Updated 22 Jan 06
This can hardly be comprehensive - it would take a lot more than a web-page! There is an excellent book by Alastair McGrath called Dawkins' God which deals with some of his egregious philosophical errors, better and at greater length than I can or have time for.
Dawkins now admits
that the ideas that we are "just machines to propagate our genes" or
that "our genes program us" are not to be taken literally. All he
says he means is that "evolution is best understood at the genetic
level" and that the "programming" is at a statistical level (ie they
influence us not program us - amazing that Dawkins can't apparently
tell the difference!). He also admits that "religion may very
well have a conventional Darwinian survival value" and there is a lot
of evidence for this. He also seems to admit that there is no
objective basis for calling religion by the "demeaning" name of a
"virus".
However there is a serious problem for Dawkins's worldview. If:
a. Belief in Christianity (say) has survival value (even though
according to Dawkins it is untrue)
b. Our brains and minds are purely the products of evolution, so that
we will only acquire a mental capacity C if C has survival value.
c. The mental capacity to disbelieve in something, believing in which
(even if untrue) has suvival value cannot have survival value.
Hence if Dawkins were correct about (b) his brain would not be
capable of making the judgement that he claims to make about
Christianity.
An Octogenerian emailed about Dawkins' latest rant on Channel 4 and
I have posted a set of
refutations on the Polkinghorne Q&A page.
Richard Dawkins communicates persuasively but his rhetoric is deeply flawed. He is a zoologist and popular writer - his professorship is in public understanding of science rather than in either science or philosophy - and although his gift for memorable images and pithy phrases/sound bites helps communicate the valuable parts of his ideas he has such a distorted agenda that almost every page contains an error.
Such writing should have a big health warning.
To take just one example..
His errors begin at the preface:
"What will follow from [an object being able to use the surrounding materials to make exact copies of itself, including replicas of such minor flaws as occasionally arise] anywhere in the universe, is Darwinian selection and hence the baroque extravaganza that, on this planet, we call life"
This a typical piece of innumerate inaccurate rhetoric. It is hard to know whether Dawkins comes up with such things because he is innumerate or because he is deliberately trying to bamboozle his readers.
The obvious reason that Dawkins' assertion is untrue is that even
if replicating objects did arise, they might be wiped out or die
out before Darwinian or evolutionary pressures generate anything
interesting. For example, the changes in the genomes might have
had no time to introduce pheontypical changes before extinction
(most changes in the genome produce no changes in the survival-value
of the organism - they are in junk genes). But more fundamentally,
research on genetic algorithms has shown that the conditions of
replication, mutation and selection have to be pretty finely balanced
before anything interesting occurs. If you are not careful you
end up with a population consisting almost entirely of one genotype.
Just as the fundamental constants of nature have to be finely
tuned to an astonishing extent in order to produce life, so the
properties of genetic algorithms have to be carefully designed in order
to yield useful results.
Very few real scientists take Dawkins seriously - he is widely seen
as a 'fundamentalist' and people roll their eyes when he goes on with
another unjustified rant about God.