Colbert v. Dawkins On Intelligibility

Yesterday I wrote about C.S. Lewis and one of the arguments for God’s existence that Lewis advances in Mere Christianity, namely, the universality of the moral law. For Lewis, it made no sense that he should have a correct and comprehensible understanding of justice while the world – and the universe, for that matter—fundamentally lacked comprehensibility (as it would if there was no mind at the source of existence). Lewis acknowledged the crux of the issue: he couldn’t maintain that the world was fundamentally the result of chance and yet admit that his notion of justice was universally true.  

As I reflected on this passage, I thought of an exchange between Stephen Colbert and Richard Dawkins from a 2006 interview on The Colbert Report. It’s somewhat easy to miss, and it comes near the end of the interview, but Colbert catches Dawkins in a transparently illogical claim: the idea that the universe and the world are not intelligently designed, but yet the things that are made by man—cars, computers, telephones, books, etc.—are intelligently designed. Colbert, in his humorous way, makes the point: How can man, the product (in Dawkins’s framework) of a creation that has not been intelligently designed have the capacity to make the judgment (as Dawkins does) that the world has not been intelligently designed? 

Dawkins never explains.