There are two issues that converge here. One
is the question what do we want to accomplish?,
what do we reasonably think we can accomplish?
And then this article of faith that I think
circulates, unfortunately, among people of
our viewpoint that you can’t argue anyone
out of their beliefs. It’s a completely
fatuous
exercise, or can we actually win a war of
ideas with people and, I think, certainly
judging from my e-mail, we can. I mean, I’m
constantly getting e-mail from people who
have lost their faith and in effect been argued
out of it. And the straw that broke that camel’s
back was either one of our books or some other
process of reasoning, or incompatibility of
what they knew to be true and what they were
told by their faith that I think we have to
just highlight the fact that it’s possible
for people to be shown the contradictions,
internal to their faith or the contradiction
between their faith and what we’ve come
to
know to be true about the universe, and the
process can take minutes or months or years
but they have to renounce their superstition
in the face of what they now know to be true.
I was having an argument with a very sophisticated
biologist who’s a brilliant expositor of
evolution, and he still believes in God. And
I said how can you? What’s this all about?
And he said I accept all your rational arguments,
however it’s faith. And then he said this
very significant phrase to me: ‘There’s
a reason that it’s called faith!’ He said
it very decisively, almost aggressively, that
there’s a reason that it’s called faith.
And that was, to him, the absolute knockdown
clincher. You can’t argue with it because
it’s faith and he said it proudly and defiantly
rather than in any sort of apologetic way.
Oh, you get it all the time in North America
from people who say you gotta read William
James and to have had, to be able to judge
other people’s subjective experiences with
something that’s by definition impossible
to do.
Right
If it’s real to them why can’t you respect
it? I mean this wouldn’t be accepted in
any
other field of argument at all. The impression
people are under is the critical thing about
them. I had a debate with a very senior Presbyterian
in Orange County and I asked him, because
we were talking about biblical literalism,
of which he wasn’t an exponent, but I said
well what about the graves opening at the
time of the crucifixion according to Saint
Matthew? Matthew, I’d rather say, and everyone
getting out of their graves in Jerusalem,
walking around greeting old friends in the
city. I was going to ask him, doesn’t that
rather cheapen the idea of the resurrection
of Jesus? But he mistook my purpose, and wanted
to know if I believed that had happened, that
was what he thought. And he said that as an
historian, which he also was, he was inclined
to doubt it, but that as a Presbyterian minister,
he thought it was true. Well, alright then.
You see, for me it was enough that I got him
to say that. I said in that case, I rest my
case. I don’t want to say anymore to you
now. You’ve said all I could say.
Yeah, yeah. Well there’s one other chip
I’d
like to put on the table here. There’s this
phenomenon of someone like Francis Collins
or the biologist you just mentioned, someone
who obviously has enough of the facts on board,
you know, enough of a scientific education
to know better, and still does not know better
or professes not to know better, and there
I think we have a cultural problem where.
And this was actually brought home to me at
one talk I gave. A physics professor came
up to me at the end of the talk and told me
that he had brought one of his graduate students,
who was a devout Christian, and who was quite
shaken by my talk, and all I got from this
report was that this was the first time his
faith had ever really been explicitly challenged.
And so it’s true to say that you can go
through
the curriculum of becoming a scientist and
never have your faith explicitly challenged,
because it’s taboo to do so, and now we
have
engineers who can build nuclear bombs in the
Muslim world, who still think it’s plausible
metaphysics that you can get to paradise and
get seventy two virgins, and we have people
like Francis Collins who think that on Sunday
you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give
yourself to Jesus, because you are in the
presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday
you can be a physical geneticist.
Or according to our friend, the great Pervez
Hoodbhoy, the great Pakistani physicist, there
are people who think you can use the djinns,
the devils and harness their power for the
reactor.
It’s almost tempting to fund such a project.
Yeah!
Haha, yes!
And it seems, and I gather that again,
I can’t get over him still, that the respected,
Tariq Ramadan of Saint Anthony’s College,
Oxford says in his book, I’m told, that
he
believes in djinns too. I hope I’m not doing
him an injustice, I’ve been told that in
his book, ‘In the Steps of the Prophet’,
he says as much, so one is up against things
that are flat-out primitive and superstition.
I think it may be easier than we’re supposing
to shake peoples’ faith. There’s been
a
moratorium on this for a long time. We’re
just the beginning of a new wave of explicit
attempts to shake peoples’ faith. And it’s
bearing fruit, and the obstacles it seems
to me are not that we don’t have the facts
or the arguments, it’s these strategic reasons
for not professing it, not admitting it. Not
admitting it to yourself, not admitting it
in public because your family is gonna view
it as a betrayal, you’re just embarrassed
to admit that you were taken in by this for
so long. It takes, I think, tremendous courage
to just declare that you’ve given that all
up and if we can find ways to help people
find that courage, and give them some examples
of people who have done this and they’re
doing just fine, they may have lost the affections
of a parent or something like that, they may
have hurt some family members, but still I
think it’s a good thing to encourage and
I don’t think we should assume that we can’t
do this. I think we can.
Yes, it’s almost patronising to suggest
that
we couldn’t and to suggest that it shouldn’t.
On the other hand, I think we all know people
who seem to manage this kind of split brain
feat of, as Sam said, believing one thing
on a Sunday and then something totally contradictory
or, incompatible the rest of the week. And
there’s nothing I suppose neurologically
wrong with that, I mean there is no reason
why one shouldn’t have a brain that’s
split
in that kind of way
But it is unstable in a certain way but, and
I’m sure you’re right, that people do
this
and they’re very good at it, and they do
it by deflecting attention from it. Let’s
start focusing attention
But how you can live with a contradiction?
How you can live with it?
by forgetting that you’re doing this and
by not attending to it. I think, what I would
love to do is to invent a memorable catchphrase
or term that would rise unbidden in their
minds when they caught themselves doing it,
and then they would think oh, this is one
of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins
and Harris and Hitchens are talking about.
Oh! right! and they think this is somehow
illicit, just to create a little more awareness
in them of what a strange thing it is that
they’re doing.
I’m afraid to say that I think that cognitive
dissonance is probably necessary for everyday
survival. Everyone does it a bit.
You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance?
No, practicing it.
Actually practicing it.
I mean take the case of someone who’s a
member
of moveon.org. They think that the United
States government is a brutal, militaristic,
imperial regime who crushes the poor and invades
other peoples’ countries, but they pay their
taxes and, it’s very, very rare that they
don’t. They send their children to school,
they do their stuff, you know, they don’t
act all the time as if ten percent of what
they believe is true. Partly because it would
be impossible, say, with people in the fifties
who were members the John Birch society, who
thought President Eisenhower was a communist.
Okay, you get up in the morning, you believe
that. The White House is run by the Kremlin
but then you have to go and get the groceries,
and do all that stuff. You still have to go
and do it.
Too many commitments, yeah.
But you absolutely wouldn’t be challengeable
in your belief. It’d be very, very important
to you, but there would be no way in your
life, your real life, of vindicating or practicing
the opinion that you have. And I’m sure
the
same is true of people who say well I shouldn’t
really prefer one child to another or one
parent to another but I do, I’m just not
gonna act as if I do.
Right.
All kinds of things of this kind.
But what do you think, as educators
Or Senator Craig saying he is not gay. Thinking
in his own mind he’s absolutely sure he’s
not, but he can’t manage his life by saying
he is or that he isn’t. So, a question I
wanted to ask was this: we should ask ourselves
what our real objective is. Do we, in fact,
wish to see a world without faith? I think
I would have to say that I don’t. I don’t
either expect to, or wish to, see that.
What do you mean by ‘faith’?
Well I don’t think it’s possible, because
it replicates so fast, faith. As often as
it’s cut down, or superseded, or discredited,
it replicates, it seems to me, extraordinarily
fast, I think. For Freudian reasons, principally
to do with the fear of extinction, or annihilation
So you mean faith in supernatural paradigms?
Yes, the wish. Wish thinking.
Then why would you not wish it?
And then, the other thing is, would I want
this argument to come to an end, with all
having conceded that
You wouldn’t like to retire and move on
to
other stuff?
‘Hitchens really won that round, now nobody
in the world believes in God’? Now, apart
from being unable to picture this, I’m not
completely certain that it’s what I want.
I think it is rather to be considered as sort
of the foundation of all arguments about epistemology,
philosophy, biology, and so on. It’s the
thing you have to always be arguing against,
the other explanation.
It’s an extraordinary thing. I don’t understand
what you’re I mean, I understand you’re
saying that it’ll never work, I don’t
understand
why you wouldn’t wish it.
Because, I think, a bit like the argument
between, Huxley and Darwin. Sorry, excuse
me, Huxley and Wilberforce, or Darrow and
William Jennings Bryan, I want it to go on.
Because it’s interesting.
I want our side to get more refined, and theirs
to be ever more exposed. But I can’t see
it with one hand clapping.
I mean, you don’t want it to go on with
the
Jihadists, I mean, there’s a certain face
of this
No, but I don’t have a difference of opinion
with the Jihadists.
Well, you do in terms of the legitimacy of
their project
No, not really, no, there’s nothing to argue
about with that, I mean, there it’s a simple
matter of survival. I want them to be extirpated.
Alright, well move it down to the people who
are blocking stem cell research.
No, that is a purely primate response with
me, the recognising the need to destroy an
enemy in order to assure my own survival.
I’ve no interest at all in what they think.
Sounds like you’re (inaudible)
No, I mean, really we haven’t still come
to your question about Islam, but no interest
at all in what they think. Only interested
in refining methods of destroying them.
Okay.
In other words, you’ve simply given up.
A task in which, by the way, one gets very
little secular support.
Yes, that’s notable.
Most atheists don’t want this fight. The
most important one is the one they want to
shirk. They’d far rather go off and dump
on Billy Graham, cause on that they know
that they can’t, so there’s no danger.
Well I think that because we find the idea
of exterminating these people just abhorrent,
and we think that, besides, it will (inaudible)
them.
No, I said ‘extirpating’.
Extirpate?
Yes, complete destruction of the Jihadist
forces. Extermination, I think, has to be
applied more as a species, or, sort of
No, but Christopher, it sounds as though you
like argument. You like having it’s almost
the theatre of having an intellectual argument,
which would be lost.
Well, I’d rather say the dialectic actually,
Richard. In other words, one learns from arguing
with other people.
Yes.
Now I think all of us around this table have
probably enhanced, or improved, our own capacities
as reasoners.
Yes, but I mean, there are plenty of other
things to reason about. Having won the battle
against religion, we can go back to science,
or whatever it is we practice. And we can
argue and reason about that, and there’s
plenty of arguments, really worthwhile arguments
to be had.
But it’ll always be the case that some will
attribute their presence here to the laws
of biology, and others will attribute their
presence here to a divine plan that has a
scheme for them. And you can tell a lot, in
my view, about people, from which view they
take. And, as we all know, only one of those
views makes sense. Well how do we know that?
Because we have to contrast it with the opposite
one, which is not going to disappear.
Well let me make an analogy here. Cause
you could’ve said the same thing about witchcraft
at some point in recent history. You could
say that every culture has had a belief in
witches, a belief in the efficacy of magic
spells. Witchcraft is ubiquitous, and we’re
never going to get rid of it, and we’re
fools
to try. Or we can try only as a matter of
dialectic, but witchcraft is going to be with
us. And yet witchcraft has, almost without
exception I mean, you can find certain
communities where
Not at all, not at all.
No, I mean real witchcraft, not witchcraft
as in its religious
Witchcraft is completely ineradicable; it
spreads like weed, often under animist and
Christian religions.
No, no, I don’t mean
But not in the western world.
I mean frank witchcraft,
The Washington Post
The witchcraft of the evil eye, and instead
of medicine, you have the
You think you’ve gotten rid of that?
I think fundamentally we’ve gotten rid of
that, yes.
But in any case
Not at all.
don’t you want to get rid of it?
Not at all. There’s currently a campaign
to get Wiccans registered to be buried in
Arlington Cemetery.
Well, modulo the Wiccans
But Wiccans are to witchcraft as Unitarians
are to (laughter)
Right, they’re not real. What I’m talking
about a willingness to kill your neighbour,
because you think that there is some causal
mechanism by which they, through their evil
intent, could have destroyed your crops psychically,
you know, or cast an evil eye upon your
I mean it comes in ignorance of medical science.
I mean, you don’t know why people get sick,
and you suspect your neighbour of ill-intent,
and then witchcraft fills the void there.
No, I wouldn’t say in such a case that one
didn’t wish to be without it, that we’d
have lost something interesting to argue with.
But, we are effectively I mean, we’re
not dealing with the claims of witches intruding
upon medical ñ and don’t go to alternative
medicine and acupuncture here ñ I’m talking
about real witchcraft, you know, medieval
witchcraft.
Well I was about to deal with that very thing,
and The Washington Post publishes horoscopes
every day.
Astrology is yet another
Yes, and that is
You think I’m
Astrology is a pale
Astrology is not going to be eradicated, even
after I stop reading my horoscope.
Okay, but it doesn’t need to be eradicated.
No, but you’re confusing whether it’s
going
to be eradicated and whether you want it to
be eradicated. And it sounds as though you
don’t want it to be eradicated, because
you
want something to argue against, and something
to sharpen your wits on.
Yes, I think that is, in fact, what I
But in fact, instead of thinking about eradication,
why not think about it the way an evolutionary
epidemiologist would, and say what we want
to do is we want to encourage the evolution
of avirulence. We want to get rid of the harmful
kinds, and I mean, I don’t care about
astrology, I don’t think it’s harmful
enough.
I mean it was a little scary when Reagan was
reportedly using astrology to make decisions,
but that, I hope anomalous, case aside, I
find the superstition that astrology is important
to be relatively harmless. If we could only
do the same thing, if we could only relegate
the other enthusiasms to the status of astrology,
I’d be happy.
Right.
Well, look, you don’t accept my ñ or you
don’t like my ñ answer, but I think the
question should be, is going to be, asked
of us. It was asked of me today actually,
again on the TV: ‘Do you wish no one was
going to church this morning in the United
States?’
Right.
What’s your answer?
Well, I’ve given mine, Richard’s disagreed.
Well, the answer I gave this morning was "I
think people would be much better off without
false consolation, and I don’t want them
trying to inflict their beliefs on me. They’d
be doing themselves and me a favour if they
gave it up. So, perhaps in that sense, I contradict
myself, I mean I wish they would stop it,
but then I would be left with no one to argue
with.
(laughs) Well, I just don’t !
But, you have many other subjects!
And I certainly didn’t say that I thought
if they’d only listen to me, they would
stop
going. Okay, so there are two questions here.
So that was my very experimental answer, but
I’d love to hear would you like to say
that you look forward to a world where no
one had any faith in the supernatural?
I want to answer this. Whether it’s astrology,
or religion, or anything else, I want to live
in a world where people think skeptically
for themselves, look at evidence. Not because
astrology’s harmful, I guess it probably
isn’t harmful, but if you go through the
world thinking that it’s okay to just believe
things because you believe them without evidence,
then you’re missing so much. And it’s
such
a wonderful experience to live in the world,
and understand why you’re living in the
world,
and understand what makes it work, understand
about the real stars, understand about astronomy,
that it’s an impoverishing thing to be reduced
to the pettiness of astrology, and I think
you can say the same of religion. The universe
is a grand, beautiful, wonderful place, and
it’s petty and parochial and cheapening
to
believe in djinns, and supernatural creators,
and supernatural interferers. I think you
could make an aesthetic case that we want
to get rid of
Well, fine, I
I could not possibly agree with you more.
But, let’s talk about priorities.
Okay.
If we could just get rid of some of the most
pernicious and nauseous excesses, what would
be the triumphs we would go for first? What
would really thrill you as an objective reached?
Let’s look at Islam, and let’s look at
Islam
as realistically as we can. Is there any,
remote chance of a reformed, reasonable Islam?
Well, isn’t the present, savage Islam actually
rather recent? Isn’t it the Wahabi I mean,
doesn’t ?
You have to go back quite a ways, I think,
to get
Only up to a point. I mean, I think there’s
and again none of us are the whether
we’re equipped to do it, we’re not the
most
persuasive mouthpieces of this criticism.
I mean, I think it takes someone like Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, or a Muslim scholar, somebody like
Ibn Warraq to authentically criticise Islam,
and have it be heard by people, especially
the secular liberals of the sort who don’t
trust our take on this, but it seems to me
that you have different historical moments
in the history of Islam that are distinct,
one where Islam really has you have some
Muslim or you have a Caliphate, or you have
some Muslim country which has a reign of Islam
and is unmolested, for whatever period of
time, from the outside, and then Islam can
be as totalitarian and happy with itself as
possible, and you don’t see the inherent
conflict, and the inherent liability of its
creed. I mean, Samuel Huntington said that
Islam has bloody borders. It’s at the borders
that we’re noticing this problem and the
borders of Islam and modernity, at this moment,
the conflict between Islam and modernity.
But yes, you can find instances in the history
of Islam where people weren’t running around
waging Jihad, because they had successfully
waged Jihad.
But what about women in that world?
Exactly, the suffering of women within those
borders.
Yeah, yeah. Even in the best of times.
But there’s obviously some kind of synchronism,
and we know quite a lot now. There have been
some wonderful books; Maria Menocal’s book
on Andalusia, for example, on periods where
Islamic civilisation was relatively at peace
with its neighbours, and doing a lot of work
of its own on matters that were not Jihadist.
And I saw myself, during the wars in post-Yugoslavia,
that the Bosnian Muslims behaved far better
than the Christians, either Catholic or Orthodox,
and were the victims of religious massacre,
and not the perpetrators of them, and were
the ones who believed the most in multiculturalism.
So it can happen. You could even meet people
who said they were Atheist Muslims, or were
Muslim-Atheists, Muslim-Secularists in
Wow!
In Sarajevo, you could, yeah. Which is a technical
impossibility, but the problem is this; whether
we think, as I certainly very firmly do believe,
that totalitarianism is innate in all religion,
because it has to want an absolute, unchallengeable,
eternal authority.
In all religion.
It must be so. A creator whose will can’t
our comments on his will are unimportant.
You know, his will is absolute, it cannot
be challenged, and applies after we’re dead
as well as before we’re born. That is the
origin of totalitarianism. I think Islam states
that in the most alarming way, in that it
comes as the third of the monotheisms, and
says nothing further is required.
Right.
There have been previous words from God, we
admit that, we don’t claim to be exclusive,
but we do claim to be final. There’s no
need
for any further work on this point.
And we do claim that there’s no distance
between theology and
The worst thing in our world, surely the worst
thing anyone can say is ‘no further enquiry
is needed’.
Oh yeah.
You’ve already got all you need to know.
All else is commentary. It’s the most sinister
and dangerous thing, and that is a claim that
Islam makes that others don’t quite make
in the same way.
Well, let me play devil’s advocate for a
moment on that
There’s no refutation of Islam in Christianity
or Judaism, but there is in Islam. We accept
all the bad bits of Judaism, we love Abraham
and his sacrifice of his son, or willingness
to sacrifice, we love all that, we absolutely
esteem the virgin birth, the most nonsensical
bits of Christianity. All that’s great,
you’re
all welcome to join, but we have the final
word. That’s deadly. And I think our existence
is incompatible with that preaching.
Let me just play devil’s advocate for a
moment,
so at least we’re clear what the position
is.
I’d rather speak for the devil pro bono
myself!
We can all speak for the devil, I’m sure
a lot of people think we’re doing just that.
I, for one, think that the fact that something
is true is not quite sufficient for spreading
it about, or for trying to discover it. The
idea that there’s things we should just
not
try to find out is an idea that I take seriously.
And, I think that we at least have to examine
the proposition that there’s such a thing
as knowing more than is good for us. Now,
if you accept that so far, then, a possibility
we have to take seriously, even when we reject
it, we should reject it having taken it seriously,
is the Muslim idea that, indeed, the West
has simply gone way too far, that there is
knowledge that’s not good for us, it’s
knowledge
that we were better off without, and the fact
that many Muslims would like to turn the clock
back, they can’t of course. But, I have
a
certain sympathy for a Muslim who says ‘well
yeah, the cat’s out of the bag, it’s too
late, it’s a tragedy, you in the West have
exposed truths to yourselves, and now you’re
forcing them on us, that the species would
be better off not knowing.’
I’m absolutely riveted by what you say.
I’d
really love an instance in theory or practice,
of something, that you think we could know
but could forbid ourselves to know. Because
that is harder for me to imagine,
than a world without faith, I must say.
Well, you brought up the bell curve ñ I mean,
if there were reliable differences in intelligence
between races, or species, or gender
Yes, but I don’t think any of us here do
think that that’s the case. I mean, I’m
thinking there must be something, you must’ve
thought of something you could believe, but
wish you didn’t know.
Oh, I don’t think it’s hard to dream up
things which, if they were true, it might
be better for the human race to go on not
knowing them.
But could you concretise it just a little
more? I’m completely
I mean, the hypothetical is one thing, but
Christopher is asking do you actually have
you ever suppressed something that ?
No, no, I haven’t.
No, no.
Can you imagine yourself doing so, by the
way? I mean, I can’t.
Oh, I can imagine it, I hope it never comes
up.
Well, take the synthesising of bioweapons.
I mean, should Nature publish the code for
Smallpox, where anyone within his lab can
Yeah, exactly. There’s all those sorts of
things.
Oh, well, all right, but that would be a knowledge
of which we should remain
innocent. That would be more like a capacity.
I think, with foresight, certainly you can
conceive of a circumstance where someone can
seek knowledge, the only conceivable application
of which would be unethical, or the dissemination
of which would put power in the wrong hands.
But actually, you brought up something which
I think is crucial here, because it’s not
so much the spread of seditious truths to
Islam or the rest of the world that I think
we’re guilty of in the eyes of our opponents,
it’s the not-honouring of facts that are
not easily quantified, and easily discussed
in science. I mean the classic retort to all
of us is ‘prove to me that you love your
wife’, as though this were a knockdown argument
against atheism. You can’t prove it. Well,
if you unpack that a little bit, you can prove
it, you can demonstrate it, we know what you
mean by love, but, there is this domain of
the sacred that is not easily captured by
science, and scientific discourse has really
ceded it to religious discourse.
And artistic discourse, which is not religious,
necessarily.
But I would argue it’s not even well-captured
by art, necessarily, there’s something in
the same way that love is not really well-captured
by art, and compassion is not well, I mean,
you can represent it in art, but it’s not
reducible to you don’t go into the museum
and find compassion in its purest form. And,
I think there’s something about the way
we,
as atheists, merely dismiss the bogus claims
of religious people that convinces religious
people that there’s something we’re missing,
and I think we have to be sensitive to this.
Absolutely, that’s why they bring up "when
has secularism ever built anything like Durham
Cathedral or a Chartres? or a devotional painting?
or the music of ?’
Bach.
Well, I guess it would have to be Bach, yes.
But I think we have answers to that. I think
we have answers to that
Yes, we do.
You provide a very good answer to that, if
there was secular patronage of the arts at
that point, then one, we can’t know that
Michelangelo was actually a believer, because
the consequence of professing your unbelief,
in that case, was death. But two, if we had
a secular organisation to
To commission Michelangelo.
to commission Michelangelo, you know, we
would have all that secular artwork.
Though do you I didn’t actually say that
the corollary held
Which?
I think it’s true we can’t know with devotional
painting, and sculpture, and architecture
that the patronage didn’t have a lot to
do
with it. But I can’t hear myself saying
‘if
only you had a secular painter, he would have
done just as good work.’
Oh no, no, I think I’m fusing you and Richard
there.
I don’t know why, and I’m quite happy
to
find that I don’t know why, I can’t quite
hear myself saying that.
What? That Michelangelo, if he’d been commissioned
to do the ceiling of a museum of science,
wouldn’t have produced something just as
wonderful?
In some way, I’m reluctant to affirm that,
yes.
Really? I find it very, very easy to believe
that.
That could be a difference between us, I mean
with devotional poetry, where I do I don’t
know much about painting or architecture or
music, and some devotional architecture, like,
say, St Peter’s,
It couldn’t be done.
I don’t like anyway, and knowing that it
was built by a special sale of indulgences
doesn’t help either!
Yeah, right.
With devotional poetry, like say that of,
say, John Donne, or George Herbert, I find
it very hard to imagine that it’s faked,
or done for a patron.
Yes, I think that’s fair enough.
It would be very improbable people would write
poetry like that to please anyone.
Well, could it be done in the spirit of reason?
Well, I frankly think that’s the only explanation.
But, in any case, what conclusion would you
draw? I mean, if Donne’s devotional poetry
is wonderful, so what? I mean it doesn’t
show that it represents truth in any sense.
Not in the least. Well, my favourite devotional
poem is Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’.
It’s like one of the best poems ever written.
It exactly expresses I wish I had it here,
well actually I do have it here. If you like,
I can read it ñ but I wouldn’t trust anyone
who believed any more, or any less than Larkin
does, when he goes to a wayside Gothic church
in the English countryside, who felt ñ I
don’t say believed ñ I shouldn’t say
believed
ñ who felt any more than he does, he’s
an
atheist, or who felt any less, that there’s
something serious about this. And something
written into the human personality, as well
as the landscape.
Let’s bring this back to your question.
I don’t see that this is anything other
than
a special case.
It goes without saying that this says nothing
about the truth of religion.
I don’t see how this is anything other than
a special case. Other special cases of which
would be I can’t think of a perfect example
only by being lost at sea for two years
in a boat, and then surviving that, that’s
the only way you could conceivably have written
this account, it could not be fiction.
Or quit smoking!
And it’s glorious, wonderful art, and it
can be true, and we just accept that’s true,
and Donne’s poetry, only very extreme circumstances
could make it possible. And we can be grateful,
perhaps, that those extreme circumstances
existed and made this possible.
In his case?
Yeah.
But now you wouldn’t recommend being lost
at sea to everyone?
No, no, no.
No, I wouldn’t recommend ‘Death Be Not
Proud’
to anyone, either, although it’s a wonderful
poem, but it’s complete gibberish if you
look only at the words. It’s the most extraordinary
gibberish if you look only at the words, but
there’s an x-factor involved, which I’m
quite happy to both assume will persist, and
will need to be confronted.
Right. You raise this issue though, of whether
or not we would wish the churches emptied
on Sundays. And I think you were uncertain
whether you would, and I think I would agree.
I would want a different church. I would want
a different ritual, motivated by different
ideas but I think there’s a place for the
sacred in our lives, but under some construal
it doesn’t presuppose any bullshit. But
there’s
a usefulness to seeking profundity as a matter
of our attention, and our neglect of this
area, I think, as atheists, at times makes
even our craziest opponents seem wiser than
we are. I mean, take someone like Sayyid Qutb,
who’s as crazy as it gets, mean Osama bin
Laden’s favorite philosopher. He came out
to Greeley, Colorado, I think it was, around
1950, and spent a year in America, and noticed
that all his American hosts were spending
all their time gossiping about movie stars
and trimming their hedges and coveting each
other’s automobiles and he came to believe
that that America, or the West, was so trivial
in its preoccupations and so materialistic
that it had to be destroyed. Now this shouldn’t
be construed as giving any credence to his
world view but he has a point. There is something
trivial and horrible about the day-to-day
fascinations of most of us, and most people,
most of the time. There’s a difference between
really using your attention wisely in a meaningful
way, and our perpetual distraction. And traditionally,
only religion has tried enunciate and clarify
that difference. And I think that’s a lapse
in our
I think you’ve made that point and we’ve
accepted it, Sam. I mean, going back to the
thing about whether we’d like to see churches
empty, I think I would like to see churches
empty. What I wouldn’t like to see, however,
is ignorance of the Bible.
No.
Because you cannot understand literature without
knowing the Bible. You can’t understand
art,
you can’t understand music. There are all
sorts of things you can’t understand, for
historical reasons. But those historical reasons
you can’t wipe out, they’re there. And
so
even if you don’t actually go to church
and
pray, you’ve got to understand what it meant
to people to pray and why they did it, and
what these verses in the Bible mean and what
this
But it only that? Just the retrospective and
historical appreciation of our of our ancestors’
ignorance?
You can more than just appreciate it, you
can lose yourself in it, just as you could
lose yourself in a work of fiction without
actually believing that the characters are
real.
But you’re sure you wanna see the churches
empty? You can’t imagine a variety of churches,
maybe by their like it’s an extremely
denatured church. A church which has ritual
and loyalty, and common cause and purpose,
and even
and music.
music.
yes, yes, yes
And they sing the songs and they do the rituals,
but where the irrationality has simply been
long without.
oh, okay. So you go to those places for funerals
and weddings
and you have beautiful poetry and music,
and also perhaps for
group solidarity meetings.
group solidarity to create some project which
is hard to get off the ground otherwise.
I think there’s one more tiny thing, I mean,
I haven’t been tempted to go to church and
that’s a very, very small point but one
reason
that makes it very easy to keep me out it
is the use of the New English Bible
instead of
Oh, how dull, yes.
the King James one, right. I mean, there’s
really no point, I can’t see why anyone
goes,
and (inaudible) stay away. They’ve thrown
away
All the poetry, yeah
A pearl richer than all their tribe.
Absolutely.
Right.
They don’t even know what they’ve got.
It’s
terrible. If I was a lapsed Catholic and I
brooded about how I wanted my funeral to be
arranged, which is not something I would,
I’d want the Latin Mass. YES!
Absolutely.
For sure.
I mean there’s another issue there, which
of course is that is when it becomes intelligible
the nonsense becomes more transparent, and
so if it’s in Latin, it can survive much
better. It’s rather like a camouflaged insect.
It can get through the get through the barriers,
because you can’t see it. And whereas when
it’s translated into not just English but
modern English, you can see it for what it
is.
But now, seriously then, do you, therefore
delight in the fact that churches are modernising
their texts and using the
No, no I don’t.
Or do you
It’s an aesthetic point. No, I don’t.
That’s the worst of both worlds.
(inaudible) it seems to me
Yes.
And we should be grateful for it. We didn’t
do this to them.
Yeah, that’s right, we didn’t impose this
on them
Any more than we
We weren’t clever enough
We don’t blow up Shi’a mosques either.
We
don’t blow up the Birmingham Buddhas, we
don’t desecrate. For the reasons given,
myself
at least (inaudible), we would have a natural
resistance to profanity and desecration. We’d
leave it to the pious to destroy churches
and burn synagogues or blow up each other’s
mosques, and I think that’s a point that
we might spend more time making because I
do think it is feared of us, and this was
my point to begin with, that we wish for a
world that’s somehow empty of this echo
of
music and poetry and the numinous and so forth.
That we would be happy in a Brave New World.
And since I don’t think it’s true of any
of us
No, no it’s not.
it’s a point one might spend a bit more
time
making, that indeed, the howling wilderness
of nothingness is much more likely to result
from holy war, or religious conflict or theocracy
than it is from a proper secularism, which
would therefore, I think, have to not just
allow or leave or tolerate or condescend to
or patronise, but would actually in a sense
welcome the persistence of something like
faith. I feel I’ve put it better now than
I did at the beginning.
but not as unintelligently there, I think.
What do you mean ‘something like faith’?
Yeah, and how like faith?
Something like the belief that there must
be more than we can know.
Well, that’s fine.
Well that we could share.
Dan Dennett believes that, that’s not faith.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, we know there’s more than we presently
know
Well, that was my original point in saying,
or are likely to know. If we could find a
way of enforcing the distinction between the
numinous and the superstitious, we would be
doing something culturally quite important.
Yes.
When I talk about this stuff well, Richard
and I did this at Central Hall with Scruton
and that rather very weird team that we debated,
who kept on saying, Scruton particularly,
well what about the good old Gothic spires
and so forth? I said look, I wrote a book
about the Parthenon, I’m intensely interested
in it. I think everyone should go, everyone
should study it and so forth, but everyone
should abstain from the cult of Pallas Athena.
Everyone should realise that probably what
that sculptural frieze that’s so beautiful
describes, may involve some human sacrifices.
Athenian imperialism wasn’t all that pretty,
even under Pericles and so on. The great cultural
project, in other words, may very well be
to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic
of religion while discarding the supernatural.
And I think acknowledging the evil that was
part of its creation in the first place. That
is, we can’t condone the beliefs and practices
of those Aztecs but we can stand in awe of
and want to preserve their architecture and
many other features of their culture. But
not their practices and not their beliefs.
I once did a British radio programme called
Desert Island Discs, where you have to go
on and choose your six records which you take
to a desert island, and talk about it. And
one of the ones I chose was Bach Mache dich,
mein Herze, rein. It’s wonderful sacred
music
and the woman questioning me couldn’t understand
why I would wish to have this piece of music.
Pious.
It’s beautiful music and its beauty is indeed
enhanced by knowing what it means. But you
still don’t actually have to believe it.
It like reading fiction. You can lose yourself
in fiction, and be totally moved to tears
by it, but nobody would ever say you’ve
got
to believe that, this person existed and that
the sadness that you feel really reflected
something that actually happened.
Yes, like the Bishop of Dublin preached a
sermon against Swift and said that he’d
read
every book of Gulliver’s Travels, and for
his part he didn’t believe a word of them!
(laughter). So that’s the locus classicus,
I think, of all that. Well, clearly we’re
not cultural vandals but maybe we should think
of the way in which so many people suspect
that that’s what we are. If I would accept
one criticism that these people make, or one
suspicion that I suspect they harbour, or
fear that they may have, I think that might
be the one. That it would be all chromium
and steel and
Yes, and very much so.
and no Christmas carols and no menorahs, and
no
Anybody who makes that criticism couldn’t
possibly have read any one of our
books.
Yes.
No. Well, that’s another problem, too.
Another problem is that the people that
the criticism isn’t just our books, it’s
so many books.
Yes.
and people don’t read them, they just read
the reviews and then they decide that’s
what
We’re about to have the Christmas wars,
again
of course, and this being the last day of
September, you can feel it all coming on,
but whenever it comes up, when I go on any
of these shows to discuss it, I say it was
Oliver Cromwell who cut down the Christmas
trees and forbade It was the Puritan Protestants,
the ancestors of the American Fundamentalists
who said Christmas would be blasphemy. Do
you at least respect your own traditions,
‘cause I do. I think Cromwell was a great
man, in many other ways as well. This is actually
a pagan festival.
Well, we were all outed with our Christmas
trees last year.
I have not the slightest problem with Christmas
trees.
No, no, we had our Christmas card with our
pictures of us.
It’s a good old Norse booze-up. And why
the
hell not?
Right.
Well, but it’s not just that, I mean, we
I like solstices as much as the next person.
We have an annual Christmas carol party, where
we sing the music and all the music with all
the words, and not the secular Christmas stuff.
And why not? Yes.
And it’s just glorious stuff. That part
of
the Christian story is fantastic. It’s just
a beautiful tale. And you can love every inch
of it without believing.
I once at lunch was next to the lady who was
our opponent at that debate in London.
Rabbi Neuberger.
Rabbi Neuberger. And she asked me whether
I said grace in New College, when I happened
to be a Senior Fellow. And I said of course
I say grace, it’s a matter of simple courtesy
and she was furious.
Oh, really?
Yes. That I should somehow be so hypocritical
as to say grace. And I had could only say
well look, it may mean something to you but
it means absolutely nothing to me. This is
a Latin formula which has some history, and
I appreciate history. Freddy Ayer, the philosopher,
also used to say grace, and what he said was:
‘I won’t utter falsehoods but I’ve no
objection
to uttering meaningless statements.’
(general laughter)
Yes!
Oh that’s very good. The Wykeham Professor?
Yes, with (inaudible)
(inaudible) was an old friend. Did we answer
your question on Islam?
Ah, I don’t know. Well, okay, I’ll ask
a
related question. Do you feel there’s any
burden we have, as critics of religion, to
be even-handed in our criticism of religion,
or is it fair to notice that there’s a spectrum
of religious ideas and commitments and Islam
is on one end of it, and the Amish and the
Jains and others are on another, and there
are real differences here that we have to
take seriously?
Well, of course they have to take them seriously
but we don’t have to do the network balancing
trick all the time. There are plenty of people
taking care of pointing out the good stuff
and the benign stuff and we can acknowledge
that and then concentrate on the problems.
That’s what critics do, and again, if we
were writing books about the pharmaceutical
industry, would we have to spend equal time
on all the good they do? Or could we specialise
in the problems? I think it’s very clear.
I think Sam’s asking more about
Well we could criticise Merck, if they were
especially egregious, as opposed to some other
company, I mean if we were focusing on the
pharmaceutical industry, not all pharmaceutical
businesses would be culpable in the same way.
Yeah right. Then the question is what? That
should we is there something wrong with
?
No I think you’re talking cross-purposes,
I think I think Sam’s asking about whether
we should be even-handed in criticising the
different religions, and you’re talking
about
evenhandedness about good versus bad.
Whether all religions are equally bad?
Yeah.
Right.
Whether Islam is worse than Christianity or
It seems to me
we fail to enlist the friends we have on this
subject, when we balance this. I mean, it’s
a tactic, it’s a media tactic, and in some
sense it’s almost an ontological commitment
of atheism to say that all faith claims are
in some sense equivalent. You know, the media
says that Muslims have their extremists and
we have our extremists. We have jihadists
in the Middle-East and we have
There’s an imbalance there, yeah.
people who kill (inaudible) doctors, and it’s
just not a real equation. I mean, with the
mayhem that’s going on under the aegis of
Islam, it just cannot be compared to the fact
that we have, you know people who (?missing
word) a decade, kill abortionists. And so
I think my commitment I mean, this is one
of the problems I have with the concept of
atheism is that I just think it hobbles us
in this discourse where we have to seem to
kind of spread the light of criticism equally
in all directions at all moment. And I think
we could, on any specific question, have a
majority of religious people agree with us.
I mean, a majority of people in this country,
in the United States, clearly agree that the
doctrine of martyrdom in Islam is appalling,
and not benign, and liable to get a lot of
people killed, and worthy of criticism. Likewise,
the doctrine that souls live in Petri dishes
even Christians, even 70 percent of Americans
don’t want to believe that, in light of
the
promise of stem cell research. So it seems
to me once we focus on particulars, we have
a real strength of numbers, and yet when we
stand back from the ramparts of atheism and
say it’s all bogus, we lose 90 percent of
our neighbours.
Well I’m sure that that’s right. On the
other hand, my concern is actually not so
much with the with the evils of religion as
whether it’s true. And I really do care
passionately
about that. The fact of the matter: is there,
as a matter of fact, a supernatural creator
in this universe? And I really care about
that. And so although I also care about the
evils of religion, I am prepared to be even-handed
because they all make this claim. Seems to
me equally upfront
Yeah. I would never give up the claim that
all religions are equally false. And for that
reason, because they’re forced by preferring
faith to reason, latently at least, equally
dangerous.
Equally false but surely not quite equally
dangerous, because
No, latently I think so.
Latently, maybe.
Because of the surrender of the mind. The
eagerness to discard the only thing that we’ve
got that makes us higher primates, the faculty
of reason. That’s always deadly.
Yes.
And always
I’m not sure there, I think
and I think
It’s potentially (inaudible)
The Amish can’t hurt me, but they can sure
hurt the people who live in their community;
they’re a little totalitarian system.
But not quite in the same way
The Dalai Lama claims to be a God King of
hereditary monarchy and inherited godliness.
It’s the most repulsive possible idea and
he runs a crummy little dictatorship in Dharamsala,
and it would be worse, and praises the Indian
nuclear tests, it would be worse. It’s only
limited by his own limited scope.
But if you added Jihad to that, you would
be more concerned.
The same evil is present. Every time I’ve
ever debated with Islamists, they’ve all
said: ‘Ah, you’ve just offended a billion
Muslims’, as if they spoke for them. As
if
there’s a different threat to this, a menace,
a military turn to what they say. In other
words, if they’d said ‘You’ve just offended
me as a Muslim’, it doesn’t quite sound
the same, does it? If they were the only one
who believed in the prophet Muhammad. No,
no, it’s a billion! And by the way, what’s
implied in that is ‘watch out!’ I don’t
care. If there was only one person who believed
that the prophet Muhammad had been given dictation
by the archangel Gabriel, I’d still say
what
I was saying.
Right, but you wouldn’t lay awake at night.
And it would be just as dangerous that they
believed that, yes. It would, ‘cause it
could
spread. The belief could become more general.
Well, it has, in the case of Islam, it has
spread, and is spreading, and so it’s danger
is not only potential but actual.
Yeah. I can see no contradiction
Yes but over space and time, I think this
tremendously evens out. I mean I didn’t
expect
ñ I’m sure, neither did you ñ in the sixties,
that there would be such a threat from Jewish
fundamentalism, of relatively small numbers
but in a very important place, a strategic
place in (inaudible) deciding to try and
bring on the Messiah by stealing other people’s
land, and trying to bring on the end. Numerically
it’s extremely small, but the consequences
that it’s had, have been absolutely calamitous.
We didn’t used to think actually of Judaism
as a threat in that way at all, until the
Zionist movement annexed the messianic, or
fused with it, because the messianists didn’t
used to be Zionists, as you know, so, you’d
never know when it’s gonna be next.
Well that I certainly
I agree, I’m not likely to have my throat
cut at the supermarket by a Quaker, but the
Quakers do a lot of the work by saying we
preach nonresistance to evil. That’s as
wicked
a position as you could possibly hold.
Given the right context, yeah.
I mean, what could be more revolting than
that? Say you see evil and violence and cruelty
and you don’t fight it?
Yeah, they’re free riders.
Read Franklin on what the Quakers were like
at the crucial moment in Philadelphia, when
there had to be a battle over freedom and
see why people despised them. I would’ve
then said that Quakerism was actually quite
a serious danger to the United States. So,
it’s a matter of space and time, but no,
they’re all, they’re all equally rotten,
false, dishonest, corrupt, humourless and
dangerous.
It’s true, I mean, there’s one point you
make here that I think we should say a little
more about, is that you almost can never quite
anticipate the danger of unreason. I mean,
when your mode of interacting with others
and the universe is to affirm truths, you’re
in no position to affirm. If the liabilities
of that are potentially infinite, I mean you
just don’t know. So to take a case that
I
raised a moment ago, stem cell research, you
don’t know going in, that the idea that
the
soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception,
is a terrible idea. I mean, it seems a totally
benign idea, until you invent something like
stem cell research, where it stands in the
way of incredibly promising, lifesaving research.
I mean, there’s something about dogmatism
which you can almost never foresee how many
lives it’s gonna cost, because the conflict
with reality just erupts.
Well, that’s why I think the moment where
everything went wrong, is the moment when,
the Jewish Hellenists were defeated by the
Jewish messianists. The celebration now benignly
known as Hanukah, so as it can not clash with
Christendom. That’s where the human race
took it’s worst turn. There’s a few people,
but they re-established the animal sacrifices,
the circumcision and the cult of Yahweh over
Hellenism and philosophy and Christianity
is a plagiarism of that. Christianity would
never have happened (inaudible) and nor would
Islam. No doubt there would’ve been other
crazed cults and so forth, but there might
have been a chance to not destroy Hellenistic
civilisation. Well, it’s not a matter of
numbers
You’d still have a Dalai Lama
it’s a matter of, if I may say so, memes
and infections, which would spread very fast.
Of course I would’ve certainly said in the
1930s that the Catholic Church was the most
deadly organisation because of its alliance
with fascism, which was explicit and open
and sordid, much the most dangerous church.
But I would not now say that the Pope is the
most dangerous of the religious authorities,
there’s no question Islam is most dangerous
religion and partly because it doesn’t have
a papacy. You can’t tell it to stop something
and make an edict saying
(inaudible) out of control, yeah.
But I would still have to say that Judaism
is the root of the problem.
Although it’s only the root of the problem
in light of the Muslim fixation on that
land. If the Muslims didn’t care about Palestine
we could have the settlers trying to usher
in the messiah all they want. There’d be
no issue. It’s only the conflict of claims
on that real estate.
Well, both sides have that, are fixated on
it.
Both sides are at fault, but the only reason
why 200,000 settlers could potentially precipitate
a global conflict is because there are a billion
people who really care whether those settlers
tear down the Al-Aqsa Mosque,
Which it’s their dream to do, because they
have the belief that one part of the globe
is holier than another. Than which no belief
could be no more insane or irrational or indecent.
And so just a few of them holding that view
and having the power to make it real, is enough
to risk the civilisational conflict which
civilisation could lose. I mean, I think we’ll
be very lucky if we get through this conflict
without a nuclear exchange.
Actually, I think that’s a very good topic.
What are our most grandiose hopes and fears
here? I mean, what do you think reasonably
could be accomplished in the lifetime of our
children? What do you think the stakes actually
are, and
And how would you get there?
Yeah, I mean, is there something we could
engineer apart from just mere criticism? I
mean, are there sort of like practical steps?
I mean what with a billion dollars could we
do to effect some significant change of ideas?
Is there any practical
Well, I feel myself on the losing side politically,
and on the winning side intellectually.
But you don’t see anything to do?
Look, in the current zeitgeist. I don’t
think
we would be accused of undue conceit if we
said of ourselves, or didn’t mind it being
said of us, that we’ve been opening and
carrying
forward and largely winning an argument that’s
been neglected for too long. I mean, certainly
in the United States and Britain at this moment
that’s true, it seems to me, but in global
terms, I think we’re absolutely in a tiny,
dwindling minority that’s going to be defeated
by the forces of theocracy, which will probably
So you’re betting against us?
No, I think they’re gonna end up by destroying
civilisation. I’ve long thought so.
Well of course you may be right, because
but not without a struggle.
because it can be a single catastrophe
‘cause that’s my big disagreement with
Professor
Dawkins is that I think it’s us, plus the
82nd Airborne and the 101st, who are the real
fighters for secularism at the moment. The
ones who are really fighting the main enemy.
So in what sense do you disagree?
And I think, amongst secularists, that must
be considered the most eccentric
position that you could possibly hold. That’s
a tooth fairy belief among most people. But
I believe it to be an absolute fact. It is
only because of the willingness of the United
States to combat and confront theocracy that
we have a chance of beating it. Our arguments
are absolutely of no relevance in that respect.
well you may have many more takers, although
not on the territory of Iraq. It mean it may
be that we need the 82nd Airborne to fight
a different war in a different place, for
the same purpose, for the stated purpose.
Voila, by all means, there are reservations
to be expressed by me, which I happily give
you but in principle I think it’s a very
important recognition.
Unfortunately we’re running out of time,
And possibly tape.
