Unstop - you are taking a scatter-gun approach to this.
How about being more systematic?
Three or four of us have explained the theory/fact issue to you in detail and instead of acknowledging that you rush off to another point.
Please could you provide specific references to where you think Dawkins is pushing an atheist agenda?
The book contains over 400 pages of pure science and yet so far you haven't mentioned a single scientific point.
The section on "The great chain of being" that you mentioned is not an attack on theism at all. It is a refutaion of a very common misunderstanding of evolution that casues people to ask silly questins about "missing links".
The medieval myth of the Great Chain of Being persists in the minds of many. God reigned from the top of the ladder above various ranks of angels, humans, assorted animals then plants and inanimate objects. (I seem to remember a watchtower equivalent) Of course in this male-centric worldview women and the various races of mankind each took their subjective places on the imaginary ladder.
Although this mental image may have been partially dismantled, there is still a casual assumption that living things have some kind of ranking. It seems natural to suppose that lower creatures evolved into higher ones and therefore it seems reasonable to ask, “Where are the missing links?”
For example, it seems obvious that chimpanzees are higher animals than earthworms doesn’t it? We may even assume that evolution makes this fact even clearer and justifies it. In fact such thinking is deeply flawed and antithetical to evolution.
Consider what we may actually mean when we assert that chimps are “higher” than earthworms.
1. Perhaps we have in mind that monkeys evolved from earthworms - This is a just plain wrong, chimps and worms share a common ancestor. It is this kind of thinking that causes creationists to ask daft questions like why are there still chimps today if they evolved into humans? Or, where are the fossils of all the crocoducks or fronkeys? Australian creationist John McKay has been touring British schools, masquerading as a geologist, and teaching children this kind of nonsense.
2. We may mean that the common ancestor of chimps and worms looked a lot more like a worm than a monkey – This may be true but it really tells us nothing useful about the two creatures we are comparing. It’s just as likely that both animals have diverged equally in different directions from their common ancestor. Also it is likely that different parts of an animal will be more or less “primitive” than other parts. For example a horses hoof is simpler than a human foot (it has a single digit to our 5) but it is the human foot that is more “primitive” our common ancestor had 5 digits.
3. Often there are any one of a number of odd assertions in our mind when we try to rank animals by some arbitrary scale – cleverer, prettier, bigger genomes, more complicated body plans etc. These are all pointless judgments. Animals may rank highly on one ladder and poorly on another. A salamander has a smaller brain than some mammals but it has a bigger genome!
4. Often we are in fact judging how much an animal is similar to us humans when we rank them in our minds. Why? This is a very important point that we need to get over if we are going to understand the world. Evolution had no point, it has not been slaving away all these years for the purpose of making you and I. This is why we find ourselves asking questions like “what is the point of cockroaches?” There is no point; they are gene machines just like us. Do not make the mistake of using humans as the gold standard of living things.
5. OK so at least are chimps are better evolved to survive than lower animals? This assumption just does not hold up. Insects rule the world while some of our most majestic creature teeter on the edge of extinction.
It is just nonsense to rank modern species on an imaginary ladder. It is this wrong-headed way of seeing the world that prompts demands for “missing links”. When paleontologists rush to offer fossils like Archaeopteryx in response they are in fact pandering to a fallacy.
The section on design flaws is also not an attack on theism. It is a response to Intelligent Design.
As I said earlier this is NOT an atheist book - it is a sceince book. Let's discuss science.
