A voice crying in the wilderness

Richard Dawkins is an evangelical. The cover of this book, with its red explosion and large writing, reminds one of those popular volumes by Protestant pastors which purport to prove that JESUS IS ALIVE. Dawkins has all the fervour and anger of such persons, and their well-meaning puzzlement that so many cannot see what to them is so blindingly obvious. ‘Can’t you see’, yells Dawkins, ‘JESUS IS DEAD?’

As the more zealous evangelicals sometimes take refuge in statistics — ‘Last year, 13,732 people in the State of Oklahoma were healed of cancer by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour’ — so does Dawkins. He tells us that scientists used to be religious in the old days because of ‘social and judicial pressure’ (without seeing that this, if true, might make us as sceptical of claims of absolute truth made by scientists as of those made by theologians), and then goes on to tell us about a recent survey of the religious opinions of 1,074 Fellows of the Royal Society. Only 3.3 per cent of these ‘agreed strongly with the statement that a personal god exists … while 78.8 per cent strongly disagreed’. He is not far off the argument that 846.312 Fellows of the Royal Society can’t be wrong.

Just think, shouts Pastor Dawkins, if the world had no religion, the Twin Towers would still be standing! True, perhaps, but this architectural point seems a particularly odd place to start (it appears on the first page of his book), since without religion there would also be no Dome of the Rock, St Paul’s Cathedral, Parthenon or Pyramids. He rightly assails the Taleban for blowing up the Bamiyan statues, but does not consider the fact that those statues were themselves religious.

Without belief in God, saith the atheist preacher, there would have been ‘no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian Partition’, no Northern Ireland Troubles, ‘no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it’ neither.