4 Cultural Darwinism? The Curious "Science" of Memetics

The Selfish Gene:

A Darwinian View of

the World

Why are things the way they are? And what does this tell us about the meaning of life? These two questions, naive yet profound, have played a decisive role in shaping Western thinking about the world. From the beginning of human civilization, people have wondered what explanation might be offered for the structures of the world - like the stars in the night sky, natural wonders such as a rainbow, and the mysterious behavior of living beings. Not only do these wonders evoke a sense of awe; they also call out for explanation.

The earliest Greek philosophers - the "pre-Socratics" - argued endlessly about the nature of the world, and how it came to be as it is. They insisted that the universe was rationally constructed, and that it could therefore be understood through the right use of human reason and argument. Human beings had the ability to make sense of the universe. Socrates took this line of thought further, identifying a link between the way the universe was constructed and the best way for human beings to live. To reflect on the nature of the universe was to gain insights into the nature of the "good life" - the best and most authentic way of living. Reflecting on the clues provided in the structuring of the world thus leads to an understanding of our identity and destiny.

For many, the answer lay in the divine origins of the world - the idea that, in some way, the world has been ordered or constructed. Many have found this idea to be spiritually attractive and intellectually satisfying. Isaac Newton comes to mind. So does John Polkinghorne, who famously resigned the Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University in 1979 in order to study Christian theology. For Richard Dawkins, however, the advent of Charles Darwin has shown this up as "cosmic sentimentality," "saccharine false purpose," which natural science has a moral mission to purge and debunk. Such naive beliefs, he argues, might have been understandable before Darwin came along. But not now. Darwin has changed everything. Newton would be an atheist if he had been born after Darwin. Before Darwin, atheism was just one among many religious possibilities; now, it is the only serious option for a thinking, honest, and scientifically-informed person. To believe in God nowadays is to be "hoodwink'd with faery fancy."

Once upon a time such religious beliefs would have been understandable, perhaps even forgivable. But not now. Humanity was once an infant. Now, we have grown up, and discarded infantile explanations. And Darwin is the one who marks that decisive point of transition. Intellectual history is thus divided into two epochs: before Darwin, and after Darwin. As James Watson, the Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA put it, "Charles Darwin will eventually be seen as a far more influential figure in the history of human thought than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed."

But why Darwin? Why not Karl Marx? Or Sigmund Freud? Each of these is regularly proposed as having brought about an intellectual earthquake, shattering prevailing assumptions and ushering in radical new ways of thinking which lead to the bifurcation of human thought. The theories of biological evolution, historical materialism, and psychoanalysis have all been proposed as defining the contours of humanity come of age. All, interestingly, have been linked with atheism, the movement that the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hoped would prove to be an intellectual and political liberator. So why Darwin? To ask this question is to open up the issues which so deeply concern Dawkins, and which have such wider implications.

Introducing Dawkins

But first, let us introduce Dawkins. Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya on March 26, 1941, the son of Clinton John and Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins. His religious background, he tells us, was traditional Anglicanism, although there are hints that he was intrigued in his youth by the ideas of the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin concerning the relation of evolution and spirituality.'

After attending Oundle School, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read zoology, in 1959. After graduating in 1962, he went on to undertake research in Oxford University's department of zoology under the supervision of Professor Niko Tinbergen (1907-88), joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for 1973.

Tinbergen and his Austrian colleague Konrad Lorenz (190389) pioneered ethology - the study of whole patterns of animal behavior in natural environments, stressing the analysis of adaptation and the evolution of patterns. Although Lorenz may be argued to have laid the conceptual foundations for the discipline in the 1930s, Tinbergen's patient and detailed observational work is widely credited with its later conceptual and practical development, especially through his landmark work The Study of Instinct (1951).2 Dawkins' doctoral thesis, entitled "Selective Pecking in the Domestic Chick," stands firmly within this tradition. Its subject was tight and well defined: what mechanism may be proposed to account for the way in which a chick pecks at the stimuli around it?

Dawkins relates how his research was inspired by a lecture he had heard from Professor N. S. Sutherland (1927-98), who left Oxford in 1964 to found the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the recently established University of Sussex. His work focused on developing a "Threshold Model" which might account for a detailed series of experimental observations concerning the timing and orientation of chick pecks at small hemispherical spots, presented in pairs. His data was processed using an Eliot 803 machine - an early computer, which relied on punched tape for its data. The thesis was submitted in June 1966, and accepted later that year.

Plate 1 Richard Dawkins (born 1941) © Rex Features

Dawkins then spent a year doing postdoctoral research, along with some lecturing in the department of zoology. Tinbergen was on sabbatical leave during the academic year 1966-7, and asked Dawkins to cover some of his lectures, while at the same time writing up his thesis for publication.' Dawkins' lectures allowed him to explore some aspects of W. D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection, including the question of how certain apparently cooperative forms of behavior arise.' An individual behaves in such a way that the reproductive capacity of another individual is enhanced, even to the detriment of its own selective capacity. The phenomenon may be observed in aspects of the social, parental, and mating behavior of animals. So how could this have evolved?

Dawkins came to the conclusion that the "most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it," was to see the entire process from the perspective of the gene. The genes, for their own good, are "manipulating" and directing the bodies that contain them and carry them about. Throughout his writings, Dawkins has developed the rhetoric of a gene's eye view of things - not simply of the individual, but of the entire living world. Organisms can be reduced to genes, and genes to digital (not analogue) information.

Life is just bytes and bytes of bytes of digital information. Genes are pure information - information that can be encoded, recoded and decoded, without any degradation or change of meaning ... We - and that means all living things - are survival machines programmed to propagate the digital database that did the programming. Darwinism is now seen to be the survival of the survivors at the level of pure, digital, code.'

In effect, Dawkins was arguing that we should extrapolate from Hamilton's theory of kin selection, and apply it to every aspect of social behavior. Animals were to be seen as "machines carrying their instructions around" with them, using their every aspect as "levers of power to propel the genes into the next generation." Because kin groups share the same genes, the sacrifice of an individual may still increase the likelihood of those genes surviving within the gene group as a whole. Dawkins can be regarded as the first, and still the most systematic, ethologist of the gene. It is this central theme which has been so decisive to his way of seeing the world, and we shall explore it in much greater detail presently.

From Oxford, Dawkins went on to become Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, returning to Oxford as Lecturer in Zoology and Fellow of New College in 1970. It was during this time that his most influential and creative works were published, including The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. In 1995 he was appointed to a new academic position at Oxford University, made possible by the generosity of Charles Simonyi, then one of the Microsoft Corporation's foremost software architects, who went on to co-found the Intentional Software Corporation in August 2002. Dawkins was appointed as the first "Charles Simonyi Reader in the Public Understanding of Science."

A further advance in his career took place in 1996, when Oxford University conferred on Dawkins the additional title of "Professor of the Public Understanding of Science," thus saddling Dawkins with the eminent, yet somewhat cumbersome, distinction of being both "Charles Simonyi Reader in the Public Understanding of Science" and "Professor of the Public Understanding of Science." Oxford University recommends that he be styled in a somewhat more simplified manner, as "Simonyi Reader, and Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. "6 He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society - the supreme accolade for a British scientist - in May 2001.

So where shall we begin to explore the ideas that give Dawkins such animation? Perhaps the best place is with Charles Darwin himself, who laid the foundations for Dawkins' approach, and the worldview he constructed as a result.

The New Approach: Charles Darwin

The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) is rightly regarded as a landmark in nineteenth-century science. On December 27, 1831, HMS Beagle set out from the southern English port of Plymouth on a voyage that lasted almost five years. Its mission was to complete a survey of the southern coasts of South America, and afterwards to circumnavigate the globe. The small ship's naturalist was Charles Darwin (180982). During the voyage, Darwin noted some aspects of the plant and animal life of South America, particularly the Galapagos Islands and Tierra del Fuego, which seemed to him to require explanation, yet which were not satisfactorily accounted for by existing theories. The opening words of Origin of Species set out the riddle that he was determined to solve:

When on board HMS Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.

One popular account of the origin of species, widely supported by the religious and academic establishment of the early nineteenth century, held that God had somehow created everything more or less as we now see it. The success of the view owed much to the influence of William Paley (1743-1805), archdeacon of Carlisle, who compared God to one of the mechanical geniuses of the Industrial Revolution. God had directly created the world in all its intricacy. We shall explore the origins and influence of Paley's thinking in the next chapter; at this stage, we need merely note that Paley was of the view that God had constructed - Paley prefers the word "contrived" - the world in its finished form, as we now know it. The idea of any kind of development seemed impossible to him. Did a watchmaker leave his work unfinished? Certainly not!

Darwin knew of Paley's views, and initially found them persuasive. However, his observations on the Beagle raised some questions. On his return, Darwin set out to develop a more satisfying explanation of his own observations and those of others. Although Darwin appears to have hit on the basic idea of evolution through natural selection by 1842, he was not ready to publish. Such a radical theory would require massive observational evidence to be marshaled in its support.

Some earlier works advocating the evolution of species - most notably, Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) - were so incompetent scientifically that they threatened to discredit the ideas that they tried to advance.' Thomas H. Huxley, who would later champion Darwin's theory, damned the book as a "once attractive and still notorious work of fiction," and its author as one of "those who ... indulge in science at second-hand and dispense totally with logic." Chambers was a publisher, not a scientist, and was a little naive at points - for example, in taking seriously a highly improbable report that living creatures had resulted from passing electric currents through potassium ferrocyanate solution.

As a result of Chambers' muddying of the waters, there was now no way that a radical new theory of biological origins could be launched without overwhelming documentation, guaranteed to disarm its critics through its sheer weight of data. Darwin's Origin of Species would offer the world both evidence of biological evolution, and an explanation of its mechanism. On his return to England, Darwin set about building up his repository of evidence.

Four features of the natural world seemed to Darwin to require particularly close attention, in the light of problems and shortcomings with existing explanations.

1 The forms of certain living creatures seemed to be adapted to their specific needs. Paley's theory proposed that these creatures were individually designed by God with those needs in mind. Darwin increasingly regarded this as a clumsy explanation.

2 Some species were known to have died out altogether - to have become extinct. This fact had been known before Darwin, and was often explained on the basis of "catastrophe" theories, such as a "universal flood," as suggested by the biblical account of Noah.

3 Darwin's research voyage on the Beagle had persuaded him of the uneven geographical distribution of life forms throughout the world. In particular, Darwin was impressed by the peculiarities of island populations.

4 Many creatures possess "rudimentary structures," which have no apparent or predictable function - such as the nipples of male mammals, the rudiments of a pelvis and hind limbs in snakes, and wings on many flightless birds. How might these be explained on the basis of Paley's theory, which stressed the importance of the individual design of species? Why should God design redundancies?

These aspects of the natural order could all be accounted for by Paley's theory. Yet the explanations offered seemed unduly cumbersome and strained. What was originally a relatively neat and elegant theory began to crumble under the weight of accumulated difficulties and tensions. There had to be a better explanation. Darwin offered a wealth of evidence in support of the idea of biological evolution, and proposed a mechanism by which it might work: natural selection.

The Origin of Species sets out with great care why the idea of "natural selection" is the best mechanism to explain how the evolution of species took place, and how it is to be understood. The key point is that natural selection is proposed as nature's analogue to the process of "artificial selection" in stockbreeding. Darwin was familiar with these issues, especially as they related to the breeding of pigeons.' The first chapter of the Origin of Species therefore considers "variation under domestication" - that is, the way in which domestic plants and animals are bred by agriculturists. Darwin notes how selective breeding allows farmers to create animals or plants with particularly desirable traits. Variations develop in successive generations through this process of breeding, and these can be exploited to bring about inherited characteristics which are regarded as being of particular value by the breeder. In the second chapter, Darwin introduces the key notions of the "struggle for survival" and "natural selection" to account for what may be observed in both the fossil records and the present natural world.

Darwin then argues that this process of "domestic selection" or "artificial selection" offers a model for a mechanism for what happens in nature. "Variation under domestication" is presented as an analogue of "variation under nature." A process of "natural selection" is argued to occur within the natural order which is analogous to a well-known process, familiar to English stockbreeders and horticulturists: "As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect?"

Plate 2 Charles Darwin (1809-82) © Bettmann/CORBIS

Darwin's theory had considerable explanatory force - a point recognized by many at the time, even those who were anxious about the implications of his ideas for the place of humanity within nature. Yet there was a serious problem with the theory. How did nature "remember" and "transmit" these new developments? How could a rising generation "inherit" the traits of its predecessor? What mechanism could be proposed by which these new developments could be passed on to future generations? Darwin's contemporaries generally believed that characteristics of the parents were "blended" when they were passed to the offspring. But if this was the case, how could a single mutation be spread throughout a species? It would be diluted to the point of insignificance, like a drop of ink in a bucket of water. It seemed that Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis was in genetic difficulties. Variation would simply become diluted. A new trait would be like a teaspoon of white paint falling into a vat of black treacle: it would vanish from sight.

Darwin was fully aware of the need for a comprehensive account of the mechanics of inheritance. The theory he developed (known as "pangenesis") was based on hypothetical "gemmules" - minute particles which somehow determine all characteristics of the organism.' These "gemmules" had never been observed; nevertheless, Darwin argued that it was necessary to propose their existence to make sense of the observational data at his disposal. Each and every cell of an organism, and even parts of cells, was understood to produce gemmules of a specific type corresponding to the cell or cell part. These are able to circulate throughout the body and enter the reproductive system. Every sperm and egg contains these hypothetical gemmules, and are thus transmitted to the next generation. It was an ingenious solution; yet it was not right.10 Darwin's theory faltered, lacking a plausible theory of genetics.

The Mechanics of Inheritance: Mendel and Genetics

Unknown to Darwin, the issues that he was finding so troublesome were being investigated at that time in a quiet monastery garden in central Europe. Gregor Mendel (1822-84) was a monk who entered the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in the Austrian town of Briinn (now the Czech town of Brno) during his twenties. His monastic superiors were impressed with his enthusiasm but not his existing levels of education. They sent him to the University of Vienna for further study (1851-3), during which time he specialized in physics, chemistry, zoology, and botany. After returning to the monastery, he taught in a local school, and conducted some experiments in the monastery garden. He had been encouraged by both his teachers at the University of Vienna and the Abbot of his monastery to explore his interest in hybridization in plant populations. In effect, Mendel studied the heredity of specific characteristics as they were passed on from parent plants to their offspring. These experiments came to an end when he was elected Abbot of the monastery in 1868, and faced new administrative responsibilities.

Plate 3 Gregor Mendel (1822-84) © Science Photo Library

Mendel's experiments involved growing something like 28,000 pea plants over the period 1856-63 and observing how characteristics were transmitted from one generation to the next. He chose to focus on seven easily determined characteristics of his peas. Two of the best known of these are the color of their flowers (purple or white?) and the color of their seeds (yellow or green?). As he observed the patterns of inheritance of these characteristics, Mendel noticed some significant recurring features. Because he used so many plants and recorded his findings so meticulously, his results could be subjected to detailed statistical analysis which disclosed certain regular, recurring mathematical patterns of immense importance. In cross-pollinating plants that either produce yellow or green peas exclusively, Mendel found that the first offspring generation always has yellow peas. However, the following generation consistently has a 3:1 ratio of yellow to green. Certain characteristics, such as yellow seeds, were found to be "dominant" over other "recessive" characteristics, such as green seeds.

From his research, Mendel was able to formulate three fundamental principles which seemed to govern inheritance:

1 The inheritance of each trait - such as the color of the flower or seed - seems to be determined by certain units or factors that are passed on to descendants.

2 An individual plant inherits one such unit from each parent for each of these traits.

3 Traits which do not show up in an individual may nevertheless be passed on to a later generation.

Mendel thus proposed a theory of "particulate inheritance," in which characteristics were determined by discrete units of inheritance that were passed intact from one generation to the next. Adaptive mutations could spread slowly through a species and never be "blended out," as some contemporary theories of genetics held. The evolutionary implications of this were considerable. Darwin's theory of natural selection, building on small mutations over long periods of time, suddenly became much more plausible.

Mendel set out his ideas at the Natural History Society of Brno early in 1865. They were received politely, but not enthusiastically, and were published the following year." Conventional accounts of this affair hold that hardly anyone read the Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereins in Briinn, and the article languished unnoticed, despite having been sent to the libraries of some 120 institutions, including the Royal Society and the Linnean Society in London. Mendel mailed an additional forty reprints of the article to prominent botanists, but they seem to have attracted little attention. It was only in 1900 that Mendel's Laws were rediscovered by Carl Correns in Germany, Hugo de Vries in the Netherlands, and Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg in Austria, and their significance appreciated.12

Yet contemporary German-language sources suggest that Mendel's views were relatively well known at this time,13 being cited in such widely distributed works as the Catalogue of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society (1879), Focke's Die Pflanzen-Mischlinge (1881), and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1881). There is another explanation for why Mendel's views were ignored - namely, that they were seen to be in tension with Darwin's ideas, which were rapidly becoming accepted as scientific orthodoxy. Indeed, such was the hostility towards Mendel within some circles that some even questioned the reliability of his experiments. Mendel, it was argued, would have opposed Darwin's theory of evolution. Could his results be trusted, given this personal agenda?"

There were also some other reasons for expressing caution about Mendel's work. In 1930 the British mathematical biologist Ronald A. Fisher published a landmark work in Darwinian theory, which argued that Mendel's empirical results could have been predicted by an armchair scientist, armed only with "a few very simple assumptions" concerning the Mendelian notion of "factorial inheritance."" Fisher also suggested, on mathematical grounds, that Mendel's reported observations were just too good to be true. Mendel's segregation ratios were far higher than the principles of variation statistics would permit. Since such segregation ratios could occur only very seldom, the integrity of Mendel's ideas would have to be reconsidered. This view is still encountered. As recently as 1991, it was argued that Mendel's "account of his experiments is neither truthful nor scientifically likely," and that "most of the experiments described in Versuche are to be considered fictitious."" However, the basis of such criticisms is generally regarded as discredited, and there seems to be no real case to answer.17

What is particularly interesting, however, is that Mendel possessed a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species,18 and marked the following passage with double lines in the margin. It was clearly of considerable importance to him. In Darwin's original English, this reads:

The slight degree of variability in hybrids from the first cross or in the first generation, in contrast with their extreme variability in the succeeding generations, is a curious fact and deserves attention.19

As Mendel's most distinguished biographer pointed out, this curiosity would not remain mysterious for much longer: "Mendel must have felt some gratification in the thought that his theory was soon to explain this curious fact."" Mendel seems to have appreciated the importance of his own ideas to Darwin. Yet Darwin, as far as can be seen, never knew of Mendel's ideas, nor their far-reaching implications for his own theory.

Dawkins himself points out that things would have been very different if Darwin had had access to these results.21 He suggests that "Mendel perhaps did not realize the significance of his findings, otherwise he might have written to Darwin. ,22 I am inclined to suspect that he did, as the unusually heavy marking of that passage from the Origin of Species indicates, but felt that he had already done enough to publicize his results. After all, he was a monk, and hence perhaps disinclined to any further self-advertisement. In any case, his treatise was listed in several major British English-language sources by 1881.

Mendel had shown that inheritance seemed to be determined by certain "units" or "factors." But what were they? This brings us to the discovery of the gene, an important event in its own right, and of fundamental importance to Dawkins' exposition of a Darwinian worldview.

The Discovery of the Gene

The significance of Mendel's ideas had been appreciated in the English-speaking world by William Bateson, who expended considerable effort in attempting to clarify the principles governing inherited characteristics or traits. By 1905 it was clear that certain traits were linked in some manner, although the pattern of coupling (later to be interpreted as "complete" and "incomplete" coupling) was far from clear. Bateson used a series of vague physical analogies - such as "coupling" and "repulsion" - in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to explain his puzzling observations. It is clear from Bateson's writings that he appears to have thought in terms of certain forces (analogous to magnetic or electrical forces) which were capable of attracting or repelling factors of genetic significance. In the end, the solution was set out in a seminal paper published by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1926. The solution? The gene.

Excited by Mendel's ideas, Morgan had exploited the short reproductive cycle of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to explore the transmission of heritable characteristics. Like Mendel, he chose to focus on some well-defined characteristic traits that occurred in pairs. The most famous of these was the color of the eyes. Noting the patterns of distribution of red and white eyes, Morgan modified Mendel's theory in an important respect: he argued that not all genetic traits are passed on independently, as Mendel had supposed. Instead, some genetic traits seemed to be linked, and are thus inherited together, rather than individually.

Morgan's most important conclusion concerned the "units" or "factors" which transmitted these traits, now known as "genes." It had been known for some time that the division of cells was accompanied by the appearance of tiny rod-shaped, threadlike structures, known as "chromosomes." Some had speculated that these chromosomes might be responsible for transmitting hereditary information. Morgan was able to provide overwhelming evidence that this was indeed the case. The "genes" responsible for transmitting this information were physically located on the chromosomes. As microscopes with increasing resolution were developed, it eventually became possible to confirm this visually.

Morgan's fruit flies had four unusually large chromosomes, which made them particularly easy to study microscopically. He discovered that there were four distinct groups of traits that appeared to be inherited together, corresponding exactly with the number of pairs of chromosomes observed in Drosophila. He also found that one of the four linkage groups had fewer characteristics than the other three. This seemed to tie in with the fact that one of the Drosophila chromosomes was smaller than the other three. While further work on the role in hereditary transmission of the chromosomes in the cell nucleus was still needed, a coherent picture was now beginning to emerge.

The principles of hereditary transmission was now known to be based on the Mendelian notion of discrete hereditary factors ("genes"). What is known as the "neo-Darwinism" synthesis was now possible - Mendelian genetics as the basic explanation of evolutionary change, linked with the process of Darwinian natural selection as determining its outcome. Yet further clarification was needed concerning the molecular basis of genetics. A decisive step forward was made in the United States during World War II - to which we now turn.

The Role of DNA in Genetics

Morgan's discovery of the critical role of the chromosomes in genetics sparked off new interest in their chemical composition. What were these threadlike fibers actually made of? The Swiss biochemist Friedrich Miescher (1844-95) established the chemical composition of cell nuclei in 1868. He determined that they contained two basic components: a nucleic acid (now known as deoxyribonucleic acid, and universally known by its acronym DNA) and a class of proteins (now known as histones). These nucleic acids were not regarded as particularly important biologically. Chemical studies suggested they were not very diverse and they had only a small number of components.

In 1938, Phoebus Levene (1869-1940), working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, discovered that DNA existed as a remarkably long polymer. However, he took the view that this long polymer simply consisted of repeated units of four basic nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C). For this reason, many (including Levene himself) regarded DNA as highly unlikely to have any major role in the transmission of inherited characteristics. It was too simple chemically to encode genetic information. Many believed that the ultimate key to the molecular basis of genetics would lie in proteins found within the chromosomes.

DNA deoxyribonucleic acid. the molecule that contains the genetic code. It consists of two long. twisted chains (a "double helix") made up of nucleotides. Each nucleotide contains one base, one phosphate molecule, and the sugar deoxyribose. The bases in DNA nucleotides are adenine, thymine. guanine. and cytosine.

RNA ribonucleic acid, the molecule that carries out DNA's instructions for making proteins. It consists of one long chain made up of nucleotides. Each nucleotide contains one base, one phosphate molecule, and the sugar ribose. The bases in RNA nucleotides are adenine. uraciL guanine. and cytosine. There are three main types of RNA: messenger RNA. transfer RNA, and ribosomal RNA.

As is so often the case, the key to solving this riddle came from an unexpected source. In 1928 an English medical worker, Fred Griffith, was involved in investigating a pneumonia epidemic in London. While investigating the pneumococcus responsible for this outbreak, Griffith made the surprising discovery that live pneumococci could acquire genetic traits from other, dead pneumococci in a process he termed "transformation." But how could this be? All that the dead pneumococci could transmit were chemicals: specifically, two types of nucleic acid - ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) - and protein. How could these bring about genetic change in living cells?

The importance of Griffith's work was not appreciated until a research team headed by Oswald Avery replicated his findings at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Avery and his team began detailed studies of how genetic information was transmitted to living pneumococci. They conducted a series of experiments which demonstrated that genetic information was not mediated by proteins, or by RNA, but specifically by DNA.23 This was a momentous discovery, even if it would be some time before its full implications were appreciated. If DNA - and no other substance - was the carrier of hereditary information, it must have a much more complex structure than had previously been appreciated. Yet nobody knew what this structure was, nor how DNA was able to play such a critical genetic role.

This gave new impetus to a remarkable series of studies. Rosalind Franklin (1920-58) undertook pioneering X-ray crystallography work on DNA, which did much to facilitate the groundbreaking work of the English physicist Francis Crick (b. 1916) and the American geneticist James Watson (b. 1928) demonstrating a double helix structure for DNA.24 This achievement was a remarkable physical discovery in itself. Yet it also opened the way to understanding how DNA could pass on genetic information. Watson and Crick immediately realized that the pairing of the bases in this double-stranded DNA had to be the key to its function as a replicator and as the transmitter of genetic information. They wrote: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." In other words, a knowledge of the physical structure of DNA suggested a mechanism by which it could replicate itself.

On the basis of this research, Crick proposed what he called the "Central Dogma" - namely, that DNA replicates, acting as a template for RNA, which in turn acts as a template for proteins. The long and complex DNA molecule contains the genetic information necessary for transmission "encoded" using the four basic nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C) arranged in sequences of "base pairs" (in that adenine is always linked to thymine, and guanine to cytosine in the double helix structure of DNA), attached to a sugar and phosphate spine. It is the sequence of these base pairs which determines the genetic information transmitted.25

Plate 4 The structure of DNA: (a) Each strand of DNA is made up of a sequence of nucleotide units. consisting of a base, a phosphate molecule, and the sugar deoxyribose. The bases in DNA nucleotides are adenine W. thymine (T), guanine (6). and cytosine (C). (b) The full DNA molecule has two complementary strands, arranged in a double helix. The width of the helix is typically 2 nanometers - in other words, two billionths of a meter.

Source: Ridley. Mark. Evolution. Third Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 23. Reprinted with permission.

So why is this so important for an understanding of evolutionary biology? The most important point to emphasize is that Darwin's theory of natural selection required variation to take place and to be transmitted, rather than diluted, to following generations. Natural selection would then take place, determining whether or not the genetic code for this variation would survive. The neo-Darwinian synthesis is grounded in the assumption that small random genetic changes (mutations) over long periods of time occasionally have positive survival value. Organisms possessing these favorable mutations should have relative advantage in survival and reproduction, and they will tend to pass their characteristics on to their descendants. Assuming that there are differential rates of survival, it is not difficult to see how a favorable characteristic can become established and transmitted.

Plate 5 The transfer of information in a cell

Source: Ridley, Mark. Evolution, Third Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. p. 27. Reprinted with permission.

The key point is that genetic variation takes place in nature, that the process of natural selection determines whether this variation survives, and that the process of genetic replication ensures that this variation is transmitted. This, however, still leaves open many of the problems of evolutionary biology. To give an example: at what level does natural selection take place? Is it at the level of genes themselves? Or of individual organisms which contain those genes? Or at the level of kin (closely related individuals) or groups?

At this point, we have laid the foundations for a proper engagement with Richard Dawkins' views on the "selfish gene," and may now turn to explore them in much greater detail.

Dawkins' Approach: The Selfish Gene

For Dawkins, the most satisfying rationale of the evolutionary process is framed in terms of gene lineages. The changes required for evolution to develop take place very slowly. The life of an individual organism, or a group of organisms, is small in comparison with the time required for these changes to come about. This demands a stable and very long-term unit of genetic transmission - and only gene lineages can satisfy this condition. As Richard Alexander pointed out, "genes are the most persistent of all living units, hence on all counts the most likely units of selection."" For Dawkins, evolution is therefore the struggle of gene lineages to replicate.

[The gene] does not grow senile; it is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred. It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death. The genes are the immortals, or rather, they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title.27

While individual DNA molecules might survive for little more than months, their ability to replicate themselves means that any given DNA molecule "could theoretically live on in the form of copies of itself for a hundred million years. 1121 In contrast, the individual organisms or groups of organisms are shortlived, and do not extend over the time-scales necessary to perpetuate the changes that slowly accumulate over extended lengths of time. "Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust-storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations. They are not stable through evolutionary time. 112' Everything, therefore, depends on the gene.

So how do genetic changes come about? Is there not, on the face of it, an obvious and fatal contradiction between Dawkins' emphasis upon the "high copying fidelity" of replicators and the appearance of change? If replicators transmit digital information so accurately, how can change come about? Surely the fidelity of transmission points to a static, not dynamic, situation?

It is an important question, which seems to raise formidable difficulties. Certain species do indeed seem to have undergone relatively little development over huge periods of time - for example, oysters and the ginkgo tree seem to have changed relatively little over the last 150 million years.30 Yet changes do occur. How? The theory of this had been more or less sorted out before Dawkins penned The Selfish Gene. In his Chance and Necessity (1971), the French Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod set out the basic consensus then emerging within molecular biology. Monod pointed out that genetic mutations can be observed in the laboratory. Rare, spontaneous mutations are observed in populations of Drosophila or other model organisms; others can be induced at random through using mutagens, such as certain chemicals or radiation. Why should not such mutations also arise over time in nature itself?

In nature itself, mutations are believed to arise accidentally, unpredictably, and for a variety of reasons. But once these changes are "incorporated in the DNA structure, the accident - essentially unpredictable because always singular - will be mechanically and faithfully replicated and translated."" The outcomes of these genetic mutations are then passed on within the evolutionary process, which acts as a "filter," determining whether they and their genetic codes survive. Most do not. "The replicative system, far from being able to eliminate the microscopic perturbations by which it is inevitably beset, knows only how to register and offer them - almost always in vain - to the teleonomic filter by which their performance is finally judged through natural selection.""

Dawkins does not endorse Monod's emphasis on the decisive role of "blind chance." While recognizing that many had indeed drawn the conclusion that Darwinism was a "theory of chance," Dawkins insisted that this was a misrepresentation of the situation. "Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially non-random."" Evolution can thus be seen as the outcome of the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators, with the emphasis placed upon the regularity of selection rather than the happenstance of variation. Random changes in DNA give rise to new organisms, which reproduce and are subject to the pressure of natural selection. "Core Darwinism" could thus be defined as the "minimal theory that evolution is guided in adaptively non-random directions by the non-random survival of small random hereditary changes. X34

So what about individual organisms, or groups? Although a hasty reading of Dawkins might suggest that evolution is conceived in purely molecular terms, involving only a silent and invisible competition between genes, it soon becomes clear that he avoids any such absurdity. In that organisms are the "vehicle" by which genes are passed on, the capacity of the organism to survive and reproduce becomes of immense importance. The process of selection is not competition between genes per se (how could that happen?), but takes places at the level of intermediaries: namely, the "vehicles" which bear or embody those genes.

A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats .15

These "gene survival machines" reproduce their genes, and die; it is the genes that survive, not the vehicles, in the form of information copies of themselves. As Dawkins points out, bodies therefore tend to "have what it takes to propagate genes" and may properly be regarded as "engines of gene propagation." This distinction could be formalized in terms of the replicators and vehicles - that is, between small genetic units ("genes") themselves, and the higher level entities (typically organisms, but sometimes a family of genetically related organisms) which transmit those genes onward in the evolutionary process.36

In The Selfish Gene Dawkins offered what might be called an "ethology of the gene" - although genes cannot really be said to "behave" or "act" - which shifted the emphasis away from individual animals, or groups of animals, as the unit of evolution to the nature of the genes themselves. This "gene's eye view of the world" regards an individual organism as a "survival machine," a "passive receptacle for genes," or a "colony of genes." Dawkins stresses that this is not to suggest that such organisms have no individuality of their own; his point is that these individual characteristics are genetically determined, and hence contribute to whether that lineage of genes will be successful or not. We must "deeply imbibe the fundamental truth that an organism is a tool of DNA rather than the other way round. X37 Evolution thus occurs when genetically caused traits are passed on to the next generation.

So what is a gene? Here, we encounter a number of widely acknowledged difficulties. The term is capable of being defined or visualized in quite different ways. In a classic paper, Seymour Benzer offered an essentially molecular definition of the concept," which attempted to bridge the gap between the classic view of the gene as an indivisible unit of genetic information, and the newly discovered physical structure of DNA, which showed that the molecular basis of genetics consisted of a sequence of nucleotides. Dawkins is fully aware of this meaning of the term, but points out that it is perfectly acceptable to conceptualize the "gene" in terms of the unit involved in creating a Darwinian adaptation. His definition, borrowed from George C. Williams, is as follows: "any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection."" It is a functional definition, but is perfectly acceptable, despite the grumblings of population geneticists. However, it does lead to a troubling degree of circularity, in that it makes it almost true by definition that the gene is the unit of selection.

Williams himself wasn't entirely happy about this defini- tion.40 Dawkins, he argued, defined a replicator in such a way that it had to be conceived "as a physical entity duplicating itself in a reproductive process." While not necessarily disagreeing with this, Williams suggested that Dawkins "was misled by the fact that genes are always identified with DNA." For Williams, it was essential to be clear that the DNA molecule was the medium, not the message: the gene is "a package of information, not an object." Williams himself insisted that not all genes are evolutionary, if one defines an evolutionary gene as "any inherited information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change. "4i

So how does this work in practice? Perhaps the easiest way is to take a case study. Let's imagine a lion. The faster it can run, the more likely it is to survive - partly because it can outrun its prey, and hence ensure its food supply. Let's imagine that a genetic mutation takes place leading to a lion appearing with superior running skills. The local lion population now has two different kinds of lion: the ones with the new mutation, and the old ones without it. To begin with, they exist side by side. But the lions possessing this mutation have a greater capacity to survive, and hence pass their characteristics on to later generations through the gene - that is, whatever it is that caused this mutation in the first place.4z

So how are these genetic mutations expressed in living organisms? At this point, we need to draw a distinction between the gene (or "genotype") as the "internally coded, inheritable information" carried by all living organisms, used as a "blueprint" or set of instructions for building and maintaining a living creature; and the phenotype, as the outward, physical manifestation of the organism - the visible characteristics or behavior which result from the interaction of an organism's genetic blueprint and the environment. Dawkins argues that the gene is the unit of selection, in that it exerts phenotypic effects on the organism - for example, the sharpness of its claws, the nature of its metabolism, or the strength of its leg muscles. Successful genes are those that cause phenotypic effects which promote their survival.

Dawkins took this a stage further through his ideas of an "extended phenotype.i4; He pointed out that the effects of the gene were not limited to physical characteristics of the individual organism, but extended to their environment. Bower birds construct grass structures within which to mate. Those species of bower birds with especially bright plumage tend to construct less elaborate bowers; those with less attractive plumage compensate for this by fabricating more intricate structures.44

This, then, is a brief sketch of Dawkins' approach, set against its historical background. There are problems with the approach, some arising from further advances in molecular biology - such as the publication of genome sequences - and others from questionable assumptions that appear to be embedded in his approach, and we may note one or two before proceeding further. We begin by considering some recent research that raises questions about the validity of the Darwinian "tree of life" model.

Dawkins' "tree of life" model, as presented in The Blind Watchmaker, sets out a simple Darwinian "descent with modification" formula using the idea of "perfect nesting. 1145 Evolutionary descent demands a branching structure, similar to a genealogical tree. Yet recent work on genome sequencing of simple organisms, such as bacteria or archaea, seems to point to the repeated transfer of genes, or perhaps even clusters of genes, from organism to organism.46 Most early studies assumed species evolved primarily by vertical inheritance from parent or parents. However, the comparison of microbial gene sequences suggests that horizontal inheritance may be relatively common. The growing evidence for extensive lateral gene transfer among organisms at the lower reaches of the tree of life47 suggests that the image of a branching "tree of life" may need revision, to take account of this apparent intersection of rings close to its base.

It seems increasingly necessary to speak of a "Darwinian horizon" - a point way back in evolutionary time at which horizontal gene transfer was so common that the traditional Darwinian account becomes problematic. Darwinism, which posits vertical gene transfer as the dominant theme of evolution, can cope with lateral gene transfer as a subtext or sideshow; when it is the main story, however, things are rather more difficult. We shall have to wait and see how things develop here. I do not regard this as forcing a revision of Dawkins' overall approach; nevertheless, it alters the detail at some important points - not least by suggesting that the standard Darwinian account does not embrace the totality of evolutionary history.

Most criticism of Dawkins, however, has focused on the validity of the concept of "the selfish gene." Dawkins' phrase "the selfish gene" was criticized by philosopher Mary Midgley, partly because of what she regarded as definitional vagueness, but more fundamentally on account of philosophical laziness. "Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological."" The basic concern expressed by Midgley was that the attribution of "selfishness" to genes represented a form of anthropomorphic thinking, by which genes were understood to possess human qualities and vices. Genes themselves cannot be selfish; the term can really only be applied meaningfully to an organism capable of behavior.49 It was a reasonable point concerning the validity of metaphorical or analogical language. After all, can genes really be said to "behave" in any way, whether "selfish" or not? Genes replicate; they cannot be said to "behave" or "act," even in a pseudo-teleological way. This reasonable point was unfortunately lost in the noise of a scientifically confused piece of polemic which managed to misrepresent Dawkins' views on the gene.50

Yet Dawkins was no stranger to the use of analogies in the sciences. In his doctoral thesis he devoted several pages to exploring the proper use of models or "pictorial aids" in scientific explanation and description, especially in relation to issues of behavior." Dawkins insisted that a clear distinction could be drawn between the subjective and behavioristic senses of the term, and that his definition was unequivocally behavioristic in nature. Genes behave as if they are selfish, whatever implications this may be understood to have. As he pointed out in The Selfish Gene, "we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes them behave rather as if they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose.s52 (Darwin himself, we may note, had earlier remarked that "natural selection" was "shorthand" for a much more complex and nuanced process.) Genes are not consciously selfish; yet their dynamics resemble those of consciously selfish agents.

Thus far, we have sketched the outlines of the Darwinian approach advocated by Dawkins. But what are its implications? What difference might it make to our broader view of reality, including that realm of human life and thought which is often, though somewhat misleadingly, called "religion"? In what follows, we shall explore some of the features of the Darwinian view of reality developed and so ably communicated by Dawkins.

River out of Eden: Exploring a Darwinian world

For Dawkins, Darwin's theory of evolution - as developed in the light of Mendelian genetics and our understanding of the place of DNA in the transmission of inherited information - is more than a scientific theory. It is a worldview, a total account of reality. Darwinism is a "universal and timeless" principle, capable of being applied throughout the universe. In comparison, worldviews such as Marxism are "parochial and ephemeral.""

Where most evolutionary biologists would argue that Darwinism offers a description of reality, Dawkins insists that it offers more than this - it is an explanation.54 Darwinism is a worldview, a grand recit, a metanarrative - a totalizing framework, by which the great questions of life are to be evaluated and answered. For this reason, Dawkins' account of things has provoked a response from postmodern writers, for whom any metanarrative - whether Marxist, Freudian, or Darwinian - is to be resisted as a matter of principle.ss

So what is this worldview like? Let's note some of its leading features.

A world without purpose

Jacques Monod's book Chance and Necessity (1972) caused something of a stir on its publication, chiefly on account of his total rejection of any purpose within the cosmos. All that Monod was doing was exploring the implications of a genetically driven account of reality, in which accidental changes were propagated by DNA, and subjected to the "teleonomic" filter of natural selection. Monod, then director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was particularly critical of the views of two fellow countrymen, Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, both of whom developed philosophies of life which were founded on acceptance of evolution, yet interpreted this as having some kind of purpose. A modern understanding of the molecular basis of evolution eliminated the notion of "purpose" altogether. Perhaps one could talk about the direction of the evolutionary process - but certainly not about its purpose. For Monod, teleonomy had displaced teleology. There was no point in asking why things had happened. They just had. While the mechanisms which governed evolution were of interest, they had no goal.

Dawkins echoes these ideas throughout his published works over the last twenty-five years. The natural sciences can clarify just about every aspect of the evolutionary mechanism; the pace of scientific progress is such that what is currently unexplained is unlikely to remain so for much longer. And when that mechanism is understood, the very notion of "purpose" had to be declared redundant. The world may appear to have been designed, or to have been created for some purpose. Yet this "strong illusion of purposeful design" can easily be explained on the basis of the outcome of chance mutations over huge periods of time. Dawkins is particularly critical of those who argue that, "since science is unable to answer `Why' questions, there must be some other discipline that is qualified to answer them." No answer is possible, other than the Darwinian answer of natural selection.56 We are here on account of no higher principle than natural selection, in that our distant forebears were able to increase the representation of their genes at the expense of others. There is no higher, no deeper, explanation of things than this.

To some, this seems a rather melancholy worldview. It might, of course, be reasonably pointed out that this is hardly an acceptable arbiter of whether something is right. I remember, during my days as an atheist, finding some solace in the fact that nobody could accuse me of being an atheist on account of the metaphysical comfort it brought. If it was right, it was an irrelevance whether it made its adherents gloomy or bright, nice or tedious. The issue was its relation to observed facts. For Dawkins, God has no "utility function" in explaining the way things are, and may safely be discarded as "very, very improbable indeed." (We'll come back to that later in the book, as the argument he offers here actually falls far short of that rather ambitious conclusion.)

Dawkins has a robustly positive take on Darwinism and the message that it brings to the world. In a short talk on BBC Radio in 2003, he set out his personal creed in the following terms.

[We should] rejoice in the amazing privilege we enjoy. We have been born, and we are going to die. But before we die we have time to understand why we were ever born in the first place. Time to understand the universe into which we have been born. And with that understanding, we finally grow up and realize that there is no help for us outside our own efforts."

Why were we ever born? The Darwinian answer is "natural selection." In fact, that's the Darwinian answer to just about everything.

But let's look at that answer to the question of why we - that is, human beings - are here. What are its implications?

The place of humanity in a Darwinian universe

If there was one aspect of his own theory of evolution which left Charles Darwin feeling unsettled, it was its implications for the status and identity of the human race. In every edition of the Origin of Species Darwin consistently stated that his proposed mechanism of natural selection did not entail any fixed or universal law of progressive development. Furthermore, he explicitly rejected Lamarck's theory that evolution demonstrated an "innate and inevitable tendency towards perfection." The inevitable conclusion must therefore be that human beings (now understood to be participants within, rather than merely observers of, the evolutionary process) cannot in any sense be said to be either the "goal" or the "apex" of evolution. It was not an easy conclusion for Darwin, or for his age. The conclusion to the Descent of Man speaks of humanity in exalted terms, while insisting upon its "lowly" biological origins:

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

Using his own version of the image of the "Great Chain of Being," Darwin occasionally seems to suggest that evolution implies progress towards superior creatures, projecting moral (and occasionally even ontological) qualities onto more neutral scientific descriptions`'

Dawkins has no hesitations here. We must recognize that we are animals, part of the evolutionary process. He is strongly critical of the absolutist assumptions he discerns behind "speciesism" - a term invented by Richard Ryder, and given wider currency by Peter Singer, currently of Princeton University.""

Yet Dawkins draws an important - indeed, a remarkable - distinction between humanity and every other living product of genetic mutation and natural selection. We alone are able to resist our genes. While some writers - such as Julian Huxley - tried to develop an ethical system based on what they regarded as Darwinian evolution's more progressive aspects, Dawkins regards this as misguided." Natural selection may be the dominant force in biological evolution; this does not for one moment mean that we need to endorse its apparent ethical implications.

It is an important point, as some have argued that Darwinian theory endorses a "survival of the fittest" ethic. A recently discovered letter of Darwin himself seems to lend credibility to this "social Darwinist" approach,"Z although Darwin is generally cautious about drawing any such conclusions. Dawkins is adamant: human beings are not the prisoner of their genes, but are capable of rebelling against such a genetic tyranny:

As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate antiDarwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs."

This same theme emerges in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins concluded this work with a passionate defense of human dignity and freedom in the face of genetic determinism. We - that is, his (human) readers - can rebel:

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.64

(Note that Dawkins introduces the term "meme" here, as a "cultural replicator" analogous to the gene, as a genetic replicator. We shall have more to say about this new type of replicator later.) Dawkins suggests that the situation can be compared to an oncologist, whose professional specialty is studying cancer, and whose professional vocation is fighting it.

So there is something different about humanity, after all. We alone appear to have evolved to the point at which we are able to rebel against precisely the process that brought us here in the first place. Only we have evolved brains which are capable of, in the first place, understanding how we came to be here, and in the second, subverting the process that may at some very distant point lead to our being displaced, perhaps by some superior primate.

The evolution of the human brain is, as Dawkins points out, as remarkable as it is controversial. What pressures led to the enlargement of the human brain?65 And why should this process yield any significant evolutionary advantage? This new development requires that roughly one quarter of human metabolism is devoted to ensuring brain function. This represents a substantial investment of energy, and a correspondingly high risk for the survival of the species. Nevertheless, whatever its explanation, it happened.66

By wise use of this additional resource, humans alone can subvert their "selfish genes" - for example, through using artificial contraception." It's a moot point whether this example can be regarded as a brave act of rebellion by enlightened humans against their genes. It could equally be argued to be an act of collusion. One of the driving arguments for artificial contraception is that it limits the disastrous consequences of population explosion, which would pose a challenge to the continued existence of the human species - and hence the transmission of the human gene.

In this chapter, I have introduced Dawkins' characteristic notion of the "selfish gene," setting it within the context of the development of evolutionary biology since Darwin. This allows us to move on to the real agenda of this book: to offer a critical examination of Dawkins' assessment of its religious implications. To explore this important question, we may turn immediately to consider one of Dawkins' most important works: The Blind Watchmaker.

The Blind Watchmaker:

Evolution and the

Elimination of God?

Darwin marks the parting of the ways. He is the colossus who separates two radically different ways of thinking. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-99), the railroad lawyer who became one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century atheist writers, had no hesitation in foretelling the triumph of Darwin over all forms of religious faith. Writing in 1884, Ingersoll declared:

This century will be called Darwin's century ... His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity.

As things turned out, Christianity managed to survive Ingersoll's prophecies of doom. Yet the issue remains: is Darwinism, as both Ingersoll and Dawkins insist, necessarily atheistic?

Before Darwin, Dawkins argues, it was possible to see the world as something designed by God; after Darwin, we can speak only of the "illusion of design." A Darwinian world has no purpose, and we delude ourselves if we think otherwise. If the universe cannot be described as "good," at least it cannot be described as "evil" either.

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe had precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.'

But some insist that there does indeed seem to be a "purpose" to things, and cite the apparent design of things in support. Surely, such critics argue, the intricate structure of the human eye points to something that cannot be explained by natural forces, and which obliges us to invoke a divine creator by way of explanation? How otherwise may we explain the vast and complex structures that we observe in nature?2

Dawkins' answer is set out primarily in two works: The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable. The fundamental argument common to both is that complex things evolve from simple beginnings, over long periods of time.

Living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin's answer, is by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successful change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process.3

What might seem to be a highly improbable development needs to be set against the backdrop of the huge periods of time envisaged by the evolutionary process. Dawkins explores this point using the image of a metaphorical "Mount Improbable." Seen from one angle, its "towering, vertical cliffs" seem impossible to climb. Yet, seen from another angle, the mountain turns out to have "gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands."'

The "illusion of design," Dawkins argues, arises because we intuitively regard structures as being too complex to have arisen by chance. An excellent example is provided by the human eye, cited by some advocates of the divine design and direct special creation of the world as a surefire proof of God's existence. In one of the most detailed and argumentative chapters of Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins shows how, given enough time, even such a complex organ could have evolved from something much simpler.'

It's all standard Darwinism. What's new is the lucidity of the presentation, and the detailed illustration and defense of these ideas through judiciously selected case studies and carefully crafted analogies. In that Dawkins sees Darwinism as a worldview, rather than a biological theory, he has no hesitation in taking his arguments far beyond the bounds of the purely biological. The word "God" is absent from the index of The Blind Watchmaker precisely because he is absent from the Darwinian world that Dawkins inhabits and commends.' The evolutionary process leaves no conceptual space for God. What an earlier generation explained by an appeal to a divine creator can be accommodated within a Darwinian framework. There is no need to believe in God after Darwin.

But Dawkins is not going to leave things there. Some might draw the conclusion that Darwinism encourages agnosticism. Far from it: for Dawkins, Darwin impels us to atheism. It is not merely that evolution erodes the explanatory potency of God; it eliminates God altogether. In an important essay of 1996, Dawkins argues that there are at present only three possible ways of seeing the world: Darwinism, Lamarckism, or God.' The last two fail to explain the world; the only option is therefore Darwinism.

I'm a Darwinist because I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God, neither of which does the job as an explanatory principle. Life in the universe is either Darwinian or something else not yet thought of.

Now the rhetoric of his argument demands that Darwinism, Lamarckism, and belief in God are three mutually exclusive views, so that commitment to one necessarily entails rejection of the others. Yet it is well known that many Darwinians believe that there is a convergence between Darwinism and theism. The extent of that overlap is most certainly open to discussion, and it is far from being a settled issue. Yet Dawkins' conclusion depends upon proposing an absolute dichotomy - either Darwinism or God - when the theories themselves do not require such absolutist ways of thinking (though they certainly permit it).

Dawkins has certainly demonstrated that a purely natural description may be offered of what is currently known of the history and present state of living organisms. But why does this lead to the conclusion that there is no God? A host of unstated and unchallenged assumptions underlie his argument. In this chapter, we shall explore a series of objections which might be brought against Dawkins' conclusion. To summarize them briefly:

1 At the most general level, the scientific method is incapable of adjudicating the God hypothesis, either positively or negatively.

2 Dawkins' arguments lead to the conclusion that God need not be invoked as an explanatory agent within the evolutionary process. This is consistent with various atheist, agnostic, and Christian understandings of the world, but necessitates none of them.

3 The concept of God as "watchmaker," which Dawkins spends so much time demolishing, emerged as significant in the eighteenth century, and is not typical of the Christian tradition. It was developed by Robert Boyle (1627-91), who compared the universe to the Great Clock of Strasbourg. Initially applied to the physical aspects of the world, the analogy was transferred to the biological sphere in the late eighteenth century. What Dawkins demonstrates is the vulnerability of a historically contingent approach to the doctrine of creation, linked with the specific historical circumstances of eighteenth-century England, which had already been rejected as inadequate, possibly even unorthodox, by many leading English theologians of the time.

If these considerations have any cumulative force, they lead to an important conclusion: Dawkins' atheism is inadequately grounded in the biological evidence. Therefore we must seek its ultimate grounds elsewhere. In what follows, we shall consider each of these points individually.

Natural Science Leads Neither to Atheism Nor Christianity

The scientific method is incapable of delivering a decisive adjudication of the God question. Those who believe that it proves or disproves the existence of God press that method beyond its legitimate limits, and run the risk of abusing or discrediting it. Some distinguished biologists (such as Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project) argue that the natural sciences create a positive presumption of faith;' others (such as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould) that they have negative implications for theistic belief. But they prove nothing, either way. If the God question is to be settled, it must be settled on other grounds.

This is not a new idea. Indeed, the recognition of the religious limits of the scientific method was well understood around the time of Darwin himself. As none other than "Darwin's Bulldog," T. H. Huxley, wrote in 1880:9

Some twenty years ago, or thereabouts, I invented the word "Agnostic" to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with utmost confidence.

Fed up with both theists and atheists making hopelessly dogmatic statements on the basis of inadequate empirical evidence, Huxley declared that the God question could not be settled on the basis of the scientific method.

Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe ... Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology.

Plate 6 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95). Photo AK6-Images

Huxley's arguments are as valid today as they were in the late nineteenth century, despite the protestations of those on both sides of the great debate about God.

In a 1992 critique of an anti-evolutionary work which posited that Darwinism was necessarily atheistic,"' Stephen Jay Gould invoked the memory of Mrs. McInerney, his third grade teacher, who was in the habit of rapping young knuckles when their owners said or did particularly stupid things:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God's method of action).

Gould rightly insists that science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God. The bottom line for Gould is that Darwinism actually has no bearing on the existence or nature of God. If Darwinians choose to dogmatize on matters of religion, they stray beyond the straight and narrow way of the scientific method, and end up in the philosophical badlands. Either a conclusion cannot be reached at all on such matters, or it is to be reached on other grounds.

Now Dawkins knows perfectly well that "science has no way to disprove the existence of a supreme being."" This, he argues, cannot be allowed to lead to the conclusion that "belief (or disbelief) in a supreme being is a matter of pure individual inclination." But who said anything about "pure individual inclination"? Where does this idea come from? Dawkins seems to imply that, where the scientific method cannot be properly applied, there is only epistemological anarchy. Without the scientific method, we are reduced to the pure subjectivity of individual opinion.

This misleading gloss on a perfectly serious and legitimate debate about the limits of the scientific method allows Dawkins to evade the point at issue. If the scientific method can neither prove nor disprove the existence or nature of God, then either we abandon the question as unanswerable (something Dawkins certainly does not choose to do) or we answer it on other grounds.

But the point at issue cannot be sidestepped in this way. If an answer is to be given, it is not a matter of "pure individual inclination," but of reasoned and principled argument on the basis of whatever criteria of judgment apply to this debate. This is not an arbitrary or whimsical matter, but a matter of intellectual integrity, in which all sides to the debate - whether atheist, theist, or Christian - seek to offer the "best explanation" of the available evidence.12 This is basic philosophy of science, and it is not going to go away because Dawkins ignores it.

The issue emerges as important on account of the problem of "underdetermination of theory by evidence." At times, it is impossible to adjudicate between rival theories precisely because they seem to offer equally good accounts of observation. Two quite different theories may turn out to be "empirically equivalent," forcing the scientific community to suspend judgment until the issue is resolved by evidence, or reaching a decision on other grounds. An excellent example is provided by two rival schools of quantum mechanics: the "Copenhagen school," based on the approach of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and that of David Bohm.13 The two are empirically equivalent, and arguably equally elegant and simple.

In practice, the Copenhagen approach has achieved dominance - but largely on account of issues of historical contingency, not theoretical superiority. The two theories are associated with quite different worldviews, with the Copenhagen approach favoring an essentially indeterminist universe, and the Bohmian approach a more determinist model. Much depends on the theory choice made; yet the choice cannot be made with conviction. As James Cushing points out, this hasn't stopped people from making choices. Yet the scientific legitimacy of such decisions is open to question. Either we cannot reach a decision, or we must reach that decision on other grounds.

Yet if the scientific method cannot settle an issue, it does not mean that all answers have to be regarded as equally valid, or that we abandon rationality in order to deal with them. It simply means that the discussion shifts to another level, using different criteria of evidence and argumentation. As it happens, that is precisely what Dawkins does himself - develop arguments for atheism which are ultimately non-scientific in character. We shall return to consider how successful these are in due course. But the key point for the moment is simply this: the scientific method alone cannot ultimately determine the God question, even though it has some important contributions to make to the debate.

Let's move on, and look at another aspect of the debate over the theological implications of Darwinism.

God as an Explanatory Hypothesis

Dawkins argues that God is redundant as an explanatory hypothesis. God has no discernible "utility function" in scientific explanation. In support of this idea, he offers a number of arguments, of which the most interesting is his "biomorph programme."" This analogy is intended to help us appreciate that the appearance of design can arise from random developments. Imagine, he suggests, a monkey (or equivalent) with a typewriter equipped with twenty-six capital letters and a space bar. Dawkins selects a twenty-eight character phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet, as follows:

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

This is the "target phrase." Now, a computer generates, at random, a phrase of twenty-eight characters - the equivalent of the proverbial monkey trying to type out the works of Shakespeare. Needless to say, it bears no relation to the target phrase.

But now something happens. The computer has been instructed to examine the phrase, and select the one "which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase."" The process now continues. After a mere thirty iterations, something recognizably like the target phrase has developed:

METHINGS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL

Just a dozen or so iterations later, and the target phrase has been reached. Dawkins concludes that the process of evolution is capable of bringing about the appearance of order rather more quickly and effectively than might be expected.

The analogy, however, is flawed. Indeed, it is an excellent example of what Friedrich Waismann termed the "conjuring away of philosophical problems" through carefully controlled and selected analogies.16 The most obvious problem is that the analogy presupposes a teleology which Dawkins believes to be absent in nature. There is no "target phrase" towards which evolution may proceed. Dawkins concedes this point in the same work, but does not regard it as being critical to his analogy."

Yet there is another problem, which Dawkins does not properly address. The idea of design or purposeful selection has been eliminated only at the verbal level. While the analogy allows us to avoid the vocabulary of "design," the notion of design is implicit in the computer program, which was constructed to control the development in a certain specific way. An unacknowledged anthropomorphism underlies the analogy, and lends it plausibility for the intended readership. Remove the (designed) computer program and the analogy loses much of its plausibility. It is best seen simply and solely as an indication of how small random mutations can accumulate to yield substantial changes provided that they are selected non-randomly."

Setting to one side the plausibility of the analogy, let us focus on the point that Dawkins wants to make. A "theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative selection" can explain the appearance of design in the world. There is no need to posit a God as an explanatory mechanism. Suppose we concede this point; what are its implications? Dawkins infers that, since God may be ignored as an improbable irrelevance, the only meaningful position is atheism. Yet he does not actually make the logical moves required to reach such a conclusion, apparently assuming that they are so self-evident that they do not require demonstration. But it is not so. To illustrate this point, we may explore the view of the world set out by the leading Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

Aquinas constructed a framework for understanding God's relation to the world which weaves together the fundamental themes of the Christian creeds.19 The basic ideas that Aquinas developed can be set out very simply, as follows. God is the cause of all things. Yet God's causality operates in a number of ways. While God must be considered capable of doing certain things directly, God delegates causal efficacy to the created order. For Aquinas, this notion of secondary causality must be considered as an extension of, not an alternative to, the primary causality of God himself. Events within the created order can exist in complex causal relationships, without in any way denying their ultimate dependency upon God as final cause.

The critical point to appreciate is that the created order thus demonstrates causal relationships which can be investigated by the natural sciences. Those causal relationships can be investigated and correlated - for example, in the form of the "laws of nature" - without in any way implying, still less necessitating, an atheist worldview. To put this as simply as possible: God creates a world with its own ordering and processes.

This classic approach had its strengths and weaknesses. The most obvious of its strengths is that it laid the conceptual foundations for the development of the natural sciences in the later Middle Ages, by encouraging the investigation of natural processes and events. It is, by the way, important to note that this Christian view of the world was set out long before Darwin. As a result, there is no way that Aquinas' approach can be described as a post hoc attempt to defend Christianity in response to a perceived threat from the new science of evolutionary biology.

A potential weakness of this approach was that the selfregulation of the natural order could lead to God being conceptually marginalized in any account of the world. An explanation of the orbits of the planets could be offered, for example, which made no reference to God. As Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) pointed out in his massive Treatise of Celestial Mechanics, a self-sustaining mechanism effectively eliminated the need for God either as explanatory hypothesis or as active sustainer in cosmology. Yet for many, this was an acceptable risk.

Precisely this conceptual marginalization of the divine can be seen in Darwin's account of natural selection. What Darwin offered the readers of his Origin of Species was an explanation of the origins and present geographical distribution of biological species which operated entirely in terms of secondary causality. Dawkins interprets this as at least eliminating, and more probably discrediting, the existence of God. In his own writings, he offers a more advanced Darwinian explanation of biological diversity, with particular emphasis being placed on the molecular basis of the evolutionary process. Once more, the conclusion is that God is superfluous; the observational data may be explained without needing to invoke divine agency.

Christian natural scientists regard the God hypothesis as giving new insights and added depth to their engagement with, and appreciation of, nature. Others prefer to explain the world etsi Deus non daretur ("as if God were not given"), to use a phrase popularized by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (15831645). Yet the alleged explanatory superfluity of God clearly has no bearing on the question of his existence. It is consistent with Christian, agnostic, and atheist accounts of the world. If there is an argument to be made against God, that must have its origins elsewhere.

The Case of William Paley

The Blind Watchmaker represents a significant and highly successful attack on the eighteenth-century concept of God as a "watchmaker." But what are the implications of this? The view that Dawkins demolishes became significant only in the eighteenth century, and is not typical of the Christian tradition as a whole. It was a hasty response to the intellectual challenge of what is usually known as "the mechanical philosophy.i20 Initially applied to the physical world, the "watchmaker" analogy was transposed to the biological sphere in the late eighteenth century, with results that some found reassuring, and others deeply unsatisfying.

What Dawkins actually demonstrates is that a very specific understanding of the doctrine of creation, which came into being in response to the historical circumstances of eighteenthcentury England, is completely undermined by a Darwinian account of evolution. This theory, associated with William Paley (1743-1805), archdeacon of Carlisle, had already been rejected as inadequate by many leading theologians of the day - such as John Henry Newman (1801-90) - before Darwin undermined it still further. In view of the importance of this point, we shall examine Paley's theory in some detail.

The background to William Paley's emphasis on the apparent "contrivance" of the biological world is a peculiarly English affair, arising through the complex interaction of politics and religion in England in the early eighteenth century. This development is fascinating historically, as well as being of no small importance to Dawkins' thesis of the "blind watchmaker."21

In the late seventeenth century, a series of events within both the British state and society at large forced the Church of England onto the defensive. One of these is of particular relevance for our purposes: the emergence of "Deism," a view of God which recognizes the divine creatorship, yet which rejects any continuing divine involvement with the world. The rise of Deism caused some problems for the established church, especially in relation to how the Bible and doctrinal tradition of the church were to be interpreted. Impressed by Isaac Newton's demonstration of the mechanical regularity of the world, many within the church began to explore the idea that an appeal to the natural world might be the basis for a new defense of Christian ideas.22

Now an interest in the natural world has always been part of the Christian intellectual tradition. However, in the past, this generally took the form of interpreting the world from a Christian perspective, appealing to the wonder and beauty of the natural world as a way of appreciating the beauty of God.23 It is well known that one of the most fundamental impulses leading to the development of the natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the belief that to study nature at close quarters was to gain a deeper appreciation of the wisdom of God.24 As the great naturalist John Ray (16281705) - author of the celebrated work The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) - put it in 1660:

There is for a free man no occupation more worthy and delightful than to contemplate the beauteous works of nature and honour the infinite wisdom and goodness of God.

Yet all this changed in the early eighteenth century. A new approach to doing theology developed, which would be variously known as "natural theology" or "physical theology" (from the Greek word physis, "nature"). The existence and attributes of God, it was argued, could be inferred from nature itself. As rationalism gained a growing hold on English intellectual life, the established church responded by shifting emphasis from traditional sources of authority (such as the Bible) to the natural world. The existence and wisdom of God could be proved to an increasingly skeptical world by an appeal to the ordering of nature.

Initially, this "natural theology" made its appeal to the ordering of the physical world - and above all, to the regularity of the "celestial mechanics" demonstrated by Isaac Newton. Suddenly, Newton was seen as having mapped out a new approach to defending Christianity and doing theology. "Physical theology" became all the rage in the early 1700s. Yet it was not long before what had seemed to be a promising alliance between science and religion led to a growing and potentially irreversible estrangement.25 An approach once advocated by the leading scientists of the day passed into the decidedly less competent hands of bishops and archdeacons, who often repeated at second hand ideas they had not properly understood, and whose implications they were prone to exaggerate. The Newtonian system seemed to many to suggest that the world was a self-sustaining mechanism which had no need for divine governance or sustenance for its day-to-day operation.26 Far from encouraging belief in God, it declared this to be quite unnecessary.

By the end of the eighteenth century, it seemed to many that Newton's system probably led to atheism or agnosticism, rather than to faith. By 1750 it was becoming obvious that Newton's synthesis of the physical sciences and religion had failed. Its death blow came when Percy Bysshe Shelley famously remarked "the consistent Newtonian is necessarily an atheist.""

But long before then, others had turned to the world of biology. If physics was a dead end, might it be possible to construct arguments for God's existence based on an appeal to the living world of nature, rather than the regular orbits of the planets? It would prove to be the last stand of an intellectual movement that was in terminal decline. It was an experiment in Christian apologetics - the discipline that concerns itself with responding to objections that may be raised to Christian faith - that had gone wrong, and should have been abandoned. But Paley could see a way of injecting new life into the approach. It would live to fight another day. As it happened, Paley's approach achieved a popular success beyond anything he could have imagined. Yet it created the utterly false impression that the intellectual credibility of Christianity somehow depended upon the approach he adopted. The approach? God as the watchmaker.

Paley's Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802) had a profound influence on popular English religious thought in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is known to have been read by Charles Darwin. Paley was deeply impressed by Newton's discovery of the regularity of nature, especially in relation to the area usually known as "celestial mechanics." It was clear that the entire universe could be thought of as a complex mechanism, operating according to regular and understandable principles.

For Paley, the analogy of God as a watchmaker needed to be transferred from the physical to the biological domain. Nature was to be seen as a "contrivance." This important word implies the ideas of design and construction - both of which Paley held to be evident in the biological world. Paley argues that only someone who is mad would suggest that complex mechanical technology came into being by purposeless chance. Mechanism presupposes contrivance - that is to say, both a sense of purpose and an ability to design and fabricate. Both the human body in particular, and the world in general, could be seen as mechanisms which had been designed and constructed, perfectly adapted to their needs and specific situations.

The opening paragraphs of Paley's Natural Theology set out the analogy for which Paley became famous, and which is the subject of many gracious, yet ultimately critical, references within Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker:

Plate 7 William Paley (1743-1805) © CORBIS

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should this answer not serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not admissible in the second case as in the first?28

Paley then offers a detailed description of the watch, noting in particular its container, coiled cylindrical spring, many interlocking wheels, and glass face. Having carried his readers along with this careful analysis, Paley turns to draw his critically important conclusion:

This mechanism being observed - it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood, the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker - that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.

The analogy, like most of Paley's work, was borrowed, and the scholarship decidedly second rate. Paley had ruthlessly plagiarized John Ray's writings in his quest for a new natural theology. Though a derivative and old-fashioned thinker, Paley was still an excellent communicator. What he communicated so effectively was nevertheless an outmoded way of thinking. Nature, Paley argued, shows signs of "contrivance" - that is, purposeful design and fabrication. Nature bears witness to a series of biological structures which are "contrived" - that is, constructed with a clear purpose in mind. "Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature." Indeed, Paley argues, nature shows an even greater degree of contrivance than the watch. He is at his best when dealing with the immensely complex structures of the human eye and heart, each of which can be described in mechanical terms. Anyone using a telescope, he points out, knows that the instrument was designed and manufactured. Who, he wonders, can look at the human eye, and fail to see that it also has a designer?

Dawkins himself is eloquent and generous in his account of Paley's achievement, noting with appreciation his "beautiful and reverent descriptions of the dissected machinery of life."" Without in any way belittling the wonder of the mechanical "watches" that so fascinated and impressed Paley, Dawkins argued that his case for God - though made with "passionate sincerity" and "informed by the best biological scholarship of his day" - is "gloriously and utterly wrong." The "only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics."

Thus Dawkins; but what about Darwin? Although scholarly investigation of the evolution of Darwin's ideas has uncovered new and potentially significant connections with alternative approaches to natural theology in the 1830s and 1840s,30 there is no doubt of the lingering influence of Paley on Darwin. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Charles Darwin read Paley, and was impressed by his arguments. At that time, Paley was widely read at Cambridge.31

[Paley's] Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley's premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced of the long line of argumentation.

Yet he was aware of some problems within Paley's scheme, even without recourse to evolutionary theory.

Paley's argument emphasized the wisdom of God in creation. But what, Darwin wondered, of God's goodness? How could the brutality, pain, and sheer waste of nature be reconciled with the idea of a benevolent God? In his "Sketch of 1842" Darwin found himself pondering how such things as "creeping parasites" and other creatures that lay their eggs in the bowels or flesh of other animals can be justified within Paley's scheme. How could God's goodness be reconciled with such less pleasant aspects of the created order?

There can be no doubt of the influence of Paley on Darwin. Even in his later writings, Darwin tended to use "the patterns of speech, the argumentative structures, and the basic concepts of Paley as if they were his own."j2 Yet Darwin had no doubt that his theory of natural selection disposed of Paley's theory of "physical theology" or "physico-theology." Deliberately mimicking Paley's vocabulary, Darwin insisted that what an earlier generation of naturalists might reasonably have regarded as "contrivances" - that is, deliberately designed features - could now be seen as having evolved naturally.

Darwin developed this point most fully in a work published in 1862, entitled On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects. The deliberate use of the word "contrivance" here must be seen as a direct, explicit criticism of Paley. The orchids, Darwin explains, possess many "beautiful contrivances," which some interpret "as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator." Others, he suggests, might now wish to see these same contrivances as "due to secondary laws." In many ways, Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker can be seen as an expansion of the argument of this 1862 writing of Darwin, set within a neo-Darwinian framework. The science may have moved on, but the religious conclusions are the same: natural processes and laws explain apparent design.

Yet others had their misgivings about Paley on theological grounds, and were not slow to express them. Before Darwin's new theory made its appearance, a growing body of informed theological opinion was urging the abandoning of Paley's ideas, or their significant modification. In 1852 John Henry Newman was invited to give a series of lectures in Dublin on "the idea of a university." This allowed him to explore the relation between Christianity and the sciences, and especially the "physical theology" of William Paley. Newman was scathing about Paley's approach, lambasting it as "a false gospel." Far from being an advance on the more modest approaches adopted by the early church, it represented a degradation of those ideas.

The nub of Newman's criticism can be summarized in a sentence: "It has been taken out of its place, has been put too prominently forward, and thereby has almost been used as an instrument against Christianity."" Paley's "physical theology" was a liability, and ought to be abandoned before it discredited Christianity.

Physical Theology cannot, from the nature of the case, tell us one word about Christianity proper; it cannot be Christian, in any true sense, at all ... Nay, more than this; I do not hesitate to say that, taking men as they are, this so-called science tends, if it occupies the mind, to dispose it against Christianity.34

Plate 8 John Henry Newman (1801-90) © Hutton-Deutsch CollectionlCORBIS

Seven years before Darwin subverted Paley's approach on scientific grounds, Newman - widely regarded as the most important English theologian of the nineteenth century - had repudiated Paley as an outdated theological liability.

What is interesting is that there is no awareness on Newman's part of a new crisis of faith about to be precipitated by Darwin's work. His argument, which predates Darwin's Origin of Species, rests solely on his belief that Paley's approach fails in what it sought to deliver, and traps Christian theology in an apologetic which can only go disastrously wrong. It was not the first time Christian apologetics had taken a disastrous wrong turn; an immediate correction was, in Newman's view, long overdue.

Others, however, took the view that Darwin's theory of evolution allowed Paley to be developed in more helpful directions. As James Moore has shown in his massive and definitive account of Christian responses to Darwin, there were many who believed that the obvious deficiencies in Paley's account of biological life - most notably, the notion of "perfect adaptation" - were corrected by Darwin's notion of natural selection.35 More importantly, a series of writers discarded Paley's interest in specific adaptations (to use a Darwinian term unknown to him), and preferred to focus on the fact that evolution appeared to be governed by certain quite definite laws - a clear application to biology of the general approach developed in the Middle Ages by Aquinas. An excellent example of this is R. S. S. Baden-Powell's Essays on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy (1855), written before Darwin's theory forced reconsideration of the issue through its new approach to the natural world.36

Paley must be seen in his historical context. He represents the late and final flowering of a movement that came into being in the aftermath of the great Newtonian revolution of the late seventeenth century, and which had completely lost its way by the middle of the eighteenth century. Paley simply reworked older ideas, unaware that their already tenuous credibility was about to expire. Darwin's Origin of Species and later writings must be seen as a nineteenth-century refutation of an eighteenth-century idea - an idea already rejected by leading Christian writers of the age. But it cannot be regarded as a refutation of Christianity itself - merely of a wrong turn that the English national church took.

Christianity is not a static entity; rather, it is like a growing plant.37 Although grounded in the Bible, the Christian theological tradition has always been mindful of the need to interpret its foundational text in the most authentic way possible. This has led to debates within the church over how best to interpret certain passages. In the first 500 years of Christianity, a number of basic principles emerged. One of these was to interpret the Bible in such a way that allowed a creative interaction with the best natural science of the day.

The most influential theologian of this era was Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who is of especial importance in relation to the exploration of the relationship between biblical interpretation and the sciences. Augustine stressed the importance of respecting the conclusions of the sciences in relation to biblical exegesis. As Augustine observed in his commentary on Genesis, certain of its passages were genuinely open to diverse interpretations. It was therefore important to allow further scientific research to assist in the determination of which was the most appropriate mode of interpretation for a given passage :31

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines our position, we too fall with it. We should not battle for our own interpretation but for the teaching of the Holy Scripture. We should not wish to conform the meaning of Holy Scripture to our interpretation, but our interpretation to the meaning of Holy Scripture.

Augustine therefore urged that biblical interpretation should take due account of what could reasonably be regarded as established facts. This approach to biblical interpretation aimed to ensure that Christian theology never became trapped in a pre-scientific worldview. This has always been the dominant theme in Western biblical interpretation. Yet it does not preclude debates over what is the best approach. And these debates often involved trial and error, determining the best way of interpreting a biblical passage by an extended period of discussion and exploration.

And one of those explorations was due to William Paley. It does not matter that history regards it as one of the less successful pieces of theological adventurism. We cannot adopt a "Whig view of history," which lauds those explorations which succeeded, and excoriates those which failed. To use Arnold Toynbee's famous phrase, the whole enterprise of Christian theology, like human civilization itself, is "a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor." Precisely the same is true of the scientific method. Exploration is essential.

Evaluation of Paley's approach to Christian apologetics was under way from 1800, and was essentially complete by 1850, before the publication of Darwin's theory. The verdict? It was an experiment that had failed. It was time to rediscover older approaches to apologetics, and develop new ones, untainted by the failures of Paley. Yet such was Paley's impact that his ideas lingered within Victorian culture - and with them, an essentially static understanding of the biological world, which was improperly assumed to be the Christian view of things. No wonder that so many theologians wanted to get back to an earlier, more authentic way of doing theology, and set Paley's adventurism to one side.

Dawkins' assessment of the theological implications of Darwinism is excessively dependent on the assumption that Paley (or Paleyesque) approaches to the biosphere are typical or normative for Christianity. He also seems to assume that the intellectual case for Christianity rests largely, if not totally, upon an "argument for design," such as that proposed by Paley. Yet Christian theology does not hold that Christian belief is irrational or lacking positive epistemic status without the kind of arguments that Paley develops. Dawkins makes a superb case for abandoning Paley. Sadly, he seems to think this also entails abandoning God.

So what if we were to forget about Paley, and return to the biblical interpretation and theological methods of the early church? Sadly, this is a historical experiment which simply cannot be undertaken. History, like the evolutionary process described by Darwin and Dawkins, is irreversible, and prone to contingencies which lie beyond experimental control. Happenstance is as important in cultural as it is in biological evolution. But what can be said, and needs to be said, is this: if the Darwinian debate had taken place in the Greek-speaking church of the fourth century, things would have worked out very differently.j9 The criticism I therefore wish to make is this: Dawkins' strongly negative assessment of the religious implications of Darwinism depends on depicting a local historical contingency as a universal theological necessity. Even allowing for the cultural importance of Britain in the nineteenth century, you cannot present the local conditions of Victorian England as if they were determinant of the Christian faith down the ages.

Thus far, I have raised three objections to Dawkins' analysis of the implications of Darwinism for Christian belief. At this point, I want to introduce two other considerations. These are not "arguments," but are rather historical observations which raise further doubts concerning whether Dawkins has adequately justified his atheist reading of Darwinism. In what follows, we shall reflect on Darwin's own assessment of the religious implications of his theory of evolution, and the judgments of leading Christian biologists and theologians around the time of Darwin.

The Religious Views of Charles Darwin

The religious implications of a Darwinian view of life are contested. It can be interpreted in a Christian, agnostic, and atheist manner. But what about Darwin himself? What was his own understanding of the religious implications of his views? It would suit Dawkins' purposes admirably if Darwin could be shown to have abandoned any faith in God as a consequence of his theory of evolution. Yet Dawkins' discussion of the complex and fascinating interaction of Darwin's scientific and religious views is most disappointing, and fails to deal satisfactorily with the issues involved.40 If everything altered after Darwin, it is clearly important to determine what Darwin himself believed to have changed as a result of his new ideas.

The view that Darwin was indeed an atheist on account of his evolutionary doctrine was vigorously advocated in Edward Aveling's pamphlet The Religious Views of Charles Darwin (1883).41 The evidence brought forward in this short work is far from persuasive, and it is unclear what weight should be attached to it. Darwin had earlier declined Aveling's request to dedicate his Student's Darwin to him. Aveson was one of Karl Marx's most dedicated English followers, and regarded Darwin's evolutionary views as reinforcing the basic ideas of Marxian materialism. Darwin did not wish to endorse such an association."

There are indeed several important passages in Darwin's writings that can be interpreted to mean that Darwin ceased to believe in an orthodox Christian conception of God on account of his views on evolution. The problem is that there are other passages which variously point to Darwin maintaining a religious belief, or to his losing his faith for reasons quite other than evolutionary concerns. However, a note of caution must be injected: on the basis of the published evidence at our disposal, it is clear that Darwin himself was far from consistent in the matter of his religious views. It would therefore be extremely unwise to draw any confident conclusions on these issues.43

There can be no doubt that Darwin abandoned what we might call "conventional Christian beliefs" at some point in the 1840s, although the dating of this must remain elusive. Yet there is a substantial theoretical gap between "abandoning orthodox Christian faith" and "becoming an atheist." Christianity involves a highly specific conception of God; it is perfectly possible to believe in a god other than that of Christianity, or to believe in God and reject certain other aspects of the Christian faith. Indeed, the "Victorian crisis of faith" - within which Darwin was both spectator and participant - can be understood as a shift away from the specifics of Christianity towards a more generic concept of God, largely determined by the ethical values of the day.

As any reasonable history of atheism makes clear, the alternatives available to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included many forms of belief in God, stretching far beyond the Christian vision of God. Voltaire (1694-1778), often thought of as an atheist, was in fact a Deist - one who believed in a divinity of reason. His Letter to Uranie (1722; published 1732) set out a strong defense of the existence of a supreme being, who was inadequately and falsely represented by the great positive religions of the world, especially the French Catholic Church and its leading representatives. Voltaire rejected the Christian concept of God on the grounds that it represented a distortion of the rival divinity of reason. There is a spectrum of theistic possibilities between "orthodox Christianity" and "atheism"; the later Darwin, as far as can be established, is to be located towards the middle of that spectrum, rather than at either of its extremes.

Two factors are known to have been a particular concern for Darwin, with negative implications for traditional Christianity. First, Darwin found the existence of pain and suffering in the world to be an unbearable intellectual and moral burden. It is widely agreed that what C. S. Lewis termed "the problem of pain" is one of the most significant obstacles to Christian belief, and it is entirely understandable that one as sensitive as Darwin should feel the weight of this matter, particularly in the light of his own protracted (and still unexplained) illness.44 The death of his daughter Annie at the tender age of ten unquestionably deepened his feeling of moral outrage over this issue.45

In 1961 Donald Fleming put forward the important thesis that Darwin's experience of suffering was an integral element of his own loss of faith. Fleming held that Darwin came to believe that "modern man would rather have senseless suffering than suffering warranted to be intelligible because willed from on high. "46 Pain and suffering were to be accepted as the meaningless outcome of the evolutionary process; this, however disagreeable, seemed preferable to the alternative - namely, that God either inflicted suffering himself, or permitted it to be inflicted by others.

The idea that evolution took place according to certain general principles or laws, with the precise details left to chance, never entirely satisfied Darwin, seeming to leave many intellectual loose ends and open up difficult moral issues - not least, the immense wastage of life attending the process of natural selection. But it seemed to Darwin to be less troubling than the alternative - that "a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."" At least this could be put down to an accident of nature, rather than purposeful divine design.

Second, Darwin shared the moral outrage of the midVictorian period over some aspects of Christian doctrine especially associated with the increasingly influential evangelical movement. Like George Eliot and many others at the time,48 Darwin reacted with repugnance to ideas such as the damnation to everlasting Hell of those who did not explicitly believe the Christian gospel.49 Darwin felt this outrage with particular force, on account of his father's somewhat unorthodox religious beliefs. As he wrote in his Autobiography:

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

In October 1882, six months after Darwin's death, his widow asked that this particular passage should not be published. She wrote the following in the margins of her husband's manuscript at this point:

I should dislike the passage in brackets to be published. It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief - but very few now wd. call that "Christianity."

We can see here something of the spirit of this remarkable period in English cultural history, in which some aspects of evangelical Christianity were subjected to an unprecedented level of criticism, reflecting a growing belief that these accounts of the nature and purposes of God were deficient and unacceptable within an increasingly sophisticated culture.'o Darwin here speaks with the voice of his age, and does not add anything of a specifically evolutionary character.

Darwin may have abandoned a traditional rendering of Christianity. However, this does not for one moment mean that he became an atheist. Although atheism is certainly encountered in late Victorian England, by far the more common response was agnosticism - a principled refusal to reach a decision on the God question, on the grounds of inadequate evidence." Thomas H. Huxley, who invented the term, was profoundly irritated by those who dogmatized on matters of religion, whether positively or negatively. Science is, by definition, agnostic on matters of religion. And there, he argued, things should be left.

There is little in Darwin's writings to force us to any alternative conclusion. In 1879, while working on his autobiography, Darwin commented on his personal religious confusion: "My judgment often fluctuates ... In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind."

Thus Darwin; but what of those who encountered Darwin's ideas at the time of their publication? What was the response to Darwin's new theory within the Victorian literary and religious establishment? As this reaction is rather illuminating, we may consider it in the final section of this chapter.

The Christian Reaction to Darwin

Within thirty years of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, many within the establishment of the Church of England had swung behind the new ideas, and pronounced them to be perfectly consistent with Christian theology. This positive new attitude within the established church was noticed by most, including Huxley. In November 1887 he penned an essay in the journal Nineteenth Century, summarizing and evaluating three recent sermons by senior bishops of the Church of England. These were prea'' .J in Manchester Cathedral on Sunday, September 4, 1887, during the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, by the bishops of Carlisle, Bedford, and Manchester.52 "These excellent discourses," Huxley wrote with evident enthusiasm, "signalize a new departure in the course adopted by theology towards science, and to indicate the possibility of bringing about an honourable modus vivendi between the two."

It is impossible to read the discourses of the three prelates without being impressed by the knowledge which they display, and by the spirit of equity, I might say of generosity, towards science which pervades them. There is no trace of that tacit or open assumption that the rejection of theological dogmas, on scientific grounds, is due to moral perversity, which is the ordinary note of ecclesiastical homilies on this subject, and which makes them look so supremely silly to men whose lives have been spent in wrestling with these questions. There is no suggestion that an honest man may keep contradictory beliefs in separate pockets of his brain; no question that the method of scientific investigation is valid, whatever the results to which it may lead; and that the search after truth, and truth only, ennobles the searcher and leaves no doubt that his life, at any rate, is worth living.

Huxley welcomed this genuine attempt to achieve a rapprochement - no, more than that: a genuine convergence - of the natural sciences and theology. Perhaps his greatest enthusiasm was reserved for the firm rejection of any notion of demanding isolated intellectual compartments of the human mind for dealing with both. Huxley singled out one comment by the bishop of Bedford for especial praise, in which the bishop repudiated any idea that science and religion

occupy wholly different spheres, and need in no way intermeddle with each other. They revolve, as it were, in different planes, and so never meet. Thus we may pursue scientific studies with the utmost freedom and, at the same time, may pay the most reverent regard to theology, having no fears of collision, because allowing no points of contact.

Why bother with such historical details? Because they make it clear that it is deeply problematic to suggest that Darwinism necessitates atheism. As a matter of historical fact, Darwinism was not perceived to entail atheism by the best-informed judges of the time. Huxley's personal view was that it led to a principled agnosticism. However, his comments on these sermons indicates that he did not regard this as a completely closed question. While there was opposition, particularly from some popular preachers, to Darwin's ideas, the vast scholarly endeavor to understand both popular and academic reaction to them has demonstrated a far greater level of support for Darwin than was previously supposed.s3

This support for Darwin was not restricted to the Church of England. A growing interest in Darwin is evident in North America around this time, even in those more conservative religious groups from which opposition might be expected. An excellent example of this positive assessment of Darwin can be found in Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921), widely regarded as the most important American theologian of the late nineteenth century. Although characterized by a conservative Protestant religious outlook, Warfield made clear his support for the concept of biological evolution.S4 Where Darwin regarded the evolutionary process as resting upon chance variations, whose subsequent fate was determined by general principles, Warfield argued it was entirely proper to see the evolutionary process as guided by divine providence.

In fact, the theory was widely accepted within early North American fundamentalism. The movement derives its name from a series of short publications entitled The Fundamentals, which appeared over the period 1912-17.55 One of those fundamentalist essays was by James Orr, who argued evolution "is coming to be recognized as but a new name for `creation,' only that the creative power now works from within, instead of, as in the old conception, in an external, plastic fashion."56 Although hostile to Darwin's notion of random variations, Orr was clear that the process of natural selection could easily be viewed in terms consistent with Christian theism.

We might also pause here to note the views of Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962), one of the most important evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century.-5' Fisher, whose many theoretical achievements are noted by Dawkins, is often cited as the father of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He was appointed Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge in 1943, and remained in that position until his retirement in 1957. He was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1948 "in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the theory of natural selection, the concept of its gene complex and the evolution of dominance." Although a rather private man, Fisher was perfectly prepared to get involved in controversy whenever he believed scientific truth was being compromised. That he did not regard neo-Darwinism as entailing atheism (or even agnosticism) is perfectly clear from a broadcast talk he gave on the BBC Third Programme in June 1947:

Plate 9 Ronald A. Fisher (1890-1962) © Science Photo Library

To the traditionally religious man, the essential novelty introduced by the theory of the evolution of organic life, is that creation was not all finished a long while ago, but is still in progress, in the midst of its incredible duration. In the language of Genesis we are living in the sixth day, probably rather early in the morning, and the Divine Artist has not yet stood back from his work, and declared it to be "very good." Perhaps that can only be when God's very imperfect image has become more competent to manage the affairs of the planet of which he is in control."

Fisher retired to Australia in 1959, and is buried in Adelaide Cathedral, South Australia.

Stephen Jay Gould rightly pointed out that many leading Darwinians self-defined religiously, and saw no problem about doing so.59 As Gould observes, any suggestion that Darwinian theory of evolution is necessarily atheistic goes way beyond the competency of the natural sciences, and strays into territory where the scientific method cannot be applied. If it is applied, it is misapplied. Thus Gould argues that Charles Darwin was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), whereas the great American botanist Asa Gray, who advocated natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian.

More recently, Gould continues, Charles D. Walcott, the discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct a history of life according to His plans and purposes. More recently still, the "two greatest evolutionists of our generation" show radically different attitudes to the existence of God: G. G. Simpson was a humanist agnostic, Theodosius Dobzhansky a believing Russian Orthodox. As Gould concludes:

Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs - and equally compatible with atheism.

And that, in a nutshell, seems to be where the debate has ended. Darwinism can be held to be consistent with conventional religious beliefs, agnosticism, and atheism. It all depends on how these terms are defined. The debate itself is fascinating, and opens up many important questions about the limits of the scientific method, the interpretation of the Bible, the evidential basis of faith, the transition from scientific theories to worldviews, and the history of biology. It is impossible to study, or become involved in, such debates without being challenged and stimulated to think through some of life's great issues.

But the debate, though immensely worthwhile and intellectually fascinating, is religiously inconclusive. Dawkins presents Darwinism as an intellectual superhighway to atheism. In reality, the intellectual trajectory mapped out by Dawkins seems to get stuck in a rut at agnosticism. And having stalled, it stays there. There is a substantial logical gap between Darwinism and atheism, which Dawkins seems to prefer to bridge by rhetoric, rather than evidence. If firm conclusions are to be reached, they must be reached on other grounds. And those who earnestly tell us otherwise have some explaining to do.

This neatly leads us on to consider the place of evidence in science and religion, an issue on which Dawkins has much to say.

Proof and Faith:

The Place of Evidence

in Science and Religion

One of the central themes of the human quest for knowledge is the need to be able to distinguish mere "opinion" from "knowledge." How can we distinguish a belief that is warranted and rigorously reasoned from mere unsubstantiated opinion? The debate goes back to Plato, and continues today. The key question - whether in the natural sciences, philosophy, or theology - is this: what conditions must be fulfilled before we can conclude that a given belief is justified? For Dawkins, the only reliable knowledge we may hope to have of the world is scientific. Philosophers, lawyers, theologians, and others may make spurious claims to secure knowledge. In the end, however, it is only the natural sciences that can provide a true understanding of the world.

There is no doubt that the debate over how we generate and justify our beliefs is immensely important, and Dawkins' contribution to this debate must be welcomed, and - along with its rivals - taken seriously. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the way in which people sustain their belief systems. The evidence is disturbing, especially for those who continue to believe in the Enlightenment vision of complete objectivity of judgment in all things. Yet there is a growing body of evidence that belief systems - whether theistic or atheistic - are neither generated nor sustained in this way.

Cognitive psychological research has demonstrated repeatedly that people "tend to seek out, recall, and interpret evidence in a manner that sustains beliefs."' The interpretation of data is often deeply shaped by the beliefs of the researcher. These implicit beliefs are often so deeply held that they affect the way in which people process information and arrive at judgments. Both religious and anti-religious belief systems are often resistant to anything that threatens to undermine, challenge, qualify, or disconfirm them. Deeply held assumptions often render these implicit theories "almost impervious to data."'

Some Christian and Islamic writers seem unwilling to examine their deeply held beliefs, presumably because they are afraid that this kind of thing is bad news for faith. Well, maybe it is - for intellectually deficient and half-baked ideas. But it doesn't need to be like this. There are intellectually robust forms of faith - the kind of thing we find in writers such as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and C. S. Lewis. They weren't afraid to think about their faith, and ask hard questions about its evidential basis, its internal consistency, or the adequacy of its theories.

Yet the problem is not limited to those who believe in God. As I discovered while researching my book The Twilight of Atheism, an atheist worldview can be just as detached from empirical evidence as a religious one. Dawkins has his own views of what religious people believe, and proceeds to rubbish these ideas with enthusiasm. Anyone who was theologically illiterate would doubtless be impressed by such a performance, and come to the conclusion that religion had been judged and found wanting at the most profound level. Well, it has certainly been judged. But whether that judgment can be sustained on the basis of the evidence is quite another matter.

To put it bluntly, Dawkins' engagement with theology is superficial and inaccurate, often amounting to little more than cheap point scoring. My Oxford colleague Keith Ward has made this point repeatedly, noting in particular Dawkins' "systematic mockery and demonizing of competing views, which are always presented in the most naive light."' His tendency to misrepresent the views of his opponents is the least attractive aspect of his writings. It simply reinforces the perception that he inhabits a hermetically sealed conceptual world, impervious to a genuine engagement with religion. Dawkins tends to seek out, recall, and interpret evidence in a manner that sustains his atheist beliefs. To illustrate this, we may open our discussion of the place of evidence in Dawkins' take on reality by exploring his approach to the idea of "faith."

Faith as Blind Trust?

Faith "means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence."' This view, set out for the first time in 1976, is an expression of one of the "core beliefs" that determine Dawkins' attitude to religion. In 1989 he hardened his views: faith now qualified "as a kind of mental illness."' This non-negotiable core conviction surfaces again in 1992, when Dawkins delivered a lecture at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, in which he set out his views on the relation of faith and evidence. Dawkins was scathing over the intellectual irresponsibility of faith:

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence ... Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument.'

Four years later, Dawkins was named "Humanist of the Year." In his acceptance speech, published the following year in the journal The Humanist, Dawkins set out his agenda for the eradication of what he regarded as the greatest evil of our age.

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion. This is to be contrasted with the natural sciences, which offer an evidence-based approach to the world. "As a lover of truth, I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence."' And quite rightly so. But does this suspicion extend to his own strongly held atheist views, which to his critics seem surprisingly unsupported by the evidence he adduces?

Dawkins here opens up the whole question of the place of proof, evidence, and faith in both science and religion. It is a fascinating topic, and we must be grateful to him for so doing. In this chapter, we shall explore some of the issues raised by the history and philosophy of science for this debate, and ask if it really is quite as simple as Dawkins suggests. I certainly thought so during my atheist phase, and would have regarded Dawkins' arguments as decisive. But not now.

Let's begin by looking at that definition of faith, and ask where it comes from. Faith "means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence." But why should anyone accept this ludicrous definition? In his "Prayer for my Daughter" Dawkins makes an important point, which is clearly relevant here:

Next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.'

So what is the evidence that anyone - let alone religious people - defines "faith" in this absurd way?

The simple fact is that Dawkins offers no defense of this definition, which bears little relation to any religious (or any other) sense of the word. No evidence is offered that it is representative of religious opinion. No authority is cited in its support. I don't accept this idea of faith, and I have yet to meet a theologian who takes it seriously. It cannot be defended from any official declaration of faith from any Christian denomination. It is Dawkins' own definition, constructed with his own agenda in mind, being represented as if it were characteristic of those he wishes to criticize.

What is really worrying is that Dawkins genuinely seems to believe that faith actually is "blind trust," despite the fact that no major Christian writer adopts such a definition. This is a core belief for Dawkins, which determines more or less every aspect of his attitude to religion and religious people. Yet core beliefs often need to be challenged. For, as Dawkins once remarked of Paley's ideas on design, this belief is "gloriously and utterly wrong."

Faith, Dawkins tells us, "means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence." This may be what Dawkins thinks; it is not what Christians think. Let me provide a definition of faith offered by W. H. Griffith-Thomas (18611924), a noted Anglican theologian who was one of my predecessors as Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. The definition of faith that he offers is typical of any Christian writer:

[Faith] affects the whole of man's nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.'

It's a good and reliable definition, synthesizing the core elements of the characteristic Christian understanding of faith. And this faith "commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence." I see no point in wearying readers with other quotations from Christian writers down the ages in support of this point. In any case, it is Dawkins' responsibility to demonstrate that his skewed and nonsensical definition of "faith" is characteristic of Christianity through evidence-based argument.

Having set up his straw man, Dawkins knocks it down. It is not an unduly difficult or demanding intellectual feat. Faith is infantile, we are told - just fine for cramming into the minds of impressionable young children, but outrageously immoral and intellectually risible in the case of adults. We've grown up now, and need to move on. Why should we believe things that can't be scientifically proved? Faith in God, Dawkins argues, is just like believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. When you grow up, you grow out of it.

This is a schoolboy argument that has accidentally found its way into a grown-up discussion. It is as amateurish as it is unconvincing. There is no serious empirical evidence that people regard God, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy as being in the same category. I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy when I was about six years old. After being an atheist for some years, I discovered God when I was eighteen, and have never regarded this as some kind of infantile regression. As I noticed while researching The Twilight of Atheism, a large number of people come to believe in God in later life - when they are "grown up." I have yet to meet anyone who came to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy late in life.

If Dawkins' rather simplistic argument has any plausibility, it requires a real analogy between God and Santa Claus to exist - which it clearly does not. Everyone knows that people do not regard belief in God as belonging to the same category as these childish beliefs. Dawkins, of course, argues that they both represent belief in non-existent entities. But this represents a very elementary confusion over which is the conclusion and which the presupposition of an argument.

In any case, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are not ideas invented by children; these myths are forced upon them by adults, even if the children themselves often collude with them. Dawkins takes the view that belief in God is something forced upon children by tyrannical adults, and is to be rejected for that reason. Yet it is impossible to study the development of atheism in the twentieth century without noting how precisely this pattern of the imposition of ideas was found in the Soviet Union and other atheist states.10

In July 1954 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ordered an increased explicit commitment to atheism in its schools. Belief in God had not yet been eliminated by argument or force. The only option seemed to be an aggressive program of indoctrination of its children. Soviet schoolbooks repeatedly asserted the malevolence of religion through slogans such as "Religion is a fanatic and perverse reflection of the world" or "Religion has become the medium for the spiritual enslavement of the masses." Alarmed at the persistence of religion, the Party decreed that "the teaching of school subjects (history, literature, natural sciences, physics, chemistry, etc.) should be saturated with atheism." In the end, all that the program did was to lay the foundations for the massive rebirth of belief in God after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

So, if Dawkins' argument carries weight, are we to conclude that atheism is evil, immoral, and incredible - the sort of nonsense that one has to force on children, because otherwise they would never believe it? No. The institutional abuse of an idea does not discredit it, whether we are talking about atheism, theism, or democracy. Yet this is such an obvious counter-argument that I am astonished that Dawkins does not even bother to note it. While I believe that it is wrong to force beliefs on children - whether theistic or atheistic - this does not invalidate those beliefs. It is merely the starting point for an argument, not its conclusion.

At times, Dawkins seems to get carried away with his anti-religious rhetoric by sliding from "this cannot be proved" to "this is false" with alarming ease, apparently unaware of the lapses in reasoning along the way. Consider, for example, his response in a 1999 debate on "Whether Science is Killing the Soul" to a question from the audience: can science offer consolation in the way that religion does - for example, after the death of a close friend or relative?

The fact that religion may console you doesn't of course make it true. It's a moot point whether one wishes to be consoled by a falsehood."

Dawkins slides effortlessly from "consolation does not make religion true" to "religion is false." Now perhaps this is an entirely natural inference for Dawkins himself, given his deeply ingrained anti-religious feelings. But it is not a logically valid conclusion. It is clearly an obvious conclusion for Dawkins himself, steeped in a particular way of thinking driven by his core convictions. But it most certainly does not follow that, since A has not been proven, A is false.

As the core belief that faith is "blind trust" permeates Dawkins' many criticisms of religion, it clearly needs careful examination. Let's examine one of his statements on the nature of faith in a little more detail. In the second edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins proposes an absolute dichotomy between "blind faith" and "overwhelming, publicly available evidence":

But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something - it doesn't matter what - in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence, then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.12

This, I must stress, is Dawkins' definition of faith, and it bears no resemblance to what Christians believe. It's on the same level as saying that the theory of evolution is about giraffes wanting to reach the leafy higher branches of trees, so that their necks stretch as a result. It's an amusing caricature of the real thing." Sadly, some people take it seriously, and think it is the real thing.

Dawkins' idiosyncratic definition of faith is unworkable and unsustainable. It proposes an absolute dichotomy between "blind faith" and a belief grounded in "overwhelming, publicly available evidence." It's an interesting distinction, but it bears no relation to Christianity or to the normal working methods and assumptions of the natural sciences, including evolutionary biology. The issue is about probability, not certainty. The point at issue is that observational evidence can never render a prediction or generalization certain; it can, however, render either or both probable. The question is: how probable?

The highly simplistic model proposed by Dawkins seems to recognize only two options: 0 percent probability (blind faith) and 100 percent probability (belief caused by overwhelming evidence). Yet the vast majority of scientific information needs to be discussed in terms of the probability of conclusions reached on the basis of the available evidence. Some have argued for assessing the reliability of probability of a hypothesis on the basis of Bayes' theorem.14 Such approaches are widely used in evolutionary biology. For example, Elliott Sober proposed the notion of "modus Darwin" for arguing for common Darwinian ancestry on the basis of present similarities between species." The approach can only work on the basis of probability, leading to probabilistic judgments. But there's no problem here. It's an attempt to quantify the reliability of inferences.

And this applies as much to God, as to anything else. Dawkins asserts - for he certainly has not argued - that God is a matter of blind faith. He ended his 1992 lecture at the Edinburgh International Science Festival with the following dismissal of the God hypothesis. As Darwinism can explain the "spectacular beauty and complexity of life," there is no need for alternative or supplementary explanations:

The alternative hypothesis, that it was all started by a supernatural creator, is not only superfluous, it is also highly improbable. It falls foul of the very argument that was originally put forward in its favor. This is because any God worthy of the name must have been a being of colossal intelligence, a supermind, an entity of extremely low probability - a very improbable being indeed. Even if the postulation of such an entity explained anything (and we don't need it to), it still wouldn't help because it raises a bigger mystery than it solves.

Now this is not a reasoned argument. It is a hastily assembled garbled paragraph, jumbling together a number of ideas without the continuity of thought that distinguishes meandering sentences from trains of thought. But what is more worrying is the loose, imprecise, and vague talk about "improbability." God, we are told, is "highly improbable." Well, how improbable? And on what basis is this figure determined? Again, God is "an entity of extremely low probability." How low? And on the basis of what evidence is this probability determined? Just how does Dawkins arrive at any figure? And since when does probability determine whether or not something actually exists?

It is interesting to turn from this rather sloppy piece of rhetoric to a more careful argument by Richard Swinburne, Oxford University's Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, who uses probability theory to assess the reliability of a belief in God - or, more specifically, the Christian belief that Jesus Christ is God incarnate.16 I do not expect Dawkins to agree with Swinburne's theistic conclusion, or his calculation of the highly probable existence of God. But I do expect him to show the same careful attention to detail in assessing the relative probabilities of belief and unbelief, instead of his usual populist swashbuckling rhetorical exaggerations. After all, Dawkins, not Swinburne, is meant to be the scientist.

Dawkins concludes his 1992 lecture at the Edinburgh International Science Festival with these words: "We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude that He is very, very improbable indeed." On the basis of the arguments offered, this is a highly unsafe conclusion, best passed over as an unscientific piece of rhetoric. Rather than dwell on this nonargument, let's turn to explore some more specific engagements with issues of faith. Let's ask a difficult, but obvious, question. Might atheism itself be a faith?

Is Atheism Itself a Faith?

Is science a religion? Dawkins is often asked this question, and has a standard answer: No. The sciences, he argues, have all the good points of religious belief, and none of their bad points. They evoke a sense of wonder at reality, and offer humanity uplift and inspiration. And they are immune from the problems of faith. Atheism is the only option for today's thinking person, whose ideas are grounded in the only valid mode of encounter with reality - that of the natural sciences. It's a splendidly simple account of things.

It all starts to unravel very quickly, however. We have already noted Dawkins' belief that religious faith is "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence."" This arbitrary and idiosyncratic definition simply does not stand up to serious investigation. In fact, it is itself an excellent example of a belief tenaciously held and defended "in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence." Dawkins doggedly holds on to his own hopelessly muddled idea of what "faith" is, and assumes that others share that confusion. But what of atheism itself?

Dawkins presents agnosticism as an intellectual soft option, offering a rhetorical dismissal of the notion. In his Edinburgh Lecture of 1992 he argued that, like faith, agnosticism is a "cop-out" - an argument that can be applied to anything. "There is an infinite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold which we can't positively disprove." Now there is unquestionably some truth in this. But the real difficulty is that Dawkins' biological arguments - to the extent that they are genuine arguments, rather than blunt dogmatic assertions - lead only to agnosticism. He is obliged to supplement them with additional arguments of a non-scientific nature to get to his intended conceptual destination. And these are often rhetorical, rather than analytical, in nature. In the end, Dawkins' atheism does not really rest on his science at all, but on an unstated and largely unexamined cluster of hidden nonscientific values and beliefs. As this point is so important, we shall explore it further.

The debate between atheism and religious belief has gone on for centuries, and just about every aspect of it has been explored to the point where even philosophers seem bored with it. The outcome is a stalemate. Nobody can prove God's existence, and nobody can disprove it. Dawkins, following G. G. Simpson, argues that everything changed with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.'8 So just what is the impact of Darwin on religious belief? That question has been explored in detail.

The basic conclusion, as we have seen, is that Darwinism neither proves nor disproves the existence of God (unless, of course, God is defined by his critics in precisely such a manner that his existence is defeated by some central presupposition of Darwinian theory). If the great debate about God were to be determined solely on Darwinian grounds, the outcome is agnosticism - a principled, scrupulous insistence that the evidence is insufficient to allow a safe verdict to be reached.

This does not suit Dawkins at all. His efforts to force an atheist conclusion upon a Darwinian description of the world are the least convincing, not to mention the least attractive, aspects of his writings. As an example, we may consider Dawkins' refutation of theism in Climbing Mount Improbable. Here, he argues that the very idea of a "designing God" is intellectually self-defeating:

Any designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable - and therefore demanding of explanation ... Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation.19

These are just assertions - bold, brash, confident statements, linked to the absolute dichotomist patterns of thought that Dawkins enjoys.

Let's begin with his first point about God being a "complicated" and hence "improbable" entity, on account of the richness of the biosphere. What does Dawkins mean when he makes the extraordinary statement that "any designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining"? It's a bold assertion, made without the customary process of careful argument necessary to lead to such a conclusion, including the fair and thorough evaluation of alternative proposals.

It is far from clear what force this point has. Dawkins himself has devoted much of his career as a scientific popularizer to demonstrating that "the dazzling array of living things" could have arisen quite simply, over long periods of time, through a process of neo-Darwinian evolution. His point would have some merit as a critique of theism - though how much can be disputed - if he were to propose a doctrine of special, individual creation, similar to that proposed by William Paley. But there is no reason to do so. A theologian might respond by arguing that God created an environment within which incredibly complex entities could develop from quite simple beginnings by quite simple processes. Dawkins seems to think that believing in God commits one to this late eighteenthcentury way of thinking about creation. But as the history of the Christian tradition up to, and since, that point makes clear, this is simply not the case.

Dawkins argues that, since God is "complicated," he is "improbable." These notions are not equivalent; nor is the latter entailed by the former. They are connected by a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, buttressed by an aggressive rhetoric rather than a rigorous, evidence-based argument. Yet, once more, it is quite unclear why this has any relevance. To reiterate the fundamental point made in the previous section: it does not matter whether God is improbable (setting to one side the fact that Dawkins neither quantifies this probability, nor offers us a method for determining that probability in the first place); improbable things happen. That, after all, is the point Dawkins makes in Climbing Mount Improbable. Improbabilities exist.

Anyway, why does God need to be explained? Which of the several diverging theories of scientific explanation is Dawkins basing this assertion upon? Carl Hempel's inferential model? Wesley Salmon's causal approach? Or one of the many other models which attempt to clarify whether an "explanation" actually explains anything? There is a singular lack of conceptual clarity in Dawkins' analysis, centering on the problematic yet critically important notion of explanation. As is well known, the philosophy of science has considered a variety of meaningful, yet quite different, concepts of scientific explanation,20 none of which possess quite the reductive sense that Dawkins appears to presuppose. As Paul Kitcher points out, the most fundamental issue is the reduction of phenomena to as few "ultimates" as possible:

Science advances our understanding of nature by showing us how to derive descriptions of many phenomena, using the same pattern of derivation again and again, and in demonstrating this, it teaches us how to reduce the number of facts we have to accept as ultimate."

So what's the problem with God, exactly? Why should God require an explanation at all? He might just be an "ultimate," to use Kitcher's term - one of those things we have to accept as given, and is thus amenable to description, rather than explanation. Dawkins needs to do a lot more work on what he means here before his point can be understood, and subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

One of the most striking things about Dawkins' atheism is the confidence with which he asserts its inevitability. It is a curious confidence, which seems curiously out of place - perhaps even out of order - to those familiar with the philosophy of science. As Richard Feynman (1918-88), who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics, often pointed out, scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.22 Yet Dawkins seems to deduce atheism from the "book of nature" as if it were a pure matter of logic. Atheism is asserted as if it was the only conclusion possible from a series of axioms.

Many of a more philosophical inclination will want to ask a question at this point: given that the natural sciences proceed by inference from observational data, how can Dawkins be so sure about atheism? At times, he speaks with the conviction of a believer about the certainties of a godless world. It is as if atheism was the secure and inevitable result of a seamless logical argument. But how can he achieve such certainty, when the natural sciences are not deductive in their methods?

This difficulty has puzzled me throughout my reading of Dawkins' works. Inference is, by definition, an uncertain matter, in which one must take enormous trouble not to reach premature conclusions. So how come Dawkins is so sure about this? Others have examined the same evidence, and come to quite different conclusions. As will be clear from what has been said thus far, Dawkins' insistence that atheism is the only legitimate worldview for a natural scientist is an unsafe and unreliable judgment. Yet my anxiety is not limited to the flawed intellectual case that Dawkins makes for his convictions; I am troubled by the ferocity with which he asserts his atheism. One obvious potential answer is that the grounds of Dawkins' atheism lie elsewhere than his science, so that there is perhaps a strongly emotive aspect to his beliefs at this point. Yet I have not come across anything that forces me to this conclusion. The answer has to lie elsewhere.

I began to find an answer to my question while reading a careful analysis of the distinctive style of reasoning that we find in Dawkins' writings. In an important comparative study, Timothy Shanahan pointed out that Stephen Jay Gould's approach to the question of evolutionary progress was determined by an inductivist method, based primarily on empirical data.z3 Dawkins, he noted, "proceeded by elaborating the logic of `adaptationist philosophy' for Darwinian reasoning." This being the case, Dawkins' conclusions are determined by a set of logical premises, which are ultimately - yet indirectly - grounded in the empirical data. "The very nature of a valid deductive argument is such that, given certain premises, a given conclusion follows of logical necessity quite irrespective of whether the premises used are true." In effect, Dawkins uses an essentially inductive approach to defend a Darwinian worldview - yet then extracts from this worldview a set of premises from which secure conclusions may be deduced.

Although Shanahan limits his analysis to exploring how Gould and Dawkins arrive at such antithetically opposed conclusions on the issue of evolutionary progress, his analysis is clearly capable of extension to Dawkins' religious views. Having inferred that Darwinism is the best explanation of observation, Dawkins proceeds to transmute a provisional theory into a certain worldview. Atheism is thus presented as the logical conclusion of a series of axiomatic premises, having the certainty of a deduced belief, even though its ultimate basis is actually inferential.

I have no doubt that Dawkins is persuaded of the case for atheism. Yet the case made is not publicly persuasive. Dawkins is obliged to make a "leap of faith" from agnosticism to atheism, corresponding to those who make a similar leap in the opposite direction. The idea that atheism is a form of faith is unproblematic. It amounts to little more than asserting what everyone knows to be true: that the things that really matter in life often lie beyond demonstrative proof. Nobody is going to be able to settle the question of the existence of God with complete certainty. It's simply not in the same category as whether the earth is flat, or whether DNA takes the form of a double helix. It's more like the question of whether democracy is better than totalitarianism. This cannot be settled by scientific means - but this does not prevent people from reaching their own conclusions on this matter. Nor does it entail that their decisions on such matters are irrational - a matter which we may explore a little further in the next section.

Christian Faith as Irrational?

As we have seen, Dawkins' analysis of faith is highly simplistic, and takes no account of the way in which words are used in religious contexts. Ludwig Wittgenstein made the uncontestable point that words are used with different meanings in different contexts. For Wittgenstein, the Lebensform ("form of living") within which a word was used was of decisive importance in establishing its meaning. As Wittgenstein pointed out, precisely the same word can be used in a large number of contexts, with different meanings in each. One way of getting round this problem might be to invent a totally new vocabulary, in which the meaning of each word was tightly and unequivocally defined. But this is not a real option. Languages are living entities, and cannot be forced to behave in such an artificial way.

A perfectly acceptable approach, according to Wittgenstein, is to take trouble to define the particular sense in which a word should be understood, in order to avoid confusion with its many other senses. This involves a careful study of its associations and its use in the "form of living" to which it relates.24 Instead of blindly and naively assuming that a word which means one thing in one situation means precisely the same in another, it is universally agreed that we need to take great care in establishing how words are used in each context, and the meanings that they bear.

This point ought to be familiar to any working scientist, who is perfectly used to using words in one sense in everyday life, and a more precise, restricted sense within a laboratory culture. I worked for several years during the late 1970s in Professor Sir George Radda's research group in Oxford University's department of biochemistry. Every weekday morning at 11.00, we gathered for communal coffee around an ancient gas ring. When someone asked a neighbor to "Pass the sugar!," what they were actually asking for was the chemical known as "sucrose" or, more precisely, [2-0-(alpha-D-glucopyranosyl)- beta-D-fructofuranoside]. Now in the natural sciences, the term "sugar" represents a very broad class of chemicals, which includes the specific sugars found in sugar cane (sucrose), milk (lactose), and various fruits (fructose). These vary greatly in "sweetness." Lactose, for example, has only 16 percent of the sweetness of sucrose.

The "sugar" of the everyday world is thus actually one very specific form of the more general scientific category of sugar - specifically, a 1,2'-glycoside. This simple difference of vocabulary can cause immense confusion, especially in relation to health problems arising from excessive sucrose consumption." It might also have led to someone putting lactose in their coffee. We would have needed to pile six times the amount of lactose into our coffee to achieve the same degree of sweetness as sucrose. But this confusion just didn't arise. Everyone who gathered for coffee knew that words were being used with different meanings in different contexts, and could tell the difference between them.

Now there isn't a problem here. You just get used to living in different worlds, and sensitive to their subtle linguistic differences. You realize that words mean different things within different communities. Outsiders find these subtle differences troubling, and often fail to understand why the distinctive languages of different communities come into being. There is no question of dishonesty involved, as if anyone was trying to deceive people by using these specific forms of language. They evolve naturally, in response to the professional needs and distinctive tasks of the communities involved. It just involves becoming bilingual, and sensitive to the different meanings of words in different contexts. It means being prepared to ask people: "What do you mean when you use that word?" and being prepared to accept that their use of that word may not be identical with your use of the word - and that this doesn't mean that they are wrong, and you are right. Otherwise, communication across disciplinary boundaries becomes an impossibility. Scientists use language in a way that differs from ordinary usage; so do theologians. The first stage in any attempt to engage with a discipline is to understand its use of language.

Dawkins famously lambasted philosopher Mary Midgley for criticizing his "selfish gene" hypothesis without any awareness of how scientists used language. His words deserve to be cited: [Midgley] seems not to understand biology or the way biologists use language. No doubt my ignorance would be just as obvious if I rushed headlong into her field of expertise, but I would then adopt a more diffident tone. As it is we are both in my corner, and it is hard for me not to regard the gloves as off.2e

Yet is this the same Richard Dawkins who, knowing nothing about Christian theology, rushes headlong into the field, and tells theologians what they really mean when they use their own language? Or that they really mean "blind trust" when they speak of "faith"? There is a total failure on Dawkins' part to even begin to understand what Christian theology means by its language. It really does make it very difficult to take his judgments concerning its alleged failures with any degree of seriousness.

Let's try and get things straight here. As a professional historical theologian, I have no hesitation in asserting that the classic Christian tradition has always valued rationality, and does not hold that faith involves the complete abandonment of reason or believing in the teeth of the evidence. Indeed, the Christian tradition is so consistent on this matter that it is difficult to understand where Dawkins has got the idea of faith as "blind trust" from. Even a superficial reading of the works of leading Christian philosophers such as Richard Swinburne (Oxford University), Nicolas Wolterstorff (Yale University), and Alvin Plantinga (University of Notre Dame) would reveal their passionate commitment to the question of how one can make "warranted" or "coherent" statements concerning God.27 There is no question of "blind trust." The issue is how one can make an informed, rational, and defensible judgment on the God question, when the evidence is so clearly ambivalent.

Now perhaps Dawkins is too busy writing books against religion to allow him time to read works of religion. On the rare occasions when he cites classic theologians, he tends to do so at second hand, often with alarming results. For example, Dawkins singles out the early Christian writer Tertullian (ca. 160-ca. 225) for particularly acerbic comment, on account of two quotations from his writings: "It is certain because it is impossible" and "it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd.i28 Dawkins has little time for such nonsense. "That way madness lies."

In his view, Tertullian's approach - as evidenced by these two isolated citations - is just like that of the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who insisted on believing six impossible things before breakfast. As this dismissive account of Tertullian is one of the very few occasions on which Dawkins engages with serious representatives of the Christian theological tradition, I propose to take his comments with seriousness, and see where they take us. They might tell us something about Tertullian. Or even about Christianity. Or, then again, about Dawkins himself.

Tertullian never wrote the words "it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd." This misquotation is often attributed to him in secondary writings. But it is a misattribution, and has been known to be such for some time.29 So at least we can reasonably assume that Dawkins has not read Tertullian himself, but has taken this citation from an unreliable secondary source. That might tell us something about how reliable his judgments are in these matters.

Tertullian did, however, write the words "it is certain because it is impossible." The context, however, makes it clear that he is not for one moment arguing for a "blind faith." Here is the full passage, in the original Latin, with my English translation:

In this passage, contrary to what Dawkins thinks, Tertullian is not discussing the relation of faith and reason, or the evidential basis of Christianity. Reading the passage in context immediately eliminates any such idea. It has been known since 1916 that Tertullian is playing around with some ideas from Aristotle in this passage. James Moffat, who pointed this out, notes the apparent absurdity of Tertullian's words:

This is one of the most defiant paradoxes in Tertullian, one of the quick, telling sentences in which he does not hesitate to wreck the sense of words in order to make his point. He deliberately exaggerates, in order to call attention to the truth he has to convey. The phrase is often misquoted, and more often it is supposed to crystallize an irrational prejudice in his mind, as if he scorned and spurned the intelligence in religion - a supposition which will not survive any first-hand acquaintance with the writings of the African father.31

The point being made is that the Christian gospel is profoundly counter-cultural and counter-intuitive at this point. So why would anyone want to make it up, when it is so obviously implausible, by those standards of wisdom? Tertullian then parodies a passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which argues that an extraordinary claim may well be true, precisely because it is so out of the ordinary. It was probably meant to be a rhetorical joke, for those who knew their Aristotle.

But this is only one of a whole series of arguments that Tertullian brings forward at this point, and it is grossly inaccurate to determine his entire attitude towards rationality on the basis of a single, isolated phrase." Tertullian's attitude to reason is summed up definitively in the following quotation:

For reason is a property of God's, since there is nothing which God, the creator of all things, has not foreseen, arranged, and determined by reason. Furthermore, there is nothing God does not wish to be investigated and understood by reason.33

The bottom line is that there are no limits to what may be "investigated and understood by reason." The same God who created humanity with the capacity to reason expects that reason to be used in the exploration and representation of the world. And that's where the vast majority of Christian theologians stand today, and have stood in the past. Sure, there are exceptions. But Dawkins seems to prefer to treat exceptions as if they were the rule, offering no evidence in support of this highly questionable conclusion.

Dawkins' views on the nature of faith are best regarded as an embarrassment to anyone concerned with scholarly accuracy. It does nothing for his credibility, especially his occasionally preachy statements like: "As a lover of truth, I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence."" So let's just draw a line under this nonsense, and pass on to something more interesting.

The Problem of Radical Theory Change in Science

When I was learning physics at school, I gradually became aware of an awkward contradiction within what I was being taught. On the one hand, I was being assured that the theories of modern physics were completely reliable, the most secure form of knowledge that humanity could ever hope to possess. Yet every now and then, we would venture into a strange, twilight region, in which it would be explained to us, in hushed, conspiratorial tones, that "physicists once used to believe this, but don't now." Most of these had to do with light - something that was reasonably simple for a sixteen year old to understand. Once, it was thought that light required a medium to travel - but now, in the enlightened 1960s, nobody believed that any more. Once, people thought that light was made up purely of waves - but now we knew that it consists of photons. At first, I thought that these old-fashioned views dated back to the sixteenth century. But the awful truth soon became clear. The acceptance of these new ideas dated from about forty years earlier. "Once" turned out to mean "quite recently."

The problem of "radical theory change" in science cannot be overlooked in any responsible account of the scope of the scientific method. It is impossible to assume that today's scientific knowledge determines how things will be seen in future, or that today's scientific theories will continue to retain the confidence of future generations. There is no doubt that such confident attitudes were held in the late nineteenth century.3s Theoretical stability had been assumed to be a sign of theoretical truth. Yet this simply turned out to be complacency.

Many noted nineteenth-century scientists held that everything worth knowing was now known. In 1871 James Clerk Maxwell expressed his irritation with the idea that physics had uncovered all that could be known, so that all that remained was to establish measurements to the next place of decimals.36 Max Planck relates how he found himself uncertain what subject to study at the University of Munich in 1875. His inclination to study the natural sciences was rubbished by the professor of physics at the university, who declared that nothing worthwhile remained to be discovered.37 Robert A. Millikan - whose investigations of the electron broke new ground - recalls how physics was widely regarded as a "dead subject" in American academic circles during the early 1890s.38 Such views were widespread, and can be found in many scientific writings of the period. The leading American astronomer Simon Newcomb felt able to assert in 1888 that more or less everything of importance had been seen and measured; what remained was to consolidate this body of knowledge.39 Sure, a few more comets would be discovered. But the "big picture" was settled. It just remained for some more detail to be filled in.

The same was true in the field of evolutionary biology. Darwin's ideas rapidly became accepted as definitive, and inhibited further research in the field. This curious fact was pointed out by the geneticist William Bateson in 1909:

With the triumph of the evolutionary idea, curiosity as to the significance of specific differences was satisfied. The Origin was published in 1859. During the following decade, while the new views were on trial, the experimental breeders continued their work, but before 1870 the field was practically abandoned. In all that concerns the species the next thirty years are marked by the apathy characteristic of an age of faith. Evolution became the exercising-ground of essayists. The number indeed of naturalists increased tenfold, but their activities were directed elsewhere. Darwin's achievement so far exceeded anything that was thought possible before, that what should have been hailed as a long-expected beginning was taken for the completed work. I well remember receiving from one of the most earnest of my seniors the friendly warning that it was waste of time to study variation, for "Darwin had swept the field.""'

From 1870 to 1900, such a degree of stability settled on the physical and biological sciences that many assumed that this temporary resting place was in fact the final destination.

By 1920, a revolution had taken place within physics. The great age of "classical physics" was over, and a new age dominated by quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, and a "big bang" cosmology had dawned. There was no hint in the final decades of the nineteenth century of the tidal wave of change that was about to sweep over the natural sciences in the twentieth. Nobody in the nineteenth century seemed to have any idea of the massive upheavals that would take place, overturning many of the scientific certainties of the age. The theories seemed settled, assured, and constant. A century later, however, new theoretical "paradigms" - to use a term popularized by Thomas Kuhn41 - had taken over.

Historians and philosophers of science have produced long lists of scientific theories, each of which was believed by one generation to be the best possible representation of reality, yet which were abandoned by later generations, in the light of new discoveries and increasingly precise measurements of what was already known. Some theories have proved remarkably stable; many have been radically modified, and others abandoned altogether.4z

As Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), a chemist and noted philosopher of science, pointed out, natural scientists find themselves having to believe some things that they know will later be shown to be wrong - but not being sure which of their present beliefs would turn out to be erroneous. How can Dawkins be so sure that his current beliefs are true, when history shows a persistent pattern of abandoning of scientific theories as better approaches emerge? What historian of science can fail to note that what was once regarded as secure knowledge was eroded through the passage of time?

Scientific theorizing is thus provisional. In other words, it offers what is believed to be the best account of the experimental observations currently available. Radical theory change takes place either when it is believed that there is a better explanation of what is currently known, or when new information comes to light which forces us to see what is presently known in a new light. Unless we know the future, it is impossible to take an absolute position on the question of whether any given theory is "right." What can be said - and, indeed, must be said - is that this is believed to be the best explanation currently available. History simply makes fools of those who argue that every aspect of the current theoretical situation is true for all time. The problem is that we don't know which of today's theories will be discarded as interesting failures by future generations.

If theories are thus subject to erosion, what of worldviews that are based upon them? What happens to a worldview, if its theoretical foundations collapse? Once more, history provides us with ample warnings of what happens when a theory underpinning a worldview collapses. Like a house of cards, the worldview follows suit.

In the case of Darwinism, there is an additional difficulty. While Charles Darwin wanted to offer an explanation of how the present forms of animal and plant life emerged, he found that some of the pieces of evidence in that argument were historical. Any attempt to verify the Darwinian theory of evolution requires knowledge of the past. Yet can the scientific method actually be applied to the study of the past? The point is that such a method must use presently accessible evidence to reconstruct what happened in the past - but with what degree of plausibility?

So important was this difficulty that in 1976 Karl Popper expressed hesitation over whether the Darwinian theory of natural selection could strictly be said to fall within the scope of a scientific method, and hence be deemed "scientific" in character.43 This is now seen as an over-reaction based on a legitimate concern. There remains a significant degree of uncertainty and provisionality to any conclusions that are based on an analysis of the past, precisely because we cannot directly access the earth's past history. While this consideration is not sufficient to undermine Darwin's original theory, it does nevertheless raise concerns which cannot be ignored, and which must lead to a degree of modesty concerning whatever conclusions we draw from an analysis of the past.

All these concerns, taken together, raise a difficult question, which cannot be answered with any degree of certainty. Will the Darwinian theory of evolution itself one day have to be radically modified, or even abandoned, suffering the same fate as so many other scientific theories of the past? And what then becomes of the confident statements about the meaning of life made on its basis? Dawkins is aware of this problem, and is quite explicit about its consequences:

Darwin may be triumphant at the end of the twentieth century, but we must acknowledge the possibility that new facts may come to light which will force our successors of the twenty-first century to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.44

Quite so.

While Dawkins is quick to rubbish those who suggest that faith plays a role in science, his arguments for doing so do not really meet the point at issue. The issue is not, as Dawkins seems to think, whether the natural sciences base their theories on blind instinct, rather than careful assessment of the available evidence. There is no doubting the critical, fundamental role of evidence-based reasoning in the sciences. Rather, the issue concerns the undeniable historical fact that the "available evidence" is situationally determined. The evidence available to future generations - for example, through technological advance - may force radical theoretical revision upon us.

There is therefore no contradiction in stating "it is believed that Darwinism is currently the best explanation of the development of biological life." This statement affirms that the evidence and theoretical models currently available are accepted as being the most robust and coherent, while allowing for future evidential and theoretical developments which may cause revision or eventual rejection of today's approaches.

The implications of this are perfectly clear, as are its religious and metaphysical implications. It is absolutely correct to say "evolutionary biologists currently believe that Darwinism is the best theoretical explanation of earth's life-forms." But this does not mean that future evolutionary biologists will share this judgment. We may believe that Darwinism is right, but we do not know that this is so. To do this, we need to stand in a hypothetical position, which allows us to see the evidence of the future. On the basis of what we currently know, we may hold this theoretical position; however, the history of science makes it clear that new evidence has a habit of arising, causing radical revision - perhaps even abandonment - of many long-held theories. Will Darwinism be one of them? And what then will happen to any worldviews, atheist or theist, which are founded on this same Darwinism? The only honest answer is that we don't know. Darwinism, like any other scientific theory, is best seen as a temporary resting place, not a final destination.

The Rhetorical Amplification of the Case for Atheism

Res ipsa loquitur - "the thing speaks for itself." In the first period of my love affair with the natural sciences, I had what I now recognize to be completely unrealistic expectations of the discipline. One of these was the charmingly naive idea, capable of being entertained only by a idealist teenager, that the natural sciences were completely evidence-based, and demonstrated their conclusions only by an appeal to that evidence. Where other, lower, intellectual disciplines made use of verbal wheedling and other tricks of the persuader's trade, these were completely redundant in the sciences. Evidence, and evidence alone, was the sole determinant of truth. "Good research needs no rhetoric."

I still love the sciences. Yet it is now clear to me that some natural scientists use rhetoric beyond acceptable limits in pressing their case - often, it must be said, when venturing beyond their field of competence, or when attempting to cover up a deficit of experimental evidence with a verbal smokescreen. No wonder that cultural critics have started to read scientific journals and literature with a view to exposing some of the argumentative sleights of hand and hidden persuaders embedded in those texts.45 And the level of rhetoric is a surefire indicator of the contentiousness of the argument. The greater the appeal to rhetoric, the weaker the argument.

What sort of techniques? One of the simplest rhetorical techniques is to associate your critics with whatever your intended readership regards as social outcasts. In the case of sociobiology - the scientific discipline widely seen as most rhetorically freighted - this means creating the impression that disagreement with them lumps you along with religious fundamentalists or science haters. The works of E. O. Wilson are often singled out for an excessive use of this kind of rhetoric. As Daniel Dennett points out, Wilson tends to portray his critics as nothing but "religious fanatics or scientifically illiterate mysterians." Anyone unwise enough to disagree with Wilson is likely to be pilloried as "a benighted, science-fearing skyhooker.s46 This isn't science, and everyone knows it.

Dawkins is fascinating to read with this point in mind. His wonderful way with words has often been noted, and I share in the general admiration for his lucidity of expression and superb illustration of often complex points, particularly in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. This is Dawkins at his best - the effective scientific communicator. Yet one reads other works - particularly the ephemeral and somewhat lightweight essays collected together in A Devil's Chaplain - and forms a quite different impression. As Robert McFarlane pointed out in reviewing this work in the Spectator, Dawkins all too often "comes across as science's hired muscle: the bruiser in the bad suit with the baseball bat." In these essays, we find what is often a surprisingly shallow argument buttressed by a correspondingly aggressive prose.

After reading Dawkins' substantial output, I found that a rhetorical analysis of his works suggested that they could easily be divided into two categories.

1 The first consists of most of his published books, with the significant exceptions of A Devil's Chaplain and Unweaving the Rainbow. This category also includes some of his shorter academic works, particularly early papers dealing with ethological questions. In these works, we find a strongly evidence-based mode of argument, with alternative viewpoints carefully and thoughtfully presented, and assessed in the light of the data. While Dawkins uses traditional rhetorical tools in these works, they are kept on a tight leash. Even if the reader disagrees with Dawkins' interpretation of evidence, the priority of detailed engagement with experimental findings as a shared defining assumption between author and reader is maintained.

2 The second consists mostly of shorter works, dealing with things that Dawkins does not like much - above all, religion. Here anecdote displaces evidence, and alternatives are generally rubbished. The tone of these writings is aggressive and dismissive, and shows little, if any, attempt to take alternatives seriously. They are often characterized by a strongly dichotomist mode of argument: "it is either A or B, and B is utterly stupid, so it must be A." The rhetorical index of these pieces is remarkably high - so high, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to believe that this is the same evidence-responsive author of The Selfish Gene. Both Unweaving the Rainbow and the collection of papers gathered together as A Devil's Chaplain deploy an unusually large number of rhetorical devices, often in place of more rigorous argumentation. As one journalist perceptively commented, "twin obsessions form virtually every piece [of A Devil's Chaplain] - Darwinian evolution (hurrah!) and religion (boo!).i47

Let's begin with one of Dawkins' most robustly scientific works, which is rigorously evidence-driven. I first read Dawkins' doctoral thesis on a cold winter's afternoon in Oxford University's Radcliffe Science Library.48 It is a fascinating piece of research, based on the meticulous observation of the behavior of domestic chicks when confronted with stimuli of various kinds. Dawkins approached his research with a range of possible models of decision-making. At every point, the sovereignty of the empirical was affirmed. Every model proposed for how chicks decide whether to peck and what to peck was rigorously evaluated on the basis of carefully designed and controlled experiments. The behavior of a large number of chicks was carefully examined and compared critically with other published studies in the field (such as Impekhoven's famous studies of black-headed gull chicks). The thesis is a model of objective, detached, evidence-based scientific research.

When it comes to dealing with the behavior of religious people, Dawkins seems to step outside this rigorously empirical approach. The careful language, meticulous research, and rigorous standards of justification of the laboratory are swapped for those of the soapbox. In contrast to his ethological studies of chicks, Dawkins offers an "ethology of religious people" from which any detailed empirical analysis is wanting. Where one might hope to find reference to extensive systematic observation of the impact of religious behavior on people - there is a vast body of data - one finds instead flagrantly biased anecdotes and hopelessly unsubstantiated generalizations. Rhetoric displaces careful observation and analysis.

There is a large and growing literature dealing with the impact of religion - whether considered generically, or as a specific form of faith - upon individuals and communities.49 Although it was once fashionable to suggest that religion was some kind of pathology,50 this view is now retreating in face of mounting empirical evidence that suggests (but not conclusively) that many forms of religion might actually be beneficial.51 Sure, some forms of religion can be pathological and destructive. Others, however, seem to be rather good for you.

A 2001 survey of 100 evidence-based studies to systematically examine the relationship between religion and human wellbeing disclosed the following:

• 79 reported at least one positive correlation between religious involvement and well-being.

• 13 found no meaningful association between religion and well-being.

• 7 found mixed or complex associations between religion and well-being.

• 1 found a negative association between religion and well-being."

Dawkins' entire worldview depends upon precisely this negative association between religion and human well-being which only 1 percent of the experimental results would seem unequivocally to affirm, and 79 percent equally unequivocally to reject. The results make at least one thing abundantly clear: we need to approach this subject in the light of the scientific evidence, not personal prejudice.

For Dawkins, the issue is simple: the question is "whether you value health or truth. s5; As religion is false - one of the unassailable core beliefs which recurs throughout his writings - it would be immoral to believe, whatever benefits it might bring. Yet Dawkins' arguments that belief in God is false just don't add up. That's probably why he supplements them with the additional argument that religion is bad for you. The growing body of evidence that religion actually promotes human well-being is highly awkward for him here. Not only does it subvert a functional argument for atheism; it begins to raise some very troubling questions about its truth as well.

Although Dawkins himself is highly critical of "the superficial seductiveness of individual stories that seem - but only seem - to show a pattern,"" he nevertheless seems to rely excessively on precisely the patterns selectively disclosed by such individual stories in his routine rubbishing of religious people and ideas. His essay "Viruses of the Mind," from which this citation is taken, is an excellent example of the selective use of this device.55

One of this essay's central arguments is that religious people do some very bad things. In his jolly swashbuckling way, Dawkins piles up the anecdotes to tell us how awful religious people are. They believe utterly stupid, pedantic, and pointless things (like the doctrine of the Trinity), or fuss about trivia (such as nitpickingly precise kosher food laws). Intelligent people - such as the philosopher Anthony Kenny - give up on religion. Instead of tolerating "the obvious contradictions within Catholic belief," he went on instead to become "a highly respected scholar." And, to cap it all, religion encourages the murder of its opponents, and other outrageous behavior.

Well, some religious people do indeed behave in unacceptable ways. Let's be honest about this. But how many? Dawkins is somewhat coy about statistics and detailed analysis of the available evidence. We have already seen how he also shies away from probabilistic approaches to belief evaluation. At points in his works, Dawkins seems to get carried away with his rhetoric, implying that religious people are all deceived and deceiving. But this highly selective appeal to evidence and easy dismissal of alternatives isn't scientific. It isn't even scientific grandstanding. It's just grandstanding.

Let's turn to Freeman Dyson for illumination here. Dyson - Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton - is probably one of the twentieth century's most respected physicists. He sums up the situation with what seems to be admirable fairness. Some religious people do dreadful things; others do wonderful things:

We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of religion. We have also seen large numbers of people inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing education and medical care to the poor, helping to abolish slavery and spread peace among nations."

It's not as neat as Dawkins' polemical pastiche, but it has the merit of doing something approaching justice to the facts.

Everyone would agree that some religious people do some very disturbing things. But the introduction of that little word "some" to Dawkins' argument immediately dilutes its impact. For it forces a series of critical questions. How many? Under what circumstances? How often? It also forces a comparative question: how many people with anti-religious views also do some very disturbing things? And once we start to ask that question, we move away from cheap and easy sniping at our intellectual opponents, and have to confront some dark and troubling aspects of human nature. Let's explore this one.

I used to be anti-religious. In my teens, I was quite convinced that religion was the enemy of humanity, for reasons very similar to those that Dawkins sets out in his popular writings. But not now. And one of the reasons is my dreadful discovery of the dark side of atheism. Let me explain. In my innocence, I assumed that atheism would spread through the sheer genius of its ideas, the compelling nature of its arguments, its liberation from the oppression of religion, and the dazzling brilliance of the world it commended. Who needed to be coerced into such beliefs, when they were so obviously right?

Now, things seem very different. Atheism is not "proved" in any sense by any science, evolutionary biology included. Dawkins thinks it is, but offers arguments which are far from compelling. And yes, atheism liberated people from religious oppression, especially in France in the 1780s. But when atheism ceased to be a private matter and became a state ideology, things suddenly became rather different. The liberator turned oppressor. To the surprise of some, religion became the new liberator from atheist oppression. Unsurprisingly, these developments tend to be airbrushed out of Dawkins' rather selective reading of history. But they need to be taken with immense seriousness if the full story is to be told.

The final opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s led to revelations that ended any notion that atheism was quite as gracious, gentle, and generous a worldview as some of its more idealistic supporters believed. The Black Book of Communism, based on those archives," created a sensation when first published in France in 1997, not least because it implied that French communism - still a potent force in national life - was irreducibly tainted with the crimes and excesses of Lenin and Stalin. Where, many of its irate readers asked, were the "Nuremberg Trials of Communism"? Communism was a "tragedy of planetary dimensions" with a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million - far in excess of the excesses committed under Nazism.

Now, one must be cautious about such statistics, and equally cautious about rushing to quick and easy conclusions on their basis. Yet the basic point cannot really be overlooked. One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that many of the most deplorable acts of murder, intolerance, and repression were carried out by those who thought that religion was murderous, intolerant, and repressive - and thus sought to remove it from the face of the planet as a humanitarian act. Even his most uncritical readers should be left wondering why Dawkins has curiously failed to mention, let alone engage with, the blood-spattered trail of atheism in the twentieth century - one of the reasons, incidentally, that I eventually concluded that I could no longer be an atheist.

Now I could draw the conclusion, based on a few choice stories - such as that of one of the greatest charlatans of the twentieth century, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists Inc." - and a highly selective reading of history, that atheists are all totally corrupt, violent, and depraved. Yet I cannot and will not, simply because the facts do not permit it. The truth, evident to anyone working in the field, is that some atheists are indeed very strange people - but that most are totally ordinary people, just wanting to get on with their lives, and not wanting to oppress, coerce, or murder anyone. Both religion and anti-religion are capable of inspiring great acts of goodness on the part of some, and acts of violence on the part of others.

The real issue - as Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out over a century ago - is that there seems to be something about human nature which makes our belief systems capable of inspiring both great acts of goodness and great acts of depravity. To illustrate this point, we may turn to a little-told anecdote about science, which shows how it, like all other areas of human activity, can be used for good or for evil.

While studying organic chemistry at Oxford in the early 1970s, I made extensive use of a massive work entitled Advanced Organic Chemistry.59 It was written by a husband and wife team, and was invariably referred to as "Fieser & Fieser." It was my companion through many a long evening in the college library, as I tried to make sense of some of the experiments I was working on at the time. Louis and Mary Fieser were based at Harvard University, where they pioneered some highly important synthetic breakthroughs. These included Vitamin K-1, the human body's blood-clotting agent (a major development for hemophilia) and cortisone (an important antiinflammatory agent). In recognition of this and other successes, Harvard named a new laboratory after them: the Louis and Mary Fieser Laboratory for Undergraduate Organic Chemistry was opened in 1996. Fittingly, Mary Fieser herself dedicated the new building, before her death in 1997. On any showing, the Fiesers made landmark contributions to chemistry, and to the advancement of human medical care. Arguably, the new synthetic routes they pioneered saved tens of thousands of lives.

Louis Fieser also pioneered another development at Harvard, not mentioned by those with uncritically positive views of the sciences. Napalm was one of the US military's most important weapons during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Manufactured by the Dow Chemical Corporation, napalm was a quick and effective way of neutralizing troops hidden in foxholes or under the cover of the jungle. It worked by burning them alive, or depriving them of oxygen through conflagration of the environment. Back in 1942, the US military had realized that there was little point in using gasoline as an incendiary device for this purpose. It burned up too quickly. What they really needed was gasoline which had been modified to bum more slowly, at greater temperatures. It would stick to people. And they would not be able to stop the material burning. Dissolving rubber in gasoline was one option. But rubber was in short supply. A chemical alternative was needed.

A research contract went out to develop jellified gasoline. Du Pont and Standard Oil invested heavily in trying to get there first. But the race was won by a small team based at Harvard, headed up by none other than Louis Fieser. (Interestingly, Mary does not seem to have been involved in this inhumane project.) Although Fieser and his team initially had hopes that divinylacetylene would create a gel that was sufficiently viscous to adhere to human flesh, this line of research proved unproductive. Instead, they found that gasoline could be jellified if added to about one tenth its weight of a powder of aluminium napthenate (made from crude oil residues) and aluminium palmitate (made from coconut oil). The sources of the materials gave the substance its acronym - Napalm. The use of both black powder and phosphorus in the bomb's fuse ensured that the burning, exploding material could not be extinguished. The moment it was exposed to air, it would ignite. Some 77 million pounds of Fieser's formula were made during World War II. And most of it was used against the Japanese.

During the night of March 9-10, 1945, 279 low-flying US B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped 1,667 tons of napalm on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm devastated a vast built-up area of mainly wooden constructions. It remains uncertain precisely how many were burned alive, how many injured, and how many made homeless. As many as 100,000 may have died during that night. But whatever the statistics, it was unquestionably one of the most destructive acts of World War II, exceeding the initial damage and carnage later caused by the first atomic bomb.

Fieser protested that he was not responsible for the way in which his invention was used by other people. He even found a use for the product which did not involve burning people or buildings - getting rid of the common garden weed crabgrass (Digitaria ischaemum), burning away its seeds while leaving good grass roots untouched. Nevertheless, it was pointed out that napalm was designed to incinerate people and buildings. As it happened, an "improved" version of napalm was developed after the war by Dow, consisting of 46 percent polystyrene, 33 percent gasoline, and 21 percent benzene. Fieser's original formula was now of purely historical interest. But his invention had burned alive men, women, and children on a horrific scale.

Now, what are we to conclude from this anecdote? That all scientists are necessarily evil? Or that science itself is malevolent? Doubtless there are some who would wish to draw this conclusion, most notably those who are alarmed at the role of science and scientists in weapons development - something that Dawkins rather glosses over, by the way - and might want to use this story and others like it in an attempt to destroy the public reputation of science and scientists. But this would be just as invalid as the equally flawed attempts to smear atheism or religion on account of the acts of some of their followers. If these were demonstrably typical or characteristic acts, it would be different. The real question here concerns what is normal and what is aberrant behavior. It may suit his polemical purposes to treat the pathological as characteristic, or the aberrant as normal. But whether Dawkins likes it or not, most atheists, Christians, and scientists are ordinary people, neither extraordinarily virtuous nor extraordinarily evil.

Religious belief sometimes leads to evil, directly or indirectly. But religion has no monopoly in this respect, as if it was distinguished as the sole area of human life and thought that was marred in this manner. Even science itself can be abused, as some of the more sinister medical developments in Nazi Germany made abundantly clear. Yet Dawkins would surely argue that this is an abuse of science, quite untypical of its normal values and approaches. And I would agree. Yet if this defensive strategy can be permitted for science, why not also for religion? Why not recognize what most people already know: that it is the abuse of religion that is pathological and destructive? Religion, like all other areas of human activity and thought, needs to be reformed, reviewed, and corrected - but not abolished.

There is a very serious issue here, which needs to be discussed openly and frankly by atheists, Christians, and scientists alike - namely, how some of those who are inspired and uplifted by a great vision of reality end up doing such dreadful things. This is a truth about human nature itself. If we are indeed to have an "open society," there needs to be a careful and informed discussion of how we are to avoid violence and aggression. And pretending that religion is the only problem in the world, or the base of all its pain and suffering, is no longer a real option for thinking people. It's just rhetoric, masking a difficult problem we all need to address - namely, how human beings can coexist and limit their passions.

So is religion "blind faith," which flies in the face of the evidence? Hardly. This definition is itself a piece of rhetoric, devised to meet the needs of Dawkins' agenda. When I debate these issues in public, I regularly get asked why Christians blindly trust in God, in the absence of any supporting evidence. I ask if they would be kind enough to tell me where they find such a ludicrous idea, and to justify it from a serious Christian writer of note. I am usually greeted with an embarrassed silence. Yet on occasion, I get the answer: "Well, that's what Richard Dawkins says." The audience usually laughs. They get the point.

Yet in his rather condescending "Prayer for My Daughter," Dawkins tells her that a "bad reason for believing anything" is "that you are told to believe it by somebody important. 1160 So why should anyone believe Dawkins when he tells us what Christians believe faith to be? His idiosyncratic definition is his own invention, created, it would seem, for purely polemical purposes. It would be nice if we found evidence-based analysis brought to bear on the issue, so that the discussion was based on what Christians actually believe, rather than what Dawkins thinks we believe. Then we might actually get somewhere in a discussion about the relation of science and religion.

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