Urgent need for atheists and believers to unite

Prof Richard Dawkins currently holds the chair for the Public Understanding of Science. I wonder what the reaction would be if the Hungarian philanthropist who funds this department had instead endowed a chair for the Public Understanding of Religion, and the professor involved spent most of his time slagging off scientists and the scientific method. His tenure would be remarkably short.

Yet the fact that Prof Dawkins could be more accurately described as the professor for public attack on religion is apparently perfectly acceptable. Prof Dawkins does not just have a problem with extremists and fundamentalists.

No, it is the moderates who incubate the virus that led among other things to the events of September 11th, 2001, by their insistence on believing things that cannot be proven by science, and which therefore do not exist.

In fact, the professor appears to have abandoned scientific research entirely, in order to devote himself to the eradication of this bizarre virus, which is responsible, apparently, for most of the ills of the world.

Prof Dawkins is a man with a mission, and his evangelical zeal knows no bounds. Teaching a child religious beliefs is child abuse, and he longs for the day when no child will have to suffer this iniquity. When religious people are cruel, or go to war, it is because of their beliefs, not because of a betrayal of their beliefs. Only a belief in science will lead us to the light.

It seems to have escaped his attention that it was scientists and physicians who in the Nazi death camps injected men, women and children with typhus, malaria and tetanus, who froze them to death in hypothermia experiments, and who made furniture out of human skin and bones.

Stalin was scarcely motivated by religion when he eliminated millions. No, but according to Dawkins and his American counterpart, Sam Harris, Stalin and Hitler represented ideologies that had become like a religion. Nice one, that.

Religious people commit atrocities because they are religious. Non-religious people commit atrocities because their belief system has become akin to a religion. Either way, religion or religion-like activities are at fault.

The professor is beginning to seriously annoy other non-believers, who think that he is giving atheism a bad name by his arrogance and intolerance, not to mention ignorance.

In a recent piece in New Republic, James Wood, himself an atheist, quietly takes apart some of Dawkins favourite themes. For example, Dawkins, borrowing from Bertrand Russell, often refers to belief in God as akin to belief in a celestial teapot orbiting the sun. Belief in God is like belief in the mythical teapot - impossible to disprove but pointless and nonsensical.

Wood, as an atheist, points out wearily that belief in an orbiting teapot is not at all like belief in God, because teapots lack the mystical grandeur of the God idea. Even though he himself no longer believes, he sees that belief in God is infinitely different to belief in a teapot, which as yet has never been worshipped.

Dawkins does not believe that it is necessary to know anything about religion in order to knock it, no more than one need know anything about the beliefs of those who believe in fairies. This leads him to make some interesting statements in his latest book, The God Delusion. In it, he professes a fondness for Jesus, and says that "the Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His 'turn the other cheek' anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by 2,000 years."

Yes, that would be the Gandhi who said, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

As a Hindu, Gandhi openly acknowledged the influence of Jesus on his beliefs. Martin Luther King Jnr was a devout Christian which makes Dawkins' statement that Jesus anticipated him by 2,000 years not just tautological but almost comical.

Yet there is little point in a believer like myself, even one who stumbles along in the dark most of the time, slagging off Dawkins and other militant atheists in turn. If Christians made a better job of living out our beliefs, we would not make such easy targets.

Instead, if it is not too offensive to invoke Christmas as an excuse, might I suggest that in the spirit of the British and German soldiers who left their foxholes at Christmas to meet in a celebration of common humanity, that atheists and believers would do well to stop sniping at each other and unite instead in a common cause. It would be better again, if unlike in 1914, hostilities did not resume almost immediately.

Dawkins writes lyrically about the wonder and awe generated by the majesty of the universe. It is possible to feel that awe both as a believer and an atheist. Last August, the eminent Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, winner of the National Medal for Science and an atheist, wrote an open letter to an imagined southern Baptist pastor, and the larger evangelical community.

Unlike Dawkins, he greets this imaginary interlocutor with respect. "You and I are both humanists in the broadest sense: Human welfare is at the centre of our thought. So forget our disagreements, I say, and let us meet on common ground." His urgent concern is to save what he calls "the Creation".

He points out that if destructive human activities continue at their present rate, half the species of plants and animals on earth could either be gone or fated for extinction by the end of the century.

He goes on to say that religion and science are the two most powerful forces in the world today, and especially in the United States. "If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem might soon be solved."

From a Christian perspective, Fr Sean McDonagh in his book Climate Change - A Challenge To Us All makes a similar plea to the churches to make care for the earth a top priority.

As a moral question, it could not be more urgent. Believers and atheists taking potshots at each other might be vaguely intellectually stimulating, but unless we wish this planet to become as barren as Russell's celestial teapot, it is an indulgence that neither side can afford.