Dawkins hits back

FIREBRAND biologist Professor Richard Dawkins is back, but, this time, he shifts the spotlight of his gaze from the wonder of evolution onto his subject's quarrels with the God squad. And Dawkins himself has provoked no small number of these almighty rows.

His work in popularising and explaining the power of natural selection to shape the life forms on our planet, coupled with his unabashed atheism, has led to him being a prime target for religious wonks from around the world.

Books, pamphlets, letters, hate mail, almost all evolutionary biologists in the public eye receive them, but I should imagine that Dawkins receives more than most. So, it's not surprising that he's decided to hit back - it should only raise an eyebrow that it's taken him so long.

Dawkins's retaliation, The God Delusion, is one powerful book. If it were a gale, it'd be force 10.

The narrative of his argument, spanning the whole book, is strident, economical and, unusually for Dawkins, often amusing. Although it must be said that a fair amount of his humour is borrowed from others, like all good scientists, he credits his sources.

For any who saw Dawkins's Channel 4 two-parter The Root of All Evil? in January and were frustrated by its brevity, The God Delusion provides a welcome fleshing-out of his arguments, which, although appearing somewhat skimpy on screen, acquire the power and style of a controlled explosion on the page.

Dawkins starts out by demolishing the reasoning as to why we afford religion so much "respect" in the first place. He highlights its absurdity by pointing out that "you can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning docroral thesis expounding the evils of war and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector.

"Yet, if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker, you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself."

Dawkins then journeys through the standard religious arguments in favour of God - or the God Hypothesis as he calls it - and the standard religious arguments against evolution, blasting through each, one by one.

What will really raise fundamentalist hackles, though, is his use of evolution itself to explain why people adopt religion at all. Natural selection has created our human tendency to occasionally delude ourselves because it's adaptive. Heresy!

Moving on, he claims that our sense of right and wrong is not controlled by religion, but depends on the zeitgeist - the intellectual climate in which we live.

Moral developments such as the emancipation of women and slaves occurred for a variety of reasons, but they were usually in spite of, rather than through, religion.

"Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth," says Dawkins.

"There are local and temporary setbacks such as the US is suffering from its government in the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistakeable and it will continue." It's heartening that someone so eminent is also so optimistic.

However, the underlying theme of the book is Dawkins's frustration at fundamentalists' reluctance to fully understand natural selection before dismissing it.

He says in exasperation, "Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason - it gives them something to do. One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding."

Whether you agree with the nuances and subtleties of Dawkins's many and varied arguments, it's the message of the importance of understanding that's worth taking home.