Ending religion is a bad idea, says Richard Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins said that being watched appeared to stop people from acting dishonestlyCHRIS KEANE/REUTERS

The Times reports that Richard Dawkins, speaking at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, said that he feared that if religion were abolished it would “give people a licence to do really bad things” and that people might feel free to do wrong without a “divine spy camera in the sky reading their every thought”.

The Times article gives other brief snippets along the same lines, and says that his remarks were influenced by an experiment by one of his former pupils, Melissa Bateson at the University of Newcastle, who made changes at a coffee honesty box for her research group.

Now I don't know if Richard had had one too many at this festival, or he was talking tongue-in-cheek, or he is going soft in the head in his dotage, or the Times is using selective quoting to misrepresent him - as if a newspaper would ever do that to someone! But what is well known is that, statistically, atheists behave at least as well in society as theists.

What about the experiment? It showed that if you showed a picture of a pair of eyes near an honesty box for paying for coffee, people cheated less. There was no control for religious belief. If Dawkins' understanding was correct, believers would be just as honest whether there were a pair of eyes displayed or not, but that wasn't tested for.

The experimenters published their understanding of what the results showed. It was obvious to me before I even read the write-up of the experiment. It's hard to believe that their explanation didn't carry any force with Dawkins, with his knowledge of the evolutionary bases for human behaviour.

• we believe that images of eyes motivate cooperative behaviour because they induce a perception in participants of being watched. Although participants were not actually observed in either of our experimental conditions, the human perceptual system contains neurons that respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes (Emery 2000; Haxby et al. 2000), and it is therefore possible that the images exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants' perception that they were being watched. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that reputational concerns may be extremely powerful in motivating cooperative behaviour.

See also Arbitrary Quotes, Arbitrary Morality: Christians Misread Dawkins https://thehumanist.com/news/secularism/arbitrary-quotes-arbitrary-morality-christians-misread-dawkins

Christians, particularly the more rabid fundamentalist ones, have jumped on the Times article, seeing Dawkins as some sort of "leader" of an imagined atheist cause, obsessed with God, whereas most of his popular books are to do with his academic subject, evolutionary science. The idea that independent thinkers need an authority figure is merely a projection from their own worldview, and the desperation of these people, seeing their flocks leaving them in droves, is palpable.