Last night’s Channel 4 programme on religion was interesting enough, if a bit predictable for anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Richard Dawkins’ work.

I have to say that I found some of the fundamentalists a bit scary. The American evangelist (Haggart?) seemed especially unnerving, the way he invaded Dawkins’ personal space, stared him in the eye without blinking and kept a rigid grin on his face all the time. Regardless of what he actually said, his whole behaviour was very threatening. I would be surprised if Dawkins did not feel very uneasy. The chap in Jerusalem was no better, possibly even worse as he was very matter-of-fact about the way he was saying that non-muslims should retreat to their own countries and wait to be conquered.

So far, so bad, but as others have pointed out, extremism in any dogma whether it is religious, political or anything else is, well, extreme. Dawkins tried to get to the fundamental problem in Jerusalem by asking about how to relate to other people who had equally strong and firmly held, but opposite, views but the question was not really answered.

I agree with Dawkins up to a point, but really his strident atheism is now getting to the point where he is as strident in his anti-religion as the zealots are in their faiths. Admittedly he does seem to be making an attempt to understand what the relious people are thinking, but a lot of that is for show. His attitude is every bit as confrontational as the fundamentalists he is talking about.

In the same way that the extreme muslim clerics cannot accept that non-muslims should exist, Dawkins does not accept that any religion should exist. He sees even the moderately faithful as only the thin end of the wedge.

Dawkins’ late competitor in the evolutionary biology field, Stephen Jay Gould, had different ideas. He had very different ideas about evolution which is what made him a sort of academic arch-enemy of Dawkins in the first place – and as a layman I still find Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium more persuasive than the alternative – but he also had different ideas about religion.

Unusually for a Darwinian biologist, and an atheist, Gould felt that religion and science could happily co-exist. He wrote about this in an essay which I would quote from but I can’t find it, and expanded on it in a later book called Rocks of Ages – which is one of his books I don’t actually have.

Anyway, Gould’s essay and book were based on the idea that religion and science are ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA, with science responsible for how things work and religion responsible for moral considerations. Its an attractive proposal, if a bit idealistic.

The concept falls down when faced with fundamentalists of the type we saw on TV last night who are not prepared to concede any ground at all, but I kind of like the idea that an atheist like Gould is capable of trying to embrace the religious rather than tarring them all with the same brush, even if the whole thing is doomed to failure.

I was a little concerned that Dawkins concentrated on Christianity and Islam. I missed a bit of the programme, but I didn’t hear anything about Hinduism or Buddhism. Is that because those religions do not have such easy targets? What I have read of Hinduism makes it all look quite benign, but Dawkins was arguing that any faith at all is contrary to good reason and science.

Don’t get me wrong, I am an atheist myself and a fervent Darwinist, but I can’t see what benefit there is from trying to impose my opinions on others. Maybe this live-and-let-live attitude is not practical on more than a personal level, but it suits me to agree to disagree. I quite happily go to the various Interfaith events in Crawley without having any faith of my own, and rub along OK with the people there and I am happier with this approach than with Dawkins’ call to arms. Its just intolerance which I can’t tolerate.

Nice line about ‘all people of faith have rejected nearly every god that mankind has ever invented: some of us just go one god further’ though. I liked that.