Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  Craig reserved his special sympathy for the poor ‘Israeli’ soldiers who were obliged to carry out the unpleasant duty of massacring all those Canaanite women and children. The empty chair gambit, by the way, has since become known as ‘Eastwooding’ because it was used by the actor and director Clint Eastwood in an inept stunt aimed at President Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign.

  My ‘two chairs objection’ to debating doesn’t apply to scholarly theologians with real credentials. With them, I am happy to have debates (I’d prefer to say public conversations), and I have done so with two Archbishops of Canterbury, an Archbishop of York, several bishops, a cardinal, and two successive holders of the office of British Chief Rabbi. In most cases these have been amicable and civilized encounters. Some time in 1993, for example, at the Royal Society, I was paired with the distinguished cosmologist Sir Herman Bondi against Hugh Montefiore, former Bishop of Birmingham, and Russell Stannard, a Christian physicist and author of the excellent ‘Uncle Albert’ books explaining modern physics to children. Stannard has written his own account of the meeting:

  On being introduced to each other by one of the organizers, Dawkins straight away told me how much he had enjoyed my Uncle Albert books. He actually enjoyed them! I immediately thought that anyone who enjoyed Uncle Albert couldn’t be all that bad, could they.

  But wait. Was this a trick to lull me into a false sense of security . . . As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The debate was conducted in a constructive and courteous manner . . . This is not to say that the debate lacked tension. Far from it. There were cut and thrust exchanges, and out-and-out disagreement on various issues. But there was no acrimony, no cheap point-scoring.

  To underline just how good-humoured the debate had been, the participants adjourned afterwards to a restaurant for a pleasant supper together! I sat next to Dawkins and thoroughly enjoyed his company.1

  I have had four meetings with Rowan Williams, recently retired as Archbishop of Canterbury, and found him to be one of the nicest men I have ever met: almost impossible to argue with, he is so agreeable. And so obligingly intelligent (in the literal sense of intellego = I understand) that he actually finishes your sentences for you, even when those sentences – in my understanding of them – should have been devastating for his position and he doesn’t seem to have any comeback to them! I first noticed this engaging habit when I interviewed him for one of my Channel Four documentaries. He later invited Lalla and me to a delightful party in Lambeth Palace (I think Lalla may have been the main draw there, because his son Pip was a fan of her character in Doctor Who). Then, a few years later, he and I had a rather overpublicized ‘debate’ in the Sheldonian Theatre. I wanted this to be a friendly conversation without a chairman, because I find (see below) that chairmen often get in the way of the discussion: and so it proved in this case. Afterwards, the archbishop and I sat together at dinner and I was again charmed by his company.

  Our most recent encounter was as speakers on opposite sides in a debate at the Cambridge Union. This was after Dr Williams had stepped down from the archbishopric to become Master of Magdalene, and he told me at dinner of his sheer joy on waking every morning and remembering: ‘I’m not Archbishop of Canterbury any more.’ When it came to the debate itself, his side won, and the victory was widely credited to him. He did indeed make a decent speech, but the real victor, as was clear from audience reaction, was the last speaker on his side, the very personable journalist Douglas Murray. Murray proclaimed himself an atheist but thought – and this was really his only point – that religion was good for people: they’d be unhappy without it. I can’t imagine Rowan Williams ever being so patronizingly condescending, but – surprisingly1 – the Cambridge audience lapped it up.

  I think the most revealing conversation I have had with a theologian was my filmed interview with the Jesuit Father George Coyne, erstwhile Director of the Vatican Observatory. We filmed it for the same Channel Four television documentary as my interview with Archbishop Williams. Unfortunately the director felt he couldn’t find the time to include both interviews and he dropped the one with Father Coyne.

  This professional astronomer, a scientist to his fingertips, talked like an intelligent atheist for most of the interview. ‘God’, he said, ‘is not an explanation. If I were seeking for a god of explanation . . . I’d probably be an atheist.’ To which my inevitable reply was that that was exactly why I am an atheist. If an all-powerful creator God is really there, how could he not be an explanation for things? Or, if he is not the explanation for anything, what exactly does he do with his time that makes him worth worshipping?

  Father Coyne also cheerfully agreed that his Catholic beliefs flowed from the accidental circumstance of his having been born into a Catholic family, and he accepted that he would have been an equally sincere Muslim if he had been born into a Muslim family. I was struck by his personal honesty, while at the same time marvelling at the professional dishonesty that his Catholic orders imposed upon him. He impressed me as a decent, humane, intelligent man.

  As did the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who invited Lalla and me to dinner in his house with some of London’s leading Jews. It was at that dinner that I learned the stunning fact that Jews, who constitute less than 1 per cent of the world’s population, have won more than 20 per cent of all Nobel Prizes. This makes a poignant contrast with the derisorily low success rate of the world’s Muslims, who are orders of magnitude more numerous in the world. I thought – still do – the comparison revealing. Whether you think of Judaism and Islam as religions or cultural systems (neither is a ‘race’, despite widespread misconceptions), how could it not be revealing that one of them has a success rate per head which is literally tens of thousands of times higher than the other, in the fields of intellectual endeavour celebrated by Nobel? Islamic scholars were notable in keeping the flame of Greek learning alive during the middle ages and dark ages of Christendom. What went wrong? Incidentally, Sir Harry Kroto has written to me of his belief that the great majority of Nobel laureates listed as Jews (including himself) are actually non-believers.

  In a later encounter with Lord Sacks, in a television studio in Manchester, rather weirdly he publicly accused me of anti-Semitism. It turned out that the reason for this was my characterization, in The God Delusion, of the God of the Old Testament as ‘arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction’. I’ve quoted the rest of the sentence elsewhere in this book (see pages 425–6), and I agree that it does sound a bit polemical, although it can be justified in spades from the Bible. But my intention was directed less towards polemic than comedy. I had in the back of my mind Evelyn Waugh’s rare purple set-pieces (and I glancingly signalled the allusion by recounting, in the very same paragraph, a story told by Waugh about Randolph Churchill). I couldn’t, of course, deny that my sentence was anti-God. But anti-Jewish? It was not, by the way, the first time I was accused of anti-Semitism on similar grounds. I gave a lecture on a ship cruising the Galápagos archipelago and a fellow passenger objected. His sole reason was that I was against God, whom he apparently identified with his own Jewishness, and as a result he felt personally offended.

  The Chief Rabbi was good enough to send me a gracious apology a few days later, and I take his remark in the studio to have been a temporary aberration: an anomalous mistake by a decent gentleman. I was not, to put it mildly, so impressed by the most senior Roman Catholic spokesman with whom I have debated, Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney. We were pitted against each other in a television studio of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I had been warned in advance that he was a bully and a ‘bruiser’ – not a happy reputation, you would think, for a senior figure in a church purporting to be founded on more generous principles.

  Pell played for cheap laughs from the gallery in a way that clerical gentlemen of the stature of Archbishop Williams, Chief Rabbi Sacks and Father George Coyne would never do. He was fortunate that a substantial fraction of the studio audie
nce had obviously been hand-picked as partisans in his favour, because he had an almost endearing gift for putting his foot in his mouth, as when he spoiled his otherwise praiseworthy acceptance of evolution by adding the gratuitous error that humans were descended ‘from Neanderthals’. Or when he told an anecdote about a time when he had been ‘preparing some English boys . . .’ and allowed an embarrassing pause to ensue before he completed the sentence ‘. . . for first communion’, a pause long enough to allow a minority of the audience to laugh suggestively. A less endearing faux pas was his apparent doubt as to the intelligence of Jews and his puzzlement at God’s having chosen them. The chairman, Tony Jones, immediately jumped on that and the cardinal had to dig frantically to extricate himself. I let him dig, and resisted the temptation to quote the rhymed exchange between W. N. Ewer and Cecil Browne:

  How odd

  Of God

  To choose

  The Jews.

  But not so odd

  As those who choose

  A Jewish God

  Yet spurn the Jews.

  He drew delighted applause from the partisan majority when he seemed to score a point by quoting Darwin’s autobiography in evidence that he was a theist when he wrote it towards the end of his life. This is definitely false, and I said so. Pell, however, was briefed with notes and able to say that he was quoting ‘page 92’ of Darwin’s memoir. It was this triumphant citation of ‘page 92’ that led his claque to applaud.

  Here’s a bit of a digression, but a televised misrepresentation of Darwin’s religious beliefs by a prince of the church is surely important enough to make it necessary. Looking at the autobiography today, I’m inclined to think that Pell was not being deliberately dishonest in his triumphant citation of ‘page 92’. Very probably an assistant furnished him with the quote, complete with page number, and failed to tell him what follows it. Judge for yourself. Here is what Pell quoted from Darwin’s chapter on ‘Religious belief’, with the word that I think Pell should have emphasized picked out in bold type:

  Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

  Pell could argue that the ‘When’ that begins the sentence did not have the conditional meaning that I see there, but was an absolute statement. The succeeding paragraph, however, which Pell did not read to us, leaves us in no doubt of Darwin’s actual position when he wrote the chapter. Once again, I emphasize in bold type the key to interpreting his meaning:

  This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker . . . The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

  I think we must exonerate Cardinal Pell of the charge of dishonesty. Let’s allow that he (or his assistant) simply didn’t read the second paragraph, and pardonably misunderstood the first. But I would like to hope that, if my book is seen by any of that Australian audience who cheered him on when he triumphantly said ‘It’s on page 92,’ they will take the trouble to read the whole of Darwin’s chapter on ‘Religious belief’ in his autobiography. In addition to the paragraph I quoted above, where Darwin concludes that he is content to remain an agnostic, much of the rest of the chapter consists of strong criticism of the Christian faith in which Darwin, as a young man, was a devout believer, destined for a career in the church. There’s the famous sentence, for example, where Darwin says he could

  hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

  Darwin remained benevolently disposed towards his local parish church, supported it financially and wished to be buried there (a wish that was denied when his friends succeeded in getting him honoured in Westminster Abbey). And he questioned what he perceived as the militant atheism of Edward Aveling (1849–98) and his German colleague Ludwig Büchner (1824–99). Aveling’s account of their meeting at Darwin’s lunch table in 1881 begins with a moving description of how the visitor fell ‘under the spell of the frankest and the kindliest eyes that ever looked into mine’, and then turns to their discussion of religion. Darwin asked: ‘Why do you call yourselves atheists, and say there is no God?’ Aveling and Büchner explained that they

  were Atheists because there was no evidence of deity . . . that whilst we did not commit the folly of god-denial, we avoided with equal care the folly of god-assertion: that as god was not proven, we were without god (άϑεοι) and by consequence were with hope in this world, and in this world alone. As we spoke, it was evident from the change of light in the eyes that always met ours so frankly, that a new conception was arising in his mind. He had imagined until then that we were deniers of god, and he found the order of thought that was ours differing in no essential from his own. For with point after point of our argument he agreed; statement on statement that was made he endorsed, saying finally: ‘I am with you in thought, but I should prefer the word Agnostic to the word Atheist.’1

  To this day there is confusion over the word ‘atheist’, some taking it to mean a person who is positively convinced that there is no god (what the atheist Aveling called ‘the folly of god-denial’), others a person who sees no reason to believe in any god and therefore lives their life in a god-free manner (i.e. what Darwin meant when he called himself an agnostic, and what Aveling meant by ‘without god’). Probably rather few scientists would adopt the first sense, although they might add that the loophole they leave for a god is scarcely wider than that through which leprechauns or orbiting teapots or Easter Bunnies may jump. There’s a spectrum between the two positions, and Darwin would admittedly have been less sceptical of gods than of flying teapots, as we can guess from a conversation with the Duke of Argyll, late in his life. By the Duke’s account,

  I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his own remarkable works on Fertilisation of Orchids, and upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he had made of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes of Nature – I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard, and said: ‘Well, that often comes with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.’2

  I too am marginally less sceptical of gods than of teapots in orbit around the sun, if only because the set of all imaginable things that might qualify as gods is larger than the set of orbiting projectiles that would qualify as teapots. But I think Darwin would agree with Aveling (and me) that the onus of proof is on the theist.

  I hope I wasn’t unfair in my assessment of Cardinal George Pell. Rather than take my word for it, you could listen to the debate itself.1

  I don’t think a recording has survived of my debate with another prelate, the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood, at the Edinburgh Science Festival in 1992. Perhaps it is just as well, as I’m not particularly proud of my performance, despite – or maybe even because of – the verdict of the Observer journalist (see below). If Archbishop Pell is regarded as a bully and a ‘bruiser’, I fear that may be how I (though physically of slighter build than they usually make bruisers) came over in my treatment of Dr Habgood. I wouldn’t handle the encounter in the same way now – perhaps I have become more compassionate than I was, but I find I can’t
now bear hitting someone who is down. Twenty years ago, however, I seem to remember that I paxmanned him, repeating several times, and too unforgivingly, a question on what he really believed about the Virgin Birth (as opposed to what he professionally was expected to believe). And I’m afraid the audience joined in, barracking him with ‘Answer the question! Answer the question!’ The Nullifidian’s account of the evening seems to bear out my remembered misgivings:

  Richard Dawkins, well-known for his books on evolution, took part in a debate with the Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood, on the existence of God at the Edinburgh science festival last Easter. The science correspondent of The Observer reported that the ‘withering’ Richard Dawkins clearly believed that ‘God should be spoken of in the same way as Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy’. He [the correspondent] overheard a gloomy cleric comment on the debate: ‘That was easy to sum up. Lions 10, Christians nil’.2

  The verb ‘to paxman’, for the benefit of non-British readers, stems from a notorious interview by the formidable Jeremy Paxman, Britain’s most feared television journalist, of the then Home Secretary Michael Howard. Paxman relentlessly asked Howard the identical question no fewer than twelve times, while the poor man equally persistently evaded answering. I have just listened to the interview again,1 and I know I would now be incapable of being so ruthless. Even then, I think that with Dr Habgood my limit was three repetitions of my awkward question about the Virgin Birth. Jeremy Paxman, by the way, has interviewed me on BBC television on two occasions, and has chaired an on-stage encounter between me and the then Bishop of Oxford Dr Richard Harries. On all three occasions he was warm and sympathetic, and I have found him so when I’ve met him socially – for example at a summer dinner in his garden, or at the Hay-on-Wye Festival during the week in which I write this, when he joined me as I was having a solitary hotel breakfast. Maybe it’s only politicians who have reason to fear him. I treasure the opening words of his interview with a notorious American political propagandist, when she was promoting her book in England: ‘Your publishers gave us Chapter 1, Ann Coulter, and I’ve read it. Does it get any better?’ I earlier referred to the school of pugnacious television journalists founded by Robin Day. Jeremy Paxman is an even more ruthless exponent. I prefer what I call the ‘mutual tutorial’ technique of interview or public conversation.