And who gets to determine what constitutes human 'malfunction?' What function exactly are humans supposed to be performing, and why exactly are we supposed to place value on any particular ends?
These are questions to which atheism is incapable of giving an answer... though of course there are hordes of individual atheist-ideologues who think we should replace the ways that made this country prosperous with their particular vision of how to achieve an 'advanced society.'
Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Incredibly disturbing. To Dawkins, every person is merely a soulless machine that invites tinkering when it meets Dawkins' own idea of "defective."
Bingo!
How does Dawkins account for his notion of 'malfunction' in the first place? Dysfunction implies that something designed for some purpose is not functioning as it ought to. If my lawnmower won't start it makes sense to say that it's malfunctioning, because it was designed for a purpose. But if in Dawkins' view the human race was not designed for any purpose and is nothing but random concatenations of atoms, themselves nothing but the result of a large series of highly improbable, impersonal accidents, what sense does it make to speak of malfunction? It is incoherent to speak of dsyfunction in some Darwinian sense where a species going extinct is presumably functioning just as 'normally' as a species that is not going extinct.
What is he comparing the universe to when he assumes that there's something wrong with it?
Cordially,