by William Whyte
Why is Richard Dawkins so cross? Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford; author of the Selfish Gene: surely he has everything to smile about? He has a lovely job, a lovely life, and lovely hair. There’s even a new Festschrift for him, a volume in his honour that proclaims him one of the most significant thinkers of the modern world. So what’s with all the kvetching? In essence, the reason for his anger’s all too obvious. It’s religion, stupid. He just hates it – I mean, hates it. ‘It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease, and many others,’ he once wrote, ‘but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.’ And what those of us who have faith? Well, we’re just stupid: ‘you won't find any intelligent person who feels the need for the supernatural’, he declares.
Now, as a Christian – and as a Christian who seeks to combine thought with faith, and who presents (I hope) little or no danger to the world – I’m inclined to dismiss Dawkins as a simple fantasist. Of course clever people can believe in the supernatural. Indeed, most clever people do. And of course, religion is not remotely comparable to the AIDS virus. Indeed, such a comparison is a simple category error. But as a historian – and as a fellow of an Oxford college just down the road from his – I’m inclined to take the rantings of Richard Dawkins rather more seriously. Because he is not alone in his fury. Thousands of apparently sensible and thoroughly civilized people share it. These are, on the whole, people with whom I agree in almost every other respect. We are united in our condemnation of neo-conservatism, of Bush and Blair’s neo-imperialism, and of the creeping tide of Creationism. Yet we cannot agree on religion. This is a highly unfortunate situation. If we take Richard Dawkins as a test case, then I think we can see four key reasons why he hates religion and why this is a problem for progressives more generally.
In the first place, Dawkins is understandably dismayed by the failure of secularization. Thirty years ago, when he first published The Selfish Gene, the dominant understanding of social development was the so-called ‘secularization thesis’. This suggested that religion was ultimately doomed: destined to be destroyed by the advancing tide of reason; inevitably undermined by the encroachments of modernity. As the sociologist Grace Davie once put it, the Soviet Union somehow became both the model and the ideal type of a modern society – one that had killed God and become advanced, atheist, and wholly admirable. Unfortunately, such a happy thesis was not to last. Not only did the USSR fail to live up to expectations, but resurgent religion in Russia, in Asia, in Africa, and in the Americas since then has made a mockery of the utopian hopes of the humanists.
In the second place, confronted by this unexpected rise of religion, Dawkins has shown himself singularly incapable of distinguishing between beliefs. For him, all religion is bad religion: ‘nuff said. Although entirely explicable in purely emotional terms, this curious intellectual insensitivity is nonetheless remarkable. Richard Dawkins is not, after all, a stupid man. Yet he seems to believe that all religions – and particularly all Abrahamic religions – are essentially the same. More than this, he is unwilling to accept that it might be possible for a Christian to accept the teachings of science and still remain a Christian. For him, Christianity is always an alternative to reason. Reviewing Ursula Goodenough’s book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, he observed that she conveys ‘a feeling of awe at the majesty of the universe and the intricate complexity of life’, and went on to say ‘If that is religion, then I am a deeply religious man. But it isn’t. And I’m not. As far as I can tell, my “atheistic” views are identical to Ursula's “religious” ones. One of us is misusing the English language, and I don't think it’s me.’ But I’m afraid that Goodenough’s is a truly Christian position to take, one that follows in a great tradition of such statements. Richard Dawkins cannot see the Christianity in her book because it is not unreasonable, not unscientific, and not totalitarian. For him, it seems, faith and falsehood are always synonymous. Anything that is true cannot by definition be Christian.
And it’s here that Dawkins’s real failings as an analyst of religion begin to become clear. He portrays religion – and especially Christianity – as a set of doctrines, and he sees these doctrines as fundamentally opposed to the ideas we group together and call science. Not only is this a faulty way of understanding faiths that are far from doctrinal; religions like Islam or Buddhism which privilege doing over believing, orthopraxy over orthodoxy. But it’s also a pretty basic misunderstanding of Christianity. What distinguishes Christians is not adherence to abstract doctrine – in fact, doctrine divides more than it unites. Rather than a body of rules, Christianity is a way of seeing, a means of perceiving or apprehending the world. If you accept the great claims of Christianity – that there is a God, that God created the earth, that God came to earth to live and die as a human, and that we are part of God as a result – then your view of the world is inevitably changed. You can and should see God in the face of everyone you encounter. You can and should see the world as God’s creation, and thus as worthy of our care. These are the key elements of a Christian worldview – and not a simple collection of doctrines. More than this, such a perception does not run against the grain of science. You can and should believe all these things and still accept scientific evidence. That is precisely what Ursula Goodenough seems to suggest.
Indeed – and this is Dawkins’s fourth problem – the link between science and Christianity is a strong one. The reason that he trumpets and the science that he celebrates grew out a distinctively Christian culture: one in which a Christian perception of the world shaped scientific endeavour. Take Darwin, Dawkins’s poster-boy, for example. Admittedly an unconventional Christian, he remained a theist, that is, a believer in the existence of God, throughout his life. And his Origin of Species makes frequent mention of the ‘laws impressed on matter by the Creator’. This was more than just rhetoric. He was, in reality, both expressing his beliefs and following in a great tradition. Since the advent of Christianity, scientists have sought to understand the world and have interpreted their findings in religious terms. Roger Bacon, Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, and others: each was as much a theologian as a scientist, and each saw the pursuit of truth as a religious duty. To be sure, the institutional Church was often hostile and frequently both stupid and cruel. Nonetheless, the Christian impulse to understand God’s world remained strong. As is increasingly becoming clear, the Enlightenment was a Christian event: growing out of Christianity and feeding into Christian faith. In that sense, there is a strong family resemblance between modern science and traditional religion – even if, in the end, they are doing different things.
No wonder Richard Dawkins is cross. The comfortable certainties with which he has surrounded himself are becoming ever more shaky, and the consoling narrative of Christian decline simply turned out not to be true. Increasingly, even he must be coming to recognize that religion and science represent different epistemological endeavours: not rivals, but simply different ways of seeing. And I have hopes that one day we may be able to show him what modern science owes to the Christian pursuit of truth. In the meantime, though, I do worry that Richard Dawkins and other confused liberals are failing to see the wood for the trees. By condemning all Christians and by constructing a caricature of Christianity, they lose valuable friends and allies. Hell, they lose me. This is a huge shame. I want to preserve Christianity’s defence of truth by condemning the lies our leaders told us when we went to war. I want to uphold Christianity’s commitment to science by opposing the nonsensical attempts to enforce Creationism on vulnerable children. I want to maintain Christianity’s commitment to the truth of the Incarnation which commits us to social action and political reform. But I want to do this as a Christian and because I am a Christian. For many progressives – Richard Dawkins among them – this means I am a hypocrite or a fool. I beg to disagree.
Richard Dawkins’s irrational anger loses him friends and loses him influence. That is clear. But he is just one among many – amongst many secular progressives whose fundamentalism fundamentally divides the forces of progress and truth. As long as these people refuse to listen to Christians, this division will be maintained and all our attempts to make a better, fairer world will fail. As the tide of fanaticism and unreason washes ever higher, we need each other. As conservatism and Creationism grow ever stronger, we need each other. Richard Dawkins may hate Christianity, but here at least is one Christian who admires him – and hopes that he will become more reasonable and amenable soon. One day, I hope, he’ll even learn God loves him. After all, God must. God gave him a brilliant mind, a wonderful life, and all that lovely, lovely hair. How could he be angry about that?