I read the Dawkins article, and while he may be speaking on target to some, he makes the mistake many do in lumping everyone he doesn't like into a single pile.
I don't know why it would offend a scientist that I believe in a Creator God. How did a weasel frog develop an elbow joint? He thinks that when I say "God did it" that it steals something away from science, or maybe from Dawkins himself. It does nothing of the sort. I still want to know "how", and I expect guys like Dawkins to get cracking figuring it out. In my Creationist ignorance, I believe that we were created for the purpose of joining in the creation, which means it is a critical part of our mission on this earth to reverse-engineer everything we see, so we can use it. For the glory of God, of course.
He seems to lump Intelligent Design with anyone who criticizes Darwin. But ID, as I understand it, basically presumes evolution, sees it as a process that can be harnessed like any other. That assumption gives heartburn to some of our creationist friends, but Dawkins argues right past ID, taking wild ad hominem swings at it that make little sense.
Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps!
Maybe, but I see it as fascinating, how the design has developed and "evolved". I don't have any fight to pick with the scientist who is trying to fill in the gap. I want to understand how the design changed from A to B to C. Dawkins thinks that if he shows how it happened, he has disproven God, he thinks faith in God is dependent on "mystery". He thinks that my faith requires the dark space between A and B to exist, and the moment he flips on the flashlight to show the machinery that links A to B, that God has been vanquished. It drives him nuts that we would look at the machinery, in awe at the ingeniousness of the design, in awe at how the design has advanced and changed, and praise God all the more.
Then we look at the next dark spot, wanting to know how that works, how God worked out that problem. He looks at the next dark spot, believing that once he reveals the belts and pulleys that God will be gone once and for all, and it never works. Because despite what he believes, faith in God is not at all dependent upon "mystery". It is a way of seeing what is known, and a way of dealing with what is not known.
I look at a car, and I know that there are some smart people at work in Detroit. Open up the hood, and show me how the pistons drive the crank, and I only marvel all the more, and yearn all the more to learn how to design engines, so that one day I can take my place at that drafting table in Detroit. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Hello dear marron! WRT the above: I strongly doubt a "real" scientist would have any problem with the fact that you or I or anybody else believes in a Creator God.
Of all humanity, scientists are thought (expected) to be the most "open minded." So if someone who claims to be a scientist shuts his mind against such views (and the people who hold them, which is the main case here it seems), then i would question that person's credentials as a scientist. I would suspect such a person was something else, promoting himself under the guise of science for non-scientific purposes.
ID is not at all interested (as far as I can tell) in proving the existence of God. ID more than Darwinists (I suspect) understands that this is not a proper scientific question at all.
Speaking for myself, a person who is NOT closely identified with ID (in my own mind, at least), I am interested in studying the DESIGN, recognizing that the "identity" of the designer is not the question under investigation. I am convinced there is design/form/purpose in universal nature. And I would like to understand it better. The best way to do that, it seems to me, is just to observe reality, and take it from there, wherever the trail leads....
You wrote: "Dawkins thinks that if he shows how it happened, he has disproven God, he thinks faith in God is dependent on "mystery".
Fascinating insight, marron. But if he wants to utterly 'demystify" the world, why, then, would he try to sell his "prescription for world-demystification" by resort to the rhetorical imagery of mystery?
This sort of thing makes my head hurt, makes me bleed through my ears. Truly, i do not understand such people at all. Hope that changes, though.
Thank you so much for your beautiful post, marron.