The Trouble with Richard Dawkins

I have to thank Rod Liddle, that darling of the Graunistas for taking the time to appear on my telly last night. In The Trouble With Atheism the Rodster takes a big agnostic stick and gives the godless a good provocative poking. His thesis is that for all contemporary atheism’s courting of reason and logic, it is beginning to resemble the religions it so despises. Atheists are shown to be haughty, dogmatic, dismissive and contemptuous. Atheism is demonstrated to have its own sacred texts and places of worship. And like all religions it has its fundamentalist zealots.

He does have a point. One of Liddle's main protagonists is celebrity scientist and page 7 atheist pin up Richard Dawkins, whose hyped best seller is billed as giving religion both barrels. Now, I haven’t read The God Delusion nor am I likely to after seeing its contents laid bare in forests of book reviews and a 3-part advert/C4 documentary. From what I can gather he argues science is superior to religion because the latter relies on mystery, faith and dogma over investigation, reasoned argument and evidence. Okay, no problems there. He goes on to make the obvious point that religion excuses people to be beastly to one another and justifies all manner of violence toward the unbelievers. Again, an incontrovertible point. But it’s when he extends his argument that he runs into trouble.

It essentially boils down to this. He cannot understand why religious people cannot see through superstition when he, his mates and a smug band of Dawkins groupies can. By way of an explanation he likens religion to viruses. These ‘memes’ gain an echo down the centuries because they offer the promise of a purpose to existence and a life beyond death. This, despite protestations to the contrary, implies atheists are more logical and have greater strength of character than their theist brethren because they can face down oblivion. But the flipside is he holds out the hope that people can be won away from religion by force of debate and reason.

Unfortunately he falls into the familiar trap of unreflective thinking. Despite his atheism and scientific writings on evolution, philosophically his position is simplistically materialist and thoroughly idealist. On the one level Dawkins accepts Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that “the world is all that is the case” but for him this remains a contemplative position. This might be enough to see him through his studies of genetics but an abstract nod to a godless world is unsuited for understanding the sensuous and active world in which we live. We cannot grasp the pull of religious ideas without simultaneously being aware of the real, historical existence of the people who adhere to them. It is not enough to suggest religion speaks to universal human concerns. That cannot begin to explain why, for example, the Palestinian militant is more likely to adopt fundamentalist Islam than the Orthodox Judaism of the Israeli settler. But also mundane everyday life is, for the overwhelming majority, profoundly alienating. Those who sell their labour power for a wage or a salary give themselves over to a power outside themselves for a set period of time, which shoe-horns them into a circumscribed role, directs their pace of work and then denies them access to the full fruits of their labour. When society is subordinated to the demands of a blind alien power, when people are atomised, individuated and powerless, the belief we are but feathers buffeted by a divine wind can make more sense than salvation lying in our own self-activity as beings capable of consciously making history.

But this was the great unsaid in The Trouble With Atheism and Dawkins' assault on religion. Conceding the demise of religion in itself wouldn't necessarily lead to a more peaceful world. Dawkins and Liddle both blame war and destruction on that old canard human nature. Not once do they entertain the possibility that our "nature" is intimately bound up with the characteristics of this society, characteristics that arise from concrete historical processes that at the same time are made by social relationships dependent on and independent of human activity. In fact it's hardly surprising that, given their agreement on this point, when Liddle does venture into pop sociology, the crimes of Stalinism and fascism are laid at atheism's door. The very strong implication is despite its faults and appalling record religion sacralises human life: strip that away and raw human nature sets us on the path to the gulag and gas chamber.

For all Dawkins' reason and logic his atheism alibies capitalism. His 'scientific' standpoint is only materialist in the sense that our immutably destructive human nature is hard wired into our genes. Substitute this explanation for The Fall and in essence you have the same argument. Bourgeois materialism and religious idealism are 2 sides of the same capitalist coin. Both justify the order of things that sustain them and therefore have to deny the possibility of change. But because Marxism fundamentally breaks with these views it sees capitalism for what it is - an antiquated system whose decomposition threatens our survival as a species. Marxism not only affirms our capacity to build a new society, but demands it.