[betty boop]

...if...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.

Your statement strikes me as spot-on, YHAOS. I question whether such a life-view is even capable of reasoning about its physical environment. For if everything is just random neuron discharges and unguided chemical reactions, how do logic and reason enter into the picture? How could logic and reason be the products of a long chain of antecedent accidents? Even if we could say they were (which I very strongly doubt we can), according to what principle could unguided chemistry and random neural activity access them?

Dawkins is undermining the very foundation of science itself by making the claims he does. His is an exercise in absurdity.

Thank you so much YHAOS for your excellent essay/post!

[FreedomProtector]

If the brain of Dawkins was programmed by a "blind watchmaker" [title of a book by Dawkins] why should he trust it?

[YHAOS]

”How could logic and reason be the products of a long chain of antecedent accidents? Even if we could say they were (which I very strongly doubt we can), according to what principle could unguided chemistry and random neural activity access them?”

I don’t see how it can, but then I am but a lowly and humble citizen of a great republic.

Perhaps that sort of a life-view is capable of a limited reasoning about its physical environment, but not, I don’t believe, to the extent that it can offer anything to a free society in the way of directing our affections or of informing our values.