Here’s a new interview with Richard Dawkins by Freddy Sayers (the editor-in-chief of UnHerd), who apparently tried to create a lot of buzz by issuing this tweet. It turns out that his first two claims are exaggerated, as I’ll show below. But Dawkins does—and rightly so—decry universities for the abysmal treatment of Kathleen Stock. It’s a good interview, though, and you’ll want to read it if you follow Dawkins.

In which Richard Dawkins
– acknowledges that being religious is better for human flourishing
– takes back his Covid-era vilification of vaccine refusers
– condemns universities for not protecting dissident faculty like Kathleen Stock https://t.co/X2o5m6Q64d

— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) June 7, 2023

Click the screenshot to read. And no, Richard doesn’t think that New Atheism was a mistake.  He is eloquent and interesting enough that this kind of buzz, or journalistic hype, is unnecessary.

I’ll give a few relevant quotes, with a long section in which Sayers tries to make Dawkins laud religion:

On religion:

FS: In the realm of theoretical physics, for example, there are whole dimensions of the universe that we simply don’t know how to describe yet. Is there not a chance that some of those feelings might be perceiving physical realities that we don’t yet have a way to analyse?

RD: As it happens, this evening I’m going to a meeting in London with Lawrence Krauss, the American theoretical physicist, who has just written a book called The Known Unknowns, which is about all that we don’t yet know. And physicists are proud to admit that there’s a lot that they don’t know, but they’re working on it. It is entirely possible — probable, even — that there are beings in the universe who already do understand things that are beyond our understanding, and that our brains simply aren’t big enough to understand these profundities about the universe. But to somehow equate those with mystical feelings that you get when you’re in love, or when you contemplate a rose, or religious feelings, that’s a naive confusion.”

. . . here’s where Sayers is almost hectoring Dawkins, trying to get him to admit that religion is, on balance, a good thing:

FS: Your work on evolution and natural selection holds that most things about human nature and the human body, in our evolved cells, are there for a purpose.

RD: Yes — and I might be in a minority of biologists for believing that. For that reason, I’ve been called an ultra-Darwinian. Quite a lot of other biologists feel there’s a lot in life that is not actually Darwinian, in the sense that it’s not actually designed by natural selection, but is there by chance.

I think Sayers is getting balled up here in the word “purpose”, which in evolution is just shorthand for “natural selection increasing adaptations.” We don’t see structures as “purposeful” in a teleological sense or being somehow driven to a goal. But even if Sayers realizes that, the next question is wonky.  For Sayers seems ignorant of the possibility that natural selection can create byproducts that are not in themselves adaptive, as in the (likely) evolved tendency for humans to believe authorities, especially parents. Dawkins fends him off.

FS: In which case, should we not view the religious impulse, or mystical impulses, and those feelings that we were just talking about, with more respect? Should we not view them as more likely to be more intelligent than purely a kind of mistake, possibly being wiser and more purposeful than you have been prepared to admit?

RD: Not wiser and more purposeful, but possibly there for a reason. I readily agree that, because it’s a human universal, pretty much, and therefore logically that means that it is highly probably that it is of Darwinian advantage. That, I get. It doesn’t mean religion is true, though. I mean, you could say, the tendency to be religious, the tendency to believe in something supernatural, the tendency to think there’s something higher than you, the tendency to think that people also can connect… all this could have been built in by natural selection.

I often suggest that this could be because children have been naturally selected to be respectful of what their parents tell them, what their culture tells them, because they need that in order to survive. Religion flourishes because children who are vulnerable, in a dangerous world, need to be instantly obeying their parents advice, not to endanger themselves. You don’t question what your parents say, you just believe what they say, which means the child mind is pre-programmed by Darwinian natural selection to be credulous of what elders tell them. And that is fertile ground for falsehood, as well as truth.

Sayers won’t give up. Religion could be a byproduct of an evolved respect for authority, but Sayers is determined to show that it also must be a “net positive”!:

FS: But if it’s there by natural selection, it must be a net positive?

RD: A net positive in a survival sense, yes – but it doesn’t make it true. [JAC: no, religious belief itself need not be a net positive in an evolutionary sense, but simply a byproduct of an evolved respect for authority that itself is a net genetic positive.] It’s not true that if you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, you will cause the crops to succeed. But it’s a net positive in the sense that it’s a by-product of the impulse to obey authority, because the impulse to obey authority, in general, is a net positive.

FS: In that context, the latest mostly secular generation could be seen as a species-wide experiment. It hasn’t happened before in history — and you had a fair bit to do with bringing it about. Judging on the evidence, how do you think the secular experiment is going?

RD: The statistics I’ve seen suggest it is slowly getting better. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that the number of people who profess some kind of religion is going down. It’s now below 50%, which is the first time that a British census has shown that to be the case, which I think is good. Similarly in America, which is lagging behind, in this respect, but it’s still going in the right direction. Those are the only figures I’ve seen and, all I can do is offer you my intuition, which is worthless.

Sayers keeps hammering away, desperate to find that religion, despite its disappearance, has simply gone underground:

FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?

RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.

FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?

RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?

Sayers still won’t give up:

FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.

RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.

Now Sayers is getting unduly antagonistic:

FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?

RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.

Sayers doesn’t like that answer! It might lead to our annihilation!

FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?

RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.

And that’s all I’ll say, though you should read Dawkins’s take on affirmative action, the vaccine controversy (overhyped in Sayers’s tweet), and the ruination of science journals by the invasion of woke ideology.

And there’s this nice ending:

FS: So if Elon Musk succeeds at getting human beings to Mars in your lifetime, would you volunteer for his next flight?

RD: No, I wouldn’t volunteer… actually perhaps yes. If I knew I was dying, it might be the last thing I’d do.

Here’s a tweet by Sayers showing the discussion about covid vaccines.

Richard Dawkins reflects on his Covid-era tweeting:

Full interview here:https://t.co/X2o5m6Q64d pic.twitter.com/64efrznft8

— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) June 7, 2023

All in all, it looks to me as if Sayers isn’t really drawing out Richard’s thoughts so much as trying to trap him with a number of “gotcha” questions. Yes, it’s fine (and recommended) for reviewers to ask hard questions, but Sayers goes beyond that, particularly with religion. I don’t know if he’s religious, but he sure keeps hectoring Richard about whether religion might be a good thing.

Dawkins, of course, is an expert at answering these antagonistic questions, and both keeps his cool and admits when he’s misspoken.