by Peter Mullen, TCW
I HAVE been thinking of some words from that prominent zoologist Richard Dawkins: ‘Believing in God is like believing in fairies or in Santa Claus.’ Or, if it comes to it, believing in the words of Richard Dawkins. He thinks that if God exists we ought to be able to see him with the aid of our scientific instruments – our telescopes, perhaps.
Even more celebrated among intellectual atheists was Bertrand Russell who shared Dawkins’s prejudice, though he expressed it in more eloquent sentences: ‘If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.’
What both men have in common is the completely unfounded belief that the only explanations which provide knowledge of human experience are of the scientific sort. But where does that leave our experience of love or of Bach or the countryside? Surely, we would want to say we have knowledge of these things too? And probably deeper knowledge because they’re more real to us, more immediate – more personal, if you like.
But in our present state of enlightenment, we regard as hopelessly primitive and outdated the old belief that ethics and aesthetics are real and so moral and artistic judgements are our most significant and important activities. Nowadays morality is subjective and a matter of mere personal preference and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, however unschooled. And the question on every TV interviewer’s lips is not ‘What do you think?’ but ‘How do you feel?’ When you boil it down, modernity amounts to little more than the worship of technology.