CV NEWS FEED // Politics and religion analyst Esme Partridge is calling evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins “naive” in light of a recent LBC interview in which he referred to himself as a “cultural Christian.”
“That the fruits of Christianity can be saved while its roots are severed speaks to a naivety that is perhaps typical of Dawkins’s generation,” Partridge wrote in an April 2 article published by UnHerd. “Baby boomers wanted to tear down the conventions of traditional society and yet, at the same time, overwhelmingly benefitted from them.”
Dawkins’ belief that one can reap the benefits of Christianity while rejecting its spiritual legitimacy is a form of “naivety,” she wrote, warning:
Cultural Christianity may seem like a sustainable position for those of a generation which has just about managed to keep the vestiges of tradition intact. But with belief rapidly declining and those beautiful parish churches struggling to survive, it is evidently not sustainable.
Like any organism, Christianity must recover its roots, or it will die — a fact of life which, as an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins ought to appreciate.
Dawkins’ embrace of Christian social and cultural mores, Partridge stated, “is remarkably similar to that of modernity’s founding fathers,” who all believed that they could live according to Christian morality while rejecting its central claims.
For example, the French philosopher Montesquieu was an avid atheist who often publicly mocked religious beliefs despite maintaining an “instrumentalist view of their social order,” Partridge noted. In his treatise “The Spirit of Law,” Montesquieu wrote, “We owe to Christianity a certain political law, and in war a certain law of nations — benefits which human nature can never sufficiently acknowledge.”
Like Dawkins, Montesquieu also eagerly denounced Islam in favor of Christianity, Partridge said.
“While the Mahommedan princes incessantly give or receive death, the religion of the Christians renders their princes […] less cruel,” Partridge wrote.
And yet, Partridge concluded, the reason why Christianity has floundered in modern society while Islam rises “is precisely because [Islam] is willing to assert its spiritual legitimacy.”
