'Darwin's Rottweiler' Needs Putting To Sleep

As a lapsed Catholic there are really only two ways I could have attended the recent Richard Dawkins lecture at the Phil and not lost my saved seat in the afterlife. 1 – stand up halfway through and yell things at him, 2 – go on a comp and claim I was just there for the free bread sticks and a nice sit down.

I chose the latter.

Professor Richard Dawkins is now a major celebrity in the world of airport bookshop theologians. His book ‘The God Delusion’ has been printed in over 30 languages and has sold in excess of 1.5 million copies. Dawkins opens his lecture with these statistics, giving you a taster of how humble and unassuming he is. He follows with a slide showing the many titles which have been written purely in opposition to his work; “The Dawkins Delusion”; “Deluded By Dawkins”; “Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths”; and so on and so forth into infinity. Dawkins laps up this attention, to him it’s just further confirmation that the religious hate to be challenged. The first ten minutes of the hour long lecture are designed to impress upon any doubters in the audience the importance of Dawkins and his theories in today’s mondo-secular society.

Not that there are many doubters here. Most of them are outside with placards, one was chanting ‘Don’t let Dawkins make a monkey out of you’, alluding to the Professors stance on creationism. Inside the largest of the Phil’s lecture rooms those who don’t fully subscribe to Dawkins’ theories are notable by their absence. Every conclusion he reaches is accompanied by a silent chorus of nods, as if he is intoning some indefatigable truth rather than shooting religious fish in a barrel. I began to wonder why these people were here, paying £20 plus to hear what they already agree with, re-packaged with slides from the book they paid a tenner for.

The myth of Dawkins is more compelling than the fact. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and though religion still plays some part in my life, usually through family ritual, I was ready for Dawkins to present me with something in the atheist position that I could agree with, or at least relate to. I was expecting this Oxford don to outsmart me in some way, to pose questions that I had no answer to. I was Dorothy, wandering down the yellow brick road to see the Wizard, and to match the analogy, I just saw an old man behind a curtain.

What Dawkins says is easy to say, make no mistake about it. Easier than telling people to ‘love thy neighbour’ certainly. He comes across not as an intellectual, or even a great speaker, but as a self-satisfied bore preaching to the converted. At one point he challenges God to strike him down with a thunderbolt – seeking attention from the deity he’s decrying as if the Almighty has nothing better to do than cut a jumped-up travelling salesman down to size.

Part of Dawkins’ problem is the dichotomy of belief vs. fact which he brings on himself and then can’t escape from. No matter how hard he tries, Dawkins can’t separate God and religion from physics and the universe. Even school aged children soon get over the idea of God as a man who lives in the sky, but Dawkins continues to rattle his bones over the lack of ‘proof’ of God’s existence. Much of his ‘lecture’ is concerned with making cheap digs at the religious, even reducing himself to mocking those who pray for their loved ones to recover from illness, literally sniggering at their belief that God has intervened when the much longed-for upturn in health arrives.

I was bored of Dawkins long before he got to the most distasteful part if the lecture, where he begins to pick away at single Biblical references. He obsesses over the Christian God and tellingly shies away from Allah, Buddha, Ganesh etc. After all, no-one likes the God he describes in ‘The God Delusion’, the Old Testament God who went Old School on the humanity after they started copulating with goats and murdering each others’ children because they were fed up. No, we like Jesus better, he even looks a bit like Brad Pitt in all those pictures and he everyone agrees her was a stand up bloke. Dawkins barely mentions Jesus, or that the basic tenets of Christianity are all concerned with being nice to each other and not breaking the law. He’d rather dwell on Genesis and the startling revelation that it MIGHT NOT ALL BE TRUE!

Throughout this lecture, Richard Dawkins never attempts to broach the simplest question of religion. Why do people believe? What exactly is in it for them? He rails against indoctrinisation but wants to indoctrinate us into atheism. He accepts no other belief system than his own, and delights in picking on the easiest of targets, like Ted Haggard, the American Evangelical preacher who was revealed to have a penchant for rent boys. It’s a good job that God hasn’t called an early judgement day because with this reasoning He might have seen Dawkins and junked us all. You can play this game with atheists too by the way, if he can ignore Mother Theresa and Father Damien of Molokai then I can ignore Baba Amte and Margaret Sanger and choose none other than Napalm Death to represent all Atheists. Don’t look so cool now do they?

During the dubious question and answer session (sample question : “Why are you so right, and where can I buy your books?”) a brave woman asked whether the survival of religion into the modern age when so much of it has been debunked by science could mean that religion has an evolutionary advantage. As you might expect, the answer was ‘I don’t know’, but it was preceded by a ridiculously complex and wordy answer which possibly only Dawkins himself will ever understand. I was bamboozled by the reply and so was the woman asking the question, as all other queries had been answered with plain English and very concisely. Dawkins had been rumbled and he pulled his secret weapon of academic waffle out the bag to send the woman back to her seat wondering why she bothered.

Comedian Matt Morgan recently compared Dawkins to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, commenting that his dismissal of all religiosity was similar to the woodpecker knocking the organ mice down to size with “It’s not a boat, it’s just a silly old shoe”. This sums Richard Dawkins up beautifully, he doesn’t allow for joy or hope in anything that can’t be quantified and proven. Take him to Westminster Abbey at vespers and he’ll probably prefer his own audio book on the iPod. Show him the Ali Mosque in Cairo and no doubt he’ll be tapping at the brickwork complaining it isn’t properly pointed. He may be the ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ to some, but he won’t shake of the Great and Powerful Oz analogy until he takes on some real opposition.