Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  From that moment on we could barely keep the book in print as the publicity it provoked spread, more and more people started to read it and the reviews came out thick and fast, almost all hugely complimentary. I remember calling you at home and speaking to Lalla (whom I hadn’t yet met) because you were out, and jabbering to her with excitement, trying to explain that something exceptional was taking place. It wasn’t just the sales that were exceptional, it was the fact that the book had struck a vital chord with the public. I think it is no exaggeration to say that it started a whole new debate, certainly for this generation, about religion and its place in society and became a game-changer.

  Game-changer? Well, it is true that The God Delusion has sold more than three million copies so far, well over two million in English, the remainder in thirty-five other languages, including sales of a quarter of a million in German. Perhaps another litmus test is the remarkable collection of ‘fleas’ that the book has gathered. My website, RichardDawkins.net, started to collect books with titles like The Dawkins Delusion, The Devil’s Delusion, The God Solution, Deluded by Dawkins, The Richard Dawkins Delusion, God is no Delusion. We called them ‘fleas’ after a W. B. Yeats poem that I had going round in my head at the time:

  You say, as I have often given tongue

  In praise of what another’s said or sung,

  T’were politic to do the like by these.

  But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

  I’ve included a choice selection of eleven of these fleas in the picture section.

  But never mind the sales figures and the fleas. Did the book feel like a ‘game-changer’ at the time? Yes and no. I don’t know where the phrase ‘New Atheists’ originated. One suggestion is a 2006 article in Wired by one of its contributing editors, Gary Wolf.1 He lists under the rubric Sam Harris, Dan Dennett and me. Presumably he would have added Christopher Hitchens if God is Not Great had been published by then. And probably Victor Stenger too, whose books, written from the point of view of a physicist, are a little less well known but none the less powerful. Vic coined the memorable aphorism, often wrongly attributed to me: ‘Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.’ His death was announced as I was revising this book for publication. His strong voice will be much missed.

  Wherever the phrase came from, ‘New Atheists’ seems to have stuck, as has ‘Four Horsemen’, which apparently took over from the earlier ‘Three Musketeers’ when Christopher’s book appeared. I don’t object to any of these phrases. It is, however, necessary to disclaim any suggestion that ‘new’ atheism is philosophically different from earlier versions espoused by, say, Bertrand Russell or Robert Ingersoll. Nevertheless, although it isn’t really very new, as a journalistic coining ‘New Atheism’ has its place because I think it’s true that something really did happen in our culture between The End of Faith in 2004 and God is Not Great in 2007. The God Delusion was published in 2006, as were Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Sam Harris’s powerful short book, Letter to a Christian Nation. Our books do seem to have hit the proverbial nerve, in a way that the many excellent books that preceded them did not, at least since Russell’s searingly limpid Why I am not a Christian (which inspired me when I read it in the Oundle school library in the 1950s).

  Was it that our books were especially outspoken and uninhibited? Maybe that had something to do with it. Was it something in the atmosphere of the first decade of this century: wings of a Zeitgeist hovering in the air waiting for an updraft from the next four books that came along? Possibly, and George Bush’s leanings toward theocracy, in parallel with the menace of the Mosque Militant, doubtless had something to do with it.

  I can certainly say that the four of us didn’t plan anything together. We surely read each other’s books, those that were available before we wrote our own. And inevitably we must have been influenced, at least somewhat. To mention just the earliest of these books, I’d never heard of Sam Harris until I opened The End of Faith. In a chillingly accomplished piece of writing on the very first page, Sam sets up the scene for a horrific suicide bombing of a bus, by a young man. You know what’s coming from the start. When the dust and the nails, the ball bearings and rat poison have cleared, the young man’s family, though sad to lose him, rejoice in the certain knowledge that their son is in the martyrs’ heaven; rejoice, too, in the material comforts of food and money showered on them by neighbours honouring his accomplishment. The punch-line for the story is like a body blow which, if anything, paradoxically gains in devastating force because we can see it coming all through the build-up. What do we know about the young man? Was he rich or poor, popular or unpopular, clever or not, a promising young student? An engineer, perhaps? We know next to nothing about him. But here’s the kicker.

  Why is it so easy then, so trivially easy – you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy – to guess the young man’s religion?

  And, sure enough, Sam doesn’t bother to tell us the religion. There was, and is, no need.

  I think Sam’s stylish boldness in The End of Faith was one of the factors that pushed me into deciding to write The God Delusion. That and John Brockman’s changing his mind, as I have already related. I’d like to think that the Horsemen books are generally as well written as The End of Faith, and that this quality – lending a fair wind to the shifting Zeitgeist – is partly responsible for the successful impact of the ‘New Atheism’.

  Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great was another landmark event in publishing. The subtitle of the American edition, How Religion Poisons Everything, is powerful, and I am at a loss to understand the decision of the British publishers to change it to The Case against Religion. What a pedestrian decision. In fact, it looks as though the publishers later thought better of it, because they reverted to the American subtitle for the paperback edition. To release a familiar bee from my bonnet, why do publishers mess around with the titles of books as they cross the Atlantic?

  Christopher Hitchens’ death from cancer in 2011 robbed the atheist movement of its most eloquent spokesman, probably the finest orator I ever heard on any subject. Good public speaking is more than just decibels – a point that’s often overlooked by demagogues, evangelists and – unfortunately – gullible audiences. Christopher had a beautiful baritone, reminiscent of Richard Burton speaking Shakespeare, and he used it to perfection. But his rhetorical effectiveness stemmed more from his intellect, wit, lightning repartee; from his formidable inventory of factual knowledge, literary allusions, and personal recollections from some of the world’s most dangerous places – for he had physical courage as well as intellectual armament.

  God is Not Great complements rather than competes with The God Delusion. Where I, as a scientist, am most concerned with religious faith as a rival to science in the role of explainer, Christopher’s objections were more political and moral. He found repugnant the very idea of a celestial dictator who demands total obedience and devotion, and is prepared to punish you for ever if you default – or even if you so much as doubt his existence. As he said of the tyranny of North Korea, you can at least escape it by dying. But with the divine ‘Dear Leader’, dying is only the beginning of your torment. I’ll say more about Christopher in a later chapter.

  Opposition from religious apologists was predictable, and I’ve already mentioned the flea books. But attacks came, too, from fellow atheists, sometimes in outspokenly belligerent terms. One well-reputed reviewer went so far as to say that The God Delusion made him ashamed to be an atheist. His reason seemed to be that I didn’t take ‘serious’ theologians seriously. I dealt fully with those theological arguments that purport to support the existence of a deity. But I was entirely right not to bother with those that assume the existence of a deity as a starting point and go on from there.

  I have tried but consistently failed to find anything in theology to be serious about. I certainly take professors of theology seriously when they use their expertise to do things other than theology: jigsaw
the fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls, for instance; or minutely compare Hebrew and Greek texts of scriptures, or sleuth out the lost sources of the four gospels and the other gospels that didn’t make it into the canon. That’s all genuine scholarship, fascinating to read and deserving of respect. It’s even true that historians need to study theological logic-chopping in order to understand the disputes and wars that have stained European history, for example the English Civil Wars. But the vacuous deepities (Dan Dennett’s splendid word) of ‘apophatic theology’ (Karen Armstrong’s obscurantist smokescreen), or the expenditure of precious time arguing with other theologians over the precise ‘significance for us today’ of Original Sin, Transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception, or the ‘mystery’ (sorry, ‘Mystery’) of the Trinity, none of that is scholarship in any respectable sense of the word, and it should have no place in our universities.

  Theological gymnastics over the ‘significance for us today’ of nonsensical ideas from the past like transubstantiation lend themselves to satire – positively beg for it. A gem that I recently met: ‘Of course we don’t literally believe the story of Jonah and the whale. But it is symbolic of Jesus’ death and resurrection . . .’ Suppose science worked like that. Suppose that (to take a most unlikely hypothetical) future scientists were to find that Watson and Crick were completely wrong, and the genetic molecule is not a double helix at all. Ah well, of course nowadays we no longer literally believe in the double helix. But what is the significance of the double helix for us today? The way the two helices twine intimately around one another, though not literally true in the crude, materialistic sense, nevertheless symbolizes mutual love, don’t you feel? The precise, one-to-one pairing of purine with pyrimidine is not literally true, nothing so crude as that, but it stands for . . . When you contemplate the Watson–Crick model, don’t you get an overwhelming feeling – I know I do – . . . etc. etc.

  For the paperback edition I wrote a new preface, in which I identified a revealingly recurrent stereotype: ‘I’m an atheist but . . .’ As with the equally common ‘I used to be an atheist but’ (as popularized by C. S. Lewis), the speaker imagines that what comes after the ‘but’ somehow gains credibility from what comes before. In my preface I named and responded to seven species of ‘I’m-an-atheist-buttery’. (More recently, in the context of western liberal apologists for terrorist outrages, Salman Rushdie has popularized the name ‘but brigade’.) I won’t repeat myself here, but will return to a couple of examples in the later chapter on ‘Unweaving the threads’.

  Later books

  My next book after The God Delusion was not really my own. Oxford University Press publishes a highly regarded series under the title ‘Oxford Book of . . . ’, usually edited by an academic in the field in question. Latha Menon, whom I have already mentioned as the editor of A Devil’s Chaplain, invited me to edit the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, which appeared in 2007. ‘Modern’ was deemed to stretch back one century, and the eighty-three authors were drawn from those writing in English (with the single exception of Primo Levi). I wrote connecting paragraphs between each author and the next, saying a little bit about them and adding personal colour where I could. For example, I was able to paint an affectionate verbal miniature of Sir Alister Hardy, the great marine biologist, because he had been my professor when I was an undergraduate.

  Nobody had a better feel for the great rolling pastures, sunlit green meadows and waving prairies of The Open Sea than Alister Hardy, my first professor. His paintings for that book still adorn the corridors of the Oxford Zoology Department, and the images seem to dance with enthusiasm, just as the old man himself danced boyishly around the lecture hall, a strabismically beaming cross between Peter Pan and the Ancient Mariner. Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea – and across the blackboard in coloured chalk with the old man bobbing and weaving in pursuit.

  Latha tried to persuade me to include in the anthology something from my own books, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.

  My next book was The Greatest Show on Earth (2009). Although most of my books had been about evolution, all of them had assumed it tacitly; none of them had systematically laid out the evidence. The British publisher was again Sally Gaminara at Transworld. In America, John Brockman negotiated a new deal with Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, where my editor was Hilary Redmon. The book was illustrated with both drawings and coloured photographs, the pictures being skilfully assembled and arranged by Sheila Lee at Transworld. The title comes from a famous American circus, but I first saw it on a T-shirt that an anonymous donor kindly sent me: ‘EVOLUTION, The Greatest Show on Earth, the Only Game in Town’. I still have it, although the lettering has faded from much wearing and washing. I wanted the whole slogan for my title, but the publishers unanimously decreed that it was too long. I managed to smuggle ‘the only game in town’ into the last sentence of the book. Unknown to either of us, Jerry Coyne and I were both working on books with the same aim, and they came out around the same time. I suppose the two books must have competed for the same market, but – maybe I should say ‘and’ – both of us published highly favourable reviews of the other’s.

  I stayed with the same publishers, in both Britain and America, for The Magic of Reality (2011), my first and only (so far) book specifically aimed at young people. Each chapter poses a question that a child might ask, such as: ‘What is an earthquake?’, ‘Why do we have winter and summer?’, ‘Who was the first person?’, ‘What is the sun?’ Before coming on to the true, scientific answer to the question, each chapter begins (this was the inspired idea of my colleague the psychologist Robin Elisabeth Cornwell) with mythical answers to the same question, drawn from all around the world. I put the myths in, not only because they are colourfully entertaining in their own right, but because my young readers could observe that the particular myths of their own culture (biblical, Koranic, Hindu or whatever they might be) have no special status, no privileged position over any of the rich variety of myths from other cultures. I never said that explicitly. It was just left up to the child’s own observation. In the case of the Noah’s Ark myth (for the chapter on ‘What is a Rainbow?’), I told the story in its original Babylonian version, with the legendary shipwright being Utnapashtim rather than Noah, and the warning to build the ship coming from one member of the polytheistic pantheon, but all the other details the same. The book was illustrated by Dave McKean, a highly original artist whose striking pictures had already won him a large fan base among readers of graphic novels. His arresting style was an ideal vehicle for the world’s myths, as well as for the science.

  After the book was published, Sally and her team at Transworld commissioned a software company, Somethin’ Else, to make an app version for the iPad. I think they did a marvellous job. It might have been better to call it an e-book rather than an app, because every word of the book is in there, along with every one of Dave’s illustrations (many of them animated). Apparently, though, there are reasons to do with the recondite mysteries of Marketing why it’s better to call it an app than an e-book, even if the content is literally (and pictorially) identical. In addition to the text and illustrations, each chapter of the Magic of Reality app has a game. For example, the chapter on gravity and orbiting planets has a description of ‘Newton’s Cannon’, and the app has a game in which you can fire cannonballs with varying velocities. Too slow and they splash into the sea; too fast and they hurtle into space; just right (the Goldilocks velocity) and they go into orbit.

  My next book was An Appetite for Wonder (2013), the predecessor to this one as the first volume of my memoirs. Again I stayed with Sally at Transworld, but in America Hilary had meanwhile been lured to HarperCollins and I followed her there out of regard for her abilities, just as I had followed Michael Rodgers from one publishing house to another earlier in my career. Since the book was about my childhood and boyhood, culminating in my early career as a truth-seeking scientist, Lalla suggested for the title Childh
ood, Boyhood, Truth, a clever rhyming play on Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Sally and Hilary both liked it but ‘Marketing’ were worried that not enough readers would take the Tolstoy allusion. So Hilary suggested An Appetite for Wonder, which picks up the subtitle of Unweaving the Rainbow.

  Festschrift

  In 2006, Oxford University Press celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of publication of The Selfish Gene. Together with Helena Cronin, they hosted a commemorative dinner in London. Helena and OUP also put on a wonderful conference at the London School of Economics, chaired by Melvyn Bragg, at which four colleagues spoke to the title ‘The Selfish Gene: thirty years on’.1 Dan Dennett, representing philosophy, began with ‘The view from Dawkins’ mountain’. Two biologists then followed: John Krebs on ‘From intellectual plumbing to arms races’ and Matt Ridley on ‘Selfish DNA and the junk in the genome’. Ian McEwan spoke as a scientifically literate novelist on ‘Science writing: towards a literary tradition’. I rounded the meeting off with my own response to the day’s proceedings.

  OUP also published a thirtieth anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, for which they reprised the original Robert Trivers foreword, and the original Desmond Morris cover design, both of which had been absent from most of the editions, hardback and paperback, of the intervening years. The Trivers foreword is especially important because that mercurial genius chose it as the place to launch his celebrated idea of ‘self-deception’, which he later (2011) expanded into a great book, The Folly of Fools.

  Moreover – a source of special joy to me – Latha Menon commissioned and OUP published a Festschrift volume of tributes, edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, called (I feel quite bashful repeating the subtitle here) Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think – reflections by scientists, writers and philosophers. The book was launched at the same London dinner, where the guests, including many of those who contributed to it, signed my presentation copy, which I treasure.