THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

John Sibley

" DAWKINS' GODLESS DELUSION"

Life as we know it," writes physicist Steven Weinberg," would be impossible if any of several physical quantities had slightly different values. " " Who before Darwin, could have guessed that something so apparently ' designed' as a dragonfly's wing or an eagle's eye was the end product of a long sequence of non-random but purely natural causes? " The above quote by Richard Dawkins is why I gave his book one star. Dawkins believes that non-random-natural causes are the basis for life on planet Earth. It is the only solution that proves that God does not exist: that with millions and millions of years of accumulative time, a complex device such as a human eye or a ' bacterial flagella motor could evolve. Dawkins wrote," To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances and complexity ( I paraphrase) could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree". If Dawkins had just shut up after the above quote there would be no need for his 461-page treatise on why God does not exist. His book is based on his. 'Climbing Mount Improbable Theory'. A theory hellbent on proving how the eye and wing evolved slowly over millions of years. I believe like the creationist, which I am not, that 'irreducible complexity wrecks Dawkins's theory. Dawkins writes "Imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49% of an eye would not." Dawkins misleads the reader when he writes that a flatworm has an eye-------flatworms do not have 'eyes' only clumps of cells that are sensitive to light. Worms have eyespots, not eyes. Worms are invertebrates and makeup 95% of all animal species on Earth. Their eyespots unlike humans evolved from skin. All vertebrate eyes are an outgrowth of the animal's brain. What Dawkins fails to mention, in his Godless Universe, is that what happens in the brain's visual cortex, is so complicated it is far from being understood even with the scientific advancements of today 20 areas of the visual cortex are still a mystery. Dawkins does not explain how evolution formed the complexity of a single lens like our own or the compound eyes of invertebrates. And if the human eye is a direct outgrowth of the brain how many years would it take to evolve into binocular vision? Did millions of years of tiny increments create a surge of brain development? If so, how could humans walk, crawl, jump, and swing from trees without the eye and brain developing in tandem? When humans started walking on two legs or bipedally, according to Dawkins, this enabled them to walk further. The mistake of atheists like Dawkins is that he assumes that God is natural and therefore can be tested and investigated scientifically. Dawkins believes the existence of an orderly world just ' happened ' over glacial time. But he never asks ' why' the laws of nature exist for us to discover. Rejecting God because of Dawkins's tirades would be like rejecting physics because of the contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity. All science is incomplete. Religion is incomplete and has contradictions but we don't abandon the spiritual truths. Science is not the sole arbiter of reality. In other words, as philosopher Gary R. Habermas brilliantly writes, "If the soul exists, it would be beyond the scope of evolutionary theory, and this would threaten the theory's plausibility. So the soul's existence had been rejected in light of the acceptance of a naturalistic form of evolution." I believe humans do need magic, mystery, religion anything extra scientific to experience the spiritual. Michael Jackson moonwalking, Michael Jordan defying gravity, Ray Charles singing the national anthem as David Botstein said," Having understood the physics of why the sky is blue doesn't make it any less blue." Dawkins is a classical linear thinker so possibility of God using non-linear dynamics and tiny wormhole-like fluctuations to create cosmic shaking results is unfathomable. Dawkins believes nature should be explained only in terms of rational principles, not in terms of religious revelation. Why? Because he and his ilk are patriarchal humanists who will always be uncomfortable with the concept of God or any- nonhuman intelligent (even alien life) tampering with the genesis of life on Earth. Just like his ilk would debunk the existence of God they would also scoff at the possibility of ancient aliens having a role in human evolution because that would mean losing control of human actions. The news from the Russian cosmonauts is that there are no angels ' out there', but according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Critique Of Pure Reason, he shows that these assumptions are false. He argues that that there is a limit on what humans can " know". That we live in a fleeting and superficial world of appearances. He asks and I also ask Mr. Dawkins, how do we know that our human perception of reality corresponds to reality itself? FINIS