Richard Dawkins: The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[RD] And the bolder physicists will say "well, who cares about intuition? I mean, just look at the math!"

[DD] Yeah, yeah, that's right, they are comfortable with their … living with their prostheses.

[SH] Well, the perfect example of that is dimensions beyond three, because we can't visualise a fourth dimension or a fifth but it's trivial to represent it mathematically, and so we can move in that dimension.

[DD] And now we teach our undergraduates how to manipulate n-dimensional spaces, and to think about vectors in n-dimensional spaces, and they get used to the fact. They can't quite imagine … what you do is you imagine three of them and, say, you wave your hand a little bit, and say more of the same, but you you check your intuition by running the maths, and it works.

[RD] But see, it's easy to do some … say you're a psychologist looking at personality, and you say there are fifteen dimensions of personality, and you could think of them as being fifteen dimensions in space. And anybody can see that you're … you can imagine moving along any one of those dimensions with respect to the others, and you don't actually have to visualise fifteen dimensional space.

[DD] No. And you give up that demand, and you realise …

[RD] Yes, yes.

[DD] I can live without that. It would be nice if I could do that but hey, I can't see bacteria with the naked eye, either. I can live without that but …

[SH] I think there's one…

[CH] Yeah, I was challenged on that, I was challenged on that on the radio the other day by someone who appeared to be fairly … who said "I believe in atoms on no evidence, 'cause I've never seen one". Not since George Galloway said to me that he'd never seen a barrel of oil …

[SH] Right! that's cute …

[CH] Yes but you realise that people at this point, they're wearing themselves right down to their uppers, I mean they're desperate when they get to this stage. The reason I say it is because I think it could … I don't want us to make our lives easier but it makes the argument a little more simple.

[CH] We are quite willing to say there are many things we don't know. What Haldane, I think it was, said, you know, the Universe is not just queerer than we understand, it's queerer than we can understand. We know there'll be great new discoveries, we know we'll live to see great things but we know there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty. That's the whole distinction; the believer has to say not just that there is a god, the deist position, that there may be a mind at work in the Universe, a proposition we can't disprove, but they know that, mind, and can interpret it. They're on good terms with it. They get occasional revelations from it …

[SH] They have a book that is a verbatim screed.

[CH] … they get briefings from it. Now any decent argument, any decent intellect, has to begin by excluding people who claim to know more than they can possibly know. You start off by saying "well, that's wrong to begin with, now can we get on with it?", so theism's gone in the first round.

[DD] Yep.

[SH] Yeah.

[CH] It's off the island, it's out of the show.

[SH] That's a footnote I wanted to add to what Dan was saying. That even if mystery was somehow something we had to just … a bitter pill we have to swallow in the end, we are cognitively closed to the truth at some level, that still doesn't give any scope to theism.

[DD] Absolutely not, because it's just as closed to them as it is to …

[SH] And also we claim perfect transparency of revelation.

[CH] And also they can't be allowed to forget what they used to say when they were strong enough to get away with it, which is this is really true, in every detail, and if you don't believe it, we'll kill you.

[SH] we'll kill you, yes.

[CH] We'll kill you, and it may take some days to kill you, but we will get the job done, yeah.

[SH] Yes, we'll kill you slowly.

[CH] I mean, they wouldn't have the power they have now, if they hadn't had the power they had then.

[DD] Right. And you know this, what you just said Christopher, actually, I think, strikes terror, it strikes anxiety, in a lot of religious hearts. Because it just hasn't been brought home to them that this move of theirs is just off-limits. It's not the game. You can't do that. And they've been taught all their lives that you can do that - this is a legitimate way of conducting a discussion. And here, suddenly we're just telling them 'I'm sorry, that is not a move in this game'. In fact it is a disqualifying move.

[SH] Right. It's precisely the move you can't be respected for making.

[DD] Yes.

[CH] Adumbrate the move for me a bit, if you would, or for us. Perhaps only for me. Say what you think that move is.

[DD] Somebody plays the faith card.

[CH] Yes.

[DD] They say look, I am a Christian and we Christians, we just have to believe this and that's it. At which point, I guess the polite way of saying it is well, okay, if that's true you'll just have to excuse yourself from the discussion because you've declared yourself incompetent to proceed with an open mind. Now …

[CH] That's what I hoped. That's what I hoped you were saying.

[DD] If you really can't defend your view, then sorry, you can't put it forward. We're not going to let you play the faith card. Now if you want to defend what your holy book says, in terms that we can appreciate, fine. But because it says it in the holy book, that just doesn't cut any ice at all. And if you think it does, that's just arrogant. It is a bullying move and we're just not going to accept it.

[SH] And it's a move that they don't accept when done in the name of another faith.

[DD] Exactly.

[CH] But now, in which case, could I ask you something, all three of you who are wiser than I on this matter, what do we think of Victor Stenger's book that says you can now scientifically disprove the existence of God? Do you have a view on this?

[DD] Which god? I haven't read the book. Which god?

[RD] Any kind of …

[CH] Any. Either a creating one, or a supervising one, and certainly an intervening one. I mean, I think that's fairly exhaustive. My view had always been that since we have to live with uncertainty, only those who are certain leave the room before the discussion can become adult. Victor Stenger seems to think now we've got to the stage where we can say with reasonable confidence, it's disproved. It's not vindicated or a better explanation proposed [inaudible]. I just thought it'd be an interesting proposition, because it matters a lot to me that our opinions are congruent with uncertainty.

[SH] Right. Well, I think the weak link …

[CH] And in other words, we doubt.

[SH] I was a big fan of his book and actually blurbed it but I think the weakest link is this foundational claim on the texts. This idea that we know that the bible is the perfect word of an omniscient deity, and it really is the claim, it's really the gold in their epistemological gold standard. I mean, it all rests on that, that if the bible is not a magic book, Christianity, in this case, evaporates. If the Koran is not a magic book, Islam evaporates. And when you look at the books and ask yourself is there the slightest shred of evidence that this is the product of omniscience? Is there a single sentence in here that could not have been uttered by a person for whom a wheelbarrow would've been emergent technology? You have to say no. I mean, if the bible had an account of DNA and electricity, and other things that would astonish us then, okay. Our jaws drop, suitably, and we have to have a sensible conversation about the source of this knowledge.

[CH] You know, Dinesh D'Souza makes this statement in his new book. He's going to be, by the way, one of the much more literate and well-read and educated of our antagonists I'm going to be debating soon. He says that in Genesis, which people used to mock, they said 'let there be light' and then only a few staves later you get the sun and the moon and the stars.