Professor Richard Dawkins, who appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival today, is happy to remain in the vanguard of the fight against creationists and theocrats
THE WORLD’S best-known living atheist sounds slightly piqued. Richard Dawkins, the renowned evolutionary biologist, award-winning author and arch-sceptic, is currently presenting his three-part Channel 4 series The Genius of Charles Darwin, during which he takes a London secondary school class on a fossil-collecting trip to Dorset’s “Jurassic Coast”, to introduce them to the rudiments of evolutionary theory.
Some elements in the press have since accused him of foisting atheism on the pupils, a claim he vigorously denies. “It’s very unjust. Never once did I attempt to thrust atheism on these children. I was scrupulously careful not to do that. I was simply trying to persuade them to look at the evidence. It was a pro-evolution point rather than an anti-religious point.
“I do get a bit exasperated at people hearing what they expect me to say, rather than what I do say.”
For Dawkins, author of award-winning books such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and, most recently, his clarion call to atheism, The God Delusion, creation is an awe-inspiring marvel of the natural, rather than supernatural world. In The Genius of Charles Darwin, he describes the pioneer evolutionist’s theories, first published 150 years ago next year, as “perhaps the most powerful idea ever to occur to a human mind”. What he celebrates as the “devastating elegance” of Darwin’s theory of natural selection ineradicably altered the way we look at the world – yet, he says on the programme, possibly as many as four out of ten people in the UK still believe that the Almighty created the Earth and everything in it.
To those of us who have more or less grown up with the concept of evolution, that figure may seem surprising, although in the United States, the legions of those who embrace the Biblical account of creation appear to become ever greater and more strident, particularly in their impact on education, with a recent poll suggesting that one in eight American biology teachers teaches creationism or “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution.
We’re talking in Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel, prior to his (sold out) appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival today. The city has certain resonances: Darwin himself came to Edinburgh to study medicine, and while the blood and guts of mid-19th century surgery repelled him, he sat in on natural history lectures that fired his subsequent thinking. We’re not far, either, from where one of the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Hutton, “father of geology” tapped his hammer about Salisbury Crags, striking his own early blow at the Biblical timescale in 1788 when he declared: “We find no vestige of a beginning … no prospect of an end.”
Next year promises to be wall-to-wall Darwin, with the combined 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of the Species and the bicentenary of the ground-breaking naturalist’s birth. Dawkins, a boyish 67 and about to retire from his current post as Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, agrees the anniversaries should strike some blows for evolution, although he doesn’t sound entirely convinced: “One can always hope,” he smiles.
He is deeply concerned at the rise of creationism allied with Christian fundamentalism in the US, and of those he describes as “the theocrats of 21st-century Washington”. Elsewhere, we have Islamic extremists who think nothing of taking countless innocent victims with them on their road to Paradise. The atrocities of 9/11 were something of a watershed in Dawkins’s views on the more pernicious extremes of organised religion.
He himself, of course, has been labelled a secular fundamentalist more than once. “I know: arrogant, strident, shrill, polemical …” he reels off the labels with weary familiarity. “If you actually look at The God Delusion, including those bits people think are strident and shrill and so on, I like to think they’re actually funny.” And he quotes from one passage where he describes the Old Testament deity as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic …” It goes on for some time, but you’ll have got the gist. It is, he says, “an exaggerated set-piece polemic” which invariably raises a laugh when he and his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward, use it as an audience warm-up at their joint readings.
The God Delusion he wrote as “a consciousness-raising exercise”, although it appears to have the opposite effect on those who send short and pithy messages of abuse to the forum on his website (
richarddawkins.net – “A Clear-thinking Oasis”), which suggests that, whatever creationists are about, some of them possess a distinctly unevolved litany of expletives. Other responses, however, give him cause for encouragement.
He is all for the “glory of life rather than the glory of God”, but does he worry about pulling the rug out from under the feet of those for whom religion is a huge comfort – the suffering, the bereaved , the lonely? “I do think that is something you can’t ignore,” he replies. “It’s a bit like the dilemma of a doctor who has a patient who has terminal cancer, and the doctor has to decide whether to tell the truth, or regard the patient’s private consolation as outweighing the truth. If I were talking to an individual who had recently been bereaved … I probably would hold my tongue in a way that I don’t for anybody who chooses to read the book.”
Known to profess a soft spot for the Church of England in which he grew up, he doesn’t reject the cultural trappings. “You can’t appreciate English literature, for a start, unless you’re pretty knowledgeable about the Bible, if you don’t understand what it means when someone alludes to “through a glass darkly” or “vanity of vanities”. It would be a step towards barbarism if children had no exposure to these.”
On Desert Island Discs, one of his choices was Bach’s St Matthew Passion – from which he quotes, in German, with some warmth when I mention it. “Just glorious, and it’s not just the music. The drama of the passion of Jesus, as a work of fiction, is something you can lose yourself in, just as one can reading a novel. You don’t have to believe that Heathcliff and Cathy really existed to get caught up in the emotion.”
He certainly can’t be accused of taking himself too seriously, having appeared in a cameo role on Doctor Who earlier this year – (Lalla, his third wife, played Romana, a Time Lady assistant to Tom Baker’s ebullient Doctor, during the late 1970s.)
But the work goes on, and he has another book planned for next year’s Darwin anniversaries. He has been criticised on occasion by fellow scientists who regard his high-profile stance against religion as unhelpful. He acknowledges that, in America especially, the slightest whiff of atheism can curtail any debate about creationism vs evolution. “But if your main object is to understand how the universe works, the question of whether or not there’s a God in the universe is profoundly important.
“So I wouldn’t wish to muzzle myself, or anybody else, for the sake of a skirmish in American schools about evolution.”
• Richard Dawkins’ appearance at the Edinburgh International Book festival today at 11:30am is sold out. The Genius of Charles Darwin continues tonight and next Monday on Channel 4 at 8pm.
RICHARD DAWKINS: A RATIONAL LIFE1941 Born in Nairobi, where his father is in the British Army.
1949 Family moves back to England, where he has “a normal Anglican upbringing”.
1959 After attending Oundle School near Peterborough, goes to Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962. Continues at Oxford, gaining MA and D Phil degrees in 1966.
1967 Becomes assistant professor of zoology at the University of California at Berkeley.
1970 Lecturer in zoology at Oxford and Fellow of New College.
1976 Publishes The Selfish Gene, which stirs the nature vs nurture debate and becomes an immediate bestseller.
1982 The Extended Phenotype further develops the ideas of The Selfish Gene
1986 Brings out The Blind Watchmaker, a forceful critique of creationist arguments, which wins the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times literary prize.
1989 Wins Zoological Society of London Silver Medal.
1990 Wins Royal Society Michael Faraday Award for the furtherance of public understanding of science.
1994 Is awarded a Honorary D Litt by the University of St Andrews.
1995 River Out of Eden, about the constant flow of DNA and gradualism in evolution, proves another bestseller.
1995 Becomes Charles Simonyi professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford.
1996 Climbing Mount Improbable further follows the DNA trail.
1998 Publishes Unweaving the Rainbow, which argues that a rational analysis of nature needn’t erode its wonder.
2006 Presents a TV documentary, The Root of All Evil, condemning religion as a malign influence, and publishes The God Delusion, his clarion call for atheism.
2007 Listed in Time magazine as one of 100 most influential people in the world.
2008 Presents The Genius of Charles Darwin for Channel 4.
The full article contains 1578 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
