'The Evolution of Confusion' by Dan Dennett, AAI 2009

I'm sometimes tempted to wonder what's the point of philosophers and then I remember Dan dennit and all is revealed all is answered Dan I I said that uh Jerry coin was my Guru since John mayard Smith died with respect to evolutionary genetics Dan dennit is my Guru with respect to clear thinking and whether an argument that I want to put forward Works whether it's uh it's silly whether it's obvious I would always go to Dan in the way that I used to go to John mayard Smith uh as a mentor uh and as a dear friend he's one of the participants in the The Four Horsemen DVD which uh Josh produced uh and um it's a very great pleasure to me to uh invite him to speak to us [Music] today okay so I'm going to talk about the evolution of Confusion And since this is Darwin year I I I do have to acknowledge at the start that that there's pretty obvious why I get invited to give Darwin talks um uh I uh I I I seem to be getting to look more and more like him as time goes by he is my hero so uh uh nice person to look like uh but in any case uh what I'm going to talk to you today about is uh complexity in religion and design in religion and earlier today or no yesterday we heard pz Meers talk about uh complexity in design and uh I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of interesting examples what do we see here we see two remarkably similar uh uh configurations uh there's dark dark rocks at the center of a ring of lighter colored rocks all of about the same size and one of them is uh an example Le of design intelligent design and one of them isn't uh you may already know the answers to them that I'll just tell you what they are the one on the left was an Andy goldworthy sculpture and the one on the right was a patterned uh ground created by self-organizing freeze and thaw patterns in the Arctic this was a actually a cover story in science back in 2003 now if you want to know how those are made you have to sort of reverse engineer them in both cases there's a process in one case there is a a a a plan an organized represented plan in the other case absolutely not it's just a physical process and doesn't involve any life at all and in fact uh the uh we here's a few more examples uh uh you might want to guess which of these are are designed and and which not uh the one on the uh upper left and lower right are both not designed those are both uh formed just by natural uh tidal actions on certain sorts of coastal Waters and the other two are designed and again we have an Andy goldsworthy sculpture on the upper right if you don't know his work I highly recommend it it's beautiful and we can reverse engineer the The Rock system and and there's even a computer Compu simulation that was done which showed how those rocks came to take on the remarkable pattern that they did so uh what I want to do today though is talk about reverse engineering religion now when you reverse engineer anything you want to know how it works uh what it does and how it does what it does and one way to figure out how it works is to see if you can get it not to work see if you can break it or induce pathology in it and then learn something about how it works from how it fails to work when you can induce pathology this is a wellestablished methodology in uh across science in fact and in particularly in the area that I have spent uh really most of my sort of scientific research time and that is in uh uh cognitive Neuroscience cognitive science where we often use experiments of nature where we have human beings who have suffered in one way or another they've suffered brain damage or they've been subjected to one horrible uh or very unusual regime or another or it may just be sitting in some psychologist lab and having various things flashed at them for a while and then you learn something about how the Machinery works by seeing what kind of pathology or failure you can induce in the system in fact if you couldn't do that you'd be hard pressed to uh to distinguish what you see from just just a magic or something it's we we have to understand how these things work so now what are the pathologies of today's religions um well how about preachers who are atheists that would seem to be a fairly pathological uh State of Affairs for a religion to have atheist preachers um and of course there's lots of former preachers who are atheists in fact there's some in this room uh and those in this room who would like to talk to me afterwards about their own experiences I'd be be very pleased to add you to our our database but we're mainly interested in preachers who are still in the Pulpit who still have parishes who are still preaching uh and so we're looking at closeted non-believing atheists uh clergy who are yeah closeted non-believing clergy and we have found for this pilot study six volunteers they're between the ages of 37 and 72 just one woman five men for ease of exposition I'll say there's three liberals and three literals that is to say the literals came from quite conservative religious backgrounds where they tended to be literalist about the reading of the Bible and the three liberals came from uh liberal churches where uh uh the uh the wiggle room in understanding scripture was already established in their childhood so we have a presbyterian and Episcopalian and a United Church of Christ for the Liberals a Methodist a Baptist and a Church of Christ for the for the for the Liberals now we haven't yet found a good Mormon or a Roman Catholic but uh that may be face to uh we're pretty sure they're out there if they be willing to participate these are needless to say deeply confidential entirely uh uh uh secure but in-depth interviews three long interviews uh by a very experienced interviewer Linda Lola who's a uh psychiatric social worker with many years of experience uh as a professional interviewer and qualitative researcher by the way it's particularly fitting I tell you a bit about this here because uh she sent me email uh a little bit more than two years ago about this and uh we met at the uh aaii conference in Washington where we uh uh agreed to join forces on this project so it's thanks to the AI that this thing ever happened at all now uh what are the questions that need answering one of them is why there are atheist clergy at all uh how does this come about you might think it's very strange that an institution like a church should end up with uh uh among the Professionals in the official pay of the church would be people who were uh atheists uh uh and yet the reasons why there are atheist clergy are not so hard to find uh we might call it the not so Tender Trap first I'm going to describe the Trap and then the the more more more Curious question is how why does the Trap exist but what's the Trap well uh you're a clergyman and you lose your faith and you contemplate leaving the church and it is a vertiginous nauseating scary Prospect uh as they say what about my mortgage what about My Wife and Kids what about the financial bind I've been if I walk away from this job I have no security I don't have any training for any other job uh so some of them are really Locked In by Financial considerations uh and I'm sure we can all sympathize with that sort of predicament um also as I just mentioned lost opportunities for training this is all they know how to do how are they going to make a living how are they going to support their wives and families or their husbands if they uh if they come out as atheists um then of course there's the Concord fallacy it is extraordinarily difficult to say it's not so hard to say to yourself interestingly enough but it is very hard to say to the rest of the world oh my I have wasted the last 40 years of my life uh it takes a very strong person I think to announce that to the world but I think in fact there is in a way a more heartening reason why these people stay in the ministry it's because they are basically very good people and they're trapped and they don't want to hurt people and there are a lot of people for them to hurt their families their friends their Associates uh here's a quotation from one of them there have been times when I'd say you know what I'm just going to tell everybody and whatever happens happens and then I think gosh I can't do that I I think I could handle it but it's other people that I'm worried about or one man talking about his wife and he's saying it's just going to turn her life upside down so these are people caught in an excruciatingly tight trap and dealing with it one way or another now in the case of our small self- selected sample my own guess is that at least half of them will soon take a deep breath and take the plunge and and go public and uh let the chips fall where they may but at least two of them are in it for the duration and profess to be content and happy and they have their they have their reasons they have their you might say they're their rationalizations or you might say no given their current predicament this is the morally right thing for them to do and they are right to do it they do more good and less harm if they stay and in effect sacrifice their own integrity and their own honesty uh and live out a lie rather than reap the consequences of revealing the truth there are six very different cases and uh they're really quite moving when you read these interviews and may I say uh Linda lascola is one heck of a good interviewer I read the transcripts and I think boy oh boy I couldn't have given this good I couldn't have conducted this good an interview not by a mile she's extremely good at uh uh securing and deserving to secure the confidence of the interviewees and then probing gently but very firmly probing probing probing by the by the way if you haven't seen it another nice example of the same sort of thing is the is the television episode where Richard uh interviewed uh uh father George coin and very respectfully held his feet to the fire and you watch this really very intelligent and lovely man George coin the the the uh Roman Catholic priest who's also the Royal well not the Royal astronomer but the Vatican was the Vatican astronomer and to watch him tie himself in knots trying to deal with the conflicts between his church and His science is a it's a stunning uh example uh I have to say that our six uh ministers are not in the same intellectual league as George coin they are they're good people but they're not very good thinkers uh but sometimes you learn a lot from people who are not that good thinkers uh because you see what they rely on how they think about these things um it's interesting that some of them are uh quite bookish a few of them I'm sure Christopher Hitchens will be delighted to learn that it was reading God Is Not Great which was the Tipping Point for one of them I think that would surprise a lot of people but no that's that was it that's what did the job in one cas case and uh The God Delusion was also on the reading list of uh at least half of them uh uh so that uh uh um our books are getting through even to the [Applause] clergy um well how did they get in this pickle first of all they all think that they are the tip of the iceberg they all think that there are lots and lots of closeted atheist clergy but they don't know one of the most interesting things about them is that although they have this conviction they have no way of testing it that they dare do they're scared to raise the issue even with their closest friends in in the clergy and again and again when you probe them on their lives it is just wonderfully or eerily or sadly reminiscent of the plight of homosexuals back in the 50s they don't have any gar or they don't trust their gar and they're terribly afraid of coming out to the wrong person and so they adopt all the usual circumlocutions and it's these wonderful cases of sort of plausible deniability they'll get together and they'll say um you know my uncle I've got an uncle who thinks what do you think of that well they're talking about themselves but and probably probably the person they're talking to knows that and they go on with a discussion like this and it's all veiled so there's always deniability it's always uh uh no Mutual knowledge there uh and that's in itself a very interesting thing but how did they get into this pickle well it turns out that they have a lot in common even though as I say they're they come from quite different backgrounds and how did the Trap come to exist well let's talk about how they got in the pickle in the first place it all goes back to Seminary when they go to Seminary they basically are initiated into a secret Brotherhood Sisterhood fatherhood a secret society and it doesn't make much difference whether the Seminary is conservative or liberal what happens is that these are young people you may know some idealistic young people they've been raised in a church they've been going to church all their lives and they've decided the life of the churches for them they they study religion maybe in college and then they go to Seminary and or maybe they go straight to Seminary without without doing uh a college but what they find at the Seminary as one person said oh you can't go through Seminary and come out believing in God now that's almost surely uh a bit of bravado a bit of uh exaggeration but the point that he was making is really quite striking um everywhere you go to Seminary you have Bible studies and this is the history of biblical scholarship its textual criticism and they learn about how the various texts were written when they were written how we know they were written and what happened next and which borrowed from which and they get a pretty good dose of textual criticism on how the Bible was compiled and how uh various texts got included and by after sort of political arm wrestling of various sorts other texts got excluded and so they learned about how the Bible was put together that's not what they learned in Sunday school and their response to that is striking the literals many of of them are angry they they get very confrontational with the professors and they refuse to accept what they're being taught in class they want they realize that if they want to get a good grade and the passing grade in that class they're going to have to spew back this terrible stuff they are not convinced by it at all whereas many are convinced or at least bothered and in any case the cat is out of the bag they get an introduction to the what's known by Scholars about the recension of the texts now in itself I think this is a very interesting and in fact very hopeful sign because even in conservative seminaries even for instance in Baptist seminar Aries you get that scholarship you apparently it's very hard to find anybody who will be a professor of Bible studies and not tell the truth and so the love of scholarship the respect for evidence is playing a subversive role right at the heart of the train training program of young clergy now this is not news to people in religion there are several books which recount this in great detail uh uh Bart erman's book misquoting Jesus is a very good example he is a very distinguished biblical scholar and he started out at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago which is one of the most conservative in the country where the professors had to take an oath they had to sign a statement that they believed that the Bible was the inherent word of God but still they taught the history of the of the recension of the texts and this bothered young Airman because he couldn't put this together with uh how could well if it is the inherent word of God then it's really really important that we figure out what the which which of these many versions is God's version because it's the only one that's inherent and he found that his professors were not all that interested in that question they sort of abandoned the idea that there was uh uh one version which was the inherent word of God even though they'd signed on to that so that began uh uh uh Bart erman's uh life I guess he was ordained at one point but he's a professor of of uh biblical studies now a very good scholar uh uh one of the leading scholars in the field and this is a book about um how this uh politically and and in the scholarly and political history of this of this development uh uh another book which is often mentioned in the same regard is Jack Good's book The dishonest church now good is a former Minister who is really outraged by this by the by the chasm between the leoty and the clergy where the clergy they all know these secrets and they it's a conspiracy to keep the secrets from the parishioners who can't handle that kind of information now a lot of young people get to Seminary they confront this they get outraged and they walk away and Lucky them they made a very they dodged a bullet because they got out while the getting was good others and I wonder if you reflect on yourself I when I look at their lives and think what what would I have done at that point if IID made that investment in going to the Seminary would I have hung around would I thought well let's see maybe we'll see and see if I get ordained and H the uh The Temptations to stay with the program along the way are surely great and after all these people go in with with really pure intentions they they want to help the world they want want to help the World by doing what their everything in their childhood said this is the way you do good there's hardly a better way of doing good than this and then they get to Seminary and they discover that of course a skill that is taught in seminary is how to put a spin on the truth about the Bible now it's there isn't a course called how to put a spin needless to say no it's taught by example sort of in every class they learn from their professors about how clever ways of talking can glide you over these problems and pro provide you with things that you can say to the parishioners that are if you squint just right and get the light just right they're sort of the truth about what you know how to avoid divulging the truth about the Bible this is what they learn well at this point I been reflecting on a question that I'd asked myself in the past why does theology exist I mean why uh why are there people who devote their lives to being theologians it's uh it's sort of like string theorists you think yeah you know is it and you for years I think I thought it was just sort of just a just a an excrescence a byproduct of the way uh cultures treat religions and there you think over the over the centuries uh there's always going to be some curious and pretty smart people who just can't quite get their head around the standard stuff that they hear from the pulpit and they don't want to abandon it so they cast about for presentable ways of recasting that material in terms that they can be intellectually comfortable with and since they're very clever they come up with all sorts of interesting stuff and if they're really really really clever they may even end up inventing modal logic or coming up with some some important advances in philosophy simply in the course of their campaign to figure out some way of couching what they are believe they ought to believe and profess in terms that they that satisfy their their their sense of intellectual Integrity so I thought that it was a sort of um encapsulated uh scholarly uh uh you know taking in each other's laundry and it to some degree I think that is what it is and Heaven Knows the academy is full of pockets of very clever people doing stuff very well where you wonder why on Earth are they doing it I I like to quote Donald Hebb one of my heroes the Great Canadian psychologist who once said if it's not worth doing it's not worth doing well you think about it and you think what what decimation this would do to academics if we if we applied it rigorously there's a lot of people out there doing very well very very well very professionally things that probably aren't worth doing and I thought that theology was one of those but I've come to realize that it does actually have some users there are some people who Avail themselves of the work of the theologians and who are they they're the ministers who have to have an answer to what can I say to the parishioners and so they're actually quite eager to read the latest theology give them and Theology of course changes as times change because parishioners have different issues and problems and questions and so there's always apparently a market among some clergy for new ways of responding to those embarrassing questions that they get from parishioners and that's fed by the theologians now now some of the theologians of course go too far you have people like Bishop Spong and Don cupit who are uh as close to being uh explicit atheists as you could get and are derided and reviled as atheists by many uh uh by many Christian uh uh leaders uh uh but just as much honored by others for their uh liberating and and refreshing and and wonderfully inight ful views on on the nature of religion um in other words what I'm saying is that what theology is is a compilation of ways of not coming clean about the whole Enterprise or as you might say theologians are religion spin meisters that I think is that's what theology is today and I see no reason to believe it isn't what it's always been I see that as it's raise own de now let's consider the Cannons of good spin it is not a bareface lie you have to be able to say it with a straight face very important it has to relieve skepticism without arousing curiosity oh I get it oh I get it oh well all right and it should seem profound now uh you've been introduced to some new terms uh was kipple was one and uh um grandf falloon was the other yeah well I want to a term of my own that I coined some years ago and that's deputies now I didn't invent the word itself the daughter the teenage daughter of a colleague of mine did he came in to see me one day and he said well last night at supper around the dinner table I was holding forth on I can't remember what the topic was but but I said something that I thought was rather important and and and profound and my daughter Alex said oo dad said a depy and ever since he told me that story I thought oh man deputies I like that idea yeah Dad said a deity uh so what's a deity I've taken it beyond the just the term itself and I've given it a definition so a deity is a proposition that seems to be profound because it's actually logically ill formed it has at least two readings and balances precariously between them on one reading it's true but trivial on the other reading it's false but would be Earth shaking if true and so what happens is you hear it and you think oh yeah this seems true oh my gosh whoa and then you got yourself a deepity so I want to I to help you get on with the term I want to give you an example of a depy are you ready this is going to be pretty profound everybody's sitting that's good yes love is just a word oh wow oh wow love is just a word now let's just walk through through it here's the first reading love is just a word that's true it's trivial it's a word it begins with an L it's got four letters it's comparable to cow is just a word and cheeseburger is just a word and so forth for any word you like so there's the true trivial reading of the sentence then here's the other one which is just take those quotation marks off love is just a word oh really oh my um first of all it's false I mean whatever love is it isn't a word it may be an interpersonal relationship it may be an emotion it may be the most wonderful uh phenomenon in in human psychology or it may be an illusion but it isn't a word it is not a word you can't find love in the dictionary right that's almost a deepity now or maybe that would be a good country western song you [Laughter] know so um what these are and this is one of the Common forms of De it's a really an elementary mistake I I catch my students in their is doing it all the time we have a name for it it's called a use mention error it's confusing the use of the word with the mentioning of the word that's why we philosophers get really nitpicky about saying you got to put quotation marks around words like that because otherwise you have an ill formed sentence if you want to talk about the word love put it in quotes because you're mentioning the word not using it okay that's a use mention error it is such a common mistake such an elementary mistake that I you I write it in the margin you know you you mention error so this is not as it were sophisticated stuff this is a very common mistake now Richard every now and then ask me well what's the point of philosophy why are there philosophers you so here is little example of some philosophers that work okay God love fragga one of the great uh fathers of modern logic famously and notoriously and perplexingly said the concept horse is not a concept this is paradoxical now what he meant by that if you're interested and there's no particular reason to be interested but what he meant by that is that given his theory of Concepts only predicates are really the names of Concepts and concept horse is of course a subject and so that's not going to be a concept is a horse on the other hand is a horse that is a concept well philosophers don't agree about fragga about whether fragga is right about the concept horse is not a concept there's a lot of literature debating that but what every philosopher I think agrees on is that the concept horse is not a horse you know you can't ride it it doesn't have to be fed hay it's a concept now if you make the mistake of thinking that the concept horse is a horse then you're making a sort of use mention error uh with Concepts instead of words as the problem so so there's a kind of use mention error here and this use mention error is actually very common in the ology we see it all the time now here's Karen Armstrong she wrote a book back in 1993 called a history of God a history of God compare it with a history of the Easter bunny or a history of Superman now what she's really talking about of course is history of the concept of God or the history of the concept of Easter Bunny the concept of Easter Bunny changes over the years but in case you didn't know it there is no Easter Bunny so the I'm sorry I'm sorry to shatter your Illusions but there is the concept of the Easter bunny how many of you believe in the Easter Bunny oh how many of you believe in the concept of the Easter bunny we all do yeah atheists believe in the concept e and we can believe in the concept of Superman without believing in Superman and yet this confusion between the concept and the thing it's a concept of is uh very creatively used by many people in in theology Robert Wright just published a book called The Evolution of God the whole book is one long attempt to of fog over the fact that all he could really be talking about at best is the evolution of the concept of God but he wants to sort of sneak it in so that you think he's actually talking about the evolution of God not the evolution of the concept of God if he'd written a book called The Evolution of the concept of God first of all a lot of people would sort of yawned they say yeah yeah there's quite a history there and it would be like the evolution of the concept of the Easter bunny it it would would not imply anything about whether God was real but just whether the concept was real and we all how many of us believe in the concept of God yeah right in other words the whole book is one big use mention error Rodney Stark one true God historical consequences of monotheism is a similar book here's what he says all of the great monotheisms propose that their God works through history I plan to show that at least sociologically they're quite right God works through history sociologically they are quite right that a great deal of History triumphs as well as disasters has been made on behalf of one true God what could be more obvious yeah the whole thing is is a is a ension error um uh here's here's one of our one of our interviewers God is literally what we would call a metaphor oh well I don't know about you but you know I believe in metaphors so I guess I can say I believe in God H if God's a metaphor hey that's easy or this is a different different a different Dodge but you'll recognize it when I lived in New Mexico I heard these Native American storytellers tell creation stories or other stories about their tribe then they'd say maybe it didn't happen this way but the story is true meaning there's truths in the story but they're not literally true this of course is a very well-known uh turn of phrase in many versions it spreads uh effet it seems to be uh I guess it's what I would call a good trick it's discovered again and again and again uh you don't even have to copy it from others it's such an obvious move to make when you're pressed with an awkward question here's another quote from one of our uh uh interviewees I Define God as the process of creativity within evolution in human history that makes for greater humanization this is clearly one of our liberals now I think about this I think oh well if that's how God is defined I think I believe in God I think Richard probably believes in God if what it is is the process of creativity within Evolution and human history that makes for greater human as age well I guess so so if that's what God is then that's another way of saying that you believe in God and then Rodney Stark again I do not Rodney Stark is an interesting person because he's a very clever man writes uh he's really a sociologist writing about religion he clearly likes religions that are he wants an anthropomorphic God he thinks a God that you can't make Bargains with that you can't pray to that you can't uh uh uh make promises to and expect returns from he has a sort of economic theory about this it's an agent you can bargain with and if that's not your God then he's just not interested that's not not a God for him I do not mean to suggest that this portrait of God is the product of conscious human creation no one sat down and decided let's believe in a supreme god surround him her with some subordinate beings postulate an inferior evil being on whom we can blame evil rather this view tends to evolve over time because it's the most reasonable and satisfying conclusion from the available religious culture well now as you read this this does seem to be a sociologist talking about the evolution of Concepts about cultural Evolution about the sort of mimetic uh uh transmission of these ideas then he puts a wonderful footnote on it nor am I prepared to deny that this Evolution reflects Progressive human discovery of the truth in other words in case you wondered I'm not saying it's all just made up it's all just a fiction it might for all we know be getting like science getting closer and closer to the truth even though he just described it as a process which would not unlike science have [Music] any reason for us to suppose it was the sort of process that would tend to get us to the truth rather than to a to a particularly satisfying falsehood now back briefly to Karen Armstrong on Fresh Air a week ago she said God is no being at at all now this is interesting compare one with two no being at all is God now one is sophisticated theology two is crude atheism she's really down on crude atheism trouble is they're logically equivalent if you put them into the predicate calculus they come out with exactly the same formula so they mean the same thing but one of them is sophisticated and one of them is that crude primitive atheism that the four horsemen represent and at this point I think you can begin to see I'm beginning to see more and more what I'm going to call the transparency of theology that is when you look at how it's conducted and how it it's just so obvious it's like a magician doing a trick where you can see the card up his sleeve it's just not it's just and and I was thinking about this I was talking with Richard last night and it reminds me some of you will know this and some of you w't how many of you remember John litz and the uh compulsive liar ah yes so I'm going to do my John loveit's inspired this is here's Karen Armstrong uh Through The Eyes of John Lovitz Terry Gross says well now Caren do you believe that God exists oh now I think that's the wrong question I really think because you see um uh that supposes that God is a being that might exist or not but God is no being at all no God is no being at all in fact God is being itself yeah that's the ticket moreover God is being no even more God is the god beyond God it rings off the tongue so nicely and you can see that this is what theologians theologians are doing now having encountered this with Armstrong Richard reminded me that he'd already he'd already exposed her uh in his response to Karen Armstrong in the guardian about a week or two ago if sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativist thinks they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap Heap by downplaying the importance of existence they should think again tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God and they will brand you an atheist they'll be [Music] right I love this quote God is so great that the greatness precludes existence now that's really deep now that's you and what I love it about it is that this was said by Rondo panikar in 1989 and some years earlier the wonderful novelist Peter Dev parodied this very idea in a in a hilarious book called The mael Plaza it's a novel one of his funniest uh Dev is an interesting man like Stark he likes his religion anthropomorphic and bold and conservative and he hated liberal sort of suburban liberal protestantism he really didn't like that and so he wrote a novel which has a character Reverend mael who is the epitome of suburban liberal uh uh preacher and there's a hilarious sermon and the punchline of mackerel's sermon is it's one of my favorite lines of all times and so dearly beloved it is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us yeah now Richard Richard was asking the other day uh he and Christopher and Sam Les me but I get a little of it are often accused of being uh philosophical Philistines crude unted uh people who shouldn't mess with sophisticated ities in the field of philosophy and he wanted to know did I think that it was true and that what what philosophy should he read if if if he should repair this damage I said no I just don't think it's true I don't think it's true I think that Theology and particularly philosophical theology is uh a pseudos sophisticated mugs game and there's no reason to learn any of it uh because uh we've just seen some of the best of it and it's full of of uh uh I think willful obscurity and and uh willful use of uh uh deputies uh um so instead what we should think about is the evolution of the God meme and here this is in a way partly a response to something that py was talking about yesterday um the Trap that traps these poor people in the role of closeted non-believing clergy is cunningly designed to hold them it is it is a well-designed tra but nobody designed it there's no Mastermind there's no ring leader there may be individuals who have a very good idea about it and who want for their own reasons to perpetuate it but that's not necessary I think every detail of that institution of that set of circumstances could arise by nothing other than natural selection blind variation and selection where these are such potent features of the institution that they get prolonged and prolonged uh and become self-perpetuating in spite of the fact that uh uh nobody really has to be their um uh their shepher their their their uh Steward they take care of themselves quite brilliantly over time uh in the paper that that Linda lcol and I are going to write we're going to look at that claim in more detail what we have here as so often in biology is reasons without a Reasoner there's lots of reasons why biological structures take on the shapes they do and why why uh bones are the way they are and wings and eyes and brains and and and uh proteins uh why they there's lots of answers to a lot of why questions and there's the reasons that we invoke are reasons that are not represented in the mind of God nor are they represented anywhere until they're represented by the biologists that figure them out what they do is they shed light on the processes the blind re unreasoning processes which have gradually HED in on those reasons because by default this is what this is what Darwin realized that when you have Offspring some will die and some will live some will die for no reason some will live for no reason but some there'll be a reason why they did better than the others those reasons tend to be perpetuated and honed honed and sharpened and built upon and in that way the process of natural selection gradually identifies and in in effect endorses reasons that's reasons without a Reasoner now when I talk this way I recently have discovered a new term for this it's called adaptationist paranoia and there are two books that have recently been written which talk about this one of them is by Richard Francis um and one of them is by Peter Godfrey Smith I'm not going to give you the titles uh because uh well the Godfrey the Godfrey Smith book is a really fine book but it has this one I think big lapse is that he buys Richard francis's idea of and term adaptationist paranoia and this is basically uh the same line that that G and Leon uh uh Champion 30 years ago uh uh which uh shakes a finger at adaptationist and says that's not a good methodology well no it's a hugely successful strategy of research in biology it can be overdone there's such a thing as doing bad adaptationism but if we do it right we ask lots of why questions and very often we get really interesting answers which we can then use to test empirical hypothesis and make predictions so I'm sticking by my guns recommending that when we reverse engineer religion same as when we reverse engineer birds or trees uh that we uh look for the reasons why the parts are the way they are and very often we're going to find that there's very interesting reasons indeed and applied to cultural designs it's actually the antidote to paranoia we've had hundreds of years of social historians and critics and theorists looking at human culture and particularly at religion and seeing likee py seeing all the design all the cunning in the institutions and they're because they're not used to evolutionary thinking they think they've got to postulate a clever designer this is the these are the clever the clever priest the evil priest uh uh The Mastermind priest theory of how religions get established no we don't need masterminds at all just like Beatles or for that matter palm trees religions can benefit from adaptations that neither they nor anything else understands the understanding comes later in the analysis not before in the process of creation Now if we want to extinguish religion or encourage it to mutate into benign form we need to understand how it works and why thanks for your attention [Applause] thank I never listen I never listen to a talk by Dan denn I never listened to a talk by Dan dennit without my mind racing and exalting in the the sheer Joy of intellectual exercise it's a fabulous talk thank you very much D thank you I'm afraid we we have overrun time rather severely um Dan has uh said that he will try to discover the missing missing link yes yes and uh so we'll we'll leave it to that so thank you Dan very much okay

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 400,759

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy, Darwin

Id: D_9w8JougLQ

Length: 56min 20sec (3380 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2009