Richard Dawkins versus Rowan Williams: Humanity's ultimate origins

as a chancellor of the university i'd like to welcome you all to this dialogue event it's exactly the sort of debate which a great university should promote as you know we're going to listen to a discussion about the nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin and the fact that there are so many people crowding the sheldonian the fact that there are two other theaters in oxford which are packed and the fact that the proceedings are being streamed live on the web to all parts of the world does underline the importance of this event i'm told that they're listening or going to listen to you in the middle of the night in australia we listen to cricket in the middle of the night they listen to these uh more important uh matters which just shows the difference between australian culture and british culture um obviously the fact that there are so many of you uh here this afternoon is largely because of the eminence of our debaters um dr williams professor dawkins and sir anthony kenny not only one of oxford's great philosophers but perhaps even more important the former master of baleal it is wonderful that both dr williams and professor dawkins who of course have been associated with the university as as teachers and scholars uh over the years have uh come to oxford uh uh this afternoon have come to the sheldonian for this debate so we're tremendously grateful to you now there are many charming things about this theater as some of you who don't know already will discover they don't include the seating but if you think you're uncomfortable you should try that throne up there which is a complete nightmare but one of the charms is of course um the recently renovated um ceiling which shows which has a depiction allegorically of the descent of truth on the arts and sciences which is of course what we're going to experience uh during the course of the next uh um hour or more so without any further remarks i'd like to um ask sir anthony kenny to chair and i'm sure take part in the discussion thank you both thank you all very much thank you for those kind words um i'd like to make a few housekeeping remarks uh initially uh the discussion uh will last until 5 30 but it will end quite promptly we are all agreed that we would prefer that to be no applause please until if you feel like it at the very end a number of you have been kind enough to submit questions in advance questions have been circulated to the three others and what will happen is that if at a suitable point in the debate it appears to one or other of us that a question is particularly appazite we will then read it from the cards which have been provided i'm sure we all have cards in our own hands but it's nice to have these trumps which have been supplied we are each going to make a brief introductory statement of our position and then the discussion uh will we hope flow freely the topic is the nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origins and we're going to take this pretty substantial question in four stages first of all the nature of individual human beings now of all of us secondly the origin of the human species as a whole thirdly the origin of life on earth and finally the origin of the universe i think that should keep us going probably we will be as if we're tracing our ancestry backwards um neither of my fellow symposiats need any introduction for me but i'd like very briefly to introduce myself and say why i am sitting between these two protagonists i'm myself a philosopher and i'm an agnostic about the existence of god i don't know whether there's a god or not i'm open to persuasion either way i'm flanked by two people who claim to know the answer to the question i don't know the answer to so i sit here as a representative of ignorance uh archbishop may i ask you to introduce yourself as well as being archbishop of canterbury um i've over my career taught theology and some philosophy in universities particularly in this university and in cambridge i have a long-standing interest in the history of theology and the history of what we rather unhelpfully call spirituality that is how christians pray and understand their praying and also a long-standing interest in the arts in general and literature and drama and poetry in particular so some of that will probably creep into what i say later do i say any more at this stage about the subject matter perhaps yes well let me then um to kick things off venture a sort of definition human beings it seems are the only bit of the universe we know about that talks about the universe the only bit of the universe we know about that seeks to represent the universe and makes claims about truth-telling and because of that we as part of that universe are able to affect the ongoing life of the universe in certain ways some of which we understand clearly and some of which we don't understand at all clearly there is in our understanding and our knowing an element of what i call feedback into the life of the universe and i guess that one of the things we might want to talk about is what kind of difference it is that human beings make the nature of the freedom we exercise or independence within that universal order but within that i would say human beings as language users have a particularly powerful central role and that's a question to our understanding why and how do we use language the relation of language and consciousness in this making a difference to the environment we share it's not a matter of absolute discontinuity with the animal world around us far from it but if we are looking for distinctives this seems to be the area where we look and just to conclude a very brief position placement it does seem that we live in a universe which while we would all have difficulties i suspect with calling it anthropocentric is anthropogenic it's the kind of universe that is produced conscious language using subjects that is us and part of what we're looking at today is exactly how we understand that whether there is a question we can answer about the origins of such subjects in the universe so i think i'll leave it there thank you well first i'd like to say what a privilege it is to be uh discussing with archbishop williams i was very interested in in the way you began and um it reminded me of two things which julian huxley said one was evolution has become conscious of itself and he meant in humanity the other is a poem that he wrote which i can't remember all of it but um it begins the world of things entered your infant mind to populate that crystal cabinet and i think that resonates with what you were saying archbishop about the the uniqueness as far as we know of humanity as being capable of as i would put it getting a model of the universe inside our heads and no doubt we'll come back to this to this idea i think it's extremely interesting um i was singing to myself in the shower this morning and i felt i realized that it was a hymn i'm i'm a cultural anglican um i'm not going to sing it now i i will i will just um i will just say um it's it's a hymn that we probably all know um it is a thing most wonderful almost too wonderful to be i'm afraid that him goes off the rails rather after that points um but um i think that it is a thing most wonderful almost too wonderful to be that at least on this planet and possibly on billions of other planets but certainly on this one the laws of physics have conspired to make the collisions of atoms get together to produce nothing that any physicist would have dreamed of but to produce things like us to produce plants trees kangaroos uh insects and us to produce collections of matter collections of atoms that don't just obey newton's laws in a passive way they don't obviously disobey them but not in a passive way but which move and jump and spring and hunt and flee and mate and think at least in our case which is a quite astonishing thing to have happened and we know since 1859 how it happened uh and it's almost too wonderful to believe but we have to believe it because we now know it's true it's almost too wonderful to believe that um the laws of physics working through this very remarkable process that darwin called natural selection has produced these gigantic collections of apparently purposeful beings which look overwhelmingly as though they had been designed they carry a terrific illusion of design which fooled humanity until the middle of the 19th century now i think that darwin's achievement in doing that was not only a magnificent achievement in itself but it was a triumph of science which can be generalized to science generally because once darwin had solved the problem of how you can get big complicated purposeful and apparently designed things out of very simple beginnings once darwin's had solved that problem it then gives courage to the rest of science that the same thing can be done in general and that we shall end up understanding literally everything as springing from almost nothing or according to some modern physicists even literally nothing and i think that that is a truly wonderful thought when i say almost too wonderful to be it's a thought that is extremely hard to comprehend and believe and many people have great difficulty in believing it and resort to uh what in my view is is an unsatisfactory uh resolution to the problem which is to say an intelligence did it that seems to me to be an invasion of the of the question an invasion of the scientific responsibility to understand how things come about how complicated things come about in terms of of um simple things so i'll stop there thank you um you began by agreeing quite a bit with each other then tended you're particularly richard to some disagreement before i stoke that disagreement i'd like to make sure we do agree on three very simple things that is that the three of us all believe in truth namely that there is such a thing as objective truth and it's not just an ideological construct to keep the lower classes down or whatever postmodernists say secondly that we all believe in logic that is that we think that if two statements flatly contradict each other they can't both be true and thirdly that we all believe in science that we think it is one of the greatest of human achievements and that we all owe the scientists of many generations a great debt of gratitude for the way in which they have improved the world is there any dissent to that or qualification now can i suggest a line of disagreement or ask for clarification of what you said you said that the laws of physics were of course never disobeyed by atoms and i'm sure that's true you also said the laws of physics have created us now it seems to me that there are two different things there there's nobody is going to say that the laws of physics are being regularly broken but that doesn't say that the laws of physics alone determine what happens in a game of chess nobody breaks the rules but the rules of chess do not dictate the game that of course is absolutely true and uh the equivalent of the um of the rules of chess would be natural selection the process of random variation random change in the genetic codes uh followed by non-random natural selection and this is the non-random process of natural selection filtering the random input from mutation which ultimately creates uh living things so um the laws of physics are being obeyed all the time at the at the lowest level and the complexity is the same sort of complexity as when you play chess when a computer plays chess um when a computer does anything for that matter i mean the computers are only machines in which electrons are whizzing around obeying the laws of physics but um the the layers of complexity on top of that the layers of software complexity um produce the ability to play chess or do a spreadsheet or or whatever it is and that that's where one of my questions comes in you spoke about how darwinian selection offers a complete explanation of how we are here and why we're here darwin doesn't seem to me to have very much to say that helps with the problem of consciousness which both philosophically and scientifically remains an enormous area which i don't see very much advance in in the scientific explanation of and one of the things which makes me wary of simply saying we have recourse to the laws of physics and that's it is the question of consciousness what is it that grants the first person perspective which we are currently sharing in this discussion i agree that that is deeply mysterious um as a materialist i suppose i'm committed to the view that consciousness is something that emerges from brains within within brains and nobody understands how and i regard that as one of the problems for the future and i think it will be solved eventually by combination of neuroscience and computer science probably what i would say is that if it when one identifies a problem that science has such as consciousness and says we don't yet understand x and it happens to be consciousness in this case um then we should remain agnostic as sir anthony has said what we shouldn't do is immediately jump to i don't understand it therefore it must have something to do with god and and so yeah and i'm not suggesting that we we buying god to get us a cheap get out of jail card on consciousness but what i am interested in is what it means to say that this is the kind of universe in which consciousness will happen given these these coordinates because it seems to me that the question is not is there some point at which god interferes to say let there be consciousness the question is does an entire universe a system of physical law which produces something not obviously physical does that require some context of intelligence that is not simply the intelligence of one finite i think that's the question we're going to be discussing in our fourth stage i'll back off without leaping straight can i ask about the soul consciousness is something we share with animals uh a lot of the higher animals are are conscious too so if we're talking about something special to human beings i think it isn't consciousness but many people have thought that human beings have special souls cells which are different from any animal psychic organism and those which are immortal can i ask if you think that is correct i'd want to go in between those two um polls of consciousness as an obvious fact about animal life and something called the soul and ask about self-consciousness about the capacity of human beings to tell stories about themselves we are beings who tell ourselves about ourselves ask questions about ourselves saint augustine saying i have become a question to myself as a definition of the life of human spirit we tell jokes we fantasize we empathize we even pray all of that is an activity of self-reflexive consciousness in a way which doesn't seem to fit at the animal level and that seems to me to have something to do with the fact that some of us believe we are capable of a relationship with that unconditional creative energy that we call god and all of those things about our self-awareness about our self-questioning have their home in the context of material beings who are nonetheless capable of that sort of relation so i'm i'm wary of talking about a soul as if it were as in the cartoons you know a rather ghostly form of the body that sort of flies away into the middle distance and i'm happier with a tradition you'll be very familiar with talking about the soul as the form of the body this is this is how this particular kind of material being has meaning has communicative and self-communication capacity and is this capacity for self-consciousness the aristotelian type of soul is that created by god in each individual or is it inherited from the individual's parents i don't believe it's created directly but god is as if there is a list in heaven that god takes off sending people down in in strict succession it's something which as several of the early christian theologians say emerges in the material life of people subject by subject it's to me very interesting that in the fourth century you have a theologian like gregory of nissa saying some quite evolutionary sounding things and saying well the soul doesn't come in separate the soul is what gathers all this together when the material processes of development complete it's not that extra thing which has to be injected do you believe in a ceremony i think that um consciousness that phrase gathering gathering together is is possibly quite insightful about what actually happens about about consciousness in the development of of a bit of a baby and and i think that it's quite there's been quite good suggestions that that a baby is a sort of uh mixture of an assortment of different semi-individuals who gradually fuse themselves together to become what we think of as our individuality as our as our conscious self and i think there are some philosophers who feel that consciousness should be seen as a kind of illusion um to to bring together all the different aspects of our of our mind but i i thought archbishop you didn't really answer what sir anthony was asking because he he wanted to know whether you believe the soul survives death and and don't actually ask me that but i'm quite happy to come through it i thought you did at the very beginning you're quite right i didn't in the last night but please answer the short answer is yes the law answer would take quite a while so bear with me a moment um what it is that we develop in self-consciousness in relationship to others and to god is for myself as a christian something which does not simply cease on material death what it means that it doesn't cease what it is for that relationship with god to advance blossom come home i have no idea i have a number of images but no idea and the confidence that i as a christian have about that is not the belief that there's something in me that will survive it's a belief in the kind of god who does not terminate the relationship initiated from god's side as i develop them grow but could i just come back very briefly on one of um one of your phrases about consciousness as an illusion yes right i've come across this sort of language and i have to say it baffles me rather yes because if consciousness is an illusion what isn't i mean the concept of an illusion presupposes the purpose yeah that's that's that's correct that's conceiving yeah and i find that there's a lot of that slippage going on in some of the writing in this area um consciousness is a mistake but to talk about mistakes we have to have a framework in which it makes sense to distinguish within a mistake and a correct observation consciousness is an illusion but we need therefore a distinction between illusion and correct perception or even well i could go on but you see the point and to say that consciousness is something emerging to resolve the problems if you're like of a discrete ete perception it's not quite the same as saying it's an illusion or to say with general dennis that there is no evidence for consciousness i scratch my head profoundly i have a colleague who who um when one gets into this argument and and they get come to the point where one says well we don't actually have any evidence that any of the rest of us can't maybe i'm the only one only one who is and so on um and he he finishes the conversation by saying i'm not conscious the thing is the thing that that really baffles me about consciousness is that i can kind of see that uh one could program a computer to behave exactly as though it were conscious to pass the turing test and actually fool people into thinking that it was conscious but i still have trouble believing it actually would be and yet i think i have to be committed to the view that it that it that it would be um i think it's sad that you're committed to that but i think it's rather sad that you're committed to that view well computers are human tools they they they can't even add two and two together they are tools that he used by human beings by human programmers they can't even tell the time and they wouldn't know what to do if they did put in another way if i may are i'm scientifically illiterate here computers are binary systems essentially aren't they that's what they work at bottom lane yes but that may not be a very helpful way to note it but if if they are fundamentally binary systems does that mean that the the way the human mind operates is invariably and always reducibly binary or other other oh no um it's just a it's just a technical convenience that they're that they're binary i mean what what matters is the software which which builds upon the the binary events that are going on at the base but then the question is isn't it whether the binary based system of a computer can given its dependence on input given its dependence on certain fixed processes whether it could move towards a state that was not like our our minds able to operate in a normal no i think i think it's a red herring with the binder i mean you could you could have a quaternary computer or an octal computer i mean it's just accidental that it happens to be an engineering convenience that computers a binary once you get into the realm of of software you can forget about they're being binary perhaps i could follow up a rowan's point by asking whether you think a computer has free will and whether you think human beings have free will well i think free will is it is a difficult question and i don't think computers have have free will in the sense that i that i do think that that everything that happens in a computer is predetermined by events in in the in the in the world in but mostly inside the computer itself um so in that sense computers don't have free will but in that sense we probably don't either i'm interested you say that because a lot of people misunderstood your first book the selfish gene to say that you believed in gene determinism that everything was determined for us by our genes and therefore we didn't have free will in your second book the extended phenotype you took great pains to explain that you were not a gene determinist yes well usually not being a determinist includes believing in free will no no um the emphasis should be on the word gene um i'm not a genetic determinist in the sense that some people thought that i was saying that it's genes that make us what we are um all i was saying is that it's genes that are the fundamental unit of natural selection which is very different matter um you can be a determinist without being a genetic determinist you can be a determinist who believes that that events in the in the world events in the universe come together to produce everything that happens afterwards including us including what we do um but that's very different genetic determinism is a much more specific and less philosophical problem does it mean that in principle every decision is predictable well that that's what that's what a determinist would say yes um i i hesitate a little bit because of quantum indeterminacy um but um i i don't think that you can get away from determinism by postulating a ghost inside which which takes decisions um which are somehow independent of physical reality i don't think that believing free will commits you to a ghost taking decisions independent of physical reality but if i'd like to come back to this if the distinction between absolutely inert stuff and mind is not quite where it's frequently being thought to lie if the universe doesn't just break down into sort of ghostly stuff and hard stuff then um a decision is not something which some independent homunculus inside me makes never mind what happens it is something that emerges from a set of physical conditions not wholly determined but innovating from making a difference i mean they are not they could be wholly determined um but you would have the illusion of of of freedom i mean there are there are how would you tell the difference well there are there are neurological um experiments where people have measured brain states yes um well i'll just finish because other people may not sorry sorry um there are neurological experiments in which um uh people make decisions like just reaching out for a glass or so at some moment you have to reach out um and they think that i i think that i take the decision now but what the experimental results show is that actually the decision was taken some seconds before because you can tell from the brain states that it's going to happen well i'm not sure what that means but i think it it it probably means or might well mean that um when i think i'm i've taken the decision when the when the illusory ghost in me which i think of myself as as me takes the decision it has already been taken one of the things which makes that experiment to my mind a bit less than clinching is of course that it relates to fairly small scale short-term rather uninteresting decisions i would be interested seriously interested to find if you could if you could map that on to deciding who to marry who to vote for well what we usually mean by decisions i suppose it's just rather difficult to do experiments on that kind of exactly yes um and so per force just as you know geneticists have to work on peas because it's easier to work on i mean i i think you you have to reduce the problem down to something that's experimentally attractable but can we go back to our commitment to logic yes if i can just press this one because again it's an interesting conundrum to me there's a an old sort of chestnut a philosophical argument which effectively says if you were to tell me that it is for ordained that i will pick up the glass of water in the next five seconds i can actually refuse to do so now my refusal may be predetermined but you see that there's a sort of yeah regress of intelligibility in other words a true statement i am determined it is determined that i pick up this glass of water is incommunicable it can't be spoken without making a difference to my possibility that's yes i think that's right and that's kind of thing philosophers like but can i also say that that most philosophers don't like the naive picture of free will that that experiment presuppose right i mean it was an idea made popular initially by descartes and by david hume and a long tradition of empiricists and rationalist philosophers that there was a sort of soul inside that in in which mental events occurred which were the causes of the bodily events and it's that picture which that experiment presupposes but since at least the time of wittenstein rowan and i both admire and gilbert ryle who was my teacher here many years ago it's commonly thought that there are very sound philosophical reasons for denying that that is the way things work it's very much it's surprising that you should admire because it is very much the ghost in the machine picture and you're saying ah the machine works before the ghost does whereas i think most philosophers nowadays would think the whole idea of constructing body and mind like that is quite wrong but why doesn't it destroy the idea of deter of free of free will because it only shows the order of events in an act that is undetermined may not be what you would have expected if you had the false philosophical idea well i'm not a philosopher that'll be obvious perhaps you should have invited a philosopher to perhaps we should move from our question one about human beings but could i just round it off with taking up something that he said right you said uh when you were talking about possible immortality uh that as a christian you thought this and that so do i take it that that means that you think the immortality of the soul or survival of any kind is a matter of faith and not something that can be proved by reason as many philosophers in the past thought it could broadly that's right and i i can't think of any uh strictly philosophical arguments that would help here and although it's interesting when people talk about near-death experiences and things that apparently suggest consciousness operating from a point of view outside the body i don't think that settles a theological point i i would embed talking about my hopes for eternal life in the specific christian discourse revelation that that i accept so i wouldn't be looking for a knock-down about immortality there well may we move on to stage two the origin of the human species uh and i'd like to start it off by reading one of the questions which was sent in by dr robert gilbert fellow and tutor in biochemistry modern college and he says do you think that human scientific knowledge can be wholly explained by biological evolution would you like to stop i don't even understand what that means i mean presumably he means the existence of people like you uh if it said if he if he said do do i think that humans can be wholly explained by or the existence of humans can be sold i would say yes um but scientific knowledge well scientific knowledge is something that humans have in their brains um so i suppose the answer is yes i can't think what else you need to explain humans or indeed any other animal than biological evolution um and i presume we all accept biological evolution yes i'd guess that the question might be about some of what we've just been talking about consciousness and so forth the capacity of a materially based mental system to represent accurately or adequately in some some sense the structure of the universe is that something which biological evolutionist sense can well i think it's very plausible that that um biological evolution would indeed give rise to brains which are good at analyzing things good at synthesizing things and good at um at packing knowledge away but it's undeniable that humans that the human brain does things which were which are far beyond what you would expect of a creature that merely has to survive in the pleistocene of africa and hunt wildebeest and find water holes and things so that there are strong emergent properties in the human mind which um uh arise presumably because in order to build a brain that is good at surviving in a certain way in a in a mundane world it's rather hard to build that brain which is not automatically capable of doing more advanced things such as mathematics and philosophy um in rather the same way as computers were originally designed as calculating machines and then without any modification it turned out that they're also very good at playing chess and and drawing pictures and and doing um all the other things that that they do i find that very interesting because you're suggesting that the brain in order to do the job in the evolutionary niche that it has to do has to have a capacity in excess of them merely functional problem solving yes yes based yes or if not has to at least a way of life was discovered by our species in which it did you know other species do it do it differently of course but you asked if we all believed in biological evolution and i take it we all do that we might differ um at the explanation of it uh or the extent of it and i'd like to put euro in the question whether you accept that the first human beings had non-human ancestors yes i do and do you think that there was any divine intervention at the point when the first humans evolved from their non-human ancestors well i think there's from where i start there has to be a point in the story at which the proto-human becomes conscious of what i'll call in shorthand a call from god or an address from god again i'm wary of saying god somehow bends down and tinkers with the machinery but that there is a point if you like implicit in the whole process from the beginning a point at which it will be possible for that proto-human to be conscious in another way including the consciousness of the divine and that i would say is the beginning of what i regard as humanity in the image of god i have a problem with the very idea of the first human i think there never was a first human in fact i mean because it's all it's all a gradual change and um i mean what perhaps i could ask archbishop i mean do you think there was a moment when as it were the last homo erectus parents looked down fondly at their baby which was the first homo sapiens um i mean i i suspect the pope probably does think that because he actually thinks that god did intervene and and inject herself i'll ask him sometime i think you're right that saying that there is a first human being in simple sense it is problematic on all sorts of levels but the point which i would want to begin to call such a being recognizably human but the other way around if you like is the point at which i would see that evidence of a self-awareness and god awareness now i haven't access to that i don't know what what was going on in the mind of the homo erectus homo sapiens crossover period but that's what i would have to say don't you think that that self-awareness it might itself have been a gradual sort of emerging thing rather than a sudden um i mean you know people do experiments on chimpanzees which they call self-awareness experiments where they put lipstick on on the on the cheek or something and see whether the chimpanzee when it looks in a mirror says ah that must be me and starts well that's one attempt that experimental psychologists have made to uh to investigate self-awareness um i should have thought there is self-awareness way way way before you would even start to call it human hmm sorry sorry well i was going to ask about this blurring between the two uh does that mean that that there is not a point when a new species emerges i think so yes i mean there may in some in some special cases be a macro mutational step where this happens in plants especially where a new species just suddenly comes into existence and is instantly um incapable of interbreeding with the old one but in in animals i think generally it's not the case that there is a sudden moment when a new species comes into existence so there's going to be happy interbreeding between not quite humans well let's say just suppose we did a thought experiment in which we um could go in a time machine back to anywhere we like in history um in evolutionary history then um you would only you would gradually have a fading out of the ability to interbreed as you go further and further back so if you had if you did the thought experiment of hopping backwards in say um 100 000 year steps in a time machine and each time you land and you take on board one passenger and you cut that passenger back another hundred thousand years and then you see whether you can interbreed with the chaps that you meet um when you when you when when you when you get there i'm suggesting that maybe 100 000 is too too long maybe 10 000 years um that every 10 000 years stop the most recent additions to the passenger list will always be capable of interbreeding with the next lot and probably the next but one but that there comes a point when the next but ten for example can't interbreed and it's a gradual fading out of ability to interpret and interbreeding by the way of course is the standard criterion for members of the same species uh you you don't have any problem with language emerging by natural selection well that's very interesting because um i mean language true syntactic language as opposed to the many um communication systems that nonprofit animals have um recursive self-embedded um syntactic structures um that seems to be uniquely human um and i had always sorry by recursive synthetic structures you mean having words in it like if not that's right yes um the adjective noun or the adjective noun which adverbly verbed in the verb of the noun the noun which which no other species could do um now there is some very interesting evidence that um i think there are two or three genes i've forgotten what they're called uh which have mutated so that they're different in in us from chimpanzees there are lots of other genes that are but these particular ones are of great interest because when humans mutated humans mutant humans who have reverted back to the chimpanzee state can't talk and so the suggestion is that what was required for language to evolve in in humans was that at some point this could have been a rather sudden moment when a particular mutation occurred um which uh enabled humans to um to use recursive syntax and if that were true it would be a a remarkable example of a sort of major step in i mean that really could have been a moment when the child could talk and the parents couldn't it's a problem who the child talked to of course that seems to me an enormously important question who the child talks to because in in ordinary physical evolution there's no difficulty in thinking that a mutation can produce an animal with a longer leg than other members of the species i mean you can measure the leg but the idea that just one member had a language given that language is a social community yes no you can't really imagine that it would have had a language it would have been i mean there have been other suggestions that the ability to do um hierarchical um embedment if we can call it started before language and was used in in controlling um presumably the child would just have shouted at his parents until they shouted back yeah i mean if you listen to those those um chimpanzees who have been taught uh various versions of human language like like sign language um claims are made that they are doing it properly but it but i think the consensus is probably that when washoe the chimpanzee says please give me a banana what she's really saying is me me me banana banana banana give me give me give me um which i think that the mutated humans can do too um it's just that they what they what they can't do is that this is the house that's the the jack built so it's actually rather like what he was saying about the brain that there's a point at which um there's a sort of step changing capacity which is not predictable simply in terms of the niche that it fits in that's right and and it could be an exception to my general prejudice that evolution is always gradual it could be a a rather unique exception thank you so even if there wasn't a first human being there was a first that's right that's right there indeed couldn't be yeah thank you before we leave the question of the origin of the human species i'd like to read out one more question from the floor from isabel richards it goes like this human beings are immensely imperfect with so many of our potentialities unrealized are these failures of evolution or are they failures of design i imagine the first alternative is a question to you well um there are numerous imperfections in not just the human body but in many animal bodies and they are extremely revealing because they are um i mean they they won't surprise anybody on this platform but but to an american fundamentalist creationist um they're quite worrying because they're things that no designer could possibly have perpetrated um i mean things like the the recurrent laryngeal nerve which is one of the branch of the cranial nerve and it goes to the larynx but instead of going straight to the larynx it goes way way down into the chest and then loops around one of the main arteries in the chest and then goes back up again which in a giraffe is a detour of about 15 feet and um so this is this has been um often often quoted as an example of imperfection no designer would ever dream of doing something as silly as that but of course if you understand it in terms of evolutionary history it makes perfect sense because in our fish ancestors the most direct route between the uh the start of the nerve and its end organ was indeed south of the um artery that it that it still is and as evolution progressed as the neck got longer the fish don't have necks as the neck got longer in their descendants the marginal cost of another millimeter of detox was less than the marginal cost of the immense embryological upheaval it would have taken to have jumped it over the um so if you if you look at it in terms of history then it makes perfect sense and we're full of examples like that and rather serious ones sometimes like um the imperfections of our the way we so many people have back pain is because we're walking upright when when our ancestors uh walked on on all fours and i don't know if that's what the question means because she says there's so many of our potentialities unrealized um obviously nothing that i've said has anything any bearing on that i i think there are two kinds of question going on here at least um imperfection and incompletion and unrealized potentiality is about incompletion isn't it it's about the fact that there are things we might as individuals or even as a species conceivably do but we can't or don't um and i don't see that that's a matter of failure because in any system where we grow through time and develop through time whether as individuals or as species that's just part of what it is to be temporarily conditioned to live in time one thing after another failure is i think another kind of question isn't it and it's yes the apparent um what inefficiency or irrationality in a rather loose sense that you've just described in terms of delivery but i almost wonder whether she means something like the christian i don't know we're all imperfect because of original sin or something like that i mean that it is part of christian theology isn't it that that that humans are all born in sin and sinful until redeemed and could she mean that i think isabelle richards is probably here perhaps she could tell us what she means hi um well i think that the context of the question when posed was when we think about on potentiality i mean potentialities that are unfulfilled um the context originally of the thought of this question was you know when a mother had a child and the child for example dies without being able to fulfill what could be its full life um and that there are these tragic moments in in people's lives um and you as humans want to try and explain or to try and come to terms with um what those things mean and i think the question is based around do do we need a sort of explanation for the fact that those things uh are unfulfilled is that something that evolution will eventually for example get rid of is there some sort of end game or is there or is um on the other hand i i think no i think you've made clear the question and i think it is much more a question to the archbishop well my answer would just be it's tough stuff happens so so um so evidence can we let the archbishop answer i think i might feel bright to say a little bit more than stuff happens um because you're asking of course the most fundamental question about if you like the the emotional coherence of religious belief how it's compatible with the fact that lives are cut short in terrible circumstances i haven't got a mega theory that will sort this out i have a kind of bottom line of understanding that in a world where change and chance are from the point of view of any individual uncontrollable tragic accidents happen um that there is no way or perhaps that's just an elegant version of stuff happens i hope it's not quite that but that is one of the things that happens in a world where we are not in control of our circumstances it it's of course inherent in the very idea of natural selection that that distress happens far from evolution getting rid of the problems that you're talking about it's the very essence of natural selection that that unfortunate things happen um death non-random death before reproduction is what natural selection is all about and it's tragic and and the the if if one looks around the world and sees the sheer amount of suffering that there is in the animal kingdom as well as it is in the in the human um it it it is exactly as you would expect it to be if it were just the blind forces of nature acting if if there were no um overarching purpose in the in the world it's one of the strongest points one can make and darwin himself said it uh that i find it impossible to believe in something like believe that the the ignominy that's the family of wasps who torture their victims in horrible ways um could be could be created by a beneficent deity some something like like that um it's it's utterly foreign to the scientific way of thinking to say oh isn't isn't the world terrible shouldn't shouldn't evolution do something about it it's because it's terrible that evolution produces the results that it does so this really is much more of a problem for you isn't it i think it is and also because also the the point that richard made about as it were design faults i mean our eyes having been put in backwards and that kind of thing they make but perhaps you don't believe that the universe was actually designed all we've got to go on when we use a word like design is what it's like for us to design things and that's a fairly short-term exercise with controllable material i don't know for obvious reasons what it might be like to create a universe i avoid the word design that there should be a universe which is intelligible that it hangs together that in various ways its processes converge to certain ends yes that's part of what i mean by believing that god created the universe that our god is an intelligent god that that involves god in what i'd call the micromanagement of the process so that there are again rapid excursions to adjust the mechanisms when they're not doing well that i i find very difficult because it runs straight into the worst morally the worst kind of case that you're talking about if god can do that why doesn't he do it more can we move now on to our third topic the origin of life how did life originate on earth and it it seems clear that life the origin of life can't be simply explained in darwinian terms because darwinian explanation assumes true breeding populations so this seems to be rather more of a difficulty for you than it is that that's of course true um natural selection explains an enormous amount once it gets started but it can't start until you've got genetics and so there has to be a kind of proto-genetics before there's before there's life meaning that there has to be self-replicating molecules is probably the best way to put it and so the whole enterprise to understand the origin of life is an enterprise to imagine what it was like in the sea probably in the sea anyway in the in the world before there was life when there were molecules bumbling around and self-replicating molecules that made copies of themselves uh came into existence by sheer luck um this is an event that only had to happen once unlike all the subsequent things that happened in in evolution which where there's a repetition of billions and billions of times of the same kinds of things going on the origin of life would have been i'm not saying it was a unique event but it but it doesn't have to be any more than a a unique event once that happened then the whole process took off nobody knows how it happened there have been various theories about it and the currently most fashionable theory is the so-called rna world theory where the idea is that the original genetic molecule probably wasn't dna it almost certainly wasn't dna dna is too complicated um but it could have been rna or or something like rna which has the property of being a good catalyst a good enzyme as well as being a good replicator those are the two properties that you need dna is a very good replicator but a terrible catalyst and protein is a good catalyst but a terrible replicator rna is reasonably good at both and so it's possible that it all started off with rna and then the twin functions diverged and dna as it were usurped the replication function while while um protein usurped the the enzymatic function that's the most fashionable theory now um i would like to say a little bit more about about how improbable it might have been i said it required sheer luck and um there is an argument which i've put before that it could have been an absolutely stupendous stroke of luck and this is quite an interesting argument it uses the anthropic principle um since we know that there are probably about 10 to the 22 planets at least in the universe the number of opportunities for life to evolve staggers the imagination it is conceivable that we are alone in the universe and actually quite a lot of people think we are and would want to believe we are if we are alone in the universe then it follows that the origin of life on this planet was a quite stupefyingly rare and improbable event and that would be a very odd consequence because what it would mean is that when we when chemists look for a theory like the rna world theory when they look for a theory they're not looking for a plausible theory at all they're looking for a highly implausible theory because if it were plausible that life could originate on a planet then the universe would be crawling with life and my view is that it probably is crawling with life but and therefore that it's not all that improbable but by crawling with life i might mean only a billion independent life forms have evolved and a billion is such a tiny number compared to the number of planets that there are in the universe that these islands of of life in the universe could be so spread out that they never have any chance of meeting each other or even knowing each other a sort of celestial polynesia with without any canoes richard in in several of your books you've shown enormous ingenuity in proving that things which seem astronomically improbable are not astronomically improbable but it seems to be a big step to move from saying that something was not astronomically impossible so it actually happened i mean it's not astronomically impossible that the roof of the sheldonian should fall on you in a moment's time but i don't think that means it's going to happen no um but remember that it only has to happen once in the history in the history and it only has to happen on one planet in the universe and that this is where the anthropic principle comes in could you explain to people what the catastrophe is if it did if it's such an improbable event that it happened in only one planet in the in the universe then that planet has to be this planet because here we are and that's that's the anthropic principle when you sorry when you say had to be this planet what kind of necessity are you talking about i mean philosophers distinguish between metaphysical necessity and epistemic necessity epistemic necessity is the opposite of epistemic possibility something is epistemic epistemically possible if for all we know it might be true but that doesn't mean that something is epistemically necessary therefore means that we know it is true but that doesn't mean that it was necessary in advance i think you somewhere give an example yourself of somebody who's put before a firing squad of 10 marksmen and they all miss and people say well there must be some explanation for that and he said oh no it had to be that way because i'm still here yes um that doesn't mean that's that's the example of john leslie isn't it yes um no the the way i was using it i i don't i don't know the words epistemic and and so on so i'm not gonna use that but but um there are so many planets in in the universe that we are allowed to postulate a theory of the origin of life which has only a very very very low probability of happening and the reason we're allowed to do that is that we are here on a planet where it manifestly happened because we're here we're thinking about it we're talking about it so if it's true i don't believe for a moment it's true that there's life on only one planet in the universe but if anybody here wants to say there's life that this this planet is unique in in having life then they are entitled to do so because we know it happened here we're sitting here talking about it therefore if this planet had to be with hindsight it's not a necessity in advance it was with hindsight had to be the one where it it it did happen i think john leslie's our argument is a little bit different um i don't think that applies to to to this can i think we will be coming back to the anthropic principle when we're talking about the origin of the universe but before we do that let me just come back on one interesting question about the um what you call the protogenetics or the genetics um is that as much as to say that even before we have a genetic scheme we have the transfer of information yes yes and that um if you're like turning back your own point about the origins of humanity there's no point in the universal story where we can say there is no information i think um that one that might be one of the places where you would want to suggest that there was a sudden moment when something happened um information in this context would mean um that there are self-replicating entities but there is more than one kind of them so it's not enough just to have a self-replicating energy which makes infinite numbers of copies of itself because then you don't get competition you don't get to get variety so it has to be something like dna probably nothing like as complex as dna but something like dna where um information means that there are there's there's heterogeneity in the in the types of entity that there are um and each type gives gives rise to its own type with an occasional possibility of a mistake which then increases the number of different types that there are which therefore allows for the possibility of competition between them where competition means very precisely competition to become more numerous in the population of such entities as as compared with with others and i think that that had to be the first step nobody knows and it's a very very difficult problem how something like the triplet code of dna arose it's a it's um it's um often described as possibly a frozen accident that that once the cryptid code had arisen um then it couldn't be changed because any any change would be completely immediately disastrous um catastrophically disastrous um but how the tryptophan arose i think is a is a mystery waiting to be solved i mean just as i think i said at the beginning we would have to say this is an anthropogenic universe in the sense that it's you know it's thrown up us is there then a sense in which we have to say that the universe is necessarily an information generating system i think it's a very interesting point to suggest the universe is an information generator i mean i wouldn't bring us into it i mean it throws up kangaroos as well um but um yes i think it would be fair to say that that natural selection generates information yeah switching a bit further back though we're just about to to move on to the origin of the universe i think um but there's a bridging question here from barry billingsley it says surely if the truth is that the universe is billions of years old and life evolved it would have been better when the bible was written to say nothing about how humans began did the writers essentially get it wrong it's probably one for me i can't imagine that the biblical writers were like faced with a set of options including telling the truth that the universe is billions of years old and saying oh that's too difficult the writers of the bible inspired as i believe they were were nonetheless not inspired to do 21st century physics they were inspired to pass on to their readers what god wanted them to know forgive the naked theology here but i might as well come clean and that means reading the first book of the bible what i look for is the basic information slightly different sense from what we were talking about listener the universe depends on god and god's freedom humanity has a very distinctive role in that universe and from the first measurable moment humanity has made a rather conspicuous mess of that role that's where the bible begins that's that's what i need to know so to speak and i don't think that it makes very much sense to talk about the writers of scripture getting it wrong in the sense that there was lots of information available and they happen to get on the wrong bits of it but i i wonder when you say humans got it wrong i mean presumably oh original yes right um but i i i'm baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know perfectly well adam and eve never existed still carry on talking about it as though it had some profound wisdom to impart to us um in an allegorical sense also i mean that i presume is what you what you mean pretty much it's again something which isn't just a 21st century invention but some it's a way people have read genesis from very early on but i don't understand why you really bother because when you think back to who wrote genesis they were not there's no reason to think that they possessed any particular wisdom or knowledge why would you want to waste your time reinterpreting genesis to make sense of it in the 21st century why not just stick to 21st century science if i want to answer 21st century scientific questions then i stick to 21st century science if i want to understand my moral and spiritual position in the universe i reserve the right to go back to genesis yes but but why don't you then why don't you then talk about moral and spiritual problems as you wish to talk about them what how does it help to go back to the to the just what somebody wrote in whatever it was 800 bc in um well presumably rowan thinks that in a certain sense they were written by god not by these humans i mean and since since he has been sporting enough to bring god into the discussion uh and uh you i think uh richard believe you have a disproof of god's name no he doesn't i don't that you were wrong when you said that i i constructed in the god delusion the seven point scale of which one was i'm i i know god exists uh seven was i know god doesn't exist and i call myself a six why don't you call yourself an agnostic then i do um but but i but i think it's a i think you are described as the world's most famous atheist not by me but can i ask you to oh you're boeing but you you have your boeing 747 yes to show you i mean i i am probably i believe that when when you talk about agnosticism it's very important to make a distinction between i don't know whether x is true or not therefore it's 50 50 likely or unlikely and that's the kind of agnostic which i which i don't which i'm definitely not um i think one can place estimates of probability on these things and i think the probability of of any supernatural creator existing is very very low so let's say i'm a 6.9 um but that still doesn't mean that i'm that i'm absolutely confident that i absolutely know because i don't but i was asking for your reasons for the high probability okay the reason for the high probability are that um complicated things things that appear to be designed don't just happen they as darwin showed us and this is what i meant right at the beginning when i said that darwin's achievement gives us confidence and the confidence that he that he gives us is because he showed how you can go this wonderful thing almost too wonderful to be true this wonderful thing that you can go from extreme simplicity where there is no design where there is no complexity and after four billion years you end up with us and that's an explicable process it's an understandable process we understand it it works now that's an astonishing thing to have to have happened if you then go back and say oh yes but i expect there was a god at the beginning anyway i mean that that that completely undermines the whole rationale for doing it why bother to do it if you're going to having devoted having explained how it took four billion years to develop complexity and the illusion of design it's a betrayal of everything that science stands for to suddenly go back and say oh yes but there was a god at the beginning anyway who started it all off or something of that of that sort consciousness is part of it intelligence design complexity the elegance of of of life all these things come late in the universe they come after a long period of billions of years of evolution they've come it took four billion years on this planet we don't know how long it took on other planets if there are um but it's not something that just happens that's the boeing 747 argument but you you i thought your boeing 747 argument was that complexity can only be produced by that a god could only produce uh the whole evolutionary story if it was more complex than the whole evolutionary source and then it might be more complex but it certainly couldn't be simple anyway it would have to be it would have to be i mean if if we're asking god to be capable of designing the laws of physics minimally designing the laws of physics let's say um setting the twiddling the knobs to get the universe's fundamental constants right in order to produce a universe perhaps um dealing with the um the chemical events of the origin of life um he's got to be at least as complicated enough to do that and he's got to forgive your sins and listen to your prayers and and all that kind of thing that's not a simple creature don't we have another one that we have to distinguish between two senses of complexity yes and of simplicity there is complexity of structure and complexity of function now traditionally theologians have said that god was simple that is to say he had no structure he was not spread out in space and time but of course in saying that he was omnipotent they said that he had an enormous number of powers an infinite number of powers but there is a distinction between complexity of structure and complexity of function take my electric razor it is a much more complicated machine than a cutthroat razor if the cutthroat razor is simple in structure but it has more complex powers than the electric razor because the electric razor can only be used to shave a beard whereas the cutthroat razor could be used to cut a throat indeed you needn't even have a cut throat raising just find a stone a flint and i really don't see what you're what you're saying i mean you cannot you cannot be serious two senses of simplicity okay can i can i have a go yes yes yes not that i know much about races but he can't he can't be a simple creature he said well in a sense obviously not we're not talking about a creature we're not talking about a single structure or a single element within the system we're talking about whatever it is that sustains the entire system and i think what what tony is reminding us of is that long philosophical tradition started to go back to philosophy again which says god is simple in the sense that god is not the result of any process it's not things that have to be put together god is such that within that unconditioned actuality that is god all sorts of things are possible in what he subsequently does engages with and that's the sense of simplicity i think theologians and philosophers have been looking for i i was very struck by your discussion of complexity and simplicity in the god dilution and um had to sit down and think a bit about why i didn't think it was it was quite on the ball here but i don't think the language of simplicity as justified is is nonsense if you're talking about something which does not come to be it's the sense in which you might say that the what david berm calls the implicated order of the universe is simple that it's not the result of a process it is what it is with all the complexity and it's not something that has been put together or brought into being i have to say that i think the doctrine of divine simplicity uh is in flat contradiction to most of the other attributes that theologians attribute to god but i just want to put in a note of dissent yes well i do that um what i can't understand is why you don't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that we can explain the world the universe life we can explain it from well physicist and our talia is telling us starting from literally nothing i mean that is such a staggeringly elegant and beautiful thing why would you want to clutter up your world view um with something so messy as a god because it's just nothing from nothing is so baffling interesting you say clutter because i i entirely agree about the elegance and beauty of what you're talking about um i was if i may say sir i was happy to quote you in a christmas sermon a couple of years ago on this subject and because if i say you write wonderfully about exactly that elegance and that beauty and it's a delight to read and i find i'm you know inspired by that i don't see clutter coming into it at all for the simple reason but as i say i'm not thinking of god as an extra that has to be shoehorned somehow into this which is exactly how i see it i mean yes well that's where we just said good i just ask one final question before handing over to professor henry brooke uh you it should seem to be uh attracted by the idea that there may be multiple universes other many other universes and this is at one point uh something you offer as an explanation of the very uh striking fact of the cosmological constants being so fine-tuned that we are able to live in a universe governed by them now it seems to me that intelligent design on the one hand and multiple universes on the other are exactly on a level they are both metaphysical hypotheses because these other universes cannot be amenable to scientific investigation otherwise they'd be our universe and i'm not against metaphysics i'm a metaphysician myself but it does seem to me that if one ought not to teach intelligent or even mention intelligent design in science classes one or not to teach or even mention multiverses well there are no doubt physicists here who will will give us the the ev it's not just that multiverses are invented for the purpose of explaining why um the physical constants appear to be finely tuned there are other reasons for postulating uh multiverses it's a kind of analogous situation i mean i i can deal with the anthropic principle at a planetary level and which is what we were talking about before where where we said um that there are so many billion planets and therefore we can make inferences about the improbability that we are allowed to to to to um entertain in talking about the origin of life it's a parallel argument that's used with the with the multiverse where the universe that we're in um appears to be finely tuned according to some views not all views by the not all physicists except that um and therefore in a rather analogous way to that to how i use planets there are some physicists who postulate um many universes in which um each universe has its own versions of the physical laws and constants and then by the anthropic principle again um we have to be in the kind of universe which is capable of giving rise to us and therefore it's no surprise that we that we are um that that's only one way in which physicists deal with that with that uh question um there are other ways that other physicists do i think we're about to have to wind up i just ask you around if you'd like a final word before we ask that's a brook too um i'd love to talk more about the the universe multiverse question but if i could just go back for a moment to the the clutter question um because i do think you put your finger on one of the things that does seriously divide us for me the the elegance and the beauty you talk about is an elegance which is if you like simply framed by the sense of a god who is let's call them the combination of love and mathematics with these purposes producing this sort of elegance um eternally unconditionally and i feel for that vision of the universe and the hand of god very much as you feel for what you've been talking about in terms of the elegance and beauty of the scientific explanation that is for me at least as much worth contemplating enjoying not just investigating but enjoying as the scientific picture you've sketched thank you very much thank you i think professor brooke is going to say a few words to close the session chancellor guests colleagues ladies and gentlemen as joint convener of oxford sophia europa group i'm honored to propose this brief vote of thanks to our distinguished speakers they've surely met our highest expectations for serious dialogue on a subject that in the blog sphere so often attracts the angry and the opinionated charles darwin declined to discuss humankind in his origin of species declaring it a subject to riven with prejudice in a culture that now contemplates the prospects for post-humanism and transhumanism prejudices still abound how fr how refreshing then to witness an engagement of the quality we've experienced this afternoon and how appropriate that it should have taken place in a university with which each speaker has been intimately associated and where the proper study of humanity requires the insights of many disciplines as a historian of science i might perhaps be permitted a moment's reflection on how high-profile events of this kind leave their mark as with the debate between the bishop of oxford samuel wilberforce and thomas henry huxley such events produce delicious anecdotes and later mythologies that shape public opinion long afterwards when a former archbishop of york dr john hubgood once engaged with professor dawkins a newspaper headline the following day famously read apes have souls too says primate in in such debates there can be no easy victories of that contra tone between wilberforth and huxley it was reported at the time that each had found a foe worthy of their steel and made their charges and counter charges very much to their own satisfaction and the delight of their respective friends this afternoon we've been privileged to hear three interlocutors even more worthy of their steel their contributions will surely have pleased their friends but they've done far more than that in enriching our understanding and in probing those fissures between theism atheism and agnosticism even if all three were voted 6.9 we should thank all in the university who have planned this event and made it realization possible and please share your special appreciation of our generous speakers i don't think we can get an answer

Channel: University of Oxford

Views: 243,451

Rating: 4.6163769 out of 5

Keywords: religion, Darwin, Debate, Dawkins, science, evolution, 1860, Creationism, Richard Dawkins (Ethologist), Anthony Kenny, Archbishop of Cantebury, Sheldonian

Id: zruhc7XqSxo

Length: 88min 8sec (5288 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/MaceWumpus]

Here's something I think would be an interesting (though in my mind, excruciatingly painful) piece of philosophical work: go through all the debates between people like Dennett and Dawkins and some intrepid theologian who maybe partially understands science and see how "incommensurable" their arguments are.

Or, in other words, can we see the idea of Kuhnian paradigms not within science, but between epistemological meta-position, and if so, might we develop a notion of relative incommensurability that would be able to do more work than the full-throated view generally credited to Kuhn?

Such a notion would note that for Dawkins and his Christian foil, nearly nothing counts as shared evidence, while for, say, string-theorists and physicists who are not, the physical facts in question and even their primary interpretation are agreed on but not the theoretical conclusions to be drawn from them. I would hypothesize, however, that in most of the debates between Dawkins/Hitchens/Dennett and the theists, one side or the other would try to overcome the evidential barrier and argue within the realm of the other's evidence, indicating that the notion of relative incommensurability would not be particularly useful and might be better expressed in terms of some sort of "level-relative" disagreement that separates out (if such a thing is possible) the differences between people on the basis of whether they disagree about the 1. empirical facts, 2. the patterns (concepts) apparent in those facts, or 3. the theoretical (or meta-theoretical?) analysis of those patterns.

[u/OneSwarm]

The problem of consciousness will be solved by neurology and computer science.

I think not. But I don't think christianity will reach truth here either. However I do think the narratives of religion and the arts are more illuminating on the matter of the origin and nature of the complete scope of consciousness. I don't think final scientific truth is obtainable in this matter.

What do you think?

[u/[deleted]]

great way to spend my saturday night