He likes to irritate half of humanity, but I won’t let him irritate me. Like Benjamin Brandreth in the nineteenth century, he purveys a powerful cathartic, purging the impurities of religious belief with his magical pills. Sitting on the sidelines I see that both Dawkins and his adversaries are products of the same evolution. They are different mutations of the same species. Which is fittest to survive, I wonder: the armies of reason or the armies of God?
Listening to Dawkins, I try to decide whether he’s a nuisance or a boon. By attacking, he forces his enemies to defend. He doesn’t attack everything in religion, because he doesn’t see everything. He sees the outward show of beliefs but not the inchoate mass of experience. Attacks are designed to kill or at least deter your quarry from growing stronger. But sometimes they kill the more sensitive and leave the field clear for the more ruthless. This is why deadly infections lurk in hospitals, after profligate use of antibiotics for generations.
Ever the optimist, I hope that Dawkins will prove a boon, sharpening the brains of his opponents to understand the difference between form and substance. The form of religious belief is irrational, cannot be otherwise. Its substance is metaphor, to express what otherwise can’t be expressed in words. Foolishness only arises when congregations lay claim to reason as well as faith; for example firing provocative salvoes, creationism v. evolutionary theory.My own experience isn’t esoteric and doesn’t ask to be clothed in magnificent imagery, or dramas of God’s overarching supremacy. I express it simply enough as the feeling that nothing happens unless it is meant to happen. Because it’s only a feeling, not a universal theory, I don’t try and apply this to everything I hear on the news. With nothing to defend, I have no axe to grind. When I’m in need, I release a simple prayer for protection, like a child losing hold of a gas-filled balloon bought at the fair. It goes up I know not where. When not in need, I give thanks for myriad blessings received. Such experiences don’t depend on belief in God. They do however cause me to sit in the same pews (metaphorically) as the believers. I accept that God is an excellent way to explain my experience. I also accept that atheism would be satisfyingly rational—if only reason could satisfy.
The greatest of my experiences is to feel a joy. I feel it whenever I’m not caught up in life’s struggles. You might say it is the ground of being, the solid earth beneath my bare feet, when flights of anxious fancy don’t waft me up into the ethers. When I don’t feel it directly, I still know it, remember it, love it, give thanks to it. You may say it sounds like God. But when others speak of God, I sometimes feel they are not talking about the same thing. A pity, because I’d like to return to the churches of my childhood and worship there, without being browbeaten by dogma.
Andrew Marr asked Dawkins how he feels about popular distortions of evolutionary theory. Dawkins sighed. If only the ordinary people would understand the purity of science: its slow but steady advance, based on nothing but solid evidence; this and the happy democracy of scientists trying to expose their more deviant peers as frauds and incompetents.
It’s plain that some scientists, not just Dawkins, want us to revere them as prophets to lead us out of the desert, into the promised land. I see it a little differently. If advanced technology is their child, yes, they have a parental responsibility, now that their child has reached its teenage delinquent stage, to pay for the damage it causes and rein in their wayward offspring, if it is not already too late.I think of evolution constantly, but not in any way that Dawkins would approve. Last night there was a slug in the bathroom again. Once more I felt awed by its visit, with a superstitious reverence—its vulnerability, its indifference to its image in human eyes, its extreme slowness, its survival against the odds, (my human idea of the odds, not a scientific one). Others may talk unscientifically about evolution, “gay genes” perhaps. I pervert evolutionary theory even further, imagining the slug as my living ancestor, to be revered along with the rest of creation.
To ask if we need religion is no different from asking if we need intellect. We come with both, built-in. If the house be divided against itself, then what?
Notes on the illustrations
1) a slug. I used it in a previous post “Slug News” from March 2008. Thanks again to nebarnix on flickr
2) a pikaia, one of the extinct creatures whose fossil remains from the Cambrian era were discovered in the Burgess Shale. With thanks to the website Forms most beautiful
3) a hagfish. “The hagfishes are renowned for their ability to produce vast quantities of slime when stressed or provoked.” See http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/labs/biomaterials/slime.html
