Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (1941–)

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born on March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father, Clinton John Dawkins, served in the colonial agricultural service during the Second World War. The family returned to England in 1949 and settled on a farm in Oxfordshire. He was sent to Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an Anglican boarding school, where he attended chapel and was confirmed. By his own later account he had begun to lose his belief in the years before that, and what finally unsettled it was the discovery, in his mid-teens, that the diversity and apparent design of living things could be explained by natural selection rather than by a Designer. He has described the loss of faith as an intellectual conclusion, not a rebellion.

He read zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962, and stayed to take his doctorate under the ethologist Niko Tinbergen, whose work on animal behaviour shaped his early research and his habit of asking what behaviour is for. From 1967 to 1969 he was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, a period that coincided with the antiwar and civil rights upheavals of the late 1960s. He returned to Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer in zoology and became a fellow of New College, which remained his academic home for decades. He was made a Reader in 1990 and, in 1995, the first Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a chair funded by the Microsoft executive of that name. He held it until 2008.

His intellectual formation was in the neo-Darwinian tradition of R. A. Fisher, W. D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith and George C. Williams, and it is within that tradition, instead of through theology, that he came to the questions Christian readers have since put to him. His first book, The Selfish Gene, appeared in 1976. It presented evolution from the point of view of the gene as the unit of selection, and it introduced the word "meme" for a unit of cultural transmission. The book made his name well beyond biology, and a long sequence of popular works followed. In the 1980s and 1990s these were concerned chiefly with evolution itself and with the case against the argument from design, notably in The Blind Watchmaker in 1986.

Through those decades he was an open critic of religion, but the criticism was a secondary thread in his work. In 1996 he joined the public debate about science and belief in a more direct way, and in the early 2000s he began to speak and write as an avowed advocate of atheism, a position he had held privately since adolescence. The God Delusion was published in 2006 and sold in very large numbers worldwide. In 2006 he also founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which in 2016 merged with the Center for Inquiry in the United States. Together with Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett he was grouped under the label "New Atheism," a label some of them accepted more readily than others.

His public career has not been without friction. Some scientists and philosophers, including colleagues who share his views on evolution, have disputed the gene-centred account of selection in The Selfish Gene, with Stephen Jay Gould among the best-known critics. Theologians such as Alister McGrath, himself a trained molecular biophysicist, and the literary critic Terry Eagleton have argued that he engages the weakest forms of belief rather than its most serious expressions. Dawkins has replied that he addresses religion as it is actually practised and professed by most believers. Other disputes have followed from his public statements on social media and elsewhere, and in 2021 the American Humanist Association withdrew a humanist award it had given him in 1996, citing remarks he had made about identity. He disputed the grounds for that decision, and the disagreement remains part of the public record. He retired from his Oxford fellowship in 2008 and has continued to write and lecture since.

His Writing and Christian Responses

Dawkins began writing for a general readership in the mid-1970s, and The Selfish Gene in 1976 remains the book on which his scientific reputation rests. Its argument is that natural selection is best understood as acting on genes, with organisms as the vehicles genes build to propagate themselves. The book was an exposition of ideas developed by Hamilton, Williams and Maynard Smith, and Dawkins has said that its vivid language was meant to convey that work and not to claim that genes have purposes. The Extended Phenotype followed in 1982, a more technical argument for the gene's-eye view, and The Blind Watchmaker in 1986 answered William Paley's argument that the complexity of living things implies a designer. Dawkins argued that cumulative selection, acting without foresight, can produce the appearance of design without a designer. Later books such as Climbing Mount Improbable and The Ancestor's Tale extended the case for a general audience, and he has also published two volumes of memoir, An Appetite for Wonder in 2013 and Brief Candle in the Dark in 2015.

The God Delusion, published in 2006, was his most direct work on religion. In it he argued that the existence of a creator is a scientific hypothesis that the evidence does not support, that religious belief is best explained as a by-product of other features of human psychology and culture, and that religion has done significant harm. It was widely read, widely translated, and widely answered. Christian responses came from several directions. Alister McGrath, who held doctorates in molecular biophysics and theology, wrote Dawkins' God in 2005 and, with Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? in 2007, arguing that Dawkins misrepresented Christian theology and treated faith as belief without evidence, a definition few Christian thinkers would accept. Terry Eagleton, in a 2006 review in the London Review of Books, charged him with ignorance of the theological tradition he was attacking. John Lennox, a mathematician at Oxford, debated Dawkins publicly and wrote God's Undertaker in 2007, contending that science does not exclude belief in God. Keith Ward, a priest and philosopher, wrote Why There Almost Certainly Is a God in 2008, and David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions in 2009 argued that the new atheists misread both the history of Christianity and the metaphysical claims of classical theism. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in a 2007 review of The God Delusion, argued that Dawkins's central argument against God's existence did not succeed on its own terms.

A common thread in these replies was that Dawkins asked scientific questions of a tradition that makes claims of a different kind. Dawkins has responded that such distinctions are used to shield belief from scrutiny, and that the existence of a creator is a factual matter. This disagreement over what kind of claim religion makes remains unresolved, and it is the main reason his work continues to be read alongside its critics.

Within the library, Dawkins stands as the most prominent English-language critic of religion of the early twenty-first century, and his arguments gave a generation of Christian writers a set of objections to answer. Some of those answers sharpened Christian apologetics on creation and evolution, and some prompted believers to separate the doctrine of creation from the argument from design. Some also exposed a gap between popular and academic understandings of faith.

Who should read Dawkins: Readers of this library who want to know the strongest popular case against belief, as put by a working scientist, and who intend to answer it honestly instead of dismissing it. The Blind Watchmaker is the clearest statement of the evolutionary argument that many Christian writers have had to address, and The God Delusion is the book most of the replies named above respond to. Both are best read with a Christian reply beside them. They are not books of spiritual formation, and they offer no account of what it means to seek God. They are for those who want to know what objections educated unbelief actually raises, and to test their own convictions against them.