As well it should be. The lecture misses a fundamental point – why do organisms bother to evolve? The answer is, they evolve in order to survive. But why is survival an aim? Why bother surviving? Why did life evolve from being blue-green algae to humans over 4.5 billion years? Ultimately there is no ‘real utility’ in surviving, because we all die eventually. Even if it is just selfish genes doing what they do best, why do they do it? My answer is – human life is an intrinsic good, it is good in its own right, and this is why it evolved. It is the purpose towards which life has evolved for 4 billion years, or so.

What is the alternative view? If there really is no such purpose, then life ‘just happened’ to evolve, culminating in human form. But this is not any kind of explanation, or theory – it is the absence of one.

SO – I think it is perfectly legitimate to say ‘we are not concerned with purpose, science doesn’t deal with ultimate ends’. However it is perfectly meaningless to say ‘there is no purpose, life evolves without a purpose’. One would only say this because one thinks the statement that life has a purpose is a religious statement, and one hates religion.

I agree with Wesley that Dawkins answered the “evangelical atheist” question as if he understood it to be “fundamentalist atheist.” Dawkins is of course not the latter, since new evidence (e.g, of god, of supernaturalism) would change his views; he is not dogmatic. But Dawkins and the other New Atheists frankly do not have a good understanding of the diversity of religious belief. They tend to generalize too much and lump religionists together. Not all Evangelical Christians are Biblical Literalists and Inerrantists, Religious Fundamentalists, and Social Conservatives. Some evangelicals (obviously not a majority) are liberal to moderate and do not read the Bible literally. They DO accept Christian doctrine, but are not necessarily dogmatic or fundamentalist. It is likely that Dawkins does not know that Christian Fundamentalists took to calling themselves Evangelicals since the term “Fundamentalist” has correctly earned a nasty stigma. That’s why Fundamentalists like to call themselves “Conservative” when they are in truth quite radical in the right-half of the political spectrum, i.e. they are Fascists.

My main complaint about this talk is the coining of new terms. Dawkins’ “archi-purpose” and “neo-purpose” are incredibly awkward and could be better stated as simply “apparent purpose” and “intentional purpose.” In fact, technical terms for these two concepts have long existed in science and Dawkins should have used them: teleology and teleonomy. Intentional, goal-oriented purposeful behavior is teleological. Ernst Mayr long ago defined the term to describe the apparent but non-teleological purposefulness and goal-directedness in nature: teleonomy. The apparent design of the biological world is teleonomic, not teleological, because it results from a natural and mechanistic modifications (by mutation, recombination, and natural selection) to a program of coded information (DNA). There is even a webpage devoted to this term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy