A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God

9 December 2006

An unlikely bestseller championing atheism will fill many stockings this Christmas. Rod Liddle meets its author, Richard Dawkins, and asks if his opposition to religion is as devout and credulous as the faith he attacks so passionately

‘Right. I don’t think you can disprove God. But I don’t think you can disprove God as you can’t disprove fairies and unicorns. It’s a kind of scientific purism that makes me say I can’t be an absolute 100 per cent atheist.’

‘But, to read your book, you are 100 per cent, aren’t you?’

‘No. Some of my friends and colleagues would say that [for them] it’s 100 per cent.’

Well, I counter, having read the book: it’s 100 per cent for you, too; it burns through on every page. Otherwise the acres of rhetoric would have been displaced by pure, disinterested science.

‘I think there is some truth in that. I think there are times when one has to resort to rhetoric. For a lot of people, religion is a question of feeling rather than rationality.’

But rhetoric is a device which must necessarily be in opposition to scientific discourse; in other words, Dawkins appropriates the tools of the believer when he feels that it is expedient to do so — and hang the science. But still, let’s move on. By far the weakest part of The God Delusion is when Dawkins attempts to explain why atheistic regimes have far outdone religious regimes in their murderousness, their inhumanity. I asked Dawkins when he would leave the god-botherers alone, and he responded by saying, ‘When they leave the rest of the world alone. When they leave children alone, stop fighting each other and endangering the rest of us.’ Which is fair enough, but the record of those regimes which presciently forsook religion is far, far worse.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I think that it is incidental that Stalin was an atheist. I don’t think that Hitler was. Stalin did his deeds in the name of a kind of Marxism, and you can argue as to whether that’s a religion or not.’

Isn’t that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves?