I wanted to thank Warren for alerting us to Roy Williams’ book.
I’ve been in Canberra for past week, but hope to finish David Stove’s “Darwinian Fairytales” by weekend and will post a review of the book before going on to reread John Lennox’s book. I intend posting a review on this as well. Stove died in 1994 and so was only able to critique the earlier works of Dawkins, viz, “The Selfish Gene” and its successors whilst Lennox is right up to date.
I have also got copies of Anthony Flew’s “There is a God”, John F Haught’s “God and the New Atheism, “The Truth behind the New Atheism” by David Marshall and Keith Ward’s “Is Religion Dangerous”.
Thankfully they are all around the 200 page mark - if people can’t say what they want to say in 200 pages they are either padding or have too much spare time on their hands (Dawkins take note!), Haught manages just 100 pages but I read a terrific article by him which induced me to order the book.
G’day David, Your quest to rebuff all the atheist books has my sympathy and support. I have noticed one book that has just appeared, and as yet I don’t think it has been mentioned in your list. It is Mark Vernons “After Atheism”. What is perhaps different about this book is that he was an Anglican priest for 3 yrs and has a lot to say about his training in the shadow of Durhum Cathederal.
He passed from a priest to an evangelical athiest to an agnostic. In his intro he says he “ longed to connect the mysteries”. Then as a priest he found people wanted “ security rather than challenge” and spent his time monitoring “who believed what” and got buried in “hatch, match and dispatch” routine and stifling orthodoxy.
It seems to me that this priest was in too much of a hurry. I don’t care what they stuff into students at theological college, time and experience is the thing that allows the grace of God to hit its mark,IMO.
David Stove was a philosopher who taught at both UNSW and Sydney University. He was born at Moree in 1927 and completed Darwinian Fairytales shortly before in died in 1994. This meant he was fully conversant with Richard Dawkins’ earlier works.
The book has been beautifully reprinted (alas with many typos) with the recent outpouring of atheist literature and Dawkins’ The God Delusion in particular in mind.
The point is not that Stove is anti atheist but that he saw Darwinism as a “mere festering mass of errors”, especially in relation to humankind.
Stove, by his own testimony, over a long period devoured books on evolution by the truckload (“hundreds” he says), subjecting them to critical analysis. The book badly fails the Palmer Perfection Principle by being over 300 pages long, but the length is compensated for by being eminently readable. The length is the result of his analysis of evolution “truths” being incredibly painstaking (“prolix” and even “fastidious” come to mind). However this was relieved by much satirical poking of fun at Darwinists with Richard Dawkins being a particular favourite in this regard. Stove has a sceptical cast of mind and mostly gentle sarcasm is never far away. Actually I found this aspect quite attractive, but then I am myself a sceptic, a (CO2 induced) climate change sceptic!
A good example appears on the very last page in his recounting some comments of Gwen Raverat, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter about her numerous Darwin relatives that the Darwins in general “were quite unable to understand the minds of the poor, the wicked, or the religious”. Stove says “this is most profoundly true”, not only of Darwin himself but of all the purest Darwinians, naming Richard Dawkins as one such pure Darwinian. Stove concludes: “And it means of course, a rather large gap in their understanding of human life; since the poor, the wicked, and the religious, must make up, on any estimate, at least three quarters of all human beings.”
I think this point, certainly in relation to the religious, was what really made me exceptionally annoyed about The God Delusion. We Christians spend hours carefully considering the arguments of the atheists but they do not return the compliment.
They are abysmally ignorant of the Bible’s plot line, though they have intimate knowledge of certain chapters in Leviticus in which they out-fundamentalise the Christian fundamentalist; they show no appreciation of ever having tried to listen to, question, debate an orthodox Christian; to the extent that they consult theologians their authorities are Elaine Pagels, Bishop Spong and Bart Ehrman; the history of the West, certainly pre-Enlightenment history is a trail of Christian inspired and realised bloodshed, whilst those paraded through their books to be mocked as your typical run-of-mill Christian are for the most part eccentric, malevolent, avaricious, sexually depraved deviants, in short your typical Sydney Anglican Forum contributor. However I digress.
Stove is not a Christian and at times makes uncomplimentary remarks about Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity and Calvinism, but these things can be easily glossed over as throw away lines much like the travel worn man might toss some crumbs into the crowd of thronging importunates. In other words in demolishing Darwin and Dawkins it doesn’t pay to show sympathy to the theist position.
When I say “demolish Darwin and Dawkins” I do mean that, but with this caveat.
Stove clearly admires Darwin as a thinker (though not Dawkins). He believed that it was “overwhelmingly probable” that we humans evolved from some other and that natural selection was probably the route. Having said that, he is also quite happy to say, “I believe that neo-Darwinism, though a very good approximation to truth and completeness for many of the simplest organisms, is an extremely poor approximation in the case of our own species. Or rather to tell the truth, I think that it is, at least in the hands of some of its most confident and influential advocates, a ridiculous slander on human beings” (p33). Elsewhere it is “a grotesque travesty of the truth” (p39). On p96 he informs us that “it is rational to conclude that the Darwinian theory of evolution is false”.
In my next post which may be tomorrow but in truth there’s a lot on, so maybe next Wednesday Thursday I will review the content of the 11 essays in one go, though word limits may require several parts.
I do regard Stove’s book as very significant. His critique of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is compelling and sometime or other I should go back to The God Delusion to see whether Dawkins has taken on board Stove’s critique. I checked Dawkins’ website and found no references to Stove or Darwinian Fairytales. But then it is often best to ignore telling critiques, saves time and bother and besides, true believers don’t want to know.
I agree Janice. It reminded me of something Johnson wrote, to the effect that evolutionism is not really science, it is a philosophy - a logical deduction from atheism. IF there is no God, then something like evolution MUST be true. I think that is the position of Dawkin and the other authors David is analyzing. or they would say more firmly, BECAUSE there is no God....
I’ve been reading Francis Collins’ “The Language of God” and I really have to say that it’s outdated and illogical. For instance, on the one hand (on page 94) he implies, regarding the “Cambrian explosion” that the reason we don’t have a fossil record of the ancestors of these Cambrian creatures is that the circumstances were not suitable for fossil formation. Yet on the other hand he says (on page 95) that “current evidence”, i.e., the lack of fossil evidence, “suggests that the land remained barren until about 400 million years ago”. But that could be explained by saying what he said before, i.e., that the circumstances weren’t suitable for fossil formation. Which means that we can know nothing about whether the land was barren or not barren.
And then he rabbits on about the meteor, the Yucatan peninsula and the extinction of the dinosaurs. Maybe the book was published before people started questioning that hypothesis.
I suppose I will continue reading Collins’ book as a matter of duty. One ought to keep oneself informed about what the opposition is saying. But it’s boring, boring, boring.
Hi David
Here’s what I consider to be a great video which analyses the rhetoric of Darwin.
rgds
Derek
Hi Derek,
When I clicked for the video, my computer went browsing and came up with FREE 14-day Trial RealPlayer SuperPass - is this what I need to do?
David
Hi David
Well the movie uses “RealPlayer” software (it’s like Windows Media player, or QuickTime, just by a different company ...). If you don’t have “RealPlayer” installed, just follow the instructions it gave you to download and install the software - after the software is installed, the link should work.
(edit: Here’s one place you can download the software from if you have trouble.)
If you want to get an insight into the minds of (generally young) atheists and near atheists/God haters, Barney Zwartz runs a great blog
His current topic is “Oedipal atheists” (you may have to scroll down if he has added another topic) - he attracts the atheists like bees to a honey pot. Apart from being instructive, I reckon Barney is having a great ministry of engaging these kinds of people, pushing their protective envelopes.
The Vitz article he draws attention to is well worth reading.
I have entered several times in the past, but I warn you if inclined to enter, it can get pretty hot in the kitchen!
What follows is my review of David Stove’s “Darwinian Fairytales”, most recently published by Encounter Books (2006) ISBN 1-59403-140-1
In approaching Stove’s work it is worth noting that he is not a Christian. He has great admiration for Darwin, but thinks his theory of evolution doesn’t work for the higher orders, especially man. He reviews Darwinism from the perspective of a philosopher with a long and deep interest in the presentation and evidence for the theory. Furthermore he wrote the book 15 years ago, though it is by no means clear to me that he is ‘out of date’.
There are eleven essays of unequal length (between 10 and 50 pages) which proceed in more or less a logical fashion.
In his preface to the 1994 edition, Stove avers (and I quote because the quotes give the ‘flavour’ of the man),
This is an anti-Darwinism book. It is written both against the Darwinism of Darwin and his nineteenth-century disciples, and against the Darwinism of such influential twentieth-century Darwinians as G. C. Williams and W. D. Hamilton and their disciples. My object is to show that Darwinism is not true: not true, at any rate, of our species. If it is true, or near enough true, of sponges, snakes, flies, or whatever, I do not mind that. What I do mind is, its being supposed to be true of man.
Concerning his own qualifications,
I should also say here that I have no professional qualifications of any kind for writing about Darwinism. I am not a biologist: merely a former professional philosopher, who happens to have both 40 odd years’ acquaintance with Darwinian literature and a strong distaste for ridiculous slanders on our species. These are evidently not ideal qualifications for criticizing Darwinian views of man. But on the other hand, Darwinism is not yet so arcane a branch of science that criticism of it by an outsider can be automatically assumed to be incompetent.
The first essay is “Darwin’s Dilemma”, ie that if Darwin’s theory were true then there ought to be in every species a constat and unremitting battle for survival with few winners, which is plainly not the case, certainly not as far as the human race is concerned.
This inconsistency (‘dilemma’) has not gone unnoticed by Darwinians who have sought to escape by making use of one or other of three defences, called by Stove ‘the Cave man way out’, ‘the Hard Man’ and ‘the Soft Man’.
‘The Cave man way out’ (following TH Huxley) is to admit that that human life is no longer the way that Darwin predicted but to insist it used to be like that. To argue this way is of course inconsistent with Darwinism for if the theory is true, no species ever escapes from the process of natural selection. But not only that, the whole idea of cave men surviving the brutal forces of natural selection is incomprehensible:
“But no tribe of human beings could possibly exist on these terms. Such a tribe could not raise a second generation: the helplessness of the human young is too extreme and prolonged.” (p4)
and,
“the human race could not possibly exist now, unless cooperation had always been stronger than competition, both between women and their children, and between men and the children and women whom they protect and provide for.” (p9)
The contradiction at the heart of the ‘Cave Man way out’ is to hold Darwinism as true, yet not true of our species now.
‘The Hard Man’ defence espoused by Herbert Spencer and all subsequent ‘social Darwinists’ basically say stuff and nonsense to the Cave Men. Despite all appearances to the contrary,
“Underneath the veneer of civilization, the Hard Man says, and even under the placid surface of everyday domesticity, human life is really just as constant and fierce a struggle for survival as is the life of every other species.” (p10)
It is easy to see where the Hard Men lead to: no care of the sick, the old, the poor, the afflicted. Reality of course bites , so whereas according to the Hard Man, a hospital is inconceivable, it is injurious to our species, whilst Governments are hallucinations, according to the Hard Man they are harmful. Not hard to see that eugenics arose amongst the Hard Me and Hitler as their apogee.
(Interesting how the new atheists never refer to their eugenic past)
“The Soft Man” is, says, Stove, you and me most of the time, freezing when we remember the hardest of all the Darwinian Hard Men but quietly agreeing that encouraging some of ‘the worst types’ to breed is a great folly.
In the second essay 2, “Where Darwin first went wrong about man”, Stove, having summarised pre Darwin thinking on evolution says,
‘….. it was in fact left to Charles Darwin to say, in ‘859, clearly and consistently and without the introduction of any extraneous matter, that all existing species have evolved from earlier ones. He expressly included man in this generalization. But at the same time—it should be remembered—he also took care to say, in The Origin of Species, not one word more on the subject of that interesting species.’ (p22)
This chapter spends time with Darwin’s cod and pine and Malthus’ theories on population, noting how Darwin took on board the notion that:
……that any population of organisms is always pressing upon, or tending to multiply beyond, its supply of food; in other words, that every organic population is always as large as the available food permits, or else is rapidly approaching its limit. (p34)
Stove quotes many examples from the animal world to show that this is simply not true,
“it is extravagantly wide of the truth” (p46)
.
Stove has considerable fun listing all the means by which our species limits its reproduction: contraception, abortions, monasticism and asceticism, abhorrence of incest, the failure of the most gifted to marry, killing of young men in wars, homosexuality and so on.
Stove concludes:
For populations of pines, cods, and countless other species, it is no doubt a useful approximation to the truth, to say that they always blindly and quickly multiply up to the numbers that there is food to support. But by the time one gets to man, it is a grotesque travesty of the truth to say this. Human life is full of opportunities for reproduction which the supply of food would permit, but which are not taken in fact. (p39)
The third essay, “But what about pestilence, and all that” is something of a digression to answer the challenge, “Darwin and Malthus knew about famine, war, pestilence”
Yes, says Stove they make reference to it but these other matters are of small account.
Does the preceding essay, then, rest on a misrepresentation of Darwin and Malthus? Were my criticisms wasted on mere men of straw? No. The reason is this: that although Darwin and Mal thus often acknowledged the existence of checks to population other than limited food, they also believed that all these other checks are of negligible importance, compared with the check imposed by limited food. In other words they believed that, as near as makes no difference, the size of an organic population does depend only on its supply of food. (p48)
The fourth essay is entitled, “Population, Privilege, and Malthus’ Retreat. There are no markings for this chapter in my copy of Stove’s book. Either the argument didn’t overly impress or I fell asleep during reading or else the bookmark slipped a chapter forward.
This is a chapter that basically recaps the previous two chapters, but adds a further criticism of the Malthus-Darwin principle of population.
It starts by saying that people who think Malthus was warning humanity of catastrophic over population have misread him totally. Malthus who wrote the first edition of his tract about the time of the French Revolution and was utterly opposed to its principles, thought in fact that subject to gestation periods and times for sexual activity, population (of any species) increases immediately food does, and exactly as much as the increased food allows.
Malthus understood that that in spite of this tendency to increase, the increase is usually spasmodic, slow or not at all and he put the reasons down in the case of humans to misery (famine, war and pestilence) and vice (infanticide, homosexuality, etc)
The additional more subtle reason for why the Malthus-Darwin hypothesis is not true, follows from Stove’s summary of Malthus’ argument:
In plain English: other things equal, and on the average, people who are less miserable (or more privileged) have more children than people who are more miserable (or less privileged). (p63)
It is this conclusion from Malthus and Darwin that is plain wrong:
But this is not at all what we find in fact, either in history or in our own observations of everyday life. It is more nearly the very opposite of it. The words of a vulgar American song of the 1930S, that
The rich get rich
And the poor get children (p63)
Stove then illustrates from history and observation that the Malthus-Darwin hypothesis is insupportable, concluding,
….there is one fact which does emerge from human history with unvarying insistence, and it is a fact which is fatal to the Ma theory: that the natural rate of human increase is repressed the more, not where the misery due to famine, war, and pestilence falls more heavily, but precisely where it falls more lightly. (p67)
You would need to read the chapter for his evidence but (re)reading it I find it compelling.
Chapter 5 is the last chapter before we meet Dawkins and The Selfish Gene and it is entitled “A Horse in the Bathroom, or the Struggle for Life”
The point of this chapter is that whereas if the Darwinian explanation is true there ought to be a constant struggle for life going on, when in fact,
in our species at any rate, no such struggle is observable. (p77)
Stove says that if clever people like Darwin saw this objection,
They never told the public what (their replies) were. Darwin not only never replied in print to this obvious objection: he never directly adverted to it at all. (p77)
The closest says Stove he came to refer to the objection was at the start of Chapter 3 of The Origin of Species, where “the absence of an observable struggle for life in the case of humans” is dismissed by noting that what his explanation predicts is not observable anywhere else either!
Almost everything that could be wrong is wrong with this reply of Darwin ……. It is an unsatisfactory way of defending a scientific theory… (p79)
Not only is Darwin’s response an unsatisfactory way of defending its theory, but his response is factually wrong as well.
This is where Stove’s critique is both clever and humorous and he sustains the argument over many entertaining pages, and I did stay awake because this chapter is heavily marked in my copy of the book.
The factual misconception lying in the Darwinian explanation is “the implication that child mortality is about the same in all species, or at least is tremendously high in all” In species such as cod and pines, the mortality rate is 99%+.
This says Stove is ridiculous, Maybe not for cod and pines, but certainly ridiculous for birds and elephants and certainly for humans!
Stove concedes something of a struggle for life “among gulls, rabbits and weeds” (p82), but where among humans? Stove will not allow the Darwinian to recount stories of hypothetical, imaginary past struggles among humans (the cave man defence).
He quotes Darwin saying in defence of his theory, that “each species, even where it most abounds, is constantly suffering enormous destruction at some period of life, from enemies or from competitors for the same place or food.” (p85). Stove manages to derive a figure of 80% child mortality from Darwin in humans and then says,
….in more than forty years extensive reading in the literature of Darwinism and its critics, I have never come across a single allusion to the fact that the Darwinian theory does contain this incredible proposition.
…..
The real reason why Darwin (and others) enormously overestimated the rate of child mortality in humans is quite obvious, and lies right under our noses. They did so under the compulsion of a theory. (p92,94)
Needless to say Stove has no difficulty in showing that Darwin’s predictions on infant mortality whether for domestic or semi domestic animals as well as humans has at no time past or present reached the level required by his theory.
Stove does return to the Darwinian theme of the struggle to life, and so should we in our apologetic against the new atheists, to ram home the point of how influential the theme has been for American capitalists, Adolf Hitler and Communism.
Listen to these concluding comments:
…it is per obvious that accepting Darwin’s theory of a universal struggle for life must tend to strengthen whatever tendencies people had beforehand to selfishness and domineering behaviour towards their fellow humans. Hence it must tend to make them worse than they were before, and more likely to commit crimes: especially crimes of rapacity, or of cruelty, or of dominance for the sake of dominance. (p109)
Stove draws the following conclusion my quote at the end of the previous post:
The Darwinian theory of evolution is an incitement to crime: that is simply a fact. (p109)
Essay 6, “Tax and the Selfish Girl, or Does ‘Altruism’ Need Inverted Commas” at 57 pages is enough to test the patience of any saint who frequents this thread.
This chapter is an interesting one, bordering on what is as much a theological discussion as anything else. Is man innately good or “altruistic” as Stove will argue or is (s)he selfish?
I wonder what the initial reaction to this question is on the part of those reading the post?
I think the Christian position is that we were created good, indeed “very good” as the Good Book says. That must be our starting point. (OK don’t get all thingy with me and quibble about what Augustine said, because I believe that too). Sin of course entered and we know from our own experience and life as well as from the Word and human history, the truth of Matt 15:10-15, Roms 3:9f, etc. The entrance of sin however though it has disfigured the image of God in man has never obliterated it and we know that just as surely as the justified redeemed Christian is as never as good as we might hope him to be, so the reprobate is never as bad as we expect him to be and according to Dawkins et al may in fact prove a better man than your bulk standard Christian, or in the case of Christopher Hitchens, the sainted Theresa of Calcutta herself.
Stove begins the sixth essay by drawing attention to the widespread belief in society that men, and it is men in particular who subscribe to this view of intrinsic human selfishness. This allows him to point out the strong affinity between the Darwinian theory of evolution and the belief in universal selfishness. This then leads him to introduce us to the socio-biologists (read Dawkins et al). As an aside Stove makes the point that Darwin did not himself embrace the selfish theory of human nature for political and common sense reasons, which fact leads into a discussion of altruism, a problem in Stove’s view, though an ignored problem, for Darwinism.
A deception practiced by socio-biologists is that they openly espouse selfishness while at the same time espousing altruism
Listen to Stove:
I hasten to add, in order to be fair to (Prof EO) Wilson and Dawkins, that they, in marked contrast to some other sociobiologists, actually approve of human altruism. Far from writing about it with cynicism or even incredulity, they make it quite clear that they think there should be more of it.’ Well, according to their own account, there could not possibly be less, since there could not be any at all. We can therefore only ascribe these authors’ enthusiasm for altruism to an amiable inconsistency on their part. (p120)
Stove sets the argument between Dawkins and himself this way:
Human selfishness goes very deep and extends very far. But that is obvious, and not in dispute. It needs no expensive education in biological science to teach us that; nor did we have to wait to learn it from the recent examples of draft dodgers, feminists, or the business virtuosos in dog eat dog and dirty tricks. The question is, whether there is not also an opposite side to human beings—an unselfish or altruistic side—which also goes very deep and extends very far. The sociobiologists say there is not. I say there is. (p124)
Stove mounts a defence for altruism, first establishing the our preference as humans to mingle together and to talk as precursors to altruism.
He notes the way in which people agglomerate into villages, towns and cities and how once a certain size and complexity is reached each particular society develops groups for specialised social functions: the military function, the religious and the medical. The point he makes is that the existence of such groups is inconsistent with the selfish theory of human nature.
What s more natural, he asks, “than the existence of an army, a priesthood and a medical profession” (p129)
Stove fleshes all this out and then on p135 goes on to point out when precisely it is that the selfish theory flourishes.
The selfish theory (as I implied earlier) flourishes always and only in periods of Enlightenment. The first victims of Enlightenment, and the most important ones, are (of course) priests. The next victims of Enlightenment, and the next most important ones, are kings: especially kings in their martial capacity.
…..
But alas, (the) Enlightenment is not only irreversible but insatiable, and proceeds inexorably to devour its own children. It cannot stop with the “unmasking” of priests and kings as being entirely selfish: it must proceed to disclosing that everyone is entirely selfish. (p135)
As to the question of why the selfish theory, Stove has this to say:
The selfish theory of human nature was always explicitly intended by its adherents to explode the belief, assiduously cultivated by priests and other obscurantists, that a vast gulf separates our species from all other animals. It was intended, as Darwinism was always intended, to bridge the gap between man and the animals, to mortify human self-importance, and to “cut us down to size.” Now isn’t that just too bad? Because a vast gulf does separate us from all other animals, in point of altruism, as in point of intelligence. That is simply a fact, and a very obvious one, even if it has been stated by a billion obscurantists. (p141)
But surely Dawkins et al will allow room for altruism?
This is where Stove takes us to the notion of “veneer”:
According to selfish theorists, these cases, in which people condemn others to death in order to save their own lives, are exceptional only in that the veil or veneer which usually disguises human selfishness is for a moment stripped away. The selfish theorist identifies this veil or veneer with the demands for self- restraint, unselfishness, and cooperation which every human society imposes upon its members. But below this veneer, the selfish theorist says, human beings, even the most highly civilized ones, are really just as selfish as savages, sharks, or wolves, and will always reveal themselves as such when circumstances, such as torture or starvation, remove all the pretences and the superficial amenities of ordinary social life. (p145)
This veneer idea, no matter how widespread and longstanding its acceptance, is false says Stove.
Stove’s argument has a number of strands to it.
First, if the members of every species are engaged in a battle for survival there was no place ever for altruism:
“how could even the least bit of morality or of altruism have escaped being eliminated by natural selection?” (p150)
Second, consider,
our stupendous present expenditure of money and effort on public health, education, unemployment relief, and the rest (p150)
Thirdly, if the veneer stripped away reveals savages, then the past 100 yrs of anthropology have revealed
the differences between us and “savages”, whatever it may consist in, certainly does not consist in their being overtly selfish, anarchic and non moral while we are covertly so (p156)
All of this is substantiated in various illuminating ways.
Stove does not shy away from, the argument that given sufficient pressure, human beings will do bad things.
How does he respond?
His response takes note of the inherent selfishness of the infant, but then goes on:
Adults are not hiding their infantile selfishness: they have grown out of it, that’s all. They may, indeed, be carried back to it, by torture or starvation. But so they may also be by, for example, brain damage suffered in a car accident. Yet no sane person would say, concerning a normal adult who has been “infantilized” by a car accident, that we now see him as he really was just before the accident happened. (p168)
That our infants survive proves, says Stove, how unselfish and helpful adults are toward them.
… our species, even apart from kinship, is sharply distinguished from all other animals by being in fact hopelessly addicted to altruism. (p170)
The opinions expressed in this forum belong to the individual posting the message and may not represent the view of the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church. Click here to read the Posting Policy.
Everyone is welcome on our forums, but please keep comments on-topic and civil. Any flaming or general nastiness will be deleted. No unsolicited advertising is allowed. All comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc. related to the forums should be directed to Robert Moller. Click here to read our complete Posting Policy.
Get the latest Sydney stories, Culture and Indepth on your mobile device. Visit sydang.mobi
