This morning on the Today programme Giles Fraser clashed mildly with Richard Dawkins over the latter’s foundation’s press release, of an Ipsos MORI poll of census self-declared Christians, with findings that:

• One in six (15%) admits to having never read the Bible outside a church service, with a further one in three (36%) not having done so in the previous three years;
• The majority (60%) have not read any part of the Bible, independently and from choice, for at least a year;
• Around two thirds (64%) were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament, when given only four answers to choose from;

…etc.

Full interview on iPlayer, here.

Giles riposted by making Richard recite on-air the full title of The Origin of Species, which RD stumbled over but eventually managed.

I tweeted this as:

So @Giles_Fraser’s test of Dawkins’ belief in evolution is if he can recite the name of a book, not whether he believes in evidence. How apt

Yes I saw the irony (if you missed it, compare and contrast this with the “Identify Matthew” point above) but thought it was worth mentioning anyway; my friend and former colleague Mark Bowyer responded:

@AlecMuffett Sorry mate, but that *was* funny. It was Dawkin’s own argument turned round and smacked back in his face. 1st book of Bible?

…and, again, I take his point; but I’ll tell you what bugs me about that.

It’s that the reason that Dawkins believes in evolution is evidence, and for him the fanboi memorisation of title, chapter and verse is probably secondary to the thrust of research into mitochondrial DNA, comparison of species and literature which – were it all to be erased from the face of the earth – could be reconstructed from scratch by future scientists.

Any religion, any belief or faith by definition persists in spite of a lack of evidence, and all there is from the exterior viewpoint is the liturgy, oral history, and commentary upon the same. You either have “The Word” or “The Book”, or you do not. In the three Abrahamic religions – four if you include the Mormons – there is phenomenal dependence of each upon a book to tell you what to believe, and were it all to be wiped from the planet then it would never arise in the same form again.

So when a Christian taunts a scientist about knowing his liturgy, I find it as sad as I suspect a believer might find an atheist like me demanding evidence before faith.

But what I also believe is that the fact that people can self-identify (ie: “profess belief”) and thereby obtain influence and seniority in an organisation, and for that seniority be appointed to political function in the United Kingdom to be slightly askew – but then that’s the House of Lords overall for you.

That folk can pull off this trick at all, however, makes me wonder what separates Christians from Freemasons in this regard?