'Setting Prometheus Free': A Lecture by A C Grayling

hello I'd like to welcome you all here on behalf of a cursed Island to the first in hopefully a large series of talks and by now the data is similar similar people like that and it's great to see such a large turnout especially given the days you know it's a Tuesday in November and originally the room looks for 30 people but it's great to see so many people show up and so many people be interested the man who's speaking today needs no introduction but for the sake of my ego I'm going to give him one anyway and he's written more books but in Jesus first that isn't hard and so to give them proper introduction and just to say a few words but atheist Ireland and what we're all doing here today I'm going to invite Mick Nugent up okay Nick thanks see us as as Harry so that says I see grayling is a prolific writer I was kind of nervous and these circles of using were prolific in case it sounds like pro-life but um but I see is a I'm in in the best sense of the word pro-life ICG is and an excellent advocate for the type of an ethical approach to to living together the people of a proper concept of what life is about would hold he's written more or less close to a you know a book a year for the last more than twenty years and has been also a public advocate for the what for the type of things of atheist Ireland is also a public event for for any promoting atheism and reason over superstition and supernaturalism for promoting an ethical and secular society where where the church doesn't have a disproportionately dominant role in either society generally or certainly in the formation of laws he is his most recent project is as co-founder of the new college of the humanities in London and will be very interesting to see how project develops and he's a just a fascinating person to listen up so I first heard him live at a conference a few years ago which was Orioles conferences where you've somebody speaking for an hour and then if somebody else speaking for an hour and then if somebody else speaking for an hour and with the best will in the world you know no matter how interesting they are I guess are struggling to keep your attention and I see came on like close to the end of a day of that and he was absolutely hypnotic to listen to and full of practical and philosophical wisdom so I think we've a treat in store today and I'll introduce a c-grade thank you very much it's a great pleasure to be back in Dublin and it's a great honor to be the first in this series that you're going to run and I think you ought to tell subsequent to people who are going to speak it it's something about the dress code because I'm feeling seriously I'd like if I may to talk about three arguments they're very familiar arguments you'll be very familiar with them but I want to revisit them and look at them in a little detail and to tease out some other aspects of them that's not often recognized three arguments which are used by religious apologists in support of theism the idea I suppose being that arguments for theism were taken to be arguments against atheism because again if you look at the range of the debate about theism and atheism you notice that there are very few good arguments against atheism and that the kind of consideration that people tend to trot out to inclined people to be hostile to an atheist standpoint relates to things like the and lack of a moral basis in atheism and the atrocities committed by 8bit allegedly atheist leaders like Hitler and Stalin and so on where we're familiar with the sort of moves that people make on that front and but that there are really very very few arguments which purport attenuate to provide a kind of knockdown conclusive case against the Atheist position they tend on the contrary to the arguments that are meant to be very powerfully in support of the taya's position and so I want to look at three rather familiar ones the argument - has just mentioned it's not possible to have a morality without a theistic basis now I'm not actually going to discuss that I've been such a bad argument that we don't need to discuss it really you only just have to point out that there's some moral atheists and then that story is over but the the point about the argument is that there are some as it were a sociological or meta theoretical remarks to be made about why tears think that's a good argument that I want to mention the second concerns the claim that there's smake about the spiritual dimension as they call it of individual lives and here there is something interesting which I think merits exploration this is the idea that we human beings with our creative and imaginative side and our need to feel some connection with the world around us and other people have a set of nostalgia and yearnings which religion has been very good at capturing and monopolizing and talking about in spiritual terms and I'd like to make some remarks about that because I think there is a very important point there and then the third thing of course is the claim the sort of stock claim the theists make that you can't prove that there isn't a gold or that there aren't gods and goddesses and fairies in the West and that they seem to take this as a kind of yarbusova of argument or you can't prove that there isn't one so so there is one you know but of course but that we know doesn't follow but there is something about the idea of proof and about the nature of argument that one should pay attention to because it's a very important point and the reason why this talk is entitled to set prometheus free and so this is the commercial break part of the story is that a year ago I published a little book of essays called to set Prometheus free for the obvious reason you know the Prometheus was tied to a rock by his use because he had stolen far from the gods given it to mankind and the gods very annoyed because it says if mankind has fire then they become gods and they don't need us anymore - right so there's a retractor Prometheus against this rock and Prometheus had his liver nord and every night of every day by a vulture and then the liver we grew overnight so that the torture would recommence the next day and Shelley had great atheist and in the usual way of these things by the way he was sent down from his college to Oxford University College because he had published an atheist pamphlet and now if you visit University College in Oxford you see there is a statue to him in the college and this is the normal way of things the more vilified you are at one point the of a national treasure you are they dropped this this happened to achieve de chelly and he wrote a great poem called Prometheus Unbound which is of course again a continuation of this story that we are no longer in really speaking a little letter just wonderful certainly shall I step a bit closer to the microphone ah I think just speak I was right so then these three arguments and let's have a look at the arguments about no no morality without days them and as I say no need to address the argument itself because it's it's too obviously experienced but what lies behind it is the thought that that there has to be something which is the authority over our moral lives there has to be something a kind of benchmark or a standard or something to which one could appeal like the Supreme Court for example something at any rate to which reference can be made in order to be sure that our moral lives are adjusted according to something that isn't merely relative or merely arbitrary or merely a matter of subjective preference in the tradition of debates in philosophy about the nature of the moral planes a debate over whether they are genuinely objective that is that they are true because they conform to something independent of themselves or whether they are subjective that is the result of how we respond to things our feelings about things in that debate the argument has really been between the idea of a kind of Authority a source of objectivity on the one hand and on the other hand how you could make out a case for saying that there are genuinely persuasive genuinely cogent moral principles that we have to obey if we're going to be serious in our moral lives but which nevertheless aren't handed down by a deity or aren't written on tablets of stone somewhere brought down from Mount Sinai and some of the very best thinkers about the this matter have come down on the side of the subjectivity on the side of the fact that our moral responses are features of our human nature indeed the reason why humans great work was called the treatise of human nature was that he thought that our thinking about the world and our thinking about morality Springs from facts about us from our passions from our moral the moral texture of our makeup and you may remember an argument that he put he said look at the case where a parent is being killed by its offspring in the one case it's a human parent being killed by its ungrateful child in the other case it's a mature tree being killed by a sapling grown from a seed that the mature tree has dropped but the sapling by its more vigorous life taking up the nutrients and the moisture in the soil next to the mature tree is causing the latter to die and he said the only reason why we distinguish between the two cases we don't say Oh naughty sapling because it's causing the death of the parent tree but we do say Oh naughty child because it's causing the death of the human parent is that we are much more sentimental about human beings than we are about trees that our our feelings are much more richly engaged in the human case than the arboreal case and this is the only distinction between them it's the way we respond and therefore the source of our moral judgments the source of our preference has to do with our nature human nature hence the treatise of human nature now familiarly and the problem with that is relativism the implication seems to be that if you were slightly differently constituted or if people come to be differently constituted in different cultures and different societies but they may value as good things that in our society we value is bad and and so on and there is therefore no means of adjudication between the two we just have to live with the relativities and yet our deepest impulses our deepest instincts lead us to think that there are some things like inhumanity and protein injustice murder and the like which are just not acceptable no matter what you feel about it I mean if you came out of the front row of your house and you saw a gang of thugs beating up a little old lady your revulsion I mean if it was a gay little old lady's beating up the pub you might feel there is a gang of thousand of the glow leading your revulsion against it but seem to be not just simply a matter of how you feel about it indeed if somebody said oh well that kind of thing doesn't bother me and went off to work you would be horrified at that person because you would feel that they were missing some very important component in their capacity to feel for and to respond to what's happening to other people around them that there is a breakdown in the relationship of concern between one human being and another and we also find although this is consistent of course with what Hume says that we do have a very natural quick information to sympathise with others so vision you're walking down Dame Street in Dublin and somebody ahead of you is just underneath the teetering pile of bricks about food on their head what would you do would be extremely unlikely that you would say this is going to be interesting you were much more much more likely to call out to them a call out a warning and you would do it instinctively with that without reflecting on it and this is an indication of how the connections between us have this moral content so um so it comes down to a question of what is it that makes moral judgments and Moral Sentiments objective if they are so what is the authority of our moral lives now two people who were brought up in a religious tradition or two people who are insufficiently imaginative about these things it really does seem that you have to have a policeman somewhere up there in the sky who's watching her of everything and has already issued a set of edicts about the do's and don'ts and who will get you in the end I mean it's a very very powerful means of social control one might point out just a kind of footnote remark that you say to people there is an invisible policeman he sees everything you do even when you're on your own in the dark and even if you get away with it during the course of this lifetime you not going to get away with it when you die and this is a very powerful powerful instrument of the control over people's lives all the more so if you make people come and report their failings once a week in the confessional and then they're reminded of the fact that they're under scrutiny all the time we noticed that most governments in the developed world have now officially given up belief in the invisible policeman because they've installed CCTV cameras in so they no longer leave it up to the deity but this idea this this recourse that the moral law has to its enforcer is a very natural one to have been embodied in the religious outlook and a very natural one for people to assume because we always want to push back the ultimate explanation for something you know how did the world how did the universe begin well it satisfies some people to say it was created by God I always say in those cases by the way don't don't call the originated the universe God call him Fred and then you suddenly see the emptiness of the claim the universe was created by Fred and then you hang on a second that hasn't actually explained anything at all but in exactly the same way if you say the moral law is handed down by and enforced by Fred then you see that that actually doesn't give you the objectivity you need and and therefore it forces you to think a bit more about how you can have a sustainable or authoritative account of the force of the moral law in our lives now those of you who reading can say take a pure reason and critique of a practical reason in the bath last night we'll know that sense of course but puts this down to reason that if we think very carefully about us and he says we stand halfway between the eight of the animals and the angels we like animals we have appetites and deeds and desires and like the angels we have reason now the Angels never do anything wrong because he didn't really believe in the Angels by the way but he's just figuratively they have no appetites but they do have reasons so they always conform to the moral law the animals have appetites with no reason so they just go with their appetites but we are cursed with both appetising reason we see the better but we do the worse we are impelled to satisfy our appetites but then we recognize the harm that that can do to others and to ourselves so we have to exercise reason to restrain and direct ourselves and therefore it is reason which provides the the authority over us it provides the objectivity I think however that although there is something very compelling and indeed in its way rather beautiful about that argument and I would always rather prefer people to employ reason than appetite when they're coming to very serious judgments about things but there is another resource and I think a much more interesting one and that is to recognize that we are essentially social animals that we need relationships with other people that we know from the Distilled experience of our kind in history and in literature and in philosophical reflection that the best and most flourishing kinds of lives our lives which have at their heart good relationships and the minute that we recognise this we recognize the duty on us to reflect on our relationships and to see and the great advantage even if you were to take the crudest of self-interest lines that are behaving well towards other people on taking into account their needs and interests their goals is is something which is a great benefit to ourselves and to everybody indeed the shortest way of putting this and I love to quip this because he's a great Irishman and the great mind Craig George managed Shaw on the subject of the golden rule you know the golden rule says do unto others as you would have them do unto you and Shaw very wisely said under no circumstances should you do to others what you'd like them to do to you because they may not like it and this is a very very good insight it's a very good insight because it recognizes the plurality and diversity of human experience it recognizes that we have a responsibility to see that that others need a space around themselves that they be allowed their choices their interests their proclivities that acquire just as we want that space around ourselves and that good relationships between people our relationships of understanding and our tolerance and that's not a cliche because tolerance if you think about it you know we all think that we're very tolerant folk actually it's because we don't mind and it's when we do mind that we have to do the hard work of tolerance and we find that it is quite hard work because it involves having to hold back some of our reactions to things and to do to do the business of finding out why it is that people behave and choose as they do and so we can look to human nature we can look to the facts about us as social beings and about our and everything that that implies because it's a very rich concept the concept of being a social being we need our relationships we need our communities we need the bonds that bind us to our children which are other members of our family to our communities and we also need to the courage and the intelligence to widen that domain of concern to other people whose interests needs our log language beliefs and practices are very very different from our own now all that is in a sort of a rather elaborate Lee put cliche and that we all understand that this is true but when you look at it full in the face that consideration you see that it is what exerts moral authority over us you don't need Fred you don't need any other consideration outside facts about us as human beings and about our societies to recognize where our moral imperatives arise and these moral imperatives are not of the kind that you could inscribe on tablets of stone because they emerge from the constant negotiation the constant conversation that we have with one another in our relationships about how we are to behave towards one another and what we are to allow and accord one another this is why we get quite dramatic shifts in moral outlook over time and there are not evidence of relativism rather they're evidence that the fact that we are a dynamic community of beings that we are reflective and intelligent and we learn from new circumstances and that when something's change in our social relations it makes other changes possible to perhaps the most dramatic example of this in the last half century and more is the greater acceptability of homosexuality in our societies so gay people have long last liberated from the oppressive attitudes towards homosexuality which dates all the way back to deepest antiquity in our religious beliefs by the way and the opposition to homosexuality has a good deal to do with the the fact that the originators of the judeo-christian tradition were herdsmen and the flocks of sheep and goats were life and death to them and it mattered that they should increase and so any misdirection of male seed was regarded as a bad news because it was needed to go to the increase of the flock and therefore they were very opposed to any non-standard sort of sexual activity and indeed the Catholic Church the Roman Catholic Church for very long time had the view that masturbation was worse than rape because at least rape could result in pregnancy and that this kind of convoluted moral thinking is the result of an attitude to that effect um I was in a London taxi a few weeks ago talking to the cab driver as one does about the Old Testament I asked him if he had read the Old Testament and he said he hadn't and I asked him if you remembered any stories from us and he said he vaguely remembered something about a woman being turned into a pillar of salt and I suppose that has something to do with his current domestic circumstances wishful thinking or something like that and I said to him do you know what that story comes from and he said no so I told him the story of course about plot in Sodom and God didn't like what was happening in Sodom so he decided that he was going to Massacre the inhabitants of the cities wiped them out the morality of the Old Testament and he was reminded that there might be a righteous person in Sodom so he should be a bit careful about that so he sent their two angels you remember you will know the story to warn lot and the citizens of Sodom since the angels were rather good-looking chaps wanted them and they came banging on locks door and lot said you can't have them you can have my two daughters instead remember that they said we don't want that we want these two two youths anyway they managed to escape when Lot's wife returned to sulfa she didn't obey the injunction a little back and then Lawson his daughter's up in the mountains the daughters have fed up their husbands what we're going to do about having children or make daddy drunk and sleep with him and then they are the ancestresses as you know I can't remember all of whom the Moabites and the somebody else I openly is the ammonites but they were fossils um I told this story to the taxi driver and he said after after a pause he said is that in the Bible I said it is and he said surely they cut it out and in a way when you reflect on the idea that religious traditions provide us with our the authority over our moral lives that provide us with their that the content is what is the principles of our moral outlook you can be very surprised and it does us a lot good to be reminded of stories like that so this idea no morality without religion you can't write out all the stories about lot and the rest the point lies behind it is this idea of what the rub the underlying bedrock is about moral activity and I don't think that we need look any further than facts about us about about us human beings a sensible generous open-minded reflection on what we need from one another and and how we get along best with one another and we find that those seemingly common sensical seemingly rather commonplace even considerations actually provide as is so often the case for things that are simple something very deep and you don't need to go further than that so that's the argument about morality now the argument about spirituality I do think that it's a wonderful thing about human beings that they have this sense of the poetry of things the sense of the of the poetry of the universe that we have at some of our more reflective some of our better moments we have a kind of yearning or a kind of nostalgia for that connectedness that we would love to feel with all other human beings and with the universe and most of the people in this room I think quite independently of illegal substances or Guinness or anything else have had moments of that sense or that yearning or wanting to be able to express that and we may well have found it Mayweather founded when we fought in doubt we may find it when we listen to wonderful music we can find it when we walk in the country you may find it when we read great poetry and it really strikes home really speaks to us in some way may have found it in a very simple moment of rest or relaxation looking at a sunset or whatever those sentiments those feelings and when those feelings come to us there is along with it because we are expressive articulate beings also a desire to do something which which gives expression to it and the sort of commonplace thing is that somebody will stand on a hill top and see the Sun setting across the ocean and great beam of light which seems to be directed at you individually and a natural thing for people to do say oh thank you God for such a beautiful world little footnote remark and it always astonished as me how many people get to church after a natural disaster when tens of thousands have been grounded object struck in and earth-quaking not made a connection there and thought of doing something different but they have that kind of feeling with the sunset over the scene and that that's an interesting and I think a capture something which is important and valuable about us part of the very best side of us as human beings that we are capable of these deep and nostalgia for the absolute as we might say and the religions have been very good at hijacking these emotions and it's saying that they own them and that you find your spiritual expression best in the course of a religious service or in the course of sitting quietly in the church or in prayer or and reading the scriptures I have to say that as somebody who was obliged as a little boy at a boarding school to sit through church services most days of the week that there was nothing particularly special about the experience at all on the contrary and especially when you look at you know how religious observance has been reconfigured in in recent years I mean now that the mass is not in Latin for example with no chance of any feelings of transcendence and and significance there you know I went to a funeral in London a couple of years ago at which the it was the Tridentine Mass and I having the experience of the medieval peasant and not knowing what the heck was going on and having to wait for other people to stand up and kneel down to know what what you know when to do the right things but you get at least you could at least imagine how a ritual whose detailed content you weren't actually able to follow but just that the sort of outlines of it could be a kind of hook on which you could hang your own spiritual feelings and very like you know that old joke about why the little girl preferred radio to television and she said she preferred the pictures of radio and so on well it's your own imagination which is feeding into things and covering them and giving them their content but when of course the religious right comes to be expressed in the demotic and you can understand it then it isn't so interesting so this the idea that the religions through their rituals through their practices through their observances provide an opportunity for people to express their spirituality doesn't persuade me so much I mean I can imagine some you know a great big thing going on in some Peter's Basilica in Rome or you know some some tremendous pomp like the investiture of a new pope I don't know whether you knew by the way hm that the Italians called the Pope Pappa and his name is Ratzinger so they call him Papa Razzi in Italy now but if the investiture that might be a greater amusing the moment of great ritualistic moment at which people could feel this upsurge of spiritual feeling but actually these these feelings these yearnings for the absolute come to us in just a ways that I've described before indistinct of music in walking in the country and being the friends for dinner and falling in love and I think that we ought to reclaim those things from the monopoly exerted over them by religion those feelings those great sometimes incoherent overwhelming wonderful rich deep emotions that we are sometimes capable of having we should we describe them as being something natural to us as human beings something that we could very well seek out as some people do when they set time aside for listening to music we're going to a concert or reading poetry that there we should recognize them as a very valuable feature of ourselves and we should recognize them also being a naturalistic component of our psychologies and not something which only happens if you do certain things like go to church or that they don't have a significance that you're actually in contact with the sublime man I've often thought that that if you were to try to do a kind of Nietzschean genealogy of religion to try and work out what it is about our remotest ancestors that led to the formation of religions and we have quite a lot of empirical evidence to guide us on this by the way because the the great religions of today Judaism Christianity Islam Hinduism which is a tremendous misnomer for a family of of religions in India but these religions are in human historical trends very young religions very young religions and they all happen to take rise to 3,000 years ago in their origins at times of monarchy which is why we have you know the sort of monarchic kind of God but for tens of thousands of years before that and in a lot of societies whose nature and structure is rather close to those more remote historical societies the that there isn't religion there is a form of animism which is a kind of proto scientific attempt to explain how nature works by attributing agency to it which is a projection from our own felt capacity as agents so the wind blows because there's a great agent puffing his his or her cheeks and blowing or the rain falls because a great agent is weeping and so on and these are attempts to provide a kind of explanation which is in its way a proto scientific and you notice a sort of geography in the history of religion or in fact it's kind of increasing altitude among the gods because they used to be in the streams and the rivers as water nymphs and briards and then when we got to know the streams and woods better they went up a bit mountaintops I mean one of the gods of the early because Judaism used to be a polytheism and the tribal god of the of the Hebrews seems to have started out as a volcano God pillar of smoke by day and a burning bush and a mountaintop and then when people crept up to the mountaintops and there were no gods there they went off into the sky and now they've gone beyond space and time altogether the more we know the further they go so there is a kind of geography and history of that kind but when you go back to those ancient times and you ask yourself what what is it that made people think that time a they could have contact with these agencies and be that these agencies were a bit more than just blows of the wind and Reapers of Tears and making thunder by walking on the clouds and the answer is that if you got drunk or if you had a fever and you had hallucinate it or if you add to a wheat with a got fungus on it or in somewhere I will put the wrong kind of mushroom you know the Amanita muscaria that'll get you in contact with a few gods for a while you if you do any of those things you will think that you have broken through to an alternative reality and you would might very well make it seems to have been the case the inference to having made contact with these agencies and that the roots of religion in fungus and mushrooms and getting drunk and of course they've stayed that way more or less ever since but that that is a ready explanation if we were looking for naturalistic explanations of why people think as they do about these matters and therefore it would have been a very natural connection you've eaten a magic mushroom and you've had that pretty floaty experience and met the gods and seeing all sorts of colors that the most extreme form of expression of these feelings of transcendence and spiritual experience would therefore naturally be annexed to religion and the regions have certainly made a great play of them and have claimed ownership of them more and more as our lives have become more and more practical and common sensical so I say that on that matter we should contest the religions contest religious apologists on their claim that we only attain the sublime and we can only express ourselves spiritually in a religious setting we should say this belongs to us as human beings this is a feature one of the best features of us alongside our capacity to be kind and to be generous and to be open-hearted it's a capacity for us to touch the poetry of things and to and to have those feelings so that's the second argument a final one now you can't prove that Fred really exists okay um this is a misapprehension about the nature of proof now we all know because CERN and I leave aside all the putative arguments that religious philosophers and apologists have produced you know the ontological argument there is that which is meant to be a purely logical argument from the definition of the Supreme Being the teleological argument the appearance of design in the world tell that somebody just had his appendix out the cosmological argument which commits the great fallacy of thinking that because everything in the world appears to have a cause the world must have a cause and then poor old Fred is dragged out as the course of the universe and all those arguments are what they well-known arguments and they and they don't work and we know that so the apologist turns the table and well you can't prove that there isn't the deity not a great deal would follow from that even if it were true but as it happens it isn't true think about the concept of proof in a formal context the mathematics or in logic you can provide a conclusive proof in a deductive system for example like first-order propositional calculus I know that was the other thing you were all reading in the bath last night gurbles proof or something like that you see how you can construct the proof in a formal system that's perfectly straightforward you're all very familiar from it from all the pleasures or Agony's that you expense at school doing geometry and the rest and it's very straightforward but in the non formal case in the non in the case where you are not looking at a closed axiomatic system where the notion of proof is actually a notion of derivation may what really happens in a closed s axiomatic system is that you were transforming expressions you were rearranging most deductive arguments are just rearrangements I mean take a straightforward example the example of a syllogism and argument of two premises in a conclusion like all men are mortal Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal and you notice that the conclusion is already contained in the premises inclusion is just a rearrangement of the premises it's a defining feature of a closed axiomatic deductive system that conclusions that those assertions or theorems or whatever which are proved in the system contain no novelty as neurological novelty there's no new information there the big distinction between a deductive system and an inductive one is that an inductive conclusion always contains more information than lying the premises this one is white that's one is right though this one is white so all swans are white now that's a much more general claim it also happens to be for false is unity there are Black Swan but it's an example of how the the content the informational content of the conclusion is much greater than the informational content of the premises but in a deductive argument that's never the case there's no logical novelty there can however be psychological novelty there is the story about the Duke he's French you see having a party in his chateau on the Rue are and he has with him a bishop as a principal guest and certain point in the party the Duke has to go down to the sellers to order up some more chatter nerf to pop or whatever it is they're drinking and he Pat's the open he doesn't he Pat's the Duke on the bishop on the shoulder when he comes back again that's the important part of the story because the bishop tells the assembled guests an anecdote while the Duke is absent he says when I was first ordained of a young priest the first person I ever gave confession to was the most hideous multiple murderer and is a gasp from the assembled company then the Duke comes back and you see what's going to happen Pat's the bishop on the shoulder and says I was the first person ever to have confession with the bishop and so the guests leave now there's no logical novelty and the conclusion that the guests have drawn they haven't yet drunk enough chatter metal depart not to draw the inference but there is psychological novelty they're surprised to find out that the Duke was a multiple murderer by these means now in the case of a non deductive system in the and in particular in the case of empirical inquiry inquiry in the Natural Sciences the concept of proof is a very different concept it is not the concept of getting a transformation of the elements or the arrangements out of the premises into the conclusion rather it is the concept of test to prove something is to test it in fact there is that saying isn't there the exception that proves the rule mum usually misused by people when they've done something against the rules and they say well that's the exception the proof to all men should make it okay but the exception is what tests the rule a bit like taking a metal and and loading it and seeing is what point of real fracture seeing how much stress it will bear that's a test of proof of the metal I don't know what the concept of proof is doing an alcohol but that's something else so the concept of proof is concept of test and when when we test things in the empirical case what we are are seeking to do is to look for what we are in title to claim or conclude on the basis of the evidence that we have available to us and the mark of accepting an empirical proof is being rational that is think about the first part of that word ratio means proportion it mean if you're rational you've proportioned your claim or your conclusion to the evidence available to you I take a basic straightforward case supposing every time I've been out in the rain without an umbrella I've got wet but as a reader of the great David Hume I know that inductive inferences are always fallible the Sun has always risen in every morning in the past it may not rise tomorrow in fact this or isn't the past no gas teeth will rise tomorrow therefore the fact that of those built wet in the past and I'm Brad it doesn't mean I won't get out that I will get wet the next time in the rain without an umbrella now if i sallied forth or fit into the rain without an umbrella what would people say they would say that's irrational why is it irrational because it's not proportioning the evidence of the past to the action or the judgment of conclusion that you reach now and that is a very simple example of what it is to put something to the test to prove something that you do it by looking for the kind of evidence that would support concluding thinking or acting in a certain way now you're all familiar because there was the third thing you're reading in the bath it was a long bath last night was Carl Sagan's thing about the dragon and the garage you all know that that case the person says I've got a dragon in my garage you said oh that's interesting could I go and see it oh well it's invisible but but surely there are some other ways that we could know that it's there let's sprinkle flour on the floor see it's footprints oh but it never lands on the floor well its wings must you know put the flour move the Duster thing around oh no its wings flat very gently doesn't it make any noise no could we light our cigarette by his breath note me and so on and so on so after a bit I get to the case where there's no way of detecting either the dragon or for that matter Fred in the garage because nothing whatever will count as evidence for it now if either nothing whatever or anything whatever cats I mean this is the Karl Popper point two about a theory which is consistent with all the evidence that there is nothing whatever that counts as counter evidence that you can't identify anything that would disprove that would really be a test of the theory then the theory is empty it explains nothing whatever you can't use it and this is precisely of course the situation with the certian to the effect that there is non division being or beings and having decent those sorts of egregious properties nothing whatever counts as evidence that would allow you to test the claim that there is such a thing indeed it is written in the scriptures God will not be tested now there's something convenient for you you know people say about Bernie Madoff that his big mistake was not to follow the example of the Catholic Church he should have promised returns in the afterlife not in this life and the thing about Bernie Madoff was that he was subjected to tests to proof of what it was he was doing these 10 percent returns year after year and so this is the example an example of of proof in the empirical non-deductible is a matter of test the matter of rationality a matter of looking at the kind of evidence that would make you even in the case of evidence that was equivocal never does make you inclined to think for ancillary reasons that you should be able minded about this this is why I think and I argue in that little book Goethe said Prometheus free but agnosticism is not a tenable position that if you are going to look at what counts as proving claims about the existence of supernatural agencies in the universe you find that it is irrational to believe that you are in the same boat with Fred as you are with Bertrand Russell's teapot or with any other of the examples that you make which show that a bare assertion a bear came to the effect that there is something is no more than that and is empty unless something is offered to you that you can test or prove and so proof is possible you can prove that is you can rigorously test and claims to the effect that there are supernatural agencies in the world and those proofs or tests will show that it is irrational to think that they exist and that argument seems to me to be one which needs a much wider airing people ought to be prepared to examine the elements of that our dimension to put that argument much more often because of all the considerations that one could reduce in criticizing every religious outlook that one has a great deal to recommend it and there I end thank you I'm very happy to take any questions comments or complaints when I was a student in the 1960s it seemed that the argument and the view of the world that you afternoon was in the ascendant and seemed to be making progress now if the research done by the pew Institute is to be believed outside of Europe and globally it would seem that that religion and belief in God and magic thinking of various coins is in the ascendant again and seems to be growing particularly over the last say 40 years or so the last cope with that few decades or so at the same time there has also been a growth in the magic thinking of the market and liberal economics yourself do you think the two things are connected well there's no reason why economists shouldn't be every bit as irrational as the people who have a religious beliefs indeed this seems to be some evidence in favor of that hypothesis it's a very mixed picture about what's happening in with religion in the world and even even the pew data is slightly more ambiguous that than you think because the Pew polling results for the United States of America particularly show an increase especially among people under the age of 35 in agnosticism and atheism and that there's now the population of the United States about 310 million and something like 18 percent of that population now say that they don't have a religious commitment one kind or another that's quite a big number that's yet getting on the region of about sort of been in 50 60 million people and I did a book tour in the United States earlier this year with my my secular Bible the good book hoping that somebody would shoot me and miss with an important part of the arrangement mr. missing would have done yeah would have done wonders for sales and I found that that everywhere I went and the audience's I meant expecting of course to get a certain amount of hostility and criticism and in fact they were very receptive audiences and this is because they've had tens of millions of people in the United States and and this is a proportion which is increasing so that's a happy sign and unhappy sign literally with you saw very recent number of the new scientists that all the major contenders for the Republican nomination for president or all of them complete in I'm on air here on time II read that argument that that article um I'm inclined to think that it isn't that the numbers of people who are religious are increasing I think rather it is the volume of the religious voice which has being turned up dramatically for a couple of different reasons the main reason is that people who don't have religious commitment are now much much more vocal I'm just looking over the last decade for example every year several thousand books are published in the United Kingdom a leader of a religious nature or about Christianity about prayer or religion for children or Bible stories or something in the thousands not not in the hundreds or the dozens and there have been about a dozen books I think Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and sam Harris and one or two others have caused the most tremendous step and this is because um the the churches and the religions have had an absolutely free ride for for most of their history except when they're fighting one another of course and in recent decades that there has been a kind of of you know the existence of religion as the bulk of the iceberg underwater and people haven't really noticed it in fact until the the atrocities of 9/11 which brought back the idea of radical aggressive violent religion to the forefront of our minds what would happen is if you met somebody at dinner party certainly in England who had a religious commitment that person is very unlikely to set everybody around the dinner party by talking about it and if you met somebody who was religious so Christian then you would treat them a little bit as if they'd had a recent death in the family which is also a poem you know said we would pussyfoot around one another and wouldn't engage but after 9/11 there has been a head-on confrontation and a lot of people have become very outspoken about their point of view and therefore a lot of people I mean I remember being very surprised in the two or three years after 9/11 by the people who I would never have guessed were never a fortunate if it bothered me bothered me to think about it had one or another religious commitment but who came out they came as gays come out you know so religious people came out too well but I'm religious or or they've defended the right of people to be religious which of course we must all accept what we need to do is is to defeat them by argument not not in any other way so it's a question of volume it seems to me not so much of numbers not so much of proportions I think maybe I'm being very optimistic here that actually the trend is in our favor and that the phenomenon that we are seeing is rather similar to the animal backed into the corner they make a bigger noise and they're much more aggressive than they and they make bigger claims and so on because they are on the backfoot and religion certainly in the developed and advanced countries of the world they do feel on the back foot in England for example of Christian communities that claim to be persecuted which of course they love I mean they should really be a you know thanking us because that's a posture they've they've most the most like to have but they actually came to be persecuted this is a country England not the whole of the United Kingdom which has an established church head of state as the head of the church they run most of the primary schools and many of the secondary schools they have four programs from the BBC every day they have prayers before the meeting of the House of Commons House of Lords every day they are officiated every public function I mean they're so pervasive that they that we haven't noticed them they be in the wallpaper for decades and decades now we are noticing them and they therefore feel just because they are noticed and criticized that they're under some sort of pressure but they still have a huge footprint in the public debate and in the public domain and an argument that I put on every possible occasion is this a secular dispensation is one in which we weaken we adjust the presence of religion in the public square in the following way we begin by recognizing that religious organizations religious voices have every right to exist of course every right to put their point of view contribute to the great public conversation about how we can port ourselves but they should have no greater right than anybody else they should recognize themselves as civil society organizations like trade unions and political parties and they should take their turn in the queue for getting their point of view or their policies implemented and of course they don't they have this historical reason to have a massive over inflation of presence in the public square and that that's one thing that on the secularist side of the argument not the you know atheism new day ISM argument or the humanism argument but on the secularism admin that we have a very clear job to do maybe a comment of sorts I saw a very interesting speech by a professor of demography in Birkbeck University of London named and he was giving a talk in the Sydney Opera House and he said whereas we had secular societies assumed that as children grow up they're going to overthrow the religion of religion of the parents he and he said demography is a very very exact science and he reckons that that the hardline religious people will out breed the secular people and he spoke about the quiver full movement in America which I'd never heard of which apparently there ten thousand men who have come together in a bond given an oath to be get as many children as they possibly and apparently the leader has 143 children and then as the generations go through they're going to have literally millions and millions and this Scotland guy is a very very interesting is written a book subject he points out that in Israel at 1948 there were 500 Orthodox tombs and now one-third of all the children in schools in Israel our persuasion and but his bottom line was that he found that the children of the hardliners are more likely to actually be more hardline than their parents and not as in say the Anglican and the Catholic and the more secular Christian world children are likely to overthrow the religion Allah parents but but by the way I thought the oath to have as much sex as possible was written into male genes from the beginning I didn't know you have to take an extra special man and I I think I think the demographic point is is a good one and under worrying one and people of a religious commitment do chant have more children than than other people whether or not they they take an oath to have yet more and so on from that point of view yes but there are other assumptions in play there and that is that parents can always guarantee that the children they can stick to the faith that they have in that they try to bring them up in I mean I'm bringing up my youngest daughter as an atheist and my wife says that will make her Mother Abbess in a few years time there there always is well there she she's pretty feisty atheist I was telling some people last night how when she was about eight she said I don't believe in God but I do believe in the tooth fairy which I think and because of the empirical evidence for it deserve and so there is a big assumption to the effect that children will adhere to the party line of their parents and of course very often they tend to I mean it is a telling fact against religion that you know 99% of people are the religion they are because their parents were of that religion and it also happens that as time goes by I remember friend of mine telling me that he found himself sitting next to a Mormon at at a dinner party and he said to the Mormon said you know the great respect I mean that story about farmer Smith finding the golden plates in the field in Ohio we're all sort of my uterus words must be and then the angel Moroni coming and translating the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and blah blah all this in the 1820s that is a bit hard to swallow and this Mormon who was swallowing busily has dinner said it won't be hard to swallow in a thousand years time and alas you know that's actually a very good point and and it is one of them one of the many reasons because of course the reasons why religion survived a over to turn but if if we were to take the most pessimistic view of the demographic data on this front it just tells us why we have a job of work to do those of us who think we would like to see the world run by reason and kindness and over mindedness that we want to argue with people that there is a very very sharp distinction between religious attitudes and ways of thinking about things and non religious ways that the latter being prepared to live with uncertainty and lack of conclusions and we're still you know on the road to finding out more about ourselves in our world and the other mindset wanting a closed narrative a beginning read you know middle and an end thread again and start something which provides a kind of certainty sort of narrative closure that these two mindsets are in competition with one another in all sorts of ways over the rights and liberties of individuals the position of women in society the chances for progress in scientific research I mean you can think of all sorts of different ways and in particular of course and you can connect it to certain sister political considerations the the future of the world depends on women getting an opportunity for education and a stake in the economies of their countries in most of the developing countries of the world and the major reason for them being held back traditional and a major component of traditional is religious thinking in the Middle East today only 47 percent of women can read I mean that's a shocking indictment and it's H is part of a complicated story about why and things that they are so we have that job of work to do against the demographic tribe to make this case and to make it work we've got a tip with questions in Twitter and so the first one is parata's ACC Catholic churches hold over are given tea shops attack from about a get over abuse and that's from after burning at times second is Twitter as a battleground for religious argument already with results but you think works best the aggressive or planting seeds approach from a pacman 1983 I just take the latter one first I'm of course Twitter that doesn't lend itself to long drawn-out detailed argumentation the amount of interaction so much so so the planting of seeds and I think the party of seeds is very valuable because if you can just make somebody pause and think reflect and think as your new president will do on Friday we're very very pleased to say then that that might help you know some people at any rate to question and that is the great thing religions demand of their followers that they don't question they don't think they don't charge they believe transient is great essay on what is enlightenment says I hear the priests say don't think obey just as I hear the taxman judgment say pay and the soldiers say obey so Trijicon be a very powerful tool and help people pause for a moment and think and the first question was again first question was how does ICC the Catholic churches hold over our ability short - the Vatican Agra views or the law of you yes indeed just the the current seem to be moving in the right direction in the sense that the tea shop spoke very eloquently and powerfully about the Catholic Church's terrible failures over the child abuse scandal in this country and it was quite quite that he did wonderful and refreshing to see a senior politician really standing up on an issue like that so that's that's great the the fact that there are some senior politicians in Ireland who have come out and said that they're agnostic or atheist publicly is a very good sign the fact that your new president mr. Higgins is a humanist and we'll be having a humanist moment in this inauguration all this adds together to something which looks optimistic and positive because it looks as though the traditional hope and it's a financial very very recently visiting Ireland was very noticeable 20 years ago that 4050 years ago how much they how much of an overwhelming presence the church had in the lives and thoughts of people in this island you know priest came to the head of queues and very very great diffidence on the part of the population at large to call the church's authority into question that's changed dramatically and so things do seem to be moving in an optimistic direction but one has to remember that everything which seems to have a kind of reforming and opening tendency is very fragile in this world of ours and so it requires diligence and commitment on the part of the people who would like to see those those trends continue it take somebody from the white hand side of the road hope for a more secular liberal tradition to rise to the poor doesn't seem like it is it seems that those revolutions that the piston is particularly in Egypt are getting more power and I agree a lot what you're saying about you know the West there is greater trend toward secularization it's a middle-eastern word it seems to actually be reversing fundamentalist seems to become more powerful there surely entire this could lead to a flash history teaches that after revolutions that tends to be a vacuum into which the better prepared the more zealous folk can rush I mean if you look at what happened for example in the French Revolution brought something rather similar I happened there a vacuum of power came to be filled by people who were not the people you would want and they had to be contested and eventually defeated by a sort of resurgence of the kind of authority that many people before the revolution were trying to get rid of and so it's very very hard to say it's very early days for one thing the anxiety is that there will be these better organized and better prepared people coming into the vacuum and filling it and taking their opportunities there and it looks as though some of the Islamist parties and movements in those areas are precisely those better prepared people but it's very very hard to tell what the longer-term trend will be I saw an article very interesting article in the International Herald Tribune just a couple of days ago suggesting that some of these Islamist groups in the Middle East are moderate moderate and in comparison for example to al Qaeda who according to this author it generates you is something of an expert on in the field Israel itself rather alarmed by the form of Islamism that seems to be positioning itself to take power in the Middle East so it's very difficult to say and I have no authoritative view on it except an anxiety of course that things will actually go backwards it would be it would be very dismayed to find that it would have been better for dictators and tyrants to stay a empower then that there should be a general liberalisation and opening up of those societies because the latter has brought in different kinds of tyranny and that would be a very sad outcome I'll just just technical comments on Michael D Higgins it was not a couple of interviews I'm day he I thought he actually camels I've been gymnast or as it is agnostic he was worried and Thank You asam's he said that he he hide his own religion of sorts that he's had his own beliefs is that that he was virtues until he even said that he attended church on occasions and oh they mean like I was suspected that he that he is a humanist erected from number one hard evidence I was a other time but that won't be interesting to see if he actually if you actually it takes text to yours that is them that is too kind of you have to be very careful what you said yeah yeah I think those of us who know nobody sorry if I make that pose must you know nobody stands and yes be very care yes I mean what what you heard in those words was the sound of feet shuffling and comfortably around political arena with that but in case you've never actually ever made work for hobbies that he that accommodate have come up or her punches throughout the odd and Rory Quinn but one day he's actually get I never thought that they divert I did public went nonsense as far as I know the obsolete geography not always presume that he is but let's talk yeah satisfied air one podcast Aditya said that he will take the oath and he asserted they said that he is spiritual but that his presidency would be inclusive of all nominated people he said that sounds like like like like political speak for I'm an atheist of me and what I go for anything not watching you well you wouldn't expect him to audition isn't that Krishna yes I yeah think about the extent of very reason within our society to a change to instil week or maybe superstation or traditional practices ante up here to Los Cerritos right the limitation reason he gives examples I've said foot-binding in China and it wasn't okay there's a good reason not to have fun finding and overlapping so other sons of mr. Bhalla to promote women's liberation season 17 so I'm wondering what you think the extent of reasons perhaps as our strengths and parts and shortcomings for social changes well um look that there's no doubt at all that the reason does have its limits that there are places for our emotions and unless we we had educated and well directed emotions of course they would be disruptive and if you look at human history we should just be able to summarize the questions okay okay so so the question in effect was other limits to reason and you closure engine the APA talking about this and examples where the practices have gone on for many many many centuries like foot-binding in china which when good reasons were advanced against the practice there was a bottom and my response is just to say that a good relationship between reason and emotion is obviously required the we need to educate and discipline and direct our emotions so that they can be creative and generous and can help us to live in sort of flourishing ways we need to give expression to those emotions like sympathy and kindness affection which genuine generally speaking not not invariably but generally speaking positive and productive ones and we need to combat those emotions like anger and greed and others will breed has an emotional component to it which is destructive so I mean all these things are clear enough a marriage between reason and emotion is the sort of thing that one wants and to quote Hume yet again may be the case that the springs of our of our activities are always emotional ones that we never act because we have a reason independent of some emotion for acting I personally don't agree that's right I think if you look at the organization of society over time if you look at the fact that the buses run the sewerage system works the lights come on you know the most things work most of the time is evidence of the fact that the organization on our lives imposed by Reason choices and the fact that most of us sign up for good reasons to those practices is an example of the big triumph of reason and human offense wars and conflicts and murders and divorces and so on indications of the triumph of emotion in human affairs but generally speaking it seems to me that reason that ways the latter I had the opportunity to talk at some length with them a friend and colleague Steven Pinker just recently about his new book a better angels of our nature in which he talks about the overall decline in proportional terms of violence through human history and he notes that the decline increases it becomes much more noticeable from the 17th and 18th century from the time of the Enlightenment and that suggests since the Enlightenment of course tried to apply to all human affairs to society to education the kinds of thinking that had been so successful in Natural Science in other words the application of reason and proportion the use of evidence the use of calibration of affairs and that that generalized itself in such a way that many many of the practices that for centuries with indulged in burning people at the stake or torturing them before we executed them and in many cruel practices just became unacceptable and this this I think is a very optimistic and hopeful sign about the place of reasoning and our friends but of course it can't be there anything and of course it does have its limitations now essentially different to assess some reason for this is it it's literally aside if I may not a question of such but just that you'll be asleep in Dublin within weeks of the celebrating the anniversary of Clan O'Brian and something you see I just remind to be war with it will always and you had this idea of a syllogism at 1 which might but they could choose you might get offer new information so in his book II put into a pub with this path and the path says I'm thirsty I am more than six months I'm buying myself a pint and Francis and I taking that to mean I'd better buy my own port research and the conclusion of your solution solution is fallacious being based on premises just a tactical question in terms of advocacy one and you said and I agree with you that we should reclaim the experiences that religious people described as spiritual and we should reclaim them as natural experiences and what would you how what phrase would you use this roadmap or would you use the phrase spiritual and say what they're natural a book has the ambiguities of spiritual also having it's over yes it has the connotation doesn't it apart of some word interesting I think the way once one wants to put it is something like this those those experiences those those feelings those states that we describe the spiritual state sort of religious describe people describe a spiritual state we should read ascribe them as a walk in the country or as listening to music or as falling in love oils being with your friends in other words we should recognize that that the sort of heightened sensitive deeply pleasurable deeply significant experiences that we have in our lives belong to us as part of our natural psychology as part of what what human beings do and feel and when you make this point it it liberates people in from thinking they have to find another kind of description of it if maybe this is a religious experience there is an Oxford a unit of match the chorus called the religious experience Research Unit which they've been collecting the religious and spiritual experiences of people now for many many many years he might have been started by Silas the Hardy way back in the 1950s or 60s and if you look at some of the results of that you're astonished at how trite a lot of spiritual experiences are I was walking in the wood and a voice came out of heaven and said you must visit your arm - you think you know going to use that opportunity to tell us something about the nuclear structure of the atom or didn't have it and in many of these cases the actual nature of the experience could be much better REE described and habilitated into our and also naturalistic view of of human beings so the strategic thing is to say to people what we think of a spiritual those great spiritual experiences those great moments of connectedness sort of transcendence or a very deep feeling of deep emotion which it's hard to articulate you don't actually have to articulate them and you certainly don't have to articulate them as religious experiences they just are the kind of experiences that we're very fortunate to have because we're the kind of creature we are I've often wondered you know you sometimes see in the field of cars you see a car suddenly look up might be having a spiritual experience yeah there is something in us that requires the invention for God to take away the bits of burden or difficulties that we would like to hand over to someone anyone anything and in our society it has been you had this over to God and this is meant to help and something that I often wonder about is you mentioning so many thousands of people died in the tsunami and everyone goes to church well they go to church because the grief would be such that they would be looking for something to diminish them and to me it's not the same I do not understand I have so many women in Ireland can still go Catholic Church after having seen what has been done to them so I do find myself wondering how do we create people that is less I think that they're very good points that you make and I think they're two separate ball and Exeter to the point people flocking to church after a natural disaster is probably expressive I think of the need for community of people to draw together and to be in one another's company and to do something as it were collegially to cope with or express or to get support and be able to support one another so people come together for funerals for example interesting that with great moments of passage in people's lives like marriage birth funerals people do get together because of the significance of it and need the mutual support and in this kind of case where there is shock and grief people need to be together and you know the churches have have taken all the rest of the oxygen out of the air the only place where you can do this and get together and think about it and address it is in a church I mean if you said let's all go to the village hall or down the pub or something that might work for some people but the tradition has used up our imagination on this from the point of view of the security of the individual I mean thinking of the lonely elderly person frightened ill alone needing to reach out wishing that there might be somebody there who by just being present or or by loving that person would give them some strength and security again what one deeply understands that in its segment but very natural thing and if if only we were that other person to one another if only our neighborliness our sense of human connection was such that nobody ever felt the need to seek an imaginary friend but had a real one that that would be a great advance and it seems to me as you think about some the sorts of fears and insecurities that people have in you and you and you look at when you have them in what circumstances you have them when you were very much in love or when you have very happy family very close family I forget who was H or Menken or somebody who said the greatest thing in the world is to have a clothes warm loving happy family who live in another town there's a great deal to be said of that but when you have such a thing you're much less vulnerable to need to look for something outside outside what other real human beings can provide you if you have the right kind of relationship with them and so if there are people who are lonely and afraid and you reach out to you know some traditional solution to that that is a fault of ours as human beings in our communities that's a failing about back to the Twitter and from us gli c16 and the common theme of all religions discriminate against women why is this apologize for the runner on his behalf and the other one is are we a theists in danger of being intolerant towards the middle ground that our fight against religion from our BNC termers one and yes I'm afraid this a common theme of the major religions to put women into a but very much a second-class position to deprive them of all sorts of opportunities for education and the rest it's known as a result of empirical work done by the UN and other agencies that if women have an opportunity for an education even in elementary education they tend to have fewer children the children are healthier women get access to their rights they can control their own economic resources at the need arises and the communities and therefore societies to which they belong benefit from from these facts and so it's a great black mark in a way on human history that at least for the last two-and-a-half three thousand years with the major religions that we know of that women have been deprived of an opportunity to be fully equal or and in my own view of the matter actually much better if they were in charge than they're not so that is a common theme and it may have something to do with that the kind of sentiment expressed by dr. Johnson dr. Samuel Johnson he said women is so powerful that it's a very good thing the law doesn't give them any rights there will be fear of women fear of the power of women fear of their sexuality of some research published just a few weeks ago that the effect on a man's brain with those men who you have one the effect on that man's brain of a beautiful woman is the same as the effect of cocaine and then sort of dundies fMRI scanners and I mean that that might be a very good reason for wanting to lock them in doors if it could were true in the view of some people so it could be fear could be anxiety it could be the tremendous mystery of birth that women own because all sorts of reasons why societies that have wanted to deprive women of rights and poor participation and most of history of course if one could hear their the weeping of and of people who have been oppressed and cloistered as a result of these attitudes it would probably be unbearable so there is that that common theme and it's one of the things that one has to contest just Romania the second question are we eight years in danger of being intolerant towards the middle ground that our fight against Romania well Sam house made a bigger point in his book the end of faith in which he says that you know ordinary moderates religious observance even you know talk about the CoV judge meaning and you know C V meaning Christmas and Easter saving time is it even sort of moderate unreflective religious observance provides a kind of mask or screen for the more zealous the more active and energetic forms all the way to extremism of course extremism is a minority affair in religion as it is in all other things but the difficulty is created for society in the world at large and if indeed masked by a moderate religion is a reason for thinking that we should be as robust in our challenge to people of moderate religious observance as to people of a more zealous outlook but I do take the point that lies behind that which is that we should do it with I think ISM it's a mistake to think in terms of of moderation and respect and the rest because actually that already concedes quite a lot of rhetorical ground so what would I respect your point of view I find it rather difficult to respect your point of view in which people believe in you know supernatural agencies telling them what they can eat on Fridays and so on so it is quite hard to respect an intellectual position like that but one one but what one can do is to remember that ideas and movements and institutions are open season and attack them be robust be critical really go for them but individual human beings that's a different matter you know there are fellows in society there are fellows in the human story and many of the reasons why they have the views they do are things that are not anti their fault that they decided to become a an annoying you know Catholic in their mature years but they were brought up that way they're brought up in a society which reinforced that and so they are in a way as much victims as other people are as perhaps women are in traditional societies and if not victims then then there are people who given how busy and complicated life is haven't yet given enough thought to urge or have just accepted it because they respect their parents and so on and so one was treat them with the default which is that your fellow human being is is somebody you should approach with kindness and concern always and never put them beyond the pale of your respect them as they behave in ways that really do demand that and then try and engage with them and argue and the argument against the ideas against the traditions against the institutions should be extremely robust not concessive that's outputted thank you I bet a lot of people have to go through work what are those you wearing ties anyway yeah and I was going to ask I'm sorry I have to read this off the off the screen because I can never remember this guy's name but it's Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor said that atheists are not fully human now I didn't hear the interview and I'm just wondering in what way you might consider we are less human than religious people well I imagine that you didn't mean we have especially hairy back so you might have meant that it is the fullest human potential is realized when we admit our dependence on the deity or when we give full expression to our religious lives I suppose some hope that he meant something along those lines clarify further again I did hear the interview and he was cold l Donna by the interview instead of the wing saying that and he said it is close to what you see said he said that if an if we don't have the connection and the desire to connect with the divine that we are missing something that makes us those necessary to make us fully new galaxies and my pushback on that point of view would be that we miss our opportunity to become fully human if we don't take that great trip Delphic responsibility to know ourselves and and to be generous and tolerant in our attitude towards others and to and to think the best of them until such time as they they're never over merited but to try to make that connection with other people that really establishes those relations relationships which make the other person's life life better and and that is the first expression of our humanity alongside something that we tend to forget and that is that we we have intellects we have intelligence no TS Eliot said there is only one method and that method is to be intelligent and and if one could try to be maximally intelligent about everything that one does all one's beliefs or one's aims and goals if one chose objectives in life for oneself that that really you could really make a case for saying are valuable and that you have a capacity or a challenge for that and you lived you know energy towards that then you would be doing something that was fully expressive what it is to be in a human being given that we have this wonderful thing which is intelligence and that if we neglect it if we don't use it we miss opportunities to learn if we don't think when we should know Bertrand Russell said most people rather dive and think most people do you know semantics but to use these capacities and really go for making a life that feels good to live and which has good impacts on other people thank you 23 probably clients or a box after you've got one or two quick questions this must look about 67 was just been through the educational system multi-denominational co-ed and no religion from her parents and huge intellect very wiry mind and was shocked and stoned by the lack of thought the lack of intelligence of lack of rational thought in and unsharp senators a from religion which was being introduced as she entered into the second in school of page first year I said why don't you go to be afraid of children to discuss have not found it starting in the extreme so and so the opportunities to discuss like that happened in science or maths of English all the other subjects but the upsetting thing would shoot like a lone voice in the wilderness against creeping creations and it would come home but early frustrated and when she's a logical person she's well educated she's clever but the M it with what you were talking about recently is the fact that my thoughts on it are that over the years religion has abated if you like if you like there's a sort of there neither casting their colors to any masks but therefore the zealous the ones that are is the ones that are and motivated forgetting that voice louder and louder it's like you're talking about being backed into a corner they're going to scream the louder but and I was shocked on her behalf and my I'm just always is wonderful she's in college is really nothing but it's it's it's that creep creeping creationism and it's it's the blind acceptance that I feel you're giving for too much respect if you like to the religious because you're a respectful person and you are appealing if you like to a thought process look look at the look at the animals try and prove it but that's just what I want to say it's actually still happening unfortunately well what does tend to happen very often is that people are afraid to think clearly or deeply about the commitments that they take themselves to help I mean most people you know Mark Twain defined faith as believing what you know and so and it's a bit it's a bit frightening to sometimes recognize that you you suspect that it really isn't so so you don't want to address it you don't want to think about it you want to hang on you want to believe in belief and you don't want to think about it too deeply or inquire I mean if you were to stop at a church-door Church of Ireland then a Catholic Church Baptist Church and ask people what happens to you when you die does your spirit go to heaven or purgatory or hell does your body sleep in the earth until resurrection what happens most people don't know most people don't really know the doctrines and the theology that they take themselves to be committed to and they don't really want to think about it because if they did they find themselves thinking crumbs well can that really you know or but not think about it because I want to keep on thinking that I believe it and it's that sort of reason it's a certain kind of anxiety it's a way of erecting blinkers and big because you want something out of it and you need something out of it and you better not test it too much and then when people do challenge they do test you you know my friend Richard Dawkins for example it's very robust in his proclamations about things and there when people hear that their one reaction among many is to say what you know I hate that war I'm not going to be an atheist longer defend my faith all the more but what they're really doing is they're defending themselves against thinking and coming up with some uncomfortable conclusions so that this is why I say when monk deals with individual human beings it's really important to take that fact about them first I'd like to meet everybody as a human being first and then as whatever profession or you know whatever good they do in the world and then whether they're a man or a woman or then you know what what beliefs and outlooks they have and if we did it in that way instead of proclaiming as some people do I mean some people instantly proclaim the one great identity that you've got to encounter them on the basis of and if you're wearing a full burqa then you're a Muslim woman and that's the only thing you are and you're presenting yourself to the rest of the world like that but if you're going to be crucifix then you're Christian and this people trying to assert an identity that you have to respond to no thank you you know you want to respond to them as human beings first and foremost and if you did that and if you were able to help anybody who had that fear the fear of thinking really thinking about something that they think they believe because they don't want to stop believing it then you might have liberated them okay all right so we just like to thank professor AC grayling for coming over here and giving that excellent and stop floating speech and thank you all for showing up on a quite cold Tuesday afternoon in November and Derek who's at the back there's ton of dirt he has a theist on membership forms if anyone wants to sign up and also give him your email address if you want to get on the emailing list and you'll be notified about at Tulsa this in the future and this talk obviously qualities we're providing it free it does cost us money to hire the room and things so any donations that people have are very much appreciated and but as I said the talk is free for everybody can and so not one final thank you - I see thank you for everyone else and wise good-looking you

Channel: Atheist Ireland

Views: 39,186

Keywords: A C Grayling, Grayling, Setting Prometheus Free, Atheist, Atheist Ireland, Dublin

Id: mbi44ObWuvk

Length: 93min 53sec (5633 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2011