Index	Opinion	Review by Holloway	References
Opinion - “On Critiquing Richard Dawkins: A Mole’s Eye View” - Larry Fisk
I confess that I regularly feel like an espionage mole or double-agent parachuted into the institutionalized church. My allegiances are richly divided between organized religion’s most obstreperous opponents and its deepest defenders. This complex double-agent role has been most acute for me as we study the popular atheists like Richard Dawkins. As I walk about wearing my anti-Church persona I can’t stomach any facile dismissal of Dawkins’ scathing critique of religion and the “God-idea”. I’m reminded of something most valuable I learned from the writings of Charles Darwin many years ago. Buried in his writings is a Darwinian exclamation that he found it essential to find the most gifted, vocal and powerful opponents of his views if he were to truly learn, understand and grow. It always seemed to me to constitute a guiding principle in learning, and in character. It is also a crucial standard in carrying out the finest of physical science and social research. Actively seek out your very best opponent! I consistently cringe when I think we give Richard Dawkins short thrift. In my other mole-like existence I do the same when my bitterly anti-religious acquaintances give feeble dismissals of all things Christian or spiritual. I’m not at all keen on finding a motley crew of religious pirates to blast the “Darwin-Dawkins” ship out of the water. I would rather hoist a friendly flag, board the good ship “D-D” and be shown around its structure and contents. Why should we grope around with this group of “religiously sanitized Dawkins’ bashers”? Here I’m thinking of those already named and dismissed by Dawkins in his book “The God Delusion”—Polkinghorne, McGrath, Anthony Flew to name a few. I intend no putdown of these good chaps. I’m simply pointing in a different direction. Dawkins has good things to say about the most formidable of his opponents, not measured by their defensiveness or nastiness but by their character, knowledge and wisdom. Why should we not follow those leads? One such person whom Richard Dawkins praises highly is the retired Bishop of Edinburgh—Richard Holloway. Dawkins affirms: “I had a public discussion with him in Edinburgh, which was one of the most stimulating and interesting encounters I have had.” (“The God Delusion, p. 269.) I took it upon myself to follow Dawkins to what even his own hero Charles Darwin would have called the very best of his antagonists. I urge you to read the attached and embedded Richard Holloway review of another book by Dawkins—“The Devil’s Chaplain”. I don’t think you’ll require anything further from me to reinforce the view that here is the real substance of humanity, decency, fair-play and depth of understanding. Call it Christian charity if you would. I think it is that and so much more. It is the writing of a truly gifted human being who recognizes and gives thanks for the gifts which belong to Richard Dawkins. Here is critical reflection at its best—when it grasps the import of one of its most potent adversaries.
Review - A callous world Richard Holloway finds Richard Dawkins insisting that nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent, in his collection of essays, A Devil's Chaplain Saturday February 15, 2003 The Guardian
Richard Dawkins's new book, which is a punchy collection of articles, reflections, polemics, book reviews, forewords, tributes and elegies delivered over the past 25 years, takes its title from a letter Darwin sent to his friend Hooker in 1856: "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." In a frequently quoted letter to Asa Gray, written four years later in 1860, Darwin makes the same point more specifically: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars." Dawkins reminds us here that Darwin's Ichneumonidae sting their prey not to kill but to paralyse, so their larvae can feed on fresh (live) meat. In an earlier book, River out of Eden, Dawkins drew the chilly Darwinian moral for us: "Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose." The fascinating thing to notice here is that, while Dawkins has assumed the role of devil's chaplain with great courage and considerable panache, Darwin explicitly rejected it. Writing to his son in 1880, Darwin said that though he was a strong advocate of free thought on all subjects, it appeared to him that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produced hardly any effect on public opinion. He went on: "Freedom of thought is best promoted by gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science." There is, in other words, a distinct temperamental difference between Dawkins and his great hero. To use an ecclesiastical taxonomy, Darwin's atheism is classically Anglican, while Dawkins's is classically Evangelical. A friend of mine once remarked that he liked Anglicanism, because it didn't interfere with your religion or politics, whereas Evangelicalism couldn't leave anyone alone and meddled endlessly in people's lives. If Darwin was a non-interventionist atheist, Dawkins is a great believer in the pre-emptive strike. He is not content to let good science gradually erode bad religion, he wants a regime change right now, which is why he has been dropping his bombs and firing his missiles for the past 25 years. And in the process of his various campaigns, there has been a lot of collateral damage. I suspect that this is why lots of people don't like Richard Dawkins. I interviewed him for a television programme at his home a few years ago. Before I went to meet him I was warned by people in Oxford that I would find him arrogant and humourless. A picture was painted of an atheist Roundhead, a scientific Puritan who couldn't leave people alone to find their own way of coping with life. The implication was that he had been damaged as a child by Christianity and was out to get his revenge. The man I met was nothing like that. He was charming, witty and accessible. Sure, there was an intensity there, but it was the intensity of someone who has made an important discovery that he wants to share with as many people as possible, the way we all like to share with our friends the excitement of that great new movie we went to last night. What Dawkins has discovered is more than Darwin's great insight into the processes of natural selection, though Darwin is its greatest exemplar. What really excites him is the beauty of the scientific method as a way of testing for truth and exposing fraudulence. Unlike TS Eliot, who wrote that humankind cannot bear too much reality, Dawkins wants us to get real about the nature of the universe in which our brief lives are set, because reality is liberating. In his foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations, John Diamond's book about his struggle with cancer, he contrasts the testable honesty of orthodox medicine with the dishonest quackery of alternative medicine. Was Diamond's courageous rejection of the siren songs of alternative therapies a bigoted refusal to contemplate alternative views of the world? No, he replies: "...scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine." He goes on to suggest a series of double-blind trials for alternative therapies, such as homeopathy, but does not expect the alternative medicine profiteers to rush into the trap. And it is the billions of pounds of profit accrued by the alternative medicine industry that really ignites his moral passion against quackery and all its works. So the real object of Dawkins's grand Darwinian wrath is not the small person, who comforts herself against the cold winds of reality with the threadbare blanket of religion and the placebos of phony medicine, it is the powerful institutions that exploit her understandable human frailty and give her the stones of illusion instead of the bread of truth. We have to define Dawkins, therefore, as a moral crusader, a prophet of science as a better way of understanding ourselves than the delusions of religion, whether orthodox or new age. And it is a tragic vision he offers us. The goal of life is life itself. There is no final purpose, no end other than entropy and the end of all endings. But there is deep refreshment to be had "from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding". As a recovering Christian, I want to say amen to that, as well as adding a few final notes and quibbles. Like him, I hate all the baseball stuff in Stephen Jay Gould, but I am glad to read here of the regard and affection they had for each other. And I think it's a mistake totally to write off psychoanalysis. Is it not possible to interpret Freud as having done for the human psyche what Darwin did for the natural world? And might this also provide us with a way of affirming some of the great insights that religion has brought to humanity, while discarding its more preposterous claims? If religion is the narrative of our childhood; and if it is true that the events of our childhood mark us for life; is it not worth continuing to explore religion for what it can still teach us about the archaeology of our own souls? But these are quibbles. This is the best book of sermons I have read for years. So please go on preaching to us, Reverend Dawkins, and don't mind the things they throw at you. After all, prophets always get stoned. Richard Holloway's "On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgivable" is published by Canongate
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