Questions that I’d like to ask Richard Dawkins

This neuroscience and psychology themed blog has been largely abandoned for the last few years, with the latter posts often deviating a lot from the main themes of this blog. I’m hoping readers will once again tolerate me writing about whatever I want to write about, with a connection to science, but deviating into philosophy. I’d also like to ask readers to not even think about plagiarising any of my ideas or content.

The famous biology populariser, author, philosopher and atheist Richard Dawkins is scheduled to tour Australia this month. I read his book The Selfish Gene, back in the mid-1970s when it was first published and I was in my mid-teens. It had a huge impact on me and immesurably boosted my self-confidence in asserting my right to not believe and to learn for myself how the world works, despite being raised as an Anglican. My respect for Dawkins is huge, but too often he seems to be preaching to the converted and avoiding the really tricky questions about religion, science and society. So I’ve put into words a collection of questions that I wish he would read and answer, in the hope that I might provoke discussions or answers of some kind, from some one.

1. If religion disappeared tomorrow, would great achievement in the arts, architecture and other areas of human endeavour eventually cease? Two singers whose work I highly respect and enjoy both have musical careers that started in boyhood within centuries-old musical traditions of two of the world’s largest faiths. The musical background of English counter-tenor James Bowman CBE was in Anglican church music, beginning as a boy chorister in a cathedral while a student at a school given Royal Charter by King Henry VIII. After his voice broke he sang as a bass, but later debuted as a counter-tenor in a school chapel. He won an organ-playing scholarship to Oxford then sang in church choirs. His career moved into opera and classical music with huge success. He ended his long and glorious career singing at the Chapel Royal in a palace in London, a church that meets the spiritual needs of the British royal family, like religion, a nonsensical tradition, based on the religious concept of the divine right of kings. Rahat Fateh Ali Khan is one of the most famous singers in Pakistan and he has made a substantial contribution to Bollywood and Pakistani cinema soundtracks. His wonderful career encompasses the most sacred and popular musical genres. He was born into a long family tradition of Qawwali singing, a mesmerising, poetic and beautiful form of Sufi Islamic devotional singing. He began singing at three, and at seven years of age was being trained by an uncle who is also a legendary Qawwali singer. I can’t explain in words what is so special about the music of Bowman and Rahat, you just have to listen to understand. I very much doubt that either of these men would have started on their long journeys of years of devoted musical training if their boyhoods had been spent outside of an established structure of religious singing traditions. Surely a child who believes that God is listening to his singing is going to approach his musical training with greater seriousness than an atheist kid? Do you want to be responsible for silencing such incredible voices?
2. The cultural critic and non-believer Anthony Daniels, writing as Theodore Dalrymple in 2021, disagreed with your characterisation of raising children in a religious tradition as a form of child abuse. To attempt to summarise Dalrymple’s philosophy, he has argued in various books and essays that religion offers much-needed order, meaning and community to some disadvantaged people, and when intellectuals who were born into more privileged strata of society argue that we don’t need religion, they are only thinking of their own welfare, and ignoring the needs of others. How do you answer this criticism?
3. You were not the first writer to highlight the apparent hypocrisy of left-wing people supporting claims made by people who insist that they are the sex or gender different to the one that they were born as (and presumably still are in terms of sex chromosomes), while at the same time such politically-left people might have vilified the American Rachel Dolezal when it was discovered that she was a white woman identifying as a black woman. In November 2020 The Monthly magazine published an essay by the Australian Muslim commentator Waleed Aly in which he also mentioned the Dolezal case while observing that the left accept claims of transgender status while emphatically rejecting the concept of transracialism. Aly received some criticism for supporting the position taken by J. K. Rowling in that essay, but his comparison of Dolezal with transgender people appears to have slipped by without controversy. In April 2021 you published a brief Tweet asking people to discuss the apparent hypocrisy of the left vilifying transracial Dolezal while also vilifying anyone who questions the authenticity of claims to transgender status. Your tweet stirred up discussion as you hoped it would do; it got a lot of press, it provoked online discussions among atheist and non-believer communities about the concept of transgenderism, and the American Humanist Association decided to revoke an award they gave you over two decades earlier. In contrast, Waleed Aly appears to have lost nothing at all for making essentially the same point. Why do you think there was such a huge difference in the reaction to you and Aly writing the same thing? Are you simply more famous than Aly? Do tweets have a greater readership than essays? Does the left unthinkingly question your motivations while accepting the writing of Aly in good faith, for political reasons, even when you both write the same thing?
4. What is a woman?
5. Many people have argued that gender ideology/queer theory/transgenderism operates like a cult; controlling minds and behaviours, requiring learning of a nonsensical body of beliefs, isolating followers from family and the wider community, and vilifying all non-believers as bigots and dangerous people. What do you think?
6. Intelligent people sometimes do or believe things that don’t make sense, not due to a lack of intelligence, but due to an excess of emotional vulnerability. Bored and directionless people fall down the rabbit-holes of conspiracy theory cults. Lonely people get scammed out of their life savings or get conned into acting as drug-smuggling mules by con artists who create fake online romances. Isn’t religion the same? Isn’t it pointless trying to reason with someone who is hooked on an idea for entirely emotional reasons?
7. Isn’t religion inevitable as a dynamic part of human cultures, like languages, fashions and cuisines? Is there any point opposing it or arguing against it?

Postscript 2023

I did get the opportunity to ask Richard Dawkins on of these questions in person when he toured Ausrtralia in early 2023. There was a generous Q&A session at the end of the event and I mustered up the courage to grab the mic and ask Dawkins “What is a woman?” and instantly what sounded like the whole audience cheered. Then Richard answered something like “Its a female of the human species” and he then mused over whether he might regard a female of species that are human ancestors and close relatives, such as the neanderthals, as being women too. Dawkins did not give the Kelly-Jay Keen style definition of a woman as “Adult human female”, and he did not engage with the gender politics behind my question, but it is worth noting that Dawkins also did not mention identity or self-identity in his definition of what a woman is. I was happy with his reply and I think Dawkins also got a cheer from the audience for his answer, but I then thought I needed to pin him down by asking how he defines “female”, but then I thought I could be pushing my luck in asking a second question, and in reality every single person in that auditorium knows how to define male and female in humans, using basic biological knowledge. After the event I was standing around deciding where to go next and two people leaving the event walked up to me and congratulated me for asking my question, one a woman who was very flattering and kind. I will never forget that evening!