Am I missing something here. Didn't Darwin put forward the idea in the "Origin of Species" that natural selection creates change in species? Why are the Creationists getting their britches tied in knots over this idea. He is not arguing the beginning of life, he is talking about change over time. Creation and evolution are two very different but not necessarily exclusive notions.
...If you push Dawkins and company far enough, you find yourself more or less where Aristotle was more than 2,000 years ago in stating his view that any chain of cause-and-effect must ultimately begin with an Uncaused Cause.
Alright, who is Dawkins?
And creationists believe the same thing. Where we differ is that Darwin believed that natural selection gave rise to new species, and there is no proof of this.
If you don't know who Dawkins is, you are out of touch with the debate.
That is precisely the author's point.
Dawkins is one of the scientists who push the conept of evolution negating God (according to the author).
“Evolutionist” is a term used by creationists to include all scientists who disagree with them.http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dalrymple/creationist_age_earth.html
Creationists get their britches tied in knots because they read fixety of species as a corollary of a literal reading of Genesis.
Dawkins? An eminent biologist who gave up science to become possibly the loudest and most odious of the recent spate of apologists for atheism. He was a bit too doctrinaire as a biologist, too, to my way of thinking, and argued vociferously that Gould’s critique of the praxis of evolutionary biology’s ‘just so stories’ was wrong (by which Gould meant the inistence on finding an adaptive purpose for every observed trait to explain it, when coincidences of adaptive traits could themselves produce other traits—e.g. sleep and consciousness are both adaptive, but dreaming might not have any adaptive function, being merely consciousness while sleeping). In this, his atheism, and misperception that classical Darwinism provided a proof of atheism, colored his scientific judgement.
You know those raving, frothing-at-the-mouth, "everybody who doesn't believe like I do is insane" religious fundamentalists? Dawkins is the atheist version.