The Darwin Day Lecture 2019, with Richard Dawkins

it is my absolute delight to be here tonight to introduce the doll in de lecture and as Andy said I will be stepping into that role for the next few years at least if you have your things with you please make sure that they are silent but if you feel me to tweet about tonight could you use the hashtag Darwin day lecture that is our hashtag for this evening it is my immense pleasure to introduce our speaker for tonight who needs no introduction Professor Richard Dawkins is one of the most well known and widely read scientists on the planet and that is not over emphasis amongst the many strings to his bow he is a course in an evolutionary biologist he's a he's an author he's also presented television programs about evolution and he was the child Simoni professor of public understanding of science and in particular evolution from 1995 inauguration of that particular professorship at Oxford to 2008 now many of you will know him best I think as the author of The Selfish Gene this extraordinary book that opened our eyes to biology in a different way it upturned our ideas of how biology works how evolution and natural selection works and introduced this idea of the genes I view that actually you could look at the whole process from that most minut angle and understand it through what was actually happening at the genetic level his concepts as well in that book have really have really taken hold not just the genes I view but he also introduced the idea of the meme and I think it is his most popular meme say the the mean is the most popular meme but Richard Dawkins has in his time it's been fair to say been fairly outspoken about atheism he wrote a book called The God Delusion which was incendiary but also restoring it was a global best it's been translated into 30 different languages and it chimed with so many people around the world he's been a passionate supporter of humanists the UK and a patron for a very long time he teamed up with humanists UK for the rather awesome atheist bust campaign which was about ten years ago where these friendly red buses were touring our cities with the logo on the side there's probably no God now stop worrying and enjoy your life Wichita's regularly chaired this lecture since 2003 and he introduced my Darwin day lecture back in 2014 and and I am stepping into that role and I'm absolutely delighted to be doing that and particularly delighted to be introducing Richard then as the lecturer tonight I was 15 I picked out The Selfish Gene from the school library and read it and it grabbed me it transformed my ideas about science and biology and that was also the year I stopped going to church I'm not sure whether the two things are actually linked but as that teenager with my eyes thing Athens the wonderful world of evolution in biology this I've been lucky to immerse myself in for my career I had no idea that 30 years later I would be standing here on this stage and introducing Richard Dawkins and somewhere inside me there's a 15 year old cheering so ladies and gentlemen it's my great pleasure to introduce Richard Dawkins for our 2019 Darwin day let Richard [Applause] that pictures really rather unfair I hasten to say Darwin himself was much too well-mannered to fight faith humble indeed he even declined to use the word atheist saying that people were not yet ready for full-blown atheism but I shall suggest today that an understanding of modern Darwinism should armed us with courage to fight what I shall demonstrate is the hubris of faith before Darwin came along it seemed absurd to imagine that the beauty complexity the purposefulness of the living world could possibly have come into being without a designer it required courage to contemplate even the possibility Darwin had that courage and we now know he was right there are still unsolved problems in science gaps in what we so far understand and this tempts people to say what was said about living things before Darwin came along we don't know whether laws of physics come from so God must have made them up we don't yet have an agreed theory of how the evolutionary process began in the first place so God must have started it nobody knows how the universe began so God must have made it wherever there's a gap in our understanding people rush to plug the gap with God but the trouble with gaps is that science has the annoying habit of coming along and filling them Darwin till the biggest gap of all and we should have the courage to expect that science will eventually fill the gaps that remain hadn't noticed by the way House theologians love to Laughton they disowned the God of the gaps they then go right ahead to invoke the God of the gap at every opportunity religion stands accused of conspicuous overconfidence and sensational that of humility the expanding universe the laws of physics the fine-tuned physical constants the laws of chemistry the slow grind of evolutions Mills all were set in motion so that in the 14 million year fullness of time we should come into existence even the favorite Christian bleeped that we are miserable offenders born in sin is a kind of inverted arrogance such vanity to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic importance if there's a creator of the universe wouldn't have better things to do than Tata Power black marks and our brownie points the universe is all concerned with me including my sins is that not the arrogance that passes all understanding Carl Sagan in pale blue dot points out that our distant ancestors could be excused such cosmic narcissism there's no roof over their heads and their artificial light they nightly watched the Stars wheeling overhead and what was at the center of the wheel the exact location of the observer no wonder they thought the universe was all about me but that excuse if it is one evaporated with Copernicus and Galileo few theologians today match the arrogance of Archbishop James Ussher who was so sure of his biblical chronology he gave the origin of the universe a precise date 22nd of October 4004 BC not the 21st or 23rd of October precisely the evening of the 22nd of October not September or November but definitely with the immense authority of the church October not 4,000 and three or four thousand and five not somewhere around the fourth or fifth millennium BC but no doubt about it four thousand and four others as I said lack assured precision but it is characteristically they just make stuff up make it up with liberal abandon and force it with limitless authority upon others sometimes at least in format I'm from still today in Islamic theocracies on pain of torture and death such arbitrary precision shows itself - in the Bossi rules for living that religious leaders impose on their followers and when it comes to bossy control freak hurry Islam is way out ahead in a class of its own we're wallowing in a sin complex is a trademark of Christianity control free career is Islam's unlovely equivalent here are some choice examples from the concise commandments of Islam handed down by Ayatollah Ozma syed muhammad Raider Mousavi Gopi Ghani a respected Iranian scholar concerning the wet-nursing of babies alone gulp igon in this no fewer than 23 minutely specified rules translated as issues here's the first of them issue 547 the rest are equally precise equally bossy and equally devoid of apparent rationale by the way in case you're wondering why for scholar in quotation marks [Laughter] that to the control freak rules about wet-nursing issue 547 it's a woman wet-nurse of the child and accordance to the conditions to be stated in issue 560 the father of that child cannot marry the woman's daughters nor can he marry the daughters of the husband whom the milk belongs to even his wet nurse daughters but he is permissible for him to marry the wet nurse daughters of the woman that's clear another example from the wet nursing department issue 553 it's a wife of a man's father wet nurse is a girl with the father's milk then the man cannot marry that girl I suppose in the culture where a woman is the property of her husband father's milk is not as weird as it sounds to us I don't know the origin of this creepy obsession with wet-nursing but it's not without a scriptural basis in the one book that the scholars have read and were made to memorize word-for-word as children quote when the Quran was first revealed the number of breastfeeding that would make a child a relative Muharram was 10 then this was abrogated and replaced with the number of size which is well known that was part of the reply given by another scholar to the following Creed occur from pardon oblique infused woman on social media I breastfed my brother-in-law son for a month and my son was breastfed by my brother-in-law's wife I have a daughter and a son who are older than the child who was breastfed brought by my brother-in-law's wife and she also had two children before the child of hers whom I breastfed I hope you couldn't describe the kind of breastfeeding that makes the child a Muharram relative and the rulings applied to the rest of the siblings thank you very much the precision of size breastfeeding is typical of this kind of religious control free career his surface bizarrely in a 2007 sat WA issued by dr. ISA Atia a lecturer at al-azhar university in Cairo he was concerned about the prohibition against male and female colleagues being alone together and not see a problem I'm sure you'll agree and he came up with an ingenious solution the female colleague should feed her male colleague directly from her breasts at least five times this would make them relatives [Laughter] and thereby enable them to be alone together at work note that four times would not suffice he apparently wasn't joking at the time well he did retract his fatwa after the outcry provoked how can people bear to live their lives bound by such insanely specific and bossy yet manifestly pointless rules this unrelieved perhaps let's turn to science science is often accused of Paragons lee claiming to know everything but the Bob is capacious Lee why does a mark scientists love not knowing the answer because it gives us something to do something to think about we loudly assert ignorant sin Bleakley full proclamation of what still needs to be done how did life begin in a primeval soup a warm little pond cracks in the rock in deep sea hot smokers in outer space I don't know nobody knows we wish we did in the eagerly exchange more or less plausible hypotheses together with suggestions for how to investigate them what caused the apocalyptic mass extinction at the end of the Permian period a quarter of a billion years ago we don't know but we have some interesting hypotheses to think about what does a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees look like we don't know but we do know a bit about it we know the continent on which it lived Africa as Darwin guessed a molecular evidence tells us roughly when between 6 million and 8 million years ago how and when did language evolved language that supreme achievement of human evolution from which so much followed what is dark matter we don't know and a large fraction of the physics community would dearly like to what is dark energy how am i quantum theory and gravity be united in the Universal theory a theory of everything ignorance to a scientist is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched ignorance if you are theologian is something to be washed away by shameless making something up if you are an authority figure like the Pope you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head which you then proclaim as a revelation or you might do it by interpreting a Bronze Age text whose also was even more ignorant than you are I can dramatize the difference between science and theology by imagining how theologians might answer a particular scientific question for example why did the dinosaurs go extinct the quarterly review of biology is a standard scientific journal in which many biologists published their research I'm going to imagine a special issue of the quarterly review given over to the question of who caused the deaths of the dinosaurs the first paper in the special issue is a typical scientific paper exactly the kind of paper you'd expect to see in this journal iridium layer at KT boundary and potassium-argon dated crater in Yucatan indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs we are now going to look at a series of theological contributions to my imaginary journal imagine that scientists thought and worked like theologians the president of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs the editor of Nature has undertaken a close study of the lamentations of Jeremiah his interpretation of the symbolic metaphorical meaning of the text is that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs it has been privately revealed - professor hat stayin in a dream that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs professor hardly has been brought up to have total and unquestioning faith as an asteroid killed the dinosaurs professor Hawkins has promulgated an official Dogma binding on all non schismatic Hawk engines that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs professor Hawking is personally offended by all strident shrill and polemical denials that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs professor Hallett's derives deep personal comfort from his belief that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs society would breakdown if the general public had no clearly accepted belief in how the dinosaurs went extinct the president of the National Academy of Sciences has issued a fatwa against all who denies an asteroid killed the dinosaurs and finally although it's perhaps not strictly theology in the ordinary sense students of sjw State College will D platform anyone [Laughter] in 1950 Pope Pius the 12th unkindly known as Hitler's Pope promulgated the dogma that Jesus's mother Mary on her death was bodily ie not merely spiritually lifted up into heaven bodily means that if you looked in her grave you would have found it empty the Pope's reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with evidence he cited 1 Corinthians 15:54 quote then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written death is swallowed up in victory the saying makes no mention of Mary there's not the smallest reason to suppose the author of the Epistle had Mary in mind we see again the typical theological trick of taking a test and interpreting it in a way that just might have some vague metaphorical symbolic hand-waving connection there's something else presumably to like so many religious beliefs pass itself dogma derive from a ceiling on what would be sitting in this case fitting the one so holy as Mary it's fascinating to see how the theological mind works the lack of interest in indeed contempt for factual evidence never mind whether there's any evidence that Mary would assume bodily into heaven it'll be good for people to believe she was it isn't a theologians deliberately tell Ann Cruz it's as though they just don't care about truths aren't interested in truths they demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations such as metaphorical symbolic or missing significance or simply what feels good and yet at the same time Catholics are compelled to believe these made up true compelled in no uncertain terms even before Pius the 12th promulgated the Assumption as a Dogma the 18th century Pope Benedict the 14th declared the Assumption of Mary to be a probable opinion which to deny were impious and blasphemous if to deny a probable opinion is impious and blasphemous you can imagine the penalty for denying an infallible Dogma once again note the brazen confidence with which religious leaders assert facts which even they admit are supported by no evidence at all truth seems to be defined as whatever feels right to me unfortunately theologians are not alone in this belief the Catholic Encyclopedia is a treasury of overconfident sophistry here's another example the encyclopedias entry on purgatory purgatory is a sort of celestial waiting room in which the dead are punished to their sins or at least cleansed off and purged before eventually being admitted to heaven the biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is shall we say generously creative once again it employs the common theological trick of vague hand-waving analogy the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that God forgave the incredulity of Moses and Aaron that his punishment kept them from the land of promise that banishment is used as a kind of metaphor for purgatory more gruesomely when King David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could marry your as beautiful wife the Lord forgave him but didn't let him off scot-free God killed the child of the marriage hard on the innocent child you might think but apparently the fact that David himself got off is a useful metaphor for the partial punishment that is her the usefulness not overlooked by the Catholic Encyclopedia authors the Catholic encyclopedias long purgatory entry has a section called proofs which is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic here's how the argument goes ifs a dead went straight to heaven there'd be no point in our praying for their souls and we do pray for their souls don't we therefore it must follow that they don't go straight to heaven therefore there must be purgatory QED our professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing enough let's turn again to science scientists know when they don't know the answer but they also know when they do and they shouldn't be coy about proclaiming it it's not hubristic to state known facts when the evidence is secure yes yes philosophers of science tell us that a fact is no more than a hypothesis which may one day be fortified but which is so far with withstood strenuous attempt to do so let us find all means pay lip service to that incantation but muttering at the same time in homage perhaps to Galileo's Airport si muove a the sensible words of Stephen Jay Gould in science fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent I suppose that Apple's might start to rise tomorrow but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms facts in this sense include the following and not one of them owes anything whatsoever to the countless man centuries devoted to a theological ratiocination the universe began between thirteen billion and fourteen billion years ago the Sun and the planets orbiting it including ours condensed out of a rotating disk of gas dust and air about four and a half billion years ago the map of the world changes as the tens of millions of years go by we know the shape of the continents and where they were at any named time in geological history and we can project ahead and draw the map of the world as it will change in the future we know how different the constellations in the sky would have appeared to our ancestors and how they will appear to our descendants matter in the universe is non randomly distributed in discrete bodies many of them rotating each on its own axis and many of them in elliptical orbit around other such bodies think according to mathematical laws which enable us to predict to the exact second when notable events such as eclipses and transits will occur these bodies stars planets planetesimals knobbly chunks of rock are themselves clustered in galaxies many billions of them separated by distances orders of magnitude larger than the already very large spacing again many billions of years apart of stars within galaxies matter is composed of atoms and there's a finite number of types of atoms 100 or so elements we know the mass of each of these elemental atoms and we know why any one element can have more than one isotope a slightly different mass chemists have a huge body of knowledge about hi how and why the elements combine in molecules in living cells molecules can be extremely large constructed of thousands of atoms in precise and exactly known spatial relation to one another the methods by which the exact structures of these macromolecules are discovered on wonderfully ingenious involving meticulous measurements of the scattering of x-rays beam through crystals among the macromolecules thousand by this method is DNA the universal genetic molecule strictly digital by which DNA influences the shape and nature of proteins and other family of macromolecules which are the elegantly honed machine tools of life is exactly unknown in every detail the ways in which those process proteins influence the behavior of cells in developing embryos and hence influence the form and functioning of all living things is working progress a great deal is known much challengingly remains to be learned for any particular gene in any individual animal we can write down exactly qin s-- of DNA code letters in the gene this means we could count the total precision the number of single letter discrepancies between two individuals this is a serviceable measure of how long ago their common ancestor lived this works for comparisons within a species between you and your cousin the Queen's resistance and it works for comparisons of different species between you and a more distant cousin aardvark say again you can count the discrepancies easily there are just more discrepancies the further back in time the shared ancestor lived such precision lifts the spirit and justifies pride in our species Homo sapiens for once and without hubris Linnaeus his specific name sapiens seems warranted hubris is unjustified pride pride can be justified in science does so in spades so does Beethoven so does Shakespeare Michelangelo Christopher Wren so do the engineers who built the giant telescopes in Hawaii and the Canary Islands the radio telescopes Very Large Array that stare cyclists into the southern sky or the Hubble orbiting telescope and the spacecraft that launched it and the engineering feats deep underground at CERN combining monumental size with minutely accurate tolerances of measurement literally moved me to tears when I was shown around the Rosetta the engineering the mathematics of physics that successfully soft landed a robot vehicle on the tiny target of a comet these also make me proud to be human modified versions of the same technology may one day save our planet by enabling us to divert a dangerous comet like the one that killed the dinosaurs by the way that may not be as difficult as it sounds the dinosaur projectile hit at a relative velocity of tens of thousands of miles per hour but these things still to hurtle straight towards us like a speeding bullet they are in an elliptical orbit around the Sun and so are we when we discover one that looks dangerous all we have to do is speed it up slightly to nudge it into a wider orbit or slow it down slightly to nudge it into a narrower orbit the necessary speeding up or slowing down is only a matter of a few miles per hour quite manageable who could sail to be thrilled by our capacity to magnify every precisely sculpted detail of an an said who does not feel a swelling of human pride when they hear about the LIGO instruments which synchronously in Louisiana and Washington State detected gravitation waves whose amplitude would be dwarfed by a single proton this feat of measurement with his profound significance for cosmology is equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to the star Proxima Centauri to an accuracy one human has breaths comparable accuracy is achieved in experimental tests of quantum theory and here there's a revealing mismatch between our human capacity to demonstrate with invisible conviction the predictions of a theory experimentally on the one hand and on the other hand our capacity to visualize the theory itself this is not surprising to a darwinian our brains evolved to understand the movement of Buffalo sized objects at Lyon speeds in the moderately scaled spaces afforded by the African savannah evolution didn't equip our brains to deal intuitively with what happens to objects when they move at Einsteinian speeds through Einsteinian spaces or with the sheer weirdness of objects too small to deserve the name object at all yet somehow the emergent power of our evolved brains has enabled us to develop the crystalline edifice of mathematics by which we accurately predict the behavior of entities that lie under the radar of our intuitive comprehension this tool then makes me proud to be human although to my regret I'm not among the mathematically gifted of my species less rarefied of still crowd making is the advanced and continually advancing technology that surrounds us in our everyday lives your smartphone your laptop computer the sat-nav in your car and the satellites that feed it your car itself the giant airliner that can lost not just its own weight plus passengers in cargo but also the hundred 20 tons of Steel that it eats out over a 13 hour journey of 7,000 miles we are not arrogant not hubristic to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science we are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth also honestl that said is the Frank admission of how much we don't yet know how much more work remains to be done that is the very antithesis of hubristic arrogance science combines a massive contribution in volume and detail what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don't religion by embarrassing contrast has contributed literally zero to what we know combined with huge hubris take confidence in the alleged facts - simply made up but I want to suggest a further unless obvious point about the contrast of religion with atheism I want to argue that the atheistic worldview is an unsung virtue of intellectual courage I begin with what may seem like a digression Fred Hoyles the black cloud one of the best science fiction novels I've ever read despite its obnoxious hero does what good science fiction should on entertaining it informs and widens thought about real science the black cloud is an alien creature of superhuman intelligence which parks itself in orbit around the Sun in order to feed on solar energy scientists eventually establish communication and much drama ensues as a novel reaches its climax our scientists asked the cloud to pass on its knowledge which is as far beyond these cysts as their knowledge is beyond that of say Aristotle the cloud agrees but explains that the flashing light code by which it will impart its knowledge is best aimed at only one human at a time a brilliant young dentist called Dave White Hart volunteered for the hot seat eventually he falls into a trance from which he never recovers and dies of an overheated brain the same happens after a longer wrestle - Christopher Kingsley the astrophysicist hero of the story human brains even those of world-class physicists are simply not equipped to cope with superhuman knowledge the cloud eventually departs for another part of the galaxy on an urgent mission it explains that despite its jargon - and knowledge there are certain problems labeled as the deep problems which are beyond even its understanding like any good scientist the superhuman black cloud has a humility to know what it doesn't know the reason for its departure is that a neighboring black cloud only a few light years away and now that it has found us solution to the deep problems presumably something other than 42 since that announcement no further communication has been received and our cloud as its nearest neighbor the odds a duty to go and investigate is the discoverer of dead or does it survive to pass on the long-sought answer to the deep problems the readers led to suspect that the neighboring cloud died from an elevated version of the lethal overheating that killed my carton Kingsley what are the deep problems for us what are the questions that might forever be beyond our poor brains in the early 19th century how complex life came to exist and diversify would have sprung first to mind but those questions have not been definitively answered by Darwin and his successors I suppose the remaining deep questions are things like how does brain physiology produce subjective consciousness where do the laws of physics come from what set the fundamental physical constants and why do they appear fine-tuned to produce us and why is there something rather than nothing the admission that science cannot yet answer these questions testifies to scientists humility it most certainly doesn't imply that religion can science may or may not during the next century or so solve these deep problems and if science including the science of artificially intelligent robots and including the science of evolved superhuman aliens can't answer them nothing can certainly inop theology but I said I was going to make a point about the intellectual courage of the atheistic worldview now do it in the context of one of the deep problems why is there something rather than nothing Lawrence Krauss in his book a universe from nothing expands the controversial suggestion that for quantum theoretically syns nothing the capital letter is deliberate is unstable just as matter and antimatter annihilate each other to make nothing so the the reverse can happen a random quantum fluctuation causes matter and antimatter to spring spontaneously out of nothing Crowder's critics largely focus on the definition of nothing his definition may not be able everybody understands by nothing but at least it is supremely simple as simple as it must be if it is to satisfy us as the base of a crane explanation Dan Dennis phrase such as cosmic inflation or evolution it is simple it is simple compared to the world that followed from it by largely understood processes the Big Bang inflation galaxy formation star formation element formation in the interior of stars supernova explosions blasting the elements into space condensation of element rich dust clouds into rocky planet such as Earth the laws of chemistry by which on this planet at least the first self-replicating molecule arose then evolution by natural selection and the whole of biology which is now at least in principle understood why did I speak of intellectual courage because the human mind including my own rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life and the rest of the expanding universe could have just happened it takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice on a smaller scale it recalls my emotional response to a really good trick by a world-class conjurer Jamy Ian Swiss CEO Darren brown or Penn & Teller emotions screams it's a miracle it just got to be supernatural almost drowning out the still small voice of reason no it's just a trick there really is a rational explanation the still small voice takes on the as I imagine Scottish tones of David Hume which is more probable as the impossible has really happened or that the conjurer has fooled you you don't have to understand how the trick was done in order to take the courageous leaf of reason and say hard as it is to swallow I know it's only a Crick laws of physics are secure move now from the contouring trick to the universe again emotion screams no no no it's too much to believe you're trying to tell me that the entire universe including my brain and the trees and the Great Barrier Reef the andromeda galaxy the tardigrades finger all came about ultimately through mindless atomic collisions no supervisor no architect you cannot be serious all this complexity and glory stemmed originally from nothing and a random quantum fluctuation give me a break and again reason quietly and soberly replies yes most of the steps in the chain are well understood although until recently they weren't in the case of the biological steps they've been understood since 1859 but more important even if we never understand all the steps nothing can change that principle that however improbable the entity you're trying to explain may be postulating our Creator God doesn't help you to the smallest degree because that God would itself need exactly the same kind of explanation however difficult it may be to explain the origin of simplicity the spontaneous arising of complexity is by definition more improbable and the creative intelligence capable of designing a universe would have to be supremely improbable and supremely in need of explanation in its own right however improbable the naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence the theistic alternative is even more so but it needs a courageous leap of Reason to accept the conclusion some deep problems have yet to be solved maybe they never will be it takes courage to go to work on them courage to work on the assumption that despite our screaming instincts solutions are there to be found and we get that courage from Darwin without Darwin's brilliant idea the problem most likely to provoke throwing up the hands and despair and invoke pure magic would be the problem of Lights and that's a as a divine magician in the sky how is it possible that living things could come into existence the speed at a pronghorn antelope the eye of an eagle the ear of a bat the wing of us the wing of a swift or an albatross the brain of a mathematician how is it possible that all this design could exist without a magical designer that was the big one that was a problem so big that before Darwin and Wallace came on the scene even our greatest minds simply gave up on it they just assumed that it was magic and didn't think any further about it but Darwin solved it with an idea of crystalline simplicity he gave us an inspiring model for how prodigious complexity can arise by comprehensible steps from original simplicity we now know that all the apparently magical beauty of life and his diversity isn't magic at all just physics and natural selection other deep problems remain very deep and cosmologists and quantum physicists are working hard on them but the big one has been solved by Darwin and that success should arm us with courage to tackle the remaining ones that is what I meant and I said the atheistic worldview requires intellectual courage it requires moral courage too as an atheist you abandon your childish imaginary friend you forego the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble there are no supernatural arms to catch you when you fall you're going to die you'll never see your dead love runs again there's no holy book to tell you what to do telling what's right and wrong not an intellectual adult you must face up to life to your own moral decisions but there is dignity in that grown-up courage you stand tall and face fall into the Keen wind of reality you have company warm comforting human arms around you you inherit a legacy of culture which has built up not only scientific knowledge and the material comforts as applied science technology and medicine brings but also art music the rule of law and civilized discourse on morals morality and standards for life can be built up by intelligent design designed by real intelligent humans who actually exist atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is wonderfully and shockingly explicable as an atheist you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you're ever going to get to fully inhabit reality rejoice in it and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it thank you very much I've got a really wonderful job to do which is to give Richard the very first Darwin date medal so this is the first time a humanist UK have ever given anyone a Darwin a medal hang on hang on because I have to tell you what it's for and it is the being you Richard and it is for a lifetime devoted to public understanding of science and in particular the evolution Richard Dawkins please accept from Harvard you

Channel: Humanists UK

Views: 151,561

Rating: 4.8313527 out of 5

Keywords: BHA, Humanism, Secularism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Education, Talks, Lectures, BritishHumanistAssociation, Non-religious, Science, Philosophy, Richard Dawkins, Alice Roberts

Id: oSNE02hwwSM

Length: 48min 25sec (2905 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019