Shoulder to shoulder with Richard Dawkins

It’s no secret that I don’t see eye to eye with Richard Dawkins on a number of issues. Well, we may be on opposite sides of the fence but we are at least at the same end of it.

Enough with the metaphors, on with ‘Enemies of Reason’. Part 1 on Channel 4 last night, part 2 next Monday. Sadly, according to the TV guides (so much more reliable than the spirit ones), we won’t be seeing a scene that was withdrawn on legal advice. A medium tells RD that his late father is sorry they parted on bad terms; he replies that his father is alive and well and the last time they saw each other they parted very nicely; and she declares ‘stop the cameras, the interview’s over’. We do however see a group of dowsers getting no more than a statistically expected score in a double blind test. We see Derren Brown explaining basic cold reading techniques, followed by a practical demonstration spiritualist church meeting. (Why do the alleged messages always come from ‘someone ... I think ... a name beginning with F? Something about ... a ... key? A dog? A car?’ Why can’t the spirits just say ‘Hi, it’s Fred, the key to the car is inside the dog?’) We see the Observer’s astrologer claim that the clockwork-predictable positions of the planets are signifiers as to what is happening on the spiritual plane in people’s lives.

Next week – faith healing and, apparently, the lady who believes she can restore the missing ten (ten!) strands of our DNA that separate us from the ancient Atlanteans.

You may reasonably point out that I, a man who believes an unemployed itinerant carpenter rose from the dead, am in no position to mock. Well, leaving aside the items that are just plain wrong (like ten missing strands of DNA), or hugely susceptible to a little logic (planet and star motions are predictable for millions of years ahead, so why not just write down a million-year horoscope now?) or down to active conspiracy to defraud, there isn’t a single positive ‘proof’ of astrology, spiritualism etc. that can’t be explained by statistical clutter, just as likely to happen to believers as non-believers. And to this I will candidly add much of outward organised Christianity.

But it’s not about the miracles. It’s not about following rules. Yes, with a little puff of science and logic, 90% of everything Dawkins hates will just blow away. It’s the residue that’s important.

For me the Trinity isn’t just a point of theological dogma, though that’s certainly how it started out, back in the days when I believed it was all about following the rules or else. It’s the base state of the universe, and the more you fixate on the clothes you wear or the shape of the building you worship in or what Biblical precepts you can shoehorn into your own out-of-context cultural milieu, the more you miss out on that basic fact. Use science to sift away the nonsense and you end up with a view of a universe - and a relationship with its creator - that is full of wonder and awe, so much bigger and better than any tidy pocket cosmology.

‘Science,’ Dawkins declares, ‘is the poetry of the universe.’ To which the Boy, who was watching with me, responded: ‘science is the HTML code, poetry is the web page that it creates.’ Amen.