Dawkins claimed, as I noted earlier, that the universe “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose,” only “blind, pitiless indifference.”77 Second, since, in his view, neither life nor the universe revealed any evidence of actual (as opposed to apparent) design, atheism or materialism provided a more “parsimonious” explanation of the world. If there was no evidence of actual design in the universe and thus no evidence of design by God, why continue to believe in such a being?
