richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

116 THE COD DELUSION
have had their consciousness raised, even those who choose to
respond negatively by digging in their heels and redoubling the
offence.
Feminism shows us the power of consciousness-raising, and I
want to borrow the technique for natural selection. Natural
selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our
consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized
complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any
deliberate guidance. A full understanding of natural selection
encourages us to move boldly into other fields. It arouses our
suspicion, in those other fields, of the kind of false alternatives that
once, in pre-Darwinian days, beguiled biology. Who, before
Darwin, could have guessed that something so apparently designed
as a dragonfly's wing or an eagle's eye was really the end product
of a long sequence of non-random but purely natural causes?
Douglas Adams's moving and funny account of his own conversion
to radical atheism - he insisted on the 'radical' in case
anybody should mistake him for an agnostic - is testimony to the
power of Darwinism as a consciousness-raiser. I hope I shall be forgiven
the self-indulgence that will become apparent in the following
quotation. My excuse is that Douglas's conversion by my earlier
books - which did not set out to convert anyone - inspired me to
dedicate to his memory this book - which does! In an interview,
reprinted posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt, he was asked
by a journalist how he became an atheist. He began his reply by
explaining how he became an agnostic, and then proceeded:
And I thought and thought and thought. But I just didn't
have enough to go on, so I didn't really come to any
resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of
god, but I just didn't know enough about anything to have
a good working model of any other explanation for, well,
life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I
kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking.
Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon
evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard
Dawkins's books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind
Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second