Some years ago, two friends of mine, one an atheist, the other a new age spiritual type, were taking about the Narnia series. They both loved the books, then the atheist said ‘It’s a pity about all the Christian stuff though.” It was like Ned Flanders saying he enjoyed Woody Allen films, “except for that nervous fellah who’s always in them.” It still strikes me as one of the most singularly stupid things I’ve ever heard, made all the worse by the intelligence of the speaker.
But religion, even the lack of it, can bring out the worst in people. It can also bring out the best, but this world being as it is, we tend to focus on the former. Reading any religious discussion on the net inevitably finds atheists lobbing in with their picture of any believer: stupid, ignorant, badly-read, afraid, unthinking, and atheists of course are all intelligent, perspicacious and brave. Actually if you tell me you are an atheist the only assumption I can make from there is that you don’t believe in God, which is rather a priori; anything else is up for argument. I know very stupid atheists and intelligent believers, and vice versa and everything in between.
I should lay my cards on the table at this point and say that I am a practising Catholic, with reservations about the Church. On the other hand, I have reservations about what people like to call secular society as well. I hope we never create a secular society. The pluralistic model seems to work much better. I will also say I am a big fan of science, and find it fascinating. Among the many things I love about science is that every answer found seems to create more questions. The ideas, the scale, the revelations and the mysteries all boggle the mind, and I enjoy that. I'm not a fan of those who say you can believe in evolution or God but not both.
I’ve recently finished two books in this broad area, neither written by a believer. The first was Darwinian Fairytales by Australian philosopher David Stove, the second The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its scientific pretensions by American mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. I don’t suppose either of them offer the final word in the area, but then who on earth thinks that they can – apart from Richard Dawkins? (Reading Richard Dawkins, I find, is rather like being shouted at.) Both books are very readable, with a sense of humour. I have never read Darwin or some of the other key authors so I can only take these authors’ word for what they said, but that is often the way.
I am not in a strong position to evaluate these writers in terms of their conclusions, but I am able to say that they ask very provocative questions. What both authors agree on is that Darwinian theory of evolution is not sufficient to answer the great questions, not even how did we get here, and certainly not why. Be careful here; both of them believe in evolution, but neither think Darwin nor his latter day followers have discovered how it works. Why do we sing, write poetry, music and operas? What survival skills do these relate to? The big flaw in attempts to use Darwinism to explain all human behaviour has always been altruism, the sacrifice of self for others with no reward, perhaps even risk of death. In The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris came up with a weak explanation and Richard Dawkins’ is merely an elaboration on it. They both claim we are all trying to protect our genes, however small an amount may be present in the other person we save. I think better of humans than either of these writers.
Science, for all its excellent qualities, does not have all the answers. And pretending it does makes it easy for those opposed to pick the flaws and the gaps and pretend it invalidates the whole. We see this in the global warming debate. Alarmist predictions and saying “The science is settled” have made it very easy to say ‘Well that bit’s wrong for a start”, “we haven’t run out of water, like you said we would” or “this scientist disagrees” and therefore the problem isn’t even worth discussing, let alone worth taking action.
Berlinski says, quite reasonably, that the rise of militant atheism is a response to the rise of fundamentalism. However one side being close-minded, arrogant and convinced that only they have the answers is no reason for the other to become so. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Reading reviews and debates and online chats, one is always struck by the amount of anger and vitriol that is engendered. Believers are child-abusers, mentally deranged, or just stupid. I don’t want to live in a world dominated by fundamentalist Muslims, Christians or Jews. But reading Richard Dawkins, the fundamentalist Darwinian, with his angry, dismissive and arrogant approach to all who disagree with him, doesn’t make me want to live in his world either.
It has always seemed to me that in insisting God should be scientifically verifiable in order to be believed, atheists are making a category error, like criticising these apples for their thick skin, soft flesh and odd colour, and condemning those eating them as stupid fools for enjoying those appalling apples, when in fact the group are happily eating oranges, with all the fibre, flavour, and nutrients they are looking for. Mind you, a diet consisting entirely of apples or oranges doesn’t bespeak a particularly healthy or interesting life.
If you are interested in this topic why not read this debate between Dawkins and Francis Collins, a scientist and author of The Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief. Books such as Collins’ or Dawkins’ tend to appeal to someone already disposed to think they way the author does. All books do; why else do we pick them up? All we can do is keep thinking, wondering, exploring and, here’s a radical thought, listening. In the end, there is no scientific proof of God, but there is no scientific proof against the concept. As Richard P Feynman, Nobel laureate, atheist, and personal hero once said, “Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers or morality. We cannot say whether something like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.”
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