The Priests

Poor Richard Dawkins. Despite all his efforts at undermining the influence of religion he's not been nominated for a Classical Brit award. Instead the panel have nominated The Priests (pictured left) for their debut album, which features hymns from the good old days when Sunday morning meant mass. Where is Dawkins going wrong?

One should really expect things to be different nowadays. The days of religion were numbered perhaps from the moment Blaise Pascal (in his mid-seventeenth century Pensées) sought to defend his belief in God by resorting to argument and abandoning revelation. Reasoned argument is a human device, not sacred but profane, and to rest God's existence on it puts God Himself on shaky ground. And the scientific revolution that paralleled Pascal's thinking further undermined the foundations of religion, as philosopher after philosopher showed that there was no area of nature that did not yield to human investigation. After Newton - and Alexander Pope's crushing "God said 'Let Newton be', and all was light" epitaph - God beat a retreat to heaven, and, under house arrest, was proscribed from ever again setting foot in the world of human affairs.

So how do The Priests get away with it? And get nominated for music awards for it? Is their album a precursor of a karate-suit-wearing comeback tour by God? Well, not quite. Most of the reviewers of The Priest's album on Amazon reveal their all too human motives behind their purchases: the need for easy listening and a glass of wine after a hard day, to chill out, etc, etc. And who could fault them? Forty years ago it was Mantovani. Twenty years ago it was Manilow. Today its Mass. Switch on and switch off.

It is a little bit worrying that today's easy-listening has an unmistakable God-fearing quality (in contrast to the liberating sound of Mantovani's cascading violin strings), but there's no accounting for musical taste. If The Priests hit the big time then good luck to them. What is more worrying, actually, is what all this says about the scientific revolution. If, in our quiet moments, we like to pretend we are back at Sunday mass or - worse - living the ascetic life in a monastery (witness the rise in sales of Gregorian chant), how serious is our commitment to the rational, godless universe in which we live?

That commitment is on the wane, but unlike Dawkins we must resist the urge to stamp about in frustration, blaming those who teach religion for the success of religion. Instead we must examine the scientific approach, adopted by Dawkins and many of the 'humanists' around today, that sees the world not only as godless but as virtually 'manless' too. In this scientistic view, man inhabits the world not as an independent thinker, capable of shaping the future on the strength of his own will, but only as a natural though admittedly complex by-product of evolution. Just read Dawkins's chapter on "The Roots of Religion" in The God Delusion to see what I mean: here man is placed in the petri dish while Dawkins (ironically adopting a God's eye view) marvels at his ignorance and susceptibility to events that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago.

There is an aspect of man that is rooted in the past, that is biological and the result of evolutionary adaptation. But the scientistic view sees this as the whole story. And so it's not surprising that, especially now when a lot of the political meaning has been drained from current events, Dawkins and Co. are unable to provide meaning to those experiences - love, community, creativity - which have an undeniable human quality to them. Enter religion and the religious chill-out experience.

I'm not proposing that Richard Dawkins approach his manager with a view to putting in some studio time and recording a cover of The Rolling Stones' Monkey Man. The Priests and the Church seem to have the music angle sewn up, and atheists' hymns don't work. Instead we need a new science of humanism, that seeks to explain historic and contemporary events in terms of human agency, a sense of which both Dawkins and The Priests seem to lack.

God's Truth?

One of the better points made by Dawkins in The God Delusion is about how religious thought acts counter to the inquisitive spirit. Those who are determined to find God like to find Him in the 'Gaps' between scientific explanations. So if we do not fully understand the transition from ape to man, say, we posit God as providing the helping hand. Arthur C Clarke posited the black monolith, but the effect is pretty much the same: we stop asking questions about the important things concerning man's development and instead start asking questions about abstract and absent things such as God or super-intelligent extra-terrestrials. Never mind that scientists are looking into something and developing workable and even elegant secular explanations, God - we are told - got there before them and has already provided the answers. In His world, truth (or rather Truth) is given only to those who do not question.

Of course, real truth is never actually given; it is extracted out of the nature of things by those who ask and attempt to answer the right questions. Scientists know how to ask the right questions within the narrow confines of the laboratory, but who is asking these questions in the world at large? Who is asking, for instance, whether the current economic crisis is really the fault of a handful of bankers, or whether it symptomatic of a problem of manufacturing productivity? More to the point, how could such questions be tested and answered outside the controlled environment of the lab?

Here we must venture into the world of politics, but not your everyday, madam-speaker-type politics. Not the politics of the professional politicians, but a politics born of an idea that has the potential to change someone's mind (OK, for the moment we'll leave aside the notion of theory becoming a material force when it grips the masses). So outside the laboratory change is not measured by comparing the outcome of an experiment against a control; change is measured in terms of numbers of people who now see things otherwise.

The truth is a standard of man, not God. But it is not ours in any ornamental sense. It is what we must continually extract and consume through our engagement with the world and our fellow man. It begins in the simple act of conversation, especially a conversation in which one party suddenly interrupts the other and says "Actually, you're wrong..."

The Dawkins Delusion

"Isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?"
(Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, page 354, Black Swan edition, 2007)

"Our society...has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them. ... Please, please raise your consciousness about this."
(The God Delusion, page 381-2)


Granted, religion is odd, and that the Creator, if He existed, would have better things to do than worry about me "not doing as I was told" and "fighting with my brother" (sins I officially confessed to many times as a child), but what is odder is Richard Dawkins's belief that he will win people over to his way of thinking by accusing them of abusing their children at the same time as being mindless automata, unable to throw off the chains of thought bequeathed to them by their parents. This is the Dawkins Delusion and let us pray it does not persist as long as the God one.

It does raise the question, however, of why religion (or rather the belief that there is more to life than THIS) persists? If all Dawkins can offer in its place is his marvelling at how we would find we are related to the merest insect if only we would take part in some feature-length episode of Who Do You Think You Are? then of course people are going to turn away from his teachings. With all due respect to Great Uncle Pond Skater, there is of course more to human existence than its evolutionary history and, it must be admitted, the utterly marvellous way we have come to be. There is also art and literature, language and science, socialism and barbarism, none of which can be explained by natural selection.

Moreover, there are also those twin, nagging feelings in the backs of my and (I hope) your minds that (i) other people are essentially the same as me, yet (ii) there is something that makes them alien to me. But that mystery is not God (and we are not 'fallen'); it is Man. Or, to bring things down to earth, it is the way that ordinary men and women have made their society. Let us commence, therefore, the proper study of mankind.