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Jay Richards: “Who Designed the Designer?”

Jay Richards

Amazingly, it’s the chief objection raised to religious belief by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. It’s also a complaint you hear all the time in response to intelligent design. Regarding the “natural temptation…to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself,” Dawkins replies:

The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.

Is that a zinger? Or not? In just slightly less sophisticated language, one of our kids, age 9, asked me recently with a look of puzzled concern, “Who made God?”

Whether you think of the problem in terms of a designer or a deity — intelligent design has good reason for not specifying — here’s a quick video in which Discovery Institute’s Jay Richards dispatches Dawkins in just two minutes and 14 seconds. Watch it.

Image: Aurora, photographed from the International Space Station, by ESA/NASA.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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designerintelligent designJay RichardsRichard DawkinsThe God Delusion