An interesting debate has broken out within the hallowed pages of the (London) Telegraph, a traditional, somewhat right-leaning British newspaper much favored by my late parents (and by many generations before them). It opposes Stephen Meyer, whose article published on September 22 sets out a measured and convincing argument that atheism is increasingly losing ground as a major cultural force, and the guru of the so-called “New Atheists,” Richard Dawkins, who exercised his right of reply on October 2 (though in doing so, he chose not to address Meyer by name).1
I was particularly gratified that the ID debate has at last gone fully mainstream in Britain: for the last half century (at a conservative estimate), Darwin and his latter-day disciples, foremost among whom is Dawkins himself, have been viewed by many Britons as the spokespersons for a “done deal.” Could this strange state of critical torpor be coming to an end? The exchange in the pages of the Telegraph certainly suggests that such might be the case.
An Unresponsive Response
The arguments presented by Meyer are (I apologize for what is a somewhat reductive summary of the article):
- Two decades after the publication of Dawkins’s The God Delusion, former so-called New Atheists have either turned away from atheism or moderated their outlook.
- Meyer links this phenomenon to advances in scientific research that undermine the arguments of materialists and neo-Darwinists that the universe can be explained from nothing, and that the “apparent design” in living organisms does not require a designing influence.
- Cosmologists, physicists, and biologists have discovered levels of complexity in the universe that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution. The attempts by neo-Darwinists to find a theory to explain our improbable world are over-complicated, unreasonable, and at best strained (in particular, the “multiverse” theory).
Readers of Science and Culture will of course be familiar with these arguments. Meyer’s pithy article quite appropriately eschews much of the more difficult terrain found in his Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), giving an excellent and eminently intelligible summing-up of many of the conclusions of his 568-page book. “Much in little compass” (multum in parvo), as the ancient saying goes. Such brevity was a wise choice for a wider British audience, many of whom might have been bewildered by the hugely complex arguments which he develops in his book. One must assume that Richard Dawkins, who is a scientific scholar of considerable eminence, was familiar with the issues raised by Meyer and has reflected on them; however, this is not in evidence in his response. In fact, Dawkins’s response cannot be said to engage with Meyer’s points in any meaningful way.
The Gentleman Protesteth Too Much?
It is striking and surprising that much of the article by Dawkins is defensive in tone, and shifts the discussion from Meyer’s scientific approach to one of ethics and philosophy with only a vague gesture towards scientific developments. This is an interesting piece of writing that would deserve a line-by-line analysis, or even psychoanalysis (but fear not, I will not impose that on you), not so much for its content as for its highly accomplished use of rhetoric to manipulate the reader. The article blends two authorial voices: one of scathing contempt and ridicule for those who do not espouse the neo-Darwinian creed, the other that of the reasonable, misrepresented writer. These two voices in conjunction appear designed to foster confusion in order to encourage the reader to give up engaging analytically with what is being said.
The hallmark of the strident voice is its reliance on setting up straw men to shoot down. People who persist in believing in God are depicted as weak, requiring a “comfort blanket,” and relying on spurious logic. The examples given do indeed beggar belief: I can honestly say that I have never encountered anyone who claimed that Stalin’s cruelty was a proof of God’s existence, or that gaps in our understanding of the universe may be automatically ascribed to divine intervention. Similarly, the idea that the belief that Christ died to redeem the sins of humanity can be ascribed to simple ignorance of the material world, as is rather crassly set out by Dawkins in his article, is at best unconvincing. The very legitimacy of theology is sneered at, in a passage that reveals more of the limitations of the authorial persona than of any theological reflection.
We must, I think, distinguish this aggressively strident persona from the person of Richard Dawkins himself (who in the flesh is by all accounts urbane, courteous, and pleasant). This voice is not so much the mouthpiece of Dawkins as a convenient way of introducing core themes. The cruelty of man towards man (taking as examples Stalin or Hitler) and the existence in nature of predators and prey are cited by the “loud” voice as arguments against a loving God, but relate to the nature of the Creator rather than to His existence. As much as anything else, what is at the heart of the rejection of God in this article is the inability to accept the presence of evil in the world — a thorny issue that many (if not most) grapple with at some point in their lives. This philosophical strand, however, is not developed. Instead, in addition to the reiteration of old arguments in favor of materialism, we are presented with the grievances of a supposedly misrepresented author. This second voice is more personal and less bombastic in tone, but with an offensive edge designed to cut deeper.
No New Atheist “Project”
The article opens with the disclaimer that the publication of his The God Delusion was not at all part of a planned program or “project” of atheistic propaganda — instead, we are told, the rise of what came to be called the New Atheists was the result of happy coincidence. Despite the fact that at no point does Meyer criticize or even mention the style and tone of The God Delusion, Dawkins then takes pains to deny it was “shrill and strident,” stressing that it only seemed to be so to “ears trained to wrap religion in a uniquely privileged cocoon of immunity to criticism.” This statement, which apparently comes from nowhere, is at best disingenuous. The committed atheist reader that I once was definitely identified stridency in the book. Dawkins appears to think that the book was simply “mildly funny.”
Humor is of course problematic for any writer. What is funny in one culture is not in another, and what one person sees as witty banter another will perceive as offensive sarcasm. One example in the article that Dawkins could conceivably dismiss as “funny” but in fact is anything but occurs in the brief section where he makes a gesture towards refuting Meyer’s scientific arguments. He thus denies the validity of the need for the concept of “fine-tuning” of our complex universe by dismissing the extent of this complexity: it is, he says, just (using erstwhile Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’s metaphor) “six knobs that can be twiddled to adjust their values.” This metaphor is striking, partly because it evokes an obsolete technological age; control consoles in the 21st century typically have switches, buttons, or touch screens rather than knobs.
It is also significant, because it allows Dawkins to call God the “Divine Knob Twiddler” — an expression he presumably considered funny, but is at best a lapse in good taste. In the schoolboy slang of his generation, “knob twiddling” had the specific sense of “masturbation,” “knob” referring to the male member. The term was not restricted to the schoolyard; it was also used in the risqué double entendres of the popular British comedian Frankie Howerd (active 1946-1992 and best remembered for his starring role in the decidedly louche TV series, Up Pompeii!). Dawkins cannot but have been aware of this schoolboy argot, and it is not to his credit.
Scientific arguments are not so much discussed in Dawkins’s response to Meyer as summarily dismissed, interwoven with comments on the many fallacies supposedly informing the intelligent design theory, which is conflated with religious faith, itself depicted as the refuge of the illogical and weak. It is perhaps significant that the part of Meyer’s article that appears to have especially needled Dawkins is the suggestion that his admitting to being a “cultural Christian” somehow indicates a mellowing of his stance towards religion. He takes pains to specify that yes, he was exposed to the Christian religion as a child, knows his hymns, is familiar with Christian liturgy, and recognizes the cultural significance of the Bible — but rejects the tenets of the Christian faith as “tosh.” Such mellowing as is in evidence in the article is limited to the back-handed approval of “some versions of Christianity” as “relatively harmless,” as opposed, in particular, to Islam. If this is an attempt to get Christians on board by making out that their religion as the least bad of the lot, it is at best misguided. It is certainly not the sign of an awakening of spirituality: Dawkins is keen to stress that, twenty years on, he stands by what he wrote in The God Delusion. If his article is anything to go by, he may actually have hardened his position.
The Substance of Meteorites
Dawkins’s response to Meyer is consummately written, and clearly designed to raise the profile of neo-Darwinism in the face of increasingly cogent scientific objections to the cult-like adherence to a flawed 19th-century theory.2 It also functions as a puff piece for The God Delusion, whose anniversary of publication will doubtless trigger renewed sales. Ultimately, though, this article is revealing of a determinedly backward-looking stance at odds with the joy and excitement felt by researchers in exploring their respective fields unconstrained by anachronistic orthodoxies.
The same day I read the exchange of views in the Telegraph, my wife passed on to me a short article published in the Catholic weekly The Tablet by Guy Consolmagno, SJ, director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory.3 The subject — why do meteorites typically have the consistency of rock rather than crumbly dust — is not necessarily one to set the pulse racing, but the awe and open-mindedness that came through in Consolmagno’s account of his unexpected research results (or lack thereof) threw the intellectual dustiness of Dawkins’s worldview into sharp relief.
Notes
- Many thanks to Richard Buggs who alerted me to this exchange.
- As I noted in my False Messiah, scientific developments in the late 1920s and mid 1940s came together to challenge Newtonian assumptions of what reality really is. As a corollary, we have been prompted to seriously question what place Darwinian theory has within an emerging scientific paradigm that has fatally undermined older scientific certainties and that cozy 19th-century consensus which gave birth to Darwinism which essentially depended on the simplistic and predictable Enlightenment worldview which Charles inherited from Erasmus Darwin’s thinking.
- The Tablet, October 3, vol. 280, no 9671.