On Richard
Dawkins’ Atheism
and His Criticisms
of the Design Argument
Kai-man Kwan
[Published:
Kai-man Kwan, “On Richard Dawkins’ Atheism and His Criticisms of the Design
Argument.” CGST Journal 49 (July 2010), pp. 165-203.]
Introduction:
An Evolutionary Biologist Turned the High Priest of Atheism
Richard
Dawkins is Reader in Zoology in the University of Oxford. He has a good reputation
in his field of ethology. In particular, his books The Selfish Gene and The
Extended Phenotype have made significant contribution to evolutionary
biology, and won him a fame in the 1980s. He is now the Charles Simonyi
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University who is
supposed to promote science to the general public. Dawkins is a good
communicator, and his books on popular science are rightly acclaimed.
Dawkins
has long expressed negative opinions about religion. The perceived threat of
creationism has provoked him to write a polemical work The Blind Watchmaker.
This work established his status as one of the most prominent contemporary
defenders of Darwinism. He not only tried to point out the weaknesses in the
arguments of the Creationists, but also heaped scorn on them. Gradually, he became
heavily involved in the contemporary science/religion debate. His attention was
no longer restricted to the issue of evolution. He also relentlessly advocated
the conflict thesis that science and religion were basically incompatible. In
recent years, he launched an all-out attack on religion, root and branch.
Dawkins has already uttered a number of antireligious statements during his Royal
Institution Christmas Lectures. In a two-part series The Root of All Evil?
on Channel 4, which was shown in Jan 2006, Dawkins argued that religion is not
only irrational, but also positively evil and harmful. In 2006 he published the
God Delusion, which summarized his case against religion, and for a kind
of in-your-face atheism. Since he is so passionate about his own atheistic
position and is so zealous to propagate it, he can be called the high priest of
atheism. In this paper, I will examine Dawkins’s atheistic naturalism with a
special focus on his criticisms of the design argument. His God Delusion will
be extensively quoted (with the book title abbreviated as GD).
