Richard Dawkins on the Creationists

now in your book Richard the greatest show on earth you also of course talk about the creationists who have this theory that the world really only started 10,000 years ago and that your sort of views and those of Darwin are ridiculous and you have described them you've said in your book those who think the world began less than 10,000 years ago are deluded to the point of perversity I mean can you explain why is there a core heart a very large cohort of people who don't subscribe to Darwin's theories even though you know there is ample evidence to show that what he's saying is correct and they believe that the world just started ten thousand years ago well the ten thousand years is particularly egregious I mean but that's just dopey has just plain daft it's it's run by an immense margin as we talked about earlier the true age of the earth is four-and-a-half billion years so that the the degree of error is is just colossal and it falls foul not just of the facts of biology but but of geology and astronomy and history and chemistry and physics and everything mean nothing that we know about the world would make sense if it really was that young nothing that we know about the universe would make sense so it is an extraordinary piece of perverse illogicality and wanton ignorance it's very hard to explain why anybody would want to do that it the immediate reason is because they want to believe that the book of Genesis is yes I know the stuff about Noah's Ark yes yeah now as you know every people in the world has its origin myths its creation myths and and they're often poetically very beautiful and it's it's if anybody who studied a bit of anthropology would know that the judeo-christian creation myth which is what is in the book of Genesis is just one of hundreds of creation myths and there's no reason to believe that one any more than any other and there's no reason indeed to believe any of them because they're all written with benefit of science and they're all just plain wrong but isn't it that they have a they have in the Christian case they have a Christian agenda they want to spread Christianity in these schools we saw particularly during george w bush's two IRA's of administration that there was a very big push among conservative christian neo christian americans to try and get this into the educational curriculum to try and push this notion that the world only began 10,000 years ago well yes III mean I'm not the person to try to explain that it is the most remarkable fact that if you've got a political agenda of that sort why would you push something which is just manifestly absurd you could also and all sorts of other things you could push and they do a course but to pick on something so palpably ridiculous is that the world is only ten thousand years old it just boggles the mind in a way it boggles the mind even more that there are so many of them are they the Christians principally this is principally driven by American Christians or does it extend way beyond that well there are strands of each and other Christians in there's quite a bit in Australia and and actually in Britain as well so and it's not entirely American but I think much of the influence comes from America but they are pushing they are still pushing to try and get their theories of creationism taught in schools in America well yes they are it's difficult for them politically because the Constitution of the United States separates church and state you can't you can't teach religion in schools and so in in public schools so they do have to think of various Dodge's ways to get around that a lot of them homeschool their children take them out of school so that to to protect them from scientific education and you also mention in your book you talk about the Islamic creationists as well that was the first time I had come across that term because I've I told creationists of the theory but was usually associated with Christians Neo Christians what's what's the agenda of the Islamic creationists well I don't know much about that but my understanding is that they're taught that the Koran is the literal word of God and so it must be true all right well as most Christians are say most Christensen it's still true that most Christians don't actually believe it's literally true so there is that problem my colleague Steve Jones in London says he's increasingly finding that in his lectures on genetics he's getting kind of opposition from Muslim students who perfectly happy to learn about genetics but not not evolution there is there are Muslim creationists who don't insist that the world is old sorry that the world is young they are allowed that the world is old yes but they don't think that any evolutions happened I mean they think that the quick creatures all species were created as they are now but they don't necessarily insist that it was as recent as ten thousand years ago but they still subscribe to the view that life on Earth came about because of their particular God there was just an Islamic God or a Christian God or a Judaism or whether it's also from Judaism that that's their principal view yes it was that that all living things were separately created by God and what about you know if you go back to your book which is the greatest show on earth you also and talk about the likes of insects which has been very interesting and that flowers were formed from millions of years I think you described it of sculpture from incest it tell me about that the evolution of plant life well flowers are sex organs they are devices for propagating purposes moving pollen onto on twisting must remove it and the male to the female and their various ways of doing that and wind is one way and you just spray pollen into the wind and the wind just sprays it scattered all over the place and some of it happens to end up on the stigma of the right species but there are more direct ways of doing that and one of the ways is to bribe insects to carry the pollen give the insects a bribe of nectar or pollen itself actually because the insects may eat some of the pollen give it to the Lavi give them a bribe which causes them to visit flowers and then they go and visit another flower and if it happens to be a flower of the right species then it's a much more direct way of transferring the pollen and the real Silver Bullet way of doing it is to have a have an insect that will only visit one type of flower so it's guaranteed to take the pollen to the right kind of flower and there are certain orchids which are only ever visited by one species of insect and the and the insect only in visits one species of flower so they're highly specialized there are things that are the same and that's the that's the magic bullet end of the of the the spectrum there are some flowers that and flowers of course have bright colors and beautiful sets as well to act as advertisements to attract the insect so they are sort of bribing the insects and fuelling the insects with nectar to act as fairies to carry the pollen there are some orchids again that don't actually bribe the insects with nectar but mimic female insect so there are be orchids which where the flower looks like a female bee and male bee attempts to copulate with the flower because it looks like a female bee and in so doing becomes covered with pollen or get gets the pollen balls from the orchid and and then goes off and tries to copulate with another bee orchid yeah and there are fly orchids and spider orchid sand and there are other kinds of orchids and and it's all life on this planet evolving all the time or we as human beings evolving all the time for example well it's a bit controversial whether we want to say wherever that they're evolving all the time potentially or at all life evolving all the time but it looks as though actually evolution is is a very much out of stop and go process and it may go for a long time without very much evolutionary change and then maybe a bit of evolutionary change it may be quite quite rapid so it's it's not a slow and steady continuous process necessarily and so it's not obvious that we are evolving it at this moment we may be and we may not be yeah especially when you say that actually we've kind of been around in our present form give or take a couple of changes for the last hundred thousand years 100 thousand years is not long but by shakes gas

Channel: Karen Coleman

Views: 89,226

Rating: 4.8131738 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, creationism v evoluion, creationists, Creationism, Religion Richard Dawkins, Atheism, Atheism Richard Dawkins, Karen Coleman, Irish broadcaster, Irish journalist, Newstalk, Newstalk106, Newstalk 106-108

Id: gxv-H0s904Y

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2009