Here's a video on YouTube of Richard Dawkins hawking his new book, The God Delusion, on the Colbert Report, a talk show parody. The host, Stephen Colbert, is usually good at making people look stupid, but in this interview, he mostly lobs softballs at Dawkins. Too bad; I'm sure the two of them could have had a spirited discussion about how raising your children with religion is a form of child abuse, comparable to knocking out their teeth.
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October 19th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Regardless of what your take on design in the biological world is, one has to see the problem confronting Dawkins' assertion; that biological organisms are not the product of pure chance, but that there's order and law at play too (natural selection). So, the complexity of a biological entity doesn't need to be explained with some divine intention or purpose because we have a natural mechanism that seems to be able to account for this already (laws of nature). This is fine and it could make sense to me if one were only to argue that the biological world's appearance of design is not actually a product of design (not that it clearly wouldn't be design, but that we wouldn't be able to separate active design from order and law acting on chance). But you can't use that argument to explain the existence of the universe and the, seemingly, immutable laws at play within the universe.
Dawkins' problem isn't alleviated, it just gets pushed back. It gets pushed back to a point where it becomes incoherent.
God isn't needed to explain the fauna and flora; because it's not only chance at play but, more importantly, order and the laws of physics. But these laws of physics can't explain the advent and apparent complexity of the cosmos (we even use the word 'cosmos' to describe it. Laws acting upon chance might explain the inception of the biological order; but you can't use laws acting upon chance to explain the inception of the cosmos. Those laws (that caused the universe) would then be of fundamental concern and the laws that spurred the inception of the biological order would be merely a contingent fluctuation of those that are more basic.
Comment by Doug — October 19, 2006 @ 6:06 pm