Richard Dawkins has a new TV series wherein he waxes lyrical on the patron saint of materialism, Charles Darwin.
“Over the next six weeks, I’m going to show you how evolution offers a far richer and more spectacular vision of life than any religion,” Dawkins intones, as the sea rolls in behind him, portentously.
“It’s hard to comprehend just how much suffering there is in the natural world,” Dawkins says, at the dead of night, eyes glowing night-vision green. “In the minutes while I say these words, millions of animals are running in fear of their lives, whimpering with fear. They are feeling teeth sink into their throats. They are injured. Starving. Or feeling parasites, rasping away from within. There is no central authority. There is no safety net. Animal life is about suffering, survival and death.”
Richard Dawkins is desperate to find meaning. Having abandoned the religion of his youth, he now seeks inspiration from evolution and proselytises the unwashed with evangelical fervour.
The problem is, however hard he tries, his argument is always circular: the ‘spectacular vision’ afforded by evolution can – by his own findings – be nothing more than a series of electrochemical reactions in a human brain, itself the product of accident. To call the electrochemical reaction ‘spectacular’ is to afford it value – a value that he appears to be trying to establish, but in reality is accepting on faith. If Dawkins is correct, the reaction is neither spectacular nor mundane: it is merely a mechanism.
Dawkins appears to want to comprehend suffering. Ivan speaking to Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, tries to prove that God cannot exist by saying:
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on this condition?”
Dawkins takes Ivan’s view. The argument against God, though, is again flawed by the unstated assumption that suffering is somehow ‘bad’ and happiness, ‘good’; at the very least the one is seen as better than the other. Since God’s existence is the only frame of reference that can give the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ meaning, the argument, while compelling on the surface, is self-defeating. Alyosha’s rebuttal to Ivan is not to offer a counter-argument, but to point out that Christ himself suffered and is with us in our suffering; considerably more comforting than, “There is no central authority. There is no safety net. Animal life is about suffering, survival and death”
To paraphrase Malcolm Muggeridge, the most primitive man worshipping a piece of coloured stone in the Amazon jungle is closer to the truth than someone like Richard Dawkins.
