Free The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins Page A

watches were literally designed and built by a master watchmaker. Our modern hypothesis is that the job was done in gradual evolutionary stages by natural selection.
    Nowadays theologians aren’t quite so straightforward as Paley. They don’t point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say ‘It is impossible to believe’ that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing ‘Speak for yourself in the margin. There are numerous examples (I counted 35 in one chapter) in a recent book called The Probability of God by the Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore. I shall use this book for all my examples in the rest of this chapter, because it is a sincere and honest attempt, by a reputable and educated writer, to bring natural theology up to date. When I say honest, I mean honest. Unlike some of his theological colleagues, Bishop Montefiore is not afraid to state that the question of whether God exists is a definite question of fact. He has no truck with shifty evasions such as ‘ Christianity is a way of life. The question of God’s existence is eliminated: it is a mirage created by the illusions of realism’. Parts of his book are about physics and cosmology, and I am not competent to comment on those except to note that he seems to have used genuine physicists as his authorities. Would that he had done the same in the biological parts. Unfortunately, he preferred here to consult the works of Arthur Koestler, Fred Hoyle, Gordon Rattray-Taylor and Karl Popper! The Bishop believes in evolution, but cannot believe that natural selection is an adequate explanation for the course that evolution has taken (partly because, like many others, he sadly misunderstands natural selection to be ‘random’ and ‘meaningless’).
    He makes heavy use of what may be called the Argument from Personal Incredulity. In the course of one chapter we find the following phrases, in this order:
    … there seems no explanation on Darwinian grounds … It is no easier to explain … It is hard to understand … It is not easy to understand … It is equally difficult to explain … I do not find it easy to comprehend … I do not find it easy to see … I find it hard to understand … it does not seem feasible to explain … I cannot see how … neo-Darwinism seems inadequate to explain many of the complexities of animal behaviour … it is not easy to comprehend how such behaviour could have evolved solely through natural selection … It is impossible … How could an organ so complex evolve? … It is not easy to see … It is difficult to see …
    The Argument from Personal Incredulity is an extremely weak argument, as Darwin himself noted. In some cases it is based upon simple ignorance. For instance, one of the facts that the Bishop finds it difficult to understand is the white colour of polar bears.
    As for camouflage, this is not always easily explicable on neo-Darwinian premises. If polar bears are dominant in the Arctic, then there would seem to have been no need for them to evolve a white-coloured form of camouflage.
    This should be translated:
    I personally, off the top of my head sitting in my study, never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar bear in the wild, and having been educated in classical literature and theology, have not so far managed to think of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being white.
    In this particular case, the assumption being made is that only animals that are preyed upon need camouflage. What is overlooked is that predators also benefit from being concealed from their prey. Polar bears stalk seals resting on the ice. If the seal sees the bear coming from farenough away, it can escape. I suspect that, if he imagines a dark grizzly bear trying to stalk seals over the snow, the Bishop