SYN FM Debate - The influence of religion on culture and politics

hello and this is Society for dummies yes that's right your weekly dose of society I'm Alan and this is a meeting in the studio with two very very special people this week the names are John Gilbert from he's an arrant emeritus emeritus professor of physics in Monash University the co-editor of Christian perspective on science technology compose set and Deputy Chair of Melbourne Anglican committees on Christianity an atheist and here we have Matthew and you're from the Australian foundation of a atheist foundation Australia I'm getting my 1 that's great yeah so we're going to try and have this whole thing is kind of a discussion on the atheism and on Christianity and their respective roles in society it's probably something that definitely needs need to be talked about in a show that's focusing on ideology so yes this there should be a very good show I hope you guys looking forward to it and if you guys ever want to text in you can texting on over 4 to 7 SMS SMS that's oh four to seven seven six seven seven six seven yes indeed this is trains by Pokemon tree that was trains by porcupine tree is indeed correct and now we're going to be starting off our discussion on atheism in its role in society and so Matthew what is the role of atheism in the modern world well I don't know that it actually has a role it's not an organization with a doctrine with a mission it's just you know my atheism is a result of me not believing in deities so nothing else flows from that there is nothing that needs to come from that so I I joined an atheist organization I joined the Atheist Foundation of Australia because I thought that it was good to have a bit of a sense of community with other atheists at the time that I joined I felt quite ostracized quite lonely that atheism or atheists were not frowned upon so much in Australia but you didn't feel welcomed bringing up the fact that you didn't believe in deities or you didn't have a religion so I joined an organization that had a newsletter and forum online and got a bit of a sense of community from that since then they've had two large conventions that really brought that sense of community to the fore and bought some some pretty impressive speakers out to Australia to give their ideas and I didn't agree with all of them but it was it was still a tremendous event and I got a lot from being part of that so I don't think there is a mission statement for atheism I don't think anything needs to stem from atheism but yeah I am an atheist because I don't believe in a deity if my goals as an atheist which personally are mostly being left alone and not having my taxes siphoned sideways or my children indoctrinated in their school if those goals are met in my lifetime you know the word atheist would probably become meaningless for me it would still describe me accurately but I wouldn't need to describe myself as an atheist yes so you're the rule rather than the exception I suppose well I didn't you are the wrong I wouldn't claim to be speaking on the behalf of other 80 I'd be extremely annoyed if someone else claimed to be doing that for me I'm just giving you my perspective on it okay um several atheists organizations will say our goal is to keep religion out of politics or something along the lines of that what do you think of that sort of thing I think it's axiomatic that religion should be kept separate to politics from both directions I think it is unfair for a religion to involve itself in the decisions that are going to fit everyone in a society and I think there is also another direction to that street in that becoming involved in politics allows politics to affect religion and the best example I can think of that is in 1876 the Privy Council in England declared that hell wasn't necessary doctrine - the Anglican Church it was an act of the Privy Council which because because the church in England is the established Church of England it is affected by legal decisions by the Privy Council and and then in Parliament in the early 20th century there was a decision in Parliament that declined changes to the Book of Common Prayer so a lot of people within the Church of England wanted to disestablish because they didn't want Parliament affecting their religion so I think in both directions there are there are reasons not to have an established church this next question goes to John Pilger oh I'd like to ask you often this is Christian's will often say that atheism is merely a fad and it's just gonna go away after a while would you agree with them no I wouldn't agree with them I in the last couple of years I've read twice through a major book by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called a secular age in which over some 700 pages he traces the history of the ideas that commonly found in modern atheism right back to the Greek philosophers and right through the medieval periods and the the Enlightenment and so on so I think that the ideas that are around and perpetrated by atheists of various sorts will go on being around for some time to come I'd like to just come back to something that Matthew was saying before or really to raise something he didn't say he said that he wanted to be sort of left alone but the reality is we all function live in a society if the society were to be run essentially on atheist principles that would have to be some agreement about ethical and other standards and I just wonder what your response to that is well I would say that there are no atheist principles i don't think there is anything that stems from atheism as I said before you can run a society on Kantian principles you can run it on all sorts of other philosophical models without needing religion to be part of that you can look at I've al you my life and because I value my life I don't think anyone else should be able to take it from me if I want that right respected I have to respect the rights of other people that I don't take their lives that's that sort of cancer in universality principle so you can come to do not kill almost from first principles religion doesn't have to enter into that so you don't need to be citing religious precedent and it's not an actual atheist principle that I'm citing in my desire not to be killed and my principle that I will not kill others without good reason principles does have some bearing on the question of where they come from because they are found in most societies that have existed in the last four or five thousand years I can't comment on on the periods before that and they don't seem to come from nowhere I think for Christians aspects of the mokou defied forests and things like the Ten Commandments and the amplification of that that we find in the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament but the the presence of of ideas and limits on behavior are not specific simply a function of Christianity or some other religious position they are sent things which have some Universal a great level of agreement perhaps not in great detail but certainly in general principle oh I would say that of the 10 commandments only to have any ethical component and that are they are do not kill do not steal and I think that they are part of most cultures because humans have evolved to live best when they live as a community and not killing and not stealing are the best strategy for living as a community so I think it's actually an evolved feature of humanity not a cultural cultural idea that has come from religion now I'm sorry to cut you off guys but we're going to go to a song and then a promotion so this is spoonful by dangling share pain he's a fantastic young artist he played at Port Fairy last year which is where I get most of my music yeah solo acoustic guitar singing that kind of thing yes if you guys want to text in on a 4 to 7 SMS SMS a 4 to 7 7 6 7 767 please feel free to do so well I was us through the bishop that you contacted although I think I'm here's an individual Christian something which may have come from Christianity oh sorry John was going to respond to Matthews proposal that ethics is something which evolved from Attila reasons as opposed to say something which came from religion or spiritual spirituality anyway so have you got response to that John partial response are given an evolutionary understanding of how we happen to be here today the emergence of consciousness and self-reflection of course is an important part of our consideration here but at the same time I do believe that many of the ethical principles that we regard as very important were not just simply a result of our evolutionary development but have a sense that that there was a revelation from from God I'm a Christian I believe in God at some point now it's true that there were other cultures like the the in the Middle East where there were codes of behavior which were not that dissimilar from what we now know as the the Ten Commandments but I don't accept that they simply arose in the sociological context of early human society without an additional input so John if if ethics arose in humanity from that revelation surely you will have encountered the Euthyphro dilemma I'll just run through it quickly for the listeners if ethics come from a deity does the nature of the deity determine what is good and bad or does the deity have to obey a universal code of what is good and bad because each Horn of that dilemma has its own repercussions if the deity decides what is good and bad then ethics are largely arbitrary we could be doing bad things but because the deity is decreed them good then you know to us it's irrelevant being being obedient to that deity is nothing to do with being good or bad as just obedience if the deity has decreed what is good and bad from some larger sense of good and bad that permeates the universe then the deity is something other than omnipotent it can't do anything a can't determine what he's good and bad that's interesting it's a very interesting point how would you respond to that scum it's a difficult question to respond to but I'll do my best there is a sense in which one can argue and people have argued this that the emergence of our ethical principles in a sense are embedded in the very fabric of the universe that's been argued by the South African cosmologists social activist George Ellis and an American Christian philosopher Nancy Murphy in their book on the moral nature of the universe but they're not arguing in in that that it's it's only that that they're allowing or accepting the fact that there will be interaction between God which Matthew refers to as the deity and and individual people I'd like to bring the discussion into the realm of the New Testament where Jesus taught he went deeper than than the rules if you like of the Ten Commandments by probing deeper into their meaning for example hatred he regarded as as serious as murder and that's not necessarily implied in Ten Commandments as we have them in front of us also he I believe argued for an ethical principle which wasn't just a matter of obeying set of rules but was a response to a good God who had provided an environment for us in which to live fruitfully I think I'll leave it at that we might leave the ethical discussion for now it's really interesting but one of our listeners has texted in asking how can someone in the modern age defend divine intervention could you respond to that yes I'm very happy to do so first of all I don't like the term divine intervention if it implies that that god interferes with the the laws of nature which which he's established the principle of non interventionist object of divine action if I can use that complicated terminology what does it mean sorry well it means that God acts through the the structure of the the material world let me just explain there was a series of conference that's held through the 90s of a six of them and to which about 25 people invited to which physicists philosophers theologians and so on and they were asking the question was there were these scientific perspectives that could be brought to bear on divine action and the two issues that came out of that were does quantum physics in that for example the so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle provides one of the windows through which God would be able to interact with the material world and at us in particular without violating the underlying principles which govern the behavior of the universe I think I see what you're talking about so God acts through the universe as opposed to sticking his hand down and yes and the other one that's been considered not without some level of discussion and controversy is that the role that chaos theory might might provide for example there's the so-called butterfly effect what what's understood it came out of long-range weather forecasting a very tiny change in the initial condition maybe the temperature or wind velocity or somewhere somewhere in Africa might have the effect eventually of an El Nino somewhere in the Pacific and that there's another case where that's been argued on the basis that it leaves open what's called an ontological gap but again one in which God would not be violating any any principles and and I don't mean simply that we're talking about the laws of physics like Newton's laws of motion and so on but deeper underlying laws which we may not know a whole lot about anyway you wouldn't actually that hard for God to affect the universe without having to do some massive acts of some kind so hopefully that answered your question mr. text Eman and by the way that this guy's like a professor in the physics he he seems to know his stuff here Ellen question we have another question texted in if God works by the natural order then why are human morals and an understanding conceived through evolutionary behavior so if if God works via the natural order so through through the universe I suppose rather than poking his finger in as Luca so eloquently put it then why human morals not an understanding conceived through evolutionary behavior I think I can interpret that question if the texture disagrees they might right back in but where John has proposed a mechanism by which God could influence the world there is no evidence that that's actually occurring and the most parsimonious explanation for our existence here and in my mind for our ethics is evolutionary which doesn't require the action of the deity so if God is interacting through that quantum mechanism how would we recognize that as being different from naturally evolved systems well can I say first of all that we're talking about the evolutionary process I think there's one school of thought I think Richard Dawkins would would would adopt this that evolution is totally directionless Simon Conway Morris is a fellow of the Royal Society and a professor at Cambridge and paleontology has through his work on the famous Burgess fossils in Canada concluded that evolution has certain inbuilt limitations in other words not every conceivable outcome will either occur or if it did will will work and survive and he finds that there are what he calls regions of evolutionary outcome that lead to fruitful development fruitful organisms whether in the plant or the animal kingdoms and so when we talk about the role of evolution plays we have to think about the actual process itself now Robert John Russell who hits the scent of theology and natural science at Berkeley in California has strongly argued that the uncertainty principle could indeed work at the level of the the causing of mutations in DNA resulting from for example cosmic rays that are passing through us some some number per second anyway and there are other influences that chemical and other influences that can affect our DNA so it's not just a matter of claiming that evolution the evolutionary understanding provides a complete worldview I believe it doesn't I believe it philosophically that's an untenable position anyway whether you're a Christian or naseous yeah okay would you like to respond to that little Matthew I'd like to ask what would constitute a testable hypothesis for that interaction that you're claiming must have occurred for evolution to have gotten the diversity that we have now I think we are what we are perhaps I'll catch this in terms of genetic heritage so hundreds thousands of breeding events occurred to bring each of us here so the likelihood of any one of us existing is very very small because there's tens of millions of sperm in each each event and tens of thousands of eggs available to make those genetic combinations so you only have to go back a few generations and suddenly the numbers are staggering the huge against your particular genetic combination existing but what was sure to happen was that someone would exist it might not have been you but someone would have come because those breeding events were successful so evolution is directionless it didn't necessarily need to end in us but if evolutionary processes are going on it will end up with something something will occur whether or not they can discuss it in a radio studios and they no matter but I don't think you can just point it evolution and say it's not enough to explain this I think it is enough to explain this and any other explanation that requires you to start adding extra bits you're losing the parsimony and yeah you're just begging the question okay yeah so we've got two very defined positions there I suppose and now we're going to listen to some birds of Tokyo who are very good discussion after the break yes we'll also be discussing argument that was waiting for the Wolves by Birds of Tokyo and we're talking with John Pilger from Monash University professor of physics and Matthew from the Atheist foundation of Australia and we're going to move on to a discussion about the existence of God and I was wondering Matthew what you think is the strongest argument against God's existence I don't think there's a catch-all for that I grew up in the Anglican tradition and was taught in church about an almighty being omnipotent omniscient and you know able to do do or think anything and the argument that I came up against that was the Omnimax paradox you can't be all-knowing and all capable because if you know everything you're unable to act you cannot act outside the way that you know you will act so those two things are contradictory so can you run that past us again the Omnimax paradox you can't be all-knowing and all capable you can't be omnipotent and omniscient because if you know everything you cannot act outside the way that you know that you will act you know possible futures you know everything that's going to happen so you can't break that train well actually I have I think I've have heard answered so you're saying that because you know everything you know exactly what you're going to do when therefore you can't act it's possible potentially I'm just thinking that perhaps God ignores time potentially and he exists outside time together I get that thrown at me a lot by people talking about the cosmological arguments for God and I don't know what it means to say acting outside of time it's potential that perhaps he exists in a sort of everything is happening to him at once potentially perhaps he for example perhaps he's experiencing this this particular radio show at the same time when the first caveman banged rocks together an experienced time like a linear fashion potentially that doesn't make the Omni Michael I'm sorry that doesn't make the Omni a Mac that doesn't break the Omni max paradox for my money though because the being can't act outside of those constraints that it already knows exists for all time so a being that exists outside of time can't begin to act it can't it couldn't even gather its thoughts yeah because that we we're trying to talk about things that we can't really comprehend we are temporal beings we live in three dimensions and experience time linearly so when you're trying to think about creation and take time out of the equation it starts to sound a bit nonsensical to me so but I wasn't that wasn't what I was thinking about in church when I was a kid I was going to Sunday School and I was coming up with questions like who made God you know God made all of this who made God and that gives you that infinite regrets who made the being that made God and who made the being that made God that made God and so that was a question that I had as a child that started me thinking and the other one that really worried me as a child was the story of Abraham and Isaac for listeners unfamiliar with it Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son and he makes ready to do so and his son is there on the altar ready to be killed and that was taught to me as a child as a laudable lesson in obedience to God and all it did was scare the pants off me I really hope my dad doesn't kill me right and that sort of the deity community communicating an idea to a person and the person acting on it just it really didn't sit well with me and it still doesn't there are people out there that have made threats against me because they think God wants them to end a particular way and that's that's terrifying yeah that makes sense how would you respond to that John well the first thing I'd want to say is that there is that we have freewill and John Polkinghorne the famous Cambridge mathematical physicist who resigned his professorship to go off and study theology and it's written a lot of books in the last 30 odd years he also argues for what he calls the free process defense that is that he understands that the universe has evolved with a certain degree of its own own freedom it's that God doesn't take action that violates the freedom he's already given to the universe and in the same way he God doesn't violate the the free free will that that we have as well back to what Matthew was trying to was arguing in relation to the paradox and that if God's all-knowing and all-powerful that there's a paradox there the question is I believe God knows all that is to be known but if you ask does God know what I'm going to say next or do next I think the answer to that is no otherwise that would be a violation of the free will which I believe is part of being human I'm not completely sold that we do have free will I'm still thinking and reading about it a lot but we are constrained very strongly biophysics you know I I don't have freewill to levitate to the ceiling and I can't stop breathing I'm not entirely sure that other actions and things that we think of as choices aren't determined by chemistry and physics I'd like to think that we do have choices but I think that they are couched in the context of everything that we've experienced up to that point and the physical and material constraints that we exist within but I don't know that religion offers scope for free will in itself because you're faced with the choice of worship or be damned and that isn't a free system that doesn't leave you options the two things I'll try and say but by way of response in the first place of course there are constraints to free will you've given the physical ones that you jump out of a building almost certainly going to die when you fall to the ground but we do need to understand that not everything reduces to physics and chemistry is not just a matter of physics that in the organization that one has in the molecular world there are behaviors which are not totally determined by the underlying physics and similarly in biology biology doesn't I believe simply reduced to physics and chemistry and you can go on up a hierarchy of ever increasing complexity and where that it remains the case so and the question about freewill and how that operates and also how God is speaking as a Christian how God interacts with with me as a human being has to do with I think the mind brain problem and in what way God would seek to influence the way we think and the choices we make but at the same time leaving us with the responsibility of making those choices we can't escape that does that make sense to you not entirely but just going back to the the question that kicked this off what is the best argument against God I don't think it's a matter of making an argument against God it's pointing out that there isn't a great argument for God a burden of proof the burden of proof falls to the to the party making the positive claim and so while individual models for God can be shown to be flawed if someone actually stumps up and gives you what they define as their deity um it's mostly the fact that there is no compelling evidence for a deity that that I stopped believing and eventually called myself an atheist suppose that makes sense Howard's you respond to the idea that religion tends to make people happier I don't know if there's data to show that but I don't know that that's particularly important I think alcohol makes people happy I don't think you'd give it out free on a Sunday morning you know morphine made me happy you want to break my leg but I don't think it should be made freely available happiness isn't the criterion I about what's true and while I like being happy I don't think I have any right to tell myself fairy stories - to try and improve that situation I think there are other ways of seeking happiness that don't require don't require require religion can i but in there there has been some research done not just on happiness so much as on health and well-being general well-being professor Alister McGrath the noted British theologian and formerly a scientist reported on one program one program of research which showed some that people who were committed to their religious life tended to have less depression and and fewer health problems at a given age than those who didn't but he wasn't claiming in reporting that that that if you're religious or in my case Christian you'll necessarily be spared major health issues I've survived major surgery many years ago which which means I can live a perfectly normal life today in a former generation I'd be sitting around in the wheelchair at this point that so but at the same time the question of our attitudes to life and the things that it froze up and the difficult things like bereavement or loss of a child and so on these are things which in principle I believe Christians can cope with better than those who don't have religious faith I'm not saying other people don't in some sense deal with those and get through them but I would argue that as a Christian I've got a broad perspective in terms of what it means to be human in relation to God and I think particularly mediated through the person of Jesus Christ I want to emphasize that we're not just talking about a set of propositions because Christianity in particular is really centers around a person we believe appeared but more than two thousand years ago and that that that he died on a Roman cross treated as a criminal but that he actually rose from the dead and there's a whole scenario of the new heaven and the new earth that that picks up on that point and we may not have time to pursue that here today but I still see the central point as largely irrelevant it wouldn't matter if religion made people deliriously happy all the time and made them able to deal with any aspect of their life more easily it doesn't actually show that any particular religion is true or valid and that's mostly my concern is the intrusions that people try to justify making into my life because of their religious convictions and I you know I I don't see personal happiness as doing that job really good I I would argue that happiness is the most important thing in one's life and the happiness with the people around them and that if something can do this whether that's truth whether that's not truth it doesn't really matter well if it's making me unhappy where does that leave us well let's say so is your happiness more important than mine no no I'm not talking about hedonism no I'm not talking about hedonism either but if if if the personal happiness of religious people is the valid concept does it outweigh the happiness of people who aren't religious no non-law I'm just saying that if if religion makes someone happy and if they didn't if that particular person didn't have that religion that would make them unhappy than sure it's better that they're part of that religion they can't they're welcome to it I don't care what other people believe I want them to keep it off my lawn so I don't see the argument that religion makes people happy has just defined the intrusions that religion makes into my life okay so you find me religion just so long as it doesn't bother you pretty much yeah I'm not I'm not ecstatic about it I don't like people pushing ideas that I see is untrue or unsupported but you know I can't say that people shouldn't believe I have no right to say that people should not believe what they choose to believe we've had a few comments someone says the best argument against God is Illuminati mules are saying that Dave if you study I don't know I think he thinks one of you is called Dave I can only assume he's talking about John just Dave if you study history of Christianity then they are truly worshipping Satan and they don't even know they're brainwashed this is I'm not gonna ask you to respond to that I'm not going to respond to this interesting comment anyway we had a song now what's it called Ellen this is Amber's by Kim Churchill he's brilliant for a musician much like David champagne yes I like it round like this we're back with Jon Hoeber from the I was about to say the Atheist foundation Australia uni and Matthew from the Australian atheist foundation mr. Richard Dawkins yes a fun break topic perhaps but not something we'll cover on there yes so we we were going to discuss kind of the limitations of science do you have any comments on that job I just like to read a very short quote from a Nobel laureate of the late Sir Peter Medawar actually shared the Nobel Prize of Medicine with Australia's MacFarlane Burnet in 1960 and in his little book advice to young scientists he says this there is no quicker way for scientists to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare particularly when no declaration that kind is called for that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer and are in some way non-christians or pseudo questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer I point out that Peter Miniver called himself a rationalist he he wasn't friend of religion right I think that's an important statement any comments on that Matthieu off in a reverie but well all I'll say is that I believe someone like Richard Dawkins who wrote The God Delusion would in fact object to the being any sense there were limitations to what science can throw up okay my response would be any limit to science and this this actually was spurred by an online debate I had with a person disputing the Kalam Ecology Kalam cosmological argument for God he points out that you know the limits of science and here and you know the the Kalam cosmological argument requires something to kick-start the universe you know science can't say anything beyond the play time after the Big Bang if the become actually occurred my counter to that was that's still no reason to insert a God into that space yes okay so if there is no creator yeah we're coming to the end unfortunately but yes if there is no creator what's the point of life well I can answer that question but before I do I'd like to know your reason for thinking that there needs to be a read a reason for life what's the where does that conceit arise okay there's no need for it quite obviously it's very possible there's no meaning to life but it would seem to me that a life a life without without any point to it I mean it would seem that surely shouldn't we just kill ourselves right now oh yeah welcome to if you really feel that way but I think the genetic inheritance you have through evolution tends not to let people do that because they tend not to breed and the line doesn't can carry on I think there is very good genetic reason to carry on but at a personal level I've generated my own reasons for living I've found the meaning that I need and sorry just to give an example of the genetic imperative my cat doesn't face existential dilemmas getting out of bed in the morning it doesn't need of meaning for its life it does its thing we are the descendants of the tool makers Homo habilis we make things we think about making things we think in terms of narratives and stories I think that that's an evolutionary tale that we occasionally wag and look for reasons that don't actually exist okay my my only concern is that I mean rather let's Maps perhaps not with the killing ourselves right now but it's it surely if perhaps I just asked you this what what are your reasons for continuing to live curiosity Qi I am fascinated by people I wake up in the morning curious as to what my children are going to do I I want to know everything there is to know and while I'm limited in my time I'm doing best to fulfill that ambition I'm just having a great time but you would agree that that's all ultimately pointless probably in a universal sense but that doesn't make me feel any less meaningful and it's about me you're asking me what my reason for leaving is you know I don't need to make that Universal to actually find meaning for myself okay what kind of makes sense okay well I would agree with a lot of what Matthews just said there I have the same sort of curiosity about people and the world around there wouldn't have been a scientist I think without that but at a deeper level about fifty-four years ago I was confronted as a rather indifferent churchgoer and Christian by a sense of a presence of Christ which I can't explain and I don't that hasn't happened to gain since but at that point I change from unbelief to beliefs and I haven't wavered from that and I've found deep meaning in the Christian journey in believing in God and of course there are assumptions we're making call the metaphysical assumptions if you like assumptions we make about who God is the nature of the world how we discern that how we read for example the Bible how we pick out from that the things that are really critical I should point out that when I was a graduate student at Oxford I was in a lab with four other students our doctoral supervisor was an Irish Catholic still a practicing Catholic in his 80s today and two of the other four were practicing Christians and students changed new ones came each year and in the final year four of us out of the five students were practicing Christians one was a Catholic and the rest of us were Anglicans as it happened so I and I don't think any of those people saw that there was any particular conflict and that they were somehow engaged in exploring God's world and that for me has been a defining tenet of my own particular professional career some very nice very interesting um but unfortunately we're all out of time again so thank you guys so much for coming in Matthew John my pleasure

Channel: Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc

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Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 29 2012