I wish I was really going to be using this post to tell you all why unicorns are hollow, but sadly I don’t have an answer to that yet. What I’m going to have to do instead is address a particular Richard Dawkins quote that has been a bugbear of mine for years:

“It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn’t even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the color of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

I’m not going to say he’s 100% wrong here, because I really do think that separating science and religion into the “why?” and “how?” is a huge fallacy, but I have different reasons for this than Mr Dawkins. Firstly, I’d point out that both science and religion make an attempt at answering both questions – it’s often forgotten that religion, science and philosophy started out as one and the same thing, and even now are branches of the same tree. They attempt to answer many of the same questions -“how did something come from nothing?” and “why are we here?” for example – and although I struggle to see how science and religion can co-exist, for many people the two exist entirely harmoniously.

The big issue that I have with this quote, and Dawkins in general, is the criticism of theology as irrelevant or unimportant, as though the questions it asks are really akin to the question of why unicorns are hollow. In this tweet, he claims that theology has no place in the UK’s university system. Naturally, as both an atheist and a theology student, I take great umbrage with this way of thinking, but it took me a long time to figure out why he’s so wrong about this: he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Clearly he’s never taken a non-confessional theology course at a secular university, nor does he have any idea of the kind of questions theology is asking or the relevance of studying these questions to the world outside of places of worship.

If the question “what is the smell of hope?” was one which was important to a large section of our country’s population, and if it began to impact on our legal system or politics, one would assume that it was imperative that academics began exploring this in a university setting and from as unbiased a perspective as possible in a world where everyone had an opinion on the smell of hope. What Dawkins is primarily failing to grasp, it seems, is that this is exactly what university courses in theology are trying to do: find the questions which drive people -and, by extension, drive our society- and deal with them. Note that I say “deal with” and not “answer”, because theology is less about finding answers to ‘silly’ questions and much more about examining why these questions are important to people and how different people approach them.

I would like to pose this question to Mr Dawkins – both you and I want a more rational and free-thinking world, without the horrors of terrorism or religiously facilitated subjugation and prejudice, but do you really think that your method is helpful?

I believe completely that if we are ever to really engage religious people in conversation (whether to discuss our atheism or simply because it’s, y’know, interesting) an understanding of their worldview is indispensable. Last year, I spent a semester working in inter faith dialogue at Leeds University, and it was honestly such an incredible experience for me, really opening my eyes to the diversity in people’s beliefs and how much their is to be gained from open and honest dialogue between people of different beliefs, and I can say with complete conviction that I believe this to be the way forward in ridding the world of negative aspects of religion. If you want to deal with the gender inequality that you perceive to exist in many religions, for example, likening a burqa to a bin-liner isn’t going to get you half as far as studying the complexities of gender politics in religious settings and employing this knowledge in open and non-judgmental dialogue with religious young men and women.