I last entered into controversy with Professor Richard Dawkins in another newspaper and another age. I was subject to his magisterial contempt – what a wonderful art critic he would have made, berating Berenson and patronising Warhol. We reached agreement on one important point. The ability to repeat an experiment is not a necessary test of scientific truth, and cannot therefore be a necessary test of religious truth.

We cannot create life in the laboratory, but that does not mean that life does not exist. We cannot repeat the process of human evolution in the laboratory, but that does not mean that Darwinism is not the best explanation we yet have for the development of species. We cannot call up God in the laboratory, but that does not mean that He does not exist. I may now be mistaken in remembering that Professor Dawkins conceded as much, but I treasure at least that little island of agreement in the gulf of disagreement that stretches between us.

Last Saturday, in The Times, the professor defended himself against his critics. I do not take the position that he is always wrong, and his critics always right. I agree with Professor Dawkins, not to mention St Paul, in rejecting the argument that people should be allowed their religious comfort, even if it is not true.

However, there is one charge against Professor Dawkins on which his defence merely confirms his critics. He replies to an accusation often made against him. It is said that he “often ignores the best of religion” and instead attacks what are called “crude rabble-rousing chancers” such as Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than facing up to sophisticated theologians such as Bonhoeffer or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Expert View

If subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would be a better place and I would have written a different book

Richard Dawkins

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Professor Dawkins’s reply makes a significant concession to his critics. He does not claim to have answered the argument for belief in God at its best; indeed, he throws in a dismissive side-note about Aquinas and Duns Scotus. He concedes that there is a wide difference between what he terms “decent, understated religion” and Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. He maintains that “the melancholy truth is that decent, understated, religion is numerically negligible”, but that the world needs to face the fundamentalists. “If subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would be a better place, and I would have written a different book.”

This seems rather odd. As in all social institutions, there are good and bad church members, and good and bad church leaders. But Professor Dawkins has not written a book to tell us that Osama bin Laden is a bad man, but to persuade us that God does not exist. He makes an assertion, that is contrary to common experience, that the vast majority of religious believers are closer to the beliefs of American evangelists or of bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists than to quiet and rational religion. That is a sociological judgment.

I believe it to be false. It is certainly false in England, where Professor Dawkins presumably meets most of his theist acquaintances. It is not true of Anglicans; it is not true of Roman Catholics. It is not true of their leaders. Whatever else may be said of the archbishops of Canterbury or Westminster, they do not bear the faintest resemblance to the personality or doctrine of bin Laden.

However, people can get their facts wrong; in a world of six billion people, the exact proportions between rational and raving theists would be hard to determine. I object to Professor Dawkins’s methods of argument much more than to his assertions of fact, mistaken though I think them to be.

After all, Professor Dawkins is a scientist, and a good one. He has been thoroughly trained in the scientific method. That requires him to examine conflicting theories in terms of their strongest arguments, not in terms of their weakest. One could disprove any theory by taking the silliest arguments that have been used by the most ignorant people to support them. To knock down Christianity on the basis of American evangelists, while failing to face up to the arguments of Bonhoeffer, who was both a very wise man and a hero, is not a scientifically respectable proceeding. Yet this is what Professor Dawkins tries to justify.

Would it not be terrible if Professor Dawkins were to lose his faith in what he regards as a scientific method and in the conclusions he derives from that? One senses the unease that comes when faith is under pressure. His tone is not like that of Charles Darwin himself; thoughtful, reflecting detailed observation, sensitive in the search for truth. It is more like that of Bishop Wilberforce in the Oxford debate of June 1860, in which the bishop attacked Darwinism.

Much of Professor Dawkins’s life has been devoted to continuing that debate, yet somehow he has adopted the style, not of the Darwinist advocate T. H. Huxley – the man who coined the word “agnosticism”, but of Bishop Wilberforce himself. Indeed, the Professor has opened himself to the conclusive rebuke with which Huxley replied to Wilberforce. Huxley closed with this passage: “I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” One has only to transpose the words “scientific” and “religious” to see that Huxley’s shaft still strikes home.

Read the Richard Dawkins article

My critics are wrong to call me dogmatic, says Dawkins

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