The Atheism Tapes (2004) s01e03 Episode Script

In the summer of 2003, I began filming the series "Atheism, a Rough History of Disbelief".
As part of the process I talked to a number of writers, scientists, historians and philosophers.
Having secured their cooperation I was very embarrassed to find that a large proportion of what went on ended up in the cutting room floor, simply because the series would have lasted 24 hours otherwise.
But as it happens, the BBC agreed with me that the conversations were too interesting to be junked, and with these 6 supplementary programmes, they made the extremely unusual decision to go back to the original material and to broadcast at length some of the conversations which I had.
Conversations with people such as the English biologist, Richard Dawkins, the American philosopher, Daniel Dennett, the Cambridge theologian, Denys Turner, the American playwright, Arthur Miller, the English philosopher, Colin McGinn, and the American Nobel-prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg.
I've always enjoyed my private conversations with the American philosopher Daniel Dennett.
And I knew the importance he attached to Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the development of disbelief.
So I asked him why he'd called his book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and one of the points he made was simply that the Theory of Evolution was easy to understand, and that's what made it so dangerously subversive.
Unlike some other great scientific advances, going back to Newton or certainly Einstein or best case perhaps quantum theory; unlike these bizarre revolutions I think Darwin's theory is quite easy to understand.
You don't need any math.
The basic idea is so simple - that you have variation, that inevitably if there is variation in the population some are gonna be better than others, and the ones that are better than others are gonna have more kids than the less favoured ones, and the offspring is going to resemble their parents.
That gives you this little ratchet.
And indeed, the idea that you could do that much lifting with a simple ratchet is a stunner and most of the scepticism has been along the lines of, "Well, there's just too much work to be done by such a simple process.
" But time and again it's been shown no, there is enough time the process is more powerful that you might think.
But you can understand why it was that at the beginning these minute ratchets, minute teeth on the ratchet, would have been seen as implausible contributions to something which was an adaptation.
What I'm interested in is why do you think it was that Darwin's idea was seen as so dangerous rather than simply nonsensical.
For the first 50 years there wasn't enough information to make Darwin's idea anything other than implausible and irreverent.
Why was it seen as so dangerous at that time? Well, in spite of Darwin's best efforts, the implications were there for anybody to draw, and that is that he's not just talking about birds and bees and flowers, he's talking about us.
He's talking about our minds.
He's talking about our consciense.
Our soul.
Everything, if Darwin is right, is made up of little ratchets doing their little rachety thing.
And it's all just mechanical and blind and purposeless at the bottom.
This was the great inversion because, until then, the idea that there was something like a life force, "Élan vital", or that there was something like a a soul that was completely distinguished distinct from matter, and that it, somehow, informed and controlled and guided creative processes, thinking processes, moral reasoning and so forth.
This top-down idea about morality and self and soul was very plausible until Darwin.
And after Darwin people could see that maybe the soul could be replaced with some of those ratchets, and that's a very threatening idea.
So if Darwin had not produced this dangerous idea, do you think that the development of infidelity, atheism or disbelief or however one wants to call it, would have been delayed? I suppose that that's a historical question that one should do very careful research on, and I haven't.
But it seems very plausible to me that it was Darwin that broke the dam.
Because before Darwin there really wasn't a good answer to the question, "How did this come to be, "how did this bird with this wonderful wing, "how did it come into existence, if not by some divine active creation.
" The rethorical question, what else could it be, had no answer.
That was what William Paley had said and I think it's important to realize that Paley's argument from design is actually very, very powerful.
It challenges any thinker to come up with an alternative.
And Darwin called his bluff.
He didn't deny the Paley argument, he said "I'm going to meet it head on.
" "Yes, there's fantastic design in the biosphere, "and I'm gonna show you how you can get that design without a designer.
" However, even if Darwin had succeded in demonstrating how you can get the illusion of design without having to postulate the existence of a designer, is still hard to resolve the problem of the relationship between minds and brains.
So the philosophers, like Descartes for example, had long ago insisted that the brain and mind were entirely separate.
And even now there's a persistent belief that the mind, the soul, or whatever you want to call it, has an immaterial existence.
Well, Daniel Dennett has written eloquently about the problem of consciousness, so I asked him about Darwin's attitude to this problem.
Why was it that Descartes was able to preserve the immaterial soul, and Darwin somehow felt, albeit a Christian, that he did not feel it possible to preserve comparable sanctuary? That's a good question, and especially because Wallis was able to make precisely the Cartesian move.
Wallis, the co-discoverer of natural selection, said that it covered everything up to the human soul.
And he drew the line exactly where Descartes drew the line.
Wallis said, "No.
We have to make an exception for the human mind.
" And Darwin famously wrote him a letter saying, "I think you will kill our child.
" To Darwin it was clear that the Cartesian stop, the Maginot Line was indefensable, simply because it was clear that we're primates.
We're mammals.
The continuity of nature was not going to permit one species on the planet to have "miracle stuff" in its brain when no other species did.
I was once interviewed in Italy and the headline of the interview the next day was wonderful.
I've saved this for my collection.
It was "Si.
Abiamo un anima, "ma e fatta de tanti piccoli robot.
" Yes, we have soul.
But it's made of lots of tiny robots.
And that's exactly right.
Yes, we have a soul.
But it's mechanical.
But it's still a soul.
It still does the work that the soul is supposed to do.
It is the seed of reason, it is the seed of moral responsibility.
It's why we are appropriate objects of punishment when we do evil things.
Why we deserve the praise when we do good things.
It's just not a mysterious lump of wonder-stuff.
- Which will outlive us.
- Which will outlive us.
Yes, we do have to give that up.
And I'm sure that that's a big part of the inexhaustible appeal of the idea of a soul.
All you have to confront is the task of consoling a child whose parent has died.
And the natural appeal of the idea of a soul that goes on living is just undeniable.
It takes a strong person indeed to not to avail himself of that crutch when responding to a child who's just facing the loss of a loved one.
Or indeed an adult facing the loss of a loved adult as well.
- The loss of anyone.
- Sure.
So really what we're saying is that the notion of an immaterial soul, by definition, because it's immaterial is that is also indestructible.
I think the source of the idea of the immaterial soul that lives on after death is probably largely connected with the fact that the purpose of our living souls, the purpose of our brains, is to project into the future.
It's to foresee the future.
And to have plans and hopes about the future.
And those projects and plans and anticipations make us who we are, and we share them.
So we know that the anticipated trajectories of people, and we have our own anticipations for their trajectories, we have hopes for our children and fears for our friends when they go off and do dangerous things.
It's this forward-looking, future- producing activity of the nervous system which we can't just turn off.
And when somebody dies all of those projects are suddenly put into abeyance - it's hard to turn them off.
So it's the most natural thing in the world to go on thinking about them.
Thinking about, "Well, if Sam were still here, "he'd be saying this or we'd be doing this," and it's a short step from there to say, "Well, you know, he is still here.
"Well, not here but here.
" But I find it very hard to see how they can actually formulate or conceive the notion of an immaterial continuity of an unembodied self.
Of how it would know that it was in fact the thing that it'd once been, the embodied person with a particular name, with particular projects.
It always seems to me that the notion of projects and trajectories and hopes and plans and so forth, are all tied up with being embodied.
Oh, yes.
And I think that everybody cheats when they think about this.
In the way that scientists cheat too when they imagine hard-to-imagine things, so people, when they imagine an immaterial soul, they imagine a sort of ghosty, semi-transparent material object that's got arms and legs and a particular physical location, but just isn't quite physical.
It's sort of like a hologram.
They know that that's not right.
They know that a soul isn't really like that.
And they know they can't really imagine an immaterial disembodied soul.
But that's all right.
These things are hard to imagine.
You know, physicists can't imagine quantum mechanics and we can't imagine an immaterial soul, but, you know, we can try and it doesn't hurt to think about, you know, people playing harps sitting on clouds.
I often ask my students, when they were children and reading comic books or watching them on television, did it ever bother them that Casper the friendly ghost could both fly through a wall and catch a ball.
I say, "Why doesn't the ball just go right through his hand? And almost all of them say, oh yes, they had noticed this mildly discomforting inconsistency but everybody goes along with the gag.
But everybody notices that this is not really consistent.
All right, then.
Given the fact that both you and I subscribe to a.
a radical, unreformed Darwinism, how do we live with the notion of the mechanisation of our own picture, the radical mechanisation of our own picture.
What does it leave us with as persons, if in fact, we turn out to be these products of ratcheting? Well, I think it leaves us almost exactly where we've always been.
We get a clearer view of the actual machinery of our souls, if you like, but what we thought our souls were for, what they were good for, for loving, and for deciding, for making and breaking promises for reasons good and bad, that goes on.
We're just a little bit less disilusioned.
A little bit disilusioned, I should say, about the nature of that process, but our moral quandaries are what they were before.
Our moral aspirations are what they were before.
Our capacity to love or to hate are intact.
When I speak about Darwinism as a universal acid, it passes through - it changes everyting and it leaves everything the same too.
Finally, and this issue cropped up in many of my conversations, I wanted to know how difficult Daniel found it to publicise his disbelief in modern America.
But I started by asking him whether there had ever been a time when he himself had had religious beliefs.
Now, here you are from everything you've said and from everything you've written, I suspect that you and I, would in fact be called by other people atheists.
Was there a point at which you became one? Had you always been one? Or is there in fact a history of the development of disbelief on your part? I was raised in one of those bland New England suburban protestant faiths, the Congretional faith, which has hardly any creed at all, but lots of good hymns and ceremonies.
I went to Sunday school and learnt the books of the Bible in order - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, etc.
So I got a good deal of biblical lore, but not a stern religious upbringing by any stretch of the imagination.
And I was always interested in it intellectually, philosophycally - I was, you know, a little budding philosopher.
I suppose I was a teenager before I began to realise that my interest in this was, if you like, academic.
I didn't believe it at all.
And I didn't seriously think about whether I'd ever believed it, or whether it had been just part of a tradition that you just, you know, go along with it because it's a bit offensive to challenge something like this.
I mean, if you see a terribly obese person you don't walk up and say, "My God, your obese!" We don't do things like that, it's just impolite.
And if people around you are being devout, it's worse than rude to challenge them.
So I don't think I ever really I never had a conversion experience.
I just gradually realised that I didn't believe any of this.
I don't think I encountered many people in my youth who really believed in God.
I think most people who say they believe in God Most people in the West who say they believe in God, actually belive in belief in God.
I don't even believe in belief in God, that is they believe that belief in God is a really good thing.
It is something to strive for, something to be maybe proud of if you succeed.
Certainly you should try to believe in God and you certainly shouldn't make it hard for others to believe in God.
And the behaviour of someone who believes in belief in God is just the behaviour we observe.
You go to church, you sing hymns, you give money to the church, you and so forth.
If you actually believed in God you'd do all sorts of lunatic things, and we don't see many people doing those things.
They don't put their lives on the line for God, typically.
I thought it was a little bit like belief in Santa Claus.
It's something that we do, we talk about it, we sort of pretend to believe in God and maybe the immature ones actually believe in God, and then some people grow out of it.
Why is it that we have such compunctions about about people's faith and devoutness whereas we're perfectly willing to be rude and argumentative and difficult with people's political beliefs? What is it about the belief in the sacred which is sacred? I don't know, and I've been wondering that a good deal.
Because there are times when I think it would be much better if we were a lot franker and ruder about religious belief.
If we look around the world today I would say that, by far, more danger, more harm comes from religious belief on every side than help.
Yes, religions, at their best, provide succour and meaning and comfort to people who are really hard-pressed, and I think that's what we don't want to deny to people.
Yes, I mean, I don't, but nevertheless I'm often rebuked for being "bloody rude" about people's religious beliefs.
I have very few compunctions about getting into arguments, often in public places, about religion.
And I will then go away and my wife says, "You really mustn't talk like that to things that people hold sacred.
" And yet, she would be much less embarrassed if I was to have a stand-up row about Soviet Communism and about the atrocities committed by Stalin.
I myself do not think that truth is sufficient justification for saying something.
And I think we all know that.
We don't tell fat people they're fat, we don't tell ugly people they're ugly, we don't There's lots of things every day, we could go around saying things to people's faces that would be perfectly true, and we could prove them, and it would just be really mischiveous.
There's things about me that I'm glad I don't know and I hope other people don't know.
I certainly wouldn't want people going around spreading this around things about you There's lots of facts that we're just as well off not knowing.
That being so, any area of enquiry, especially something like philosophy, which gets so close to things that matter so much to people, I think we have to think seriously about what the, if you like, the environmental impact of putting a view out there is.
It's possible that some real mischief, some real harm might come from presenting a position which is in itself perfectly true.
But let's look at the boundaries of this.
If somebody is a member of a cult, as we say, we have no trouble being rude with them and laughing at the Raliens, or those people that got interested in the comet, various doomsday propheciers.
When the prophecies don't come true we laugh at those people and the world laughs with us at them.
So we have a line where we consider some religious belief to be just too kooky to take seriously, and we are rude with impunity in talking about those.
- But is it because they're a minority? - I think so.
I think that's all it is.
And I think this is just political.
If Christianity were a small sect in the world I think it wouldn't receive the respect.
But look at all those churches the Christians have built! Look at all the great art! Look at all the great music! It's hard to be rude to a religion which has created so much great culture.
I've had this friendly disagreement with Richard Dawkins over just this issue.
I said, "Richard, of course, I completely agree with you "but I don't think you want to hurt people's feelings.
"Why do you want to hurt people's" And for a long time I thought he didn't have a good reply to that and more recently I've been thinking, maybe I should hurt a few more people's feelings.
Maybe we should turn the tide a bit on this.
Maybe we should get out in front of this and Yes, we'll take some awful lumps because we'll be the rude, evil ones, but let's see if we can just move the barrier a little bit.
Maybe we should get out there with Richard and be more aggressive.
Just to open up the space behind us.
And I think this is true not just in this area, in religion, I think what America really needs right now is some outspoken, bold, serious liberals.
Yes, they can't be elected but let them get out there and make a big noise so that so that To move the center.
To move the effective center.
And, particularly in the United States where, in fact, it is very closely tied up with Christian belief.
It certainly is.
It's true that our own Prime Minister is a very pious Christian but I don't think one can detect as one can in Bush, and one can in the in the right wing of the Republican Party here, a constitutive relationship between right-wing politics and born-again Christianity.
Oh, yes.
They have the strange overconfidence of the religious zealot.
They're sure that the world is what their religion says it is.
There's the good guys and the bad guys.
We're the good guys.
And we will smite the bad guys.
Now, granted your increasing sense of the importance of being explicit and outright, and forthright about this, here you are, you've written some important, influential books on various aspects of philosophy and various aspects of science in which philosophy has interest.
It's hard to imagine an area in which philosophy would have more interests than religion.
What would you feel about writing a book which did, in fact, smite religion with the same energy that religion itself would like to smite people like us? I'd love to write that book if I could.
But, of course, what one fears is what comes afterwards.
And just how much disarray How right are the people who think that we need religion to preserve whatever veneer of civilization and good feeling we have? I think religion, for many people is sort of, you know moral Viagra.
They think some people need help being moral and don't deny it to them.
Well, if that's true, if religion does help people lead moral lives, then one should take very seriously the proposition that we're just going to eliminate it and let the devil take the hindmost.
Because the hindmost may be great many people and we might have the chaos that these people fear.
A lot of people many, many people they want their life to have a meaning, and where is it going to come from? Yes, but there must be something better than religion, I'm Yes, we certainly hope there is.
What's it going to be?