There are no "Christian Children"! (God Delusion UC Berkeley Lecture) | Science vs Religion

[Music] if you're watching this on YouTube you might have noticed that this episode is a week delayed but if you want to get early access to our episodes consider becoming a paying member if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share it with your friends thank you for all your support when I was doing my book tour of America for The God Delusion in 2008 one of my venues was the University of California at Berkeley it was a nostalgic visit for me as I'd spent two eventful years there as a young man it was a receptive audience and I obviously seem to be enjoying myself I hope you enjoy it too [Applause] that's very kind thank you very much I'd like to dedicate this lecture to the memory of George W barow a long-term faculty member here who recruited me here for my very first job as an extremely Junior assistant professor and uh was my guide and Mentor during the time I was here can I begin with a little bit of research the website in the middle there Richard Dawkins doet could I just have a show of hands for the number of people who've been there okay thank you all right P far thank you very much isn't it a remarkable coincidence almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just happens to be the right religion religions run in families if we'd been brought up in ancient Greece we'd all be worshiping Zeus and Apollo if we'd been born Vikings we'd be worshiping Wan and Thor how does this come about well of course through childhood indoctrination one by one those ancient belief systems have vanished from the face of the Earth and we seem to get just fine without them Zeus with his Thunderbolts Apollo Wan Thor with his hammer Beal mithas and amanra all were once woried as Gods people believed in them prayed to them sacrificed to them children were brought up with them told of their existence as a matter of undoubted fact but nowadays everybody agrees that no matter how sincere those Believers undoubtedly were they were deluded every one of those Gods was a delusion and so were countless other gods that human tribes have sincerely believed in all around the world some of us just go one God further my book is called The God Delusion and I need to make it clear that the God I'm talking about is a personal intelligent creative being like Yahweh Allah Beal Wan's use or Lord Krishna but if by God you mean nature goodness the universe the laws of physics the spirit of humanity or planks constant we're going to be talking at Cross purposes an American student asked her professor whether he had a view about me sure he replied his positive science is incompatible with religion but he wax is ecstatic about nature and the universe to me that is religion well if that's what you choose to mean by religion fine that makes me a very religious man but if your God is a being who designs universes listens to prayers forgives sins reeks Miracles reads your thoughts cares about your welfare or your sex life and raises you from the dead then you're unlikely to be satisfied as the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said if you want to say that God is energy then you could can find God in a lump of coal but I would add don't expect congregations to flock to your church this is sometimes called pantheistic religion I call it einsteinian religion when Einstein said did God have a choice in creating the universe he meant could the universe have begun in more than one way God does not play dice was Einstein's poetic way of doubting Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle Einstein did not believe in God he did not believe in a personal God he was irritated when people said that he did but what did he expect the hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him religious physicists if you meet one usually turn out to be so only in the einsteinian sense they are atheists of a poetic disposition and so am I but given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding deliberately to confuse einsteinian pantheism with Supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason another example of einan religion the indian-american Nobel prizewinning physicist soanian chandraa said this shuddering before the beautiful this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the Beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in nature persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound the American physicist John Wheeler said we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple so beautiful so compelling that we will all say each to the other oh how could it have been otherwise how could we all have been so blind for so long wrong don't forget by the way with all this talk of aesthetic beauty beauty isn't enough it must also be true and that comes finally to evidence Beauty may be a good Guide to the stage of science where we put forward hypotheses but those hypotheses must finally be tested Carl Sean said this how is it that any Ma how is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded this is better than we thought the universe is much bigger than our Prophet said grander more subtle more elegant instead they say no no no my God is a little God and I want him to stay that way a religion old or new that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths sooner or later such a religion will emerge einsteinian religion pantheistic religion does not involve belief in anything Supernatural the pantheistic God doesn't exist except in a purely poetic sense of those people who do believe in a supernatural God many make a distinction between deism and theism the deistic god designs the laws of physics and then retires never to be heard from again certainly not interested in human Affairs the theistic interventionist [Music] God there he is he's parting the Red Sea then he intervenes in the world intervenes in human Affairs performs Miracles answers prayers and all that other list of things that I gave you earlier there are many people who call themselves agnostic and I want to clarify this it's rather a confusing term I put up here a scale of religiosity from one to seven where one is I know there is a God and seven is I know there is no God and we've got a scale of intermediate agnostic positions in between four is exactly 50% number four agnostic believes that the probability of God existing and not existing is exactly equal number two is I don't exactly know there's a God but I have a very high probability I believe in a very high probability of there being a God I'm a de facto theist I can't know for certain but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he's there uh a number six the other end is somebody who believes there's a very low probability of God existing but still not quite zero I'm a de facto atheist I can't know for certain but I think God is very improbable and I live my life on the assumption that he isn't there I'm a number six I'm an agnostic but with the same level of belief in God as I have belief in fairies or unicorns bertran Russell Illustrated this with his parable of the Celestial teapot uh he pointed out that it is impossible to disprove the hypothesis that there is a China teapot in orbit around Earth around the Sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars we therefore all have to be agnostic about the teapot Theory but in practice we are all atists I want to make it clear that the agnostic position does not should not be confused with an exact 5050 probability position there are people who quite wrongly and illogically say you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God therefore there's an exactly 50% probability of God existing it's like tossing a penny that of course is completely illogical just because you cannot disprove something and the teapot example shows that it doesn't mean the odds of it being there are 50% and you can quickly see that with the example of the teapot I regard the hypothesis of the existence of God as a scientific hypothesis and in this I disagree with many of my scientific colleagues who feel that science and religion have absolutely nothing to do with each other and you can be a perfectly good scientist while your religious belief is a purely Private Matter that has nothing whatever to do with your science I think that's wrong because a universe with a God would be a completely different kind of Universe from one without and the difference would be a scientific difference God by the way could clinch the matter in a heartbeat in his favor if he chose to intervene for example at this very moment [Music] the only one of the traditional Arguments for God that is still widely used today is theological argument sometimes called the argument from design it's the famous watchmaker argument surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered and it's rediscovered by just about everybody until they learn the logical fallacy of it and or they learn Darwin's brilliant alternative in the familiar world of human artifacts things like watches computers complicated things that look designed are designed to naive observers it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed things like eyes and hearts are designed too this is not just a bad argument by analogy it's a bad argument by statistical reasoning as well it's fallacious but it carries an illusion of plausibility if you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a heart a million times you probably won't hit on one that can see or pump this demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance by random chance and there are many people who think that the only alternative to random chance is design because of the lamentable scientific education of most British and American [Applause] students there are many people who simply don't know what darwinian natural selection is and therefore the only alternative to chance that many people can imagine is design the English astronomer s Fred H dramatized his own version of that misunderstanding he suggested that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard would be as likely to assemble by luck a Boeing 747 as that natural selection could put together Life as we know it even before Darwin came along and gave us the answer the impotance of the argument from design was glaring how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate as an explanation for the existence of complex improbable things a designer who would have to be even more complex and improbable than that which he's being invoked to explain the entire argument is an obvious logical nonstarter as the great philosopher David Hume realized before Darwin was born but what human what Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give to to us natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant it not only explains the whole of life it raises our Consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain probably everything else essentially what's wrong with creationism stroke intelligent design there's no difference by the way is that it is what the philosopher Daniel dennit calls a Skyhook a sky I hook is a great hand that comes out of the sky unexplained and starts manipulating things in the world and superficially it looks as though this great hand is explaining something but of course it explains nothing because it lacks an explanation itself that's a Skyhook the opposite of a Skyhook is a crane a crane really does do explanatory work natural selection is the crane par excellence natural selection is cumulative it starts from simple beginnings and works up by gradual degrees incremental degrees to the prodigious Heights of complexity and improbability that we see in the Living World here's a couple of examples of the products of natural selection of the great crane of cumulative natural selection on on the right is a rosethorn an adapt ation by roses to avoid being eaten and that thorn has been carved and shaped by natural selection over many generations on the left those are not rose thorns those are bugs they too have been carved and shaped by natural selection into the shape of a rosethorn as protection against their own Predators natural selection is not just an alternative to chance it's the only ultimate alternative to chance that's ever been suggested design is a workable alternative but only in the short term because you still have to explain where the designer came from Francis Crick and lesli oral distinguished molecular biologists once playfully speculated that life on this planet May indeed have been designed this is their theory of directed panspermia whereby an alien intelligence from outer space seeded our planet with a rocket in whose nose cone were bacteria and that's where all of life sprang from they didn't really believe that but they put it forward as an interesting hypothesis it's interesting from my point of view because I see nothing wrong with it it could it could be right it seems to be very unlikely but it could be right but whatever else you can say it cannot be the ultimate explanation because you still have to explain where the alien intelligences from outer space came from sooner or later that regress has got to be terminated if the aliens from out of space were themselves seeded by another rocket from a different planet you still haven't solved the problem finally you've got to terminate the regress by postulating a crane instead of a Skyhook and the obvious crane would be evolution by natural selection the logic of creationist arguments is always the same some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable too complex too beautiful too or inspiring to have come into existence by chance design is the only alternative to chance that the author can imagine therefore design must have done it and science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same design is not the only alternative to chance natural selection is a better alternative notice what rotten logic it is we have Theory a and Theory B Theory a is supported by loads of evidence Theory B is supported by no evidence at all now here's the key step in the argument four I can't understand how Theory a explains phenomenon X therefore Theory B must be right I bet you don't know how the elbow joint of the Lesser spotted weasel frog evolved you don't right then God did it this kind of argument is a failure of the imagination I've described it as the argument from personal incredulity a metaphor for extreme improbability is a combination lock a very good high quality combination lock of the kind that they put on Bank vaults a bank robber could theoretically get lucky and hit upon the right combination and therefore get all the money in the bank but in practice combination locks at least the ones in Bank vaults are designed with enough improbability to make this tantamount to impossible as unlikely as Fred Hil spontaneous uh coming into existence of a Boeing 747 but now imagine a badly designed combination lock one that gives little hints a bit like the childhood game of hunt the slipper where you say getting warmer getting warmer getting cooler getting warmer getting warmer suppose that each time you turn the dial and you get a little bit closer to the correct combination suppose that the bank vault door Creeks open just a [ __ ] and a little bit of money spills out the dribbling combination lock which of course the bank robber would instantly home in on the jackpot if he had that sort of Clue the dribbling combination lock is a better analogy for darwinian evolution than the real Bank lock which offers only two Poss possibilities the jackpot or nothing and the trouble with creationist arguments is that they all think that evolution by natural selection is a jackpot or nothing argument nothing could be further from the truth but God the god theory on the other hand really is a jackpot or nothing argument because God is postulated as being there from the beginning before the process of evolution got going I can imagine Godlike beings like the ones that Crick and orle postulated as seeding life from their planet to ours I could imagine Godlike beings such that if we ever met them I mean if they came here for example in order to have got here they would have to be Godlike because for sure we couldn't get there I mean they need to be technological wizards of of A Sort that we have no no comprehension of we would worship them as Gods but they would not be Gods because ultimately they would have uh evolved by a gradual process but the god of the Old Testament the god of the New Testament the god of the Muslims who's always been there he is the ultimate 747 well why not teach the [Applause] controversy there are real controversies in science they're interesting and we should certainly teach them uh it's a very important part of scientific education to understand that science is not a done deal that scientists are constantly changing their minds as new evidence comes in that's important so let's by all means teach controversies that really are proper scientific controversies but the controversy over so-called intelligent design versus evolution is just not a real controversy at all I hope it's not pure wishful thinking to suggest that there is a new wave of Reason sweeping Across America Britain the whole of the western world one indication of this perhaps is a wave of bestselling books which I'm happy to advertise and perhaps even more significant is the backlash and I uh invite you to count along 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 the flea illusion you will of course recognized from WB Yates but was there ever dog that praised his fleas hence the flea powder that just got rid of that and a nice little afterthought you you may not have seen the British Edition but that's a uh that's a copy of the of the cover design of of the British edition of The God Delusion [Music] [Applause] I'm not trying in this lecture to teach facts and I'm certainly not trying to indoctrinate I'm trying to raise Consciousness and we've all met the phrase Consciousness raising in the context of feminism it's especially powerful there's no law against using a phrase like the rights of man or one man one vote yet because we've all had our Consciousness raised by feminists most of us feel kind of uneasy when we hear people use a phrase like one man one vote and even those who still use man in that sort of sentence do so with their Consciousness raised they know what they're doing they're taking a stand for traditional language perhaps or trying deliberately to rile feminists but everybody on one side or the other has had their feminist Consciousness raised and I want to raise our Consciousness about some unconscious assumptions we all make about religion let me try a little experiment on you at Christmas time one year my newspaper in Britain the independent was looking for a seasonal picture and they found a heartwarmingly ecumenical one at a school Nativity Play the three wise men were played by Shad breit a seik mushara a Muslim and Adel a Christian all aged four now my guess is that you probably think that picture is rather sweet how nice that four year olds who belong to different religions should come together in a nativity play and I suppose the caption said this Shad bit a socialist mashara a conservative and Adel a liberal or all aged four shadb an atheist mushara an agnostic and Adele a secular humanist all aged four I'm trying to raise Consciousness I hope that that series of three slides has raised your your Consciousness I hope that every time from now on you hear anybody talking about say a Catholic child or a Protestant child or a Muslim child you will protest you will say you wouldn't talk about a postmodernist child or a Keynesian child or a hakan monetarist child there is no such thing as a Catholic child there's only a child of Catholic parents there's no such thing as a Protestant child only a child of protestant parents there's no such thing as a Muslim child only a child of Muslim parents I repeat these slogans over and over again probably too often too often it can't be too often when you're in the business of Consciousness raising please join me in protesting every every time you hear anyone ever referring to a Catholic child a Christian Child a Muslim child Etc I like to think that this particular piece of Consciousness raising has had some some effect I'm now going to play you a short three minute extract from a British comedian called Marcus brigstock um and the it's it's quite funny I hope you don't mind if I I hope you don't take offense too um um at the end of this of this monologue it somebody's put put sort of pictures onto it as well I think it must originally have been on on radio uh at the end I hope you'll get the the same Consciousness raising point that I've just made so I'll start the I hope the sound will come through H I'd like to start this week with a request and this one goes out to the followers of the three abrahamic religions to the Muslims Christians and Jews it's just a little thing really but do you think that when you finished smashing up the world and blowing each other to bits and demanding special privileges while you do it do you think maybe the rest of us could sort of have our planet back um I wouldn't ask but the thing is I'm starting to think there must be something written in the special books each of you so enjoy referring to that tells you it's all right to behave like Precious petulent pugnacious Pricks forgive the alliteration but your persistent parad punch-ups are piss pissing me off it's mainly the extremist obviously but not exclusively it's a lot of mainstreamers as well let me give you an example of what I'm talking about okay Muslims listen up my bearded and VY friends calm down okay stop blowing stuff up not everything that's said about you is an attack on the prophet Muhammad and Allah that needs to end in the Infidel being destroyed have a cup of tea put on a cat Steven's record sit down and chill out I mean seriously what wrong with a strongly worded letter to the times Christians you and your churches don't get to be millionaires while other people have nothing at all they your bloody rules either stick to them or abandon the faith and stop persecuting and killing people you judge to be immoral Oh and stop pretending you're celibate as a cover up for being a gay or a non right that's too ticked off choose I know you're God's chosen people and the rest of us are just whatever but when Israel behaves like a violent Psychopathic bully and someone mentions it that doesn't make them anti-semitic and for the record your troubled history is not a license to act with impunity now so when the letters come and I'm guessing they will I can guarantee that each one of those faiths will be utterly convinced that I've singled them out for special criticism what did it have to be us Islam is a peaceful faith I don't see what's wrong with being Christian we're a peaceful loving Faith how dare you after all we've been through we Jews know how terrible violence can be you see all of them will be convinced that they're the ones being picked on the abrahamic faiths are like scousers they're always convinced they have it harder than everyone else right and why is it that all of these faiths claim to be peaceful when even the most fleeting glance at a history of warfare will tell you otherwise the relationship between religion and warfare is very similar to the relationship between ant and deck you could have one without the other but I'm not sure anyone would see the point I wouldn't actually like it but it would at least be refreshing to hear one of them come out and say oh our face vient as you like we love a scrap us lot we do honestly our special book says fight fight kill m fight smash destroy fight murder kill and fight that's why I sign up to be honest I'm a bit old you know what I mean but no all of them claim to be peaceful religions yeah peaceful right up to the point where someone takes something they think is theirs or says the wrong thing or looks at them funny then it's fighty smashy kicky punchy all the way I know this will upset a lot of people and frankly I don't care I'm getting so sick of religious people screwing it up for the rest of us please don't kill us seriously as far as I'm concerned this is the only chance we get when we die it's all over there's no virgins and ply Gates waiting for us no big beardy man saying right so how do you think that went then um bit Mi killed a lot of people in my name I see yeah not really what I had in mind actually um tell you what have another go as a worm while we're at it I'm sick of religious people forcing their children to Define themselves by their parents Faith a four-year-old is no more a Christian than he is a member of the postal workers union we want a fair working wage decent working conditions and time a lotted to see the new Transformers film said a spokesman another piece of Consciousness raising you've all seen maps of the world showing what people believe in different places in the Blue Area they're Catholic in the red area they're Protestant in the orange area they're Eastern Orthodox in the green area there Sunni Muslim and so on and we all take that perfectly for granted it seems entirely natural that people's opinions about the cosmos about morality about Humanity should depend upon the accident of geography where they happen to have been born suppose scientists work like that take a difficult and interesting scientific issue take for example the question of what made the dinosaurs go extinct was it an asteroid hitting the Earth was it a comet was it the rise of the mammals was it a plague of viruses all these different theories have something going for them in the Blue Area the scientists all believe that it was a meteorite in the red area they believe it was a comet in the orange area a virus plague in the green area the eggs of the dinosaurs were all eaten Etc I hope yet again to have raised Consciousness we all take for granted that it's okay for religion to be distributed geographically in that kind of way and yet we immediately see when you when I show you a map like this how totally ridiculous that is why do we all accept it as though it were natural and sensible and the way things should be here's another exercise in Consciousness raising again using the example of the scientific controversy over what what made the dinosaurs go extinct the quarterly review of biology is a journal in which biologists publish their findings their research I'm I have edited an imaginary spoof issue of the quarterly review of biology devoted as they sometimes are to a particular topic namely the topic did an asteroid Kill the Dinosaurs the first paper would be a perfectly respectable and normal scientific paper iridium Lair at KY boundary and potassium Argan dat crater in yukatan indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs nobody would be surprised to see a paper like that in any scientific journal the president of the Royal Society has been vouch safe a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs it has been priv L revealed to Professor huan that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs Professor Halley has been brought up to have total and unquestioning Fai that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official Dogma binding on all loyal Hainan that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs Professor Hawkins is personally offended by all strident shrill and pical denials that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs Professor halock derives deep personal comfort from his belief that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs the president of the National Academy of Sciences has issued a [Applause] fatwa I'm now going to switch gears and look at a couple of criticisms that the hardback God Delusion encountered uh and I've mentioned these in the preface to the paperback which is now uh just out interestingly some of the strongest criticisms came from atheists who although they don't believe themselves believe in belief as the philosopher Dan dennit puts it I'm an atheist but I wish to dissociate myself from your shrill strident intemperate intolerant ranting language well actually if you look at the language of The God Delusion it's rather less shrill or intemperate than we regular regularly take in our stride when listening to political commentators for example theater critics or book critics or restaurant critics here are some quotes from restaurant criticisms of London restaurants in the leading papers recently it is difficult if not impossible to imagine anyone Conjuring up a restaurant even in their sleep where the food in its mediocrity comes so close to inedible All Things Considered quite the worst restaurant in London maybe the world serves horrendous food grudgingly in a room that is a museum to Italian waiters taste kirco 1976 the worst meal I've ever eaten not by a small margin I mean the worst the most unrelieved awful what looked like a sea mine in miniature was the most disgusting thing I've put in my mouth since I ate earthworms at school well insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God but restaur and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt whereas blasphemy as the witty bumper sticker puts it is a victimless [Applause] crime another example in 1915 the British Member of Parliament Horatio bottomley recommended that after the war if by chance you should discover one day in a restaurant you were being served by a German waiter you will throw the soup in his foul face if you find yourself sitting at the side of a German clerk you will spill the ink pot over his foul head now that's strident and intolerant and I should have thought ridiculous and ineffective as rhetoric even in its own time the British literary critic Terry Eagleton described the late Kingsley Amos extremely distinguished novelist as a racist anti-semitic bore a drink Soden self-hating reviler of women gays and liberals well I think that compares fairly well with my own beginning of chapter 2 of The God Delusion which is the passage most often quoted as strident or shrill the god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction jealous and proud of it a petty unjust unforgiving control freak a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser a misogynistic homophobic racist infanticidal genocidal filicidal pestilential Mega maniacal sedom masochistic capriciously malevolent bully now that's the passage most often quoted as strident or shrill it's not for me to say whether I succeeded but my intention was closer to robust humor a humorous broadside rather than shrill polemic I don't don't think words like misogynistic infanticidal genocidal megalomaniacal that doesn't sound shrill to me something about those long words [Music] suggested my wife Lala and I do a sort of double act reading from my books when they're published and one of the things you have to do in order to warm an audience up is to get them laughing early and so with each book we try to pick a humorous passage near the beginning and we always pick that passage for The God Delusion it sort of gets a laugh as as as this this one is another one um which at least was my intention to be humorous um about Our Lady of Fatima um there you see some typical examples of Catholic kid this is a quote from The God Delusion now Pope John Paul II cre ated more Saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together and he had a special Affinity with the Virgin Mary his polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima a maternal hand guided the bullet one cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether others might think the team of Surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit but perhaps their hands too were maternally guided the relevant point is that it wasn't just our lady who in the Pope's opinion guided the bullet but specifically Our Lady of Fatima presumably our lady of Lord Our Lady of guadaloop Our Lady of medjugore Our Lady of Akita Our Lady of zun Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of knock were busy on other errands at the time I think that's quite funny too a pure montypython nevertheless it's quite true that many people do feel very strongly about their faith and very offended if you insult it uh We've Come To Expect never to be offended what you say is offensive to me [Laughter] the novelist Douglas Adams To Whom The God Delusion is dedicated picked out exactly what's going on here in a wonderful speech an impromptu speech that he made in Cambridge uh not long before he died and I was privileged to be there fortunately somebody had the blessed good sense to Swit on a tape recorder and so this Priceless hour or so of Douglas just holding forth impromptu is preserved and I'm going to read a a passage from it because he he puts his finger exactly on what's going on with all this offense religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever what it means is here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about you're just not why not because you're not if somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with you're free to argue about it as much as you like everybody will have an argument but nobody feels grieved by it if somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you're free to have an argument about it but on the other hand if somebody says I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday you say I respect that why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the labor party or the conservative party republicans Or democrats this model of Economics versus that Macintosh instead of windows but to have an opinion about how the universe began about who created the universe no that's holy we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a fuori Richard creates when he does it everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be and that agreement seems to extend to the non-religious as well as the religious let's raise our Consciousness what's so special about religious arguments that they should be immune to exactly the same kind of rational discussion as political or any other kind of arguments [Music] [Applause] I'm offended by some things I'm offended by chewing gum I'm offended by backwards pointing baseball hats but I don't try to get a version of the blasphemy law p to prevent people chewing gaml reversing their cap so what if I'm offended so what if my feelings are hurt does that give me the right to prevent others from expressing their opinions however is there a time when it is right to be offended I think so yes we should be offended when children are denied a proper education we should be offended when children are told they will spend eternity in hell we should be offended when Medical Science for example stem cell research is compromised by compromised I should say by the bigoted opinions of powerful and above all well financed ignoramuses we should be offended when Voodoo of all kinds is given equal weight to science we should be offended by Hyman construction surgery we should be offended by female circumcision euphemism for genital mutilation this this picture was taken in Africa but it happens in Britain I had a long conversation with a school's inspector from London and she told me it's common girls are typically sent away to stay with an uncle in Bradford we should be offended by stoning this young Kurdish woman was stoned to death in a so-called honor killing because she wanted to marry a young man of the wrong religion I mentioned the novelist Kings Le Amis a moment ago his son Martin Amis as an equally distinguished novelist and he made a very important Point secularism contains no warrant for action one can afford to be crude about this when islamists crash passenger planes into into buildings or hack off the heads of hostages they shout God is great when secularists do that kind of thing what do they shout a Critic of Martin amos's book remarked upon on this that question is meant to be rhetorical but there's a simple answer they shout secularist shout H Hitler what a truly outrageous thing to say whether or not Hitler was a Roman Catholic the evidence is contradictory he often said he was nobody could deny that Hitler's soldiers were as Christian as everybody else was in Europe at the time and that means that most of them were mostly either Roman Catholic or Lutheran but even if Hitler was an atheist so what Hitler was also a vegetarian does that suggest that vegetarians have a special tendency to be murderous bigoted racists the point is that there is a logical pathway leading from religion to the committing of atrocities it's perfectly logical if you believe that your religion is the right one you believe that your God is the only God and you believe that your God has ordered you through a priest or through a holy book to kill somebody to blow somebody up to fly a plane into a skyscraper then you are doing a righteous act you're a good person you're following your religious morality there is no such logical pathway leading from atheism or secularism to any such atrocious act it just doesn't [Applause] follow now it's sometimes said that humans need religion even if it isn't true they need the comfort of religion I think there's something rather patronizing about that rather condescending about it but that's what people say often atheists say it of course you and I are too intelligent to need religion but what about all those poor people out there who need the comfort of religion Humanity's need for comfort is of course real but isn't there something childish something infantile in the belief that the Universe owes us comfort in the sense that if something is comforting that must kind of make it true Isaac azimoff's remark about the infantilism of pseudo science is just as applicable to religion he said inspect every piece of pseudo science and you will find a security blanket a thumb to suck a skirt to hold and it is astonishing how many people are unable to understand that X is comforting does not imply X is true a related plaint concerns the need for a purpose in life to quote one Canadian critic The Atheist may be right about God who knows but God or no God it's clear that something in the human soul requires a belief that life has a purpose that transcends the material plane one would think that a more rational than thou empiricist such as Dawkins would recognize this unchanging aspect of human nature does Dawkins really think that this world would be a more Humane place if we all look to The God Delusion instead of the Bible for truth and comfort actually yes [Applause] since you mention Humane yes I do but I must repeat yet again that the consolation content of a belief does not raise its truth value I can't deny the need for emotional comfort and I can't claim that the worldview adopted in my book offers any more than moderate Comfort if you're afraid of death for example you might superficially think that a priest who tells you that you're not really going to die would be more comforting than a scientist who tells you it is highly implausible that our individuality could survive the decay of our brains but I have heard I have heard experienced nurses whove worked all their lives in old people's homes say that the ones who are most terrified of death tend to be the Roman Catholics all that guilt fed from the cradle up and the terror of purgatory and Hell as for Eternal nothingness is is it really all that frightening as Mark Twain said I do not fear death I'd been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest [Applause] inconvenience in any case I don't think I've ever met anyone at a funeral who dissents from the view my view that the non-religious parts the eulogies the deceased favorite poems or music those nonreligious parts are always more moving than the prayers I want to end by reading the opening lines of a previous book of mine unweaving the rainbow these are lines that I've long earmarked for my own funeral we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born the potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keat scientists greater than Newton we know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so passively outnumbers the set of actual people in the teeth of these Stupify odds it is you and I in our ordinariness that are here we privileged few who won the lottery of birth Against All Odds how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred thank you very much w w [Applause] been a recent controversy in California um a court has recently um decided ruled that homeschooling without certified teachers uh is a violation of the Constitution I wondered what your opinion is on that particularly since homeschooling movement in this country is generally an excuse for indoctrination of children in fundamentalism I always have to be a bit careful when wading into uh local American politics not not living here and not knowing what the underlying issues are if the underlying issue is as you've suggested one of indoctrinating children in religious fundamentalism that does I must confess uh embolden me to uh to say something which I might not otherwise have said if uh if I thought that homeschooling was a completely different issue so is that really right that the whole point of homeschooling is no no okay so so what what other reasons are there for homeschooling schools bad schools okay okay well I think it's clear what I would think if it was an issue of religious fundamentalism and it's not clear what I think given that I don't know what the real issues are so um I will uh Retreat behind uh a facade of not being an American and hi um I'm a big fan by the way um my question to you is something that's a little bit more of a philosophical history so often times I've heard you say on YouTube for example that the the reason that the whole hypothesis that God created the universe is a non-starter because God would have to be more um complex than the universe is um I would just like to know what your a um objection would be to someone such as like medieval um Theologian like Thomas aquinus who would say that God's actually something very simple but powerful so that that might be another alternative I'm I'm an atheist so I don't buy something like that but I just like to understand your objection to a claim like that it is an utterly prepost ous idea that The God Who not only creates the universe which you think would be something you need to have have a fairly good knowledge of physics and Mathematics um in order to do not only does that but listens to the prayers of every one of six billion people simultaneously such bandwidth forgives their sins knows when they're thinking evil thoughts worries about their sexual proclivities how could anybody seriously suggest that such a being who's capable of doing all the things that are attributed to him could possibly be simple if God is simple this is really what I was saying right at the beginning when I said if you want to make God equal to energy or planks constant that's fine make him simple make him the bare minimum that you need in the way of physical constant let's say in order to get the universe going if that's what God means to you that's fine but then you're totally wasting your time praying to him sucking up to him asking forgiveness from him expecting him to make you survive your own death you cannot have it both ways either God is simple in which case he's not worth worshiping or he's complex in which case he doesn't exist [Applause] hi obviously uh religions have a vested interest in gaining more worshippers and uh spreading their own ideas um I was kind of surprised in The God Delusion you didn't address kind of the mtic nature of religion and um possibly speculate on the basis of mtic immunity if you will to uh religion you know any correlates that actually prevent people from becoming religious well there there there is a certain amount of mimetics in The God Delusion um uh perhaps not as much as some people would wish perhaps more than other people would wish um I think there's about half a chapter on it uh I I suppose the mimetic approach would be to say that uh religious ideas might not be deliberately crafted by cynical priests uh in the interests of their own well-being or the well-being of their um their their their Church whatever it is but religions might simply grow by a kind of natural selection not a genetic natural selection a mimetic natural selection a natural selection of ideas in the meeme pool ideas in the pool of ideas so the reason why so many religions believe in life after death by this model would be that life after death is an appealing idea and therefore when people hear somebody say you're going to survive your own death they say oh that's good I'll go and tell somebody else about that and so the idea spreads so popular ideas ideas that people enjoy spread in the same way as popular Tunes spread good Tunes spread when people whistle them other people pick them up and whistle them too whereas a bad tune would not spread so that would be a a mimetic approach to the explanation of religion it gets a lot more complex than that too the idea of a meme complex or uh mlex as it has been called a to explain that I need to go back to Gene complexes genes in natural selection you know that natural selection is fundamentally all about the differential survival of genes in gene pools the simple way to express that is to say that genes survive in the Environ onment provided by the World by the trees by the Predators by the diseases and so on but probably the most important part of the environment in which a gene survives is the other genes in the gene pool of the species because it's those other genes that the genes that are being selected have to be compatible with so that every Gene is being selected not only for its ability to make a good coat of hair or a good anti-predator behavior but is being selected for its ability to survive against the background of the other genes in the gene pool genes which on average it's going to have to share bodies with and maybe the same thing happens with memes maybe there are meme complexes just like Gene complexes maybe the whole of say the Roman Catholic Church is is a is a meme complex it's a group of memes which while not necessarily having high survival value in themselves they do have have high survival value against the background of each other in the context of each other in the meme pool provided by the other Catholic memes so that's another application of memetics to the study of Religion those are both in The God Delusion yes it's kind of high good evening Professor Dawkins I wanted to first thank you for making yourself so accessible to the students here um coming somewhere close by that I could come see you um I also Lov R of all evil by the way um my question to you is there was a survey that was recently conducted that basically the results were a huge majority of people would not vote for a president who claimed or stated that they were atheist I I don't know if you heard of the study it was conducted here in America and it it sparked kind of a controversy at my school there were lots of columns written about why people wouldn't vote for an atheist president and I wanted to ask you what you make of such a result and what you think about the culture of a society that would not vote for an Atheist president it's not quite true to say that a huge majority wouldn't vote for an Atheist president what is true is that if you ask a number of things like a like a woman a gay a black a Jew or an atheist atheists come bottom of of that pecking order it's not that a majority wouldn't vote for them it's just that more people would not vote for an atheist and would not vote for any of those other uh categories of person um and certainly if you look at presidential candidates in this election and any past election that I can remember uh it is true that uh candidates for election in this country seem to feel a need to mention God uh in every speech in in Britain no politician ever mentions God in any speech uh there was one occasion when Tony Blair who T Tony Blair is a very religious Man by the way Bush's companion in arms in Iraq Tony Blair was asked by Jeremy Paxman who is Britain's most aggressive television interviewer uh is it true Mr Blair that you prey with George Bush and Tony Blair jumped back like a startled cat and said no no no no no no no but in fact he almost certainly did pray with I mean he he he is a praying man but he keeps quiet about it as his right-hand spin doctor Campbell said we don't do god well American politicians do do God in a big way because they think they have to in order to get elected and the poll that you suggest You' you've quoted suggests that that's true maybe it's an exaggeration I think Christopher Hitchin is of the view that it's an exaggeration maybe it's not but either way it's up to not me because I'm not an American citizen it's up to you to change all that the actual numerical number of atheists agnostics secularists in this country is very high it's higher than religious minorities who have enormous political power by the force of their lobbying I think I'm right in saying that the atheist secularist agnostic group is larger than any other single religious group I think there may be one exception yet they are totally without influence because they are almost completely um not involved in lobbying as a group in a way that's a compliment I mean it it's uh organizing atheists has been has been compared not by me to hering cats uh it is it is a a kind of compliment but U it probably would be of political Advantage uh if uh something equivalent to uh professional lobbyists got going and I'm happy to say that that is now happening and that that um a a a group in America has got together the money to pay a professional Washington lobbyist uh and and she's doing extremely well and that sort of thing ought to ought to increase and uh let's hope that that it does and let's hope that everybody here will help to make that happen thank you hello Professor Dawkins I'm definitely a fan but I'm having trouble reconciling one thing um you say that religious beliefs are are basically preferences like pizza or any kind of color or something however um you yourself preach that the faith in non-belief is an objective truth how can there how can objective truths in general exist in the realm of subjective belief objective truth exists in the real world this what science is about is finding our what is true in the real world for example plate tectonics the movement of continents is true uh it is supported by massive amounts of evidence it doesn't mean that scientific uh beliefs are always true for all time because sometimes new evidence comes in to change people's beliefs but there always is a standard which is evidence and that standard of evidence is objective it's Universal it applies wherever you're born wherever you live an Indian scientist a Japanese scientist an American scientist looking at the same data will come to the same conclusion the same of course is not true of religious belief the questioner asks how can there be an objective truth in a world of subjectivity well genuinely subjective phenomena like uh love of certain kinds of music or uh love of another person these are there are truths about that which are not amable to immediate scientific investigation but that doesn't mean that there's something other than scientific events scientifically investigable events going on in the mind of a person who loves a kind of poetry loves a kind of music or loves another person you cannot necessarily prove that your wife loves you by scientific means but you can observe all sorts of little catches in the voice little looks in the eye years of experience years of of of exposure and that is evidence that's genuine objective real world evidence of the same kind as scientific evidence is even though it may not be system atic or experimental in the way that scientific evidence ideally is yeah um Francis Collins was here last month in the in the same room and spoke to an audience which is just as big and um I wrote he said something about your book that that I wrote down and I want you to respond to he says um uh Dawkins in this book argues that religion is the greatest source of evil and basically at one point argues that parents who raise their children in religious ition are committing child abuse and should be prosecuted for it that's what he said I think he might be prosecuted for Lial actually um I have never said that parents who bring up their children religious should be prosecuted for child abuse I'm trying to raise Consciousness I'm not trying to change the law I'm trying to say when you hear a child labeled as a Christian Child simply because it's parents are Christian then that is child abuse but I'm not saying that as I actually have frequently been accused of saying that children should be seized by the state from religious homes and brought up in statun communal child Farms so no I mean um that is a that is a travesty and one that I should have thought Francis Collins would have risen above thank you you thank you if you enjoyed this episode you can show some support by subscribing to the podcast sharing it with your friends and leaving a review [Music]

Channel: The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

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Id: WhZjUiYQ7Z0

Length: 73min 53sec (4433 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2024