I am focusing on particular points in this interview with Richard Dawkins in the Sunday Times . I have criticised the proselytising type of atheist before and elsewhere for attacking the easy target (Christianity and Judaism) but not the stroppy faith Islam. Give Dawkins his due here --he is setting himself up nicely for a fatwa.
Dawkins is about to chew up religion again now, in a television series about his hero, Charles Darwin, which holds up to ridicule those who refuse to accept the theory of evolution. Astounding though it may seem, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, there are many people who don’t believe its findings, he says.
“Science is being threatened in our class-rooms,” says Dawkins . . . More seriously, Dawkins believes that many science teachers who do believe in evolution are selling our children short by kowtowing to political correctness. Cowardice is at the root of the problem, he feels. When it comes to presenting the truth of science against the “mythology” of religion, science teachers duck the issue for fear of reprimand. And not only from evangelical Christians. In his view, devout Muslims are a large part of the problem.
“Islam is importing creationism into this country,” he says. “Most devout Muslims are creationists – so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught.”
In his TV series, Dawkins faces a class of 15-year-olds at Park High secondary school in London. A few of the pupils readily tell him they don’t believe in evolution because it runs counter to their religious beliefs. It’s only after he bundles them into a coach and shows them fossils at the seaside that one or two admit there might be something in this evolution gig after all.
“I was shocked by how some put up barriers to understanding,” says Dawkins. “I showed them the evidence, and they just said, ‘This is what it says in my holy book.’ And so I asked, ‘If your holy book says one thing, but the evidence says something else, you then go with your holy book?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘It’s the way we’ve been brought up’.”
Even worse, from his point of view, their science teachers are extremely unwilling to oppose anything that smacks of a faith-held belief. And science teachers, people who should be Darwin’s flag-wavers, are simply looking the other way. “It seems as though teachers are terribly frightened of being thought racist,” says Dawkins. “It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because [if you do] you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”
He may be Darwin’s most ardent fan, (and the BBC must be kicking itself that Channel 4 has snapped him up a whole year before the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth in 2009), but Dawkins does not believe we should subscribe to the dogma of “survival of the fittest” when it comes to our own lives.
“We need to rise above our Darwinian heritage,” he says. In what way? “Well, we devote our lives to writing books, composing music, creating poetry – all higher functions of the brain. (And of the spirit.) If we were following Darwinian dictates, we males would be spending all our time fighting other males to get females, and screwing them all over the place in order to have lots of children and grandchildren. I’m very glad we have risen above all of that.”
It is not true that God’s creation is incompatible with scientific theory. All the Christians I know well enough to discuss the subject with believe that God made the world. None of us believe that 6000 years ago He snapped his fingers and there it was, complete with dinosaur bones hidden to test our faith when tempted. St Peter said “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day”. Because the human mind can grasp a period of 6000 years but finds it harder to understand the eons the world took to evolve does not limit the Lord to our human timescale. To try to is to underestimate His handiwork. And as for the argument why would he make dinosaurs and the other creatures which are now extinct, well why not? They fascinate us, and sound to have been creatures of beauty, so who are we to try to limit God’s creativity only to that of obvious and utilitarian purpose to us. But that’s just this Christian’s view and Islam is another kettle of coelacanth.