Dawkins and the “new atheists" take to the buses

A Christian bus driver in Southampton, England has refused to drive a bus which carries a pro-atheism message on the side. The driver said he was shocked by “the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God”. 800 buses in England are now adorned with the message "There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life." The English move follows a campaign in Washington DC last year which planted the message: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake” on 240 buses. Here in Australia, the ad agency APN Outdoor took a more prudish stance and rejected a $16,000 campaign to put such slogans as "Sleep in on Sunday mornings" and "Celebrate reason" on local public transport.

While Australian atheists have been forced to take their case to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Board, their counterparts in the UK would probably be delighted with the publicity their campaign has afforded. While the idea was the brainchild of comedian Ariane Sherine, it was quickly taken up by the country’s most public atheist Richard Dawkins. Sherine got a thousand people to pledge money to counter a pro-religion bias in the advertising world. Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion” and the TV documentary “The Root of all Evil?” came to the party by agreeing to match all contributions up to the first £5,500. His endorsement also helped the credibility of the project, and in the end, the fundraising drive raised more than £140,000.

The campaign has raised a predictable outcry from the religious lobby and also some surprising support. The activist group Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the ads. However, the Methodist Church said the campaign might be a "good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life”. But even some non-believers are finding this new militant brand of atheism off-putting and unnecessary. According to Natalie Rothschild in Spiked, the new atheists are engaging in religion-bashing. She says the reason the likes of Dawkins believe preachers and charlatans form such a threat to rational thinking is because of all the gullible masses that “apparently so easily fall for their quackery”.

But Rothschild’s argument is flawed. She says that Dawkins (and the other atheist campaigners) are preaching at the public rather than trying to engage it. Even if that were true, they would simply be mimicking the way religion also advertises itself. In any case, Dawkins went to great pains in The God Delusion to avoid preachiness and engage with the debate. The book presents 400 pages of closely argued points that look at the evolution of belief, its role in society, morality, philosophy and the impacts of organised religion. Harking to the bus campaign, one of his chapter headings is “why there is almost certainly no God”. Ironically it is one of the least interesting chapters (with its over-intellectual ruminations on irreducible complexity, god of the gaps, and the anthropic principle) of an otherwise engaging book and passionate polemic.

In an early chapter, Dawkins quotes the words of his late friend Douglas Adams. In the speech, Adams tackles the whole notion of the sacredness of religion. Religion was a notion, he said, that people were not allowed to say anything bad about. Adams continued:

“Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'.”

Dawkins called it an example of “society’s overweening respect for religion”. Religious grounds are still the best bet for a wartime conscientious objector. And in those wars, Dawkins noted a “pusillanimous reluctance” to use religious names for the warring factors. Religions are exempt from a whole raft of laws (include taxation) that govern every other organisation. In the US, the constitutional right to the freedom of religion has been used to justify warped behaviour and discrimination against homosexuals and other minority groups. In the Muslim world, the furore over the Danish cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten was deliberately stoked up by a small group of Muslims living in Denmark. The clerics took their propaganda campaign worldwide with predictable results. Libyan rioters killed nine people and burned an Italian consulate. Pakistanis and Nigerians burned Christian churches, while in Britain some Muslims carried banners which read “behead those who say Islam is a violent religion”.

Believers deemed the hurt and suffering they felt as a result of seeing the pictures worse than any physical violence perpetrated on anyone who got in the way of their revenge. What Muslims share in common with believers of most other faiths is that their values trump anyone else’s. The atheist campaign is not about gratuitous offence or hurt to religious belief. But it is a valid protest against the disproportionate privilege of religion in otherwise secular societies. Dawkins quotes the words of the great H.L. Mencken: “we must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart”.

Richard Dawkins: Fundamentalism

In previous posts, Woolly Days has looked at Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and followed his arguments on the phenomenon of Lourdes and the arguments around creationism and evolution. Dawkins then goes on to meet some American evolutionists who live in Haggart’s shadow.

Dawkins describes them as browbeaten rationalists who have organised themselves into what they called a “freethinkers group” who meet furtively. One of their number, biology teacher John Spangler, said he has received letters from parents who say he is Satan’s incarnation. Another, Gary Betchan admitted atheists are likely to suffer career damage or lose their jobs. A third man Rick Baker likened the current oppressive atmosphere to the McCarthy era.

Dawkins argues that fundamentalist Christianity is attacking science and offers in its stead a mirror image of Islamic extremism, an American Taliban state. The religious terrorism inspired by Osama is the logical outcome of deeply held faith. Even moderate believers encourage ‘unreason’. Religious warriors think what they are doing is the ultimate good. Dawkins describes the religious struggle between good and evil merely as a battle between two evils.

Dawkins goes to Jerusalem, which he describes as a microcosm of the religious conflict that threatens rational values. Politics and extreme faith have combined to cause the deaths of four thousand people in attacks and reprisals over the last five years. Tourists still flock to Jerusalem to revere their particular brand of religion. Christians come to Calvary, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion; Muslims come to the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque, Jews to the Western Wall, Judaism’s most holy ruin. On the surface it looks like a place of harmless myth. But it is a source of barely repressed religious hatred.

Different religions live cheek by jowl in the Old City, all under strict security. But one area above all is under heavy guard: the Temple Mount. Here lies the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque; together Islam’s third holiest shrine after Mecca and Medina. They believe the prophet Mohammed flew up to heaven from here. But next door is the site of the long destroyed first and second temple and the Western Wall. Jews are not allowed to worship inside the compound. Their prayers are confined to the Wall. The Dome of the Rock was situated on the site of the altar of the old temple.

Neither religion is inclined to share the Temple Mount with the other. Dawkins goes to meet someone whom he says “in my naiveté, would see both sides of the story”. Yusuf Al-Kattah was brought up as a secular New York Jew, came to Gaza as a Jewish settler where he was converted to Islam. Dawkins admits to Al-Kattah he is an atheist who hears nothing but hate from all sides in this religious conflict. Al-Kattah immediately goes on the attack “I hate atheists,” he says. “They don’t care if someone fornicates on the middle of the street….They don’t believe in a set of rules, they can amend the rules as they go along. They don’t believe in God’s rules. ..That’s all you have, man-made laws”.

Dawkins asks Al-Kattah what he thinks about 9/11. Al-Kattah ignores the question and continues the attack on Dawkins “you like to talk about evolution. I’d like to start by saying what do you think of the Jews that have destroyed over 417 Arab villages…what are you saying we should sit back…let us sit down and drink tea and talk about what to do”. Al-Kattah says that if there were no state of Israel there would be no 9/11. Dawkins worries that there is someone out there with faith as strong as Al-Kattah but with an opposite view. Al–Kattah counters “the problem with you, Richard, is that you have fear”. Al-Kattah advises Dawkins to “take your soldiers off our lands and fix your women”.

Historic injustice to the Palestinians breeds hatred and anger. In creating a suicide bomber culture, a level of conviction in your own righteous faith is the key. If preachers then tell the faithful that paradise awaits them if they make the ultimate sacrifice, it is hardly surprising that some crazed followers will act out the deed; leading to a vendetta, war and suffering. This will continue as long as people are brought up from the cradle to believe that there is something good in faith, about believing because you’ve been told to believe. Dawkins says killing for God is not only hideous murder but also utterly ridiculous. Unlike religion, science doesn’t pretend to know everything. But just because science cannot answer those questions right now doesn’t mean faith can. Science cannot disprove the existence of God; but that does not mean God exists.

Dawkins says we cannot disprove the existence of fairies, unicorns and hobgoblins. But we don’t believe in any of them nor do we believe in Thor, Amon-Ra or Aphrodite. We are all atheists about most of the Gods that society has ever believed in. But some of us go one God further.

Richard Dawkins: Evolution and Creationism

In the first part of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins looked at the phenomenon of Lourdes. Dawkins describes religion as turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. According to Dawkins, this was testament to the power of tradition in religion.

Dawkins examined the Assumption of Mary to hammer home his point. According to Catholic theology, Jesus’ mother Mary did not die, she ascended directly into heaven at the end of her life. There is no evidence for this; it is not mentioned in the bible. The belief she ascended into Heaven emerged in the 6th century AD. The story spread by word of mouth and became established tradition. The longer it kept going, the more it was taken seriously. In 1950 it became authority. The Vatican decreed Catholics must believe in the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin. This doctrine was ‘revealed’ to Pope Pius XII by God.

While Catholic doctrine over the assumption of Mary is not in itself harmful, the Pope’s personal convictions about discouraging the use of condoms in Aids-ridden Africa is another story. Here there is an appalling human cost. The Church uses its authority to issue edicts to the faithful without a shred of evidence to back their claims. But Dawkins is at pains not just to blame the Catholics. Fatwas by Muslim imams follow the same trajectory.

Religion thrives on unsolved mysteries. For early humanity what was mysterious and unexplained was so vast, it needed a higher being an ‘alpha male in the sky’ to explain it all. Scientific investigation has rolled back many mysteries. Where once were Sun Gods, science now tells us the Sun is middle-sized star halfway through its 10 billion year life. Revolving round it is the 4.5 billion year old Earth. Science has used evidence, comparing and corroborating evidence, to update old theories about how things work.

Humanity used to resort to supernatural hypotheses for creation myths. Genesis is one of many such myths. God fashioned the world in six days. In the 19th century Charles Darwin hit on what really happened, without any need to invoke the supernatural or the divine. Evolution is a gentle slope; Darwin’s great insight was that life evolved steadily and slowly over four billion years. Natural selection not a divine designer was the sculptor of life. The design hypothesis raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?

Dawkins thought that in his lifetime evolution would be accepted as fact everywhere, backed up as it is by overwhelming evidence. But this evidence cuts no ice with many. Evolution today is under threat. In the bible belt of Middle America, evangelicals are fighting back against science. In the new world, religion is free enterprise. Rival groups set up shop competing against each other to save souls. Fundamentalist Christianity is on the rise in the world’s only superpower. Its power spreads up to and including the president. 135,000 million Americans believe the universe is less than 10 thousand years old.

Dawkins goes to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs where conservative Christians have built an $18 million Church. New Life isn’t just a church but a social network. A 12,000 congregation attend 1,300 organised programs which guide them on everything from marriage to dog walking. It is a New Jerusalem in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. While it lacks the tradition of Lourdes, it makes up for it in swaggering authority.

Evangelical churches like this have become enormously powerful in the US influencing everything from the teaching of science in schools to foreign policy. New Life Church Pastor Ted Haggard was a powerful man, chairman of the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard had a hot line not only to God but also to President Bush. He is a staunch Republican. He had also rubbed shoulders with Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon. Dawkins was not to know that Haggart was forced to resign in November 2006 after paying for sex with a gay prostitute and admitting he bought drugs.

When Dawkins and Haggart met, they clashed on the Bible. Dawkins wanted to understand what he called ‘irrational faith’ is spreading and attacking science. In their interview Dawkins began by complimenting Haggart and suggested a lot of money was spent here. Haggard said “I wanted people to be able to worship and enjoy it and be in a setting where the speaker is close to them…so I can look at them”. Dawkins said this was effective and said the sermon reminded him of the Nazi Nuremburg rallies. Haggard laughed and said lots of Americans think of it more as a rock concert.

Dawkins acknowledged that every person needs at the centre some sense of meaning about existence. But most accept that life is complex not the childish certainties of God. Dawkins biggest concern is that evangelicals like Haggart are foisting falsehoods on their flock. They deny scientific evidence just to support a Bronze Age myth. Haggart hit back by accusing “people like Dawkins” of intellectual arrogance and air of superiority because “they know so much more”.

Haggart’s approach is to lets teach evolution as just another theory alongside creationism and intelligent design, which sounds reasonable on first impression. But whereas evolution by natural selection is supported by mountains of evidence, creationism exists on a flimsy base; self-contradictory and supported only by what Dawkins contempuously calls "ancient scribblings".

Richard Dawkins' Lourdes evil

ABC has broadcast part 1 of “The Root of All Evil?” by Richard Dawkins. Produced in 2006, in it Dawkins argues the world would be better off without religion. Part 1 is called ‘The God Delusion”. it was presented in ABC’s Compass brand devoted to faith, values, ethics, and religion with a warning it might cause offence. Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer who has not only split the evolutionary scientists but has also gained the wrath of religions worldwide by stridently proclaiming his orthodox atheism.

He began by looking at the cult of Lourdes. Lourdes is in Catalan country called Lorda in Occitan. Now a town in the Hautes-Pyrenees department, Lourdes is the largest Catholic religion pilgrimage location in France. In 1858 the Virgin Mary appeared to 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous in a cave on the banks of the Gave River at Massabielle.

Massabielle is natural karst cave. It is called a grotto which means it is not a deep cave. For a period of about five months, Soubirous claimed the Virgin Mary appeared 18 times. Marie-Bernarde Soubirous was a sickly child; she had cholera in infancy and suffered most of her life from asthma. Her father was a miller, her mother a laundress. Post Napoleonic France was undergoing hard times and Bernadette grew up in extreme poverty. She survived by doing farm work and waiting at tables in the nearby town of Bartrès. Aged 14, she returned to Lourdes to attend schooling. But the classes in French were difficult for children who spoke Gascon, a dialect of Occitan, which now survives in the form of its cousin Catalan.

Her teachers thought Soubirous was simple minded. On 11 February 1848, she was out collecting firewood with her sister and a friend at Massabielle. Bernadette claimed to see "a small young lady" standing in a niche in the rock. This lady wore a white veil, a blue girdle and had a golden rose on each foot and in her hands she held a string of Rosary beads. Neither of the other two girls saw anything. The Small Young Lady asked her to return every day for the next fortnight.

When Bernadette told her story, the town divided into two camps. While some dismissed her story as nonsense, others were desperate to believe. She soon had a large number of people following her on her daily journey, some out of curiosity and others who firmly believed that they were witnessing a miracle. Bernadette alone would see the young lady for the next seventeen nights. She called her 'Aquerò' ("the lady").

But the townspeople were quick to judge that Aquerò was really the Virgin Mary. Bernadette seemed to confirm this, when on the 17th apparition the Aquerò spoke to the young girl. Speaking in fluent Gascon, the lady said “Que soy era Immaculada Conceptiou”. This translates in English as I am the Immaculate Conception.

Four years earlier the Pope Pius IX had promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; that, alone of all human beings who have ever lived, the Virgin Mary was born without the stain of original sin. This doctrine was not yet well known outside the Catholic intelligentsia and certainly unknown to a semi-illiterate farmherd teenage girl. Here was proof that some higher authority was at work. Matters soon took another turn. After this appearance Soubirous began to dig at the site and discovered a spring in the grotto. The first known cure occurred that same year.

Catherine Latapie lived at Loubajac, a few kilometres from Lourdes. She had injured her right hand after a fall from a tree eighteen months before and was now nearing the end of a pregnancy. One night Latapie got a sudden inspiration, rose at three in the morning and went to Lourdes. Arriving at dawn, she met Soubirous at the grotto and put her hand in the spring. Her hand was immediately cured and went home that evening where she gave birth. A doctor pronounced the Latapie case as “presenting a supernatural character”. Soubirous was now famous.

Some of the people who interviewed her following her revelation of the visions thought her simple-minded. But she stuck to her story. The civil authorities tried to frighten Bernadette into recanting her accounts, but she always remained faithful to the vision Aged 22 Bernadette entered the Monastery of Nevers. She died aged 35 and was canonized a saint in 1933.

Lourdes is now big business. 5.5 million people take the pilgrimage each year. There are 40,000 beds to receive them. 70,000 of these are sick or handicapped and looking for a cure. Out of its millions of visitors, there have been 66 documented cures that have been given "miracle" status by the Catholic Church, including Latapie's case. In statistical evidence, Dawkins pointes out, that is nothing at all. He finds it more likely that patients seeking a cure at Lourdes are more likely to catch another disease from a sick person. Yet the pilgrims desperately lean on the faith like a crutch and their belief remains profound. That is the real miracle.

Gene Wilder

Richard Dawkins is the high priest of traditional Darwinism and he fight the battle well in books such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

I’ve just finished reading the latter. Typical of Dawkins’ feisty nature, he takes as many swipes at potential allies (such as proponents of ‘punctuated evolution' like Stephen Jay Gould and those of ‘molecular drive’ like Gabriel Dover) as his obvious enemies – the creationists.

He writes with great spirit though with occasional slapdash and condescension. He spins useful metaphors and parables to expand upon difficult points. His fascination with computer imagery (the book was written in 1986) now seems curiously dated as is the puny power of his then computers.

I enjoyed his exposition of bats’ echolocation and how when scientists tried to prove it existed to a conference in 1941, the peer group indignantly panned this proof on the grounds that radar was still a military classified subject and it was offensive to believe that bats could match, let alone pre-date human technological prowess!


road poem
so what wrong with my head
god spare me some cells in a room of my view
don’t make me the hanging judge of a hung Jewry
with only me to see the funeral
time is merely entropy emitted backwards
but I created it from nothing
and working in my rear true mirror
I re-invent the past and relive the blast
and feel the schrapnel of a long exploded supernova
and we all lived happier ever after once before
but when we fast ran out of once before onces
we explained it all with symbols and sunsets
genesis of many colourful beliefs
manifold and simple
but because my casuistic cause
causes over-strict reaction
only takes six days to build the world
but seven is a long time in politics
soulsausage burned by scientist intent
garotted and mashed by knowledgable big bangers
I glean the gold like scraps of goodness in this misery
of ghettoes, slums and shantytowns
black holes on earth
where most of us are sucked in abject wonder
I know why the bus did not stop
I’m fighting the frighteningly real though not mathematical true
go out there and differentiate
burn everything english except its energy
the servants of the servants are demanding their severance price
to lead I must help
and walk among the weeds of uncultivated obeying principle
its a hard road to follow
its easier to do this masqued in cassock, clothed in the faithful,
I will die beaten but with a message beyond the medium
put my shoulders on my back
and as my sins slip off me
and fall three times and die
so that others may have life
in the best and worst of worlds
in this too shitty tale
its the only one I’m in
the problem with you jesus
is that you are a prisoner of my imagination
a life that is every-choice perfect
christ must I accept this?
when I keel over rusted on the outside
while inside insipid, insights off-sight
bloated to mediocre excess
society overripe and turning rotten
so supply this crap compost with an afterlife resurrection
extensions of the law and choices abounding
see demagogue poets refugees from another ring
spell out wisdom and an unsupplied machine code
giving out clues to the human password
among the mixed bag of fanatics and whisky priests
some deranged by their own piety
some enraptured by stark experience
the revolutionary military and the clerics and partially insane
rocking the kaaba in a lullaby down riyadh lane
in the happy chain of a chant, in the paradise of a dance
these bootless mosque moments
are a push from a counter-culture
supplying spiritual aid for Kuwait
like soul stone cold in Newcastle
I dream that my life adventure be over
I sit among the costly cynical wreckage
the price of every thing these days is known
will my life be remembered only for the funeral bill
this shallow callowness, I allow, I cannot swallow
trotters tottering in panic
free-flight pigs look so manic
over the moon in the flying pan
I dream of Roger Bacon in strange circumstance
with a twisted smile on his lips
and a crooked tune which he whistled
to cheddar cowboys in the meadow
‘how now chairman tao”
thought by many teachers to accept
that sharkjaws in the gene pool are
diet dracula for the dyspeptic generation
this advertising pushing pull drags us further
brushed under the carpet in tides between right and wrong
and swept away by the culture of the weather
just another space commodity
polluted by the admans apples
and adam’s atman
a merry jingle, by jingo
faking orgasms while speaking wank
only dream for what is possible
look away while we give you the
“miracle cure of the bedsore of the eyes”
don’t let the imposition of a manmade commandment
stop you from dwelling on this question far too long
do dervishes only dance anticlockwise and
are there mathematical clues to the puzzle of their ecstasy?
through hymn with hymn and in hymn
only power of imagination lies beyond reason
and may defeat it yet
and its quite desperation of deep space monsters
nothing earthly I hope
in my dream I’m slowing faster than light
unmanufactured by science
flowing with the glow
this sea of empty squares
chasing windmills and electric chairs
smacking of the purest heroine
eloping with a sometimes charming mortician
fleeing ahead of the posse of statisticians
thats how you’d do it
so imagine