Main Menu - The Fool Hath Said... - U.S. Attorneys - The Publisher - Lying in the U.S. - Enigma - The Tsunami of Currency - The Schiavo Scandal - Supreme Solecisms - Five to Four Fallacies - Church and State - Voting "Rights" - $100 Oil - Immigration - Worst Eminence - Assassinations - The Chief - Order "The Firm League of Friendship" - Email Firth

The Fool Hath Said . . . .

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY, a cosmonaut re-entered from orbit and reported that he had looked out into space and seen there no God. The archbishop of Canterbury - if I remember aright - gently remarked that he had been looking the wrong way . . . and the world, or at least the English-speaking world, chuckled.

And now Richard Dawkins, professor of the Public Understanding of Science at New College, Oxford (I aspired to Old College, Reno, Nevada, which is even newer, but was rejected) has studied astronomy, where we find that ours is not the only planet, of not the only sun, in not the only galaxy, in not the only cluster . . . and evolution, where we find that complexity arises from simplicity by mere chance and time . . . and quantum mechanics, where we find that we can predict results but not understand them . . . and has generalized the cosmonauts observation: There is no God anywhere, at anywhen.

Ever since the days of Hume, philosophers have agreed that theories about the real world in which we [happen to] find ourselves can never be proven; even the most esteemed theory may fail when a new test is devised. Certain knowledge must govern abstractions, such as numbers and ellipses - and God decidedly cannot be an abstraction. How remarkable, then, that a mere mortal has succeeded in proving the non-existence of God.

Allow me to refine that. What he has established is, that the accepted evidence of God's existence cannot stand up to critical scrutiny.

ARGUMENTS

Dawkins' reading of books about science has convinced him that there are many, many, many galaxies and ditto clusters of galaxies, so that it is only natural that one or more should harbor intelligent life. He can make this argument because he still believes in the random-mutations theory of evolution; when biologists remark upon the extraordinary complexity of vision, or of flagellae, he points out that the feature need not have appeared rapidly; one can scale Mount Improbable either rapidly up a sheer face, or gradually, gradually up a gentle slope (he does not mention that the slope must be uninterruptedly upwards.) Dawkins acknowledges, at least by name, the irreducible complexity argument: life other than human (a distinction he deplores) is engaged in a zero-sum battle for resources; therefore, any mutation that does not result in an actual improvement in performance will not survive. Consequently, an improvement in the light sensor or the pressure-rate-of-change sensor must be accompanied by corresponding changes in the nervous system and the command center and the muscular system . . . . If Dawkins can entertain such improbabilities, then his theory forbids nothing - and, therefore, predicts nothing.

He is blissfully unaware that his theory was discredited decades ago by James Graham in Cancer Selection; Graham observes actual data that Darwinian evolution cannot explain, such as that polar bears perfectly well know that their black noses are conspicuous against the snow, and arrives at a radical conclusion: it is, that the quality that fits a species to survive the attacks of cancer is the ability to reproduce without suffering Darwin's mutations.

Let us give credit where credit is due; Dawkins has actually heard the intelligent-design thesis, but he is able to dismiss it a priori because it would raise new questions, such as where the information accumulated by the Designer would be preserved. (In his understanding of science, it is not a cause for rejoicing that every discovery opens new questions.) How lucky he was to have completed his oeuvre before he saw Andrew Parker's In the Blink of an Eye, which shows that vision appeared in five distinct phyla concurrently (on the archaeological scale of time!)

The Dawkins philosophy of science is nothing if not eclectic: he applauds the theory of evolution, which any school-child can understand, which the specialists struggle to salvage with punctuated equilibrium, which conflicts with a fossil record showing species varying not a whit in strikingly different environments - and is equally enthusiastic about quantum mechanics, which not even the other Richard, Feynman, can comprehend, but which makes quantitative predictions with an accuracy equivalent to measuring the Atlantic with a micrometer.

Dawkins has, apparently, read every book (other than on evolution) in the library: he assembles mountains of examples of scholars who believe in God arriving at implausible conclusions. He is so well informed that he knows that there is more than one other university. But he dismisses that founded by Oral Expect a Miracle! Roberts on the grounds that his methods of fund-raising are strikingly unsophisticated, whereas in fact Roberts' practice of healing undeniable diseases without medicine or surgery presents a severe challenge to Dawkins' naturalism (he conveniently overlooks, also, that Kirlian photography affirms that Roberts has a distinctive aura.) However, he also sneers at the faith of the one who founded his own college - seven centuries ago; he is an equal-opportunity exponent of the ad hominem argument.

Not only his grasp of God, but also that of philosophy, is astonishingly flawed. He remarks that when an elaborate controlled experiment to test the healing power of prayer yielded a null result, Christians were generally unimpressed: it does not seem to him to be elementary that there is no non-white swan or . . . no healing by faith can be disproved by a singular observation, but never, ever, proved by accumulating evidence. (Surely he knows that, if the first controlled experiment had yielded a positive result, at least a handful of other experimenters would have repeated it to see if his experiment had been properly controlled?)

LACUNAE

Dawkins has, of course, mastered all the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Biblical scholarship which proves that the Scripture was not written by the purported authors or at the supposed times. One is unsurprised that he does not mention that Genesis 10:25 accurately dates the break-up of Pelagia - nor that God's self-introduction to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I AM, became comprehensible only millennia later, when the physicists showed that time is merely another dimension, so that He is no more at any time than in any place. Dawkins is properly appalled at the story of the Levite cutting the corpse of his concubine into twelve parts after she has been raped [Judges 19;] he does not trouble to mention, for the benefit of those readers who are not Jews, Christians or Muslims, just what he did with the twelve fragments. (He sent them to the twelve tribes in a demand for revenge - flouting JHVH's claim, Vengeance is mine[Deut. 32:35.]) Dawkins could have supported his fabrication theory by citing The Nine Commandments, by David Noel Freedman and his associates, Jeffrey C. Geoghegan and Michael M. Homan, [Astrid Billes Beck, editor] which proves that the cutting and pasting was performed by Baruch, scribe to the prophet Jeremiah, but has refrained (although he does very frequently cite U.S. sources.)

BLUNDERS

Dawkins is not content to be ignorant of the Bible; he aspires to be ignorant also of modern subjects. He drags in an instance in Canada where a strike of the police force precipitated an outbreak of crime: in his innocence, he had not known that if, instead of a republican form of government in which all officers are elected for limited terms, you have a body of professional civil servants, then those servants will dedicate themselves to ensuring that their services are indispensable - the police, and the prison guards, have a vested interest in crime. His prescription for ending the dissension in Northern Ireland is for there to be no longer [Roman] Catholic schools and Protestant schools: he dares not even dream of extinguishing compulsory school attendance.

At one point, his text includes the words Good Samaritan, complete with capitals; at another point, he assures us that when Jesus commanded love thy neighbor, He meant only Jewish neighbors - no Syro-Phoenician woman [Mt. 15:22-28, Mk. 7:25-30], no Roman centurion [Mt. 8:5-13], no woman at the well, no mission to Samaria [Jn. 4:3-42], in his bowdlerized New Testament! No curiosity as to why the powers that were among the Jews resented Him (He refused to obey any merely moral maxim - Mt. 23:4) . . . why he expelled from the Temple the money-changers and the sellers of animals for sacrifice (they were not honest business-men, they were buying protection from the priests - Mt. 21:12, Jn. 2:14-16) . . . or why He said Show me the tribute money (No Jew would touch anything bearing the image of a person, but the Romans supposed He was approving the tax - Mt. 22:15-22.) Needless to say, Dawkins is utterly unaware that, centuries before the common law, or fraternitŽ, or solidarity, or the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, or collective security, Jesus had preached He who is not with Me is against Me [Mt. 12:30, Lk. 11:23.] (One wonders how he would explain the enduring phenomenon that three common-law countries, the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, are head and shoulders superior to all others in highway safety?) Perhaps Dawkins does not study law or economics or political science; Jesus mastered all of these: He allowed divorce only for adultery by the woman [Mt. 5:32], He preached capitalism, Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things? [Mt. 20:15], He condemned Prohibition - the Son of Man has come eating and drinking [Lk. 7:34] - and the War on Drugs - not what goes into the mouth defiles a man [Mt. 15:11.] He was a democrat: the rulers of the gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors [Mt. 20:25, Mk. 10:42, Lk. 22:25.] He saw the distinction between law and legislation; On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets [Mt. 22:40, Mk. 12:31.]

Dawkins acknowledges that a predecessor at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, was a Christian apologist, but dismisses him by arguing that, whereas Lewis contends that Jesus can only have been insane, or untruthful, or what he claimed to be, there is a fourth possibility - that He was honestly mistaken. But this is not a fourth: one who honestly believes that he is what he is not (Napoleon, perhaps?) is indeed mad. He never mentions Lewis's more interesting arguments, such as that all the miracles in the Gospels are in the order of nature; water does turn into wine, fig trees do die, lepers can be healed, blind men may receive their sight (recall that the reporters admit that Jesus had difficulty with His healings; they do not flatter Him! [Mk. 8:22-25.])

It is indeed more or less accepted that our translated Bible is far from inerrant: the highly implausible story of the man commanded to take up thy bed and walk becomes credible, and thoroughly Jewish, if one letter in the Greek is altered, so that roof becomes threshold [Mk. 2:3-12.] However, inconveniently for Dawkins, the Qu'ran is incorruptible; because of the dominance of 19 = 10 + 9 = 10² - 9², discovered only by word processors, we today know that it has been handed down word-perfect for fifteen centuries. (Dawkins is, however, able to dismiss this miracle by finding that the later chapters of the Qu'ran are inconsistent with the earlier ones.)

Dawkins extends this cavalier treatment also to the entire sphere of the supernatural. He devotes hundreds of words to there are more things in Heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy . . . and he proves it true! He has never attended a séance, and heard a quite ordinary woman suddenly personify a strong, confident, sophisticated man. Never seen a ouija board spell out the thoughts in a spectator's mind. Never read of card-guessing experiments, where sometimes the subject consistently guesses the card before it is drawn. Never heard the poignant tales of women envisioning a funeral, at which they recognize their acquaintances but not themselves. Never heard that sheep (believers) do better, and goats (skeptics) do worse, than random in telepathy tests. Never consulted a ju-ju man to learn things that are in someone else's consciousness.

Indeed, consciousness is a terra incognita in Dawkins' science. There are those researchers who argue that the complexity of the brain is so great that the human DNA - so similar to that of a chimpanzee! - cannot conceivably transmit it. He attempts to test the adherents of religion by the challenge, if there is discovered a species intermediate between chimpanzee and human, what then? He plainly does not know that scripture has answered: Kill and eat (so long only as it is your own) [Acts 10:13.]

Dawkins has emulated the philosophers of ancient Rome, who surveyed the religions and found them all equally false, but has gone them one better: he admits, Scientology (whose prophet, L. Ron Hubbard, was a native English speaker) is not false. Thus, Dawkins knows that man is a spirit. However, Dawkins cites Julian Jaynes, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, placing the dawning of human consciousness [at] about one thousand years BC, . . . but then he signally fails to put two and two together, Aha! Adam was indeed recent!!

Science comprises, largely if not entirely, theories which may, tomorrow, be proved false: why, then, should any philosopher object to the fact that religious theories also may be (or must be, if they are inconsistent) false? Dawkins justifies himself by asserting that religious theories distort civil rights; draft boards give more credence to a youth who happens to have pacifist parents, and has accepted their teachings uncritically, than to the articulate, erudite Dawkins. But Dawkins deserves no credence at all: he cannot solve Sir Lancelot's Problem, whether to fight with the White or the Black Knights - it is Oxford-Union-1933 all over again, This House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country [emphasis added.] It is not religion, but simple logic, that if A and B are fighting, the one who does not want you to assist him is the aggressor, the one who does is the victim: the draft board is entitled to say to Dawkins, you are behaving as would an enemy alien, you will be interned. If, instead, it allows him to remain at liberty as a conscientious objector, it is doing him a favor. (Allow me to add that my oldest friend was a parachute-jumping medic; I respect him for following his principles, although it was in a defensive, justified war.)

CRITICISM

Dawkins attempts to show that religion is a threat to civilization, even though (by his own admission) religion preceded civilization. But this is sheer black ignorance: civilization is today in danger, not from the hordes of barely-literate Muslims, but from attacks by environmentalist pagans, who worship Nature and are - ignorantly! - afraid that the last tree or the last whale will be sacrificed, and by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who strive to attain their values at the expense of human beings.

Dawkins does not acknowledge the pioneers who have labored in the anti-religious vineyard, such as the Marquis de Sade - Philosophy in the Bedroom - or Ayn Rand [Alyssa Rosenbaum] - "The Virtue of Selfishness." Seemingly, he fails to see what they found blazingly obvious - that the evils surrounding them were not caused by God, nor even by faith in God, but by religion, by mere men presuming to dictate ethics (relations between equals) and even morality (relations with intimates or dependents.)

It is titillating indeed to imagine what Richard-the-skeptical would feel if he knew that, in fact, God agrees with him. Only three decades ago, and little more than three hundred miles away from Oxford, God manifested Himself to a prophet, Michel Potay (previously an Orthodox bishop, and thus well versed in scripture) and denounced harshly not only the Black King (Rand's Attila) but also the White King (Rand's witch-doctor,) the pseudo-intellectuals of the established schools and universities who apologize for the present-day scene, where liberty is not just endangered but barely known. (One very interesting detail is that God spoke French, but with an archaic vocabulary including words that Frére Michel had not known - how characteristic of I AM.) Even if Oxford men do not speak French, they can be enlightened: The Revelation of Arés is printed in both French and English, as also is Frére Michel's blog, freesoulblog.net.