Richard Dawkins on evangelizing for evolution, science, skepticism, reason, and rationality

welcome to the michael shermer show it's michael shermer my guest today is the great richard dawkins new book is books do furnish a life writing reading and writing science as you know richard needs no introduction but i'll give him one anyways the author of the selfish gene he was voted the royal society's most inspiring science book of all time and also the best sellers the blind watchmaker climbing mount improbable the ancestor's tail the god delusion and two volumes of an autobiography an appetite for wonder and brief candle in the dark he's a fellow of new college oxford and both the royal society and the royal society of literature in 2013 dawkins was voted the world's top thinker in prospect magazine's poll of 10 000 readers from over 100 countries i have to agree he is one of the great thinkers of our time really of all time and certainly an evolutionary theory one of the most important since darwin his new book is a compendium uh or a collection of his forwards afterwards uh reviews essays commentaries on books mostly science books a lot of evolutionary books and so forth this podcast is brought to you by one dream our sponsor it's the former great courses of course you've heard me talk about that one dream is the expanded version of that it's a subscription service in which you can access all those great courses in their lectures plus documentary series and other content that they've acquired through relationships with other companies so it's really great for example i took this one years ago called the darwinian revolution apropos my guest today in which there are 24 lectures in which you uncover the remarkable story of darwin's ideas how scientists and religious leaders reacted to them and the sea change and human thought that resulted all right so 24 lectures 30 minutes each listen to about 1.25 speed you can grind through them in 20 minutes so on a hour commute you get three lectures or work out or walk or hike or whatever so that's great if you subscribe through my podcast you get a free month so this is the deal just go straight to onedream.com shurmur get sign up for your free trial cancel anytime in the future and you can give it a shot and you'll see it's like all these other subscription services it's great just endless content just to see of just flowing information coming into your brain through your earbuds that's great one dream w-o-n-d-rium.com shermer get you the free trial and now on to the podcast richard and i discuss of course evolutionary theory his conversations with neil degrasse tyson stephen pinker matt ridley and christopher hitchens the audio edition by the way of richard's new book is great because those conversations are recorded and they're actually played in the audio version in the book of course they're transcribed we talk about science books as literature and why no one has won the nobel prize in literature from the sciences talk about evolutionary adaptationists and hyper adaptationism spandrels group selection other kind of spin-offs of evolutionary theory uh and to what extent natural selection is a force it's not this is kind of a myth you know it's a descriptive term for things that happen in nature of course we talk about hitch and and richard's relationship with him and and what a great thinker he was religious truths versus political truths versus empirical or scientific truths and um and then kind of wrap up talking about the grand questions that is the mysterian mysteries or to what extent we can ever understand truly whether there's a god or not whether there's free will determinism what's the nature of consciousness what does nothingness mean we drilled out on this one super interesting subject you know a universe from nothing nothing what does that mean nothing no thing but what is the thing the idea of god that's a thing so in truly nothingness there can't even be the concept of god so what are we even talking about of nothingness so anyway i hope you enjoyed this conversation with the great richard dawkins thanks for listening yes well i mean hitch is just remarkable that he's able to speak in like whole paragraph long sentences that are just perfectly articulated as if as if he had written them down and uh yes uh you know so that and then also the um the interview you did with matt ridley and you know about genetics and and uh how people still misunderstand evolution but before we get into all that i i just uh well i'll have already introduced the book this is the uk version i think the u.s version has a similar it looks to separate yeah but any case uh i think of this as kind of a third culture book like uh our our mutual agent friend john brockman introduced this idea that um that book should not just be either scholarly or popular dumbed down versions but that in fact they should be just one version that anybody could read and that takes a lot of skill and i always think of your selfish gene as a perfect role model also pinker's you know better angels of our nature and enlightenment now or or matt ridley's books or you know a number of these dan dennis books you know those aren't the pop versions of the technical professional papers they wrote like jared diamond's guns germs and steel that's the only version there is and anybody could read it i strongly agree and i feel that scientists ought to do more to try to write in a way that's accessible to other people i think actually they would actually understand themselves better we scientists would actually understand ourselves better if we wrote it as if for a lay audience it's hard to do you know it takes a lot of uh practice and work and um you know it's it's a learned skill almost like i think of it as like people that watch american idol of all the singers or or any of the the kind of contests where most people are not good at this and they think well i could do that and then you see most of the people on these shows it's like they're awful that's probably what i would be like and writing is like that it just takes it just takes a lot of practice so i mean let me just give you i'll i'll read some passages from the book to give your voice a break here you open with the literature of science first first just give us the distinction you make at the very beginning of the two types of literature yes um this is here are two different definitions from oh uk yeah the uh so you have from the oxford english dictionary that kind of written composition valued on account of its qualities of form or emotional effect and then b the body of works and writing that treat of a particular subject so you provide some beautiful examples of these this kind of literature i love the first one you have from sir james jean in his 1930 the mysterious universe standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time our first impression is something akin to terror we find the universe terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances terrifying because of its inconceivable long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye terrifying because of our extreme loneliness because the material insignificance of our home in space a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea sand in the world but above all else we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own emotion ambition and achievement art and religion all seem equally foreign to its plan oh man was that your inspiration for your famous sentence about the the universe uh you know his blind pitiless indifference no but i think it's a very good example of the way scientists ought to write it ought to be we we ought to inspire people with a kind of poetic feeling about the universe or about life or about uh geology all about um i i subscribe to what i call the carl sagan school of science of science writing where you you try to inspire with the poetry of science rather than with the usefulness of science there's nothing wrong with being useful of course and science is immensely useful but that's not all it is and i think the poetic inspiration of science is something which we need to get across in which james jean does in that passage which carl sagan does in everything he ever wrote yes you quote uh you provide his famous pale blue dot soliloquy which you can find online in many youtube versions where uh people have um cut in visuals to go along with it and uh so carl right so that's so well known maybe i shouldn't have bothered to quote that really because it is it is so well known but but um i just think it's beautiful yeah you also have i'll just read a few others just to give an example of what you're talking about of the kind of scientific literature this from peter atkins in the beginning there was nothing absolute void not merely empty space there was no space nor was it was there time where this was before time the universe was without form and void obviously lifted right from genesis but emphasizing the point yeah um you know often you know just sort of listening to the interviews in the book and reading your chapters i especially um when you talk about like group selection and you know not in our genes this idea that you know human behavior and emotions cannot just be reduced to some material substance i still get the feeling that there's this transcendental temptation even among a lot of scientists that there's something else besides the stuff and and then almost like that famous sydney harris cartoon with the two mathematicians at the chalkboard and in the middle he says uh you know and then a miracle happens it's almost like in a lot of these these debates it's like and then you know consciousness and then a miracle happens well well wait a minute yes you need to be more specific here in step two exactly i think it's actually it's worse than that i think it's a betrayal of everything that science stands for because if if you allow miracles to happen then you might as well just pack up science altogether and just not not bother with it science is all about doing it in spite of the lack of miracles once you allow a miracle to to get smuggled in then you've sold the path you've given up on science you've betrayed science i think so and and i'm not just talking about supernatural i'm talking about even if you deal with the hard problem of consciousness which is a hard problem maybe it's just a conceptual problem i like the way steve pinker puts it you know it's not a scientific problem it's a conceptual problem namely our concepts about consciousness are uh you know such that we can't solve it in some scientific way as if the homunculus in my head could go over into the into the into your skull to see what the the red looks like on your screen you know i mean just these kind of weird ideas we have of what it's like to be somebody else it it's just conceptually not possible and i think you know just take something like the group selection thing uh you have a lot of several chapters on that and the problems with group selection and i've read ed wilson and and uh um david sloane wilson and the mathematicians and i follow the arguments along and then and then it's almost like they go and then a miracle happens and the group is all of a sudden doing this thing it's like wait a minute the group is just a bunch of individuals so yeah you still gotta somehow bore into the individual so i still feel but i think uh what a dan dana called that a crane right a crane reaches in and does something miraculous yeah yes that's that's right i got a lovely uh picture which i sent to dan uh of a crane lowering a cross onto a church i thought it was a beautiful illustration of exactly what what he's talking about i think a slide for him to use yes and in your conversation with with pinker you know you guys were talking about adaptations and steve pointed out that you know when he talks about art or music as is not adaptive just a byproduct a a cheesecake analogy he used and then he made the point that a lot of artists and people that study art and literature they find that kind of offensive like no no this is super important uh to the human condition therefore it should be adaptive they're misunderstanding what adaptation means just being able to reproduce and survive into the next generation and so on and uh and if music didn't evolve for that reason then somehow that that lessens it in value of course it doesn't but still there it feels like they're trying to say well this is a miracle happens and then you know music magically you know does these things for us or literature art yes i think steve is right when he says that i think he alluded to it just now that we have no right to expect that we should necessarily solve these difficult problems like the hard problem of consciousness or like uh quantum mechanics our brains were not if we're not adapted to understand these really difficult problems in a way it's a wonder it's a it's it's a wonder that we can understand so much as much as as we do at least some of us do not not not me in most cases but but um that some members of the species homo sapiens are capable of understanding quantum mechanics is to me a wonderful fact and i feel humble that i can't understand it but i'd have no right to expect to because my brain was not evolved for that and that's the point steve makes you call that middle land that we evolved in this uh middle-sized world and in the plains of africa where things move the side you know move the speed of say a running lion or uh we can see things say between the size of an ant and a mountain range so things like the speed of light and and subatomic particles there's there's nothing to hang those concepts on and our evolved brain so they're conceptually difficult yes do you think it's possible that if as children we were brought up with computer games which were kind of tailored to these weird things like particles going through two slits at once or something like that whether if children were brought up like that or put in another way suppose a child was brought up in the space station so they never experienced the pull of gravity um and they experienced gliding around weightless they we would all be natural newtonians we would have no problem with with uh um with getting newtonian physics anyway uh i mean the idea that once something starts moving it carries on unless there's some reason why why it won't would come absolutely naturally to us if we'd been brought up in the space station as it is of course we're brought up in a world where where we're ruled by the tyranny of gravity yes that would be an interesting well we're going to run that experiment aren't we we're going to have uh you know permanent space stations and people going into space and then children and but but i think the the deeper problem will be the point you made about middle land is that it's in our evolved nature you know gravity does certain things you know things are up and down and they move a certain way and that's just part of our evolved uh nature to conceive of it it's almost like then you have a long discussion in your book about nothing what nothing means like the passage i just read um i mean i mean you can't really conceive of nothing it it because to conceive of something you have to exist so you're something so just for example to say imagine what it's like to be dead you can't do it people think well there i am in my casket and and people are mourning or whatever no you wouldn't see the casket you wouldn't see you there'd be nothing it's like but but i don't know what that means right no it wouldn't it wouldn't be dark it would just be nothing right okay we're talking about nothing i i just want to um talk about that for a minute because you know you you had your conversation with lawrence krauss his book the universe from nothing and and again this difficulty in in in conceiving of that so i wrote an essay in my giving the devil is due using john leslie and robert lawrence kuhn's book the mystery of existence why is there anything at all and they really bore down on when you talk about nothing i mean so i'm in a room you take all the stuff out but there's still air you take the air out well there's still walls and so on so you you go out in the universe you take out all the planets and stars and gas and so on uh but that's that that's not even remotely close to nothing so uh it says kun says not just emptiness not just blankness and not just emptiness and blankness forever but not even the existence of emptiness not even the meaning of blankness and no forever and then he goes on to include if you're going to take some things out of the universe to make it nothing you'd also have to take logic and platonic ideals and even the concept of god so at some point there can't be a god if you really mean nothing and therefore there's because we think of it like well there's nothing and that god is outside of it but no there would not be any outside there'd be no god that's right i i think um lawrence's universe from nothing though uh he's not talking about absolutely nothing he's talking about this kind of i think it is how he phrases it something kind of boiling um winking in in and out of existence of um quantum events and things it's not nothing in this totally totally nothing sense you're talking about it's it's um that's one of the problems he gets into with when talking to philosophers and theologians um by lawrence's kind of nothing is not entirely nothing as many people would understand it there's there's a sort of what is his phrase about boiling boiling confusion of quantum events something like that quantum foam quantum foam i think he calls it that kind of thing yes yeah so there you know i'm i'm like you i'm lost you know they talk about quan virtual particles popping in and out of existence i don't really know what that means well i don't either but it's it's it's what you need if we if we're going to explain the the origin of everything the origin of well the big bang for example um you've got to have a quantum event i think he describes it as um if if if matter and antimatter can neutralize each other and turn into nothing then nothing can do the reverse and turn into matter and antimatter something like that um so that's not quite nothing in this in the sort of total vacancy that you're talking about yeah so so much of this kind of theological debate depends entirely on what you mean by the word you know so we end up talking about words not not things that are actually out there that's awful that so often yes right so i'm going to talk about um the subject you and neil discussed about to what extent people are irrational or rational and of course this is what i do for a living and study human irrationality but you know lately i've been kind of re rethinking this you know somebody who says uh you know i believe q and on been thinking about this lately because this is a popular subject and and you're familiar with q and on of this you know this kind of right-wing conspiracy theory about democrats running this secret pedophile ring out of a pizzeria led by hillary clinton where they're drinking the blood of children you know it just goes on and on it's hard to believe anybody would believe that and yet some huge portion of republicans like a third ticked the box that you know there might be something to this what can they possibly be thinking when they say yeah i believe that they can't believe these are people that hold down jobs they raise families they can write a checkbook they can balance you know they invest in stock market you know they're rational people they can there's something else they can tie their own shoelaces yes um i think it's part of it is a matter of loyalty to the tribe i think that uh and and it's not just them i i i'm again i think steve pinker makes the point that we we all of us to some extent hold opinions that we do not because we've thought them through but because it's our tribe it's what our tribe believes i mean i like to think that i don't but but i but i'm not that confident and the republican tribe at least part of them is is a tribe that believes these ridiculous things and it's not because they thought it through or even really thought what it really means but this is what my tribe believes this is what our people believe this is what fox news believes this is what qanon believes um and it's a question of loyalty to the tribe something like that could be it's not an adequate explanation but perhaps a partial explanation yeah i think that's right yes uh because we know from research on people that say they accept climate science and global warming or they don't neither one of them really knows much about climate science i mean it's a technical science yeah you know people send me these articles i don't really understand computer models and all the math and you know it's like i don't know but in a way when i say you know i accept global warming as real and human cause i'm just signaling i trust science and that the scientists working in this field are competitive and they try to debunk each other and somehow or another when they reach a consensus i can be reasonably confident they're probably right or on the other side i don't trust that that is more rational that is that is more mike what you just said there is more rational because you because you're saying although i don't understand it i i trust the scientific process peer review um people have examined the data it's not quite the same as believing in your tribe a little bit the same it's a little bit like that it's not quite yeah well it's it yeah it's it's kind of a way of of either trusting authorities or not and there's there's reasons why not to trust scientists all the time because of error and fraud and things like that but then you and i would counter but it's the scientists themselves who weed out the fraud and the mistakes and the errors yes you know most of the replication crisis was exposed by scientists uh graduate students or whatever working in the lab it is reasonable to have faith in the scientific procedure where experiments are repeated peer review uh or all the procedures that science has put in place to guard against bias to guard against uh just following what what you want to believe i think science is pretty unique in having these procedures put in place to actually immunize ourselves against the dangers of simply believing what you want what do what you want to believe yeah so this process works pretty well for let's call them empirical truths things that we can test you can see it i can see it and and you can run my experiment and we can corroborate or test each other but how do you think about say religious truths or political truths uh in a different way and and let me recap the story that i've been telling on this podcast many times hopefully it's not a a false memory or a conflated memory but i i recall that you and i and ken miller were at a conference together uh on a panel or something like this and and you know ken miller is a you know world-class biologist and also a catholic and he wrote this book about um you know darwin's uh theory and and and so on but at the last chapter he says i'm a catholic i accept jesus as my savior and so on and then if i recall correctly you said something about well if we had a piece of the true cross and on the piece of the true cross was a little piece of flesh and we could extract jesus's dna would it be you know since he was born a virgin right would it be something like apartheid genesis or would it be a full complement of d and and if i again recalling this story correctly i think ken said something like richard i'm not claiming this is true this is just what i believe i'm a catholic something like that he said something like that he said he said richard if there's a reason it's called faith that's what i remember him saying there's a reason it's called faith um yes i think i met the same thing with father george coyne when i was interviewing him for television he was the vatican's um chief astronomer at the time or maybe just before and we had a long and very very nice conversation and clear that we agreed about just about everything and so finally i said to him but father kind i don't understand why why you believe in in god and jesus and all that and he said i was brought up that way i can't help it um it was something like that he couldn't help it because he was brought up a catholic he wasn't trying to defend it in any way based on evidence or rationality or thinking it through it was just that that's the way he was brought up and i believe somebody told me recently that ken miller now more or less says just that that he has absolutely no defense for what he believes at all it's just that he's a catholic and so that's what he believes because he that's the way he's been brought up i suppose it's largely to the tribe again yeah because if you don't accept jesus as jesus's resurrection then there's no reason to be a christian that's what it means to be a christian you might as well be a jew or a muslim or nothing right yes yeah actually the phrase loyalty to the tribe um is one it is one that martin reese the astronomer is very keen on but he does not believe in god but he he simply uses it because he goes to when he was a ma master of trinity college cambridge he used to go to cu to the college chapel and that was related to the tribe but that's a different meaning of that of the phrase he that he that was not believing something because of that was just going through the motions just that was just simply turning up putting a gown on and going to chapel because he was the master and and that's defensible i i could imagine doing that myself yes i remember in the 90s we did an issue with uh an interview with martin gardner you know one of the modern skeptics founder of the modern skeptical movement and you know he was a fadist he said he believed in god and thought there might be an afterlife you can't prove that there isn't uh he agreed that atheists have better arguments than theists but this is just what he believes because it makes him feel better and and he did there's no point in arguing it because he's already conceded you atheists have the better arguments like okay then at some point the conversation just stops it's like well all right then what there's nothing to talk about i think he's a very idiosyncratic case i i was talking to paul kurtz about that once and paul kurtz said he doesn't really believe it but he wants to believe it because he he wants there to be an afterlife and so he's he kind of convinced he tells himself that he believes it because it gives him consolation something like that uh that was paul's um summary of martian gardeners uh belief which was a bit different i think i can't imagine doing it but but i somehow almost self-confessed wishful thinking yes i love paul kurtz's book the transcendental temptation because he shows in so many ways uh we're tempted uh to transcend the material stuff where we began this conversation interestingly i had jamie and swiss on the podcast a few months ago and uh he was talking about how paul got kind of suckered by uh kresgen the magician kresgen uh because kresgen uh he kind of hovered over the line of of i'm just doing magic and then over the line but i'm also doing something else and and kresgen would do these like mind reading mentalism things where he would have somebody in the audience hide an object that he couldn't see and but the person the volunteer on stage could see where it was and what it was or whatever and then he would like hold the hand or hold the arm of the of the subject you know the volunteer and then walk around the audience and he he claimed he could like read the muscle movements or you know some kind of special power he had but that wasn't it at all he was doing something else it was you know a much simpler magic trick and so jamie was talking about how paul kind of thought like oh he's got this but kresgen's different he's got this special and then you know he randy and jamie had to kind of sit him down and go no no that's not what's going on here and uh and then jamie jamie was talking about how audiences have become so sophisticated now for a magician you have to do something else like my favorite example of this was a banach would you know here's a here's a deck of cards pick a card any card sign the card put it in the middle of the deck or whatever and then and then he he holds his hand up to and go now look at my hand and then think about the card think if it's a spade or a club and think of the number as if he's reading your eye motions right of course this is all he's this is misdirection he it's a forced card trick he already knows what the card is right but but jamie was saying you kind of have to do this to make it seem more exciting more interesting like ooh i've got this special it's not supernatural it's not paranormal but i've got this kind of special power i can you know use to read what you're doing and and uh that was kind of interesting i i think um conjuring magic is actually philosophically quite interesting because you know a really good conjurer like like jamie himself for example you really feel the transcendental temptation quite strongly you feel it's got to be a miracle and no no no it's not right it's not a miracle it's just just a trick right but it's one of the most powerful um ways to argue with people who are who who are tempted by the transcendental temptation is to point out how a really great conjurer like jamie ian swiss or darren brown um can almost force you to think it's supernatural and and yet you that they're honest enough to admit that it's not yeah darren brown is especially good at this i mean his shows are so elaborate you just cannot figure out where the trick is it's in there somewhere and it's relatively simple i was telling jamie this story about being on a cruise on a scientific american cruise to the bermuda out to bermuda triangle anyway uh so everybody there is in our group was you know readers of scientific america presumably rational and so i'm having dinner with some guy and he goes all right i i'm a skeptic too and i don't believe in the spoon bending thing business like like hurry geller but i saw this this guy he did this thing and he twisted the spoon in a way with his mind that it's impossible he could not have twisted it physically so and i know this bit because jamie ian swish showed me how it's done you take a spoon and and you sort of twist it this way rather than that way it's kind of hard to show but anyway it's super simple and so as he's telling me the story i take the spoon next to me and i pull it beneath the table and i do the little move and then as he's finishing the story i said did it look anything like this and he's like and i could see in his eyes he was thinking you know i'm a skeptic too but this one thing and then had i not happened to know that because i don't know all the tricks he would have left thinking well but there is this little bit of magic left it's like no there isn't it's just you just don't know and sometimes i'll make the analogy like there's something about mentalism that's different than you know if copperfield makes the statue of liberty disappear do you really think he moved the atom somewhere people go well no of course not yeah right of course not but the spoon bending thing oh or the mentalism thing oh there's something special there no it's just another trick douglas adams had quite a nice story about um a man who didn't understand how television worked and so he got an engineer to explain to him how television worked the engineer oh oh the the the man believe there must be and there must be lots of little men inside the screen manipulating the electrons or something like that with um lots of lots of little men so the engineer explained to him how it worked and how it was scan lines and radio he explained it it's all to him and he said yeah okay now i really do understand it okay i understand it i expect there are just a few little men in there aren't there it was it was just unwilling to quite let go of the last little little bit of the magic yeah yeah it's it's it's there and most people don't understand things again i just think of this cut research by cognitive psychologists on uh when people say they understand something and then you ask them to articulate it like do you understand how an internal combustion engine works do you understand how a zipper works most people go oh yeah of course all right explain it they're like uh well the thingy goes inside the other thingy and you pull it up and they somehow you know i don't know right in other words they're kind of dumbfounded and again back to this more tribal thing you know it's like well i'm against nafta the north american free trade agreement do you know what's in it no or you know immigration policy or you know afghanistan or whatever do you know what our policy is not really you know so people think that they understand like like your whole lifelong program of explaining evolution in your chapter on ed wilson you actually make the statement i think he never really understood kin selection it's like how could ed wilson not understand kid selection but it's possible he seemed to understand it in the insect societies which was his book in um 1971 but then in 1976 sorry 1975 biology he treated this as a subset of group selection which it absolutely isn't and i think from then on he was on a downward path all right richard picking up where we were we were talking about the kind of misunderstanding of evolution i think people in natural selection people think of it as like a force instead of a description of what's going on in nature and uh you know some of this i attribute to um you know darwin's own analogy of pigeon breeders you know domesticated uh you know animal breeders because it implies that there is somebody top-down making these decisions and it's almost built into our language like natural selection is it's selecting for something but there's there's no selection in a top-down way and i think some of that misunderstanding about evolution is a result of the language we use you know um wallace darwin's co-discoverer made this very point and um wallis wrote to darwin and said my dear darwin um to you and me this is as clear as daylight but many people have such difficulty understanding that there is no selector and that was why wallis urged darwin to change his language and start talking about the survival of the fittest instead of which was herbert spencer's phrase instead of natural selection and darwin did that but he carried on talking about natural selection as well i think rightly so i think there's you've got to be pretty stupid to have that problem really i mean i don't understand what's so hard about making the jump from pigeon breeding where there is a human selector and i think that darwin's use of artificial selection pigeon breeding was superb i think it's it's exactly what was required and then it's to me it's just a seamless jump from that to say okay we don't actually need a pigeon breeder survival will do the job for us or differential reproduction will do the job for us um but you're quite right that many people do have that problem they they seem to think that that maybe i'm okay for a moment now well let me just um no i thought you said it you said it perfectly and and again i i agree some of it is the language you know like the survival of the fittest i think people think well physical fit strong fast beautiful smart yeah because that that's what darwin meant it was only later that fittest became defined by population geneticists as that which survives in which case it becomes a circular argument a tautology but the criticism that some creationists make that it's a tautology is again ridiculous you can show that with respect to the pigeon breeding or the cattle breeding if it really was a tautology farmers would be wasting their time trying to breed cattle to give a high milk yield because no it's no good you can't breed cattle with a high milk here it's a tautology it won't work um it's it's absurd anybody can see that although it might have become a tautology when mathematical geneticists define fitness as that which survives nevertheless you go back to darwin's definition where it really did mean the strongest the um the the cleverest the um keenest of eye uh fleetest of foot and so on then it does make perfect sense yeah and again i think uh you know if we think of counter examples like the we think well the eye is good and the and the more complex the eye the better and so on unless you're a blind cave fish in which case it's better to not have an eye because eyes cost energy to run and if you don't need them then not having eyes is the fittest thing or being you know small and slow and camouflaged and and dumb as a post if that helps you survive that makes you fit or fitter you know so again we have this kind of you know big brains the more brains you have the better not necessarily i mean our what our brain takes up like a fifth of our total energy consumption or whatever for the three pounds uh no that's it it it it's not necessarily so that organism should evolve brains so i did want to get your thoughts on directionality to evolution you famously you know wrote about the evolution of evolution but that's something different than say convergent evolution or is it inevitable and i know you and i had this little debate years ago about you know would extraterrestrial intelligences be something like us you know with a head and get appendages and they'd be intelligent or something like that um how do you think about you know convergent evolution and the inevitability like gould's famous rerun the tape obviously we wouldn't be here but something like an intelligent uh creature might might evolve again i think they're two different issues i think the the issue of progress uh is one thing the issue of whether we would expect to get um if we re-ran kaufman's tape again whether you would expect to get something like us um i think that's a genuine controversy which is interesting and on the one hand we have simon conway morris who thinks that um almost certainly if there's life elsewhere in the universe or rather there will be humanoids elsewhere in the universe there will be bip brainy bipeds with forward-looking eyes and hands um like us uh that's one extreme the other extreme is the sort of steve gould extreme which says nothing like us totally different um i'm kind of on the simon conrad morris end of that spectrum i i think that convergent evolution is so impressive and when you see the power of selection to produce oh pill bug um crustaceans and and millipedes looking almost exactly alike when you look at the australian mammal fauna with these parallels multiple parallels i find convergent evolution so impressive that i believe in the conway morris version of um the predictability of evolution but the other issue is the one of progress whether evolution is progressive and and that i think is more straightforward it's just that um progress doesn't necessarily mean progress towards what humans think of as progress which is things like graininess it's anything where you have if a and if a gives rise to b because rise to c gives rise to d if there's a trend from a to b to c to d that is progress even if it's progress in the direction of becoming less brainy or smaller or stupider as long as it's transitive in a mathematical sense then that's progressive now progress in the sense of building up something complicated like an eye um that's got to be progressive in the full sense of being becoming more complex because um you cannot get something like an eye in one fell swoop that's the whole point of the argument against uh against creationism it's got to come gradually because it's because it's too improbable that you would get something efficient something like an eye that works well to see in one fell swoop it's got to come gradually and that's got to be progressive so something like the evolution of an eye has got to be starting with very simple beginnings and getting more and more complex better a better and better eye as time goes on that i think is necessary it doesn't mean that it's going to be progress from the origin of life to now or from some very distant point in the past until now it's more likely to be relatively rapid progress may be taking only about 5 million years and then maybe starting again with another five million years starting another five million years uh so when the dinosaurs went extinct the mammals only took about five or ten million years to fill their places with progressive evolution and if the present mammal forum were to go extinct it wouldn't take that long before progressive evolution would produce creatures as sophisticated as the ones we see today by progressive evolution so maybe that would look like something like a gold punctuated equilibrium where uh you see these you know gaps in the fossil record then all of a sudden rapid change it's just a descriptive term for allopatric speciation where you get a founding population that's small and you get rapid genetic change and so you see these kind of halting steps but again people misunderstand this they think punctuate equilibrium it's this force pushing things along it's not a force at all it's like natural selection is not a force it's not like gravity it's just a description that we impose on nature to talk about what we observe happening in this case the fossil record um i remember seeing an x-files episode where some monster creature emerged out of uh some weird inbred family and they said oh that was punctuated equilibrium it's like oh my god you know how these things trickle down into pop culture again as like some kind of force pushing things along there's no force i think steve gould confused about three different things there's what you talked about just now it is rapid gradualism where you have allopatric speciation and um progressive evolution is happening continuously but in a different place that's one thing but he confounded that with mass extinction which is totally different nothing to do with it it's a totally different thing and also macro mutation goldsmith type hopeful monsters which again is a totally different thing and he confounded those three different things because they all in a verbal sense are punctuations but nothing to do with each other in terms of what's actually going on on the ground in evolution yeah sometimes it feels to me as an outsider that because natural selection explains so many things if you're a new scientist you want to make a contribution you feel like well i want to add something on top of that so gould famously said well we're going to introduce multi-level selection you know now i can talk about all these other things that happen above the level of natural selection operating on on genes um and again but that that's problematic because exactly how does that happen you know what's the mechanism underlying the higher level selection in the book uh let's switch topics i'm going to talk about christopher hitchens your conversation with with hitch was just so moving you know he's got that it's his last conversation he's got that raspy voice from his esophageal cancer and yet he still you know sort of hacks out these paragraph long perfectly articulate sentences it is so so beautiful uh just stunning um but i i liked your conversation about religion other things as religion so you know nazism is kind of a faux religion communism marxism as kind of a faux religion and now i i see people making these analogies you know that woke-ism is a kind of religion you know you have original sin we're all born as racist uh you know john mcwhorter makes this this analogy uh yeah or or uh trumpism you know it's like a cult or it's like a religion with a you know figurehead uh cult of personality at the top and so on do you ever you ever worry that that analogy gets overused yes and i think it's important when you use analogies like that to recognize that the only an analogy for part of it and so um part of what we think of as a religion is supernatural and that doesn't apply to some of these other things but part of it is uh tribal loyalty um fanatical devotion to it um punishment of heresies um you've just mentioned original sin which i like very much um by the way when i first published the selfish gene two clergymen came up to me and said that the my idea of the selfish gene reminded them of original sin i thought that was that was quite funny um well but and it's true that that you can make different i mean in in many respects stalinism and uh nazism were religions hitler had grace said before meals he said what it wasn't for what we are about to receive we thank the lord then the lord makes truth we thank adolf hitler for the good things that are placed on our table that was this is more or less exactly what what they what they had um stalin had a similar kind of grace a similar kind of prayer uh that wasn't supernatural um the cult of the kim family in north korea pretty much is supernatural i mean when when bears of the kim family were born you know everything the rainbows appeared in the sky and and birds um sang and and all sorts of miracle miraculous things happened so that verges on uh being a supernatural religion and i think it's important to realize that you can use an analogy in a partial sense it doesn't have to be a totally it doesn't have to cover absolutely all the bases and it doesn't have to be supernatural in order to qualify as a religion in many respects but not in all respects yes and of course we mean this in a critical way because say critical race theorists who claim that we're all inherently racist even if you and i are not personally racist that it's baked into the system it's kind of an original sin going back to america's foundation yeah yeah and and the only way you could atone for it is you know reparations or you know get down on your knees and apologize for you but i didn't do anything no i'm not talking about you personally all of us collectively you know again it's it is like an original that you have to atone for and accept this doctrine as your savior that kind of thing um and uh yeah i loved your discussions with dan dan barker's work um and uh you know the argument that uh that the resurrection must have happened because the disciples would went to their deaths so believing that it has to be true and then barker's one-liner rebuttal 9 11. people die for causes all the time this is pretty pretty normal that's a very good rebuttal i'm not sure it was dan barker though was it might have been um herb silverman maybe oh maybe that was it yeah yeah yeah i i kind of plowed through those chapters quickly but any case yeah yeah but i think the larger problem is explaining religion trying to explain religion is it adaptive is it is it co-opted of something else it's so big a concept it entails so many different things that it can't have one cause it's got to have multiple causes you know sort of like in your conversation with pinker you know how do you explain art or literature language there's many many there's not going to be a gene for language it's going to be thousands of genes because so many different components of language go into making it up same thing with religion you know so uh you know why do people go to church well you know their friends are going the spouse goes their co-workers are going the music is nice free parking you know and so on and so on and you know there's kind of a whole collection of of stuff that they get out of it and then maybe a little moral homily at the end of the sermon and you you know we're all going gonna donate and help this charity and you know that just goes on and on about the benefits uh such that i think you know when atheists like you and i think well if we could just explain why the cosmological argument or the fine-tuned argument is not sound they won't be religious i don't think that has anything to do with it because that's not why they go to church in the first place it has a bit to do with it i think but it's far from everything as you say but i think that for some people it actually is the reason they believe but for many people it isn't they just as you say they go for all sorts of reasons yes and again it's back to that religious truth it's just what i believe full stop i'm not claiming i could prove it i i would i think that's what most people think i think they haven't really thought it through like uh this has to be empirically true for me to accept it now some some christians theists and theologians think that so they come up with these elaborate arguments that you've engaged with in your books particularly the god delusion you know here's their argument here's why it's not sound and so on i think most people the average believer they don't really think it through that carefully it's just this is what i believe in the same way of you might think of an analogy of a political truth like i'm a liberal i think taxes should be reasonably high so we can take care of the poor and catch people that fall through the safety net mentally ill and drug addicted and so on that's our obligation we should have an open immigration policy to take in asylum seekers and so on that's what i believe is a liberal if i didn't believe it i wouldn't be a liberal i'd be a conservative and conservatives would counter with well this is our truth and i'm not sure to what extent either of those sides are true you know what's the right tax rate what's the right immigration policy i don't know is there some experiment we're going to run to determine that no uh i mean if this is your goal as a society then that model works better than that model but where did that goal come from in the first place we want a society in which everybody's taken care of or something like that i'm quite interested in the way all those things you just mentioned defining a liberal the way they all go together it it's not obvious to me why they should but it's true that if you know where somebody stands on one of those issues you pretty much know where they'll stand on on the rest of them and it's quite surprising that political opinion is so one-dimensional i mean christopher hitchens was actually an exception because he he wasn't classifiable on on a one-dimensional scale like most of us are but it i think it's worth the wait yes yes he you know hitch would change his mind his mind if you had a better argument or at least as he perceived it to be uh i would recommend on this one george lakoff's book moral politics that uh his again back to the the use of metaphors and analogies his metaphor is that um the the nation is like a family and that for liberals the family is like a nurturing mother family and for conservatives it's like a strict father family and so for conservatives the reason all these things hang together is that you know we are by nature sinful you know we're greedy we're selfish and so on and you need a moral um compass a kind of a foundation to to a moral society to be you know kind of drop down on the family by the father you know he enforces the rules and and and that's what the government is supposed to be like the president is like a strict father family enforcer whereas liberals think of it more of a nurturing mother so you take something like the abortion issue um you know that young women uh get into trouble they get pregnant or whatever and our job is to you know take care of them give them a reproductive choices abortion and so on to the to the conservative no no uh they they sinned they made a mistake and that they should be punished for this and never allowed you have to have the child and so on and where and and you know and no birth control just say no and so on or guns uh you know if you think of conservatives tend to say well we're in favor of small government no you're not they love big military big court system lots of prisons huge police force and and lots of intruder and conservatives i believe in individual autonomy and freedom oh yeah how about women making reproductive choices well not that how about gays being able to do whatever they want no no not gays right so you know it's a lake office the explanation is like they're not in favor of small government they don't want autonomy and freedom they want this strict father family structure as government and as a nation yes makes a lot of sense what's the book called oh uh moral politics i think that's the title moral politics yeah george lakov he's a he's a cognitive psychologist writing about politics and because in his model everything is metaphor we you know that all of life that we we make metaphors and analogies to understand things and you know what's an economy you know what's it what's a political system it's so huge that i can't get my mind around it so i have to have these kind of models or or or metaphors um you know so sort of like um jonathan heights you know five components of of being liberal or conservative and which of the five you pick and select these are just kind of heuristics to get our mind around a super complex system um yeah uh so i also want to ask you about um you know how science works you and um i think neil were talking about this um you know oh you mentioned falsification papery and falsification you know that that that theories develop along and as long as they're not falsified you know we gain a little more confidence than in them but i think more and more that it's not really preparing falsification it's more like a bayesian reasoning that we pile up confidence with more and more positive outcome experiments so in your own field of evolutionary biology where you stated in the book where you you're very confident it won't be overturned because after a century and a half you know we got like 10 000 experiments and it's not that it hasn't been falsified it's more than that it's that there's this huge amount of positive evidence i totally agree with that i think i think hyperion falsification i suspect that philosophers of science are misled by the the single example of newton and einstein they always come back to that to that example and it it really works for that right um but for for my field it's it's just a fact it's it's not going to change we're not waiting for it to be full to be falsified it's not that it's so far survived attempts to falsify and it hasn't been it is simply a fact that you and i are cousins of kangaroos and horses and pigs and chimps um and that's never going to change cannot it cannot change maybe natural selection isn't is just about imagine somebody coming along with another theory but but the fact that we are cousins of other animals sharing common ancestors that is a fact for all time [Music] nothing nothing poor parent about that yeah and this is why you know i'm reasonably confident that climate global warming is real and human cause because we have decades now of evidence piling up to show that from independent lines of inquiry you know it's not like these people know each other you know the scientists that works on clouds and the other one that works on glaciers they don't publish in the same journal they don't even know each other they don't go to the conferences to get their stories straight against those those uh conservatives that they want to overthrow capitalism this has nothing to do with it right you know i don't know if you know these conspiracy theories about you know climate change is a hoax and all that stuff but um but my confidence is high because of the independence of the inquiry that converge this consilience of inductions william ewell called it this convergence of evidence of independent lines of inquiry and i think evolution's the same thing it's not like paleontologists and geneticists are are know each other or publish in the same journals they don't um then i wanted to just kind of talk about uh how far you're willing to go with with science you know scientism is a is supposedly an insult or a criticism of people like me and i think maybe yourself sam harris d pinker you know let's apply the methods of science to understanding art music morality you know can you determine right and wrong and uh you know as you know because you've been critical of of the kind of progressive left post-modernism that there is no fact there are no facts in you know cultural truths or moral truths they're just these relative standards in the moment you say well how about female genital mutilation is that just a relative thing some people like it some don't and then you know usually you can you know you can push that so i'm just curious how you think about that charge of scientism and how far you're willing to go i i i'm really interested in that um i too have met scientism as a dirty word and um i mean sometimes they used to just as a dirty word for explaining anything and but you're talking about using science to explain things like morality um and i've been rather persuaded i must say by recent arguments that i've read suggesting that maybe you do need a premise like suffering is bad but yeah who's going to deny that suffering is bad i mean who's going to it it seems it's it's such an easy premise to accept and once you accept that then science takes over science takes over because we can then work out um what is going to cause suffering it's it's harder for non-human species it's it's it's we there's there's room for argument about whether earthworms suffer um and i don't think we can necessarily settle that easily i i do i do have an argument about animal suffering which is an evolutionary one based upon the idea of what it's about what what pain is for pain is a warning not to do that again pain is a negative reinforcer so the animal is pre-programmed with a rule that says if what you've just done causes pain don't do it again and that being the case it's by no means clear that an intelligent species like ours is more capable of suffering than an unintelligent species actually quite the reverse because if an unintelligent species would require more pain in order to ram home the point that you mustn't do that again you see what i mean an intelligent species yes might be satisfied with just a a red flag being raised in the brain saying don't don't do that again don't do that again um whereas an unintelligent species it doesn't have much in the way of brain power might need a really big shot of pain in order to ram home the point that you shouldn't do that again so there might almost be a negative correlation between the the braininess of a species and the capacity to feel pain suffer so this is a kind of argument um yes in favor of animal welfare uh it's it's more than just given them the benefit of the doubt it's an actual positive reason for thinking that animals might be more capable of feeling pain than we are i don't know if that's true but it but at least it's an argument you can put it's a plausibility argument i think we're animals so we can certainly suffer pain as we know but we have a meta a level of this we can think about the pain we're going to feel but uh it's more like your red flag example because people do not respond say to the death penalty uh like well okay we're going to impose the death penalty if you murder somebody but people that you know lose their their temper and they shoot somebody they're not thinking in some rational calculation in a utilitarian matter well i better not do this because you know 10 years from now i'm going to be put to death right it's it's too delayed yes so but my larger point here kind of following um peter singer and stephen pinker at sam harris myself uh you know that part of our moral progress has become this kind of meta level like well i know what it feels like to suffer that kind of pain so and i wouldn't want somebody doing that to me so i shouldn't do that to them this kind of principle of interchangeable perspectives how would i feel that this happened to me and you know singer's idea of the expanding circle we've just been slowly gradually you you call it consciousness raising just kind of aware that other people are like this and that somehow we probably shouldn't do that cause other people to suffer so and you have to start a moral argument somewhere so you start with the suffering like jeremy bentham is not can they think or can they talk it's can they suffer that's it seems like a good starting point i i like um peter singer's book um the expanding circle the reason you've said yeah so okay so from there then you you start down the road of like well can science determine human values what's right and wrong so you can start with something simple like is it okay for men to commit female genital mutilation against young girls no why well then you have a set of arguments and then most people i think would agree with that even cultural relativists would have a hard time saying no no that's none of our business people should do whatever they want uh but but but then when you move away from that kind of left wall of you know simple examples like that uh then it gets harder like to what extent like with afghanistan to what extent should we send troops in to protect the rights of girls in these islamic countries where they have sharia law you know well yeah we do have that obligation well there's 20 countries how come you just did the one well well because you know whatever didn't work out well yeah no no so i just want to get your thoughts on you know so current events like that to what extent you know how can you say that abortion is immoral or or it's moral or it's okay i mean those are harder issues you have the rights of the fetus to live the rights of the mother to choose you end up with these conflicting rights and here i'm not sure science can can determine what the right answer is well i think in the case of abortion you can say that the uh the capacity of a fetus to suffer is proportionate to its nervous system which is negligible um or totally absent um or even if it wasn't it's still a lot less than that of a full-grown cow or pig and so um if you want to be consistent uh if you're going to be against abortion you should also be a vegetarian um and many of them are not so so at least we can um we can make a consistency argument right so but then you have to draw the line somewhere um so you know in the court systems here it's usually the you know that before the end of the second trimester because after that uh you know the neural networks are pretty much in place by the third trimester probably the fetus can suffer to a certain extent and then you have this kind of legal notion of a personhood like for example in the the case of lacey peterson who was pregnant her husband uh was was convicted for double homicide because he killed her when she was in her third trimester pregnancy so that counted as a person in the third trimester so here you get this sort of difference between the way scientists think as you just described in a sort of continuum way but you know here's your your principle of of the tyranny of the discontinuous mind which is a problem in a lot of areas but the but the law they have to draw the line somewhere they got to go before this day you can drive and after this day you get you know or take drugs or go to war or vote or whatever you you and um and matt ridley were talking about wallace uh so i want to just kind of clarify you know i wrote a biography of alfred russell wallace you know in darwin's shadow which is appropriate you know wallace it gets back to this problem we were talking about earlier of adaptationism you know wallace was a hyper adaptationist he he thought everything should be explained as a you know adaptation by natural selection and he could not figure out what the purpose would be of having a brain this huge in which you're capable of doing mathematics and aesthetic appreciation and music and art and literature and so on what what's the purpose of that you know he famously said you could have a brain the size of a gorilla is perfectly fine for survival uh even for social relations and so on you don't need all this so that's when he imposed his you know higher intelligence he he wasn't religious in any traditional sense he he wasn't thinking of an intelligent designer plopping into the system that maybe there was some kind of force of evolution driving it in some way or you know something that we just can't quite understand so it wasn't that you know he kind of lost his mind or he got old he did all this in his in his 40s he was in his late mid to late 40s when he he admitted to darwin that you know i have this other idea and you're not going to like it and darwin wrote them back and said i hope you have not murdered your child and mine natural selection it's a great one and then he then in his 50s he got involved in seances you know back to jamie and swiss and magic you know if you don't understand how it's done it's just baffling you think well okay here's an example of the spirit world coming in and and he has a a drawing in here uh in his in in his little one of his books he wrote see if i could find a picture of this drawing where he's at this seance and uh well i don't have it here anyway there and they're all sitting around holding hands and he marks where the psychic was and then he was sitting here and then they kept the cabinet and they turned all the lights off and then whoa all this crazy stuff happened and and we were holding hands so she couldn't have done it of course and then uh then he had this other story this crazy story about his sister uh he he wrote this pamphlet on um the scientific aspects of the supernatural let's see if i can find this uh thing here and so uh in his archives there's i'm showing you here a picture of uh of the the the frontis piece which was blank in this pamphlet he wrote on the supernatural and then his his sister uh hand wrote in what happened to her with this particular booklet and i'll just read to you this while you give your your voice a break there so she writes this book was written by my brother alfred and with 24 others copies of the book was laying on my table they had been there four days and i had not had time to give them away one morning i had been sitting at my table riding and left the room for a few minutes and when i returned the paper parcel was opened and the books laying on chairs and tables in every direction i immediately called my friend the medium as you do and told her of it and then she said to write out what is the meaning of this though i can guess they are to be distributed and not lay here idle yes yes by nox then was wrapped out this sentence okay so this is this kind of rapping sound in which it's almost like a morris code yes right and so she interprets this to mean one for my sister francis i have marked it upon this i opened one of the books and looked through the leaves and soon found marks with a red crayon which i had on my table i then said if you could do this while the book was shut you could write my name in this book and while it lays under my hand in a few minutes i opened the book and found francis wallace written i said now dear spirit write my marriage name i shut the book and in two minutes opened it again and the second time was written francis sims her married name that's december 1866. oh and here's the seance where wallace says you know i was sitting right here and so on so to wallace this is like oh my god this is evidence this is empirical evidence look look look here's the here's the here's the booklet it's all marked up you know how did the and then you know he fell for the slate riding you know the you know where the the medium would uh close this this is a hinged slate here and they put a piece of chalk in there and they close it and then the chalk does its miracle you know this is all just standard magic stuff right but again he didn't know you know this is a this is a scam this is you know this is a game it's a magic trick right and uh so he has and like in his archives he has hundreds of examples of like that like those and says this is to him it's empirical evidence of this other life and that's why i think countering tricks are quite interesting philosophically because they they they are so powerful i mean much more powerful than anything that the pool poor wallace but but um it is disquieting how powerful they are yet they're they do have an explanation of course yes even among scientists wallace described himself as more darwinian than darwin um and in many ways he was i mean he he hated sexual selection in in is the darwinian sense of sexual selection he wanted it to be more utilitarian than darwin did darwin was happy to to allow that female whim should be allowed to have a selective effect whereas to wallace female wim was was mystical he he didn't like mr mysticism in in that sense he was a bit of a contradiction there well anyone that lives that long and writes about that so many different things is going to be but like you and matt were talking about darwin of course his product of his own time but he would be pretty liberal uh by today's standards compared to his contemporaries and uh wallace even more so i mean wallace was you know he had definitely a feminist supporting women's rights you know uh land nationalization he was very strong critic of capitalism particularly as it was practiced in england in the 19th century and and uh and and he was also weirdly an anti-vaxxer he had he had quite a campaign against vaccinations you know along the lines of injecting yourself with a piece of the of the virus uh as they understood it then uh you know just seemed you know counter-intuitive unnatural to him so um yeah anyway that's that that's it uh well richard i i know i don't want to keep you too long i i i just want to get some final thoughts on you know at this point in in your in your career uh you know to what extent can we solve the big problems like consciousness uh free will and determinism you know that that kind of thing or are these conceptual problems and we're just never going to crack them because we just don't think about them the right way i don't understand what a solution to the problem of consciousness would even look like um so i i don't know whether the solution will come from computer science or from biology from philosophy um we will i always hate the free will question i will get always get it when i give a talk i know i know i i like hitch's answer do you believe in free will i have no choice he said i think that's that's my that's right um i i read the stuff on it and um i i guess we have no choice but to be um to feel that we are determined um but we have the powerful illusion of having free will um so i i don't feel comfortable thinking about it but i i and i try to avoid the question as i say um consciousness maybe it'll just go away maybe it'll kind of dissolve um or maybe it'll have me the the problem that darwin solved and wallis solved the problem of the complexity of the illusion of design that's one big idea that solves a very big problem a very big question and i can't imagine if there is a similar big idea that will solve the consciousness problem i can't imagine what it would look like it may be you know we'll just kind of chip away at it in a in a rather desolate kind of fashion it'll kind of dissolve away rather than being solved in one fell swoop as darwin solved the consciousness sort of the the um design problem yeah it's hard to say um because you know if we came back a hundred years from now after being chronically frozen maybe the problem would be solved it'd be like oh that's so obvious you know like like huxley why didn't i think of it right maybe it could be or or maybe it'll just uh okay last last subject on religion you you published the god delusion in 2006 and you know since then the rise of the nuns the you know people with no religious affiliation has gone up quite dramatically maybe to a certain extent the influence of your work but that of maybe the secular movement in general has had some influence but any case if the trend lines continue do you think it possible that religion will simply fall into disuse or be replaced by secular institutions do we even need to replace it i mean is it is it you know paul kurtz had this idea well we need to build a secular equivalent of a secular church in every city where you can get buried and married and you know so forth and but i'm not sure about that i'm not either um it's a separate question and and um i i know many people who feel very strongly we do need something like that and they and they do want to set up kind of secular churches and if they want to do that that's fine i don't feel the need for it myself um will religion just go away it might go away in christendom um although in america i'm not so sure but there's a huge problem of islam i mean it it's a major force in the world of benighted ignorance and and uh there's no that there are beginnings of science i get i hear sort of rumblings from iran and from um egypt and iraq um that things may be beginning to shift but we've got a long way to go there you know the um translation project that my foundation is running translating um books for example my mine and other others into the languages of islam into into arabic and and farsi and and um urdu and indonesian um and there's big take up for them the god delusion has been translated millions of times sorry has been has been downloaded millions of times as a pdf translation into arabic that's a very encouraging sign um so there there are there's a sort of beginning to be a shift there i think um in in in christendom it looks to me as though things are going in the right direction quite a significant way as you say the rise of the nuns certainly in northern certainly in northern europe uh but now in america you know i mean evangelicals uh not to mention catholics are ringing their hands about you know losing members uh to which i say well good but you know to their in their world view well that that means the kind of decline of moral standards and values but really i think you know we've developed a pretty good system of secular values with the foundation of why certain things are right and wrong again based on human suffering and other criteria you know that uh it's a science really so and as for the idea that we either get our morals from religion or should get them from religion it's such a horrific idea whatever else we get them from we do not and should not get them from religion well right this week or last week with the fall of afghanistan you know there's all this discussion about well hopefully the taliban will adopt a new reading or understanding of you know women's rights and sharia law and so on it's like this is this just hope they read it the right way you know what what what right way it is quite i mean unless you know unless islam has an enlightenment like christianity did where they went through the enlightenment and they became much more liberal slowly you know the abolition of slavery and civil rights women's rights gay rights and so on christendom has gotten behind those movements albeit late in the game and slowly but they got there you know because they're modern people that live in an enlightenment influenced culture uh but the problem is islam never went through something like an enlightenment also the quran is the inerrant word of god so the only way it can happen is if they stop believing in it which i hope they will but it's harder right well christians say that too sort of but they then they they reinterpret the passages you know john three right yeah you talk about that in your book right this is what this really means you know you know when when jesus said this he really meant uh it's okay for gays to marry oh really is that what he meant because ten years ago that's not what you said he meant yes you know so the theists will make the argument for example that well it was the quakers uh and samuel wilberforce that were opposing the slave trade so that's you know one point for christianity yes but almost everybody in opposition to the quakers were christians they were what we would call evangelicals protestants and catholics they were totally in favor of the slave trade so it really came late and you can see it with the gay marriage debate because uh all religions were absolutely opposed all the way up until around 2011 2012 when it began to shift and then 2015 the supreme court made its decision uh to legalize gay marriage and and then most religions said all right i guess you know we'll have to reinterpret those passages you know so they get there so that's encouraging uh i mean i don't think we have to you know hope for the the absolute uh disillusion of all religion because it serves obviously serves people other personal purposes but just as long as you have a secular government where they can't impose their values on other citizens of different faiths or no faith that's the key i think but islamic states don't have those kind of constitutions like we have so just tell us what's next on your on your plate what are you working on november called flights of fantasy which is which is about flight okay fighting animals and humans oh all right oh nice all right very good so you haven't retired

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 42,837

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, Alfred Russel Wallace, artificial selection, Charles Darwin, consciousness, evolution, evolutionary adaptation, extraterrestrials, falsification, free will, group selection, natural selection, rationality, reason, Science Salon, The Michael Shermer Show, third culture, truth

Id: yiEYuTvzuHM

Length: 86min 47sec (5207 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021