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Said the atheist to the (ex) bishop...
One is a secular crusader bent on wiping out the ‘virus’ of faith, the other a lifelong Anglican still willing to wager on God. Writers RICHARD DAWKINS and RICHARD HOLLOWAY compare notes on evolution, myth and the enduring challenges of Jesus..
RICHARD DAWKINS: When I mentioned contraception that was just an example of the way in which it is possible for humans to rebel against the dictates of natural selection and selfish genes. So if we can do it on a relatively crude level of contraception, why shouldn’t we do it with respect to other things? My Darwinian suggestion for pity is that it stretches back to a time when we lived in small bands which were so small that everybody you met would be a close relative, a cousin, a family member, or a person that you’re going to meet again and again and again. Therefore from a purely cynical point of view you would expect to get reciprocation. So natural selection at that time built into us a lust to be good, a lust to be nice to people, because in those days the genetic pay-off was there. Nowadays the genetic payoff is not there, because we’re no longer surrounded by cousins. But just as our sexual lusts survive contraception, so our lust to be good and sympathetic survives moving out into big cities where there no longer is the Darwinian usefulness. I think just as sexual lust can flower into the great poetry of John Donne and William Shakespeare, so the lust to be good, which was originally rather mundane, can flower into the true nobility of goodness.
RH: Can we talk a bit about religion? Theology is quite a sophisticated discipline and there are ways of doing God-talk that are closer to you than, say, to Jerry Fallwell. There’s a whole negative theology tradition that says you cannot say what God is, only what God is not, and the reason why I welcome the kinds of books that you write is because of their cleansing of what I consider to be idolatrous versions of God, confident human projections. But do you allow for any nuanced subtleties in religion? Because you’re pretty massive in your onslaught against it. Do you have any sympathy for the religious consciousness which is trying to be honest and is even hearing the challenging things that you say, and isn’t rejecting them out of fear?
RD: Well I think I have to ask you back, Richard, before we can talk further: what do you actually believe about God?
RH: I’m between Gods. I don’t believe in the God outside everything that is, the supernatural being. I’m probably not so much an agnostic as an unknower. And incidentally, one of the criticisms of your book made by the philosopher Anthony Kenny is that the intelligent position is agnosticism rather than either theism or atheism, because you cannot know for certain either of those, but you can know for certain that you don’t know. I would say that I’m in a state of unknowing about the nature of ultimate reality, whether there is something that either was the agent of it, or is somehow embedded within it... It seems to me that the essence of Christianity has always been about actions, not about belief. Jesus himself was not interested in persuading people to have a piece of metaphysical software, but in getting a certain kind of response. I continue to be a member of the Christian church because I’m for Jesus. So are you, because you wrote an essay called ‘Atheists for Jesus’1. So we have Jesus in common. Theologians make a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The Jesus of history was this extraordinary man, and then you got this theological development that gradually deified him into a great kind of Byzantine emperor. My position is eccentric, and since I’m not evangelical about it I don’t need to persuade anyone else to hold it. What I’m interested in is knowing whether you look upon it with contempt.
RD: Very far from that. I think we’re actually extremely close. First: technically, I’m an agnostic.
RH: Ah!
RD: I made a seven point scale, where one is total confidence in God, and seven is total confidence in no God, and I’m maybe a 6.8…
RH: Well I’m a five and a half.
RD: …But I’d qualify that by saying there’s an infinite number of things we can be agnostic about, and I wouldn’t privilege any particular God over fairies or unicorns. So I think that pretty much makes me a de facto atheist. Now when you start using pantheistic language, quoting Spinoza, talking about God as being the same as nature, then I think there’s no difference between us. If you wish to use the word God for that then I’m with you, except that I think it’s misleading because the great majority of people mean something very different. Christianity does seem to have certain existence claims about God, about Jesus being the son of God, about Jesus redeeming our sins. If you throw all that out, there’s not a lot of Christianity left, is there?
RH: There’s this magic little word, myth. I see Christianity as a beautiful myth. And the interesting thing about myth is it’s more enduring than science. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, I can read with benefit today. I cannot read the astronomy of Aristotle because it’s over. Myth has enduring value, and if you look upon religion as essentially a series of stories, you don’t have to buy the historicity of it. The tragedy of religion – and this is Nietzsche’s great point – is that the priests come along and historicise myth. They turn it into mean fact, instead of letting it be the glorious poetry of myth. I go to a church that’s full of myth and mystery, I like high opera worship because it appeals to the senses. And I can listen to these stories because they still teach me things, they still challenge me. The real question to ask about myth is not whether it’s true or false but is it living or dead. Is it still doing stuff?
RD: But in that case you would be perfectly happy to study the myths any people in the world. Aboriginal myths of the dreamtime, West African myths.
RH: Yes.
RD: I can appreciate that. I would love children to be taught the myths of the world. But by calling yourself a Christian you’re singling out one particular set of myths, rather than saying there are lots of myths that are beautiful, we can study them as poetry, perhaps even as containing some wisdom.RH: But I can like my own myth without dismissing other people’s. You can only be in one place at one time. This is the myth of my family, and there are lots of commonalities anyway in myth systems. I’m simply saying that it is possible to see religion as a valid human construct, a work of the human imagination, which references back to us much about ourselves. One of the good things about interrogating religious myth is that it’s a form of intense self-analysis, because we’re the creatures that have created these systems and structures and imaginative understanding.
RD: So in the same way that I enjoy the poetry of WB Yeats, which is steeped in Celtic myth, or you might enjoy Wagner and so resonate to Nordic myths, or Homer and resonate to Greek myths… in all those cases you’re getting some kind of poetic value out of it. But nevertheless there’s a certain loyalty to the one of your childhood – Christmas carols and Christmas crib etc. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, he’s a non-believing Anglican – ‘out of loyalty to the tribe’ is the phrase he uses. I’ve got a certain loyalty to the Anglican tribe –
RH: Were you a childhood Anglican?
RD: Yes.
RH: And were your parents fiercely Christian?
RD: No, oh no.
RH: Because people have wondered…
RD: My parents were non-believers but sent me to Anglican school and so on. So I got the full works. Not that the Anglican full works is very full… But yes, I’ve got a certain tribal loyalty. It’s not very strong, but there’s a certain aesthetic tribal loyalty.
RH: Well it’s more to me than beautiful stories. It’s also about personal challenge because I think of Jesus as belonging to the prophetic tradition, from those extraordinary people thrown up in history by whatever processes that challenge the cruelty and the power dominance and madness of humanity. I think that they have enduring value, and appear in different traditions. I think Jesus made certain enduring challenges to human selfishness and cruelty – and to religion, because one of his predominant themes was that compassion trumped everything else.
RD: I think that’s true, but Jesus was one of several: you could talk about the Buddha, you could talk about Gandhi… there are various such figures who are inspiring. But somehow, because you happen to have been brought up Christian, to keep returning to Jesus because of that seems to me a rather inadequate reason to keep returning to Jesus rather than Buddha or Socrates or Russell.
RH: I do a wee bit of Buddha. I’m a kind of Buddhist Quaker Anglo-Catholic Agnostic – you can’t get much broader than that. … Frank Sinatra said he believed in anything that got him through the night. I don’t actually despise that, and I’m not certain enough about anything to know ultimately that there’s nothing beyond that to which it might ultimately refer. I think that’s the difference between us: I think you’ve got a more settled mind on these things than I have. I’m in a state of expectant unknowing.
RD: About surviving death?
RH: No, no, I’m not particularly interested in that. About the possibility of the universe meaning something other than an accidental collocation of atoms. I can’t demonstrate it one way or the other. But the fact that we are all so passionate about meaning, because of our own extraordinary nature – a bit of me reserves the possibility that it all refers to something other than simply…
RD: I have no problem with understanding why the human brain would wish to see meaning in things. As for the suspicion that there is more to the universe than we understand, I’m damn sure there’s more to the universe than we understand. There’s a hell of a lot more that we are going to understand in the next few hundred years, and there may be some things that we shall never understand. But I think I’d draw the line at saying because we don’t understand it, therefore some kind of theistic interpretation is therefore plausible. I suspect that the truth, when and if we discover it, will be far grander and more mysterious than anything that theists have ever imagined.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you think religion gets in the way of appreciating humans as animals, and studying them as animals?
RD: Well humans of course are animals – we’re not plants – and yet we are rather special as well. But I think there is a tendency for humans to erect a wall around our species as though we are somehow so qualitatively different from the rest of the animal kingdom that we deserve special moral consideration. For example the abortion of tiny four-celled embryo is regarded by many people as a more serious moment than the killing of an adult chimpanzee. Well that kind of speciesism could not survive a serious understanding of evolution. So to the extent that religion has fostered the idea that there is something qualitatively unique about humans, I think that the answer to the question is yes.
RH: I would agree with that. I think that the problem is that some of the scriptures, for example the book of Genesis, give man dominion over all the other creatures. When the idea of a soul was developed, we had them but animals didn’t, and I think that’s given us permission to treat them in an intensely cruel way. I think we in our generation probably have been more cruel than any previous generation because we treat them as product. I think the whole factory farming ethic is one of the moral scandals of our time.
RD: I agree with that. But you just quoted Genesis, and you somehow manage to pick and choose which bits of Genesis you’re going to adopt and which bits you don’t – so what is the value of myth if you decide on modern criteria which bits you’re going to adopt and which bits you reject as evil?
RH: Because if you’re an intelligent human being that’s what you do.
RD: But why bother with the myth at all? Why not just go straight to the moral question?
RH: I think that’s perfectly valid. But the thing about a lot of those old texts is that they are self-correcting and you do get challenges within the text itself against particular readings. I think you could say there is a valid, gentle way of understanding it. Until a lot of modern farming methods, we lived off animals, we sold them, we slaughtered them, but we did it in a more humane way because we lived alongside them. We didn’t treat them as product. I think you can develop an ethic of husbanding animals in an appropriate way. I think it’s actually the market economy that has distorted our relationship with these creatures.
AQ: I read Alastair McGrath’s book The Dawkins Delusion, and I just wondered if you admit to any of the mistakes you made in hindsight. And also how you feel about being labelled an atheist fundamentalist?
RD: When you say mistakes, what are you thinking of?
AQ: Just stuff you’ve taken from the internet, historical, factual, theological mistakes…
RD: I’ve no doubt I’ve made a few mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, and I’ve no doubt you can find some. But I don’t think they are very fundamental ones. As for being called a fundamentalist, I repudiate that utterly. A fundamentalist is someone who absolutely knows what’s right because it’s written in a holy book. I don’t know what’s right because it’s written in a holy book. I know what the evidence supports and I know that if new evidence was to come in that supported some other point of view I would change my mind in a heartbeat. That is not what a fundamentalist does.
AQ: If you actually read a lot of what Christ said, isn’t it just as challenging as what Nietzsche said 150 years ago?
RH: I think one of the astonishing things about Jesus was precisely his attitude to the way that institutions and ideas idolatrise themselves. The whole point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that it was not about religious hypocrisy, it was about religious righteousness. The guys that passed the man who had fallen among thieves did it for valid religious reasons, and what Jesus was saying was if you hold your religion too intensely, it gets in the way of your neighbour. Compassion trumps the fact that you can’t touch that guy because your religion tells you he might be unclean – and if he’s dead he’s certainly unclean. And that to me is the most radical dissolving of all purely doctrinal understandings of religion.
To me Christianity is not a noun, it’s a verb. It’s not a faith that you can hold in any abstract way, it’s a journey, it’s a way of being, a way of travelling. And it means discarding a lot of stuff, because constantly you accrue phony ideas and idolatries, hatreds and cruelties. It took Christianity 2,000 years to drop its wrong attitudes towards women, and it’s now wrestling with its attitudes towards gays. It seems to me you’re absolutely right that Nietzsche and Jesus challenge that kind of understanding.
AQ: You described yourself rather splendidly as a Buddhist Quaker Anglo-catholic Agnostic. But if I picked you up correctly you also said you don’t really believe in a supernatural God. I’m just wondering in what sense you would say you’re not an atheist?
RH: I’m not an atheist because I don’t have certainty. Atheism it seems to me has as much certainty as theism, and I mistrust certainty. Certainties crucify people. And I think that the more doubt and love that there is in the world, the more human plenitude and good feeling there will be. Maybe I’m not a Christian, I’m not particularly interested in the label. But I do still want to be a member of that family because I love much of what it stands for. I see it as a mad mixture of people, some doubters, some believing things that I can’t… I was so horrified by the last Lambeth Conference in 1998, which turned into a kind of hate-fest against gay people, that I walked away for a bit, gave up the Bishopric, and took a kind of sabbatical from religion. But then I said to myself: this still holds important truths and values for me. I refuse to exile myself totally and I gradually found my way back, in a way that I find has a kind of conscientious integrity. I think the mistake that a lot of religions make is that they make these absolute truth claims that they think they have to force other people to believe. I’m not doing any of that. I’m simply being odd, eccentric me.
AQ: Can you explain how life began?
RD: The origin of life, we don’t know how it happened, but we know the kind of thing that happened. It was the origin of the first genetic molecule that made copies of itself. And nobody knows how that came about, it was a phenomenon of chemistry, and chemists are working on trying to find possible models of how that might have happened, so far without success. It may have been a very, very, very improbable event indeed. There are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, probably, and we don’t know whether life originated on more than just this one. If life originated only on one planet then the kind of event we’re looking for as the origin of life would be so improbable as to go far beyond what we already would call impossible. But with hindsight, because we are here, we have a perfectly satisfying explanation for our existence. As a matter of fact I don’t think it was that improbable, which is exactly the same as to say I believe there is life on many planets all around the universe – but I still don’t know how it came about. It may be that we’ll never know, though I suspect we’ll probably get rather better theories than we have at present.
AQ: What’s your opinion of Pascal’s wager?
RH: Pascal’s wager is betting on the possibility of God and it goes like this: if you win, you win everything, and if you lose, there’s nothing to lose. So bet on the possibility of God. I prefer another existentialist approach which says that if it is nothingness that awaits us, then let us so live that it will be an unjust fate. I quite like that. I choose to live as though there were that which we call God and it were all loving and all compassionate. There’s a certain kind of existentialist romantic thing in that. In a sense it’s the last ditch that a theist can be put into because evidence does not affect it. You simply choose, even against the evidence, because you’d rather be gloriously wrong than meanly right. A bit of me still gets the old claymore out and pops into that ditch.
RD: But what if you take Pascal’s Wager and get to heaven and discover it’s not the God you thought it was, but Baal? You bet on the wrong God! And what makes you think that what God really wants you to do is believe in him? Maybe what God really wants is for you to be good or honest or sincere or kind. Why do we have this obsession with the idea that God wants you to believe in him? Why not just say I don’t necessarily believe in God one way or the other, but I’m going to be a really good person? Wouldn’t that be a better way of implementing Pascal’s wager?
1 http://richarddawkins.net/article,20,Atheists-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins
This is an edited version of a public conversation held at this year’s Edinburgh International Science Festival. See www.sciencefestival.co.uk.
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