Feck wrote:OK so then you assessed the logical and rational strength of trying to claim that Dawkins ,a man whose BUS adverts said Probably and who has said on many occasions that science can never disprove god ......... Has claimed that science has disproved god ? A point I addressed in my first post you ignored .
I never said Dawkins made such a claim, I said he uses the Atheist's Fallacy as a jumping-off point for his diatribes against religion. He neatly avoids being called on it by temporizing in TGD to the extent of saying that God "might" exist, but this is a facile admission that he utterly ignores from there on out. His entire edifice is constructed on his assessment of the "need" for God to exist and his opinion on the unlikelihood of God's existence based on his ideas about how life MIGHT have come to exist in the universe. But he never once provides credible scientific evidence that his model for how life may have begun actually ever occurred, much less has he debunked the notion that the origin of life on earth might just as easily have been the product of intelligent design.
He makes guesses and suppositions based on his understanding of biology and then expects people to simply disregard the possibility of intelligent design because he deems it "unnecessary." However, it is not true that the simplest answer is always the correct answer, and that distortion of Ockham's Razor is constantly amplified and further distorted by the unintelligentisia who misread even Dawkins and come to fallacious conclusions about the origins of life on earth as a result.
Evolution MAY be the cause of life on earth, or it might just as easily be the product of intelligent design. Just because someone posits that the bacterial lancet MIGHT evolve into the bacterial flagellum does not prove that it did so. The arguments made in that regard rely upon the presupposition that evolution is the "preferred" method of organismic change, but it's not ever been demonstrated that a bacterial lancet DID evolve into a bacterial flagellum, and the fact that both the lancet and the flagellum use SOME of the same protein building-blocks is no more proof that one became the other than the existence of 7/16th inch bolts and nuts in both automobile engines and gantry cranes mean that gantry cranes evolved into automobile engines.
It's just as likely that some intelligent agent took those common building-block proteins and assembled them into lancets and flagella as it is that they evolved that way...absent critically robust scientific evidence showing how, exactly, at every step, a bacterial lancet DID (or can) naturally evolve into a flagellum. Similarity does not necessarily connote common origin or purpose.
And let's suppose for a moment that some biologist somewhere manages to deconstruct a lancet and turn it into a flagellum. All that proves is that intelligent design CAN create the latter, not that evolution DID create the latter. One would have to put a bunch of bacteria with lancets in a petri dish and observe them for 20 million years to have any certainty that such a thing could actually happen in nature. Even then, there's Heisenberg to contend with.
So, what I'm saying is that all Dawkins does, or can do, is make educated guesses and state his opinions. Nothing he says has any rational strength in proving or disproving the existence of God, and everyone needs to acknowledge this objective fact and admit that he's not some sort of Atheist saint who is going to save the world from religion. He's a religion-hating pundit, nothing more, and the world's seen millions of them and religion endures nonetheless. I expect religion will endure Richard Dawkins as well.
But, if gullible, ignorant Atheists want to provide him with a nice living buying his books and going to his lectures, I'm fine with that. There's a sucker born every minute, and a fool and his money are soon parted.
Nobody has made the argument you seek to destroy and at best your destruction even of that argument is weak .
Actually, many thousands of people have made that argument, including a large number at Rat Skep. Not so much here.
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