Justified True Belief

(●) The Oxford zoologist who retold the story of evolution as a story about genes, and then became the most widely read atheist of his lifetime. + Most people who have heard of Richard Dawkins have heard of him for the wrong book. He is known to the general public for The God Delusion, which sold in the millions and put a professional biologist on television arguing that belief in God is a mistake. His standing among scientists rests on a slimmer book written thirty years earlier, when he was an unknown lecturer of thirty-five, and when the Royal Society polled the public in 2017 to mark thirty years of its science book prize, that book, The Selfish Gene, came top of the list of the most inspiring science books ever written. He belongs on a Christian shelf for two reasons. The first is that he has been the most widely heard critic of the faith in living memory, and a reader who meets him only through rebuttals never learns why the rebuttals were needed. The second is subtler. The particular argument Dawkins spent his life dismantling, that living things are so well made they must have been made on purpose, is an argument Christians themselves had leaned on hard since William Paley picked a watch up off a heath in 1802. Whatever else he did, he forced Christians to say more carefully what they were claiming and why. One fact sits underneath everything that follows. He never held a chair in theology, philosophy, or religion, and never claimed to. Every post he ever held was in zoology or in the public explanation of science, and the criticism that has stuck to him hardest, from unbelievers as much as from believers, is that he wrote about religion the way an outsider writes and about biology the way an expert does.

(●) 1941 AD: Born in wartime Nairobi to a colonial agricultural officer, and shipped home at eight to an Oxfordshire farm. + Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi on 26 March 1941, and the war is the reason he was born there at all. His father, Clinton John Dawkins, worked for the British colonial service as an agricultural officer in Nyasaland, the country now called Malawi, and had already been called up into the King’s African Rifles by the time his son arrived. His mother was Jean Mary Vyvyan Ladner. The boy carried his father’s first name for a while and then let it go, and he has been Richard ever since. In 1949, when he was eight, the family sailed home. His father had inherited a place called Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, a run-down country estate that he turned into a working commercial farm, and the boy who had spent his first years in East Africa learned England from the inside of a farmhouse. Dawkins has described himself as an ordinary Anglican child of that world: he believed in God, he said his prayers, and he assumed the grown-ups knew what they were talking about.

(●) 1954 AD: Confirmed into the Church of England at thirteen, he had given the faith up by about sixteen. + He was sent to Oundle, a Church of England boarding school in Northamptonshire founded in the sixteenth century, where chapel was on the timetable and confirmation was part of growing up. He was confirmed at thirteen, and by his own account he went through it believing. What unsettled him first was not science but arithmetic of a sort. He noticed as a boy that the faith a person holds is usually the faith of the place he was born in, which is a sharper observation than it looks, and it left him holding Christianity a little more loosely than before. What finished it was Darwin. The last reason he had for believing, he later wrote, was the argument from design: the sense that living things are too well put together to have simply happened. Then, at around fifteen or sixteen, he understood how natural selection actually works. Natural selection is the plain fact that whatever happens to survive and breed leaves more of itself behind than whatever does not, so that small differences pile up generation after generation, in one direction, for a very long time. Once he saw that a process of that kind could account for the fit between a creature and its life, the last reason went, and the belief went with it. The way he lost it matters, because it explains the shape of everything he wrote afterwards. Dawkins did not lose his faith to suffering, as Antony Flew did before he was fifteen, and not to philosophy, and not to a bad experience of the church. He lost it to a biological mechanism, and he has spent the rest of his life explaining that mechanism to anyone who will listen.

(●) 1959 AD: He went up to Balliol to read zoology, and learned the trade from a man who watched animals for a living. + Dawkins entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1959 and took his degree in zoology in 1962. He stayed on for a doctorate under Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Dutch-born zoologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 for the study of animal behaviour. That study has a name, ethology: watching what animals actually do, in the field rather than in a cage, and then designing a small experiment to test what the watching suggested. Tinbergen’s own experiments were famously homemade, cardboard gulls’ heads held up in front of newly hatched herring gull chicks to find out which mark on the beak set them begging for food. Dawkins’ thesis was on how newly hatched chicks decide what to peck at, which sounds like a small question and is really the question of animal decision-making in miniature. He also learned to write computer code, at a time when very few biologists could, and it marked him permanently. A man who spends his twenties thinking about instructions, copying, and errors in copying is halfway to The Selfish Gene before he starts. From 1967 to 1969 he taught zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving in the campus town that was then the loudest centre of protest against the Vietnam War, and taking part in the marches himself. In 1970 he came back to Oxford as a lecturer in zoology and a fellow of New College, and he stayed.

(●) 1976 AD: The Selfish Gene turned the story of evolution around and made him famous at thirty-five. + Consider a small bird that gives a warning call when a hawk comes over. Calling draws attention to the caller, and the caller is likelier to be eaten for having done it. For most of the twentieth century biologists explained behaviour of that kind by saying it was good for the species, an explanation with a comfortable and obvious feel that hid a real problem underneath: natural selection has no way of noticing what is good for a species. It only ever notices what gets passed on. Dawkins began the book in 1972, when Britain’s power cuts shut his laboratory and left him with a typewriter and time. The power cuts of those years were scheduled blackouts, whole districts taken off the electricity supply for hours at a stretch, and a laboratory with no power is a laboratory with no experiments running. What he did with the empty weeks was move the accounting one level down. Look at the gene and the sums come out. A gene that makes its bearer warn its close relatives is helping copies of itself that are sitting inside those relatives, and it will spread through the population even though the individual bird pays for it. The idea was not his invention and he never said it was; he was making the work of W. D. Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers readable by people who were not going to read the equations. What was his was the change of viewpoint. The animal is not the thing that owns the genes. It is the thing the genes build. Two words from the book entered the language, and both have caused him trouble. "Selfish" was one, and he spent decades explaining that it described the mathematics of how gene frequencies change and not the character of anybody’s children. The other was "meme," coined in the last chapter, which has since escaped into ordinary speech and now usually means a picture with words on it (T3).

(●) 1986 AD: The Blind Watchmaker took up William Paley’s watch and answered him. + In 1802 an English clergyman named William Paley opened a book with a man crossing a heath who strikes his foot against a stone, and then asked what the same man should think if he had found a watch lying there instead. A stone needs no explanation, Paley said, but a watch does: the parts are fitted to one another for a purpose, and purpose means a maker. He then spent the rest of a long book showing that the eye is a far better watch than any watch. The Blind Watchmaker is a direct answer, and it begins by conceding the observation rather than denying it. Living things do look designed. The appearance of design is not an illusion a biologist may wave away; it is precisely the thing that has to be explained (T2). What Dawkins offered instead of a designer was cumulative selection: not one leap from nothing to an eye, which would indeed be absurd, but a very long series of small improvements, each one kept because it worked slightly better than the last. To make the process visible he wrote a program that bred branching shapes on a screen, which he called biomorphs, and watched recognisable forms appear out of nothing but copying, small errors, and choosing. The book won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize. Four years before it he had published the more technical book he has most often called his finest, The Extended Phenotype. A phenotype is whatever the genes actually build, not the instructions but the finished article: the beak, the coat, the courtship dance. His argument is that the building does not stop at the skin of the animal carrying the genes, so that a beaver’s dam, and a caddis fly’s case, the little tube its larva glues together out of sand grains and scraps of twig and then lives inside, are as much the products of genes as a beak is.

(●) 1995 AD: Oxford made him its first professor for the public understanding of science. + The chair was endowed by Charles Simonyi, the Hungarian-born programmer who led the team that built Microsoft Word, and the holder was expected to explain science to people outside it rather than to publish for colleagues. Dawkins held it from 1995 until he retired in 2008, and the books of those years are the best writing he ever did: River Out of Eden, short and bleak, on what a river of DNA looks like from the outside; Climbing Mount Improbable, which pictures evolution as a mountain with a sheer cliff on one face and a long gentle slope up the back; Unweaving the Rainbow, an argument against the charge that explaining a thing spoils it; and The Ancestor’s Tale, a pilgrimage backwards through time in which every living lineage joins the walk at the point where it last shared an ancestor with us. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. One of those fellowships is for the science and the other is for the prose, and very few people have ever been given both. Together they are the fairest short summary of him: a working scientist who could write. Across the same years his tone about religion hardened. He had always been an unbeliever, and had mostly kept it to the last chapter and the odd essay. Now he began to argue in public that religion is not merely false but harmful, and to argue it in the sort of language that gets a scientist onto the evening news.

(●) 2006 AD onward: The God Delusion sold in the millions and made him the public face of a new atheism, and he has gone on publishing ever since. + The book appeared in the autumn of 2006, in a decade when a handful of unbelieving writers found a very large audience all at once: Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. The label that stuck to them was the New Atheism. What was new was not the arguments, most of which David Hume would have recognised two centuries earlier, but the confidence and the reach. The God Delusion has sold in the millions and been translated into more than thirty languages. On 30 September 2007 the four of them sat down together in Hitchens’ Washington flat with two cameras running and talked for two hours without an audience, a recording that went out under the title The Four Horsemen and did more than any of the books to fix the movement in the public mind. Dawkins had founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science the year before. He retired from the Simonyi chair in 2008 and did not stop working. Two volumes of memoir followed, An Appetite for Wonder in 2013 and Brief Candle in the Dark in 2015, then a version of the case written for teenagers, Outgrowing God, in 2019, and after that books on the engineering of flight and on what an animal’s body records of the worlds its ancestors lived in. His critics rarely mention what he wrote about his own certainty, and it cuts both ways. In The God Delusion he lays out a scale of belief with seven positions on it, running from one, the person who knows God is there, down to seven, the person who knows he is not. Dawkins does not put himself at seven. He puts himself at six, the man who thinks God very improbable and lives on the assumption that nobody is there, and then says at once that he leans towards seven: he is agnostic about God, he adds, only to the extent that he is agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

What He Taught

(T1) The gene, not the animal and not the species, is what natural selection is really counting. + Start with a dairy farm. A farmer who wants better milk yields does not sit down and think about what would be good for cattle in general; he thinks about which particular animals to breed from, and thirty years later the herd is a different herd. Natural selection works the same way, without the farmer. Dawkins’ contribution was to insist on carrying that thought one step further down than biologists had been carrying it. The thing that survives across the generations is not the animal, because the animal dies, and it is not the species, because a species is a bookkeeping category rather than a copy of anything. It is the gene: a stretch of DNA short enough to be handed on intact many times over. Genes that build bodies which get copies of those genes into the next generation become common. Genes that do not, vanish. Nothing in that sentence requires the animal to want anything, and nothing in it requires the gene to want anything either. "Selfish" in the title is a metaphor for the result of the accounting, not a description of a motive, and Dawkins grew visibly tired of saying so. The reach of the idea is what makes it more than a technical adjustment. It explained, for the first time properly, why a worker bee will sting and die for a hive she will never breed in: her sisters carry her genes, and in a hive they carry an unusually large share of them. It explained why parents will sacrifice for children more readily than children for parents. And it left one question standing that Dawkins named himself as the hard one. On this accounting, why is anybody ever kind to a stranger? His answer is that we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of our own selfish replicators, which is a striking thing to say if the replicators wrote us, and both his friends and his critics have been picking at the sentence ever since.

(Q) "They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence." + Source: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chapter 2, "The Replicators" (Oxford University Press, 1976). The closing lines of the chapter in which he traces genes back to the first molecules that could make copies of themselves in the early oceans. "They" are those replicators, which he says now go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

(T2) Living things look designed, and a long series of small steps explains the look without a designer. + Ask somebody who has never studied biology whether an eye looks designed, and the answer is yes. Dawkins agrees with them. He opens The Blind Watchmaker by defining his own field as the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose, which is a considerable thing to hand an opponent on the first page. His answer turns on a distinction between two kinds of chance, and the distinction is the whole argument. Single-step chance would be a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard and assembling an airliner, and it is exactly as absurd as its critics say it is. Cumulative selection is a different animal: each small improvement is kept and built on, so what is wildly improbable in one jump becomes reachable in stages. You cannot leap a cliff a thousand feet high. You can walk up the same thousand feet if the back of the mountain slopes gently enough, and Dawkins liked the picture well enough to build a later book around it. Two things follow, and a Christian reader should hold on to both. The first is that Paley’s argument, in the form Paley gave it, running straight from biological complexity to a designer, does not survive this. Most Christian philosophers now grant that, and have moved the design argument to ground where selection cannot reach. One such ground is the fine-tuning of the physical constants. A physical constant is one of the fixed numbers written into the laws of physics, the strength of gravity being the familiar one, and the fine-tuning question asks why those numbers sit in the narrow band that permits any chemistry at all. Selection has nothing to say about that, because selection needs things that already copy themselves, and chemistry comes first. The other ground is the origin of that first copying molecule, where Dawkins himself concedes the problem is unsolved. The second thing is that "explains the appearance of design" and "shows there was no designer" are different claims, and the gap between them is not a small one. A watch is fully explained by the factory that stamped it out. Somebody still built the factory.

(Q) "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." + Source: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, chapter 1, "Explaining the very improbable" (Longman, 1986). The words are the second half of a sentence whose first half grants that atheism was logically tenable before Darwin, so what Darwin supplied was not permission but an explanation. The sentence is the hinge of his whole case (T2), and it concedes more than it is usually read as conceding: on Dawkins’ own account, before Darwin the unbeliever had a hole in his picture of the world that he could not fill.

(T3) Ideas spread because they are good at spreading, not because they are true. + A tune gets into your head in the supermarket and you catch yourself humming it three hours later in the car. You did not choose it, it does you no good, and it will be gone by Thursday, but for one afternoon it used you to make a copy of itself. In the last chapter of The Selfish Gene Dawkins asked what such a thing is, and gave it a name. A meme, in his coinage, is a unit of culture that copies itself from one mind to another: a tune, a catchphrase, a fashion in clothes, a way of building an arch. He built the word from the Greek root behind "mimic" and shortened it to rhyme with "gene." The claim underneath is more interesting than the word. Wherever you have copies being made, copies varying, and some copies spreading better than others, you have the machinery of evolution running, and it stops mattering whether the things being copied are made of DNA. Ideas will then be shaped by whatever makes them spread, and what makes an idea spread is not the same thing as what makes it true. He applied this to religion straight away, and here the disagreement is real rather than verbal. Faith, on his account, is a meme that survives by discouraging the very checks that would expose it, and he defined it in that chapter as blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. Two replies matter here, and they pull in different directions. The first is that the definition is not the Christian one and never has been: Luke wrote his Gospel so that his reader might have certainty about what he had been taught (Luke 1:3, Luke 1:4), and Paul staked the entire faith on an event in public history that could in principle have been shown false (1 Corinthians 15:14). The second is that this way of thinking, which grew into a small field of its own called memetics, the study of ideas as things that copy themselves, cuts both ways, and cuts deep. If beliefs are held because they spread well rather than because they are true, that is as true of atheism as of anything else, and Dawkins has never explained why his own convictions should be the one set the acid does not touch.

(Q) "Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." + Source: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chapter 11, "Memes: the new replicators" (Oxford University Press, 1976). The sentence that launched a small field. Dawkins offered it in a few pages at the end of a book about biology, and it has outlived most of what was written about it since. That the word itself has mutated in ordinary use, from any unit of culture to a captioned photograph, is a fair demonstration of the point he was making (T3).

(T4) At the bottom of things there is no design, no purpose, and no justice. + Dawkins is quoted here more than anywhere else, and read carelessly here more than anywhere else. What he claims is narrower than the famous sentence sounds, and the narrower version is the harder one to answer. He is not saying that a human life has no meaning. He says elsewhere, often and warmly, that it does, and that the meaning is one we make for ourselves in the short time we have. What he is saying is that the physical processes underneath us are not the sort of thing that can hold an intention. A digger wasp lays its eggs in a living caterpillar and the larvae eat it from the inside while keeping it alive, because fresh meat keeps better than dead meat, and the fact that this is horrifying is a fact about us and not about the wasp. Nature, on his account, is not cruel. It is indifferent, which is worse, because cruelty at least implies that somebody is home. The Christian reply needs two halves and is weaker with either one missing. The first half agrees with him further than most readers expect. Scripture does not describe the present world as a smooth machine running toward the good; it describes a creation subjected to futility and groaning together in the pains of childbirth (Romans 8:20-22), which is a great deal closer to Dawkins’ river than to the greeting-card providence he is arguing against. The second half asks a question he does not answer. If there really is no good and no evil down there, then the moral weight of his own most famous paragraph, the indignation at a universe that lets caterpillars be eaten alive, has nothing left to rest on. He wants the horror to count. Horror only counts if something is genuinely wrong, and "genuinely wrong" is not a fact that blind physical forces are able to supply.

(Q) "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." + Source: Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, chapter 4, "God’s Utility Function" (Basic Books, 1995). He has just set a child dying of a parasite beside a predator’s cubs starving for want of prey, and has refused both of the comforting readings, that nature is kind and that nature is cruel. The lines immediately after press it harder still: DNA, he says, neither cares nor knows, DNA just is, and we dance to its music.

(T5) A God able to design a universe would be harder to explain than the universe, so design explains nothing. + This is the argument Dawkins regarded as the centre of The God Delusion and as his own contribution to the debate, and he named it after a line of Fred Hoyle’s. Hoyle, an astronomer and no friend of Christianity, once said the chance of life assembling itself was like the chance of a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard and assembling a Boeing 747. Dawkins turns the picture around and points it the other way. If complicated things are what need explaining, then a mind capable of designing a universe is the most complicated thing there could be, and reaching for it does not close the gap but widens it. Design, on this view, cannot explain anything at all, because it always leaves behind a larger question than the one it was called in to answer. The reply that philosophers have given, believing and unbelieving alike, is that the argument is aimed at a God nobody in the classical tradition was defending. By the classical tradition they mean the main line of Christian teaching about what God is, worked out in the early church and carried on by the medieval theologians. Divine simplicity, the doctrine that God is not built out of parts and therefore cannot be assembled or come apart, is not a modern piece of footwork invented to dodge Dawkins. It is in Augustine, in Anselm, in Aquinas, and it is the reason Christians say God has no beginning rather than saying that his beginning is a mystery. A being with no parts is not improbable in the way a 747 is improbable, because that kind of improbability is a fact about how many ways parts can be arranged. Alvin Plantinga made exactly this point in his review of the book, and did not soften it: "God is a spirit," he wrote, "not a material object at all, and hence has no parts" (†2). That does not settle the larger question and should not be dressed up as though it did. Anyone can grant every word of it and still ask why there should be a necessary being at all, a necessary being meaning something that exists and could not have failed to exist, and that is a serious question with a thousand years of argument behind it and no quick answer. What it does settle is narrower and still worth having: "who designed the designer" is not the checkmate it is usually played as.

(Q) "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747." + Source: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, chapter 4, "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God" (Bantam Press, 2006). The argument in two sentences, and the reason the chapter carries the title it does. Everything else in the book, the historical chapters, the moral chapters, the chapters on how children are taught, is offered in support of this one move (T5).

(Q) "I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian." + Source: Richard Dawkins, in conversation with Rachel Johnson, LBC radio, 31 March 2024. Spoken rather than written, and transcribed from the broadcast; the published transcriptions differ here and there in a small word, and these are the words they agree on. Asked on Easter Sunday about the decline of Christian belief in Britain, Dawkins said he loves hymns and Christmas carols, feels at home in the Christian ethos, and would not be happy to lose the cathedrals and the parish churches. He added, in the same breath, that he is glad the number of people who actually believe is falling. The remark drew fire from both directions at once, and it is the most revealing thing he has said in twenty years about what he thinks the argument was ever about.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The answers that mattered came first from scientists, not from theologians. + The most useful replies did not come from apologists defending a wall. They came from people who did Dawkins’ own job for a living. Take Francis Collins first. He led the international effort that sequenced the human genome and afterwards ran the National Institutes of Health, and he is also a Christian, converted in his late twenties; his 2006 book The Language of God made the case that a scientist can accept every word of Darwin and still believe. John Polkinghorne did something rarer. He resigned a chair in mathematical physics at Cambridge to be ordained, and spent a second career on the same question. Alister McGrath took a doctorate in molecular biophysics at Oxford before he took one in theology, which is an unusual order to do it in, and he wrote two books aimed squarely at Dawkins, Dawkins’ God in 2004 and The Dawkins Delusion? in 2007. Then there is Simon Conway Morris, the Cambridge palaeontologist who re-read the Burgess Shale fossils, a bed of Canadian rock that has kept half-billion-year-old animals in such detail that even their soft parts are legible. His argument is that evolution converges on the same solutions over and over, eyes and wings and intelligence arrived at repeatedly by unrelated lineages, and that it is therefore far less of a lottery than Dawkins allows. John Lennox, an Oxford mathematician, met him twice in public debate, in Birmingham, Alabama in October 2007 and in Oxford’s own natural history museum a year later. Those exchanges are worth watching for a reason that has little to do with who won. Neither man disputes a fossil or a mechanism. They part company on whether explaining how a thing works has disposed of the question why it is there at all.

(†) Philosophers judged the central argument a failure, and some of them were atheists. + The reception of The God Delusion outside the churches was in some ways rougher than the reception inside them. Alvin Plantinga, the most decorated philosopher of religion of his generation, reviewed it for Books & Culture in the spring of 2007 and marked Dawkins the way a tutor marks a weak essay: "many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class." His objection is the one that runs through (T5): the Boeing 747 argument assumes that God is a complex assembly of parts, and the God of classical theism is not that kind of thing. Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic with no stake at all in defending Christian doctrine, opened his review in the London Review of Books with a line that has followed the book ever since: reading Dawkins on theology, he said, is like reading a man hold forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds. Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology and an atheist who had testified in court against creationism, gave the McGraths a line for the cover of their reply: the book made him embarrassed to be an atheist. Two Dawkinses are in play, and fairness means keeping them apart. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype are serious contributions that professional biologists still argue with fifty years on. The complaint about The God Delusion is narrower, and it is a complaint about method rather than about conclusions: a man who would not have accepted a two-paragraph summary of natural selection from a theologian wrote about theology from a two-paragraph summary.

(†) He did the church a service he never intended. + Something happened after 2006 that nobody planned and Dawkins would not have chosen. A great many ordinary Christians who had never once been asked why they believed found the question put to them in a bestseller their colleagues were reading, and went looking for answers. Popular apologetics, which had been a thin trade for decades, became a busy one. William Lane Craig toured Britain in October 2011, asked Dawkins for a debate, was refused, and spoke at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford beside an empty chair with Dawkins’ name on it, an evening that got a good deal more attention than the debate itself would have. Dawkins set out his reasons for refusing in the Guardian. His critics set out theirs. The questions themselves moved, too, and that is the more lasting effect. Because the old argument from biological complexity had been closed off, the arguments left standing were the harder ones to answer: why the physical constants sit in the narrow band that permits any chemistry at all, why there is a universe rather than nothing, how the first self-copying molecule arose, and why a species of survival machine should be able to do mathematics that turns out to describe the interiors of stars. Those are better arguments than Paley’s ever were, and Christians were pushed toward them by a man who thought he was closing the subject.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: on what faith is, on who designed the designer, and on how far down the indifference goes. + Dawkins is not a Christian, has never pretended to be, and would not thank anybody for softening the disagreement. It runs to the root, and it runs in four places. - What faith is. He defines faith as blind trust in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence, and if that were what the word meant in Scripture the case against it would be over. It is not what it means. Luke opens his Gospel by telling his reader that he has followed everything closely and is writing an orderly account "that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught" (Luke 1:4). Jesus answers Thomas’ demand for proof by holding out his hands and telling him to put his own hand into the wounded side (John 20:27). Paul writes that "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14), which is a claim that could have been checked at the time and could have failed. Faith in the New Testament is trust placed in a person for reasons, which is what a patient does with a surgeon, not what a gambler does with a horse. - Who designed the designer. The Boeing 747 argument tells against a God who is a very large made thing, assembled out of parts, improbable in the way machines are improbable. No Christian tradition has ever claimed one. The God who names himself to Moses is the one who simply is (Exodus 3:14), and the psalm puts him there before the mountains were brought forth (Psalm 90:2): without parts, without assembly, and so without the kind of improbability that belongs to arrangements of parts. - How far down the indifference goes. "No design, no purpose, no evil and no good" is offered as a finding, and it is not one. No telescope reports it and no experiment tests for it. It is what is left over when a method deliberately built to exclude purposes is then treated as a complete inventory of what exists. Sweep a metal detector along a beach and it will find every coin and pass in silence over the driftwood, and nobody takes the silence for a report that driftwood is not there. Scripture makes the opposite claim about the very same evidence: the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), and what can be known about God is plain in the things that have been made (Romans 1:19, Romans 1:20). - What a human being is. On his account we are vehicles built by genes for the carrying of genes. On the Christian account we are creatures made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which is why the death of one of us is a grief and not a statistic, and why he himself writes about human suffering with more indignation than his own account of the world can pay for. Dawkins spent a working life on a real question and gave it a real answer, and no Christian who has not felt the force of The Blind Watchmaker has understood what happened to the design argument after 1859. Where he goes wrong is not in the biology. It is in the step taken just after the biology, the one that moves from "the mechanism is enough to explain the eye" to "the mechanism is enough to explain everything," and that step is not a scientific result. It is a decision about what will be allowed to count.