This didn’t go down too well with theologians of the time, notably William Paley who wrote an entire text against it (including a metaphor which provided Dawkins with the title for a book of his own). Paley’s metaphor was one comparing a rock to a watch, one being a purposeless lump of raw ore and the other a well-defined, precise piece of machinery capable of performing a function. He held that the distinction between these two is that one has a designer and one does not, the wider implication of this being that the universe’s/human being’s innate complexity was evidence of design. Dawkins attacks this idea in “The Blind Watchmaker”. Dawkins gives us the sense of a force of evolution capable of creating human beings in all their complexity and beauty, at once doing away with notions of the divine background that give strength to our claim on a soul. Evolution is the blind watchmaker of the title, the ultra-slow cumulative selection filtering system that weeds out miscreant creations through a process of statistical averages across mind-bogglingly huge lengths of time. This theory is now so tight and well accepted that the pious peoples of the intelligencer have declared war on it. Some of their focus is sadly misdirect against cheap shots on Dawkins himself, where he makes categorical errors of his own. These include the idea of “memes”: a reality tunnel Dawkins used to illustrate both the pollination of the human genome and the accelerated spreading of knowledge due to the advent of global communication. This has been attacked as “smuggling” in genetic precepts to explain human behaviour (thus further reducing us to a material level), but I suspect it has been taken out of context. There are, however, some very important things to be said against modern materialistic thinking (not just against Dawkins, but the ideas he argues). Firstly, it ignores innate human feeling and instinct. We have for generations lived in a world where we have an immortal soul. The...