I guess they don't teach you about gene duplication in bible school.
Not surprising really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication

Dan S de Merengue,

I agree with your first sentence, and even with the fact that Dawkins takes a leap in deriving his atheism from the evidence of evolution--he has evidence for evolution but not first causes. But in this we've already reduced the premises for theism to equivocation over first causes or singularities. Dawkins has compelling evidence to infer that life is self-generating all the back. Even if he concedes that God lit the match, he has no need of God after that--though admittedly this seems to foreclose on all the other matters that seem important to us--love morality etc. Though we don't know that these are anything more than social constructs that grow like viruses in our psyches.
The problems with your contention:
<the lack of a credible materialist explanation for our origins points us to a non-material one. If nature cannot create itself, then it must have had a non-natural creator (spirit, mind, or intelligence>
are 1) there is a credible explanation, i.e. evolution, 2) it only "possibly" leads us to a non-materialist explanation, not "necessarily". There's no evidence to say nature can't create itself, and lots to suggest it can--we just don't know for sure. What we have is ignorance, not ultimatums.
You are not being sceptical, you're defending an anachronistic explanation that can only be defended on faith.
It's enough for me that life is deep and mysterious, but I can't recoil from that into some personalised conception of reality that just happens to grant me divine blessings and eternal life etc.
Unlike Dawkins, I don't dismiss other than materialist possibilites--but this scepticism is based both on appreciation of my limited sense perception and compromised sensibility. We can trust neither our senses nor the sense we make of them--or at least we have no way of verifying these.
Ergo God remains a possibility, though a long shot and beyond comprehension.
I'm agnostically satisfied that I'll never know, and so am more concerned with the social reality I do know, which I find both unsatisfactory and easier to interrogate than ultimate realities--if there's a qualitative difference.

Squeers,

I wish to convey my appreciation of and my compliments on your last post in response to Dan S de Merengue. Clear, compelling, and I doubt anyone could have put it better. Bravo, and thank you.

Some contributions keep us coming back to OLO in eager anticipation.

Squeers, Dan,

In re-reading, I didn't put that last post of mine very well. To clarify, I found your posting, Squeers, meaningful to me on a personal level, and I didn't mean my post to be possibly interpreted as a compliment for rebutting Dan. Your thoughts, Dan, I also found significant, though I can't agree with your argument, but nice try.

Cheers, and thank you.

You are sounding very defensive about something, Dan S de Merengue.

>>Pericles, you are disagreeing at least somewhat with what Dawkins said. In your ultimate quest to disagree with everything I say, you forgot to whom it was you were addressing, and you wanted to challenge him.<<

You are quite correct, that I disagree Dawkins on this. I disagree specifically with the whiff of certainty with which he surrounds his assessment of the pivotal nature of Darwin's discoveries to the atheist's intellectual wellbeing.

However, the point I was trying to get through to you, and am obviously still failing to, was that your take-away from his position statement is erroneous:

>>As I understand it, Dawkins message is that a proper understanding of science is antithetical to religion; science opposes religion<<

For the avoidance of doubt, as lawyers say, I disagree somewhat with Dawkins' on the level of importance he attaches to evolution, in the eyes of the atheist. But I profoundly disagree with your conclusion that this indicates that Dawkins believes that "science is antithetical to religion; science opposes religion", and remind you that these were your words, not his.

>>...if you want to suggest that Dawkins doesn't oppose religion (the Christian religion especially)<<

I don't wish to suggest that. Nor have I.

But I am able to disagree with this confident assertion of yours:

>>As a result of Jesus appearing, men such as St Luke wrote “orderly accounts” of what he did.<<

In your view, it would appear, these writings are factually accurate reportage. In mine, they are stories.

Faction, I believe, is the contemporary term.

But leaving Jesus aside for a moment, the nub of your argument keeps coming back to this.

>>If nature cannot create itself, then it must have had a non-natural creator (spirit, mind, or intelligence).<<

When you can prove the "if" part, you may have the beginnings of a case. By starting with that assumption, though, you are like the hitter who set off to first base before the pitch.

(That analogy seems to work better with baseball than cricket, I found)

Having actually read Dawkins' books, I am unaware of Dawkins ever having used evolution as a proof for atheism. Rather he makes no assumption that God does not exist, but says that in the absence of any evidence of his existence, he chooses not to believe in his existence.

His debunking of the Creationist theories and their proponents is more to point to the moral bankruptcy of the fundamentalist christian movement.