Richard Dawkins is at it again – trying to wean the non-converted away from religion this time in his examination of The Genius of Charles Darwin, on Channel 4.
In 2006, his brutal and beautifully convincing exegesis The God Delusion tormented those whom Dawkins described as holding “beliefs that flatly contradict demonstrable scientific facts”.
In this vein, the first of Dawkins’ three programmes, aimed to show how we can live without the looming shadow of God, and enjoy a world that rests entirely upon the accuracy of natural selection – the hitherto most important discovery in science since time began.
It’s not very long before Professor Dawkins cuts to the chase and explains how utterly irrational and dangerous spiritual beliefs can be (indeed it was an amusing undertaking to see how long it was until Dawkins plunged his dagger once more into faith).
Drawing upon the vacant menace of creationism and its sister theory intelligent design, Dawkins, in his inimitably composed manner, argued that hostility towards rationality, free thought, homosexuality and women still owes its persistence to medieval-esque subservience to theism, a vexation of science which should really have been promptly tossed away after the 18th century age of enlightenment, which Darwin himself was a prominent figure.
Dawkins’ simple yet elegant address of Darwinism will surely make the programme a success, yet his attack on religion still seems to be somewhat indistinct. One obvious problem for Dawkins is that he battles to hold two rather inharmonious positions; at once he is the scientist – disciplined in observation and objectivity. But also he is the emotionally charged evangelical atheist.
Since the release of his bestseller, Dawkins has been unable to separate the two positions. Gone are the days of the professor dissecting halibut in front of an audience of pre-teens divided into those who are averting their squeamish gazes and those who can’t for the life of them turn away. Now, even in his scientific capacity, Dawkins is belligerent.
The God Delusion really marked the point where Dawkins transformed from the professor holding the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science to the celebrity fundamentalist atheist.
In his capacity as a scientist his efforts should be directed at safeguarding the longevity of Darwinism which, with the unsettling figure given by the British Humanist Association that at least 40 UK schools teach creationism, has the potential to be under attack from certain organs of the religious community. But given his more demanding role as fundamentalist, cedes all religiosity as dangerous, thus quashing any potential union to debilitate the creeping infection that is intelligent design, a topic where moderate atheists and those of faith can meet eye to eye. Indeed, Darwinism is not under attack from the religiously moderate, so why is there need to slur them?
The books by The Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) may well be trendy accessories (shown quite clearly by the numbers in their sales) but can they really solve the creationism-evolution argument in schools, or will they only create a small, solitary corner for themselves?
It’s quite clear that what the New Atheists are doing is lumping all the religious together in one bundle, just like the religious fundamentalists would do to atheists. Dawkins, in choosing to pursue a form of emotional firebrand atheism over the discipline of the scientist, is no longer the champion of reason, but an old problem this time on the other side of God. Even dyed-in-the-wall atheists like Bertrand Russell recognised a minimum of contribution religion has given to civilisation notably when he illustrated that religion informed “Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they become able to predict them.”
In the fight against religious fundamentalism, atheists need to embrace the moderate religious community; they may well find they have more in common than they’d care to admit.
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