Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books
Why I've lost faith in Richard Dawkins
Michael Dibdin
October 30, 2006
A recent book called The God Delusion addresses one of the key issues of our time - does Richard Dawkins exist, and if so how does he manifest himself to us? For my part, I truly believe that Dawkins has appeared to me at traditional places of worship such as Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham and Edinburgh. Hundreds of my fellow pilgrims affirmed that they had also witnessed the apparition, but such evidence cannot be regarded as conclusive. We're only too well aware of the human capacity for mass hysteria, particularly considering how long it took to get served at the bar.
Others have appealed to the canonical texts as proof not only of Dawkins' existence but also the dual modalities of his being. For most believers, he is the charming, articulate media don who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten books over to explaining evolution in terms even you could understand. It is indeed a challenging test of faith to reconcile this Dawkins with the fire-and-brimstone authoritarian given to smiting the heathen and heretics such as Stephen Jay Gould, who interpret the Darwinian commandments in a revisionist form, thundering, "Thou shalt have no other gods before meme."
It's hard to know what to believe, but the basic argument will be familiar to anyone who has ever been doorstepped by proselytising atheists. The evolution of the species and the origins of the universe are now essentially understood and agreed upon by the competent authorities. Belief in any God is therefore almost certainly false and quite certainly redundant. Even if such a being did exist, it would be an irrelevance, a Holy Ghost in the machine. To adapt Whistler's retort to the woman who compared him to Velazquez, why drag God into it? Worse still, religious belief, like so many addictions, is not only foolish, but bad. Just look at all the horrors that have been perpetrated in its name. Now contemplate the infinite wonders of a God-free universe. Enjoy!
Okay, here's an equally trite response. Try telling the victims of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot that the world would be a better place if it were run by atheists. Try telling Samuel Beckett he should be happy to be here. Compare Edward Gibbon's cynical view that the various forms of worship in the Roman empire "were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful". Unless Dawkins can demonstrate that religious believers necessarily and consistently behave worse than anyone else - and he can't - then on this point his case collapses.
As regards belief, we now pretty much know which neuron receptors fire when you kiss your lover. The facts are not in dispute, but between that knowledge and your experience lies an explanatory abyss. The same applies to Dawkins' much-touted memetics, one of those theoretical retrofits that are unverifiable, non-predictive and exist solely to prop up an academic discipline, in this case evolutionary psychology, and the funding that comes with it. But neurological research is at least real science, while the tautological loop offered by memetics - roughly, nothing succeeds like success - is equally unhelpful at explaining why you love this person rather than that one, or the one over there. And if memes can't explain your experience, they can't explain it away, any more than they can what William James called the religious experience. You either have it or you don't, but if you do then no amount of argument is going to persuade to the contrary, any more than those "I don't know what you see in her" comments will persuade you that you aren't in love.
But Dawkins' real target is not God, or even the majority of religious believers; rather, it is the disproportionately powerful community of single-issue American fundamentalists who are trying to have intelligent design, the con-artist formerly known as creationism, put on the high school curriculum. Academics are notoriously territorial, and Dawkins' habitat is under threat from an invasive species and he feels an instinctive urge to defend it. Fair enough, but he's botched the job.
Intelligent design is a mordantly ironical term since the whole hoax is founded not on the G word but the S word: stoopid. PJ O'Rourke wrote of the Bible belt: "I almost don't have the heart to make fun of these folks. It's like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope." Dawkins has no such compunction, but it's pointless to argue the toss with people incapable of grasping the difference between a theory and a belief. This is a secular issue, not a religious one. If loony-tune fundies want to believe that the sun revolves around a flat earth, good luck to them. If they want the schools to teach it to my kids, I'll see them in court.
Microsoft's Charles Simonyi shelled out a couple of his millions to endow Dawkins' chair as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. In other words, he's a hired PR guy with a fancy title. After this shallow rant, whose tone is eerily reminiscent of Tony Blair at his most nauseatingly sanctimonious, Simonyi might well wonder whether he's getting an adequate bang for his buck. The God Delusion not only adds nothing to Dawkins' earlier impeccable contributions to the public understanding of science but is likely to have a disastrous effect on its public perception, confirming the mistaken but sadly prevalent view of scientists as mean-spirited reductionists intent on bulldozing away the fragments that millions of people around the world have shored against their ruin. I don't believe that science need be done like that and neither did Charles Darwin, so I suppose I've lost my faith. I just don't believe in Richard Dawkins any more.
