I did say in an earlier piece that I’d comment at greater length on Richard Dawkins’ two-part polemical documentary for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil?
A few days on and I’m not so sure that there’s much about the two documentaries, themselves, that needs to be addressed. It was what it was and either you take Dawkins’ views on board - which means you’re most probably an atheist - or you don’t. That’s very much the nature of polemics, you either agree with them or you disagree with them out of which basic position all further discussion proceeds by a fairly predictable course.
What been rather more interesting in the days since the second part has been the various efforts of ‘believers’ of one kind or another to leap to defence of religion in face of Dawkins’ programmes and, particularly, how poor a defence most of these commentators have succeeded in mounting - so its to this that I decided to turn my thoughts.
Let’s start with the [over]reaction of AA Gill in the Times:
Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement, such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room. His splenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it? He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis.
Well quite AA. But what did you think of the actual programme?
Those who know Gill’s work will recognise the style instantly. When you have nothing to say - which in Gill’s case is the vast majority of the time - simply break out the big book of ad-hominem attacks and sprinkle illiberally. ‘[S]plenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant’ rather nicely sums up Gill himself, so much so that one half suspects that his real objection to this documentary lies in Channel 4 having given someone other than himself the opportunity to mount a solid prime-time rant and is therefore merely the literary equivalent of penis envy.
Whatever. Gill was ever the dilettante in his endeavours and there’s nothing in his comments to change that view.
Moving on, we find Dawkins getting right up the collective noses of the Evangelical Alliance, about which I’m sure he’s been having sleepless nights ever since.
There’s two or three beauties in this piece worth noting, starting with:
Dr David Hilborn, Head of Theology at the Alliance, said that Dawkins “signally failed to define key terms like ‘religion’, ‘evangelical’ and ‘fundamentalist’, showed no evidence of having engaged with scholarly sources at the interface of theology and science, and dodged any interaction with peers from the academic community who are believing scientists, or with theologians trained in the natural sciences.�
Yeah, right. As if the ’scholarly sources at the interface of theology and science’ are in anyway representative of the mainstream of religious thought amongst the masses. Organised religion, whether it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of the others for that matter, is broadly split into two classes; a small elite at the top of the pile, the intellectuals, theologians and other full paid-up members of the priestly caste - those ‘in the know’ - and rest of the sheep below for whom religion is a matter of being told, in simplistic terms, what believe, threatened with hellfire and damnation, and then told to get on with it.
The objection here is not that Dawkins’ failed to engage with the priestly caste but rather that he used a mass medium - television - to talk directly to the masses without them in they way to put their particular spin on his views. Heaven forbid that anyone might just have seen these programmes and - oh the horror of it - actually tried thinking about Dawkins arguments for themselves. No, we can’t have that can we?
Further on we get this, equally laughable statement:
Dr R. David Muir, the Alliance’s Head of Public Policy, commented, “One of the few things on which we agreed with Professor Dawkins in this programme was the inadvisability of the government’s proposed religious hatred legislation. We are not suggesting that ‘The Root of All Evil?’ should be banned or censored; we are simply surprised that Channel 4 commissioned a programme of such poor quality. Like the BBC, commercial terrestrial channels are subject to broadcasting standards, and this did nothing to enhance Channel 4’s reputation for often impressive, well-researched documentaries. Dawkins’ film was so viciously biased against faith-communities, and against Evangelicals in particular, that in the interests of balance and freedom of speech the station ought to offer a substantial right of reply.�
Sure, you want a ’substantial right of reply’ do you? Because the documentary was ‘viciously biased against faith communities and against Evangelicals in particular’.
As far as bias is concerned, the two programmes were polemics, a word for which the dictionary definition reads:
A controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine.
So of course the programmes were ‘biased’. What else did you fucking expect - ‘Songs of Praise’?
Muir also neglects to mention that all the UK’s terrestrial broadcasters are required, under OFCOM regulations, to carry some religious programming - an average of 7.4 hours per week even though their own research found ‘promotion of the needs of different religions as of low-ranking importance to viewers’.
I wonder how often any of those programmes break off in mid stream for a brief atheist interlude or even pause for a few seconds to reflect that there are people who don’t share the beliefs being promoted in these programmes? I think the obvious answer is as near ‘never’ as makes no difference - at least certainly never when a programme is on at a time likely attract an actual audience.
Dawkins was given two hours, actually nearer an hour and forty minutes allowing for adverts, over two weeks on a minority channel (C4) to make his case - and that’s it. Today being Sunday I thought I’d check the schedules and between the ‘Heaven and Earth Show’ and ‘Songs of Praise’ religion gets two hours and thirty-five minutes of airtime, not just today but every week on BBC 1, which is still the most highly regarded terrestrial channel…
…and Muir is concerned about bias against religion?
If Muir wants a right to reply to Dawkins, then there’s 7.4 hours of religious programming a week in which he can ask for a slot, although on the evidence so far I can’t see he’s going to have much to offer but the usual run of bland platitudes and sophistries that crop up every time anyone dares to suggest that religion might not quite so wonderful a thing as he supposes.
Finally, there comes a point also echoed by Dominic Lawson in his first column for the Independent - no link due to crappy PPV firewall:
On the same point, Dr Hilborn added: “Especially in view of Professor Dawkins’ false depiction of religion as inherently violent, it would be worth pointing out that in the name of scientific materialism, atheistic regimes like those of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot have caused far more bloodshed in the past century than any self-consciously religious belief system. Not surprisingly, this inconvenient fact did not feature in ‘The Root of All Evil?�
Which, of course, proves absolutely nothing other than that there is little in this world more dangerous than a fanatical belief, by anyone, that they have possession of the sole absolute and exclusive truth about everything and that the world would therefore be a perfect place if everyone only believed exactly the same things that they believed, which then leads on to the belief that it it right of compel others to adopt these same beliefs… or else.
Aside from noting that such behaviour is clearly psychotic, irrespective of whether it is founded on a particular theological or political belief system, it also needs pointing out that the Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot argument is both an obvious straw man and a correlation fallacy. The scale of atrocities carried out by atheistic political regimes in the last century has be actual relationship to the beliefs of those regimes, it is merely a function of the industrial technology that those despots had to hand couple with a larger overall global population. Compared to a Torquemada or to the Crusaders, Stalin et al had both more people on hand to kill and more efficient and effective industrial means of killing them - that doesn’t make them less moral or less restrained than earlier purveyors of religious persecution, just rather more efficient in going about their business.
Most of the other counter arguments I’ve seen dotted about are equally specious.
Howard Jacobson - again behind the Indy’s bloody firewall - accuses Dawkins of being as evangelical in his views as those he attacks, which again does nothing to refute his arguments. Moreover one suspects that this overlooks a fundamental difference between Dawkins’ outlook and that of many believers. Provide Dawkins scientific proof of the existence of God and he would change his views, provide believers with scientific proof of God’s non-existence and would they change their views? One suspects not.
Jacobson, like AA Gill, also shows no particular aversion to resorting to ad-hominem attacks on Dawkins, which rather points up the paucity of his other arguments.
“Nothing returns one quicker to God than the sight of a scientist with no imagination, no vocabulary, no sympathy, no comprehension of metaphor, and no wit, looking soulless and forlorn amid the wonders of nature.�
Jacobson clearly appears to have some difficulty, here, in distinguishing between god and William Wordsworth while offering an observation about which one can only say ‘pass the bucket, quick’.
Going back to the question of bias, there have been numerous complaints about the documentary spending so much time on Dawkins encounters with assorted semi-psychotic wingnuts - especially those of the scary wild-eyed American fundamentalist variety - rather than his altogether more genial encounter with the Bishop of Oxford.
In part this, again, harks back to my earlier point about trying to confine the parameters of debate to the priestly cast but it also, to a great extent, highlights a very British, almost English fallacy about the nature of Christianity. Yes, the Bishop of Oxford did seem to be a nice, moderate even liberal kind of guy, the kind of guy who fits comfortable into the British stereotype which still sees the clergy as being a fairly benign and mildly beneficial influence on society. For many people in Britain, their view of the Church is fundamentally bound up in images of Derek Nimmo in a dog collar and Vicar of Dibley, the old, slightly careworn and comfortable face of Anglicanism - a branch of Christianity that has been on the decline for many years.
In placing most of the emphasis on right-wing evangelicals Dawkins wasn’t so much exhibiting bias - although they do make for a better foil for his arguments - as pointing out where Christianity in increasingly heading. The nice-guy Bishop of Oxford, the kind of priest you’d find popping round for afternoon tea in Miss Marple novels, is a force in decline and increasing being replaced the world over by American-style psycho-preachers who really don’t blink often enough for anything like comfort. The dear old Church of England may well insulate us Brits from this to some small extent, but that does not mean we should simply ignore the rise of fundamentalist Christianity or its potential implications for the future, particularly should the religious right succeed in their efforts to mount a wholesale takeover of US politics.
Just remember, they way things are heading there is every possibility that the scary preacher guy from the first programme - or someone very like him - could wind up in White House with the codes for all the nukes, all of which rather puts into a different perspective the potential threat that a few Islamic fundamentalists pose to western civilisation, with or without their having taken flying lessons.
Elsewhere, the Jesuits - inevitably - take a shot at responding to Dawkins to no great effect either.
From Dr Gerard J Hughes SJ we get this:
First, Dawkins is remarkably vague about what exactly scientific rationality amounts to. He repeatedly emphasises the importance of ‘evidence’; but he gives the impression that there is no problem at all about what is to count as evidence for some theory, nor that there is a process of assessing evidence which is vastly more complex than simply looking and seeing.
One might think of the complexities of deciding whether the evidence in a trial justifies a conclusion beyond reasonable doubt. One could record all the statements of the witnesses, listen to the forensic scientists; and still have to assess what can reasonably be said. Or think of the debates among scientists about the possibility of producing a general theory of everything, which will integrate all our piecemeal theories in physics into one coherent whole. Must the universe have exactly eleven dimensions, then?
A comment which speaks rather more of Hughes lack of understanding of scientific methodology than any lack of clarity on Dawkins’ part.
Scientific evidence derives from observation and experiment its validity being tested by whether it is both verifiable and repeatable - such evidence, to be valid, must be empirical and objective in nature. Subjective ‘evidence’ may support a particular theory - as may logical inference - but neither is sufficient to elevate a theory into the realms of a scientific law or concrete fact.
This same [deliberate?] misunderstanding appears in another Jesuit response - from Dr Louis Caruna SJ of the University of London, who notes:
The question of justification is as crucial in science as it is in religion. And we cannot naively reject religious claims just because they are justified mainly by testimony rather than experiment. The role of testimony within scientific practice is a growing area of research. Individual scientists cannot establish all the claims they need. There is an inevitable role for mutual trust both in science and religion.
Quite how both have arrived at the idea that subjective testimony is considered valid evidence within the core empirical sciences - physics, chemistry, biology - is rather unclear. It is certainly to be found in the social sciences, in psychology, sociology etc. but these are far from being regards as either empirical sciences or, in some cases, as being science at all.
Caruna goes on to note:
What is really worrying in Dawkins’ approach, however, is that he himself makes a very dubious use of evidence. He challenges various religious interviewees for evidence, but then neglects evidence for his own more eccentric claims.
The very choice of interviewees undermines his whole approach. He disregards an elementary point of scientific method. For a good survey, observation needs a random sample not a biased one. Dawkins never applies this fundamental principle here. He seems to have first decided what to prove and then chosen interviewees to confirm his hypothesis. He never bothers to consider contrary evidence, even though he recalls his former professor whom he commends for doing exactly that.
Which again completely misses the point of Dawkins’ documentary, which was sociological and not scientific in nature, as well as missing the fact that it was intentionally polemical and therefore not bound to be unbiased in the views presented.
Caruna continues by advancing this observation:
Is it possible that Dawkins couldn’t find individuals who represent a healthy view of religion? In Christianity, for instance, did he ever consider prominent people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who spent her life helping the poorest of the poor precisely because of her deep religious faith? He did not.
Did he ever think of the innumerable, unnoticed, under-estimated priests, nuns, and lay people who dedicate their entire lives to bringing health, hope, and joy to countless families in the most derelict shanty towns imaginable, precisely because they are driven by faith? He did not.
Does the fact that faith motivates some to acts of apparent altruism really negate Dawkins argument that it also motivates others to acts of atrocity? I don’t think so, nor for that matter do I regard religion as necessarily being particularly altruistic in the general sense of the term.
Throughout history, Religious altruism has all too often come at a price.
The Church may do ‘good works’ but rarely without looking for a little quid pro quo along the way - a tithe of 10% of believers’ income being the traditional starting point for such things.
But of course the real price of religious altruism is measured not in hard cash but in souls, at least the in Christian tradition. The Church’s good works are not just acts of altruism but part of its proselytising – across the globe the Church has, during the colonial era and beyond, been an active and enthusiastic participant in the wholesale destruction of numerous indigenous cultures. In fact, taking on board Dawkins’ idea of the ‘virus of faith’, nowhere has religion acted more in the manner of virus than in the manner in which it has spread itself across Africa, Central and South America and those parts of the far east, such the Philippines, where it has been able to take hold. And in all these cases, ‘good works’, the Christian Mission, with its hospital and its school, has been the primary means of infection, the transmission vector for the virus.
It is impossible to estimate quite what the human cost of this has been – like the Americans in Iraq, the Church rarely bothers to keep a headcount of ‘native’ casualties, let alone the social and cultural cost.
But all of this is academic.
One either subscribes to Dawkins’ view of religion or one doesn’t, in which case one will have either enjoyed the programmes or loathed it. Likewise, if one is a believer, then nothing I have said above will make the slightest bit of difference in how you view the world or what you believe about god, religion or even Dawkins, himself.
Like any good polemic, the two programmes were intended to polarise opinion and spark debate and as such must be considered to have been very successful.
What is interesting about the reaction it has provoked is not so much the nature of that reaction, or the arguments that various supporters of – and apologists for - religion have put forward to try and counter Dawkins’ views, but rather the question of why argue the case at all? Very few, if any, believers are going to suddenly become rampaging atheists on account of seeing Dawkins on TV, so why is it that some many believers appear so obviously threatened by it?
What is most interesting about the counteroffensive against Dawkins is not so much what is being said and where and how his views are being challenged so much as what isn’t being said. Of all the arguments put forward by Dawkins, perhaps his most contentious was his attack on the indoctrination of children into religious beliefs, yet this seems to be the one point that his opponents are studiously avoiding, preferring instead to mount their defence of religion in terms of broad generalities.
Why avoid this issue? What is it about this one highly contentious point in his second documentary that causes his opponents to shy away from it, almost as if to pretend that it doesn’t exist? What is it about this particular idea that religions various supporters and apologists fear so much?
Here we come to crux of the matter. What bothers Dawkins opponents so much is not that he is questioning and challenging religion itself but that, in doing so, he is challenging the privileged position that religion holds in Western society.
It’s that more than anything else that has religion’s supporters and apologists worried and scrambling to put forward counter-arguments and complaining about bias.
Why should religion be accorded any more of privileged position in society than any other belief?
What rational justification is there for having a state religion and an established church?
Why should Bishops to sit in the House of Lords as a matter of right?
Why should the state fund faith schools?
Why should Britain’s equality laws permit religious groups to engage in discrimination, but not other groups? It is a fact that under current employment laws it is unlawful to discriminate in employment on grounds of sexuality other than for religious reasons – you can’t turn a gay person down for a job just because you hate queers but you can if your god tells you to hate queers.
How is that rational? Bigotry is wrong unless you particular version of god is a bigot?
By challenging the validity of religion, Dawkins also challenges the privileges granted to it by Western society and while faith may offer some defence from rationality in terms of beliefs, its is much less certain a shield when it comes to defending unjustified and warranted privileges.
That’s the real debate here, and it’s precisely the debate that religion does not want because there is no rational defence for such privileges – which is why its supporters have been so assiduous in avoiding this issue.
As for me, I’m an atheist and a left-wing libertarian, so it’s a debate I’m going to have whether they like it or not.
