Yesterday Professor Richard Dawkins penned a comment piece for the Standard. Titled “How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?”, the piece argued that one of the key difficulties at the heart of the trans debate is a lack of coherent agreement about the meaning of certain words, such as violence.
The article, predictably, drew support and criticism from every quarter. But it was by no means Dawkins’ first foray into the trans debate, nor into contentious topics.
The academic is extremely at home with controversy: as a biologist he has argued that a belief in a God is essentially a delusional practice, which has ruffled the feathers of many religious communities globally. He has taken particular aim at the Christian faith of his upbringing, remarking that “somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist” which has made him both a hero and an enemy to people around the world.
He has a long history of arguing for free speech, too, touching on the problems around “tacit censorship” in liberal democracies and universities. He has argued that labelling children as being part of a certain religion is a form of child abuse, as children are too young to be able to know their views on such complex issues as God and the universe.
“It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child,” he once said. “I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell. It’s a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse.”
So who is Dawkins, one of the world’s greatest living scientists and thinkers? And what has made him such a controversial figure?
Dawkins’ career and personal life
Born in Nairobi in the Forties, when Kenya was still under British colonial rule, Dawkins moved back to England with his family when he was eight years old. His father, an agricultural servant, was from landed gentry and Dawkins grew up on a 210 acre country estate in Oxfordshire which had been in the family since the 1720s. In interviews five decades later, Dawkins still speaks about how the wonder of the African landscape haunted him as a child.
Dawkins, now 82, was brought up as a Christian, went to a protestant school, and was confirmed. But then, half way through his teenage years, the theory of evolution became a problem for him: “It was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing,” he said to The Guardian. “It was a very positive feeling. Darwinism is a very beautiful, very positive explanation and the world suddenly starts looking a lot more exciting.”
He studied zoology at Balliol College in Oxford, and stayed on and gained a Doctor of Philosophy. He then went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to Oxford to work as a lecturer. He became a fellow of New College in the city in 1970 and has led a predominantly academic life. He became the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford in 1995, a position which he held until 2008. When he stepped down, he said he planned to write a book for children that wasn’t based on “anti-scientific” fairytales.
“I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure,” he said. “Perhaps it’s something for research.”
In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science to “to promote scientific literacy and a secular worldview”. The foundation’s missions are “teaching the value of science” and “advancing secularism”. In June he launched a new a podcast, The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins, which discusses a wide-range of topics, including transgenderism and aliens.
He has been married three times, most recently to actor Lalla Ward (the ex-wife of Doctor Who’s Tom Baker), who illustrated many of his books. They divorced after 24 years of marriage in 2016. Dawkins has one child, a daughter.
His works and their claims
Dawkins was catapulted from scholarly biologist to international star in 1976 when his book, The Selfish Gene, was published. The book looked at the role of genes in evolutionary biology, arguing that genes are programmed to ensure their survival. It put forward an evolutionary argument for altruism, but also made human beings out to be mere vessels for their genes’ ambitions: “Sam Beckett couldn’t have come up with a more depressing worldview,” said The Guardian. It sold millions of copies worldwide, was translated into over 25 languages, gave us the word meme, and made Dawkins a household name.
Dawkins has published 17 subsequent books, the most notable of these being The Blind Watchmaker (1986), a further explanation of his views on natural selection; A Devil’s Chaplain (2003) a collection of essays on everything from pseudoscience to terrorism, and The God Delusion (2006), an all-guns-blazing take down of God and the delusion of those who believe in one.
He is seen as a figurehead of the New Atheists, a group of academics and intellectuals with a severely critical view on religion which includes Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The term originates from a 2006 Wired article written by Gary Wolf, in which Wolf said: “The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; its evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.”
His arguments against religion have come to be regarded by many as a crusade, and over the course of his career Dawkins has lost many of the early supporters of his less explicitly anti-religious work. His words on religion have been less than measured: in The God Delusion Dawkins argued that a belief in God was “pernicious”; in the past he has said that religion is a “betrayal of the intellect” and a “betrayal of all that’s best about what makes us human”.
But Dawkins is in the minority: in 2018, 84 per cent of the global population still identified with a religious group. Christians still form the world’s largest group with 2.3 billion believers, with Muslims being the second largest group, with 1.8 billion adherents.
The scientist’s issue with people who take a moderate approach to religion is that they “make the world safe for the extremists”.
“I’m sure they’d be horrified,” he said at the Edinburgh book festival about this accusation. “Nevertheless it could be true.”
As a result of his beliefs, Dawkins has been accused of being a fundamentalist atheist, though others would disagree. In an interview with The Guardian he explained, “I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. Now, that sounds aggressive, that sounds fundamentalist, that sounds fanatical, but if you actually analyse it, it’s inescapable.”
Beliefs and controversies
Dawkins is extremely vocal on a wide-range of issues – particularly those related to truth – believing that a quest for veracity is a central responsibility of being a scientist. When he was working in California in the Seventies, he joined protests against the American war in Vietnam, and remains left-leaning to this day. In his Standard article published yesterday, he said, “No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.”
He has tended to vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats throughout his life, and was part of the New Statesman’s 2009 project, 20 ways to save Labour: “Stop toadying to Muslims and other ‘faith communities’ as part of a general abolition of all religious privilege,” he said in the project. He has pro-choice views, is a supporter of animal rights, is pro-LGBT rights, and has generally backed the feminist movement.
However, he has been inconsistent. He once tweeted, “If you want to be in a position to testify & jail a man, don’t get drunk.” He has also tweeted: “Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”
His vitriol against religion has inevitably made him an enemy of many. In 2008, after he pointed out mistakes in the Turkish creationist books The Atlas of Creation his website was banned in both Turkey and Pakistan; he believes so strongly that educating children according to a religion is a travesty that he once argued that sex abuse in the Church, “unpleasant as it is, may do less permanent damage to the children than bringing them up Catholic in the first place”.
He has also doubled down on the trans debate, in part because it is inextricably linked with the debate around free speech. In 2015, he wrote: “Is trans woman a woman? Purely semantic. If you define by chromosomes, no. If by self-identification, yes. I call her ‘she’ out of courtesy.” As mentioned in yesterday’s article, his 1996 humanist of the year title was removed by the American Humanist Association in 2021 after they deemed some of his arguments, “to demean marginalised groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values”.
But has also pushed further with his ideas. In 2013, he sparked outrage on Twitter when he said: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.”
“They did great things in the Middle Ages, though,” he added. In the midst of the backlash he tweeted: “A statement of simple fact is not bigotry. And science by Muslims was great in the distant past.”
At the time, Caitlin Moran said: “Think it’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again” alluding to The Selfish Gene where Dawkins made humans out to be robot-like. Faisal Islam, Channel 4’s News Economics Editor at the time, called the remark a “spurious use of data”. Owen Jones said: “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” In 2017, a radio station in California cancelled a book event they had with him, saying that he had, “offended and hurt … so many people”.
In 2013, during a Cambridge Union debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury Dawkins also said: “If I were a cultural Muslim, I would have something to say about that faith’s appalling attitude to women and various other moral points,” which once again caused a wave of animosity. Dawkins has also described Islam as “the most evil religion in the world ... of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else.”
As a result of this belief, in 2018 he planned to make his books obtainable by free download in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Indonesian in response to what he saw as a “stirring towards atheism” in some Muslim countries. At the time, he said that an unofficial Arabic-language pdf had reportedly been downloaded as many as 13 million times.
This week he published an article on his Substack about the accusations of Islamophobia against him: “I’m frequently accused of Islamophobia, but I’m not Islamophobic or Muslimophobic. I see Muslims as victims of their own religion,” he tweeted.
I’m frequently accused of Islamophobia, but I’m not Islamophobic or Muslimophobic. I see Muslims as victims of their own religion. Read more about it in my article. (link on the thread) pic.twitter.com/iby5p3TiHo
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 9, 2023
Twitter is known for making its users’ words come across as sharper, less nuanced and more aggressive. After all, no subtle argument can be debated 280 characters at the time. People comment on a whim, and make outrageous and combative statements they never would dream of saying to anybody face to face. Dawkins seems to be a victim of this: foreseeably, many of the comments he has made on the platform have come to undermine his more thoughtful academic work.
Although he has denied enjoying the backlash that is often directed towards him, he has released several videos where he reads out his hate-mail. In one published on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science YouTube channel he reads in front of a log fire.
“I don’t mind being disliked by complete idiots,” he has said.
