Acknowledgments

Cultural Darwinism?

The Curious "Science"

of Memetics

Darwinism is too big a theory to be limited to the field of biology. Why restrict Darwinism to the world of the gene, when it is laden with significance for every aspect of human life and thought? In The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins explains that he had long been interested in the analogy between cultural and genetic information. Might not Darwinian theory be applied to human culture, as much as to the world of biology? This intellectual move lays the ground for converting Darwinism from a scientific theory to a worldview, a metanarrative, an overarching view of reality.

The move, however, requires a cultural equivalent to the gene - a "cultural replicator," which ensures the transmission of information across time and space. If this concept of a cultural replicator could be established on a firm scientific basis, Darwinism would be transformed into a universal method, reaching beyond the specific domain of biological evolution to include the world of culture.'

Dawkins stands in a long tradition of those who have attempted to apply the theory of evolution to human culture, including Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century, and E. 0. Wilson in the twentieth. The evolutionary psychologist Donald T. Campbell (1916-96) developed the idea of a "cultural replicator" as early as 1960,2 and introduced the term "mnemone.i3 The related idea of the "culturgen" has found particular acceptance within North American sociobiology.'

Although the notion of a cultural replicator is thus far from new, Dawkins has done much to popularize the concept, and make it accessible to a wider audience through his simple terminology and illustrations. Above all, he introduced the term which has come to dominate popular discussion of the issue - the "meme." In part, the greater success of this term can be put down to the neater and more memorable terminology Dawkins developed. Yet another factor was the greater popular reach of his writings, which allowed a much wider reading public to become aware of the potential of essentially biological analogues for cultural development. As a result, Dawkins' work has generated considerable popular discussion.'

In this chapter, we shall explore Dawkins' central contribution to a Darwinian account of the evolution of human culture - a specific conception of the cultural replicator, which he named the "meme." From the outset, Dawkins associated his idea of the "meme" with issues of religious belief, regarding religions as "the prime examples of memes.i6 Given this, it is clearly important to explore this concept in this work, and locate it within the broad spectrum of recent atheist critiques of religious beliefs.

A series of writers - including Karl Marx (1818-83) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) - argued that, since there is no God to believe in, human religious belief is essentially an invention designed to provide "metaphysical comfort" (Nietzsche) to an existentially beleaguered humanity.' Dawkins develops this approach in a new direction, arguing that religions are basically "mind parasites." Belief in God is to be seen as "self-replicating information" that "leaps infectiously from mind to mind." It is an idea that Dawkins finds both academically attractive and humanly repulsive,' and has come to feature prominently in recent popular atheist polemical writings. But is it right?

In what follows, I shall explore the origins of Dawkins' concept of the "meme," and address four critical difficulties that confront this specific idea, before moving on to consider Dawkins' later idea that God is a parasitic "virus of the mind." These difficulties may be summarized as follows.

• There is no reason to suppose that cultural evolution is Darwinian, or indeed that evolutionary biology has any particular value in accounting for the development of ideas.

• There is no direct evidence for the existence of "memes" themselves.

• The case for the existence of the "meme" rests on the questionable assumption of a direct analogy with the gene, which proves incapable of bearing the theoretical weight that is placed upon it.

• There is no necessary reason to propose the existence of a "meme" as an explanatory construct. The observational data can be accounted for perfectly well by other models and mechanisms.

We shall return to consider these in more detail, after we have explored how the notion of the "meme" arose.

The Origins of the Meme

In an important article of 1968, expanded in 1975, the anthropologist F. T. Cloak proposed that culture evolved through an essentially Darwinian mechanism, and set out how ethological methods might be applied to culture-specific behavior.' The question of whether it is possible to identify and study cultural replicators, directly analogous to genes, had thus been raised before Dawkins published The Selfish Gene.

Cloak's model was clearly of importance to Dawkins as he wrote The Selfish Gene. Cloak drew a distinction between "i-culture" (the set of cultural instructions that are contained in the nervous system) and "m-culture" (relationships in material structures which are maintained by such instructions, or changes in material structures which come about as a result of these instructions).

Dawkins recalls how he wanted a word for a "cultural replicator" that sounded like "gene" - thus stressing the analogy between cultural and genetic transmission - and came up with "memes10 - an abbreviation of the term "mimeme," derived from the Greek mimesis ("imitation"). The meme was proposed as a hypothetical replicator - "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation"11 - to explain the process of the development of culture within a Darwinian framework:

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain by a process which, in the broad sense of the term, can be called imitation.

As examples of what he has in mind, Dawkins points to such things as tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, fashions, aspects of architecture, songs - and God.

Yet there is a problem with this definition of the meme. In Dawkins' account of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, it is the gene that is the unit of selection, even though it is the phenotype which is actually subject to the process of selection. The gene is the replicator, or the set of instructions; the phenotype is the physical manifestation of the organism, the visible characteristics or behavior resulting from that set of instructions. Yet all the examples of "memes" that Dawkins offers in The Selfish Gene are the result of such instructions, not the instructions themselves.12 While Dawkins proposed an analogy between meme and gene, he actually illustrated this by appealing to the cultural equivalent of phenotypes, not genes. Dawkins' suggestion of a parallel between the propagation of genes in the gene pool and memes in a (hypothetical) meme pool was thus not entirely warranted.

Dawkins recognized this problem, and modified his ideas in his next major popular work - The Extended Phenotype (1982). His original account of the meme, he conceded, was defective; it required correction.

I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself, as replicator, and its "phenotypic effects" or "meme products" on the other. A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's "i-culture"). It has a definite structure, realized in whatever medium the brain uses for storing information ... This is to distinguish it from phenotypic effects, which are its consequences in the outside world (Cloak's "m-culture ").13

This clarification removed one fundamental difficulty with the concept of the meme. On any standard neo-Darwinian account, genes give rise to phenotypes. There is no question of phenotypical causation of genetic traits. To put it in a nutshell: genes are selected, not instructed.14 Dawkins, who vigorously defends this "central dogma" of Darwinian orthodoxy, had put himself in a potentially indefensible position, in that he appeared to imply that it was phenotypes that were inherited.

This new definition of the meme identifies it as the fundamental unit of information or instruction which gives rise to cultural artifacts and ideas. It is the set of instructions, the blueprint, not the product. What Dawkins originally defined as memes - things like "catchy tunes" - are now to be regarded as "meme products." At a popular level, however, Dawkins' meme concept continues to be discussed in terms of his 1976 definition, set out in The Selfish Gene, rather than its 1982 revision, as presented in the somewhat less widely read Extended Phenotype.

So what is the relevance of this to God? Dawkins is an atheist, and incorrectly believes that religious faith is "blind trust," which refuses to take account of evidence. So why do people believe in God, when there is no God to believe in? Dawkins' answer lies in the ability of a God-meme to replicate itself in the human mind. The "god-meme" performs particularly well because it has "high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture."15 People do not believe in God because they have given long and careful thought to the matter; they do so because they have been infected by a powerful meme. (This idea would later be developed in terms of the imagery of God as a virus.) In both cases, the intent and outcome is a subversion of the intellectual legitimacy of belief in God. The God-meme or God-virus is just good at infecting people.

The same, of course, would also be true for an "atheism"meme. Dawkins does not deal with how atheism spreads on the basis of his memetic approach, presumably on account of his core belief that atheism is scientifically correct. In fact, it is itself a belief, which requires explanation. Dawkins' model actually requires that both atheism and belief in God should be seen as memetic effects. They are therefore equally valid - or equally invalid, for that matter.

The problem with this approach is immediately obvious. If all ideas are memes, or the effects of memes,lb Dawkins is left in the decidedly uncomfortable position of having to accept that his own ideas must also be recognized as the effects of memes. Scientific ideas would then become yet another example of memes replicating within the human mind. This would not suit Dawkins' purposes at all, and he excludes the notion in an intriguing manner:

Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless self-serving behavior."

This represents a case of special pleading, in which Dawkins makes an unsuccessful attempt to evade the trap of selfreferentiality. Anyone familiar with intellectual history will spot the pattern immediately. Everyone's dogma is wrong except mine. My ideas are exempt from the general patterns I identify for other ideas, which allows me to explain them away, leaving my own to dominate the field.

But why on earth is conformity to scientific criteria allowed to determine whether a meme is "good" or "useful"? On any conventional reading of things, a "good" or "useful" meme would be one that promoted harmony, gave someone a sense of belonging, or increased life expectancy. These would seem far more natural and obvious criteria for "good" memes. But on further reflection, the truth dawns on us. There are no "natural" criteria involved at all. We decide whether we like them or not, and then label the memes accordingly. If you like religion, it's a "good" meme; if not, it's "bad." In the end, all that Dawkins does here is to construct an entirely circular argument, reflecting his own subjective system of values.

We shall return to explore the idea of "God as a virus" later in the present chapter. But first, we need to develop the four objections, noted earlier, which have led most to abandon the "meme" as a serious tool of scientific research. As Simon Conway Morris pointed out, memes seem to have no place in serious scientific reflection:

Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic. To conjure up memes not only reveals a strange imprecision of thought, but, as Anthony O'Hear has remarked, if memes really existed they would ultimately deny the reality of reflective thought."

Is Cultural Development Darwinian?

My own interest in intellectual history developed at more or less the same time as Dawkins first set out the "meme" theory. When I first encountered the idea of the "meme" in 1977, I found it immensely exciting. Here was something which was potentially open to rigorous evidence-based investigation, offering new possibilities for the study of intellectual and cultural development. Why was I so optimistic about the idea? I was in the process of beginning what would be one of my lifetime concerns: the history of ideas. My particular interest lay in how religious ideas develop over time, and the factors that lead to their development, modification, acceptance or rejection, and - at least in some cases - their slow decline into oblivion.

The "meme," I thought at the time, would allow me to create and validate robust and reliable models for intellectual and cultural development, firmly grounded in observational evidence. Yet as I began my research, I found myself coming up against serious obstacles in practically every area of intellectual activity I investigated.

Most important of these was my growing realization that Darwinism itself seemed very poorly adapted to account for the development of culture, or the overall shape of intellectual history. When I researched the rise of atheism during its "Golden Age" (1789-1989), I was struck by the purposefulness of the contemporary retrieval of the older atheisms of writers such as Xenophanes or Lucretius. These ideas were deliberately reappropriated. Their revival did not just happen; it was made to happen in order to achieve a specific goal. The process was strongly teleological, driven by precisely the purpose and intentionality that Darwinian orthodoxy excludes from the evolutionary process.

The same point can be seen in the emergence of the Renaissance, widely regarded as one of the most remarkable developments in the history of Western culture. Its origins lie in Italy during the thirteenth century, although its full blossoming would take place in the following two centuries.19 The movement expanded from Italy into northern Europe, causing significant changes wherever it took hold. The cultural impact of the movement was immense - for example, the Gothic style of architecture gave way to the classical style, impacting significantly on Western European urban landscapes.20

So why did this happen? What explanation may be given for this radical and highly creative redirection of European culture at this time? Since the origins and development of the movement are so well understood, it represents an ideal - indeed, even a critical - case for the application of memetic theory.

Since the pioneering work of P. 0. Kristeller, the fundamental basis of the Renaissance is widely accepted to be the critical reappropriation of the culture of ancient Rome (and, to a lesser extent, Athens).21 Perhaps stimulated by the presence of the remains of classic civilization in Italy, Renaissance theorists advocated the recovery of the rich cultural heritage of the past - the elegant Latin of Cicero; the eloquence of classical rhetoric; the splendor of classical architecture; the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle; the republican political ideals which inspired the Roman constitution.22 Renaissance writers set about deliberately and systematically adopting these principles, and applying them to their own situation.

It is a fascinating and complex picture, which continues to delight a new generation of scholars. But it does raise some serious difficulties for Dawkins' theory. The origins, development, and transmission of Renaissance humanism - while subject to the inevitable happenstance of history - were deliberate, intentional, and planned. If Darwinism is about copying the instructions (genotype), Lamarckism is about copying the product (phenotype). It would thus seem that Lamarck, rather than Darwin, offers the better account of cultural evolution.

The patterns of development I found in the history of the Renaissance - and, I must add, in most of the other intellectual and cultural phenomena I have studied - is that of the blending of memes, and a clear pattern of intellectual causality which forces us to use a Lamarckian, rather than a neo-Darwinian, understanding of the evolutionary process - assuming, of course, that evolutionary biology has any relevance to the development of culture, or to the history of ideas. The use of such terms as "Darwinian" and "Lamarckian" to describe cultural development may just be downright misleading, implying a fundamental analogy where none - other than the passage of time and the observation of change - really exists.

Dawkins seems to be aware of problems like this. Consider these cautionary comments of 1982:

Memes may partially blend with each other in a way that genes do not. New "mutations" may be "directed" rather than random with respect to evolutionary trends. The equivalent of Weismannism is less rigid for memes than for genes; there may be Lamarckian causal arrows leading from phenotype to replicator, as well as the other way round. These differences may prove sufficient to render the analogy with genetic selection worthless, or positively misleading.z3

I think this is a fair judgment. If the observational evidence compelled us to conclude that cultural evolution or the development of ideas took place in a Darwinian manner, then that would be the end of the debate. Yet the model is singularly uncompelling, perhaps because it is singularly inappropriate. Biological and cultural evolution may have their points of similarity; they seem, however, to proceed by quite different mechanisms.

Do Memes Actually Exist?

The second difficulty with the meme idea is that it is inadequately grounded in the evidence. In his preface to Susan Blackmore's Meme Machine (1999), Dawkins points out the problems that the "meme" faces if it is to be taken seriously within the scientific community:

Another objection is that we don't know what memes are made of, or where they reside. Memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick; they even lack their Mendel. Whereas genes are to be found in precise locations on chromosomes, memes presumably exist in brains, and we have even less chance of seeing one than of seeing a gene (though the neurobiologist Juan Delius has pictured his conjecture of what a meme might look like).24

Dawkins talking about memes is like believers talking about God - an invisible, unverifiable postulate, which helps explain some things about experience, but ultimately lies beyond empirical investigation.

And just what are we to make of the point that "the neurobiologist Juan Delius has pictured his conjecture of what a meme might look like"? I've seen countless pictures of God in many visits to art galleries. And that verifies the concept? Or makes it scientifically plausible? Delius' proposal that a meme will have a single locatable and observable structure as "a constellation of activated neuronal synapses" is purely conjectural, and has yet to be subjected to rigorous empirical investigation." It's one thing to speculate about what something might look like; the real question is whether it is there at all.

In 1993 Dawkins laid down the essence of what constituted a "scientific" approach: "testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on."" So where is the evidential support for memes? The quantitative analysis? The formulation of criteria by which the meme may be confirmed or eliminated as a useful construct? We await clarification here.

The glaring contrast with the gene will be obvious. Genes can be "seen" and their transmission patterns studied under rigorous empirical conditions. What started off as hypothetical constructs inferred from systematic experiment and observation ended up being observed themselves. The gene was initially seen as a theoretical necessity, in that no other mechanism could explain the relevant observations, before being accepted as a real entity on account of the sheer weight of evidence. But what about memes? The simple fact is that they are, in the first place, hypothetical constructs, inferred from observation rather than observed in themselves; in the second place, unobservable; and in the third place, more or less useless at the explanatory level. This makes their rigorous investigation intensely problematic, and their fruitful application somewhat improbable.

A gene is an observable entity that is well defined at the biological, chemical, and physical levels. Biologically, the gene is a distinct portion of a chromosome; chemically, it consists of DNA; physically, it consists of a double-helix, with a sequence of nucleotides which represent a "genetic code" that can be read and interpreted. Even if genes were never observed, they would continue to be considered a superb theoretical explanation of what can be observed.

The situation with memes is quite different. What are memes? Where are they located? How are they to be described biologically, chemically, and physically? If they were not to be proposed, our understanding of cultural development and the history of ideas would not be disadvantaged. The meme is simply an optional extra, an unnecessary addition to the range of theoretical mechanisms proposed to explain the development of culture. It can be abandoned without difficulty by cultural theorists.

And what about the mechanism by which memes are allegedly transmitted? One of the most important implications of the discovery of the structure of DNA was that it opened the way to an understanding of the mechanism of replication. So what physical mechanism is proposed in the case of the meme? How does a meme cause a memetic effect? Or, to put the question in a more pointed way: how could we even begin to set up experiments to identify and establish the structure of memes, let alone to explore their relation to alleged memetic effects?

Now if memetics was a legitimate evidence-based science, comparable to genetics, there would be no particular difficulty. It might be argued that the memetic observer of cultural evolution is in a situation similar to Darwin in the 1850s - observing patterns which seemed to demand some kind of inherited transmission of traits, even though he had no explanation for such a mechanism. Yet I see no reason for suggesting that memetics offers even a plausible description, let alone an explanation, of the evolution of human culture. While Darwin accumulated a mass of observational evidence in favor of his theories, memetics has yet to make any significant advances on this front. Unsurprisingly, its plausibility is on the wane.

And since the meme is not warranted scientifically, are we to conclude that there is a meme for belief in memes themselves?27 The meme concept then dies the slow death of self-referentiality, in that, if taken seriously, the idea explains itself as much as anything else. And as the qualifications mount up, the concept loses its plausibility. It's like adding more and more epicycles to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. What was once a bright, neat idea becomes immensely cumbersome, its initial brilliance fading with every additional qualification added in its defense.

The Flawed Analogy Between Gene and Meme

Dawkins' argument for both the existence and function of the meme is based on a proposed analogy between biological and cultural evolution. His implicit assumption seems to be that, since the transmission of culture and the transmission of genes are analogical processes, the well-developed concepts and methods of neo-Darwinism can account for them both. The argument can be set out as follows:

Biological evolution requires a replcator. now known to actually exist namely the gene. So. by analogy:

Cultural evolution also requires a repGcator. which is hypothesized to be the meme.

It is a brave and bold move. But is it right? Does this analogy actually work? And what is the hard, observational evidence for memes, that demands that we accept this hypothetical concept as a necessary and fruitful means of explaining cultural development?

As has often been demonstrated, analogical argumentation is an essential element of scientific reasoning." The perception of an analogy between A and B is often the starting point for new lines of inquiry, opening up new and exhilarating frontiers. Yet that same perception has often led to scientific dead ends, including the long-abandoned ideas of "calorific" and "phlogiston." As Mario Bunge points out, analogies have a marked propensity to mislead in the sciences.29 So is this posited analogy between gene and meme in the first place real, and in the second helpful?

Let's begin by exploring whether the analogy has any basis in fact. The exploration and testing of the limits of scientific analogies is an important and legitimate aspect of the scientific method. In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins provides an eloquent discussion of how science has often advanced by exploring whether a possible analogy may point to something deeper:

Some of the greatest advances in science have come about because some clever person spotted an analogy between a subject that was already understood, and another still mysterious subject. The trick is to strike a balance between too much indiscriminate analogizing on the one hand, and a sterile blindness to fruitful analogies on the other.3o

Analogies don't always mislead. The problem is working out which ones are fruitful and which are dead ends. In proposing the meme, Dawkins was exploring a potentially significant analogy between biological and cultural evolution, proposing an analogical process or mechanism to account for this. He was not the first to do so, but he communicated it with particular skill.

Exactly the same process of exploring analogies can be seen in Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin spotted what seemed to be an analogy between the way animals were bred to improve certain desirable characteristics, and the way nature seemed to bring about changes. He proposed the idea of "natural selection" as a mechanism within the natural order, analogous to the "artificial selection" of the animal breeding industry.31 This analogy has turned out to be highly fruitful, but as the history of science demonstrates, there are significant limits to analogical argumentation of this kind.

Remember the ether? Sound and light seemed analogous to many physicists in the nineteenth century. They seemed to behave so similarly. Both were known to be forms of waves, whose speed and wavelength could be determined with a high degree of accuracy. And since the propagation of sound required a medium - such as air or water - then the same had to be true of light as well. The term "ether" was used to designate this mysterious medium, through which light and other electromagnetic radiation traveled.

The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 set out to explore the properties of the "luminiferous ether" - that is, the medium through which light was believed to travel. As a result of their experiment, Michelson and Morley came to the remarkable conclusion that "the ether is at rest with regard to the earth's surface.i32 This puzzling result had a number of possible implications. One of these was that there was no "luminiferous ether" in the first place. The analogy with sound had just been pressed too far.

By the 1920s the scientific world had finally come round to the conclusion that light was not the same as sound. There were unquestionably similarities, parallels, and convergences - but these had been overinterpreted, and allowed to create the impression that two different entities were analogous. Even though light and sound did indeed behave in very similar ways in very many contexts, they were completely different things. Light needed no medium; it could travel in a vacuum.

It's a well-known story, and its moral is perfectly clear: analogies can be dangerously misleading. The argument from analogy was seen to have misled here - as it had misled in so many other cases. Quantum theory is an excellent example of a scientific discipline bedeviled by problems arising from the bad use of analogies.33 And when we move outside the relatively well-defined world of physics into the chaos of human culture, analogies often develop a life of their own, unchecked by the rigid demands of evidence-based argument.

The early case for some physical factor for the transmission of hereditary information - now known as the "gene" - was based on the Mendelian demonstration of the precision of such transmission, and the self-evident fact that there was no other means by which such information could be stored, transmitted, and retrieved. The case of cultural evolution is completely different. All human cultures possess means by which information may be transmitted within existing populations and to subsequent generations - such as books, rituals, institutions, and oral traditions.34 The notion of a "meme" is functionally redundant, forcing its defenders to make a case by analogy with the gene - yet to downplay the empirically determined biological, chemical, and physical parameters of the gene, which are now an essential aspect of molecular genetics. The plausibility of the meme is thus grounded in a questionable analogical argument, not in overwhelming evidence and observation.

We clearly need the memetic equivalent of the MichelsonMorley experiment - something which will determine, by empirical investigation rather than questionable analogical argumentation, whether memes exist. The present state of research overwhelmingly suggests that memes are the new ether - a redundant hypothesis just waiting to be eliminated.35 The "meme for memes" may have a high capacity for survival and transmission - but it names nothing in the real world. In fact, in both respects, it seems to be inconveniently similar to Dawkins' God meme.

The Redundancy of the Meme

Perhaps the most significant criticism of the "meme" concept is that the study of cultural and intellectual development proceeds perfectly well without it. Economic and physical models - especially information transfer - have proved their worth in this context. The contrast between meme and gene is, once more, painfully obvious: the gene had to be postulated, as there was simply no other way of explaining the observational evidence concerning the patterns of transmission of inherited traits. The meme is explanatorily redundant.

Economic models, which treat ideas as "information cascades" or consumer durables, are rather more persuasive and helpful than the unverified meme concept.36 These models incorporate the "competition" and "extinction" motifs of Darwinian theory, without necessarily endorsing its theories on the origins of innovations. For example, an economic "theory of fads" is considerably more convincing as an explanation of patterns of thought adoption and dispersal than Dawkins' meme.37 Cultural evolution and intellectual development can often be better understood in terms of a physical, rather than a biological, analogue - such as the transmission of information on random networks.3s Yet Dawkins does not consider these significant theoretical alternatives in evaluating his meme hypothesis.

The meme is not yet completely dead. Dawkins' canonical memetic statements have been upheld in two major recent publications - Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) and Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999). Yet the concept of the meme remains so vague and so empirically indeterminate that there is no means by which it can be verified or falsified. In any case, what it proposes to "explain" can be accounted for by other models. Exactly what otherwise puzzling phenomena are accounted for by memes? Dawkins is coy about specifics here, exposing all the more clearly the glaring contrast between this and his brilliant evidence-based defense of his concept of the "selfish gene."

Although now a quarter of a century old, the "science" of memetics has failed to generate a productive research program in mainstream cognitive science, sociology, or intellectual history. On the basis of the evidence available, I can only agree with Martin Gardner's withering criticism of the notion, published in the Los Angeles Times:

A meme is so broadly defined by its proponents as to be a useless concept, creating more confusion than light, and I predict that the concept will soon be forgotten as a curious linguistic quirk of little value. To critics, who at the moment far outnumber true believers, memetics is no more than a cumbersome terminology for saying what everybody knows and that can be more usefully said in the dull terminology of information transfer.39

Not surprisingly, Dawkins himself has moved on, distancing himself from any suggestion that he offered the meme concept as an explanation of human culture in general.40 As Daniel Dennett puts it, Dawkins has recently "drawn in his horns slightly."" He has retreated from his early optimism, and hinted that the meme hypothesis was simply a useful analogy. Dennett suggests that Dawkins was forced to back off here because he was seen as having become a sociobiologist.42 I think it rests more on a growing realization of the massive evidential underdetermination of the thesis. The meme concept was either redundant or wrong - and quite possibly both.

God as a Virus?

Undeterred, Dawkins developed his meme concept in another direction - a virus of the mind. "Memes," Dawkins tells us, can be transmitted "like viruses in an epidemic."" Although the connection between a "meme" and a "virus of the mind" is not clarified with the precision we might expect, it is clear that, for Dawkins, the key theme in each case is replication. For a virus to be effective, it must possess two qualities: the ability to replicate information accurately, and to obey the instructions which are encoded in the information replicated in this way.44

Yet there is also a verbal sleight of hand at work here, a rhetorical device apparently being presented as if it is good science. As everyone knows, viruses are bad things; they are contagious, parasitic entities, which exploit their hosts. The rhetorically freighted "argument" that God is a virus amounts to little more than thinly veiled insinuation, rather than rigorous evidence-based reasoning. Belief in God is proposed as a malignant infection contaminating otherwise pure minds. Yet the whole idea founders on the rocks of the absence of experimental evidence, the subjectivity of Dawkins' personal value-judgments implicated in assessing what is "good" and "bad," and the circularity of self-referentiality.

So just what is the experimental evidence that God is bad for you? Dawkins presumes that it is publicly accepted within the scientific community that religion debilitates people, reducing their potential for survival and health. Yet recent empirical research points to a generally positive interaction of religion and health. That there are pathological types of religious belief and behavior is well known; yet this in no way invalidates the generally positive estimation of religion's impact on mental health to emerge from evidence-based studies.

Dawkins appears to assume that his readers will rather uncritically share his own subjective views on the malignancy of religion, and thus accept his grandiose conclusions without demur. But they are not grounded in the rigorously evidencebased analysis, based on objective observation of the impact of religion on individuals, which is typical of the scientific enterprise that both Dawkins and I admire. When, one wonders, will popular science catch up with cutting edge research here?

The implications of this emerging consensus for the "God as virus" hypothesis are unambiguous. An already tenuous analogy becomes completely unsustainable. If religion is reported as having a positive impact on human well-being by 79 percent of recent studies in the field,45 how can it conceivably be regarded as analogous to a virus? Viruses are meant to be bad for you. So just how many viruses have such a positive impact on their hosts? Far from being something which reduces the survival value of its host, belief in God is an additional resource that enhances psychic survival.46 I have no doubt that, within the faith-based worldview which shapes Dawkins' account of reality - atheism - God ought to have such a negative, detrimental impact on human well-being. But God does not. The evidence just doesn't fit the theory.

Furthermore, what is the actual experimental evidence for such hypothetical "viruses of the mind"? In the real world, viruses are not known solely by their symptoms; they can be detected, subjected to rigorous empirical investigation, and their genetic structure characterized minutely. In contrast, the "virus of the mind" is hypothetical; posited by a questionable analogical argument, not direct observation; and is totally unwarranted conceptually on the basis of the behavior that Dawkins proposes for it. Can we observe these viruses? What is their structure? Their "genetic code"? Their location within the human body? And, most importantly of all, given Dawkins' interest in their spread, what is their mode of transmission?

There is no experimental evidence that ideas are viruses. Ideas may seem to "behave" in certain respects as if they are viruses. But there is a massive gap between analogy and identity - and, as the history of science illustrates only too painfully, most false trails in science are about analogies which were mistakenly assumed to be identities. The "God as virus" slogan, to the extent that it has any scientific validity, might be shorthand for something like "the patterns of diffusion of religious ideas seem to be analogous to those of the spread of certain diseases."

Unfortunately, Dawkins does not give any evidence-based arguments for this, and prefers to conjecture as to the impact of such a hypothetical virus on the human mind. The science just isn't there. In any case, each and every argument that Dawkins adduces for his idea of "God as virus of the mind" can be countered by proposing its counterpart for "atheism as a virus of the mind." Both ideas are equally unsubstantiated and meaningless.

The "thought contagion" metaphor has been developed most thoroughly by Aaron Lynch,47 who makes the crucially important point that the way in which ideas spread has no necessary relation to their validity or "goodness." As Lynch puts it:

The term "thought contagion" is neutral with respect to truth or falsity, as well as good or bad. False beliefs can spread as thought contagions, but so too can true beliefs. Similarly, harmful ideas can spread as thought contagions, but so too can beneficial ideas ... Thought contagion analysis concerns itself primarily with the mechanism by which ideas spread through a population. Whether an idea is true, false, helpful, or harmful are considered mainly for the effects they have on transmission rates.48

Neither Dawkins' concepts of the "meme" or the "virus of the mind" - whatever their relationship - really helps us validate or negate ideas, or understand or explain patterns of cultural development. As most working in the area of cultural development have concluded, it is perfectly possible to postulate and study cultural evolution while remaining agnostic to its mechanism. "All we need to do is recognize that cultural inheritance exists, and that its routes are different from the genetic ones.""

And what does this have to do with the idea of God? Well, not very much, really. This general approach to the diffusion of ideas may allow some insights about how beliefs spread within a culture. But it can't tell us anything about whether this belief itself is right or wrong, good or bad. This won't stop people drawing such conclusions - but they are not valid conclusions. And they are most certainly not scientific conclusions.

Science and Religion:

Dialogue or Intellectual

Appeasement?

It is widely agreed that in recent years there has been a growing interest in exploring the relation of science and religion. Many are openly speaking about "a new convergence" in the disciplines, opening the way to new insights and understandings.' Dawkins has an admirably robust response to this: "To an honest judge," he writes - perhaps with himself modestly in mind? - "the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. s'

It's an interesting point of view, but it belongs to another century. In recent years, the scholarly understanding of the historical relationship of science and religion has undergone an intellectual revolution no less than that occasioned by Darwin's Origin of Species. Intensive historical scholarly research has demonstrated that the popular notion of a protracted war between church and science which continues to this day is a piece of Victorian propaganda, completely at odds with the facts.' Sure, there were individual conflicts, often reflecting institutional politics and personal agendas - such as the Galileo affair - or simply misunderstandings on either or both sides of the debate. But these conflicts are neither typical nor defining.

Dawkins takes a strongly positivist view of science, and links this with the idea that science and religion are necessarily at war with each other. To talk of a rapprochement or convergence between these is therefore for him nothing less than crude "intellectual appeasement."' It is thus important to note that this belief is firmly located in the social world of nineteenthcentury England, and that both have become severely, even fatally, eroded and discredited with the passing of time. It is understandable that they should still linger in some works of popular science - after all, academic historical scholarship takes a long time to filter down. Yet a serious review of the popular myth of the "warfare of science and religion," so vigorously defended by Dawkins, is long overdue. His popular science has a lot of catching up to do.

To begin our exploration of these issues, we may consider the myth of the permanent "warfare" of science and religion in more detail.

The "Warfare" of Science and Religion

The history of science makes it clear here that the natural sciences have often found themselves pitted against authoritarianism of any kind. As Freeman Dyson points out in his important essay "The Scientist as Rebel," science often finds itself in "rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the local prevailing culture."' Science is thus a subversive activity, almost by definition. For the Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam; for nineteenth-century Japanese scientists, science was a rebellion against the lingering feudalism of their culture. In that the West has been dominated by Christianity, it is thus unsurprising that a general tension between science and Western culture could be seen specifically as a confrontation between science and Christianity.

Yet most historians regard religion as having had a generally benign and constructive relationship with the natural sciences in the West. Tensions and conflicts, such as the Galileo controversy, often turned out on closer examination to have more to do with papal politics, ecclesiastical power struggles, and personality issues than with any fundamental tensions between faith and science.' Leading historians of science regularly point out that the interaction of science and religion is determined primarily by the specifics of their historical circumstances, and only secondarily by their respective subject matters. There is no universal paradigm for the relation of science and religion, either theoretically or historically. The case of Christian attitudes to evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century makes this point particularly evident. As the Irish geographer and intellectual historian David Livingstone makes clear in a groundbreaking study of the reception of Darwinism in two very different contexts - Belfast and Princeton - local issues and personalities were often of decisive importance in determining the outcome.'

In the eighteenth century, a remarkable synergy developed between religion and the sciences in England. Newton's "celestial mechanics" was widely regarded as at worst consistent with, and at best a glorious confirmation of, the Christian view of God as creator of a harmonious universe. Many members of the Royal Society of London - founded to advance scientific understanding and research - were strongly religious in their outlooks, and saw this as enhancing their commitment to scientific advancement.

Yet all this changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The general tone of the later nineteenth-century encounter between religion (especially Christianity) and the natural sciences was set by two works: John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The crystallization of the "warfare" metaphor in the popular mind was unquestionably catalyzed by such vigorously polemical writings.

As a generation of historians has now pointed out, the notion of an endemic conflict between science and religion, so aggressively advocated by White and Draper, is itself socially determined, created in the lengthening shadows of hostility towards individual clergy and church institutions. The interaction of science and religion has been influenced more by their social circumstances than by their specific ideas.' The Victorian period itself gave rise to the social pressures and tensions which engendered the myth of permanent warfare between science and religion.

A significant social shift can be discerned behind the emergence of this "conflict" model. From a sociological perspective, scientific knowledge was advocated by particular social groups to advance their own specific goals and interests. There was growing competition between two specific groups within English society in the nineteenth century: the clergy and the scientific professionals. The clergy were widely regarded as an elite at the beginning of the century, with the "scientific parson" a well-established social stereotype. With the appearance of the professional scientist, however, a struggle for supremacy began, to determine who would gain the cultural ascendancy within British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. The "conflict" model has its origins in the specific conditions of the Victorian era, in which an emerging professional intellectual group sought to displace a group which had hitherto occupied the place of honor.

The "conflict" model of science and religion thus came to prominence at a time when professional scientists wished to distance themselves from their amateur colleagues, and when changing patterns in academic culture necessitated demonstrating its independence from the church and other bastions of the establishment. Academic freedom demanded a break with the church; it was a small step towards depicting the church as the opponent of learning and scientific advance in the late nineteenth century, and the natural sciences as its strongest advocates.

Today, this stereotype of the "warfare of science and religion" lingers on in the backwaters of Western culture. Yet the idea that the natural sciences and religion have been permanently at war with each other is now no longer taken seriously by any historian of science. It is generally accepted that the "warfare" model was developed by religiously alienated individuals in the nineteenth century to help the professional group of natural scientists to break free from ecclesiastical control - a major issue in the intellectual life of Victorian England.' Detailed historical analysis of the origins of the "warfare" model have demonstrated that it is historically located. It does not reflect the fundamental natures or themes of either the natural sciences or Christian theology; it is specifically linked with the social situation of science and religion in Victorian England. With the passing of that particular set of circumstances, that conflict receded.

It is certainly true that some have taken the view that the relation between science and Christian theology is permanently defined, at least in its fundamental respects, by the essential nature of the two disciplines - and, on Dawkins' unsatisfactory reading of the history and philosophy of science, that they are therefore locked into mortal combat, from which science must emerge as the ultimate victor. Underlying these "essentialist" accounts of the interaction of science and religion is the unchallenged assumption that each of these terms designates something fixed, permanent, and essential, so that their mutual relationship is determined by something fundamental to each of the disciplines, unaffected by the specifics of time, place, or culture. But it is simply not so. The relation of science and religion is historically conditioned, bound to the social and intellectual conditions of the age.10 What we are seeing at present is a growing interest, on both sides of the divide, in seeing how the two disciplines can illuminate and even assist each other's efforts.

The twentieth century has witnessed a vast revision of the simplistic views of the nineteenth century on the nature and limits of the scientific method, and the relation of faith and science. The huge scholarly process of subjecting these traditional views to minute examination has forged a new awareness of possibilities for positive and constructive dialogue and engagement, at a time in the history of Western culture which is showing a new interest in spirituality at every level.

I do wish Dawkins would join in this dialogue, instead of firing off inaccurate, wildly rhetorical salvoes, and lampooning those who disagree with him. Why? One of the defining characteristics of Western culture is the perception of a growing - possibly accelerating - alienation between the humanities and natural sciences, and an increasing cultural unease about where science is taking us. Back in 1959, C. P. Snow observed that the gulf between the arts and sciences had become so pronounced that it was necessary to speak of two distinct and non-interactive cultures in Western society:

The intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups ... Literary intellectuals at one pole ... at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

If anything, things seem to have got worse since then. The once relatively civilized disagreements between the natural sciences and the humanities seem to have given way to something approaching a shooting war. Recent works dealing with the cultural impact of science show a growing polarization between the disciplines. The possibility of reconciliation - or even a constructive dialogue - seems to diminish year by year. And Dawkins is one of those who some accuse of making things worse.12 It doesn't need to be like this.

Cautious and careful exploration of issues has been replaced by the megaphone diplomacy of the ideologues. On the one hand, we have those who insist that science is totally objective and neutral in its methods and goals, and dismiss those who express anxieties about those methods or goals as "antiscientific" or "defilers of science."" On the other, we have those who argue that the sciences have failed to appreciate the extent to which they are constituted by social and cultural forces, and who excoriate what they see as pretentious claims to privilege - such as the claim that the sciences offer the best account of things.14

Unweaving the Rainbow marks a significant change in Dawkins' writing style. Instead of offering a popular exposition of Darwinian evolutionary theory, linked with speculation on its metaphysical and religious implications, we find a sustained engagement with a cultural agenda. Part of the book's content - not to mention its title - derive from Dawkins' 1997 C. P. Snow Lecture at Cambridge, in which he explored the hostility of the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) towards Isaac Newton's mechanical philosophy.15 This deep suspicion towards scientific analysis is best seen in Keats' 1820 poem "Lamia," in which he protests against reducing the beautiful and awesome phenomena of nature to the basics of scientific theory, thus allegedly emptying nature of its beauty and mystery, and reducing it to something cold and clinical:

Unweaving the Rainbow is a triumphalist manifesto for the cultural independence of the sciences. It is a robust defense of the values of the Enlightenment, untroubled by the less appealing aspects of the scientific enterprise - such as the links between scientific research and military applications - in the face of what Dawkins sees as outbursts of irrationality in Western culture. Nor does Dawkins bother to note the darker side of the Enlightenment, which has so troubled many thinkers of the late twentieth century - such as its demand for the enforcement of uniformity, and its intolerance for deviation from what is declared to be "rational."

Unweaving the Rainbow is also a work of no small importance for the present book, which focuses on Dawkins' religious views. Two issues stand out as being of major significance:

1 Dawkins argues that the sciences lead to a model of the universe which is "not a superstitious, small-minded, parochial model filled with spirits and hobgoblins, astrology and magic, glittering with fake crocks of gold at where the rainbow ends."16 In contrast, the religious view of nature is presented as being so ugly that it could not lead anyone to aesthetically pleasing conclusions. Religion is said to be aesthetically deficient, leading to the impoverishment of nature, and a diminution of the natural human sense of wonder and mystery evoked by the universe, and its scientific investigation.

2 His elimination of any transcendent dimension to nature as aesthetically redundant and intellectually untenable. Science is said to get rid of such meaningless notions as "purpose," "God," and so forth. Nothing is lost by their elimination, except the deviousness that keeps the psychics, astrologers, and other peddlers of dishonest nonsense in business.

It is the first of these criticisms of religion that is the more important, and we may turn immediately to explore it in greater detail.

The Poky Little Medieval Universe of Religion

One of Dawkins' persistent complaints about religion is that it is aesthetically deficient. Its view of the universe is limited, impoverished, and unworthy of the wonderful reality known by the sciences:

The universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe-inspiring. The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited."

The logic of this bold assertion is rather hard to follow, and its factual basis astonishingly slight. The "medieval" view of the universe may indeed have been more limited and restricted than modern conceptions. Yet this has nothing to do with religion, either as cause or effect. It reflected the science of the day, largely based upon Aristotle's treatise de caelo ("on heaven"). If the universe of religious people in the Middle Ages was indeed "poky," it was because they trusted the best cosmologists of the day to tell them what it was like. This, they were assured, was scientific truth, and they accepted it. They took it on trust. They were naive enough to assume that what their science textbooks told them was right. Precisely that trust in science and scientists which Dawkins commends so uncritically led them to weave their theology around someone else's view of the universe. They didn't know about such things as "radical theory change in science," which causes twenty-first century people to be cautious about investing too heavily in the latest scientific theories, and much more critical of those who base worldviews upon them.

Medieval conceptions of the universe were largely based on a Ptolemaic model of the planetary system, which located the earth at the center of a vast, ordered cosmic mechanism.18 This is vividly depicted in Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), one of the most popular and technologically advanced printed books of the late Middle Ages. On this grand view of the universe, the earth stood at the center of a series of concentric spheres, each of which rotates round the earth according to its own predetermined rhythms. Beyond them lies the "empyrean" - a vast, eternal, infinite, and formless void. Christian theologians assumed that this was where paradise was located, often on the basis of questionable traditional arguments.19 Popular depictions of this vision of the universe, such as the Nuremberg Chronicle, depict God and the saints as dwelling in this region. It's not today's model of the solar system, and is wrong at just about every point. It's certainly "medieval," but it's hardly a "poky little universe." Most medieval writers that I have read on the topic found the thought of cosmic vastness to be really rather awesome - even on a Ptolemaic model of the heavens.

The implication of Dawkins' unsubstantiated criticism is that a religious view of reality is deficient and impoverished in comparison with his own. There is no doubt that this consideration is an important factor in generating and maintaining his atheism. Yet his analysis of this issue is disappointingly thin and unpersuasive. One of the common themes of much religious writing in the English language from about 1550 to 1850 is that the scientific investigation of the grandeur and glory of nature leads to an enhanced appreciation of the glory of God.20 Although I see no reason to impute such a base motive to such writers, it was in their interest to exaggerate the beauty and wonders of the created order, so that a correspondingly greater vision of God might be had. The very slight historical evidence that Dawkins brings forward in support of his extravagant excoriation of religious visions of reality, whether in Unweaving the Rainbow or elsewhere, amounts to little more than an observation that our understanding of the vastness and complexity of the universe has increased in recent years.

Plate 10 A late medieval vision of the universe. Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) depicts the earth as lying in a fixed position at the center of the universe. surrounded by a series of spheres defining the orbits of the Moon. Mercury, Venus, the Sun. Mars. Jupiter and Saturn. The "empyrean" ties beyond the fixed stars. Photo AKG-Images

A Christian approach to nature identifies three ways in which a sense of awe comes about in response to what we observe.

1 An immediate sense of wonder at the beauty of nature. This is evoked immediately. This "leap of the heart" that William Wordsworth described on seeing a rainbow in the sky occurs before any conscious theoretical reflection on what it might imply. To use psychological categories, this is about perception, rather than cognition. I can see no good reason for suggesting that believing in God in any way diminishes this sense of wonder. Dawkins' argument at this point is so underdetermined by evidence and so utterly implausible that I fear I must have misunderstood it.

2 A derived sense of wonder at the mathematical or theoretical representation of reality which arises from this. Dawkins also knows and approves of this second source of "awed wonder," but seems to imply that religious people "revel in mystery and feel cheated when it is explained. s21 They don't; a new sense of wonder emerges, which I will explain in a moment.

3 A further derived sense of wonder at what the natural world points to. One of the central themes of Christian theology is that the creation bears witness to its creator: "The heavens declare the glory of the Lord!" (Psalm 19:1). For Christians, to experience the beauty of creation is a sign or pointer to the glory of God, and is to be particularly cherished for this reason. Dawkins excludes any such transcendent reference from within the natural world.

Dawkins suggests that a religious approach to the world misses out on something.22 Having read Unweaving the Rainbow, I still haven't worked out what this is. A Christian reading of the world denies nothing of what the natural sciences tell us, except the naturalist dogma that reality is limited to what may be known through the natural sciences. If anything, a Christian engagement with the natural world adds a richness which I find quite absent from Dawkins' account of things, offering a new motivation for the study of nature. After all, John Calvin (1509-64) commented on how much he envied those who studied physiology and astronomy, which allowed a direct engagement with the wonders of God's creation. The invisible and intangible God, he pointed out, could be appreciated through studying the wonders of nature. Perhaps the greatest difference between science and religion thus lies not in how they begin, nor even in how they proceed, but in how they end.

In a moment, we will give thought to a Christian reading of nature. But first, we need to pause, and explore this sense of "awe" which so many people experience in an encounter with the wonders of nature.

The Concept of Awe

In recent years, a new interest has arisen in the concept of "awe." The idea has featured prominently in theology, sociology, and philosophy. For example, Rudolf Otto spoke of the "numinous" - a mysterium tremendum et fascinans which inspired awe on the part of those who experienced it.23 Such an experience can be both profoundly positive and terrifyingly negative, and frequently reduces the subject to a state of silence or confusion. More recently, the concept has begun to attract the attention of psychologists,24 who have noted that a range of stimuli triggers an experience of awe, including "religious encounters, charismatic political leaders, natural objects, and even patterns of light."

In a recent groundbreaking study, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt developed a prototype approach to the experience of awe, which has at its heart two distinctive features: vastness and accommodation.25 Vastness, they argue, refers to "anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self's ordinary level of experience or frame of reference." It may refer simply to physical size, or to more subtle markers of vastness, such as social signs or symbolic markers. Accommodation refers to the process identified by Jean Piaget (1896-1980), professor of genetic and experimental psychology at the University of Geneva from 1940-71. Piaget defined this as the process by which human mental structures undergo an adjustment in the face of the challenge posed by new experiences. Thus it would be possible to experience a sense of awe through realization of the "breadth and scope of a grand theory" - such as evolutionary theory itself.

We propose that prototypical awe involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast. Such experiences can be disorientating and even frightening ... They also often involve feelings of enlightenment and even rebirth, when mental structures expand to accommodate truths never before known. We stress that awe involves a need for accommodation, which may or not be satisfied. The success of one's attempt at accommodation may partially explain why awe can be both terrifying (when one fails to understand) and enlightening (when one succeeds).26

On the basis of this approach, the human sense of awe at the vastness of the universe, or the dramatic beauty of a natural landscape or feature (such as a rainbow), could be enhanced by grasping the theoretical foundations or implications of what was being observed. This resonates with Dawkins' belief - which is also mine - that the theoretical representations of reality are in themselves beautiful, and capable of evoking awe on account of their complexity or their capacity to invoke a "big picture" view of things. This is unquestionably the case with theories which propose a larger vision of things - a list of theories which includes, but is not limited to, Darwinism, Marxism, and Christian theology.

The Mind of God

Christian theology does not in any way detract from a natural appreciation of the beauty and wonder of the world; if anything, it adds to it. As I pointed out, there are three levels at which Christianity affirms a sense of wonder about nature: (1) through an immediate encounter with its vast beauty; (2) through the theoretical explanation and representation of nature; and (3) through nature's capacity to point to God as its creator. I assume that the first of these is uncontroversial, and will discuss the remaining two in what follows.

The unsubstantiated allegation that Christian theology holds that the "explanation" of natural phenomena robs them of divine significance is total nonsense. The fact that we are able to develop such theories in the first place, along with the mathematical beauty of the resulting theories, is firmly grounded in a Christian worldview. The theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne explores the implications of this point as follows:

We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us ... There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without."

That human beings have been remarkably successful in investigating and grasping something of the structure and workings of the world is beyond dispute. Precisely why the rationality of the world should be so accessible to human beings remains rather more puzzling. Polkinghorne is quite clear as to how Christianity might offer an explanation of this observation:

If the deep-seated congruence of the rationality present in our minds with the rationality present in the world is to find a true explanation, it must surely lie in some more profound reason which is the ground of both. Such a reason would be provided by the Rationality of the Creator."

In developing this point, Polkinghorne draws on resources from deep within the Christian tradition, which stresses that God endowed humanity with intelligence and reason both to investigate the world, and to discover God. Precisely the same point was made by the astronomer Johann Kepler, at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. Since geometry had its origins in the mind of God, it was only to be expected that the created order would conform to its patterns:

In that geometry is part of the divine mind from the origins of time, even from before the origins of time (for what is there in God that is not also from God?) has provided God with the patterns for the creation of the world, and has been transferred to humanity with the image of God."

On this reading of things, which is typical of the Christian tradition, the theoretical representation of reality can itself be seen as peering into the mind of God. Dawkins, I have no doubts, will wish to dispute this interpretation of theory. Yet his suggestion that Christianity necessarily or characteristically places a total embargo on the theoretical representation of the world is simply untenable, unsubstantiated by the evidence.

More importantly, Christianity argues that nature is to be seen as an "image of divine things" - something which somehow points to God himself, enabling us to see nature in a new light. While not denying anything of what Dawkins affirms about the beauty of the world, this perspective simply adds to it, by seeing nature as a pointer towards the greater beauty of God. The wonder of the creator can be known through the created order. This point was made by the thirteenth-century theologian Bonaventure, a great admirer of Francis of Assisi and his love for every aspect of nature:

The creatures of the world lead the souls of the wise and contemplative to the eternal God, since they are the shadows, echoes and pictures; the vestiges, images and visible images of the most powerful, wise and best first principle of that eternal origin, light and fulness; of that productive, exemplary and order-inducing art. They are set before us in order that we might know God. We are given signs by God ... every creature is by its very nature and kind of depiction and likeness of that eternal wisdom.3°

This idea that nature elicits the praise and knowledge of God underlies Romanticism, which sought to reestablish a connection between nature and the transcendent. Romanticism viewed the development of the mechanistic model of the universe, which it associated with Newton, with great distress.31 Something had been lost - a sense of mystery. As Dawkins raises this question in Unweaving the Rainbow, we may explore this in more detail.

Mystery. Insanity, and Nonsense

Dawkins is a splendid representative of the no-nonsense, "one rationality fits all" approach of the Enlightenment. Perhaps this is most obvious in his discussion of "mystery" - a category which he cheerfully, if a little prematurely, reduces to "plain insanity or surrealist nonsense."" We can make sense of things - or, if we can't make sense of things right now, the relentless advance of science will make this possible sooner or later. Given enough time, anything can happen. Religious people who talk about "mystery" are just irrational mystics who are too lazy or frightened to use their minds properly.

It's a recognizable caricature of the idea of "mystery." But it's still a caricature. Here's what a theologian means when using the word "mystery": something which is true and possesses its own rationality - yet which the human mind finds it impossible to grasp fully. Some years ago, I started learning Japanese. I didn't get very far. The language uses two syllabaries, has a vocabulary which bears little relation to any of the languages that I knew, and a syntax that seemed completely illogical to my Western way of thinking. In short: I couldn't make sense of it. But my failure to grasp the Japanese language represents a failure on my part. Those who know the language assure me that it is rational and intelligible; it's just that I can't get my mind around it.

There is no way that the concept of "mystery" means "an irrationality," except in the sense that it may be counterintuitive. It may lie beyond the present capacity of human reason to grasp; that does not mean it is contrary to reason, as Thomas Aquinas emphasized. The human mind is just too limited to grasp the totality of such a reality, and we must therefore do what we can, while recognizing our limits. We're not God, and hence find what John Donne called "the immense weight of divine glory" difficult to cope with. And it's not just an issue in the area of theology. Any attempt to engage with the immensity of nature - such as the seemingly vast time scale of Darwinian evolution - faces the same problems, and makes the use of both the word and the idea of "mystery" entirely appropriate in the natural sciences. Dawkins himself knows this, as is clear from his derisive comment on postmodern critics of the sciences:

Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye; or than meets the all too limited human mind, evolved as it was to cope with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds through medium distances in Africa. In the face of these profound and sublime mysteries, the low-grade intellectual poodling of pseudo-philosophical poseurs seems unworthy of adult attention.33

My point precisely.

Quantum mechanics is an excellent example of an area of science where the category of "mystery" seems entirely appropriate. It is something that we believe to be true, and to possess a deep rationality of its own - but which it often seems impossible to get our minds around. I certainly found my mathematics pressed to its limits when specializing in this discipline at Oxford in the academic year 1972-3. Dawkins concurs, noting in particular how its conclusions "can be disturbingly counter-intuitive. "34

The point here is that both the scientific and religious communities can be thought of as attempting to wrestle with the ambiguities of experience, and offering what are accepted as the "best possible explanations" for what is observed, accepting the intellectual difficulties that are demanded on account of the evidence which demands that we think in this way. The analysis of experience can lead to the generation of conceptualities which are often very complex, and occasionally quite counterintuitive. Many more unreflective natural scientists hostile to religion deride the complexity of its conceptualities. Science, they argue, deals with simple ideas, and avoids such extravagant ventures into such realms. Others, however, who have given more careful thought to the matter, are not so sure.

The Princeton philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen is intensely skeptical of those who suggest that science is justifiably simple whereas religion is unjustifiably complex; once more, quantum theory is cited as an example:

Do the concepts of the Trinity, the soul, haecceity, universals, prime matter, and potentiality baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event-horizons, EPR correlations, and bootstrap models."

Fraassen clearly considers that the conceptual and imaginative demands of some areas of modern physics exceed those traditionally associated with even the most labyrinthine theological and philosophical systems of the Middle Ages. His point is that an empirical engagement with the world of experience and phenomena throws up theoretical concepts which are far from simple, yet which appear to be inevitable if the phenomena are to be preserved.

For an orthodox Christian theologian, the doctrine of the Trinity is the inevitable outcome of intellectual engagement with the Christian experience of God; for the physicist, equally abstract and bewildering concepts emerge from wrestling with the world of quantum phenomena. But both are committed to sustained intellectual engagement with those phenomena, in order to derive and develop theories or doctrines which can be said to do justice to them, preserving rather than reducing them.

Dawkins' most reflective account of "mystery" is found in Unweaving the Rainbow, which explores the place of wonder in an understanding of the sciences. While maintaining Dawkins' core hostility to religion, the work acknowledges the importance of a sense of awe and wonder in driving people to want to understand reality. Dawkins singles out the poet William Blake as an obscurant mystic, who illustrates why religious approaches to mystery are pointless and sterile. Dawkins locates Blake's many failings in an understandable - but misdirected - longing to delight in a mystery:

The impulses to awe, reverence and wonder which led Blake to mysticism ... are precisely those that lead others of us to science. Our interpretation is different but what excites us is the same. The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not "meant" to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder, but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, "But we're working on it.i36

So there isn't actually a problem with the word or the category of "mystery." The question is whether we choose to wrestle with it, or take the lazy and complacent view that this is conveniently off-limits.

Now let's agree that William Blake was a somewhat colorful character, with decidedly odd ideas. He can hardly be taken as representative of mainline Christianity. Blake was regarded by many of his family and friends as showing symptoms of an incipient insanity, not least because of his "visions." Who can read his poem "Milton" - which includes, incidentally, the famous song "Jerusalem" - without being fazed by Blake's graphic description of how the spirit of the poet John Milton fell vertically from heaven, before entering him through the tarsus of his left foot? But Blake is not typical of Christian theology - a discipline he opposed on several grounds, by the way, not least its tendency towards rationalism.

Traditionally, Christian theology has been well aware of its limits, and has sought to avoid excessively confident affirmations in the face of mystery. Yet, at the same time, Christian theology has never seen itself as totally reduced to silence in the face of divine mysteries. Nor has it prohibited intellectual wrestling with "mysteries" as destructive or detrimental to faith. As the nineteenth-century Anglican theologian Charles Gore rightly insisted:

Human language never can express adequately divine realities. A constant tendency to apologize for human speech, a great element of agnosticism, an awful sense of unfathomed depths beyond the little that is made known, is always present to the mind of theologians who know what they are about, in conceiving or expressing God. "We see," says St. Paul, "in a mirror, in terms of a riddle;" "we know in part." "We are compelled," complains St. Hilary, "to attempt what is unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot utter; instead of the mere adoration of faith, we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of human expression."37

A perfectly good definition of Christian theology is "taking rational trouble over a mystery" - recognizing that there may be limits to what can be achieved, but believing that this intellectual grappling is both worthwhile and necessary. It just means being confronted with something so great that we cannot fully comprehend it, and so must do the best that we can with the analytical and descriptive tools at our disposal.

Come to think of it, that's what the natural sciences aim to do as well. Perhaps it's no wonder that there is such a growing interest in the dialogue between science and religion.

Conclusion

This book has barely scratched the surface of a series of fascinating questions raised by the writings of Richard Dawkins. Some of these are directly, others indirectly, religious in nature. I am conscious that I have failed to deal with any of them in the detail that they rightly demand. I have opened up some questions for further discussion, and have not settled anything - except that the issues raised in this book are important and interesting, and that further discussion is needed. Dawkins raises all the right questions, and gives some interesting answers. They're not particularly reliable answers, admittedly, unless you happen to believe that religious people are science-hating fools who are into "blind faith" and other unmentionable things in a big way.

This book aims to move the discussion on, and draw a line under the often unreliable account of the relation of science and religion that Dawkins offers. An evidence-based approach to this question is much more complex and much more interesting than Dawkins' "path of simplicity and straight thinking." There are, as Dawkins rightly points out, areas of tension, which must be acknowledged and confronted; yet alongside them there is an immense potential for intellectual synergy and the discovery of fresh perspectives on reality.

I'm sure that we all have much to learn by debating with each other, graciously and accurately. The question of whether there is a God, and what that God might be like, has not - despite the predictions of overconfident Darwinians - gone away since Darwin, and remains of major intellectual and personal importance. Some minds on both sides of the argument may be closed; the evidence and the debate, however, are not. Scientists and theologians have so much to learn from each other. Listening to each other, we might hear the galaxies sing.38 Or even the heavens declaring the glory of the Lord (Psalm 19:1).

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