Suffocating On Mount Improbable

By Bud Stark

This book is an attempt to reestablish a hope that the universe is somehow directed, among students of evolution who have turned to atheism. To do that, one must confront Richard Dawkins of Oxford University. He holds the atheistic command in the battle between random biological evolution and biological directedness whom some call intelligent design. He holds the command but not the science. Dawkins is an atheist first, and a Neo-Darwinist second, for his atheism is a belief, a religion. Absent Darwin he is logically thrown back on an intelligently designed universe. His modus operandi for protecting his belief is to tear down religion. This he must do because his evolutionism is simplistically reasoned. Quite an accusation coming from someone who has no education in science. The first problem with Dawkins is that what he calls simple is complex beyond comprehension, as this book demonstrates. Moreover, it demonstrates it by what all science says and which Dawkins himself admits to. Given his turn, Dawkins asks theists questions as unanswerable as those confronting him: why would a good god design a world filled with evil. The stock answer for Abrahamic faiths is man’s fall and his exercising of freewill. But does the story of Eden thoroughly address the problem of justice? Was God just to condemn all of creation for all time because of the sin of our first parents? Is it possible that the Eden story was written by an inspired mythmaker for the purpose of conveying truth rather than historical fact? Could the story’s purpose be to simply describe the human condition as a search for why we exist and why we have concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice? This book argues that our greatest hope for a universe created for a purpose lies in the questions and their source rather than in the answers, which neither we do not have nor did the mythmaker it seems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bud Stark
• Release date: Apr 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311937667

Bud Stark

I was born in Holliday, Texas in 1938, the second youngest of eight children. We lived in Texas about a month then moved to Oklahoma. We were an itinerant oilfield family. In 1941 we moved to California, my home ever since. I took up my father's occupation for most of my working life. My wife, Reta, and I were married in 1968. We have two daughters, one son and five grandchildren. I retired in 1995 and began research and writing on cosmology and evolution as they apply to the debate about an intelligently designed universe and one of random chance. I suffered a few rejections for work I had submitted for paper publication and decided not to suffer more, even though I was convinced that my input on those subjects was noteworthy. That is where things were left until I discovered eBook publishing. Smashwords has provided a way for me to get the word out to the untrained in science that they are not helpless before what seems at times to be an onslaught of science against the reasoned faith that whatever life is and whatever its purpose, it, like the universe, did not come from nothing.

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Suffocating on Mt. Improbable

Published by Donald Stark at Smashwords

Copyright 2015

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Simple Universe?

Chapter 2 - Simple Life?

Chapter 3 - The Lazy Way?

Chapter 4 - Knowing The Unknowable

Chapter 5 - Gaps In The Fossil Record

Chapter 6 - Lamarck Returns

Chapter 7 - Consciousness

Chapter 8 - Dawkins Witness To Eden

The Author

Introduction

Simon Conway-Morris of Cambridge or Herald Morowitz of George Mason University are brighter places to begin a thesis on evolution than Richard Dawkins, but if one is to reestablish a a hope that the universe is somehow directed, among students of evolution who have turned to atheism, Dawkins is the man he must first contend with; he holds the field in the battle between random biological evolution and biological directedness whom some call intelligent design. He holds the field but not the science. Dawkins is an atheist first, and a Neo-Darwinist second, for his atheism is a belief, a religion. Absent Darwin he is logically thrown back on an intelligently designed universe. His modus operandi for protecting his belief is to tear down religion. This he must do because his evolutionism is simplistically reasoned. Quite an accusation coming from someone who has no education in science. The first problem with Dawkins is that what he calls simple is complex beyond comprehension, as this book demonstrates. Moreover, it demostrates it by what all science says and which Dawkins himself admits to. Given his turn, Dawkins asks theists questions as unanswerable as those confronting him: why would a good god design a world filled with evil. The stock answer for Abrahamic faiths is man’s fall and his exercising of freewill. But does the story of Eden thouroughly address the problem of justice? Was God just to condem all of creation for all time because of the sin of our first parents? Is it possible that the Eden story was written by an inspired mythmaker for the purpose of conveying truth rather than historical fact? Could the story’s purpose be to simply describe the human condition as a search for why we exist and why we have concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice? This book argues that our greatest hope for a universe created for a purpose lies in the questions and their source rather than in the answers, which neither we nor the mythmaker has.

Chapter 1

...[metaphysic’s] business is not merely to analyze concepts...and thereby to clarify them analytically, but to extend our a priori knowledge. And for this purpose we must employ principles which add to the given concept something that was not contained in it, and through a priori synthetic judgments venture out so far that experience is quite unable to follow us, as, for instance, in the proposition, that the world must have a first beginning.

Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason

Simple Universe?

Publishing evolutionist beware! However logical the voice you hear, if it is not the voice heard on Dawkins’s mountain, heed it and find yourself treading career ending ground, for you are locked into successfully publishing only what you can see from the heights of Mt Improbable: The safest course, if your study seems to threaten classical Darwinism, is what Rudolf Raff does when writing about genetics–don’t mention Dawkins or his Selfish Gene, and for safety’s sake don’t criticize either. If Dawkins is short on demonstrable facts, he is long on sophistry and doesn’t shrink from name-calling. A flourish of his rhetoric reduces most contrary scientists to fools; all creationists are fools and all scientists who countenance design are creationists. What a convenience then, when one doubts Dawkins, to be as I am, a professed fool; neither a scientist nor a creationist–although I do believe in design. I am a fool because, not being a scientist, I debate the most popular of them (although they don’t debate me back). I would be a greater fool if I did not debate them. I cannot build a gun, so I cannot argue with a gun expert about what constitutes the best design. I would be a fool, however, if I left all matters of gun use to expert gun builders. In fact it is my responsibility to make sure that if there is a gun around it be used with discretion. Gun builders have a say as to what constitutes responsible gun use, because that responsibility lies with all of us whom guns may affect, but their advice in responsible gun use cannot be based on their expertise in ballistics.

The ingenuity of science has so enthralled us laymen that we have increasingly turned over to physical scientists our metaphysical responsibilities. The blessings have been immeasurable for humans, but so has the carnage. Physical scientists must have a say in metaphysical matters, but not based upon their expertise in physics. As it turns out, what physical science has done with metaphysics in the last two hundred years is declare that existence means physical existence and that because metaphysics by definition is not physical it does not exist. They have the right to make that claim, but not because their insight into physics gives them insight into metaphysics.

It is hard to talk about physical existence outside of a metaphysical frame of reference. In fact the words one