Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb on Richard Dawkins' Master Argument

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

this chapter has contained the central argument of the book and so at the risk of sounding repetitive let's summarize it as a series of six numbered points one one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect over the centuries has been to explain how the complex improbable appearance of design in the universe arises two the natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself in the case of a actual design itself in the case of a man-made artifact such as a watch the designer really was an intelligent engineer it is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing a spider or a person three the Temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer the whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical statistical improbability it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable we need a crane not a Skyhook for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from Simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity four the most genius and Powerful crane so far discovered is darwinian evolution by natural selection Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures with their shown how living creatures with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design have evolved by slow gradual degrees from simple Beginnings we can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that an illusion five we don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics some kind of Multiverse Theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for

Jump to a moment

1. 0:06this chapter has contained the central argument of the book and so at the risk of…
2. 1:08statistical improbability it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable we need a…
3. 2:40strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one the relatively weak cranes we have at present…
4. 3:41really being designed fine that's the bulky now he says perod of design usually involves complexity…
5. 5:18move I'm not going to spend the rest of the evening on all of what's wrong…
6. 6:18don't know if you've seen them and you you can look at them on the Internet…
7. 7:52correct so the idea that you can't describe you can't explain complexity complexity in organization by…
8. 8:55to know why one is right the other one's wrong when you ask why is something…
9. 10:27could be okay now how does religion regard God does religion regard God as an accident…
10. 11:28any alternative then the question why doesn't the it's the second problem in his argument third…

Every second of this shiur plays inside Lehallel — a filtered YouTube library where each video was reviewed against one written standard before it could appear. No ads, no comments, no autoplay into anything unapproved.