Richard Dawkins: The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[RD] There's a slipperiness too, isn't there, about one way of speaking to sophisticated intellectuals and theologians and another way of speaking to congregations and above all, children. And I think we've, all of us, been accused of going after the easy targets of the Jerry Falwells of this world and ignoring the sophisticated professors of theology and, I mean, I don't know what you feel about that but one of the things that I feel is that the sophisticated professors of theology will say one thing to each other and to intellectuals generally but will say something totally different to a congregation. They'll talk about miracles, they'll talk about …

[DD] Well they won't talk to a congregation …

[RD] Well, archbishops will …

[DD] Yes, but when sophisticated theologians try to talk to the preachers, the preachers wont have any of it.

[RD] Well that’s true of course.

[DD] I mean, you gotta realise that sophisticated theology is like stamp collecting. It’s a very specialised thing and only a few people do it.

[RD] They're of negligible influence.

[DD] They take in their own laundry and they get all excited about some very arcane details, and their own religions pay almost no attention to what they're saying. A little bit of it does, of course, filter in but it always gets beefed up again for general consumption, because what they say in their writings, at least from my experience, is eye-glazing, mind twisting, very subtle things which have no particular bearing on life.

[CH] Oh! No I must insist, I must say a good word here for Professor Allister McGrath who, in his attack on Richard, said it’s not true, as we've always been told and most people, most Christians believe that Tertullian said “credo quia absurdum”, I believe it because it’s ridiculous, no! It turns out, I've checked this now, though, I don't know this in McGrath that in fact Tertullian said the impossibility of it is the thing that makes it the most believable. That’s a well worth distinction, I think, and very useful for training one’s mind in the fine (inaudible).

[SH] If possibility is cause to absurdity …

[CH] It’s the likelihood, in other words, that it could’ve been made up.

[SH] Right

[CH] … is diminished by the incredibility of it. Who would try and invent something that was that unbelievable, that is so off the wall?

[SH] You make a very good point on those lines.

[CH] That actually is, I think, a debate perfectly well worth having.

[RD] That’s a good point.

[CH] What I say to these people is this, you’re sending your e-mail or your letter to the wrong address. Everyone says let's not judge religion by its fundamentalists. Alright. Take the church of England, two of whose senior leaders recently said that the floods in north Yorkshire were the result of homosexual behavior, not in north Yorkshire presumably, probably in London, I think they’re thinking …

[DD] God’s aim is a little off!

[CH] One of these, the Bishop of Carlisle, is apparently about to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Now, this is extraordinary. This is supposed to be the mild and reflective and thoughtful and rather troubled church making fanatical pronouncements! Well, I want to hear what Allister McGrath is gonna to write to the Bishop of Carlisle, not to me. Is he going to say, my Lord Bishop, do you not realise what a complete idiot you're making of yourself and of our church? Did he do this? If he did it in private I am not impressed. He has to say it in public.

[RD] The Bishop of Carlisle backtracked.

[CH] Why are they telling me that? I will judge the church by the statements of its

bishops, I think I'm allowed to.

[RD] Yeah, but the other thing is that never mind about the academic theologians, bishops and vicars who will attack us for taking scriptures, or for accusing people of taking scriptures literally, and "of course we don't believe the Book of Genesis literally", and yet they do preach about what Adam and Eve did as though they did exist, as though there's somehow … it’s a sort of license to talk about things which they know and anybody of any sophistication knows is fiction. And yet they will treat their congregations, their sheep, as though they did exist, as though they were factual, and a huge number of those congregations actually think they did exist.

[DD] Can you imagine any one of these preachers saying, as such a topic is introduced, ‘this is a sort of theoretical fiction’?

[RD] Yes.

[DD] It’s not true but it’s a very fine metaphor. No, they'd never … they’re just not going …

[RD] they kind’ve, after the fact imply that that’s what they expect you to know.

[DD] Yes but they would never announce …

[SH] Well there's another point there. It is that they never admit how they have come to stop taking it literally because you have all these people criticising us for our crass literalism, we’re as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists, and yet these moderates don't admit how they have come to be moderate. What does moderation consist of? It consists of having lost faith in all of these propositions, or half of them because of the hammer blows of science and secular politics …

[DD] of the crass literalism of the critics.

[SH] Yeah. Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions and moderates tend to argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith, that faith is somehow self-enlightening, whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside. It has been intruded on by science.

[CH] On that point that I was wanting to raise myself, about our own so-called fundamentalism, there's a cleric in Southwark, the first person I saw attacking you and I in print as being just as fundamentalist as those who blew up the London Underground, do you remember his name?

[RD] No, I don't remember his name.

[CH] Sorry, I don't remember. He’s a very senior Anglican cleric in the diocese of Southwark. I went on the BBC with him just entre parentheses I'll say, when I've said, ‘how can you call your congregation a flock? doesn't that say everything about your religion? that you think they're sheep? He said, "Well actually I used to be a pastor in New Guinea, where there aren't any sheep". Well of course there’re a lot of places where there aren't any sheep! Gospel’s quite hard to teach, as a result. We've found out what the most important animal to the locals was and I remember very well my local bishop rising to ask the Divine One to ‘behold these swine’, his new congregation. But this is the man who deliberately does a thing like that, that’s as cynical as you could wish and as adaptive as the day is long, and he says that we who doubt it are as fundamentalist as people who blow up their fellow citizens on the London Underground. It’s unconscionable. Thus, I don't really mind being accused of ridiculing, or treating with contempt, people like that. I just frankly have no choice, I have the faculty of humour, and some of it has an edge to it, I'm not going to repress that, for the sake of politeness of people.

[DD] Would you think that it would be good to make a distinction between the professionals and the amateurs? I share your impatience with the officials of the churches, the people whose … this is their professional life. It seems to me, they know better.

[SH] Right.

[DD] The congregations don't know better because it’s maintained that they should not know better. I do get very anxious about ridiculing the beliefs of the “flock”, because of the way in which they have ceded to their leaders. They've delegated authority to their leaders and they presume their leaders are gonna do it right. So I think in this, you know, who stands up and says the buck stops here? Well it seems to me it’s the preachers themselves, it’s the priests, it’s the bishops and we really should hold their feet to the fire. For instance, just take the issue of creationism. If somebody in a fundamentalist church thinks that creationism makes sense because their pastor told them, well I can understand that and excuse that. We all get a lot of what we take to be true from people that we respect and we view as authorities. We don't check everything out. But where’d the pastor get this idea? I don't care where. He or she is responsible because their job is to know what they’re talking about in a way that the congregation …