By TERRY GRIMLEY / BIRMINGHAM POST
Added: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:00:00 UTC

Richard Dawkins talks to Terry Grimley about his rallying-cry for atheism

Big thanks to Richard Prins for sending the article!

Reposted from:
The Birmingham Post

If, as Richard Dawkins believes, natural selection accounts for everything, it must presumably explain his own selection as spokesperson for the Godless.

In his latest bestseller The God Delusion, the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and author of The Selfish Gene argues that it is time for atheists to stand up and be counted in a world which is increasingly threatened by religious conflicts and nervous about offending religious sensibilities.

The book combines a scientific case for the extreme improbability of God with various practical arguments as to why religion is bad for us. It even puts forward a theory that, in evolutionary terms, the persistence of religious belief is a negative byproduct of what is otherwise a sound survival trait: the tendency to believe what our elders tell us.

Jack Straw's unexpected intervention last week on the subject of veiled Muslim women was notable for deviating from what has seemed a growing religious deference in Britain over recent years. The Government has hitherto appeared to embrace this with enthusiasm, notably in its active promotion of faith schools, which makes you wonder whether it has learned anything from Northern Ireland.

Yet paradoxically it is clear that a majority of people in Britain have no particular religious convictions. Apart from those who would declare themselves atheists or agnostics, many of us are content to live our daily lives without God, perhaps falling back on religious ritual to help us through challenging moments in our lives, in particular bereavement. These are the kind of people whose consciousness Dawkins hopes may be raised by The God Delusion.

"I'm under no illusions that I can do it with faith-heads, but there are a lot of people at the moment who only think of themselves as Christians or belonging to other faiths because they've been brought up in them, and they may well come off the fence," he says.

"After all, we are all atheists about most religions. Christians don't believe in Zeus or Thor. So I'm just asking people to take one more step.

"A lot of people talk vaguely at funerals as if Auntie May was really up there watching them. I think they go along with that without thinking what it would actually mean if Auntie May was really up there watching them. You're not asked to think about whether you mean it. It probably doesn't mean any more than 'Oh, how I miss her' or 'She would really have liked this party afterwards', or whatever one says.

"There's a passage in The God Delusion where I directly address my late friend Douglas Adams. Some people might mistake that for a belief in the afterlife, but it's pure sentimentality - which is human but doesn't in any way imply a belief that I am addressing someone who is still there."

Dawkins says he has tried to make the book humorous and entertaining, and, so far, it is doing very well in terms of sales.

"It's number one in Amazon.com and it's high up in the American lists as well. And that's pretty much before any great efforts at promoting it. The reviews have been mixed - it's the luck of the draw whether or not you get a religious person."

The promotional tour which brought Dawkins to the Birmingham Book Festival this week is following a format which has become well established with his previous books.

He explains: "My wife Leila Ward and I are going around doing readings. We've done this for several of my books now, and having two voices speaking antiphonally works really well. She usually does the quotations and I do the in-between parts, and then I take questions. It's usually about half reading and half questions."

However, he will be on his own when he takes the book on a forthcoming American tour. The rise of the religious right there has clearly helped prompt the book and is extensively referenced in it. Is he expecting a rough ride?

"Mostly the American audiences I come up against are sympathetic university communities, but I'm going to Kansas and Virginia on this trip. I think the scientific, sceptical intelligentsia there are feeling rather beleagured."

Does he have any explanation for the much higher profile of religion in the US as compared to the UK?

"I'm not sure why it is. I've heard two or three suggestions. One is that America is a society of immigrants and lots of people have found themselves a bit rootless and cut off from established family, so they have identified with the church for that reason. It's a bit like going down the pub on a Friday night to meet your friends and have a social time.

"Another idea is that, paradoxically, it is to do with the constitutional separation of church and state. In Britain the connection of church and state allowed religion to become a boring thing in the background, whereas in America because it's not established it's open to free enterprise, and it's sold like soap flakes. Churches are competing for huge tithes, and it's very big business. They get very slick about it."

I offer a couple of theories of my own, one geographical, the other historic. The first is that America is a large, spread-out country where many people live in small communities, enabling small-town thinking to have a bigger influence on politics and the media than in compact, urban Britain.

The other is that the two world wars, which had a big impact on religious belief here, were more distant experiences in the US. This is not to minimise American casualties, particularly in the Second World War, but perhaps to suggest they did not reach a sufficiently critical level to trigger a wholesale questioning of faith.

Dawkins finds the first theory interesting, but is dubious about the second, pointing out "the very odd fact that when there is a natural disaster people turn to God rather than blaming him."

While Islamic fundamentalism is a clear and present danger, it still remains to be seen just how big a problem the rise of Christian fundamentalism within the world's only superpower may become for the rest of us (Dawkins objects anyway that the problem is not religious fundamentalism but the religious belief which breeds it).

He has no claims to making predictions, saying that he is "not a great reader of the zeitgeist". But in his book he quotes a warning from an American colleague:

"Europeans need to know that there is a travelling theo-freak show which actually advocates reinstatement of Old Testament law - killing of homosexuals, etc - and the right to hold office, or even to vote for Christians only. Middle class crowds cheer to this rhetoric. If secularists are not vigilant, Dominionists and Reconstructionists will soon be mainstream in a true American theocracy."

Dawkins' own feeling is that, when viewed historically, trends tend to look like saw-teeth, and that things which are intensifying now may have receded a decade from now. He contests any idea that human progress is an obsolete notion, citing spectacular accelerations in genetic research and computer technology, but draws the line at saying he is actually optimistic about the future.

But he adds: "My days are pretty cheerful."

* The God Delusion is published by Bantam (£20).

www.birminghambookfestival.org

TAGGED: ATHEISM, INTERVIEWS, RICHARD DAWKINS