Nagel on Dawkins

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York State University in a review (In The New Republic) of Richard Dawkins latest tirade against religion and faith:

"The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them."

Why the world appears to be designed

In the book, "The Blind Watchmaker," Dawkins ponders why it took so long for the idea of evolution to arise, why so many brilliant scientists and thinkers in various disciplines missed it, and why so many people today will not accept it. Dawkins makes the following statement:

"It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe." P. xi

Dawkins, of course, was not the first to make this observation:

"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessess and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be know about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - has been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."
Romans 1:18-21

Where Dawkins tries to explain why people reject a naturalistic explanation for the world, the apostle Paul explains why people reject a theistic explanation.