THE SUBTITLE OF RICHARD DAWKINS' bestselling book, The Blind Watchmaker, reads "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design." I suppose my criticism of Dr. Dawkins and his theory of atheistic evolution begins right there on the front cover.
As a premier spokesman for secular humanism, Dawkins is an informed, fairly engaging writer (though in my opinion, his rival Stephen Jay Gould was more objective and more entertaining). In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins does an admirable job of interpreting observable realities in terms of naturalistic evolution. He does not, however, present a whole lot of tangible "evidence of evolution" per se. Read the book, and you will see that his evidence for what he calls "cumulative natural selection" consists in the main of a disappointingly subjective mixture of analogies, metaphors, personal anecdotes, computer simulations, extrapolations, ad hoc hypotheses, and most importantly, lots of little potshots at creationism. A more accurate subtitle would be, "How the Mere Possibility of a Universe Without Design Somehow Passes as Evidence for Atheistic Evolution - Which in Turn Reveals a Universe Without Design."
Evidence Versus Ignorance
It could be argued that the overriding theme of The Blind Watchmaker is one large argument ad ignorantium. As Dawkins sees it, if it is possible "simply to postulate" - as he says for example in reference to the origin of life - a naturalistic or non-teleological explanation for things, then scientists are obligated to embrace it as a valid scientific explanation, and thus sufficient evidence that supernatural claims are false and life was not designed. Leaving aside for the moment any fallacy of equivocation involved in equating naturalist philosophy with empirical science, I would ask Dawkins how he would propose to demonstrate that complex biological structures exhibiting the characteristics of specified complexity - or what he himself terms "good design" - were in fact not designed. A subjectively perceived lack of evidence for teleological or supernatural processes does not logically nullify them, much less constitute evidence of blind evolutionary processes by default. Nonetheless, that is pretty much Dawkins' argument in a nutshell; indeed, he tactily confesses that his conclusion is not based on evidence for evolution but on the non-applicability of scientific methodology to competing supernatural claims: "The theory of cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favour it, it would still be the best theory available." He then assures us: "In fact the evidence does favour it. But that is another story." Okay, Dr. Dawkins, but I thought your book was supposed to show why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.
Opinions, Interpretations and Authority
Some would stop me right here, and insist that since I am not a scientist, and Dawkins is, I really have no right to question his authoritative opinions on evolutionary biology. I would counter that since Dawkins is not a Christian or theologian, and I am (ordained minister and theology student anyway), he has no place to question my historical reading of Genesis as the most viable, coherent explanation available for the observable complexity of life and the earliest history of man. Much less is he or any other scientist in any position to doubt the validity of my conversion, my exegesis of scripture, my experiences of miracles, etc. The fact is, I don't question Dawkins' scientific expertise or his particular findings in the field - only his faulty logic. Biological origins is neither a strictly scientific nor a strictly religious issue. It essentially turns on a battle of presuppositions, one being that God in the Bible has revealed the mysteries of life and the universe, the other that all the mysteries of life and the universe are ultimately subject to scientific examination and validation. At an epistemological level, this may be seen as a conflict between intuitive belief in God, or faith, and a sort of scientific realism or empiricism, or belief that all of reality is scientifically verifiable.
As it turns out, creationists and evolutionists do not generally disagree on the validity of scientific data, but on the interpretation of such data. To conservative believers such as myself, Darwinism is part of an impossible attempt to redefine science in terms of naturalist metaphysics. For us, science proper is the exploration and discovery of the workings of God's creation. This understanding of science was embraced for centuries by a number of great scientists, among them Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, James Maxwell, Robert Boyle, Gregor Mendel and Louis Pasteur. To orthodox Darwinists, however, creationism is the imposition of religious dogma into the rightly secularized discipline of science. Barring some notable exceptions, this is the predominant position of contemporary professional scientists, including Dawkins. In any case, I reserve the right to question Dawkins' authority as it extends beyond observation of biological systems to questions of philosophy and theology, just as he is free to question the authority of the church, and indeed, the authority of God himself, as it applies to those same questions.
As revealed in the Preface, it is this mere questioning of humanist-scientific authority that seems to seriously perturb Dawkins, to the point that he collectively reduces his critics to a bunch of dishonest religious bigots: "There are still those who seek to deny the truth of evolution .... Pretend as they will to scientific credentials, the anti-evolution propagandists are always religiously motivated." So anyone who appears to question evolution is merely denying the truth out of religious motivations? What of those non-religious people who would rather not see it taught because they for whatever reason genuinely believe it to be false, or poor science, or the evidence for it inconclusive? Does this also mean that anyone who does not oppose the teaching of evolution, but to the contrary openly opposes any criticism of it whatever, is free of all personal biases? And where does this leave the falisifiable-in-principle criterion required of any scientific theory? It's my opinion that ad hominem caricatures of evolution critics don't do a whole lot for Dawkins' credibility. But to forsake personal attacks and sweeping stereotypes of religious people in the attempt to prove the truth of evolution would presumably require a reliance upon objective evidence for evolution instead - and unfortunately that sort of evidence appears to be in short supply.
Evolutionary Apologetics
So how does Dawkins propose to win over an audience skeptical of his theory of large-scale cumulative macroevolution, without supplying the necessary evidence? Well, he simply assumes it, or postulates it. The approach is much like an atheist-evolutionary version of presuppositional apologetics. Assume that Darwinist evolution is the right answer for everything you look at, and sure enough, everything you look at will begin to take on an evolutionary flavor. All things are possible for him who believes. Dawkins certainly believes, and is so convinced of his belief that he seems genuinely puzzled by the fact that more people do not see things through the same presuppositional evolutionary filter. With the use of such a filter, or sieve, as we should perhaps call it, traditionally difficult questions are easily dismissed. After all, according to Dawkins a sieve is a device used for generating non-randomness, and nature is full of such devices. For instance, some people thinking about the sorts of questions addressed in The Blind Watchmaker might be tempted to wonder exactly how the planets came to be placed just so in their orbits around the sun. Not Dawkins: "Obviously all the planets that we see orbiting the sun must be travelling at exactly the right speed to keep them in their orbits, or we wouldn't see them because they wouldn't be there! But equally obviously this is not evidence for conscious design. It is just another kind of sieve."
So a number of planets varying in size, density, atmospheric conditions - one of them quite remarkably attuned to the existence of life - orbiting the sun like clockwork, each according to its own necessarily precise speed and pattern, is all merely the result of some undefined natural "sieve," and we can simply dismiss any speculation as to how such a sieve could possibly have been constructed by the blind processes of nature so as to construct, in turn, entire functioning solar systems. Presumably this sort of vague anthropism also puts to rest any cosmological ponderings about where these planets, or even their basic chemical constituents, came from in the first place - obviously they came to be by some process or another, or we wouldn't see them because they wouldn't be there! Of course, the original question before us was not whether planets, fine-tuned orbits, matter, or the myriad of preconditions necessary for biological life to exist - much less evolve - came to be by "some process or another," but whether they came to be by an unwitting naturalistic process in particular. It's obviously not "obvious" that blind nature came upon the seemingly ingenious concept of orbital motion, for instance, all on its own. Of all people, atheists claiming to refute creationism on purely scientific grounds should be able to supply definitive scientific answers as to how such a thing came to be, rather than a question-begging appeal to the weak anthropic principle: "Because it's there." That response may explain why a man decides to climb Mount Everest, but it does not explain how a universe or primordial life form brings itself into being. Of course, I'm not being entirely fair. Dawkins invokes chance, or the like, only for those structures he feels are simple enough to be explainable by such means. My point here is that the particular structures he "explains" in this way, such as life-supporting solar systems or the first self-replicating organic structures, are still sufficiently complex that his purported explanation actually explains nothing.
Cumulative Natural Selection and the Fallacy of Composition
Dawkins' "blind watchmaker" thesis is essentially the notion of cumulative natural selection. Defined as "tiny changes cumulated over many steps," he considers it "an immensely powerful idea" - so powerful, apparently, that it requires little or no evidentiary substantiation. Basically it is the theory that species evolve as they undergo a huge number of infinitesimally small changes over vast periods of time through reproduction, adaptation, embryonic devolopment and natural selection. Though he regards himself a "hierarchical reductionist" rather than merely a plain old reductionist (and though despite his best explanatory efforts I can't see much difference between the two), it seems that to Dawkins, the understanding that complex objects actually consist of a number of individual parts is some sort of epiphany. I wonder if he's ever considered whether his immensely powerful idea could be a fallacy of composition. An entity exhibiting a high level of apparently ordered and prespecified information content, or what biochemist Michael J. Behe would call "irreducible complexity," is more than simply a collection of its parts - or in this case, more than an accumulation of its selectively advantageous mutations.
Thus, whether Dawkins can manage to envision some incidental yet beneficial purpose for "half an eye," or not, is irrelevant to the larger question. As logician Irving Copi has noted, "A whole... has its parts organized or arranged in certain definite ways." That is, a whole (like a machine or a cell) is defined not merely as the sum of its parts, nor even, as Dawkins proposes, as an entity only slightly more devoloped than other entities "only one level down the hierarchy," but by the particular and strikingly useful organization or arrangement of all the parts together. An airliner, or a computer, or a bacterium or an elephant, is not an assemblage of so many individual components, each in turn representative of some individual past modification within the larger process of evolution, useful in its own way at the time of its emergence - yet somehow still incidental to the structure of the (future) whole. To the contrary, in an instance of specified complexity each modification or component is integral to the whole.
It follows from all this that each emergent component of a functional whole was actually integral to the whole even at the time of its emergence - which means either that the whole was in fact designed, or else the apparent design of the whole is in fact entirely coincidental. Yet design and coincidence are the two notions Dawkins specifically sets out to dispel. Instead he promotes a third option, cumulative natural selection, which supposedly lies right in between randomness and teleology. However, the third option is no option at all: The blind watchmaker of natural selection could not conceivably have selected such a huge number of precisely integrated components without having a prespecified goal in mind, unless somehow nature also just happened to present a correspondingly huge number of "selective pressures" (and beneficial mutations to go along with them) incidental to their collective formation. "What good is half an eye?" is an interesting question, but as it turns out, it has little to do with the teleological question, which concerns only the complete structure. Though it may be possible to "explain" - quite apart from empirical evidence - the emergence of any number of individual components (or if you prefer, any number of collective minor modifications) by merely postulating any number of ad hoc hypothetical selective pressures, favorable mutations and consequent morphological adaptations, the larger functional, structural integrity of the whole remains unexplained.
Can the Blind Lead the Blind?
However, let's assume for the sake of argument that the blind state of nature could happen to present just the right combination of selective pressures and favorable mutations so as to produce functionally integrated structures. Then let us assume that a significant portion, let's say half, of a complex organ such as a human eye, really would be useful for something. Finally, let us assume that if it could be shown that half an eye would be useful for something, this fact would somehow mean that Darwinism is true. It still remains to be seen whether so much as half an eye could ever be realistically expected to form from no eye at all under these Darwinian operating premises. Dawkins believes it could, and supports his case by subtracting a part here or a part there - such as a lens - from a fully functional eye, and then pointing out that in such cases limited vision is still obtainable, and therefore of evident selective value. "In a primitive world where some creatures had no eyes at all and others had lensless eyes, the ones with lensless eyes would have all sorts of advantages."
Apparently missing the irony of this statement in light of the blind watchmaker premise, he goes on to state, "Vision that is 5 per cent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all." By removing a single component or two, Dawkins sidesteps the question posed by creationists, intelligent design advocates and even Stephen Gould.They ask, "What good is 5% of an eye?" He responds by demonstrating the value of roughly 95% of an eye. Granted, no one should be suprised to discover that 95% of an eye is good for at least some vision. But the fact that 95% of an eye is good for some vision doesn't mean that, by extension, 5% would also provide a correlating measure of vision. An automobile with a missing spark plug might still run, but it doesn't follow from this that an automobile missing not only a spark plug but an engine, a transmission, and a fuel system would also run - albeit less efficiently than if it had all its parts. In attempting to demonstrate how an eye would evolve from no eye at all, Dawkins is obviously proceeding from the wrong end of the supposed evolutionary continuum. So again he misses the point. A creature fortunate enough to be born with a lensless eye in a world of eyeless creatures may be expected to enjoy certain advantages over his eyeless brethren (though H.G. Wells seemed to draw precisely the opposite conclusion in The Country of the Blind), but this tells us little as to how the rest of his eye came to be formed in the first place. On the other hand, a creature born with an eyeless lens would see nothing, and very possibly would become a target, rather than a beneficiary, of natural selection by virtue of what would be a useless disfigurement.
Miracles and Metaphysics
How, then, do we explain the emergence of a graduated series of beneficial mutations leading to "good design," or explain the origin of life itself, much less the sheer capacity for self-replication presupposed by it? Here we come to the heart and soul of The Blind Watchmaker, the discussion of "Origins and Miracles." I call this little exercise in raw speculation the heart and soul of the book because it reflects what is obviously Dawkins' chief concern - debunking theism. Here Dawkins strays far from the path of scientific inquiry in his determination to show that Darwinist atheism is the only intellectually tenable world view. Apparently with a straight face, he opens his discussion of abiogenesis by positing "luck" as a credible, even measurable efficient cause of natural phenomena. "We can accept a certain amount of luck in our explanations, but not too much. The question is, how much?" I would ask in turn: Can luck really be considered a factor - much less the central factor - of a scientific hypothesis? If the purpose of a scientific hypothesis is to confirm or verifty the laws or "rules" of nature, then luck - the unpredictable or unexpected - would represent all the exceptions to those rules. Nonetheless, for Dawkins the answer must be "yes," because otherwise, by his own admission, his entire thesis would dissolve into a question-begging paradox (it does anyway): "The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication needs complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem." Let me get this straight: Replication is, according to Dawkins, "the basic ingredient of cumulative selection," indeed the only ingredient that separates it from the unacceptable alternatives of design and chance. And even the most rudimentary mechanism of replication is, according to Dawkins, too complex to have arisen on its own, apart from cumulative selection itself, which can only operate via replication mechanisms. One would expect a reasonable theorist at this point to stop, laugh, concede that his "theory" is really an empty assertion - at best not a very good theory - and do something else, perhaps go out and dig the garden.
Instead, Dawkins unwisely decides to employ a sort of "atheism of the gaps" argument - that because theism as a proposed explanation for complexity is self-defeating, it follows logically that abiogenesis followed by eons of cumulative selection is the only satisfactory explanation for the origin and diversity of life. "To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer." There are many fallacies in this superficially clever argument, beginning with a non sequitur based on the argument from ignorance mentioned earlier: Even if theism was shown to be groundless, that fact would not establish the scientific legitimacy of abiogenesis or any aspect of Darwinism. I suppose it's also fair to point out that Dawkins' main charge against theism, that it's question-begging, begs the very question introduced by Dawkins himself. That is, his tack is doubly question-begging. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by refuting a straw man theological explanation is to explain precisely nothing, for it still leaves unexplained the origin of the DNA/protein machine, which happens to be the question at hand and which happens to constitute the theoretical driving mechanism of cumulative natural selection - all of which Dawkins has assured us he has the ability to explain.
I don't know of any theist who would presume to explain the origin of "a supernatural designer" - that is, the origin of God - since one of the defining characteristics of God is supernatural, eternal preexistence. Unlike Dawkins' stop-gap naturalist metaphysic, the concept of transcendence is not a special plea, but an attribute of God revealed in Scripture long before Charles Darwin was born and defended by many brilliant philosophers and theologians to the present. In the meantime, the question before us is the origin of life, not the origin of God. They are separate questions altogether, which is why, ironically enough, creationism doesn't beg the question of the origin of life while the blind watchmaker "postulate" does. I could propose that my computer was created by the Hewlett-Packard corporation, and a critic of computer-creationism could retort that in itself this answer would leave the origin of the Hewlett-Packard corporation completely unexplained. Indeed it would, but the fact remains that regardless of whatever its own origins may be, the Hewlett-Packard corporation created my computer. To infer that my response here is question-begging is to illegitimately read circularity into a valid, causally connected and perfectly true answer to the particular question of my computer's origins. And to infer from presumed question-begging on my part that my computer was not created by Hewlett-Packard would continue to beg that very question. At the most, it would rule out but one of numerous possibilities.
But if that's the game Dawkins wants to play, I can play it too. He argues in effect that merely postulating the emergence of the first self-replicating structures is superior to merely postulating the existence of a creator, since we know at least that life as we know it exists. "You have to say something like 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or 'Life was always there', and be done with it." Though taking the lazy way out by laughing it off, Dawkins is faced with the very question he aims at the creationists: If natural processes produced the first replicators, what produced the first natural processes? The assertion, with no accompanying specifics, that natural processes were produced by something other than simply more natural processes, smacks of creationism. But an assertion that natural processes have always existed assigns the particular characteristics of deity to nature, and this smacks of theism - or at least pantheism. If you're going to postulate the eternal self-existence of nature as an article of faith, you may as well then fall to your knees, sing a hymn and offer a libation to nature in worship, and be done with it. But this will not do, as Dawkins' entire agenda is to demonstrate that nature is blind, not divine, and to do so with scientific evidence, not confessions of faith. Moreover, much evidence - from the fields of theoretical physics, cosmology and thermodynamics - indicates that the physical universe has not likely existed forever. If we must choose someone or something to honor as the eternally self-existent creator of life on earth - and it appears from Dawkins' discussion of primordial realities that we must - it only makes sense that we go with God himself rather than an impossibly restricted material substitute.
Science and Falsifiability
Despite whatever debilitating handicaps the blind watchmaker argument suffers on a philosophical level, there remains the possibility that neo-Darwinism is at least a genuine scientific theory. Defending that premise comprises much of Dawkins' discussion of punctuated equilibria, the theory of paleontologists Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge that evolution actually proceeds in "fits and starts," or long periods of relative species stasis interspersed by "sudden bursts" (geologically speaking) of speciation/ macroevolution. Evidently a fundamentalist of sorts himself, Dawkins chastises Gould and Eldredge - along with the "transformed cladists" and anyone else who even appears to question Darwinist orthodoxy - for acting irresponsibly in giving the impression "that something is wrong with Darwinism." In essence Dawkins is calling for repentance and a return to doctrinal purity in order to facilitate more effective evangelism. To accomplish all this, he must first establish (to many of his secular colleagues now, as well as the religious general public) that evolutionary theory is legitimate science.
Clearly most of evolutionary theory belongs to the realm of what Gould would call "natural history," and can only be "verified" through an evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record, the very incompleteness of which led to the formulation of the punctuated equilibria hypothesis in the first place. In other words, large-scale evolution is not strictly testable. And again, because Darwinist macroevolutionary theory is - unlike conventional theories that constitute most of what we call science - more an interpretation of prehistory than an explanation of how things work, it has little predictive value. Arguably, it thus fails to acheive scientific credibility on two major counts. But the big question, in light of the emphasis placed upon falsifiability by philosophers of science like Karl Popper, is whether evolution is falsifiable. Evolutionists such as Dawkins have seemingly reduced the burden of proof for their theory to the suspiciously low standard of merely showing it to be falsifiable. Such a standard is obviously too low for credible scientific work, since at least some theories are falsifiable for no other reason than they happen to be false. Even so, it is doubtful whether Darwinism passes the falsification test.
Dawkins of course insists otherwise: "If a single, well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million year-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is a sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology." This argument is certainly objectionable, for at least a couple of reasons. First, if the fossil record is so patchy that, as Dawkins says, "we are lucky to have fossils at all," there is no assurance of ever finding mammal fossils in 500 million year-old rocks even if mammals actually lived 500 million years ago - or even if creatures believed to have lived 500 million years ago actually thrived quite recently right alongside mammals. That is, the same gaps in the fossil record which evolutionists explain away as an indication of an imperfect fossilization process rather than a good reason to doubt evolution, themselves explain away any methodological certainty of finding 500 million-year old fossilized mammals as a falsification test for the theory.
Second, the history of evolutionary theory is such that there is no reason to expect evolutionists to concede defeat even in the face of contrary evidence. Later in the same chapter on punctuationism, Dawkins describes the finding of a living coelacanth - thought to have died out with the dinosaurs - off the South African coast in 1938 as a vivid example of "species stasis." If a presumably extinct fish dating from the Cretaceous period can resurface alive and well in 1938 and still maintain its place in the evolutionary scheme of things, doubtless a mammal fossil discovered in Paleozoic rocks could also be reinterpreted as having emerged much earlier than was previously supposed, and having persisted, much like the coelacanth, for millions of years in inexplicable stasis. Assuming that evolution is a "law of science" every bit as pervasive as the laws of gravitation, as I was taught in college, it should seemingly apply to all creatures. So how did the coelacanth manage to elude its influence? And if creatures long extinct according to the theory are allowed to resurrect at any time, how can that theory be falsifiable?
But again I'm not being entirely fair, at least not in respect to the fossil record. Not all evolutionists see the fossil gaps as an indication of imperfection, least of all Dawkins: "The 'gaps,' far from being annoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect, if we take seriously our neo-Darwinian theory of speciation." So even gaps in the fossil record do not falsify Darwinism; to the contrary, they vindicate it. Regardless of Dawkins' reasoning for producing this assertion, the point I wish to make here is that an evolutionary reading of the fossil record is ostensibly unfalsifiable - unless of course anyone seriously believes that the discovery of what Darwin called an "unbroken succession of intermediate forms" somewhere in the fossil record would actually serve to falsify, rather than tend to confirm, Darwinian evolution. Otherwise, it should be noted that Dawkins has created for himself the best of all possible evolutionary worlds, in which all conceivable fossil evidence - whether a notable lack of fossils or a strikingly gradualistic succession of fossils - is somehow evidence for the theory of evolution. And any theory which cannot at least in principle be contradicted by some sort of contrary evidence cannot be falsified. The same holds for Dawkins' highly strained view of abiogenesis as a theory that predicts implausibilty: "If a theory of the origin of life is sufficiently 'plausible' to satisfy our subjective judgement of plausibility, it is then too 'plausible' to account for the paucity of life in the universe as we observe it.... Having said all this, I must confess that, because there is so much uncertainty in the calculations, if a chemist did succeed in creating spontaneous life I would not actually be disconcerted!" So Dawkins' "theory" specifically accounts for two possible experimental eventualities: (1) The appearance of implausibility, in the form of repeated failed attempts to "create spontaneous life" (is there an oxymoron in there somewhere?) in the laboratory; and, (2) The demonstration of plausibility, in any successful future attempts to create spontaneous life in the laboratory. But if experimental failures and successes both somehow serve to strengthen the hypothesis, it's actually a weak hypothesis to begin with because again there is no conceivable means to falsify it.
Conclusions
Such weasel-worded arguments as those which include implausibility or a lack of evidence as predictive criteria obviously have little to do with science. I can only reason that Dawkins must resort to these sorts of tactics because the evidence for his theory of macroevolution is sorely lacking. The blind watchmaker hypothesis seems completely baseless. Evolutionists may well be expected to disagree. Some may accuse me of taking Dawkins out of context, as he has accused creationists of the same: "[I]f a reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of some detail of current Darwinian theory, the fact is eagerly seized upon and blown up out of all proportion." I'm curious as to what "out of all proportion" implies here. Does it mean that critics of evolutionary theory have taken the very words of scientists to mean what they obviously did not mean in their immediate context, or could it mean simply that critics have found the logical implications of the very words of those scientists to be such that they cannot follow them to their evolutionary conclusions? In any case, Dawkins may as well get used to it.
If he insists on placing the Genesis account of creation, for example, on a par with "the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants," then he should not be surprised when his own beliefs are not properly "contextualized" - that is, when he finds that they are likewise subject to criticism in the public square. I have ministered as a pastor and evangelist, a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and I know what it feels like to have my beliefs criticized and ridiculed. I would remind Dawkins and his evolutionary cohorts of one basic fact of life in the public arena: "Anything you say can and will be used against you." Nonetheless, I believe Richard Dawkins to be a highly intelligent person, and I don't question his sincerity as he does mine. I believe him when he states, "I may not always be right, but I care passionately about what is true and I never say anything that I do not believe to be right." I would say the same of myself and my own beliefs . Rather than judge, condemn or ridicule Dawkins (or those atheists who challenged me to read The Blind Watchmaker* and formulate a response), I would appeal to his intellectual integrity as well as his scientific instincts in suggesting that, by his own admission, he may not be right when he argues that the watchmaker that created our universe is blind. Perhaps the blind watchmaker is merely an anthropomorphism. As a former unbeliever, I can say that I was once blind myself. "But now I see...."
_______________
* All quotations in this essay attributed to Richard Dawkins are from The Blind Watchmaker
(W.W. Norton: New York, 1996).