Washington Post
April 17, 2010
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/04/17/robert-fulford-richard-dawkins-evolve-thyself.aspx
Why is Richard Dawkins, of all people, acting like a fool? On the subject of evolution, he argues with wondrous self-assurance and a brilliant command of detail. He's established himself as his generation's finest author on the human sciences and (in many opinions) the most effective popular science writer in the world. But he's turned himself into a clown, and damaged his reputation, by supporting the grotesque scheme to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested for "crimes against humanity" when he visits Britain in September.
Dawkins of course knows that won't happen. British judges almost always refuse to deal with crimes that, if they existed, happened outside the U.K.'s jurisdiction. It would take a mountain of evidence to produce anything like the "universal jurisdiction" warrant from a Spanish court that led to Augusto Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. Pinochet was charged with mass murder while dictator of Chile, a rather more impressive crime than the cover-up that the Pope's critics believe they have exposed. Anyway, as a head of state, the Pope has immunity under international law.
So the arrest is a publicity stunt to denigrate the Pope and his Church. Dawkins more or less admitted that when he wrote on his blog the other day: "I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope's visit."
As always, "raising public consciousness" means "manipulating opinion." And that's OK for Christopher Hitchens, the journalist promoting the attempted papal take-down. His exuberant campaign against the Pope follows the pattern of take-no-prisoners hyperbole that has been an essential element in his remarkable journalistic career.
But Dawkins? Appealing for justice to a shadowy and mostly theoretical version of a courtroom, he looks no better that those idiots who react to criticism of their beliefs by whining to kangaroo courts maintained by B.C. or Ontario under the name "human rights." Dawkins knows better. In fact, he does better, all the time, by working the beat he knows better than anyone, the detailed relationship between reason and the understanding of evolution. That's a fight against ignorance, well worth anyone's time.
A harsh critic will say that he's afflicted by Star Syndrome, the
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need certain celebrities feel when a day goes by in which their faces don't appear on TV or their names in a headline. My guess is that what he's doing reveals a more serious predicament.
Dawkins has done his best, after all, to explain that reason should govern all human decisions, and religion should be set aside as a relic from the past that does nothing but hobble progress.
Nevertheless, the public has declined to embrace reason as he does, and even occasionally shows signs of backsliding into faith. Can it be that Dawkins fears he's losing the battle against godliness? Could it be that he's losing his faith in atheism?
He must have noticed that Jurgen Habermas, the most eminent of contemporary German philosophers, nobody's idea of a believer, has recently been muttering about a blind spot in rationality if it's accepted as a guide to life.
An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age (Polity Press) contains Habermas's tentative conclusion that there may be a necessary role for religion in the future. He's made the not entirely original observation that modern societies function best, as human communities, when they have religious traditions they can draw on. If religion disappears, where does that leave the human future? Reason and science have built a devastating critique of religion. But, with religion gone, where will the world go for a critique of reason? Habermas envisions some sort of rapprochment between science and faith.
As well, those committed to the Dawkins point of view have recently been dealing with certain discomfiting suggestions about relations between religion and the brain. God's Brain (Prometheus Books) by Lionel Tiger, the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Michael McGuire, the author of Darwinian Psychiatry, opens up the possibility that faith is rooted in the very structure of the brain. Discoveries in neuroscience suggest that religion should be seen as a natural product of the brain's development, a source of the serotonin that makes life bearable.
As Tiger and McGuire claim, the brain is more comfortable believing than doubting. Richard Dawkins, absorbing that research, must live in dread that one day he will read scientific evidence that religious belief is essential to survival and therefore to, uh, evolution.
Contact: robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
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