The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins

[Marcus Marulus]

The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion 1: Summary

There are two loosely connected themes in Richard Dawkins's TV programme, The God Delusion. These are a major theme of science versus religion and a minor theme of religion and terrorism. On this page we summarise the programme in so far as it relates to the major theme.

Dawkins starts the programme by presenting himself as a scientist and suggesting that science and religious belief, which he equates with belief in God, are fundamentally at odds. [A bit about religion and terrorism follows.] Dawkins refuses to accept governmental attempts to stifle criticism of religion, which does not like independent thinking and which splits people apart.

1 CATHOLICISM

Lourdes

Dawkins starts his travels with a visit to Lourdes. At the end of the visit, he concludes, 'the hard fact is, over the years, with their millions of pilgrims, there have been 66 supposed miracles' and adds that the cures were all from afflictions that may clear up naturally anyway: you don't get severed legs regenerating at Lourdes.

The Catholic priest from whom Dawkins has elicited the statistic also points out that millions of visitors to Lourdes have benefited spiritually. This is in line with what the two women pilgrims whom Dawkins has previously spoken to have said: that the pilgrimage was an act of faith and that the benefit was spiritual.

Millions

Now, not that it really matters, Dawkins was correct that the 66 miracles prove nothing. But he was failing to get to grips with the important statistic: millions of people have made the pilgrimage over the last 150 or whatever number of years. The real significance for the faithful of the miracle cures is this, they point to Lourdes as a sacred place, somewhere special to go in order to have your faith reaffirmed: by asserting it in the company of thousands of other people from all over the world doing likewise. In Lourdes, the millions of pilgrims were the hard fact Dawkins needed to home in on, not the 66 miracles.

A single blow

Why Dawkins should ignore the millions and focus on the 66 is explicable in various ways. For one thing, there is a tradition within atheism of debunking alleged supernatural phenomena: one thinks for example of James Randi on the paranormal or Professor Michael Persinger on the electro-magnetic basis of religious experiences. For another thing, There is the consideration that reducing religion to a matter of statistics seems to be part of the ethos of secularism in Britain.

Again, we can recognise in Dawkins and in other militant freethinkers the urge to come up with some clincher that will demonstrate the falsehood of religious belief once and for all, some kind of polemical equivalent of a medical magic bullet for wiping out disease. Another analogy would be with the kind of critical scientific experiment that establishes a theory in a single blow, such as Eddington's 1919 eclipse observations confirming Einstein.

Protestant roots

But we also need to be aware that Dawkins's choice of Lourdes to debunk has its roots in old-time Protestant anti-papism, that a lot of what atheists like Dawkins criticise in religion generally was originally what Victorian and earlier Protestant polemecists criticised in Catholicism. When Dawkins comments on Lourdes, he recycles what was originally Protestant disapproval of Catholic religious theatre, blind faith and so on.

The Assumption

Dawkins follows up his Lourdes visit with an account of the history of the Catholic doctrine of the Assumption of Our Lady. Now clearly, your present writer doesn't believe in this doctrine any more than in a divine explanation for cures at Lourdes, but it was nevertheless inaccurate for Dawkins to represent the doctrine as the product of 'private thoughts' from inside the head of a religious authoritarian, Pope Puis XII, and imposed on the Catholic Church in the year 1950.

In fact, Dawkins contradicts himself in this matter. First he represents the doctrine as the product of a widespread tradition, then as the product of a single authority figure.

First Dawkins tells us that the belief was initially 'made up like any tale' 600 years after Christ, then gradually took hold as a tradition, till in 1950 it became 'official truth.' There can be no real quarrel with that account. The language is biased, but the essentials seem fine: a tradition gradually emerged over many hundreds of years that was eventually formally recognised as part of the Church's official teaching.

But suddenly, from one sentence to the next, Dawkins switches to something totally different:

'By 1950, the tradition was so strongly established that it became official truth. It became authority. The Vatican decreed that Roman Catholics must now believe …'

Dawkins now proceeds to explain that the Pope had made it all up himself. Ridiculously, he claims that, if asked, Pius XII would have said that 'it had been revealed to him by God'. He comments that the Pontiff had 'shut himself away and just thought about it'. Obviously, the Pope would have said no such thing and it didn't happen that way.

It was not a case of 'Roman Catholics must now believe', but of putting the official stamp of approval on what Catholics in general already believed. [1] We must suppose the idea arose and prospered because it fulfilled some kind of need within Catholicism: maybe to give an enhanced role to some kind of female principle or perhaps as a counterweight to some notion of female impurity.

What is more, we should view the belief in the light of other Christian beliefs, particularly those concerning the ascent to heaven of all of the faithful at the end of the world: in the Assumption, Mary seems merely to be getting a head start. Again, is the Assumption as a belief all that far removed from that Protestant idea they call 'the Rapture'.

As with miracle cures at Lourdes, there is little to be learned from taking belief in the Assumption out of context and demonstrating that it is a fiction. That's like looking at a spark plug and expecting to understand why people buy cars.

As with Lourdes, in Dawkins's debunking of the doctrine of the Assumption we can detect the freethinker urge to come up with a critical argument, to pull out that single brick and bring tumbling down the whole edifice of religion. Likewise, we have to see him merely repeating time-honoured Protestant views on aspects of Catholicism.

There's a particular clue to Dawkins's residual Protestantism when he mentions that the doctrine of the Assumption is non-Biblical. That matters a lot to Protestants, who in the Reformation replaced the doctrinal authority of Church tradition and of the papacy in particular with that of the Bible. But it is impossible to see any relevance in it for atheists, who surely set no more store by the authority of the Bible than they do by that of the tradition of the Catholic Church and the pope.

2 AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM

This site does not find its representation of Dawkins as a Godless Protestant to be underminded by his highly critical attitude to today's American Protestant fundamentalism, when he visits an evangelical megachurch in Colorado Springs. You feel that Dawkins's approach is fuelled not only by his opposition to creationism but also by some sense of betrayal: that old-fashioned Protestant values are being abandoned in c21st evangelicalism American style.

Megachurch as 'Nuremburg'

At the start of the Colorado Springs interview as televised, Dawkins points to the great expense involved in building the huge megachurch which he is visiting. Then, incredibly, he suggests to the pastor, Ted Haggard, to his face, that the latter is some kind of nazi. For, referring to the Pastor addressing his huge congregation, he remarks outrageously:
'I was almost reminded, if you'll forgive me, of the Nuremburg rallies, I mean such incredibly … Dr Goebbels would have been proud.'

Now let's be clear, there's no 'almost' about it. The quantum difference between nazism and the rest of us means that in any attentuated comparison the attenuation is inoperative. You can't be almost reminded of anything to do with nazism, either you are reminded or you're not.
Obviously, militant atheists like Dawkins can't be happy at the ascendency of fundamentalist religion in the USA today. But why did he react so strongly at the sight of thousands of Protestants in a colossal church in Colorado Springs, when the thousands of Catholics in Lourdes didn't seem to bother him all that much?

Part of the explanation must be that Dawkins was viewing this new development in US Protestantism from the perspective of an earlier style of Protestantism, that there was some sense of disgust that the Oxford professor's expectations of what Protestantism should be all about are not being met.

Essential Protestantism has always meant minimal religion: making sure that as little as possible comes between the individual believer and God as known through the Bible. Such an approach is epitomised architecturally in those minimal churches you see in pictures of old-time America, the traditional little white clapboard ones out on the prairie. The Colorado Springs megachurch for a congregation of 12,000 seems to fly in the face of that minimalist Protestantism.

The social dimension of religion

At Lourdes, Dawkins had referred to the 'tremendous feeling of group solidarity' the pilgrims must experience. He thought it must reinforce their blind faith. We may suppose that he sees the Colorado Springs megachurch in the same sort of light.

Essential Protestantism has been about the psychological dimension, interiority, with the social dimension of religion found in Catholicism for the most part effectively rejected as superstition. But megachurch Protestantism seems to be about religion as social experience: not only do is there the emotion inevitably generated at church services for thousands, there are also the 1300 programmes of community activities. Dawkins seems to resent all that!

The other part of the explanation for the references to Nuremburg and Goebbels starts with the consideration that Catholics don't challenge the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection: that's why Dawkins can label the Lourdes pilgrims a 'benign herd'. For him, the socially reinforced blind faith being generated in the evangelical megachurch is far worse because it does challenge Darwinism: hence the intemperate comparison with nazism.

Now as far as this site is concerned, Dawkins's brand of evolutionism, something he pursues with a religious fervour rather than with a scientific enthusiasm, is actually part of his Protestant atheism. It seems as though he has simply replaced the God and the Bible with Science and the literature of Darwinism. This argument will be developed on a later page.

The eye as accident

Prior to the Colorado Springs segment of the programme, Dawkins has argued in his commentary in favour of evolution and against creationism, using his Mount Improbable analogy. The matter comes up again in the televised exchanges between himself and Pastor Haggard, most notably regarding the role of accident.

When, in an exchange on scientific method, Haggard refers to the eye as the product of accident, and the ear as well, Dawkins homes in, asking his interviewee to confirm what he's said and concluding:

'You obviously know nothing about the subject of evolution.'

It is impossible to see what Dawkins has to gain by this sort of remark in terms of his stated aim of finding out in Colorado Springs why in general fundamentalism is on the up in the USA and why in particular it is attacking science. Rather we have to understand the remark in the same light as the debunking of the 66 miracles at Lourdes or the Assumption doctrine. Dawkins really seems to believe that he can use debating QEDs as magic bullets with which to cure the world of religion.

Indeed, the imaginary visitor from Mars might conclude that there is not too much to choose between on the one hand Catholic belief in miracle cures or Protestant creationist belief in the eye as an accident (effectively as a miracle) and on the other militant atheist belief in killer arguments that are going to miraculously eradicate religion.

Beleaguered freethinkers

In the programme, Dawkins stays on in Colorado Springs in order to gather comments from a handful of beleaguered freethinkers. This is further confirmation that he was not really in the USA to find out about the upsurge of fundamentalist religion, but rather to challenge it. For if he had been genuinely interested in why Americans are returning to religion, it's members of Haggard's congregation Dawkins would have been talking to, not freethinkers.

Dawkins is surely correct that local freethinkers are under attack for supporting Darwinism, that they are being subjected to a sort of McCarthyism. But that's an effect of the rise of fundamentalism, whereas the TV programme purports to be about its causes. The glaringly obvious first step in finding out the why of fundamentalism would have been to actually ask people, particularly those involved.

Yet, as far as we are aware from the material screened, Dawkins doesn't even ask Pastor Haggard to give his own account for the success of his ministry or why he is hostile to Darwinism. All we see is Dawkins making freethinker debating points of one kind or another at the American evangelical's expense.

That's not good enough for this site: here it seems preferable to try to understand rather than simply to dismiss out of hand.

NOTES

1 Dawkins on the Assumption

At the time of writing, when you look for 'doctrine of the Assumption' on Google UK, the first entry you find is for a BBC info page. This tells you that in 1946 Puis XII consulted all Catholic bishops to ask if they, their priests and their people thought the doctrine should be made official and that 99% agreed. See The BBC on the \'doctrine of the Assumption\'.
Of course, it could be argued that this percentage did not really represent a significant consensus, that in a hierarchical situation such a result was only to be expected: like an election result in a dictatorship. But even so, the fact that there was a consultation process at all undermines Dawkins's version of events in his remark:

'Now if you had asked Pope Pius XII how he knew it was truth, he would have said you had to take his word for it, because it had been revealed to him by God.'

That's not at all what the Pope would have said. Instead, he would undoubtedly have indicated in some way that the Church was central to his decision making process: he would have said something to the effect that he felt he was expressing the will of God, as revealed to the Church.

Readily Available Information

In fact, it is quite clear that the 1950 proclamation of the doctrine of the Assumption was definitely not a personal initiative of Puis XII. Thus Marina Warner: Alone of All Her Sex - The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary [1976] has a whole chapter devoted to documenting the doctrine and reflecting on it. Though she does not mention the 1946 papal survey, Warner does tell us concerning the doctrine that:

'Between 1849 and 1940, 3,387 cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops petitioned for its proclamation, and dozens of international Marian congresses were held to debate the question. All came out in favour.' [p 92 of the 1978 Quarto paperback edition]

Now Puis XII was not elected Pope till 1939.

We must ask how, given that information on the Church's consensus is readily available, Dawkins could come up with his silly story that Pope Puis XII would have claimed that the doctrine of the Assumption 'had been revealed to him by God'. The answer has be that rather than checking on the facts our Protestant atheist Professor relied on his thoroughly Protestant understanding of how religion works.

Dawkins has jumped to the conclusion that Puis XII would have claimed to have experienced a personal revelation from God, because in the Protestant understanding that's how God reveals Himself: in person to person encounters with particular individuals. He did so to the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, as in the case of Moses on Mount Sinai, and has continued to work that sort of way ever since.

(For more on Protestant understandings, see the other Bytrent website passim: Bytrent on Protestantism.)

Personal Religion, Social Religion

Dawkins fails to appreciate the fundamental difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestantism is essentially about personal religion, about individuals being in a personal relationship with God, whereas Catholicism has essentially been about social religion, about the Church being in a relationship with God and individual believers being part of the Church.

In Catholicism, God has not revealed Himself doctrinally by speaking to lone individuals on discrete occasions, but by speaking to the Church over time, over the whole Christian era. Thus, when popes have made any given doctrine official, they have claimed to be passing on not something that God told them personally one day, but something that the Church has gradually formulated over the centuries of its collective engagement with God.

Note that the TV programme was not the first time Dawkins had discussed the doctrine of the Assumption. He had spent a page or more on it in Good and Bad Reasons for Believing, a piece first published in J.Brockman and K.Matson (eds): How Things Are [1995] and reprinted in R.Dawkins: A Devil's Chaplain [2003]. This earlier account likewise totally ignores any notion of the Pope expressing a consensus when he proclaims doctrines ex cathedra.

So clearly, the silly story had been in Dawkins's polemical arsenal for at least 10 years: 10 years in which he could have checked the facts, 10 years in which he could subjected his own understanding to the sort of critical scrutiny he urges on religious believers with regard to their understandings.

(c) John C Durham, 2006

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion: Comment 2

This is the second of three pages looking at Protestant atheism in Richard Dawkins's recent TV programme, The God Delusion. Here we offer this site's understanding of the function of Creationism and comment on the Oxford professor's arguments concerning the Existence of God.

3 WHY CREATIONISM

We shall develop the argument later, in relation to the Bertrand Russell teapot analogy, that people in groups and whole societies do not entertain an idea unless it has some kind of functional validity in terms of their group or society. In that perspective, understanding why creationism is entertained is a matter of understanding what value there is for Middle Americans in preferring an idea that flies in the face of the overwhelming intellectual evidence in favour of Darwinism.

And note that this is not simply a matter of preferring the authority of the Bible to that of science. If it served the needs of Evangelicals to adopt a symbolic interpretation of the Genesis creation story, they would do so.

One piece of evidence as to what is going on in Middle America was mentioned by Dawkins, but obviously not seen by him as in any way significant. This is the fact that Pastor Haggard's church caters comprehensively for the social needs of its 12,000 members with 1300 programmes of activities.
A morally coherent world

We must suppose that, in an American society characterised by extreme social and geographic mobility and by social isolation associated with, among other things, the motor car, people have turned to religion in order not so much to believe as to belong. At the same time, there are the issues of morality and social threat, seen most critically in the matter of drugs and associated crime: people have turned to religion in order to embrace moral certainties and gain some measure of hope in the possibility of a morally coherent world.

In the light of needs of this order, intellectual considerations are not important. It is undoubtedly the case that if Dawkins had taken the trouble to ask members of Haggard's congregation why they belonged, their answers would have focussed on those moral issues rather than on whether the world has existed for 10,000 years and not for 4½ billion or whatever the current scientific estimate is.

Durham's Law of Coherence

In the hierarchy of human needs, intellectual needs come bottom, vastly less important to most people than social and moral needs. In particular, in the actual lives of everybody apart from evolutionary scientists, the age of the world is of no practical significance whatsoever. People need to belong to a social network of others whose morality they feel confident about infinitely more than they need to have their facts straight about how the world began. Social and moral coherence is infinitely more important to people than intellectual coherence (Durham's Law of Coherence). [1]

It is remarkable that Dawkins does not seem to grasp this, seeing that it is explicable in evolutionary terms. The precedence of our needs corresponds to evolutionary precedence: our social needs as primates take precedence over our intellectual needs as humans. Our intellectual capabilities developed in the service of our needs as primates and we have to see them as continuing to operate that way.

It is in this light that we should understand the amount of intellectual effort currently being expended to undermine Darwinism and establish Intelligent Design. It is people defending a social and moral order that is fundamentally important to them.

Note that moral coherence is not something needed by other primates, but is necessary for humans in order to manage of the greatly increased autonomy of action that is part of our intellectual capabilities. We need morality in order to handle our greatly increased possibilities for damaging our social groups.

We shall return to these matters in part 3 of these comments.

For the present let's just note that it seems likely that people like Dawkins can pursue intellectual coherence only because they already have the luxury of a sufficient degree of social and moral coherence in their lives. It is indeed a feature of British atheist organisations that they make big deal out of the famous people in the academic, political and media worlds who support them: look at the websites.

The leading atheists are thus by definition insulated from kind of social and moral problems that beset ordinary people. They don't need to worry about what trouble their stupid neighbours are going to inflict on them next. They can take a lofty view because they are at the top of the social heap, in a world where things work for you, not against you. They live behind high walls and sophisticated security systems; their children go to nice schools where everything is under control; when they report something to the police, somebody comes round straight away.
In a nutshell, the privileged classes, including top atheists, have security systems and personnel to protect their interests, whereas ordinary people have to rely on the good behaviour of all those around them, which requires a simple, coherent moral order.

The situation is somewhat analogous to Ancient Athens, where the citizen minority developed a nice democracy for themselves, but were totally blind to the slaves on whom their society was totally dependent. We can certainly see more than a touch of Marie-Antoinette style let them eat cake incomprehension and sheer ignorance of the lives of ordinary people in Dawkins.

Creationism

Of course, none of this explains why Middle Americans have adopted creationism in particular as something they believe in. But isn't it partly a matter of historical contingency, with Christian fundamentalism as the incumbent religion of Middle America, its seeds already in the ground ready for rain and sun? Isn't it partly that when people felt critically the need for a social network and moral coherence, the evangelicals were there for them, with a simple message and an entrepreneurial style of religious organisation capable of responding. Creationism was part of the package, its intellectual limitations unimportant.

There is however something else to be considered. Middle Americans need to have some kind of explanation for the social and moral incoherence they find around them, but what possibilities are there. It cannot be capitalism that is to blame and it can no longer be communism, which makes evolutionism and its apparent dragging down of humanity to animal status a likely culprit.

In fact, in the TV programme Dawkins reports that Pastor Haggard (when he finally lost patience) had said to him 'You called my children animals'.

4 THE EXISTENCE OF GOD:

The last segment of Dawkins's TV programme starts with him cycling along a privileged, sun-lit, leafy street in Oxford and past a university building. In this segment the professor offers two arguments to the effect that it is reasonable not to believe in God. The first argument refers to science and the second to religion.

Teapot analogy:

In his first argument, Dawkins attempts to demonstrate that it is reasonable to be an atheist even though science cannot disprove the existence of God. To do this, he calls on Earl Russell's analogy of a society believing in a teapot that orbits the sun, too small to be detected scientifically. The idea is that there are all kinds of beliefs that can't be disproved by science, but that doesn't make them right.

The analogy is of value only for what it reveals of the Oxford professor and, incidently, of the aristocratic philosopher before him. For it suggests that belief in God and any other religious beliefs that arise are totally arbitrary: somebody comes up with a daft idea one day and somehow imposes it on everybody else.

Sunny, leafy academic Oxford seems an entirely appropriate setting such an analogy as the orbiting teapot to be proposed. A society that believes in an orbiting teapot may make sense in the ivory tower worlds of our private boarding school educated professor and the late noble lord. However, it doesn't in the real world.

Certainly, in the real world lone individuals are generating apparently daft ideas all the time and this must have been so ever since humans first became humans. But these ideas are accepted by other individuals, then groups and then by society as a whole only if they make sense in context: as having some value for the other individuals and groups and then for the whole society.

(Ideas are dropped in the same way. As long as an idea continues to make sense in terms of the society or group that embraces it, it will be retained, though isolated individuals will always question it.)

No society is going to invest resources in developing and maintaining a belief that has no value for it. Russell's scenario of a society coming up with a ridiculous idea, a china teapot undetectably orbiting the sun, then passing the idea on from generation to generation, including writing about it in holy books, is itself ridiculous.

Thus, though we may not believe in God ourselves we must accept that the people who do believe in God, do so for reasons that make sense not only to them as individuals, but also in terms of the life of their group or society as a whole.

One god further

Dawkins ends his programme with his one god further argument. As part of his attempt to demonstrate that it is reasonable to be an atheist even though science cannot disprove the existence of God, he suggests that people no longer believe in the old gods, such as Thor, and that atheists merely go one step more. The implied argument is presumably that just as it was reasonable with the advent of monotheism for people to give up the old pagan gods, so it is reasonable now, with the advent of Science, for people to go one step further and give up the One God.

This argument of Dawkins is not merely feeble but false. The step from polytheism to monotheism just is not comparable to the step from monotheism to atheism. In the first case you are going from one type of supernatural belief to another, but in the second case you are abandoning all belief in the supernatural. That's not a step, that's a quantum leap.
Of course, with the rise of neo-paganism, it is not even altogether true that people have given up the old gods. Now it does not seem feasible that Dawkins can be completely unaware of the existence of neo-pagans. So presumably, he is brushing them under the carpet because he regards them as some kind of negligible lunatic fringe for whom it is not worth spoiling his neat implied pattern of many gods to one God to none.

But aren't we in fact in a classic science situation here: the neat hypothesis that leaves out some anomolous evidence. If we omit evidence that doesn't fit, isn't it incumbent on us to explain why.

The view of this site is that we should be asking why some people have turned to Celtic mysticism, the Great Goddess or whatever. It just will not do to regard the resort to pagan religion as looniness; the people concerned must be seeking to answer some need they feel. Aren't they likely to be part of a trend, a trend that is giving us everything from feng shui religiosity to Christian fundamentalism.

Dawkins's historicism

This site sees Dawkins's implied pattern of many gods, one God, no God as actually a particular expression of an underlying historicism, a version of the notion that history ought to be developing according to some progressive sequence of stages, typically three. In fact, Dawkins had suggested a historicist perspective at the start of the programme as well, when he remarked that the c21st ought to be an age of reason.

At one point in the programme, Dawkins says, 'I am a scientist' and of course the whole thing is about the superiority of scientific thinking. But it's not science to suppose that the future should be rolling out in conformity with some simple preordained pattern, rather it's scientistic wishful thinking more in the vein of say Teilhard de Chardin or of Marx, with his so-called scientific socialism.

Dawkins's thinking here derives from a century or more ago, from that of atheists like the British armchair anthropologist, James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (15 vols) is still today widely read in his 1922 abridged version. Frazer had a view of human cultural history as being composed of three stages: magic, religion and science. Dawkins's three implied stages of polytheism, monotheism, atheism are simply a particular reworking of that sort of pattern. [2]

Now whatever excuse Frazer might have had for looking forward at the start of the c20th to the triumph of some alleged scientific rationality is no longer available to Dawkins at the start of the c21st. One might have thought the latter would have learned something from the c20th, particularly from the horrors perpetrated by fascism and communism in pursuit of their own historicist doctrines: notably the Thousand Year Reich and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Significantly, the only awareness of c20th history shown by Dawkins in the entire TV programme apart from his Nazism smear is his discussion of the utterly marginal Catholic doctrine of the Assumption, promulgated in 1950, which we looked at earlier.

NOTES

1 Atheism and immorality

Part of the issue is undoubtedly the association of evolutionary science with atheism, which in turn is associated with immorality in the religious mind. In the Jerusalem segment of Dawkins's programme, a Muslim fundamentalist says he hates atheists for their flexible moral standards. There can be no doubt that US fundamentalists view atheists in the same light. Of course, true to form, Dawkins totally ignores his Muslim interviewee's point, preferring his own agenda.

The association has recently been aired on Dawkins's own doorstep. Another Oxford professor, the Protestant theologian, Alister McGrath, is at pains to link atheism with moral laxity in his polemical history of atheism, The Twilight of Atheism, [2004], a work that obviously has an American readership very much in mind.

If Dawkins's aim is to promote atheism with the population at large, he would be better advised to address the issue of morality rather than to try scoring petty debating points based on science.

2 Science as God

An important point of difference between Dawkins and Frazer is that the former seems to deify Science in much the same way that Marxism deified History. We shall explore the matter in Part 3 of these comments.

(c) John C Durham, 2006

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins

Here we summarise atheist Richard Dawkins's TV programme, The Virus of Faith, in its entirety, in preparation for commenting on it in later pages.</B>

The Root of All Evil: 2 TV programmes

After a brief recapitulation of the previous programme, The God Delusion, also summarised and commented on on this site, Dawkins proposes to look at two more issues: the indoctrination of children and morality. [1]

Dawkins starts by challenging the validity of sectarian education, finding it bizarre that we consider it acceptable to teach children the religion of their parents, though not their politics. He sees sectarian education as comparable to the formation of new species, when parts of a species become totally separated geographically.

Jewish Education

Dawkins interviews a Hasidic Jewish rabbi, Herschel Gluck, in North London. He asks why children should be made 'victims' of a particular tradition rather than being presented with all the evidence and choosing for themselves. The Rabbi points out that we must inevitably be affected by our parents and family: and we can choose to opt out. Also, a minority must be able to express itself and learn about itself.

Dawkins asks if minority traditions can't be upheld without teaching children unscientific ideas about the universe. The Rabbi replies that the Jewish children are taught about evolution, but most end up not accepting it.

Dawkins comments that these children grow up 'victims' of 'miseducation' and Gluck rejects this, finding it a matter of a scientific tradition, the theory (only) of evolution, versus Judaic tradition. He suggests Dawkins is a 'fundamentalist believer', at which Dawkins interrupts to deny it emphatically. (In an initial taster we had seen Gluck saying,

'Mr Dawkins, I'm very impressed that you're the new Messiah and I appreciate your desire to redeem the world.')

Protestant Education

Dawkins now moves on, to visit Phoenix Academy, a private evangelical school, presumably also in London, that uses an American Baptist curriculum. He claims that this smuggles superstition into science.

Dawkins points out to Adrian Hawkes, presumably either the headteacher or a science teacher at the school, that God or Jesus appears on almost every page of a science programmed learning booklet he's just seen: such as something about Noah's Ark. Hawkes considers it a matter of opinion: he was taught science myths when he was at school, such as the moon having been created by being flung off the earth and into space. He adds that he doesn't actually believe the Genesis story of creation, though God could have created the world in seven [sic] days had he wanted, so it's an academic question.

Dawkins now objects that the science booklet calls AIDS the wages of sin, thereby confusing health education with 'moralistic preaching'. Hawkes replies that without God the lawgiver why would anything be wrong.
Dawkins's response is that Hawkes's morality works through fear of God. To this Hawkes says that without that people tend to try to get away with things.

The Oxford professor judges Hawkes 'well-meaning', but claims that children are being indoctrinated into a 'warped morality' as well as into considering 'weird' Biblical alternatives alongside scientific 'fact'.

Religion as a Virus

Dawkins now explains his idea of religion as a virus. Children are particularly prone to this infection because:

'A child is genetically preprogrammed to accumulate knowledge from figures of authority.'

This is necessary, but means a child will believe whatever it is told, including nonsense. Many people shake off the virus as they grow up, thanks to the medicine of rationality, but, 'if an individual doesn't succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy' and he will expose the following generation to the infection.


Hellfire

Dawkins now moves on to look at the religious use of the fear of hell as child abuse, briefly interviewing Jill Mytton, a psychologist who was brought up in a presumably Protestant hellfire sect. She says that children should not be 'forced into a particular mould', but 'allowed to develop their critical faculties' and make their own choices. Her own childhood had been dominated by fear of disapproval in the present and literally of hellfire for all eternity: she is still affected when the subject comes up.

[For comment, go to Meaningless Choice.]

The main part of Dawkins's hellfire section is a visit to an American pastor, Keenan Roberts, who creates hellhouse shows, modern morality plays that demonise abortion and homosexuality. We see the Pastor's latest production being rehearsed.

Roberts says he wants to leave the unforgettable message with his audiences that sin destroys. Referring to an abortion scene, Dawkins comments that the real show must be even more horrific than the rehearsal. He asks if Roberts worries about giving nightmares to 12 year olds (the youngest age for seeing the show). The Pastor indicates that the vital consideration is getting the message across.

Dawkins now questions Roberts about homosexuality, suggesting that people of the same sex living together is their own business. The Pastor refers to the Bible, where homosexuality is sinful. He asks Dawkins why he doesn't believe that and gets the answer 'because of evidence'.

The Moral Values of the Bible

In the next section of the programme Dawkins looks at the moral values to be found in the Bible, starting with the Old Testament.

First, there is a quotation to the effect that if anybody, however closely related, tries to lure a person into worshipping gods other than Yahweh, then that person must take the lead in the offender being stoned to death. What is more, for Dawkins, the Old Testament God is actually genocidal.

Second, God's prophets are no better. Abraham was prepared to make a human sacrifice of his own son. Moses, in spite of the commandment not to kill having been delivered by him, gave orders for the Mideanites to be ethnically cleansed. Third, Dawkins points to an episode in the Book of Judges in which it is shown to be preferable to allow your daughter to be raped than your male guest.

In the New Testament, the moral teaching of Jesus was better, but then came St Paul, who introduced the 'nasty sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin'. Dawkins wonders why God would want to bother with such a rigmarole. And of course, Adam, whose fault it was, never existed anyway. Dawkins concludes that the whole thing is 'barking mad'.

Rev Paul Hill

As an example of Biblical values being taken literally today, Dawkins refers to the case of the Reverend Paul Hill, who killed an abortion doctor in Florida in 1994 and who was executed for murder in 2003. Dawkins discusses the matter with Hill's friend, the Reverend Michael Bray.

Bray claims that Hill acted to protect the embryos rather than to punish the doctor. Dawkins argues that embryos are not comparable to an adult doctor: being 'tiny little things, without knowledge, without any memory, without any fears'.

Bray counters that the important issue is that they had sanctity, becasuse they were in God's likeness. In a comment made later, Dawkins suggests that most sensible people find Hill a 'dangerous psychopath'.

Dawkins asks Bray if Jesus would approve of murdering a doctor, to which the Pastor responds by quoting Jesus: 'Suffer the little children to come to me'. He says the Bible interprets reality for him in an intellectually satisfying way.

A Liberal Protestant

Dawkins now interviews a liberal Protestant, Richard Harries, Anglican Bishop of Oxford. His church is currently riven over the issue of homosexuality.

Harries accepts that the Bible condemns homosexuality in 'a few isolated texts', but the matter should be considered in the light of Jesus's message overall. When the New Testament was written, homosexuality was seen as a choice people made, but now we know that a certain percentage of people are 'predominantly attracted to their own sex'. In other words, the facts have changed.

Harries claims he is a 'passionate moderate': passionate about religious belief and rationality. In a comment added later, Dawkins sees that as merely fence-sitting.

He now tackles Harries on the issue of miracles, the Virgin Birth of Jesus in particular. The Bishop says that this isn't crucial to Christianity, whereas the Resurrection of Jesus is. In a comment added later, Dawkins sees this as cherrypicking what to believe from the Bible. Why bother with it at all when we can decide for ourselves what is right for 'today's society'.

'Altruistic Genes'

Dawkins now offers an atheist perspective on moral values, based not on a God and his holy texts but on 'altruistic genes' created in our animal ancestors by natural selection. Contributor Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics tells us that we humans have sophisticated developments of the 'social instincts' seen in chimpanzees etc. He proposes a Microsoft comparison, with chimps being to humans what MS-DOS is to Windows 2000. There is no elaboration of this point.

[For comment, go to Curry\'s Microsoft Analogy.]

Dawkins points to 'kindness, charity and generosity' in our nature: explicable in terms of altruistic genes selected because family nurturing and cooperation with peers had survival value. Curry reports this kind of protomorality in chimps. Also, he tells us that these animals compete for status not only through 'brute force' but through 'public service' as well: this involves 'being good leaders' and 'intervening to settle disputes'. Cooperation and altruism, working as part of a team, are mutually beneficial.

[For comment, go to The Noble Chimp.]

An 'Advancing Wave of Moral Standards'

Dawkins claims there is a contemporary moral consensus that depends on neither holy texts nor religious leaders, but perhaps on our evolution. We have worked out for ourselves as social animals what is not acceptable: raping, murdering, stealing.

What is more, our morality is 'constantly evolving'. Thus, half a century ago most of us in the UK were to some extent racist, now only a few are. Similarly, there has come acceptance of gay people.

There is an 'advancing wave of moral standards', with some of us ahead of it and some of us lagging behind, though we are all in advance of the people of the Old and New Testament eras. This is explained in a passage that must be quoted in full:

'The progressive shift often emerges in opposition to religion. It's driven by improved education and then expressed by newspaper editorials, television soap operas, parliamentary speeches, judicial rulings and novels.'

Atheism as 'Life-affirming'

A final section of the programme starts with a sort of atheist testimony from the novelist Ian McEwan. He says that when we die, that's the end of it, but being alive is a privilege we must take responsibility for. There is no reliance on paradise as something to sacrifice this life for, as religious believers do.

The 'gift of empathy' for others is something it is wonderful to see developing in children; this is the basis of our morality. The religions, with their creation story and the relationship between this 'sky God and you', eliminate the fascination and marvellousness of the world.

[For comment, go to Empathy.]

Dawkins ends the programme by developing that last theme himself, declaring that atheism is 'life-affirming'. This life is not merely something to be gone through prior to heaven or hell, it is something to be made the most of.

We see Dawkins in a setting of natural beauty. He claims that nature excites our curiosity with questions only Science can answer. This life is the only one we need. We are incalculably fortunate to have it and (again) we should make the most of it.

[For comment, go to An Echo of Moses.]

NOTE

1 The Virus of Faith

The Virus of Faith, televised by Channel 4 on 16-01-06, was the second of two programmes under the overall title of The Root of All Evil.

A lecture with slides

This programme again works as a lecture partially illustrated by slides. Basically, Dawkins delivers a lecture either over a background of stock footage, such as scenes of scientific research, or at one of his locations.

The present summary

The Channel 4 website does not appear to provide a transcript, so the present summary is again based on a personal recording of the screening. The summary is somewhat shorter than that for the first programme. This is because this programme contains more redundancy, with points repeated etc.

But note that the final part of the programme is reported on in detail, as giving an important insight into what positive alternatives Dawkins and co have to offer.

(c) John C Durham, 2006

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins

The Virus of Faith 2:

Historicism 1

This is the first of the pages looking at Richard Dawkins's Protestant atheism in his recent TV programme, The Virus of Faith. Here we start to explore the Oxford professor's historicism as revealed in the programme.

The Historicism of Richard Dawkins 1: Religion as the Intrusive Evil

There were in Richard Dawkins's first programme, The God Delusion, as we saw, signs of historicist tendencies: his reference to an upcoming Age of Reason and his historical pattern, polytheism, monotheism, atheism. In the second programme, The Virus of Faith, our suspicions are fully confirmed. Dawkins is indeed a historicist.

Here we look at some classic historicist doctrines and show how very comparable is that of Dawkins as revealed in The Virus of Faith. We find in particular that Dawkins is about offering a scientific rationale of capitalist society.

Historicist doctrines generally follow the same kind of pattern. They point to how appallingly bad the present is, but promise an idyllic future based on regaining some kind of original paradise, lost in some kind of fall. Both the fall and current misery are attributed to one particular intrusive evil. Regaining paradise is a matter of accepting the leadership of a messiah figure, who has identified the evil and who has the power to destroy it. Individuals who accept will be transformed personally and will become part of a collective paradise renewed.

The very language used here - paradise, fall, messiah - is derived from the example of Christian religion and the other Western historicisms are undoubtedly transformations of the Christian model. Dawkins himself, of course, had a Christian background and education.

The Christian Model

In the Christian model, the original paradise was the Biblical Garden of Eden and the fall was caused by a single evil, the original sin of our ultimate ancestors, Adam and Eve, succumbing to the Devil's temptation. This fall not only caused God to cast our first parents out of paradise but has also given us this present world full of sin. The idyllic future is basically heaven and the key is simply accepting the salvation that Christ, the Messiah, offers us.

It would seem that, when Christianity was first promulgated around 2000 years ago, after the death of Jesus, the end of the world was expected imminently. In that scenario, Christian historicism was doubtless understood at a social level. It would not have been about entering into a personal relationship with God, but rather about individuals who accepted the message joining the community of believers which would very soon be in some kind of paradise en masse.

The idea of entering into a personal relationship with God, the kind of thing Protestants refer to as interiority, and then going to heaven as an individual after a natural death must be a later rationalisation. When the end of the world failed to materialise as expected, a whole new understanding of what following Jesus meant had to be developed: it is an example of what individuals and organisations in general have to do in order to survive when their original raison d'être becomes obsolete.

At any rate, we find later Christian historicism operating on two levels, the social and the personal. On the one hand, there is humanity as a whole condemned to present misery on account of original sin, but with the community of true believers capable of heaven thanks to Jesus Christ. On the other hand, there is the individual dragged down by a personal inheritance of original sin, but who can attain heaven personally by accepting true religion on a personal basis.

Earthbound Historicisms

The original Christians thought of their expected future paradise not as some kind of supernatural heaven existing outside of time and space, but as their own real world radically transformed. [1] The idea of departing to a supernatural heaven must have been part of the rationalisation that was necessary when the end of the world did not happen. That original Christian expectation of an earthbound paradise resurfaces in various guises in the later historicisms, with their promises of a better world for whoever their messages target.

As an initial example of the earthbound historicisms, we can mention the feminist versions, in which the original paradise was an alleged matriarchal stage in the development of human society, the evil insertion was patriarchy, still the basic cause of all our ills, and the promised future paradise regained is a return to matriarchy.

Racist Historicisms

The same underlying pattern is seen in the likewise earthbound racist historicisms. These versions obviously see the whole thing in terms of whatever racial group the proponents identify with. Original paradise is some supposed glorious golden age in the alleged race's past history. Fall, the loss of greatness, is explained as a matter of the loss of racial purity through the infiltration of inferior races; the present problems of the alleged racial group are likewise the result of the presence of the inferior races. The key to paradise regained, to ushering in a new golden age, is the mighty leader, who identifies the problem as the polluting inferior race and who will ensure its elimination.

Obviously, the most virulent form of racist historicism we know is Nazism, with its claim that the problems of interwar Germany were the result of communism and capitalism, both of these the work of an alleged inferior race, the Jews. The Messiah in this case was of course Hitler, who mythologised a glorious Germanic past and promised a Thousand Year Reich, to be assured through the extermination of all Jews.

Note that, though this is often overlooked, the various fascisms included a pitch at the personal level, comparable to the Christian message of personal dedication to Christ. For the fascisms had a New Man concept in which surrender to the will of the Great Leader meant personal transformation to some higher level of being.

Dawkins's Historicism

Now it is impossible to see the views of Dawkins, as presented in the TV programme, otherwise than as yet another variation on the historicist theme. We find an initial idealised state, an evil intrusion, a present dreadful state caused by the intrusion, the promise of a future idealised state assured by the elimination of the intrusion. There is a glorious leader and even a sort of New Man. The message is pitched both at the level of humanity and at that of the individual.

Dawkins's message is basically that we are social animals on an evolutionary trajectory to ever more rational and therefore higher moral standards, but that the process has been derailed somewhere along the line by the appearance of religion. It had looked until recently as though we were shaking off religion and entering an Age of Reason. But now, with the rise of religious fundamentalism, there is a relapse which accounts for the world's present troubles. Nevertheless, thanks to the enlightenment Science brings, we can root out religion and get back on track.

Protestant Historicism

The Dawkins historicist variant of a trajectory from a primitive idealised state to a later higher one being knocked off course by religion derives from a particular Protestant historicism within the overall Christian pattern. This is the idea that the original Christianity of the New Testament has been corrupted by Catholicism but brought back on course by Protestantism, thanks to a messiah figure, Martin Luther.

In this context, we need to bear in mind that there is a very important sense in which 'religion' [2] has been a dirty word for Protestants. It has stood for all those aspects of Catholic Christianity which they rejected at the Reformation: idolatry, superstition, tradition, hierarchy, authoritarianism, mumbo-jumbo, whatever. For more on this, see the bytrent website for Protestant Minimalism and also The Sacred in English Religion.

Overall, what Dawkins has done is generalise on the Protestant historicism. In his basic scheme, primitive Christianity has been replaced by a primal human state, Catholicism as bad 'religion' has been replaced by religion in general and the Protestant Reformation by the Scientific Revolution, by the discovery of evolution by natural selection in particular. The Protestant Age is of course replaced by the Age of Science and Reason.

Rationalist Historicism

This Dawkins scheme contrasts markedly with that of a leading rationalist of a century ago, James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. The armchair anthropologist saw human advance in terms of our growing understanding of the world. This gave him three phases of progress: magic, religion and science. In Dawkins's TV programme, human progress is moral and driven by evolutionary forces.

In the Dawkins scheme, religion is no longer a phase in human cultural evolution, it is an alien disruption of the proper trajectory of human development. There is an an initial state of primal human authenticity in which our ancestors lived in accord with what we might call evolutionary morality, an intermediate phase when religion has put us off course and a final state when religion has been extirpated and we are once more moving forward in accord with evolutionary morality.
Primal Human Authenticity

Let's look a bit more closely at the elements of Dawkins's historicism, starting with primal human authenticity.

With the help of his contributor, Oliver Curry, Dawkins evokes protomorality in chimps, with the suggestion that the similar social behaviour of our primate ancestors was the basis for our own moral sense. The implication is surely that, given that our primate ancestors' social behaviour was determined by natural selection, so too was the morality of our human ancestors till religion popped up and introduced distortions.

Certainly, Dawkins speaks of 'altruistic genes' and of a 'Darwinian explanation' for our moral sense. Note that it is not clear whether he thinks genetic change continued or not once humans became humans. If genetic change continued, then our moral superiority over primates would come from our superior brains working with our superior morality genetics. But if genetic change did not continue, then our moral superiority would come from our superior brains working with merely primate strength morality genetics.

Religion as the Intrusive Evil

At any rate, what is perfectly clear is that for Dawkins religion was not a natural phenomenon of human development as Frazer had supposed it to be: and as we must imagine Dawkins considers science to be. Instead, he labels religion a virus, making it an extraneous, parasitical blight.

Given that Dawkins understands religion this way, describing it as a contagion passed on from generation to generation, responsible for the world's ills, then it most evidently is the intrusive evil of the historicist pattern, an equivalent of the original sin of Christianity and of the polluting inferior race of fascism and the like.

But how he can imagine this really to be the case is impossible to understand. If religion was not generated by a humanity going about its natural business, then how on earth did it come into existence.

Science

To put the question another way, what is there about religion as opposed to, in particular, science, that makes the former a virus of humanity and the latter an essential feature of human culture now. Dawkins does not say.

It would seem to be Science with a big s that in Dawkins's historicist scheme of things offers the promise of paradise regained, in this instance getting humanity back on the track of authentic human moral progress from which which religion has derailed it. For Science it is which generates evidence, which in turn proves the falsehood of religion: in some sort of process of antibody creation.

We may bear in mind at this point that science-talk has been used in all sorts of new belief systems since the c18th to claim that they were not belief systems at all, but scientific truth. Such a one was Marxism, aka scientific socialism, another form of historicism.

What Dawkins is offering is not science but just another belief system presented as science. The consideration that he is himself a scientist in some particular field of science is neither here nor there.

Darwin, the Unwitting Messiah

Early in the programme the North London rabbi, tongue in cheek, calls Dawkins 'the new Messiah'. Now there is certainly a messiah component in Dawkins's historicism, an equivalent of Martin Luther, but it's actually an unwitting Charles Darwin. Darwin himself was not a historicist: our Oxford professor makes use of him for his own historicist ends, projecting Darwinian science on to a scheme of things that is ironically religious in origin.

This piece continues as The Historicism of Richard Dawkins 2: Scientific Capitalism.

NOTES

1 The End of the World

See Norman Cohn: Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come [2nd edn 2001] ch 11, The Jesus Sect.

2 'Religion'

This attitude to 'religion' is crucial because it has shaped the way religion in general is understood in our Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact, it has worked out that religion proper in our culture is the part of Catholicism which Protestantism acknowledged, basically God and the Bible, with all the rest being brushed under the carpet.

Thus when our scholars study other religions, they do so largely in terms of God and holy texts. For tribal religion that became essentially a matter of gods and myths, with the rest approached confusedly in sterile controversies over magic, taboo, ritual etc. Not surprisingly, discussion of the origins of religion became no more than discussion of the origins of belief in supernatural beings.

Clearly, it is with that kind of baggage in his head that we need to understand Dawkins. For example, there is a sense in which the first of the two TV programmes is about disposing of God (the stuff about the existence of God) and the second one is about disposing of the Bible (the nastiness of Bible morality): as if disposing of those two disposes of religion altogether.

Here's Dawkins's contributor and fellow British Humanist Association vice president, Ian McEwan, speaking at the end of the programme:

'And if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began or what the relationship is between this sky god and you, it does curtail your curiosity ...'

'Sacred text' and 'sky god and you': the same Protestant minimalist understanding of religion as Dawkins's own.

(c) John C Durham, 2006

[source]

[Milesian]

It's a pity that people like Dawkins can't stand back and observe themselves from an objective distance. Perhaps after a long life crusading against what he perceives as baseless superstition, he will have the awful but truthful epiphany that the thing he really despised the most was right in front of him the whole time.

People like Dawkins seem to suffer from what is certainly one of the most peculiar manifestations of self-loathing around.

If they ever actually manage to prove or disprove anything then I will most definitely sit up and take notice. Otherwise, he is just one more preacher amongst the crowd trying to convince us of his own personal beliefs using the negative tactics of sarcasm, demonisation and doubt. They seem to rely on tactics which people like Plato attacked in the ancient Sophists - that they concentrated on what sounded most probable in order to persuade people, when what they should be doing is trying to uncover the truth instead.

Dawkins should stick to what he is qualified in - his own narrow scientific field.
Subjects such as philosophy, theology and metaphysics already have a pantheon of greats and I'm afraid Dawkins doesn't compare favourably with the likes of Aristotle or Aquinas.

[Marcus Marulus]

The Protestant Atheism of Richard Dawkins

The Virus of Faith 2:

Historicism 2

This is the second of three pages looking at Richard Dawkins's Protestant atheism in his recent TV programme, The Virus of Faith.

The Root of All Evil: 2 TV programmes

The Historicism of Richard Dawkins 2: Scientific Capitalism

Darwinism has always been particularly open to historicist abuse. Thus fascism undoubtedly depended on an ideological matrix derived from the Social Darwinism of Darwin's successors to give credibility to ideas of genetically superior and inferior races and to justify exploitation, expropriation, enslavement and genocide: as the operation of natural selection.

Scientific Capitalism

The particular kind of political Darwinism which Dawkins subscribes to and which is generally known as social biology or evolutionary psychology must be seen as a contemporary attempt to harness Darwin for capitalism. On the analogy with the scientific socialism mentioned previously, we can more informatively call this line of thought scientific capitalism.

In the programme, Dawkins introduces his argument by encapsulating the so-called 'altruistic genes' of our prehistoric ancestors as a matter of 'nurturing our family' and 'doing deals with our peers', in other words in terms of life as Margaret Thatcher and her cohorts wanted us to see it.

It is impossible to see primate life in these terms and it is impossible to see contemporary human life in these terms, consequently it is impossible to see the intermediate stage of prehistoric human life in these terms either. The vital consideration that Dawkins is omitting is social hierarchy, which Margaret Thatcher herself got around by denying that society exists.
Primates do not have peers: they are in hierarchical groups that are organised to favour the higher above the lower. Socially speaking, we humans never have true peers either: the idea of the peer group is simply a consoling fiction. In every human social situation hierarchy appears sooner or later, with squabbling of varying intensities continuing till that happens.

Parity in human affairs is possible only to the extent that we consciously determine to transcend our primate inheritance and make special dispositions to create it at a cultural level: as in fact religions do when they declare all humans equal in the eyes of God.

The Noble Chimp

The political thrust of Dawkins's argument becomes even clearer when we get a brief evocation of chimpanzee social behaviour from Dawkins's London School of Economics based contributor, Oliver Curry. Like Dawkins, Curry fails to mention social hierarchy as such among chimpanzees. He merely points to competition for status among these animals, and in such a way as to make it seem as benign as possible: as if in Noble Chimp society every individual is a winner.

Curry first says that chimpanzees live in family groups and work together in groups. Then he says that these animals engage in competition for status, suggesting that they are particularly good at doing so through 'public service'. Therefore, so his argument goes, their competition is not simply a matter of 'brute force' [1] but also of good leadership and dispute settling skills.

This interpretation of chimpanzee social behaviour can be understood as nothing other than the projection back on to our primate ancestors of a benign, sanitised, propagandised understanding of today's capitalist society. In other words, Curry reads back into chimp behaviour a particular interpretation so as to justify today's political order as natural and inevitable in terms of Darwinian science. We are to understand that at the end of the day, competition in capitalist society is a matter of 'public service', that in spite of appearances competition is actually altruistic.

Durham's Law of Cooperation

Of course, along with his other distortions, just like Dawkins, Curry is omitting one vital consideration, in this case, that most chimps never get to become leaders. Statistically speaking it would be far more accurate to describe chimpanzee society not in terms of leadership, but of followership, of social subordination.

We should not take seriously those TV series that follow the lives of groups of social animals such as chimps. The leaders of these groups have the most interesting lives and they are ones featured. This gives the series the scientific value of some weekly magazine that follows the lives of celebrities.

After Curry has offered his extremely skewed interpretation of chimp society, Dawkins asks him for the principal reasons in evolutionary terms for cooperation and altruism. Curry replies that are frequently 'mutual benefits'. However, he does not specify in any way what these 'mutual benefits' might be.

We ought not to be surprised at this. For we must suppose that in any unregulated social hierarchy the benefits of cooperation accrue to those cooperating in proportion to their status within that hierarchy (Durham's Law of Cooperation). In other words, the few individuals at the top are mostly working for themselves and the survival of their genes, while the many individuals at the bottom are also working mainly for the few individuals at the top and for the survival of the top individuals' genes rather than their own benefit.

Moreover, the larger the hierarchy, the less chance there is that the individuals at the bottom share genes with those at the top. So while lowly chimps will be to a significant extent working directly for their own genes when they cooperate with their social superiors, the same cannot be said for the people at the bottom of today's mass societies.
As the student poster had it in the Paris Events of 1968, conjugating the verb to cooperate: 'I cooperate … you cooperate, they profit'.

Though Dawkins and Curry would not admit it, this is the logic we get when we insist that humans can be no more than Darwinian social animals. In order to have any measure of human equality, we have to transcend the natural order of things and say that humans are more than animals.

Mindless Elitism as Atheist Bliss

Given the way Dawkins ignores the place of the follower majority at the start of his trajectory of human progress, we cannot be surprised at the same thing happening at the head. His evocation of atheist bliss at the conclusion of the TV programme can perhaps best be described as mindless elitism in the style of the alleged Marie-Antoinette remark, 'let them eat cake'.

We start the final section of the programme with a short contribution from top posh novelist and Dawkins's fellow British Humanist Association vice-president, Ian McEwan, who is seen presumably in his posh home. McEwan rhapsodises over our curiosity about the world, our wonder at its loveliness.

Dawkins then takes up this theme himself, as he walks through an idyllic mountainscape in perfect weather. The location is probably in the Rocky Mountains, presumably near Colorado Springs, where part of the first programme was set.

Dawkins tells us that the 'here and now' is inspirational, with nature exciting our curiosity and science revealing 'the true majesty of our world'. This world should be enough for us; indeed we must count ourselves extremely fortunate to be alive at all. End of programme.

An Echo of Moses

Such communing with a Nature revealed by Science must be understood as Dawkins's and, beyond him, the British atheist establishment's substitute for Protestant interiority, for communing with the God revealed by the Bible

Earlier in the programme, Dawkins had condemned Moses as part of his attack on the Bible, but the sight of the professor picking his solitary way through a sub desert Rockies mountainscape is reminiscent of nothing so much as some Protestant image of the biblical prophet ascending to the high places of Mount Sinai to commune with his God, Jehovah.

We have to view Dawkins as forever echoing Protestantism even as he condemns it, revealing an atheism that exists only in terms of the prior monotheism, the way a black mass exists only in terms of the mass proper.

Crass Insensitivity

In their atheist contemplativeness, Dawkins and McEwan are ignoring their position at the top of the social hierarchy, at the visible tip of the iceberg of humanity. For it to be possible for the one to be wandering through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and the other to be sitting in his posh home, there must a whole host of lesser mortals at various levels of humanity, cooperating away for less and less benefit the lower they are. Atheist bliss as evoked is for the tiny top fraction of humanity that has the wherewithal to attain it.

Obviously the sensitivity to the world these two individuals express does not extend to the actual lives of the vast majority of the human population. Dawkins's evocation of a Rocky Mountains atheist heaven has not a human in sight, apart from the professor himself, not even any evident signs of human presence. Dawkins's two programmes had shown plenty of scenes of teeming humanity earlier, at Lourdes, at Colorado Springs, at Jerusalem and so on, but always to condemn, to say how stupid and misguided religious believers are: with the implication, compared to Dawkins himself.

The McEwan evocation at least showed a mother and infant, but they were not in any way typical. From the way she talked to her small child, the mother was very articulate and middle class, making them a Madonna and Child of the elect of British Humanist heaven.

The crass insensivity of this final section of Dawkins's second programme has to be seen as amounting to just another variation on the usual historicist theme of heaven for that part of humanity we identify with, that community of believers, that master race or whatever, and to hell with the rest.

The Personal Level

A final element in the Dawkins historicist pattern is the understanding offered of how the message works at the personal level: how the intrusive evil operates on the individual, how it is driven out thanks to the messianic leader, how a regenerate life is achieved. What is the Dawkins equivalent of say the American fundamentalist three moments, i.e. being born to sin, accepting Jesus as your personal saviour, being a born again Christian?

A large chunk of the TV programme is about how children are infected by Dawkins's virus of religion. It is a matter of indoctrination by parents and in our country today by sectarian education. Dawkins attacks in particular the insinuation of creationism a