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?”

MK: But is there a sense that if it does have an evolutionary purpose we will never be rid of it?

RD: No. Not at all. To say it has an evolutionary purpose means that natural selection has favored genes which in the past has produced brains which have a tendency under the right conditions to produce religion. Suppose we asked well what are those psychological dispositions that favor religion: they could be things like obedience to authority, a tendency to hallucinate vision – these are all things which the brain has a susceptibility to. And under the right conditions those psychological susceptibility will give rise to religion. But the conditions might be different. They’ll give rise to religion if, for example, you’re bought up in a culture in a culture that teaches religion. But if we change the culture so that we no longer teach religion or if we change the culture so that we educate people in science or if we change the culture so that we teach comparative religion then things might be different.

MK: But religion has appeared in all societies – in different gradations. We’ve been educated in science a lot of us since birth and still – look at America there’s been science teaching in school and still 50% of the population believe mad things about the origin of the world.

RD: Yes. So what are you saying then?

MK: That it will always appear within any cultural format.

RD: I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It doesn’t affect everybody. The fact that I and presumably you don’t believe it mean that it is possible by education to escape from it which proves that it is not inevitable. All we have got to do is reproduce whatever conditions it is that make people escape from it and my guess it that’s largely education.

MK: At the moment would you say we are regressing in that respect?

RD: I think we are but I think it’s probably temporary and I think the overall sweep of history is in the right direction. And any trend in a complex system like a society tends to have sawtooth ups and downs. I think we are going into a sawtooth at the moment, especially in America but it won’t go on for centuries, probably not even decades.

MK: I wanted to move on briefly to you views on Iraq. You weren’t opposed to the war in Afghanistan were you?

RD: Well I wasn’t because I felt that America needed to try to find those responsible and it did really appear as though Al-Qaeda was being actively encouraged by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and it was promoting that kind of terrorism and promoting the most awful religious repression in its own country as well which is an additional factor.

MK: But in terms of Iraq, did you feel it was establishing a new military norm for the US?

RD: Well what I really objected to was the lying about the motives for going into Iraq. I mean lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction and really taking our eye off the ball of world terrorism since whatever else Saddam has done, he did not mastermind the 9/11 attacks and so the deliberate lies by Cheney and Bush and that gang who implied that he did – the timing of it. If there was a reason for going into Iraq that reason had been around for a long time before, why suddenly choose a time of hysteria immediately after 9/11? Obviously, because it was an act of political opportunism – catching the America mood – the tendency just to blame all Arabs because it was Arabs who did 9/11 and the Iraqis are Arabs aren’t they?

MK: Do you think there was any altruistic motive in it? Freeing the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

RD: I think there probably was and that was immensely naïve with hindsight.

MK: More on Blair’s part than Bush?

RD: I think that’s true.

MK: Lots of other people have said… did you read the memo recently in which Blair was assuring Bush about British support even before Parliament voted?

RD: Oh yes. I mean Blair is surely guilty but I as I said “with agony” – that’s what I meant. I think he really did agonize over it whereas I think Bush is too stupid to agonize about anything.

Source:  Richard Dawkins interview on religion, evolution and Iraq (Comment Factory)