A Devil's Chaplain

  • Richard Dawkins &
  • Latha Menon
, Latha Menon Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 2003. 320 pp. £16.99
Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID NEWTON

The original 'Devil's chaplain' was Robert Taylor, an apostate priest and self-styled 'infidel missionary' whose rabble-rousing entourage stormed into Cambridge in 1829 — halfway through Charles Darwin's undergraduate career. Taylor's brew of atheism and republicanism held no allure for young Darwin, then a conventional Christian thoroughly steeped in the hierarchical values of nineteenth-century Britain. But Darwin never forgot Taylor's nickname. In 1856, pondering the brutal inefficiency of natural selection, Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!” Although creationists constantly remind us that On the Origin of Species is a satanic work, Darwin never aspired to succeed Taylor: he was too shy of controversy, too worried about the happiness of his devout wife.

Richard Dawkins, however, is more than happy to step into Taylor's shoes. Religion, writes Dawkins, is a “malignant infection” of the human mind. Six of the 32 essays in this eclectic collection (culled largely from the British press) address religion either directly or indirectly, a surprising statistic for a science writer whose chair at Oxford University is dedicated to the public understanding of science. However, another six essays attack further impassable routes to knowledge (such as homoeopathy, crystal worship and postmodernism). Clearly, Dawkins sees his brief as not only popularizing science, but demolishing its competitors.

Dawkins' other major bugbear — and the main non-divine theme of A Devil's Chaplain — is the late Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins offers here a gracious tribute to Gould, but also turns his incisive analytical mind and lucid prose against Gould's ideas with devastating effect. For example, Gould's notion that the evolutionary processes that shaped the early history of life (with new phyla being produced) differ qualitatively from the processes that direct more recent evolution (with only lower-level taxa appearing) is deflated in two deft sentences: “It is though a gardener looked at an old oak tree and remarked wonderingly: 'Isn't it strange that no major boughs have appeared on this tree recently. These days, all the new growth appears to be at the twig level!'.”

In fact, the critiques of Gould and God are not as unrelated as they appear. As this collection makes clear, Dawkins is a fierce advocate of scientism, the philosophy that genuine truths — as opposed to spiritual or personal 'truths' that are not universally held — can be found only through the scientific method. Gould was not as strict: he was an accommodationist, insisting in works such as Rocks of Ages that both religion and science are independent and valid domains of enquiry. Dawkins, then, is both scientifically and philosophically opposed to Gould. Several books have been written about the scientific arguments between Gould and Dawkins, but Dawkins aficionados outside Britain have had little exposure to his withering assaults on religion, pseudoscience and accommodationism. It's a rare treat to see him sail into battle, prose and logic perfectly attuned to the destructive business at hand. I should add that A Devil's Chaplain is not wholly focused on religion and Gould: it also includes obituaries of friends, and essays on ethics, genetic determinism, Africa (Dawkins spent much of his childhood in Kenya) and meme theory (the collection's only low point, given my view that 'mimetics' is an extended tautology that has yielded no real understanding of human culture). But it's in religious territory that A Devil's Chaplain is most compelling.

“Modern theists,” writes Dawkins, “might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” But Dawkins goes beyond a mere defence of atheism. He also subscribes to the American writer H. L. Mencken's dictum that: “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” Why, asks Dawkins, should the public give religious arguments any more credibility than arguments for other brands of nonscientific 'truth'? Curiously, Dawkins does not explore why religious ideas get undue respect. Surely one reason is that arguing about religion (especially when one participant is an atheist) is unproductive, likely to produce only mutual dislike. No rapprochement is possible between those whose beliefs derive from evidence and those whose beliefs either do not depend on evidence or are unshaken by contrary evidence. This is why science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.

Dawkins' critique of religion rests on three points. First, because different faiths make very different claims about the world, they cannot all be true; and none of the claims (such as the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven) can be scientifically verified. Second, the choice among faiths is not based on rational consideration: the vast majority of people simply practice the religion of their parents. This is especially galling to Dawkins, who sees the easy indoctrination of children as a product of natural selection favouring the rapid spread of information between generations. Finally, Dawkins considers religions to be vehicles of evil because they facilitate the labelling of people as either 'us' or 'them', fostering xenophobia and its attendant horrors — Northern Ireland and the Middle East come to mind.

These views are summarized in a wonderfully passionate essay, “Time To Stand Up”, written shortly after 11 September, 2001. One excerpt: “To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real-world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons, and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.”

Would that there were an afterlife, so that Robert Taylor could smile upon his far more effective heir! As Taylor and his fellow freethinkers knew, atheism in early nineteenth-century Britain was blasphemy and thus illegal: Taylor was twice jailed for his activities. Thankfully, such strictures are now much rarer, but a subtler form of repression prevails in places such as the United States. Scientist–atheists, bowing to prevalent notions of politically correct social inclusiveness, are unwilling to express their opinions for fear of offending religious sensibilities. But Dawkins makes a strong case that most religions are insidious and dangerous illusions. It's time for those who agree to stand up beside him.