Every morning, BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a “prayer for the day” at 5:45 a.m.; you can see the list at this site, and listen to today’s prayer here. Most of these segments begin by setting up a situation and then ending with a formal petition to the Lord. Reverend Richard Littledale of Teddington Baptist Church gives today’s invocation, which begins at the opening of the linked segment with the formal prayer starting at 1:16 and ending eleven seconds later. You’ll be vastly amused to hear Littledale supplicating God to take care of “the independent shops”!
These prayers are always religious, and I’m appalled that a state-controlled radio station promulgates religion in this way. And, as far as my host Latha Menon remembers, there has never been a secular prayer. Yet it’s as unconscionable to do this in a secular society as it is to have “faith schools,” but Britain seems to harbor a lot of what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief.”
Now there is an opportunity for secular invocations: in the BBC Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day“, broadcast about two hours later (collection here). But these, too, are nearly always religious; the latest one archived is about Ash Wednesday, presented by Canon Angela Tilby of Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford. Like the others, it’s about three minutes long. The religion involved need not be Christianity: they’ve also had Sikhs, Jews, and Muslims. But, as the BBC notes, the purpose is to give “reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.”
One group largely missing on Thought for the Day has been nonbelievers. Radio 4 tried to accommodate them once, choosing Richard Dawkins in 2002 to give what they called “Richard Dawkins’ Alternative Thought for the Day.” [Note the weasel word “alternative.”]
Here’s what Wikipedia says about Dawkins’s one-off (there was actually another “secular thought for the day” in 2013, but that, too, was shifted to a different time).
In 2002, 102 people put their names to a letter to the BBC Governors, drawn up by the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society, and the Rationalist Press Association. This protested that the slot was available only to religious views. As a consequence, Professor Richard Dawkins from Oxford University was given a two-and-a-half minute slot to deliver a reflection from an atheist viewpoint, although this was not broadcast in the Thought for the Day slot itself.
The BBC was too scared to even put it in the regular slot. Here’s what Dawkins said; remember that was four years before The God Delusion was published:
When a terrible disaster happens – an air crash, a flood, or an earthquake – people thank God that it wasn’t worse. (But then why did he let the earthquake happen at all?)
Or, even more childish and self-indulgent: “Thank you God for the traffic jam that made me miss that plane.” (But what about all the unfortunate people who didn’t miss the plane?)
The same kind of infantile regression tempts us when we try to understand the natural world.
“Poems are made by fools like me . . . But only God can make a tree.”
A pretty song, but an infantile explanation. It’s too easy. Lazy. The moment we put a little effort into thinking about it, we realise that God the creator is no explanation at all. He constitutes a bigger question than he answers.
Once, we couldn’t do any better. Humanity was still an infant. But now we understand what makes earthquakes; we understand what made trees. Not just trees like oaks and redwoods, with their underground root system like a huge, upside-down tree.
The arteries that leave the heart branch and branch again like a tree. There are about 50 miles of blood vessels in a human body.
Nerve cells, too, branch like trees. They are so numerous in the teeming forest of your brain that, if you stretched them end to end they would reach right round the world 25 times.
In the face of such wonders, do you fall back, like a child, on God? “It’s so wonderful, so complicated, only God could have done it.”
It’s tempting, isn’t it. But it’s not a real explanation. Not the kind of explanation that actually explains anything. And it’s nowhere near as poetic as the true explanation.
Because the beauty is that humanity has grown up. We now know the true explanation. It’s gloriously simple once you get it, and more wonderful than our forefathers could ever have imagined. It makes use of yet another tree. The family tree of life. It began with something smaller than a bacterium, and it branched and branched to give all the species that have ever lived, whether extinct like the dinosaurs, or still hanging on like our own. Evolution really explains all of life, and it needs no supernatural intervention of any kind.
The adult response is to rejoice in the amazing privilege we enjoy. We have been born, and we are going to die. But before we die we have time to understand why we were ever born in the first place. Time to understand the universe into which we have been born. And with that understanding, we finally grow up and realise that there is no help for us outside our own efforts.
Humanity can leave the crybaby phase, and finally come of age.
Now there’s a thought for more than just a day!
This caused a furor, centered on Dawkin’s characterization of religion as “childish”, “infantile”, and as a locus of humanity’s “crybaby” phase. And since then, there’s been only a single secular “thought for the day,” at least as far as I can discover.
Responding to a 2009 BBC proposal to present more secular thoughts for the day, Dawkins said, “This has been a long running issue. I did a spoof a few years ago as a kind of stunt but I hope that this does happen because religious people do not have the monopoly on morality and ethics.” He’s right about religion’s non-monopoly on morality, but I don’t think his piece was a spoof!
Regardless, I think Dawkins, in his desire to promulgate nonbelief, missed a good opportunity to show the positive side of secularism. Why not tout the wonders of the natural world without dissing religion at the same time? After all, this is supposed to be a “thought for the day” that inspires people—perhaps not the best place to go after faith. Who’s ready for that before 6 a.m.! Certainly Dawkins is really good at showing the magic of reality: presenting a naturalistic “spirituality,” if you will.
It may be that the tone of Dawkins’s Thought for the Day kept the BBC from having further secular “Thoughts”. We’ll never know. But the secularists should persist, for there’s no good reason why a Thought for the Day has to be religious.
