Richard Dawkins Creates to Disprove the Creator


I read the following article singing accolades to Dr. Richard Dawkins, "the face of a new crusading atheism”, and immediately realized that one of his well-known attempts to disprove God's existence is illogical.

This is the excerpt in question:

“Recently, he’s [Dr. Richard Dawkins] been resurrecting a program that he wrote in the 1980s to illustrate the process of evolution, called Blind Watchmaker. … A few years ago, Dawkins put a plea on his website for help updating it. A freelance programmer called Alan Canon, based in Louisville, Kentucky, spent months on the project - often working through the night, …”

“… The first time Dawkins tested his creation back in the 1980s he saw, after numerous selections, images of entirely new creatures emerge, apparently distant from the original tree and yet its logical descendants: spiders, fish, a fox. He was the breeder; the process, by artificial selection, was evolution. … Even now, playing a game he invented 30 years ago, Dawkins became excitable as he unleashed generation after generation, click after click. ‘Look at these, you see?’ he said, pointing at the morphing shapes. ‘Look how quickly you can evolve!’” [1]

Dr.Richard Dawkins created a computer program, then an expert computer programmer helped him update it. Together they created a model that exists according to a clearly defined set of rules from an outside intelligence. This creation is supposed to demonstrate (to the naïve and the gullible) that there is no outside creator of the Universe. This is a prime example of self-delusion. For this scenario to be a valid analogy a computer would have to evolve, all by itself; and a companion compatible computer program, equivalent to his "Blind Watchmaker" computer program, would have to evolve, all by itself; and then he would have to wait until the computer started itself (assuming that there was electricity already attached) and produce the outcome he hoped for, without any outside intelligent input or instructions.

Since he had to create a model, he only ended up proving that we are created and are not the result of a blind unguided process.


 


[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation


 

Please login or register to comment