Charles Moore reviews An Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins (Bantam Press)
Richard Dawkins Photo: More4
The Telegraph - 22 Sept 2013
John Henry Newman wrote the greatest spiritual autobiography in English, his
Apologia. In it, he recalls that, when young, he lived under the ''detestable
doctrine’’ of predestination. He believed he was saved, which made him ignore
everyone else and ''rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and
luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’’.
The great atheist Richard Dawkins seems, as a boy, to have had a similar cast
of mind. Unlike Newman, however, he quickly discarded the idea of God. Which
left only one absolute and luminously self-evident being – Richard Dawkins.
Or, to give him his full, hereditary name, Clinton Richard Dawkins. The
Clinton is because Richard’s great-great-great-grandfather married the daughter
of the British general Henry Clinton, who helped lose us America. As befits a
great expert on genes, Dawkins is extremely interested in his own ancestry. His
autobiography reproduces his family tree, showing, you might say, the origin of
his species. It culminates in the name – printed, uniquely, in bold capitals:
(CLINTON) RICHARD DAWKINS.
Dawkins has a generous self-centredness. Everything associated with him is
blessed – his parents for giving birth to him, Ali, the ''loyal’’ family servant
in colonial Africa, and Balliol College, Oxford, which had the good fortune to
admit several generations of Dawkins men. When he admires others, one is made to
feel how lucky they are.
After his friend the scientist Mike Cullen died, Dawkins delivered his
eulogy. It is beautiful, thinks its author: ''I almost wept when I spoke that
eulogy in Wadham chapel, and I almost wept again just now when rereading it 12
years later’.
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