The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  But the most important sentence I pick up in that passage is his assertion: ‘I dislike unfairness even more.’ I think he is unfair to religion throughout his book.

  He is unfairly dismissive of ancient religions, totally fails to contextualise them, shows no historical respect and merely scorns them from our present pinnacle of knowledge (which will surely pass in its time). For instance, writing of the Australian Aboriginal tribes: ‘on the one hand aboriginals are superb survivors under conditions that test their practical skills to the utmost.’ He is quoting, with approval, Kim Sterelong. Richard Dawkins (in his own words, I presume, as there is no indication they are a quotation) goes on to write: ‘the very same peoples who are so savvy about the natural world and how to survive in it simultaneously clutter their minds with beliefs that are palpably false and for which the word “useless” is a generous understatement.’

  It is worrying that he does not understand what is really going on. A people, without a tittle of the banks of knowledge available to us now, without access to the information in Newton’s generation, in that of Avicenna, the Romans, the Greeks, even as far back as the Babylonians, felt compelled to construct systems which explained the world to them. What now seems to Richard Dawkins, dismissively, as useless ‘clutter’ was an elaborate fabric based on dreams, intuitions, experiences and hopes – all of them literally stabs in the dark that lay about them. But the dark was what they had. And they made an intricate web of explanation out of it. So it was with so many civilisations who struggled to make sense of the world in times that were without a twig of scientific knowledge. Some of their metaphors were sustaining, ingenious, admirable.

  We may, if we want to feel superior, merely scoff at them now. It is not difficult, given our current constellations of information, to dismantle those ancient systems. It is, though, grossly unfair and a lack of intellectual energy and respect to fail to attempt to understand them. Nor would a little sympathy have come amiss.

  So – trees were worshipped as were double-breasted mountains, roguish and tyrannical deities feasting in clouded-capped hills and certain animals were declared to be sacred. The ocean was worshipped and so – and most of all – was the sun. Practices naïve to us, in their time served a purpose. It is the purpose which is at the heart of it. Why was it so constantly pursued? Why did it matter so much to peoples to find ways to understand the world? Those are the questions.

  Is it all to be written off with a ‘clutter’ and ‘useless’? Is all prehistory just a trivial prologue to what is here presented as the ultimate rather supremacist creeds of atheism and science? If so, the argument needs to be made with rather more than a sideswipe and a sneer. There were questions out there and our ancestors tried to address them with the material to hand.

  Where did plagues come from and why? What was death and birth? What came before us, what was to come after us? Why were we here at all? Did thunder mean the anger of the gods and rain their benison or, depending, their drowning fury? I see them as bewildered but brave. Every bit as intelligent as us where it most matters: survival. They would live where we would starve. Should the Aborigines not be venerated for that and their, let us call it religion, accepted for what it was: their explanation?

  In an uninterrupted succession, Christianity follows in that tradition. It is itself a compound of many traditions, almost an anthology of religions. It came into history when belief was at least the equal of observed evidence and while that can now be repudiated I see no reason why it cannot be respected and examined for what it was. It was a desperately needed explanation. It provided the essential satisfaction for humankind’s innate and intractable rage of curiosity – to know the workings of the world. And obviously very annoyingly for Richard Dawkins, it still does so for many people.

  The Aborigines and others like them deserve more than derision, more than hilarity, more than easy superiority, an easy dismissal. They were at a stage: they were us, back then. They flailed around; unlike us, of course.

  What happened was that in many cases – in ancient Egypt most spectacularly, but also in Christianity – these imaginings and guesses and profound longings for an answer became institutionalised. The faith system which was often the spine of the knowledge system became the body of the state, the principality, or the monarchical system. The Church turned consoling convictions into stone. The powerful saw another window of opportunity for the exercise of power and moved into the Church. The faith systems were colonised by the engines of societal ambition. The very innocence of faith made it malleable.

  But unfair, I think, to mock those early gods and goddesses and saints. The number of Our Ladies (of Fatima, Lourdes, Guadeloupe, Akita, etc., etc.) are roundly scorned by Richard Dawkins. They were real to some people once. Probably people not educated enough to be atheists but still human beings trying to make sense of life or come to peace with it. Yes, they became exploited. And no, their miracles did not take place and their place in an unproved heaven is a chimera. But I think merely to deride and dismiss them is again unfair: rather like stamping on those who cannot defend themselves. A bit like deciding that certain casts of mind are simply not in the same league as that of the alpha-educated atheist and therefore to be ignored. Why not attempt to understand, and point out how new knowledge has made this questionable or obsolete? And why not let people get on with the old ways unsneered at, if they want to, if it’s harmless?

  In the very paragraph after his gleeful knocking of the Ladies of Lourdes and so on, the author writes: ‘How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums ? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate God? Who cares?’

  If anyone ought to care it is a man who has received a brilliant and privileged education, inherited and been encouraged to develop a fine mind, and been deservedly successful in his chosen field: Richard Dawkins. He ought to care about the gods and goddesses of the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings, if only because all three cultures had a vital and lasting impact on his own civilisation – in language, thought, technology and science. They cared a lot about their gods. All three peoples saw their gods and goddesses as integral to their civilisation. But another swipe is all they get from our twenty-first-century mega man.

  The God Delusion is particularly good on the brainwashing of children. But I have a problem here. If parents think that the better way for their children to thrive in their world is to become familiar with that world and be prepared for that world, then what he calls ‘brainwashing’ can become politic parental guidance. Certainly Richard Dawkins’s youthful immersion in Anglicanism to prepare him for a successful Oxford life and an English career appears to have done him no harm at all. He easily cast it off as so many do. Yet he may have picked up some useful tips about the establishment of his day, how to work the system. He may have found his prose improved by contact with the King James Version – Anglicanism might even have left the young Dawkins enhanced.

  My book wants to look at what has been neglected: a history that no longer dares to speak its name. A history of positive achievement catalysed by the King James Bible and the Protestant movement.

  Richard Dawkins scarcely mentions these. You could argue that in his broad sweep there was not the space for such a diversion as positive thinking. Or that he was writing a polemic, and the gusto and pace of that must not be allowed to stub its toes on stubborn contradictions and awkward facts. And he could say that he did, indeed, refer to the lasting value of the language of the King James Version, but he would, I hope, be honest enough to admit he shovelled it in hurriedly and made no great play of it.

  In fact the language is only one great play, only one lasting and enriching unexpected consequence. Would it have appeared without men and women prepared to die for that Bible, to see it burned and to be burned for it, to spend a lifetime’s hoarded scholarship on its shape and sentence, would it have
happened without that? These men and women believed in a Sky God, in Eternal Life, in Purgatory, in the Resurrection, in the Virgin Mary. And these men produced the King James Version. Perhaps the one could not have come about without the other and at the very least that should be acknowledged and its root causes investigated carefully.

  Then there is the crucial role in the development of democracy, in the abolition of slavery, in the relief and education of the poor, in large-scale philanthropy and the evolution of social equality. Why do these – and other – positive factors so rarely if ever feature on the Dawkins scorecard? The positive record is there to be seen as much as the negative.

  There are those who respect Richard Dawkins’s lack of faith but wonder why he is so intolerant of their lack of his lack. Is atheism the final conclusion, the end of all thought about religion ? Is everything about everything that preceded it of no more account? Are we now living on the summit of human achievement ? I doubt it.

  He is convinced that the indoctrination of children is entirely to be deplored and I agree with him: it can be wicked. But what if that ‘indoctrination’ is a form of teaching that helps children lead a happier and fuller life? What if it is a rather lackadaisical, half-hearted sort of tolerant ‘indoctrination’ as it certainly was in my experience? Those of us in the boys section of the church choir were as susceptible as any other boys to tales of hellfire, but we did not take it then all that seriously. They were about the same as ghost stories, not as frightening as the atom bomb, less worrying than the teacher with the cane, not as scary as the school bullies. We made up our own minds and found our own ways through.

  The consolation of religion gets short shrift with Dawkins, but to need it is no small yearning for some people. He appears to have little or no empathy for the utter desperation people find themselves in and the comfort which the depths of the Bible’s promises can bring. What is the full meaning of comfort? Is it only for the under-educated and therefore not worth examination?

  There is the bizarre paragraph about medieval cathedrals. ‘A mediaeval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling or for any recognisably useful purpose.’ That is one way to look at it. Another is to think oneself into a period when prayer was considered ‘useful’, when ‘worship’ of God was considered ‘useful’, when the glorifi cation of the Creator was considered ‘useful’, often by educated men and women. All these uses were part of a religious society which in some countries has come and gone but it was like that here once and among brilliant folk too.

  People sometimes cleverer than us were living in that age of belief and if asked the questions posed by Richard Dawkins they would have had little problem in answering him. And one unforeseen consequence, one impact of this ‘usefulness’ was the construction of supreme works of art. So often the greatest works of art have been the by-product of religion. Surely it is worthwhile to investigate what, if any, the connection might be.

  We underestimate the intelligence of the past at the peril of misunderstanding the past. Context is key. To take a rather extravagant example. Richard Dawkins has great fun with ‘the Four Choirs of Angelic Hosts, arranged as Nine Orders: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels (Leaders of all hosts) and just plain old Angels, including our closest friends, the ever-watchful Guardian Angels’. He goes on to say: ‘It is shamelessly invented.’ Quite. Just like science fiction, perhaps? Or the brilliant novels of a close Dawkins ally, Philip Pullman?

  Why could it not be the amusement of clever monks and nuns? They were confined to a small patch of knowledge-acreage compared with what we have today. But they held on to their right to be inventive; to amuse themselves, to elaborate the heavenly life which they must have seen and sensed as beyond their present grasp. They charged at the impenetrable for sport, a sort of gallant, witty stab in the dark. Could that be an explanation?

  About certain matters I think he is badly off track. Now and then he is just plain wrong, and so wrong it undermines his historical credentials. He writes: ‘It is surely true that black slaves in America were consoled by promises of another life which blunted their dissatisfaction with this one and thereby benefited their owners.’ Leave aside how he can possibly know that ‘black slaves were consoled by promises of another life’. All of them? Some? Which ones? Where’s the evidence? As often, it is partial, anecdotal or altogether absent, as here.

  It is insulting to the African-American slaves to treat them as objects – as their slave owners once did – and see them as so docile, unintelligent, and without spirit that they simply obeyed their masters and took religion as opium. Many of the slaves were not like that. They were often remarkable, brave and intelligent people. Records prove it. Dawkins is so very wrong about them.

  The fact is that access to the King James Bible gave to the many different tribes of slaves a common language, a common religion and an inner force often experienced through their appropriation of Bible stories and messages for their own purposes. It gave them access to politics and strategies for a future. They took it and made it their own. They made it essential in their long, courageous struggle for liberty. This happened again and again, as I point out in a later chapter.

  There is much chaff, much that is bad in religion and Richard Dawkins seizes on it often with glee. There is also, as manifested in the King James Version taken up by the slaves, good wheat to be found, and good guidance to be unearthed. Far from ‘blunting their dissatisfaction’ with this life and benefiting their owners, the Bible as an education and as a cohering force raised their expectation, nourished their anger and fired what became, under the most terrible conditions, revolutionary hope. If Richard Dawkins had searched harder he might have found a more accurate Darwinian message in the survival and advancement of the African-Americans over the last four to five hundred years.

  It is clear that he has not studied the Bible’s effect on slavery. As a scientist he would never allow himself to be so remiss in such a comparably crucial area. So why here? It is embarrassing and raises questions about the authority and trustworthiness of other points he makes. All those other sweeping dismissals – what hard evidence does he have? How carefully is it weighed?

  His Google search engine, so nimble at racing along and picking up statistics and quotations which hammer nails in what he sees as the coffin of religion, has a curious defect. One example will do. He is very fond of quoting and at length the unacceptable ravings of the extreme evangelicals in the Mid-Western Bible Belt in the United States. Yet, though declaring himself a friend and an admirer of Richard Harris, former Bishop of Oxford and a distinguished author, his Google engine seems to have sought out none of his books. Why not? Would a positive Christian intelligence have weakened his case? Is it so weak it can’t bear such an intervention? Would it have spoiled the fun he has in taunting the telly preachers? Is this another example of Dawkins being unfair? As again when he quotes the Bible where it embraces slavery but omits all the quotations that deplore it.

  Richard Dawkins writes: ‘I am not a dualist,’ and then goes on to explain why. He quotes from Paul Bloom who puts dualism most squarely in the minds of young children, though he concedes that this condition persists in some adults. Dualism is defined here as ‘a fundamental split between matter and mind’. But is there another way to look at this differently, that does not demand a split between mind and matter? Is there not another intriguing ‘split’: in the mind itself which can inhabit two or more places simultaneously?

  For what about imagination? When Einstein was asked what was the most important factor in his work, he said, ‘Imagination, above all, imagination.’ When Samuel Beckett wanted to signal the end of things he wrote: ‘Imagine dead. Imagine.’ Knowing that we could not. And when we look at men and women who leap as it were to new thought worlds, it is imagination that takes them there, that conjures words out of the air, as Shakespeare said of the poet’s gift, and gives them �
��a local habitation and a name’. What does that tell us?

  Children move easily into other worlds. A game of football or cricket as a boy often involved us taking on the names of our heroes: ‘I’m Denis Compton; I’m Jackie Milburn.’ (Long-gone stars of respectively cricket and football.) As Richard Dawkins points out, they can have imaginary friends; they can go to see a film and when they come out for some time they can ‘be’ one of the actors they have seen.

  I think it is mistaken to think that this faculty does not persist throughout life. For example, the late Brigid Brophy, a fine novelist, wrote an article on the subject: ‘The Novel as a Takeover Bid’. And so, for many of us, it is. We receive from an author of fiction, most often someone who is a stranger, these infinite combinations of the alphabet. Generally in solitude we translate these intimate revelations into our own experience and they become ‘us’ and we become ‘them’. We are ‘wrapped up’ in them, ‘spellbound’ by them, ‘carried way’ by them, ‘hooked’. Is this not living another life, even lives? And if so does it not have something to say about hitherto ‘unproven’ possibilities of other lives?

  These fabricated people stand outside us. We not only bring them inside, we are also perpetually aware that they stay ‘outside’. In short, we have experience of what is both inside and outside of us. The notion that there is a being, spirit, essence, entity, force, pulse, emanation, otherness ‘out there’ is part of how we experience the world. Without this faculty we would not be able simultaneously to operate on the many levels we do.

  The evidence that we are apparently encoded with this leads me to conclude that the long catalogue of ‘worlds out there’ and all manner of ‘otherness’ is part of our world. It is not psychic or weird but normal. Not to have imagination may be a cause of insanity. The King James Bible provides us with a blazing instance of that majestic and opaque ‘other worldness’.

  Finally, is reason, as Dawkins believes, the only way to understand ourselves and our predicament? ‘The heart has reasons which reason does not know’ – a cliché but like all clichés well worn because found consistently useful. Perhaps, as Francis Crick a co-discoverer of DNA believes, or rather asserts, we shall come to a time when every jot and tittle of every move we make, every step we take, every impulse we feel, every thought we form, every sensation we experience, every sight we see, sound we hear, taste we take will be accessible to mathematical formulations described in minute and inescapable detail. That is a certain outcome, if a wholly rational universe is postulated.