Explainer

Atheism

Belief

Creed

Epistimology

12 June 2024

7 min read

The difference between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How we decide what is true rests on where we start from.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man and woman speaker on a stage greet and embrace each other.

Friends reunited.

UnHerd.

If you want a deep dive into some of the big questions of our time, and a fascinating clash of minds, just listen to the recent conversation between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In case you haven’t heard the story, as a young devoutly Muslim Somali-Dutch woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali turned her back on Islam to become a poster-child of the New Atheist movement, often mentioned in the same breath as the famous ‘four horsemen’ of the movement – Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. When she announced she had become a Christian (or, as she described herself, a ‘lapsed atheist’) in November 2023, it sent shock waves through atheist ranks. A public meeting with her old friend Richard Dawkins was therefore eagerly anticipated.

As the conversation began, Ali described a period in the recent past when she experienced severe and prolonged depression, which led her even to the point of contemplating suicide. No amount of scientific-based reasoning or psychological treatment was able to help, until she went to see a therapist who diagnosed her problem as not so much mental or physical but spiritual - it was what she called a ‘spiritual bankruptcy’. She recommended that Hirsi Ali might as well try prayer. And so began her conversion.

Of course, Dawkins was incredulous. He started out assuming that she had only had a conversion to a ‘political Christianity’, seeing the usefulness of her new faith as a bulwark against Islam, or as a comforting myth in tough times, because, surely, an intelligent person like her could not possibly believe all the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that vicars preach from the pulpit.

He was then somewhat taken aback by Ali’s confession that she did choose to believe the reality of the incarnation, that Jesus was the divine Son of God born of a virgin and that for a God who created the world, resurrecting his Son Jesus was no big deal. With a rueful shake of the head, Dawkins had to admit she was, to his great disappointment, a proper Christian.

Yet he was insistent he didn’t believe a word of it. The nub of the issue for Dawkins seemed to be his objection to the idea of ‘sin’. For him, all this is “obvious nonsense, theological bullshit… the idea that humanity is born in sin, and has to be cured of sin by Jesus being crucified… is a morally very unpleasant idea.”

Of course it’s unpleasant. Crucifixions generally were. It’s where we get our word excruciating from. And from the perspective of someone who has no sense whatsoever that they need saving, it is distasteful, embarrassing, not the kind of thing that you bring up in Oxford Senior Common Rooms, precisely because it is just that – unpleasant. I too find the notion that I am sinful, stubborn, deeply flawed, in desperate need of forgiveness and change unpleasant. I would much rather think I am fine as I am. Yet there are many things that are unpleasant but necessary - like surgery. Or changing dirty nappies. Or having to admit you are addicted to something.

And that is ultimately the difference between Dawkins and Ali. They are both as clever as each other; they have both read the same books; they both live similar lives; they know the same people. Yet Ayaan has been to a place where she knew she needed help, a help that no human being can provide, whereas Richard, it seems, has not.

It is like trying to measure the temperature of a summer’s day with a spanner. Spanners are useful, but not for measuring temperature.

Dawkins responded to Ali’s story by insisting that the vital question was whether Christianity was true, not whether it was consoling, pointing out that just because something is comforting does not mean it is true. True enough, but then it doesn’t mean it is not true either. The problem is, however, how we decide whether it is true. Dawkins seems to continue to think that science - test tubes, experiments and the rest - can tell one way or the other. Yet as the great Blaise Pascal put it:

If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being invisible and without limits he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is.

Science can’t really help us here. It is like trying to measure the temperature of a summer’s day with a spanner. Spanners are useful, but not for measuring temperature.

Whether Christianity makes sense or not cannot be determined by asking whether it is scientifically plausible or logically coherent – because that all depends on which scientific or logical scheme you are using to analyse it. It is all to do with the place from which you look at it, your ‘epistemic perspective’ to give it a fancy name. From the perspective of the strong, the super-confident, the sure-of-themselves, Christianity has never made much sense. When St Paul tried to explain it to the sophisticated first century pagans of Corinth – he concluded the same - it was ‘foolishness to the Greeks’.

Christianity makes no sense to someone who has not the slightest sense of their own need for something beyond themselves, someone who has not yet reached the end of their own resources, someone who has never experienced that frustrating tug in the other direction, that barrier which stands in the way when trying and failing to be a better version of themselves – that thing Christians call ‘sin’.

Why would you need a saviour if you don’t need saving? Would you even be able to recognise one when they came along? No amount of brilliant argument can convince the self-satisfied that a message centred on a man who is supposed to be God at the same, time, much less that same man hanging on a cross, is the most important news in the world. It is why Christianity continues to flourish in poorer than more affluent parts of the world, or at least in places where human need is closer to the surface.

She found the atheist paradigm that she used to believe, and that Dawkins still does, was no longer adequate for her.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described what he called ‘paradigm shifts’. They happen when a big scientific theory of the way things are gets stretched to breaking point, and people increasingly feel it no longer functions adequately as an explanation of the evidence at hand. It creaks at the seams, until an entirely new paradigm comes along that better explains the phenomena you are studying. The classic example was the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics, which was not a small shift within an existing paradigm, but a wholesale change to a completely new way of looking at the world.

That is what Christians call conversion. This is what seems to have happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What marks her out from Dawkins is not that she has found a crutch to lean on, whereas he is mentally stronger, so doesn’t need one. It is that she found the atheist paradigm that she used to believe, and that Dawkins still does, was no longer adequate for her – it no longer could offer the kind of framework of mind and heart that could support her in moments of despair as well as in joy. It no longer made sense of her experience of life. It could no longer offer the kind of framework that can resist some of the great cultural challenges of the day. This was not the addition of a belief in God to an existing rationalist mindset. It was adopting a whole new starting point for looking at the world. When she first announced her conversion she wrote: “I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” This is a classic paradigm shift.

Of course, Dawkins can’t see this. He is still in the old paradigm, one that still makes perfect sense to him. It’s just that he thinks it must make sense to everyone. It is surely the one that all right-thinking people should take.

As the conversation continued, Ayaan Hirsi Ali often seemed like someone trying to describe the smell of coffee to someone without a sense of smell. Dawkins in turn was like a colourblind person deriding someone for trying to describe the difference between turquoise and pink, because of course, anyone with any sense knows there is no real difference between them.

No amount of proof or evidence will ever convince either that the other is wrong. They are using different methods to discover the truth, one more analytical and scientific, the other more personal and instinctive. The question is: which one gets you to the heart of things? It’s decision every one of us has to make.

Explainer

Creed

Virtues

15 March 2024

6 min read

Temperance: neurotic vice or self-control for future benefit?

We’re better at bravery than temperance, just when we need that self-control more than ever.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A casually dressed man perches on railing balancing, clasping his hands and looking around.

Jed Villejo on Unsplash.

The 21st century is witnessing a crisis of temperance, self-discipline, and self-control. Lent is one way to combat this.

According to the international Leader Character framework, there are eleven “character strengths” important for human wellbeing and good leadership. These include virtues like justice, accountability, courage, and good judgment. Researchers have used this framework to perform thousands of studies on teams and groups of people around the world. These studies show that, almost without exception, temperance is the weakest virtue in every team everywhere. (Not quite every person – each team has one or two members with strong temperance, but temperance is still weakest on average for a group).

The modern world is not only intemperate: it actively encourages the opposite: immediate gratification of desires. Every day we are bombarded with online ads, posters, and TV commercials that tell us to ‘Indulge yourself’; ‘treat yourself’, ‘look after yourself’, along with images of sensually pleasing people and objects. It is a rare advert that appeals to your calm rationality and long-term thinking. The advertising industry knows that it can make much more money from people who lack self-control. If it targets your basic animal impulses, then you are more likely to buy things you don’t need and wouldn’t have thought of without ad’s enticing promise.

Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on.

Worse still, there are elements of Western thought that praise intemperance as a virtue and pathologize restraint as a psychological disorder. Elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, popularised in the media, suggest that you do damage to your mental health if you suppress your desires or try to hide them. It is far healthier to give free rein – to sexual desire first of all, but to all desires in the end. Temperance is no longer a virtue to be admired, but a neurotic vice that fills your subconscious with envy, bitterness, and psychological problems.

What is temperance anyway and why is it a problem if we lack it?

Temperance is self-control. It is acquired by self-discipline. Its purpose is to organise and order your many desires, giving priority to the ones that matter most to you. Let’s say you want to lose weight, and you also want to eat that doughnut you can see in the shop window. Or you want to save money to buy a house, but you also want that new and larger TV screen. Those are competing desires. Temperance is the power to choose what you won’t regret choosing later on. It doesn’t tell you what you ought to choose: it simply gives you control over your desires so you rule over them instead of them ruling you.

What does lack of temperance look like? Whenever you keep doing something you wish you didn’t keep doing, you are being intemperate. I don’t mean one-time actions that you later regret. I mean things you know you’ll regret even before you do them, yet you still do them. Things like: smoking (for most people), eating too much, browsing Instagram or TikTok instead of working, failing to show up for gym class. It can also mean any kind of procrastination: avoiding doing a task you know you have to do but don’t want to do ‘now’. In sum, it reveals a disorganisation in your priorities and goals, so a lesser priority subverts a higher priority because it’s more immediately available and enjoyable.

We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going

The problem with lacking temperance is that it undermines your own goals for your life and makes your future self a helpless victim of your present self. It leads to a downward spiral of the heart of intemperance is that some desire, some pleasure, some indulgence, has gained so much power over our life that we no longer have control over it. It is in the driving seat, not us. Intemperance is also a cause of self-hatred and low self-esteem. One of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to set long term goals and stick to them. It makes you feel like you’re heading somewhere good.

By contrast, the heart of temperance is to subordinate everything we think, feel, and enjoy to our will, our clear-headed decisions about the kind of person we want to be in the long-term. We need temperance if we’re going to be happy with where our lives are going. Temperance is even needed for worldly success. Warren Buffett once said, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”

Why is temperance so lacking in our own time? I can think of at least two reasons.

First, we are one of the wealthiest societies ever to exist. Wealth may have benefits, but it also enables us to get what we want, when we want it. Wealthy people are less used to having their desires unsatisfied than poor people. Unfulfilled longing is a less common occurrence for the rich, so there is little natural opportunity to exercise the muscle of self-denial.

Secondly, we are one of the least religious societies ever to have existed. In contrast to secularism, religion has always had practical tools to cultivate temperance. All major world religions have ritual practices of fasting and feasting designed to exercise and strengthen self-discipline. Every year Muslims endure the gruelling discipline of Ramadan. Orthodox Christians restrict themselves to a vegan diet during the forty days of lent, and many other Christians give up some indulgence. Both rich and poor share alike in this voluntary self-denial. Now that these practices are eroding away, they are being replaced not by other self-discipline practices, but by the worship of I-want-it-here-and-now. This is shown most poignantly in the 2000 movie Chocolat, which explicitly puts up sensual indulgence in competition to traditional religion and abstinence – and indulgence wins.

But the decline of religion has done more than this: it has also undermined the sense of transcendent purpose in many people’s lives – which was what motivated them to look beyond their physical desires. Without hope and without a larger sense of meaning to life, people have less reason to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the sake of longer-term goals.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance.

I don’t mean that short-term pleasures are always bad, or that sensual desire is evil in itself. The whole point of temperance is that it involves the right amount, and not too much, of something good. That is what makes it so tricky. If eating a doughnut was like stealing or violence, we would have a stronger voice telling us not to do it. But because it’s not bad in itself, we find it harder to resist. We need temperance to say no to something good when we’ve already taken enough of it, so we don’t take too much.

Nor are sensual desires the only way we can be intemperate. An outburst of rage on social media is a sign of intemperance. A father who spends too long in the office and not enough time with his children is being intemperate. He is sacrificing the long-term goal of healthy family relationships for the short-term goal of career success. We lack the self-control to express our anger in the right place at the right time.

Temperance is needed for so many of the other virtues to function. If you’re not temperate, then you will be late for meetings, fail to deliver work on time, or makes too many commitments that you can’t keep. You’ll be a liability to your friends and colleagues.

Temperance doesn’t tell you what you should aim for in life. But no matter what you aim for, you won’t get it without temperance. So, what are you giving up for lent?