Richard Dawkins: Best arguments against religion/faith of all Time.

[Music] if you don't mind can we spend a few minutes talking about about god that's okay so i'm just wondering i too get asked at many lectures my view on god and my typical answer is that sure there could be a god that's behind it all and what we're doing is physicists chemist biologists working out god's laws and if that's how it is i am thrilled to be part of that noble journey i then add by saying look there's no evidence for that i don't see any reason to believe that and if what we're doing is just working out the laws of physics or chemistry or biology and that's all that you need for a universe i'm thrilled to be part of that journey so the bottom line is you know from a sociological from historical viewpoint religion is very very interesting but it's kind of profoundly uninteresting to answer the deep questions because i feel like all i'm doing is replacing one mysterious set of words framed scientifically with another set of equally mysterious words that are framed non-scientifically now i should say after i say that i always apologize because i am all for hedging your bets i'm you know not beyond that at all um what do you think of that view well um [Applause] i think that the the sort of newtonian that we knew newton thought that he was he was working out um god's laws and he was demonstrating the glory of god's mind when he worked out the laws of the laws of mechanics and so on um i've i'm not so at ease with that as you seem to be because it does seem to me that if there is a super natural superhuman intelligence that worked it all out in a way that undermines the entire scientific enterprise because we are maybe maybe an evolutionary biologist feels this more strongly the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology is to explain how you get prodigious complexity and design from virtually nothing i mean we hand over to physicists when we can go beyond the virtually nothing to the absolutely nothing um but um but but if you if you start from if you if you say start from quite an advanced level bacteria and and work up to uh to mammals and and humans um we have a working theory which we know is true uh which explains how you can go from great simplicity to prodigious complexity uh and and finally to the sort of complexity which is capable of designing things of creating things of working out how to do things well if you are suddenly going to insert a designing machine a creator an intelligence at the root of the universe you've just undermined your entire enterprise because your entire enterprise has been to explain how you get to something complicated enough to do the to do to do design i think that religion teaches people to stop questioning i'm sure you disagree with that but the way i see it it is such a privilege to be born at all it's very improbable event that either of us were born we have the privilege of being in this universe for a few decades and during that time it is an enormous privilege to be able to understand something about the universe in which we live why we're here why we were ever born where we come from and i think that is such a wonderful thing to be able to do that i am hostile i can get angry about competing accounts which seem to me to not encourage that kind of questioning but instead to say this is how it is it's all written in the holy book it was written 2000 years ago and that's the end of it uh i i think that deprives people i think that is such a um a belittling a demeaning view of the of the universe and i think it's tragic that children are brought up with that when they could be brought up in a more open-minded way so that's one reason for the anger the other reason we've touched upon it it is that i do think that faith unsupported by evidence is a lethal weapon not doesn't have to be of course it doesn't have to be but it can be it's a weapon because possibly unscrupulous people can get hold of often young men and use them as weapons use them as human bombs the only reason they can be deployed as human bombs is that they have been brought up from childhood onwards to believe implicitly without question that whatever the particular religion is it's the details don't don't matter the point is that they do believe that it is the will of god that they should detonate themselves and blow up a busload of people or blow up a skyscraper in new york i don't think that any kind of reasoned argument would do that to people and i felt the presence of the lord i have had that personal experience in a way that whatever you say with fancy darwin talk i have felt it the way i felt this chair yeah how do you respond well i mean i i'm not impressed by that because there's a similar number of people who are hidden who brought up hindus and so i felt the presence of lord krishna and etc i mean that there are there are all sorts of illusions that the human brain is very capable of of creating and that's an illusion those people are those people deluded those people that say they have had a religious experience i think they are yes those people who say that we have experienced a miracle that god has interceded in the world yes most definitely that that's a delusion yes the notion that raising lazarus from the dead oh of course i mean i mean that that kind of story happens so easily it happens to this day there are all sorts of people reporting miracles all the time and and we don't you you don't believe them because it just doesn't happen to chime in with the religion in which you were brought up many people have criticized you and when they read the god delusion you for example you talk about the jewish god and you say genocidal homophobic racist you use very provocative the abrahamic god which is the god of the jews christians and muslims yes yeah you you are absolutely provocative on your descriptions uh read leviticus read deuteronomy i don't need to to do any more than just quote but is that a caricature to take the worst or the most fundamentalist literalist readings of it as opposed to the thousands of years of evolution of all of those religions two things to say about that one is that there are many people in this world who do take uh the bible or the quran lit literally and literally do think that you should stone homosexuals to death or whatever it might be on the and the other that's the first thing to say the second thing to say that even those people who don't say that those people who have as you say evolved have moved on they have moved on for secular reasons we've now abolished slavery we now give equal rights to women we now give votes to women that's nothing to do with scripture that's nothing to do with the bible that's come about in spite of the bible and people have now gone back to the bible and said oh we'll we'll leave out that bit we'll leave out that video although some would say some would say the end the abolishment of slavery was very much inspired by the bible even though slavery might have been the same but you've got to be joking because because what what you're saying is that you can if you look through the bible pick a verse you can probably find a verse that you can read as abolishing slavery and then you've got another verse that says you should keep keep slaves say you're picking and choosing that's all i'm saying we don't get our morals from the bible because we pick and choose on the basis of a modern morality which has evolved quite right to say it's evolved it's evolved for secular reasons and now with hindsight having evolved our morality for secular reasons we can go back to the bible and we can as it were rub out the bits that don't fit with our modern secular morality just don't don't read them anymore and that's what people do um we are incredibly social animals as i said before and and when somebody does you a good turn it's important to be grateful you it's important to pay back the favor and to express your gratitude and that i suggest might generalize the psychological predisposition to feel grateful when something good happens to you might generalize from feeling grateful when a person does something good for you and when the weather does say uh when um when an accident happens when there's an earthquake and your child doesn't die you feel grateful and you feel the need to to be grateful to something or somebody and that and you can't feel grateful to other people because they're not responsible for the weather so you can't conjure up a fictitious person to feel uh grateful to and that's a special case really of the idea that it's good survival practice to suspect agents in nature a lot of what happens in nature doesn't have an agent deliberately causing it a lot of it is the weather a lot of it is the wind um a lot of it is just plain accidents that that happen but when there are agents around and where those agents might be lions or leopards or crocodiles who might be lurking in wait for you i might be stalking you then it's important for your survival to attribute agency to things and that may generalize even to places where there's no agency and i've often used the example of a rustling in the long grass which could be the wind is actually most likely to be the wind but which could be a lion and although the odds are that it's the wind uh your best bet is probably to assume that it's a lion because if you get the bet wrong um if if you bet on it being the wind and your vet is wrong that then that that's that's rather tragic so um there may be a psychological predisposition to invent agencies invent agents where there aren't any and this then this same psychological predisposition generalizes itself to wind gods and thunder gods and enlightening gods and river gods and and sea gods and things like that which then become merged later on in cultural evolution into the gods into the named gods like thor and zeus and apollo in yahweh i would like to ask you professor what do you have to say to someone to someone who has met the risen and living lord jesus christ who has walked with god for over 50 years who received anointing of the holy spirit the holy spirit with the same consequences as the early apostles in the book of acts sir what did you have to say because i assure you for my life it has been no delusion if you had been born in india i daresay you would be saying the same thing about lord krishna and lord siva if you had been born in afghanistan i dare say you'd be saying the same thing about allah if you had been born in viking norway you would be saying the same thing about votan if you'd been born in olympian greece you'd be saying the same thing about zeus and apollo the human mind is extremely susceptible to hallucination monsters why throw around these sweeping statements about religion not the god of the old testament but religion itself being evil i mean do you believe religion is evil no but you say plenty of times in this book that religion is evil you said in a speech famously that i think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils comparable to the smallpox virus virus but harder to eradicate i do think that yes because what i'm talking about there is faith where faith means belief in something without evidence because if you believe something without evidence then that justifies anything you you're no longer vulnerable to somebody coming back at you and saying hang on a minute let me argue the case if you believe it without evidence which is what faith is then you don't argue the case you say no i'm not arguing that case this is my faith it's mine it's private i don't i don't dissent from it i don't retreat from it you're just going to have to accept it now that is evil and yet you spend so much of your time debating people of faith so clearly people of faith are interested in having discussions they're not just all blind believers insisting on their way of nobody said anything about all of them i mean the vast majority of religious people are perfectly good nice people as you are there's no suggestion i've ever made that all religious people are evil of course not there are many people who call themselves agnostic and i want to clarify this it's rather a confusing term i put up here a scale of religiosity from one to seven where one is i know there is a god and seven is i know there is no god and we've got a scale of intermediate agnostic positions in between four is exactly fifty percent number four agnostic believes that the probability of god existing and not existing is exactly equal number two is i don't exactly know there's a god but i have a very high probability i believe in a very high probability of there being a god i'm a de facto theist i can't know for certain but i strongly believe in god and live my life on the assumption that he's there a number six at the other end somebody who believes there's a very low probability of god existing but still not quite zero i'm a de facto atheist i can't know for certain but i think god is very improbable and i live my life on the assumption that he isn't there i'm a number six i'm an agnostic but with the same level of belief in god as i have belief in fairies or unicorns bertrand russell illustrated this with his parable of the celestial teapot he pointed out that it is impossible to disprove the hypothesis that there is a china teapot in orbit around earth around the sun between the orbits of earth and mars we therefore all have to be agnostic about the teapot theory but in practice we are all a teapotists i want to make it clear that the agnostic position does not should not be confused with an exact 50 50 probability position there are people who quite wrongly and illogically say you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of god therefore there's an exactly 50 probability of god existing it's like tossing a penny that of course is completely illogical just because you cannot disprove something and the teapot example shows that it doesn't mean the odds of it being there are 50 and you can quickly see that with the example of the teapot yes well that concluding bit rather gives the game away doesn't it all that stuff about science and physics and the complications of physics and things it all what it really comes down to is the resurrection of jesus i mean there's a fundamental incompatibility between the sort of sophisticated scientist which we hear part of the time from john lennox and it's impressive and we and we are we are interested in the in the argument about multiverses of things and then having produced some sort of a case for a kind of deistic god perhaps some god the great physicist who who adjusted the laws and constants of the universe and that's all very grand and wonderful and then suddenly we come down to the resurrection of jesus it's so petty it's so trivial it's so local it's so earthbound it's so unworthy of the universe when we go into a garden and we see how beautiful it is and we see colored flowers and we see the butterflies and the bees of course it's natural to think there must be a gardener any fool is likely to think there must be a gardener the huge achievement of darwin was to show that that didn't have to be true of course it's difficult of course it had to wait until the mid-19th century before anybody thought of it it seems so obvious that if you've got a garden there must be a gardener who created it and all that goes with that what darwin did was to show the staggeringly counter intuitive fact that this not only can be explained by a undirected process it's not chance by the way entirely wrong to say it's chance it's not chance natural selection is the very opposite of chance and that's the essence of it that was what darwin discovered he showed not only a garden but everything in the living world and in principle not just on this earth but on any other planet wherever you see the organized complexity that we understand that we call life that it has an explanation which can derive it from simple beginnings by comprehensible rational means that is possibly the greatest achievement that any human mind has ever accomplished not only did he show that it could be done i believe that we can argue that any that the alternative is so unparsimonious and so counter to the laws of common sense that reluctant as we might be because it might be unpleasant for us to admit it although we can't disprove that there's a god it is very very unlikely indeed

Channel: Free Thinker

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Keywords: Richard Dawkins, richard dawkins, big think, bigthink, educational, education, religion, atheism, faith, Ricky Gervais, Sam Harris, Creationism, The God Delusion, Atheism, Atheist, Science, Darwin, Religion vs Atheism, Religious, Facts, Delusional, Own, Atheism (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Religion, Debate, Philosophy, argument, funny, nice, cool, Good, debate, anti-theist, anti, theist, church, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, morality, god, free will, islamism, extremism, amazing, islam

Id: bdvoe0j4Hjw

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2017