The Cardinal Pell -- Richard Dawkins encounter on the ABC's Q&A program was a dispiriting shambles. I say this having seen the riveting discussion Dawkins had with Rowan Williams at the Sheldonian Theatre last week.
The format of the program was an undeniably confrontational forum for discussing big questions. While some very profound points were raised, it was very clear that the Cardinal had gone in to score points off Dawkins. While Dawkins managed to remain courteous, for example, by referring to and addressing George Pell according to the correct convention, Pell most certainly failed to return the civility. Not once did Dawkins dismiss Pell out of hand (tempted as he must have been); Pell took every opportunity to do so.
The epic fail of the show was a badly misplaced pause. Pell was referring to an experience he had in discussing the existence of hell with a schoolchild. His remark began "When I was working in England, we were preparing some young English boys...," whereupon he paused for breath before continuing, and the catcalls began. Surely his media adviser had a severe convulsion in the backstage area when that bauble dropped.
To me, the whole enterprise was lost at the beginning when Tony Jones's failed to give proper shape to the discussion, and to define some common ground for the two guests. The result was an epistemological fistfight, with Pell failing to engage meaningfully with Dawkins's materialism, and Dawkins left with no room to move. It really made things deeply unfair to both guests, and cannot have advanced any deep understanding in the audience.
Instead, Pell kept coming back to Aristotelian natural philosophy as viewed through Scholasticism. Now, there's nothing wrong with this way of seeing the world so long as you remain clear in your mind that it has limitations, that it cannot process certain types of information, and that it does rely on metaphysics as a starting point. He spent half the time veering off onto irrelevant tangents, bringing in a whole web of issues that had no bearing on the issues in the discussion. He sounded every bit as strange as a Scientology convention, and confirmed all the worst cliches about Catholic bishops. Pell's airing of his views on climate change simply confirmed the basic irrationality of his thinking. It was obscurantism of the most determined variety, and Pell came out looking like he fails to take (philosophical) materialism seriously.
By contrast, Dawkins had so little room to move that he ended up sounding off in the key of materialistic dogmatism. He knows that his views are open to challenge, and he welcomes those challenges when they are presented in a way that he can work them through. If I was as jetlagged as he must surely have been (he arrived in Australia the day before the program went to air), then I would appreciate having a discussion like this framed in a way that allowed questions to be answered in bite-sized chunks. If I were Richard Dawkins, I'm not sure what I would be thinking right now. Perhaps something along the lines of "cross the Equator and turn your intellectual clock back 700 years."
This certainly wasn't the ABC's finest hour. One questioner was allowed to get away with ascribing the phrase "survival of the fittest" to Darwin. That laurel belongs to Herbert Spencer, who created the notion of Social Darwinism. This lazy slippage demonstrates a sad lack of engagement with evolutionary and Darwinian theory.
Q&A has introduced a new live viewer poll. This week's question was whether religious belief is of any benefit to the world. 76% declared against, although I think they were answering a dud question. The reality is that people have beliefs, and people act on beliefs. The existence of belief in the abstract is completely neutral, totally uncontroversial, and absolutely uninteresting to anyone. To answer a question as loaded as the one put to the Q&A audience is not easy. It is people who have beliefs that act in the world -- whether they make war or care for the vulnerable. Beliefs in themselves are not sufficient to bring about change, but rather preparedness on the part of people to act on them. I think it would have been a mark of higher integrity for Q&A to have asked a less loaded question.
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