by A. N. Wilson
In Burma, the chief opposition to the repressive regime of Lt General Soe Win was led by Buddhist monks. In Guatemala, Pentecostals built the largest building in Central America, the 12,000-seater church of Mega Frater, which was not named, we must presume, in playful allusion to Orwell. The Yoido Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, boasted 830,000 members, a number which was growing, in 2007, at a rate of 3,000 per month. The number of Christians in China grew from 10 million in 1900 to 400 million in 2000–and rising. In Russia, following the collapse of communism, not only were all the churches full on Sundays, but the monasteries and convents which had been so mercilessly destroyed by Lenin were rebuilt and bursting with aspirant monks and nuns. The proportion of people attached to the world’s four biggest religions–Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism–rose from 67 percent in 1900 to 73 percent in 2005, and according to the prognostications of The Economist, looked set to rise to 80 percent in 2050.2
Was this what it had all been leading up to, as the intelligent sons and daughters of the Enlightenment tried to rebuild the world ruined by the mid-twentieth-century clash of European ideologies? The heirs of Bloomsbury had assumed that theology would vanish with the extension of education. Bertrand Russell’s atheism had taught two generations to think as he did. A. J. Ayer’s dismissal of religious questions as meaningless had been as apparently devastating as his tutor Gilbert Ryle’s dismissal of God Himself as a category mistake. The Church of England had done its bit to spread Enlightenment, with a Bishop of Woolwich in the 1960s trying to be Honest to a God in whom he could scarcely believe, and a Bishop of Durham in the 1980s wondering whether the Resurrection itself had been anything more remarkable than ‘a conjuring trick with bones’. The Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, had surely taken matters to their logical conclusion when, having mused on the ebb tide of The Sea of Faith, he wrote a book with the candid title Taking Leave of God. British primary schools were no longer teaching the children Bible stories but were giving them hazy versions of comparative religion, so that rather than having their heads filled with wonders which they would later dismiss as fables–Moses and the Burning Bush or Christ Walking on the Water–these progressive tots knew about Diwali and Ramadan and Yom Kippur, and, it could be hoped, by the kindly minded educational theorists, develop into mature beings who had the vague sense that religions, no more than social constructs, were phenomena out of which human beings progressed, when they came to learn about science. With no common mythology, they could learn to put their trust in the integrity of relationships, in intellectual sincerity, in respect for one another’s differences. What else was religion, but, in the words of one of the most eloquent poems of our times:
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die?3
After half a century of ‘perfectly sound agnosticism’, it must have been galling, and worse than galling, for those who believed that human beings could simply be taught not to be religious, to watch the innumerable pairs of sandals and trainers cast off at the doors of mosques in every big British city, and to hear the jaunty strains of ‘Sing Hosanna!’ or ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ drifting from the packed doors of evangelical churches. No wonder some of the perfectly sound agnostics felt beleaguered, and, like religious people when beleaguered, began to say and write things which were no longer sensible.
The long-running British television series Doctor Who was a popular illustration of how science fiction provided an alternative metaphysic, comparable to, though not a substitute for, religious mythology. Dr Who was a Time Lord travelling through time and space in his Tardis (‘Time And Relative Dimension in Space’) which had the reassuring outward appearance of a police telephone box. These boxes became obsolete in reality so that the Doctor, by the time he was once again thrilling audiences in the early 2000s, had a dated rather than timeless quality whenever he fetched up on the planet earth. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was played by an agreeably toothy actor called Tom Baker whose long face somewhat resembled that of the polymathic opera director Dr Jonathan Miller and whose long woolly scarves gave him the appearance of a fun-loving lecturer at one of the new universities which had sprung up in the real-life Britain of the period. At one stage his companion on his journeys in the Tardis was the Time Lady Romana, played by the Honourable Sarah Ward, daughter of the 7th Viscount Bangor. (Half)-sister-in-law of the biographer Sarah Bradford, she acted under the name Lalla Ward. Dr Who was not unlike a crude version of Christ, immortal yet apparently wholly human, who visited the planet to overcome evil. Baker and Lalla appeared in a number of adventures together, including Destiny of the Daleks, City of Death and State of Decay. The pair married for sixteen months, but separated, and it was at the fortieth birthday party of the science fiction writer Douglas Adams that she was introduced to a strikingly handsome and amusing biology don, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, named Dr Richard Dawkins. The same year Lalla and Dawkins were married.4
Dr Who had been fearless in his war on monsters, his most popular adversaries with television audiences being the Daleks, metallic dustbins covered in flashing lights who rolled along on castors pointing something like sink plungers at their victims with the throaty, agitated cry of ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’
Dr Dawkins was to become even more famous than Dr Who. He was one of the most successful popularisers of scientific ideas, occupying a position in our times comparable to that of Thomas Huxley in the time of Darwin, and, like Huxley, consumed not only with a zeal for scientific knowledge but also for the denunciation of superstition. In such elegant monographs as The Selfish Gene, The River of Life and The Blind Watchmaker, he explained the working of Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of the species by natural selection, while never hesitating to point out that Darwin’s theories, confirmed by twentieth-century discoveries about genetics, obviated the need for the mechanistic ‘creator’ envisaged by the cruder Deist philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He devoted much of his intellectual energy, during his prime, to the demolition of such obsolete theological writers as Archdeacon Paley (1743–1805), whose View of the Evidences of Christianity defended a mechanistic idea of creation, owing more to Leibniz than to the Bible or the Church Fathers. Dawkins wrote as if he was unaware of the existence of William James (1842–1910), the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist who had concluded that Leibniz’s God was ‘a disease of the philosophy shop’.5 James had a tentative belief in God, based on the widespread evidence that human beings had religious experiences. Whereas Dawkins preferred to concentrate on the nonsensical things which some religious people had written or said, and enjoyed seeking out proponents of intolerant and ugly theological points of view, James had pointed to the many cases where prayer or the awareness of God’s presence appeared to bring courage, calm, a sense of wellbeing and an urge to be kinder.6 (His brother Henry, an agnostic, had written in his notebooks, the sentence Be kind, be kind, be kind.)
A book which showed Dawkins at his most attractive and articulate was a volume of essays entitled A Devil’s Chaplain. It contains a celebration of a great science teacher Frederick William Sanderson (1857–1922), who had been headmaster of Oundle School a generation or two before Dawkins himself picked up his infectious enthusiasm for science at the same establishment. It is a joyous essay, which celebrates the pleasures and duties of intellectual knowledge. Sanderson directed that the laboratories be left unlocked so that boys could go in at any time and work on their research projects. Dawkins longed for an educational system which, rather than making students cram for exams, inspired them with a thirst for knowledge, a passion for truth. Sanderson was an inspiration both in his own enthusiasm for science and in his ability to communicate it to others. Dawkins himself had this wonderful ability.
In the essay he quoted quite extensively from Sanderson’s sermons in Oundle School chapel. One such paragraph summons up a cloud of scientific witness–‘Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who bin
ds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibniz in their wondrous mathematical harmonies.’ And on the catalogue goes. Not surprisingly, Dawkins shortens the quotation a little and indicates his omissions in the traditional manner by the occasional…
There must have been readers of A Devil’s Chaplain who felt tempted to turn from this essay to the compilation Sanderson of Oundle, put together by his grateful pupils. There they would have found the catalogue of great scientists, quoted by Dawkins–Faraday, Ohm, Ampère, Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Röntgen. The words not quoted by Dawkins are that these scientists are ‘all, we may be sure, living daily in the presence of God, bending like the reed before His will’.7
Nor did Dawkins quote Sanderson when he told the boys, ‘We perish if we cease from prayer. Of course, true, earnest helpful prayer is difficult. It is difficult to fix the attention, difficult to know what to pray for, what to pray about. Perhaps the best way is to meditate with a notebook.’8
Sanderson the inspirational science teacher exclaimed, ‘Thou, O God, dost reveal thyself in all the multitude of Thy works, in the workshop, the factory, the mine, the laboratory, in industrial life. No symbolism here, but the Divine God.’9 The ‘biological purpose of man’, thought Sanderson, was, ‘to bring and maintain order out of the tangle of things; he is to diagnose diseases; he is to co-ordinate the forces of nature; he is above all things to reveal the spirit of God in all the works of God.’ And education? ‘The business of schools is through and by the use of a common service to get at the true spiritual nature of the ordinary things we have to deal with.’10
Some would consider it dishonest of Dawkins to have omitted these sayings in the account of his hero. Obviously, what Dawkins admired in Sanderson (the communicated enthusiasm for science) would have been admirable whether or not he himself shared the religious beliefs. But no one would guess from the account in A Devil’s Chaplain that religious belief underlay all Sanderson’s wonder at scientific discovery and all his faith in the curiosity, resourcefulness and healing creativity of human beings. ‘Individuals are not hard Newtonian molecules. Individuals are like atoms under radium. The life within a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is the most powerful, vital, complex, energetic thing there is. It cannot be treated as a “hard” molecule any longer. There are vast stores of energies to be liberated.’11
It was clear from Dawkins’s animated, handsome face, and from his laugh, and even from the arrogant contempt which fell from his lips or pen in anger that he did not believe, any more than had Sanderson, that human beings were hard Newtonian molecules. Ethical statements, denunciations of intellectual immorality, passion for liberty, animated much of Dawkins’s rhetoric. In his accounts of life on earth, however, and his expositions of how natural selection operates, he never revealed by so much as a syllable that he considered himself, and other sentient beings, to be mysterious. Nor did he ever ask the question which had puzzled mankind at least as long ago as the pre-Socratics: what is Being itself? When we see, say, observe that we, or the Universe, are, rather than are not–what is it that we are saying? Instead, when he turned from the excellent explanations of science, which were his métier, to the area of metaphysical inquiry, Dawkins often gave the impression that these deep questions were scientific speculations about, say, the origin of the universe, or the origin of species. He answered What? questions with How? answers. What is Man that thou art mindful of him? was not a question which ever seems to have troubled him. What Wordsworth in The Prelude called ‘a dark/Invisible workmanship’ at work in each of us was central to the life-view of Sanderson of Oundle but apparently absent from that of Dawkins.
But so was it absent, apparently, from those ‘fundamentalists’ whom Dawkins attacked with such Huxleyian zeal. This is even odder. Readers of Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion will find that his bullets reach a bull’s-eye not when he is attacking what he understands as religion, but when he is demolishing those who themselves believe in the ‘religions’ he lambasts. In Emmanuel College, Gateshead, for instance, one of the ‘city academies’ set up by Tony Blair for promoting higher intellectual standards, Dawkins found an object worthy of his scorn. The school was endowed by Sir Peter Vardy, a car salesman whose life had been changed by the combination of becoming a very rich man and conversion to neo-con American-style evangelicalism. It was Andrew Brown, the Independent’s first religious affairs correspondent, who had drawn attention to a lecture given at the school on ‘The Teaching of Science: A Biblical Perspective’ in which the speaker, the head of science in the school, spoke about the legendary narratives in Genesis as if they were texts of a different order. Defence of the historicity of Noah’s Flood–a global catastrophe which took place ‘in the relatively recent past’–appear, from Dawkins’s quotations in The God Delusion, to be only part of a story which includes assertions from the science teacher that the earth itself–contrary to all evidence from geology and palaeontology–is also of recent origin.
Disputes between ‘fundamentalists’ or their subtler co-partners the ‘creationists’ and the debunking materialists became commoner in our times as year succeeded year and not, as might have been predicted, less common. Matters which some observers might have been thought settled for good and all by Stanley Kramer’s film Inherit the Wind, of 1960, were more of a live issue than ever in the year 2008, both in the US and in Britain. In that film Spencer Tracy played the role of a hard-bitten lawyer coming to a Southern town to defend a schoolmaster accused of teaching Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the so-called monkey trials of 1925. Maybe in 1960 the Southern backwoodsmen who professed themselves outraged by a young teacher’s scientific honesty seemed like historical freaks. Kramer’s film celebrates the passion for truth and justice which the Spencer Tracy character exemplifies. But there is more than a hint of patronage and swagger in the portrayal of the hayseed-sprinkled hicks who actually believe in old-style religion. Kipling bid the Christians
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakara
They did not heed his advice. Nor did the modern unbelievers display gentleness to the believers. The ‘debate’ which became louder and uglier as the twenty-first century unrolled, was not really a debate: more a species of trench warfare in which one side, only semi-visible to the other, hurled verbal abuse and occasional threats of actual violence. Dawkins quoted some of these poor crazies with evident relish in his book–such letters as this addressed to the author and director Brian Flemming, whose film The God Who Wasn’t There had clearly hurt:
You’ve definitely got some nerve. I’d love to take a knife, gut you fools, and scream with joy as your insides spill out in front of you. You are attempting to ignite a holy war in which some day I, and others like me, may have the pleasure of taking action like the above mentioned. However GOD teaches us not to seek vengeance, but to pray for those like you all.12
It is a happy accident that the English word pray (from Middle English preien, old French preier (Latin precari) should be a homophone for prey–(from Middle English preye, Old French preie, Latin praeda, booty). The Christian Bible itself ends with the alarming series of visions known as The Apocalypse in which all those of a different persuasion from the seer are made to perish everlastingly in a burning lake, and in which civilisation itself, the day-to-day life of the civis, is deemed to be in itself sinful (see especially the XVIIIth chapter of the Revelation of St John the Divine which exults over the desolation and fall of Babylon the Great): ‘And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth her merchandise any more: the merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet…’. A great catalogue. So must the disciples of Osama bin Laden have exulted when they watched the mass murder of office workers in New York and imagined that they beheld the vengeance of the Almighty upon the unjust city.
Those who studied the alarming, and profoundly uncongenial fundamentalism of ou
r times were bound to investigate the source and origin of all this violence and hatred. The ardent secularists took the view that religion was itself the poison from which the human race needed to be cleansed. While having some fun at the expense of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Christopher Hitchens concluded in his diatribe that religion ‘poisons everything’. ‘What we’–the non-believers–‘respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake,’ he claimed. He called for a ‘new enlightenment’ which believed that ‘the proper study of mankind is man, and woman’. He had little to say about the Anglican monks who had spearheaded resistance to apartheid in the 1950s, or about the phenomenon of the Peace and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa when apartheid came to an end and Christians led by Archbishop Tuto steered that country to majority rule without bloodshed. Nor did the Peace Now movement in Israel in which religious Jews played a striking role move him to moderate his tone, nor the Peace Movement in Northern Ireland, which was the impulse of practising Christians trying to build understanding in a community wrecked by the activities of neo-Marxist gangsters. The resistance to Hitler by Confessing Christians such as Pastor Bonhoeffer or the defence of Human Rights in Latin and Central America by heroic figures such as Archbishop Romeiro were conveniently passed by, as was the lifetime’s witness for peace of the Dalai Lama or resistance to tyranny by the Buddhist monks of Burma. Nor were the works of aid agencies such as Christian Aid or CAFOD allowed to interfere with the argument that those who said their prayers were filling their minds, and presumably those whom they helped in famine and disaster, with poison. God, for Hitchens, was a Santa Claus–style invention, religion the cause of hatred and conflict in the world, the tool by which such evils as misogyny, child abuse and brainwashing kept the human race in the Dark Ages.13