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Dawkins is very clear that he thinks God emerges from natural processes in the human mind and culture.  He has a *lot* to say about God, none of it good, hence the title of the book.  

There are two things at issue here, in my mind.  

The first is that science is unambiguous about evolution, and teachers should be teaching it the way that they teach about gravity (well, maybe not gravity, since nobody really understands it), or about cosmology (newtonian or non-newtonian?), or about the structure of the atom (anyone seen that higgs boson?), or about light (hmmm, this gets complicated).  But anyway, evolution is science and should be taught in the science classes.

The second is the issue of persuasive tactics.  We all believe from our education backgrounds that you start from where people are and then try to expand their knowledge.  Though Martin is pretty hard core when it comes to teaching science, the evolution exhibition he worked on--Charlie and Kiwi's Evolutionary Adventure-- is actually deeply informed by the need to start where people are, not where you want them to be.  Margaret Evans, the U of Michigan researcher who worked on the exhibition with Martin, studies young people's understanding of the world, and she is rigorous and illuminating on the topic.  I'm sure Martin can point you to literature, but when I heard her speak at a planning meeting for Charlie and Kiwi, I was struck by her insight that young people are naturally fabulists about the natural world, their stories are full of agency (someone made it that way), and lack any sense of the time scale and processes that underly evolution.

I extrapolated from this research that people in general are naturally fabulists, story-makers.  You see it all over, from how people pick lottery numbers to the myriad ways that psychology tells us that we delude ourselves about our own histories and what we see around us.  No one has a "natural" feel for the kinds of processes and time scale that make evolution work.  They are jarringly unfamiliar and out of scale with our everyday awarenesses.  And of course there are a world of researchers examining the evolutionary psychology of people's understanding of their world.

I think starting from that point, that a religious or fabulist understanding of evolution is actually more natural for people than the science, which frankly sounds as farfetched as anything (birds are dinosaurs?) is an important insight for science educators to carry with them.  That would soften the sense of superiority that we science believers have, and that comes across so irritatingly in things like Dawkin's writing and speaking.

Eric




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