By Matt Kennard
MK: Do you draw distinctions between religions? In terms of Islam and Christianity do you think they are both equally malicious and malign or do you think that one is worse than the other?
RD: Well in terms of the potential danger from blind faith there’s no difference between them. All faith is dangerous because all faith teaches that you don’t need to argue for your point of view – you just simply assert: this is my faith, this is what I believe, I don’t have to give reasons for belief. That is very dangerous. And in the case of Christianity the danger in practice was sort of played out in the Middle Ages and thereafter and Christianity has now more or less tamed it except in some extreme areas in America. In Islam it hasn’t and so what we’re seeing in Islam – they are now doing what Christianity used to do in the Middle Ages, in much more dangerous circumstances because now there are much more terrible weapons than the Crusaders, for example, ever had. Or than other Medieval Christians ever had.
So Islam is the big danger today because they have a Medieval mindset which bursts through into the twenty-first century.
MK: How far do you think the rise of this Medieval mindset can be put at the door of the West in terms of encouraging it in the 20th century?
RD: That is always a good point that one has to make. That the West in a way has been answering for trouble by its belligerent posture, for example, in the Iraq war. This has served to exacerbate political – that’s undoubtedly true. But I think it’s a sort of added affect over the precept of Islam.
MK: Do you think religion – I know your very anti-it – could it be described as an evolutionary mechanism to consolidate social relations and that type of thing?
RD: I believe that it probably does have to have some kind of evolutionary explanation. But you immediately slid into one particular hypothesis, which was social consolidation. That’s only one of many hypothesis that one could offer and it could be right but you don’t have to plump for that one when you talk about an evolutionary hypothesis.
MK: So it could be a whole manner of things?
RD: Yes. Social consolidation is not a very good evolutionary theory, by the way, because it doesn’t explain how it could have evolved. It says that in some vague sort of way it’s a good thing. But a vague good thing – there’s no rule that says it has to evolve. No absolutely not. I mean natural selection is a very specific process, which works by the differential survival of some kind of entities as opposed to alternative entities. In real biological evolution that usually means genes: that successful genes survive at the expense of unsuccessful genes. The reason they survive is that they are good at doing something: good at building bodies that fly or hunt or swim or whatever it is. To say that something that something is good for social consolidation doesn’t explain anything because it doesn’t say why natural selection would therefore favour it.
You could make a kind of group selection model. There are people who believe that natural selection works at the group level. That some groups survive while other groups don’t survive. Then you could say, well, groups that have a religion that causes social consolidation survive. Groups that don’t have a religion or have a less efficient religion don’t survive. And that is group selection but group selection is a very… I mean it’s controversial and I’m partisan in that controversy – I don’t think it works. This could be the one place where it does work but I would rather bring it down to the level of the individual and say: “What is it about the psychology of humans which makes them take to religion under the right circumstances? And how is it that that particular kind of psychology in the past made them more likely to survive and reproduce?”
