Richard Dawkins: The Mathematical Sublime

In an episode of The Simpsons, “Black Eyed, Please,” Ned Flanders has a nightmare. He visits his “personal hell” where they “worship famous atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion,” a devilish figure in the process of “making Catholic-saint stew.” Irreverent enough to be attracted to the program’s irreverence, and enough of a celebrity to be asked to do the show’s voice-over, Dawkins is content to appear as a parody of himself. But his skepticism is no act. It is deep-seated, with roots in his early childhood. Concerning his 18-month-old self, Dawkins says: …At Christmas a man called Sam dressed up as Father Christmas and entertained a children’s party in Mrs. Walter’s house. He apparently fooled all the children, and finally took his departure amid much jovial waving and ho-ho-ho-ing. As soon as he left, I looked up and breezily remarked to general consternation, “Sam’s gone!”… This precocious skepticism blossoms in Dawkins’s later views, a set of convictions in which science does not so much supplement as substitute for religion: “a friend . . . persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestige of theistic credulity probably about the age of sixteen.” To Dawkins, biology is no more—and no less—than a rigorous skepticism applied to the living world. No need for Father Christmas. Without question, Dawkins’s vision of biology, a living world ruled by mathematics, is a “grand conception,” readily comparable to the origin stories of Weinberg, Greene, Randall, and Hawking, a saga of “how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.” In his work, Dawkins has employed mathematics to create, as Adam Smith said of Copernicus, “another constitution of things, more natural indeed, and such as the imagination can more easily attend to, but more new, more contrary to common opinion and expectation, than any of those appearances themselves.”