Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

From: Little known facts about the intelligent design community … we have a reb … um, yeah … we do

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In the person of Rabbi Moshe Averick, whose book, Nonsense of the Highest Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist, has merited the attention of someone or other at Richard Dawkins’s Foundation’s Web site, who is looking for help in refuting the Reb.

Moshe offers, “Turns out Richard Dawkins’ watchmaker has 20/20 vision after all.”

In his turn, the Reb also identifies a Dawkins schoolboy howler, in the opinion of colleagues: An “all ya gotta do is … ” origin of life. On the same page, we also learn from Robert Shapiro:

SHAPIRO: Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful book, but the place where he absolutely blew it was in a section on the origin of life. He took all of the supposed irreducible complexity and said that natural selection can explain all this, you need no other rule. But then when it gets to how does one get to natural selection, he has no other recourse — he’s not a chemist — than to invoke some improbable event; he says that we need a vast improbable event and he goes anthropic and says, well maybe there are many universes and we happen to be the lucky one.

But the same type of reasoning that Richard Dawkins uses to explain evolution could apply equally well to what could be called thermo-dynamic evolution. In fact natural selection may just be one special case of thermo-dynamic evolution; there may be other forms of evolution undetected by us. So his schoolboy howler is the section on the origin of life. He writes brilliantly elsewhere. If you want to write that to him, Freeman — He hasn’t written an email to me; I keep my hands off evolution, I don’t claim to know very much about it.

Well then, Shapiro is not in the running to be Mr. Pop Science.

I’d bet on the Reb and am downloading his book to my Kindle.

By the way, this is not Bash Dawkins Day. It’s just that the guy’s like Paris Hilton: He keeps popping up in the news all the time, everywhere but in science journals. Maybe that’s what’s beginning to annoy a lot of his colleagues as Reb Moshe astutely observes.

(Note: We probably, of course, have other rebs. I’m just a lay Catholic, don’t rely on me for definitive information about the chaplaincy around here.)

Comments
Way to go Denyse, I've been a fan for years. Good luck with your new book.joe jensen
February 18, 2011
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