The Unbelievers Q&A Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss & Penn Jillette

I do want to say before we before we start the Q&A and I'm mostly gonna just throw this right to Q&A I have very little to say but I just want to take a moment we all talked about this backstage and it's so important the last words you saw on that screen before Christopher if we just hear a little something for Christopher here now once we open this to questions it could be very very soon we know that all the questions are going to go to Lawrence and to Richard's so I want to point out the two gentlemen on the end these brothers here are the whole worded brothers and they're the ones that made the movie so let's hear for them for a second what a good job and I want to ask y'all so you least get one question in there's no one's going to absolutely think I so you started out pretty like-minded to Richard Lawrence but having heard the number of lectures that you heard and following them around with cameras what did you feel each of you was the biggest change in in experiencing that community in that world that you traveled with kind of all over the world what was the well I mean obviously I don't think any of us were prepared for the reason rally I mean that was a big thing we were all surprised and just shocked when we were there it hard to explain what it was like but it was this this feeling of just that many people and and so so young and enthusiastic I mean we all know that obviously there's more of us out there than then we all think at first but the reason rally I think just blew us away it's just it was an experience you couldn't explain to somebody if they weren't there and we tried to capture in the film but I don't know they love to be another event like that it was um the eye opening was um well for me I guess just a little backstory we both grew up in a very Christian household and for me anyways it kind of just when I left home it just kind of faded away more than anything but I think the biggest thing that I learned was kind of just did the being honest with people intellectually honest and being able to say I don't know to something and that being okay rather than needing something just to say to say something well they made a great movie let's hear it again for them and it's like it's like the Beatles in 1964 I can't tell them apart yet but they are the whole they often people often confuse pan and I well can I just since much of the time we were actually talking science I mean what Lawrence is a physicist I'm a biologist and I I like to think that we had a kind of mutual tutorial and and one of the questions that I would have asked Lawrence if it had happened would be what about gravitational waves because then what you want me to answer well briefly let me before I do let me say that a bunch of people have asked that but I it was it's always a thrill to be with Richard but every time were together I learned something and so that you know we were together a lot during the shooting of this film but it's always I always learn things it's been we do spend a lot of time talking about science and so it's been for me it was just a complete pleasure but gravitational waves the neatest thing is we've turned a lot of metaphysics into physics because before the earliest time we could see in the universe was 300,000 years after the Big Bang the cosmic microwave background radiation the afterglow of the Big Bang because before that the universe was opaque you can't couldn't see past it like you can't see the past these walls but gravitational waves interact so weakly that they could make it through that opaque universe so if we could see them we're seeing a signal of what the universe looked like when it was a millionth of a tree of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old and we're really seeing back to the Big Bang and that is just so amazing and I'm happy among other things that I kind of predicted it I know you all want to talk to these guys run away so let's start right away with questions so my job from here on is just a point let's start over here is over the microphone is there hello all right great wonderful film my question is quite simply to anyone who wants to answer it's about the role of celebrities and celebrity culture in the film I see that you had several celebrities that were doing interviews at the beginning and at the end credits I'm curious about how that process came about and what you guys are doing moving forward because frequently you know celebrities are tastemakers in our society so I was just curious about the whole process I mean that's what you said there is exactly the reason why we wanted to include them is because a lot of people know original orange think about these things but to see somebody like Cameron Diaz up there who you may not know you know he shares these kind of ideas and Cameron's not an atheist you know she's she's kind of more she's a fan of science she's in there she's very big besides my lectures and she's a real fan of science yeah she's more kind of like she believes in kind of Einstein's God almost you know is she she's like she's very close to there but they're not quite but we thought showing some of those folks in showing role models from other walks of life not just scientists but it would help to maybe real a few people in to start thinking about these ideas that haven't or wouldn't otherwise I mean let me add I mean one of the reasons that making a movie or doing something like this is to try and reach a broader audience in particular we hope a large set of people who've never thought of these questions so they're people who know richer to me in there and they're gonna come to the movie but what it would is really hopeful hopeful is that people may be attractive because of some of the celebrities but more importantly it's not just surprising that Richard and I are fans of science okay but what I think is really neat is for people to see that their their cultural role models are also fans of science they were interested in know something about it I think that's a message that I hope think both Richard and I wanna want to express is that science is part of our culture and it should be everyone should be interested in it and at another point that is really Christopher Hitchens makes this point in God is not great he doesn't make it quite this impolitely but you don't have to be smart to be an atheist and that's what I've been trying to prove I don't have to be as smart as these two to say I don't know and I think having people up there that are out of Sciences but love what comes from the sciences and also are able to say I don't know and won't follow these rules and have that kind of self possession it's a very important point to make and I know I I said that in a way that was a little bit funny but there's no joke intended you don't need to be Wiley coyote super genius to UM to realize that these these fairytales are not true and Richard I mean another thing is in the movie I think you see that we're both also happy not to know you know to learn from each other to I mean the interested science but not you know to be to be in awe in some sense of what other people are doing I think is is great yeah anyway Jim my question is for the whole world of brothers in the scene it really is in the scene where Richard Dawkins is in his hotel room that scene to me is just the best moment in the film and I'd like you to maybe talk a little about how that scene happened what was going on there and the way that you hung on the nightmare that he was going through and it was kind of this view of kind of a dreary view of being on the road and being in a band and kind of flying to one city taking a cab to the venue doing the show signing autographs off to the next thing just just churning it out and that that kind of happened it was just an organic thing that happened and we we said you know Richard had these interviews set up and we said we'd love to film one and for the most part we were just sitting there just hitting record letting it roll because the guy was just talking as a euro yeah we just kept waiting for Richard to speak and after a while you start to realize the guy on the other end of the phone isn't interested in what richard has to say I mean right I mean again it's there's a lot of editing done there you I'm Terry was a really nice fellow but but we decided to go the Hitchcock route and draw that out as long as possible it's one of my favorite scenes also you know and I think we were all surprised I mean you know because there's the interspersing with me running around and I I think we didn't know how people would take that yeah and whether people would look bad for Richard actually and it and I think it I think for many people it's the favorite part of its didn't you say that timber no her song said it was his favorite yeah yeah Bernie said it was his favorite part of the movie yeah hi this question is primarily for mr. Dawkins but I would love to hear everyone's take on it as technology progresses exponentially once we're able to recreate the human mind and create artificial intelligence do you think we'll be able to predict how that would develop based on the evolutionary model and I had something else but that I doubt if we would predict it from evolution I mean this is this is a fascinating question is whether computer technology is going to replicate human minds and whether they will be conscious there have been various bets taken there was a bet of some years ago about whether a chess program would would beat some grandmasters and and that took a bit longer than was expected bets about artificial intelligence are taking longer than expected I have no doubt at all that eventually computer intelligence will mimic human intelligence and will be will will be conscious because there's no reason to suppose there's anything other than a different kind of computational machinery very different kind but it is computational machinery inside the brain but I don't think I would use evolutionary expertise to predict which way that's going to go necessarily evolution doesn't plan for things so but but I think what's what's pretty clear is that when computers I agree with Richard when computers become a way of self-aware which i think is inevitable and my Mac will before a PC but anyway that there you are religious right but anyway that that it will be that whatever that will be difficult for biological systems maintain that so that the dominant elegance if if humans want to be part of that will probably have to merge with that but there's one really neat thing that I don't think it's a film that's really you should think about the challenge of this that right now if you want to build a computer a digital computer that would have say the processing power the memory storage a human brain it would use 10 terawatts of power 10 terawatts of power the human brain uses 10 to 20 watts so it's a factor of a million a million there's clearly something different about the way the human brain is computing their current digital computer so it's gonna be a challenge I don't think it's gonna happen soon but I think it'll happen inevitably this question is primarily for professor Dawkins in the film it was alluded to the fact that natural selection does not plan ahead to have a positive outcome but I would like to challenge something about that the laws of physics have been used in cosmology to predict the future course of the Sun the universe and many other things and I'd like to to throw out the idea that evolution also follows the laws of physics and therefore has possible outcomes and possible future courses and and roads and so on that are predetermined by the laws of physics I'm not saying the outcomes predetermined but is it professor doctors do you think there's potential for science to analyze these possible future courses of evolution to help man kind of avoid bad Forks of the road we're talking about two different things here you're talking about the potential predictability of the future which i think is a very interesting question and I agree with what your however what I was talking about was something rather different which is that there is no foresight in natural selection because there's a very common fallacy that people since natural selection produces outcomes that are good that are good for the animal it's very tempting for people to think that there's something all-wise all-powerful about natural selection that somehow it can look ahead and take action say to prevent the species going extinct something of that sort natural selection cannot do that natural selection is a blind melee arising force it just chooses the best outcome of available ones and that means that it cannot look ahead and foresee what's going to happen and take take action to to prevent disasters in the future now humans can do that at least potentially humans and our culture and our computers and our science can look into the future can predict the future not very perfectly at the moment but I accept your point that there may be science of a futurology of the future in which case we can do something that natural selection could never do let me and because people actually laughs Richard questions I answer them but that I think to get to the other part of your point is it it's just a lot more complicated the reason I'm a physicist is because it's easy I mean it's the easy stuff biology is is much harder it's much more complicated and therefore it's much harder prig it's hard to predict you can't predict where all molecules this room are and you know think about the number of cells in human brain so it it inevitably I think is the laws of physics and the laws of nature are determined they're completely deterministic even including quantum mechanics but it's so complicated that I I think it's very hard to imagine what this complex system or model what this complex system is going to do in my opinion as a humble physicist well I was answering the wrong person wasn't tired yeah yeah in future can anybody wave weather let's go over to stage right over here hello my name is Mark Gunn as anthropology student here at the University I want to thank you all for coming out here really means a lot thank you thank you thank you for coming my question once you leave here it's gonna be obviously us who are spreading your message more assuming that everyone here is mostly atheist and in the movie you guys were bringing up the beauty of science and I I have that beauty in that appreciation a lot of my friends and family don't have that natural beauty they're not in the sciences and so maybe they have other beauties in their life acknowledging that professor Dawkins what do you think is the the best way for you with your friends and your family perhaps to find what their beauty is and relate that to atheism and do you do you think that maybe like organizations like the sunday assembly or are doing a good job at trying to embrace that I don't know about the sunday assemblies I it's not my way of doing things and I I hadn't been to one on earth and they can't be that interested in doing that but I fully appreciate that some people do science for me is beautiful it's it's a privilege to be in a world that we are able to increasingly understand so I'm in favor of science education of a what I would call the Carl Sagan approach to to science as opposed to what I call the nonstick frying pan approach the there is a school of thought that thinks that science should be taught in a sort of practical way you you use science in the science of the kitchen science of cookery the nonstick frying pan is a spin-off of this of the space race that seems to me to be demeaning to the space program the space program is is about exploring the outward urge the excitement of reaching out to the into the universe so I think Carl Sagan rather than Margaret Thatcher who once gave a lecture on television on science talking about the science of cookery so there are people who think that the way to make science exciting and inspiring is to say is to bring it into the home and say this is everyday science well everyday science is great but the science of the universe the science of the galaxies the science of looking down a microscope the science of looking inside a living cell that's what I that's what I like to inspire people with hello gentlemen all right mr. Dawkins mr. teller it's a crowd honestly yeah either way honestly humbled by your presence here thank you for coming sorry in then and this is more of a question of interest over science in general but I'd like to ask you with the massive amount of matter that we have in this universe do you honestly feel we are the only intelligent species here in the universe um I think it's highly unlikely there are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe each containing 100 billion stars moreover we know that at least one kind of intelligence forms from from organic molecules water and sunlight pretty easily in fact within about within a as soon as the laws of physics allowed then 500 million years or so after the earth formed after comet bombardment stopped the earliest life-forms appear to have evolved so if we're wanting any example it appears to be pretty easy in a sense although we still don't know how although I do think in the next decade we'll learn how and so and the thing that people should realize is that the universe is full of obviously there's lots of Starlight there's lots of light water is ubiquitous and so are organic molecules the basis of amino acids rather complex organic molecules are being discovered comments all the time it's quite likely that the basis of the first complex molecules of form to RNA came from space and in or at least where were created in in due to chemical reactions and comets or something like that so it's that appears to be a Bic witness so it's hard to imagine and now we also know that most stars have solar systems around them which is something we physicists thought of already be you know we're pretty sure of because if you built a star on a computer it generally had an accretion disk that would fragmented foreign planets but now we learned in not only other planets around every star but their planets that we never imagined where possible all of the laws we thought that had to be big gas planets out in the outer part and and and not in the inner part we've learned all that's wrong and the variety is much greater and I find that all the time that the universe continues to surprise us so the possibilities of life are great and I'm absolutely certain that there's that there's life elsewhere in the universe now intelligent life is a very different question because it's not at all clear it's an evolutionary imperative we're here do some accidents evolutionary accidents but I believe even if it's it's really rare it there's so many possibilities it's hard to imagine that it's not out there however that's the good news the bad news is that I think it's highly unlikely that we'll ever know about it and I could explain that but I think I've talked long enough I I agree with all that and I would just add if the famous miller-urey experiment where it was shown in the lab that you could get the right kind of organic compounds in if you simulate the early conditions of Earth that's no longer necessary because those compounds are now known to be in meteorites they're all over the universe one thing I would add if you're one of those people who wants to believe that we are alone in the universe then given that there are something like 10 to the 22 stars and most of those probably have planets the paradox is that if you want to believe that we're alone in the universe that means that the origin of life on this planet was a spectacularly improbable event such a so improbable that you might as well give up speck about how it happened because what we're looking for if you believe that we're alone in the universe what we're looking for as the chemical event that gave rise to the origin of life is an event so improbable that you would call it impossible by ordinary standards and of course I don't believe that and so I agree with Lawrence I think that probably there's lots of life in the universe I also agree that we may never know about it because by the very same argument that says because there are so many billions of planets available for life to form in and they're so spaced out chances are that these islands of life may rather sadly never encounter each other hi my name is ed well thank y'all for coming to Fabulous Las Vegas in your movie was great I've seen all your documentaries on YouTube and my question is for professor Krauss black holes they say that light can't even escape him but in a young universe you've seen energy or light coming out the top and the bottom well if light can escape a black hole how does that happen well our universe well first of all actually in it very small black holes are very bright anyway they tend to evaporate by something called Hawking radiation which is what made Stephen Hawking famous we think we've never tested it but the laws of physics suggest that should be the case but more importantly the early universe isn't a black hole as far as we know Nate we think that the universal large scales is almost flat and that says something quite interesting and and I learned this from Tommy Gould who you may know when I was a high school student he really inspired me was in the astrophysicist and writer and this is really need to take this home with you black holes are really weird objects for most people because yeah light can't escape from if he took the Sun and you compressed it to the size of Las Vegas have become a black hole probably a lot like Las Vegas and and anyway ah but and every teaspoon would would weigh millions of tons that's what people think of black holes like but the properties of black holes change if you had a black hole of the mass of our galaxy it would have the density of water when it became a black hole so it's not so unusual and here's the neat thing if you had a black hole of the mass of our universe its density would be within a factor of two of the density of our universe so we could be living inside a black hole in principle it's not too bad take that home with you Stage Left thank you gentlemen I have only one question for the panel in 23 parts but seriously I actually changed my question because there was a point in the movie where professor Dawkins mentioned taking back certain terms like morality and intelligent design and one of my pet peeves is the misuse of the term theory and I want to know what it's going to take to take back that term from the colloquial meaning of a guess and bring it back to its true scientific meaning of peer-reviewed proof that will take a miracle do you want to I mean one thing is that we we have to be careful when we use the word theory and I've said this somewhat facetiously today is my friend Brian Greene but that it's an insult to evolution to call string theory a theory because it's not a theory and and I think he agrees with that now theory in science as you know is something is very different than a guess something that is well tested over and over again and and we use that word unfortunately scientists use that word inappropriately as well as the public we have to be very clear that theory is the highest thing you can attain quantum theory general theory of relativity evolution is so I think we scientists have to be more careful but it's it's really hard I think to imagine changing that meme if you want wish and in the end in society in my opinion over yes I think it went fighting a losing battle trying to get people to change the way they use the word I think we need to start talking about the fact of evolution it is a fact it's a totally secure fact there's no doubt about it and we need to to stop even using the word theory for it call it call it a fad that's what it is I just have one question what do you think of the new cosmos well the honest answers haven't seen it okay Neil's a good friend of mine I don't have TV I don't have cable and the other answer is that I worked Annie there's other books yes no and but I I I'm very enthusiasm and and it will hopefully help create more science than to be it'll convince those idiots to program TV who think incorrectly that science isn't interesting look at this and every time we're happy Richard are going to be a meeting in my institution on Saturday and there are 3,000 people paying to come listen to science and every time we do that there's 3 million people listen to science Friday people are fascinated by science but TV producers don't realize so I hope it'll do very very well because then it'll convince these nudnik s-- that that that they should put something interesting on TV and then maybe i'll get cable know about the definition of an astrophysicist it's someone who writes about something EF c I hate this but I warned you all that I had to go and I actually do my wife and I are going to something and I would I don't want us to miss it so I'm I'm gonna unfortunately have to leave but I thank you all for coming and I'm what I have seen I have seen the new the new cosmos i I have no right to have seen it it's not been shown in Britain I said I've seen it illegally I I downloaded a piece of software which fools my computer into thinking it's in America and so I've seen the four episodes that have so far appeared I think it's terrific I loved the original cosmos and I think that Neil Tyson is doing a fantastic job I think now that Lawrence is gone we can really talk I noticed that neither one of the lines got any shorter when Lawrence left over here Stage Left so everyone here shares a huge appreciation for science as we saw with the cops for the cosmos and science is the only game in town when it comes to describing the world however there's other normative distinctions that are left over and I was wondering like as atheists we still might have some conflicts over normative decisions that aren't descriptive which science provides answers for oftentimes religions fight over those normative distinctions that can still exist with atheists so I was wondering like do you have any thoughts on how we could use our knowledge to inform something like a debate between a libertarian and a socialist or other situations that are still left over conflicts absence god I think it's clear that science in itself cannot answer normative questions of morality of the of the kind of society in which we want to live political decisions like that but the methods of thinking that characterized science when what when you think about what moral philosophers do and moral philosophers consider moral questions in a scientific way I mean using using methods of logic which is the same as the methods that that science uses scientists can in massively inform moral questions on abortion and things like that not not fundamentally saying what is absolutely right or wrong there probably isn't such a thing as absolute right or wrong but what science can do is say if you believe so and so then you're being logically inconsistent if at the same time you believe so and so so we can hugely edify moral moral discussions and political discussions by not just scientific knowledge not just factual knowledge but by the scientific way of thinking and I wish that really all moral decisions and foot and political decisions were informed by scientific thinking rather than just calling on scientists for expert knowledge about facts call on scientists as well for expertise in how to think what is the one scientific discovery you all would like to see within your lifetime the nature of consciousness and how it evolved I was gonna say longer battery life but now I feel like a dick yes Stage Left it's for professor Dawkins I'm a student here in molecular biology I was hoping that you could comment on a quote from Charles Darwin he was he said that a scientific man ought to have no wishes and no affections a mere heart of stone it's wondering what you thought about that yeah I mean I see what he meant we we have to take the facts as they are take the world as it is and dissected and analyzed it and report it and accept it whether we like it or not but of course we are human and we do have human emotions and so I've never actually met a scientist I think who is that cold-hearted and Darwin himself certainly wasn't either professor Dawkins I'd like to say a first it's an honor to get to talk to you because I've been following you since I was about this tall and B I actually have that same program on my computer to watch iPlayer since being in America my question for you is for all of us or at least most of us here who consider ourselves atheist or practically atheist a lot of us pretty much get flack for being atheist and we get called or at least I get called a godless heathen oh we got compared to rapists in that one report what would be your plan you think to break the negative stigma and connotations to being atheist in society I'm astonished and I've read that the same poll that he referred to him and I've seen it it's often quoted I don't meet these people who say things like that I mean I when when I come to America I don't think I ever meet people who are religious maniacs in that in that way I assume that the people that I needn't talk to our nice intelligent people and I assume that they don't believe in God and I'm always astonished when I read pearls like the one you refer to so I well that's the that's the first thing I'm hoping that there will be a tipping point phenomenon that there are actually far far more people who are not religious in America than many people realize and there's going to come a time I think when we start to when everybody starts to writ to realize where numerous we're not alone where numerous and then it there will be a tipping point and suddenly it will go politicians will suddenly realize that they no longer have to pretend to be religious as they do apparently at present all politicians in America think they have to pretend to be religious and they all say God Bless America and things it isn't statistically possible I think that all 535 members of the US Congress are believers in a supernatural being as I think all but one or maybe all of them now pretend to be they've got to be lying we know we know they're lying I mean you just statistically inevitable that many of them maybe even most of them I mean some of them are quite well educated so I I think that when when politicians start to realize that they no longer have to lie and then there will be a tipping point and then it'll go rather suddenly rather quickly I think it may happen much more quickly than most people realize but you also have to keep in mind that those kinds of studies that say how do you rank an atheist how do you rank this it's a very badly designed question Christopher Hitchens said we will never have an atheist president we will have a president who atheist and that's a very important point to this because if you'd asked people in 1980 if they would elect a divorced movie actor they would have said not at all but they elected Ronald Reagan and the same thing that happened with the gay movement there were some parallels that what will happen with the atheists is people will start to say would you love respect trust a person who was atheist as opposed to would you trust an atheist and those are two very very different things and I think that those questions themselves it's the humanizing of the idea it's not an idea that these people it's an idea these people are bothered by it's not the people we need to remind them that it's the people that matter ok that question is essentially the entire point of this movie is to show that that change is happening and when you see that reason rally and you see that I mean it's it's an amazing thing I think the work that people like Richard Lawrence and and all the other people who appear in the film are doing is helping and then people everybody here is helping just by talking about these ideas I don't think at all it all gets us there I'm very optimistic about about all of this it seems to be going very well and very very quickly I mean when I was uh when I was in high school it was very very difficult for me to find an atheist to look up to and now we're maggoty with them and just look at how fast the gay movement just has moved it's just and something like that's going to happen with you yeah I think it's I think it's happening so quickly when we look back on in our heads we'll spin over here Steve as a science teacher and in Utah and someone who will debate the missionaries that show up at my doorstep I often feel that I'm banging my head against the wall so when you're out speaking to overly religious groups how many people do you have to reach to feel that you've been a success and it was worth your time I'm sorry to say that when I go out and speak they don't come I tend to find myself preaching to the converted which is not a bad thing to do actually and that's that there is some value in that but I don't on the whole get hecklers I don't get people standing up and and that I mean they they heckle outside they have they stand outside and hand out leaflets but they tend not to come in and challenge me directly which i think is it's a great pity I'm told that the annual conference of the American Atheists is taking place in Salt Lake City this year have you how many people have read um douglas adams is Dirk gently's holistic detective agency so lovely remember there's a there's a character called the electric monk and the electric monk is a labor-saving device which you buy to do you're believing for you and this particular electric monk has developed a fault which never mind up mind about that the point is that the mark 2 electric monk I think it was called the electric monk classes who goes back to the days when it was the Mac class is capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City you know I do end up speaking to people who are not atheists I have been outnumbered many many many times and what I had to learn and it was difficult for me to learn was the absolute inverse of what I said earlier I had to learn having been surrounded in my close friends and family by atheists I had to learn that people who believed in God were also a ok and that the vast majority of them were kind and sweet and gentle and open-minded and sometimes we forget that because sometimes we like to brag about our hate mail so they would like to be macho and talk about how people hate us and how we're raging Against the Machine and we're fighting this whole powerful thing and sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by pretending by making jokes like that and pretending the other side is social is so stupid and making that kind of caricature because the same kind of thinking that says that an atheist is less respected than a rapist is the precise it's not like it is the exact same kind of thinking that says that Christians are rednecks and all want to beat us up and we all hate them because the fact of the matter is if you take all the people in the world and round off the numbers all the people are good the vast majority of people are kind and I have sat in an auditorium with 200 Glenn Beck supporters who I would think these people would consider to be the worst people possible and you know something they were wicked nice to me and let's please never forget that that they can be nice to so hate that hate the sin okay there are women in the atheist movement first I'd like to think hey thank you professor Dawkins for coming to Las Vegas I heard you on a NPR on our state of Nevada which is our small radio station and I felt very proud that we finally got to have an international scientist on our small state radio station it was awesome and also I'd like to thank you mr. Gillette for your perspective your non hard scientific perspective and sharing of atheism my mother came out to me a year ago said after being a Catholic for 40 years she told me she was an atheist and I was like so proud and I think I'm pretty sure I wasn't watching you on YouTube actually my question is based on regardless of your atheist or humanist or whatever we all have this sense of awe and a sense of you can call it spirituality when we look up in the sky or when we stop and we notice the birds singing and we all kind of have a sense that there's something greater than us out there and many religious people call that God we resent it as they say in a sense of faith but I believe that well my question was actually for dr. Krauss but he left but I really do to hear your perspective as well everybody else's perspective as well do you believe that there ll ever be a time where say you know maybe the grand unified theory or how M M theory works and I feel kind of dumb about using the word theory now thank you that maybe there will be a time when spirituality and science can be married and maybe there can be a scientific explanation for that spiritual feeling that many of us feel I think the only problem is the use of the word spiritual I mean I I feel exactly the way you feel and you can call it spiritual if you wish I wouldn't actually call it spiritual but I would call it perhaps poetic and I feel it very strongly I feel it when I look up at the stars I feel it when I as I said earlier when I look down a microscope and I contemplate the complexity of life the the prodigious complexity of every single one of your cells let alone your whole body that fills me with wonder that fills me with a kind of poetic sense of uplift which other people would call spiritual and the only reason I would not call it spiritual is that that plays into the hands of people who would then wish to say well then you must be believed delivering the supernatural or something like that I absolutely am NOT I think it's actually rather demeaning to that sense of scientific wonder to import an idea like supernatural which is not doing justice to the grandeur of it this question is for any one of you gentlemen who would like to pick it up but as an atheist what would you say to a well-meaning mother or grandmother who while she says that she loves you no matter what also claims to worry for your soul and stay up at night praying for your salvation I would say I love you very much unconditionally there's no other job you have except to love your family in that kind of situation you just have to no matter how much love Christians can lay on you you got to equal it and double it you have to sympathize I mean they they if they believe that you're destined for everlasting hell then that's a very serious worry and so I think you have to to sympathize with with with what they feel thank you yeah I just I it's it's so easy to turn that into a into a dividing thing and they are concerned and when they when they claim they love you but still worry about you that's not a claim they absolutely do and just love them back that I'm both the most and least trusted and America's a being that I'm an atheist nurse so I apologize that my question is just the subject matter of Dawkins tie tonight I was just asking Richard what what is going on with your time my time you didn't know they were going to be hard questions all my ties the only times I ever wear are hand-painted by my wife the out crystal award and so this is my Galapagos tie and she painted it for me when we went to the Galapagos Islands at the bottom there is a nazca booby that is a blue footed booby that's a galapagos flightless cormorant which is a remarkable bird it's lost the power of flight but it still has wings and like any other cormorant it hangs them out to dry which is a rather beautiful thing I think that's a galapagos hawk and i can't see what's in your knot but and there's an egg on the the other end I have to say you know we don't get asked a lot of the questions but I mean the the benefit is just to be able to hear stories like that and there was one moment I don't know if you remember when we were in Canberra in Australia and we were at Lawrence's place or Nancy's place and we were waiting for them in the car and we saw these mud daubers outside the car there was a mud dauber nest and we walked out there and you were looking at this one that was really high up but there was one like right here Richard right here and you walked over to it and you went the female mud dauber goes out and grabs a water in her and you started telling me this and then Lawrence came over and just said we gotta go right now does it enough developing they're magnificent creatures you can find them you almost certainly around here you find them under bridges they build mud nests which look they called organ pipe mud daubers they look like organ pipes and each one of these mud tubes is is filled with spiders which the wasp goes and hunts catches the spider stings it not to kill it but to paralyze it and then lays an egg on it and then puts a whole lot of them in in these tubes and then they they hatch out these are just amazing see when Lawrence is gone we can hear things like that we're gonna do two more questions so there's a bunch more people in line so if you have got the best question in this line you should move to the front the less pressure this lies you should move to the front and work that out among yourself if your question sucks go back to your okay so hope this question doesn't suck but it's the last one from that side so if your question is not really good the guys behind you're gonna kick your ass okay I'll be quick I'm originally from Belgium but I live in Texas and I'm wondering why is the u.s. still so much more religious than Western Europe and why can i what can I personally do about that what why is why is the you have so much more religious such a it's such a big question I I can only answer the comparative with Britain where in Britain we have an established church with the Church of England the Queen is the head of the Church of England the church runs royal weddings and opening of Parliament of things like that this means because there's an official Church religion has become boring whereas in America religion is sort of exciting because it's run on private enterprise and you have mega churches advertising with each other competing with each other for huge congregations tens of thousands of people going to churches come to my church not that church and but and the tithing that goes on so I think that possibly is one is one reason but maybe the Pilgrim Fathers has something to do with it certainly the founding fathers didn't because they were all as near atheist as you could be in the 18th century yeah I think their freedom of religion is one of the things that that let it go let it go so wild is just allowing everybody to have that and I'm very glad that's the way it happened because we if we look at this thing as a laboratory I think there's no doubt that the u.s. is moving toward the right answer it just takes a while to think about things now do you that's a better question than you guys had otherwise hit him oh you had the best question in that line it's the last question the night there's a huge amount of pressure on you I just wanna I just a public high school I teach science there's no pressure that's bigger than that one sorry folks I teach I teach biology and I teach their science so I get it all the time how can you believe in this or that or the other thing mine is a very practical question professor you wrote in one of your books I can't remember if it's blind watchmaker or one of the other ones about a computer program you made that did evolution that showed evolution I can't remember which program which book it's in is that program available someplace you had a friend of yours write a program that would starts with a very simple creature yes okay it's in the blind watchmaker and then it was again in climbing Mount improbable I wrote it for the Mac and I wrote it and it runs on the old Mac before system 10 and I would love it if somebody were to rewrite it for modern my kids and ability to play with it to show you see it in a very real time is the hardest thing they have whether it's an earth science or biology is that such a small the change happened so slowly yes and high school students have no anything so if it was if it was somewhere I would love it if you could young people have rewritten bits of it I mean if you if you look on them on the web if you search for blind watchmaker program search for bio most computer biomorphs you'll find that there are quite a lot of programs out there which mimic my original program and so yes you couldn't you couldn't you can find it there but I would like somebody to rewrite the whole the whole of the original one okay your question was all right the whole word of brothers who made that film Professor Richard Dawkins Penn Jillette you

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 122,161

Rating: 4.8717813 out of 5

Keywords: Lawrence M. Krauss (Academic), The Unbelievers (Film), Richard Dawkins (Academic), Penn Jillette (TV Writer), Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason And Science (Nonprofit Organization), Atheism (Religion), Secularism (Political Ideology), Skepticism (Quotation Subject), skeptic

Id: 6DSKi4KTkV8

Length: 53min 48sec (3228 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 02 2015