In Conversation with Richard Dawkins - Hosted by Stephen Law

further ado I'd like to introduce to our speakers tonight we are talking about atheism humanism and recent going on first of all we have Steven law from Heath Rock College in the University of London he is also a philosopher and editor for think magazine and of course we also have Richard Dawkins who does not need any further introduction so I'd like to pass you onto them and thank you very much coming okay can you hear me okay yeah pretty good okay um so um we're going to have a conversation I'll be asking Richard questions and he can come back at me as we as we go along we'll talk for maybe 45 minutes or so and then there'll be 45 minutes roughly 45 minutes for Q&A you can also either one of us a question and there's a roving a roving microphone so um I'll begin by asking Richard a question okay um I'm a philosopher I'm very interested in science and reason I've worked a lot in the in the field of philosophy of religion published papers in the philosophy of religion but I've also become very interested in other beliefs of a supernatural and paranormal nature and I find that when I have conversations with people about these kinds of topic and when people begin to feel that perhaps what they believe is being threatened in some way that science and all reason is beginning to encroach on their territory and perhaps is beginning to threaten the credibility of what they believe that all sorts of smoke screens and maneuvers are wheeled out and one of one of the one that was given to me just very recently this week a couple of days ago when we were talking about what happens to us when we die somebody accused me of being arrogant and prideful for suggesting that you know I might have a quite a good quite a good idea about what happens to us when we die phrases like well there are more things in heaven and earth than the dreamt of in your philosophy tend to be wheeled out and there is a suggestion that really I should be showing a little bit of humility and acknowledging that you know there are great mysteries out there and that I'm just a mere human being and that I should just take a step back and acknowledge that these are things that I can truly understand and as one I was wondering how do you that's obviously very irritating but I was wondering what's a good response to that and do you think there's any truth to at all that quotation from from Hamlet I was told the other day by a scholar of English we some it may be that we get it wrong and it's normally read there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy it's a suggestion is that the end that Shakespeare's intention was there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy where it's just kind of young it just means philosophy generally but that's a that's an aside yes it's obviously a thing that I very often meet the lesson of history is that we should never be so arrogant as to think that present-day science is it that present-day science knows everything and that there's nothing more to be discovered if we take the history of science seriously then we should be alive to the very real possibility that the science of 200 years hence will be mind-bogglingly different from what it is today it may not be I mean maybe one day physics will come to an end one day people really will be right when they say physics has come to an end but it would be rash of anybody to say that so my anticipation would be that if we could get into a time machine and come back in 100 years 200 years we would have our minds totally blown by the physics that we find maybe even the biology that we find but of course it's totally illogical to say that because we don't yet know what the physics what the science of the future is going to be therefore instead we should put our trust in a Bronze Age document written by a began of goatherds right I mean it's going to be grand it's going to be wonderful but it's not going to be anything like what any religion has ever said well I mean what what's happening here in part is that a barrier is being arrested it's as if a veil is being drawn across reality and we're told that scientists such as yourself can go up to the bail and that's your proper province that the natural world your typical world but there's stuff behind the veil there are fairies back there and goblins or ghosts or gods or whatever it might happen to be psychic powers perhaps that's a different point in it and and that's another point that we that we often meet of course that there is this there is this veil and somehow religion or superstition has a kind of territory which belongs to it which we can't encroach upon and there's certainly no justification for that I mean for the same reason as as I said before it is this there are many things that we don't understand there are maybe things that we can never understand but if there are things that science can never understand then sure as hell nothing else can you're not sympathetic to the view that some people might have a special ability to peek if only dimly through this veil I mean so psychics will say that that they can communicate with the other side that those that have passed over and that they can then tell us perhaps what they're thinking or their mystics who can communicate we have some awareness of some greater reality or not you're not persuaded I'm assuming you're not persuaded there that anyone might have such an ability to glimpse something on the other side that science is necessarily incapable of touch I wouldn't talk about another side what I would say is that there are plenty of things which poets mystics artists can talk about which science has has no particular insight into so I love poetry and I love the even mystical poetry and I get up an emotional response to it just as I do to music and so that that in one sense is is outside the territory of science but in a rather trivial sense it doesn't mean that there's something that is in principle incomprehensible to science it just means that that it's too complicated it's too difficult if it involves too much complicated brain stuff which we which were not yet in a position to understand from a scientific point of view yeah I mean I'm I mean the thing about what's behind the barrier is though it may not be observable by us I mean claims about the unserved often have observable consequences so we're in a position to refute claims about the energy or what this artifact would those be what were those observable consequences being well if it's a claim about psychic powers oh well we'll you can test that other day yeah communicating with us yes and why's that all of these things are actually potentially testable yes um so it's not as if these things are immune to know that's Remini parapsychology seems to me actually can be perfectly valid indeed and that that's interesting because these things are testable and funnily enough the people best qualified to test them are often not scientists but conjurer's yeah because they can see through the tricks here which people like psychics are are fooling right let me ask you about some scientific investigation into unusual mental states there's a little while ago sometime ago now a chap called Persinger develops idea to develop something called which has come to be known as the god helmet it's a helmet she put on your head and which creates a very weak magnetic field and the suggestion is that when you put on this helmet some people have some interesting psychological studies some interesting experiences some people feel that there's some kind of presence in the room with them and a small number of people claim that they are experiencing God whilst wearing the helmet now I believe that you have one well I know that you have worn your god helmet um I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about ailment that was right I think it was the BBC was a television company I think it was a BBC flew me out to Canada to dr. Persinger's lab to test it wasn't a very good test was just me and the control was a local vicar and the helmet it's a modified motorcycle helmet and it does bendy pass a electric I'm in a magnetic field through your brain you sit in a totally dark room totally silent is all sound proofed for an hour and I think I probably drifted off to sleep I'm not I'm not sure when but um afterwards I was given nothing happened I didn't get any I didn't get any experience I was great looking forward to it I was hoping for some kind of mystical experience I did not expect to see God I mean what I'd read about it before was that when people do see God under the Persinger helmet the God that they see is the God they've been brought up with right so if they're Roman Catholic what they see is Virgin Mary's and if they're Protestants they see a different kind of God if they're Muslims they see mohamad or something I wasn't expecting to see any gods but I was hoping for some kind of oneness with the universe and that that kind of thing like going on a drug trip my friend Susan Blackmore actually testified that the Persinger helmet was even better than LSD I've never taken LSD I'd been offered a trip which I'm so debating whether to whether to accept anyway I experienced nothing and I came out and dr. Persinger had been analyzing my EEG rhythms while this was going on and he told me he wasn't surprised that I didn't experience anything because my EEG rhythms were those of the 20% who don't who don't experience it I mean they're up there about 80% get something 20% get nothing and I'm one of the 20% the the local vicar who was my matched pair control also claimed to have no experience when he came out when dr. Persinger's EEG analysis showed that he was right in the extreme of the 80% he was he was a prime subject and what it seemed to have happened is that as soon as he started to get the experience he started to fill his mind with something else it was though he was reciting the multiplication tables or something like that in order to distract himself it was though he desperately did not want to have a religious experience induced by a magnetic field I don't know why not no but that was the evidence well I thought well that was my next question really I mean I think some people fear that if that collie experience could be produced in a purely natural way that that's somehow discredits the experience and I mean I've had a number of people working in the area who are fears saying that of course this in no way undermines religiously the claim that some religious experiences are reliable this is not any kind of threat to religious belief because the mere fact that's an experience can be produced naturalistically that doesn't show that no one actually fails to have a genuine religious experience if the helmet produces an experience say of listening to an orchestra a wonderful and vivid illusion of listening to an orchestra and it wouldn't follow from the fact that the helmet could produce that experience that well no one ever has listened to a real Orchestra of course that wouldn't follow this right um and so you find that people think that or they want to say that the this kind of research could not possibly threaten the credibility of theism the credibility of certain kinds of religious experience would you say about I suppose that if people really are visited by angels in flowing robes then the angels in flowing robes would have to influence the nervous system and so there must be something in the nervous system which is capable being of seeing angels and therefore it wouldn't be totally surprising if magnetic fields could tick all that in the same way as the point you've just made that the illusion of listening to an orchestra could be stimulated by stimulating the brain in some way so it doesn't seem to me to be a knock down case in either direction but I thought sort of can see that if you wanted to believe that you would had a vision you might be a little bit disturbed if you thought it could be in invoked at any time by a magnetic field it may be in somebody else maybe yeah I mean I think that I mean maybe that maybe that the threat here as far as the ears if there is a threat is that many people point to their own experience in to the experience of many other people and say this this gives me good grounds for thinking that there's something to it that my experiences of something real but if we could show that these experiences can be produced in an entirely natural way we can we can we can say that people are going to have these kind of experiences anyway whether or not there's any truth to them then that completely undercuts that kind of experience as so far as providing evidence for the truth of theism is concerned so in fact there is some threat to fears and year.there despite despite it no doubt being true that the mere fact that you can inducing the experience doesn't show that no one has never had the real thing when I can't imagine what a non natural cause would it would even be it does it seems to me to be an incoherent idea right okay um I wanted to this move on to slightly different topic um and that's which I've gotten interested in I wrote a book a little while ago about faith schools and moral and religious education and I know that you you very much disliked the idea that children should be labeled a Catholic or a Jew or a Muslim but this is something that they should be free to adopt later on if they wish but they shouldn't have this thrust upon them um you know from the cradle I was wondering what what's your view about religious schools I'm sure that you don't think they should be state-funded but do you think that the state should actually prevent there from being religious schools or are you happy for there to be such schools in principle well I suppose I mean I I went to Anglican schools myself it Anglican schools are pretty mild on the whole they don't thrust it down your throat as you correctly said the thing I really really inject to his labeling children and you can very quickly get people to see the point if you imagine that children inherited that their philosophical views of their parents and you talked about a postmodernist child or an existentialist child or a marxist-leninist child or something like that and you laugh when well in what anybody says that nor would you talk about an ornithologist child or something unless the child happened to be interested in Birds which I hope it would be but religion is the one exception and until it's pointed out to people they immediately have no problem we're talking about Catholic children two-year-old Catholic child and it's because we all buy into the actually ludicrous idea that a child is is as likely to inherit or should inherit the religious beliefs of its parents in the same kind of ways it inherits the eye color well the or the hair color so somehow religion has got itself into this privileged position of being regarded as hereditary in a way that no other philosophical view is and so any any faith school which actually tells children you are a Catholic child therefore this is what you believe that does seem to me to be wicked on the other hand a school that teaches religion teaches about religion teaches children there are things called religions and there's the Christian religion and the Muslim religion and the Jewish religion Buddhist religion the Hindu religion this is what they believe and there are subdivisions of them and this is this is what they believe that is sensible that's what should be taught because you can't function in the world today unless you know about these different beliefs that pervade different parts of the world any more than you can function without without knowing that Venezuela is in South America so I think that that's important so I wouldn't wish to ban religious education far from it right what about a school but it describes itself as a Christian school and it says this is our Christian ethos and we want children to really be immersed within Christianity but we encourage every child to think independently and critically about these ideas and these beliefs and we want every child to know that it is their free choice whether they accept them or not how comfortable would you be if that if they really lived up to that I think I would be comfortable with that right I mean it I so would I in fact I mean I think I think probably what I really have a problem with is not is not religious schools at all it's all Thorat aryan yeah schools I mean if schools started opening up and down the country that were political schools yes exactly Marxists going as a neoconservative school and if each day started with a rousing political anthem and if the schools selected on the basis of the parents political beliefs and if there was portraits of political leaders beaming down from the classrooms and if each day had involved some learning of the political tenets of that yeah some doctrine are we will be out writing that you hit a nail on the head that's exactly right now you just cross out politically right edges yeah our schools like that up and down the country and those are those are the schools that I would have a problem with yeah but I had just as much a problem with the political equivalent is not so much that but there is lit that there isn't a political equivalent that's the point right yeah I mean and that's the problem that's the exactly the point you've made that if there were schools that that taught a political ideology or an ideology and literary criticism or something hmm then then you would object it and so what everybody else but but but because it's religion it doesn't get the same objection right because I mean those political schools are exactly the kind of schools you would find under totalitarian regimes and we will point to them and say oh I serve my child boot up in a school yeah like that and we can all we can all see that it did seem to me that the really then the problem is not so much religion as that kind of authoritarian a liberal approach I mean if you were given the option of getting rid of all thora Tyrian schools schools that had that flavor and getting rid of rid of all religious schools you wouldn't blink you'd get rid of the the authoritarians but that's what yes that's really what your objective yes it is but they don't exist their religion I was really yeah yes not here anyway yeah yeah okay do you think that maybe then with this would this be a fair criticism arm or view that by focusing on religion and atheism understand the divide between those two groups a great deal of smoke and the heat has been generated by that battle but actually there are people on Iran who are religious who actually have far more in common with you in terms of being liberal in terms of being anti-authoritarian with whom you could make some kind of an alliance against the starlings of this world who are highly totalitarian and illiberal and authoritarian but also the the religious yet as though that suet l88 a we with with with we've lost sight of the more important battle because we've become so fixated on the issue of religion on atheist well there is any truth to that I mean the the British Humanist Association is campaign against faith schools is actually led by a rabbi yeah that's wrong so he's a very good example of what what you're talking about and yes of course and I keep coming back to the point that at least in Britain we don't have Marxist schools or Nazi schools or postmodernist schools but you'd be nervous of course you'd be noticing I'd be just as strongly against them music um okay I'm going to change the subject again um do you think that talking about reasonableness and reasonable belief do you think that in order to hold a reasonable belief that that belief you should be in a position to show that there's evidence to support it in order for it to qualify as a reasonable belief I think I do if we're talking about beliefs about the real world I mean I I wouldn't wish that let an essay about the interpretation of Romeo and Juliet should be defensible by scientific means that's a different ballgame right but if we're talking about reasonable beliefs being beliefs about the real world which would include not just science but well pseudo science like like astrology and homeopathy and things like that I think that it's very very important that the only reason to believe anything in that realm is evidence and evidence has to be properly assessed and and science has provided the means to do it right and including statistics and logic and and the various tools of thinking that have been developed over the years right there was a phosphor called um Clifford who said it is always wrong on his way it is wrong ways and everywhere to believe anything on the basis of insufficient evidence and we'll pack them maybe that's that's close to your view at that you is often criticized by theists but not just by theists I mean I'm not entirely comfortable with it either I mean there's a there's an obvious regress problem looming if you insist that every belief is supported by a piece of evidence before that belief can qualify as being reasonable because if the evidence is another belief and presumably it would have to be then that belief will in turn require another belief to provide the evidence for its truth and so on and so you generate a Cline of that but is not an interesting dress doesn't it doesn't it terminate at some point well it will have to terminate with beliefs which are reasonable not because they are held on the basis of evidence II why that should be I just because a belief is held on the basis of another belief and then maybe the fourth order one is then supported by evidence but if that evidence is itself in the form of a belief well but my evidence for thinking that um yeah what would be an example well well in order to move let me put it like this I mean perhaps the perhaps if there is a regress looming here and some people think there is perhaps the way out of the regress is to say that sometimes it's reasonable to hold a belief if it just immediately and directly seemed to be the case that such and such so there's a glass of water on the table in front of me and I'm just you know I can see it there and it's reasonable for me to believe that it's there and I'm not inferring that the glass is there on the basis of any kind of evidence this is just the belief that I now immediately have it's not a belief I arrived at on the basis of some climate wise procedure I didn't know they even you can see it just as just as a scientist can see his instruments in my thumb in when you when you when you're a physicist and you're doing an experiment and you read the voltmeter you're using your eyes to read the voltmeter and which same as I'm using my eyes to see that there's a glass here well I could maybe let me I'll just leave that thought and come back to admit it maybe but maybe this is true then that this is not to contradict what you just said that sometimes it's reasonable to believe things if it just the directly and immediately appears to be you to you to be the case so you know if a it looks like there's a tree sitting there and I have no reason to think there's anything funny going on then it's reasonable for me to believe that if it looks like there's a glass on the table and I have no reason to think there's anything funny going on then it's reasonable for me to believe that and there is a thought that many theists think gives them a window of opportunity because they will say well I've got this other sense - it's a census Davinia tortoise is a God sense and if it's reasonable for me to believe that there's a glass of water on the table because that's how it just directly in immediately looks to me but that is a reasonable belief for me to hold on the basis of how things very clearly appear to be then if it very clearly appears to me that there's a God and he's making himself known to me in some direct intermediate fashion then it's entirely reasonable for me to believe that there is a good well yes um I suppose what a scientist would say to that is that the belief that there's a glass on the table is publicly available and it's not just my eyes it's everybody else's eyes you couldn't do you can do measurements you can do all sorts of other things so this is something that is cross checkable with lots of other forms of evidence whereas if I just say I privately believe I have it in my eye privately experience God and that really is no more to be trusted because it's private then the person who says I I know in my heart that I'm Napoleon I mean you know lunatic asylums are full of people who have these private beliefs and we lock them up because if there was some way in which it could be publicly checkable by lots of other people and yeah different methods that they are in fact Napoleon but then it would be different but it since it's private as I say we lock them up and we don't do that with people who say that they've had experience of God right I mean I think yeah you're right it's not it's not interesting it's not into subjectively checkable magical experience and also we know that people have a great many such experiences and very many of them must be unreliable because they contradict each other it has been that different kinds of God experience we also know that they are very much a product of the power of suggestion to a very large extent I mean just in the same way that reports of alien abduction tend to stop at certain national borders so the Mexican border for example you don't find many people being abducted below that so certain religious experiences tend to stop at certain causes they are a product of via the power of suggestion of color and so and once you know that that is largely responsible for producing these kind of experiences that surely foes all of them is a very significant doubt so even if you think you're having a good experience right now you have good grounds for questioning whether that is actually lovely area you haven't raised this point but it's a point people often do do raise that um that you know I know that my wife loves me you know that your wife loves you and things like that as though that were not based on on evidence and of course it is based on evidence it's based upon yeah all sorts of little signs and traces and looks and catches in the voice and things like that which are which are evidence they're not meter readings that they are they are evidence and they're sometimes wrong yes um how we doing a little bit more time I'm um I'm a philosopher and I know that Richard is a little bit skeptical about philosophy the value of philosophy I don't think we're quite in his mind in the same camp as the theologians philosopher I don't know why you think that actually but I really um okay um I mean I know you're right about theology I mean I don't think theology is a subject at all I don't think it belongs in the university right I mean I do I do think that that theologians who study biblical history and and biblical literature doesn't think I mean that that's a proper proper subject but those who study the theology of the transubstantiation or the Incarnation or something in that is not a subject however philosophy does seem to me to be a subject so carry on well I'm reassured I thought I mean I think that I think there are questions that reach beyond science which arm are often though not always well at least in some cases they are answerable other than by means of some kind of scientific investigation and if I invite your thought in the invited by yeah by I mean you know here's a trivial example you know somebody might say could my great-grandmother's uncle's grandson failed to be my second cousin once removed now you don't have to do any empirical research to figure that out you just need to sit in your armchair with your eyes closing have a good thing and I'm unpack the concepts and figure out the relations between the concepts and then you can figure out whether or not it's whether or not it's yes so there's a kind of a role for conceptual investigation which can answer questions and you're doing it from the comfort of your armchair without engaging in any kind of Oh scientific yeah but I mean why are we I still call it science that question about whether your great-grandmother's second cousin a soul that's something that you get out a pencil and paper and you draw it out and you don't admitted you don't do any experiments of course you don't but that you do you you do a scientific investigation in your head and your Morris defining philosophical investigation is one that you do in your armchair but plenty of good science goes on in armchairs right I mean there are some very famous scientific thought experiments on there there's the Galileo in his to two balls there was the okay yeah it's that's only aside that's a say there was the Aristotelian view was that had the consequence that the heavier ball should fall we got faster than the lighter ball Galileo is supposed to have gone to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and throwing the big ball in the small ball off the top of the tower but actually it's not clear that he ever did that and not an always believed it was necessary and no is it clear that it's necessary because actually you can run a thought experiment Coney you can which is what Galileo did he said well if you if you suppose we chain the two balls together and then we apply our studies theory now the two balls chained together makes an even heavier object so it should fall even faster now but hang on the smaller ball will also being smaller function as a brake on the larger ball being now connected to it and so the two balls pull more slowly than they did independently and so you generate a contradiction Aristotle's theory with what just one or two little additional clauses about what happens when you tie things together with chains produces a contradiction so you know without doing any science that Aristotle's theory cannot be true you can do it from the comfort of your armchair yes so so so you're happy with that it's an activity but I call it son you call it son yes it's may be that I'm going I'm going to turn out to be a scientist well of course you are I mean Steven you I've heard you have this discussion before with their little teaser adkins yes who really does have a negative view of philosophy which which I don't right um and you challenged to produce a philosophical thing that problem which could only be switch needs to be solved in an armchair and it was the one about why a mirror yeah reverse is left right but not that doesn't turn you upside down um once again I mean yes you solve that problem in your armchair right but it's a scientific problem with the scientific salut well you know what see Ned block wrote a paper on that question he's a philosopher and the journal that published it was the Journal of philosophy very prestigious philosophy journal my guess is that if he'd sent it to nature they would not have published it they would have said why have you sent this to us there's no empirical content oh this is just know that they might not I don't think they did reject it because there's no empirical content I think they'd have rejected it because they just said it's a trivial problem right by the way if you if you want to know how to solve that problem the first step is to forget about mirror's yeah just get a sheet of glass I'm in a glass door right a shock door that has open written there and you go around the other side and it says neppo and it's much easier to solve it for the glass door than it is for the father for the mirror and I think it's simply that when you go from one side of the door to the other you go like that you know don't go like that I mean if there was a planet where people habitually went through doors by turning somersaults over the top yes so that the way then then it would indeed turn it upside down and when you go left right yeah yeah yeah that's about half of the explanation is a bit more.you but I'm not going to get into that but that's that's exactly right yeah that is the explanation it's conceptual work it's armchair philosophy and it could have been done in ancient Greece by Plato who actually thought about the problem and came up with the terrible solution it could have been done back then even before the development of the scientific method I mean it was something that could have been sold from the Comfort well I think weird banding words here because I mean it seems to me that that's armchair science actually Darwin could have been I mean Darwin's theory of natural selection could have been done in from the comfort of an armchair to Aristotle could have done it but he didn't but you don't actually need to go around the world on the Beagle you don't need to go to Galapagos in order to solve the problem of natural selection you could do it from an armchair so the fact that it didn't happen is just but I mean it's it is historically interesting that it had to wait to the 19th century and for two possibly more natural ists to solve it rather than rather than philosophers so what so what I find frustrating sometimes as a philosopher is that scientists will say oh the mind-body problem you know we'll sort that out for you the mind-body problem or just you know do more work create more elaborate empirical yeah theories and we'll sort out the mind-body problem we don't need any philosophers on board but actually it seems to me that I mean scientists certainly are able aren't they to establish that this is that that these are one in the same thing that water the water in that glass is a vast collection of molecules of h2o for example or that heat is molecular motion they establish that these identities obtain and so why couldn't science establish that say my sensation of paying is a certain brain state my see fibers are firing example why couldn't science just do that but that is to overlook the fact that what makes the mind-body problem hard is that there's a kind of conceptual component to it it is at root I think a conceptual problem and in order to solve that conceptual problem you'll have to do this kind of armchair conceptual work will Simon Blackburn the Trinity and Cambridge would call conceptual engineering and if you don't do that conceptual work all you'll have established is that whenever this happens that happens and vice-versa pain and drains to see fibres firing but you won't have solved the mind-body play and example that has the ring of sense to me and when I think about the sensation of redness or something like that and it's not enough to say well light of long wavelengths is red yeah there's something in the brain which which gives us this is astonishing the sensation of redness so you you'll probably write that science may not solve that problem I'm not sure that anything will do now I'm in front of really it may be insoluble there may be a kind of conceptual obstacle there that cannot be dealt with but if it can be dealt with this going to be is going to be dealt with by philosophers as I would call them you'd call them scientists but I think we're agreed about what it is that they're going to be doing they're going to be sitting in their armchairs and reflecting so I give you a quick example of what I think the problem what that particular problem might be I mean here so here's here's a simple argument I'm not endorsing it but somebody might argue that if pain just is my C fibers firing if that's what it is essentially well now consider this I can I can conceive of its seeming to me that I mean terrible pain terrible agony but actually my C fibers are not firing I mean I can imagine that as a scenario that that that's happening now if that's if that's what I'm imagining and pain essentially is C fiber firing then what I am conceiving of there is not pain it's a kind of Falls pain like fool's gold or Falls water it it seems like pain but it's not really pain because there's no C far before and going on it's just the appearance of it but actually it just there's a conceptual problem about Falls pain it just doesn't make sense to suppose that somebody could think they were in screaming agony and yet it's just a mistake if you think you're in pain you're in pain there's no possibility of error and if that error is conceptually ruled out now if that's true and maybe it isn't but if that's true then you cannot identify pain with C fiber flooring or any other physical property there's something about the concept of pain that actually creates a a conceptual obstacle to any kind of identity theory of that saw is I mean I'm not saying that this is an insurmountable obstacle but it's on the face of it it's quite a serious obstacle and you know I'm I'm I'm not sure I can but it seemed to me you you'll help yourself there too a gigantic assumption which is that it's possible to imagine that you're in pain when you're not I mean I I can I can sit here and say I'm desperately trying to imagine myself in pain as I don't understand what you were saying along no I think I've explained it very clearly maybe we shouldn't go into soo much like a point I was just trying to illustrate our the general point that it may be that what really makes the mind-body problem an intractable problem is that actually it's a conceptual problem not an empirical or a scientific problem you'll need to do some kind of conceptual engineering in order to to solve it well I'm also conceptual engineering and scientists have to do it a lot all right good we're on the same track on the same page um how we doing for time I think that at this point we should probably yes open up the floor to questions yeah okay so all sorts of hands going up straight away luckily I'm not the pestis make sure my mics working for thank you first for applause okay we're going to do a few moments of questions we've been trying to stop by nine if not a little bit beforehand for us for anyone in the top Crescent and this middle one if you want to ask question please actually come down onto the bottom floor and stand by the door because we're not going to get this mic up to you okay so if anyone wants that please make your way down now my friend breads where is he gone there is he's going to be passing the microphone to people I point out so please like obvious won't ask question if you're sitting in this middle balcony here and you want to ask question if you're sitting in the middle please move you all yourself to the outside of your row just so we can get the microphone to you okay please keep the questions nice and short because we will have quite a lot of questions okay thank you very much so start over here with this gentleman here thank you very much for such an interesting conversation and just a you you touched briefly on this area during a conversation there's a lot of talk about the scientific method and it seems to me that your idea of empirical investigation in terms of ascertaining the truth value of something harks back to a time maybe a hundred years ago in which logical positivism was at the forefront of the philosophy of science is philosophy of science has been plagued by problems of induction and actually what is the scientific method ever since and I was just wondering whether you could touch upon three there's a whole host perhaps of areas which aren't open to such investigation and the interviewer presented a couple maybe I present a couple more for example the scientific method itself would seem resilient to scientific inquiry without being circular or ethical values for example or the mathematical and logical laws okay well it can I take and take ethical questions and mathematical as well in mathematical truths are obtained by deduction they follow that their inherent in the premises and it's just a matter of doing clever mathematics in order to deduce them ethical principles it doesn't seem to me it contrary to my friend sam harris it doesn't seem to me that science has at least certainly doesn't have the last word on that that what science can do with ethics is to say if you you believe that such and such is a good value then you are illogical if at the same time you don't believe so answer is you can you couldn't do good moral philosophy which is scientific principles applied to morals you can do good moral philosophy to show up inconsistencies in people's ethical views you could say you are you're being inconsistent if you if you on the one hand are against abortions on the other hand in favor of so-and-so or you can point out to people those inconsistencies I think there's there's a lot that you can do with the scientific style of reasoning with with ethics but you cannot with by science alone simply say X is wrong and that's all there is to it which religious people claim to be able to do but without any basis as far as I can see that was good also I have two questions one for each of you - sniffing I mean you mentioned about you know the pain another thing that in the mind someone feel either firing or whatever your preferred neuro physiological event like okay I wonder whether what you are talking is about the psychiatric problem or people in depression who you know which falls under science I mean that's a question I mean I don't know whether what you define as pain and other things that people affected by you know psychological problem do have similar thing so is that not a science and my question to Dawkins is okay science we know many things are there you have discussed about that but for an ordinary person who don't have much education or even with the education but you know very normal person from different world how we are going to approach because they can't understand every high level science whether it is physics or matter whatever you talk about I mean maybe only a philosophical way of approach is possible or I I don't know I'm just asking that question to you how we are going to approach normal people Thanks there were two questions the first was t OS X yes I think well the first question I think was look calm can't we have a scientific investigation of various mental phenomena such as depression and pain and so on else to that is yes cause you can we can certainly have that but that's not to contradict anything that I said well what I was raising was a was what appears to be a conceptual obstacle to actually identifying mental states with brain snakes there does appear to be such a conceptual obstacle but that's not to say that you can't scientifically investigate both what's going on in people's brains and also mental states there's all sorts of research that can and is being being done on both those things I think the second question was about come not everybody can understand science and so what are we going to do about that that is a real problem and as a biologist I don't understand advanced modern physics and I think what we have to do is if there's a kind of thing is a little bit akin to faith but it's a bit different from from faith you say I don't understand what physicists are talking about but I know that physicists are subject to the discipline of the scientific method I know that they're subject to the discipline of peer review in their papers I know that if they do an experiment which which is dodgy that somebody else is going to come along and do the same experiment later and get a different result I know that there are other very clever physicists who are checking their mathematics so there is a kind of faith in one's fellow scientists but it's a faith that's based upon evidence is based upon the knowledge that them these two in their own field of science are using the same scientific method the same criteria for judging and in fact and evaluating the science zone well first I want to respond to me you said earlier because I am using my hackles went up and when you said that mainstream schools are um well they don't they're not political I think you said there was no politics in the school system or if politics was introduced in the school system then you would get your backs up because you're getting irate about religious schools but I just want to point out that I've got a quick list of seven things that they are not questioned at all in mainstream schools very quickly capitalism hierarchical structures first-past-the-post in my kradic system scientific rationalism male dominant society competitiveness as a way of life compared to cooperativeness and bounded discourse in national discussion so you can only have biology physics you can't have anything across as boundaries and that was just a big list of things that are inherently in there already I thank you and I question basically was that um if you you were talking about how scientists are bound by fellow scientists making rules and laws I feel that like at least the religious community have a similar kind of structure where they are expected to peer-review each other you know people don't say there's no sort of like within the Catholic Church you're not allowed to say crazy beliefs about things without being peer-reviewed and my question really relied on and think about the Higgs boson which is that only a handful of people can actually identify whether the results that are appear on screens are a Higgs boson or not Higgs boson and why is that specialization any more believable than the specialization of somebody who's been through seven or eight years of relative rigorous religious training and believes that they're talking to God well sure so I am I'll start in you saying okay okay um well I very much endorse your thought that we should be encouraging children to think about all of those things it seems to me is terribly important and in fact been thinking about and they would be doing forcibly so you know thumbs up thumbs up to that but that's not quite the same as saying that in schools for example all children are expected to sign up to capitalism and sing songs praising the capitalist regime and have images of a famous capitalist staring down at them going thumbs up to capitalism and so on I mean that's not happening but if your if your point is is they're really okay well I would take that down so yeah the point we were making I think excuse me was that the there shouldn't you know we should not be taking a particular political political philosophy and presenting it in that kind of why using those kind of highly manipulative methods in order to try and get children to accept it and so to some extent you know there may be some truth to the suggestion that actually to some accuse some extent we are doing that we just don't realize that we're doing it and you know it had some sympathy with that view and the cure so far as I'm concerned will be more philosophy get kids to think more reflectively ask questions about that kind of stuff in terms of um peer review that was I didn't I'm not quite sure I understood your question but I think I yes I think the thing about yeah think the thing about the thing about I mean I think I think that in order to say that you're acquiring a skill and you're getting better at it right you need some objective standard against which you can check how well you're doing right so if you're on them if you're on a rifle range you're trying to become a good marksman you keep firing at the target the way in which you get better is you check the target something objective against you can see you can see how well you're doing right but if the target disappears every time you pull the trigger you're never going to get any better you're never going to acquire any skill you need something objective against which you can check how well you're doing if you don't have that if you just have a little talking shop of people staring dimly through something and and they can't quite make out what it is but there's no way of really independently checking how well you're doing then you end up the situation that you had with the astronomer Lowell who looked to his telescope and thought he saw some strange lines on Mars and then it was Lowell isn't it yes and then he started mapping them out and then the more and more detail became clear to him and other people started looking through their telescopes and they started drawing in the lines and so eventually there was a consensus about this fantastic map which had been drawn and it was all an illusion none of it was real but there had been a consensus which had developed why because there was no independent check and once a decent telescope was produced where you could check and see what the surface of Mars was really like it turned light it was all baloney so what is the independent check so far as knowing how well religious people are doing this concerning happiness but a theological argument about the transubstantiation does the does the host really become the body of Christ or is it only symbolic however to settle that it's not like the higgs-boson where where it loved them however the minority of people is that really understand it nevertheless these are experiments which testing something real happiness could be used as a measure you can't you don't necessarily have to use physical properties as imagine you could use people's feelings I have nothing to say to that and I've got another question about faith schools so I'm a PGCE student Oxford studying to be a science teacher this year and I've been placed in a faith school this year get very much against my will and I've got to last ELISA and and I've found that it's very disappointing in a faith school i I thought that they what would happen it'd be quite mild how how much does your indoctrinated but in fact they're very much required to pray in genuflect and go to Mass and I was wondering what you think people in education who are concerned what this can actually do to help I only have heard that I don't do it what can people who work in education do to help when when that kind of fairly heavy-handed indoctrination is going on I should have thought all you could do would be to teach the children to think critically to get the children to ask questions to say to the children whenever you're told anything by any of your teachers say to them what's the evidence for that say is it based upon tradition is it based upon faith is it based upon revelation is it based upon Authority if it's based upon any of those things check it out but the only the only reason to believe anything in that in that line would be would be evidence and there isn't any I wouldn't say that but then III think that the government should introduce minimum standards that all schools independent state whatever they are should need so far as moral and religious education is concerned and the first one is every single child should be told that it is their free decision whether or not to accept a particular face but their school espouses that should be told to them repeatedly over and over again so they really believe it they should also be presented they should also be presented with a range of different plates and also humanist humanism from people who actually hold those fights because say very often although you get a range of face being presented it's the range of faiths is being presented by someone who's highly partisan and I know from experience that you know I know I get invited into schools sometimes to talk and I know from experience that you know the chaplain or the rabbi will want to be in the room while I'm talking just to hear everything I say so the minute I leave it cannot be rebutted it's it's not it's not a level playing field really there's a lot of control often that goes on in a slightly clandestine why they are not everyone likes to sign up to truth and reason and it's get the kids to think but then they say are but not too much and not too early and if all sorts of qualifications then come in and that that concerns me so I think all schools should be encouraging kids to think in question should be encouraging kids to think that it is their own free decision whether or not to sign up to these days having said that I think there are lots and lots of religious people who would agree with that and there are many religious schools that would happily embrace that philosophy so this is not an attack on religious schools per se it's just an attack on a certain style of religious school thank you dr. Dawkins for coming out I wrote down my question so I wouldn't like Rambo like some of these people I recently watched your interview with dot with dr. Ben Stein and when he asked you if at elegent design is possible you said that it could be possible through some intelligent life force like aliens or so thing like that do you think that is a more probable explanation that evidence forgot and if so what is your evidence why did you come to that conclusion that's a very interesting event that happened I was interviewed by this man whom I later discovered was called Ben Stein I never actually heard of him before I was invited to go on that program along with several other scientists and we were told this was going to be an objective discussion of the whole issue of intelligent design we would not tell that it was a propaganda exercise which it turned out to be i was asked the question you said could I could I imagine any circumstances in which life on this planet could be intelligently designed now if you've read the intelligent design literature you will know that the leading proponents are made people like demske are very keen to distance themselves from God when they're talking to their own people they talk about God all the time when they're talking about to septa scientists they will say we don't know who the designer is all we want to do is to show scientifically there's evidence for design and so they are very keen to try to find alternative designers who are who are not God when Ben Stein asked me that question could I imagine any circumstances in which life on this planet could be intelligently designed I bent over backwards to try to think of a positive answer the only answer I could think of and it's a very very improbable answer it's one that I do not for one moment believe the only in the only conceivable way in which life on this planet could be intelligently designed would be if it was designed by an alien from outer space who had evolved by something like the Darwinian process or if he'd been designed then the you know ultimately that regress have got to be stopped by something like the Darwinian process that's what I meant to say I think that's actually I did say though that bit of course was cut lots of other along with lots of other things been a Stein when I had said it's highly improper but if you really really twist my arm to try to think of a way in which life on this planet could be intelligently designed if you twist my arm then I will say possibly designed by some evolved life form evolved life form on another planet what did better Stein do cut out that bit he said wait a minute Dawkins believes in little green man that's what went out your friend Ben Stein so the latest and greatest in faith news is the purpose of course resigning allegations have come out today that he approached the Italian president for possible community towards court procedures for the Catholic child molestation cases in the child abuse what do you think the fallout will be of having a resigned Pope who could be potentially subpoenaed and get into court to face these charges I do who's gonna be subpoenaed well it's possible that Pope Ratzinger or perper benedict after he's finished resigning could be subpoenaed or arrested in con there in in connection to his time as the head of discipline as the church and moving around all the allegedly child abusing priests well I was one of those who actually paid a lawyer to look into the case and provide a the the case for the prosecution this was done by Geoffrey Robertson QC and I and Christopher Hitchens raised the money to pay him and I think I paid half of it myself so the case for the case for the prosecution so to speak has been laid out by Geoffrey Robertson it would be certainly interesting to see that really come to court I don't think anybody's accusing Benedikt of child abuse himself but rather being complicit in covering up what was going on and it wouldn't and I wouldn't wish to preempt any any judgment but if there's some serious case that he might be arrested I would be interested to see the outcome I rather doubt him by more than rather doubt it'll happen a short question for mr. Dawkins if I will understand your standpoint it seems to me that being against the religiosity and religion you understood completely what religion is if you understood that it means that you know very well what religion is so can you please give me a definition of what religion is and if you have it I must tell you something that we who are in a precarious condition of being believers we don't know what religion is I studied a bit what religion but I didn't understand believers believe in revelation in what it's given to them and that's why I wanted to assist to tell it to give me a definition because if it doesn't it doesn't have a clear understanding of what religion is that it should not be against religion thank you very much well my understanding is that is that really is that the word religion as opposed to faith is to do with literally come from bindings as to do with the organization of people who have a certain faith into a community which which binds together the people who do have who share that faith I'm not that interested actually in the distinction between religion and faith I think that faith is one of the great evils in the world and to the extent that religion organizes faith it's it's part of that I just wanted to ask whether you saw there being an endpoint as such to this debate and if so is is the ideal endpoint that there is no religion or do you think it ever will end this is a question about looking into the future and see what might happen in in human society with respect to religion will will religion eventually disappear and you're not asking me what I hope you're asking me what I expect well perhaps those well obviously you know what I hope I I'm cautiously optimistic but I think it'll take a very long time I mean the more the more we have good education the more religion will wither and die thank you for everything oh do years ago I attended a conference in Stockholm conference which takes place annually his philosophy conference um I know about it and it was a group of scientists from from the States I think saying that they did genetics and they had a very difficult moment a crisis and they couldn't go forward with the research and eventually somebody in the group tried praying and they pray and they got them at the end of the prayer they go to solution they are they acted on it and it worked and it happen again later how can we explain that your point is I asked how we explain you cannot be serious the conference took place the whole Facebook placing a little more trouble the reason you're telling the story the reason you're telling the story is that you got the result you wanted nobody ever says do you know there was this conference in Scandinavia and they didn't get the result than they prayed and it still they still didn't get it it doesn't happen like that you only tell the story when something like that appears to happen it's going to happen from time to time and that's when you tell the story and this is a on subject of religious belief do you think belief in a God is just the product of indoctrination and the occasional mystical experience or do you think it could actually be instinctive in some people well that's very interesting because what you could be meaning by that is are certain people they were they instinctive you mean there would be some sort of predisposition in certain brains due to genes perhaps which makes people more susceptible to whatever influences it is that makes people religious that seems to me to be quite probable because so many other things are influenced by genes it would be rather surprising if a susceptibility to religion wasn't was not under genetic influence my questions about the nature of scientific evidence are you both said I think most people agree with you though we're justified in horney on belief if we can find evidence for it or if there are logical arguments that support it but it seems like that in itself is a belief which would require some form of evidence so if so what do you think would count as evidence for that and if not how do we justify choosing that pure istic without a beings that same sound of evidence oh we're trying to joseph ER and have you actually got the microphone cuz it's not okay you're not hear me or what okay so I'll be that better okay so the questions about the nature of scientific evidence you you both said and I think most people here would agree with you that we're justified in hordeum belief if there's evidence for it or if there are logical arguments we can find that support it but it seems like this in itself is a belief it should require some form of evidence and so if so I'm wondering what you think would count as evidence in favor of that and if not how do we justify choosing that heuristic without appealing to the same standard that we're trying to justify so how do we justify as it were faith that science will give us the truth is that the place of you yes um well he said it works it it works planes fly cars dry computers can compute an inductive argument if you if you based medicine arms on science you cure people if you base the design of planes on science they fly if you base to the design of rockets on sides they reach the moon it works no I just can I just I didn't say just a carrot or I didn't say that a belief is reasonable only if it's based on evidence or some kind of rational argument in fact I questioned that I'm not actually I don't believe it's true but that's another long story bro no we won't open that chemically thank you very much just after Christmas we went to London and saw the scroll of Jack Kerouac on the road which you may know is was sort of pasted by him so that he could type out the whole thing in a of the creative frenzy and I was thinking in a way that this was a kind of a revolt against rationalism and a kind of element of spirit that shows that people will actually not even if religions are all gone they won't be completely satisfied with a purely religious I'm a purely rational and scientific society what do you think about that not a lot really um I didn't do what um I've got so I say something in the yes please Divya um you have a thing um so the last few questions not yours quite so much actually but there's a the way in which the conversation appears to be heading at this point is the faults that appear to be raised or what I what I called it um I read a book called um I plugged my book I wrote a book called bleeding and in that book there's a chapter called going the nuclear and going nuclear is a strategy that people employ in an argument when they suddenly realize that the tide of rationale he is going against them and then they reach for the nuclear button and the nuclear button is a kind of a skeptical argument so either a relativist argument or a skeptical argument in a religious context it's almost always a skeptical argument they will run some kind of argument for why reason itself is untrustworthy cannot be justified there's some kind of circularity involved in any attempt to provide a justification for reason because you will be using reason and thus the justification will be wholly circular and there you go then reason is just another faith position they say and all of your arguments count for nothing now it's all been laid waste every position is as reasonable or unreasonable as in every other and then having devastated everything they walk out the room fast leaving you to clear up that mess and that is an intellectually dishonest strategy for people to adopt if they trust reason on a day to day basis and in fact in every other corner of their lives which they do and in fact you generally find they will use reason in their argument up until the point where they realize they're losing and only then do they press the nuclear but so they do not do it in good faith they are simply applying a certain sophisticated philosophical puzzle and you know to generate as much dust and confusion as they possibly can in order to get out of the room fast leaving you to clear up the mess you can be damn sure that as soon as they're out as soon as they've made their escape will be using reason again well they lose reason to open the door I mean of yes and of course they'll be using reason in order to undermine reason so it's an intellectually dishonest strategy people ought not to do that do not use reason trust your life to reason which you do on a daily basis all of you and but then when you find yourself cornered in a particular area such as religious beliefs I suddenly start reaching for the nuclear button on reason and saying oh the reason is just another faith position - you don't really believe that and it's so it's intellectually dishonest think you were necessarily doing that now I'm pointing you were the last person to speak and maybe that wasn't quite fair yeah sorry I thank you very much oh I thought the point you made earlier Richard Dawkins is very interesting about how science allows us to show whether morals are inconsistent or consistent but as our society and technologies are advancing we're becoming more and more I guess scientifically caught up with ethics as well in how we how we progress and I was just wondering how do you personally determine the foundation for your morals and ethics when as you say science can't tell us what is right or wrong at a fundamental level it can only tell us what's consistent and how do you think as a society we should be progressing with determining what's acceptable or unacceptable what we should be placing our values and our energy and our time on as a as an Society of people and if it's just based on feelings of what it feels ok for someone at the bottom line you know is that really justified and what does that really mean yes Steven will correct me if I'm wrong but I think that the position that I would take in moral philosophy will be called consequentialism that that's a term isn't it yeah so to me what when I'm faced with him with a moral dilemma I would ask question like who suffers or how can we increase happiness and I wouldn't and I would then had to pass subsidiary questions like well whose happiness are we talking about is it only human happiness or are we talking about the happiness of any sentient being this is an interesting question which science bears upon because if you're talking about non-human non-human animals then question like do they have brains like ours do there is it likely that they suffer in the same kind of way as we do have they evolved from the same sort of ancestors as we have in the answer is of course yes if you if you want to base your morality as many people do on a rigid wall of separation between our species Homo sapiens and all others then science again immediately steps in and says well hang on at what point in the evolution of humans would you or do erect that barrier if for example we can do a thought experiment an armchair scientific thought experiment we can say suppose that the that the the eight men eight women who are link us to chimpanzees going all the way back to six million years ago to the common ancestor of chimpanzees then all the way forward again to us suppose that there were an unbroken chain of intermediates who all happen to survive as it as it turns out they're extinct and so we are we are totally distinct from chimpanzees but if they hadn't by the sheer accident gone extinct then there would be an unbroken chain of interbreeding intermediates I mean interbreeding between us and chimpanzees so the only way in which to erect a morality that was human based and distinguished so-called animals from humans would be to have apartheid like course to decide whether so-and-so passes for human or not as they had in South Africa with passes for white so science can't tell you what's morally wrong or right but what it can do is you can do scientific thought experiments and you can show up the problems in your in your moral thinking in your in your ethical thinking by doing such thought experiments and the same thing with the progression of embryos when talking about about abortion that kind of thing it seems to be your standpoint that religion and science are at loggerheads and what you say there's questions that religion can't answer and there's also questions that scientists can't answer do you not see the science is just the new religion let's say it shows people how to act and social social situations I guess hierarchical things like no you are faith in science and you said I I think that the science is very different because it is based upon upon evidence I - I think it would be completely wrong to say that science is like a religion science certainly does answer some of the questions that historically religion aspired to answer questions of origins questions of where we all come from and so there are some deep and interesting questions that historically religion attempted to answer by dancing wrongly and science now attempts to answer and is getting the right answers and may not have them all yet but is progressing in that direction I don't think there's any there's any basis for that kind of rather facile comparison I've got a question for professor Dawkins so based on your argumentation I didn't see a difference between between God and love because you said say if God reveals himself to me and I believe in God this evidence is not publicly available like a glass of water for example to say that's not true on the other hand if you say say I've got a wife and I believe my wife loves me because you say it's evidence oh she's got some facial expressions or something long lines of that but I think that's actually the same kind of revelation because if other people see the expression and my wife has when she looks at me they don't see any love probably do I see the love because because because no but they probably see differently I guess so yeah I see the love because because it kind of fits do you know what I mean it's kind of yeah it's a relation I mean it by itself so it's it's a clever point it you're what you're saying is that my point about Napoleon about people who think they're Napoleon that's that's private and we say and we locked them up what you're saying that somebody who says his wife loves him he's the only person who thinks his wife loves if nobody else believes it because they don't see they don't see the the private term little looks and squeezes and things like that I think it were all though I call it clever I think it's actually you can kind of break it down I mean what that sort of evidence is susceptible to investigation by the people if they look hard enough they usually don't bother but um whatever the cues are that tell you that your wife loves you those are in principle investigador other people and you could be wrong as I said before uh yeah question for professor Dawkins we were talking about evidence and scientific evidence but there are different Sciences of course I wonder about a comparison between say biology and physics um if you look at physics which is generally a mathematical theory there are all sorts of things which tend to be replaced when I when a theory changes that we no longer think that heat is a caloric fluid for example but the mathematic still works and that's what you told one of the questioners before that ultimately science works now when it comes to something like evolution on the other hand it seems to be of a different kind it seems to be an explanatory theory which sort of unifies seemingly disparate phenomena um but when there's Theory change what will be preserved on a theory which is not a theory which makes predictions or does it make predictions so you're saying that in physics things change and the physics of the 17th century is superseded but the mathematics tends to you might see the structure of the mathematics yeah preserved that's romantically preserved in the sense that for example Newton's theory of gravitation that's warming it is just simply was a limited case an empirical law the mathematics of which gives the approximately the right answer then you came on to evolution where I suppose it's fair to say that that that is not going to be superseded in the same way this is this is what were you saying that this is definitely true and it's not inverted oh oh oh it makes oh sure it does yes I mean um admittedly sorry yes that the theory of evolution makes makes prediction certainly admittedly in some cases their predictions about the past but it's still a prediction if you go if you go and dig up fossils you will find that the fossils come in the right order for instance I mean that's a that's a prediction hello question to both actually looking at it from their point of view science and philosophy to believe or not to believe this question has been bugging me is that just a random variation of our biological makeup or will is there something more to it in that individuals have a different option life in some of us even if have been brought up religious quite early on have this have discovered in ourselves that we can't bring myself to believe hoping would be we are being told is that just a as I said before a random variation biological makeup or is there more to it in terms of our it is that difference key to our evolution as my beans so you're saying that there are there are people who reject religion despite being brought up with it and other people who accept it I very much am amikacin and I know the people who are - yes so there more to it than just a random by biological variation of it well I wouldn't there it's their purpose to our own evolution that out of its random but but I mean the difference between people who accept it and people who reject it is darkness a a complicated function of their of their genes and education and things like that I wouldn't call it random but but you seem to be going a little bit further and suggesting that maybe we're evolving by natural selection to become better at it or something like that well I don't think that we've genetically moved on since the dark ages I think we're you know Genet genetically there hasn't been that that kind of change if you mean might we evolve in the future to become better thinkers or something like that that would only be the case if the better thinkers were the ones who had the most children okay thank you hi Steve Steven more closer no well that was the great answer I don't hit and had anything to it other than I'm pessimistic about the plate I think is being the ones that have the most children okay oh please you make our event a tradition is to give our speakers a t-shirt as a thank you very much for being here take you

Channel: ThinkWeekOxford

Views: 195,534

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Keywords: Dawkins, Law, humanism, atheism, think, week, oxford

Id: zvkbiElAOqU

Length: 88min 52sec (5332 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2013

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[u/wolf3482]

This was part of an event I help run with my society (Oxford Atheists, Secularists, and Humanists) every year as part of a week "festival of Atheism" - ThinkWeek.

www.thinkweek.co.uk