Here is a review of Richard Dawkins's new book. (Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion [2006].) Key paragraphs:
When Dawkins asserts that evolution “is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the Northern Hemisphere,” it seems he doesn’t know what a theory is. Yet he is justified in his passion to demonstrate how beautifully the theory of evolution explains the biological world. How can his knickers be untwisted?
The best way, in my view, is to distinguish between evolution as history and evolution as science. Evolution is indeed a historical fact. Every living thing and every fossil-bearing rock bears evidence that evolution occurred. But evolution is not a scientific fact as philosophers of science see it. In science it plays a far grander role: it is the theory without which nothing in biology makes sense. The condition of this high status is that it cannot be the final and absolute truth that Dawkins imagines it to be; it is liable to future modification and change like any other scientific theory.
This brings me to the intellectual flaw, or maybe it’s a fault just of tone, in Dawkins’s otherwise eloquent paean to evolution: he has let himself slip into being as dogmatic as his opponents. He has become the Savonarola of science, condemning the doubters of evolution as “history-deniers” who are “worse than ignorant” and “deluded to the point of perversity.” This is not the language of science, or civility. Creationists insist evolution is only a theory, Dawkins that it’s only a fact. Neither claim is correct.
With friends like Dawkins, Darwinians don't need enemies.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 