I was more than amused to read that the English polemicist Richard Dawkins likened Senator Fielding, to the Senator’s disadvantage, to an ‘earthworm’in his (Dawkins) recent outing in Melbournes festival of atheism.
My amusement was not for Dawkins, for his rapier wit, or delightful use of language; none of which was in evidence in the jibe, but against him; and for Fielding.
The background to this is that on an ABC TV program, Sen. Fielding aligned himself with those who believe that the creation is but a few thousand years old, as against the those who think that the cosmos, and earth to boot, are many billions of years old.
Dawkins was on the same program and declared the young age to be a ‘non-trivial error’, akin to thinking that the United States was only 8 metres from coast to coast.
I agree, it is a non-trivial error, but on the other foot. Dawkins’ position is akin to thinking that the United States is wider than the Earth!
But my amusement?
Dawkins, if you’ve not detected, or do not know, adheres at least implicitly to philosophical materialism: he thinks, or so it seems, that what exists is only material, or the result of material; thus mind is an epiphenomenon of matter, as is language and, for that matter, grand opera; but so, of course, are love, intellect, and ideas.
When thinking of this, I think of Darwin’s recursive defeater; he observed something along the lines that if his idea of evolution was the result of random changes in a monkey’s brain, then what would commend it to our attention: the whole of our world becomes just a jangle of atoms aimlessly rearranged by mute forces. Whence ‘aimfulness’ when all that is real is mere aimlessness? How, then does anything have any meaning: everything has the same status and is finally a value-free pile of material; and nothing else.
So Dawkins’ comparing Fielding to an earthworm falls flat. What after all, is the basis for comparing intelligence in a material world where random material action has caused everything? With the only final point of reference being material, Dawkins can say nothing meaningful about either himself or Fielding and so his claim has no content, unless he can explain how value is derived from material when there is no reference for value within a material universe and no source outside it.
