Declension wrote:
I think Dawkins is out of his depth when it comes to questions like whether God exists and what God's properties are. He hasn't had training in philosophy, and it shows. In fact, his "central argument" in the book doesn't make sense at all! Here is Dawkins' summary of his so-called central argument:
Richard Dawkins wrote:
1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
5. We don’t have an equivalent explanation for physics.
6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
Um... what?
He should have cut that down to "who designed the designer?"
I would have expected a scientist like Dawkins to say that "God did it" isn't a testable statement, makes no predictions, and so forth. We can't explain the Standard Model, that doesn't mean it isn't a good explanation for how the world works.
Paley was unable to tell anything about the designer of his watch, but could tell it had been designed. This is true for all occasions when a complex object is thought to be designed- we know nothing about the designer.
It's a weak argument and not one that should be used- but then the design argument itself is very weak because we know of alternative means for complexity to arise.