It was one of those books which was so "talked about", so hyped, that, out of perverse principle, I made a point of ignoring it. Further to that, I had heard the author sounding off on some television programme and he had come across as a pompous and opinionated twerp. I am talking, of course, of Richard Dawkins and his best-selling "The God Delusion". I had previously come across (but not actually read - a Pierre Bayard HB) his earlier work "The Selfish Gene". I am in no sense a militant anti-geneticist, but my response was that this was another "just" argument: human life is "just" this, the meaning of existence is "just" that; my own feeling is that, whichever way you look at it, the fact of being alive at all is deeply mysterious and certainly never "just" anything. Reductionism is basically a way for the reductionists to think they're in control of things. My position was that of an anti-reductionist agnostic, who, among other things, thought that life was probably too short to be spending too much of it reading Richard Dawkins books.

Then Carol picked up "The God Delusion" at a station bookstall - just something to pass the journey - but, my curiosity getting the better of me, I had soon purloined it and was ploughing my way through it. It's a good read. A combination of heated invective and ruthless argument makes it a real page-turner. When you finish, however, you do breathe an inner sigh of relief as you realise that you have been listening to a man shouting at the top of his voice for 420 pages! It is this tone of intolerant insistence that betrays him. The core of his atheistic argument is really a sort of schoolboy "prove it!" - the onus is on believers to prove the existence of God, not on atheists to disprove it. Well, in that case, why get so hot under the collar about it? What point is there in trying to out-argue delusional thinkers who will anyway always be able to trump any merely rational argument by playing the faith card. Dawkins stamps and fumes like a scientific Rumplestiltskin at the injustice of it all, where an attitude of amused but patient tolerance might be more dignified and - ultimately - more convincing.

Dawkins' basic argument is that life on earth does not require any sort of supernatural intervention either to initiate or maintain it. It's really just a question of orders of magnitude. Given the infinite vastness of the universe, it was statistically probable that conditions permitting the beginnings of life would crop up somewhere. Once life gets started, natural selection gets to work. Over inconceivably long periods of geological time genetic mutations develop by exploiting their competitive advantage until finally we arrive at the acme of evolutionary creation, homo sapiens, and the acme of homo sapiens, Richard Dawkins (only kidding)! Dawkins' follow-up argument is that religion's track-record is catastrophically poor. Mankind would be far better off without the physical and psychological horrors inflicted on it in the name of religion. Human happiness requires, therefore, that we jettison delusional thinking and stand freely on our own two feet - a sort of dressed-up version of John Lennon's "Imagine".

Without sounding like some red-neck creationist nutter, there's no easy way around the evolution argument. Pursuing my inquiries, I came across a copy of "Evolution in Action" by Julian Huxley. Written in 1953, it seeks to explain some of the basic notions of evolution to the general reader. The author's calm, measured prose was a welcome antidote to Dawkins' hectic diatribe. His interpretation of evolutionary theory avoids the reductionist pitfall. He argues that evolution from single-celled creatures to man represents an undeniable progress. Man, with his unique capacities, represents a whole new evolutionary stage, a conscious stage:

In the light of evolutionary biology man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet, and one of the few possible instruments of progress in the universe at large.

What a tremendous responsibility! And what can we do to assume this responsibility? I turned to Julian's brother, Aldous Huxley and the introduction to his "Perennial Philosophy":

...man's final end [is] in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being...

And if the whole purpose of thousands of millions of years of evolution were the creation of beings with the potential to consciously realize Ultimate Reality? Thousands of millions of years would be as the blink of an eye in the eternal present in which all of time is encompassed. Evolution might then be seen as integral to the Cosmic Purpose of the spiritualisation of matter. What are the preconditions for us performing our evolutionary duty? Aldous Huxley again:

The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.

Richard Dawkins' bumptiousness is the opposite of any such selfless humility, and yet he cannot hide his respect for Albert Einstein's awe at the workings of Nature and the Universe. He quotes him as saying:

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuine religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

Like so many arguments, the God debate is a debate about definitions. What do you mean by mysticism? What do you mean by God? What do you mean by supernatural? What do you mean by religion? There is only ever one reality, but our level of comprehension of it depends on our inner state. The final word is for Aldous Huxley:

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.