‘Either might be preferred, sir, depending on the gravity of the offence.’
‘So, as I was saying, when I was caught perpetrating some malfeasance or misdemeanour, I expected the swift retribution to land fairly and squarely on the Woofter trouser seat, not some other poor sap’s innocent derrière, if you get my meaning?’
‘Certainly, sir. The principle of the scapegoat has always been of dubious ethical and jurisprudential validity. Modern penal theory casts doubt on the very idea of retribution, even where it is the malefactor himself who is punished. It is correspondingly harder to justify vicarious punishment of an innocent substitute. I am pleased to hear that you received proper chastisement, sir.’
‘Quite, Jarvis.’
‘I am so sorry sir, I did not intend . . .’
‘Enough, Jarvis. This is not dudgeon. Umbrage has not been taken. We Woofters know when to move swiftly on. There’s more. I hadn’t finished my train of thought. Where was I?’
‘Your disquisition had just touched upon the injustice of vicarious punishment, sir.’
‘Yes, Jarvis, you put it very well. Injustice is right. Injustice hits the coconut with a crack that resounds around the shires. And it gets worse. Now, follow me like a puma here. Jesus was God, am I right?’
‘According to the Trinitarian doctrine promulgated by the early Church Fathers, sir, Jesus was the second person of the Triune God.’
‘Just as I thought. So God – the same God who made the world and was kitted out with enough nous to dive in and leave Einstein gasping at the shallow end, God the all-powerful and all-knowing creator of everything that opens and shuts, this paragon above the collarbone, this fount of wisdom and power – couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to turn himself over to the gendarmerie and have himself served up on toast. Jarvis, answer me this. If God wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Why the torture? Whence the whips and scorpions, the nails and the agony? Why not just forgive us? Try that on your Victrola, Jarvis.’
‘Really sir, you surpass yourself. That is most eloquently put. And if I might take the liberty, you could even have gone further. According to many highly esteemed passages of traditional theological writing, the primary sin for which Jesus was atoning was the Original Sin of Adam.’
‘Dash it, Jarvis, you’re right. I remember making the point with some vim and élan. In fact, I rather think that may have been what tipped the scales in my favour and handed me the jackpot in that scripture knowledge fixture. But do go on, Jarvis, you interest me strangely. What was Adam’s sin? Something pretty fruity, I imagine. Something calculated to shake hell’s foundations?’
‘Tradition has it that he was apprehended eating an apple, sir.’
‘Scrumping? That was it? That was the sin that Jesus had to redeem – or atone according to choice? I’ve heard of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but a crucifixion for a scrumping? Jarvis you’ve been at the cooking sherry. You are not serious, of course?’
‘Genesis does not specify the precise species of the purloined comestible, sir, but tradition has long held it to have been an apple. The point is academic, however, since modern science tells us that Adam did not in fact exist, and therefore was presumably in no position to sin.’
‘Jarvis, this takes the chocolate digestive, not to say the mottled oyster. It was bad enough that Jesus was tortured to atone for the sins of lots of other fellows. It got worse when you told me it was only one other fellow. It got worse still when that one fellow’s sin turned out to be nothing worse than half-inching a D’Arcy Spice. And now you tell me the blighter never existed in the first place. Jarvis, I am not known for my size in hats, but even I can see that this is completely doolally.’
‘I would not have ventured to use the epithet myself, sir, but there is much in what you say. Perhaps in mitigation I should mention that modern theologians regard the story of Adam, and his sin, as symbolic rather than literal.’
‘Symbolic, Jarvis? Symbolic? But the whips weren’t symbolic. The nails in the cross weren’t symbolic. If, Jarvis, when I was bending over that chair in the Rev Aubrey’s study, I had protested that my misdemeanour, or malfeasance if you prefer, had been merely symbolic, what do you think he would have said?’
‘I can readily imagine that a pedagogue of his experience would have treated such a defensive plea with a generous measure of scepticism, sir.’
‘Indeed you are right, Jarvis, Upcock was a tough bimbo. I can still feel the twinges in damp weather. But perhaps I didn’t quite skewer the point, or nub, in re the symbolism?’
‘Well, sir, some might consider you a trifle hasty in your judgment. A theologian would probably aver that Adam’s symbolic sin was not so very negligible, since what it symbolised was all the sins of mankind, including those yet to be committed.’
‘Jarvis, this is pure apple sauce. “Yet to be committed?” Let me ask you to cast your mind back yet again to that doom-laden scene in the beak’s study. Suppose I had said, from my vantage point doubled up over the armchair, “Headmaster, when you have administered the statutory six of the juiciest, may I respectfully request another six in consideration of all the other misdemeanours, or peccadilloes, which I may or may not decide to commit at any time into the indefinite future. Oh, and make that all future misdemeanours committed not just by me but by any of my pals.” Jarvis, it doesn’t add up. It doesn’t float the boat or ring the bell.’
‘I hope you will not take it as a liberty, sir, if I say that I am inclined to agree with you. And now, if you will excuse me, sir, I would like to resume decorating the room with holly and mistletoe, in preparation for the annual yuletide festivities.’1
There are good verses as well as nasty ones in both the Old and the New Testaments. But there has to be some criterion for choosing which verses are good and which bad. To avoid circularity, that criterion must come from outside the scriptures. It is hard to piece together where our dominant criteria for morality come from, but they are clearly exhibited in what I called the ‘shifting moral Zeitgeist’. We today are twenty-first-century moralists, unmistakably labelled with twenty-first-century values. Even the most advanced and progressive thinkers of the nineteenth century, men like T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, would appal us with their racism and sexism if they were to enter a modern dinner party or web chatroom. Huxley and Lincoln both took the inferiority of black men for granted, and many of the US Founding Fathers owned slaves. Most of the world’s democracies introduced female suffrage as late as the 1920s, France in 1944, Italy in 1946, Greece in 1952 and Switzerland not until a staggering 1971. Justifications for opposing women’s suffrage unbelievably included: ‘It’s not necessary because women just vote with their husbands anyway.’ The moral Zeitgeist moves inexorably in one direction, with the result that even the most progressive thinkers of the nineteenth century tend to lag behind the least progressive thinkers of the twenty-first. It is by the standards of a civilized twenty-first-century conversation that we cherry-pick the Bible and decide that this verse is bad but that one good. And since we evidently have preferred and agreed standards for cherry-picking, why bother to go to the Bible at all, if we seek moral guidance? Why not go straight to our moral Zeitgeist and cut out the scriptural middleman?
There are, on the other hand, good reasons to go back to scripture as literature, because, as I also said in The God Delusion, our whole culture is so bound up with it that you can’t take your allusions or understand your history if you are biblically illiterate. Indeed, I filled two pages with close-packed biblical quotations, phrases familiar to everyone but whose scriptural origins are known to few. I am strongly in favour of teaching children about religion, even as I passionately oppose indoctrinating children in the particular religious tradition into which they happen to have been born. I have repeatedly called attention to the strange fact that, although we would cringe if we met a phrase like ‘Existentialist child’ or ‘Marxist child’ or ‘P
ostmodernist child’ or ‘Keynesian child’ or ‘Monetarist child’, our whole society, secular as well as religious, blithely fails to cringe on hearing ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’. We need to raise consciousness of the unacceptability of such phrases, exactly as feminists succeeded in raising consciousness about phrases like ‘one man one vote’. Please, never speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child or a Muslim child. Speak, instead, of ‘a child of Catholic parents’ or ‘a child of Muslim parents’. Alarmist demographic calculations concluding, for example, that ‘France will have a Muslim majority by the year so and so’ are entirely based on the gratuitous presumption that children automatically inherit the religion of their parents. That is an assumption that must be fought, not unthinkingly taken for granted.
It’s a recurrent question, one that has often been put to me since publication of The God Delusion, whether we should be conciliatory and ‘accommodationist’ when arguing with religious people, or whether to be totally frank. I mentioned this earlier in connection with public questions put to me by Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I suspect that each of the two approaches works well, but with different audiences. I once heard a well-received lecture entitled ‘Don’t be a dick’ in which the speaker asked the audience for a show of hands: ‘If somebody called you an idiot, would you be more or less likely to be persuaded to their point of view?’ Needless to say, the vote was overwhelmingly negative. But the speaker should have asked a different question. ‘If you were a third party, sitting on the fence, listening to an argument between two people, and one of them gave good reasons to think the other was an idiot, would that bias you in favour of one or the other?’ I hope I never stoop to gratuitous personal insults, but I do think humorous or satirical ridicule can be an effective weapon. It must hit its target accurately. The American satirical cartoon South Park once included me in a lampoon. It’s an instructive illustration because half of it was an accurately targeted satirical ‘touché moment’ (a future century in which the atheist ‘movement’ had split schismatically into warring factions) and the other half was not aimed at any target at all and could not be called satire in any sense (a cartoon of me buggering a bald transsexual).
If there are passages of The God Delusion which can be read by the sensitive as strongly critical if not actually ‘strident’, the book both ends and begins gently. The last section, entitled ‘The mother of all burkas’, is an extended metaphor. The life-impoverishing slit in the burka stands for the narrowness of a pre-scientific world-view, and I go on to illustrate various ways in which the slit can be widened, with consequent enhancement of life and its joys. Science widens it, for example, by showing what a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to our senses.
The beginning of the book is a generous reminiscence about a chaplain at my old school who, as a boy, was lying with his face in the grass and was inspired, by a moment of revelation, to embrace the religion which was to become his life’s path. ‘Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it.’ I respected his epiphany enough to say that, ‘in another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden’.
The reference to Ursa Major was consciously prompted by the memory of a poem, written by my mother as a girl, which concluded with the following lines:
The Great Bear stands upon his head,
His paws among the apple boughs
That, dark against a darker sky,
Wave in the wind and tap their twigs
With little sounds forlorn and sad
Within the night’s dark emptiness.
My opening page ended with a warmly indulgent reminiscence of how we used to distract our chaplain in divinity lessons by asking him to recall his wartime service in the RAF; and I quoted, in his honour, John Betjeman’s gently affectionate poem, ‘Our padre’.
Our padre is an old sky pilot,
Severely now they’ve clipped his wings,
But still the flagstaff in the Rect’ry garden
Points to Higher Things.
After my book was published, I was delighted when an old boy of the same school sent a verse in to my website, RichardDawkins.net:
I knew your flying chaplain,
As my Housemaster I oughta.
While you embraced his liberal views
I just embraced his daughter.
Whatever the faults of a British private school education, Oundle must have something going for it if it produces alumni who can turn out that sort of thing.
FULL CIRCLE
I’LL end where I began, on my seventieth birthday, among a hundred guests at the dinner that Lalla put on for me in New College Hall. After the choir had sung nostalgic songs, after speeches by Lalla herself, by Alan Grafen, my star pupil and later mentor, and by Sir John Boyd, former Ambassador to Japan and then Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, I made a speech of my own. It culminated in a little poem (verse, rather; I don’t think I would dignify it as a poem) filled with parodic allusions – to A. E. Housman (favourite of my youth, and also of Bill Hamilton who indeed reminded me of the melancholy protagonist of A Shropshire Lad), to the Book of Psalms, to George and Ira Gershwin, to our national game of cricket, to Shakespeare, G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Marvell, Dylan Thomas and Keats.
Now of my three score years and ten
Seventy won’t come again:
And take from seventy springs the lot . . .
Subtraction tells you what I’ve got.
But only if you’re so alarmist
As to believe the ancient psalmist.
For what is said in holy writ
I’m one who doesn’t care a bit.
Away with actuarial mystics!
I’ll throw my lot with hard statistics.
The bible may be old and quaint . . .
Necess’rily so . . . it ain’t
(I’ll go along with George and Ira).
Across the Reaper’s bows I’ll fire a
Warning shot. I’m not about
To let life’s Umpire give me out,
‘Leg before’, or ‘caught and bowled’,
At least until I’m really old
And reach that bourn – the one we learn,
From which no travellers return:
That decent inn – no Marriott –
Presaged by time’s winged chariot.
Still time to gentle that good night.
Time to set the world alight.
Time, yet new rainbows to unweave,
Ere going on Eternity Leave.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For advice, help and support of various kinds, I should like to thank Lalla Ward, Rand Russell, Marian Stamp Dawkins, Sally Gaminara, Hilary Redmon, Gillian Somerscales, Sheila Lee, John Brockman, Alan Grafen, Lars Edvard Iverson, David Raeburn, Michael Rodgers, Juliet Dawkins, Jane Brockmann, Lawrence Krauss, Jeremy Taylor, Russell Barnes, Jennifer Thorp, Bart Voorzanger, Miranda Hale, Steven Pinker, Lisa Bruna, Alice Dyson, Lucy Wainwright, Carolyn Porco, Robyn Blumner, Victor Flynn, Alan Canon, Ted Kaehler, Eddie Tabash, Lary Shaffer, Richard Brown.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but any who have been overlooked are invited to get in touch with the publishers.
Sir Peter Medawar: © Godfrey Argent Studio; Nikolaas Tinbergen: courtesy Lary Shaffer; Douglas Adams: © LFI/Photoshot; Carl Sagan, c. 1984: NASA/Cosmos; David Attenborough and RD: © Alastair Thain; John Maynard Smith: courtesy the University of Sussex; Bill Hamilton: photo courtesy Marian Dawkins
Cutting from the Gainesville Sun, 11 May 1979: courtesy Jane Brockmann; view of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Center, Panama, 1977: © STRI; Michael Robinson; Fritz Vollrath: photos supplied by the author; Sphex ichneumon
eus: courtesy Jane Brockmann
Schlosshotel, Kronberg: © imageBROKER/Alamy; Karl Popper, 1989: IMAGNO/Votava/TopFoto; first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Evanston, Illinois, August 1989: courtesy Professor Edward O. Wilson; RD at Melbu, 1989: photo by Tone Brevik courtesy Nordland Akademi, Melbu; Betty Pettersen, 1992: courtesy Nordland Akademi, Melbu; general view of Melbu: photo Odd Johan Forsnes courtesy Nordland Akademi, Melbu; Jim Lovell and Alexei Leonov; Starmus conference, June 2011: both © Max Alexander; spaceman drawing: STARMUS courtesy Garik Israelien
RD and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Howard University, September 2010: Bruce F Press, Bruce F Press Photography; RD and Lawrence Krauss: photo supplied by the author
RD and Lalla, 1992: © Norman McBeath; RD and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, Oxford, February 2012: Andrew Winning/Reuters/Corbis; Robert Winston and RD, Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 2006: © Retna/Photoshot; RD and Joan Bakewell, Hay Festival, May 2014: © Keith Morris News/Alamy; RD at a book-signing: Mark Coggins
Alan Grafen and Bill Hamilton at the Great Annual Punt Race, mid-1970s: both courtesy Marian Dawkins; RD, Francis Crick, Lalla, Richard Gregory, Oxford, early 1990s: photo by Odile Crick supplied by the author; RD having received an honorary degree from Richard Attenborough, University of Sussex, July 2005: photo courtesy the author; Mark Ridley, c. 1978: courtesy Marian Dawkins; Great Annual Punt Race, c. 1976: photo Richard Brown
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, London 1991 and Japan 1992, left-hand page: all stills from Growing Up in the Universe; right-hand page: all © The Yomiuri Shimbun
RD in front of the Triton: courtesy Edith Widder; Raja Ampat, Indonesia: ©Images & Stories/Alamy; RD in a canoe: photo Ian Kellet supplied by the author; RD on Heron Island: photo supplied by the author; Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef © Hilke Maunder/Alamy; Edith Widder in Triton; RD, Mark Taylor and Tsunemi Kubodera in Triton; giant squid: all courtesy Edith Widder
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 42
