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Although I enjoyed reading the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins clearly isn't a scholar seeking the truth; rather, he is an activist that is trying to spread/evangeliz

• adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Remember that The God Delusion was published 20 years after The Blind Watchmaker. While certainly TBW made no bones about the author's atheism, it primarily focused on evolution, which was, in 1986, still considered rather subversive and doubtful to much of the public. Even more so when The Selfish Gene in 1976, only 4 years after the first gene was sequenced. A lot of public opinion changed from 1986 to 2006, making evolutionary biology unlikely to be a radical, controversial or even interesting topic any more. Probably also changed was Dawkins' personal outlook on religion and atheism. Possibly this was affected by the reactions drawn by TSG and TBW, as two notable books that helped finally drew evolution into the mainstream and Dawkins himself being a self-made pro-evolution lightning rod. I also don't happen to think it was a coincidence that the more philosophical angle of things like Unweaving the Rainbow gave way to more aggressive writing (uncharitably I might say "Reddit bait") just as the Internet really hit its stride. Alternatively, and rather more prosaically, some people seem to just get, well, angrier, in their mid-60s.