Faith School Menace?

Richard Dawkins has been in the news lately as he has made a documentary arguing for the ending of faith schools. I watched it yesterday and he actually makes a fair point. However, I wish he would stick to the science books. He is one of the best science writers I have ever come across and his first book, The Selfish Gene, is not only a fantastic introduction to evolutionary biology but also a fantastic example of how to present a technical subject to a general audience - I'd strongly recommend anyone to read it. Unfortunately, he seems to be better known these days as "God basher in chief".

My own beliefs have always been rather sceptical. For the most part I went to a non-denominational school but I was taken to church on a Sunday and encouraged to attend Sunday school. I never really believed in God as such. I would go along with things; I found the stories about Jesus, Noah, Moses and so on entertaining enough, but for me they were always just stories - possibly with an important moral message (The Good Samaritan, for example) but stories none the less. The young priest was quite entertaining as well. He would do magic tricks to entertain the kids and tended to get into various scrapes with the older priests. He rather reminded me of Dougal from Father Ted - at least he would have been like that if he had suffered from some sort of horrendous head injury.

When I left home, I left religion - more or less. I would go along to services with friends for the want of anything better to do and occasionally volunteer for good deeds. In fact, the voluntary and charitable works are what really makes religion worthwhile and I have great admiration for the likes of The Salvation Army for that kind of practical application of belief. It's just that I can't be bothered with grovelling to deities in cold buildings. I think by 1998 I would describe myself as an atheist although I think a more philosophically honest description would be agnostic. I had no real belief left in any form of God; although living in Glasgow may have made my mind up about that one. I didn't have any passionate dislike of religion or religious people but I just could find no thread of logic in any form of belief. It was also at this time that I really started reading up on philosophy.

I never did philosophy at school. It wasn't that sort of school. I don't think logic and reasoning would have gone down well with the kind of Neanderthal I dealt with on a daily basis. However, I always had a sense that some people were talking utter bollocks without ever being able to put my finger on it. I think, in fairness, I probably had read a lot of philosophy over the years but it just took the form of cheap Sci-Fi paperbacks. Reading up on critical thinking and logic, and more importantly logical fallacies, does stretch one's mind and shows clearly why politicians, hellfire preachers and snake oil salesmen are really talking utter nonsense. In time, I started to delve into this strange world of rational discourse and the intriguing (if sometimes impenetrable) world of Kant, Locke, Descartes, Nietzsche, Popper and Russell.

In the last few years there has been a fairly vocal movement of notable writers who have been dubbed the "New Atheists". Some of the books of writers like Hitchens, Harris and Dennett have been entertaining; and sometimes intriguing. However, it was Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion that I was really looking forward to and, I have to say, it was the one book I was really disappointed with. It's not that it was complete rubbish (although I felt a philosophically astute proof reader would not have gone amiss) but I just felt that it was a verbose version of Bertrand Russell's essay Why I am not a Christian. A much better expansion of this had been done by Ludovic Kennedy a few years earlier with All in the Mind: A Farewell to God. However, the book was a best seller and a number of people have told me what a revelation it was (oh, the irony). I can only assume that they had never read another book on the subject and, when I have asked, it turns out to be the case.

So Dawkins seems to have headed away from his science writing and now spends his time getting cross about religion. Faith School Menace? was buried away on More4 but I think he has maybe mellowed slightly in his tone and the arguments he made that Faith Schools are a bad idea were fairly coherent; at least until slightly closer inspection. These kinds of documentary are always going to be rather one sided and I did think he went for the low hanging fruit by turning up at a Belfast primary. Having said that, the footage of him interviewing children at the Muslim school was revealing although I do wonder how much selective editing went on.

Whilst I would agree with him that crap science teaching is crap science teaching, the crux of his objections seem to be that children are incredibly gullible and if they are told to believe something at a very young age they will be lumbered with it for life - rather reminiscent of St. Francis Xavier's "Give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man". Now given that he has a low opinion of the academic credentials of religion I would expect him to be a little sceptical of that. It's just that up until the age of seven I was told to believe in all sorts of things: God, Father Christmas, The Tooth Fairy, unspeakable beasties that would lurk in the woods and the fact that any coin found lying on the pavement had been in dog poo. These things were told to me by responsible adults and I was able to see past them one by one. Maybe I could see the original logic behind them but I could clearly see them as the myths and stories that they were.

In fact this was famously put in the bible thus:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - 1 Corinthians 13:11