Dawkins: The Blind Watch Faker

Won't Richard Dawkins please just go away? His moment in the sun is over. It's sad watching him talk about the origins of the universe acting like he has even an inkling of an idea of what's going on like an audience member at a magic show pretending to understand the magician's tricks by saying, "It's all smoke and mirrors." Dawkins, once known as Darwin's pitbull, IS very much smoke and mirrors and the sad part is not the many fans who have read, or claim to have read his books and support him and the educationally, and societally mandated "MEME" of Darwinist thinking, it's that it's pretty obvious he's a smart enough guy to know he's full of shit. The more he studies, the more he realizes this, but he is so completely invested in his false cause that he can't just change his mind now.

Although, in the spirit of science, which I think he genuinely DOES respect, it would not be out of character to completely flip-flop. Science does it all the time. And scientists constantly disagree. Even though they are always claiming to require hard evidence and uncompromised objectivity as the basis of scientific method. One wonders how these things could happen... Is the Earth flat or round? Are birds related to dinosaurs or not? Are brontosaurus and triceratops just mistakes? Are eggs good for me or not? Is light actually the fastest thing known to man? What the hell happened to Pluto?

I don't think it will be long before this whole wave of Darwinist, evolutionary thinking will be just another famous scientific flip-flop. Evolution happens. That's not what I'm debating. It's the extent that people, most who claim science as their ally, carry it. A scientist I once read defined faith as assumption based on imagination. In the interview above, O'Reilly's very first statement was that it takes more faith to believe in what Dawkins is shovelling, natural selection, than to believe in intelligent design. If people bother to actually READ "The Origin of Species" they'll find a lot of passages where Darwin virtually says he's probably wrong. And if one was to pick up a copy of Dawkins' book, "The Blind Watchmaker" he/she would find Dawkins elucidating, in chapter 2, the wonders of bat echolocation and writing the following:

"We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully
'designed' to have come into existence by chance."

He then spends the rest of the book saying that Darwin and Wallace took a "very large leap of the imagination" but there's no faith, there's no design, there's a much more plausible way that the wonders of cre - (oops I almost typed "creation"), the universe came about. How can a person use words like "plausible" and then claim to be scientific? There's no plausible in science. It is or it isn't. As Dawkins says in this interview, "Somethings got to either be true or not." At least it's supposed to be that way. But when convenient, Dawkins can just flippantly say, "We're working on it." We BELIEVE in it 100% but we're working on it. There goes evidence and there CERTAINLY goes objectivity. How can terms like "natural selection" be used for that matter? If nature, as Darwin, Wallace and Dawkins are constantly telling us, is just an inanimate, non-sentient force, how can it make a selection?

This book, "The Blind Watchmaker," was also the origin of the word, "meme," which I hated long before I knew Dawkins was responsible for it. Could, irony of ironies, everything he writes about and believes be just that? A meme? I think so. But I'm not going to just hypothesize and pass it off as scientific fact. Let's explore this a little bit more and see exactly how "plausible" it is. I'm not inclined to think, "Well the guy wrote a book and he's on T.V., he must know what he's talking about."

Back in 1802, (50 years before The Origin of Species), William Paley used a famous analogy to explain why we believe in a Creator when we see nature. It was called the Watchmaker Argument or Analogy. It was something like if a person who had never seen a watch before found one in the wilderness, he would conclude that it was a product of intelligent design. It had a creator. A watchmaker. The thing most people DON'T know about Paley is that he compiled a staggering catalogue of evidences of intelligent design from mostly the human body but also the animal and plant kingdoms and he said that all of these evidences were much more compelling than the watch in their complexity. Let's not forget that the watchmaker analogy is macroscopic. We know that cells are divided into parts made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of particles, some of which are made of sub-particles. And in 50 years maybe sub-sub particles or sub-sub-SUB particles will be discovered. The irony is that because of scientific knowledge, (which evolutionists are always claiming to support THEM), we know that the watch is actually a watch made of millions of tiny pieces even more complex than watches, which themselves are made of billions of even tinier pieces more complex than watches. And there is undoubtedly MORE going on there that we can't yet see. What kind of person could understand this and not take it as a compelling argument for creation over random happenstance? Someone who has TREMENDOUS faith!

Even though he uses phrases like, "increasingly fewer," talks about seeing Apollo not looking so good, O'Reilly is absolutely right. And Dawkins knows it. Come on!

Also in the same book Dawkins expands on what he calls the more "plausible" explanation of how things come about. He created a program called the Weasel program. It was designed to randomly generate the Shakespearian phrase, "Methinks it is like a weasel," from Hamlet. A parent of randomly generated letters was created and it bred offspring through random mutation. In his own opinion his program would have taken a million, million, million, million, million years to produce the phrase. As further research has shown, he was way off. Monkey typing Shakespeare programs have been tested all over the place and the best they have ever done was in 2005 when the first 24 characters from Henry IV were randomly typed. It only took 2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey years to get it. Whatever the hell that means... Another typed "Valentine Cease to idor:eflpoFrjwK78axzv" the first 19 characters of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and THAT only took 42 billion billion billion monkey years. Considering the age of the earth, the streak of 24 characters, the best ever recorded, would take many billion billion earth ages. The complete works of Shakespeare are about 4.5 million characters. Yet there are people who still believe that a room full of monkeys would eventually bang that out if given enough time. That's just a complete misunderstanding of how random works, which undoubtedly contributes to their belief in evolution. Or it's incredible faith!

Back to the weasel program. Dawkins wanted to randomly generate a phrase of 28 characters with it. As we now know, that just ain't gonna happen. And it didn't. But did that stop Dawkins? No. He then changed to program to CHOOSE the closest progeny to the desired quotation. This, according to Dawkins, "shows" or "demonstrates" the ability of natural SELECTION to generate biological complexity out of random mutations. Well hold on now! These mutations were no longer random. Like I said before, call it choosing or selecting, that's intelligence. All Dawkins has done here is Goded up his Godless program. It's not random any more. But even if you inexplicably believe, as so many did, that this is proof of natural selection, there is a much bigger problem: it took 43 generations.

24 mutations to the same species. 23 useless spandrels that only became useful after the 24th mutation in the 43rd generation. Dawkins was quoted as saying that the probability of a gene mutating is less than one in a million. What then are the odds of something mutating 24 times? Don't make the mistake of thinking it's only one in 24 million. Every mutation raises the odds exponentially. That's what Shakespeare's monkeys showed us. 24 mutations is not gonna happen. Add to this that mutations very rarely make something more attractive or better able to survive. Genetic material is not gained but lost during a mutation. Mutations are often lethal. Some examples we know are cystic fibrosis, sicle cell anemia, Down's syndrom and cancer. We naturally mate with attractive survivors. Mutation almost always makes the mutant less likely to procreate. Anything different is usually scorned. AND, a lot of mutations are recessive. That is they will not be passed on unless BOTH parents have them.

Taking all the SCIENCE into account, this model was insanely inane. But it was lauded as hard scientific evidence of natural selection by a LOT of people. People with a LOT of faith.

In the same book Dawkins uses an eye for an example. He begins with a simple organism capable of only distinguishing between light and dark. Then through a series of what he calls "plausible" minor modifications the organism builds in sophistication until we arrive at the elegant, complex, mammalian eye. This is not science, it's science fiction! Any REAL scientist knows that this is absolutely absurd! Zoologist Pierre Paul Grasse, former president of the French academy of science observed that a single animal or plant would not require 24 but thousands and thousands of these luckily approprate events called mutations.

Another highly respected scientist, Dr. Lee Spetner sat down and figured the odds of developing a single new species through mutation. He multiplied the rate of mutation by the chance of it being advantageous by the chance of mutation spreading through the species by the lowest number of steps required to form a new species. Though he used numbers VERY favourable to the evolutionists, the resulting odds were one in 3.6 x 10 to the power of 2738. That's 36 with 2737 zeroes behind it. The average biologist estimates there to be 15 million species on the Earth. Some say up to 100 million. It has been proposed that 90% of the species on Earth have yet to be identified.

Add to all of this the ecosystems' interdependance, the rotation of the Earth, the wind, water, seasons, volcanic action, rocks, gasses, stars, clouds, rain, lightning and then contemplate that we are just one planet in a HUGE universe that is probably one in a huge number of universes! For all we know everything could be made of an infinity of particles each more microscopic than the last, and the expanse of the universes may be endless as well. Infinity both ways. Infinity: the Achilles heel of the whole Darwinist movement. The only thing more astonishing than the vast miraculous nature of our universe is the incomprehensible FAITH in the unfortunate people out there who either don't see, or pretend not to see any evidence of a Creator here.

Least that's how I see it.