Full Length Talk by Daniel Dennett - 'How To Tell You're An Atheist'

[Music] in the green room when I asked him where do you get your ideas from he admitted to me that he comes up with some of his best ideas in the shower in the morning and when his wife complains he says honey I'm working ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Daniel [Applause] Dennis where is mine yeah good day good day I'm delighted to be here and uh today I'm going to talk about how to tell if you're an atheist in in my other role as a researcher on the conscious on Consciousness in the brain one of my favorite phenomena but I've never actually witnessed it directly is Anton syndrome uh which is a variety of anosognosia this is where a patient has a serious problem is completely unaware of it completely oblivious of the problem there a variety of different cases of anos agosia but probably the most extreme is Anton syndrome which is also known more uh informatively as blindness denial now these are people who have been just struck blind they've had sight all their lives they have recently been struck Blind by some cerebral accident and they don't realize it they're blind and they do not know that they are blind they deny it and they carry on noticing that they're having some problems but they don't think it's blindness well as I said I've never actually seen it firsthand uh it's rare and it usually lasts only a few days or weeks and uh I have a standing invitation uh uh or request to various people in the field who might get an Anton's case call me up send me an email I'll be on the next plane because I really want to see it firsthand I have some hunches about how to think about it and how to interact with people that are suffering from Anton syndrome it's hard to believe that it's possible a lot of people I know I've had students when they hear about it first they think I'm making it up they just don't think it's possible for somebody to be blind and not realize it well it is possible possible and these people are not stupid they're not insane they're just victims of some sort of brain disorder well now that's just to introduce my topic of today which is a much more common Affliction atheism [Applause] denial I think I think we all know people who deny that they're atheists and we're not so sure that they realize what they really are and that's what I'm going to talk about and I've been talking about this recently with Linda lasola Linda and I as many of you know have been conducting uh some research on the curious and important and unstudied category of preachers with parishes who are secret atheists or non-believers and we found thanks in part to Dan Barker we found five that we we actually found six that we interviewed for our first study one of them got cold feet and we completely expunged all the facts about her from our study we published one about the first five and now we're into phase two uh which uh we're just about completing Linda's done a whole lot more interviews we're going to be writing it up probably this summer or in the fall and uh uh probably publication in this calendar year and let me just take this opportunity to thank those who've supported it we always need more support we don't have support for phase three yet which will be a more Grand study yet but talking with Linda about what we were finding and she's doing all the interviewing and she noticed this pattern we all noticed this pattern we both noticed this pattern that many of our preachers even though they volunteered for this study didn't want to call themselves atheists and in fact we recently placed an ad in the National Catholic Reporter we're I was surprised that they took the ad quite frankly uh the Boston pilot which is the another publication refused the ad and wouldn't say why but the National Catholic Reporter published it just a few weeks ago and I'm I'm going to point out one little passage there where it says mismatch between what they believe about God and faith and what their parishioners expect them to believe we couldn't say atheist because they wouldn't accept that but there's many pastors who are only too willing to acknowledge that what they believe in their heart of hearts is not what their parishioners think they believe and that is a source of real anguish to them as as Dan Barker was mentioning earlier now it's very hard then for some clergy to say that they're atheists now in this group that must seem pretty surprising except we all know why or we think we do isn't it obvious uh there are terrible connotations at least in America of the word atheist and there's the cognitive dissonance there're supposed to be people of God and probably one of the biggest is what's known as the Concord fallacy or sunk costs when you've invested most of your life in something turning away from that deciding that that was not a good investment it's very hard to do the tendency to throw good months and years after bad is very hard to resist now we atheists don't feel this way we don't have any difficulty saying that we're atheists but in fact I'm today I'm going to be talking to two audiences to this audience here today and also to the audience that I anticipate in due of course once these talks get out on the web and I think in fact there are a few quiet secret Christians in attendance here and I'm talking to them too so I'm talking about us and those who are curious about us I'm talking to us and those who are curious about us as you know we atheists are a happy lot we're deeply moral but we don't have a mind mountain of artificial guilt we do feel guilty about our misdeeds but we don't consider them sins well how about you then might you be an atheist out there might you be an atheist there's an American comedian Jeff Foxworthy whose main stick is uh you might be a redneck these are redneck jokes he's the Chief he's the poet laurate of redneck jokes you might be a redneck if you've been married three times and still have the same in-laws you might be a redneck if the centerpiece on your dining room table is an original signed work by a famous taxidermist and there's a lot more uh you can find them online they're pretty pretty good one of the things I like about them is that although he's making fun of rednecks it's a sort of uh affectionate fun and I don't think the Rednecks mind interesting fact so now I want to sort of follow in Jeff Foxworthy's shoes a little bit and say well you might be an atheist if you're reflective enough to be curious about us so if you're listening to me now somewhere you might be an atheist before you quick move to another website I'd like to point out that you might be an atheist if you're afraid to listen because of what you might learn about yourself that pretty well covers is everybody I think so let's get down to some details Richard Dawkins in the Christmas issue of the new Statesman reported on a wonderful survey that he recently completed that is to say uh uh he his foundation had this done by professional surveyors uh he points out that the census of 2001 seemed to show that over 70% of uh British people were Christian and the Dawkins Foundation commissioned a survey done by the ipsos Mory group in accordance with its strict rules so this was a carefully done survey and this is what they found that percentage that describes themselves as Christian had dropped from in the UK from 72 to 54% plus or minus two that's a very significant drop you could read about it in Richard's article I don't know how much it was otherwise publicized in England more interestingly of those 54% census Christians that is these are the ones that are identified by this methodology as Christians half of them hadn't attended the church service at all in the previous year 16% hadn't attended in the past 10 years further 12% had never done so so this has paired the group down quite interestingly I think we have to say even more important only 44% of the census Christians less than half of that 54% claim to believe that Jesus is the son of God now I want to highlight that and I want to I want to amend it very slightly only 44% of sensus Christians say they believe that Jesus is the son of God and I'm sure you share my suspicion that great many of those who say that are thinking soov well in a sort of metaphorical and symbolic way yes uh they don't literally think that Jesus is the son of God how could you believe that it's interesting that 56% don't bother with the symbolic or metaphorical Dodge they just say no I don't believe that so we're pairing it down a little bit more so now I want to ask you out there do you believe that Jesus is the son of God if not you might be an atheist now every Christian out there knows that there are lots of Christians literalists fundamentalists who would say something stronger they'd say you're an atheist not you might be an atheist but you see I I'm more tolerant I only say you might be an atheist few more questions do you believe that God literally listens to prayers and intervenes in people's lives if not you might be an atheist do you believe that God is on our side in war or in football games or if not you might be an atheist do you believe that God created all creatures great and small if not you might be an atheist well I know what some of you out there are thinking not in this room but in the wider world you don't believe any of that nonsense you know about Son of God and taking sides in football games and all that but still you say you believe in something Divine not a personal God not a God that makes the creatures and that answers the prayers but still something Divine a sort of benign Force I think I get it May the force be with you but you know I believe that Star Wars is a fantasy how about you oh I got to tell a little story I do some radio interviews and once with a with a Christian radio station the interviewer was just beside himself talking with me and he said wait a minute wait a minute are you telling me that you don't you you don't believe that there's there's some force that governs the whole universe and protects our lives and all the rest and I said oh I do I do and he got very excited said you you do and I said yeah I do I really do I call it [Applause] [Music] gravity doesn't make me a theist at least I don't think so here's another common Dodge not a Dodge a common response what God is is is a concept it's a concept in people's minds it's a concept that enriches their spirits and inspires them if you believe this you're definitely an atheist God is not a concept the concept of God is a concept a cup of coffee is not a concept the concept of a cup of coffee is a concept the elementary philosophy I have a term for this it's called a deity a friend of mine when his teenage daughter many years ago nice smart Al girl and dad was in in the habit of uttering pronouncements at the dinner table MIT professor and one day he issued forth one of these wise tidbits and his daughter said wow dad said a deepity he told me about that I thought the term was just so great I going to appropriate it so what's a deity a deity is an apparently profound observation that is ambiguous and I mean that quite literally it has two readings on one reading it's obviously false but if it were true it would be very important and on the other it's trivially true and so when you hear it you you sort of see ooh I think that's true it is it's trivially true or at the same time whoa it's some that's a deepity I want to give you one of my favorite examples of the dity when I teach this concept to my students are you ready everybody sitting down love is just a word oh wow love is just a word think about it whatever love is it isn't a word you can't find love in the dictionary put the quotation marks around it we philosophers are sticklers about this it's called a use mention error and you get love is just a word that's true and it's trivially true cheeseburger is just a word word is just a word so that's a deity now the idea that God as a concept is a another great deity I believe the concept of God exists and I'm an atheist in fact I believe that thousands of concepts of God exist does that make me a polytheist no I'll go go a little further I even agree that the concept of God helps some people lead Better Lives I agree that does happen don't ever forget it I just think that there are better ways to help people lead Better [Music] Lives you heard earlier from Dan Barker about the clergy project and the first graduate of the clergy project is a former Pentecostal Minister named Jerry dwit and he gave a wonderful talk at the reason rally in Washington it's available on a website I'll leave this up for a bit if you want to check it out listen to it it's great fun and about halfway through this and it's all in Evangelical rolling musical cadences he's still a he's a brilliant preacher really and he describes the five stages of his Theology and first he believed that God loves everybody but he couldn't reconcile that with the fact that God sent a lot of people to hell so he changed his mind and decided that God Saves everybody but that didn't seem to square well with what he thought he knew so then he decided that God is in everybody and that seemed more defensible and he clung with that for a while and then he got the idea that God God is everyone's internal dialogue and then as he memorably says at this point he was just one good book away from the fifth stage God is a [Music] delusion and so now he's using his skills as a preacher to carry the word that God is a delusion so this is the website for the clergy project Dan Barker played a big role in getting it organized Linda and I helped and Richard Dawkins Foundation helped by providing the technical help to set up this website now that it's going yes thank you Richard thanks Dan now that it's going as Dan said you have to be a preacher or a former preacher to be in this so Richard and I are not preachers or former preachers noris Linda so we're completely outside we have no access to their discussions their debates they are self-governing they do their own thing now we've launched them and wish them all the best and as Dan says they have they have now over 200 members and every now and then somebody in the group sends us an email about how they're doing they're doing very well uh without any advertising they have picked up these new members and they're being very careful about not they're not sending out brochures or or big blanket things to all the clergy in the world they want the clergy to hear about them and come to them in fact one of their main problems now is that because it's it's all confidential of course course but in order to get in you have to prove to the members that you're legit and they don't want journalists or troublemakers trying to get into the inner sanctum of the of the clergy project so the vetting process is quite is quite careful and laborious and that's a bottleneck now at this point there isn't funding to provide job retraining which is what we would love to have for them but there is support that they provide for each other moral support and help and advice and it seems to be working out wonderfully and one of their members when we raised the possibility of trying to come up with funding for uh retraining for instance sort of a safe place where people could get retrained to go out in the world and this one uh former uh preacher said if you promis free training you'd have 10,000 members tomorrow so it's a really interesting problem and one of the interesting things about it is that when we published our first study Linda and I when we published about about clergy who don't believe we expected a lot of church leaders religious leaders to condemn us for making a mountain out of a mole hill or making the whole thing up there was very little of that on the way they all know they all know it's true there was hardly anybody who questioned the fact that this is a phenomenon what nobody knows is how big it is the clergy that we interviewed that Linda interviewed they really all think that they're the tip of the iceberg but they don't dare ask their fellow clergy they're like gays in the 50s without gayar they don't dare raise the issue with other clergy they know whom they suspect are just as much non-believers as they are and well they should be careful because one of the things that came out a few weeks ago is that one member of the clergy project took a brave move and told his best friend not not somebody in the clergy project but his best friend a parishioner in his church that he joined the clergy project and he didn't believe his best friend next day he lost his job so serious now those of you out there are you an atheist how can you tell how do you tell wishful thinking from genuine belief and this is not easy in fact science has dealt with this problem everybody falls prey to it and science has developed what you might call a technology of disciplined belief they do double blind experiments they have multiple coder interpret who don't know the hypothesis to do the interpretation of your data I'm thinking for instance of psychological experiments when you have say videotapes of subjects and you want to understand what they're doing you have peer review you have replication studies and so forth religion you will notice doesn't have any of that scientists know the anguish of confronting awful facts just like everybody else does they confront cases where they find it hard to to believe their own data or even more anguishing they sometimes find cases where they find it hard to believe that their colleague might have faked data but there's nothing like this in religion it's just the opposite fake it till you make it and think of the case of Mother Teresa after her death I was amazed actually the Catholic Church agreed to publish her Diaries her letters with her with her her Confessor and what they reveal is a woman who for years was basically an atheist and tortured tormented by the fact that God didn't talk to her at all I'll tell you my own suspicion if you look out in the world of the clergy and you see clergy who redouble their efforts to help the poor to to sucker to the sick to be to be doing good works those are probably the secret atheists atoning for their hypocrisy the ones that are playing golf still [Music] believe what about the pope might he be an atheist well you know the late Andy Rooney American commentator in world class kudin uh had a nice quote he says the pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter and the fact that it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him what goes through the Pope's mind about being rejected all the time does God have it in for him well think about it and I'm sure the pope has thought about it and he's a smart smart man I suspect that the pope is an atheist he's a sophisticated man a company man a bureaucrat but I don't know I don't know if he's an atheist nobody knows in fact I doubt that the pope knows that's the thing about religious belief we don't really know what Rick sorum really believes and neither do his children how could they well they say they do that's what is known in religious circles as professing it's what Catholics are required to profess Cardinal ratzinger before he was Pope wrote a very interesting document on the requirement of good Catholics to profess meaning to say it even if you don't believe it and for that reason alone if for no other we cannot take the Pope's utterances that face value reminded of the little child at guest in somebody's house says to the hostess thank you very much for the really delicious meal I enjoyed it so much my mother told me to say that his father told him to say that there's a theoretical problem I can't resist being a philosopher here my one of my heroes Quin in his book word and object raises the issue of radical translation in radical translation is when you go to some remote place and and there's no bilinguals to help you interpret and you encounter people they're speaking their language you don't know their language they don't know your language and you have to figure out you have to make a dictionary you have to figure it out it's possible it's hard it's interesting and it raises interesting technical problems and what Quin wanted to point out about this is that that you must use what he calls the principle of Charity which is to maximize true belief quoting the maxim of translation is that assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of language he gives an example certain Islanders are said to speak of pelicans as their half brothers h can they really think of pelicans as their half brothers or are we mistr ating a term here what do we really want to say about this we suspect mistranslation what do we do well we check this by probing by having follow-up questions to see how it comes out and that introduces a sliding scale where polite curiosity at the outset turns to insulting challenges down the road you then have a diplomatic problem your informant says but I really mean it and so you say diplomatically okay okay you really mean it you idiot you don't say that and this apparent agreement has to be disingenuous and it happens all the time when people talk about religion doubt persists on at least Forefront am I still mistranslating is he really an idiot is he lying or is he perhap perhaps is his tribe exploiting the principle of charity for dubious ends this is not unknown it's a common enough feature in illness for instance where uh brain damag patients have a brilliant capacity to deflect uh uh probes that they that are embarrassing to them it seems to be something that's built right into us as one of our natural talents and this inconclusiveness when we try to find out what people really believe is made more difficult because of what Quin talks about as the web of belief where he thinks of all beliefs as sort of fastened to the world at the periphery with concrete sensory information you know you can figure out what the word for rock and table and Cat are because you can see the things that they're referred to once you get to theoretical abstract issues it's a little harder example Anthropologist says to the native do you think this water is drinkable yeah that's the proof all you need do you think the bridge is safe yeah but when it's religious beliefs as we move into the theoretical abstract Center there's more and more opportunities for alternative paths and this is a real practical problem for anthropologists and one Anthropologist Rodney Needum put it very movingly in his book a book called belief language and experience and here's his confession I realized I could not confidently describe their attitude to God whether this was belief or anything else in fact as I had glumly to conclude I just did not know what was their psychic attitude toward the personage in whom I had assumed they believed now this is after NM a trained experienced distinguished Anthropologist had spent years studying these people this was the conclusion he reached he missed an important point he thought of himself as an outsider but he didn't notice that his the children were the same way we're all Outsiders the penan children faced the same problem that he did and in fact if you were raised in any religious tradition you face this problem when your elders your parents whoever it was told you what the what the Creed was and you had to think wait a minute do they really believe that and you may have faced the fact that it's very hard to tell and that's true of religious belief in general it's almost impossible to find good evidence for the sentence X believes at P where p is a proposition of religion it's so removed from any concrete consequences NM then was simply being more self-critical than most and the upshot of this of course is that when it comes to religious belief if we want to try to catalog it we are confronted with a Thicket in a swamp full of fog which is brilliant it's a brilliant defense it's a yielding passive but more impenetrable barrier than any Fortress a wall you can challenge but when you got to slog through the swamp and the brush and the fog I forget it well it's brilliant I just said who designed it that way and the answer is nobody designed it that way cultural Evolution did it because Creeds that are too easily discovered and interpreted are not long for this world this is an adaptation of religious beliefs to be impenetrable in this way which maybe leads you to think well if it's so difficult why bother well that's just what they want you to say don't even try walk away it's very much like the unwitting deflection by parents patients and the Willing deflection by con artists there's a lot of people in the world who don't want you to explore further and this leads to a policy of don't ask don't tell and that's what we're confronted in most cases today you just don't ask people about their religion and I want to propose a slightly different principle don't ask tell let me explain in Breaking the spell I advocated a policy that was actually discussed a little earlier today um by lesie canold and several people on the panel the idea of having compulsory religion religion education education on comparative religion on different religions I think this is a key move to uh moving to a better and more tolerant World Quebec leads the way in this by the way they have a curriculum covering all major faiths found in Quebec culture including Catholic Protestant Jewish and Aboriginal beliefs and this is obligatory started in 2008 recently some parents sued they did not want to subject their children to facts about other religions or for that matter their own religion it went to the Supreme Court of Canada and they lost there is no right in Quebec to keep your children ignorant of religions this is maybe one of the few places in the world where the idea that keeping your children ignorant is child abuse and is to be forbidden by the state but all is not well in Canada Alberta has got a a bit of a problem right now they have a new Education Act and under it homeschoolers in faith-based schools are not be permitted to teach that homosexual acts are sinful as part of their Academic Program well you may think well that's good but no I don't think it is actually here's what the spokesperson said what they want to do about their ideology elsewhere that's their family's business but a fundamental nature of our society is to respect diversity and we will command them to teach this well you can't do that you can't command and respect what Alberta should do is let the parents go ahead and teach that tripe to their children but oblige them to teach about how other people don't teach that tripe to their children so here's why I think telling works we in a brand new age for religions for Millennia religions did not have to worry about the the flock acquiring lots of information about other religions or about their own religion these religions evolved culturally in a world of easy to maintain ignorance but the new transpar parency of information brought about by technology by cell phones by the internet and all the rest by by transistor radios uh is the first really drastic change in the epistemological environment that religions have had to face in several Millennia and every religion is going to have to adapt or go extinct and deny their children all the benefits of the technology I don't think any but a few really crackpot fanatic religions have the stomach for that I love this cartoon aren't you a little old to have an imaginary friend as I'm with him now children are great at puncturing the balloon of hyper resect now let me say a little bit finally about why I think asking is ill advised it antagonizes people for no good reason there are many good reasons actually that one might prefer not to be asked such as I don't want Grandma to know I don't want a lie or even I just don't want to think about it or Justify my refusing to think about it I think we should largely let people alone and not confront them because it's almost never works sometimes it works but you have to wait till they want to be confronted let me illustrate this in a curious way here's a few facts did you know that polar bears do not run wild in Florida that jet fuel is unpalatable that cell phones out number Cadillacs in the US I'm sure that's not news to any of you but nobody ever told you those things nobody ever informed you of those things it's just you know enough to know that those are true a lot of what we know we know without ever having been told that it just sort of flows out of everything that everybody knows in other regards telling gently all the time gentle exposure to mountains of facts is builds up a great Foundation of knowledge that arms children against propaganda a teacher that casually drops a fact in here or there says simply oh the people who still say they believe in heaven and hell doesn't make a point of it just goes right on or mentions that Walt Disney didn't believe in God goes right on just let these little nuggets drop there don't make a deal of it just go on just go on let those things settle and percolate or little facts about Evolution what I think we want to move towards and can move realistically practically is towards something like the Santa Claus myth which I think it's not I don't think I don't want to abolish the Santa Claus custom if it's bad I think somebody would have figured out by now that it is I think it's relatively benign compared with say the boogeyman or the Devil myth which I think are really vile and should be uh EXT pated as best we can Santa Claus is we might say semi-transparent in our culture everybody sort of knows that everybody else knows that this is all just fun and games wouldn't it be great if we could get the god myth to be similarly transparent in our culture like Santa Claus and you know we could go on saying God damn it and God bless you just the way we talk about sunsets and sunrises and Santa Claus and nobody would take it seriously and that's a key too because humor as we saw last night brilliantly is it's a great dissolver of taboos and I think it's an interesting fact it's an interesting fact about the world we live in that nobody complains about God and Heaven cartoons like this there's this whole genre of you know the lawyer goes to heaven and meets God or St Peter meets him at the pear we tell these jokes no it's pretty clear that we're not offending anybody that nobody takes offense everybody's ready to joke and laugh about that the idea of God in heaven and sitting on the throne that's already that's already a fossil that's already gone in most quarters let's just make sure it's gone in the of the quarters where bited people still don't see it that way thank me it's Friday I think that's and then I particularly like this one why God really created [Laughter] humans as you will have noticed religion has no sense of humor those of you out there who in in in the cyers space who may hear this talk some someday think about that this convention is full of people laughing happy enjoying life and all of its Ridiculousness can you say that about what goes on in your church I doubt [Music] it the religious are Past Masters at playing the oh how disrespectful the I am offended card I think we want to discredit those cards our Creed is that we think that nothing in the whole world is exempt from laughter thanks for your [Music] attention thank you [Applause] Daniel this is Big Ideas from the a see

Channel: TheClergyProject

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Keywords: Dan Dennett, Melbourne, Global Atheist Convention, The Clergy Project

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Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2012