Best of Richard Dawkins Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 1

I do not believe that religion is the root of all evil thank you channel for religion is the root of quite a lot of evil but that didn't make for a very catchy title I just want to briefly reply to dr. Spivey a couple of points he says we're fighting a losing battle because religion is a part of our human nature well speak for yourself it's not a part of mine and it's not a part of the great majority of my friends in universities in England and the United States and elsewhere he also said if we had no religion how would we do without King's College Chapel the Sistine Chapel etc well you know artists had to make a living and in the time when the Sistine Chapel was built in its ceiling was painted you know who had the money artists such as Michelangelo had to go where the patronage was we shall never know the ceiling that Michelangelo might have painted if he had been commissioned to paint the museum of science for example we shall never know what Haydn's evolution' oratorio might have sounded like or Beethoven's mesozoic Symphony I face two questions firstly is religion true and second is it necessary for human psychological welfare or something of that sort if it isn't true then for anybody to maintain that somehow humans need it and you're wasting your time trying to get rid of it what an amazingly patronizing and condescending thing to say we intellectuals of course know that it's not true but but all those all those poor people out there they need religion I mean what a condescending thing to say about about all those people either it's true or it's not and I have enough respect for people to say that if it's not true people will reconcile themselves to that and will not find any need for it now I was asked a specific question is that is it in the genes is there some Darwinian reason for religiosity maybe there is but that doesn't bear the slightest degree on whether it's true I care about whether it's true I also care as a Darwinian about the origin of it and I'm interested in the origin of it and I'm inclined to agree with the implied suggestion of the questioner that it may be that religion itself has no advantage but it may be that it's a byproduct of some other psychological disposition which does but that is an entirely separate question from whether it's true and I don't like it when people say oh humans need it or we have it built into us but in our genes or Darwinian natural selection has built into it therefore that somehow validates it of course it doesn't validate it it merely says that it's been built into us by natural selection just as all sorts of other probably disagreeable things have been built into us doesn't mean we can't try to cure ourselves okay can I just I have experienced plenty of things which could be called transcendental I've experienced the feeling of almost mystical wonder that I get when I look up at the stars look up at the Milky Way contemplate the galaxies receding from us listen to a Schubert quintet read a sonnet of Shakespeare these are all things which only a human mind is capable of doing so may I ask you little Apocrypha only a human mind is capable of doing labs and a human mind is capable of doing those things because the human mind has been put together in the brain who has a highly complicated organization that has evolved over some four billion years of evolution putting together nervous systems it is a stunning achievement of evolution to have put together the human brain the human brain that is capable of being moved by such things I yield to no one in my capacity to be moved by what you call the transcendental what I do not do however is to indulge in mystical nonsense about it being there before there were brains or the equivalent frames a quote from Kurt wise who is an American geologist he studied geology at Harvard no less under Stephen Jay Gould no less and he was set for a good career as an academic geologist which all his life he had desperately wanted the problem was it came from within it was his religious upbringing his firewall of faith and he couldn't reconcile the two his scientific education with his religion and he literally got a pair of scissors and went right through the Bible and cut out every verse that would have to go if he accepted his scientific education and in the end he decided there was nothing left of his Bible he therefore tossed out science and said from then on he said with that in great sorrow I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science he goes on I am a young age creationist because that is my understanding of the scripture as I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism I would be the first to admit it but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate here I must stand if religion can do that to a highly educated Harvard geologist just think what it can do to an average school child or student thank three separate the scientists that I respect are scientists who work hard to be understood to use language clearly to use words correctly and to understand what is going on we have been subjected to a kind of word salad of scientific jargon used out of context with inappropriately apparently uncompromising ly there is a deep confusion going on here between properties of things within the universe and the properties of the universe itself it is one thing to say that the universe contains objects that have sentience and the various other properties that you mentioned of course it contains objects that have scent if we are among those objects so are dogs so are chimpanzees the universe contains sentience the universe is not sentient this is the one thing Deepak you seem not to understand you're constantly confusing explanations at the level of what goes on inside the universe with the universe itself it's not enough to say the universe contains sentence contains purpose etc and say therefore the universe is sentient the universe is purposeful evolution you say has a purpose diversity because what we see is diversity of course what we see is diversity that's the consequence of evolution but you mistake when you think that evolution is diving towards here time ashore on a blow some girl had one in his court I will say I would just add to that that these the science of any one century is going to be superseded by the science of future centuries such that if somebody from say the Middle Ages were to come which be brought back by a time machine to now they would find mobile phones and and computers and jet aeroplanes they would be indistinguishable from magic they would appear to be supernatural so I am a materialist I don't believe there is anything supernatural but don't think of that as a denigration of the natural because if you were to come back in 500 years time you wouldn't have seen nothing yet the the physics the engineering the biology of 500 years time will be so far advanced over two days that we might well fall on our knees and worship it as supernatural but it wouldn't be it would be the evolved natural the question is not whether individual people who happen to be religious or who happen not to be religious a good or bad the question is whether religion itself is I think there are aspects of religion which are bad in themselves I think that the idea of blind faith believing something without evidence and sheltering behind the right to hold faith such that you can justify doing bad things because your religion your faith tells you it's the right thing to do many many good and righteous people who believe themselves to be good and righteous have done terrible things precisely because they believe that they're doing it for their God so faith blind faith can have that bad effect for myself as a scientist I'm accustomed to saying that the things I really object to about religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding teaches us to be satisfied with pseudo explanations which are really not explanations at all things that sound good things that sound like an explanation but which really are which appeal to the emotions but don't actually explain anything so I think that religion in that sense can be the enemy of science the enemy of truth but this evening I'm reflecting more that what may really be the enemy of truth and the enemy of science is willful obscurantism whether it comes from religion or not the the measure of the fact the factuality of evolution is the same as in any other science some of the things that scientists have found are found with great confidence scientists are always open to the possibility of being proved wrong at some point in the future but there are some things that seem at any one stage in history far better demonstrated than others the fact of evolution is about as well demonstrated as anything we know it is absolutely certain by the normal standards the same kind of standards as we are certain that the Earth rotates and the Sun doesn't go around the earth that formerly we have to say well that's a hypothesis that might one day be disproved but we all know that it won't be and evolution has now come into that category I don't mean that Darwin's theory of natural selection as at least as the only driving force of evolution that probably should be treated as slightly more uncertain but the fact of evolution itself by which I mean the fact that all living creatures that have ever been looked at on this planet are cousins sharing a common ancestor that is a Sakura fact as as any in science my attitude to science is that we are fundamentally trying to understand how things work science is very difficult it's very difficult to understand how things work the hard problem of consciousness has been mentioned the problem of the origin of the universe the problem of the origin of life of how life has this uncanny appearance of being designed the size of the universe the scale of the universe how embryology works these are all deeply difficult questions they require hard scientific work and in all cases I think I'm right in saying that scientific work consists of explaining complicated things in terms of the interactions of their parts or of simpler things so we always try to explain complex things in terms of simpler things we do not resort to magical language we do not snow our audience with highfalutin sounding words that don't actually mean anything we use words that actually have meaning we use expressions that can be tested we work hard at understanding the universe in terms of its component parts we don't invent super arching entities which have no explanation in themselves we don't invoke ideas like the universe house consciousness the universe has awareness atoms have awareness if we have a difficult problem like awareness we explain it in terms of the interactions between small parts working together in ways that scientists understand if Freeman Dyson ever said atoms are aware then he's wrong I don't think he said it I think he should sue you although I can't recall ever having kissed a photograph I have wept when reading poetry when listening to music I think that those on this side have come to rather resent the suggestion that religion has a monopoly on emotion on poetry on sympathy on empathy everybody in this room I dare say has felt deep grief at the sight or the thought of a suffering individual somewhere in the world maybe even of another species that does seem to be something in humanity to feel empathy with suffering and as a Darwinian I can offer explanations for that I won't do it now because there isn't time but it is a travesty that has somehow become widely accepted that if you throw out religion you throw out the good samaritan you throw out weeping at a sonnet of shakespeare or at a Shabbat quartet it has nothing whatever to do with religion in the sense of the supernatural of course you can redefine religion as covering all these emotional artistic aspects and in that case of course there's no contest but I suggest that that's confusing and that we need to define religion as belief in something supernatural you get your beliefs not from evidence but from faith from revelation from tradition from scripture from authority now all those are very bad reasons to believe anything evidence is the only reason to believe something and that's the second point that I want to make in closing but the first one the main one I want to make is that we are all in this together we are all capable of the same kinds of emotions we're all capable of wanting to free the slaves and all the things all the good things that have been talked about whether we're religious or not you cannot give religion the credit for any of those things they are a part of humanity the good things of a part of you energy just as the bad things of particle energy whether you're religious or not

Channel: Agatan Foundation

Views: 1,551,181

Keywords: Richard Dawkins (Author), Best, of, Arguments, And, Delivery, Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Religion, Debate, Philosophy, argument, funny, Science, great, nice, cool, Good, Fun, debate, comeback, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, clever, intelligent, bright, smart, church, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, new, morality, god, free will, islamism, extremism, amazing, one, scientist, pro

Id: gtw6ABSkRnw

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 11 2014