The God Delusion was written with the explicit intention of removing any belief the reader might have in a deity. ‘If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’ When I read this in the opening chapter of Delusion, I was merely amused. At least he’s honest! Others reacted in quite a different way. They saw instead a foaming zealot, a snarling evangelical atheist riding the crimson chariot of the Antichrist. This is not the Richard Dawkins I know.
He is gently spoken, donnish, argumentative in that ever-so-Oxford way: ‘If you mean this… then that…’ or ‘I wouldn’t accept your premise-let’s unpack those assumptions’ and so on. All very pass the port and proper protocols. He would certainly not see himself as leading any kind of hostile movement raiding monasteries or burning basilicas. Or even as a member of a group who-with the possible exception of the Skeptics-are as unfascist a bunch of jovial iconoclasts as anyone could hope to meet (not even the shadow of a Robespierre among them). His ire with religion, which I share, is directed at the harm it does and at our polite pretense that things are otherwise.
Richard Dawkins is not remotely political (perhaps his greatest failing) but he is assumed to be so. The Selfish Gene, written 30 years ago, was taken to be a primer for rapacious come-what-may capitalism. It was nothing of the sort. When celebrating its 30th anniversary, he confessed that the title was given to him by the publishers and that it could equally easily have been called The Cooperative Gene. His own societal views are as unremarkably social-democrat as you would find at any Ivy-League campus sherry party; he is unusual only in the amount of confidence he has invested in science and the effortless elegance with which he is able to write about it.
What do his accusers say? Scientists on the left, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose, call him a reductionist, claiming he sees genes as independent ciphers marching relentlessly towards some hideously inhumane goal of their own. Their difference with Dawkins on biology is that they see whole organisms and populations at the forefront of selection, not just bits of them. Stephen Jay Gould, as far as I know, appeared only once in a public forum with Dawkins, in a debate broadcast on the Science Show, in which they referred to each other as ‘ships passing in the night’. It is interesting that in one of Gould’s last books he benignly separated religion and science into different ‘niagisteria’, implying they need not be in flagrant contradiction.
Terry Eagleton is more scathing. Eagleton is Professor of English at the University of Manchester, was once at Oxford and is solidly on the left. He writes:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. That is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgement on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia. they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.
Is this fair? How much of the vast scholarship on Christianity alone (from the begatting in the Old Testament to the various accounts of Jesus’ life in the New) does one have to swallow in one small lifetime- not to mention the literature of the main religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Bahai’ism, Jainism, Shinto and Zoroastrianism-before doing a scientific critique? One could never, on this requirement, be prepared. Physicist Professor Steven Weinberg wrote acidly that by Eagleton’s logic you could not criticise astrology without being able to cast a horoscope expertly. If you are denying the existence of something (flat-Earthism, fairies), you are not obliged to be a world authority on all its loopy manifestations to argue its fatuity.
But Eagleton is doing more than this. He is saying that Dawkins is dismissing an entire body of human thinking, with all its subtlety and undoubted benefit to humankind. He is saying religion does something necessary for us, irrespective of its possible connections to God.
‘Now it may well be,’ writes Eagleton on orthodox interpretations of what the Bible means, ‘that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy’ He continues:
Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront the case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledegook. Mainstream theology may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.
What about the immeasurable damage this mainstream theology may be doing? Dawkins’s case is that we have evolved to be obedient to our parents so we may survive growing up in dangerous surroundings. This useful characteristic has, along the way, as a side effect, made us vulnerable to authority figures. We can be persuaded, with perplexing ease, to bend the knee to mad popes, dim kings, Jim Joneses, Pol Pots and Joe Stalins. Religion has undoubtedly brought benefits, but what we must now decide, if we are to have a future at all, is how much of this ‘gobbledegook’ we can still bear. Eagleton is right, however, about diplomacy. Telling your bearded adversaries that their cherished beliefs are balderdash probably won’t work-though I note that Eagleton, in his London Review of Books article on Dawkins, feels free to call his own clerical high school teachers ‘dimwitted’.
Richard Dawkins does not believe in God because the evidence is overwhelmingly against God’s existence. But he is not immovable: ‘I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the evidence were forthcoming’, he writes in The God Delusion.
This is where the second problem arises: the problem of fact. Dawkins is thoroughly committed to scientific criteria and, it appears, scientific criteria only. But science is a limited tool when it comes to human affairs. I wrote in Chapter 2 that science tells us who we are, or more precisely, who we are not. Science can pronounce on the intelligence of women and the fact that there is only one human species. It will be able to tell us which kinds of human society may flourish and which may not. But it cannot tell us how to live our lives and what values to believe in.
Steven Rose, Professor of Biology at the Open University, has written in The Conscious Brain and other books, that a full picture of our human lot can be achieved only by moving through the hierarchies of knowledge-the science certainly, but then additionally psychology, sociology, politics, history and philosophy. And somewhere between the last two categories: theology. You do not get a full picture of man or woman by means of biochemistry or physiology alone. It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether religion has a Darwinian explanation for its ubiquity, but you need more than natural selection to tell the whole story of us. Rose does this; Dawkins much less so. It is enough to build a chasm between them.