AND ANOTHER THING
A still, small voice raised above the bubble of the test-tubes in the stinks lab
PAUL JOHNSON
Recently a stinks don from New Col- lege, Oxford, has taken upon himself to raise the standard of militant atheism again. In this capacity he has been popping up on the wireless and television and even in the columns of The Spectator. Among other things, he has accused me of being told what to think by 'an elderly Pole'. He is called Richard Dawkins, and I would not bother with him had not a Christian lady, for whom I have the highest respect, said she was impressed by his arguments and challenged me to refute them.
Dawkins is an expert on genes, which are currently the fashionable objects of scientif- ic inquiry. His colleagues are constantly dis- covering 'new' genes which explain aspects of human behaviour. Thus they recently unearthed a gene which makes some peo- ple homosexual; eliminate it, and there will be no more queers. Last week we learned they have found an 'ageing gene', which determines how we grow old; if they can get to work on this fellow they will be able to cure Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. No doubt in time they will discover a 'religious gene' which makes people believe in God, and if they can get rid of that one we will all grow up to be like Richard Dawkins. But it could be that, by this time, genes will have been succeeded by another scientific fash- ion.
In any case, I distrust the way in which people like Dawkins set up scientists and believers as polar opposites. Like Darwin, I am sure there is no necessary quarrel between science and religion. In fact sci- ence is a working tool of religion. The mediaeval universities treated theology as the queen of the sciences, and rightly so, for what can be more important than to discover how we, and everything, came into existence, and for what purpose, and what will ultimately happen to us all? The over- whelming majority of great scientists have always believed in God and regarded adding to our knowledge of Him as a cen- tral part of their work. That great 12th-cen- tury doctor, Maimonides, who has strong claims to be considered the father of psy- chiatry, was also the greatest of Jewish the- ologians. It seems to me significant that Sir Isaac Newton wrote two defences of belief, A short scheme of trite religion and his Ireni- con, though he published neither. He drew none of the distinctions Dawkins seems to think matter so much. Indeed, come to think of it, Newton's library contained 138 books on alchemy and he wrote at least 650,000 words on alchemic topics. It proves nothing except that Newton had an inquir- ing mind and never ruled out possibilities, thus setting a good example to us all. I was educated by the Jesuits, who since their inception in the 16th century have engaged in every form of scientific inquiry all over the world. My school had a famous obser- vatory and the most respected member of the community was an ancient Jesuit who had spent almost all his life examining the heavens through a giant telescope. It never occurred to him, or to any of us, that there was a conflict between his work and our beliefs.
Scientists like Dawkins, who argue that the physical sciences inevitably lead to a denial of God's existence, seem to me to fall into two errors: materialism and deter- minism. They are obsessed by big numbers, rather like military dictators and multimil- lionaires. Writing in The Spectator, Dawkins seems to think that the sheer size of the universe refutes the truth of Chris- tianity, since knowledge of Christ, travel- ling at the highest possible speed, can have reached as yet only a tiny corner df it. But there is a reality even greater than the uni- verse, however large it can conceivably be, and that is eternity. Indeed, compared with eternity, past, present and to come, all cre- ation is nothing, a tiny notch on Dawkins's slide-rule, a bubble in one of his test-tubes. Yet eternity and its infinite perspectives of time are the warp and woof of Judaeo- Christianity since it is the realisation that this life — this world, this universe, every- thing in fact in the Dawkins compendium of actual and possible knowledge — is merely the flicker on a microsecond in God's scheme of things, which underlines every aspect of moral and dogmatic theolo- gy. The fact that we are eternal is far more 'These drug testers seem suspiciously energetic: important than the fact that we are, for a time, material. Materialists shut their eyes to all except a tiny fraction of existence. They forget that God plays the numbers game on an infinitely bigger scale than any- one else.
The determinism of the scientific atheists is even more dismaying than their obses- sion with matter, for it is precisely this bale- ful philosophy, whether in its Marxist, Nazi or other forms, which has ruined the 20th century, at its dawn the most promising of human epochs. Our behaviour is no more determined by minute changes in our chemical components than it is by our class or race or any other crazy theory that deprives us of free will. Nor are events fixed in advance by irresistible forces. A lifetime's work as a historian has convinced me that we human beings are masters of our fates. Nothing is won or lost in advance: the game is to be played by each one of us. But, as Einstein wisely observed, God does not play dice: the game of life is played with the counters of love, forbear- ance, fidelity, compassion, patience, accep- tance of suffering and imagination, not least with courage, all of which are power- ful, real forces in our lives but which cannot be quantified or even identified by the instruments at Dawkins's disposal in his lab.
Indeed, the most important single ele- ment in religious faith is belief in free will. We are free spirits. True, our hearts will never be at peace until we have submitted our wills to our maker's. But that act of dis- sent or assent is voluntary and cannot under any circumstances be taken away from us. It was still possessed by a Jew on the threshold of the Auschwitz ovens or today by a black child scrabbling around in the filth of an African refugee camp. Our material impotence, however total and degrading, is belied by the fact that, by an act of our uninhibited will, we send a signal to the architect of all existence, across the infinities of time and space, which is instantly received and registered. It is a comfort to me, and, I think, to all who believe, that this power of communicating with the Almighty cannot be taken away from us by the Stalins or the Hitlers or the materialists or the determinists or the sci- entific humanists or by any combination of those who have the power of the world on their side but who lack awareness of the spirit.
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