From theology professor Paul-Louis Metzger at Patheos:
Science, Metaphysics and Metaphorical Ladders: When Science is Theology
For those who think that metaphysics and theology are antiquated disciplines that have no place in our scientific age, please think again. Take one prominent contemporary example—Richard Dawkins. Like Freud, he is an anti-theology theologian in disguise. The anti-theological Dawkins presents theological or metaphysical claims. His fundamental thesis that the gene is selfish and that it governs all reality is not a hypotheses that Dawkins could readily jettison on the basis of empirical observations. Rather, it serves as a ruling construct that governs his approach to the data. This is how theology and metaphysics function. In other words, theology and metaphysics function as overarching frameworks that interpret various kinds of data.[1]
Dawkins’ Selfish Gene reflects a metaphysical dogma that rules his biological framework. Systems biologist Denis Noble makes this basic point in The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes.[2] Accounting for Dawkins’ own confession in An Extended Phenotype[3] that there is no experiment that could prove his metaphorical claim of a gene-centered view of reality (that is, the selfish gene),[4] Noble goes on to offer an alternative reading of the biological domain. More.
If a person really believes in the selfish gene, then their science is theology. That’s been the problem all along. Th sfish gene spawned one of the most ridiculous fforts in the hstory of psychology: evolutionary psychology
See also:
Denis Noble on physiology “rocking” evolutionary biology
and
Vid nite: Oxford British biologist Denis Noble debunks neo-Darwinism
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