An impassioned defense of Richard Dawkins

So I did a blogsearch for Dawkins and all of the top ten hits were people (ignorantly; see below) slagging him off. They miss the point, so here is my defense...

I will start my plea with a caveat; I do not agree with everything Dawkins says. He is overly confident in some areas and sometimes hypocritical. An example is his defense of the multiverse/megaverse theory as being more sound than the god theory. However, neither have scientific evidence to support them, so in my mind they have an equal footing in terms of scientific integrity (ie they exist as just theories).

However, all of the arguments against Dawkins concentrate on one, tiny little error in his approach and use that to invalidate his entire argument. This is completely incorrect. For every slip Dawkins makes, he puts forward ten arguments that creationists cannot refute.

In his book, The God Delusion, he easily and convincingly does away with every single creationist/intelligent design argument I have ever come across (and there have been a few), with intelligence, wit and a good degree of fairness (surprisingly). He reveals many of the transparent techniques used by the ID brigade (misquoting, deliberate misinterpretation etc) and simply puts forward scientific arguments that are hard to ignore - for example, if one argues that something is irreducibly complex, and is so improbable it must have been designed, then Dawkins argues that the designer must be more complex again, which begs the question - who designed the designer? We soon reach a recurring paradox that ID/creationism cannot answer.

Anyway, read the book; recognise Dawkins' mistakes, note them, and then concentrate on his more sound scientific arguments; they are very hard to ignore or dispute. Consider it a challenge.