Richard Dawkins: The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[SH] Right.

[CH] How could that be?

[SH] Yes.

[CH] Well, according to the Big Bang, that would be right.

[RD] Yeah, but that’s pretty pathetic.

[CH] The Bang precedes the galaxies. Believe me, I think it's pathetic too, but …

[SH] Right. Well, I try to demonstrate this cast of mind in, I think, a very long end note in ‘The End of Faith’, where I say, “any text can be read". Well, with the eyes of faith you can make magical (?prescience/impressions) out of any text. So, I literally walked into a book store, the cookbook aisle of a book store, randomly opened a cookbook, found a recipe for wok-seared shrimp with ogo relish or something, and then came up with a mystical interpretation of the recipe. And you can do it! I mean, you can play connect the dots with any crazy text and find wisdom in it.

[CH] Michael Shermer did it with the Bible code.

[SH] Right, I haven’t seen that, but, yeah.

[CH] The hidden messages in the Bible. Very, very good. You can write yesterday’s headlines from it anytime you like. Yeah.

[SH] I have a question for the three of you. Is there any argument for faith, any challenge to your atheism that has given you pause, that has set you back on your heels where you felt you didn’t have a ready answer, etc?

[DD] Actually I can’t think of anything.

[RD] I mean, I think the closest is the idea that the fundamental constants of the universe are too good to be true. And that does seem to me to need some kind of explanation. If it’s true. I mean, Victor Stenger doesn’t think it is true but many physicists do. I mean, it certainly doesn’t in any way suggest to me creative intelligence because you're still left with the problem of explaining where that came from. And a creative intelligence who is sufficiently creative and intelligent enough to fine-tune the constants of the universe to give rise to us has, to got to be a lot more fine-tuned himself than …

[CH] Yeah, why create all the other planets in our solar system dead?

[RD] Well, that’s a separate question.

[CH] Well say we think he was that good. Bishop Montefiore was very good at this; he was a former friend of mine. He’d say that you have to marvel at the conditions of life and the knife-edge on which they are. And I'd say well, it is a knife edge. Yes, a lot of our planet is too hot or too cold.

[SH] Right. Riddled with parasites.

[CH] The other planets are completely too hot or too cold to support it. And that’s just one solar system, the only one we know about where there is life. Not much of a designer. And of course you can’t get out of the infinite regress. But I’ve not come across a single persuasive argument of that kind. But I wouldn’t have expected to because, as I realised when I thought one evening, they never come up with anything new. Well, why would they? Their arguments are very old by definition. And they were all evolved when we knew very, very little about the natural order. The only argument that I find at all attractive, and this is for faith you asked as well as for theism, is what I would, I suppose I’d call the apotropaic. When people say all praise belongs to God for this, He's to be thanked for all this. That is actually a form of modesty. It’s a superstitious one, that’s why I say apotropaic, but it's avoiding hubris. It’s also for that reason, obviously pre-monotheistic. But, religion does, or can, help people to avoid hubris, I think, morally and intellectually and that might be a …

[RD] But that’s not an argument that it’s true.

[CH] Oh, for heaven’s sake! No. There are and cannot be any such arguments, I think.

[SH] Well maybe I should broaden this question.

[DD] Well, no, no. Wait a minute! I think …

[SH] Before you answer Dan, I want …

[DD] I could give you several discoveries which would shake my faith right to the ground.

[SH] No, no! Let me just broaden the question.

[DD] Yep, yep.

[SH] Not only …

[CH] (inaudible) and the Precambrian?

[RD] No, no, no. That won’t work!

(laughter)

[SH] Not only in argument for the plausibility of religious belief, but an argument that suggests that what we’re up to, criticising faith, is a bad thing.

[RD] Oh, that’s much easier.

[SH] That we shouldn’t be, so let's exclude that.

[CH] Ah! Okay, yes, by all means.

[SH] We shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing.

[RD] That's much easier.

[SH] Okay.

[DD] It’s easier to think of a good reason?

[RD] Oh, I mean, if somebody could come up with an argument that says that the world is a better place and everybody believes the falsehood, is there any context though, in your work or in dialogue with your critics, where you feel that that argument has given you pause?

[DD] Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Not so much in ‘Breaking The Spell’ but when I was working on my book on free will,, ‘Freedom Evolves’. I kept running into critics who were basically expressing something very close to a religious few, namely free will is such an important idea, if we gave up the idea of free will, people would lose their sense of responsibility and we would have chaos. And, you really don’t wanna look too closely, just avert your eyes. Do not look too closely at this issue of free will and determinism. And I thought about that explicitly in the environmental impact category. Okay, could I imagine that my irrepressible curiosity could lead me to articulate something true or false …

[SH] That’s dangerous.

[DD] which would have such devastating effects on the world, that I should just shut up and change the subject?

[SH] Right.

[DD] And I think that’s a good question that we all should ask.

[RD] Yeah, it's good.

[DD] Absolutely! And I spent a lot of time thinking hard about that and I wouldn't have published either of those two books if I hadn’t come to the conclusion that it was not only, as it were, environmentally safe to proceed this way, but obligatory. But I think you should ask that question. I do.

[SH] Right.

[RD] Before publishing a book, but not before deciding for yourself do I think that this is true or not? One should never do what some politically motivated critics do, which is to say this is so politically obnoxious that it cannot be true, and which is a different …

[DD] Which is a different thing entirely. No. No.

[CH] No, it would be like discovering that you thought that the bell on white and black intelligence was a correct interpretation of IQ.

[RD] Yes, and you could well suppress publication of …

[CH] You see (inaudible) And now I’ve looked at all this stuff again, I’m absolutely (inaudible) … so you could say, “now what am I gonna do?”

[SH] Right.

[CH] Fortunately these questions don’t, in fact, present themselves in that way.

[SH] I’ll tell you one place where it’s presented itself to me, I think it was an op-ed in the LA times, I could be mistaken, but someone argued that the reason why the Muslim population in the US is not radicalised the way it is in Western Europe, is largely the result of the fact that we honour faith so much in our discourse that the community has not become as insular and as grievance-ridden as it has …

[DD] As in Western Europe?

[SH] in Western Europe. Now, I don’t know if this is true, but if it were true that gave me a moment’s pause.

[CH] That would be of interest. James Wolfensohn, late of the World Bank, recently the negotiator on Gaza, says that he firmly believes that he had tremendous influence for good with the Muslim brotherhood in Hamas, because he was an orthodox Jew. If so, I think it would be disgusting, I have to say, and he shouldn’t have had the job in the first place. Because we know one absolute thing for certain about that conflict, which is that it’s been made infinitely worse by the (inaudible). If it were only a national and territorial dispute it would’ve been solved by now. But his self-satisfaction in saying so, even if it were true, would turn me even more against him.