A few days ago I attended a book launch in Central London. The event was put on by Christians in Science, an organisation to which I have belonged for many years. There are no qualifications for joining apart from being a Christian. Members include professional scientists, retired scientists, students, and people who just happen to be interested in scientific questions and their interface with religion. There is a journal called Science and Christian Belief (which is moving online now) and regular meetings both national and local.
This particular book was called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins and was an edited collection of 12 biographical accounts by people who were not Christians when they first read Richard Dawkins’ books but were stimulated by his anti-religious polemic to reconsider the intellectual claims of Christianity.
Professor Dawkins himself was not present by the way. He had been sent an invitation as a matter of courtesy but had chosen to ignore it. If he had been present, he would have heard nothing concerning himself and his style of argument that was not entirely respectful and indeed admiring, though he would certainly have been annoyed by the conclusions that some of his readers had been led to after reading his books.
But as the meeting continued, I felt more and more that I had fallen down some sort of rabbit hole into a lost world, one that had once been very familiar but which now seemed strange and haunted by an almost unbearable nostalgia. Everyone present simply took it for granted that there was such a thing as truth, not “my truth” but the truth. And everyone took it for granted that rational argument was the way to find that truth, and that you could identify and challenge weaknesses in an opponent’s argument without having to impugn his motives. No one pointed out snidely that Dawkins was a white cis male or that one of his ancestors might have been involved in administering some part of the British Empire. In fact most of those present would have considered an ad hominem attack of that sort as unacceptable in a civilised debate.
Now I am not suggesting that people were arguing in that objective way simply because they were Christians. It would be nice to believe that, but I’m pretty sure that if Professor Dawkins had been present, he would have been arguing his case against us in precisely the same way as we argued against him. He too belongs to that same lost world, because the world that we are increasingly forced to live in is alien to Christians and traditional atheists alike. I can conclude this with some confidence because I have recently heard Dawkins vigorously defending (or attempting to defend) the claims of science and rationality against opponents who clearly did not get the point. They thought that being women or having some kind of non-white background gave them access to an alternative version of reality that automatically trumped his.
The problem is that most of the younger generation accept this kind of arrant nonsense as totally valid. A lot of them pick it up at university, since it appears to be common in academic circles. It is also widespread on the BBC and in other mainstream media, and of course online. Anyone who dares to challenge it is liable to be deluged with hate, often expressed in a complex Orwellian jargon in which everything means the opposite of what it says. I have complained about this sort of wokery in some of my other blogs and I think there is little to be gained by repeating the accusations. Everyone knows by now that we are in the midst of a full-blown culture war, one that reason seems to be losing by the day.
That may be one reason (there are others) why I am not much good at evangelism. A common Christian formula for spreading the Good News is to remember how you yourself came to Christ and guide your hearer along the same route. But I was converted many years ago by reading the theological works of C.S. Lewis, which were steeped in the joy of intellectual argument, and that particular door to the Kingdom of Heaven has been nailed shut for some time. That’s why the most successful modern evangelism (for example that of the Holy Trinity Brompton churches) peddles emotional excitement, miracles, speaking in tongues and the like, not serious argument. Modern people will only believe that something is true if they stand to get something out of it.
But what I felt in that lecture room was that, just for a short time, I had miraculously dropped back into a world in which facts existed, you could argue about them in plain English and not in “Newspeak”, and you were not baffled by the rising tide of insanity, because it just wasn’t happening in that sacred space. Maybe we were just a collection of old dinosaurs (though I saw quite a few people there who were clearly younger than me), but I find that I desperately want that world to go on existing on some level, if only as a kind of secret Narnia that those of us who know of its existence can slip into at will through some enchanted wardrobe.
J R R Tolkien once said, about those who accused him of peddling escapism, that the only people he knew of who were dead set against other people escaping were gaolers. In the 1960’s a lot of young people wanted to escape from a grim and prosaic postwar world into one of heroic fantasy, and they found inspiration in Tolkien. I had discovered him earlier, back in the 1950’s when the trilogy was first published, and when it was a thrill to find anyone else who had read it. It felt very much like being a member of a secret society. So I felt more than a little irritated when suddenly everyone was producing vulgarised and drug-addled versions of his world. Of course those same young people eventually grew up to staff our universities and media companies and to become the creators of a world every bit as unreal as his but without either the heroism or the beauty.
It is the world of sweet reason, common sense and objective truth which is the lost world now.
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