Good Reasons for "Believing" in God - Dan Dennett, AAI 2007

dan dennett is a year younger than me almost to the day can you hear me at the back but I must admit that I've grown to think of him as a sort of intellectual elder brother since the deaths of Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith I've been rather short of intellectual hearers to consult on difficult questions thank goodness we still have Dan Dennett a year or so ago it seemed that it might be a close-run thing I remember the shock followed by deep gloom that was cast over a large group of people in the New York theater when we were informed that Dan had collapsed and was undergoing emergency surgery which seemed so we were informed unlikely to succeed heroic surgery to save an intellectual hero not just a national treasure but a world treasure at least to the world of the mind many of you I'm sure will have read the stirring testimonial that he read while he was in recovery it was actually called thank goodness it was widely published all over the internet and was read out to those gathered in San Diego for the beyond belief conference Dan mentioned his religious friends who'd prayed for his recovery he was touched by their efforts but he chose to interpret their words as meaning that they had been thinking of him and he added I'm not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said they were praying for me I've resisted the temptation to respond thanks I appreciate it but did you also sacrifice a goat I feel about this the same way I would if one of them had said I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health what a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects don't expect me to be grateful or even indifferent I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it dan considered the impulse he might have felt to say thank God for his recovery he asked himself whether his near-death experience had been some kind of Epiphany I find his response to this so stirring that I again want to read it out for you yes I did have an epiphany I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say thank goodness this is not merely a euphemism for thank God we atheists don't believe there's any God to thank I really do mean thank goodness there is a lot of goodness in this world and more goodness every day and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am Alive today it is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today and I want to celebrate that fact here and now to whom then do I owe a debt of gratitude to the cardiologist who's kept me alive and ticking for years and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than ammonia to the surgeons neurologists anesthesiologists and the perfusionist who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances to the dozen or so physician assistants and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and the small army of phlebotomists so deaf that you hardly know they're drawing your blood and the people who brought the meals kept my room cleaned at the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case we all chaired me to x-ray and so forth these people came from Uganda Kenya Liberia Haiti the Philippines Croatia Russia China Korea India and the United States of course and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect as they hit as they helped each other out and checked each other's work but for all their teamwork this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague the physicist Alan Cormac who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the CT scanner Alan you have posthumously saved yet another life but who's counting the world is better for the work you did thank goodness then there's the whole system of Medicine both science and the technology without which the best intentions efforts of individuals would be roughly useless so I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees past and present of science nature Journal of the American Medical Association Lancet and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements detecting and correcting them I think you can see why Dan Dennett is my intellectual hero he's one of today's most distinguished philosophers but among philosophers I would describe him as a scientist philosopher many philosophers call themselves philosophers of science but rather few of them take the trouble to learn much science to immerse themselves in the scientific literature to talk to working scientists and understand what makes them tick one of the things that strikes me about reading Dan's books is how much science I learn from them new science new experimental results fascinating scientific research often still unpublished but which Dan knows about because he keeps his ear to the scientific ground and travels to visit laboratories where he's always an honored guest he is indeed a scientist as much as he is a philosopher and he's also a superb explainer where other philosophers are mainly interested in showing off how clever they are to their colleagues really really wants to be understood he seems to make no distinction between a book written for laypeople and a book written for professional philosophers and this is something I also aspire to when writing for professional scientists clarity is clarity and it doesn't matter who you're writing for there should be no need to write separate popular books which dumb down the books that are written for professionals dan thinks long and hard not only about the philosophy itself but about the best way to explain it he's a great corner of phrases an inventive devisor of metaphors a vivid painter of mental images intuition pump is one of his phrases and it well describes exactly what he does when he's explaining something difficult to his readers his celebrated lecture where am I is a tour de force of the explainers art combining comedy and high drama with the usual weapons of the lecturer notions like skyhook and crane the Cartesian theatre the library of mendel Universal acid all these are superb intuition pumps crafted to assist the reader to accompany him on an exciting mental adventure he's a leading thinker in a wide range of important philosophical topics philosophy of mind the problem of freewill consciousness evolution and of course religion breaking the spell is a pivotal contribution to the rather exhilarating revival which secularism is enjoying at the moment in all these fields as I said I look up to him as an intellectual hero elder brother he may be but also dynamic or for terrible of the mind and there's no paradox in the contrast it's a huge pleasure and honor to me to present this award to Dan and the fact that the award is in my name redoubles the pleasure and quadruples the honor down it's beautiful before you leave the stage Richard I would like to present you with the Dan Dennett award it is it is not quite as glorious as that what this is is a a Jesus action figure that I that I found in that I found in a gift shop in Vermont it has been autographed by Julia Sweeney by you and by me and by Sam Harris and we're going we're going to get a few more signatures I hope from from ayaan Hirsi Ali and from hitch and I think that probably although I'm going to give this to you the suitable place for this award is in next year's auction don't you think that would be an appropriate list but for now you are the keeper of the Jesus action figure well I actually have a I have a whole talk to give but it's got some pictures it's got some PowerPoint I hope I can keep you awake and let's see if if the PowerPoint is going to work I've got my first slide up no that's not it I love it Sam Sam gave us a talk which he quarreled with the very idea of atheism being a term well I'm going to try to outdo him in sort of hutzpah for an atheist group if somebody can find the where my powerpoint is okay there we go ah can everybody see good reasons for believing in God um as many of you know I'm having I have signed a lot of copies here's this is the hardback of my book breaking the spell many of you have not seen the British paperback cover which I have to show you here because of half the next slide that I want to show you which I think is good news for atheists everywhere this was sent to me by a friend is from the British of scandal gossip magazine now they pestered their men for attention what is it with Dawson's creeks Joshua Jackson he's on a beach with his stunning girlfriend German actress Diane Kruger and he wants to read a tome on rationale atheism so you may not have realized it guys but atheism is a chick magnet now long long ago most people really did believe in God and some people still do I'm talking here about the basic primitive phenomenon of belief like for instance the belief that Mount Everest exists just straight ordinary everyday uncomplicated belief in a proposition now you can believe that Mount Everest exists and not know a whole lot about my own Everest Rus Mount Everest exists it's just one of these four peaks which one is it I doubt if any of you can pick out the picture of Mount Everest from these four mountains but that does not disqualify you from believing the proposition that Mount Everest exists it's one of them and you could still tell me a bit about Mount Everest enough to convince me that you are as it were competent to believe that Mount Everest exists that's ordinary everyday straight-up belief you don't have to be able to pick Mount Everest out of a lineup necessarily and you still you know enough about it so that you know what you're talking about when you say that Mount Everest exists now let's try another case I can't even read this proposition alpha probably hair and son dog are yes are there or something like that now I haven't the faintest idea what this means because it's in Turkish but I believe it's true and the reason I believe it's true is that I went to a trusted Turkish colleague and said who vain please give me a sentence of Turkish do not tell me what it means but just it's got to be true and so he gave me this sentence and I'm happy to say that I've told you if you know what it means don't tell me I want to keep using this example and I want to be able to say truly cross my heart I haven't the faintest idea what this proposition means but I would bet a large sum of money that it's true okay notice I've got no nothing up my sleeve this is magic this isn't supernatural it's a very simple state of affairs I've got somebody to give me a proposition that they warrant is true and I think I trust you I'm going to believe you okay nothing special about that well here's another proposition proposition beta e equals mc-squared how many of you believe that right how many of you understand it ah I use this example by the way I gave a talk about my book at Fermilab outside Chicago to an audience of about 250 of the world's great physicists and as I put this on I said you know I don't think this example is going to work in this crowd I said how many of you believe it all I hands up how many of you understand it of course all the hands went up but then as they were sort of laughing about that one of them stood up and said yeah the experimentalists think they understand it but they don't really now do I believe alpha and beta no I don't understand alpha at all hi Semyon understand beta I I can make some basic algebraic manipulations I couldn't derive it really I couldn't use it in any way so I don't really qualify but that's alright because I can do what we all do all the time and that is we can pass the buck to the experts I don't have to understand it but there have to be people that really understand it and this is oddly enough curiously enough this is one of the great powers of language one of the unsung powers of language is that you can use language to give yourself formulae that you can use without understanding them you can you way do the believing we leave the understanding to the experts and this is in fact a very useful tactic there are there are scientists who use formula in their work that they themselves really don't know how to derive really don't know how to use but they this there's a sort of a chain of authority that they can trust so that they can use them with confidence compare that situation with science with religion with the religious formula even the experts claim not to understand in fact they make they don't confess that they don't understand they insist that they don't understand they make a special marvelous glory of the fact that the central propositions of their faith are incomprehensible even to the experts now this is just bizarre I mean when you think about it from guess or take a Martian perspective on this this is just strange as the devil how on earth did this strange state of affairs arise that's what I want to talk about first of all I think I will will get no disagreement from this crowd with it there simply are no good reasons for believing that God exists Christopher was very very eloquent on this score this after come on there just aren't any good reasons the arguments are all from hunger and there's plenty of good reasons for believing that God does not exist but but there are several good reasons for declaring a belief in God now really there aren't any good reasons for believing God there are many good reasons for not believing in God and I'm sure you share with me sometimes you you contemplate people talking about their belief in God and you you just want to exclaim how can anybody believe this stuff and the answer is they can't they don't actually they don't now there are unreflective folks and there are plenty of them who believe Allah my proposition alpha the one in Turkish that whatever it is that those free say that are pre sick that's true but remember that's not really believing the proposition that's just believing that that formula whatever it means it's Turkish to me it's true and and it doesn't bother them they just accept this on the authority of their religious leaders the leaders of their community their elders this is not an unusual state of affairs and most people are too busy living their lives to be very reflective so those people believe that the things that they are asked to say in church or in the mosque are true and they don't really care too much about the fact that they really haven't got much of a clear idea even a clue what they mean that's not their issue they just don't think about it that's how come they aren't gobsmacked and bewildered and embarrassed by the religious propositions they don't believe them they just believe that whatever those formulae say whatever they mean if they mean anything it's true but what about the reflective folk they have a problem they can see as clearly as we can that there are no good reasons for believing in God they can they can see just the way we do this is why by the way I don't waste much breath on arguments against the existence of God or refuting arguments for the existence of God because quite frankly I've met very few people to give them any stock anyway these people the reflected people they know they know there aren't any good arguments any good reasons to believe in God but they think that belief in God is for some reason obligatory that's what I want to look at what their reasons are for thinking that belief in God is obligatory what they do given their belief is they contrived to believe in God and that's a phenomenon which is quite distinct from believing in God here's a good line from Cardinal Ratzinger who's been mentioned several times before he's now pope benedict xvi he talks about what the Catholic faithful are required to profess required to profess so the Catholics then have this category in which all good Catholics fall of being professors well needless to say I know one who's that word I want to reserve professors for for an altogether a more reasonable occupation the one that I myself hold so I'm going to call them declares so what are religious folk required to declare well they profess belief in God why on earth do they do it why on earth did they do it remember reasons for declaring belief in God are not identical two reasons for believing in God these are two different states and they have different reasons and now I'm going to talk about reasons for declaring belief in God the reflective folk who go on declaring their belief in God and we know there's many we're not talking about bumpkins we're talking about educated people college-educated people who go on declaring their belief in God they're not stupid well some of them are but then some atheists are stupid they're not radically misinformed they are worried about something that we should actually take very seriously I'm going to now give you several good strategic reasons now they're strategic because they're not reasons for believing in God they're reasons for trying to believe in God or declaring your belief in God for believing in God and their strategic and the first most obviously is fear and we I don't need to tell you about that we heard eloquently from ion here she alley about fear we've heard about the fear of many people their fear of God their fear of a vengeful God of a God who demands this belief but actually a much more interesting category of fear is the fear of the reflective folks who think they are obliged to support the belief in God and what they're mainly afraid of I think is catastrophic collapse of consensus now hich earlier was talking about a failed state a failed state as we know only too well these days is there's a truly depressing and ugly awful situation when you have a failed state it's very hard for for any force on earth to pull a failed state back into sanity nobody trusts anybody the smart people leave the country there is nothing but corruption and warlords and violence it's just it's just a horrible catastrophic abandonment of civility reliability trustworthiness and everything else a failed state is a very grim and terrible state of affairs and confronted with the prospect of a failed state I want you to put yourself in the position of somebody of some authority in a state which is on the brink of becoming a failed state and the people are asking you is it safe to go to market is it safe is it safe to plant my crops is it okay can I go shopping and you don't know that it is you rather doubt that it is there is a trim there are very good reasons under these circumstances to lie very good reasons I think each one of us here would be strongly tempted to lie under these situations and for a very good reason saying no no it's too late this is out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if there is a small chance that you can salvage things just goose the society a little bit into a sense of confidence you may be able to save it so what you say may have a huge ripple on effect and so there's a tremendous reason a very good reason to life and this is I think the state of great many people who are reflective people who go on declaring their belief in the existence of God they're terribly afraid that if that belief somehow falters we will have a societal collapse now this sort of issue is not just about religion think about hyperinflation we have a number of phenomenon in the world in which social consensus is a sort of treading water that holds everything up as soon as people start losing confidence in a currency and the currency starts to hyper inflate inflate and then we get hyperinflation and it all goes to hell and if you can forestall that and calm people down and reestablish their confidence and things you can do some real good in the world but of course it may require telling some white lies the gold standard I was thinking about this year there's a really nice case where people are terribly afraid if we abandon the gold standard confidence and currency would just be so volatile that this was really dangerous that's one of the best reasons not a good one but not a bad one either for maintaining the gold standard as a sort of fetish really to protect the confidence of the community in in a currency and I think something like this is going on in the belief by so many religious people that they have to cling tenaciously with white knuckles to their religious declarations run away cynicism can even lead to the death of communication we have Aesop's fable about the boy who cried wolf and a similar phenomena have been seen argued imagined and so we have this this kind of fear which is not unreasonable it's can be very well informed if we think it's false fine but there's some problems with that too by the way another great example this is in Doug Hofstadter's wonderful column about the luring lottery some of you may remember that in Scientific American a sort of catastrophic loss of of trust now suppose we think that well okay then you've shown us that this is reasonable but you know they're just wrong giving up the belief and draw is like giving up the gold standard life goes on community confidence trust security it's just not such a big problem okay so we want to explain this to these people can we reason with them no why because we should expect them to shun the opportunity to discuss our disagreement rationally because the very discussion of the issue undermines the consensus don't talk about it Shh don't even think about it there's been some very elegant research by the psychologist Philip tetlock on sacred values what makes a value sacred is don't even think about you should feel guilty for even thinking about it even if you decide the right thing about it it's to protect us from subversive criticism which might lead to a catastrophic collapse of values so there's fear in several different varieties and what I've tried to do is to show you that in your own lives in your own circumstances you can imagine the case where you would be gripped by that fear and you would think the right thing to do here is to grit my teeth and lie maintain a pretense to save a situation from catastrophe another is love and we've heard a lot about that today it's so wonderful the speakers today weren't just vivid and compelling they Illustrated my issues just right down the line the prospect of disappointing or enraging or hurting or those we love this is so terrible - I actually hope to all of us that it overpowers our candor we just can't face telling the truth when grandma or mother or our sisters or somebody else that we love we're afraid that it's going to hurt and so many people are trapped in a pretense from which any escape would be in their eyes of betrayal our overtures our sceptical overtures therefore threaten to expose them no wonder they loathe us now wonder they love us we are threatening them with in a choice between betrayal and line which they do not like there's a lovely new book I wish that were here just came out I'm not sure it's actually out as it is called philosophers without gods it's a collection of essays put together by the philosopher Luiz Anthony by the way my little piece thank goodness which Richard quoted from is is in their brand-new essays about these are philosophers some of whom actually had had religious training and went to religious schools and they're all atheists now and they've written essays about their life one of the best is by my dear late friend David Lewis and it's called divine evil and this issue came up hitch actually spoke about this Lewis develops the following argument I'm just going to give you the barest bones of it the Christian God he points out as a God of judgment and punishment vengeance is mine save the Lord in fact eternal punishment for unrepentant sinners and disbelievers if you write read the Bible literally as it said and at least in North Korea you get to die it's not eternal punishment but in heaven or in hell it's eternal it's as infinite pain that seems to be the implication of the Christian Bible well that's that's nasty as Richard is said that's how could you ever respect anybody who not only believed in but worshiped at God that was a perpetrator of infinite pain it's so unprofessional to whatever your crime is an eternity of suffering this is this is so this is just outrageous can we admire the believers lewis and he says only if they're ignorant of the nature of the perpetrator i'm sorry for the long quote but it's good and i'll pass through it quickly he says david lewis says we dodge the consequence by keeping it all in soft focus consoling ourselves with the thought that Hellfire and brimstone are mere conceits that grown-up theists have gotten beyond the cartoon scenarios that is probably the stance most favored by those who worship the perpetrator starting from their trust in God they suppose that there must be there must be some nice version of the story one would that will not literally end with billions of damned souls writhing in eternal agony non-believers have been able to excuse their religious friends on the grounds that they are probably not clear-headed about the commitments of their worship how could you condone that your friend worshiped such an evil perpetrator he very usefully compares this God with Hitler we can think of them as good people who have not seen the perpetrators dark side in bringing the problem of divine evil to their attention David Lewis says slyly I am presenting them with a choice they have previously avoided and then he ends with a lovely punchline I may be making it impossible for myself to admire many who might have previously liked and respected that is part of the dynamic of this issue is that if we push hard as we should on our friends and those we admire and respect we may awkwardly find ourselves in the position of no longer being able to admire and respect those that we have previously thought rather well off now that we've removed their confusion and imposed this knowledge on them so there's two and here's a third reason and that's guilt the guilt of the deceivers is just part of this that is the guilt of the the priests and the leaders who know better it's just stunning how much guilt there is among the priests and Imams and pastors of this world when they know very well that the things that they are saying in their Pope are not what they believe but it propels the infectious guilt of the deceived they pass the buck to the deceive and let the people in the congregation police themselves ion here's the ally in this stupendous book is to me very eloquent on just exactly this topic I'm calling it the mutual policing of the devout she doesn't need to fear the Imam or to listen to the Imam she can just get from her sisters from her brother from her aunt's from her family from her clan they're all involved in enforcing the pretense of the beliefs and making her feel terribly guilty and afraid for not maintaining them it reminds me of of this stunt which some of you may have done where you get a circle of people and everybody sits down in the lap of the person behind them and you it's also supporting you can you can all sit down which is a sort of a nice trick and but but in this instance it's not so nice because what you have is a whole society that is supporting itself on nothing but the enforcement by its own members of the obligations that have come from somewhere and who knows where anymore you can cancel out the priests the Imams the whole group just goes right on perpetuating this terrible cycle of guilt Boyd and Richardson I'm a professor I can't resist getting a little bit academic here a boy Richardson have a lovely paper on second order punishing so it's an evolutionary model which shows that when you have second order punishing that is when you not only punished your people in your group for transgressions but you punish those who refuse to punish that this this creates a potent situation with just about any taboo at all can be maintained simply by the cycle of punishment that's created and of course punishment doesn't have to be corporal punishment it can be just disapproval it can be just banishment it can be just a shame and so forth then we got to break this cycle how do we do it well I on here she ollie in her book gives a wonderful example of what broke it for her and I was so glad that she mentioned it today I already had this slide in here because I was going to mention it it was a detail that just knocked me out when I read it in the book Nancy Drew who would have thought that the Nancy Drew books would have been just dynamite to her they gave her as she said tales of freedom adventure of equality between girls and boys trust and friendship I want you to remember that and think about all the different sorts of Nancy Drew germs that you can spread around in different places and it won't work for everybody we want to spread thousands of different ideas of this sort recognizing that all it takes is one of these to get into the right mind and we've broken this cycle for one person who would it guess that Nancy Drew would break the cycle for this amazing woman but by her own testimony it did well there's another way of doing it consider the successful campaign of the gays and and and you were just speaking about this just a minute ago here's here's Queer Eye for the straight guy what a brilliant advance that program has made not everybody likes it some people hate it but it has simply shifted the balance of of what's considered normal what's considered acceptable it is simply changed the playing field I think in alter ibly in a very good direction we have gay roles and sitcoms we have the gay congressman Barney Frank this is a wonderful progress in this attention this consciousness-raising that richard talks about and we want to have more of it and I think that inspired by the successful hijacking of the word gay by the word brights as coined by Paul geyser in Mingo folk true trail is is a worthy shot and I know a lot of you hate the term but a lot of homosexuals hated the term gay when it came out too it may take a few years for this to catch on and it some of you may never want to use it and that's true some gays never want to call themselves gay either but they all are grateful to the change in consciousness that the word gay has provided and maybe the word brights can do the same thing I don't in this audience don't have to give the website you know about about the brights Network and some of as I say a lot of you don't like the word oh it's so arrogant it so it suggests that if you're not bright you're dim well actually of course it does but we don't say that anymore than the gay say that this that the heterosexuals are ghulam there happens to be a nice positive upstanding word for the opposite of gay and that's straight gay straight to nice positive words so I've suggested that if the non brights want to have a name for themselves they should call themselves the supers that's a nice word super because they believe in the supernatural and we don't so they give you the supers and we can be the brights and they're both nice words but I haven't seen many of them taking me up on this but I think it's a good suggestion more recently just just before coming here I thought about this a bit and I decided you know actually I think there may be another species of non bright not just supers there may be Merc E's now supers and Merc ease are two distinct species of non brights and they really are now that I've been thinking about it quite different and so this is maybe just an aesthetic matter a difference in taste Merc YZ they shun clarity they like mystery philosophers call the mysterious they want things to be kept soft focus they want to turn down the lights don't break the spell they are in general in favor of a sort of a gauze filter over everything so that nothing's very clear they like things to be murky supers want there to be supernatural things they want real magic they want miracles and these are really two distinct ways of not being bright for instance Tom Nagel is a murky but not a super Tom Nagel the philosopher one of my one of my favorite philosophers also one of my favorite opponents here's Tom I quote him this is the passage that the odious Leon weasel ter claims I pulled out of context and misrepresented Tom Nagel snooze here's what tom says it isn't just that I don't believe in God and actually hope there is no God I don't want there to be a God I don't want the universe to be like that he's an anti theist so he certainly is no super that's in his book the last word but he is a murky he's a very urbane humane mysterion and it's immensely appealing to many people so we don't have just the enemy of the supers to fight that's not our only opponent we also have to have as as a targeted opponent the Merc ease of this world and they will take offense if we call them supers they're not supers they have no truck with miracles or org or supernatural beings they're just Merc ease and they think that by being murky by having everything murky they're protecting something important it's never quite clear what if they could get clear about it they wouldn't have to be murky so we need lots of equally engaging examples of Bright's leading fulfilling moral lives I mean Tom Nagel is a wonderful guy he's done brilliant work he's lovely working in political and judicial philosophy he's a he's a really fine example of what a philosopher can be I admire him tremendously and so for me it's a problem that he is such an honourable and exemplary fellow and yet he's a murky so we have to we have to we have to confront the murkiness and we have to provide examples of equally marvelous brights to give people just role models for what a bright can be now we have Pete Stark and I do hope that he's the first of many who will come out of the closet and admit that they're atheists I'm often asked when do you think there will be an atheist president ever I said oh we've had lots of atheist presidents they just wouldn't admit it and certainly as Richard was saying we know they've got to be atheist congressmen atheist senators and maybe maybe we can make the situation change enough so that they will come out and it they will come out that's the point of Richards proposal so there we have three good strategic reasons for declaring belief in God and here's another one the Concord fallacy this was invented my whole talk here was beautifully presaged so I can't I can sort of speed over this the Concord fallacies when one makes a hopeless investment one sometimes reasons I can't stop now otherwise what I've invested so far will be lost Iraq well Christopher Hitchens gave us two examples he also gave us the example of Billy Graham you know hey at this point in my life what am I going to do I've devoted my whole life there's all there's so many religious leaders out there who laid in their life are trapped by the Concorde fallacy I think we should feel actually a fair amount of sympathy for them even if we heartily disapprove of the of their inability to have the courage to come forward but we should recognize that it takes tremendous courage for them to do this if you want to read a very moving book on this I recommend John Updike's novel in the beauty of the lilies about Clarence Wilmot a Protestant minister who loses his faith finds the courage after many years in the pulpit to announce his atheism and then you watch his life plummet thereafter this is this is a this is this is a the Concord fallacy is a very compelling if ignoble reason and then finally just play an embarrassed I don't remember know how many of you follow chess or computer chess but when deep thought was playing in one of its matches it made a move on I moved 12 and on move 13 it took the move back and the commentators roared with laughter they said this was hilarious boy it showed that a computer was incapable of embarrassment no no human player would do that or even if they could see oops darn that was a mistake they just it just takes too much out of you does that oops sorry made a mistake we hate to make mistakes and we hate even more to admit to making mistakes and there are a lot of people out there who would hate to admit whoops sorry this religion thing I've been doing for the last five years of my life is just you know haha sorry a big mistake it takes it takes an unusual courage to acknowledge that or just weirdness so the outcome is what I've called belief and beliefs some people believe in God how many it's very hard to say actually because some people believe in belief in God and there are more people who believe in belief in God then believe in God well how do I know that well all the people who actually believe in God also believe and believe in God I mean I don't know about you but I have not really encountered anybody who goes around saying oh man I just wish I could get rid of this belief in God it's so embarassing you know it's no no if you believe in God you're proud of it but then there's all the other people so they all believe in belief in God and then there's all the people who believe in belief in God but don't believe in God well what's the proportion what's the ratio we'll never know because those who believe in belief in God behave exactly the way people behave who believe in God except that they won't say run into a hail of bullets expecting God to save them there aren't many people who believe in God that way so we just don't we can't tell maybe we're tiptoeing around and very few people actually believe in God they just believe in belief in God so what we've seen is the evolution of the God concept in the last few thousand years from Yahweh a really sharp craggy real Mount Everest type god to the ground of all being a low you can barely tell it's a mountain now is this evolution homing in on the best concept that's what the religious theologians like to say you know this is this is a theory and we are getting closer and closer we're getting a better concept of God all the time is that what it is or is it the erosion in the face of skepticism and I think it's pretty clear that it's erosion in the face of unrelenting skepticism over actually several thousand years the weathering of the God concept at an almost imperceptible rate it's very important that the weathering go on without our sort of noticing it it happens every time a preacher tweaks a phrase in his sermon to avoid irritating or arousing any scepticism in somebody out in the congregation if the congregation has been frowning a little bit he's going to start watering down the doctrine just a little bit won't even realize he's doing it gradually over the years the concept of God is watered down watered down watered down water down these personal revisions are passed on without notice not just from preachers but from individuals parents talking to their children till gradually what started out as really a Mount Everest type concept of God becomes a sort of amorphous cloudy mysterious concept that nobody really knows what it is even mystery is elevated and considered itself to be wonderful and we get the privatization of the concepts this is particularly true in the in the say the mega churches in this country where we don't care what your concept of God is just so long as you're one with Jesus and you come to the church and so they're actually allowing you to freelance it and come up with your own concept of God whatever you like it doesn't matter they've begun to realize that it doesn't matter what concept of God you have because nobody believes in any way so we get the almost comical confusion of today if it were sped up it's very important this happened very imperceptibly this is like the heating up the pail of water with the frog in it if it were sped up it would just be hilarious the revision piled on revision piled on revision at all in one direction here's a quote it is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us now that's a joke that's a wonderful joke by Peter DeVries in his hilarious novel the macroplaza back in 1958 God is so great that the greatness precludes existence that is not a joke that is said that is said in all po faced seriousness by a buddhist scholar in a book published in 1989 as I say you speed it up and it would just be hilarious so the picture of God which started out just as a sort of eroded mountain now the fog is rolled in and it's really just about impossible to tell to get your bearings or figure out what you're attacking or what you're criticizing and so we have this Alice in Wonderland world of theism today and my suggestion to you is don't be angry be amused be proud we've got them on the run they've been on the run actually they've been on the run for a thousand years that's the erosion that we see in this God constant we got rid of the Yahweh Mount Everest long ago and now we're into the fog we're almost there we're almost there and so what's left to them not very much we get a lot of name-calling Richard was talking about this the other day here's this lovely quote I love this kind of atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than 30 seconds without referring to religious people as imbeciles extremists metal deficient fascists enemies of the public good crypto Nazis conjure men irrationalist authoritarian despots and so forth well yeah I think I haven't I've actually gone out of my way to say these people are intelligent they're well-informed they're just trapped that's from Jack Berliner by having said this he goes on to call us the soccer hooligans of reason to discourse this is Sam and pitch and and Richard and me Stanley fish don't need to say much about him he quoted this with approval now these tactics I think of as a testimonial to the power of rational skepticism and we should respond to them firmly but gently a little good-natured chiding or teasing can work wonders I was asked by ABC News earlier today about the new apologetics this new movement that's arising mainly within the Catholic Church but not just the new apologetics and I think this is wonderful these advocates are useful to us because they aren't straw men they are creating articulate arguments for their their various creeds which they are now prepared they say to argue for wonderfully they embarrass many of the faithful what is it we're supposed to believe what because you can't articulate these views without articulating some some fairly drastic claims which a lot of the faiths will just they never imagined they were signing up for that so I think that I do not regret the occurrence of this new wave of apologetics spokespeople there there fish in a barrel we get to expose their tricks one of my favorite is witnessing I'm going to pass this on to you because I think this is a little little social bit you really should have in your kit and I go to an authority the Cardinal Dulles in a book and an article of his called the rebirth of apologetics he said he's very candid I don't think he realizes how candid he's being he says personal testimony calls for an epistemology quite distinct from the scientific in which interpretations proffered by others are not accepted on authority but tested by critical probing but when we proceed by testimony he's talking about religious testimony the situation is very different without in any way compelling us to believe the witness calls for a free ascent that involves personal respect and Trust to reject the message is to withhold confidence in the witness in other words witnessing is the ploy of personalizing in such a way that you have no choice either but to mumble and bite your limbs and look good or you're going to have to be rude and say well you're just deluded and most of us don't want to do that here's how you should respond politely to somebody who does the personal witnessing thing you say look you're playing the witnessing card you leave me no choice but to be rude I can't accept what you say so I have to tell you that I don't accept it and that does impune your honesty and your and it makes you I simply say you're incredible not in the good sense if that's rude you leave me no choice do you realize you might say that you're using that old con artists trick you know con artists have known for many years that if if the mark starts getting skeptical and critical they play the hurt feelings card what you don't it's a con now a lot of people use a con without knowing that they're using a con you can gently point out to them what you just did is a variation on an old con artists trick do you really want to do that then there's the business about metaphor this is such a shell game does go out judge or does he judge does he listen or does he listen is God merciful or merciful are we to take these terms literally or metaphorically does God punish our does he punish now what I think we need to do is to point out to people who rely on this that they're unembarrassed exploitation of this convenient dodge as if they'd never notice that they're availing themselves of a parlor trick we should make them embarrassed when they do this we should show them that this is just a cheap trick I have a bad joke Lucy thinks rock is to die for desi thinks rock is to die for Lucy's thinking of Rock Hudson does he's thinking of rock music they don't really agree on anything now I submit that many people that that the different concepts of God are more different than Rock Hudson and rock music but people say hey we're not atheists we all believe in God in our own ways yes and Lucy and Desi both believe in rock it's it's just a bad pun now why do people do this they do it because of belief in belief in God and it has belief in belief in God has eclipsed belief in God as a reason and we should recognize that and start adjusting our strategies to meet that so I've given you five actually good strategic reasons for declaring your belief in God even though you don't believe in God for believing in God don't have to tell you there are better reasons for not believing in God and we know and they've been rehearsed for us here or are we perhaps wrong let's be open-minded and think this fear that the opposition has of catastrophic collapse of society for instance what if they're right about that then we're then we're being vandals this is the what's behind that I'm an atheist but wine that Richard and others have written about these are the people who share our atheism but are really afraid that we're doing a lot of harm when we press the case well I'm going to concentrate on one example who has not been used in this regard and that's David Sloan Wilson in his book Darwin's Cathedral which is a very interesting book in many ways but it has a bombshell at the end that I think nobody's really commented on in this book David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist he's he's battled with Richard for years over the issue of a group selection and that's a long story for another day and another group of people but I want to concentrate on just one aspect of David Sloan Wilson 's work in this book Darwin's Cathedral David introduces a distinction between what he calls factual realism and practical realism this is what he says it is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the world but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism a factual realism based on literal correspondence and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness hmm he illustrates it an atheist historian who understood the real life of Jesus but whose own life is a mess as a result of his beliefs would be factually attached to and practically detached from reality so he ought to believe a myth even at the expense of his factual knowledge in order to keep his life not a mess that seems to be the implication rationality says Wilson is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged along with all other forms of thought if this were a philosophical audience and it weren't though late at night I would take issue with that but I just draw your attention to these passages it is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective if there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true than factual realism will be the loser every time so he seems to be giving what he thinks up as an evolutionary endorsement for practical realism over factual realism and indeed he goes on to say many intellectual traditions and scientific theories of past decades have a similar silly and purpose-driven quality once their cloak of factual plausibility has been yanked away by the hand of time if believing something for its desired consequences is a crime then let those who are without guilt cast the first stone no I want to point out the fundamental difference between factual realism and practical realism is that the truth or falsity of the factual realist series is always an issue imagine if a priest were to say well of course there isn't really a God who listens to your prayers that's just a useful fiction than oversimplification now even the Unitarians don't just blurt out the fact that these may be useful fictions since it's quite apparent that their utility depends on their not being acknowledged to be fictions in other words practical realism as advised and recommended by David Sloan Wilson is paternalistic and disingenuous it appears he says that factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adapted behavior at times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better at what and motivating behavior well you know I think he's right about that is this a recommendation that one should lie when it will lead to adaptive behavior does Wilson recognize the implications of his position let us consider that practical realism of Cheney Bush and Rumsfeld in a chilling article some several years ago by Ron Suskind White House correspondent we get the following quote the aide to President Bush said that guys like me were in what we call the reality-based community which he defined as people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality he goes on I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism he cut me off that's not the way the world really works anymore he continued we're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality and while you're studying that reality judiciously as you will will act again creating other new realities which you can study too and that's how things will sort out we're history's actors and you all of you will be left to just study what we do there's practical realism for you now it seems to me that David Sloan Wilson hasn't thought this through he maybe though is saying that we're actually confronted with a sort of tragedy it may be that our quest for scientific truth has somehow trapped us it's too late for practical reality that was for bygone days we're stuck now with factual reality which sometimes won't motivate us we just know too much we can never again act honestly honestly follow the path of practical realism I don't believe it but that might be the position that he holds well if so we will just have to learn to do the best we can guided by our knowledge and we will have to set practical realism aside it's too late for that there's no going back but I'm actually optimistic here we see the Vatican 20 years ago if I had stood up and said hi in a few years the Soviet Union will be will evaporate will not exist anymore people will laughed if I said the party will be gone in just a few years people would have laughed sometimes institutions phenomena that seem to be massive and have tremendous inertia can just pop like a bubble so how do we know until we try maybe within our children's lifetime the Vatican will become the European Museum of Roman Catholicism and maybe Mecca will become Disney's Magic Kingdom of Allah if you think that's funny just bear in mind that the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul started off as a church then it was a mosque and today it's a museum thank you from the bottom of my heart

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 374,777

Rating: 4.7766056 out of 5

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy, Darwin, Religion, Belief, Atheism

Id: BvJZQwy9dvE

Length: 70min 13sec (4213 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/amgtfy]

Dennett discusses the idea that it religions are partly "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon.

Maybe most of the people do not actually believe, but pretend to believe. Why?

People may pretend to believe because others seem to believe. Breaking the spell seems potential danger to them, will the society fail if people stop believing? Does immorality break loose? etc. So they continue pretending to believe, and try keep others pretending as well.

It is kind of trying to avoid bank run. You try to keep people confident to avoid catastrophic chain reaction.

I think this idea explains well how some religious people act. And why they seem to think religion is so fragile. And why they get angry when other views are presented, even as they are not offensive in any way.

edit If this is true, then the religions might fall very quickly, once a tipping point is reached.