CHRISTMAS WITH FRANK AND DICK

Every Christmas I get to buy the books I want, hand them over to She Who is Perfect and then squeal in feigned surprise when I unwrap them. It is the best part of the holiday and for weeks before I relive the excitement of my childhood and contemplate the read-fest that will follow the turkey. Leading this year’s list were The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The Language of God by Francis Collins (Head of the Human Genome Project). I was anticipating two good reads but I was unprepared for how revealing the two are in tandem and what together they demonstrate about the characters and dispositions of the religious and non-religious. There is plenty of hard science in both–actually more with Collins– but the scientific truths they share are filtered through two very different perceptions of what exactly it is they are seeing.

Both men are Big E evolutionists who take their Darwinism neat. They differ profoundly about God, but not at all about natural evolution. Anybody hoping Collins will help him question the reliability of the fossil record, doubt descent from a common ancestor, posit divine meddling in eyes and bacterial flagellum or distinguish micro from macro-evolution will be let down badly. Indeed, Collins is actually aiming as much at literal creationists and IDer’s as at non-believers. He is very troubled by the resistance to natural evolution among the religious, which he rightly sees as particularly Christian (not even Muslims are so hung up) and even particularly American Christian, but he respects it and understands why it persists. In fact, he is so sensitive to the feelings of all these scientific doubters that at times his tone becomes cloying and patronizing, as if he were addressing a tea party of nice elderly creationist ladies and was worried the old dears might faint if he went too far too fast. He has great personal respect for the champions of ID (which in one rare and delicious moment of sarcasm he calls Dawkins’s and Dennett’s love-child) and even for some creationist scientists, but none at all for their science, which he analyses and then deftly destroys using a combination of the latest discoveries in biology and paleontology and the writings of St. Augustine. Talk about a one-two punch!

The two books prove the old saw that atheists look through microscopes and the faithful through telescopes. Collins’s faith has both a scientific and non-scientific source, the scientific being grounded in modern physics. He describes a range of current theories on the origins and development of matter and the cosmos with elegant simplicity and concludes that the anthropic principle compels either belief or wild, completely unsubstantiated conjecture about an infinite number of hidden universes. If there is one sentence that sums it all up for him it is this statement by a noted physicist: “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”

The second source of Collins’s faith is what he terms the universal Moral Law, which he sees followed, however imperfectly, in all faiths and societies except secular ones and which is inexplicable without faith. Here it should be mentioned that, as with C.S. Lewis (his inspiration), Thomas Merton, St Augustine and many other theological trailblazers, Collins’s upbringing was not particularly religious and he passed through a long period of youthful atheism. His faith is that of the convert, not the pushy and insufferably all-knowing kind, but the kind who has no difficulty distinguishing the tenets of faith from the actions of churches, and fundamental moral strictures from religious practices and disciplines born of reverence and tradition. Unlike many doubters who lived through religious childhoods and seem to have consequent lifelong difficulties distinguishing faith from fetters, he understands that belief is not just about submitting to unassailable authority and irrefutable evidence, but equally about choosing on the basis of what yer lyin’ eyes tell you. And unlike many modern materialists, he also knows the Infinite remains largely hidden and that faith bumps up regularly against the empirically unknowable and even logically inconsistent. For example, his belief does not extend to predestination and he knows the world would have evolved very differently if the meteor he believes killed off the dinosaurs hadn’t hit the Yucatan, but his intrigue and doubts about whether there was design in that or not does not cause him to rail petulantly that such a mischievous, illogical god is simply not worth believing in. Collins is a practicing committed Christian, not an airy faculty lounge theist, but he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff and in a sense carries all the hopes of Pope Benedict’s maxim, Succisa virescit (Pruned, it grows again).

The good news for Dawkins fans is that Dawkins is still very much Dawkins and hasn’t lost any of his ability to take us on thrilling, breathless rides through the mysteries of existence, and to answer each and every one of our questions with total authority. It’s all very simple: there is nothing but the accidental natural world (in fact, there isn’t really much more than biology) and anybody who thinks otherwise is stupid or evil. So contemptuous is he of religion that he won’t even fall back on the popular Darwinist notion that it offered some traditional survival advantage. It was all a big evolutionary mistake, a genetic misfiring not unlike like Downs Syndrome. Nothing, absolutely nothing good is to be said about it, and any bright young agnostic inclined to see it as benign, or who doesn’t think of it at all, had better understand Dawkins is handing out white feathers and expects to see him in the trenches at dawn.

Dawkins’s breezy style and polemic flair hide the fact that this is a grossly simplistic book by a very angry man who knows much more than he understands, and it is heartening to see so many of even his non-believing scientific colleagues disassociate themselves in embarrassment. His depth of understanding of theology is that of a freshman after the first term of Philosophy 101. Here is a good example of Dawkins at his theologically deepest, and also of the faux-politesse that gives a very English aura of reasonableness to the outrageous: “The five ‘proofs’ asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily–though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence–exposed as vacuous.” From there the roller-coaster thunders down, flattening one vacuous eminence after another.

After taking about two hundred pages to reveal thousands of years of Western thought as a bad joke perpetrated by philosophical underachievers, Dawkins addresses morality and more or less repeats the same muddled, a-historical analyses of his previous writings. He is not without the courage to address tough questions from the enemy, like how to explain Hitler and Stalin, but his responses are so superficial that one suspects he mastered them responding in two sentence quips to questions from young audiences on the university speech circuit. He is honest enough to allow there is nothing rare about believing scientists who he admits “bewilder” him, surely an embarrassing admission from one who earns a living speaking with sage-like authority on the tensions between religion and science.

The end of the book is where it all becomes very nasty. Dawkins takes on the mantle of protector of the children of the world and comes within a hair’s breadth of arguing that religious parents should be prohibited from teaching faith to their children, if they should be allowed to keep them at all. This deserves a separate post and it will soon have it, but if Dawkins were, say, German rather than a ruddy Englishman with a pretty face, he would be revealed for exactly what he is. He is a living, breathing example of how modern secularist thinking can start with wonderful, exciting talk of freedom and liberation and end in much, much darker places.

Collins and Dawkins are obviously divided by emotional disposition as much as philosophy. Both claim to stand in awe of the wonders of nature, but for Collins it is a humbling, unsettling awe whereas one easily imagines Dawkins repeating “Wow, cool!” as he flits around an endless cycle of labs, conferences and parties. Dawkins appears to have lived broadly, but Collins has thought deeply and not always happily. Whereas Dawkins casually tosses out sunny encouragement to enjoy our sex lives, Collins recounts his daughter’s brutal rape by a stranger and the searing pain it caused him and her for years. He also tells one of those life-changing inspirational stories about a Nigerian farmer he saved temporarily in a remote and under-equipped clinic, who looked up from his Bible afterwards and told Collins calmly and serenely that he (the farmer) could answer his (Collins’s) doubts about why he was even in Africa–Collins came for him. One can only imagine Dawkins’s patronizing smile at that and hear him dissemble to his fellow brights over a fine dinner: “Given Collins’s cultural dislocation and the incidences of both Christianity and tuberculosis in Nigeria, it is by no means statistically improbable that...”

Two men who believe exactly the same thing about science and the natural world. One loves sadly in awe and doubt, while the other scorns cheerfully with impatient certitude. Perhaps it is within those differences, rather than between the competing claims of theology and science, that we all eventually must choose who we are.