Interessante artikel raakgeloop van 'n onderhoud wat 'n joernalis van The Mail and Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead, onlangs met Richard Dawkins (van The God Delusion) gevoer het. Die titel van die onderhoud is Science is losing to religion en ons gebruik dit as inleiding vir ons gesprek rondom Vrae oor God. Hieronder enkele uittreksels:
One evening in 2006, at a colleague's house, I met a friend of her teenage daughter. He was intellectually curious and obviously bright - but implacably loyal to his parents' born-again Christian faith. We spent pretty much the whole evening arguing with the poor boy, appealing to his logic and reason - all to no effect. There must, we despaired, be some seminal atheist text we could refer him to. We just couldn't think of one. But lo - ask, and ye shall receive. Not a month later Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a scorching manifesto for secularism. Even by the standards of Dawkins's 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, it was a spectacular success, with sales exceeding 1,5-million. As Dawkins retires from the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, the Oxford post he has held for 12 years, you might expect him to feel that the secular scientific cause to which he has devoted his career is winning. Late last year campaigners ran an atheist advertising campaign on the side of British buses with the message: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Within days the campaign, launched by TV comedy writer Ariane Sherine, brought public donations of more than £96 000. In the same week record numbers of new maths and science undergraduates were reported. Even in America, the religious right seemed to be losing its grip. But when I ask Dawkins (67) if he feels public understanding of science has improved during his career, he looks doubtful. "I would say that when my academic career began there was probably just as much ignorance - but less active opposition [to science]. If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to."
Does he attribute that to lower standards of scientific education, or to the rise of religious fundamentalism? "Oh," he says without hesitation, "I think it's due to greater religious influence." In Dawkins's view, there is a battle taking place in Britain between the forces of reason and religious fundamentalism and it is far from won. He is one of its most famous and prolific combatants - but the question might be whether he is among its most effective. The The God Delusion's stated aim was to "convert" readers to atheism - but he admits that as a proselytising tool it has broadly failed. "Yes," he smiles. "I think that was a bit unrealistic.
Aitkenhead beskryf Dawkins se eie beskouing van waarheid en die bron daarvan verder aan in mooi detail.
Like most rationalists, Dawkins tends to invoke people's innate intelligence, and attribute their flawed ways of thinking to ignorance rather than stupidity. "But I don't have any evidence," he concedes. "I could be wrong. It's a kind of ideal. It's a sort of bending over backwards." People might just be stupid, I suggest. "They might be, yes," he cautiously agrees. "But at least my saying that ignorance is no crime is my defence against the charge of arrogance. Because if you tell people they're stupid, that certainly isn't the way to win friends and influence people."
Dawkins once described the British Airways employee dismissed for wearing a gold cross to work as having "the stupidest face". Did he regret saying it?A slightly naughty smile flickers over his face.
"Well ... well ... yes, I do really. Yes. That was an unguarded moment. Although I think I said stupid-looking. Did you see the photograph of her? I think if you look up the story, and they've got the photograph ... " He checks himself, and stops. "But this is unkind."
Before meeting Dawkins, I'd worried that he might be so intellectually impatient as to be crushing. The impression instead is more like that of a lion who has given himself strict instructions to behave like a pussy cat - which is both a relief and just slightly disappointing.
Does he ever, I ask, envy people who believe in God?
"No." He shakes his head firmly. Even though faith is said to be so famously comforting?
"You see," he says, "I'm so eager to say well maybe it is comforting but so what? I suspect that for every person who is comforted by it, there will be somebody else who is in mortal fear of it." Does he not envy those who manage not to find God mortally fearful?
"If I envied them that, then I'd have to envy people who are on some drug, which just makes them feel good. So to the extent that religion's comforting, it's probably not ..."
Dawkins likes to joke that old people go to church because they're "cramming for the final". He never worries that one day in old age he may wake and find himself feeling drawn towards faith, though. If he did, he would put it down to senile dementia. He seems much more worried about spurious reports of a fictitious deathbed conversion being put about by his enemies after he dies. He is probably not joking at all when he says: "I want to make damn sure there's a tape recorder running for my last words." -- © Guardian News & Media 2008
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