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Dawkins and The Alabama Insert

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2009

Alvin Plantinga
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Abstract

In issue one, Richard Dawkins attacked the Alabama State Board of Education for pasting into biology schoolbooks an insert (reproduced overleaf) that explained that the theory of evolution is an ‘unproven’ and ‘controversial’ theory that ‘some’ scientists accept. The insert also raised a number of important questions that (the suggestion seems to be) the theory of evolution still struggles to answer. Here, philosopher Alvin Plantinga responds to Dawkins' criticisms of the insert.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Autumn 2002 , pp. 7 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2002

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References

Notes

1 Other times he is less generous, attributing creationist declarations to dishonesty rather than stupidity: ‘willfully confusing one thing with another’; ‘calculatedly misleading manner’, etc. Compare this with his declaration (in a review in the New York Times) that ‘It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)’…. This may seem a bit rigorous, but, given the level of rhetoric in this area, it is actually rather mild. Daniel Dennett, for example, goes Dawkins one (or two) better along these lines: according to Dennett, if you so much as succumb to doubts about evolution you are culpably ignorant: ‘To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant….’ (Darwin' Dangerous Idea, p. 46). (You wake up in the wee hours, when things sometimes seem unreal; you ask yourself ‘Can it really be that all this enormous variety of living things has been produced by evolution?’; Bam! You are inexcusably ignorant!) At least Dawkins gives skeptics a choice.

2 In Critical Condition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 167.Google Scholar

3 Think, Issue One, p. 10.Google Scholar

4 Think, Issue One, pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., River Out of Eden: a Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 32–33.Google Scholar

6 River Out of Eden, from chapter 4, p. 98.

7 The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1987, 1986), p. 141.Google Scholar

8 The Blind Watchmaker, p. 141.

9 See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, la, Question 3.

10 See, e.g., my Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 26 ff.Google Scholar

11 The Blind Watchmaker, p. 15.

12 One suspects that Dawkins thinks Darwinism would be the best explanation of the living world even if it weren't true: ‘The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available!’ (Watchmaker, p. 317, Dawkins' emphasis).

13 New York Review of Books, Jan. 7, 1997, p. 31.Google Scholar