Professor Dawkins doesn’t seem to know much about Darwin: either what his masterpiece is actually called, or even what he believed about God (he wasn’t an atheist)

‘ ..the researchers discovered proof of a vast filament of material that connects our Milky Way galaxy to nearby clusters of galaxies, which are similarly interconnected to the rest of the universe.’…ordinary matter is driven, like foam on the crest of a wave, into vast interconnecting sheets and filaments stretched over enormous cosmic voids…’
Australian National University News Cosmic thread that binds us revealed Thursday 29 September 2011.
Thanks JB and AC,As far as the square Kilometer array is concerned they are now quoting only 50 times sensitivity.I suppose it depends on what you compare it to and in what wavelength.

Except that Dawkins is not doing what you describe. He has, quite correctly, pointed out that Darwin’s theory, in addition to it being a huge scientific advance (it is not every day that the founding principle of an entire branch of science is discovered) was a philosophical discovery of shattering magnitude.

What Darwin did was to undermine the Teleological Argument as it applies to the complexity and variety of life on earth. He did this by undermining the key premise of the Teleological Argument, which was that something as complex as life had to be designed because there was no natural process which could achieve the same effect.

Darwin described that natural process – evolution by natural selection allied to time in geological quantities.

Dawkins correctly avoids claiming this as a disproof of God, but points out that we no longer have any need of that hypothesis when considering the complexity of life.

I suspect that you would know this had you actually read The God Delusion rather than merely reading reviews of it by Christians who had misrepresented it.

But there are considerable complexities regarding what we’re committed to in believing that there was an original pair. Ed Feser blogged on this: 
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-i.html

 Edward Feser argues in favour of Adam and Eve. Here is one of the paragraphs in his argument that you linked to:
“Now for A-T [Aristotle-Thomism], all material things are composites of form and matter, and ‘soul’ is a technical term for the form of a living thing, specifically.  The soul is that which organizes a living thing’s matter in such a way that it is capable of the operations distinctive of living things.  Since the activities of living things other than human beings are entirely dependent on matter, their souls are themselves dependent on matter, and A-T allows that such souls may therefore have material origins.  But the human soul is different, precisely because it is that which makes us capable not only of material activities like digestion and sensation, but also of immaterial activities like thinking.  Hence it operates, at least in part, apart from matter.  Indeed, unlike the forms of other material things it is a subsistent form, capable of carrying on in existence beyond the death of the body of which it is the form, as a kind of incomplete substance.  For this reason, for A-T the human soul cannot in principle have a material origin.  In fact, it has to be directly created by God whenever a new human being comes into existence.“.

Are you seriously suggesting that this makes logical sense?

Rest assured the religion of atheism listens to things that support their preconceived notions, ignore anything that contradicts this belief, and ostracize those of other beliefs. Much the same thing they accuse Christianity of. Maybe they have a guilty conscience.
Atheism is reforming less like those who just dont believe in God and more like a cult and people like these Dawkins people are deified.

 You are quite right that DM is a preferred model for explanation of the stability and coherence of galaxies.Australian scientists have been in the forefront of the observation of the accelerated expansion of the universe and the proposition of a force that explains it. Their recent sharing of the Nobel prize is a testament to this.Australians also have been finding more of ordinary matter as well.A Monash new graduate found more as well last year.
 But there are stirrings.In a recent unpublished article entitled “The dark matter crisis:falsification of the current standard model of cosmology”Pavel Kroupa makes some interesting claims based on further observation.,he concludes” The Dual Galaxy theorem is falsified by observation and dynamically relevant cold or warm DM on galactic scales cannot exist.It is shown that the standard model of cosmology is incompatible with a large set of other extra galactic observations.Other theoretical solutions to cosmological observations exist,which yield an excellent description of astronomical observations.’..and so it goes
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia [CSIRO Publishing],in press,LaTeX,50 pages,16 figures. Publication date 04/2012
Comment & Blogs
Professor
Dawkins doesn’t seem to know much about Darwin: either what his
masterpiece is actually called, or even what he believed about God (he
wasn’t an atheist)There is, Darwin
said, an ‘impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful
universe … as the result of blind chance or necessity…. I deserve to be
called a Theist’By William Oddie on Wednesday, 18 April 2012In This Article Cardinal George Pell, Charles Darwin, evolution, Giles Fraser, On the Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
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About the author William OddieDr
William Oddie is a leading English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He
edited The Catholic Herald from 1998 to 2004 and is the author of The
Roman Option and Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy. Contact the author
Related PostsDid you know that it is the Times newspaper’s official view that a creator God doesn’t exist? Neither did IDarwinism: is it a threat to the Catholic faith?Today’s Catholic must-reads: 11/04/12Morning Catholic must-reads: 10/04/12Beware the smuggling of atheism into science lessons Dawkins: not as much of an expert on Charles Darwin as he thinksProfessor
Dawkins has been making something of a fool of himself lately (I tried
to find a more charitable way of putting it, but I fear I have failed)
over his knowledge of the works and opinions of Charles Darwin, of whom
he is so well-known as being supposedly the great high priest, or
vicarious presence in our own times. That indispensable website, Protect the Pope,
draws our attention to one occasion on which this was embarrassingly
revealed, which I had previously missed, and which occurred during a
recent debate in Australia between Dawkins and Cardinal Pell.Of
that, more presently. First, though, that wonderful moment of
revelation, when we all discovered that Dawkins couldn’t even say what
the full title of Darwin’s greatest and most quasi-iconic work, On the
Origin of Species, actually was. The circumstances were these. The
modestly entitled Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
(“a clear-thinking oasis”, it calls itself) had commissioned a poll
from Ipsos MORI to discover “the extent to which adults recorded as
Christian in the 2011 UK Census … believe, know about, practise and are
influenced by Christianity, as well as their reasons for having
described themselves as Christian in the Census”. The poll discovered
that “when given four books of the Bible to select from and asked which
was the first book of the New Testament, only 35 per cent could identify
Matthew as the correct answer”. In a discussion with Giles Fraser,
former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dawkins said that an
“astonishing number [of self-identified Christians] couldn’t name the
first book in the New Testament” and that this indicated that they were
“not really Christian at all”: this declaration led to the following
highly amusing piece of dialogue between Dawkins and Fraser, who quite
rightly said that the poll asked “silly little questions” to “trip”
people up:Giles Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of ‘The Origin Of Species’, I’m sure you could tell me that.
Richard Dawkins: Yes I could
Giles Fraser: Go on then.
Richard
Dawkins: On The Origin Of Species.. Uh. With, Oh God, On The Origin Of
Species. There is a subtitle with respect to the preservation of
favoured races in the struggle for life.
Giles Fraser: You’re the
high pope of Darwinism… If you asked people who believed in evolution
that question and you came back and said 2% got it right, it would be
terribly easy for me to go ‘they don’t believe it after all’. It’s just
not fair to ask people these questions. They self-identify as Christians
and I think you should respect that.Now the point
is, surely, that the full title of Darwin’s work, “On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life”, though unwieldy, is highly informative,
in that it doesn’t just tell you roughly what the book is about, it
summarises its entire argument: know the title and you can tell me what
the book says. One would have thought that someone so famous for knowing
what the book says would have no difficulty in remembering the title.
“Oh, God”, replied Dawkins to Giles Fraser (an interesting turn of
phrase under the circumstances); “On The Origin Of Species”, he
desperately continued, “There is a subtitle with respect to the
preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”. But that just
won’t do: it leaves out the most essential part of the title: “by Means
of Natural Selection”: how well does he really know the book?
Or has it just become for him a source of polemic and ideology, like Das
Kapital for Communists, often referred to, never read?On to Professor Dawkins’s next uncomfortable moment,
at the hands of Cardinal Pell. This one is, if anything, even more
embarrassing, since what it draws our attention to is the undeniable
fact that Darwin thought that there was no contradiction whatever
between evolution and the existence of God.The cardinal correctly
declared that Darwin was a theist because he “couldn’t believe that the
immense cosmos and all the beautiful things in the world came about
either by chance or out of necessity”. Dawkins, incredibly, immediately
interjected that this was “just not true”. There was applause (and the
total collapse of Professor Dawkins) when Cardinal Pell instantly
replied: “It’s on page 92 of his autobiography. Go and have a look.”Yes, indeed, it’s certainly worth a look (incidentally, I already knew this passage very well: why didn’t Dawkins?). Here it is; it’s worth reading in full:Although
I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a
considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague
conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in
nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive,
fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can
no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve
shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a
door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of
organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the
course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed
laws. … At the present day the most usual argument for the
existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction
and feelings which are experienced by most persons…. This argument
would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward
conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very
far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward
convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really
exists. The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and
which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not
essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of
sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of
this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence
of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings
excited by music….
Another source of conviction in the existence
of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses
me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty
or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful
universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and
far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus
reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an
intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve
to be called a Theist.Darwin goes on to say that
though “This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time … when I
wrote the Origin of Species”, it subsequently became “weaker”; rather
than a “theist”, Darwin became an “agnostic” but never, so far as I can
discover, an atheist like Dawkins. Whatever the truth of this, it is
certain that at the time he wrote the Origin of Species, he did not
believe that there was any contradiction between belief in the origin of
species by means of natural selection and the existence of a Creator
God who was actually himself involved in the process by which the world
came to be so sublimely what it was: he concluded, he said, that there
was an “extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this
immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of
looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind
chance or necessity”.That sounds very much to me like an idea of
God which is declared by Dawkinsite fundamentalists to be at the very
opposite pole to belief in evolution. Well, it’s clearly not: at any
rate, Darwin certainly didn’t think so: so back to the drawing board,
Dawkins.
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Have you any reference to Dawkins advocating that Darwin’s ambition was to refute any supernatural being?

I’ve only ever seen this accusation from mainly creationists but some non-creationist theists. I’m not aware of any evidence that it was espoused by Dawkins.

Darwin was very aware that his work and theory undermined some theistic viewpoints. Two facts demonstrate this awareness, the full quote that Oddie mentioned part of and the changes in the Origins from edition to edition which show Darwin backing off and diluting some claims because of the quite right fear of a theistic backlash.

And from some of the comments and this article, one can say he foresaw the future so clearly…

 ”The current standard model of cosmology requires the Dual Dwarf Galaxy Theorem to be true.’He discussed the model theorem.He falsifies the theorem by observation.He therefore concludes and ‘show[s] that the  standard model is incompatible with a large set of other extragalactic observations.’ I am not a cosmologist,but I would read this that he thinks he has disproved the SMoC.
“In particular, alone the empirical mass-discrepancy-acceleration correlation constitutes that galactic-scale dynamics cannot be Einsteinian/Newtonian.’
As a lay person in Cosmology I would read this that DM is not a player in the binding together of galaxies or preventing them spinning apart.He thinks there is a better explanation.I have no strong views on this but await with interest the debate.He does describe this as “The dark Matter crisis”.

 ”mature faith” is an oxymoron. Even those who become religious later in life are reaching out for a comfort blanket, and there’s no reason why they should be denied it as long as no one else suffers as a result. There is the snag. For religions to survive from one generation to the next and in competition with other religions, they prescribe suffering. The survival memes explain why you feel that people should be ‘educated’ into your version of your religion and are otherwise uneducated or miseducated, but you don’t really know that yours is the ‘right’ religion and that all the other religions are wrong, so you may be prescribing miseducation yourself.

Some religious people seem to regard lack of religion as just another religion (despite the absurdity of that idea). The point about not taking things on faith is that you take them only when presented with a reasonable amount of evidence and mentally assign levels of certainty based on that evidence (rather than being absolutely certain about something for which you have no evidence). You can see why religions teach that religious faith is a virtue, but it is a lie. Feeding and clothing of the hungry and destitute, for example, does not require religious faith.

 Ill post at the top,see you

‘
Kroupa can”t find DM in the Milky Way’

I see a French group has recently claimed that the effects of DM cannot be seen local to our sun, but they still admit that the orbital velocity of stars in the Milky way are anomalous. 
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hqd2eW2cX6-HPG313C4hFhPqbUxA?docId=CNG.cc51b8b1149b3724b3f352a005a19262.371 
Does Kroupe dispute this?

William Oddie, you’re the second commentator here in recent days to duck the challenge to describe any error of fact or logic in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion. the first was Fr Alexander Lucie Smith.

 In his autobiography, Darwin describes how, the more he thought about it, the less of a theist he became. In trying to suggest that there is no real dichotomy between science and religion, Pell referred to Darwin’s earlier theism. Putting aside the validity of comparing science with the supposed religious beliefs of particular scientists, the relevant consideration is what Darwin thought after giving the matter much consideration, not before. If Pell has read Darwin’s autobiography, then he knows that Darwin moved away from theism, and knows that Darwin’s conclusion did not support religion. To suggest that it did was a lie. Dawkins was correct to say that what Pell said was not true.

So we have Pell deliberately lying, and Dawkins telling the truth, but where is Oddie’s condemnation of Pell? Now look at the assertions in the headline:

1. “Professor Dawkins doesn’t seem to know much about Darwin…”
2. “…either what his masterpiece is actually called…”
3. “…or even what he believed about God…”
4. “…(he wasn’t an atheist)“.

1. It is quite easy to discover that Dawkins knows quite a bit about Darwin.
2. Dawkins does know the title, even though unable to instantly recall the whole thing on one occasion.
3. Dawkins does seem to know that what Pell said was untrue.
4. To state that Darwin was not an atheist is a lie because this is not known.

I think the Catholic Herald owes Dawkins an apology, and that apology should be in the same font size as the headline.

To state that Darwin was not an atheist is a lie because this is not known.

Moreover, the issue of whether or not Darwin was an atheist is a red herring. Pell’s claim was that Darwin was a theist, and Dawkins challenged the truth of that statement. Dawkins made no assertion that Darwin was an atheist, and it is dishonest of Oddie to state either directly or indirectly that Dawkins made that claim.

 Thanks for the link and heads up Ac.I don”t know what the other authors’ views are of each other’s findings of ‘missing DM’.Like a thirsty man in the desert two of them start reaching for water, in the form of a new ‘theory of everything’.Usually when this happens someone mentions string theory.
As an onlooker all I will do is wait for a Scientific American review article and find out the new ‘consensus’.Since this is a religious site may I make a prophecy?
 I think it will take two years.

 Thanks TP.But wait,there’s more.In an article entitled’ Is supersymmetery dead?’in the May Scientific American in the context of super particles, “wherever we look,we see nothing”:If this continues to be the case then there goes dark matter,there goes string theory.
We still await the new consensus theory of everything.

Not sure what sort of sense ‘logical sense’ is, but if you’re asking, ‘Is this a comprehensible point of view?’ the answer is yes.

I suspect your lack of familiarity with the technical vocabulary of hylomorphism is what’s causing you difficulty here, particularly with the point (found in Aquinas and arguably also in Aristotle’s De Anima) that the human soul (as a substantial form) is capable of existing separately from the body. But apart from this, the idea that the soul (or mind if your prefer) is a separate entity from the body is a commonplace of a variety of philosophical dualisms. Certainly, many philosophers would reject dualism as a false view of the mind. (Many wouldn’t.) But that’s very different thing from suggesting it doesn’t make sense.

Suitably raised, I respond that your problem here a) you’ve missed the point of what I was arguing and gone off onto new territory; and b) you’ve not even understood the new territory.

1) Let’s put my original comment in context. I was responding to the claim that that literal belief in an original pair -Adam and Eve- was obviously absurd. I was simply pointing out that what Catholics are committed to (even if that commitment were to the existence of a literal pair) is not as clear cut as was being made out. Feser’s article (broadly) is making the point that such a belief is (eg) compatible with the co-existence of that pair with many others of the same bodily makeup so long as (at one point) two individuals are ensouled in the right way. (So the existence of an original pair -Adam and Eve- is consistent with the existence of a large number of bodily similar but mentally different pre-humans with whom they interbreed -and thus cannot be refuted by (say) showing that we have more than two original ancestors.)

2) Now the objections you are making are not to that point, but to the specifics of Thomist metaphysics which Feser uses in his explanation (eg: your criticism of his definition of the soul is simply a criticism of Aristotle’s definition of soul as the ‘substance as form of a natural body which has life in potentiality’ (De Anima II 1, 412a20–1)). The claim that such metaphysics is circular is well known (and found in Moliere’s Le malade imaginaire) but still wrong. It is in any case irrelevant to my point here: that even a literal belief in Adam and Eve is not as straightforwardly refutable as might be thought. (You could rewrite his claim as a Cartesian dualist and it would still make sense.)

3) On the refutation of Thomist metaphysics, good luck! It’s not religious thinking but metaphysical thinking, so even refuting it would leave Catholicism largely untouched. (I would regard Thomism as the best way of defending and articulating the truths of Catholicism, but it is hardly absolutely essential to it.) In any case, refutation is certainly not the knock down case you seem to think: try David Oderberg’s ‘Real Essentialism’ if you’re feeling strong. This in the end is not a matter of being an ignoramus on theology but a) misunderstanding the nature of my argument and going off on a tangent; and b) whilst on that tangent, being a philosophical ignoramus about the sort of metaphysics you’re criticizing. 

If you could just stop assuming that everyone who is a Catholic is a moron who needs only a few strung together phrases from Dawkins in order to see the light, you’d probably enjoy these forums a lot more and might even have more people listening to you.

1) Why would any Catholic pay attention to the ramblings of someone who went from one idiocy (liberal Protestantism) to another (Dawkinsism)? Fools wander. That’s all that can be said.

2) A great many of the best known Catholic intellectuals were not brought up as Catholics but converted as adults. (Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Dummett etc). So you’ll need an explanation of why they were Catholics other than parental influence. (To end on a rather less elevated level, I was brought up on the sort of fuzzy minded atheism you seem to represent. It’s not really fit food for the adult mind. If you’re going to be an atheist, please at least do it properly rather than thinking that Dawkins knows what he’s talking about.)

3) If you want to penetrate ‘the barrier’, you’re going to have to learn a) what the philosophical and theological  issues are and b) how to deal with them rigorously. Dawkins is a poor guide to this.

I was about to say the same thing, but I saw that you put it quite nicely. What people often are thinking of when they say “you can’t prove a negative” is an argument from ignorance. That asserts that if something can’t be disproved, then it must be true. That of course is a fallacy since that would prove the existence of fairies in addition to God.