Is Richard Dawkins intelligently designed?

I have to admit, the evidence from his own lips suggests not.

From here:

“We still don’t know what exactly happened at the time of the Big Bang, 13.72 billion years ago. Cosmologists and physicists now have good ideas which are yet to be proved definitely, that the whole universe came into being as a quantum event out of literally nothing,” he said, according to the Times of India.

“This leaves religion with nowhere to go. Because however difficult it may be to explain the origin of the cosmos, it would be even more difficult to explain the origin of a designer who made the cosmos.

“So you have absolutely nothing to gain by postulating any kind of intelligent designer, because that simply evades the question we’re trying to solve. If you want to believe in some kind of god, don’t look to science.”

There are three problems with this.

First, it confuses the categories of things that have an origin – like the universe – and things that don’t – like God. God, by definition is a necessary not a contingent being: he does not depend on something else for his existence. To look for a cause for the universe’s coming into being makes sense, to look for a cause for God’s coming into existence has no meaning because, in order to be God, he must have always existed.

Second, saying: “the whole universe came into being as a quantum event out of literally nothing” doesn’t solve the problem of how something that requires a cause for its existence arrived, apparently, without a cause: what caused the “quantum event”?

Third, since Richard Dawkins’ atheism is a presupposition not something that has been demonstrated logically or empirically, it isn’t surprising that science can’t help him find something he is already convinced isn’t there. Scientists who do not start out with a belief that God does not exist see a great deal of evidence for a universe that has been designed.

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