PROF AC GRAYLING "PROVING ATHEISM"

ladies and Gentlemen please give a very warm welcome this evening to our speaker Professor AC Grayling thank you very much thank you thank you very much I hope I'm audible have I managed to switch on the machine as you can see my anxiety is about the technologies that we're flooded with these days we live under a tsunami of technological developments and some of us are still catching up on things like this so my theme tonight is proving atheism which is a very I don't know provocative titles to have because most people think that you can't prove either way whether there are gods and goddesses or Supernatural agencies in the universe or not and those who would like to be able to believe that there are take comfort from the um supposed fact that you can't prove that there are and I would like to um if I can somehow upset that sense of comfort on their part by explaining how indeed you can prove in order to do this I must take you for a little foray as it might be a stroll through um some very important philosophical Concepts the concepts of knowledge of Truth and of proof itself and first let me point out to you is something which we all of course actually familiar with and that is that knowledge is even though in philosophical terms tends to be defined very very strictly as a belief which is not merely true but Justified so you have a complete assurance that that it's true that knowledge as defined in those very strict terms is simply not possible outside formal contexts that's to say outside logic and Mathematics where you can achieve especially by deductive means a complete certainty as to the outcome of a chain of reasoning and if you can be completely certain that a conclusion has followed from premises then you can know the conclusion because not merely do you believe it but you have a complete justification for it namely the the proof procedure the logical or mathematical proof procedure and of course it would be true on the definitions I say true on the definitions because you must remember your reading of Alice in one land you remember when she falls down the rabbit hole has some rather confusing experiences like getting very big and nearly drowning in our own tears and so on and so she says I better do my maths tables to see if I'm all right and so she says 5 times 7 equals 12 and five times eight equals 13 and 5 times 9 equals Fourteen and then she says oh dear at this rate I'll never get to 20. and she's right because as you know lateridge Dodson was a mathematician and he loved to play tricks which he does all the way through Alice in Wonderland and because she's multiplying to a different base each time it is true that five times seven equals twelve five times eighty was 13 and so on and she can indeed not get to 20 because the series jumps when you get to 19. so that that is the demonstration of the fact that if you change the axioms and definitions of a formal language then of course you're going to get different uh outcomes there will be formal languages in which one plus one might not equal two but in fact be 11. so you can see that that uh in order to be satisfied of the truth even in formal contexts of the outcome of a chain of reasoning you have to understand the axioms and the definitions but all that said it remains that it is only in mathematics and logic that you can have watertight complete certainty on the assumptions and the definitions and therefore you can claim to have unexceptionable indefeasible knowledge but knowledge as we understand this in the ordinary sense that is scientific knowledge knowledge and encyclopedias uh knowledge about how to get around Manchester I've just learned a bit of that knowledge myself this evening with the help of GPS and that kind of knowledge is what's called defeasable knowledge in the sense that now our circumstances in which you might have to change your view you might learn something new you might be shown that's something that you took as a fact something that you could rely on that you could use in your thinking about the world or about yourself or which you could use as a premise in further reasoning might have to be adjusted or changed or abandoned or replaced if you if you get hold of a physicist say a particle physicist and ask that person do you know anything in particle physics in the sense in which you know that one plus one equals two um she should say no I don't because um we can have an extremely high degree of confidence in some set of results after very exhaustive experimental runs and we can very safely premise this conclusion that we've reached in our further investigations but there will always be a chance that something might come along new evidence better arguments better experiments better equipment which will show us that we need to adjust or abandon or replace some view that we hold the defeasability of knowledge is a very important feature of inquiry in the case in the empirical case the contingent world the world of uh um not of of formal definitions as in mathematologic but the world of actuality and practicality so all knowledge is defeasable you may know that that physics review letters which is one of the absolute top physics journals regards as a discovery any result which achieves the level of probability of Sigma 5 it's called Sigma 5 which means that there is only a one in three and a half million chance that you've made a mistake or there's something wrong or some little Gremlin has got into the system a one in three and a half million chance but there is still a chance and therefore you have to remain open to the possibility that revision might be necessary and indeed this is one of the remarkable uh and wonderful things about science that it is very open minded and open-ended and always looking to test itself and to to see whether it's conclusions its theories are safe and whether the light of new information new knowledge new experimental data it might have to revise itself now you may um also remember of course that the Higgs boson was identified back in 2012 and the results of a large number of experiments an extremely um elaborate and and Powerful experimental tool the Large Hadron Collider had detected the presence of this uh field the Higgs field at the energy levels at which the original theoretical procrastinations had said they might be found a very good friend of mine was one of the lead scientists on the compact muon solenoid experiment you may remember there were two quite separate experiments looking for the Higgs in two very different ways so that if they both spotted the same particle of the same energy level then they'd be a very high degree of confidence that they've got hold of this very important part of the standard model of the of the atom and uh and the friend in question of the man called tijinda Verdi is now sir to gender Verdi haven't been knighted for this great achievement that he and his colleagues made at the LA children collider he won the European physics medal which is a sort of physics Nobel uh for the European um uh setting in in science and I said to him golly it must have been absolutely wonderful on the day that after so many experiments and so much analysis of the data you felt able as a committee in Geneva to say right we can now publish the fact that we have found this particle and he said yes yes yes it was quite nice but if we hadn't found it it would have been really exciting because that would have meant that there was a lot more physics to do and it's it's that it's that sort of wonderful enthusiasm and openness and preparedness not to know and to be uncertain and to be still looking which is very characteristic of science very unlike Dogma with its absolute certainties even to the point where you might be prepared to die or were still to kill for your absolute certainties now I often point out to people that you can explain the major tenets of any religion the major doctrines of any religion in less than half an hour it takes a bit longer to study Physics so you can see that the difference of mindset is a very important feature here and it takes us back to this point about the nature of knowledge knowledge is defeasable when you came to know something you have to have very good evidence for it but you also have to be prepared to revise it if new and better evidence comes along so that's what we need to say about knowledge and immediately that has a consequence for our concept of Truth because the relationship between the concepts of knowledge and Truth is a very intimate one when I gave you that definition the standard philosophical definition of knowledge has Justified true belief obviously you cannot know something which is false you can know that it's false but you can't say I know this falsehood you know thinking that somehow rather it's equatable with knowing a truth so the concept of Truth plays a very important role but what I just said about the open-endedness of science suggests rightly that no scientists would say this is the truth about things this is how things are I have got hold of the truth about the nature of fundamental reality on the contrary as you know there are all sorts of um very imaginative some wildly speculative theories about what lies beyond the standard model Beyond quantum theory into String Theory into thinking about how we are to understand all these uh apparently incomprehensible ideas of superposition entanglement and uncertainty and so on and these are imaginings very controlled and very disciplined and well-informed imaginings about the possibilities of the nature of nature and there what the inquiries are seeking to do is to get as close to the truth of things as they can and that means that they're treating the concept of Truth as an ideal as a as a a point uh you know in the distance as it were of inquiry on which they hope to converge they hope that different ways of examining this problem different experimental and theoretical efforts will bring us closer and closer to what might be regarded as the truth about things always however accepting that what seems to be the truth about something may turn out to be only a staging post towards that ideal so the concept of truth becomes an ideal of inquiry something that we uh we wish to aim for and instead of thinking that there might be something which is the truth of a given matter I mean apart from things like it is true that you're sitting here now looking at somebody waving his arms around inside you think all right what sense of Truth in in that respect but then of course you have to remember our friend or any Descartes who said you may be asleep and dreaming or having a nightmare but you're in a philosophy lecture and uh you therefore you can't claim to have the truth about it and it's quite possible that somebody is asleep and dreamy in this audience at this very moment of course you know you know the old story about the man who dreamed that he was giving a speech in the House of Lords and woke up and found that he was well that that is a kind of proof of the Cartesian possibility so truth is an ideal of inquiry but it does give rise to some very very important Associated ideas the idea of being truthful of uh of being intellectually honest of intellectual Integrity that the idea of trying to cleave to the truth or to find the truth or to aim one's inquiries at the truth is what it is to be truthful it's an interesting fact you know that the word true etymologically comes from an Anglo-Saxon word which denotes the flight of an arrow you know we talk about something running true running straight going straight to the Target that's where the idea of truth comes from and therefore from the point of view of the uh as it were the convergence eye concept the idea of Truth is a an ideal of inquiry trying to get the right aim trying to find the right Target and to run straight and true to that Target and that's where the idea of truthfulness of Truth likeness of being as as intellectually honest as one can be becomes important so now let me turn to the concept of proof proof itself already mentioned in the case of the formal languages of mathematics and logic and there the idea of proof which is the idea that far too many people export into the contingent or empirical Realm is a very straightforward one so I give you a syllogism syllogism is an argument uh with two premises and a conclusion a very familiar one all men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal now one thing you will notice about that is that the conclusion of that argument is just a rearrangement of the terms in the premises all men and Mortal Socrates is a man their for Socrates is Mortal you just switch the words around to get your conclusion and this is uh how it is with deductions deductions are always such that the information in the conclusion is already contained in the premises you've all seen you know in the detective films and TV series and so on the detective pins up all the suspects and murder victims and the cases and times up onto a board and looks at them but because all the the answer is there the answer is present in the information and it just has to be rearranged and made visible the conclusion is there already that's the whole point of that process of trying to deduce from the premises the conclusion there is therefore never any uh logical novelty as the point is often made in no logical novelty in a deduction all the information inclusion is already in the premises but there can however be psychological novelty so a very very long complicated deduction might pop out a very surprising conclusion as is the case with the detective with everything pinned up on the board you know the actual uh murderer might be a very surprising result there's a nice story usually told in this context of a of a Duke notice that he's a French Duke and not a Duke and he has a weekend party and a guest of honor at the weekend party is a a cardinal who Regals the assembled company with a story to entertain them while the Duke is had popped out to get a bit more Chateau enough to pop or whatever it is they're drinking that evening and he tells them that when he was a young Curie first ordained his very very very first person who came to have confession with him was a vile multiple murderer of the worst conceivable kind oh save the assembled company the Duke returns claps the Cardinal on the shoulder says I've known the Cardinal for ages you know in fact I was the very first person all the guests leave they were logician to a man and a woman they'll jump into their coaches and off they go so you can see plenty of psychological novelty there but no logical novelty because just the rearrangement of the information but in the empirical case the contingent case the case of the world as it is the case of the world of actuality we have very very few opportunities to deduce and most of our reasonings are inductive of one kind or another inductive reasoning is the kind of reasoning which goes from a sample from a bit of evidence and it extrapolates or draws out a a probability or or a more General conclusion than is warranted by the premises strictly speaking it may very well be warranted if it's a very well controlled and thought out induction so for example we see posters will take usually about thirteen hundred or so people selected from you know different social classes and economic levels and so forth and then they ask them how they're going to vote and then they give us a proportion of support for one political party or another they're they're extrapolating from a controlled sample to the whole set and there to some degree that there is a rough kind of measure of accuracy although of course people larger posters and and the last minute change their votes and so on so there is a degree of inaccuracy which they allow for they always give a kind of error margin in there but that's an example of um controlled inductive reasoning and inductive reasoning is always to a much larger degree are uncertain and because of the conditions uh that affect how safe the extrapolation is from the sample to the whole now your expectation that a bus will come when you're waiting at the bus stop or that you'll get wet if if you don't take an umbrella on a rainy day all these expectations are inductive expectations and this is where things get interesting because what you notice about our Behavior about our thinking and acting on the basis of inductive inferences it says something about how responsible we're being to the grounds that we have for our induction for example supposing you look out of the window one morning and it's bucketing down with rain and it's set on the weather report that it's going to rain all day but you think to yourself well I was reading David Hume in bed last night and he points out that inductive inferences are very very unsafe the fact that the sun is risen every morning for millions of years is no guarantee that it's going to rise tomorrow morning in fact butcher Russell has a rather different and better example he says think of the chicken which is fed every day and protected from the fox and so on the chicken thinks to herself my word life is pretty good actually and it can only get better until the day that uh he is Sunday lunch well there's an example of how very very unreliable inductive inferences can be because indeed no matter how often things have happened in the past they may not happen again in the future so you reflecting on this decide well I have got wet every time I've been in the rain without an umbrella in the past but it could maybe it won't happen this time so I'm not going to take my umbrella as you stagger about the street sopping wedge what are your neighbors going to think of you they're going to think you're in Egypt and why because you have been you have failed to match your expectations and your actions to the evidence that you've accumulated in the past what you fail to do is you have failed to be rational now look at that word rational first part of that word is ratio and ratio means proportion so your your conclusion your judgment your decision about how to act must be proportional to the evidence that you have in favor of it this is why the uh um belief that there are fairies at the bottom of your garden is irrational because you have so well no but scarcely any evidence in favor of it and a great deal of evidence against it and therefore to proportion your belief in there being fairies from the garden to the evidence that you have would result in you saying no there aren't and I'm not going to act as if there are I'm not going to predicate anything on that my thinking is not going to involve any any you know fairy dust or fairy possibilities rationality the proportioning of evidence to judgment to what you accept and to how you act and this is absolutely key so bear that in mind now let us go back to the concept of proof itself ancient and empirical case proof means test if you go to a steel foundry you will notice that every hundred or thousand or whatever it might be rods or sheets of Steel that are produced in a Rolling Mill will be taken out from Once cooled they will be loaded to see at what point they will fracture how much loading they will take before they fracture this is called proving the steel testing this deal you've heard the saying the proof of the pudding is in the eating so the tests of the pudding whether the pudding has worked okay whether it tastes or right and so on whether it's just like your grandma did it that proof of the pudding is in the eating the exception that proves the rule of course most people not really understanding the the meat of the concept of proof here thinks that if there's an exception to the rule then it is validated the rule on the contrary what that phrasing means the uh the uh um proof exception proves the rule is that the an exception will show the limit of application of the rule how far the rule works and when it ceases to work so the uh exception that proves the rule tests the rule shows how well the rule works or how far it works so in the empirical contingent case proof means test and this is how you can prove that there is there are no gods goddesses supernatural beings or agencies in or associated with the universe by the way you'll notice I use this rather elaborate formula it's because when my youngest daughter was very little I I said to her look I set my my dad and wife I said look you know everybody in in this country is exposed so much religion and their prayers and hymns at school and church Easter and Christmas and so on I'm determined now that this uh last of our children to bring her up an atheist and my wife said oh my God that means she's going to be a mother Abba since she grows up because you know it shouldn't be like anyways I thought I would give it a shot and I said to her when you get into discussions with with other people of the children at school and so on uh don't talk about God with the capital G's if it's a name because there isn't anything it names it's just you know empty uh thing talk about gods and goddesses so you can say well I don't believe in gods and goddesses why do you and then people will say well I don't believe in God's grace if there's one God and he said well well you know what's your evidence for that if there's one why can't there be an infinite number of them and anyway most religious Traditions have got a plurality of them even in fact Christianity because by a kind of theological arithmetic we managed to get several of them involved and also if you ever those of you who were Catholics or perhaps still are will know that um Catholicism of course is a is a is a goddess worshiping faith and mariolatrist's Faith I've been astonished actually walking around some European cities recently and going to very very very beautiful churches Baroque churches and noticing that the central figure above the altar is uh is Mary and the iconography and the church is mainly um you know Mary Jesus is a kind of sort of also Iran he figures mainly as a baby actually which is sort of quite harmless in her way and occasionally as a torture eviction but you do see this uh concentration on on Mary and you remember um Frazier of golden bow Fame gave a reason for this which is that when the at the end of the fourth Century the church became the official was pronounced to be the when when Christianity was pronounced to be the official religion of the Roman Empire by theodosius the first in the Edict of thessalonica 380 A.D you all know this reading about it just last night when that happened and the church and undertook a sort of campaign to achieve Mass conversion one thing they did and you can read about this in Catherine nixie's book The darkening age of how they destroyed as much of the literature of classical Antiquities they could and smashed as many statues and temples as they could but also by um saying to to people you know the gods that you worshiped here in your local area actually they're Saints of the church and in particular the great Center of worship of Diana the Virgin goddess at aritzia in Italy was said by the church in fact you know we can now tell you her real name is Mary the Virgin goddess is Mary and Mary has been a great focus of uh worshipful attention in Catholicism ever since so that's you know a way to do it so you might you might uh um argue that in fact not even Christianity itself is quite as Unitarian as it might be anyway this is what I said to to my little daughter by the way she said to me one day she was about seven or eight she said said uh Daddy I don't believe in God's goddesses but I do believe in the tooth fairy and I said well you've got evidence in favor of the existence of the tooth fairy haven't you because every time you lose a tooth you get a pound there is a tooth fairy it happens to be me but there is one and you've got you've got your Heavens foot so that that was a very heartwarming moment so gods and goddesses I always use that phrase because it you know shows the burden of the argument so how do you go about um saying to somebody well let us test the claim that there are gods and goddesses or Supernatural agencies of some kind in the universe and here I cite we're very well known example you probably know it Carl Sagan's dragon in the garage you've all perhaps come across that already and it goes like this somebody says to you I've got a dragon in my garage and you say oh I'd love to see a dragon and he says oh well this one is invisible until you say okay uh but we can hear it's leathery Wings flapping can't we no this one is silent so you say okay let's put talcum powder on the floor of the garage and we can see it's dragony footprints no this one never lands on the floor of the Dragon okay how about we feel it's hot breath no this one doesn't have hot breath we've got cool breath etc etc what you're doing is you're testing the claim that there is a dragon in the garage you're testing the claim just as you test an iron Steel Rod prove the steel rod so you are trying to show what would satisfy any rational person rational person who's going to proportion evidence to judgment that there is a dragon in the garage you can come up with all sorts of experiments you can come up with all sorts of uh tests for this and if the claim fails those tests if there is nothing whatever that will meet even ordinary levels of requirement for a claim to pass a test you can regard it as being irrational to accept that there is a dragon in the garage now let's Circle back so just keep that in mind we Circle back now to claims about knowledge and truth and notice that when we talk in our normal colloquial way about knowing something we you know that that an encyclopedia contains a lot of knowledge or that we know we're all in Manchester at the moment um but it's the feasible unbeknownst to us we might have been raptured up by some aliens into a spaceship as we stood here so we might not be in Manchester even that very remote possibility has to be allowed you might think that that means well that the remote possibility that there are gods and goddesses but neither of those remote possibilities are rational to believe because they're not they don't sit with the evidence for them so when we Circle back to the concept of knowledge we notice that what we can claim to know is what it is rational to research rational because we have a sufficient degree of evidence or cogency of argument that supports that claim right so there is a way of proving that there are no Supernatural agencies in or associated with the universe that is testing claims to that effect because anybody who asserts such a claim has a burden of proof a burden of justification a burden to provide us with the kind of evidence that would be sufficient for us to think twice or perhaps to accept the view that there are notice that the concept of the burden of proof means the burden of providing the degree of evidence that would be persuasive is that the word persuasion so a sways of degree of evidence that would make you think well you know there is a degree of probability that is worth taking seriously or maybe I should revise my view about the universe but if there is a is very very very little uh such evidence then it is irrational to believe it but there is a further step that we need to take here when we are proving uh that there are no uh testing the claim that there are Supernatural agencies proving that there are not okay and that further step is to put those claims into context let's go back to fairies you may know that fairies were very very widely believed in until the early 20th century I mean people thought that fairies were responsible for your missing shoelaces and for curdling the milk and for pinching you in the middle of the Niger and so on and people thought they even saw them I mean we famously there were some people who docked some photographs of fairies you may remember nobody took that seriously but but people thought that you know little lights across the marshes whether the Wisp or whatever thought of these as being uh non-natural or Supernatural entities of some kind and there was a great deal of law l-o-r-e you know of tradition of teaching of stories about them and what they did so it was a whole tradition there just as there was for many many many for many many centuries and sort of several Millennia anyway belief that the heavenly bodies the Stars Sun Moon planets and so on influenced us in our character in which part of the year we were born in and the witch stars and from them we could infer things about the future and so on and there's a whole elaborate science of astrology in fact a number of different astrological uh schools with very elaborate theories with the whole structure of uh argumentation about why a given juxtaposition of planets in the configuration of the heavens would have this effect rather than that effect and so on and mainly although people of course mainly still do look at their horoscope whenever they're feeling a bit miserable hope that things will be better next month and so on mainly acceptance of claims in astrology have vanished in them more educated parts of the world and belief in fairies and Sprites and so on likewise has has faded away but the probative value that is the amount of of evidence belief and support for them both astrology and belief in fairies and pixies and gnomes was very very considerable there were the whole bodies of of a belief and story and Legend and literature supporting these things they've Fallen away for a variety of reasons one is I I know that there were two major uh reasons why schools schooling became much more widespread in England in the 19th century the church was anxious to combat superstition so brackets haha close brackets the uh the Superstition in question of course being fair belief in fairies that they wanted to combat that and the state was prepared to support that endeavor because they wanted literate or people who could add and subtract and so on to be good foot soldiers in the economic Army you know to be able to work in shops and factories and so on those are the two main reasons for the beginning of schools but the one that one which was about combating Superstition is a very interesting one and is one of the explanations as to why a generalized belief in the little people faded away hasn't completely faded away there's the famous story isn't there of the Irish lady who's asked if she believes in leprechauns and she says I do not but they're there anyway so I mean that that kind of that that kind of belief sort of lingers in the back of people's minds but when you push that when when you challenge somebody on a belief of that kind and you make them think uh about the question of evidence about how rational the belief is how proportioned it is to all the considerations that you can reduce you find that the degree of conviction Fades away you put the religious Traditions into the context of the great history of human endeavor to think about the world and to make sense of the world to point this way I'm very keen to argue in the educational context that religious studies isn't it some of us will remember how they used to be called religious instruction RI in schools just think of that anyway religious studies now you know we've got to be much more open-minded and have more than one religion to study and so on but religious studies think of the great tapestry of human efforts to make sense of our world and ourselves all the mythologies and different religions the attempts of science the philosophies the rich material that has come out of literature to explore the Human Condition and out of this Rich tapestry to pull out one thread which is the story of religions and to study them independently of the Great tapestry of which This Thread is part is to give it a very very undue salience to make it important in a way that it isn't really because if you just left the thread in place of the tapestry you would see that you know over to the left of the tapestry here there are lots of mythologies and religions and so on and they kind of fade around Fade Out and fade out until we come to what is functionally a very secular kind of world and way of thinking about the world in more recent times because you have to if you look at the history of religions you notice that they begin as an attempt to try to make sense of the world they're a kind of proto-science by attributing agency to the forces of nature that the Thunder is caused by a deity or a big version of me walking on the clouds or the wind is you know some invisible agency puffing up its cheeks and going like that and then as our forebears got to know the world a bit better and began to notice natural regularities and variations so all these agencies the nymphs the dryads in the trees and streams gods in this under the sea and in the earth they all kind of moved away mainly to mountaintops actually that's where Moses met his God and where the Olympians were and then when people got to the Tropic mountains and there weren't very many gods there so gods were all by decreasing in number by the way because there used to be everywhere then they became 12 and then they became one and then out into outer space and when people discovered that the world is around so no way is up that was a bit more complicated so then the the last remaining deity just left space and time all together so there's a whole process there those strands of the tapestry have resulted in just very very few Gods left maybe one or three or something and not in space and time and not incounterable or understandable because of course the great argument left to theologians after you've tested and tested and tested and proved and proved and challenged and challenged and asked them for the evidence and ask them for the consistency between the idea of a good God all the moral the natural even in evil in the world when you've pushed and pushed they said ah our finite Minds incapable of understanding the infinite and God is ineffable this is a tremendous now the tapestry has turned into a carpet under which you can sweep you know all your inability to to stand up against the testing the proving that the challenge of rational inquiry poses so to prove atheism to prove atheism I've just had a signal about the time to prove atheism is to test the claims of religion and to test is to look for the degree of rationality the degree of proportionality to evidence that you have always remembering to put um you know not just claims about miracles and uh encounters with the Divine and so on in the remnant of the religious Traditions that we have now but put it into its historical context put it alongside talk about fairies and and the influence of the of the stars on our destiny put it into that same context and then ask yourself why is it that religion should still hold a claim uh on so many people when fairies and and astrology don't and of course the answer is it's institutionalized and we have great uh religious organizations um they are very influential in society it's only very recently in in history in the last you know Century or so that the significance of religious organizations in the anglophone world for example of the eurocentric world has diminished and it is still extremely powerful in Muslim majority countries in India uh and so you can see that the institutionalization is what keeps people thinking that it is rational to believe those things even though they're no longer uh see that it is rational to believe in astrology or in fairies and a final concluding point so we have a um you know atheist Society is a very very great honor to be the honorary president of it and Atheism has become a thing so there are atheists and there is atheism which makes it sound as though it's a set of doctrines and as you know it isn't in fact the word atheist is a theist's word now theists have described people who don't sign up for their way of thinking about things as those you know who are non-believers some of you here would have heard me like in this situation to the attitude of people who collect stamps to people who don't so stamp collectors I don't know if stamp collecting was incredibly important to stamp collectors they would regard people who don't collect stamps as a stamp collectors and maybe even in the past these a stamp collectors would have been burned at the stake or stamped on or you know so something horrible but that's pretty well what it's like so it's an atheist of people who don't kill like stamps it doesn't if you're an atheist doesn't follow anything else doesn't then follow from that fact if you're a theist certain things do follow from that because you can legitimately ask of atheist well which form of theism there are plenty and how many gods do you believe in and so on but if you're an atheist there's nothing more to be said you just don't you know you're just not at that party so people sometimes can you know you've heard people describe Richard Dawkins as a militant atheist it's just not possible to be militantly somebody who doesn't collect stamps I mean how do you do that you know I don't understand well you can see that that's the wrong expression uh um Christopher Hitchens uh was self-described himself not just as an atheist but an anti-theist now you can be a militant anti-theist because you can be very cross with those things to want to impose their views on other people and kill them if they don't agree and so on you can you can certainly be a militant anti-theist you can be a militant secularist wanting to drive the religious voice out of the Public Square you could really be a militant humanist can you I mean after all humanism is a non-religious ethical Outlook which tries to think about what our values should be how we should relate to one another how we should live our lives so uh you can be an Enthusiast I suppose for the humanist View and want to show people because very often you know you get people to say well if you're going to give up on religion you know what what's going to provide meaning in life you can say there's this wonderful long-standing goes all the way back to classical Antiquity and before a very rich Humane View humanism which is you know that we as Emerson said we give other people the same advantage that we give a painting which is the advantage of a good light we try to treat them with sympathy and generosity and understanding and it's only when they turn out to be mean and selfish and nasty and so on that we don't accept that so you know that that you you can't really be a militant humanist because humanists are just too nice it could be militant but so you can be a militant secularist and a militant antitheist but you cannot be a militant atheist an atheism just just denotes a space the space where you're thinking your attitude to the world your set of beliefs and so on is not predicated on the idea that there are the supernatural agency is in one or another way involved in our world and when you think about it um and you think about the idea that there is a uh an invisible policeman who watches you all the time even when you're on your own at night in bed you know you're being watched I don't know whether you know that that thing George Carlin's great thing about uh people who believe there's an invisible man in the sky watches everything you do uh and if you don't do what he says he's got a list of things you're allowed to do and not allowed to do and if you don't conform to that list then he's going to send you into hell fine you're going to ban that forever but he loves you and he wants your money as George anyway so he put put it into context and then you notice the power because it is a very powerful idea of proof as test of testing the rationality of these claims and why it is just straightforwardly irrational to believe that there varies in the garden that there are nymphs and drieds in the trees and streams that there are Gods 12 of them on Olympus or one somewhere outside space and time whatever that means thank you thank you absolutely fascinating um don't go away Technologies are you sure I'm ashamed red yeah okay um could I have the first question please if you don't have a lot of time for Q a tonight I'm so sorry put your hand up now if you have a question so oh by the way sorry could I impose something on you which is that there are empirical studies which show that if the first question is asked by a woman that other women in the audience will feel empowered to ask questions as well and so now to be affirmative could I please have a lady to ask questions what Imperial study was that that's a very good question yes we should dig that up the next time somebody asked me that I'm going to come out with the answer but thank you perfect another question please now that gentleman there was a second yeah you were with the the Welshman I think he must be some people would claim that to improve God exists on a priori necessary The Logical basis the ontological arguments and things like that um it is a bizarre proof not logical what's your favorite way of demolishing it well but by showing that it also proves that there can't be a devil uh in in the following way so the archaeological argument says there is something which is the greatest or the most perfect thing in the universe a most perfect thing which actually exists is more perfect than one that doesn't exist therefore the most perfect being in the universe exists now unfortunately for this argument the most perfect thing in the universe could be a very imperfect thing just less imperfect than anything else so it would still be the most perfect thing the most perfect thing in the universe could very well be in this room right now one of you even though you might be you know pretty imperfect just the rest of us might be worse so the argument doesn't establish anything uh you know for example somebody is the tallest person in Manchester somebody is and if there are two people who equally tall then whichever one of them brought up latest today because as you know gravity makes you sure uh is the tallest person in Manchester okay so you know just using the superlative that doesn't establish anything if you read Kant the uh you know critique of pure reason he has a wonderful destruction of the argument and saying that existence cannot be a property of things so you can't say of the deity that the deity has all these properties in Perfection and one of the properties has to be existence if I said to you this lectern belongs to the um you know the free uh well the What Friends Meeting House and it is made of metal and it doesn't exist then you would be a bit puzzled by that because they were denied one property of It While attributing others so all those reasons is a really really bad argument but my favorite one as you asked for is this there is a being which is the least perfect being in the universe so this putatively would be the devil okay a least perfect being which doesn't exist is even less perfect than one that does therefore the least perfect being doesn't exist so this is a reduction of the argument if you can prove that it just shows the argument spirit um and the third question please have you gone for something from happening my family are a very fundamentalist Evangelical family and um and they would argue that the evidence of God existing is their evidence of their own personal lives and I remember as an Evangelical Christians you can always say to people because nobody can argue with his own personal experience and that personal relationship that they have with God how would you respond well it's uh it's true that um the uh psychological conviction you know if you if you really believed for example uh in the influence of the stars and planets on your destiny if you really really believed in it then you would act accordingly and it would be implicit and it would be meaningful to you and you know it would be the whole framework of your life and similarly if you're psychologically convinced about something or accepted then you interpret everything accordingly you know what they say if your tool is a hammer everything is a nail so if your tool is you're an Evangelical Christian then everything conforms to your beliefs and expectations uh predicated on that in Oxford at Harris Manchester Cottage in Oxford there is a research center it's called the religious experience Research Center and it was set up by a very very lovely man whom I have the privilege to know when I was a student at Oxford a man called Sir Aleister Hardy he was a marine biologist he's the one who came up with the idea that our forebears in the primate linear lineages Must Have Spent A very long period on the pleurisine literals on the seashore which is why we lost our body here whereas other primates haven't while we've got uh subcutaneous fat as a way of like other Aquatic mammals have why we have the diving reflex the heart rate change that other Aquatic mammals have we have salty tears which is what sea going marine mammals have to exude and you may remember Elaine Morgan wrote a book called The Descent of woman which was predicated on the Hardy thesis about it her thesis was that we've got fat bottoms because we had to sit on pebbly beaches and then protect us but he sets up this Research Center the religious expense Research Center because he was himself a man of uh he was an Anglican of some faith and I I I've read the reports uh of this they accumulated you know people send in religious expenses they've had and what's sort of astonishing about them because because they're also like Fatima and you know the appearance of the Virgin Mary to children and what have you it's the sort of banality of them I mean we would really like some answers about Quantum Theory and about the future and so on and yet when you read these reports say I was walking in White Room woods and the voice said you must visit your auntie next Saturday and so you think really well I mean and if you're going to come down to earth and give us a message you know tell us something interesting and the banality of them is and and the fact that they that they are always always within the limits of the imagination and experience of the person who has that experience that's the interesting fact about them which suggests that they are very very much products of the psychology of the person in question and the next question please is there so many who is up quickly that gentleman there I'm gonna rush you to the night thank you thank you uh do we need to be illusionists like Daniel did it to make sense of Consciousness in a physicalist paradigm or are there alternatives oh wow okay uh have you got breakfast organized by the way well as a matter of fact yes well um I have to say Dan uh Dan Danish who is a personal friend and colleague of mine he always used to say by the way something very well worth knowing used to say to my students when he came to visit my college he would say the weakest part of any argument is when you hear the word surely surely and then you know that something's gone wrong with the argument so it's well worth remembering that I'm not entirely sure that uh that I agree with Dan about the emergence of of uh what looked like or can be interpreted as conscious phenomena just from the you know the emergent properties from higher and higher levels of organization in the brain so the idea that and you can replicate to quite a large extent actually by very very simple elements and simple sets of relationships between them in a computer program you can get immense complexity um out of that we're very familiar with with that phenomenon and he attributes the appearance of of conscious phenomena to that kind of emergence I wonder whether that too because you know there is um there is something very functional about uh consciousness even though most of our cognition is non-conscious so we're processing information all the time at a non-conscious level nevertheless the organizational ability of conscious reflection and the use of memory for example selective awareness to things that really do matter well that does seem to be sort of functional and a very good example of this is the way that we all feel a little uneasy or maybe even startled when there's a rustle in the bushes as we're walking through the park at night this is because in our evolutionary history it would have been very wise to be alarmed just in case it was something that wanted to eat us so this would be a reason for having evolved an ability to pay conscious aware attention to selected aspects of our cognitive repertoire at any particular point and that suggests that there is something that the brain is capable of integrating and uh being self-reflexive about some of the data that it's handling and processing all the time which is a very good candidate for conscious experience I remember once um uh I had to launch Frank Ramsey's young sister Frank Ramsey who tragically brilliant brilliant young man died on the operating table at guys hospital at the age of 26 in 1931 I think it was and he had a much much younger sister she was fascinating because the Ramsay family lived in the president's lodging said modern College Cambridge because their father was the president of modern college and there was no small talk in that family never they didn't talk about the weather or anything trivial it was only about you know proof Theory and Mathematics and you know philosophy and probability and so on and so she had no small talk and she was there for a rather difficult guest at lunch as you can imagine anyway we're sitting opposite one of my ears when I was teaching in Oxford at sinan's college and she'd come as a guest and we were sitting opposite a colleague of mine a psychologist who himself um took a sort of rather donesian sort of view that there's no such thing as Consciousness there are only different cognitive modules separated for different functions and I said to uh to her I said um you know he he doesn't uh think that there is such a thing as consciousness and she said that's a very extraordinary View and I thought oh great I'm going to unleash her on him because you know she was a terrifically sort of forensic and would really have a go at him so I said well would you like to meet him and discuss this point and she said certainly not I I I wouldn't understand his point of view and nevertheless I wouldn't agree with it and that's a very uncomfortable position to be in that's a question please you know anybody out there who would like to ask her you know you don't have to but I'm just you know going to LEAP out there if you no okay somebody over there political ideas oh uh well I think they they apply directly I mean of course we're we're all conscious of the fact that uh politics is a an extremely difficult game I mean the one one thing that uh what one can say even about the very worst politicians of the worst political party and living memory and so on and so on is um that uh you know the metaphor of herding cats didn't even come close to the difficulty of politics and of government because the society you know we think falsely uh that there are majorities for anything in society Society is a great collections of minorities and individuals lots and lots of competing interests and desires projects plans needs and therefore to govern and in the interests of of everybody is very difficult so even a very well-intentioned government a government which sees itself as having transcended politics so that it's not just acting in the interests of its donors and supporters but is really interested in the welfare of the country as a whole has a very difficult time trying to meet all those interests and needs and in any case in in democracy or or sort of you know quasi-democracy like the one we nearly have here is one that is characterized by noise disagreement arguments some years ago I had a very great privilege to be a one of a group of people sent by the United Nations development agency to Bhutan after the last king of Bhutan had against the wishes of his people made Bhutan a democracy he had asked his courtiers to that was a joke but not true as well to being funny um his course is to make two little political parties and have an election and then they had a government and then the UN decided that there were going to be a conference with that government about the nature of democracy and my little offering was the sound of tyranny is silence now the sound of democracy is noise argument disagreement complaints uh discussion and that's therefore a sign of good health that there's something which is healthy about a society where that that does go on um we have a very unhealthy Society at the moment but there's a hell of a lot of noise so maybe I was wholly right about that particular Point yes to test to test to prove to subject to scrutiny okay ask challenging questions and and to look at the data to look at the outcomes of uh applied government policies in their effect on the economy on Society on great social institutions like the NHS and our education system and so on there are plenty of opportunities to subject to test to proof whether or not our government is working government policies are working and whether our political order is genuinely being responsive and sensitive to the needs of the country thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Greater Manchester Humanists 2

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Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023