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

‘Because we’ve got very big brains. I mean ...no other animal practises contraception, for example.’

‘But,’ I say to him, ‘there is no reason why the complexity and size of our brains should lead us to do something which is precisely what our genes do not wish us to do, is there?’ It would surely be the reverse: it is perfectly counter-Darwinian.

‘Yes. But it happens to be true. Darwinian selection couldn’t possibly ever have favoured contraception. That’s simply a demonstration that it’s possible to decide to do other noble things, like being nice....’ Does that sound very scientific to you? It doesn’t to me. It sounds horribly like a devout believer — a believer in non-belief, except when it comes to Darwinism — rather ineffectually attempting to dig himself out of a hole.

At the end, as we sip our coffee in this agreeable secular house, I ask Richard Dawkins if he has ever had a religious experience, i.e., something more profound than signing up to God because Elvis had done so before. ‘No,’ he says.

‘What would convince you?’

He looks askance for a moment. ‘Of a supernatural being?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well.’ He has a think. ‘I suppose a large-scale miracle which could not have been engineered by a conjuror. But I, um, find it hard to imagine exactly what that might be,’ he concludes.

The question, I suspect, has never even occurred to him. It is one of those possibilities to which he is not — being human and fallible, and thus wedded to a certain train of thought and resistant to being diverged from it — wholly open.

Richard Dawkins’s Commandments

1. Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.

2. Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.

3. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate science, and how to disagree with you.

4. Value the future of things on a timescale longer than your own.

The Trouble With Atheism is being shown on Channel 4 on 18 December.