I spent my
Christmas weekend reading the book, Brief Candle in the Dark, by atheist
extraordinaire Dr Richard Dawkins.
Now here's
being candid, I am a Christian - for the last 30 years. Still am but I have
grown over the years. The word "grown" is a subjective and loaded
word. Loaded because I am one believer who enjoys the simple brilliance of
atheist authors like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens.
Some
fundamentalists may describe me as sleeping with the enemy, playing with fire
or traversing to the dark side. But I see it as keeping an open mind, always.
While my faith is not the cherry-picking type to suit my convenience, my
personal conviction is to travel always in pairs. That is, to walk in the shoes
of others, to see things from their vantage point, and to understand
sufficiently before I form my own opinion. And my journey in an atheist's
sneaker is never unexciting.
My
disclaimer is that I will never attain perfect knowledge for as long as I live.
It is just impossible. And should the fundamentalist chant with vehemence that
nothing is impossible with God, then they will have to admit with grit teeth no
less that it is impossible to fully understand God's thoughts and ways lest we
stand in parity with omnipotence. Dare us?
In fact, in
the book, Dawkins mentioned a Jesuit Father by the name of George Coyne, former
director of the Vatican Observatory, who once said matter-of-factly in an
interview with the author this: "God is not an explanation. If I were
seeking for a god of explanation...I'd probably be an atheist."
Now, I
sense the ire of fundamentalists aroused by that statement, but let's keep the
mind open, the soul cool and the heart tempered. The Jesuit Father has got a
point - if not directly. Strictly from a secular, empirical angle (underscore
"strictly"), God explains little and his role is at best to fill in
the gap/void where science has yet to bridge. However, this is not a source of
revelation, but is one borne out of desperation. For as science progresses
rapidly in the last few decades, the gap on which the divine authorship
occupies is shrinking fast. Here's just a foretaste of what I mean.
To the
creationists, the earth is no more than 6000 years old - give or take a few
hundred. This clashes head on with the time of dinosaurs roaming the earth 65
million years ago. Then the earth used to be flat until science set the record
straight. And Galileo downgraded us or the earth from being at the center of
the solar system and the universe to an insignificant blip hidden in one
godforsaken corner of an immeasurably huge universe(s). This reality took the
Catholic Church only recently to concede. But of course the sun is not going to
wait until an ex cathedra or council decision is pronounced before it switch
places with the earth.
I dare say
that the Bible is just not a scientific book because God had never intended it
to be one. And if it ever were a science book, it would be an extremely thin
one with every subject on physics, chemistry, biology, geography and astronomy
starting and ending with phrases similar to this: "God somehow created
it" - full stop. And it is that "somehow" that science is currently
trying to unravel with empiricial precision.
So as a
firebrand atheist, Dawkins does have a point about there being no reason of any
persuasive gravita for him to believe in God. That's just him I guess.
For a
believer like me, the book comes alive when Dawkins talks about the many
debates and encounters he had with Christians. And in the past 70 years, he had
met the worst and the best of them.
In the
former category, the name of the former preacher Ted Haggard was mentioned and
not because he was caught with a man in a sexual act. It was however because of
the brazen, ignorant and arrogant attitude shown by the preacher. Dawkins also
met a so-called Reverend (Michael Bray) who "had been in jail for violent
attacks on doctors who carried out abortions."
The
weirdest one was a self-styled Pastor Keenan Roberts. He interviewed him
because his main pastoral preoccupation was to scare children with self-made
videos about how sadistic Satan was in hell. Dawkins wrote this about him,
"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-Haar" manner of a Victoria 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. Afterward, I interviewed
Pastor Roberts. He told me his target audience was twelve-year-olds."
Nevertheless,
the best of Dawkins' encounters were deeply encouraging. In this honors roll,
he mentioned Rowan Williams (retired Archbishop of Canterbury) and this was the
impression the Archbishop left on him:
"I
have had four meetings with Rowan Williams...and found him to be one of the
nicest men I have ever met: almost impossible to argue with, he is so
agreeable. And so obligingly intelligent (in the literal sense of intellego = I
understand) that he actually finishes your sentences for you, even when those
sentences - in my understanding of them - should have been devastating for his
position and he doesn't seem to have any comeback to them!" The other
affable illuminaries were Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the Jesuit Father George
Coyne.
What I like
about the book is that there is much to respect and to learn from those who
profess to be godless. They can be an endearingly unpretentious lot of highly
intelligent people. Dawkins once asked the co-founder of the double helix,
Nobel laureate James Watson, this question "What are we for?" and his
candid reply is this: "Well, I don't think we're for anything. We're just
products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak
if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm looking forward to a good
lunch."
Further,
there is just a pervading and unperturbed sense of down-to-earth serenity about
the atheists. Take the author of the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, the late
Douglas Adams for example. Dawkins devored one of his books and they quickly
became close friends. The respect is unsurprisingly mutual.
When
Dawkins asked him this: "What is it about science that really gets your
blood running?" the cosmic comedian said, impromptu: "The world is a
thing of utter inordinate complexity, and the richness and strangeness that is
absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out
of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most
fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that
might have happened - it's just wonderful. And...the opportunity to spend
seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as
far as I am concerned."
Now the
book is quite a revelation into Dawkins' world and how he was "almost in
tears" writing about his daughter, Juliet, who was only twelve when his
second wife Eve was diagnosed with adrenal cancer and how she lovingly cared
for her mother "through the ordeals of successive chemotherapy cycles,
hiding her own foreboding and grief in a way that no child should be expected
to do, keeping calm and sensible when the rest of us were not doing so well at
that." Eve died thereafter.
In 2010,
Julie qualified as a doctor and Dawkins wrote, "Eve would have been deeply
proud of her, as I am."
In the end,
the book is about what Dawkins holds dearly and that is a restless, daring and
questioning mind. Never take things at face value - that's my takeaway. He
urges his readers to probe between the cracks of religion, keep an open mind,
challenge dubious authority, be courageous even when one is standing alone, and
as best as is humanly possible, to keep your cool about it.
This is one
man who lives his life on his own terms just like his fellow like-minded
compatriot, the late Christopher Hitchens - whom the fanatic believers just
love to hate. And there is no better end to this brief review about his memoir
than to draw out extracts of a speech Dawkins gave to his friend Hitchens when
the latter won the Richard Dawkins Award of the Atheist Alliance of America
shortly before he died of oesophagus cancer.
"Today
I am called upon to honor a man whose name will be joined, in the history of
our movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Pain,
David Hume
...Though
not a scientist and with no pretensions in that direction, he understands the
importance of science in the advancement of our species and the destruction of
religion and superstition:
"One
must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where
nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made
from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
It comes
from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt
to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort,
reassurance and other infantile needs).
Today the
least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any
of the founders of religion.
...And in
the very way he is looking his illness in the eye, he is embodying one part of
the case against religion. Leave it to the religious to mewl and whimper at the
feet of an imaginary deity in their fear of death; leave it to them to spend
their lives in denial of its reality.
...Every
day he is demonstrating the falsehood of that most squalid Christian lies: that
there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch is in a foxhole, and he is dealing
with it with a courage, an honesty and dignity that any of us would be, and
should be, proud to be able to muster.
And in the process, he
is showing himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and
love." Cheerz.