyphlic. "

ENDM: "What does that mean, doctor???"

O: "Putting it in layman's terms, he is 'blind to god'. I am afraid your son will be an atheist. There is no cure."

Whereas in fact the typical atheist does not start off that way, but is someone who was brought up to believe in a deity or deities, and then stops doing so. I was a devout and (I think I can claim) committed and well informed theist for many years. Then, after following certain trains of thought, I came to the conclusions:

1. In so far as my religion made specific claims about the world, they were unpersuasive.
2. The content that I had ascribed to interactions with a deity by myself and others was simply part of our wonderfully complex human intellectual, emotional and aesthetic endowment. If I gave up believing in an deity, I didn't need to lose any of it.

If anything, I see things more, not less clearly than I did before I took off my god glasses.
Zadok:
I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
_Analytics
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Analytics »

Lemmie wrote:Not only is our blogger not an original thinker, he's not even an original bad thinker.


LOL. I was honestly surprised that he double-downed on this in the comments. It appears he sincerely believes that scientists (i.e. adherents to “scientism”) believe that since the human brain is subject to cognitive biases that it is impossible to think well, and thus all ideas are necessarily invalid. Yet, he thinks that when making these claims, scientists aren’t self-aware enough to know that they themselves might be subject to these same cognitive biases?

To prove his point, he quotes Darwin’s concern about the existence of cognitive bias and how he wasn’t immune this this phenomenon. He thinks this somehow supports his thesis that scientists aren’t self aware?

As an analogy, his post would be like an anti-Mormon saying, “Jesus said in the first vision that all religions are false. But Mormonism is a religion too! Therefore Mormonism is self refuting and necessarily false. QED.” The argument is cute in a way, but if the blogger is actually serious and thinks this idea is somehow a formindable criticism of what scientists actually belive, more than anything it is sad.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_Maksutov
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Re: Sawing off the branch on which it sits

Post by _Maksutov »

Nancy Pearcey has been in the ID bull game for a long time. She was assisted for a while by Chuck Colson, who famously would have driven over his grandmother for Nixon but instead got busted, went to prison and left to become a born again douchebag instead of a regular douchebag. His logic and morals didn't seem to improve much in the transition. :wink:
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
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