Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

It’s an extraordinary publishing phenomenon—atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett’s success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Last week, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was published in the US. The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books.

One could almost feel sorry for them. A minister like Ruth Kelly is wrenched from her bucket-and spade holiday on a rainy British beach with the kids to launch yet another push to engage with Muslims and to step up efforts to tackle extremism. A ministerial tour of nine cities to meet Muslims is announced.

It’s all designed to sound energetic and purposeful. We pay fat cabinet salaries and we want our politicians to sound like they are earning them. But in truth, beneath the rhetoric—an odd verbal combination of rugby tackles and romantic engagement—is a profound confusion in government policy as to what to do about British-grown Islamist terrorism, apart from large amounts of surveillance and frequent use of detention. Beyond that, the hearts-and-minds strategy is running on empty.

It’s time to say goodbye. After 17 years on this newspaper, I’m leaving journalism to run a thinktank. Looking back to the fresh-faced reporter who arrived in the newsroom in 1989, I realise that I’ve spent as long here as I did in formal education—and it has been a comparably life-forming experience. The decision I made, at the age of 18, to go into journalism—to understand how the world worked (prompted by observing, as a volunteer, Sri Lanka’s plunge into civil war in 1983)—has been vindicated here. Not a day has gone by when I haven’t glimpsed another small portion of that huge complexity, whether from interviewees, colleagues or readers: any insight or knowledge I have acquired owes much to the generosity of thousands of other minds. Thank you.

On Wednesday evening, at a debate in Oxford, Richard Dawkins will be gathering the plaudits for his long and productive intellectual career. It is the 30th anniversary of his hugely influential book The Selfish Gene. A festschrift, How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, has been published this month, with contributions from stars such as Philip Pullman.

Daniel Dennett, one of America’s most brilliant philosophers, wants to provoke. That’s obvious not just from the title of his new book, Breaking the Spell but the image he uses to begin his 400 page analysis of why people have religious faith. An ant climbs laboriously up a blade of grass. Up it climbs, falls and climbs again… and again. Why? A parasite, a tiny brain worm, has commandeered the ant’s brain because it needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow to complete its reproductive cycle. The ant’s wellbeing is redundant. Could religion have commandeered human brains to ensure the survival of its own precepts without any regard to its hosts’ wellbeing?

On Monday, it’s Richard Dawkins’s turn (yet again) to take up the cudgels against religious faith in a two-part Channel 4 programme, The Root of All Evil? His voice is one of the loudest in an increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists; something has got them badly rattled. They even turned their bitter invective on Narnia. By all means, let’s have a serious debate about religious belief, one of the most complex and fascinating phenomena on the planet, but the suspicion is that it’s not what this chorus wants. Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there’s the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again.