RICHARD DAWKINS AND GOD
EXTRACT FROM BELOW: NOTE HOW THE GUTLESS
WONDER MERELY MENTIONS THE BURKA....
GS
news of a last-minute change of plan. God was only joking, after all, tempting Abraham and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence
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, philicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully
Transcript
THEME
Kirsten Garrett: Hello, this is Background Briefing on ABC Radio National. I'm Kirsten Garrett.
There's been much robust debate in the media over recent years about evolution and intelligent design, and the power of religions to shape thinking.
Today, eminent scientist Richard Dawkins is speaking about his reasons for being, as you'll hear, a 'tooth fairy agnostic'. The talk was given recently at the Free Library of Philadelphia in America.
Man: Good afternoon, welcome to the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position he's held since 1995.
He studied at Oxford and graduated in 1962. He remained at Oxford to work for his doctorate with ethologist, Nico Tinbergen. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for three years, and then returned to Oxford.
In any event, after September 11th 2001, Dr Dawkins wrote an essay entitled 'Time to Stand Up', in which he called on those of us who have renounced one or another of the three major monotheistic religions, to start being honest, and to stop being politely mute, as the most outrageous beliefs are treated with a respect and dignity which, were they attributed to the followers of Thor, Baal, or Zeus, would be dismissed as quaint fantasy.
Dawkins has certainly stood up, and in the God delusion he calls on the rest of us to stand up and to face ...(fades out)
Kirsten Garrett: His most recent book is The God Delusion in which he enters the fray with no holds barred.
Man: Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Dawkins.
APPLAUSE
Kirsten Garrett: Richard Dawkins starts by reading from the beginning of the book.
Richard Dawkins: The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots of forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles, and even (though he wouldn't remember details at the time) of soil bacteria, by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro world.
Suddenly the micro forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms, and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest, and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond.
In another time and place, that boy could have been me, under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Caseopea and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet-flowers in an African garden.
Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other, is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.
I often hear myself described as a deeply religious man. An American student wrote to me that she'd asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure', he replied, 'his positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me that is religion.'
But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think so. Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God, and he's not the only atheistic scientist to do so, inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand, and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.
The dramatic (or was it mischievous) ending of Stephen Hawkins's 'A Brief History of Time', ('for then we should know the mind of God') is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. One of Einstein's most eagerly-quoted remarks is 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also said 'It was of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions; a lie which has been systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.'
Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself, that his words can be cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No. By religion Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I'm calling only supernatural gods delusional.
I'm now going to skip to an extract from Chapter 2: The God Hypothesis.
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, philicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways, can become desensitised to their horror. A naïf, blessed with the perspective of innocence, has a clearer perception. Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, somehow contrived to remain ignorant of Scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight. Unhappily, it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before, and is hideously excited, keeps reading quotations aloud, 'I say, I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible!' or merely slapping his side and chortling, 'God, isn't God a shit?'
Thomas Jefferson, better read, was of a similar opinion. 'The Christian God is a being of terrific character; cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.'
It is unfair to attack such an easy target. The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his insipidly opposite Christian face, gentle Jesus, meek and mild. To be fair, this milksop persona owes more to his Victorian followers than to Jesus himself. Could anything be more mawkishly nauseating than Mrs C.F. Alexander's 'Christian children all must be mild, obedient, good as he.'
I'm not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh or Jesus or Allah, or any other specific god, such as Baal, Zeus of Wotan, instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensively. There exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view. Any creative intelligence of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences being evolved necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God is a delusion, and as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
Christianity claims to be a monotheistic religion, but you have to wonder sometimes. Rivers of mediaeval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the mystery of the Trinity, and in suppressing deviations, such as the Aryan heresy. Ayrus of Alexandria in the 4th century AD, denied that Jesus was con-substantial, i.e. of the same substance of essence, with God. What on earth could that possibly mean? you're probably asking. Substance, what substance? What exactly do you mean by essence? Very little, seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Ayrus' book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs, such has ever been the way of theology.
Do we have one God in three parts, or three gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopaedia clears up the matter for us in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning. 'In the unity of the godhead there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; these three persons being truly distinct, one from another. Thus in the words of the Athanasian Creed, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three gods but one god.
As if that were not clear enough, the Eyclopaedia quotes the 3rd century theologian, St Gregory, the Miracle Worker. 'There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity, nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards. Therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit, and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.'
Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which unlike science, or most other branches of human scholarship, has not moved on in 18 centuries. Thomas Jefferson, as so often, got it right when he said, 'Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct, before reason can act upon them, and no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. It is the mere abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.'
Jefferson heaped ridicule on the doctrine that, as he put it, 'there are three Gods' in his critique of Calvinism. But it is especially the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity that pushes its recurrent flirtation with polytheism towards runaway inflation. The Trinity, is joined by Mary, Queen of Heaven, a goddess in all but name, who surely runs God himself a close second as a target of prayers. The pantheon is further swollen by an army of saints, whose intercessory power makes them, if not demigods, well worth approaching on their own specialist subjects. The Catholic community forum hopefully lists 5,120 saints, together with their areas of expertise, which include abdominal pain, abuse victims, anorexia, arms dealers, blacksmiths, broken bones, bomb technicians and bowel disorders, to venture no further than the Bs.
Pope John Paul II created 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 Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadeloupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal, and Our Lady of Knock, were busy on other errands at the time.
Kirsten Garrett: Speaking is Richard Dawkins at the Free Library of Philadelphia in America. Richard Dawkins' arguments against the existence of supernatural gods are laid out in his book, The God Delusion.
Richard Dawkins: Chapter 4, Why there almost certainly is no God, is in a way the central core chapter of the book, and it's hard to compress into short readings, so I'm not going to try. Chapter 5 is on the question of why so many people are religious. Chapter 6 is why are people moral, to the extent that they are, and I'm going to read a bit now from Chapter 7, The Good Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist.
There are two ways in which Scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wards of America's boondocks. The other is by example. God, or some other Biblical character, might serve as (to use the contemporary jargon) a role model. Both scriptural roots, if followed through religiously, encourage a system of morals which any civilised modern person whether religious or not, would find (I can put it no more gently) obnoxious.
Abraham was the founding father of all three great monotheistic religions. His patriarchal status renders him only somewhat less likely than God to be taken as a role model. But what modern moralist would wish to follow him? God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon him and trussed Isaac up on top of the wood His murdering knife was already in his hand, when an angel, dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan. God was only joking, after all, tempting Abraham and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence 'I was only obeying orders'. Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions.
Modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And the appropriate response is twofold: first, many, many people even to this day, do take the whole of their Scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not of literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely, nothing praiseworthy. As a moral lesson? But what kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?
Remember, all I'm trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from Scripture, or if we do, we pick and choose among the Scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits. A criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from Scripture itself, and is presumably available to all of us, whether we are religions or not.
Apologists even seek to salvage some decency for the God character in this deplorable tale. Wasn't it good of God to spare Isaac's life at the last minute? In the unlikely event that any of my readers are persuaded by this obscene piece of special pleading, I refer them to another story of human sacrifice, which ended more unhappily. In Judges Chapter 11 the military leader Jephtha made a bargain with God, that if God would guarantee Japheth's victory over the Ammonites, Jephtha would, without fail, sacrifice as a burnt offering, 'whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me when I return.'
Jephtha did indeed defeat the Ammonites with a very great slaughter, as is par for the course in the Book of Judges, and he returned home, victorious. Not surprisingly, his daughter, his only child, came out of the house to greet him with timbrels and dancers. And alas, she was the first living thing to do so. Understandably, Jephtha rent his clothes, but there was nothing he could do about it. God was obviously looking forward to the promised burnt offering, and in the circumstances the daughter very decently agreed to be sacrificed. She asked only that she should be allowed to go into the mountains for two months to bewail her virginity. At the end of this time, she meekly returned and Jephtha cooked her. God did not see fit to intervene on this occasion.
God's monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god, resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind. And again, it should strike a modern moralist as far from good role model material. To my naïve eyes, 'Thou shalt have no other Gods but me', would seem an easy enough commandment to keep, a doddle, one might think, compared with 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, or her ass, or her ox', yet throughout the Old Testament with the same predictable regularity as in bedroom farce, God had only to turn his back for a moment, and the Children of Israel would be off and at it with Bael, or some trollop of a graven image. Or on one calamitous occasion, a Golden Calf.
Which brings us to Moses and I shall draw a veil over Moses and pass on to Joshua. The ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses, is brought to bloody fruition in the Book of Joshua, a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records, and the xenophobic relish with which it does so. As the charming old song exultantly has it, 'Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down'. There's none like good old Joshuae at the battle of Jericho. Good old Joshua 'didn't rest until they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword'. Joshua 6:21.
Yet again, theologians will protest it didn't happen. Well no, the story has it that the walls came tumbling down at the mere sound of men shouting and blowing horns, so indeed it didn't happen. But that is not the point. The point is that whether true or not, the Bible is held up to us as the source of our morality. And the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the lebensraum of the Promised Land in general is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals.
As it happens, the story of Joshua in Jericho is the subject of an interesting experiment in child morality, by the Israeli psychologist, George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than 1,000 Israeli schoolchildren aged between 8 and 14, the Book of Joshua's account of the Battle of Jericho. He then asked the children a simple moral question: Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not? They had to choose between A (total approval) B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarised: 66% gave total approval, and 26% total disapproval, with rather fewer, 8%, in the middle with partial approval.
Here are three typical answers from the Total Approval A group. 'I my opinion, Joshua and the sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner, or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyen.'
'In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.'
'Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them, he wiped their religion from the earth.'
The justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Even those in Category C who gave total disapproval, did so in some cases for backhanded religious reasons. One girl for example, disapproved of Joshua's conquering Jericho because in order to do so he had to enter it. 'I think it is bad since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land, one will also become impure and share their curse'
Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from the Book of Joshua, but with Joshua's own name replaced by General Lin and Israel replaced by a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago. Now the experiment gave opposite results. Only 7% approved of General Lin's behaviour and 75% disapproved. In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgments that most modern humans would share. Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view, and the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it.
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude, have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: Cursing your parents; committing adultery; making love to your stepmother or your daughter-in-law; homosexuality; marrying a woman and her daughter; bestiality, and to add injury to insult, the unfortunate beast is to be killed too; you also get executed, of course, for working on the Sabbath. The point is made again and again throughout the Old Testament. In Numbers 15, the Children of Israel found a man in the wilderness gathering sticks on the forbidden day. They arrested him and then asked God what to do with him. As it turned out, God was in no mood for half measures that day, and the Lord said unto Moses, 'The man shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without the camp and stoned him with stones, and he died.'
Did this harmless gatherer of firewood have a wife and children to grieve for him? Did he whimper with fear as the first stones flew and scream with pain as the fusillade crashed into his head? What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened, they probably didn't, what makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh, and even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster whether fact or fiction, on the rest of us.
Kirsten Garrett: Richard Dawkins. There is a link on the Background Briefing website to a recent critique of the Dawkins book in the London Review of Books.
The last section of Richard Dawkins' book is called 'The Mother of all Burkhas'.
Richard Dawkins: One of the unhappiest spectacles to be seen on our streets today is the image of a woman swathed in shapeless black from head to toe, peering out of the world through a tiny slit. The burkha is not just an instrument of oppression of women and classical repression of their liberty and their beauty, not just a token of egregious male cruelty and tragically cowed female submission, I want to use the narrow slit in the veil as a symbol of something else.
Our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is a chink of brightness in the vast dark spectrum from radio waves at the long end to gamma rays at the short end. Quite how narrow is hard to appreciate, and a challenge to convey. Imagine a gigantic black burkha with a vision slit of approximately the standard width, say about 1-inch. If the length of black cloth above the slit represents the shortwave end of the invisible spectrum, and if the length of black cloth below the slit represents the long-wave portion of the invisible spectrum, how long would the burkha have to be in order to accommodate a 1-inch slit to the same scale? It's hard to represent it sensibly without invoking logarithmic scales, so huge are the lengths we are dealing with.
The last chapter of a book like this is no place to start tossing logarithms around, but you can take it form me that it would be the Mother of all Burkhas. The 1-inch window of visible light is derisorily tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth representing the invisible part of the spectrum, from radio waves at the hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head.
What science does for us is widen the window. It opens up so wide that the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely, exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom.
Optical telescopes use glass lenses and mirrors to scan the heavens and what they see is stars that happen to be radiating in the narrow band of wavelengths that we call visible light that other telescopes see in the x-ray or radio wavelengths and present to us a cornucopia of alternative night skies. On a smaller scale, cameras with appropriate filters can see in the ultraviolet, and take photographs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots that are visible to, and seemingly designed for, insect eyes, but which our unaided eyes can't see at all. Insect eyes have a spectral window of similar width to ours, but slightly shifted up the burkha; they are blind to red, and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do, into the ultraviolet garden.
The metaphor of the narrow window of light broadening out into a spectacularly wide spectrum, serves us in other areas of science. We live near the centre of a cavernous museum of magnitudes, viewing the world with sense organs and nervous systems that are equipped to perceive and understand only a small, middle range of sizes, moving at a middle range of speeds.
We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (a view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin). Outside this range, even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics, which fortunately we can learn to deploy. The ranges of sizes, distances or speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible, from the scale of quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of Einsteinian cosmology at the larger.
Our imaginations are forlornly underequipped to cope with distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally familiar. We try to visualise an electron as a tiny ball in orbit around a larger cluster of balls, representing protons and neutrons. That isn't what it is like at all. Electrons are not like little balls, they're not like anything we can imagine. It isn't clear that 'like' even means anything, when we try to fly too close to reality's further horizons. Our imaginations are not yet tooled up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter, as we are evolved to think, ought to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar, which I have dubbed 'middle world'.
Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from middle world, tear off our black burkha and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as just mathematical, understanding of the very small, the very large and the very fast. I genuinely don't know the answer, but I'm thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding.
Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE
Kirsten Garrett: A member of the audience asked where the world is heading. Will the influence of religion get stronger, or weaker? Richard Dawkins said that in his view, in the broad sweep, the force of religion is decreasing.
Richard Dawkins: But in any broad trend, you tend to get temporary reversals. Progressive trends to be saw-tooth shaped rather than simply linear. We are undergoing a temporary reversal, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world, but it's I believe, only temporary, and the great enemy of faith is education. We must all do what we can in the direction of education in freeing children from being brainwashed, freeing children from being labelled with the religion of their parents. In the United States, I've had very, very good nice receptions wherever I've been, including such places as Kansas and Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Jerry Falwell, and his Liberty so-called university. And I have been enormously heartened by the reception that I've been getting, particularly when I say things like 'There are far more of you unbelievers than anybody realises. All you have to do is stand up, speak your mind, recognise each other, and organise.' And I got a very, very warm response to that. People in the signing queues after I said things like that, have come up to me and said 'Thank you, Thank you, for saying, for articulating the things that we have wanted to say but didn't feel we could'. I believe that non-believing, unbelieving, non-religious opinion in America is very strong, widely perceived not to be, and when a critical mass is reached, then suddenly there'll be a landslide.
Man: We'll go to the man right in the middle of the mike, here.
Man: I'm a huge fan of Douglas Adams, I notice your book was dedicated to him, and you had a beautiful, moving tribute in the centre of the book that was written in a style where you addressed him directly as opposed to addressing the reader. So I wonder why you wrote in that style and how do you address the critics who say that kind of implies some kind of belief in the afterlife?
Richard Dawkins: The question is referring to a place in the middle of the book where I discuss Douglas Adams' written reasons why he became an atheist, which I was delighted to see included reading a couple of my earlier books, 'The Selfish Gene', and 'The Blind Watchmaker'. And I said something like, 'Douglas, I miss you; you are my cleverest, tallest, most open-minded ...' and various other things, 'and possibly only convert.' The question is asking how could I address a dead man in that way? Doesn't that betray a sort of quasi-religious feeling.
No more than when we read a work of fiction, say 'Wuthering Heights' knowing perfectly well that Heathcliff and Cathy never really existed, but going along with the fictional pretence. I am occasionally moved to tears when I think about dead friends and Douglas Adams is one of those, and I see no harm and no betrayal of rationalism in using in a poetic spirit, that kind of direct addressing what I believe to be the non-existent shade of a dead person. You'll find it again if you look in my book 'A Devil's Chaplain' which contains an essay of tribute to an old headmaster who died long before I was born, the headmaster of my old school, F.W. Sanderson, who was a splendid educator, who believed in real education as opposed to constantly worrying about tests and getting exam results and things. And I describe two incidents which happened after Sanderson's death, which epitomise his approach, both in the school that he did so much to raise.
One was when a small boy suddenly burst into an important meeting which the headmaster was presiding over, and the small boy said, 'Sir, sir, there are black terns down by the river.' And the headmaster got up from the table, seized his binoculars and bicycled off in the company of the small ornithologist. And I added, (and this is the point) I added 'with the ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake'.
And then the second incident was a story in which when I was at the school my biology master asked us a question to which none of us knew the answer, and he went right the way around the class, asking this question with increasing enthusiasm. The question was What animal eats hydra? What animal eats hydra? What animal eats hydra? What animal? And one by one we said, we guessed, we guessed. And finally we said, 'Sir, sir, what animal does eat hydra?' And he said, 'I don't know'. And I added, 'None of us will ever have forgotten that lesson. And again the shade of Sanderson.' I conjured up the image of his ghost, his spirit.
Man: About six rows back on the left, gentleman in the blue?
Man: I've always been fascinated by the fact that coming across good scientists who are God-believers. Lately for example I watched a program by Bill Moirs who had a renowned physicist and he explained that he's a strong believer in Christianity, and Jesus and God and all that on the basis that God is a character of the fifth dimension. And added to that, if I may, I've also come across scientists, theoretical physicists who equate the three persons in one God to the common way function of two particles which share a supraposition as having the same character of one individually. Can you comment on that please.
Richard Dawkins: I find it very hard to summon up any respect for that kind of over-the-top metaphorical thinking. Maybe there are three entities in some branch of physics, but to somehow equate that with the trinity seems to me to be an absurd misuse of the human capacity to analogise which is one of our more valuable features. There are analogies which help by illuminating, and there are analogies that do absolutely nothing to help illumination, and my impression is that that's one of them.
Man: The gentleman on our left here.
Man: Thank you for speaking, again. I would like to know, in your honest opinion or experience, are there any advocates of creationism or intelligent design that actually have a genuine understanding of the theory of evolution?
Richard Dawkins: Well the vast majority of them have not. If there is a minority that does, then I would suspect their honesty.
Man: The gentleman in the green here, with his hand up on our left.
Man: I notice a lot of inconsistencies in your work, and some you've even noticed yourself. As this talk is your book is imbued with morality and you notice that it's hard to have moral laws without a lawgiver. Another section in your book, you pretty much completely undermine the basis to believe in rationality and trust your own thoughts, since according to your own world view, your thoughts are just atoms bounding around in your brain a certain way and you don't believe in anything because they're true but because they're constrained by the laws of physics. You were challenged on that a couple of days ago and on the internet it says you said that's an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. And just one final note, you're going to respond, you're going to probably use the laws of logic and as a materialist I want to remind you that the laws of logic are immaterial.
Richard Dawkins: If I understand what you're saying, it goes something like this: that if I believe that my thought processes, the processes that go on in my brain, my neurons are all physical processes that are physically understandable, they're atoms moving, they're ions moving, there are molecules moving, there are electric charges; if all those things are physically understandable, that somehow undermines the logical conclusions that ones come to by using those neurons. I don't see why that should be at all. One could give various reasons why that shouldn't be. One is that our brains are shaped by natural selection in our evolutionary history, to work in the world and to make sense of the world. That's one of the reasons why as I said at the end, we do find it hard to understand things like quantum theory because we were not built to understand them. But the great majority of things of our thought processes, concerned with logic, concerned with evidence, concerned with reason, were honed in our ancestral past because they were useful for survival. If you went through life deluded and not equipped to understand, make sense of the real world, predict what's going to happen in the real world, you would not survive in the real world. So one can give a Darwinian account of why we think rationally and logically.
If you're trying to suggest that only a theistic point of view, only a belief in God could justify or explain the use of thought processes, again that seems to me to be completely without foundation. I can see no justification for that at all. You don't feel undermined by the fact that the neuronal apparatus that you used in order to do your reasoning is physical, why on earth should it be undermined?
Man: Lady in the third row right here?
Woman: I agree that the existence of God isn't proven but how can you assert that some divine intelligence isn't possible and compatible with evolution? According to some logic and some natural properties beyond the frontiers of what we know right now.
Richard Dawkins: Now that's very good. Let's think that through. I agree with you that the science, say of 500 years time may be so much more queer than we can suppose today that we should be completely bowled over and bewildered and amazed by it. I actually expect that to happen, and it is therefore always important to say that we could be wrong, and we could be disproved by future scholars and future science.
Having said that, there's certainly no reason to expect that if we are confounded by a future science, that confounding will be in the direction of a particular Bronze Age text and so one can immediately rule out all that sort of naïve religion. Might it though be a more sophisticated kind of theistic belief? Maybe, and certainly we have to be prepared to be surprised in the same way as Victorian science was surprised by quantum theory and relativity and as mediaeval would be completely confounded by everything that we have around us in the way of technology.
So maybe we're in for some utterly mindblowing, mindshattering surprises. We have to do the best we can in our own time, and my guess is, and I've given reasons for this, that however amazing and wonderful and surprising future science will be, the one thing it won't show is that any kind of deity, presided over the origin of the universe. Now the reason that I've given, you're quite right to say, depends upon a contemporary usage of reason and logic. That contemporary usage of reason and logic is the same one as is used wrongly by creationists who sometimes call themselves intelligent design theorists today. It's the really rather simple logic that goes: complicated, statistically improbable things don't just happen. They need an explanation. They come into existence by some understandable process. The understandable process that brings complicated things into existence, the only one really ultimately that we know of in life, is Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. But yes, I could be wrong, we could all be wrong, but I'd be hugely surprised if we were wrong in any direction that was anticipated by anybody in the Bible or the Middle Ages.
Woman: So basically would you define yourself as an atheist or an agnostic.
Richard Dawkins: Well I quote a friend of mine who calls himself a tooth fairy agnostic. We have to be agnostic about everything because you can't disprove anything. But the god of the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims anyway, is about as likely as the tooth fairy.
Man: Gentleman in the white shirt, yes.
Man: Hi. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are, if any, on certain quasi-mystical concepts like the I Ching or astro projection which are kind of mystical in nature but not necessarily supernatural.
Richard Dawkins: We all have to be broadminded and open minded, but there are limits. Let us just say that the onus is on anybody who wants to believe in such things to provide evidence and anecdote is not evidence. You need proper evidence, and the funny thing is that whenever those so-called paranormal effects have been looked at with proper double-blind control trials, for some reason the effect mysteriously vanishes away.
Man: Folks, we've reached the limit of our time, please thank Richard Dawkins.
APPLAUSE
Kirsten Garrett: That was the eminent evolutionary biologist, Professor Richard Dawkins, of Oxford. There will be a link to further information about Richard Dawkins and a link to a critique of his book in The London Review of Books on the Background Briefing website.
I'm Kirsten Garrett, and you're with ABC Radio National.
THEME
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