The Ideas Guy
Richard Handler
The world's most famous atheist
Last Updated: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 | 3:04 PM ET
By Richard Handler CBC News
He's been called "the world's most famous atheist" and his website offers us "a clear-thinking oasis."
I speak of Richard Dawkins, the retired Oxford biologist who first came to prominence more than 30 years ago with his book The Selfish Gene.
Now a public personality, Dawkins is arguably now the world's leading spokesman for Darwin and evolution.
His new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, arrives in the celebratory year that marks Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the On the Origin of Species.
Author Richard Dawkins. (Houghton Mifflin/Associated Press) You might think it overkill in the midst of all the hoopla. But Charles Darwin still needs defending, says Dawkins, because evolution is so misunderstood.
Dawkins has two passions. One is Darwin's great idea (for Dawkins, the greatest scientific idea ever).
His second underscores the first: the total triumph of science as a form of knowledge.
Notice I did not say his passion was his intense dislike of religion, what he's best known for after having written The God Delusion three years ago.
That is because Dawkins' real métier is forceful explanation. At one time, he was the Oxford professor "for the public understanding of science."
That meant he was, and still is, Darwin's bulldog.
Powerful illusion
These days, Dawkins is sometimes accused of being as fundamentalist as any religious believer, a charge he dislikes.
Indeed, on a CBC Radio interview with Mary Hynes of Tapestry, we hear Dawkins as a more discerning intellect than his brawler reputation would suggest.
Dawkins admits that the whole idea of a world created without a "designer God" can seem counterintuitive.
Everywhere we look — in our homes and workplaces — somebody has designed all that we see and touch. So why wouldn't we think that the world itself, indeed the entire universe, has a designer, a God?
Dawkins says he's sympathetic to the layperson's confusion. But what really fools us, he argues, is the appearance of design in the natural world, something he calls "a powerful illusion."
In a world in which so many beautiful, intricate varieties of life appear, we may think a grand designer is at work, like a sublime artist. But that is not the case.
Take a giraffe
Take, for example, the giraffe. In a giraffe, there is a nerve that runs from the brain up and down the long neck to get to the voice box under the throat.
As designs go, it is an unnecessary and inefficient solution: a 15-foot detour. Any designer would have gone back to the drawing board.
But over the course of the giraffe's evolution, incremental changes were made that, as a consequence, left it with all that unnecessary wiring.
You can think of that when your own back aches, because we humans haven't quite adjusted to our evolution as largely sedentary beasts.
Dawkins also likes to clear up the idea that evolution is random. It isn't, he says. It's overseen by natural selection, commonly reduced to what Darwin (and Herbert Spencer, who coined the term) called "survival of the fittest."
Individual mutations are random, but the whole process is not. Useful mutations survive. Others do not. Every organism that lives is the "elite of the elite of the elite," he says.
It's as if every organism on the planet is the supreme champion — for now, anyway — of the greatest reality show of all time, Survivor: Earth.
Checking out God
So, knowing that evolutionary theory rubs against our common sense, Dawkins is surprisingly sympathetic to the ways religious thinkers concoct a divine creator.
Some deists, he notes, believe God started the process, then checked out. That's the theory of God as watchmaker, winding us all up.
Others believe God intervenes when needed, when we get into trouble. And fundamentalists believe in miracles and direct, repeated intervention.
A whole spectrum exists, says Dawkins. But he can't help putting the knife in. Some religious explanations, he says, are "less absurd than others."
Dawkins is also baffled how a scientist such as Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project can understand the scientific principles behind evolution while still maintaining a belief, as an evangelical, in a Christian God.
But at least Collins doesn't believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that every animal and plant are exactly the way they have been from the moment of creation. Dawkins is withering in his criticism of such ignorance.
Shorn of mystery
At one point, Mary Hynes brings up the case of John Polkinghorne, a British particle physicist who went on to become an Anglican priest. How does something like that happen? And why aren't more scientists turning into believers?
Dawkins says that in Britain and the U.S. only about 10 per cent of scientists are believers. But he also acknowledges that there has been a slight increase among physicists, especially those studying cosmology and quantum physics.
One possible explanation, he suggests, is that it is a field still full of mystery.
Biology, on the other hand, ever since Darwin, has been robbed of its mystery. Natural selection, as an explanation of how the world evolved, is simply too all-consuming and brilliant, Dawkins argues.
By contrast, God, as an explanation for how things work, is just too easy, too uninteresting.
What a put down! God doesn't exist because He is a lousy theory, not up to the standards of rational scientists.
Dawkins does admit that some things in the universe may always remain a mystery. Any sane scientist would have to acknowledge this possibility.
Also, when pressed, he comes up with one theological principle: If there is a God, He would have to be beyond human imagining.
It is not an unknown idea and it may be where Dawkins' lack of religious knowledge undermines his understanding of what others believe.
Mystics of all stripes, Eastern and Western, have always offered up a God beyond human imaginings.
In Buddhism, God is replaced often enough by the concept of "the void." Christian mysticism speaks of the numinous, the ground of being. And in the Muslim Sufi tradition, God is an ecstatic, dancing presence.
My guess is that these esoteric interpretations would not bother Dawkins, since these mystics and subtle believers aren't the ones forcing creationism down the throats of students in small-town America or blowing people up in Afghanistan.
But until the mystics and the poets of religion have unseated the militant believers, Dawkins will always be reason's champion.
