by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It becomes almost immediately evident that Richard Dawkins—Oxford evolutionary biologist, staunch Darwinian, best-selling author and outspoken atheist—doesn’t suffer fools gladly. And the biggest fools in a crowded field, he thinks, are the faithful.

If he believed in such a thing, Dawkins would have a special place reserved in Hell for all the intelligent designers, fire-breathing fundamentalists, unquestioningly devout parents and the snake-oil politicians who court them.

In his latest book, The God Delusion, Dawkins carefully lays out his reasons for not believing in a higher power—let alone an interventionist, personal saviour—and his loathing of religion in general. First and foremost, there’s no scientific proof for the existence of a supreme being. All the laws of probability, he argues, are weighed against such an intelligence, while there are a number of arguments involved in the creation of complex life that have nothing whatsoever to do with mysticism or the supernatural.

He also points out that a decidedly un-holy amount of blood has been spilled in the name of religion, and that the holy books—principally both Testaments of the Bible, which he focusses on especially because he’s more familiar with them—are so full of contradictions that to believe in them as a moral compass, let alone the revealed word of God, is the height of absurdity. The Bible is filled with gruesome scenes of murder, rape, genocide, adultery and incest, and God comes across as a capricious, jealous, “evil monster.”

Mixing high-end science with a fair dose of secular compassion, common sense and a fierce, sharp wit, his book has the power to either affirm the convictions of committed atheists, shore up the faith of believers, or wash away the muddy middle ground of agnostics. Dawkins, who was in Montreal last month to deliver the Beatty Memorial Lecture at McGill, spoke to the Mirror at his suite at the Ritz.

Question everything

Dawkins quickly dispenses with the red-herring chestnut of the non-religiosity of the 20th century’s greatest killers: Stalin and Hitler. He condemns equally “any belief system in which the questioning of faith is pernicious. Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany demanded an unquestioning faith in a vicious non-supernatural system. They shared all the worst characteristics of religion—deference and obedience. Instead of the Bible you had Marx and Mein Kampf, with devastatingly awful effects.”

For a dedicated scientist like Dawkins, unceasing critical evaluation and measurement of any system are paramount. Political subservience is no less evil than religious. And, as he claims in his book in a chapter titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God”—no mincer of words is he—natural selection holds most of the answers to the riddles people like intelligent designers cherish: namely, that it is statistically improbable for complex life to have come about in the absence of a higher power. That, he writes, is “an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn’t understand the first thing about natural selection.”

But The God Delusion’s main purpose, he writes, is not to explain the science of evolution or expose religious belief’s stupidity and hypocrisy—which he does, sometimes with humour, but often with anger and clear thinking—but to “raise consciousness.” To be an atheist is a noble thing, he believes, and he posits that atheists today are in a similar position as feminists or gays were decades ago: unwanted, irrelevant and unelectable, but with some organization and will, able to improve their station within the greater societal polity. And, if possible, proselytize.

Suffer the little children

Religion, according to Dawkins, doesn’t just propose a belief system that worships an invisible friend (who could logically just as easily be a supreme creator of the universe as a garden fairy as the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a china teapot floating between Earth and Mars, to use Betrand Russell’s phrase). Religion itself, he says, is dangerous and harmful. And to bring up a child in a religious household is akin to child abuse.

“We should feel a frisson when we hear about a Catholic child or a Muslim child or a Protestant child,” he says. “It should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. A child has no more choice in that than being a Marxist child or a Keynesian child or a monetarist child.”

Drawing on the vast and unpleasant history of sexual abuse at the hands of priests or nuns is one way to measure the malevolent effects of religion, he writes. But a far more lasting consequence of a religious upbringing is the psychological damage of prejudice and fear instilled in an innocent mind. He writes of the number of disillusioned theists he has met or corresponded with over the years who tell him of the terror they experienced as a result of their faith—Catholics fearing their non-Catholic friends would burn in Hell, Christian families rejecting their atheist children, the breakdown of relationships when the belief in God is lost in one, or when different faiths prevent a lifetime of happiness and love. He also expresses disgust at moral relativists who condone—or even celebrate—human sacrifice among the Incas and female circumcision in Muslim countries.

“Religious schools are truly terrible,” he says. “I have no problem with the teaching of religion, of its art, its literature and its history, but having segregated schools, where everyone is different from the other, I consider that a form of child abuse that is very, very wicked.”

Sanctity of the secular

Dawkins, of course, is not without his enemies, and they don’t all come from religious communities. A review by Jim Holt in the New York Times, that bastion of craven, godless liberalism, came down hard: “Reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie… [the] tone is smug and the logic occasionally loopy.” His sidestepping some important philosophical arguments “makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience.” And a Harper’s essay does not defend religion so much as attack science by wielding some of the same intellectual weapons as Dawkins. Eugenics—bad science with horrific consequences—is used as an example of how vulnerable science can be when manipulated by cultural prejudice, for instance. And how endless advances in weapon systems, beginning with the atom bomb, have fostered a culture of imminent doom that has quite naturally attracted a strong interest in the End of Days (it also points out that those same weapons are developed by well-paid scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom, Dawkins is keen to mention, are atheists).

But readers do not have to be atheists to enjoy and learn from The God Delusion. Dawkins makes some excellent arguments about the pervasive and noxious influence of religion in modern societies. But Dawkins does not reserve all of his distaste for the evangelicals, who “rigged the [2000 presidential] election” in Washington D.C. (not to mention Ottawa) and their anti-gay, anti-choice, parochial, “family values” mantra. The recent outbreak of anger in Europe over the niqab, the veil Muslim women wear over their faces, is an example, he feels, of how wrong religious belief can go.

“I think people should be free to wear as much or as little as they like, but I sympathize with Jack Straw,” he says, referring to the Labour MP who said last month that he found the niqab divisive. “A hornet’s nest has been stirred up. There’s a lethal paranoia in the British Islamic community, an extremely unpleasant form of paranoia… [The niqab] is a badge of separation. It’s trying to be exclusive. I think it’s a matter of courtesy to, when in Rome….”

In the meantime, he has been trying for the past six months to get charitable status for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science (www.richarddawkins.

net/foundation), a process he finds agonizingly slow—and worthy of suspicion. “I don’t know too much about these things, but what’s annoying is how religious organizations get such an easy ride, while we really have to argue for it,” he says. He hopes to be able to counter the influence of the religious right, who “are extremely well-provided for with money from dopey rich people.”