Richard Dawkins to world: Evolve Already!

Richard Dawkins has more than anyone since Charles Dawrwin (or at the very least since John Maynard Smith)to promote and popularize the theory of evolution as the final word in biology. His books (especially "The Selfish Gene")have become the most widely read text for laymen on the subject. Although he has flirted with it his entire career, Dawkins has now tured his attention to the subject that he thinks is a natural extension of Darwinian thought: atheism. If ever a person has volunteered themselves to be the face and spokesperson of this cause it is Richard Dawkins. Television specials ,an Eurpopean and Amercian lecturing tour, a open slot on the 24/7 cable news cycle whenever they need an atheist go-to mouthpiece and, most of all, a best-selling book. "The God Delusion" has been a suprise hit in America; an affront to all those who, quoting "polls" of the American populace, assert that almost all Americans are church going pious Christians. Dawkins has cetainly faced his fare share of criticism for the book; mostly from other liberal athesist thinkers reviewing the book in various periodicals and newspapers. What's the beef? A philosophic look at Dawkins arguments can shed some light.
Unlike Sam Harris, Dawkins is more thorough and systematic in his argumention. He does his damndest to convince the reader, that God-because of logical constraints- is almost certainly a fictional creation. Although he often thinks of himself as making this point scietifically, he is engaging in philosophy, pure and simple. One might wonder how an evolutioary biologist could be qualified to argue in such a way but, then again, Leibniz was a Mathematician and Ayn Rand a novelist so, why not? What's important is how well he achieves his task. The brunt of his philosophical analyses can be found in Chapters 3 and 4, "Arguments for God's Existence" and "Why there is almost certainly no God." He begins dismantling Aquinas' proofs of God's existence rather, shall we say, unmodestly:

"The Five 'Proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so,given his eminence - exposed as vacuous."

Even if a person believed that dismantling Aquinas is an easy task, better to keep such sentiments to oneself, for in displaying that he doesn't really think Aquinas to be so hard after all, he lessons his own rhetorical power. I would much rather here from someone who found Aquinas incredibly challenging and still rejected him. One's counter-argument must be respected and given all due consideration. In attempting to disprove Aquinas one must first try to convince themself that Aquinas in true. While this is critical of his rhetorical style, and not Dawkins' actual argumentation, it nevertheless betrays a certain chauvenism on his part. After this declamation he goes to a mostly satisfying, if unoriginal, critique of the proof's of God's existence. He handles the problem of infinite regress with aplomb, nearly dismisses the "Argument from Degree" out-of-hand (a move which I have some sympathy for, given the arguments awkwardness and poor formulation) and, evolutionary biologist that he is, provides Darwin as the answer for all problems teleologic (that is, the argument from design.) After dismantling these "a posteriori" arguments for God's existence he moves on to a priori ones, namely the ontological argument. I was happy to see Dawkins dip his toes into these murky waters (something Sam Harris avoided) but was quickly put-off by Dawkins' dismissal of the argument as "infantile," and that the argument belongs "in the language of the playground." Upon reading this I knew that a sophisticated analysis of Anselm was not going to be found in "the God Delusion." Dawkins seems baffled by Betrand Russell's struggle with the issue, owning it up to Russell being "a exaggeratedly fair-minded atheist, over-eager to be disillusioned if logic seemed to require it." Of course, Mr. Dawkins, if logic requires one to believe something there is nothing illusory about it. The question at hand is whether the ontological arguent is really such a logical truth-tout court. All Russell appreciated was that this argument was far more than a school-yard taunt. Dawkins knee-jerk reaction to Anselm is a "suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world(itallics mine)" What he fails to appreciate, (and he admits nearly as much when he says that that is why he is a "scientist" and "not a philsopher") is that the ontological argument is metaphysical in scope; empirical evidence can weigh on it neither for or against. If datum from the world made a crucial difference in the ontological arguments truth or falsity it would not be an a priori argument at all. I suspect Dawkins doesn't believe we can gleam much knowledge from a priori reasoning; in fact I don't think he really thinks about the subject much at all-even in how certain a priori assumptions relate to science. Dawkins has a bemused fondness for philosophers, never so evident as when he realtes the story about how he challlenged a group of philosophers to prove that pigs do not fly. They had to resort to modal logic to do so. Those silly philosophers!