Is 'faith' really a 'great cop-out'?

[Edwardo Piet]

Hi Catherine

I'm afraid that this is my fault for using words like clever. From our point of view they are clever but I'm not imbuing these processes with any form of consciousness nor am I implying that there is any kind of design behind their behaviour.

What happened, probably, was that a certain chemical reaction took place all those billions of years ago that produced something that was able to crudely replicate itself.

This is pure chemistry. Evolution then took over simply because it is an inevitable consequence of replicating chemicals.

So.. The chemicals and processes themselves are not clever, they are simply obeying the laws of physics. However, from our point of view we see them as clever. This is more to do with our perspective and how we see the world around us.

The Universe looks designed and thought out simply because we design things and we like to anthropomorphisise things.

Yeah, I understand that you were using "clever" in a metaphorical sense, just as biologists such as Dawkins use "purpose" in a metaphorical sense, like "what is the purpose of a wing?" when what Dawkins really means is "What is the evolutionary advantage of a wing?"