Dominic Lawson: Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

When my brother-in-law John Diamond died in 2001, he left unfinished a book which he had characterised as "an uncomplimentary look at the world of complementary medicine". The completed chapters were published later that year - together with a selection of other material which I edited - under the title Snake Oil. The publishers, Random House, were in no doubt as to who should write the foreword: Professor Richard Dawkins. They could not have made a better choice. He wrote a perfectly-judged and substantial piece, somehow both brutal in its demolition of medical charlatanry yet also delicate in its honouring of John's memory.

That is why I felt a slight twinge of remorse when I devoted my first column for this newspaper to an attack on Professor Dawkins' Channel 4 documentary broadside against religion, The Root of all Evil?. I said at the time that it was "silly" to suggest that belief in God is the cause of all the evil in the world. Dawkins himself has since disowned the title of the documentary, though not its contents.

Next week, Professor Dawkins and Channel 4 are joining forces once more, this time with a two-part documentary called The Enemies of Reason. It is an investigative attack on faith healers, psychic mediums, astrologers, Tarot card readers and all the other paranormal riff-raff who prey on the gullible. It is exactly the sort of programme which Dawkins should be presenting, not least because, as he points out, Britons are spending ever-increasing amounts of money on such "therapeutic stabs in the dark".

Richard Dawkins would probably argue - assuming he thought it worth the effort - that it is completely illogical to praise his work in unveiling pseudo-medical charlatanry while finding fault in his attempt to demolish the religious sensibility. As far as he is concerned, they are two sides of the same coin - the fraudulent coin of superstition.

He makes a powerful case - but he also ignores some very important distinctions. Most importantly, religion - and certainly the established Judaeo-Christian idea of it - devotes itself principally to instructing its adherents in how to behave well in their dealings with others. Christians would argue that this is encapsulated in the injunction "Love thy neighbour as thyself." Despite what some seem to believe, this does not originate with the figure of Jesus Christ. Not only does it appear in the Old Testament; Rabbi Hillel, who also predated Jesus, said that the same idea "is the whole of the Torah; the rest is interpretation".

This concept--sometimes called "The Golden Rule" - does not require the approval of religion. The point, however, is that it is the polar opposite of the concerns of the modern fads stigmatised by Professor Dawkins: they are all to do with how we should look after ourselves, not our neighbours. This self-centredness is what makes its followers and practitioners so unbelievably boring.

The other significant difference is that religion, at least in its modern manifestations, does not attempt to challenge the scientific method - the shrine at which Professor Dawkins worships. (I do not criticise him for this: the establishment of medical knowledge through rigorous double-blind testing has given us a life-expectancy that would have astounded our ancestors. If homeopathy was the only form of practised medicine, it would still be commonplace to die in childhood.)

It is true that the Church was once science's main ideological opponent. Religion used to concern itself much more with matters of factual knowledge - but it lost every battle it fought against science. The Inquisition might temporarily have "persuaded" Galileo to recant his view of the movement of the planets around the Sun, but the Catholic Church no longer has the power to threaten dissenting scientists with torture - and whatever Richard Dawkins might think, it has no wish to resume the practice.

It's true that there are elements within Christianity - based mostly in the American Bible belt - which hold to the notion that the Earth was created by God in six days a few thousand years ago. Their refusal to countenance Darwin is, I suspect, what has so enraged Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist by specialisation.

For the most part, however - and certainly in the mainstream - the Christian churches have retreated to the safe high ground of ethics. Here, it seems to me, they are immune to Dawkins' high-velocity rhetorical weaponry - and will not have sustained even a scratch from the Professor's best-selling book, The God Delusion. We know this, oddly, because of the work of that remarkable 18th-century Scottish atheist David Hume - a man whom Dawkins rightly admires.

Hume was perhaps the first to make the point that we cannot derive "ought" from "is". That is to say, we cannot know how the world ought to be, simply from describing how it is - no matter how knowledgeable we are. Hume's point was later defined with more brutal simplicity by men such as Professor A J "Freddie" Ayer: all statements of ethics are factually meaningless, being no more than the expression of the view that we either like or dislike something.

Freddie (my late stepfather, as it happens) was the Richard Dawkins of his day, at least in the sense that he became this country's most celebrated anti-religious proselytiser; but his impeccable Humean logic is now the impenetrable shield that the churches can use to deflect the ideological bullets of his successor. After all, if religion has been forced to become little other than an assembly of ethical opinions - however passionately adhered to and however elegantly housed-- then it cannot actually be depicted as "wrong".

It could not remotely be described as "unscientific" to declare that, for example, marriage is the only fully morally acceptable form of partnership between couples, or that adultery is sinful. Dawkins loathes the fact that theological ideas such as Hell still persist in Catholic doctrine - but the modern Christian concept of Hell means little more than permanent separation from God: the notion of being tortured by sulphuric flames for eternity is as dead as Hieronymus Bosch.

There is one final sense in which Dawkins' targets have no contiguity. The professor is greatly exercised by the profits which dodgy faith healers and therapists make from the gullible - indeed he appears to believe that the practitioners' principal motive is financial greed. It's true that there are some American TV evangelists who have done very well out of the God business; but anyone who became a Catholic priest - or indeed a Church of England cleric - for the money would have to be even crazier than Dawkins thinks they are.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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