Archbishop Williams and Prof Dawkins in public dialogue

Last night Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams shared a platform with Professor Richard Dawkins in a packed Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, for a dialogue chaired by Sir Anthony Kenny (former Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University) on the subject of "the nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin".

The dialogue is available for viewing on the Archbishop's website.

It was a welcome and long-overdue event. For too long, Prof Dawkins has chosen to set up Aunt Sallies to knock down with his arguments - and there are plenty of fundamentalist Christians only too happy to play that role - some of whom are dangerous ideologues who need challenging. It's been a source of great irritation to me that some prominent anti-religionists (I think of the comedian Marcus Brigstock for example) have portrayed thinking Christians as merely watered-down fundamentalists - the velvet glove on the iron fist - when there is virtually nothing in common between the two except some of the vocabulary we use. Rowan Williams is no Aunt Sally, so this public dialogue marked a welcome departure.

It promised, as a result, to be more enlightening, and I found it so. I don't think it achieved any particular resolution, but that was not the aim. What it did for the most part do was tease out some of the key differences and similarities between atheist and Christian thinking. So often militant atheists attack Christians for believing things that I, at least, not only don't believe but find as meaningless or dangerous as they do. If there's to be a debate, let's at least deal with the real points of difference.

Clearly, evolutionary theory and the science of the 'Selfish Gene' (as Dawkins called it) is not a contentious issue. There was an interesting discussion about the emergence of homo sapiens from its evolutionary ancestors - was there a single Adam and Eve, or did creatures with homo sapiens capabilities coexist and interbreed alongside less able siblings for thousands of years? (Either way, the point of the Adam and Eve myth is not negated). Prof Dawkins thought it more likely that the evolution of a homo sapiens with full syntactic language capability was a more sudden step change. But it was clear that, though this is interesting, Christian thinking does not require belief in an interventionist, micro-managing God who tweaks the Creation as it goes along.

There was an extended section looking at the 'anthropic principle' - as I understand it, the idea that the evolution of organic life and most especially human beings is so utterly unlikely that it is evidence of 'intelligent design'. This was the least satisfactory part of the discussion and became tangled up in some rather obscure philosophical vocabulary. It didn't seem to me that this 'proof of intelligent design' was of any great importance to either of the participants.

The issue of language, however, was an important part of the debate in two ways. Firstly (as above) it was agreed that the language capability is the most significant human capacity, and for such a complex capability to evolve from primal simplicity is (as Richard Dawkins put it) ". . a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be." (To much laughter, he added that "the hymn loses the plot rather badly after those lines"). But secondly, and more importantly, we had a frustratingly short little dialogue - I think it emerged out of a discussion about the nature of the 'soul' - about the inadequacy of 'ghost in the machine' thinking. This way of thinking emerged during the Enlightenment and is still held by many atheists (as well as Christians). Prof Dawkins has deployed it vigorously against his ever-willing 'Aunt Sallies'. Following Wittgenstein and others (Anthony Kenny refers to this at 34min44sec on the video), it has long since been generally rejected. I'm no expert on Wittgenstein, but I know that his philosophy centres heavily around language.

In two ways, this leaving-behind of the Enlightenment scientific philosophy proved to be the key area of difference :

1.
the discussion about the evolution of the human brain to the point where it has 'soul' - and whether that 'soul' is 'immortal' (which Prof Dawkins clearly can't believe) - was tantalisingly short. (The issue is discussed at the 22 minute point, and again at 36 mins.) Rowan Williams, though holding out for 'immortal soul' as part of the language of faith, was clear that humans are not material creatures that have had some immortal soul injected into them.

2.
Prof Dawkins could not see how the concept of God could add anything to human knowledge. It's an unnecessary complication to have the base of scientific knowledge and then try to lever a supernatural agent into it. Rowan Williams tried his best to show how the concept of God is not a concept of some imaginary additional 'active ingredient' (my words) in the universe, but is to do with the whole context within which the universe sits. This really is a crunch issue. It parallels the 'soul' discussion : Is a human being a material substance with an additional 'spiritual' ingredient called 'soul'; is the Universe a material thing with a non-material ingredient called 'God'? For this Christian, at least - and for Rowan Williams it seems - the answer is clearly 'No'. Amongst the words with which I commence my funeral services are the following :

"To worship something that we have imagined into being is to worship an idol, and worshipping idols is expressly forbidden in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. No, ‘God’ is the word we use for that mystery as to why there is anything at all — if you like, we are the product of God’s imagination, not the other way round."

Where we ended up was with both participants expressing awe and wonder at the nature of the universe, the (albeit incomplete) beauty and complexity of human beings, and that we have evolved out of such pure simplicity. For one participant (Dawkins) that was enough, for the other, it leads to worship.

For myself, the primary issue is about language and vocabulary. For Richard Dawkins, the language of science - indeed, the scientific enterprise in itself - is what opens up the nature of reality, and leads us to wonder. Though wonder is not the point of it, it does motivate scientists to varying degrees. The language of theology can not only embrace that scientific enterprise, and some theologians can 'speak' scientific 'language', theology also seeks to express and communicate that wonder in music and poetry, tell stories of humanity's engagement with it, tease out the implications for human moral behaviour, channel that wonder in directions that are in harmony with that Ultimate Reality which it labels 'God'. In this sense, theology still is the "Queen of the Sciences".