MAY I, once more, request the hospitality of your columns and make a last comment on Richard Dawkins and The Blind Watchmaker.

This letter concerns his methodology which I will suggest is seriously flawed – he is a hard core scientist – physics rules – and that the material and biological worlds have been created by the law of physics.

This is not to be discussed – except for one conclusion which he postulates from it.

The universe in which we live is such that given sufficient time and opportunity, anything, however improbable, can happen.

He does not bother to explain the arcane proposition - anything? - but presses straight on with his thoughts.

Anything can involve events of which we know or it can involve events of which we do not know and which we could not imagine happening or we would like to think happening.

The word 'anything' is carte blanche on which anything can be written and Dawkins obliges us in spades.

The purpose of the Watchmaker is to explain the improbable, ie the emergence of life, but we have seen in previous letters that this cannot be described as improbable, since presumably, it is a one off event and we know nothing of the circumstances in which it occurred.

Speculation about it is beside the point!

Dawkins seeks to enlighten us by discussing a number of hypothetical events which he describes as colossally improbable but which, he says, could happen and if they could happen, so could the colossally improbable event of spontaneous generation happen.

1. He raises the old yarn about monkeys and typewriters – if you teach monkeys to endlessly press the keys of type writers, sooner or later one of them will type the works of Shakespeare.

This story is really a reducto ad absurdom of the idea of spontaneous generation, but Dawkins can read some significance in it.

He claims to have performed an experiment, in a very short time, in which by random pressing of his computer keys, he has managed to type the sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel'.

On a computer with 100 keys, this involves the pressing of 29 keys (letters, gaps and full stop) and the probability that this will be done to produce Dawkins sentence is one in a hundred multiplied by itself 29 times, which yields one followed by 58 noughts which is a tad short of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.

Some experiment, some result.

2. His second colossally improbable event is the arm waving statue and he claims that a friend has actually calculated the probability involved.

This involves discussing the probability of an event which has never been observed – no further comment.

3. The idea that a cow might jump over the moon with the same probability as the statue waving an arm, so that if one could happen, so could the other - beggars belief.

The best comment is – no further comment!

One wonders at what point in his thinking processes, does Dawkins faith in colossal inprobabilities run out of steam and change, without his being aware of it, into colossal gullibility.

Gullibility seems to be the name of the game – the number of panegyrics written by princes of the church biological, on the subject matter of the Watchmaker on its publication, seem to suggest that logical analysis, and the critical examination of facts and ideas are in short supply and that “A place where fact, hypothesis, theory, guesswork and nonsense are found” and some things more sinister than guesswork and nonsense are found also.

Finally, one must give credit to Dawkins for one concession that he makes in his book – he insists that the process of evolution is a physical scientific, deterministic, non-chance process – but on the other hand he knows that the simplest organism is infinitely, infinitely more complex than the simple chemical compounds from which they are made, that on page 140 of the Watchmaker he writes: “Cumulative selection is the key but it has to get started and we cannot escape the need to postulate a single one off step, chance event in the origin of cumulative selection itself.”

Even his honest confession lands him in more trouble – for a non-chance sequence of events which is totally dependent on an, admitted, one off chance event, is in most peoples eyes, a chance sequence of events.

As David Hume said: “What is commonly called chance is but a secret and concealed cause!”

One question puzzles me.

Does Richard Dawkins really believe some of the things that he writes?

Finally, a challenge, your correspondent John Ricketts finds the writings of creationists "hilarious, very funny!".

Perhaps he will tell us that he finds the writings of Richard Dawkins to be 'funny ha ha!', 'funny peculiar' or a combination of the two.

Cyril Govier

Stonehouse