Richard Weikart: Darwinian philosopher embraces Darwinism as a religion

3 Replies to “Richard Weikart: Darwinian philosopher embraces Darwinism as a religion”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   September 23, 2019 at 5:19 am

   as to:

   “If the facts are failing Darwinism and smart people are now safe to just plain doubt the claims of people like Dawkins and Ruse, what is left but blind faith?”

   A few quotes to that effect:

   Atheism,,, is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith. – David Bentley Hart
   God, Gods, and Fairies by David Bentley Hart – June 2013
   Excerpt: All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be described there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments.
   Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which both experience and reason say is an ensemble of ontological contingencies, can exist entirely of itself, without any absolute source of actuality. It requires also that one resign oneself to an ultimate irrationalism: For the one reality that naturalism can never logically encompass is the very existence of nature (nature being, by definition, that which already exists); it is a philosophy, therefore, surrounded, permeated, and exceeded by a truth that is always already super naturam, and yet a philosophy that one cannot seriously entertain except by scrupulously refusing to recognize this.
   It is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content—it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic—but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.
   https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/06/god-gods-and-fairies

   Atheism and the remarkable faith of the atomist – by Dave Armstrong • May 12, 2016
   Excerpt: The atheist places extraordinary faith in matter — arguably far more faith than we place in God, because it is much more difficult to explain everything that “god-matter” does using science alone.
   Indeed, this is a faith of a non-rational, almost childlike kind. It is quite ironic, then, to hear the constant charge that we Christians have a blind, “fairy tale,” gullible faith, as opposed to the self-described “rational, intellectual and sophisticated” atheist.
   In reality, atheistic belief is [see my explanatory “disclaimer” at the end] a kind of polytheistic idolatry of the crudest, most primitive sort. The ancient Babylonians, Philistines, Aztecs, and other groups believed that their silver amulets and wooden idols could make the sun shine, defeat an enemy or cause crops to flourish. The polytheistic materialist, on the other hand, believes trillions of “atom-gods” and their distant relatives, the “cell-gods,” make everything in the universe occur by their own power, possessed eternally either in full or (who knows how?) in inevitably unfolding potentiality.
   One might call this (to coin a phrase) Atomism (“belief that the atom is god”). To the atomist, trillions of omnipotent, omniscient atoms can do absolutely everything that the Christian God can do, and for little or no reason that anyone can understand (i.e., why and how the atom-god came to possess such powers in the first place). The atomist openly and unreservedly worships these trillions of gods, with the most perfect, trusting, non-rational faith. He or she is what sociologists call a “true believer.”
   http://www.themichigancatholic.....h-atomist/

   Evolution Requires Lots Of Purposely Blind Faith Pro Creation It’s Easier To Believe In God Than Darwin. – March 13, 1998
   Excerpt: By blind faith, neo-Darwinists believe all that exists came from … what? A cosmic accident? That assumption fails scientific muster because it can’t be tested, observed or proved. By faith, they contend inorganic matter in a primordial ooze spawned a living organism – against impossible odds calculated by mathematicians at one in 10 to the 40,000th power. By faith, evolutionists believe the first living cell figured out the complicated code to duplicate itself and eventually played both Adam and Eve to complex life forms. Finally, they cling to their faith despite admissions from prominent evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould that there’s no fossil record to back it up. In lieu of missing links, they offer as evidence minor variations within species, like the sizes of finch beaks on the Galapagos Islands.
   Maybe this blind faith in illogical hypotheses is why only 9 percent of Americans believe in unabashed evolution – a random, godless process. This, despite decades of being force fed evolutionary propaganda in public schools. And maybe it’s why nine out of 10 of us still believe in a divine designer, whether we hold that God started the ball rolling and let things evolve or that he created all. Most of us have the common sense described in Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
   https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1998/mar/13/evolution-requires-lots-of-purposely-blind-faith/

   I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist – (Geisler, Turek)
   Summary
   The less evidence you have to support your position, the more faith you need to believe it. Faith covers a gap in knowledge. The authors of this book claim that atheists have less evidence to support their beliefs than Christians do. That means they require
   more faith to be an atheist than many people do to be a Christian.
   https://gracelead.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/faith-atheist-summary.pdf
2. 2
   Seversky says:

   September 23, 2019 at 10:01 am

   So, if Weikart classifies “Darwinism” as a religion, does he mean that it is thereby a better or worse way of “knowing”?
3. 3
   ET says:

   September 23, 2019 at 12:05 pm

   Seeing that Darwinism hasn’t led to any knowledge it is obvious it isn’t a way of knowing.