Without a doubt, Richard Dawkins is one of the most influential atheist of our time. Influential in part due to his rather “evangelistic fervor” in pushing his anti-God view. But one who is burning out under the burden of carrying an illogical worldview.
While a prominent and best-selling authour, one does have to wonder about how he tweets and some of the ideas he comes up with. Take the title choices for his book “The Blind Watch Maker” and his “Weasel Program“.
“The Blind Watch Maker” – being blind isn’t usually a trait which helps with making things, let alone things requiring fine precision like watches. The title makes the opposite case to the one he’s trying to.
Same goes with his choice of phrase and subsequent title of his experiment. Calling someone a weasel isn’t exactly flattering in what it implies about their honesty.
On Weasels
Perhaps there’s more logic in his titles than their content?
For example, his “Weasel program” is supposed to be an answer to the Infinite Monkey illustration. This illustration makes the case against genetic progress by chance.
The Infinite Monkey illustration goes like this: If you have a monkey banging away on a keyboard, even if you gave it an infinite amount of time, it would never come up with the works of Shakespeare.
Dawkins’ response? That’s not a fair reflection of reality and to prove that, he came up with the Weasel program. It’s a computer program which is supposed to simulate what really happens.
What really happens? There should be a target phrase which is being aimed for (in this case “Methinks it is a weasel”) and a mechanism to steer or select toward this phrase.
Here’s the problem – to have a target, one needs a design, just the thing which Dawkins denies:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
It gets worse. This situation will also require the infrastructure of language to host the target sentence’s construction as well as a system which has the resilience to survive the variations (mutations). Experience and evidence shows these aren’t the kind of things which come about without a design.
The weasel isn’t just in the sentence, it is also in the details. Details which Dawkins either missed or chose not to reveal to his reader. I’m not sure which scenario is worse.
“Did this really happen? My cringe glands are going into overdrive.”
“Looks like the closing ceremony for a suicide cult.”
This, among many other examples are why my wife has this take on Dawkins: “I think he’s going mad. It must be frustrating to believe in something which is looking increasingly more ridiculous.”
She’s not the only one. This article makes the case that he is growing increasingly irrelevant. In concluding its case, the article states his “Memes vs Genes” song “surely put the nail in the coffin”.
In case you can’t be bothered to go read the article, at least look at the video below. It may well make your day (since the Weasel program won’t).
Politically Incorrect - A History Lesson - All Of Us
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