A Devil's Chaplain by Richard Dawkins

Richard Harries finds the devil in the detail in a new collection of essays by Britain's most outspoken atheist

This highly readable selection of essays exhibits Richard Dawkins' characteristic qualities of clarity and passion. Above all is his moral commitment to evidence-based science and his sense of wonder at the world which such scientific endeavour opens up. A series of brilliant analogies renders most of the science accessible to the non-specialist. All this more than justifies his fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and his professorship in the Public Understanding of Science, which he likes to think of as "Advocate for Disinterested Truth".

In this role he demolishes New Age religion and the claims of alternative medicine as well as exposing the mixture of nonsense and fraud which constitutes some French post-modernist writing. Inevitably, too, organised religion is the object of some brilliant polemical writing. Richard Dawkins often seems to suggest that science generally, and evolution in particular, simply rule out the possibility of a religious view of the universe. This view was reinforced by his recent atheistic "Thought for the Day" on Radio 4, for the message was quite simply: "Religious people, why don't you grow up?" In other words it was a moral attack on religion as a form of immaturity, not a scientific or philosophical exposé.

This collection of essays, of which a good number relate to religion in one way or another, enables us to see more clearly the basis of his atheism. It ends with a letter to his daughter in which he urges her only to believe things on the basis of good evidence. He picks out three bad reasons for believing anything: tradition, authority and revelation. Religion depends on all three but there is no real evidence, he suggests, to substantiate these claims. Religious believers, however, would say that the evidence is simply the existence of the universe as such and ourselves within it. One way or another this needs accounting for.

Dawkins argues that only science can account for the world and he is particularly scornful of the recent accommodation of science and religion, each with their separate spheres of intellectual territory into "How questions" (science) and "Why questions" (religion). He asks, "What are 'why questions', and why should we feel entitled to think they deserve an answer? There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think that they are therefore not beyond religion too." Why questions are those that arise in the mind of every human being when they wonder if there is or is not some kind of rational purpose, not of our own making, behind the universe. When he asks, "Why should we feel entitled to think they deserve an answer?" we can say that surely we are entitled at least to ask the questions. Such questions cannot be answered by the scientist qua scientist, though that same scientist outside the laboratory may very well attempt an answer of some kind or another, and most of them do.

One of the weaknesses of Dawkins' approach to religion is that he tends to select the weakest examples and worst cases. But God is not an object in the world of objects, for, as Simone Weil put it, "God can only be present in creation under the form of absence." Further, he is, by definition, that reality which makes a total difference to the way we perceive ourselves. This means that knowing God is more complex than knowing whether there is a table in the next-door room or a miracle occurred at Lourdes. There is still plenty of scope for scepticism. What is the difference between a God who can only be present under the form of absence and no God at all?

Darwin did not lose his faith because of evolution as such (indeed it is doubtful whether he ever entirely lost it) but because of the apparent cruelty in nature. This is borne out by the first essay in the collection in which a letter from Darwin to his friend Hooker in 1856 is quoted: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature." Here Dawkins seems to agree with the evaluation of Darwin, referring to the "cruelty and clumsy, blundering waste".

I imagine we have all felt something of Darwin's horror at some aspects of nature, even though it is easy to give a riposte in relation to the criticism that it is wasteful: wasteful of what? Paradoxically, much of the rest of Dawkins' book seems, at least implicitly, to undermine Darwin's moral evaluation of the character of evolution. Furthermore, he believes that the core of Darwin's theory of "cumulative evolution by non-random survival of random hereditary changes" is universal. Darwin discovered the theory by going round the world but it could have been worked out from first principles as inevitably and inescapably right. All this gives "the appearance" of design. The point is not whether the universe is divinely designed or not but whether Darwin's evaluation of the evolutionary process as one of blundering waste is an appropriate response.

The kind of language that Dawkins uses about the system, which so enthrals him, seems to point much more to a kind of elegance, even though the pain which seems to be felt by the higher vertebrates does, of course, remain a problem. Furthermore, if "evolution is not just incidentally progressive", but "deeply, dyed-in-the-wool, indispensably progressive", this seems a neat, rather than a blundering way, of getting us here. Even the theme of genes as replicators, which occurs throughout the book, has a certain, pleasing quality.

In short, the total disjunction with which Dawkins begins the book, between horrible nature and ethically passionate human beings, seems by the end to be more of a junction. Indeed, here is another paradox. For another theme in these essays is the way that we, by our labelling, divide animals up into discontinuous species, not least between ourselves and other African apes. It may be that nature may not be as immoral as Darwin thought it and we may not be as moral as we like to think we are.

Richard Harries is the Bishop of Oxford. His latest book 'God Outside the Box: why spiritual people object to Christianity', is published by SPCK