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Wednesday 8 October 2008

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

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

‘I agree with you that I have not sufficiently explained that. This gap, this absence — it could be a psychological weakness of the human mind. I did have one chapter at the end, but I think I didn’t do it justice, from your point of view. If I were to, then I wouldn’t have any trouble filling it — it might be science, it might be human love. Relationships, something like that.’

Relationships indeed. Richard has handily provided a new bunch of commandments to replace those which Moses handed down to the rest of us. But they are terribly ephemeral things, unintentionally hilarious — the sort of stuff that might be dreamed up by Polly Toynbee after someone had slipped an ecstasy tablet in her San Pellegrino after a long day in the Guardian offices. ‘Have an enjoyable sexual relationship with someone of either gender but try not to hurt anyone while doing so’ — that sort of thing. They have no resonance, not the slightest suggestion that they might outlast even our current generation, never mind provide us with a template for 2,000 years.

‘I’m astonished you think it a good thing, longevity,’ Dawkins counters, ‘You say that my commandments are here today and gone tomorrow — but that’s a good thing and that’s one of the points I am trying to make. That there is a steadily shifting moral zeitgeist.’

But all this leaves you with a sort of damp and most unconvincing historical relativism. By Dawkins’s argument, the moral imperatives of 500 years ago were, de facto, right then — and wrong now. In the end, it leaves you without a real sense of right and wrong, merely a constantly shifting plane — and thus open to the malefactions of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot. But of course, as I concede to Dawkins, the simple fact that Christianity has given us a moral code which has, to an extent, lasted 2,000 years is no reason to believe in a divinity. It is, though, a very valid reason to doubt ourselves — as the historical evidence would attest.

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