I would not have known, if I hadn’t read Suzan Mazur’s The Altenberg 16 (on the growing collapse of Darwinism): While speaking at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society meeting one Saturday night (March 12, 2008) on his book, The God Delusion, as she tells it, Richard Dawkins
admitted to being “guilty” of viewing Darwinism as a kind of religion and vowed to “reform”
Having a natural interest in reform, I would be most interested to learn of any evidence for this one. But now this, from Mazur:
(no one was allowed to tape Dawkins’ confession, however, with organizers of the event threatening to march offenders around the corner to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). (p 97)
Can’t help wondering whether the warning was principally aimed at Mazur. Certainly, in her book, she manages to put a number of Darwin devotees and their enablers, whom the New York Times considers important authorities for no particularly good reason, in a much less flattering light than they are used to.
It seems that Mazur had met up with Dawkins the night before at a book signing. On self-organization theory (to which Mazur is partial), he noted,
… it absolutely neglects the question where does the illusion of design come from? Where do animals and plants get this powerful impression that they have been brilliantly designed for a purpose? Where does that come from? (p. 99)
Bzzzz!! Short circuit.
The self-organization (theory of form) guys believe that life forms can self-organize, so they don’t think that design is an illusion at all. It’s really there, but the life forms did it themselves, according to laws of physics. Myself, I don’t see how their idea works. But Dawkins’ idea works even less, co-opting a conservative force like natural selection to create huge amounts of new information.
Note that Dawkins is attempting to make his own problems into everybody’s problems. Figures the New York Times would like him.
Mazur’s is the book you need to get and read now.