Does Richard Dawkins Actually Care About Evidence?
Stories from Rupert Sheldrake, Medhi Hasan and Peter Boghossian
It reads like an episode of that old VH1 show Where Are They Now? Or perhaps Behind The Music. On this episode: The New Atheism. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (which are sometimes assumed to have been caused by religion), and up until 2013 or so, The New Atheism was one of the biggest phenomena in the Western World. Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens. Sam Harris. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Lawrence Krauss. Like the Beatles or Elvis or the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, they were everywhere. Their ideas and quotes were everywhere. "But they soon found out...” as the music gets moody and dramatic, “…that there was a dark side to their success."
First, Christopher Hitchens dies from cancer a few years after they hit the big time. Then, Lawrence Krauss’ history of sexual misconduct accusations emerges, reinforcing the idea that a disproportionate amount of Atheists are creepy, romantically predatory males. Richard Dawkins is slowly de-platformed by his own movement in a Great Schism Of Atheism after it realizes he doesn’t share many of their radical beliefs about feminism and gender identity. As all of this is playing out, Sam Harris maintains his popularity and influence by transitioning away from religion-centered discussions on his podcast. Peter Boghossian, in a true strange bedfellows moment, forges an alliance with conservative Christians based on a mutual interest in combatting Cultural Marxism in universities, while Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the firebrand critic of Islam who was raised in that faith, announces in 2021 that she has converted to Christianity.
Richard Dawkins' response to Ali's Christian conversion was to claim that Ali didn't literally believe in the supernatural aspects of Christianity. “Someone of your intelligence does not believe you have an immortal soul, which will survive the decay of your brain. Christians believe in a frightful place called Hell, where the souls of the wicked go after they are dead. Do you believe that? Hell no!”
Brushing aside the question of when Dawkins became an expert on Ali’s sincerity (not to mention the inconvenient fact that Young-Hoon Kim, current holder of the title of World’s Highest I.Q., is a Christian), he says: “Intelligent people believe [something] because, and only because, they have seen evidence that supports it.”
If there was one central idea that the New Atheism posited, beyond all others, evidential justification was that central idea. At its core, it was a scientific-style argument: that the primary difference between science and religion is that science only makes claims that it has evidence for, whereas religion’s attitude towards the entire concept of evidential justification is one of either apathy or hostility. This claim appears repeatedly in New Atheist writings. As Dawkins famously wrote: “The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification.”
This assertion, that religion is inherently fideist, is too long to address in this article (the Monadnock Review is currently drafting another article where this claim is inspected). But the question can easily be turned around: is there evidence that Richard Dawkins doesn’t care that much about the concept of evidential justification?
Dr.
is a man with some good firsthand insight into Dawkins’ credibility on this topic. Sheldrake is a renegade biologist, author of many scientific papers and several books, who decades ago developed the theory of “Morphic Resonance”, “which proposes that all natural systems, from molecules to humans, inherit a collective memory from previous systems of their kind. This ‘memory’ influences their form, behavior, and development.” Sheldrake is also an advocate of the idea that living things have natural telepathic abilities, and these can explain the phenomena of “dogs that know when their owners are coming home”, and similar cases.Sheldrake has been targeted numerous times over the years by people with materialist worldviews, including the late Nature editor John Maddox (who also disliked the Big Bang Theory because it suggested the universe might have a beginning, like the book of Genesis says) and Richard Dawkins, who attempted to interview Sheldrake about the topic of telepathy for his materialist and anti-mysticism propaganda piece The Enemies Of Reason (2007).
As Sheldrake tells it: “The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. [Richard] said that if [telepathy] really occurred, it would ‘turn the laws of physics upside down,’ and added, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’
‘This depends on what you regard as extraordinary’, I replied. ‘Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?’
He produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in ‘the paranormal’ because of wishful thinking.
The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers [on telepathy], published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data. I had actually been doing experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.
Richard seemed uneasy and said, ‘I don't want to discuss evidence’. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘There isn't time. It's too complicated. And that's not what this programme is about’.
…There had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes [director] asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.”
For the first few years after this alleged incident, Sheldrake’s word was all we had to go by. And while I trust Sheldrake is telling the truth here, the raw video footage might not exist anymore. The strength of his claim would increase if, for instance, the same thing were to happen again.
…the same thing happened. And this time, it was recorded.
The following comes from the theistic Shadow To Light blog, and happened before New Atheism’s decline. In December 2012, the blog’s author, “Michael”, wrote about a journalist named Medhi Hasan from Al Jazeera, who asked Richard Dawkins a question about his claim (one that appears in The God Delusion) that “it would be better to sexually or physically abuse a child than to raise the child as a Catholic.” Dawkins bases his claim on one letter he received from an American woman, raised Catholic, and the emotional trauma she felt after being told that a Protestant friend of hers, who’d died, had gone to hell. Here is their exchange:
HASAN: With respect Richard, you’re an empiricist. You’re a rationalist. One letter from one woman in America isn’t really a basis to extrapolate and making such sweeping conclusions.
DAWKINS: That is of course true. And I am not basing it on that. It seems to me that telling children, such that they really, really believe, that people who sin are going to go to hell, and roast forever, forever, that your skin grows again when it peels off from burning, it seems to me to be intuitively entirely reasonable that that is a worse form of child abuse, that it will give more nightmares, that will give more genuine distress, if they don’t believe it its not a problem, of course.
Do you see what happened? Michael hones in on it: “note that Dawkins acknowledges one letter from one woman in America isn’t really a basis to extrapolate and making such sweeping conclusions. Yet he has been doing that for ten years! He denies he has been basing his argument on this hearsay yet prior to him being challenged by Hasan, that was his entire argument. Second, and most important, is that Dawkins offers not one shred of evidence in his reply. Instead of replying to the challenge with evidence and science, he retreats into some armchair philosophy. His argument amounts to this: ‘My intuition makes me think it seems like my claim is entirely reasonable.’ That’s it. That’s all there is. No data. No studies. No science. No evidence. Nothing more than some hypothetical story that appeals to his intuition and confirmation bias. And he believes it.”
Now for the final story selection:
On October 11, 2013, Richard Dawkins appeared with philosophy professor Peter Boghossian at Portland State University, where he teaches. Boghossian had recently published the book A Manual For Creating Atheists, and during their conversation, he asked Dawkins a very good question:
BOGHOSSIAN: What would it take for you to believe in God?
DAWKINS: I used to say it would be very simple. It would be the Second Coming of Jesus or a great, big, deep, booming, bass voice saying “I am God.” But I was persuaded, mostly by Steve Zara, who is a regular contributor to my website. He more or less persuaded me that even if there was this booming voice in the Second Coming with clouds of glory, the probable explanation is that it is a hallucination or a conjuring trick by David Copperfield. He made the point that a supernatural explanation for anything is incoherent. It doesn’t add up to an explanation for anything. A non-supernatural Second Coming could be aliens from outer space.
[Peter Boghossian begins to speak and is in full agreement with Dawkins, arguing, for example, that if the stars spelled out a message from God, we would first have to rule out alternative explanations, like an alien trickster culture.]
BOGHOSSIAN: So that [stars aligned into a message] couldn’t be enough. So what would persuade you?
DAWKINS: Well, I’m starting to think nothing would, which, in a way, goes against the grain, because I’ve always paid lip service to the view that a scientist should change his mind when evidence is forthcoming.
Lest you have any doubts that this is what’s being said, Peter Boghossian’s YouTube channel, on November 7, 2013, uploaded a video of their conversation. The relevant moments are from the 12:30 mark to the 15:30 mark.
When I found out about Dawkins’ remarks to Boghossian, Hasan and Sheldrake, I was bored to tears. I all but lost interest in him, except to the extent that I hoped public awareness of his two-faced nature would increase. If Dawkins’ remark that “intelligent people only believe in something because they’ve seen evidence for it” is true, then:
-What does that mean about people who refuse to look at the evidence at all?
-What does that mean about people who believe in something because “it so seems to me” or “it seems intuitively reasonable to me”?
-What does that mean about people who admit their praise of evidence is mere lip service, with limited substance to it?
I personally care quite alot about the concept of evidence, and that includes evidence for the Orthodox Christianity I came to believe in. I see nothing of myself in Richard Dawkins, and I don’t think I ever will.
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