Johann Hari: Why Richard Dawkins is heroic

He is one of the few brave enough to stand up to the massed legions of the faithful

We have never needed Richard Dawkins more than now. In this country, we have produced at least eight followers of a religious death cult prepared to commit mass murder to gain access to Paradise. And they are not the biggest religious killers operating on our soil: the Catholic Church tells Africans that condoms contain tiny, invisible holes that make them "useless" in preventing Aids, condemning tens of thousands of innocent people to a slow death from ignorance.

And the response of our Government? They are proposing to spend billions on indoctrinating a whole new generation into these faiths - with a massive expansion of religious schools, many run by hardline Madrassah-mongers and Creationists - and new legislation to forbid fierce criticism of these religions. The response of the wider culture is just as appeasing; we have meekly accepted that a religious mob threatening violence can close down plays that dare to criticise their superstitions.

Step forward Dawkins, with his superb new Channel Four documentary, The Root of all Evil? He offers a clear, crisp message: "The time has come for people of reason to say, 'Enough is enough'."

It is only as you watch the film that you realise how rare it is to hear clear arguments against organised superstition, even in this, the least religious country in the world. As religious faith has collapsed in this country - fewer than 7 per cent attend a religious service every week, and many of them are recent immigrants - the padding protecting the religious from criticism has grown. The novelist Douglas Adams, in one of his final speeches, pondered: "If somebody votes for a party you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like. But if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday, you have to say, 'I respect that.'"

Of course, if it were simply a matter of not flicking light switches, few would object. But Dawkins shows that our genuflection to superstition - out of simple, understandable politeness - is causing terrible problems, from the Aids-stricken villages of Africa to the segregated schools of Birmingham, to the burned-out carriages of the District Line. There is a fundamental and growing conflict between two different ways of understanding the world: reason and faith. As one of the world's most distinguished scientists, Dawkins knows better than most that reason - and its child, science - demand rigorous, relentless testing of reality. Faith is the opposite: it is "an idea not based on evidence", since "if there was proof, we wouldn't need to take it on faith, would we?"

He first came to appreciate reason through his study of Charles Darwin, the man who discredited the oldest and best argument for God - how did things become so complex and work so well unless there was a smart alpha male in the sky making it all? Evolution showed that incredibly complex organisms can emerge over millennia from amoeba, without even a flick of the divine wrist. Darwin revealed "a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, [where] some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice." In place of God, the universe offers us "blind pitiless indifference".

This might sound depressing - but remember that once we understand this universe using the scientific method as Dawkins advises, things that would once have seemed like miracles happen every day. Go into any hospital and you can watch scientists making the blind see, the deaf hear and the crippled walk. Jesus and Mohammed supposedly pulled off similar acts once in a millennium and the religious have never stopped talking about it. Reason can make hunks of metal fly and wipe out smallpox, a disease that killed over one billion human beings. Faith cannot make anything happen out here in the real world (ever been to a faith-healer?) except a lonely prayer.

Dawkins' critics say that he, too, is a peddler of faith - an ayatollah of atheism offering certainties as glib as the pastors and mullahs he attacks. At first, this might sound logical: isn't Dawkins' insistence that God does not exist also a matter of faith? How can we know? But this is flawed, for reasons the great philosopher Bertrand Russell outlined. He asked his readers to take it from him that there is an immense tea-pot orbiting Mars and then asked - are you agnostic about its existence? Of course not. You do not believe it is there. If you do not believe in something because there is absolutely no evidence for it, you are not acting on faith. You are acting on reason - its polar opposite. As Dawkins says: "We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so."

As science explains more and more of human existence, God is being intellectually peeled back. The religious now scramble to offer a "god of the gaps" - a Creator who resides in the remaining crevices that science has yet to comprehend. Are there gaps in the fossil record? There's God. Don't understand how the physics of large objects so completely contradict the rules followed at the sub-molecular level? That's the Almighty. God is whittled down until He is reduced either to a pale metaphor or to some vague "first cause". (And Russell explained why even that argument doesn't make sense, since "if everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there must be anything without cause, it may as well be the world as God.")

True, some manage to mesh faith and science in their minds. But they are surprisingly few: in 1998, the scientific journal Nature studied scientists who had been elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences in the US. Just 7 per cent believed in God, in a country where 95 per cent of the wider population do.Dawkins is much more characteristic of the scientific community than the token Christian-scientist offered up in these debates.

No, Dawkins is not perfect. As times he sounds like one of those naive 19th-century atheists who believed that all evil descended from superstition. That can be rebutted with two words: Stalin. Mao. If you eradicate cancer, you still have to deal with malaria and leprosy. If you eradicate superstition, there will be other deadly human delusions to deal with. If atheists do not, for the sake of a rhetorical point admit this, then we give our critics a glaring open goal.

But he is one of the few people brave enough to stand up to the massed legions of the faithful, and - in Norman Mailer's apposite phrase - "noble enough to live with emptiness". For that, we should offer him every accolade and hallelujah but one. Whatever you do, don't thank God for Richard Dawkins.

j.hari@independent.co.uk