Evolution of a delusion

In his new book, prominent atheist Richard Dawkins outlines why he sees religious faith as a dangerous force and tries to explain its persistence in spite of evidence that God does not exist. Aengus Collins asks him whether there are any positive aspects to religion

Richard Dawkins's new book, The God Delusion, is the culmination of many years of anti-religious writing. It sets out the author's reasons for believing with almost total certainty that God does not exist, his account of the evolutionary origins of religion, and the dangers he believes religious faith presents. His stated purpose in writing the book is to woo believers over to his atheist position. I say "woo", but this is far from being a charm offensive. By page five, he is referring to the devout as "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads".

The stridency with which Dawkins writes about religion is striking. He is surely one of the finest living writers in the English language. His works on evolution are sublime both for the rigour and clarity of their arguments and for the seemingly effortless fluidity of their prose. Yet when he writes about religion, the careful building of theory and marshalling of evidence curiously give way to something else, which on occasion puts one in mind of a demolition derby. I meet Dawkins at his Oxford home on a beautifully sunny autumn day and ask him whether the voice he adopts when writing about religion isn't counter-productive. Wouldn't a more conciliatory tone be prudent?

"Perhaps that would have been a tactically sensible way of doing it," he says, "but it wasn't my way. That's an approach which [ philosopher and fellow Darwinian and atheist] Daniel Dennett took with Breaking the Spell earlier this year, where he was clearly trying to be conciliatory and appeasing towards the people you're talking about. But I don't know how much he succeeded - if you look at the responses, people don't seem to have been appeased very much.

"Some of the people who read my book will be turned right off by it. They will hurl it across the room and that will be it. But I think there may be quite a few who enjoy the polemical style and who actually welcome as a breath of fresh air a different way of thinking."

At the heart of The God Delusion is the claim that God does not exist. In the early chapters Dawkins swiftly rejects a number of familiar arguments in favour of God's existence, before turning to consider at length what he says is currently the most popular such argument - the argument from design, which states that life is so complex only God could have created it.

Dawkins rejects this outright, and responds to it with a Darwinian account of how evolution by natural selection enabled the complexity of life on earth to develop in achingly slow stages from the simplest of beginnings. Whereas this evolutionary account succeeds in providing a simple explanation for complex phenomena, he says, religious accounts succeed only in replacing one complexity in need of explanation (life on earth) with another (a God capable of creating life on earth).

There are some scientists who hold that evolution is compatible with religious belief. Dawkins is not one of them. To believe simultaneously both in evolution and in the existence of a supernatural God, he says, requires a degree of intellectual compartmentalisation that is beyond him.

"There are people who muddle along, and that's fine if they haven't really thought either of those positions through very thoroughly," he says. "But there are others who know that it's contradictory and still somehow manage to hold the two simultaneously. That, I can't understand. It's a feat of psychological gymnastics which, like the splits, I'm not capable of doing. These are people like the American geologist I quote in the book, Kurt Wise, who says in effect: 'Even if all the evidence, every single jot of it, was to the contrary, I would still believe that the earth was only 6,000 years old, because that's what scripture says.' And he knows perfectly well that every bit of evidence does contradict it, and yet he's holding those contradictory beliefs. I couldn't do it."

Dawkins is still best known for his first book, The Selfish Gene, which was published in 1976. It is frequently misunderstood, its title contributing to the misconception that Darwinians in general - and Dawkins in particular - view human beings as inherently selfish and wholly determined by their genes. As it happens, the book is more about altruism than selfishness, and Dawkins goes to considerable lengths to make clear that what makes humans unique on earth is precisely their ability to rebel against their genes.

DAWKINS TOUCHES ON religion in The Selfish Gene in a still-controversial chapter that introduces the word "meme" as a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene. He points to the "faith meme" as an example - a component of religion he defines as blind trust even in the teeth of contradictory evidence. Such a meme is successful, he writes, because it is self-reinforcing. Once accepted by an individual, faith is difficult to dislodge because it discourages rational inquiry.

"Faith is potentially dangerous because it doesn't require justification," Dawkins explains. "You simply retreat and say: 'You can't question that, that's my faith.' If you hold a political philosophy, like socialism or capitalism, you can be expected to justify it and defend it and give reasons why you believe it. But faith is, more or less by definition, immune to that. And in extreme cases, that can be used to justify terrible deeds because the person carrying them out is absolutely convinced he's right."

But if faith and the other memes that make up religion are as perverse as Dawkins believes them to be, then why would anyone succumb to them in the first place? This is a question Dawkins takes up in The God Delusion, where he argues that religion is an unfortunate by-product of an otherwise valuable evolutionary inheritance.

Specifically, he suggests that religion piggybacks on a rule of thumb that natural selection has hard-wired into our childhood brains: "trust your elders without question". Childhood learning and safety are facilitated by this rule, but the trust it creates is indiscriminate. The child has no way of filtering the advice received and is therefore as likely to take the faith meme on board as, for instance, a warning not to stray too close to the cliff's edge.

Dawkins is a generous, engaging conversationalist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in person he seems less strident on religion than he does in writing. There's a sense of pragmatism that's largely absent from the polemics of The God Delusion. On the page, it's as if he sets the bar high and aims for a world in which everyone would come around to his atheist world-view. In conversation, one is reminded that, like the rest of us, he lives day by day in a real world that remains shot through with religion at many levels. And at one of those levels, the cultural, there's a hint that, even for Dawkins, a world without religious influence might be a drabber place.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins recalls appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and being greeted with bemusement for his selection of Bach's deeply religious St Matthew Passion as one of his eight castaway recordings. He makes the point that the religious themes of such works are accidental to their greatness. And there is no reason to assume, he goes on, that had circumstances permitted Beethoven to write a Mesozoic symphony, or Haydn an evolution oratorio, those works would be any less grand than the works the two composers did in fact produce.

THIS IS AN interesting hypothesis, but I suggest to him that he brushes over the depth and breadth of the themes that religion offers to artists. He starts to formulate a response to this, but then decides that I'm making too much of a minor point here. The quality of a piece of art is independent of the artist's religious views and of the religiousness or otherwise of the subject matter.

"I love Yeats," he says, by way of illustration, "even though he had all these bonkers ideas about fairies and things. I think this may be an instance of the kind of compartmentalisation we spoke of earlier. It's a bit like reading fiction, isn't it? You don't have to believe the characters are real in order to appreciate it."

True, but this takes us into interesting territory. In his writings, Dawkins seems dismissive of the idea that religion should be valued for the meaning it offers to believers. His view seems to be that such meaning is hardly worth having if the price to be paid for it is falsehood. Yet talking here about art and literature, he seems untroubled by the idea of meaning and life affirmation being based upon texts that are untrue. Even if he were to succeed with The God Delusion - that is, even if all those readers who pick up the book as believers were to put it down again as atheists - might there not then still be a role in Dawkins's world-view for religion as a cultural tradition? Whatever the merits of its claims to truth, might not religion remain of value as a repository of music, art, literature and architecture, not to mention centuries of thought about what it is to be human?

"I think there's a lot in that," he says of this idea of religion stripped of belief. "I could be persuaded to get into that. The English language of the early 17th century sounds astonishingly beautiful to us. It's the time of Shakespeare, the Cranmer prayer book, the King James Bible. I don't know how it sounds in original Hebrew or Greek, but it sounds terrific in the English of that time. It's an interesting point - I would be sad if all that were lost. Religion does have great aesthetic value, and I would be sad," he says, before adding in conclusion, "but of course I'm also sad when people believe in it literally."

The God Delusion is published by Bantam Press, £20 in UK