Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  My second stitch-up was more serious because it was perpetrated by a proper film company with professional production values – albeit also with the same apparent level of dishonesty as the Australian amateurs. Again, the initial approach, in 2007, promised an objective look at the world of creationist apologetics, with no hint that the purpose was actually creationist propaganda. Indeed, so persuaded was I of the film-maker’s intentions, I even went out of my way to help him find a venue for the filming, in London. Other evolutionists including Michael Ruse and P. Z. Myers confirm that they were misled in a similar way. I still had no inkling of the film’s agenda, even right through the interview. The interviewer asked me whether I could conceive of any possible circumstances in which life on Earth might have been intelligently designed. My honest answer was a bending over backwards to try to imagine such possible circumstances. I said that the only way I could imagine it would be seeding by aliens from outer space, and that is something I do not believe. It was my way, in other words, of saying that I did not believe life on Earth was intelligently designed. With hindsight I should have guessed how easy it would be to twist! I still see frequent tweets and blogs saying things like ‘Dawkins, the man who doesn’t believe in God but believes in little green men’. However, the distortion of what I said is actually small beer compared to the rest of the film. My colleague Michael Ruse was stitched up in an analogous way, exploiting his own sincerity as an honest educator and twisting it to a dishonest agenda. The film even went so far as to blame Darwin for Hitler! (It’s doubtful that Hitler ever read Darwin, whose name does not appear even once in Mein Kampf.)

  Actually, my bending over backwards was even more generous than the interviewer or his duplicitous producer realized. Apologists for ‘intelligent design’ make no bones about who the ‘designer’ is when they are talking to the faithful: the God of the Jewish/Christian Bible, of course. However, there are times when they try to pretend that their case is a purely scientific one which would work just as well if the designer were an alien from outer space. In America, they need to put it that way in order not to fall foul of the US constitutional separation between church and state, when they try to argue for ‘intelligent design’ being taught in science classes. When the interviewer asked me if I could imagine any conceivable circumstances under which life on this planet might have been intelligently designed, my mentioning of aliens was a conscious and deliberate bending over backwards to be more than fair to the apologists whom – little did I know – he was supporting.

  I’ve probably been fortunate in having experienced only two such episodes of outright dishonesty. And I don’t want to make too much of what were, after all, rare occurrences among literally hundreds of television interviews over many years. Even so, such dishonesty has a disproportionately malign effect, in that it undermines one’s natural impulse to trust people, a benign impulse the loss of which makes life the poorer. As a very different example of the same kind of thing, Lalla and I were once deceived by a young woman (a tutorial student of mine) into believing she was mortally ill with cancer. It eventually turned out that the only thing wrong with her was a version of Munchausen’s Syndrome (the strange mental disorder whose sufferers feign illness), but before this was discovered Lalla had spent many hours sitting with her in hospital, holding her hand while she underwent painful tests. As soon as the doctors rumbled her, she instantly refused to see Lalla ever again, presumably out of embarrassment. We never discovered how many of her other stories were also lies – for instance, her claim to be a professional trumpet player. We both agreed that the worst aspect of this episode was the way it undermined our natural human kindness and desire to help disadvantaged people. Fortunately the undermining was only temporary, and Lalla continues, to this day, to devote a sizeable majority of her waking hours to unpaid, and highly skilled, charitable work.

  Channel Four again

  After Break the Science Barrier in 1996, I didn’t get back into presenting full-length television documentaries until ten years later when I began my long and fruitful association with the independent producer/director Russell Barnes. Russell and I have worked together now on eleven hours of documentary television, spread over five different programmes on Channel Four. The first of these was about religion, broadcast in 2006 under the title Root of All Evil?. The question mark was Channel Four’s sole concession to my distaste for the title. No single thing is the root of all evil, although religion, when it hits its stride, makes a pretty good go of it.

  The budget of the film must have been quite generous, because our entire crew travelled to America, and also to Jerusalem and Lourdes. Lourdes served as a gently mocked monument to human gullibility, a gullibility born, perhaps, of desperation among the unwell. Lalla told me of her first visit to Lourdes many years earlier, in the company of the actor Malcolm McDowell (star of films such as If and A Clockwork Orange). They stopped their car at the top of the hill in Lourdes, and Malcolm ran wildly all the way down, shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I can walk! I can walk! I can walk!’ Did the pilgrims take it in their stride as yet another miracle such as their faith and hope had led them to expect?

  Russell encouraged me, when interviewing the Lourdes pilgrims, to hide my scepticism and just let them talk. I also interviewed a resident Catholic priest. He appeared not to believe in miraculous cures himself but – and this is so typical of the religious mind – he didn’t seem to care whether they were real or not. It was enough that the pilgrims believed they might be cured, and that this gave them comfort. For him, the real miracle was the pilgrims’ faith. For me, a real miracle would have to include a cure (if not the regrowth of an amputated limb) and, as I pointed out – to his complete lack of consternation – the statistical cure rate at Lourdes is no more than would be expected by chance.

  In all our films Russell encouraged me to remain quietly polite when interviewing creationists and the like. It amounts to giving them the rope to hang themselves. I tested the method almost to destruction in a later film made with Russell, The Genius of Charles Darwin, for which I interviewed Wendy Wright, president of ‘Concerned Women for America’, as an influential creationist. Her repeated refrain of ‘Show me the evidence, show me the evidence, show me the evidence’ in the face of – in the teeth of – clear and overwhelming evidence has become legendary on the internet, and so, it has to be said, has my patience in the (fake-smiling) face of her. I take no credit for it; I was simply following the director’s instructions and fighting down my more natural – and less gentlemanly – impulses.

  It was even harder to fight them down in some of the interviews for Root of All Evil?, which exposed me to actively unpleasant individuals: the snarl-smiling Ted Haggard, for example. We concentrated most of our American filming in Colorado Springs because it has become a hotbed of Christian revivalism, while the ‘Garden of the Gods’, in the foothills of the Rockies just outside the town, provided some magnificent backdrops for filming pieces to camera, for example on the metaphor of ‘Mount Improbable’ (see page 417). Whole areas of new (and, surprisingly for America, dull) housing in Colorado Springs have become de facto fundamentalist ghettos, and we went to one of them to film a decent but naive young family who were loyal regulars in ‘Pastor Ted’s’ vast congregation.

  Ted Haggard was a small man in a big church (‘was’ because he has since fallen from grace in a way that I won’t spell out because I don’t do Schadenfreude). We watched in amazement as his sheep flocked into the gigantic car park in their sedans and pickup trucks, clutching their bibles or prayer books. We listened in even greater amazement to the huge amplifiers booming out God-rock while the people jigged up and down the aisles with both arms raised to heaven and beatific expressions on their faith-doped faces. Finally, Pastor Ted himself strutted his entrance on to the stage, grinning wolfishly and encouraging the 14,000-strong congregation to intone the word ‘obedience’ in docile chorus. ‘OBEDIENCE.’ After the service he gave me the full arm-around-the-shoulder g
reeting as we started our interview. He seemed mildly flattered when I compared his service to ‘a Nuremberg Rally of which Dr Goebbels might have been proud’ but, to be fair to him, it seems possible he had never heard of Nuremberg or indeed Joseph Goebbels. Things didn’t turn nasty until I questioned his understanding of evolution. But however nasty they turned, nothing could shake the carnassial grin.

  Later, our gifted cameraman Tim Cragg and I were packing up the kit after Tim had taken a few final shots in the car park when a pickup truck drove up fast and slammed to a halt just short of hitting us. Pastor Ted was at the wheel and he was furious, far more so than during the interview. With hindsight, we guessed that he probably went straight from the interview to Google my name and discovered who I was. At any rate, he berated us for abusing his hospitality, calling particular attention to his generosity in giving us tea with milk. He stressed the milk twice. And then, weirdest of all, he said to me, in accusatory tones: ‘You called my children animals.’ I was too baffled to reply. Afterwards the crew and I discussed what it might possibly mean. The consensus was that, although I hadn’t explicitly mentioned either animals or the Haggard children, it would be implicit in the mind of a creationist that any evolutionist must regard all humans as animals. Correctly, as it happens, although why Pastor Ted chose to mention his own children rather than the entire human race was as puzzling as his homing in on milk in the tea. Perhaps he didn’t mean his own biological children but his churchgoing flock, doped up on childlike ‘OBEDIENCE’. Who can tell?

  While ordering us off his land, Haggard threatened (among other things) to seize our film footage, a threat which our crew took seriously enough to carry it with us when we went out to dinner that evening, rather than leave it in Tim’s hotel room. That sounds paranoid now, but Colorado Springs is such a hotbed of fundamentalist religion, and Pastor Ted’s ‘obedient’ congregation so enormous, it was perhaps not totally unrealistic to think there was a risk.

  Also in Colorado, I interviewed Michael Bray, another clergyman (although I’m not sure how much that means in America: the title ‘Reverend’ seems to be something you can acquire with the bare minimum of effort, complete with tax breaks and unearned prestige, without a qualification in theology or indeed anything else).1 Bray had been in jail for violent attacks on doctors who carried out abortions, and I questioned him about his attitude and that of his friend Paul Hill, another ‘Reverend’, who had been executed in Florida for murdering an abortion doctor. I got the impression both men were sincere, honestly believing in the righteousness of their cause. Indeed, among Hill’s last words were that he expected a ‘great reward in Heaven’: a chilling example of Steven Weinberg’s much-quoted dictum: ‘With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.’ And indeed, I suppose if you really do think a fetus is a ‘baby’ (as these people sincerely seem to do) you can put together some kind of moral case for taking the law into your own hands. At any rate, I couldn’t find it in me to dislike Michael Bray the way I disliked Ted Haggard. I wished I could have found a way to talk some sense into him, but there wasn’t time. Weirdly, he wanted to have a photograph taken of himself with me. I didn’t know for what purpose, and I’m afraid I declined.

  One can make a similarly sympathetic case for ‘Pastor’ Keenan Roberts, another of my Colorado interviewees, although he was a less appealing character. He ran an institution called Hell House, devoted to performing short plays designed to scare children out of their wits with threats of being barbecued for all eternity. We filmed rehearsals of two of these playlets. The lead character of both was a sadistically roaring Satan, noisily gloating, in the ‘Ha-Haaar’ manner of a Victorian melodrama baronet, over the eternal torments prepared for various sinners – a woman having an abortion in one play, a pair of lesbian lovers in the other. Afterwards, I interviewed Pastor Roberts. He told me his target audience was twelve-year-olds. I bridled at this and questioned the morality of threatening children with everlasting torture. His defence was robust: hell is such a terrible place that any measures to dissuade people, even or maybe especially children, from going there are justified. He had no answer to my question as to why he worshipped a God capable of sending children to hell, or why he believed in hell at all. It was simply his faith, and I had no entitlement to question his faith.

  As with Michael Bray, I could kind of see where he was coming from. If you really do believe literally in hell, if you really do think abortion is murder, and if you really do think people will roast in hell for ever if they fall in love with a member of their own sex, I suppose you could say that any preventive measures, however illegal or however cruel, are the lesser of evils. Indeed, from that point of view, it’s hard to see how any sincere believer could do anything but evangelize to try to save people from such a terrible fate. A bit like pulling people back from falling over a cliff. You’d feel bound to do it, even if you had to be pretty rough about it: another example of Weinberg’s dictum.

  I could find no such justification, however – not even a partial justification – for Joseph Cohen, alias Yousef al-Khattab. Russell and I and the crew were in Jerusalem, trying to get to grips with the religious enmities that plague this ancient city. We spoke to a pleasantly cultivated, educated Jewish spokesman, and we spoke to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who used our local ‘fixer’ as interpreter. Seeking a middle way, somebody who could see both points of view, what could seem a more natural choice than a Jewish settler who had converted to Islam: Yousef al-Khattab, the former Joseph Cohen from New York? Surely he was in the best possible position to see both sides? How wrong we were. We found him in his small shop in a Jerusalem back street, selling perfumes. He greeted me cordially enough, but as soon as the camera was switched on so was the vitriol, a vitriol heated up by the authentic zeal of the convert. Having been a Jew, his most passionate hatred was reserved for the Jews. He openly expressed his admiration for Hitler. He longed for world domination secured by the victorious Soldiers of Allah. He refused to condemn the 9/11 raids. He attacked me as, in some warped way, responsible for western decadence, reserving his especial disgust for ‘the way you dress your women’. I momentarily let my anger show through as I made the obvious retort: ‘I don’t dress women, they dress themselves.’

  In most of my films with Russell Barnes we have worked with the same cameraman, Tim Cragg, and the same sound man, Adam Prescod. Tim and Adam have worked together as a team on many more films all around the world, often with Russell. I have come to value friendship with all three men, and the kind of camaraderie that comes from working together day after day, travelling together, eating together, laughing together at the same absurdities, even getting thrown out of the same megachurch car park together. Tim is a handsome, smiling fellow, so dedicated to his craft that he never really stops looking at the world through an imaginary viewfinder or a real one, constantly seeking interesting, rewarding camera angles. Russell would happily send Tim off to get useful background footage on his own, knowing that he had no need of a director. Adam is similarly dedicated to, and similarly good at, his craft of sound recordist. He and Tim make a great team, knowing each other’s game like doubles tennis partners. Someone we interviewed took one look at Adam’s dreadlocks and dark skin and started asking him about reggae music. A classic case of judging a book by its cover, as Adam himself jovially observed to me (whenever I heard him humming to himself it was more likely to be J. S. Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello). As for Russell himself, he has the same virtues as a documentary director that I first identified in Jeremy Taylor. The best directors, such as Jeremy and Russell, are like academic scholars in that they become true experts in the subject of their current documentary, reading up the original research literature and visiting and talking to experts. Then, having planned their film, shot it and edited it, they switch to another subject and start reading up all over again. Does this chameleon-like switching make for a more satisfying
ly varied life than that of the academic which it superficially resembles? I could readily imagine so.

  For later films, I also enjoyed working with Russell’s business partner and fellow director Molly Milton. Preternaturally cheerful and friendly, she would charm her way through any barriers and breeze our whole crew through any red tape, come what might. Her Pollyanna-ish ways beguiled me too, but occasionally with mixed feelings. For the film Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life, she telephoned to ask me to go to India to interview the Dalai Lama. I was convinced (as it turned out, rightly) that the great spiritual leader would be much too busy to talk to me, and I used this as my de facto method of saying no to Molly: ‘Har har har, well, if you har har har succeed in booking the Dalai Lama har har har, I’ll go to India with you har har har.’ I assumed that my laughing challenge was equivalent to a no, put the phone down and thought no more of it.

  About three weeks later, Molly telephoned in high excitement: ‘He’s agreed, he’s agreed, he’s agreed, we can go to India, you promised you’d go if I booked the Dalai Lama, he’s said yes, he’s said yes, he’s said yes, we’re off to India, we’re off to see the Dalai Lama.’