Reposted from:
http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2007/05/dawkins_transce.html



Richard Dawkins had requested no photographer for our interview at his Oxford home last week, so instead artist Paul Winner came along and produced this numinous illustration. The results of the interview appeared in T2 today, as the cover, which was thrilling for me. Bloggers are already following it up, with one describing it as "refreshing". There's also a lively debate going on Dawkins' own site. More links to Dawkins copy on the TimesOnline Faith Page. (Updated: If you go here and scroll down, you will see a videolink.)

It was when the company who made The Root of All Evil for Channel 4 employed me as the fact checker for the documentary that I was alerted to the atheistic crusade about to be unleashed upon the western world and conceived a desire to interview Professor Dawkins. At about the same time, I dreamed a nickname for Dawkins, Mobius Dick. This is a reference to the two-dimensional Mobius Strip with its infinite edge, and the story of Moby Dick, the white whale who survives repeated attempts to hunt him down and kill him, and then turns on his attackers, destroying them.

I was expecting an angry man, impatient of my own unsophisticated faith. I was so nervous I tried first a bipartite approach, and wanted to take along a colleague who is an Oxford graduate. He resisted this suggestion. So I sort of smuggled in Paul, who read law at Oxford, as back-up in case I got stuck. But in the end I needn't have worried. When I finally went along last week to interview him I found an urbane, charming and ophisticated professor manifesting just a little of the anger against religion for which he is known, and I have to confess that much of that anger is justified.

What he is is passionate for what he describes as "the truth". Because he has aimed his writing, most notably in The God Delusion, at the fundamentalists he so detests, it carries something of the tone of the very preaching he decries. But with the rare and hugely appreciated luxury of being able to talk to him at depth, I had the privileged opportunity of being able to explore precisely what he does and does not believe. And what emerged was a man whose mind is not at all closed to the possibility of the transcendent. I would say - and indeed I did say this to him - that if some of our more intelligent and liberal Church of England and Episcopal bishops were quizzed in detail about what they really believed, and if they gave truthful replies, they might not be that far from the doctrine Dawkins is propagating. Indeed, I might go so far as to say that here we have a man who is in danger of founding a new religion of his own, a religion we might want to call Dawkinism.


We spoke for 90 minutes. It was one of the most absorbing conversations I've ever had. The day before we met, I had received by email a promotion from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for a new DVD series for children, Growing up in the Universe. It looked superb, and I will buy a set for my young son. I told Dawkins how similar it was to receiving text from a religious company, the accompanying blurb almost like a creed. "You're very close to being right," he admits. How could I be more right? "To be spot-on would be to say that this had nothing to do with the sort of religion which believes in a divine creator who forgives sins, answers prayers and listens to your inner-most thoughts, cares about your sex life does all the things that the Christian God is supposed to." It would be a "mysterious beyond-present comprehension, physics of the future."

He has no name for it. "It's hard to have a word for it because part of it lies in the future. For example it would be hard to ask a medieval peasant for a word that sums up Boeing 747s and computers and televisions." He is indeed convinced that future physicists will discover something "at least as wonderful as any god you could ever imagine." So why not call it God? "I don't think it's helpful to call it God." Ok, but what would "it" be like? "I think it'll be something wonderful and amazing and something difficult to understand. I think that all theological conceptions will be seen as parochial and petty by comparison to it."

He also talked about the nature of the universe, confessing that he can even see how "design" by some gigantic intelligence might come into it. "But that gigantic intelligence itself would need an explanation. It's not enough to call it God, it would need some sort of explanation such as evolution. Maybe it evolved in another universe and created some computer simulation which we are all a part of. These are all science fiction suggestions but I am trying to overcome the limitations of the 21st century mind." He adds: "Whatever it is it's going to be grander and bigger and more beautiful and more wonderful and it's going to put theology to shame."

Alister McGrath, author of The Dawkins Delusion, is among those who have attacked his "ideological fanaticism." Dawkins responded graciously to this and this provoked further correspondence in The Times letters page. McGrath also wrote an earlier piece for our Credo columna recent series of sermons preached by Nicholas Sagovsky, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey.

For now, I thought it would be fun to explore whether "gigantic intelligence" fitted with any of the 72 names for God listed in the Hebrew Bible.

For this, I consulted my Orthodox Jewish friend Irene Lancaster, an academic and fellow blogger who last year made aliyah to Haifa and who is a regular commentator here. She is currently teaching a university course which addresses this very subject. She tells me: "There are supposed to be 72 names of God. The words in the Bible represent all sorts of things, not because Judaism is pagan at heart, but because of our own limitations. Hence, God of war, God of the field, gods (elohim), which also stands in for 'judges', God's representatives on earth. Then there is the name YHVH, which is unpronounceable as it is only made up of vowels, meaning 'becoming'. That is, 'I am that I am' at the burning bush is really, 'I shall be that I shall be'. And Rashi says that that implies that God will be with us in all our troubles."

This means that the transcendent God is actually the one who is with us, while the God Elohim of every day is more one of justice, not so much love.

Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed said you can only talk about God in negatives, or what he isn't. I myself am a member of the Church of England, but a pretty ignorant one. When pressed on my belief, I always tell my inquisitors: "The only thing I know absolutely for certain about God is that I'm not it." After speaking to Professor Dawkins I had another insight. I knew he wasn't it either, even though I have no doubt of his "gigantic intelligence". But the Jewish view, from which we derive our Christian theology, is certainly that God created the world, maintains it and is with us at all times, even if He is unknowable. Irene speculates that the fact that there isn't a Jesus figure in Judaism probably encouraged the development of Kabbalah in which the sephirot are "forces" representing various attributes, based on the Book of Chronicles.

These include from, Crown, Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Loving Kindness, Severity, Beauty, Foundation, Glory, Victory and Earth. These also relate to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to characters in the Bible. Joseph would be Yesod, foundation; Jacob would be Tipheret, beauty. Abraham represents loving kindness and Isaac severity. Jacob is a merger of both and is of course Isaac's son. By coincidence Irene's husband Brian Lancaster, who runs an MSc in consciousness and transpersonal psychology and who holds the country's first chair in transpersonal psychology at John Moore uni in Liverpool, has put much of this in his book, Essence of Kabbalah. Irene says: "Dawkins' description is definitely Jewishly OK, whether he likes it or not. Dawkins has tried to describe some sort of power, even intelligence, which does not include the word 'God.' The word for the Lord in Hebrew is Y-H-V-H-, which is a transliteration of the consonants in Hebrew which sound like vowels. This was before vowels came into use around the 7th or 8th centuries CE.

Maimonides talks about what God isn't and says that we cannot describe the entity which God is. That is why in Hebrew a circumlocution is used, called 'Ha-shem', meaning 'the name'. In other words, if you named that power, you might fall into the trap of thinking you really understood it."

Maimonides lived from 1135 to 1204 and influenced Thomas Aquinas and the whole Christian tradition. "So what Dawkins is describing here is the Jewish concept of God the creator," says Irene. As Professor Dawkins said at the end of our interview, there seemed to be very little we did not agree on. He just refuses to call it God. I still maintain, though, after our conversation, that he would be a worth recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. By making the religious among us examine and question our beliefs, he has brought about more progress than he might care to understand.

(Incidentally, Paul Winner also came with me to Rome, where he sketched the Pope and Rowan Williams, and has done a number of other drawings of top religious people. He has also been employed as the Government's official Holocaust Memorial Day artist and on a number of other projects. We are at present seeking a publisher for a book we are writing together, People of the Book.)

Bloggers discussing this include The Stuff of Life here and here, calling for the article to be "canonised"! Globalclashes critiques a "sugary excerpt".