Rod Liddle is talking to Richard Dawkins in this week's issue of The Spectator (free registration required). It's an interesting exchange. On the points I want to pick up, I think it's match drawn between them.
Dawkins goes one nil up, as far as I'm concerned, on the question of whether he's a '100 per cent atheist' - as if his atheism has to be a matter of relative certainties. As I've argued here before, and as Dawkins himself indicates it is for him, atheism need only be about a lack of compelling reasons for belief in any deity.
Dawkins scores an own goal, however, with this riposte regarding the murderousness of some atheist regimes:
Oh... I think that it is incidental that Stalin was an atheist... Stalin did his deeds in the name of a kind of Marxism, and you can argue as to whether that's a religion or not.A useless argumentative ploy. Whatever one might think of Marxism as an outlook, it wasn't and isn't a religion in the sense which is relevant to Dawkins's contention that religion is false. One all.
Finally, I adjudicate a draw on the issue of whether you need religion to ground a persuasive set of moral values. Liddle writes:
... if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled - and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves?He goes on to refer to 'the simple fact that Christianity has given us a moral code which has, to an extent, lasted 2,000 years' - to this, he says, Dawkins can only oppose a 'damp and most unconvincing historical relativism'. Well, if that's all Dawkins had to offer during their conversation, that's a shame. But Liddle needs to explain why the idea of a deity, which even believers are generally reduced to founding on an act, or attitude, of faith, is a more solid basis for morality than the recognition that there are certain fundamental human needs and interests - universal needs and interests - which we should all take axiomatically as guiding our social and political arrangements and our conduct towards one another. That moral axiom may be rejected, but it looks at least as good as an act of pure faith.