I would disagree. I think that Dawkins' point was that before Darwin, being an atheist was not intellectually fulfilling because intellectual honesty demanded an explaination for the diversity of life as we observe it, and atheism denied any resort to God.
To the science of the time, it was a daunting task and no other area of science posed anywhere near such a glaring, and then-unanswered, challenge. Far from being an answer to "everything that the theist points to God for," evolution through natural selection provided the answer to the one big, giant, glaring, obvious thing that the atheist had no answer for at that time.
By that token, being an atheist today would be equally unfulfilling intellectually because intellectual honesty demands an explanation for the very existence of life in the first place.
Besides, contextually, that's not possible. Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker as a direct response to Paley's argument, and the entire point of the book is to prove that a designer isn't really necessary to explain the existence of life, but that the "blind" forces of nature are sufficient in an evolutionary context to explain how it came about. I believe his arguments are misconstrued as a result of his initial premise--that God could not exist except as a fantasy--but that is in fact his argument.
Far from being an answer to "everything that the theist points to God for," evolution through natural selection provided the answer to the one big, giant, glaring, obvious thing that the atheist had no answer for at that time.
Properly and narrowly defined, that's true. And strangely, I don't have a real problem with the theory of evolution, though having studied the issue, I don't believe that the evidence for it is nearly as strong as it's made out to be.
For example, Darwin himself put forth a falsifiability test for his theory: He was troubled by the lack of transitional fossils--that is, we see numerous fossils of one animal form and numerous of another, but not a smooth, continuous change over time. He supposed that this was due to the fact that paleantology was in its infancy in his day, and believed that if his theory were true, further digging would provide the smooth transitions.
Guess what? We're still lacking those transitions, causing many scientists to posit that evolution from one form to another takes place so quickly that it doesn't get captured in the fossil record. Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory designed not on the basis of the evidence, but to explain away a lack of evidence while retaining the evolutionary paradigm.
Now, do I deny that things change over time? Not at all; clearly, there are many animals that once existed that no longer do, and others that appear later in the fossil record than the first forms. Microevolution--evolution within a type--is a fact of life, proven by thousands of years of breeding dogs. Strangely enough, though, despite all our breeding, dogs are still dogs, and fruitflies are still fruitflies (the latter after thousands of generations).
Here is where we must separate, far more carefully than we do, the Theory of Evolution (an attempt to explain speciation) from the Religion of Evolution. The Theory of Evolution plainly admits that it has no solution for abiogenesis, for the Cambrian Explosion, for the lack of continuous change over time in the fossil record, no fossil evidence directly linking Man to other primates, etc. If that were all that was being taught in schools and shown on government-funded PBS specials, I don't think you'd hear nearly as much objection from my side of the issue.
However, what we do is blur the line between Theory and Religion. In the Religion of Evolution, the universe emerged spontaneously from the Big Bang, evolved without direction for billions of years, that life "evolved" from muck, and then evolved into all the modern forms. It goes further and speaks of the "evolution" of morality (which is to suggest that the "old" morality of all other religions has been superceded by its own "do as thou wilt").
I'm a youth minister, among my other duties. I recently had some of the kids in my group come to me, disturbed because they were taught in their science class that it had been proven that life could "evolve" spontaneously from the so-called primordial soup with just a strike of lightning. Fortunately, having done my homework, I could show them that they had been . . . misinformed . . . by their textbooks.
The fact that evolution on the one hand dodges the question of abiogenesis and on the other claims that life "evolved" into being (depending on which is more advantageous for the particular conversation) frankly bugs the heck out of me. I don't care if the classrooms teach ID per se, so long as they and the textbooks are frank in saying, "We have no idea how life came about," and explaining the current problems evolution has as a theory.
The fact that those on the evolutionist side of the debate demand that IDers and Creationists publish peer-reviewed research while making it impossible for anyone to do so (at least without sacrificing their reputations and careers) also bugs me. It's frankly hypocritical, and it actually retards scientific progress.