[MD] Dawkins' anti-theism campaign

[Ham Priday]

Scott, Ian, David, Arlo, Platt, et al --


For you Richard Dawkins fans out there, the notorious evolutionist is
currently making a series of public appearances (including Channel 4 in
Britain) in which he's castigating religion as the "evil" of the
post-Darwinian world.  I ran across his latest article in the Commentary
pages of my Sunday Inquirer.  It was titled: "Is religion the root of all
evil?", and you can find the entire text at
http://exchristian.net/2/2006/01/is-religion-root-of-all-evil.html .

What Dawkins is actually attacking under the banner of "scientific reason"
is belief in God. Here's the summary paragraph in which two premises of his
argument are linked together, supposedly to convince us of the
reasonableness of his conclusion.

"Let me give just two guidelines to understanding.  First, the commonest
fallacy about natural selection is that it is a theory of chance.  If it
were, it is entirely obvious that it couldn't explain the illusion of
design.  But natural selection, properly understood, is the antithesis of
chance. Second, it is often said that natural selection makes God
unnecessary, but leaves his existence an open plausibility.  I think we can
do better than that.  When you think it through, the argument from
improbability, which traditionally is deployed in God's favour, turns out to
be the strongest argument against him."

I don't know how you read the logic of this, but when I took the author's
suggestion to "think it through", it seemed like a fairly convincing
argument for the theist position.

Any comments?

Essentially yours,
Ham