The review was the predictable pean to evolutionary dogma that dominates the popular and semi-scientific literature. Tells us nothing, really.
I get the impression from this, and other items of cultural interest I've mentioned in recent posts, that the basic pulse of the modern intellectual climate is given by neo-Darwinian views of origins, it frames the way people approach life and relationships, at some level, and certainly creates an orienting grid through which human life and social and religious thought are filtered. If this assessment is correct, then if the question of origins is not dealt with in both theology and evangelism, then we will end up talking to ourselves, as we Christians largely do as we have evacuated the marketplace of ideas.
The review ends with this comment:
...if you find yourself needing ammunition for evolution-creationist fights at dinner tables or in the public sphere, Dawkins is the arms dealer of choice.
To continue the military metaphor, I would rely on the thermobaric weapon of the origin of life: the debate is only worth taking up if evolution's boosters can explain how life originated, and how a dumb collection of atoms spontaneously made their own software: an information and action system (code, language, reading and transcription machinery), as Paul Davies has made the point (in a New Scientist article in 1999).
I would also want to know why on earth it would matter in an evolutionary world? Matter doesn't give rise to any system of signification, so why do evolutionists so enthusiastically act as though things, including their ideas, matter? They speak as materialists, but act like theists!
There's another review of Dawkin's book at the Economist, which ends with the telling statement:
...Those who do read it will find that among the many puzzles that evolution explains so well are the futility and suffering that are ubiquitous in the natural world...the immensity of pain in the animal kingdom, which defies explanation except via the unyielding calculus of competitive survival.
Firstly, this suggests the rhetorical failure of theistic evolution, which pins pain on God's very good creation (and not seeing it in biblical terms as a result of our federal rejection of God in Adam), and the dead end of natural theology 19th C style, which fails to lead from pain to Christ. Secondly, I don't think evolution per se does explain suffering at all well, or in any convincing way, because suffering is a moral judgement, a value laden reaction to certain events. Once evolution can bring an ought from an is, we might start listening, but until then it will remain a destructive Christian heresy with its roots in pagan speculations about a world that made itself.
Incidently, the Economist's review gets short shrift from Darwiniana and relies on half digested straw man arguments about biblical creation.
Also check Dissenter's comments on Dawkins' book.
