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

A Devil’s Chaplain & Other Selected Essays by Richard Dawkins 320pp, Weidenfeld, £16.99 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.

More… http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,894941,00.html