Reposted from:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1971115.ece

'Attacking religion can seem like breaking a butterfly on a wheel'

I FIND, AS I GROW OLDER, THAT I AM perhaps not as up to speed with the Zeitgeist as I used to be. The rock subculture emo may, I think, have come and gone, and I'm still not entirely sure what it is/was. Web 2.0 is a phrase that I've noticed passing by in newspaper articles as if we all know what it means, but clearly I missed the explanatory one when it first arrived. I have yet – as a full-blooded modern male, I'm ashamed to admit this – to watch a single episode of 24 (although, as is the modern way, I do have the first series waiting for me in a box set, pining for that two-day-solid watching window), but I know that it is already passé, long jumped its shark, and that I should by now have moved on to Entourage. And, worst of all, I have only just started reading The God Delusion.

The pace of cultural debate being what it is these days, it feels, only a year after publication, very late to be reading this and even later to be writing about it, (although not as late as publishing another version of it, as Christopher Hitchens seems to have – although obviously, with my backlog, I haven't read God Is Not Great, and accept that this comment may be unfair).

In my defence, I was waiting until the paperback came out, because my shelves groan with unread hardbacks, left there out of a combination of comfort-concern – one's man-bag is so much less painful on the shoulder with a paperback – and a realisation that easyJet now charges £10 for every 20kg.

Anyway, it's interesting to read a book that you've read a lot about. I'm not just talking about reviews, but a book that caused a big old chattering-classes stir, with responses in The Sunday Times written in the name of God. A book that broke out of the Books pages on to the opinion pages, even on to the news pages. Thus my responses to it are not neutral, but waver upon a median line of expectation.

It is, for example, much funnier than I had expected. Sometimes I'm not sure that this is intended – Dawkins's recommendation in the preface (after a thank-you to his wife, the former Doctor Who companion Lalla Ward, for doing so) that all authors should employ an actor to read their manuscripts back to them before submission ("it must be a professional actor, with voice and ear sensitively tuned to the music of language") made me laugh out loud, bringing to mind how much Nigel Planer's brilliant comedy character Nicholas Craig would salivate at the work prospects that taking up this idea might create. However, I laughed with the author at – but was also surprised by – his use of sixth-form sarcasm. I just wasn't expecting the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science of New College, Oxford, to quote long tracts by theologians and then begin his argument against them by saying: "Yeah, right." I wonder if Lalla got exactly the right Nick Hancock-style intonation.

I also have begun to understand why The God Delusion caused such ire. Logically religion is, of course, nonsense. Attacking it with logic, especially if you are as bright as Dawkins, causes its arguments to disintegrate so quickly that it can seem like bullying, like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. Except that this isn't a butterfly – it's a vast and powerful superstructure. You have to keep on reminding yourself of this when you read the book, because, within its confines, Dawkins seems (and is, intellectually) the high status one.

Nor was I expecting it to give up attacking the idea of God's existence so early (page 189 in the paperback), and turn into an ultra-Darwinian analysis of why religion exists at all. This is the bit that I'm at, and I don't like it as much.

The problem for ultra-Darwinians is that they have to assume that all things – including ideas, or memes as Dawkins calls them – progress via the animal narrative of natural selection (so religion, or rather the need for it, must serve some basic "positive" survival-enhancing purpose) but surely the key thing about religion is that we have it and animals don't. That is because we have consciousness of death and they don't. Thus we had to conjure religion, "that moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die", as Larkin puts it. Also, animals feel no need to explain the world; we do. We look at it long past the point where we are straightforwardly governed by our selfish genes, and what drives us are not the basic positives any more but the basic negatives: anxiety, fear, incomprehension, the desperate need to think that we know, to be "right"all the time, and, above all, to be parented – and there you have him, God.

Anyway, I'm off to listen to My Chemical Romance's lastest album. I have a lot to get through.