A.C. Grayling - What's Next For Atheism?

thank you thanks very much well you would have got the impression I think it's a correct impression from some of the talks we've heard today so far that things are trending in a comfortable direction it looks as though with the spread of enlightenment the spread of literacy the spread of scientific knowledge that more and more people coming to think along with Dan Dennett that they might be atheists and that's good news it's supported by a lot of empirical data for example from pew polling results in the United States which we think of as a country sort of God besotted country where increasingly especially among under 35s larger and larger proportions of the population are saying that they have no religious affiliation or commitment but it's important to look back across the landscape of history a bit to understand what the present phenomenon is in this discussion sometimes rather bad-tempered discussion between people who retain a religious movement and those of us who don't you look back for example at the sixteenth century after the Reformation when the Roman Catholic Church which had been the church in the West lost a great deal of influence in control over Great slaves of Europe and it fought back very bitterly same thing happened in the 19th century after Darwin and after the movements in the second half of the nineteenth century stemming from the scholarship especially in Germany but also in the UK questioning the historicity of the Bible and showing that the Bible of religion at any rate was a document made by many people many texts over a very long period of time and that there were spurious interpolations in it and these were anxious times for people of faith and they did the same thing as they did in the 16th and 17th century and that is they they fought back much as a cornered animal might do and I think we're witnessing the same phenomena now after what we refer to as 911 there's been a polarization quite a dramatic one in the debate over religion and its place in the public square and a lot of people who have kind of have had a residual religious faith have come out much more openly and strongly in support of their faith and a lot of people who didn't care about religion very much and didn't really bother to take part in these discussions realized that they had a commitment on the other side of the argument the non-religious side of the argument I felt that they had to step up too and be part of their discussion about what we are to do about the effects the influence the pace of religion in our public policy discussions in our education its effect on science and in particular the effect that it has on individual lives individual lives of women of gays of minorities in countries where religious zealotry is major influence and so the trend that we've seen especially in more advanced economies in the world over the last couple of centuries and in particular the dramatic change to the historical rhythm introduced by the Enlightenment of the 18th century which earlier on Peter Singer was talking about referring to Steve Pincus book when that development to greater peace and cooperation among people became more pronounced as a result of the 18th century enlightenment that trend is a good and a positive trend and it's one that we on this side of the debate needs to capitalize on so we ask the question what next for a theism what should people with our view of things be thinking about doing to try to make sure that this while the healthy trend continues even though of course is going to be a work of long breath as the French say it's there to be many decades perhaps even centuries before finally humanity is liberated from its it's past the deep roots in ignorance and superstition which we now think of as the established religions I think there are three areas we need to focus on one is the question of the mess physical debate the debate about the nature of the universe that we occupy of course physics and cosmology tells us a very great deal about that and Lawrence is going to tell you about that in a little while but the metaphysical aspect of it is a debate about whether or not in addition to all the forces and entities described by by physics there is something else other supernatural agencies are there gods and goddesses angels Archangels that discussion the metaphysical discussion is one which still needs to be pursued we still have to have a conversation with people who want to believe that there are agencies of that kind and that's the discussion about rationality about evidence about our understanding and the way that we achieve further understanding about the nature of the universe the second debate is say debate about secularism it's a debate about just where religious organizations the religious voice is positioned in the public debate and its influence on government policy and its place in education and the third and and in some ways perhaps the most important one because it is the one which might most quickly help people who are wavering in their views about religion or who would like to be able to free themselves from from religion is the debate about the ethical about our lives about how we live them and make decisions about what sort of communities we're going to construct and what the basis of our relationships with one another should be this is a very very important one this is why a lot of people who don't have a religious commitment and commit themselves to a humanist view of the world and by a humanist view I I don't mean anything very elaborate just the view that our ethics our attitude towards other people and our sense of our responsibility to them should be premise taun our best most generous most sympathetic understanding of human nature and the human condition so it's the point I'll come back to in a moment the first point point about about the metaphysical discussion what kind of place is this universe and what does it contain well I'm very different and indeed reluctant to disagree with anything with Dan said little while ago when Dan suggested that what we should do is just slip in little atheistic or comments like Disney Walt Disney was an atheist by the way I didn't know that so that's Petula or some people still believe that there are gods and so on that little remarks like that just dropped in would help people to get a kind of perspective a sense of perspective on what they hear from other resources but I have a little anxiety about that in the following way but for very good evolutionary reasons children are very gullible very credible very credulous and the things that adults on whom they rely in their immediate circle say about the world are important to children fire burns buses run over you so you must be careful you must do this you mustn't do that these are things that children have to believe they have to be very very accepting of what is offered to them on the authority of the adults in their circle in order for them to survive so they are prepared to believe everything believe in fairies they believe in the Tooth Fairy for example believe in father Christmas I mean I've been bringing up my youngest child as an atheist my wife says to me that means you're probably you know want to be a mother a best when she's a teenager but we learn the lesson from the religions that if you can indoctrinate them early enough they will always revert to type later so I've been bringing her up to say never to use the word god but always to use the phrase gods and goddesses I'll also point out to you that when people use the word God with a capital G is difficult as if it referred to something that she should ask the people who do that to substitute the name Fred because then it shows the vacuity of what they're saying who created the universe Fred so and then you suddenly see that it's actually not explanatory at all or who says that you shouldn't lie or we should be you should honor your mother and your father Fred well once again you see the vacuity of it so we taught her to say gods and goddesses and she said one day when she's about seven or eight she said I don't believe in gods and goddesses but I do believe in the tooth fairy and I said well that's actually pretty smart of you because there's much more empirical evidence for the Tooth Fairy than there is for God and I could leave it up to her to find out if she did the age of 10 or 11 that there wasn't a tooth fairy and that there wasn't fall to Christmas and by the way I mean she's quite serious about father Christmas she came up to me about two Christmases ago in fact and said don't tell mummy but I I know about father Christmas but don't tell her about it because she likes to believe that I still believe that there is father Christmas so that was there was a bit of nuance thinking also but she is she's an example of how children can can accept anything can accept the fairy stories can accept the legends can accept the religious teachings of their community can believe in the truth fairy and in father Christmas but the one thing which retains powerful social reinforcement after they've given up their crude unity in things like father Christmas is religion if you live in a Christian community you're surrounded by churches there are services on the radio there's Christmas there's Easter we talked about the Church of England COV Christmas and Easter that's what most most people go for but that the fact that they still go for it is a reinforcement and so children continue to think that there must be something serious behind it if so many grown-ups get dressed up like the Archbishop of Canterbury and appear on telly the Father Christmas thing and the Tooth Fairy thing don't get reinforced in that way and therefore there is a job of work to be done the job of work involves trying to get people children especially to think a bit critically about the sorts of things that people believe and why they believe them this is a very very familiar point you want to demand of people that they be rational in their beliefs and what you mean by rational is that there should be a ratio or proportion between the grounds that they have for thinking something about the world the beliefs that they hold and those beliefs themselves but if somebody makes a claim about how the world is that they've got to come up with the robust case and they should be open to having that case examined and they should explain to you what would count as confusing or even refuting that case and if they don't do that if it's a matter of bare assertion or appeal to tradition or appeal to authority that that can't be good enough and so that's the job of work that we have to do on the metaphysical front and it has to be done in a number of different ways not just by addressing the claims made about the nature of the universe that it was created by a powerful agency and designed on purpose to fulfill certain functions and so on not just that but also by inviting people to think a little bit about the origins and the history of the religions to look for example at how the religions have behaved in history and to ask whether that stands up to any kind of justifying case for them it is written somewhere I forget where by their fruits you shall know them well indeed look at their fruits look at how history is panned out under the government of religions for almost all of human history of recorded human history at any rate and there have been religious leaders religious teachers the influence of religious beliefs in society and we can ask ourselves quite legitimately the question how has that been for humankind has it on the whole been a successful story and that's something that we should challenge people to understand because it's been a very important feature of the way religions have survived not only that they proselytized young children and adults parents teach their children the same beliefs that their own cultural tradition treasures but also because they've obscured facts about the past and reinvented themselves in ways that make them more acceptable to to any present time for example the Church of England in the 1920s of one of its adults abandoned the doctrine of hell we've seen just in recent years the the Vatican apologized for its persecution of Galileo by the way the anniversary of the trial of Galileo was just two days two days ago so you may as you may know forgetfulness amnesia about the past and about how the religions behaved in the past is is very useful to them because they can present themselves now as being positive agencies in our societies doing charitable work encouraging people to be kind to one another they complain bitterly apologist for religion that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile to them in their criticisms of them I always say when people talk about militant secularism I always say look you know when when you guys were in charge you didn't used to argue with us you just burnt us at the stake now what we're doing is we're we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions and you complain in fact it was some mystery it was th Huxley Darwin's bulldog th Huxley who in a letter to Darwin said bishops alike was not not a very kind remarks by the way but perhaps nevertheless true he said bishops alike peace if you poked one they all squeal and this is what's been happening in the last and the last ten years criticism criticism is received as an offenses in the front and and even rather reasonable people like Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury use this phrase militant secularism I've always been surprised by that I've often wondered for example what a fundamentalist atheist is fundamentalist atheist well what would a normal fundal Mentalist a theist be that somebody who believes that a part of a God exists maybe like like a left-footer or a butter cover Agathe although that god exists on one day in the week that's Sunday that's actually what most Christians think I think so I mean you you it's it's very difficult to accept these these charges of fundamentalism and military militancy when of course one look at the landscape of history shows us what militancy and fundamentalism really does mean so there is that that discussion we've got to look at the history of religions at their origin that how they've exercised their influence in history we have to look at the claims that they make and the arguments they offer and we have to to do this rather as aerospace you may remember I knew in the Buell reading Virgil in the bath last night say you were reading that story about how Hara stairs to chased after you Aditi thinking she was a deer she was the beloved of Orpheus and she stepped on a snake a snake bit her she died she went down to Hades and Orpheus with his wonderful music he went down into Hades to try and bring her back and you remember that he made the great mistake because he was forbidden to turn around and look at her and he did that there are true stories about it by the way one is that he couldn't hear her she was so light a foot that he didn't know that she was actually following him and that Hades that kept his promise and so he had a quick peek to see if she was there and sure enough she was but she was snatched back into the shadows because he had disobeyed the king of the underworld and the other story is that she kept saying obviously you don't talk to me and turn around and look at me I'm not coming another step and so on and so finally he did turn around and she was snatched back to the shadows again but but that the point of the story is that Eris tears who caused this in order to find out what he had done and to hear the story of Orpheus as tragedy with religion he had to go and capture that one of the gods of the sea Proteus and as you see from the name Proteus he had the power of changing himself into all sorts of beasts animals riding serpents fierce Tigers and our stairs had the good fortune to have a river nymphs for a mother and she told him just hang onto him hold onto him hold onto this protein shape and he changes shape and changes into all sorts of different things just hang onto him and eventually when he's exhausted all his his metamorphoses Yi will tell you why it is that you have been you were being punished and indeed our stairs hang on and he got the story about Orpheus from Proteus now the religions are like Proteus you criticize them you attack them you you advance arguments against them and they immediately change into something else they say the apologists of religion say that's not what I mean by religion or that's not my understanding of God well God is ineffable nobody can know what God is and therefore you can't say that there isn't one you can't prove that there isn't they're gone that's not what I understand by my faith and so on and so on just as Dan was saying it's a swamp of forests the fog and the goal posts this is a tremendously mixed metaphor I keep shifting but one has to be persistent one has to hang on in there one has to to keep challenging them to ask them what they mean what is it that they're committed to if they were going to convert you you say what is it that that's going to convert me tell me why I should believe what is the case what are the grounds and if there aren't any if there if there is no cogent rational evidence-based logical reasons for doing it then we have found the true source of a commitment of our faith nature and that is that it is deeply and fundamentally an emotional commitment and that's not an unimportant fact that's the fact that I think we ought to address in connection with the ethical with how we live our lives and how we respond to the universe and to one another and that point I come to in just a moment first though bei briefly the second point the point about the about about secularism now we all know that what we mean by that is the separation of religious organizations or the the distancing of religious influences from matters of public policy it's terribly important to iterate and reiterate as often as one can that nobody is saying that people are not entitled to believe whatever they like providing it doesn't harm other people so you can believe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden you can even set up a church for that reason you can try to persuade other people of your view you can put your point into the public conversation about how things should be organized and that's perfectly legitimate and in an open liberal with a small elf society nobody has a right to stop anybody else from trying to put a point of view but for historical reasons the religions have a massively overinflated presence in the public square look at the at the United Kingdom or more particularly at England that part of the United Kingdom which has an established Church the Church of England now about 3% of the population go on a regular basis to a church service and yet the Church of England has 26 bishops entitled to sit in the House of Lords and vote on laws that apply to everybody there are four religious at least four religious programs from the BBC a publicly funded broadcasting service every day of the week almost every major political and state event begins with prayers or has bishops or their Archbishop's present at it so the the presence of religion this reinforcement which our children are witnessing all the time the fact that taxpayers money is used to pay for faith-based schools I mean it's often seem to me that the phrase Roman Catholic school is a kind of oxymoron I mean what if there's a big difference isn't there between religious studies teaching people about religions especially if you teach them about all the different religions so they can see how they all silly they all are but it's a different matter having a school which is premise for the faith outlook like Judaism or or Islam or Christianity and yet in a society like England English society this is something which is publicly funded I've always thought that you don't have to present an argument against faith-based schooling you only need two words and those two words are Northern Ireland and if you mention that to anybody they'll see the reason why ghettoizing people into interfaith communities in different faith schools is a terrible mistake so for these historical reasons the the religions have this massively massively over amplified voice in the public debate and what we should demand of them is that they see themselves for what they are there are self-interest groups there are lobby groups they've got a point of view they've got beliefs and what other people to share those beliefs or they want to try to impose their outlook on life or never I've never myself thought that there is any justification for the argument that says I believe so and so therefore you mustn't do such-and-such which is precisely what religious moralists always saying some of you here may remember the great Mary Whitehouse do you remember her great moralist from the 60s and 70s the only person in the universe who had a television set that didn't have an off button so she used to watch everything she was subjected to two hours and hours of nudity on television which she didn't want anybody else to see and it always struck me as being very illogical but because she didn't like it I wasn't allowed to watch it and this is exactly the the view that this voice in the public square is constantly telling us we don't like this therefore you must do it we don't like gays we don't think that women should be you know allowed to do anything at all except stay at home do the washing-up therefore you must do likewise no there are interest groups their Lobby groups they're entitled to try and persuade us of their view of things but they are on a par with trade unions political parties and other nongovernmental organizations there's civil society organizations we shouldn't be funding them they should be funding themselves out of their own constituency and if they were to do that and if they weren't allowed to proselytize children and faith-based schools because they weren't getting tax payers money for their faith-based schools then the presence they have in our public square would be much diminished and that would be a very good thing and that I think is where the the secular argument that is where the secular argument must end we must make that case constantly for bashing the the the religions and their organizations to churches back into their their true perspective a very often I've told this to lots of people before but it's again it's a point worth iterating I very often go on panels to discuss the secularism issue the place of religion in public policy matters and there are invariably five men with men because there aren't very many women at the top of any religious organization there five men would be a Jewish man a Muslim man a Catholic man a Protestant man and one and I am there because I'm a token atheist secular humanist that got the hairstyle so they didn't have to ask a woman after all and I always begin the conversation by saying the reason why there are four of them is that they don't agree with one another in fact for most of history they've been fighting one lover in the bloodiest of Wars now they were all making common cause with one law because they want our tax payers money for their schools and so on and then there's one of me and between them certainly in the UK or all the major religious groupings probably represent about eight maybe at the at most ten percent of the population who are regular committed observant believers of their religion go to mosque or synagogue or temple or church on a very regular basis and yet most people in the UK are functionally very least secular they don't have be run by bishops or mullahs they want they want to have an open diverse pluralistic public square where all views can be aired and tested and where reason should govern so that is an illustration that panel of five people five men is an illustration of the tremendous imbalance in the public square introduced by the historical distortion of the fact that the temporal powers and the religious powers found one another so useful in the past so that's the thing that in the future we a theists must contests and challenge but the final thing the final thing is the quest of how we live our lives what kind of people we are what sorts of relationships we develop with one another what our ethical responsibilities and commitments are and how we respond to the fact that we live in this universe and in a you know in a world on a planet for which we have responsibilities not any gods and goddesses not any supernatural agencies but we now this is where the religions quite often think they can score because they think that what they call spirituality and morality is a is a preserve of their own they are the specialists in that matter and the deep emotions that we feel the capacity for and the need to receive love and our enjoyment of beauty the way we're moved by things like like music or our pity our compassion for our fellow human beings and they suffer the fact that as essentially social creatures we need our bonds with one another all these are facts about us which the religions exploit because they claim that they own those things and I don't think that they do I think that what we need to do on this front is to read ascribe a great many of the things that we do in order to take back possession of them as those features of us of our humanity which are most important to us we should we describe as what Ignatius the founder of the Jesuit Order talked of the Spiritual Exercises we should describe a walk in the country listening to music or having dinner with friends or falling in love or floating in a swimming pool or lying in bed on on a Saturday morning wiggling your toes all these things are spiritual exercises these are things that refresh us these are things that make us feel that we inhabit a world which has many aspects to it that are good and rich and deep and we don't have to run away to do a temple or a church in order to give expression to those feelings we should accept them as aspects the best aspects of being human of what what human beings are one of the things you were reading in the bath last night was David Hume and his views on religion and fate indeed but the more to the point is views on the nature of beauty now as you know David Hume is a subjectivist he thought that our valuations of things both in in morality and in aesthetics with the result of our emotional makeup and that we projected onto the world our valuations so that there aren't beautiful things in the world but we we make things beautiful because we respond to them in the way that we do now I happen not to agree with him about this I think there are many many beautiful things in the world objectively so on which many of us agree a lot of human beings just because of our shared nature and thrilled to the same things very often but the important point about Humes view is that he thought that the fact that human beings find beauty in the world is a wonderful thing about human beings the fact that human beings can fall in love I can care about other people or can show compassion and pity he thought is a wonderful thing about human beings I agree I think these are remarkable things about us and there are things to celebrate because there are many terrible things about us as well but by the exercise of reason of will of the conversation that we have about the nature of the good in society we have learned as time has gone by to be to be better at this business of relation to our fellows something which again Stephens really a remarkable book and suggests is the powerful trend running through history so this this side of us this this question of how we how we live our lives in our relationships with others and the world addresses those things about us that sense that we have sometimes of yearning for the absolute or of wanting to celebrate the the great interconnectedness of nature or all the facts that our emotions can be deeply stirred by things like like the affections or our own newborn children or the success of our friends but all these things are things about us they don't need religion they're nothing to do with religion religion is told us that all these good things come from the gods and all the bad things come from us and that's not true there everything comes from us all our attitudes and our intelligence educated sensibility helps us to try to capitalize on and to express better all those parts of us which make life really really worth living so if we can say we are now going to take back possession of all the positives of all those things about us but our about our friendship and about our enjoyment of being in this world we can do that then we open the door a door of invitation to people who think that they can only express that part of themselves by getting involved in some some mumbo-jumbo which is not necessary so the future of atheism turns I think on a number of things we have a kind of breeze at our backs the the trend of history at least in the developed countries of the world is on the whole a positive one but we should capitalize on it we should challenge the claims of religion we should challenge them over their history and the origins of faiths we should try to pin them down or what it is they really do say in me we should conduct that argument about the the public space about just how loud a voice we will allow anybody in the public space demand of any voice in the public space that it should be proportional to its actual constituency and finally we should say that the great question of how we live our lives for the good is a is a question for us as human beings and we don't need to invoke something transcendent something outside the world to explain it or justify it or motivate it and I think that if it were possible if only they would get on with the stem-cell thing so we could all live another couple of centuries that we would see probably over that period of time that this trend will continue enhanced by the the campaign that we as atheists can mount on those three fronts thanks very much thank you very much I see grayling ladies and gentlemen you

Channel: Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc

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Keywords: AFA, GAC, Global Atheist Convention, 2012GAC, Atheist Foundation, AC Grayling

Id: VulWIb2Srq4

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 09 2012