The Religious Impulse of Richard Dawkins

 “The Heavens declare the Glory of God, and the Firmament sheweth His Handiwork,” says the psalmist, and even a child can see what he meant. To look up at the night sky and to see the stars looking coldly down and to be moved to the core of one’s being, is often one’s first contact with the transcendent. So it was with me as a child, and I shall never forget the sense of a planet holding me comfortably to itself, while I lay on my back in soft grass on a summer night looking out into infinity.

I was moved by this experience to study astronomy and later physics and mathematics, whereas another might have felt guided to religion. I should have considered the second option vulgar had I thought of it at all. It would have struck me as very crass to want to contaminate that hard, cold beauty with bits of grubby humanity. I certainly saw myself, in my epiphany, as a child of the Universe, but my instincts are those of Boddhidharma, who when asked by the Emperor of China what were the fundamental principles of Buddhism replied, “Vast emptiness, with nothing holy in it.” Many people when faced with the transcendent feel the impulse to abase themselves and worship it. I find that contemptible and disgusting. I shan’t try to explain or defend that reaction, but it is so.

I have started what is intended to be an article on religion and Richard Dawkins with an autobiographical introduction, not because I regard myself as particularly interesting, but because without it it might be rather difficult for most readers to see why I make some observations which they would likely think absurd.

The first such observation is that you cannot understand why Richard Dawkins says the frightful things he does unless you see that he is a deeply religious man. He has, after all, dedicated his entire life to the pursuit of truth, and truth about the natural world. This has involved him with a great deal of study of the most recondite facts and some complex and demanding ideas, and also imposed the necessity of confronting uncongenial truths. It is not an easy discipline, and the motivation for engaging in it certainly does not involve any substantial material rewards nor any great prestige. Why does he do it? Because he values truth and understanding. I know this because I share those values and recognise a kindred spirit. This is surely a religious impulse and perhaps the deepest. That his exegetical skills have led to his becoming a leader of a small cult is the kind of step down that often afflicts religious thinkers; they succumb to the admiration of their intellectual and spiritual inferiors.

Of course, there will be those for whom religion is all about submission to authority and to rituals. Jesus thought otherwise, and I’m with Jesus on this. If that is your conception of religion, then you are a poor fish who has never experienced a genuine religious impulse and are to be pitied. Your need to belong to a tribe has conquered your hunger for the sublime, and you have been fobbed off with trinkets. Dawkins, to his great credit, has not been, and that is part of why I claim that he is a genuinely religious man.

Many whose beliefs have been affronted by Dawkins and his writings on evolution have supposed that believing in Darwin is very like believing in the Bible but in much worse taste. That there is a tribe of people called Darwinians having its code and beliefs, held on the usual basis that everyone else in the tribe holds them. Or worse, that Dawkins is busy propagating a heresy contrary to propriety, and building such a tribe.

This is a serious error and it is the error of Caiaphas. I am not suggesting that Richard Dawkins greatly resembles Jesus Christ, or that Darwinians resemble the early Christians, except in two respects: the first is that both Dawkins and Christ saw a greater moral imperative than conforming to tribal rules. Both indeed felt contempt for the way in which the genuine religious impulse had been subverted to the benefit of a priesthood. The second is that both started a cult and led it, largely in both cases out of a desire to share their own insights more widely for the benefit of their followers. I doubt that Richard Dawkins would see the comparison in this light and I hope he never does, he is quite bumptious enough already. But if the pursuit of truth is the highest religion, a proposition with which I am entirely sympathetic, then Dawkins is undeniably a deeply spiritual man. If following the purest impulses of the heart against the dictates of the powerful is a religious impulse, as I believe it to be, then Dawkins is a true man of religion. Most scientists are, at least those who pursue truth rather than government grants.

Some of the opposition to Dawkins comes from those who see him as propagating a new religion in defiance of their own, and there is some justice in this. It would, however, be a mistake to confound his ideas with those of the Gaian-Green religion which is gaining so many converts currently. Those committed to one of the three religions of the book will naturally find Gaianism repugnant, but a descent into a battle between the great Sky-Father and the great Earth-Mother, or at least their earthly representatives, would look as absurd to Dawkins as it does to me. Dawkins has spent much time and energy pointing out the follies of the great Sky-Father adherents, trying to arrest the Pope for instance, but hardly any on the equal and complementary lunacies of the great Earth-Mother crowd. This is a pity, and may indicate some sympathy with the underlying impulse to respect the natural world which is the only part of Gaian “theology” which is capable of stimulating the moral sensibilities of healthy people. But the elevation of objective truth as the centre of a spiritual life has much more a history of association with great Sky-Fathers than it has with great Earth-Mothers. Gaia-Cybele tends to be more on the touchy-feely side of things; Jahweh is rather bigger on truth, justice and the right way of behaving. So if Dawkins is true to his beliefs, he should surely be seen as supporting the fundamental values of the Judeo-Christian religions, if not their rationale. 

Clement Attlee was asked once whether he was a Christian and replied, “Believe the ethics. Can’t accept the mumbo-jumbo.” (I think it was in the same interview that he was asked if he was an agnostic and replied that he didn’t know.) To the sceptic there is a great deal of “mumbo-jumbo” in Christianity and it is very off-putting. The miracles attributed to calling on the name of a saint are an embarrassment. The sacred eucharist to the sceptic is faintly disgusting and redolent of cannibalism, whereas to the believer it is sublime. The gulf between these two positions is huge but not, I hope to show, unbridgeable.

To argue that a religion is not helped by the mumbo-jumbo element, indeed is seriously impaired by it, while following strenuously the fundamental values it asserts, is surely to be on the side of right. The lifting of the heart when one reads or hears the words of a man of insight, from the Sermon on the Mount at one end to Darwin’s Origin of Species on the other, is a very different thing from the comfort many receive from following the rituals and asserting a “belief” in something for which there is very little evidence. The truly religious are repelled by the latter. They sense that to go down that path is to cut out of themselves a capacity for doubt, something alive and responsive to the world, and that it is an evil thing and a desolation of the spirit to do so. That is a very old-fashioned way of putting it of course, and not likely one that Dawkins would think of, but I am confident he would recognise the sentiment.

In rejecting what he sees as intellectual dishonesty and sacred mumbo-jumbo for the clarity and honesty of doubt, in repudiating comforting ritual and embracing a healthier and cleaner longing for insight, Dawkins is following in the footsteps of Christ and Buddha. It is a spiritual choice made for spiritual reasons, and both his critics and Dawkins himself need to acknowledge this.

Before we canonise Dawkins for deep spirituality or award him the Templeton Prize for bringing together science and religion (which is absurd, for the pursuit of truth for its own sake is a religious impulse of the highest order, and not to see this is obtuse) we must look at his errors. 

His first fundamental error is not to see how very much he has in common with the Pope, or, for Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The differences are considerable of course, including, at least in Dawkins’s eyes, of asserting that the great Sky-Father is as physically real as, say, the star Arcturus but a bit further away. This Dawkins holds to be silly and I agree with him. Nearly every honest man or woman who has looked at the matter in the last century or so would also agree. A list of eminent scientists of the past who have appeared to think differently is not much to the point, since it is only since Darwin that the whole silliness has started to unravel. The idea that there is a personal God up there and that he loves us and sends tsunamis and hurricanes and volcanoes and cancers and earthquakes to make us better people is just so utterly silly as to be incredible to anyone who has not been brainwashed from infancy or suffered some other form of brain damage. The idea that He can be diverted by prayer, or by wearing some dead nun’s clothing, is cheapening both to the alleged creator of the Universe and to the people who claim to know what He thinks. To defend the idea is to betray a contemptible moral vacuity as much as an intellectual dishonesty. Dawkins is opposed to it for exactly these reasons, and they are moral reasons deriving from a religious impulse. 

But Dawkins hasn’t noticed that. He has the religious impulse, but doesn’t identify it as being one. He has the instinct to reject the perceived mumbo-jumbo as ultimately incompatible with the dignity of a human being, but seems rather unreflective about the status of the instinct itself, as he is about the consequences of his opposition to the usual God Squad.

I daresay that Dawkins, if challenged, would reply that his instinct for pursuing truth and opposing the moral vacuity which is the mumbo-jumbo aspect of religion is a part of what it is to be human, and was developed in him in much the same way as any other instinct: evolution favoured in some way people who had it. It is easy to see that this is a credible hypothesis. A tribe is more likely to survive if it contains at least some people who reject beliefs which are false even if those beliefs are popular with the rest of the tribe. And if the tribe survives, so will the sceptics. And so, of course, will the credulous. Dawkins has, on his own terms, to account for both the popularity among so many people of the mumbo-jumbo he despises, as well as his own distaste for it. And he can do part of that quite easily. He can account for his own urge to condemn irrationality and to disseminate and propagandise his own religion of reason. He does not appear to have given much thought to the reasons for it being necessary. Why the prevalence of mumbo-jumbo? Why the deep need for a great Sky-Father or a great Earth-Mother, and what happens when you take one or the other away from the great unwashed? Will they thank Dawkins for relieving them of their ignorant superstitions and henceforth lead a life of rationality, believing things not simply because they want to but because the evidence leads them to? Dawkins either thinks so or has not seriously considered the matter. 

The picture of the great Sky-Father, as physically real as Arcturus or a brick, who sends a great many troubles which can (sometimes) be averted by prayer may possibly be believed by the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury. I don’t know. I would hope not. Certainly it need not be the case. It is just possible that both these gentlemen are rather wiser in their understanding of human beings than Richard Dawkins, who is, let’s face it, an academic and consequently more used to abstractions, and to organisms rather less complicated than people.

For a religious man who cares about truth but also cares about people, even those too dumb to get into Oxford, the problem is not quite so simple as just passing on your own accounts of what the truth is. Human beings develop and change, some rather faster than others. Dumping a massive computer output of part of the human genome on a five-year-old child is unlikely to accomplish any desirable aims, and denying the existence of God for most people amounts to denying the existence of The Good. I can’t see Dawkins denying the existence of truth since he spends an inordinate amount of time pursuing it, so he might, at a pinch, be prepared to accept the existence of beauty too. And if he can go that far, why not believe in something like The Good? Of which truth or its pursuit might be a part, and justice and mercy other parts. He already believes in altruism. It isn’t too far-fetched to suppose there might be other aspects of behaviour which we are constructed, for sound zoological reasons, to admire and respect. He probably accepts the existence of a sense of humour, why not a moral sense too? Both seem to be rather primitive at birth and both seem to develop as we grow older. And for different people they usually develop in similar directions.

Consider the problem of developing a moral sense. In the Dawkins world we explain to the average child that it should avoid doing anything bad, telling it to be good because it will be happier in the long run. This is because the child was made so, nearly all human beings are. Even though doing something slimy appears to lead to short-term gains, the sliminess should be identified and avoided. The child should tell the truth, even though a lie would seem to confer a benefit, because part of the child knows that lying is slimy and will cause damage, while telling the truth even at the expense of some loss will make it feel better about itself. This would be to recognise a moral sensibility in the child; whether this is written into its genes by God or by the blind forces of evolution (or both) is quite beside the point. It is undoubtedly there. As is our ability to discern within ourselves a duty to the child to develop this moral sense.

The above method of doing so may be somewhat less efficacious, particularly with the very young child, than telling it that God is watching and will punish it if it misbehaves. Both are stories designed to develop a moral sense in a child, and it is perfectly possible to make the claim that they are the same story told in different ways. The first version has the merits of presenting a more accurate picture of how the sane and educated think it works, and the second the pragmatic merit of being much more likely to succeed. The defect of the second is that it may actually reduce moral development past some point, and the defect of the first is that most people may never get to anywhere near that point. If your own life experience is of only good, kindly, gentle, decent people you may find the first method preferable. If your life experience has involved any exposure to unpleasant bastards, you may prefer the second. If you take away the fear of unpleasant retribution you will improve the lives of the gentle and biddable, at least up until they meet the consequences of taking away the fear of retribution from the thoroughly nasty.

This would lead any moderately reflective person to the conclusion that whether the great Sky-Father exists in the same sense as a brick exists, or in the same sense as truth, beauty, justice and mercy exist, is of some limited philosophical interest, but that there is also a rather crucial pragmatic issue: the older religions have at least acquired over the years a certain sophistication about human nature and how to channel it towards decency; if you destroy the mumbo-jumbo element (which is there because people have wanted it) will people stop wanting mumbo-jumbo or simply find another sort—one which may be tied to a far less humane religion? Marxism, Nazism and Gaianism spring to mind. Take away a God who made the universe and you may find people believing in the state as the source of all power, and worshipping it and abasing themselves before it. The great Sky-Father God may or may not exist, but at least He has some moral grandeur deserving of respect. The state is merely a mechanism and abasing oneself before it is as crazy as worshipping a bicycle. But one can already see some doing it. 

Dawkins’s commitment to truth is rather naive. It is rather like a child responding to the parable of the Good Samaritan by wanting to know if it really happened and if so when. This is to miss the entire point of the story, which is that it could have happened, and whether it actually did is of not the smallest importance. Whether God is as physically real as a brick or whether He is something like a personification of The Good, is an important distinction for the philosophical temperament, but truth, justice and mercy, although abstractions, are very real. Without them, human beings would be merely bald chimpanzees and probably extinct. They may be abstractions, and we may not understand how they are implemented in our brains, but they go to the core of what it is to be a human being. In rejecting the great Sky-Father as an implausible myth, Dawkins is at risk of rejecting the whole point of having the myth. It is not pointless because it lacks credibility to the modern educated adult, any more than the parable of the Good Samaritan should be rejected because we cannot date it and point to the location where it took place. The myth may be in need of updating, and as an explanation of the physical universe it is admittedly hopeless and always was. But that was never its primary purpose, which was to personify, to make more concrete and intelligible, the idea of The Good: of truth, justice, mercy and a whole stack of other entities which are mysteriously embedded in the brains of human beings, are every bit as real as our toes, and a good deal more useful. 

Personifications are less popular than formerly, but still work on children, the innocent and the uneducated. Which is why I believe in Father Christmas, despite running across a good many overweight men in red coats perspiring heavily in a Perth summer. The shops that pay them and the men themselves may think it’s all about selling trash; but I know what the children know, which is that there is something of generosity and kindness in the air and that this is mysterious and wonderful and to be treasured.

Dawkins rejects prayer as an incantation to the creator of the universe to break his own laws. He rejects both any God who can be bribed by faith and any faith in such a God and I agree with him entirely. 

But when I search my conscience to ensure that my quite colossal self-esteem will not be damaged by an inadvertency, surely I am doing nothing the least bit unreasonable? My conscience may be nothing more than social conditioning, or it may have, as I am inclined to think, larger significance to my humanity, but it is perfectly real, and disturbing it can and does cause pain as real as toothache. And when the verbal part of my brain communes or seeks to commune with the larger part which responds with a lifting of the heart when it sees someone displaying moral courage and which is the source of my own, am I praying or not? I would not call it that, perhaps to avoid confusion with the child begging God not to let it rain on Saturdays to ensure the footy goes ahead, but some quite reasonably might. It is one of Dawkins’s severe intellectual limitations that although he probably acknowledges that he has a conscience and an impulse to admire courage, decency and the need for truth, he doesn’t seem to make any connection between consulting his conscience or reflecting on his admiration for courage and decency and his desire for truth on the one hand, and the activity known as prayer on the other. I think that if he did he might realise that he actually prays quite a lot. 

Any serious attempt at communication between the verbal part of the brain and that part of it where our moral sensibility resides can reasonably be described as prayer. Any reflection on what is right and honourable is prayer. Any acknowledgment of respect for the mysterious goodness that lies at the core of what it is to be human is prayer. It’s a perfectly natural act of the whole mind. That it has been vulgarised for fools and children is a pity, but would Dawkins want to put a stop to all the fat men in red coats on the grounds that Santa can’t possibly visit all the children on one night and that sleighs can’t fly?

The key issue which Dawkins needs to address is this: How do you develop the moral sensibility a society needs in a majority of its members if it is to survive? The method the human species has evolved is to tell them stories, like the parable of the Good Samaritan. For this method to work on the young and the uneducated, the stories have to be simple. To focus on the literal truth of the stories is to miss the point. They are quite different from the stories we tell each other to explain how the physical universe works, but not less important. The stories about the physical universe do have to be literally true, or at least to contain a lot of truth, and mostly are and do. They also contain mysteries which do not yield well to simple analysis; our deeper ideas about space and time may be precisely formulated these days but there is still an element of the mythological about them. Our beliefs in them does not entail a scrap of blind faith, and is liable to revision at any time the universe stops obliging us, but it would be dishonest to present them as undeniable facts. How much of physics is out there in the world, and how much arises from prescriptions of what, for human beings, constitutes communicable truth is less than clear. See contemporary debate on the Anthropic Principle if you want a simple accessible example, or if you want a better one consider the question of reproducibility of scientific results in terms of temporal invariance of the laws of physics and how that leads, via Noether’s Theorem, to the “law” of conservation of energy.

It is true that the distinction between stories we tell each other about the physical world and stories we tell each other to develop a moral sensibility has, in the past, been seriously confused, and it is important to see the stories as different genres. They also have several features in common. This last has created the kind of category error which requires all stories to pass the test of literal truth, which has deceived both Richard Dawkins and most Christian (and other) fundamentalists. There is a certain engaging naivety about this, but we shall have to defer Dawkins’s canonisation until he catches up.

To conclude, let me return to the issue of the “mumbo-jumbo”. The experimental or observational scientist is seldom faced with the problem of the inadequacies of natural language. Poets, theoretical physicists, mathematicians and the religious are faced with this all the time. Language, according to Terry Pratchett, was invented so as to shout abuse at the neighbours in the next tree. It is adequate for this and quite a lot more, but there is a huge region where a perception, possibly of something of overwhelming importance, resists any expression in the existing language. We are faced with trying to eff the ineffable and unscrew the inscrutable. Mathematicians and poets respond to this by trying to develop the language, to extend it so as to convey something of their perceptions rather better than has been done before. It isn’t easy, and doing it well is surely important. Which would explain, no doubt, why poets and mathematicians are so well paid. 

When I say that I believe in Father Christmas, I do not mean that looking into the sky with binoculars on Christmas Eve is likely to result in observing a sleigh hurtling past with a faint “Ho ho ho”. What I mean is that there is a huge constellation of perceptions I am trying to communicate in a wholly inadequate language: the intense feeling of happiness I get when seeing an excited child opening its presents on Christmas morning and holding up a toy with wide-eyed wonder. The innocence and purity of carol singers, and a host of similar and clearly related perceptions. Dawkins and company persist in interpreting everything in the most naive terms of hurtling sleighs and Ho-ho-ho theory. The assumptions they bring to bear on interpreting what is meant are absurdly simplistic. 

If I present God as a personification of The Good (which in fact I do not) then the usual response from the sceptic is that this is perhaps defensible, but it reduces His status to that of a mere personification. I object strenuously to the “mere”. I once explained to a committed Christian that I was an atheist for religious reasons. “My God,” I explained, “expects me to not believe in things merely because I want to. My God expects me to believe in things on the basis of evidence and reason. In particular, my God does not want me to believe in Him unless there is compelling evidence to support His existence, and there isn’t so I don’t.” 

While she sensed the paradox she didn’t know how to handle it. But the matter is important to atheists and the religious who can perhaps meet at this point. To me, my God is of immense importance and I feel a need to do what He wants. Including denying his existence. This is not inconsistent. I have a great admiration for several characters of Terry Pratchett: commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, Granny Weatherwax who is a witch, and Susan Sto Helit, Death’s grand-daughter. None of these splendid people actually exist, but this does not diminish my respect for them in the slightest. Existence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Many of these issues may upset people who have stopped their spiritual development at some point. The church has an obligation to be kind to the simple for whom subtleties of theology are incomprehensible, a responsibility to bring them as far down the path of spiritual development as they can go, and if mumbo-jumbo is what it takes, then mumbo-jumbo they must have.

An important part of being a human being is a hunger for the transcendental. Where this hunger comes from, what biological imperatives give rise to it, is less than clear, but like the hunger for truth, it is indisputably there. I do not advance the existence of these things as evidence for a great Sky-Father who put them in us, I simply acknowledge their presence and observe that these hungers need to be fed. 

We are made with a need for wonder which a Dawkins satisfies by studying the natural world and which a less cerebral person fills up with miracles. If someone is so crass he doesn’t notice that every moment of every day is a miracle, that the entire universe is miraculous, then give him walking on water. At least it might awaken a sense of wonder, and it links the satisfaction of his need to virtue rather than vice.

N.B. The author wishes to acknowledge three primary sources for the development of his moral sensibility. First is the Judeo-Christian tradition. Second the traditions of Hinayana or Therevadim Buddhism. And third the writings of Sir Terry Pratchett, who has done more than any man alive to propagate the moral traditions of the English-speaking people.

This article aspires to build a bridge between atheists and the faithful, and the author also acknowledges that it will almost certainly annoy the hell out of both.

Mike Alder is Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Western Australia.