Richard John Neuhaus has an excellent essay at First Things on the odd decision of the New York Times Book Review to assign Richard Dawkins to review Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution.
Neuhaus doesn't say this in his piece, but the weakness of Dawkins' "argument" against Behe's book is telling. Behe puts the materialists in a real pickle. He grants that evolution has occured and then uses the evidence of molecular genetics to argue that it couldn't have occured through purely mechanistic processes. The Darwinians are left to show that he's mistaken, but they have no empirical evidence to support the claim. All they have is their faith that there is nothing other than mechanistic processes at work in the world. Since there is no God, or He's uninvolved in the creation, physical processes like mutation and natural selection must be the whole explanation for the diversification of life.
Dawkins offers little else, beyond copious insults, in his review. He sputters about Behe being a creationist (he's not). He scoffs that Behe stands against the accumulated wisdom of many Darwinian worthies (so what). He misrepresents Behe's argument in Darwin's Black Box (and also overstates the success of the responses to that argument), and he ridicules Behe for the fact that his colleagues at Lehigh don't agree with him (Of course, many of Darwin's colleagues didn't agree with him, either). The only scientific argument Dawkins musters is the embarrassing claim that the many different breeds of dogs proves Behe wrong, which, of course, they do not.
Behe doesn't argue that there's no variability among living things, rather he argues that there's a limit to how much variability can be produced by genetic mutation. This argument Dawkins steers clear of and for good reason. He has no answer to it except a derisive sneer.
Check out Neuhaus' essay.
RLC
