I should explain the point about the watchmaker.

A SMALL ROCK

If you’re walking along in the countryside and you come across a rock, you don’t say, well, where the hell did that come from and who made it? It’s a rock. No one cares. There’s no notices stuck on trees or printed in local free newspapers anywhere saying “have you seen this rock? Description – roughly three inches by four by three; last seen in the Dorchester area; undistinctive grey colouring; answers to the name of “rock”; reward – please call this number; WE MISS YOU ROCK” . It’s a rock.

ON THE OTHER HAND, A GOLD WATCH


Now, if you saw a beautiful gold watch on your walk in the countryside, you would say – lo! a watch – I deduce that someone has lost a watch and it is here; also, I furthermore deduce that there must be a God.” Richard Dawkins says that watches, or indeed anything complicated, do not infer the existence of a watchmaker. Or, to use a different analogy, a book, which can be a complicated thing, does not infer the existence of an author. You could say well, here’s a book called The Blind Watchmaker and it says it’s by Richard Dawkins, so we see that Richard Dawkins is the author and he wrote this book, but Richard Dawkins would say NO! it doesn’t, have you not been paying attention, have you been giggling and passing notes in the back row again?

EVOLUTION OF THE SEMICOLON

What happened is that gradually, over many billions of years, language formed, inconceivably slowly, for instance it took ten million years for commas to evolve out of a full stop, and another ten million for the exotic semi-colon to evolve out of the comma. So this book The Blind Watchmaker (like all other books) evolved slowly. We have fossils to prove this. They show the missing links. We have, for instance, copies of the book which are called The Blond Watchmaker dating from the Devonian period – it took several millions of years for the Blond to evolve into the Blind, you see. I read that Mexican paleontologists recently unearthed a copy called The Bland Watchmaker. Going back further , we find all sorts of evolutionary byways that, because of natural selection, died out eventually. One manuscript from the late Pleistocene period which is currently on display at the University of East Anglia shows a strange hybrid between an early version of The Blind Watchmaker and Alice in Wonderland in which the famous teaparty scene features a pterodactyl, a plesiosaur (so very unlikely) and a crazed archaeopteryx. This unviable literary form did not survive, as we know. Natural selection, although brutal from our limited human perspective, explains the evolution of complex things.

RELIGION CANNOT EXPLAIN WHY TWILIGHT IS POPULAR

God cannot explain why the book species “Stephanie Myers” and “Dan Brown”, for instance, proliferate wildly in many varied habitats, whilst arguably more beautiful forms like Henry James, Proust, and the Golden Tamarin



dwindle to the point where human intervention from libraries and literary professors are the only thing keeping them from sinking into oblivion – no, God cannot explain this. But Richard Dawkins (also known as "Science") can.

Sorry, that should be “Richard Dawkins”.