There is no escaping "first philosophy."

Francis Beckwith on Dawkins' inevitable reliance on philosophy:

Second, critics often issue normative judgments that depend on the reasoning of first philosophy. Take, for example, Dawkins’ criticism of the career path of paleontologist Kurt Wise. In The God Delusion, Dawkins laments that even after earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. under the renowned Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Wise did not abandon his belief in young-earth creationism, the view that the first chapters of Genesis should be interpreted literally and that the Bible teaches that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Although, as I have noted elsewhere, I share Dawkins’ puzzlement with Wise’s tenacity, there is something strangely, and delightfully, non-scientific about Dawkins’ lament. He writes: “I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic – pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.”

This is an odd lament for someone of Dawkins’ philosophical leanings, for he denies that nature, which presumably includes Wise, has within it any intrinsic purposes from which we may draw conclusions about our moral obligations to not frustrating those ends. Dawkins claims that Darwin has shown us that natural teleology of any sort, including intrinsic purpose, is an illusion, and thus maintains that belief in teleology is “childish.” (This, by the way, is rhetorical bluster of the worst sort, since as virtually anyone who has studied the subject knows, Darwinism may count against some versions of design but not all, as Ed Feser, Etienne Gilson, and my former professor, James Sadowsky, S. J., have convincingly argued.)

In order to issue his judgment, Dawkins must know something about the nature of the sort of creature Wise is and the obligations that such a creature has to his natural powers and their proper function. But since Dawkins cannot discover the human being’s intrinsic purposes or our obligations to them by the methods and means of the natural sciences, he opines – when he is not lamenting another person’s life choices – that these purposes and obligations must be illusory and to believe in them childish. Yet Dawkins’ brief against Wise depends on these “childish” illusions.

The key to escaping such counter-intuitive dead-ends is to abandon the failed project that the methods of the natural sciences are the model of rationality for all human endeavors. But don’t just take my word for it. Just observe how Richard Dawkins does not practice what he preaches.

First, click on through to the Gilson book and give me a "helpful" vote.

Second, Dawkins' smuggling of teleology into his life occurs constantly. In one interview he explained that "we’re not put here to be comfortable.” [See this video, at 9:30 minutes.]

"Put here"?

By who?

For a purpose?

So, even Dawkins who claims that he can only "dimly" understand the compartmentalization of the mind in the "rational" and "irrational" cannot escape from teleology.