Richard dawkins and Self delusion

It's my contention that Richard Dawkins is the most self-deluded human being on the planet. On the one hand he claims man is some kind of robot controlled by 'selfish' genes, but then he goes on to criticize everything under the sun; including God, the Bible, Christians, Christianity, Design, Jesus Christ, and much more. This is all a joke. A person with his bizarre views on human beings has no basis for doing any of this.

In his book the God Delusion Dawkins engages in a vicious attack on Christianity. The fact he has no basis for doing so doesn't seem to bother him. As soon as he picks up his pen to write another of his venomous rants against Christianity, he seems (conveniently) to forget everything he's claims to believe about man. (e.g. that man is a gene carrying robot, with no free will, and hence without moral responsibility for what he does, etc.) He should be held to write in conformity with what he says he believes. He has no basis for his critique; his rants are schoolboy exercises in hypocrisy. (Can't the man remember from one moment to the next what he believes :=) The man has no basis for even a knowledge of reality; let alone have a basis for morality, for truth, for justice, or for anything else. If man is a mindless gene carrying bag of chemicals life is a complete illusion. If it's an illusion (which it has to be under his scheme) he has no basis for criticism. [1.]

Quotes and comments;
1. ‘The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.’ - Dawkins (God Delusion p. 361) [2.]

- This has the ring of the old poem 'The captain of my soul' and all that; but Dawkins claims man is just the slave of his genes, so the bravado is a tad over the top, not to mention delusional. (i.e. isn't it the point of the selfish gene mythology that man's desires are somehow put into him to motivate him to do things for the sake not of self but for the sake of his genes; i.e. that he's deluded into thinking he does x for reasons of his own, but in fact he does x because his genes manipulate him in doing so?)
- how does he know he's not self-deluded?
- this is a joke coming from someone who claims man (not Dawkins himself of course :=) is a tool of his genes; that man is a gene carrying robot. That this is a complete contradiction doesn't seem to bother him in the slightest!
- he's certainly self deluded if he thinks what he's said makes any sense. If his selfish gene theory is correct man is totally self-deluded; and delusion is his normal waking state! (Hence the title; Dawkins and the Self delusion)
- if what d. says is true, then the self is a delusion.
- anyone who imagines (hopes, dreams) that inert matter can somehow turn itself into a living organism is utterly and totally self deluded.
- anyone who imagines pond scum could become a human being by suffering thousands of copying errors is totally self deluded.
- if d. imagines his views aren't contradictory he's self deluded
- if d. imagines he can say one thing in the lab and another outside the lab and be taken seriously as a thinker he's self deluded.
- the idea inert matter could somehow turn itself into a cell is wishful thinking on steroids.

2. ‘Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate the alternate view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.’ (emphases in original; p. 31).''
- well isn't that a pretty way of putting it :=) And what does gradual evolution involve? a series of random accidents, a series of mutations (copying mistakes) and errors. What d. (and his gang of clowns) is claiming is that intelligence only comes about when pond scum suffers a huge number of deleterious mutations! This is clearly impossible; but to an atheist the implausibility of the story doesn't matter. All that matters is whether you can get naive people to believe this monstrous story. (Not only is Dawkins a freakish character, but Darwinism itself is a freakish outbreak in history. Darwinism is an omen of terrible calamities; it's an omen of collapse and revolution.) The most appalling thing about Darwinism is its utter stupidity. To claim pond scum can become a human being by suffering a long string of copying errors is stupid beyond belief. (If you doubt this, go and try it; subject pond scum to all the mutations you want; zap it day and night for a hundred years.... it won't become a human being... but yet this, stripped of window dressing, is the story.

3. 'Those who believe in irreducible complexity are ‘no better than fools’ (p. 129).
- one wonders how he knows this; after all he's just a mindless robot obeying the orders of his (its?) genes.
- I guess it's alright for him to engage in slander and juvenile name calling about creationists. Is this because (as he claims) there is no such thing as right and wrong? (Inconsistent as he is, he often forgets that this is what he believes... and gives the world a seething lecture on some misdeed or other :=)

4. The man’s arrogance is palpable. At one point, having attacked irreducible complexity, he says:
‘… we on the science side must not be too dogmatically confident.’ (p. 124)
- that strike anyone as self-delusion :=) This is the most dogmatic person I've ever come across. (Not to mention obnoxious and repellent.)

5. 'Indeed, philosopher and Marxist Terry Eagleton opened his own review of The God Delusion with these words:
‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’

- if Rich Dawkins imagines he knows anything about Christianity or theology he's totally deluded. (He's one of these people who think they are experts in all subjects by virtue simply of being clever. What he knows of biblical theology is junk he's picked up from heretical theologians like Spong. He's an ignoramous who imagines he knows what he's talking about. The self-delusion is comical. What makes the situation something other than comedy is that his youthful admirers know even less than he does, and so, regretfully, are taken in by his hokum.)

6. ‘… and we would abandon [evolution] overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that. … But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.’ (p. 283)

- does anyone believe that? Does Dawkins believe it. E. theory has been disproved many times over but d. hasn't given it up. If d. doesn't believe he's a fundamentalist he's self-deluded. There never was a more fervent fundamentalist than him.
- the belief in materialism is indeed a faith. That d. doesn't see this is evidence of his self-delusion. (Origin of life experiments have been a complete failure, and no scientist on the planet can tell us how inert matter can magically 'self assemble' itself into a living organism. This has been admitted by the leading scientists and philosophers of the day.)
- so why doesn't he tell us what it would take to get him to change his mind. (I think Carl the Sagan wanted a huge sign in the night sky; and didn't Gordon Stein want the lecturn to rise up five feet from the floor :=)

7. 'The professor is on record as saying something very different the previous year:
‘I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.’

- in 'The god delusion' dawkins tells us his views aren't a matter of faith, but here he admits that he can't prove them. That's a good definition of faith isn't it? The man is drowning in self-delusion. (Or is it that he writes so much he can't keep track of what he says? Or is it that he's as double minded and unstable as the sea?)
‘I do not, by nature, thrive on confrontation. I don’t think the adversarial format is well designed to get at the truth …’ (p. 281)
- why does he engage in confrontation then?
- if he doesn't think the adversarial format is well designed to get at the truth why does he employ it?
- why does he behave in a way he says he opposes? Is he so deluded he doesn't realize this is what he's doing?

8. ‘Nobody knows who the four evangelists [gospel writers] were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally.’ (p. 96)

- this is simply false; Dawkins doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. If he really believes this claim it must have been something he picked up from some apostate scholar. (The gospel of John was written by one of Christ's original disciples for goodness sake.) Dawkins is gullible and naive when it comes to repeating bits of gossip that he likes. (He doesn't examine the evidence at all; as he scolds cs for not doing.) He's so gullible that he actually seems to have deluded himself into thinking he's an expert on Christianity.

9. ‘It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all …’ (p. 97)

- No, it's not. This is simply more self-delusion.

10. ‘The creationists are right that, if genuine irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. … But I can find no such case. … Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.’ (p. 125)

- in my opinion he's just plain wrong. As someone [Alex Williams] I read recently said, 'life itself is irreducibly complex.' Materialists have no explanation for this, and so (at least as things stand now) Darwin's theory has been wrecked. I think Dawkins is self-deluded if he thinks this doesn't disprove Evolution. i.e. if e. can't get off the ground it's a fallacious theory. (All the evidence we have now strongly supports the view this is the case.)

11. 'For instance, his attempt at a refutation of the bacterial flagellum motor is straight out of Kenneth Miller’s discredited book Finding Darwin’s God, an argument that is as fallacious as it is audacious.10 Surprisingly he even gets his facts wrong, claiming that:
‘The flagellar motor of bacteria … drives the only known example, outside of human technology, of a freely rotating axle.’ (p. 130)
‘It has been happily described as a tiny outboard motor (although by engineering standards—and unusually for a biological mechanism—it is a spectacularly inefficient one.’ (pp. 130–131)

'On the contrary, Dawkins is apparently ignorant of the F1 ATPase motor,11 direct observations of the rotation of which were published in Nature in 1997; that same year, several scientists shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this discovery. Also, the bacterial flagellum motor is 100% efficient at cruising speed.12 Such errors hardly inspire confidence.'
- if Dawkins imagines he's a scholar he's sadly deluded. (This is one of a long string of errors the man makes; and makes continually.)

12. 'Chapter 4 ‘contains the central argument of my book’, says Dawkins, and he gives a useful six-point summary of it (pp. 157–158). To précis this yet further: It is tempting to explain design using the watchmaker analogy but this is false because the Designer then needs an explanation (again misconstruing the designer as having a beginning in the first place, as well as explaining away the fact that God is not composed of different parts).

- his central argument (get out your trumpet) is that design should be abandoned because it only takes us back to the creator, but doesn't explain the origin of the creator. I don't know why this would impress anybody. All worldviews (e.g. materialism and c.) have to start somewhere; are based on foundational assumptions. With m. we have the eternality of matter, and with c. we have the eternality of God. Does the fact Dawkins can't explain the eternality of matter mean we have to abandon materialism and evolution? We're finite (fallen, fallible) creatures; we're not god; we don't know everything and we never will. This means that unproven (and unprovable) assumptions are at the heart of all worldviews. In other words, whether Dawkins realizes it or not (whether he wants to admit it or not) he believes in materialism on faith. (The c. also believes in creation on faith.) This doesn't mean both ms and cs can't gather evidence for their positions; but evidence isn't (and can't be) proof.
If Dawkins doesn't realize this he's self-deluded.

13. 'In chapter seven, the missionary zeal of this apostle of atheism becomes very apparent indeed. His thesis is that morality needs neither God nor religion and that the Bible’s standards of morality are abhorrent.'

- Morality isn't a person; therefore it has no needs.
- If his argument is that we don't need 'religion' or god to live moral lives he's wrong. We are who we are because we were created by god. If we weren't created by god we wouldn't have any moral concerns at all. (Certainly not the ones we do have.) Of course it's my view that without god we wouldn't exist at all. (Nor would any 'alien' beings.)
- but he's wrong even in a more banal way. Morality is always a public entity (if I can call it that). It's not a private invention or a private matter. i.e. people have the moral concerns and values they do because they are part of a culture, part of a society. This public nature of morality makes it a 'religuous' matter. All morality is religious. I don't like to use the term religion as it has lost most or all of its meaning. I prefer to use the more precise (technical) term world view. So if we use the term worldview the question becomes, 'do we need a wview to live moral lives?' The answer to that is yes.
- and I've already answered the question do we need god. The answer is yes. Animals know nothing of morality. If we were created (as e.s claim) in the image of animals we wouldn't have any moral values.
- If Dawkins imagines we don't need god or religion (read wview) to lead morally upright lives he's self-deluded.

14. 'His thesis is that morality needs neither God nor religion and that the Bible’s standards of morality are abhorrent.

- Dawkins makes extensive use of the straw man argument to condemn the bible's standards of morality. This aside, we'd like to know how a collection of genes has any basis for judging standards of morality. (Gee; don't these genes make slaves out of human beings :=) The problem the materialist has is finding a basis for morality. If he agrees with the Dawkins view of man there can't possibly be any morality; any 'morality' would only be an illusion.
- since Dawkins is so ignorant of the bible let me say that the standard is god's law, not the behavior of human beings. (How anyone can get such a basic thing wrong I don't know.) God's holiness is an afront to fallen man; so we shouldn't be surprised Dawkins finds it at times abhorrent. (Is Dawkins aware we're not living in old testament Israel? Is he aware that Jesus Christ has come? Just asking. His obsession with the old testament is mainly irrelevant.)
- since Dawkins doesn't believe in right and wrong, what right does he have to judge any standard of morality. He's self-deluded if he imagines he can find a basis for morality in the random action of matter, or in the reproductive strategies of selfish genes. (His sermons denouncing Christianity are hypocricy on stilts.)

15. ‘… there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of ‘atonement’ for ‘original sin’. 251

- should? should? Is Dawkins forgetting that he claims man is a mindless robot that has no free will, that operates strictly in terms of instructions it receives from the genes it's obliged to carry around? Why is it the man thinks he can speak out of both sides of his mouth? (Maybe he possesses two tongues like some other dirt loving creatures :=)
- Dawkins has no basis for talking in terms of should. He's up to his old game of saying one thing as a scientist (when was the last time he was in the lab I wonder) and another thing as populist muckraker. He seems to think there doesn't have to be a connection between the realm of facts and the realm of values. Here's more self-delusion. If there's no connection his words are meaningless, simply the quacking of duck. (Apparently reality doesn't matter.)
- why is he telling people they should do x when people aren't free? This makes no sense. His claim (based on his own biological theory) is irrational. He's telling people to do something they have no power to do. If their genes tell them to believe in the Atonement they will; and if their genes tell them not to accept it they won't. End of story.
- how deluded do you have to be to give sermons to people who aren't free?

16. 'As an aside, Dawkins never tells us how he defines a ‘good person’. Indeed, he bandies about such terms as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (often when indulging in ad hominem remarks about his detractors) quite brazenly and fails to justify his inconsistent absolutist position. So,
‘… Hitler and Stalin were, by any standards, spectacularly evil men.’ (p. 272)

- by any standards? Not by the standards of a certain Richard Dawkins; who claims there is no such thing as right and wrong. How he can say this and then call what these men did evil I have no idea. (He must be a complete scatterbrain.) If he imagines he can contradict himself so brazenly (and on so many occasions) and be taken seriously by serious thinkers he's deluded. This is intellectual buffoonery.
- by any standards? No. Not by their own standards, not by the standards of at least some of their followers.

17. ‘To cap it all, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place: an awkward fact …’ (p. 253)

- and how does Dawkins (the gene bag) know this? Obviously he can't know this; but as usual, he plays to a god-like omniscience. (After all; he is a clever boy, and if he imagines a thing to be true, well it must be.) If he truly thinks he can know this he's self-deluded. (The man truly seems to think he has some god like knowledge of all things; from the origin of life to all of history to the beginnings of matter, to the mind of god, to an accurate view of all history... apparently no knowledge of anything has been denied him. Amazing.)

18. "This teaching [the atonement], which lies at the heart of New Testament theology, is almost as morally obnoxious as the story of Abraham setting out to barbecue Isaac..."

- this from the man who told us he wasn't going to go out of his way to offend people. Does he really believe the things he says? It's hard to believe that he does.

Notes;
1. - none of his criticisms (eg in god delusion) make any sense in terms of his e. worldview. Not a single one of them can be founded on materialism; not one of them makes sense in terms of his gross reductionism. (eg. if I deny truth I have no basis for saying anything is wrong.) Is Dawkins so blind he can't see this?
- a criticism (or a proposition) must be constructed out of the materials a person's worldview provides them. eg. if a person (eg. dawkins) denies right and wrong they have no basis for criticizing behavior as wrong. This is intellectual buffoonery; but yet this is what dawkins does from one end of his rant to the other. This is a farce. I don't know if dawkins doesn't understand this or if he's a deliberate fraud.
- if he really were just a gene bag he wouldn't care about atheism at all. (I guess he can't see this.) Why would he? Or why would the genes he ferries around? Are we supposed to believe genes carry about philosophical issues? If what he says about humans beings were true, people's sole concern would be procreation; producing as many progeny as possible. I don't see this happening. (Dawkins I believe has but a single child.) I really wonder how many times this theory has to be refuted; the evidence against it is mountainous. Dawkins's life is one long refutation of his own theory.
2. reference; quotes are from a review of the 'God Delusion by Philip Bell [Creation.com]
3. 'Similarly, leading philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues5 that Dawkins’ forays into philosophy could be called sophomoric were it not a grave insult to most sophomores.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/marapr/1.21.html
4. d. tells us he doesn't like a confrontational approach; but clearly he does. This is what turns his crank, this is what gets his kite to fly. (If he loves science' so much why isn't he working in the lab or in the field?)
5. Dawkins of course doesn't deserve a tiny fraction of the attention he gets. It's a sad commentary on the low intellectual standards of our day that he does. Never since the days of stalin and mao has a buffoon gotten so much ill deserved attention. He's not even a fourth rate thinker. (And he rates far lower as far as civility and decency of any kind goes.)
6. I await his massive tome attacking the evils of communism. (Communism is a basic deduction from materialism; it's called dialectical materialism of course. If god isn't absolute, then the man and the State must be.) I await his book attacking how evil atheism and communism are. I await his book showing how impossible the doctrine of materialism is.
- communism has its own view of the atonement; there the individual must be sacrificed to the state; family members must be killed to atone for the 'crimes' of anti-party rebels; etc. (I await the Dawkins book on the horrors of sacrifice in the communist system.)
- people need to understand that this attack on Christianity is a rationale for tyranny. (i.e. a planned tyranny the societal elite would like to implement.)
- In trying to destroy Christianity (a big goal for a little man) Dawkins is merely following in the footsteps of people from Roman emperors to Philosophers like Voltaire to communist dictators like Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I have a question for him; "Richard, do you really want to go down this path again?"
7. It's a great weariness (at least for me) to respond to a blasphemous atheist like Dawkins. One wonders what good it can possibly do; but yet God (in his word) commands us to answer the skeptic and the naysayer, and so this becomes a duty. The c. is told to tear down every artifice raised up against the word and the person of Christ. I'm not one of those who thinks Dawkins is in any way a superior thinker or writer. [Brits seem especially prone to this bit of thing.] I think he's a buffoon; the classic village atheist. On a purely intellectual level he's not worth a dismissive wave of the hand.
8. A great fallacy we see in Dawkins (and his comic book version of reality) is the pretense that all people are the same. His entire argument depends upon this; upon the claim everyone in the world is identical to Uncle Richie. Nothing could be more fallacious. Christianity teaches that all human beings are unique. If true, this reduces Dawkins to ashes. (The man seems to be such an egomaniac that he really believes he, for reasons unknown to the rest of us, has gotten hold of absolute truth. This is a man living in fantasyland.)
9. Contra Dawkins; the worst idea on earth is materialism (atheism). No worldview (religion) has done more to harm people; nothing else comes close.
- he likes to pretend that 'religion' (which he conveniently never seems to define) is the worst evil on earth. There is no creditable evidence for this. The greatest evil on earth (by magnitudes) is Collectivism. (This, incidentally, is what Dawkins believes in. His self-delusion knows no end.)
10. Dawkins ignores the fact that the worst 'Christians' in history were people only pretending to be Christians. (a la Machiavelli's advice for the prince to appear good. Think George Bush.)