Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion + Questions and Answers

good evening my name is Doug shed I'm a professor of biology at rol Maka woman's college and I would like to welcome to the college and to this year's Philip the memorial lecture this lectur ship was established by the colleagues and Friends of Philip the the late Theodore Jack professor of history at rofm woman's college in recognition of his long service to the college the lectur ship seeps seeks to bring to the college distinguished lecturers in a wide range of academic Fields who will continue Professor the professor the's own tradition of edifying and challenging lectures I was fortunate to have known Professor there he was a wonderful Larger than Life freeth thinker and he would have been delighted by the person who will deliver the the memorial lecture this evening this person is of course Richard Dawkins the Charles Sani professor in the public understanding of science at Oxford University Professor Dawkins was born in Nairobi Kenya and moved with his family to England when he was seven he studied zoology at Oxford where he was tutored by Nobel prize winning niiko tinbergen and earned his Doctorate at Oxford between 1967 in 1969 Professor Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California Berkeley in 1970 he was appointed a lecturer and then in 1990 a reader in Zoology at the University of Oxford before becoming the University's first Charles sonani professor in the public understanding of Science in 1995 Professor Dawkins has been a fellow of new College Oxford since 1970 this year marks the 30th anniversary of Professor Dawkins his Landmark book The Selfish Gene in this D in this book Professor Dawkins explained to a popular audience many important new ideas in evolutionary biology and did so in a way so insightful that the book in influenced how a generation of scientists think about Evolution the book is truly a classic in modern scientific literature Professor Dawkins followed the selfish Gene with a remarkable series of books including the extended phenotype the blind watchmaker my personal favorite the river out of river out of Eden climbing Mount improbable unweaving the rainbow a devil's chaplain the ancestors tale and most recently The God Delusion The Wall Street Journal said Professor Dawkins is passion is supported by an all inspiring literary craftsmanship and the New York Times book review has hailed him as a writer who understands the issue so clearly that he forces his readers to understand them too Professor do Professor Dawkins Awards include the silver medal of the Zoological Society of London the Royal society's Michael Faraday award the nakama prize for achievement in human science the international Cosmos pride and the kler prize he has an honorary he has honorary doctorate in both literature and Science and is a fellow of the Royal Society Professor Dawkins is an outspoken commentator on science politics and religion and among the world's best known public intellectuals we are delighted to have him here this evening to discuss his new book The God Delusion professor [Applause] dawers thank you very much is this microphone working I hope and expect that the high spot of the evening will be when you get to talk in the question and answer session but before that you'll have to listen to me for a bit while I read just a few passages from my latest book The God Delusion to set the scene for the questions I'm going to begin with the opening of the book from chapter one a deeply religious non-believer the boy lay prone in the grass his chin resting on his hands he suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the Tangled stems and Roots a forest in microcosm a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even though he wouldn't have known the details at the time of soil bacteria by the billions silently and invisibly Shoring up the economy of the microw world suddenly the micro Forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe and with the wrapped mind of the boy contemplating it he interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood he was ordained an Anglican priest and became a a chaplain at my school a teacher of whom I was fond in another time and place that boy Could Have Been Me Under the Stars dazzled by Orion cassia pier and Ursa Major tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way he with the night sense of Frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African Garden why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in One Direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer a quasi mystical response to Nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists it has no connection with Supernatural belief I often hear myself described as a deeply religious man an American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor whether he had a view about me sure he replied he's positive science is incompatible with religion but he wax he wax is ecstatic about nature and the UN Universe to me that is religion but is religion the right word I don't think so much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called einsteinian religion from Supernatural religion Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God and he's not the only atheistic scientist to do so inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misund understand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own the dramatic or was it mischievous ending of Steven Hawkings A Brief History of Time for then we should know the mind of God is notoriously misconstrued it has led people to believe mistakenly of course that Hawking is a religious man great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply L this is certainly true of Einstein and Hawking one of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is science without religion is lame religion without science is blind but Einstein also said it was of course a lie what you read about my religious convictions a lie which is being systematically repeated I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly if something is me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself that his words can be Cherry Picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument no by religion Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant as I continue to clarify the distinction between Supernatural religion on the one hand and einsteinian religion on the other bear in mind that I'm calling only Supernatural Gods delusional that's the end of the extract from chapter 1 now an extract from chapter 2 the god hypothesis the god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all f ition jealous and proud of it a petty unjust unforgiving control freak a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser a misogynistic homophobic racist infanticidal genocidal filicidal pestilential megalomaniacal sedom masochistic capriciously malevolent [Applause] bully those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror a naive blessed with a perspective of Innocence has a clearer perception Winston Churchill's son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of scripture until Evelyn war and a brother officer in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight unhappily it has not had the result we hoped he has never read any of it before and is hideously excited keeps reading quotations aloud I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible orely slapping his side and chling God isn't God a [ __ ] Thomas Jefferson better read was of a similar opinion the Christian God is a being of of terrific character cruel vindictive capricious and unjust it is unfair to attack such an easy target the god hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation Yahweh nor his insipidly opposite Christian face gentle Jesus Meek and Mild to be fair this milksop Persona owes more to his Victorian followers than to Jesus himself could anything be more mishly nauseating than Mrs CF Alexander's Christian children all must be mild obedient good as he I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh or Jesus or Allah or any other specific God such as be alus or Wan instead I shall Define the god hypothesis more defensively there exists a superhuman Supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it including us this book will Advocate an alternative view any creative intelligence of sufficient complexity to design anything comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual Evolution creative intelligences being evolved necessarily arrive late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for Designing it God in the sense defined is a delusion I usion and as later chapters will show a pernicious delusion not surprisingly since it is founded on local traditions of private Revelation rather than evidence the god hypothesis comes in many versions historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animism through polytheism such as those of the Greeks Romans and Norman to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives Christianity and Islam Christianity claims to be a monotheistic religion but you have to wonder sometimes rivers of medieval Inc not to mention blood have been squandered over the mystery of the Trinity and in suppressing deviations such as the Aryan heresy Aras of Alexandra Alexandria in the 4th Century ad denied that Jesus was consubstantial I.E of the same substance or Essence with God what a Earth could this possibly mean you're probably asking substance what substance what exactly do you mean by Essence very little seems the only reasonable reply yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century and the emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of aras's book should be burned splitting Christendom by splitting hairs such has ever been the way of theology do we have one God in three parts or three gods in one the the Catholic encyclopedia clears up the matter for us in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning in the unity of the godhead there are three persons the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit these three persons being truly distinct one from another thus in the words of the athanasian Creed the father is God the son is God and the Holy Spirit is God and yet there are not three Gods but one God as if that were not clear enough the encyclopedia quotes the thirr Century theologian St Gregory The Miracle Worker there is therefore nothing created nothing subject to another in the Trinity nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed but had entered afterwards therefore the sun has never been without the father nor the son without the spirit and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever whatever Miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname they were not miracles of honest lucidity his words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavor of theology which unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship has not moved on in 18 centuries Thomas Jefferson as so often got it right when he said ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them and no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity it is the mere Abracadabra of the mountain Banks calling themselves the priests of Jesus Jefferson heaped ridicule on the doctrine that as he put it there are three gods in his critique of Calvinism but it is especially the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity that pushes its recurrent flirtation with polytheism towards runaway inflation the Trinity is are joined by Mary Queen of Heaven A goddess in all but name who surely runs God himself a close second as a target of prayers the pantheon is further swollen by an army of saints whose intercessory power makes them if not demigods well worth approaching on their own specialist subjects the Catholic Community Forum helpfully lists 5,120 Saints together with their areas of expertise which include abdominal pains abuse victims anorexia arms dealers blacksmiths broken bones bomb technicians and bow disorders to venture no further than the bees Pope John Paul II created more Saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together and he had a special Affinity with the Virgin Mary his polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima a maternal hand guided the bullet one cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether others might think the team of Surgeons who operated on him for 6 hours deserved at least a share of the credit but perhaps their hands too were maternally guided the relevant point is that it wasn't just our lady who in the Pope's opinion guided the bullet but specifically Our Lady of Fatima presumably our lady of Lord Our Lady of guadaloop Our Lady of meori Our Lady of Akita Our Lady of ziton Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of KN were busy on other errands at the time well chapter 3 debunks the arguments for the existence of God leaving that on one side chapter 4 why there almost certainly is no God is hard to compress into a brief reading and I'll have to leave that as well chapter five is about the interesting question of why people are religious because actually most people are chapter six and why are most people moral to the extent that people are chapter seven the good book and the changing moral Zeitgeist I shall read a little bit from that I'm keeping a tally of the people walking out I think it's about three or four so far there are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living one is by direct instruction for example through the Ten Commandments which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America's Boondocks the other is by example God or some other biblical character might serve as to use the Contemporary jargon a role model both scriptural Roots if follow through religiously encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person whether religious or not would find I can put it no more gently obnoxious Abraham was the founding father of all three great monotheistic religions his patriarchal status renders him only somewhat less likely than God to be taken as a role model but what modern moralist would wish to follow him God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed for son Abraham built an altar put firewood upon it and Trust Isaac up on top of the wood his murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel Dr atically intervened with the news of a last minute change of plan God was only joking after all tempting Abraham and testing his faith a modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma by the standards of modern morality this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships and the first recorded use of the neurenberg defense I was only obeying orders yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact and the appropriate response is twofold first many many people even to this day do take take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us especially in the United States and in the Islamic World second if not as literal fact how should we take the story as an allegory then an allegory for what surely nothing praiseworthy as a moral lesson but what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story remember all I'm trying to establish for the moment is that we do not as a matter of fact derive our morals from scripture or if we do we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty but then we must have some independent Criterion for deciding which are the moral bits a Criterion which wherever it comes from cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not apologists even seek to salvage some decency for the god character in this deplorable tale wasn't it good of God to spare Isaac's life at the last minute in the unlikely event that any of my readers are persuaded by this obscene piece of special pleading I refer them to another story of human sacrifice which ended more unhappily in Judges chapter 11 the military leader jeffa made a bargain with God that if God would guarantee Jeff's victory over the ammonites jeffa would without fail sacrifice as a burnt offering whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me when I return jeffa did indeed defeat the ammonites with a very great Slaughter as his power for the course in the Book of Judges and he returned home Victorious not surprisingly his daughter his only child came out of the house to greet him with timberl and dances and alas she was the first living thing to do so understandably Jeff the rent his clothes but there was nothing he could do about it God was obviously looking forward to the promised burnt offering and in the circumstances the daughter very decently agreed to be sacrificed she asked only that she should be allowed to go into the mountains for two months to bewail her virginity at the end of this time she meekly returned and jeffa cooked her God did not see fit to intervene on this occasion God's Monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival God res resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind and again it should strike a modern moralist as far from good role model material the temptation to sexual infidelity is readily understandable even to those who do not succumb and it's a staple of fiction and drama from Shakespeare to bedroom F but the Apparently irresistible temptation to [ __ ] with foreign Gods is something we moderns find harder to empathize with to my naive eyes Thou shalt have no no other gods but me would seem an easy enough commandment to keep a dole one might think compared with Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife or her ass or her Ox yet throughout the Old Testament with the same predictable regularity as in bedroom fast God had only to turn his back for a moment and the children of Israel would be offened at it with Baal or some trolip of a Graven image or on some on one calamitous occasion a golden Cal there then follows a section on Moses which I'm going to cut go on to the end of the Moses [Applause] section the ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses is brought to bloody fruition in the Book of Joshua a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so as the Charming old song exultantly has it Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho and the walls came a tumbling down there's none like good old Joshua at the Battle of Jericho good old Joshua didn't rest until they utterly destroyed all that was in the city both man and woman young and old and ox and sheep and ass with the edge of the sword Joshua 6 21 yet again theologians will protest it didn't happen well no the story has it that the walls came tumbling down at the mere sound of men shouting and blowing horns so indeed it didn't happen but that is not the point the point is that whether true or not the Bible is held up to us as the source of our morality and the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of the laan's r of Jericho and the invasion of the promised land in general is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds and the marsh Arabs the Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals as it happens the story of Joshua in Jericho is the subject of an interesting experiment in child morality by the Israeli psychologist George Tamarin Tamarind presented to more than a thousand Israeli school children aged between 8 and 14 The Book of Joshua's account of the Battle of Jericho he then asked the children a simple moral question do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not they had to choose between a total approval B partial approval and C total disapproval the results were polarized 66% gave total approval and 26% total disapproval with rather fewer 8% in the Middle with partial approval approval here are three typical answers from the total approval a group in my opinion Joshua and the sons of Israel acted well and here are the reasons God promised them this land and gave them permission to conquer if they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone then there would be the danger that the sons of Israel would have assimilated among the [ __ ] in my opinion Joshua was right when he did it one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth the justification for the genocidal Massac by Joshua is religious in every case even those in category C who gave total disapproval did so in some cases for backhanded religious reasons one girl for example disapproved of Joshua's conquering Jericho because in order to do so he had to enter it I think it is bad since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure Land one will also become impure and share their curse Tamarin ran a fascin a in control group in his experiment a different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from The Book of Joshua but with Joshua's own name replaced by General Lynn and Israel replaced by a Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago now the experiment gave opposite results only 7% approved of General Lynn's behavior and 75% disapproved in other words when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgments that most modern humans would share Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide but it all looks different from a religious point of view and the difference starts early in life it was religion that made the difference between the children condemning genocide and condoning it do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it the following offenses Merit the death penalty according to Leviticus 20 cursing your parents committing adultery making love to your stepmother or your daughter-in-law homosexuality marrying a woman and her daughter bestiality and to add injury to insult the unfortunate Beast is to be killed too you also get executed of course for working on the Sabbath the point is made again and again throughout the Old Testament in numbers 15 the children of Israel found a man in the wilderness Gathering sticks on the Forbidden day they arrested him and then asked God what to do with him as it turned out God was in no mood for half measures that day and the Lord said unto Moses The man shall surely be put to death all the congregation shall Stone him with stones without the camp and all the congregation brought him without the camp and stoned him with stones and he died did this harmless gatherer of firewood have a wife and children to grieve for him did he whimper with fear as the first Stones flew and scream with pain as the fusel ad crashed into his head what shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened they probably didn't what makes my jaw drop is that people today should should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh and even worse that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster whether fact or fiction on the rest of us I'm going to skip the remaining chapters now to the last chapter uh and the very last section of the last chapter the mother of all burkers one of the unhappiest spectacles to be seen on our streets today is the image of a woman SED in shapeless black from head to toe peering out at the world through a tiny slit I should say that the streets that I normally walk are the streets of England it probably isn't the case here the burka is not just an instrument of Oppression of women and claustral repression of their Liberty and their beauty not just a token of egregious male cruelty and tragically cow female submission I want to use the narrow slit in the veil as a symbol of something else our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum visible light is a [ __ ] of brightness in the vast dark Spectrum from radio waves at the long end to gamma rays at the short end quite how narrow is hard to appreciate and a challenge to convey imagine a giant black Burker with a vision slit of approximately the standard width say about 1 in if the length of black cloth above the slit represents the shortwave end of the invisible spectrum and if the length of black cloth below the slit represents the longwave portion of the invisible Spectrum how long would the burka have to be in order to accommodate a 1-in slit to the same scale it's hard to represent it sensibly without invoking logarithmic scales so huge are the lengths we're dealing with the last chapter of a book like this is no place to start tossing logarithms around but you can take it from me that it would be the mother of all burkers the 1-in window of visible light is derly Tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth representing the invisible part of the spectrum from radio waves at the Hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head what science does for us is to widen the window it opens up so wide that the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely exposing our senses to Airy and exhilerating freedom optical telescopes use glass lenses and mirrors to scan the heavens and what they see is stars that happen to be radiating in the narrow bound of wavelengths that we call visible light but other telescopes see in the X-ray or radio wavelengths and present to us a cornucopia of alternative night skies on a smaller scale cameras with appropriate filters can see in the ultraviolet and take photographs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots that are visible too and seemingly designed for insect eyes but which our uned eyes can't see at all insect eyes have a spectral window of similar width to ours but slightly shifted up the burka they are blind to red and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do into the ultrav Scarlet Garden the metaphor of the narrow window of light broadening out into a spectacularly wide spectrum serves Us in other areas of science we live near the center of a cavernous Museum of magnitudes viewing the world with sense organs and nervous systems that are equipped to perceive and understand only a small middle range of sizes moving at a middle range of speeds we are at home with objects ranging in size from a few Kil MIM the view from a Mountaintop to about a tenth of a millimeter the point of a pin outside this range even our imagination is handicapped which fortunately we could and we need sorry outside this range even our imagination is handicap and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics which fortunately we can learn to deploy the range of sizes distances or speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible from the scale of quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of einsteinian cosmology at the larger our imaginations are forly underere equipped to cope with distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally familiar we try to visualize an electron as a tiny ball in orbit around a larger cluster of balls representing protons and neutrons that isn't what it is like at all electrons are not like little balls they are not like anything we recognize it isn't clear that like even means anything when we try to fly too close to reality's further Horizons our imaginations are not yet tooled up to penetrate the neighborhood of the quantum nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter as we are evolved to think ought to behave nor can we cope with the behavior of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light common sense lets us down because Common Sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast and nothing is very small or very large the mundane world of the familiar which I have dubbed middle world at the end of a famous essay on possible Worlds the great biologist JBS haldan wrote now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose I suspect that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of or can be dreamed of in any philosophy how should we interpret hans's queerer than we can suppose queerer than can in principle be supposed or just querer than we can suppose given the limitation of our brains evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle world could we by training and practice emancipate ourselves from middle world tear off our black Burker and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as just mathematical understanding of the very small the very large and the very fast I genuinely don't know the answer but I'm thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding even better we may eventually discover that there are no limits thank you very much professor professor Dawkins will take questions uh we'll ask you to line up at the two mic phones introduce yourself and concisely ask your question is it possible to have the house lights up a bit so I can see um people are asking questions hello is this microphone on I'm uh Dr Howell it's good to have heard your talk I really appreciate hearing this I should like to hear more of you uh because the more you talk the more you convince me that there is a God and you crystallize our need for him I'm glad I have some effect anyway um as a scientist I'm a bit disturbed that you would go on a TI raade for 40 minutes against God so could you talk a bit more clearly I can't quite sure as a scientist I'm a bit upset by the fact that you had G on a 40-minute tiate against God and then begin talking of science as if to put the authority of science into what you said but I do have a question about your long discussion about morality and it coming from the the Bible and that you you accuse people I suppose Christians of saying that we get our morality from the scriptures um but clearly this cannot be the case because Humanity from every civilization throughout time has a sense of morality and clearly most of them have had not have not had access to the Bible so I'm curious then um what you think is the origin of this morality if someone comes in here with a gun and begin shooting all of us we would call that bad why why is that bad um I think we probably agree that people don't as a matter of fact get their morality from scriptures and that's what I was actually saying people get their morality from somewhere quite other than the than the scriptures uh and to the extent that they do get their morality from the scriptures as I was saying they pick and choose now if you're asking me where we get our morality from I think that's an extremely complicated question and one that I'm very interested in I've got a whole chapter on it in the book which I didn't have time to read from I think that a sort of Bedrock of it probably comes from our darwinian her AG as a kind of misfiring byproduct of our darwinian past when we lived in small villages or small roving bands which meant that we were surrounded by close kin and that as you no doubt know uh is one good prerequisite for the evolution of altruism under darwinian rules and also in those small villages or roving bands we would have been surrounded by people whom we are likely to meet again and again throughout our life which provides the basis for the other main darwinian reason to be moral or altruistic that I think is the darwinian origin and I suspect that although we no longer live in small bands the same rule of thumb rules of thumb which were honed in our darwinian past are playing themselves out under the alien conditions of Modern urban Society the rule of thumb used to be be nice to every one you meet because everyone you meet is likely to be either a cousin and or somebody you're going to meet again and again and therefore in a position to reciprocate Darwinism doesn't forecast doesn't suggest that we should be all wise and do what is actually going to be best for our selfish genes instead it says that it builds into our brains rules of thumb which worked in our ancestral past that rule of thumb be nice to everybody is still in our brain brains it is a lust which is rather similar to sexual lust which is still in our brains even though we may use contraception and therefore are not actually using culation to reproduce the same rule of thumb persists and that is also true of the lust to be good the lust to be nice that I think is the darwinian origin but I think that it's become modified and refined through culture through civilization until it shows itself in the much more sophisticated and actually much more pleasant uh rules for being nice that we see today wherever else it comes from it certainly doesn't come from scripture and that was the only point I was trying to make from that particular reading well hello there oh welcome to welcome to America uh I I'm I've been reading your book I I've been reading your book and I I think you're a terrific writer and I got to say listening to you in person in that accent and everything man now I just think you're brilliant but um I thought they'd be a botch yesterday I know I well it's it's Lynchberg um well I I am I am a theist uh you'll be disappointed to know but uh my you know how um ber and Russell you know said that if he faced God he'd ask you know where you know he didn't give enough evidence where was the evidence and all that uh a couple pieces of evidence that I I would just kind of be interested to hear hear what you think about um pertaining to this issue of Ethics I read this chapter on on Ethics in your book I found it interesting um I mean you were dealing with the the origin of our moral sense more so than I think the origin of morality itself you you'd probably agree right um so so you know you still wonder what is it about the world that makes some things you know right and and some things wrong some things good some's bad and and you know you want to retain the language of of some things are evil and you give a lot of religious examples and I'm I'm in agreement with you on some of you know um but if we're going to retain these categories these very strong you know moral categories it it seems to me that naturalism is going to be very hard pressed to kind of provide an account um for for where real good and evil would would be I mean um I'm not sure how how entirely we can simply assert the existence of value without providing a deeper account for it and one other moral Freedom as well uh it seems to me that if the naturalist is kind of um Shackled you know I mean a naturalistic world it would seem as if we're just bound and determined to behave just the way that we do Mor if morality is all about ought and ought implies can how can we ever do anything other than exactly what it is that we do so I'd be real interested in your responses to those things well I think it's a problem for all of us I mean not not not just for naturalists and I think it is actually fairly baffling where our morality comes from and why we're in fact as nice as we are mean the Professionals in this field are moral philosophers and moral philosophers the majority of them are are not theologically inclined I mean they tend to develop ideas the simplest of all the one the one all know about is the is the Golden Rule behave to others as you would wish they should behave to you and moral philosophers have developed other such principles um uh always oppose suffering um always uh behave as if you didn't know whether you were going to be at the top of the pecking order or the bottom these are all moral precepts which moral philosophers have developed now it's a genuinely difficult question why any individual should wish to follow such moral precepts if I ask myself I'm actually a very moral person I think and I'm sure most of you are to um if I ask myself why I don't steal why I pay my taxes why I do the all the things that keep Society going I suppose it's a slightly irrational feeling that I wouldn't wish to live in the kind of society where people behav in the sort of ways that I wouldn't wish them to be to behave in and therefore I shouldn't behave in those ways either and that isn't entirely rational because if I behave in an antisocial way then that doesn't actually stop anybody else doing the nice things to me that um well maybe it does and that that could could be the problem but it is a genuinely difficult problem why we are moral all that I wish to assert today is that um is that religion certainly doesn't help or if it does I mean if there's anybody here who thinks that they're moral purely because they're frightened of what God might do if they're not I mean that's a pretty contempt reason to be moral and and I don't think we probably have much respect for people who only behave well because of the great surveillance camera in the sky um so I think that that that I'm sure all all of us here are are moral for for better reasons than than that although I quite agree with the questioner it's genuinely difficult to decide uh why why we are thank goodness we are [Applause] [Music] good evening Professor Dawkins my name is Thomas lowski I come from Thomas Jefferson's University here to ask you a question Richard atheists have a PR problem they are among the most distrusted minorities in the US many many people equate atheism with immorality and pessimism they ask what good has atheism done atheism is so cold I don't find any comfort from those who do not believe in God some have attempted to answer these criticisms with new life stances such as humanism or the Church of reality they assert there will be there will not be widespread apostasy until there is a replacement for religion Sam Harris says we must find ways of meeting our needs that do not require the abject Embrace of the of the Preposterous further he says we must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to Mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity birth marriage death without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality so my question is do you what is your view of that assertion that there will not be widespread apostasy until we find a replacement for religion yes thank you that's an extremely interesting question um a very important one if it is the case that people find consolation and comfort in religion then I'm not in the least surprised but note that that doesn't in any way imply that religious beliefs are true what is comforting and what is true are two entirely different things it's important to get that out of the way first because there are people I'm sorry to say who can't tell the difference between that which is comforting and that which is true um if you don't see the point uh imagine a doctor telling you you're absolutely fine when actually you've got terminal cancer there are people who would wish their doctor to lie to them um but um th those people who would not wish their doctor to lie to them should not be sympathetic to the idea that um that that religion has value simply because it is comforting or consoling now the questioner quotes Sam Harris as by the way I strongly recommend his books um the end of faith and letter to a Christian Nation both utterly brilliant books Sam Harris um says we need to replace the um various roles of religion uh Comfort might be one of them ritual might be another uh rights of Passage U marriages funerals and so on might be another to the extent that humans do need ritual and do need uh public meetings to Signal things like births marriages and deaths I don't see any reason why we shouldn't put on secular equivalence of the religious ceremonies that mostly dominate our our lives at the moment uh I have myself organized one secular Funeral for a very dearly loved colleague and been to many others uh and um what what we did and what is normally done is to obviously dispense with all prayers but you retain music you retain poetry you can have um readings from the deceased person's favorite books eulogies by people who knew and loved the deceased person this is not difficult to arrange it has the smack of sincerity about it in a way that prayers which are after all the same prayers for everybody regardless of who they are um the smack of sincerity comes from the fact that they're individually tailored to the individual who's died whenever I've been to religious funerals which have an element of the non-religious about them religious funerals which include eules which include the deceased favorite poetry Etc I don't know about you but my experience is that the prayers fall absolutely flat whereas the eulogies and the poems are intensely moving my wife even says thank goodness for the prayers they are the one thing that stops her from crying and keeps her um amused almost rather than rather than being sad about the the loss of the much-loved dead person the questioner is absolutely right in his Preamble when he says that at least in American society atheists are um the least loved least um respected major group that's something that's got to change because atheists are far far more numerous than most people people realize and that's mostly because they won't come out of the closet it's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this University I stress this University since who was it so who was it so fit to give them accreditation I'd like to [Applause] know in a place like this I have not the slightest doubt that there are a very large number of atheists and agnostics what is wrong with everybody in that position throughout the country standing up recognizing each other other joining together and forming I won't say a Lobby because somebody suggested that organizing atheists is rather like hering cats they are on the whole too intelligent and independent-minded to lend themselves to being herded but if a if an atheist Lobby could be got together which showed a small fraction of its numerical strength it would outnumber for example the Jewish Lobby which is formidably and notoriously powerful in this country there are more secularists agnostics and atheists in this country than there are Jews but do they have a voice in politics is it possible for an atheist to get elected to high office in this country no the Congress of this country is presumably at least partly derived from the intelligent educated wing of the country that being so it is statistically almost inconceivable that a substantial number of members of Congress are not atheists obviously many of them must be and yet not a single one of them will admit it they are forced to dissemble even to lie about their religious convictions because that's the only way they can get elected well isn't that something that the American electorate ought to be doing something about so I accept the question as premise and suggest that it's up to well I'm not an American citizen so it's unfortunately not up to me but up to all of you to do something about it and to change the status of atheists in this country and to change the electability of atheists in this country country good evening my name is Amy lham and I'm a first year student at rmwc and sorry I didn't hear that my name is Amy L Hammond I'm a first year student at rmwc thank you and firstly I'd like to thank you for recognizing that there are probably many atheists in this room and that we are not morally dangerous or have no morals um my question is in the case of sort of mock religions such as uh the invisible pink unicorn and such which I'm sure you're familiar with do those help the atheist cause or do they actually hurt it by creating sort of um hilarity about religion okay they do they do one good thing they they they they answer one question and it's it's a very important question because it's a very ubiquitous one it's the foll following question you cannot disprove the existence of God now amazingly there are a lot of people who think that's a powerful argument you cannot disprove the existence of God which somehow seems to suggest to them oh well therefore the existence of God must be about equally likely to the to the non-exist existence and non-existence must be approximately equally likely and the point about the invisible pink unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the celestial teapot and all the examples is simply to demonstrate that it's just not the case that because you cannot disprove something therefore that makes it the slightest bit likely and so that that that's that that's the sole purpose of them it is a very important purpose thank [Applause] you dokin um my name is Zach Smith I happen to be from Liberty University and uh I just want to applaud you're uh you're uh atheist wit because I have never at the same time been uh so insulted but amused at the same time so uh I just want to say that was uh good one but um uh my uh I uh have to foro my uh original question uh with the pr uh state of uh the atheist atheist that uh you've you know implied that there's some kind of social justice uh issue at at at at stake here by saying that it's you know wrong or that that ought to be and that kind of language kind of implies that there is some kind of moral standard I'm wondering if if you know from from your perspective what kind of moral standard could uh be a basis for that kind of social justice if if indeed there's no higher power I just oh well um first I I don't understand why you should feel insulted I I didn't insult you I insulted God and that's a very um but but then the the the question of of social justice in the in the in the in the rights of of of atheists to be considered citizens and to be considered electable I don't think the issue is is quite that they should be elected because they are atheists that wasn't the point the point is that being an atheist should not debar you any more than being black to go back in history to being black or Jewish or Catholic or a woman or any of the other things which historically have tended to make somebody unelectable and no longer do I'm delighted to say um that that that atheists and indeed homosexuals um which which are which are the next one most difficult rot to get elected um but atheists are the are the sort of of the last major group um to be embraced in in in this um um Charmed circle of the electable um I'm not saying they should be elected because they're atheists I'm I'm saying that that that they should be free to openly say what their religious conviction or lack of conviction is and not thereby instantly be unelectable that that's all I that's all I meant I didn't mean anything more than [Applause] that thank you uh I just would like to say at the outside I thank you for for coming and putting yourself in a sense on the firing line and in so far as you've taken on God you you have um always the opportunity that God might win so um I I would like just to call your attention to something that in my hearing of your your talk um you mentioned in a in a the sense of ridicule about the Trinity and and it's a front to reason very difficult to understand to even make sense of and you know why would a person even try for that matter but you interestingly enough you finished your lecture with Quantum strangeness which in in fact is the same problem for scientists as the Trinity is for believing Christians who have a need to understand just making that comment um and and I'm recalled I I spent most of my life being an atheist or non-believer in that sense and I've seen the world through that lens and I understand the logic of it and and so on uh when I became a Believer um I also noticed that uh the same world out there was being viewed through a different meta metaphysical lens and I would suggest to you that there's a burka as well for the metaphysical reality you can shift up and look through faith or you can shift down and look through human intelligence or or human understanding call it reason or or Intuition or whatever but I would call to your attention that there is a whole new reality that comes it's not uh Supernatural in the sense but it's a shift in understanding yes um I I I think that's a very interesting point and I I can answer it with reference to how you began which was the comparison between quantum theory which is deeply mysterious and the Mystery of the Trinity and you um implied that there's a sort of comparability between those that they are both um deeply mysterious so why should one prefer one over the other the answer to that is actually very simple quantum theory yields experimental predictions which have been verified to an accuracy number of decimal places so accurate that the great theoretical physicist Richard feineman compared it to the accuracy of predicting the width of North America to the accuracy of the width of one human hair that is why quantum theory has to be taken seriously and it doesn't matter well it does matter but it's um one can take in one's stride because of the Brilliance of the experimental verification it doesn't matter that quantum theory is so mysterious that as feineman himself once said if you think you understand quantum theory you don't understand quantum theory it is true that the human mind and I believe the reason is that the human mind evolved in Middle world where the strangeness of quantum theory never impinged upon human life it is true that the human mind cannot grasp cannot visualize cannot imagine the assumptions that quantum theory need needs to make but human physicists doing experiments can verify the predictions of quantum theory to an accuracy which is utterly Stupify and which leaves one in no doubt that in in some sense quantum theory must be right nothing remotely like that could ever be claimed for the doctrine of the Trinity nor by the way is the doctrine of the of the Trinity anything like so interestingly mysterious as quantum [Applause] theory hello thank you for coming to Lynchberg my name is Matthew I'm a grant student at Liberty University and I have one uh one question going back to ethics and morality you essentially said that the darwinian uh reason we have morality is that back in the day you had cousins and people and you want get them to reciprocate in order to act like that you would have to make decisions the decisions would have to be based on critical thinking I was wondering if you have a darwinian response or explanation for how critical thinking um relates to darwinian ISM right I think I understand you you're you're the question is not really about morality the question is about is there a similar darwinian account of critical thinking which is at the basis of your explanation for Morality In my mind and my explanation for everything else presumably as well not not not just morality um well um I mean cr critical thinking is is something which um isn't universally an attribute of the human mind um it's um uh I I don't think it's very very hard to imagine that um imagine ways in which critical thinking could have benefited the survival of our ancestors I mean I I think that um taking a a rational view of evidence would probably have helped our ancestors to survive in a world of saber-tooth tigers and ice ages and drying up water holes and all the other things which all the other hazards which threatened life um I would have thought rather the reverse that the problem that faces us is how do we explain uncritical lack of thinking why is there so such a lot of that about [Applause] um and uh I I mean I do have a chapter explaining that but I should have thought that was a that was a rather harder problem than than the one about about uh critical thinking hi my name is Carl Swinson and um I'm going to tip my hand right off the start like the other Brave questioners and say um that if if theories and ideas around things like intelligent design and creationism are scientifically all but dead they just haven't fallen over yet um then I see something else waiting in the wings scientifically that needs that would could be a problem for Science and that's and so I ask your opinion about this um things like like um you've used the word mind a lot we think of Mind as some dimensionist thing in the middle of our head which tells us what to do and it's separate from the brain um which is similar to the soul another popular notion so what does science or philosophy at this point have to say about um this about the about the mind about yeah about the existence of it that or the Soul or the pop your Notions of well I um I mean my my my view would be a materialistic one not everybody's would and and my my view would be that uh mind and soul and Consciousness and all those sorts of words are they they describe something which is a manifestation of the material brain and doesn't have any existence outside material brains where material brains could at some future date perhaps include silicon brains not not just neuronal brains but there has to be some sort of uh physical medium doubtless highly complicated highly interconnected a network of um of complicated wiring diagram uh which um uh by by some means which neurophysiologists are now working on results in the phenomena which psychologists study and which we colloquially give names like mind and even soul too so I don't think that the mind is an immaterial thing that has any existence outside the material world um I'm archna data um I'm a sophomore at Randal maker women's college majoring in biology and environmental science um my my question is in no way controversial it's not intended to be so and um it basically Springs out of what uh the point you made in your hypothesis about God um do you imply that we may evolve to become God or do we share a common ancestry with god well um I don't think it's very helpful to suggest that we are likely to evolve to become Gods I do do think that um there may very well be somewhere in the universe being evolved beings which are so far Advanced compared to us that we would if we saw them we might very well be tempted to call them gods and it it is also possible by the same token that if our species goes on evolving either genetically and or culturally for a sufficient number of Millennia are descendants might become so Advanced that we would be tempted to call them Gods however uh I don't think I would wish to call them Gods because however Advanced they are however ingenious however intelligent however um their technology would strike us with awe they would still be evolved beings they would be beings that had evolved by a process of slow gradual incremental Evolution and that to me is the diagnostic feature of a god a God doesn't evolve a God just happens a God is just there and so um I I think my answer to your question is it's an interesting thought but in but but actually I don't think it would be a helpful use of the word god anym than if a Stone Age Hunter were to suddenly be transported into the 21st century uh and would of course be a struck by computers and mobile phones and Boeing 747s and helicopters and Rockets to the Moon that Stone Age Hunter might be tempted to call us Gods but I think it's a Temptation that he should resist and so should we Dr Dawkins I uh am a professor at Liberty University of uh a non-sub religion right but uh according to your book and I've been reading your book and it's helped me to understand atheist mind and I appreciate that I have a whole group of my students here tonight they've been in the back there and uh because I wanted them to hear what you have to say and we want to be careful not to set up strong men about atheists which you know are done and and I want them to avoid thank you very much okay yes sir but I I wanted to uh read from your book you've been reading from your book and I find it interesting this footnote on page 82 we might be seeing something similar today in the overp publicized tergiversation of the philosopher Anthony flu who announced in his old age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity now I wanted to read that footnote before my question right you would consider yourself a de facto atheist leaning toward a strong atheist Category 6 leaning towards seven uh apparently because you would say the evidence demands your being an atheist not a theist for you the evidence makes the existence of God highly improbable so my question is what evidence would you need to conclude that God's existence at least was as probable as that of extraterrestrials and why did you relegate um an and he flew to a footnote with with him being such an eminent philosopher and uh finding design in the DNA an indication of um Anthony flu is a is a British philosopher who has long been um a champion of atheism and he has as the question of remarks announced in his old age that he has um been converted to a form of Diaz m not out andout theism form of theism where he thinks there probably is some kind of mysterious intelligence at the root of the universe many great people have thought the same what disappointed me about Anthony flu's reasons for that is that he publicly admitted publicly announced that what had convinced him was the idea of intelligent design and specifically the book of Michael beee well that doesn't argue for um the surviving powers that Anthony flu once had as an intellectual um no serious thinker could possibly be uh positively impressed by the arguments of the so-called intelligent design creationists there may be good reasons for believing in a God and if there are any I would expect them to come from possibly modern physics from cosmology from the um observation that uh as some people claim the laws and constants of the universe are too finely tuned to um to be an accident that would not be a holy disreputable reason for believing in a some form of Supernatural deity I think there's a very good argument against it and I've developed much of my chapter 4 to as I think refuting that argument if Anthony fluid said that then I think we could have a serious argument with him but what he actually said was that he was convinced by intelligent design in biology and anybody who knows anything about biology um will immediately see that that is ridiculous [Applause] um I'm sorry to be so I'm sorry to be so harsh but when I last saw Anthony flu he he didn't endear himself to me because he actually went about promulgating the legend that Darwin himself had a deathbed conversion and that really is a ridiculous story which was long long ago um disposed of by the Darwin family and it led me to uh somewhat discount other things that Anthony flu is now saying he once was a a great philosopher it's very sad [Applause] good evening uh my name is Ryan Thomas I'm a biology major at Liberty University and uh I kind of have a two I kind of have a sorry I I'm having a hard time hearing oh I'm sorry I my name is Ryan Thomas I'm a biology major at University at Liberty University right now and uh I have a two-part question for you if you don't mind um my first question would be do you draw a distinction in between Blind Faith and reasonable faith okay um is there a distinction do I draw a distinction between Blind Faith and reasonable Faith [Music] [Applause] No it's uh it's it's interesting that you say that because um just through through my my own studies through through my uh my investigation into this matter I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as proof right that uh there is reasonable faith and and there is blind faith when I uh when I drop a ball uh you know to the ground on Earth it's it's reasonable for me to believe that the ball will fall the very next time that I drop it but I can't prove it just as I can't prove that you exist yes I believe that you exist based on a reasonable Faith because I can see you because I can hear you but our senses can sometimes deceive us people on cocaine feel bugs in their skin but that doesn't make it real uh people that are taking hallucinogen see things but it doesn't make it real so I think it's interesting that you deny the the line between reasonable pH yes I mean I think we agree I think we're just using words in a different way I I think it's it's a semantic thing um some something like um when you when you drop a ball it falls and when you drop another ball it falls and when you drop another ball it falls um I don't think I would wish to use the word faith for your belief that the next time you drop it it will fall I don't think that's what I'm would use the word faith for I think that's that's that's normal science I mean that's based upon uh Newton's Laws it's based upon a tremendous body of theory it's based upon uh scientific evidence so I would not use the word reasonable Faith the way you're using it it seems to be you're using reasonable faith for um basing beliefs upon upon evidence so if if you're using reasonable Faith to mean belief based upon evidence then there's no disagreement we're just using words in a different way I Define faith as as belief that's not based upon evidence okay and that's why I answered your first question in the way that I that I did I I don't think we actually disagree and I'm sure we disagree about other things but I don't think we disagree about this in a in a in that in in in in an other than semantic way okay um then then my second question I'm sorry I didn't expect you to answer no actually to the first one but yeah there surprises every day um my second question is uh considering then that we must believe what's based on reason and and reason of course is based on experience correct you know reason is is based on the fact that when I when I drop the ball it it falls every time so it's reasonable to believe next time I drop the ball it's going to fall why then is it reasonable considering our experience concerning the law of cause and effect concerning the fact that we our experience tells us that everything which has an effect has a cause how is it that it's more reasonable to believe that the universe created itself because when confined to the Natural laws because nature is bound by its own limits which which are the natural laws and if nature is bound by the laws which say that matter can't create itself then how do you get around this issue that there must have been something outside outside the system it is it is very difficult it is of course a very difficult question to ask how things began at the very beginning of the universe it's very difficult to even know what the word beginning even means with respect to the universe that any physicist any biologist any scientist any reasonable person would accept however when you ask what's the alternative if the alternative that's being offered to um what physicists now talk about a big a big bang a spontaneous um uh Singularity which gave rise to the origin of the universe if the alternative to that is a Divine intelligence a Creator which would have to have been complicated statistically improbable the very kind of thing which scientific theory such as Darwin's exists to explain then immediately we see that however difficult and apparently inadequate the theory of the physicists is the theory of the theologians that the first cause was a complicated intelligence is even more difficult to accept they're both but the theory of the cosmic intelligence is even worse what Darwinism does is to raise our Consciousness to the power of science to explain the existence of complex things and intelligences and creative intelligences are above all complex things they're statistically probable Darwinism raises our Consciousness to the power of science to explain how such entities and the human brain is one how such entities can come into existence from simple Beginnings however difficult those simple Beginnings may be to accept they are a whole lot easier to accept than complicated Beginnings complicated things come into the universe late as a consequence of slow gradual incremental steps God if he exists would have to be a very very very complicated thing indeed so to postulate a God as the beginning of the universe as the answer to the riddle of the first cause is to shoot yourself in the conceptual foot because you are immediately postulating something far far more complicated than that which you are trying to explain now physicists cope with this problem in various ways which may seem to you they even seem to me somewhat unconvincing for example they suggest that um our universe is but one bubble in a foam of universes the Multiverse and each bubble in the foam has a different set of laws and constants and by the anthropic principle we have to be since we're here talking about it we have have to be in the kind of bubble with the kind of laws and constants which are capable of giving rise to the evolutionary process and therefore to creatures like us that is one current physicist explanation for how we exist in the kind of universe that we that we do it doesn't sound so shatteringly convincing as say Darwin's own Theory which is self-evidently very convincing nevertheless however unconvincing that sound it is many many many orders of magnitude more convincing than any theory that says complex intelligence was there right from the outset if you if you have problem seeing how matter could just come into existence try thinking about how complex intelligent matter or complex intelligent entities of any kind could suddenly spring into existence it's many many orders of magnitude harder to understand one more thing sorry you've had three [Applause] already hi my name is Amber Moore I'm from Liberty University as well I have two questions for you how can you believe in extraterrestrials as a higher being and not believe in a God could you just say that again how can you how can you believe as extra extraterrestrials as a higher being and not believe in a God how can I believe that an extraterrestrial is a higher being and not believe how can you believe in them as a extra as an advanced higher being yeah I understand um the words of your question um an extraterrestrial higher being if one exists comes into existence as the end product of a long slow gradual incremental process of evolution just just like the one that gave rise to us that's the explanation for why the Extraterrestrial if it is indeed an advanced being is an advanced being it's a very sensible easy to understand explanation it's a gradual explanation you start from simple beginnings and you work up God isn't like that God is a being that is not supposed to have evolved God is a being that has always existed and therefore does not have the benefit of that kind of sensible rational gradualistic explanation that is an absolutely crucial difference I suspect that on other planets there probably are beings as I said before which are so far Advanced relative to us that they might as well be Gods except for this one absolutely crucial respect that they came into the universe by slow gradual degrees they didn't just happen nothing as complicated as that just happens they didn't just happen and therefore they or it or he or she could not be responsible for Designing the universe okay my last question this is probably going to be the most simplest one for you to answer but what if you're wrong well what if I'm wrong I mean anybody could be wrong we could all be wrong about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the pink unicorn and the flying teapot um you happen to have been brought up I would presume in the Christian faith you know what it's like not to believe in a particular Faith because you're not a Muslim you're not a Hindu why aren't you a Hindu because you happen to have been brought up in America not in India if you've been brought up in indu in India you'd be a Hindu if you were brought up in in um Denmark in the time of the Vikings you'd be believing in Wan and Thor if you were brought up in in Classical Greece you'd be believing in in Zeus if you were brought up in central Africa you'd be believing in the great Juju up the mountain there's no particular reason to pick on the judeo-christian god in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up and and ask me the question what if I'm wrong what if you're wrong about the great JuJu at the bottom of the [Applause] sea uh in continuation of the last fellow's questions uh the problem is that you're applying natural laws to God whereas he claims to exist outside of them therefore he does not necess necessitate a beginning unlike matter on the other hand which NE which necessitates a beginning well isn't that just too easy easy I mean you you talk your way out of having to provide a rational argument by just decreeing by fear that God that that God simply declares himself outside matter and therefore doesn't need the same kind of of argument as as anything else I mean if you're convinced by that kind of thing you're welcome [Applause] my name is Kay Goodman and I'd like to hear your thoughts on whether or not there is a God or Gods what effect has it upon humankind upon the ERS of the world upon men and women that we rather consistently refer to God as a male [Applause] well that's a perfectly Fair Point and um I um I mean to to me to me there there is no difference between a non-existent male and a non-existent female um to the extent that to the extent that God or Gods has sociological psychological political significance then I could easily imagine that um if one could somehow Begin The Cult of a female god it might well have a very improving effect upon Human Society I'm nervous Amber Dawn student here at Randolph Mak um thank you for that previous answer um I'll give you a bit of reprieve I am not challenging you in any way shape or form um and I only wrote this down because I know I'd forget what I wanted as someone coming from a religious family especially in an area with such a dominant religion and a particular Figure Head how does someone find their own way when leaving is not quite an option I didn't quit the last sent how does one find their own way when leaving just yet is not quite an option okay um that's just the first and I have a small I think this is a very serious question because I've had I've had letters from really quite a lot of people in especially in America and they say things like I I'm actually an atheist but I D admit it um I'm frightened of my family I'm frightened of my parents um I'm frightened of my Minister um I read an article the other day about a boy in a a small town in Texas who didn't want to be confirmed and the priest said well that's okay you don't have to be confirmed but you have to write down your reasons for not being confirmed Why did the Bo had to write down his reasons for not being confirmed into that particular church he didn't have to write down his reasons for not being Bar Mitzvah as a Jew it just so happened that he was born into a Christian family and therefore the presumption was made that he better have a good reason for not being confirmed into the religion of his parents or else and that's one of the main problems we have is the assumption that our society makes regardless of whether we are religious or not we all buy into the convention that children belong to the religion of their parents you will see newspaper articles talking about Christian children and Muslim children and Jewish children children who may be as young as three or four years old and who are therefore obviously much too young to know what their beliefs are about the cosmos and humanity and religion there is no such thing as a Christian Child there is only a child of Christian parents whenever you hear the phrase Christian child or Muslim child or Protestant child or Catholic child the phrase should grate like fingernails on a Blackboard just as the feminists have raised our Consciousness to phrases like one man one vote you can't hear that phrase now without sort of at least wincing slightly because you realize it should be one person one vote at present we haven't had our Consciousness raised about the labeling of children with the religion of their parents that's just one aspect and it shows itself to return to the questioner it shows itself in a great deal of difficulty that any young person has any person of any age has in departing from the religion of their parents their social group their grandparents their uncles and aunts and so on it might be a bit like getting divorced I mean it's sort of something that raises um real social problems there's a magnificent onew woman show by the comic actress Julia Sweeney called letting go of God in which she describes her own Journey from Catholic upbringing to the mature and balanced atheist that she is today and she describes the difficulty of admitting to her family that that she had become an atheist it actually was reported in in in a newspaper and her mother read it and screamed down the telephone and Julia Sweeney it's a very witty a very funny performance she she does she says um that her mother was absolutely horrified not believing in God was one thing but an atheist I don't know what the answer is the I mean the the the precedent of of of gay people is one that one can vaguely bear in mind I mean uh homosexuality is now much much more accepted in our society than it was when I was young uh when I mean homosexuality was actually illegal in Britain up until I think the 1960s believe it or not um and uh the Great British mathematician one of the two fathers of the modern computer Alan Turing um who arguably because of his Brilliance in solving the German Enigma codes in the second world war did more to win the second world war than either Churchill or Eisenhower Alan Turing was arrested for homosexual behavior in the 1950s and was um essentially driven to Suicide uh that has now changed and now people can be openly gay the word gay has become a a word used with pride rather than with shame uh I think that we do have to have a a shift in social attitudes to atheism which will um mirror that towards homosexuality um it is after all just a view about the cosmos and about um various other things about Humanity about morality it is really quite extraordinary that somebody's view about such an academic matter as whether there exists a supreme intelligence should reflect upon their um the way they're looked at in society the way their family and their friends look at them it is quite remarkable that that should be the case once again it's something we've all got to do something [Applause] about um last question very simple is anger a common symptom of a person who is going through the deconditioning process of their parents religion I didn't I think you're too close to the microphone I said is anger a common symptom of a person who is going through the deconditioning process of their parents' religion is anger a common symptom of a person who's going through the a deconditioning process from their parents religion I don't know um uh I it had never occurred to me um does anybody else have personal um um I I I think sort of fear is is probably more common I mean fear fear of of um what their parents are going to think rather than anger but but I could be wrong um I'm I'm interested in that if if that's that's question is based on personal experience I'd be interested to hear more is is is is that a common experience wow and anger on the part of the person who is undergoing the deconversion themselves anger against whom or what eness clergy people all the authority figures who push this as a norm which was antha to the child's reason right well thank you that's extremely interesting I've learned something this evening thank you hi I'm Ron Ron feineman I love physics um two two qu two questions if I may uh at Liberty University they have uh on display some fossils that they say are I might be off by factor or by thousand years or so but they say these fossils of dinosaurs are 3,000 years old maybe 4,000 maybe 5,000 my my question the first question to you is what what could they do to to Really prove to a scientist that those fossils are indeed um that old only um that's number one and then number two would you be willing to elucidate a little bit further your um arguments against creation by Design and maybe give us some better sense of cosmological time just how long it really is right um the the belief that dinosaurs are only 3,000 years old and uh that the the universe is only 6,000 years old how to give an idea of the real time span um of the world when what one way to put it which I've recently been think thinking about is that if somebody believes that the world is only 6,000 years old or of the order of a few thousand years old when the true age of the Earth is um of the order of a few billion years old that means they're out by a factor of a million um which is not a trivial error uh it's I mean I I am not very good at at at arithmetic and I calculated that it's equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 700 yards uh but I received a letter from a a a mathematician who done is done the sum again and he said I got it wrong it's actually equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 28 ft um either way it gives you an idea of the scale of the era uh the questioner asked what would uh the um people of Liberty University have to do in order to demonstrate that these dinos fossils really were 3,000 years old well what they would have to do is to find ous rocks which uh were found in proximity to or sandwiching the the fossils and date these by radioactive dating several different half a dozen at least different forms of radioactive dating all of which give independent estimates of the date of these fossils and all those different methods of doing it should point to an age of 3,000 years in fact of course what th those methods of dating all show is that dinosaur fossils are hundreds of millions no less than 65 million years old not just one method of radioactive dating lots and lots of different methods of radioactive dating different clocks clocks working on completely different principles that that all point to the same order of magnitude of age of these dinosaur fossils if it's really true that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labeled as being 3,000 years old then that is an educational disgrace it is debauching the whole idea of a university and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here to leave and go to a proper [Applause] University [Applause] follow up with your elucidating on um chance versus uh natural selection versus uh intelligent design and give us a sense of cosmological time um chance and natural selection and intelligent design one of the biggest fallacies in popular understanding of darwinian evolution by natural ction is that it is a theory of random chance it is not it's the it's the very opposite and this is one of the most important things to understand about it um uh there is a certain chance element in it mutation is is a process of random chance it's random with respect to Improvement things don't tend to get better as a result of mutation the important step in the darwinian theory of evolution is natural selection natural selection ction is a non-random process natural selection is the non-random survival of randomly varying genetic codes and the reason why some genetic codes survive better than others is their phenotypic effects via the processes of embryogenesis on phenotypes on bodies and which make them survive or not survive reproduce or not survive and the ones that do survive and reproduce pass on the genetic cured instruction that built them and equipped them and made them good at surviving and reproducing that's the idea um that is the explanation for the apparent adaptive design the the the illusion of design which all living things show it is a non-random process it does not involve design of any sort um it produces an illusion of design it is hard for people to grasp for very ious reasons and one reason the questioner has pinpointed is the sheer length of time involved geological time is larger than most human minds are capable of grasping um one the various metaphors have been used to um convey the sheer magnitude of geological time one that I like which I didn't invent is you hold out your hand to represent the um the the length of ological time and if say the middle of my tie is the origin of life and the tip of my finger is the present then the dinosaurs which went extinct 65 million years ago um lived about there most of this is bacteria you have um you have um multicellular life evolving about here dinosaurs about there humans at my fingernail and the whole of recorded human history everything everything from the Egyptians Biblical times the Romans the Assyrians the Greeks all of human history disappears in the dust from one stroke of a nail file that's the the scale of human history is is the dust from one stroke of a nail file on the same scale as the time that's available that has been available for evolution that is one of the reasons why people find it so hard to understand there are many reasons I've written about eight books on the subject um which um preceded The God Delusion and it's a little hard to condense it into a few minutes um thank you very [Applause] much I I I'm sorry I I don't know when we're supposed to stop and I uh we want to Professor Dawkins is going to sign books for us after this down in Ribble Lounge which is downstairs give him a few minutes to get there but I think we probably better stop here here for this evening okay thank you very much indeed thank you thank [Music] you very many thanks thank you

Channel: Muon Ray

Views: 177,514

Keywords: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Lynchburg, University, Virginia, United States, America, Questions, Answers, Truth, Reason, C-Span

Id: 5sRBGGzdsl8

Length: 107min 24sec (6444 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2012