Hey editor-surveyor! (I've been away for the past few days.) Please note the above italics. :^)
The answer to Dawkins' disingenuous question is: Yes, the scientific mechanistic view does make nonsense of the very idea of personal responsibility.
If man were merely a machine, incapable of exercising free, rational decisions (machines do not modify their own programs as a rule), then the whole idea of personal responsibility and legal sanction for wrong-doing is absurd.
Plus Dawkins seems to indicate that the "program" that governs the human machine is an "accidental" result of Darwinian evolution over a very long period of time. He says that "we scientists believe..." this. Well, that's a faith statement pure and simple. He can conjecture all he wants to; what he can't do is offer any evidence to back up this claim, or notion.
The fact appears to be that Dawkins simply prefers to think of human beings as not possessing reason or free will, for whatever reason. On his view (the observer problem rears its head here), we humans and all other living creatures are simply cogs in a universal clockwork and, as such, differ little from one another in principle. In fact when you boil it all down, Dawkins seems to recognize little if any distinction between the living and nonliving worlds. And yet nowhere does he come to grips with the problem implicit in saying that a clockwork can spontaneously construct itself (this problem has something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, which seems incapable of generating formal causes).
Plus if reason and logic are but the outcomes of random development, why should we find them trustworthy? And if they are not trustworthy, then neither is anything built on them -- and science itself is a splendid edifice raised on the foundation of reason and logic.
Dawkins isn't "doing science" in this essay. He is doing something else entirely.
Well, FWIW. Thanks so much for the ping, editor-surveyor!
Indeed, Dawkins is not doing science in his essay - it sounds like he is prostelyzing for his own atheistic beliefs. On my reading of his works, atheism is his primary objective, not science.
(You) “If man were merely a machine, incapable of exercising free, rational decisions (machines do not modify their own programs as a rule), then the whole idea of personal responsibility and legal sanction for wrong-doing is absurd.”
Moreover, if, as you say, the scientific mechanistic view of life (therefore of the human brain) is that of an array of unguided chemical reactions and random neuron discharges, then that sort of life-view cannot claim anything as a matter of positive knowledge beyond its physical environment, and must confess it is helpless to believe anything other than what it does believe.
If I have stated anything which is substantially inaccurate or unfair, please enlighten me.