Mick Hartley

Here's Simon Barnes in the Times, back in January:

Dinosaurs are not extinct. I know, I saw plenty this week. I went dinosaur-watching, and saw Circus aeruginosus, Recurvirostra avosetta and Tyto alba. I didn't even have to travel too far to find them: they are part of the landscape of East Suffolk. They stem from the maniraptors, which include Tyrannosaurus rex (below), but only one line still survives and that is the Neornithes. You can find it today represented by creatures better known as birds. Feathered dinosaurs.

I don't know who brings me closer to despair. Sometimes I think it is the creationists, wilfully blind to fact. At other times I think it is the advocates of intelligent design, who are quite clever people wilfully blind to fact. But then I think that the proselytising atheists of science are the worst of the lot….

What of Richard Dawkins, who had the arrogance to write a fat book about God without troubling to read up on theology, a discipline that includes many writers as subtle-minded as himself?

I can understand any scientist getting cross about creationists and their demands for equal time in schools. But getting cross because some people believe in God – well, what's that got to do with science? No believer can prove that God exists: isn't faith rather the point? And no scientist can prove that He doesn't.

You may believe that you have a soul. Professor Dawkins believes that you don't. Both positions are equally tenable in that both are matters of belief, of faith. This stuff can be neither proved nor disproved, therefore it is nothing to do with science.

I have been out dinosaur-watching this week. It’s been great. Watching dinosaurs going about their business in Suffolk, and pondering on the extraordinary silliness of Richard Dawkins. Look, I’ve been saying, another dinosaur — and by the way, isn’t Dawkins an eejit?

That silly sod Dawkins has just come up with a book about all this. It’s called The Greatest Show on Earth, and I have much enjoyed and wholly approved of its serialisation in this newspaper. The introductory piece bore the headline “Evolution is fact. End of story”.

Shock horror, eh? That’s been the end of story for precisely 150 years. Professor Dawkins is rightly passionate that the truth should be available for us all: that it should be taught, understood and accepted for what it is. Fact. Humans are animals: deal with it.

Evolution is not a matter of opinion. It is not a theory, as in a spot of idle speculation. It is the only explanation that fits, unites and explains a billion truths, or could ever do so. The idea that we should teach such inanities as “intelligent design” or that we should respect the counter-factual notions of fundamentalists and bigots is ludicrous.

Dawkins’s anger on this point, his comparison of evolution-deniers with holocaust-deniers, is utterly legitimate. It’s a terrible shame, then, that he has done his cause so ridiculous a disservice.

Oh God, we’re on to God again. But I’ll be brief. Dawkins has brought the same passion to the fact of evolution as he has to his opinion about God. He has presented his doctrinaire atheism with the same force as he has shown us the irrefragable truths of evolution. He is our leading voice on evolution: he is our leading voice on atheism. As a result, the two things have become inextricable. This is devastatingly counter-productive.

He says that evolution is a fact. Fine. He also holds up the non-existence of God as a fact, but that can never be the case. If you believe in an ineffable God who started the whole business of evolution, that’s your business. It can’t be proved or disproved — and therefore, it’s beyond the scientist’s scope. You can’t prove you have a soul; you can’t disprove it either. You can believe that life continues after death, and all that anyone can say is good old you, I wish I did.