Limits to the Authority of Science

In a recent post on Twitter regarding the beginning of human life and abortion, Richard Dawkins wrote:

RichardDawkins Many people are challenging me to draw a line. Exactly when does "personhood" begin? Please Google "The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind". 12/14/15, 8:47 AM

So, I did.

Persevering through the boring English rhetoric using statistics to draw irrelevant conclusions, I managed to pick out a few quotes that are unique to Dawkins' style of argumentation. Dawkins is in black and I am in red.

Perhaps such wastage of information is inevitable: a necessary evil. I don’t want to make too much of it. What is more serious is that there are some educators – dare I say especially in non-scientific subjects – who fool themselves into believing that there is a kind of Platonic ideal called the ‘First Class Mind’ or ‘Alpha Mind’: a qualitatively distinct category, as distinct as female is from male, or sheep from goat. This is an extreme form of what I am calling the discontinuous mind. It can probably be traced to the ‘essentialism’ of Plato – one of the most pernicious ideas in all history.

If this were St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, after stating their opponent's argument, they would prove it wrong. Dawkins just says, "It's pernicious" and leaves it there. Let us proceed.

It is amusing to tease such absolutists by confronting them with a pair of identical twins (they split after fertilisation, of course) and asking which twin got the soul, which twin is the non-person: the zombie. A puerile taunt? Maybe. But it hits home because the belief that it destroys is puerile, and ignorant.

A new embryo, a new form. What's so hard about 1+1=2? Matter doesn't exist without its [metaphysical] form. Thus, at the moment an object, separating itself from another object, is identifiable as "something else", it has a new form (in this case, a rational soul/personhood).

An embryo is either human or it isn’t. Everything is this or that, yes or no, black or white. But reality isn’t like that.

Anybody catch the irony? Everything isn't black or white. It simply isn't. Unless he defines "reality" as something separate than what it constitutes (such as "everything"), then he contradicted himself. According to Dawkins, that "reality isn't black and white" is pretty black and white. Being essential to his argument, he'll go on to give no supporting evidence for this absolute claim about all of reality.

But personhood doesn’t spring into existence at any one moment: it matures gradually, and it goes on maturing through childhood and beyond.

Astonishingly, Dawkins is refusing to acknowledge the Law of Non-Contradiction. Apparently, one's personhood exists and doesn't exist in the same moment in the same place. Only things that exist can mature, unless he can prove the changes of an object that doesn't yet exist.

In this sentence, he might even be insinuating that only adults are persons, in which case he contradicts all of his remarks regarding violence done to children. They're not persons.

“It would never be made human if it were not human already.” Really? Are you serious? Nothing can become something if it is not that something already? Is an acorn an oak tree?

           

This analogy would work if we were discussing an unfertilized egg. However, an acorn is potentially an oak tree and once fertilized, is in the process of becoming only an oak tree (and never an orange tree or a squirrel).

A fertilized egg is in the process of becoming a human. Naturally, it will only become a human. The essential characteristics that differentiate a human from any other species are the intellect and will, which are both non-empirical traits. Since science can't determine when these characteristics are formed in the embryo/fetus, science is unqualified to determine personhood.

This is without speaking of the intellect and will as part of the metaphysical form/essence, which is necessary for an object to mature into what it is.

If a time machine could serve up to you your 200 million greats grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon. He was a fish. Yet you are connected to him by an unbroken line of intermediate ancestors, every one of whom belonged to the same species as its parents and its children.

Dawkins' major premise for the argument that humans developed from another species is the similarities between the molecules of different species. This is what the evidence states - nothing more. Dawkins applies his reason and concludes that one must have come from the other (post hoc ergo propter hoc). He mandates that everyone accept his conclusion. I accept the evidence - that there are similarities in the molecules between different species -, but what evidence is there for the conclusion? Evolution is a working hypothesis, not yet a provable fact.

I'm curious as to why there have been no alternative proposals of possibilities for the existence of similarities in DNA molecules between different species of life on earth. All life on earth is carbon-based. All molecules that would eventually develop into some life-form would need to have similarities among themselves to live under similar conditions.

Why not several different molecules that develop into different organisms that look the same? Why one original organism for all life when there are other possible conclusions for the existence of similarities?

If life can form in a far away galaxy with a different ancestor than us, why not the same thing on the same planet?

Just because someone wrote the same answer on the test as I did doesn't mean the answer originated with one of us and was passed on to the other.

The only way to maintain our human-privileging laws and morals would be to set up courts to decide whether particular individuals could ‘pass for human’, like the ludicrous courts with which apartheid South Africa decided who could ‘pass for white’.

I admire that he called them "privileges" and not "rights". Any atheist that believes in rights without design and absolute truth contradicts oneself.

The only way to determine who could "pass for human" would either be through similar aspects of DNA molecules (thus requiring such study and conclusion at the birth of every infant) or by the abstracting of universals as inductive reasoning has always done. Dawkins believes in science; good-bye reason.

Humans are clearly separable from chimpanzees and pigs and fish and lemons only because the intermediates that would otherwise link them in interbreeding chains happen to be extinct.

He admitted that the "missing links" are all extinct. How convenient: the "intermediates of the gaps". They are only known to exist because "they must have". Sound familiar?

This is remarkable: It is clear that humans aren't fish only because the intermediates don't exist.

At some point, whatever the intermediate looked like, the differences would lead me to conclude that this thing is no longer a fish because it has legs.

If your theology tells you that humans should receive special respect and moral privilege as the only species that possesses a soul, you have to face up to the awkward question of when, in human evolution, the first ensouled baby was born.

No you don't.

All living things have souls. There are vegetative souls, animal souls and rational souls. All living things have souls. Morality applies only to that species with a rational soul - humans.

I've also never demanded worship from a monkey. Other than that, I can't figure out what "special respect" might mean.

It is only the discontinuous mind that insists on drawing a hard and fast line between a species and the ancestral species that birthed it. Evolutionary change is gradual: there never was a line, never a line between any species and its evolutionary precursor.

Personhood exists because of the rational soul in a human body. A dead person doesn't have "rights" (otherwise known as "tradition"); nor do pigs (they're smarter than humans to avoid asking for rights to avoid politics altogether). The rational soul isn't empirical, therefore not definable by natural science. Personhood isn't something physically gradual and subject to change as all material things are.

There never was a ‘first’ Homo sapiens.

Then how could there have been a second? Two is two ones. Three is three ones. Without the first, nothing follows.

As soon as you define the characteristics of a Homo sapiens, the first would be the first to fit the categorical definition.

Scientists are called upon by governments, by courts of law, and by the public at large, to give a definite, absolute, yes-or-no answer to important questions, for example questions of risk. Whether it’s a new medicine, a new weedkiller, a new power station or a new airliner, the scientific ‘expert’ is peremptorily asked: Is it safe? Answer the question! Yes or no? Vainly the scientist tries to explain that safety and risk are not absolutes. Some things are safer than others, and nothing is perfectly safe. There is a sliding scale of intermediates and probabilities, not hard-and-fast discontinuities between safe and unsafe. That is another story and I have run out of space.

I wonder why they're not considered "experts" of reason and ethics.