Book Review: The Greatest Story Ever Told

Author:	Richard Dawkins	Rating:	***** (3)
Date read:	Feb, 2010
Evolution vs. Creation Book:	1

The first book I read in my quest to learn more about the evolution vs. creation arguments. One of my initial overwhelming impressions as I started reading this book is finding out that my ideas of what I thought evolution was were not at all accurate. Many of the arguments against evolution which I had heard years ago and still clung to did not even apply to the principles being expounded in the book. 

Overall, Richard Dawkins comes across as very intelligent and well informed, if somewhat denigrating of creationists, who he calls “history deniers,” putting them in a class with “holocaust deniers.”

Despite this arrogance, the book is, in most of its content, fascinating, and very informative. I came away with doubts about many of the things I had believed for a long time, though not about the fact that the origin of the universe had to do with an act of God, IOW, creation. When I say doubts, I mean wondering about things, as in, “What if this aspect of evolution’s teachings were true? What would that mean to me and to Christianity and my faith and various doctrines I believe?”

I also, however, came away with doubts about some of the central tenets of evolution. For example, I was not convinced of the reality of macroevolution, i.e., new species evolving through mutations and natural selection. If this were true, I can’t help but believe logically, we should be up to our necks in intermediate forms in the fossil record. Instead, even granting that some intermediate forms have been discovered, they are extremely rare. Also, there is no evidence of this (macroevolution) ever happening, only inferences and speculation, and well, if macroevolution were true, we would expect to see thus and so, and that’s exactly what we find. I don’t see that as foolproof logic, but more as circular reasoning.

Dawkins repeatedly proclaims the equivalent of “an intelligent designer would never do things this way, therefore this disproves creation.” However, I think, from a creationist perspective, if we assume an intelligence sufficient to be the origin of the universe including time, matter, DNA, and all the rest, even natural selection, then that intelligence would necessarily be so far beyond our understanding that we could not presume to such claims as “would never do this” or “should always act in this way.” Surely there would always be natural phenomena beyond our understanding, no matter how far science advances.

Ironically, several of the passages in the book in which Dawkins is explaining the details of natural selection to me were usable as evidence for the existence of God as part of the teleological argument, that is, design implies a designer. The description of embryology also impressed me in this way–very fascinating.