In this essay Richard Dawkins proposes the following:
In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things… We need a better explanation [than design by space aliens], such as evolution by natural selection or an equally workable account of the painstaking R&D that must underlie complex, statistically improbable things.
An equally workable account? An “ultimate explanation”? R&D? R&D is research and development. R&D is design. The logic and terminology of design is inescapable, even by those who deny that design exists.
Richard Dawkins is certainly not a stupid person, but I find it amazing that he cannot see the obvious problem here. Natural selection is not random, but it does not create anything; it only throws stuff out.
The F-35 fighter aircraft (for which our company is designing a new pilot ejection parachute), did not come about by throwing out the Wright Flyer biplane, and then throwing out the Piper Cub, and then throwing out the F-16. The impotence of natural selection as a creative force is transparently and logically evident.
Dawkins:
[It is proposed that] He [God] was always there and always complex. But if you are going to resort to that facile cop-out, you might as well say flagellar motors were always there.
But flagellar motors were demonstrably not always there.
The who-designed-the-designer question is nonsensical when one considers that time had a beginning. This is also transparently and logically evident.
The physical universe (matter, energy, space, and time) came into existence at a finite point. Dawkins must surely admit this. Whatever caused the physical universe did/does not exist in time, because time did not exist. Therefore, the cause of the universe has no past and has no history. That which does not have a past or a history has no point of origin, and thus no designer or originator. The infinite regress logically stops at the origin of the time domain, which is well established by modern science.
None of what I’ve written here is hard to understand. In fact, it’s logically trivial. How the “Professor of the Public Understanding of Science” could have missed these obvious points astounds me.
Is my frustration understandable?
See here for an insightful rebuttal of Dawkins’ logic and argumentation.