In a November 2006 interview with Time Magazine, Dawkins gets it so miserably wrong;

TIME [Magazine]: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1553986-2,00.html

In depth discussions of epistemology aside, I believe Dawkins is making a category error which results in a conclusion that does not logically follow from the premise. You see science, which is limited to observations of interactions within the “natural” world, is being used to come to the conclusion that a “supernatural” creator does not exist. Or put another way, if it turns out that science doesn’t have the tools to “test” for the existence of supernatural things, then it stands to reason that it cannot be used to come to the conclusion that a supernatural creator does not exist. I think that’s fairly straight-forward.

Thinking that science (defined as it is within a materialistic framework) can be used to make such conclusions on questions like this, is like concluding that chickens have no weight because the thermometer we used to investigate this question failed to provide any answers. Science can only deal with physical things governed by physical laws. So by very definition then, science cannot directly address the question of whether non-physical things, like God, exist or not. Such a question is outside its capabilities.

But there is another point to be made here concerning the use of reason and logic. Reason and logic, it turns out, are tools that science depends upon, yet they are not physical things that science can test. To illustrate, what scientific experiment could you do to verify reason? Can you put it in a test tube and watch what happens when it’s heated? Can you measure its diameter or weight, or check it’s reaction to various external stimuli? No of course not. Instead science must assume the presence of immaterial things such as reason and logic to be able to make a scientific case for anything! They must therefore rely on the presence of the immaterial to make sense of the material. But that’s not all folks! Not only must atheists like Dawkins assume that reason and logic exist to be able to do the science that he thinks disproves the existence of God, but he must also assume that his own mind (another non-physical entity) can make accurate assessments pertaining to these non-physical things, which if anything, implies the existence of God, rather than evidence against. No amount of high-tech lab equipment can take a sample of reason or a few milligrams of logic, put it under the microscope and test its properties. These are things that only a mind can grasp and put to use, because minds, like thoughts, reason and logic, are not physical things. In other words they’re real, but not physical.

So if reason and logic and the mind are immaterial things that we know exist, even though we know science cannot possibly test them, then is it at all correct for Dawkins to claim that the answer to the question, “Does God Exist?” is a scientific one to which the “answer is no”? Absolutely not! This is a category error. It’s like trying to weigh a chicken with a thermometer. Science can teach us some pretty awesome things about the universe that God created (and to a certain point, about God Himself), but science alone can never disprove God. It’s not a scientific question.

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