True faith is greater than the ranters
Tuesday 14 May 2007
I liked this piece in yesterday´s London Times and would welcome any comments via this website.
William Rees-Mogg replies to Professor Richard Dawkins
I last entered into controversy with Professor Richard Dawkins in
another newspaper and another age. I was subject to his magisterial
contempt – what a wonderful art critic he would have made, berating
Berenson and patronising Warhol. We reached agreement on one
important point. The ability to repeat an experiment is not a
necessary test of scientific truth, and cannot therefore be a
necessary test of religious truth.
We cannot create life in the laboratory, but that does not mean that
life does not exist. We cannot repeat the process of human evolution
in the laboratory, but that does not mean that Darwinism is not the
best explanation we yet have for the development of species. We
cannot call up God in the laboratory, but that does not mean that He
does not exist. I may now be mistaken in remembering that Professor
Dawkins conceded as much, but I treasure at least that little island
of agreement in the gulf of disagreement that stretches between us.
Last Saturday, in The Times, the professor defended himself against
his critics. I do not take the position that he is always wrong, and
his critics always right. I agree with Professor Dawkins, not to
mention St Paul, in rejecting the argument that people should be
allowed their religious comfort, even if it is not true.
However, there is one charge against Professor Dawkins on which his
defence merely confirms his critics. He replies to an accusation
often made against him. It is said that he "often ignores the best of
religion" and instead attacks what are called "crude rabble-rousing
chancers" such as Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson,
rather than facing up to sophisticated theologians such as Bonhoeffer
or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Professor Dawkins´s reply makes a significant concession to his
critics. He does not claim to have answered the argument for belief
in God at its best; indeed, he throws in a dismissive side-note about
Aquinas and Duns Scotus. He concedes that there is a wide difference
between what he terms "decent, understated religion" and Robertson,
Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. He
maintains that "the melancholy truth is that decent, understated,
religion is numerically negligible", but that the world needs to face
the fundamentalists. "If subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the
world would be a better place, and I would have written a different
book."
This seems rather odd. As in all social institutions, there are good
and bad church members, and good and bad church leaders. But
Professor Dawkins has not written a book to tell us that Osama bin
Laden is a bad man, but to persuade us that God does not exist. He
makes an assertion, that is contrary to common experience, that the
vast majority of religious believers are closer to the beliefs of
American evangelists or of bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists than to
quiet and rational religion. That is a sociological judgment.
I believe it to be false. It is certainly false in England, where
Professor Dawkins presumably meets most of his theist acquaintances.
It is not true of Anglicans; it is not true of Roman Catholics. It is
not true of their leaders. Whatever else may be said of the
archbishops of Canterbury or Westminster, they do not bear the
faintest resemblance to the personality or doctrine of bin Laden.
However, people can get their facts wrong; in a world of six billion
people, the exact proportions between rational and raving theists
would be hard to determine. I object to Professor Dawkins´s methods
of argument much more than to his assertions of fact, mistaken though
I think them to be.
After all, Professor Dawkins is a scientist, and a good one. He has
been thoroughly trained in the scientific method. That requires him
to examine conflicting theories in terms of their strongest
arguments, not in terms of their weakest. One could disprove any
theory by taking the silliest arguments that have been used by the
most ignorant people to support them. To knock down Christianity on
the basis of American evangelists, while failing to face up to the
arguments of Bonhoeffer, who was both a very wise man and a hero, is
not a scientifically respectable proceeding. Yet this is what
Professor Dawkins tries to justify.
Would it not be terrible if Professor Dawkins were to lose his faith
in what he regards as a scientific method and in the conclusions he
derives from that? One senses the unease that comes when faith is
under pressure. His tone is not like that of Charles Darwin himself;
thoughtful, reflecting detailed observation, sensitive in the search
for truth. It is more like that of Bishop Wilberforce in the Oxford
debate of June 1860, in which the bishop attacked Darwinism.
Much of Professor Dawkins´s life has been devoted to continuing that
debate, yet somehow he has adopted the style, not of the Darwinist
advocate T. H. Huxley – the man who coined the word "agnosticism",
but of Bishop Wilberforce himself. Indeed, the Professor has opened
himself to the conclusive rebuke with which Huxley replied to
Wilberforce. Huxley closed with this passage: "I asserted – and I
repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for
his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame
in recalling, it would rather be a man – a man of restless and
versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in
his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with
which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless
rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real
point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to
religious prejudice." One has only to transpose the
words "scientific" and "religious" to see that Huxley´s shaft still
strikes home.
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