Darwin, Dawkins, a celebration, a spat, and the Christian Darwinists on the march

We are all, increasingly, in a Darwin frame of mind with the bicentenary coming up in 2009.  Richard Dawkins' Channel 4 series does him great and due honour (though my own ranted reservations about the anti-religious tone are published here, the Times leader here).   Prof. Dawkins has just written us a somewhat furious letter about my article - read it here - to which I can only reply that both of us at home watching his fine programme felt, sorrowfully,  that he was hammering the evolution-or-God choice very hard indeed, spoiling an otherwise lovely presentation on Darwin.  As a scientist he should stop pretending that there are hard and reliable figures showing that a majority of Christians are creationists;  and might also admit  that it is unseemly for a senior academic to go around - without research or sensible reservation -  making up imaginary lives for people who dare to  criticize him (he snipes that I eat canapes in Islington and "Hampstead Garden Suburb", for God's sake, how petulant can you get?) 
         By the way, if you want the actual poll figures on creationism in the UK  (I assume he means the 2006 Horizon poll asking 2000 respondents)   here they are.  Note that only 22 per cent chose creationism and 17 per cent 'intelligent design"(few people know what that means, I suspect, and some will simply think it means that if there is a Creator he is intelligent).   Asked what should be taught in school science,  69 per cent went for evolution.  Better if it was 100 per cent, of course, but it hardly suggests an overwhelming scepticism shared by the entire population outside of  - er - Hampstead Garden suburb.
        Meanwhile the Theos think-tank  about faith has set up  a project with the Faraday Institute and a grant from the Templeton Foundation , to conduct a project aimed at the Darwin anniversary.  Its director writes to me:
     "Basically the idea is to 'Rescue Darwin' from the crossfire of a battle (between the creationists and public atheists) that he had little personal interest in. There's more to it than that, but the main objective will be a kind of 'plague on both your houses', arguing that both the creationists/IDers and the militant atheists are wrong, that Darwinian evolution is compatible with Christianity, and that we need to treat Darwin as a supremely gifted scientist and not the mascot (or demon) for one anti/religious cause or another" . 
    Darwin's complete works are now online!  Here they are - and here is the BBC report on the project, whose picture heads this blog.   And what with the birthdate coming up,   the About Darwin site is very excited already.As am I.

Comments

[Tim Dempsey]

His reply was just snide, Libby. Useless logic, as is the norm now. Lazy man living on his reputation and ample media bunce.

I wish he would move onto something that sits with the ranting "play the man not the ball" style he is sporting. Green issues feels likely.
:-)

[Wosret]

Care to explain how Christianity is compatible with evolutionary theory as outlined by science? I can understand how believing that modern animals are descendant from a common ancestor some four billion years ago is. I have trouble understanding how the mechanism of natural selection and spontaneous genetic mutation is in any meaningful way. This completely rules out theism. In order to make it compatible with a theistic world view you must reject this mechanism, and opt to believe that evolution was guided by a form of selection that was not merely natural and random forced, but purposeful, and intentional ones. This makes theism wholly incompatible with neo-Darwinism, in it's current form.

[Wosret]

I also find it presumptuous that you can claim "most believers are not creationists" with absolutely no backing, yet feel you can discard the actual backing offered by Dawkins. No matter how suspicious, or how incredulous you are, that is hardly solid ground you occupy. I personally am not trusting of polls myself, but Dawkins did say "suggests", he didn't say "proves". Even if the polls are wrong, that indeed is what they suggest. Where is your backing? What suggests that your assertion is in fact true? Even if the polls are wrong, (which they very well could be) shaky evidence is better than your total lack of evidence.

[Robert]

That does total 37%, hardly off from Richard's 40%. Your rebuttal is to speculate that those who chose intelligent design didn't understand it. Don't get the results you want? Spin them!

[Scott Chapman]

In response to "most believers", Richard does not limit this criteria to the UK. Yet you seem to have ignored that in your reply.

Darwin is celebrated not for Evolution of species, but for it's mechanism by "NATURAL" Selection. The Catholic church accept Evolution, however, they insist it was guided by something supernatural.

Accepting Evolution, isn't the same as recognising that natural laws can shape it.

[elfstone]

Oh, someone funded by the Templeton Foundation writes that evolution is compatible with christianity. How original!
Before you take anyone's word for it, you may want to check out what both christianity and evolution claim to clearly see they are NOT compatible. Adam and Eve's original sin is foundational for christianity because the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is based on it. Evolution clearly shows that Adam and Eve are fictional. Evolution simply destroys the foundations of christianity, and anyone who claims otherwise simply resorts to wishful thinking and willful ignorance. The only reason you people attack Dawkins is because he shutters your precious delusions. The "militant" atheists are not wrong, but the IDers are. The truth isn't a 50/50 warm and fuzzy compromise, unfortunately for those self-proclaimed intellectuals that find superiority by fence-sitting.
Grow up, face the music and get over it.

[Andrew Cooper]

I really didn't see Dawkins the "hammering evolution or god" line at all.

I'm a big fan of the Prof's books about evolution but, even though I don't believe that there is a god, I found both The God Delusion and The Root of All Evil very disturbing. Dawkins is at his worst when he takes on religion.

But I really didn't see Dawkins hammering anything in what I thought was an excellent programme. He mentioned the fact (and it is a fact) that Darwin's discovery provided an alternative explanation for the complexity of life. He couldn't completely overlook the implications of evolution for belief, could he? But he didn't over-egg that point and I sincerely hope that he doesn't embark on another rant in later programmes. I also think he should have acknowledged that it's perfectly possible to believe in God and evolution by natural selection. The Vatican doesn't have any problems reconciling the two, of course.

I guess we all construct our own realities, Libby. I think you two at home were seeing something that wasn't there. But, on the same grounds, it's entirely possible that I missed something that was.

Something that really concerns me is the tendency of Christians to launch ad hominem attacks on Dawkins. Your description of him in your review was, I'm afraid cheap, purile and, to my mind, completely wrong headed. It was a mistake for Dawkins to respond in kind, although you have to admit his words were rather gentler than yours.

Why do Christians so often attack Dawkins the man rather than the ideas he propounds? It seems rather un-Christian to me. American creationists mock his 'whiny' voice, to quote one of their mildest complaints about Dawkins' personality.

My question is rhetorical, of course. The reason that so much Christian bile is aimed at the man himself is that you know you'd be on rocky ground if you took on his logic.

[Anath]

22% creationism...plus
17% intelligent design... equals
39% who promote some form of creationism. You add them together because one person could not have answered the same question twice.

Dawkins' statistic was "about 40%". If this is the poll he used, then are you seriously arguing a 1% difference?

[William Hobson]

Dawkins was not claiming Evolution demands Atheism! He was simply forcing those with beliefs based aruond the absolute, unconditional denial of one of the most profound discoveries of humanity's history to challenge their inherited views with some direct interaction with the theory. You seem to have attached Dawkin's wider work to this programme, which is unfortunate. My own interpretation of this programme was exactly that of your preffered body, this "Theos Think-Tank" - trying to seperate Dawrin's theory from the discourse on the validity of religious belief, and you should remember it is not Dawkins who repeatedly frames the argument of belief around this subject, it's his opponents. It was unfortunate but inevitable that the children themselves, indoctrinated as many of them were by their faiths into rejecting an idea that they would later find personally appealing and intriguing, were the ones who saw it as a choice between God or Darwin. This is the choice their teachers have presented them with, not one that Dawkins demanded (within this programme naturally), and it was a great shame to see so many of them admit interest but reject it outright because of the percieved eternal danger of questioning the beliefs they have been indoctrinated with.

[Steven Carr]

Libby seems to be confusing her alleged god with Dr. Josef Mengele.

It was Mengele who tried to create super-humans by exposing people to disease and breeding from the survivors.

Libby's god is not supposed to create by creating diseases, and exposing children to them in the knowledge that the survivors will have superior genes.

Every case of smallpox, every case of malaria, every case of TB is one step in Libby's god's act of creation.

Libby's god is a god who creates by letting animals rip each other apart, on the grounds that the fittest will survive.

Why should we worship Libby's god and condemn Mengele?

Mrs Purves,

After having seen prof Dawkins' television show I wonder if we both have watched the same program.

Adding 22 to 17 gives 39 which rounded yields 40%. Since ID and creationism are the same thing this wonderful piece of mathematics seems justified. On a population of 100 million this means that 40 million ar creationist! Having established darwinism as a proven fact by science this is a disturbingly large number. I can't understand your airily treatment of this alarming ignorance of the population.

Herre Faber
Netherlands

[SteveZ]

It isn't militant to realise the serious problems that Evolution raises for theism. Christianity requires an interventionist God, and evolution shows that all the complexity of life can appear with no intervention. It doesn't even make sense to talk about evolution being guided, as the fuel for evolution is purely random mutation (the engine being natural selection). It is possible to consider God as being involved in the process, but it is as redundant as trying to say that planes fly with the help of fairies once you know the involvement of aerodynamics.

Wishful thinking like this should not be respectable. It isn't in other areas of life. It is also sloppy to call anyone who simply points out that God is redundant in terms of the explanation of how we appeared on Earth is "militant".

[Coel]

Come in Libby, you bristle at Dawkins's suggestions about your life, but you started it with false statements about his programme.

"But every few minutes he spoils it by announcing that natural selection means there is, categorically, no God."

Nope, he did not say that.

"his emotional implication that, gee, Nature is too cruel to have been invented by God!"

Sorry, he did not say that either! It's amazing that Dawkins critics so often do exactly what they accuse Dawkins of doing, going on an intemperate rant that leaves the facts behind.

As for you criticising Dawkins over the lack of hard statistics. It was again you who started this, saying "But most believers are not creationists." What is your evidence for this claim? The poll data do not support you, even for the UK; and worldwide it is fairly clear that the majority of religious believers are indeed creationists!

[Jason]

I always think the measure of intellectual honesty is whether the arguments you make are ones you would find convincing, mutatis mutandis, coming from the other side.

Dawkins' whole point is over the domain Purves refers to by "most believers". He considers the relevant domain to be international and gives examples which provide an obvious contrast to the British urban middle class. The use of "Islington" is as instantly recognisable as "Fleet Street" and need not be construed as an ad hominem attack.

In this reply, Purves completely disregards the international aspect and refers again to the survey. The way she treats the figures is suggests disingenuousness, statistical illiteracy, or more charitably being in a hurry and not extending a charitable approach to Professor Dawkins.

Dawkins carefully states that the poll "suggests" that over 40% believe in creationism. For anyone with a scientific approach, ID is simply a rebranding of creationism: treating it as a separate school of thought gives credibility to the idea that it is a more rational, moderate position, and there is no more reason for scientists to do that than there is for supportes of abortion to accept "pro-life" as the designation for their opponents. So puting the 22% and the 17% together is correct from a scientific standpoint. And I'm aware I am using scientific to mean "pro-evolution".

The figures (which are from a 2006 survey - not a wildly out of date one from 1976) include 12% who said they did not know. It is improbable that fewer than 1 in 12 of those saying they "did not know" were not favourable to creationism; that would be true of any question where there is a 39/48 split in full answers, without relying on the additional likelihood of people being embarrassed to declare a belief which is rightly derided as uneducated.

It would not have been appropriate for Dawkins to go into these intricacies in a brief reply, but the carefully nuanced "suggests" implies that the workings have been done, but not shown.

So what's the story? ?

[M. Brown]

"...Darwinian evolution is compatible with christianity"? Oh, boy! I just can't wait to see which areas of compatibility they are talking about.

What is it about religion that makes otherwise intelligent people completely moronic?

[Christopher Gray]

Libby, I share some - though not all - of your criticisms of the programme's structure, and you're probably justified in giving Richard a smack for his petulance.

However, if you really want to help to cut down the crossfire and its attendant tragedies of understanding in this debate, you will need to actually address the two issues which made him so angry, namely your misapprehension of his attitude towards the children on the beach, and the slightly warped perspective of what constitutes the proportion of believers in other parts of the world.

Unless we address the issues, this just looks like another pointless slanging match to defend 'professional status', which is just embarrassing.

[M. Brown]

"...Darwinian evolution is compatible with christianity"? Oh, boy! I just can't wait to see which areas of compatibility they are talking about.

What is it about religion that makes otherwise intelligent people completely moronic?

[SaviourLove122]

The main thing that I dont understand is how someone can be a cristian but not a creationist. Surely by not being a creationist you are disregarding the book of genesis and therefore ignoring the teachings of part of the bible. You say of Dawkins: "As a scientist he should stop pretending that there are hard and reliable figures showing that a majority of Christians are creationists" - but shouldnt all true cristians be creationists? - the kind who disregard the book of genesis are surely not cristians in the true sense of the word...In short - they are non-believers

[Wilka]

In that poll you reference, 52% of the respondents don't believe in evolution. If some of those people are non-religious, and those non-religious people do believe in evolution (which seems like a reasonable assumption). Then that means more than 52% of the religious questioned don't believe in evolution. Which would be 'most'.

Doesn't this support what Prof. Dawkins said about most Christians being creationists?

[tim ellidge]

How reasonable Libby sounds, “hoorah for Darwin” and all that, the professor accused her of mendacity and i think it is a criticism that fits the bill perfectly. The mendacity starts with the false accusation that Darwin = Atheism is something Dawkins promotes as self evident. Her real issue is that supposed moderate Christians are also, at heart, the enemies of reason, a truth they find hard to swallow especially when they are genuinely trying to be reasonable.
God ‘the creator’ is not actually criticized by evolution at all, evolution is how life (once established) will progress in response to, and in conjunction with, any environment, be it natural or man-made, shaped by catastrophe, predation, hardship, or aeons of plenty in balmy sunshine.
What evolution makes unnecessary is a god that fiddles around the edges that one day decides to swap a G for a T, or an A for a C or to duplicate a whole set of codons. Evolution is NOT about how life appeared; true it’s a vexing question but NOTHING to do with Darwinian evolution.
Of course evidence based rational thinking of the kind that revealed the process of evolution has over the past millennia given god less and less to do. We now know he need not interfere in the spinning of the world on its axis, nor need he hold up the stars, or even paint the sky with rainbows. Of course that also lets him off sending tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes to cull the faithful or hoarding electricity in the sky to smite the wrongdoer.
In other words reason has caused the very role of god himself (in the minds of the moderates like Libby) to evolve. No more the jealous murderer and capricious bully with a psychotic hatred of firstborns (even his own). Reason has made god a distant ineffable often entirely internal concept. I almost feel sorry for the old duffer; after all he now only wants the best for us.
If we recognise the truth of evolution through evidence and rationality then those same tools eventually, in the enlightened, snuff out god. Evolution itself is not attacking god but the thinking that reveals it also shows there is no evidence for a god at all. As Mark twain said “faith is believing what you know ain’t so” What is to be respected or encouraged in that?
Libby celebrating the Templeton foundation funding research to prove the compatibility of Darwin with Christianity rather proves the professors point. The raison d’être of the foundation is to use science to prove Christian theocracy is viable, (the end goal is already decided, the results are already known) it’s as disreputable as the tobacco companies trying to disprove the links between smoking and cancer. What Libby is demonstrating is ‘reasonableness’ not reason.

[Aegis]

"Prof. Dawkins has just written us a somewhat furious letter..."

Really? Is that how you perceive his letter?
Richard's reply is a far more kind reply than I would have given to such an obvious misstatement of my position and mis-characterization of my persona.

Your seeming infatuation with a middle ground fallacy pushes you to ignore Richard's salient point. Citing the statistics you choose to accept, 22 (rather than 40) percent - almost a fourth - of Britons believe that the earth and its inhabitants were created supernaturally. This of course, is in Great Britain, a traditionally secular society when you look past its Anglican veneer. When you (as Richard has in his reply, and as you should) extend that sample size a bit you'll quickly find that overwhelmingly religious explanations for existence outweigh those of science in the world at large. As a fun test, might I suggest traveling to any mid-eastern nation or any small American town and attempting to open a Center for Evolutionary studies? You will find that, in a profound way, your views are ill-informed.

In large part I blame centrists who wish that everyone could just get along, despite centuries of evidence that such coexistence is tenuous at the very best, and frequently murderous at its worst. That you fail to acknowledge how this enabling attitude gives the irrational multitudes a foothold is a sign of either apathy or cowardice. That you disparage a man brave enough to finally mention the problem is doubly so on the latter. How's THAT for a petulant response?

[Chill out in love]

No science is ever has the answer to an unanswered question set in stone, it is the ideas that evolve . What makes the difference between all involved in such a discussion is whether they have humility and have the grace to know that the answer is much greater much larger than themselves. Is what stake (without devaluing any person contribution to the discussion) a fear of their own mortality and an inability to be reconciled in love.

[ukvillafan]

Yet again we have an apologetic who seeks to maintain that Christianity is compatible with (add here any particular scientific advance over the past two millennia that has chipped away at the basis of faith - this time it happens to be evolution by natural selection).
The attack on Dawkins in the original article was cheap, inaccurate and indicative of someone who not only does not understand the facts but would ignore them even if she did.
The Bible is, supposedly, the true revealed word of god, put into written form by the divinely inspired. So, one might expect it to be accurate, informative, consistent and perhaps contain enlightenment. What exists is, in fact, nothing that could not have been written by anyone with the average degree of knowledge of a person living in the first centuries of the first millennium (itself a crass and meaningless religion-oriented concept by the way). The Bible is the foundation of the Christian faith but it is clearly utterly incompatible with the concept of evolution by natural selection. That is why faith leaders spend so much of their time and energy changing the accepted “interpretation” of the Bible as and when one or other previous “truth” is revealed by modern human advances to be a falsity. So much for the infallibility of god! You’d think he might have made his holy book a trifle more accurate wouldn’t you? Perhaps, with his omniscience, he might have been expected to predict that his favoured species might develop to the point where it could identify the more ludicrous parts of “the good book”!
Anyone, and I do mean anyone, with sufficient intelligence to enable truth and reason to shed light upon the very foundations of faith would clearly favour rationalism over mythology. Only those who do not wish to see the truth allow dogma and indoctrination to retain their power over them so that they are blind to the advances of science. An alcoholic has to admit to the problem before the cure has any chance of success.
If Ms Purves cannot see that creationism is, at the very least, a threat to educational standards both here and abroad then she truly has no understanding of its potential impact. Not only does she consider it reasonable to quibble over the odd percentage point but she seems to feel that a 22% belief in creationism is acceptable. Presumably she is equally sanguine about the 17% of intelligent design enthusiasts who believe in that “concept” (it is not a scientific theory) without understanding what it is! Evolution is just as fact based as the fundamental “laws” of physics; would she be happy with those percentages if they applied to the “theory” of gravitation?
Remove the first four letters from “omniscience” and Ms Purves would find something worthwhile to devote some time to!

[iain rae]

If god is controlling natural selection as some christians suggest,then god has made a bit of a mess of it. 99.9% of all species have become extinct.Darwinian evolution has changed our views and places us in the natural world.Martin Luther said "reason should be destroyed in all christians" not much has changed over the years.

[JoeyJoeJoeJr]

"Basically the idea is to 'Rescue Darwin' from the crossfire of a battle (between the creationists and public atheists)"

Its silly to suggest that any presentation of evolution framed in terms of Darwin's life and work can avoid discussing the conflicts between a scientific and supernatural worldview. A more specific exploration of the wealth of fascinating science that supports evolution could achieve this, but I don't see how an overview of the larger cultural and historical impacts of Darwin's ideas (i.e. a TV show called "The Genius of Darwin") can ignore the contradictions these views had, and still have, with so many religious people's worldview.