The greatest show on earth?

Discover magazine called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three intellectuals in the world. Now people who reject the theory of evolution should be placed on a level with Holocaust deniers, argues Dawkins in his new book.

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.

Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context — which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word “evolution” systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into “change over time”. Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom — abetted by the official commitment to “multiculturalism” and the terror of being thought racist.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

What we must not do is complacently assume that, because bishops and educated clergy accept evolution, so do their congregations. Alas there is ample evidence to the contrary from opinion polls. More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we — and by implication all of life — were created by God within the last 10,000 years. The figure is not quite so high in Britain, but it is still worryingly large. And it should be as worrying to the churches as it is to scientists. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

Comment…

"The brilliance of Dawkins goes beyond anything the religious mind can apparently comprehend. Even within "The God Delusion", he anticipated and refuted exactly the kind of arguments proposed by Alister McGrath. So much so, in fact, that I have to wonder whether Mr McGrath even read the book, or was simply informed of it and thought, "I can counter that one!" It would make sense if the latter was the case, for if he did in fact read the book, he must have known that he was making an ass of himself even as he was writing "Dawkins' God". Then again, the sad truth is that he probably knew the majority of his readers would be morons, and that his book would serve as a soothing salve of ignorance for any of his suddenly (and frighteningly) enlightened readers whose faith had been shaken by Dawkins. Nothing at all unexpected here. Religious leaders have always tried to keep their flocks as ignorant as possible, and whenever they learn anything, (such as literacy) it is their job to desperately go about the task of damage control. It is for this fact that nothing written or said by apologists can be trusted, and if you're smart enough you might just see how weak their arguments are. Unfortunately, one thing apologists don't have to worry about is their religions' acolytes possessing much intellectual capacity." — Bran

"Richard Dawkins is a complicated individual, but wrong. Just because the majority may believe him, doesn't mean he's right. Richard Dawkins is deluded, he's only been alive for a very short time, yet he thinks that God doesn't exist. He has no relevant facts. The whole evolutionary theory is bogus, well proven to be very wrong, creation science and history destroys it completely. A car cannot come about by chance, how much more so the man that made it? Evolution is a joke, a piss poor joke, the whole of creation points to intelligent design. Order does not come out of disorder. I wish someone would topple evolution completely, and all the shit heads that believe in it, if you believe evolution, then you must be brainwashed, conditioned and indoctrinated to the absolute extreme. Richard Dawkins and all the other Darwinists are all doomed, unless they repent of their ignorant, arrogant, and spiritually blinded ways. Evolutionists can all piss off." — Peter Passarelli

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