Bruce Chapman at Evolution News and Views has a piece about a review by atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagel of Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion, which Nagel finds unsatisfying. He begins his review with this observation:
In his new book, he [Dawkins] attacks religion with all the weapons at his disposal, and as a result the book is a very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument.
The review itself is available at The New Republic (by subscription), but Chapman provides a good summary of it:
Examining the inevitable clash of chance and necessity with design, Nagel describes the "overwhelming improbability of (an original self-replicating molecule)...coming into existence by chance, simply through the laws of physics...Dawkins (he goes on) recognizes the problem, but his response to it is pure hand-waving."
Darwinism and Dawkins reach a theoretical as well as factual dead end on origins. "That is why the argument from design is still alive, and why scientists who find the conclusion of that argument unacceptable feel there must be a purely physical explanation of why the origin of life is not as physically improbable as it seems." Multiverse theories are merely an unpersuasive and "desperate device to avoid the demand for a real explanation."
He agrees with Dawkins that "the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question." (We agree with them both on that. Would someone please tell Judge Jones and the ACLU?) But, paradoxically, to try to win the debate on that question, Dawkins and other neo-Darwinists are reduced to the philosophical "reductionist project" that Nagel says "tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical-that is, behavioral or neurophysiological-terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed-that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts..."
Dawkins also would yoke all religion to the sins of the kind of fanatics who attacked on 9/11. Of course, fanatical religionists are bad, Nagel notes, but that is hardly an argument against design. "Blind faith and dogma are dangerous; the view that we can make ultimate sense of the world only by understanding it as the expression of mind or purpose is not," he concludes.
As Chapman points out in the beginning of his article, much of the best intellectual work done in the last half century has been in the service of deconstructing, refuting and discrediting the intellectual edifices built by the great architects of modernity, particularly Marx and Freud. It certainly looks as if Darwin is next on the list.
Viewpoint will have more on The God Delusion this weekend.