Friday’s Guardian carried an article in the “Comment is Free” section by Madeleine Bunting. She writes about Richard Dawkins’ recent debate with John Cornwell on the Today programme for 6th September. Ms Bunting alleges that Dawkins has “repeatedly refused a head-to-head with protagonists such as his Oxford colleague, Professor Alister McGrath”, and implies that this is the first such debate. She goes further, and says that the Today programme snippet shows him
1) “com[ing] over all conciliatory” under Cornwell’s challenge.
2) Making non-existent distinctions, as when she quotes him thus: “I never said religion was a disease, only “a virus”. She goes on to say that “It was a shame we didn’t have time to establish the fine distinction Dawkins was trying to make.” Implying, of course, that there was no such distinction.
The background to this debate is Cornwell’s book, Darwin’s Angel, in which he writes a riposte to Dawkins own God Delusion.
Ms Bunting’s article arouses the Sceptiphreniac’s ire for the usual reasons: blatant misrepresentation of the facts and outright untruths. As usual, the unfortunate recipient is the hapless British Public, who have to have read Dawkins’ works and sought out his debates in order to know that Madeleine Bunting is being less than honest.
Take her early point about Dawkins not debating his critics. I may have been deluding myself that Dawkins interviewed Alistair McGrath as part of his “Root of all Evil” TV series. Clearly this link to a video of said interview is a figment of my imagination. I also seem to recall hearing audio of a lengthy debate with McGrath at the Oxford Festival, but surely a humble blogger like me can’t know better than Ms. Bunting?
What about Dawkins coming “over all conciliatory”? Well, it seems that atheists have been “aggressive” and “shrill” in their attacks on religion, and that Dawkins’ conciliatory tone during the debate was “welcome”. I myself thought that this is how Dawkins always comes across when he speaks in public, but perhaps that’s my subjective opinion. On the other hand, Ms Bunting might think that statements like “There almost certainly is no God” and “religious ideas are outrageous violations of rational thought” are aggressive and shrill. To me they seem no more so than the polemics one encounters on Newsnight, or in the House of Commons.
Finally, the part of her article where Bunting accuses Dawkins of making non-existent distinctions: when Dawkins refers to religion as a virus, he is referring to the way that the ideas of religion propagate from mind to mind, not because they have any truth value, but because they possess characteristics that make people want to believe them and spread them. This is an example of one of Dawkins’ favourite topics, that of the meme, which he introduced in his 1970’s work “The Selfish Gene”.
Expert opinion appears divided as to whether the idea of a meme is a useful concept or not, but anyone who has read Dawkins’ works would know instantly that he was referring to the meme theory of idea dissemination, and could not possibly make the mistake of thinking that Dawkins was talking about religion being a disease. Only someone who was completely unfamiliar with Dawkins’ work could make such an error, with its obvious scope for, albeit unknowingly, setting up a straw man to attack.
Having only got as far in this critique as the third paragraph, I would be disinclined to read more on the very reasonable grounds that Ms Bunting was caricaturing Dawkins’ position in order to attack it.
