Doubting John

SECULARISM and atheism are becoming more powerful and influential in Britain today and the mass media - especially the BBC - give far more space and respect to the views of atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Polly Toynbee than they give to serious Christian theologians. But theology is an academic discipline and in any academic discipline you won't get far unless you study the subject carefully.

But the atheists I have just named do not show the slightest sign of having applied themselves seriously to the religious questions on which they pontificate so loudly. Let me put it in a little verse: Richard Dawkins is so odd; He says that the Almighty God Might be above the world so high, Like a tea-tray in the sky...

No, I'm not joking. Dawkins really does say that if there is a God, then we ought to be able to observe him as we would observe any other object in the universe - through a telescope, perhaps, or a microscope.

This is really idiotic and shows that Dawkins knows no theology. No Christian has ever suggested that God is just one more object in the universe - bigger and more powerful but an object just the same. Dawkins is merely pig-headed and ignorant. How would he react if I suggested that the sum total of all biology is to be found in the little book, Janet and John Look at Frogs?

Dawkins is also notoriously intolerant of religion. He says that religious people are "malevolent, mischief-stirring, obscurantist, vicious, repellent, barking mad, viciously unpleasant, mendacious, obnoxious and vindictive". The people in our church are not like that at all.

Dawkins seems instead to be describing himself here.

John Cornwell has done a wonderful thing: he has refused to get riled by Dawkins' raging hatred of Christianity and he has written a gentle, witty book repudiating Dawkins' silliest ideas - and doing so through the voice of a kindly angel.

Dawkins says that science and religion are incompatible. But they are not. Over the centuries thousands of eminent thinkers have done original scientific work while holding firmly to the religious sense of life: some of the very greatest minds such as Newton, Descartes and Einstein. Any reasonable person looking at the great complexity of the universe would conclude that it is not an accident but a creation. The great astronomer Fred Hoyle said: "The idea that the universe came into being by chance is as if a wind should blow through a scrap-yard and leave behind it a fully constructed Jumbo jet."

Dawkins thinks that the theory of evolution can explain everything. True, it can explain some things; but it cannot explain how lifeless rocks and stones turned into ideas, thoughts and mental images.

And to claim, as Dawkins claims, that all religious people are a force for evil is as stupid as saying that all scientists are malicious because some scientists invented the atomic bomb.

John Humphrys, the presenter of the BBC's Today Programme has put together a collection of his own thoughts on religion, his conversations with theological experts such as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi and extracts from the many thousands of letters from members of the public which came as a response to his award-winning radio series, Humphrys In Search of God. This book is thoughtful, reflective and openminded.

Humphrys is not a believer, but he can't quite bring himself to be an atheist either. Hence the catchy title In God We Doubt.

The most moving parts of his book are those which tell of the persistence of love in the face of terrible and prolonged suffering and the persistent, tenacious awareness so many people have of the beauty and mystery of life, the universe and everything. As the 20th Century's most brilliant philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: "It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is."

The miracle is that there is anything at all, when there just as well might have been nothing. If you think that everything which exists came spontaneously under its own steam out of nothing, you might as well believe in an endless flow of beer pouring from an entirely empty barrel.