The Scientific Deception Of The New Atheists by Mohammad Hijab

Realistically, religious leaders from Muslim and Christian communities may find it advantageous for the cause of social and cultural edification to propose counter-questions to congregation members or religious followers. Moreover, they may limit the corrosive impacts of New Atheist misinformation on historical narratives by conducting research into this area. Such a counter question is exemplified by asking whether New Atheist discourse is itself inhibiting to science. Another example is the Third Way of Evolution group which has hundreds of sciences consisting of non-normative evolutionary ideas which undermine the modern Neo-Darwinian synthesis (see Third Way of Evolution Website). On the website rationale, it states that neo Darwinism:

Is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. NeoDarwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. Moreover, some NeoDarwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis (The Third Way of Evolution, 2016).

Indeed, one of the organisation’s co-founders, Dr. Denis Noble, disagrees with Dawkins on the Selfish Gene idea but is reluctant to dispute Dawkins on the issue (Crace, 2008). Certain Third Way scientific members may be interpreted as rejecting the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism altogether. This is observed with Eugene Koonin’s proposal of a ‘biological Big Bang’ that supposes ‘the major types of new forms emerge independently, via a sampling process, from the pool of recombining entities of the preceding generation’ (Koonin, 2007, p.1). From this Dr. David Berlinsky in his polemical work against Dawkins states, ‘Major transitions in biological evolution,’ Koonin writes:

These are precisely the transitions that Darwin’s theory was intended to explain. If those “major transitions” represent a “sudden emergence of new forms,” the obvious conclusion to draw is not that nature is perverse but that Darwin was wrong (Berlinksy, 2009:192).

A wide array of biologists – who communicate methodologically naturalistic articulations - and other specialists disagree with aspects of Darwinian theory, but this is glossed over by dogmatic New Atheists like Daniel Dennett who proposes that Darwin’s theory is ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ (Dennett, 1995, p.11). Theoretically, science is based on induction and can, therefore, never be incorrigible as indicated by Dennett in other contexts, stating ‘Note that the Argument from Design depends on an inductive inference: where there's smoke, there's fire; and where there's design, there's mind’ (Dennett, 1995, p.30). Dennett may substitute the words ‘arguments from design’ to ‘the entire Darwinian enterprise’ and effectively refute his own previous postulation. Scientific dogma may be defined as more inhibiting to scientific advancement than religion as there is no question of overlapping magisteria.