Rupert Shortt

Richard Dawkins and the ignorance of ‘New Atheism’

I recently met an old friend at a party. She works for a Christian NGO. Later that evening we were introduced to a man with a background in software engineering. Having learnt about my friend’s job and then discovered that she goes to church, he asked her how old she thought the universe is. Her jaw dropped a bit. But she was composed enough to reply with a counter-question. ‘Did you know that it was a Catholic priest [the cosmologist Georges LeMaître] who proposed the Big Bang theory in the first place?’ Now it was the engineer’s turn to look shocked.

Some may dismiss this exchange as a flash in the pan. To others it will reflect a phoney war evident across Western culture and beyond. The frustration felt by this second group is well founded. Popular contemporary attitudes towards religion include condescending dismissal. The same applies to large sections of the media, universities and the arts establishment. Faith groups must bear their share of the blame for this. But so must the strident atheists who reject what they have never taken the trouble to investigate beyond a superficial level – especially those who write bestsellers ridiculing belief systems they know so little about.

How might scientifically informed religious believers defend the coherence of their world view? If they are Christians, say, part of their answer might run like this. The aim of God’s creation is that the world should help make itself, and the Scriptures are humanly written and developed history riddled with ambiguities and dead-ends and fresh starts. Nevertheless, they are powerfully challenging calls to humanity to grow and reform and criticise itself. This sort of judgement could be voiced in allied ways across the spiritual spectrum. ‘We have a deep respect for science,’ people of various stripes often add.

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