Ever since Voltaire famously cried "Ecrasez l'infâme!", faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, scores of enlightened thinkers have declared organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder.
Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, who recently concluded a British TV series The Root of all Evil? is the most influential living example of this tradition.
His first major book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1977 - certainly a marvellous book - now enjoys cult status. The author had that rare ability to make complex things understandable, without talking to his audience. His achievement wasn't just to make evolutionary theory intelligible: Dawkins was willing to set out its implications for every aspect of life, in effect presenting Darwinism as a universal philosophy of life, rather than a mere scientific theory.
It was in this scene-setting book that Dawkins introduced a new concept and word into the investigation of the history of ideas: the "meme", essentially functioning as a cultural replicator which ensures the transmission of information across space and time, thereby proposing a new theoretical framework for exploring the general question of the origins, development, and reception of ideas.
Following the acclaimed reception of his first bestseller, Dawkins went on to write a series of brilliant and provocative books, arguably the most famous being The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) and The Devil's Chaplain (2003).
However, and most disappointingly so, the tone and focus of his writing has changed. As philosopher Michael Ruse commented in a review of The Devil's Chaplain, Dawkins's "attention has swung from writing about science for a popular audience to waging an all-out attack on Christianity". The charismatic scientist became a savage anti-religious polemicist, resorting to sermon rather than argument.
Granting Dawkins a stab at a theory, but finding fundamentalism of all kinds equally repugnant, religious or anti-religious, I find his attitude quite unimpressive and rather distressing. Already in The Selfish Gene Dawkins explains that he had long been interested in the analogy between cultural and genetic information. More recently, he has embellished this intuition - for it is, from a scientific point of view, little more than an intuition - referring to it as "the theory of the religious meme".
On Dawkins's account a meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell. The meme exploits its host in order to reproduce itself, spreading from brain to brain like meningitis, and killing off the competing powers of rational argument.
Very much like their Darwinian associates genes and species, the success or failure of memes depends on their ability to find the ecological niche that enables their reproduction. Such is the nature of 'gerin oil', as Dawkins contemptuously describes religion. Unhappily, this is Dawkinian rhetoric at its worst.
As everyone knows, viruses are bad things; they thrive by exploiting their hosts. The rhetorically freighted "argument" that God is a virus amounts to little more than thinly veiled insinuation, rather than rigorous evidence-based reasoning. Even though his idea founders on the rocks of the absence of experimental evidence, we might respectfully suggest to Dawkins that not every dependent organism destroys its host. In addition to parasites there are symbionts and mutualists - invaders that either do not impede or positively amplify their host's reproductive chances.
And which is religion? Why has religion survived, if it has conferred no benefit on its adepts? And what happens to societies that have been vaccinated against infection - Soviet society, for instance, Nazi Germany, or Albanian totalitarianism (where atheism was the constitutional faith) - do they experience a gain in reproductive potential? Surely we must think twice before vaccinating against a religion that seems most suited to temper our belligerent instincts, and which, in doing so, asks us to forgive those who trespass against us and humbly atone for our faults.
Lacking any evidence-based arguments for religion as a malignant meme, and preferring to conjecture as to the impact of such a hypothetical virus on the human mind, science just isn't there. Each and every argument adduced for his idea of "God as virus of the mind" can be countered by proposing its counterpart for "atheism as a virus of the mind". Both ideas are equally unsubstantiated and meaningless.
Moreover, Dawkins's analogical extension of the theory of biological reproduction should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Conceding that his opinions on evolution must be judged by the scientific community as a whole, my concern is the critically important and immensely problematic transition from biology to theology.
After reading his works and listening to numerous interviews, it is pathetic that in Dawkins's view religious faith is represented as a retreat from a rigorous, evidence-based concern for truth. For him truth is grounded in explicit proof; any form of obscurantism or mysticism grounded in faith is to be opposed vigorously. Thus, by his own lights, the theory of the religious meme can hardly be presented with accuracy let alone qualify to scientific proof. Yet even if we concede Dawkins some use for his meme, there are still bad memes and good memes.
As a friend of mine brought home to me, let us consider the case with mathematics. This propagates itself through human brains because it is true; people entirely without maths - who cannot count, subtract or multiply - don't have children, for the simple reason that they make fatal mistakes before they get there. Maths is a real mutualist. Of course the same is not true of bad maths; but bad maths doesn't survive, precisely because it destroys the brains in which it takes up residence.
Perhaps religion can be compared to maths: its survival has something to do with its truth. Of course it is not the literal truth and maybe not the whole truth. As philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote, "The truth of a religion lies less in what is revealed in its doctrines than in what is concealed in its mysteries". Now, this in no way points to a defect present in religion. The meaning and import of mysteries is still accessible through worship and prayer, and by a life of quiet obedience. Nevertheless, truths that are hidden are still truths; and maybe we can be guided by them only if they are hidden, just as we are guided by the sun only if we do not look at it. A direct encounter with it could cause a sudden conflagration.
In a London public debate with Steve Pinker back in 1999, Dawkins said that "the fact that religion may console doesn't of course make it true. It's a moot point whether one wishes to be consoled by truth or by falsehood". The effortless slide from "consolation does not make religion true" to "religion is false" may be an entirely natural inference for Dawkins himself, given his deeply ingrained anti-religious feelings. But as any clear-headed person will immediately recognise, such an inference is patently not logically valid.
It is a great pity that Dawkins, who clearly having mastered the intricacies of evolutionary biology and its vast research literature, seems to enter into a different world when it comes to anything to do with God. As was evident in his recently broadcast TV series, it has become the world of a schoolboy debating society, relying on rather heated, enthusiastic overstatements, spiced up with some striking oversimplifications and more than an occasional misrepresentation to make some superficially plausible points - the sort of arguments that usually persuade an adolescent that atheism is really the only option for a thinking person.
Some final points. Science and religion are in absolute conflict, according to Dawkins. Moreover, his extraordinary claim when broadcast live on a British TV channel was that religion might be the root of all evil. To those who have recently suggested that science and faith might together shed cumulative light on the truth (though Thomas Aquinas was long convinced that faith is also rooted in reason; indeed it is an act of reason!), Dawkins has one response: "To an honest judge (perhaps with himself modestly in mind?), the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham".
The idea of religious truth is hogwash. The mysteries of religion, he will say, exist in order to forbid all questioning, so giving religion the edge over science in the struggle for survival. In any case, why are there so many competitors among religions, if they are competing for the truth? And how does religion improve the human spirit, when it seems to authorise crimes, violence in the name of faith, acts of terrorism, and which are in turn no more than a shadow of the crimes that were spread across Europe by the Thirty Years War?
Those are big questions, certainly not to be solved by a TV programme. Certainly one must say that Dawkins' definition of faith is an amusing caricature of the real thing and bears no resemblance to what Christians believe. We need not be committed to the absolute dichotomy he proposes between "blind faith" and a belief grounded in "overwhelming, publicly available evidence". God is not a matter of blind faith and any intelligent reader would expect Dawkins to show some attention to detail in assessing the relative probabilities of belief and unbelief, instead of his usual populist swashbuckling rhetorical exaggerations.
As a matter of fact, an atheist shoulders a far heavier burden of proof than one who believes that there must some kind of explanation for the fact that there is the universe rather than nothing at all. Moreover - and this is something asserted by John Paul II himself - the scientific intuition of the evolution of species does not contradict belief in the existence of God.
Evolution, that is, the doctrine of the selection of species, does not entail the negation of intelligent design in the world. Rather, it can be quite consistent with a cogent natural theology (for instance one inspired by Aquinas' understanding of divine providence) and a robust belief in God's role in creation. Which is why the ferocity with which Dawkins asserts his atheism is quite troubling.
If religions survive and flourish it is because they are a call to membership - they provide customs, beliefs and rituals that unite the generations in a shared way of life, and implant the seeds of mutual respect. Like every form of social life, they are inflamed at the edges, where they compete for territory with other faiths. For this reason one cannot blame religion for the wars conducted in its name, just as one would not blame love for the Trojan war.
As Darwin himself has taught us - and Dawkins must have surely noticed it - even the noblest of human motives will feed the flames of conflict when subject to the "territorial imperative". Subtract religion, as the Nazis and Communists did, and you do nothing to eliminate the lust for Lebensraum.
There is a further lesson to be learnt. The tendency of media sensationalism is to judge all human institutions by their behaviour in times of conflict. The real test of a human institution is in peacetime. Peace is boring, quotidian, and also rotten television. But you can learn about it from books. Those nurtured in a mature Christian faith know Christianity's ability to maintain peace in the world around us reflects its gift of peace to the world within.
Rational argument raises the monotheistic faiths above the muddled world of superstition. It can help us to understand the real difference between a faith that commands us to forgive our enemies, and one that commands us to slaughter them. But the act of faith itself - responding to God as loving Creator - is a leap over reason's edge. This does not make it irrational, any more than falling in love is irrational. On the contrary, it is the heart's response to the truth of love, peace and forgiveness that Dawkins too is seeking, since he, like the rest of us, was made just in that way.