We learn that at the ripe age of 22 he lost his virginity to a cellist in London. Why not? Some people let it all hang out but I prefer not to. You can say that again.
Dawkins may have an appetite for wonder, but he is positively anorexic when it comes to personal revelation. I suggest that radical movements invariably function on peer pressure and he agrees that he succumbed to the impulse to belong.
I never had the opportunity. But the music of the time and the atmosphere — there was a feeling of loyalty to the protesters: These are my people.
One should be more independent-minded than that. He avoids any details of interest about his first marriage — to the ethologist Marian Stamp. The couple live in Oxford, where Dawkins has resided almost all of his adult life, and where he spent 13 years until his retirement in as the professor for public understanding of life.
The memoir is strong on the professional excitement of his early years as an academic, but it assiduously sidesteps the rivalries and disputes that mark even the most unremarkable scientific careers, let alone one as distinguished as Dawkins. Dawkins seems determined in both the memoir and our interview to present a calm, conciliatory side to his character that has not always been associated with his public image.
Dawkins has long maintained that there is no real difference between his work on evolution and his anti-religion position as an atheist. To some extent, he has a point. So in a way even my science books are forced to take a stance, not against posh theologians who accept evolution but surely the absolute majority of religious people in the world who literally believe that every species was separately created and even, in the case of the Abrahamic religions, believe that Adam and Eve were created 6, years ago.
While this may be true, no other evolutionary biologist has been quite as outspoken as Dawkins in his denunciation of religion and, indeed, the religious. He waited several years and the book was eventually published in All the same, it seemed a little perverse to be galvanized by the acts of followers of one religion to set about debunking the presumptions of another, especially as Christianity, particularly in Europe, and specifically in Britain, had become largely a toothless affair which had almost reformed itself out of existence.
Did he really think that Christianity matters very much nowadays? Douglas Murray, an outspoken critic of many aspects of Islam, recently lambasted Dawkins for taking the easy target of Christianity and ignoring the more problematic question of the Islamic world.
He merely wanted to highlight how Islam, which produced algebra and kept safe the Greek philosophers of antiquity in the Middle Ages, had lost its way scientifically by focusing too much on the study of religion. One thing they have in common is their religion. And one could make the case that the Islamic religion is not friendly to science. He sounds genuinely offended that anyone could think otherwise.
He does regret, he says, the comparison with Trinity College. He wishes he had set contemporary Muslim academic achievement against that of the Jews. Space is limited, so let's look his two core arguments -- that religion can be explained away on scientific grounds, and that religion leads to violence.
Dawkins dogmatically insists that religious belief is "blind trust," which refuses to take due account of evidence, or subject itself to examination. So why do people believe in God, when there is no God to believe in? For Dawkins, religion is simply the accidental and unnecessary outcome of biological or psychological processes. His arguments for this bold assertion are actually quite weak, and rest on an astonishingly superficial engagement with scientific studies.
For example, consider this important argument in The God Delusion. Since belief in God is utterly irrational one of Dawkins' core beliefs, by the way , there has to be some biological or psychological way of explaining why so many people -- in fact, by far the greater part of the world's population -- fall victim to such a delusion. One of the explanations that Dawkins offers is that believing in God is like being infected with a contagious virus, which spreads throughout entire populations.
Yet the analogy -- belief in God is like a virus -- seems to then assume ontological substance. Belief in God is a virus of the mind. Yet biological viruses are not merely hypothesized; they can be identified, observed, and their structure and mode of operation determined. Yet this hypothetical "virus of the mind" is an essentially polemical construction, devised to discredit ideas that Dawkins does not like.
So are all ideas viruses of the mind? Dawkins draws an absolute distinction between rational, scientific and evidence-based ideas, and spurious, irrational notions -- such as religious beliefs. The latter, not the former, count as mental viruses. But who decides what is "rational" and "scientific"?
Dawkins does not see this as a problem, believing that he can easily categorize such ideas, separating the sheep from the goats. Except it all turns out to be horribly complicated, losing the simplicity and elegance that marks a great idea.
For instance, every worldview -- religious or secular -- ends up falling into the category of "belief systems," precisely because it cannot be proved. That is simply the nature of worldviews, and everyone knows it. It prevents nobody from holding a worldview in the first place, and doing so with complete intellectual integrity in the second. In the end, Dawkins' idea simply implodes, falling victim to his own subjective judgement of what is rational and true. It's not an idea that is taken seriously within the scientific community, and can safely be disregarded.
The main argument of The God Delusion, however, is that religion leads to violence and oppression. Dawkins treats this as defining characteristic of religion, airbrushing out of his somewhat skimpy account of the roots of violence any suggestion that it might be the result of political fanaticism -- or even atheism.
He is adamant that he himself, as a good atheist, would never, ever fly airplanes into skyscrapers, or commit any other outrageous act of violence or oppression. Good for him. Neither would I. Yet the harsh reality is that religious and anti-religious violence has happened, and is likely to continue to do so. As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland, I know about religious violence only too well. There is no doubt that religion can generate violence. But it's not alone in this.
The history of the twentieth century has given us a frightening awareness of how political extremism can equally cause violence. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have "disappeared" as a result of ruthless campaigns of violence by right wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated his millions in the name of socialism. The rise of the Soviet Union was of particular significance. Lenin regarded the elimination of religion as central to the socialist revolution, and put in place measures designed to eradicate religious beliefs through the "protracted use of violence.
They were accountable to no higher authority than the state. In one of his more bizarre creedal statements as an atheist, Dawkins insists that there is "not the smallest evidence" that atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. The facts are otherwise. In their efforts to enforce their atheist ideology, the Soviet authorities systematically destroyed and eliminated the vast majority of churches and priests during the period The statistics make for dreadful reading.
This violence and repression was undertaken in pursuit of an atheist agenda -- the elimination of religion. It can be all too easy to fall into the trap of being perceived as a "dick" when challenging people's beliefs.
They seem to think that tackling such beliefs is a question of dispelling ignorance, of educating people in the "right" way of thinking. Sadly, it's not that simple. Such atheists and skeptics would do well to remember that we are all capable of holding irrational beliefs and that there are myriad social, economic, cultural and educational factors that determine what and how people think. Heck, I'll go out on a limb and suggest there might even be genetic factors involved in determining the extent to which people may or may not be susceptible to holding religious beliefs.
Atheists and skeptics can feel incredibly frustrated by the beliefs of others and feel that they have to "correct" them, and in doing so they can come across as condescending, patronising and aggressive.
It's not always accidental. Several prominent atheists and skeptics have been accused of deliberately behaving like "dicks"; let's face it, calling believers "deluded", as Dawkins famously does, is not exactly diplomatic. The backlash against this kind of behaviour is not just coming from believers but also from within the atheist and skeptic communities — there are various corners of the internet where atheists and skeptics are engaged in heated discussions about whether or not to be a "dick".
I have to confess to finding it somewhat amusing that much of this debate seems to have descended into the kind of argument you might hear in a school playground: "You're a dick", "No, you're a dick for calling me a dick". On a serious note, I have been guilty of being a "dick atheist" myself, albeit unwittingly. I'm hoping this is a thing of the past, and for this I owe thanks to a good friend of mine who confronted me over my attitude by saying "you think I'm stupid because I believe in God".
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