Here’s a conundrum, of sorts, for evangelical atheists. Richard Dawkins has just written a book — an entertaining, wildly informative, splendidly written polemic against the existence of a divine being — called The God Delusion. As a scientist, perhaps these days our most lauded scientist, Dawkins is canny enough to know that, by the lights of his own methodology, it is impossible to state with certainty that there is no God. So he quietly concedes, early on, that God is “improbable”. Yet the rest of the book burns with a fervent faith that God is a childish construct of our imaginations; that He never existed and was a delusion.
Rhetoric and dark humour are brought to bear to swing the vacillating reader; we are elegantly cajoled, cleverly harangued into shedding ourselves of this superstitious nonsense that has bedevilled us since our first visit to Sunday school.
It is a passionate book; it is a book based on faith. It uses a wonderful array of literary and philosophical devices to convince that Dawkins’s belief is correct. It uses every manipulative trick there is to convince us of the author’s rectitude. It attempts to use science to destroy God, but cannot stick with science because science, sadly — by the author’s own admission — cannot do the job. “Well, there’s lots of science in it,” Dawkins replied, after a while, when I put this point to him during an interview for a Channel 4 documentary — and so there is. He had earlier concurred that The God Delusion was in the main a rhetorical work, and that he was in danger of becoming better known as a serial God-basher than as a serious scientist. “That would be sad,” he agreed.
There is no reason, of course, why a brilliant scientific mind like Dawkins’s should be debarred from rhetoric, satire and humour. But the problem is, when you advance a case rooted in the supposedly disinterested scientific discourse that insists God probably does not exist, then flam it up so that God becomes a ludicrous and contemptible conceit, you undermine the basis of your argument. That’s the conundrum for atheists: the belief that God exists is scarcely less worthy than the belief that He does not exist. Or, at least, neither proposition obliges belief per se. It is this notion of belief, rather than God, that causes the problems. And The God Delusion throbs with belief, the belief of the disbeliever; its broad sweep of science is in most cases subordinate to the author’s standpoint.
Science does not exist in a vacuum, its practitioners inured to such human frailties as hubris. If this were the case, we would have paradigm shifts less frequently; science would progress in a more orderly manner, each practitioner disinterestedly testing the hypotheses of their predecessors, unblemished by an unscientific attachment to this or that standpoint.
That’s not how science works. Scientists tend to attach themselves to their disparate theories with a very human, unscientific fervour. Later, their theories are almost always amended or discarded; that’s the way with science. And refusing to let go of those theories is the way with human beings. You might argue further that if you are a scientist, you should be disinclined to talk in terms of certainties, knowing that human knowledge is finite and will change. Particularly when dealing with God, and even more so, when your viewpoint is drawn from a theory that is beginning to look a little careworn: Darwinism.
Of all the scientific ideas that have sent God scurrying into a hole in the skirting board, Darwinism had the most shattering effect. The previously unanswerable question — how could an organ as complex as, say, an eye, evolve by chance? It couldn’t! There must be a creator! — was suddenly rendered irrelevant.
For 147 years, Darwinism has been the best way we have of explaining evolution. And when Dawkins and the like eviscerate bone-headed creationists and advocates of intelligent design, one is unreservedly with him. Theirs is an obnoxious and dangerous stupidity, a wilful promulgation of ignorance. But increasingly one feels that their numbing certainties are matched by those of the atheists; that there is an intellectual blindness on the other side, too.
Take Dawkins’s riposte to those who suggest that there may have been a God of some kind responsible for the inception of life, who then conveniently absented himself. This is silly, he suggests, because it would contradict the principle that the complex evolves from the simple; if God were there before the amoeba, He must surely have been a complex being, and therefore something must have created Him. QED, reverend.
Well, that’s true if Darwinian evolution is a sort of sacred text that must never be gainsaid. Yet increasingly, scientists are picking holes in this notion of gradual change. The “evo-devo” school of thought holds that sudden change can occur within a species effectively in the space of one generation. It does not imply that there is a creator; it is, if you like, God- neutral. But it challenges a central tenet of something that has become less a theory than a faith.
Nowhere, though, do the atheists flail more ineffectually than in attempting to fill what Sartre called the “God-shaped hole” inside all of us: our need to believe in something from which we derive our notion of morality.
Atheists squirm when presented with the fact that political regimes that did away with religion and replaced it with a supposedly rational creed (to which the description “scientific” was frequently appended) ended up murdering more people than Torquemada could have ever envisaged.
Clearly, something always moves in to fill that gap — and you might argue that the more avowedly “scientific” it is, the more it will be disposed towards viciousness. Dawkins acknowledges this need for something and concocts 10 commandments. For which thanks, Richard, mate. In place of don’t kill, steal or covet your neighbour’s wife, we have stuff like “Value the future on a timescale longer than your own”, or “Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else)”. It is the 10 commandments handed down not by Moses, but by a wet Guardian leader-writer, etched not in stone but perhaps on organic tofu. It is beyond parody, and its potential longevity as a useful moral code can be counted in years rather than millenniums.
The truth, though, for the atheists — Dawkins included — is that science itself fills their “God-shaped holes” in a way that, by its own lights, it should not. Dawkins marshals figures that suggest belief in God is low among scientists, implying this is because they know better. More likely is that, being human, they have swapped one belief system for another and his statistics are simply a tautology: the scientists believe in a different God.
It is evident in the fury and passion with which Dawkins et al advance their cause: they proselytise, they evangelise, they demand our repentance and our acceptance of their own creed. I’d rather treat science as a wonderful human creation for describing the world around us — often in metaphors that have an agreeably biblical ring to them. And, at the same time, I suspect — Betjeman called it, in a lovely oxymoron, a “faint conviction” — that we do not know everything, nor ever shall, and that there is a ghost somewhere in the machine.
Rod Liddle’s programme on atheism will be shown on Channel 4 later this year
