https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/i-was-charitable-enough-to-think-he-was.htm
Here's another thing that keeps coming up with boring and tedious regularity. Someone wrote, "Coming from one of the most well-known scientist that believes in evolution. Richard Dawkins himself. You can hear it with your own ears. He believes in intelligent design as long as it’s not God. Yet believers in God get told we don’t think critically?" No. Evolution is not something "believed in". Rather, it is concluded from the evidence. And Dawkins is not a cult leader. Whether or not we believe in any god or gods, we critical thinkers do not slavishly follow any preachers, priests, creationists, shamans, witch doctors, gurus or any other charlatans. We have our own minds and we use them. So Dawkins' opinions are his own and we are not swayed by the fact that he holds them. But we are persuaded by evidence and reason. What follows is what Dawkins actually thinks about this matter.
From http://richarddawkins.net/article%2C2394%2CLying-for-Jesus%2CRichard-Dawkins
"Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings." - Richard Dawkins
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