The Atheism Tapes (2004) s01e06 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.
One of the first people I talked to on making the series on atheism was the Cambridge theologian Denys Turner whose inaugural lecture on taking up the Chair of Theology was entitled "How To Be An Atheist".
As it happens, the conversation we had was never included in the final series, since it turned out to be much more to do with the current relationship between theology and philosophy than it was about the history of disbelief.
However, Professor Turner's theological arguments were so interesting and so forceful that I'm pleased now to have the opportunity to show them at their full length.
Denys, I'm reluctant, as you'll see, for reasons we'll discuss, to use the word atheism of myself.
I'm reluctant to call myself an atheist.
But I get the impression from your inaugural lecture that you feel that us atheists - if I can use that term of ourselves - have somehow, A - missed the target, and also, from the title of your lecture, that atheism is an achievement of some sort, or it's something which one can get good at and one can do it badly or achieve it badly.
I wonder if you could explain to me, first of all, why it is you feel that atheism is something which you have to practice, and practice makes perfect, and we've got it wrong.
Well, I think that you've got to find a way of avoiding a certain kind of question if you're going to be a proper, card-carrying atheist.
I think one begins to be a theist when one realises that there's a certain kind of question which gets swept off the agenda.
And my point was, you have to work quite hard to ensure that question doesn't keep on re-emerging.
And that question is the question - why is there anything at all? As distinct from - how are things, given that we've got them? And I think it takes quite a lot of work, really, to be sure that your position is secure against that kind of question re-emerging, and I think it just does.
Marx once said that each age asks only such questions as it can answer, and it's the cutting back on the agenda of questions which seems to me to be the important issue here.
Even more important than the question about whether God exists is the question of what questions are legitimate, and a standard answer to the theistic position in our time is that the question which the name "God" appears to be some sort of answer to doesn't make sense as a question.
It gets ruled out.
So, it's the agenda of questions, which is where I would start.
And why is it that a culture limits itself to asking a set of routine questions, which it has, handily, the methodologies for answering? It's almost as if the methods we've got for answering questions dictate what questions we allow to be asked, and I thing that there's a very troubling question which niggles on the edge of all the other questions.
If we can get back to that bigger, more awkward question, but return for the moment to that card-carrying atheist.
I always get the impression that the card-carriers, and there were more of them once than there are now is it not the case that the reason why there were so many explicit article-writing, card-carrying atheists who affirmed their position and recruited people and so forth - people like Bradlaugh for example, or Annie Besant and John Stuart Mill, for instance - that the reason why there so explicit card-carrying was that they were up against a formal institution which forbade there being a disbelief.
Sure.
Those were the days when it was intellectually interesting to be a card-carrying atheist.
I think it ceased to be intellectually interesting, which is why I find the likes of a card-carrying atheist like Richard Dawkins to be really just an inverted image of a certain kind of rather narrowed-down theism.
There's a sort of fundamentalism about Dawkins' atheism which matches, as in the reversing of a mirror image - that which he's rejected.
It seems to me there's a certain locking of that card-carrying atheist into a fixed form of theism, which it opposes, if you like, also matches on the atheist's side the refusal to ask certain sorts of questions on the theistic side.
To give you a practical example, it seems to me that if you suppose that in this world there is a space which must be occupied by evolution, and that whatever space is occupied by evolution, God has to be excluded from, then it doesn't really matter which way round you have it If you're an evolutionary theorist, you're going to have to exclude God.
If you're a theist of the same sort, you're going to have to exclude evolution.
And there is, as it were, an equivalent fundamentalism on either side.
Which is why, I think, much more troubling to a theist is the position of indifference than that of militant atheism.
Your position as distinct from Dawkins', for example.
Why is it troubling to you that there should be people like myself, for whom it's a matter of indifference, to whom - to speak for myself - the question really never occurred? It never entered my mind when I was a child.
I heard people using this strange glottally stopped monosyllable and never new what it was they were talking about.
I've had a more intellectually exciting life than yours.
I think everything does hang on the question of whether God exists or not, and I think that on the other hand, I'd like to re-educate some of the card-carrying atheists in to what it is they should be denying, as distinct from what it is they DO deny.
On the other hand, it does seem to me that there are questions that remain to be asked.
I think challenging people to ask them, and asking them why it is that when presented with a question - why is there anything at all rather than nothing? - they seem to rule it out as an intelligible or sensible question or, at any rate, as a question which doesn't matter.
It seems to me that it must matter, though in a rather peculiar sort of way.
It's not going to make any difference to how you understand the world if the answer is "there must be something which accounts for the fact "that there is anything rather than nothing.
" It accounts for the EXISTENCE of what there is - not for the kind of world that it is.
I think that that as Wittgenstein said, it's not how the world is, but THAT it is that is the cause of astonishment.
I'd like to try and arouse people to a stronger sense of that astonishment that there is anything at all.
While I think there is something startling and remarkable about the fact that there is something, and that it never ceases to amaze and to produce all the feelings which religious people of various denominations say, "Where do you get your spiritual feelings from?" Whatever - I hate to use the word "spiritual" The feelings of awe of splendour, or what Freud referred to as "oceanic feelings" that I get are suddenly catching myself out and saying, "It's amazing that my consciousness exists "and my consciousness has content at all.
" But where I find I differ from you, even in this attenuated, non-idolatrous form of theism, is that if you can ask the question, "Why is there anything at all?" and the answer to that seems to be, "There is something which accounts for it", then I find myself - why is there God then? Why does the question not go into a series of infinite regresses, asking the question about why the cause of it all, or the bringer about of it all, does not himself or herself require some sort of Now, you and I are engaged in an argument.
We could have a very complex and detailed discussion about that and it just seems to me that that's where I would want to start - with the sense that there is a problem here.
And that there is a problem here at least moves one away from that condition of absolute intellectual indifference to the question of God.
There is a fight on now and it seems to me we're back in the days where it mattered what answer one gave to that.
I haven't answered your question.
I'm simply saying that your engaging with me on that question is already, in my book, to be doing something called theology.
Why does it have to be called theology rather than an extension of what one would call "natural science", which has taken many unpredictable turns to include, for example, a truly unseen world, a world of atoms - which we will never see - and then a world of subatomic particles, field forces and so forth? And, indeed, degrees of uncertainty which seem to be mathematically describable.
Those themselves are opening up all sorts of possibilities within the sphere of natural science which doesn't seem to require something beyond as an explanation.
I'm not sure that it does have to be called theology - I wouldn't bother about names there - but there is a reason, it seems to me, why it can't just be an extension of natural science.
It seems to me that there is all the difference in the world between the question concerning how things are and the question concerning THAT things are - a question which has to do with the fact that things are.
Because if you are setting that things are against a background of nothingness, then one's beginning to entertain questions about creation.
And the classical theistic doctrine of creation is that creation is ex nihilo - out of nothing.
It's a curious expression, as Thomas Aquinus pointed out, that nothing isn't a funny kind of something of any kind.
There isn't a kind of thing that the name "nothing" names.
There are philosophers who go about as if it did, but Thomas Aquinus was absolutely clear about it.
He said, "It's an odd sort of making that you're talking about.
"Because the negation against the out of is a making, but there's no "out of" going on here.
" One of the things that always worries me about these fathers and these theologians I have to mention, by the way, so as to prove that I'm not a one-off, that this is classical theism.
I know it's been going on a long time, but it always seems to me to be rather similar to the brilliant piece of improvisation my friend John Bird did when he played a frog footman in my production of Alice in Wonderland.
He improvised rather brilliantly suddenly in the Carroll mode when Alice is thundering on the door of the cooks' kitchen and can't get in.
And he says, "I'll tell you what I'll do for you" and she looks at him, and he says, "I'll tell you what I'll do.
Nothing.
" "Would that be any good for you?" He said, "I can't do it straight away, because all these things keep cropping up.
" Then he said, brilliantly, "If I was to do nothing for you, "I'd have to find time to squeeze it in.
" There is a beautiful intelligibility about that joke, but the reason why it's a joke is that we know that he's using nothing as if it were something about which we can talk.
But then I can't get my mind around the notion of this omnipotent creator existing in this nothingness, who then creates something out of the nothingness or brings something about, leaving the question of why is there a God at all.
I acknowledge the force of your bemusement about that, and, of course, so do the theologians, who say that it couldn't be the case that the god in question was a sort of thing.
The classical theologians say God is not any kind of thing, because if God were a kind of thing, God would just be one of the other kinds that there are - only a rather different one.
We're not talking about something that's on the map of creation.
We're talking about something which is off the map of creation, which is why what we're talking about, how we're talking now, is a kind of bamboozling nonsense, if you like.
That's, by the way, called negative theology - that is to say, knowing that you don't know what you're talking about.
And I think that's really what theology's about.
It's the sense that on the other side of our language is something which sustains it which can't be contained within it.
I think this is what Wittgenstein was after at the end of the Tractatus when he said, "What underlies how we say things "cannot itself be said.
" Yet that's what we call God.
But it could also be claimed that what lies beyond the possibility of being expressed or said is something about which you'd better be silent in order not to talk nonsense.
And you leave it at that, as Russell said when he was arguing with Father Copleston.
You simply have to say, "Well, that's what there is.
" But it doesn't seem to me that one can press the reiterated child's questions of "why" merely because it has a question mark behind it to an infinity, merely because you can reiterate at will.
Reiteration is not necessarily a sign of continuity.
No, no.
I agree.
I think there is an argument to be had as to whether the question makes sense or whether it isn't just, as it were, the irritating, childish pressing of a question beyond all possible meaning.
And I think there is a case to be made for saying that the question doesn't make sense, but you can't simply say the world is just a fact - there isn't anything more to be said about it.
That's a refusal to discuss whether the question does or doesn't make sense.
I just think there is an argument to be had here, and I think having that argument is already beginning to do theology.
As you can see from all this, theology, modern or otherwise, can be maddeningly obscure.
But what intrigued me, since Denys had been quite clear in his lecture that anything that went beyond the idea that God was the answer to the question "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" is mere idolatry What intrigued me was how Denys was able to apply this notion of God to his daily life.
You've already given me the position of an extremely attenuated initial state, or a NON-initial state, about which there is a legitimate question to be asked.
It seems to me that the way you describe it, it is so attenuated, this nothingness, that I find it hard to see it as being a content of belief, such that it could animate your life, give energy to your moral existence.
Here's a sort of soundbite answer.
Russell says, "the world is just simply given.
" It's a fact.
I would say nearly right, but not quite right, because the world is actually gifted.
That is to say, it comes, as it were, as a gift of a certain kind.
- But it is given - It is given in the sense that there is a giver.
Whatever it is that counts for the fact that there is what there is, is going to be the giver, the creator.
So, existence is a certain kind of gift.
My existence, or anybody's existence, or that there is anything at all is in the manner of a gift.
And, of course, one begins to move further in the direction of what I actually believe about things when we make this move from saying the world is simply given to saying that it has been given to us, that there is an author of it, it is given to us by a god who A further step down that line is this is not an ironic gift, this is a gift of a good and loving God.
There are all sorts of steps that have to be taken to get from that very, very primitive thought about the creator up to that sort of point.
And there are many obstacles to taking those steps with any degree of confidence - one of them of course being the immediate problem, the problem of evil.
Let's leave the problem of evil on one side for the moment.
Let's talk about the gift and the donor.
It seems to me that language being what it is, the notion of donation and gift and giving - are inseparable from the recipient.
- Yes.
What I would like to know is to whom is the gift donated? The only things that are in the position to be conscious recipients are human beings.
Now, if this donor is preparing this gigantic box of gifts, why is it that it took so long to create the grateful recipient? Why were there aeons of non-recipients? Is any other world possible than this world? One can invent possible worlds.
In fact, in some cosmologists' accounts, all the possible worlds do exist.
Indeed, they'd have to exist for THIS world, which we know of, to be the way it is.
It's one of the ways of trying to explain how come we've got what we've got.
But leaving that out of the question for the moment, why not this world? Is any other world? I have to reply to you in all ignorance.
I'm not a good enough physicist or mathematician to be able to conceive of alternative arrangements of subatomic particles and so forth.
But I'd like to leapfrog backwards a little bit, and it raises the question which I think you wanted to ask.
And we can ask it between ourselves.
The notion of gift presupposes intention.
And one of the things which I find, as someone trained in biology - and I think that Richard Dawkins would say this as well, and certainly Daniel Dennett does - that intentions and so forth don't start to appear in the universe until there are entities which have what Dennett would call "interests" maintaining themselves.
And these don't start to occur until very, very late in the history of the universe.
And I think that it's really putting the cart before the horse to start invoking intentions on the part of this maker, this gift-giver, when intending and having purpose seems to be something which occurs only when you get biological systems which have interests for which there are purposes of self-maintenance and survival.
I'm not sure in what way I'd want to get the word "purpose" in here.
I know there are questions about scientific explanation and how far it does or does not involve purposive concepts.
Some read evolutionary theory itself in a quasi-purposive fashion, though Dawkins won't.
I think an aesthetic account of what's going on here is better than a purposive one, where what one means by purpose is doing things as means towards certain ends, which are the intentions in questions.
It's much more to do with When you ask, "Why does the world exist?" It's much more like asking, "Why did Mozart write The Marriage Of Figaro?" Well, the quick answer is he needed money fast.
But a much better answer is because it was a wonderful exercise in his own creative process, in which there was great joy and it was a great joy, as it were, to those who performed it and then those who listened to it.
So, the thing is justified simply in terms of its inherent beauty.
That does connect with gifts, which, of course, etymologically is connected with the word "gratuitous".
You're not talking about a purpose for which it exists.
It exists simply because that sort of thing is beautiful.
To say of a thing that is beautiful IS to say why it exists.
If you ask, "Why beautiful things?" then I think you've already misunderstood what beauty means.
I still felt that I was in the dark.
And I simply couldn't understand how it could be that the creation was said to be a performance on God's part, carried out for aesthetic reasons or how this form of Christianity could become a faith you could practise in church without it being so simplified that it would become, in Deny's own words, idolatrous.
All right, let me accept your claim as you express it, and really press you to say in what sense is this a Christian theology and what does it mean, as it were, on Sunday? How does it construct your worship? In what sense do you, outside the daily practices of your life, in those parts of your life which you regard as your religious experiences and religious actions and religious feelings, what does it do? To whom, for example, to what are prayers directed, or are there such things as prayers in this, by your own admission, attenuated form of non-idolatrous religion? Quite often, I suppose that when I think I'm praying I am simply talking to myself in a kind of dialogue.
But there are times when one seems utterly at one's wits end and it seems clear that you are utterly at the mercy of something bigger than you are.
When you're at your wits' end, you're not very big, and it's not hard to find something bigger than you are when you're at the end of your wits.
But even when you're within your wits, you're constantly - unless you're merely going about your business and therefore distracted from the largeness of things What is it that makes the difference between merely saying, "What a beautiful sunset," "What a vast universe," "Why am I conscious of anything?" How does it differ from those sorts of bewilderments and amazements we all have? I don't really think it does, all that much.
If you're looking at it from the point of view of the experienced feel of it, I don't see that there's any difference at all.
I just think that sometimes giving it a name can make all the difference in the world.
But then for the pious atheist, which I would think of myself as - pious in the sense that I have episodes of piety.
They're not episodes of piety in which I am bewildered and find myself asking the question of why it is at all, but find myself shaken to the depths of my being THAT there is anything at all and by the strange mysteries of the fact that my scrambled egg in the morning is me by the end of the day.
Something as negligible as scrambled egg can become part of something as considerable as me.
Or considerable as anyone.
That seems to me to be the most mysterious form of incarnation - much, much grander than what happened in Bethlehem.
Why do we have to go back to Bethlehem in order to worship the extraordinary majesty of there being anything at all? Even without having to invoke an author for it.
I'm not sure that I would actually succeed in getting a merely philosophical argument going which demonstrated that this fact that there is anything at all is in the way of being a gift of a loving God.
I think that that would have to be revealed to be believed.
If only for the reason that there's so much counter-evidence.
Yes.
Well, in that case I want to ask you the question, for the religious person, in what way and in what manner and what episodes of revelation bring it to your consciousness? Everything.
It's either everything, you see, or simply not true.
It couldn't be in just some things.
It would have to be that creation is like that.
And therefore, everything has to be brought into the story in some way or another.
That is to say, I wouldn't be selective about it.
I wouldn't want to go down the line in which I said, "This reveals God, but that doesn't.
" As if you could explain some things in these terms but other things didn't fit.
It seems to me that's intellectually disincongruous.
It's got to be the lot.
You've either got to accept that everything in some way or another reveals God, including failure - and that is the most surprising thought, which is why a central part of the Christian story has to do with the way in which failure works within this.
If it weren't the case that everything could be included in the picture of what reveals God, including catastrophic failure, a failure of love - the mystery that if you do love, as Herbert McCabe put it If you don't love, you're scarcely alive, but if you do love, you'll almost certainly be killed.
That's the story of Jesus, it seems to me.
That is a totally inclusive story.
It says the whole lot, everything about it, is, in some way or other, a revelation of the mystery of love.
It's either the case that everything does or else your position is correct.
That none of it needs to.
You could look at it in a different kind of way and you don't need the story at all.
For me, it's merely the revelation itself But I don't think there's any rational argument which would settle the question between you and me.
I think it is a question of faith and whether one can accept it or not, at this point.
And it seems to me that one is talking about faith at precisely the point where one has gone that step beyond the point where you can have properly speaking philosophical argument about it.
So, when you ask me about the content of my belief, we've moved away from that which we can probably dispute.
Because you either accept my position or you don't.