Close friends of mine have known this (I know that viado Pranay saying, "I knew it all along, you were a viado!!!" This is a long standing joke between the two of us. Just in case you didn't understand what viado means (it's the derogatory form of gay in Portugese.) , I'm an ATHEIST.
BTW (By the way) , I'm not anti-gay. One of the chapters in the book The God Delusion explains one of the many dangers of religion, making people anti-gay or even anti people who are atheists like yours truly and Dawkins. I completely agree.
In the last edition of the FT week-end there was an interview with Richard Dawkins (Author of books like The Selfish Gene, The BlindWatchMaker, The God Delusion)
Here it is reproduced in full. Enjoy!
Richard Dawkins looks like a typical don, riding his old-fashioned bicycle complete with wicker basket into an alleyway off Oxford High Street. He props the bike against the ramshackle 17th-century building that houses the Chiang Mai Kitchen and joins me inside for a meal.
Dawkins, the current (and first) Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, may be a militant atheist and Britain’s greatest bioscience celebrity, but after 36 years on the university’s staff, his conversational manner is unmistakeably civilised and academic. There is none of the strident arrogance or anger that critics sometimes detect in Dawkins’s television appearances and, indeed, in some of his books.
Nor does he show false modesty. We are meeting a week before the autumn publication of The God Delusion, his brilliantly argued attack on all forms of religion. He tells me that he has just checked the Amazon bestseller list, and been gratified to find the book at number two in the UK, even though it is not yet officially available. Recognition and influence matter to Dawkins: he makes clear his disapproval of anonymous articles in newspapers. “If a colleague or friend dies and I’m asked to write an obituary, I tend to go for The Guardian or The Independent, where obituaries are signed, rather than The Times or Telegraph, where they are not,” he says. “I want my love or appreciation to be recognised.”
The food hardly distracts us from weightier subjects. Although Dawkins chose the restaurant because he “loves Thai cooking”, he takes little interest in the menu, quickly accepting my suggestion of one noodle and two rice dishes with prawns, beef and duck.
While we wait for our meal, Dawkins tells me how much he enjoys writing. The God Delusion was much less work than its predecessor, The Ancestor’s Tale, he says. The latter was a major work of evolutionary biology, which took five years to write with a full-time research assistant, tracing back the ancestry of life from modern humans to the first microbes almost four billion years ago.
Dawkins gets most pleasure from the final stages of authorship. “I enjoy the perfecting, titivating stages more than the blank screen at the beginning,” he says. “I do a lot of cutting and editing - it is gratifying to find something I can cut without losing the cadences of the passage.”
He is not the sort of author who sends his typescript out to a wide circle of friends and colleagues to read before submitting it to the publisher. “Writing by committee usually dulls a book,” he says. “But I do find that one or two very compatible souls can be extremely helpful critics, can be a second eye.”
Dawkins’s most important writing assistant is his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, “who reads the whole book aloud to me at different stages of development. Hearing my own words coming from another voice is very revealing. If she has trouble finding the right emphasis, then I know I have to made a change”, he says. He recommends the practice to other authors, even if the reader does not have as beautiful and well- trained a voice as Ward’s.
As three steaming bowls appear in front of us, fragrant with herbs and spices, I ask Dawkins what sort of response he hoped to get from The God Delusion and its televisual prelude, his two-part documentary Root of All Evil? which caused a furore after its transmission on Channel 4 in January. “I don’t want just to annoy people - I want to change people’s minds,” he says.
In his most optimistic moments, Dawkins imagines that “religious readers who start the book will be atheists by the time they finish it.” More realistically, he admits: “I’m not going to change the minds of many dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads.” He believes there is “a middle ground of open-minded people who have vaguely ticked the Church of England box but have not really thought it through”, people whom he hopes to persuade to “break free of the vice of religion altogether”. At the minimum he hopes to turn agnostics into outright atheists. Although Dawkins believes the world would be a more peaceful and better place without gods, I get the impression that his attack is more motivated by intellectual outrage in the face of religion’s irrationalities.
But has not Dawkins taken on a task that he, as an evolutionary biologist, should recognise is impossible? Superstition and belief in magic and religion have dominated every known human culture, as he knows all too well. Although this does not mean that some form of God (or gods) must exist, it implies that evolution has endowed us with an extremely strong religious instinct - which rational campaigning has no chance of stamping out. When I put this point to Dawkins, he says I am being defeatist. (Although I have not said so directly, he assumes that I too am an atheist.)
“Religion has been eradicated in me and a lot of my friends,” he says, transferring dainty spoonfuls of Thai food to his plate. “There is a strong correlation between religion and education: the more educated people are, the less religious.”
Why then is the US so much more religious than European societies with a broadly similar level of education and wealth? Dawkins does not claim to understand the “quite extraordinary level of religiosity in America”, but he floats a few speculative explanations. One is that the US is a society of immigrants who have been cut adrift from their roots - and turned to churches to fill the gap. Neither of us is quite convinced.
The next idea is that the constitutional separation of church and state has helped American religion. “In western Europe, established religion is background muzak and is not taken seriously,” he says. “In the US, religion has become free enterprise, with all the benefits of high-pressure advertising and marketing.”
We feel there may be something in this but then Dawkins asks: “What about a ‘critical mass’ theory?” He suggests that the US has a critical mass of religious people who encourage one another to proclaim their belief, whereas “in Europe, people who are religious try to hide it in social settings. At a smart London or Oxford dinner party people would not admit [to being religious], but a smart dinner in Dallas or San Antonio might begin with grace.”
Our discussion leaves the US with the mystery unresolved. After we have ordered green tea, I suggest that an ultra-advanced civilisation could have evolved through a long period of Darwinian evolution to a level of technology beyond human comprehension. How would an intelligence that could, for example, create new universes differ from God?
Dawkins agrees that in practice such an advanced intelligence might be indistinguishable from a deity. But the key point would be the way it had arisen in evolutionary steps. Although Dawkins does not want to tackle the ultimate existential question - why anything exists at all - he notes that “it is orders of magnitude more difficult to understand why a complex creative intelligence should just have happened than to understand why a ‘big bang’ happened.”
By now we have finished our tea, the bill appears and Dawkins says he must leave soon for another meeting. So I turn to his future. The God Delusion is “probably the culmination” of his war against religion, he says, though he will continue to campaign against irrational ideas. One vehicle will be another two-part programme for Channel 4, provisionally entitled The Rational Inquirer, looking at telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. He is also looking forward to starting work on an anthology for Oxford University Press, “which I’d like to be a shop window for the most beautiful writing by scientists on a scientific theme”. But Dawkins says he has not yet decided on another really ambitious project on the scale of his works on evolutionary biology and religion.
One preoccupation is his fast-approaching academic retirement. Dawkins looks like a healthy fiftysomething but in fact he is 65, two years short of the age at which Oxford makes its professors give up their university chairs. Dawkins does not oppose compulsory academic retirement. “If I were in my twenties and looking for an academic job, I might be a bit pissed off if professors could go on for ever,” he says. “I should have thought that the best solution would be compulsory retirement, followed by a voluntary invitation to come back.
“We all know people in universities who are wonderful value in their 70s, such as John Maynard Smith [the late biologist at Sussex],” he adds, warming to his theme. “Every university should have a fund to bring back people like that. Indeed it would be a great idea for a billionaire benefactor to endow a fund for brilliant oldies.”
As it is, a retired professor may be given the title of professor emeritus and an office, but little or no pay. For a moment I imagine an impoverished elderly Dawkins. Then I remember that the income stream from 30 years of scientific bestsellers should see him through a very comfortable retirement - after all, his elegant charcoal jacket and shirt are many cuts above the typical academic attire.
Throughout our meeting Dawkins has been courteous and efficient, conscious that in the time available I was unlikely to get through more than a fraction of the subjects I wanted to discuss. When he had no worthwhile opinion, as on public funding of science, he told me so. He is an engaging companion, yet remains slightly reserved, and I do not think we shall meet again for such a tete-a-tete. As Dawkins cycles off, the nostalgic sadness I feel is only partly due to the autumn light.
Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor.
Chiang Mai Kitchen, Oxford
1 x mixed seafood noodles
1 x stir-fried beef with Thai curry paste and coconut milk
1 x sweet chilli duck with cashew nuts
2 x Singha beer
2 x green tea
Total: ₤32.20
