The “why?” question that is often thrown at Dawkins in public lectures (“everyone who asks it, asks it in the tone of voice that suggests that no one has ever asked it before”) is, to his mind, irrelevant: “The mere fact that a question can be put – the mere fact that the English word “why” exists – doesn’t mean that it’s a legitimate question.”Darwinians ask meaningful “why” questions, he says. Those that ask “why is this leaf this particular shape?” or “why does this animal walk like this?” What about, “why are humans so credulous?” I ask. So happy to pay through the nose for an aura massage or crystal healing. Mustn’t gullibility have an evolutionary explanation too?”I would put it back to childhood and say that there’s a Darwinian survival value in children believing what their elders tell them, because the world is too dangerous a place and it takes too long to learn what you need to learn to survive,” Dawkins replies. “You’ve got to have a rule of thumb that’s built into the nervous system that says ‘Believe what you’re told’.
And once you’ve got a rule of thumb like that, it’s like having a computer, which is vulnerable to viruses. A good computer will run whatever programme you stick in it, whether it’s beneficial or not.”The vulnerability of children to such parental downloads is one source of Dawkins’ fierce opposition to religious schools (he recently described government plans to encourage the spread of single-faith schools as “evil”). The subject briefly makes him forget his self-denying ordinance: “I can’t bear the religious labelling of children,” he says. “Like four-year-old Islamic children or four-year-old Catholic children… If anything makes me see red, that does, because these children are too young to know what they are… Would you ever talk about a four-year-old neo-Keynesian monetarist? Or a four-year-old Gramscian Marxist? Of course you wouldn’t.
Religion is the one place where opinions about society, about philosophy, about cosmology are grafted on to labels tied round the necks of children.”Dawkins’ own label would have read “four-year-old Anglican”. His father read Botany at Oxford, and both parents were interested in the natural sciences, so many of the answers to his own youthful questions were likely to have been couched in scientific rather than mythical terms.”I think I can remember at the age of six regaling my unfortunate younger sister, was three, telling her about the solar system and telling her which planet was further away than which, and the order in which they came… I must have got that from somewhere…”The first time I understood Darwinism was when my father explained it to me.. I understood it but I didn’t believe it… it didn’t seem to me to be strong enough.”Educated at Oundle, he was confirmed into the Church of England after a brief lapse in faith. He then drifted from the church again as he read more on evolution: “The second time, it was the collapse of the argument from design and the realisation that the beauty and complexity of the living world had a simple explanation. That was a very beautiful revelation”.He revises this word “revelation” later – anxious, I think, that this shouldn’t sound too much like a Damascene conversion – but the sense that he had found a credo rather than lost one remains strong.
