I was struck by an article in yesterday’s Times (“It’s time
feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam” p32, 30/1/16) in
which Richard Dawkins opined about the decency he detects in the Church of
England, the cultural value of Biblical language, feminism, Islam and the
Koran, and even about his own death. As an aside, over the years he has been an
expert and interesting evolutionary biologist; he’s worth listening to and
reading on these topics. He talks with deep knowledge, based on years of skillful
practice. He is an authority on such things, although I suppose it’s possible that now
(in his 74th year) he’s a bit out of touch with his specialist
field. It’s not my field, so I wouldn’t be able to give an authoritative view.
On that other long list of topics, he clearly has opinions that people want to
hear (otherwise they wouldn’t send journalists to interview him). I have no
doubt that his opinions are sincerely held. He may even have thought about them
deeply. But the authority he has in the one realm should not carry over into
the others. His views carry the weight of an interesting, articulate, generally
well educated amateur, nothing more.
Back to the article. A couple of things in it struck me as
particularly interesting. First is the almost wistful way in which he thinks
about the Church of England and the Bible (or at least some of its language).
These things seem to have some useful role to play in our culture. Is this a
mellowing with age? Well, maybe. As he makes equally clear, he still has no
time for the God whom the Bible reveals. Presumably he still thinks that both
this God, and the morality He would have us follow is pernicious and
despicable. Or at least that his reading and interpretation of these are. But
can you really recommend the one thing without the other? And if the basic
premise of even beautiful language is wrong, can the language really be said to
be beautiful? I suppose it might have a beautiful sound. But this of course was
the trick of the Sirens, the sound of whose beautiful voices lured innocent
sailors to their doom. Given all that Dawkins has said and written about not
just the irrationality of religion (particularly that based on the Bible), but
its dangers, it’s clearly highly illogical, perhaps even dangerous, to now say that
some of it is worth having because it’s “nice”. One can imagine the
fulminations of the younger Dawkins against such talk.
The other thing is that is striking is the reason for some
of this wistfulness. The problem is that Dawkins fears cuddly Christianity
being replaced by fundamentalist Islam. To be fair he probably objects any sort
of religious view that is fundamentalist in his terms. Sadly, these days he
appears to encounter few Bible-believers who are prepared to stick to their
guns – “Christians have grown out of that. They don’t believe every word of the
Bible.” He thinks that this is a blip. But as so often happens when one strays
outwith their area of expertise, he’s probably missing the point.
Religion is
not an unfortunate accident or diversion from the true path of intellectual progress,
it is basic to it. Indeed, all that happens when you deny this, is that you set
up another religion in the place of those which you seek to deny. So we have the idol of scientism, or its close cousins rationalism and naturalism.
These have all the hallmarks of the religion that they condemn, including
creeds, rituals and priesthood. They don’t stand outside the game, they are part
of the game. They are not the referees and umpires of the competition between other
strange, barbaric, teams, they are on the field of play themselves competing
hard. Except that these “isms” (note the distinction here between science and scientism) haven’t actually produced much of worth. No,
that’s harsh. They’ve occasionally produced nice words, I’ll grant them that.
The problem is that it was and is the truth of the Bible
that produced a society in which science developed and flourished and in which
questioning, challenging skepticism (“virtues” in Dawkins’ view) were not just
tolerated but encouraged. It was centuries of Christianity which conditioned
minds and developed intellectual life to the point where advance was possible
beyond a certain point. While one cannot rule out the possibility that a
different network of beliefs and truth might have led to the same end, it’s a
brute fact of history that we came from where we were, not some other starting
point.
So, maybe the eponymous Professor is mellowing. Although I
suspect that even old mellow Dawkins bridled when he read the first sentence of
the article, in which he was introduced as “the high priest of atheism”.
