One of the things I find most interesting about many materialistic evolutionists is the way they cannot seem to refrain from talking in the very terms they repudiate. It's as if they don't take their only philosophical convictions very seriously.

For example, Dawkins:

Q: ... A lot of people think that evolution is all about random chance.

Dawkins: That's ludicrous. That's ridiculous. Mutation is random in the sense that it's not anticipatory of what's needed. Natural selection is anything but random. Natural selection is a guided process, guided not by any higher power, but simply by which genes survive and which genes don't survive...

Let me make an analogy: Water -- rivers, streams, etc. -- tend to flow towards the lowest point. Rain ultimately flows to the sea. Now of course where the water falls, and the lay of the land, is indeed random. But yes, it always is pulled downward by gravity, in the same way that Dawkins might think the selection of mutations is always pulled towards greater reproductive fitness.

But note the odd linguistic choice: Nobody, not even most Christians (except perhaps in a fit of poetic pique) -- would say rivers are "guided" to the sea. The term "guided" itself smuggles in the notion of a "guide", a person who directs, or a mechanism which an artifact of conscious design.

We tend to say water "flows" towards the sea. Or perhaps that it "seeks" a level, as if the water has a will. Yet here is Dawkins, using language which is only appropriate to a thestic interpretation: evolution is guided, but not by a guide. It is guided by an outcome. Which to say it is not "guided" at all, but simply tends to result in outcome X, just as we wouldn't say gravity "guides" a moon to orbit a larger planet.

Next, consider another example: Evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser asserts, in his title, that "Nature Designed Our Sense of Right and Wrong." Designed? I did a double-take when I heard this: How odd, for a profession which takes great pains to dispute the idea we can detect properties like "design" in nature. Why not just say our sense of right and wrong "evolved" (which is merely descriptive) or "came about"?

Carl Sagan wasn't immune either: I remember watching Cosmos, where Sagan preached his religion, scoffing: the idea that a mind which created the universe ("God") might also note "the fall of every sparrow is ludicrious". Yet Sagan also asserted:

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Why? If I hate him enough to want to kill the guy, then why should I be disturbed that there won't be any more like him? Wouldn't that be a relief? Sagan is hinting that the Cosmos itself cherishes "precious" individuals even if we don't: his argument makes no sense otherwise.

So what was absurd when attributed to a "God" (who would at least be sentient) is something Sagan himself is sorely tempted to attribute to a blind universe, which, to be consistent, couldn't care less. But Sagan desires for human beings to be "precious" and conscripts a force higher than himself in the game.

But then again, here's another famous Sagan quote: "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself." No, Sagan: We have impressions in our head which probably reflect the universe, but of which it, the universe, could care less. It doesn't "know" itself any more than a house "knows" Shakespeare because I am sitting inside reading Hamlet, or any more than the Cosmos "sees" a tree because the pond below reflects the tree's image on its surface.

The implications of theism -- that the universe and life were "designed", and that we have transcendent meaning -- are absurd! Except that famous atheists themselves apparently can't help but employing them with some regularity, in an even less sensible philosophical context.