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july 2008

What to do with Dawkins

A burgeoning array of academics continues to advance debate since the publication of Richard Dawkins' atheist bestseller The God Delusion in 2006. Having digested the writings and speeches of many such academics - and reflected on the work of the great popular scientist himself - theologian and former lecturer in evolutionary genetics John Campbell proffers a Dawkins survival kit

As everyone knows, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, really doesn’t like the idea of God. He made this very clear in his bestseller, The God Delusion and continues to make the case in lectures, radio and TV interviews and magazine articles. He takes evident delight in describing the God of the Old Testament as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction”. And he explains the whole business of religion as no more than “an accidental by-product [of human evolution] – a misfiring of something useful”. But for Dawkins it’s far worse than that. For him religion is a deeply dangerous force, regularly unleashing suffering and violence in our world; all notions of a supernatural god or gods must be strenuously resisted and the deluded believers rescued.

So what are we who profess some form of faith in God, to do with a thinker like Dawkins? With a bit of help from some of those who’ve written books and given talks in response, I’d like to make five suggestions…

1 WATCH FOR THE BEAMS

Dawkins has written The God Delusion in an aggravating, knockabout style with a relentless readiness to insult, ridicule and belittle. Always, whilst he builds his argument, you can see him positioning himself to focus his fire on the big targets he is most confident of hitting. For instance, he quickly dismisses “understated, decent, revisionist religion” as “numerically negligible”, so he can focus all his attention on “crude rabble-rousing chancers” such as TV evangelists from the USA. It’s very difficult to respond to this sort of writing without either dismissing it wholesale, or thinking up juicy chunks of ridicule to hurl back. Yet, Jesus’ wise words on sawdust specks and beams should caution us to be very careful. Slanging matches help no-one and walking away in disgust means we may miss something we need to hear. I reckon we need to ignore the recurring distractions and listen out for the argument.

2 TAKE THE HITS

There’s something painful but very necessary in finding how the things we treasure look to others who are far outside our castle of safety. When Dawkins points to all the violence and suffering perpetrated through human history in the name of religion, our first thoughts may be “What about Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot?”, or some argument that limits the bit of blame we’re prepared to pick up for our own strand of the story. Yet, even if there are big flaws in Dawkins’ argument that religion is evil and it would be much better if we were all atheists who would never go to war for our beliefs, we need to stop and take on board the problems at the root of the argument.

3 AVOID OVER-REACTION

Dawkins presumes a clear, logical link between Darwinian ideas and atheism. His apparent stark choice of “God or Darwin?” is also affirmed by committed Christians who have opted for creationism or, more recently, intelligent design.

A vigorous battle of words endlessly rages between these diametrically opposite world views. Yet both sides seem to have a vested interest in belittling any idea that it’s possible to believe in God and also accept that evolution by natural selection is good science.

Don’t be fooled by this unholy alliance – there are other views out there. It is not a straight choice between a fundamentalist Bible and evolutionary atheism; both can be resisted as distortions. For a careful history of faith reactions to Darwin try Peter Bowler’s Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons (Harvard UP); for a non-believer’s assessment of the compatibility of faith and biology see Michael Ruse’s Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (Cambridge UP); for 
a Catholic biologist’s account of his faith and his science check out Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God (Harper).

4 RESIST THE LOGIC

Dawkins has grasped Darwin’s big idea and sought to apply it wherever he can. For him, God is no more than an unnecessary hypothesis. Let me picture what Dawkins is doing. He seems a bit like a man who has found a supplier of self-cleaning linoleum. He has spotted how helpful that would be for cleanliness and efficiency and so has fitted this self-cleaning linoleum in every single room of his house.

Indeed, to push its benefits to their limits he has not only fitted it to every floor but used it for walls and ceilings too. “Look,” the man says, “my house is cleaner that yours will ever be!”, as if that’s all that matters.

On the other hand, as a Christian believer who has a background in evolutionary genetics, I am like someone who equally delights in this amazing self-cleaning lino, but having fitted it on my kitchen and bathroom floors, where I deem it most helpful, I see no reason to abandon the quite different approach to furnishing I have in the rest of my house; an approach that speaks of other values, other priorities, other ways of seeing.

There are a number of reasons why I feel no need to join Dawkins in running Darwin’s big, beautiful biological idea right through every part of my world view. Let me offer a swift list:

• Historians of science point to the long history of complex interaction between Christian faith and the emerging approaches of science. The common account of the endless warfare between enlightened science and the deliberate delusions of religion was, it seems, a myth carefully cultivated by Darwin’s colleague T H Huxley and his followers to try to establish professional scientists (of which they were some of the first) as the new experts leading society. Dawkins, so far as I can see, just ignores this and shows no awareness of the implications of history.
   

• Philosophers of science have sought in vain to find an underlying, unifying logic to explain why science works. It works because it seems to work. We don’t know why it works and we can’t be sure it will work wherever we try to use it. Just because science, with its in-built assumption that we should seek material explanations, has impressively explained some material things, does not mean we can deduce that it will eventually explain everything, even non-material things.
   

• Physicists working in the area that was once the most confidently clockwork-like science have found the neatness and clarity of Newtonian physics replaced by counter-intuitive theories with built-in uncertainty that feel far less obvious. Why should we conclude that Darwinian neatness maps directly onto the way all things are any more than Newton’s neatness did?
   

• Other Atheists admit that Darwinism, although it fits comfortably with their atheism, does not rule out forms of Christianity that try to take science (including evolution) with a provisional seriousness. Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, mercilessly ridiculed by Dawkins (possibly because he lacks a real argument against Ruse) has written a book Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?, that concludes the answer is “Yes, of some sorts”. Peter Bowler also makes the case.
   

• Human Behaviour Scientists find that the ultra-Darwinian explanations of evolutionary psychologists don’t take account of the full range of complexity affecting human behaviour. In one example Steven Rose (The 21st Century Brain, p.103) tells of a book of papers by evolutionary psychologists where each author reported some 20 years later on what had happened to the people in their original studies. Lots had changed, but often in ways that cut right across the behaviour patterns that the original studies had said were clear evidence of necessary, evolved human behaviour. The evolutionary psychology models simply hadn’t worked. Empire-building biologists applying their big idea in other areas of empirical study may not be better at explaining things than sociologists or social psychologists.

5 KEEP TRYING TO MAKE SENSE

Dawkins has built a neat, logical case to explain life and everything without recourse to the God hypothesis. Yet, for me, he still has one enormous yawning gap; Darwinian explanations of human behaviour don’t begin to answer the right question. How does it help me through the day to think that my every urge to be kind is just a misfiring Darwinian adaptive trait – and my every nastiness may be pretty much the same? If reality is simply unseeing, callous and indifferent, why should I try to do anything rather than anything else?

For me, Dawkins has far too much faith that science in general and Darwin’s big idea in particular can offer him certainty right out to the edges of reality. He invites the total disregard of that deepest of human urges – to seek for meaning and “make sense” of our lives – and in its place he would have us cherish this unproven materialism with its debilitating message that, at root, life has no meaning. That is one enormous leap of faith, and for what?

I am very wary of this deal. I prefer to live in the complex world of faith and doubt, abandonment and the possibility of meaning, where most people have always lived; a world recognised and challenged in the strange, quirky, unsettling stories of the Bible, stories that invite me on a journey of discovery without ruling out the simultaneous searchings of science.

I need to read Dawkins, and I am challenged by many of his arguments, but for as long as I suspect that he has hidden such huge assumptions deep underneath them, I’ll carry on trying to make sense in the company of those rough, difficult Bible stories that seem to take suffering and failure and nastiness, and the possibility of hope seriously. 

John Campbell is principal of Northern College, Manchester

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