! Faith and Belief: Richard Dawkins evolves his arguments

No wonder the creationists want to kill the messenger. Dawkins has been accused of aggression, militancy, arch-adaptationism and even -- don't say it -- reductionism. His critics hurl themselves against him in article after debate after full-length book, peppering him with questions: What about the gaps in the fossil record? How about the possibility of an intelligent designer? Would you believe the Earth is only 10,000 years old?
Each book has been a response to some fallacy, an effort to dispel a common misconception. "The Selfish Gene" was meant to unravel the notion of group selection; "The Blind Watchmaker" to respond to the idea that natural selection is random; and "The God Delusion" to expose the dangers of insistence on God. Dawkins searches for the simplest, most powerful explanations. In his own intellectual evolution, he has peeled off, one by one, from his mentors to arrive at a lonely, beautiful place -- the non-beneficent universe. "Life seems so incredibly complicated," he says.
To counteract this, Dawkins' next book will be for 12-year-olds, an expansion on a letter about the importance of critical thinking that he wrote to his daughter, Juliet, now a medical student, when she was 10. In it, he describes the dangers of "tradition," "authority" and "revelation" as reasons for believing anything.