The God Delusion's creator, Richard Dawkins, joins me to discuss his new book, "Outgrowing God," and why he doesn't believe in God. We also talk about his work as a TV host and producer, and how he came up with the idea for Outgrowing God. And we talk about some of his most controversial interviews with people like Bill O'Reilly, Ted Haggard, and others who have challenged him on his beliefs. It's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having Richard Dawkins on the show. If you're a fan of Richard Dawkins or religion, you'll love this episode, because you'll get a chance to listen to him talk about the things he's written and the ideas he's come up with to counter religion. And if you're not a fan, you can skip right to the end of the episode and listen to Richard's interview with me, because it's a must-listen! Thanks to Richard for coming on the pod, and for being so generous with his time and his insights and wisdom. I really appreciate it. Thank you Richard for being on the podcast and for taking the time to talk about this episode with me. -- it was a lot of fun, and it was great to have you here on this episode of Thick & Thin. -Jon Sorrentino and we hope you all enjoy it! Timestamps: 8:00 9:00 - The God is Real? 11:30 - How do you know God? 16: What do you believe God is real? 17:15 - What's your favorite religion? 18:20 - What would you like to see in a movie? 19:40 - What is your favorite deity? 21:00- What are you'd like to have as a movie star? 22:30- What does God do? 25:00 | What are your favorite part of a movie about God's role model? 26:30 | What would God do in a film? 27: Does God do you think of you? 29: What kind of deity do you have in your life? ? 30:00 -- How would you want to see me talk about God in your head? 35:30 -- What is the most important thing you would you need to be? 36:00-- What is God s role?
00:00:58.000I mean, I like to think it's a funny book.
00:01:00.000But a lot of people do think it's hard in the other sense.
00:01:02.000And sometimes when they read it again, they realize, actually, no, it's more humorous.
00:01:08.000It's not so edgy, not so hard-hitting as they originally thought it was.
00:01:15.000Well, I think that's probably because you've had some interviews in the past where you have talked to some fiercely religious people and you've had some cantankerous interactions with them.
00:02:15.000I mean, freak them out with horrible little playlets.
00:02:20.000The devil coming on with horns and glowing eyes.
00:02:25.000I actually participated in a reenactment of that play in Los Angeles back in the day, a comedy reenactment.
00:02:33.000Bill Maher was in it, a bunch of other comedians were in it, and we read word for word the script and we acted it out in front of a live audience so people would come through the Hell House.
00:03:11.000Are you really serious that you like to...
00:03:14.000He said, hell is such a terrible place that anything I can do to persuade children not to sin and they must acknowledge Jesus and so on is worth it.
00:03:27.000I thought that was a deeply immoral thing to say, but I think he was sincere.
00:03:37.000There's a great documentary on it as well for someone who wants to see the thought process behind them creating this.
00:03:43.000But one of the things that I really enjoyed about The God Delusion is that you kind of outlined every single possible argument against atheism and then how to counter to it in advance.
00:03:54.000Like, if you have a soft position, look at chapter one.
00:03:59.000If you look at this, look at chapter And you outlined that in the preface before you got into it.
00:04:23.000Why is it that you think that there are so many religions and that basically every single civilization throughout human history has had some sort of deity, some sort of higher power?
00:04:37.000It's amazing the way they split and diverge and diverge and diverge.
00:04:42.000It's as though they somehow can't get along with each other.
00:04:47.000Maybe new leaders arise who have a leadership complex or something and want to found their own sector.
00:04:53.000Time and time again, you have breakaway religions, breakaway faiths.
00:04:59.000I don't know what the psychological reason for it is, but what I have noticed is that they usually… They hate the religion which is the closest to their own more than they do more distant ones and that has a certain biological ring to it too.
00:05:13.000That just kind of makes sense to a biologist looking at diverging species.
00:05:18.000Well, it almost seems like if you were studying human beings, if you were something that was completely alien to our civilization, our culture, and you were looking at this strange tendency To believe in something that there's no proof of and devote a massive amount of energy into defending that,
00:05:37.000put it into your songs and put it into, you know, your Pledge of Allegiance and all these, which of course was not until the 1950s.
00:05:44.000But all the different things that people have done in so many different cultures in regards to religion, it almost seems like a natural aspect of being a human being.
00:05:54.000You're right that they put an enormous amount of energy and effort and expense and time.
00:06:58.000I can understand why people might want to believe a priest who comes along and tells them you don't have to worry about death because you're going to survive it.
00:07:06.000I'm less understanding of people who make up stories to comfort either themselves or other people.
00:07:14.000I mean, a made-up story should not be comforting.
00:07:17.000I don't understand how a made-up story can be comforting.
00:07:19.000Of course, if you make it up and persuade somebody else, then they could find it comforting.
00:07:23.000On the other hand, is an afterlife really all that comforting?
00:07:28.000When you think about half of them believe they're going to go to hell, so it's anything but comforting.
00:07:35.000And also, even if you're not going to hell, if you're going to heaven, eternity in heaven, I mean, Sitting in heaven for not just billions of years, but trillions of years.
00:07:47.000I mean, these are time spans beyond our comprehension.
00:07:56.000I enjoy life, but if I had to live my life over and over again, infinitely, if I had an infinite number of this exact lives, I don't know how I'd approach that.
00:08:12.000I could do with maybe 200 years, but after that – no, I mean, I think that eternity is what's frightening about death, and eternity is best spent under a local – under a general anesthetic, which is what's going to happen.
00:08:48.000I asked advice of a cousin of my father who's just recently died who was a major expert on psychedelics and I think he was the one who introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline for example.
00:09:00.000And he judiciously advised against, he said that the horrors of a bad trip are so awful that he wouldn't advise somebody to go into it.
00:09:11.000My friend who's offering me this trip says it would be a relatively low dose and she would take another low dose so she could kind of accompany me and stop me jumping out a window or anything.
00:09:25.000Well, there's so many stories in so many ancient religions that seem to originate with the consumption of some sort of a psychedelic.
00:09:42.000I mean, you could see the connection if you were a primitive person with no access to science and you found some mushroom growing under a tree and consumed it and had this unbelievable experience.
00:09:53.000You would assume that you've transcended this life and gone into this other realm where God exists.
00:10:00.000I once thought that I would try a psychedelic when I was on my deathbed.
00:10:19.000I used to encourage people to do things all the time.
00:10:22.000Now, my thought is do whatever compels you, whatever you feel like it.
00:10:26.000But I would think that a person like yourself, who has this sort of rigorous belief that the lights go out and then that's it, I would think that that would be attractive to just at least dip your toes in.
00:10:43.000I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences that make me wonder what thoughts are and what consciousness is and whether or not there's some way that it transcends where we are now.
00:10:53.000Well, I wonder what consciousness is but it's pretty clear that it's to do with brains and brains decay and so I wouldn't hold out much hope if I were you.
00:11:04.000Well, certainly consciousness does have to do with brains, and we know brain damage severely perturbs consciousness.
00:11:10.000But there's some interaction with certain chemicals that makes this experience far different than what it is when we're on the natch, as we are right now.
00:13:53.000Super intelligent people who are deeply religious and who believe everything, everything from the resurrection to the Virgin Mary to everything.
00:14:01.000I assume that he would Believe possibly in the resurrection because they regard that as a kind of non-negotiable part.
00:14:08.000What surprised me was that he turned out to believe in all the other miracles as well, which I thought sophisticated theologians just don't do.
00:14:18.000I thought they said, oh, that's just a metaphor or it didn't really happen or that's not important, just symbolic or something like that.
00:14:27.000But he really believes in the whole lot.
00:14:30.000What was his interpretation of things like death for adultery and things like that?
00:15:23.000Plenty of respectable people, including presidential candidates, men in suits, appear to believe it.
00:15:31.000In the case of, I mean, I discuss it in Outgrowing God, in addition to the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith purported to translate another book called the Book of Abraham, which was in a different language, some ancient Egyptian language,
00:15:47.000And he published his full translation of the book of Abraham which he said was all about Abraham's journey to Egypt and lots of detail about Egypt and Abraham in Egypt and things.
00:16:00.000The original manuscripts were destroyed in a fire in Chicago and so he was safe from anybody exposing his translation.
00:16:13.000It was discovered that actually some of these manuscripts had survived and they had not been destroyed.
00:16:19.000And modern scholars who actually knew the language, including some Mormon scholars, translated it again, a true translation, which had nothing whatever to do with Abraham or Egypt.
00:16:32.000This is an absolute cast-iron demonstration that Joseph Smith was a complete fake and charlatan.
00:17:30.000I'm also very interested in the, perhaps even more recent things, the cargo cults of the Pacific, where, again, these actually arose in living memory.
00:17:45.000The worship of John Frum in some of the islands in the Pacific, where you can see what happened.
00:17:52.000And this gives you an insight into what must have happened with Jesus, where, you know, the Gospels weren't written down until decades after Jesus' death, if he ever lived, which he probably did.
00:18:06.000So having seen how easily the cargo cults arose, people who worshipped John Frum, worshipped Prince Philip, believed that cargo planes were sent by their ancestors and would build dummy airfields with dummy control towers and radar dishes and dummy planes on the airfield and things.
00:18:29.000And something like that, it's just so transparent that something like that went on in the early church.
00:18:37.000Well, the Scientology story to me is the most bizarre because it was literally, I mean, if you wanted to have a crazy religion, like what would be the most ridiculous religion for people to believe in?
00:18:48.000Well, and he even announced he was going to do it.
00:18:53.000But if you're going to have the most ridiculous religion, you would say, well, get a fiction author, particularly a bad one, a bad science fiction author who walked around in a jacket with medals on that he gave himself, and have that guy create a religion, a guy who is really self-diagnosing his own psychological issues and trying to deal with him through this concept of Dianetics.
00:19:16.000I'm sure you read Lawrence Wright's book.
00:19:18.000I haven't read it, but I mean, I know the story.
00:19:23.000And it's so strange that to this day, people are clinging to it.
00:19:26.000And it makes you wonder, like, what is it about these systems of belief that are so intrinsically attractive to people, so uniquely a part of being a person, these belief systems?
00:19:39.000I think I get it when there's childhood indoctrination involved.
00:19:42.000But in the case of Scientology, some of the celebrities who joined it, that's not childhood indoctrination.
00:19:55.000Especially the celebrity thing, because I've met quite a few of them out here, especially in the early days, the 90s before the internet came along and sort of exposed a lot of this stuff.
00:20:03.000And South Park, before they came along and exposed it, there was quite a few people that thought there was a career advantage to being a part of Scientology.
00:20:12.000There were so many successful actors that were a part of Scientology, and they seemed to be disciplined and focused, and they were avoiding drugs, and all the pitfalls of Hollywood fame and stardom.
00:20:25.000And they also seem to be helping each other.
00:20:28.000That Hollywood directors who were also Scientologists would look towards hiring Scientologists producers and actors.
00:21:07.000Steven Pinker, you probably had him at some point.
00:21:10.000He makes the point that so much of what we believe, we humans generally believe, is not about evidence, but is about, is this part of my tribe?
00:21:27.000Jonathan Haidt also makes the same point about Republicans and Democrats.
00:21:30.000There's a fierce tribalism going on and it accounts for so much of what people believe as opposed to actually looking at the evidence.
00:21:42.000The Center for Inquiry, which my foundation has just merged with, is of course all about trying to get people off that sort of thing, a sort of irrationality.
00:21:49.000And to instead evaluate claims on the basis of evidence, critically evaluated scientific evidence.
00:21:57.000But it's hard because people have other motives like emotion, tribalism, things like that.
00:22:05.000Well, people find great comfort in these belief systems.
00:22:10.000I've often said that it gives them some sort of scaffolding for their structure of the world, their ethics, their morals.
00:22:18.000They can use religion as some sort of a mechanism to help them get by, something that they can climb on to ease some of the confusion of the unknown.
00:22:31.000I'm sure that's true, but I don't understand why anybody therefore thinks that therefore the religion is true.
00:22:38.000Why would you think that because it provides you with a scaffold you can climb on?
00:22:43.000I could understand you erecting a scaffold that was, say, gymnastics or a certain diet or something like that, but a belief about the universe That's either got to be true or not.
00:22:56.000And it doesn't make it true just because it's comforting or provides you with a scaffold to climb on.
00:23:01.000Well, it's almost like it's a spiritual system like a placebo effect, like a spiritual placebo effect.
00:23:09.000And by believing that this is true, it gives you this comfort and allows you to condense your thoughts into a better path.
00:23:19.000The placebo effect, of course, is very real, and doctors know about it.
00:23:23.000But did you know that the placebo effect works even if the patient is told it's a placebo?
00:23:33.000Well, sometimes people doing things and knowing that they're doing things gives them this sort of feeling of momentum, of accomplishment, of progress.
00:23:43.000And I think so many people are just so adrift I think the main reason why so many people believe in homeopathy,
00:24:02.000which not only doesn't work but cannot work, Is the placebo effect.
00:24:08.000It's partly they're going to get better anyway, of course, but it's also the placebo effect that a homeopathic, I won't say doctor, a homeopathic practitioner gives them a nonsensical piece of medicine.
00:24:20.000And they believe it's going to work and so it does.
00:24:24.000And so the placebo effect is important.
00:24:27.000The CFI, Centre for Inquiry, has actually got a lawsuit going on at the moment against pharmaceutical shops selling homeopathic remedies.
00:25:11.000Real doctors used to prescribe placebos all the time.
00:25:14.000But they're now no longer allowed to because it violates human rights.
00:25:18.000But homeopaths are allowed to, bizarrely, because they don't call them placebos.
00:25:24.000If they did, they wouldn't be allowed to.
00:25:25.000Well, I have a similar thought about chiropractic work, that chiropractors do relieve pain for some people, but there's no reason why it works.
00:25:35.000I would not be totally surprised if it worked.
00:25:40.000I would absolutely be surprised if homeopathy works.
00:25:43.000It cannot work because there's no active ingredient.
00:25:46.000I can't wait to tell you the story of chiropractic medicine then.
00:25:49.000It was created by a guy who is a magnetic healer who was murdered by his own son and his son took over the business and started saying that it can cure everything from leukemia to heart disease, everything, all by manipulating the spine.
00:26:01.000It was done in the 1800s and there's no science behind it at all.
00:26:05.000But yet so many people have found pain relief and chiropractors today It's weird to lump them all in together, but many chiropractors today do do good work because they incorporate legitimate modalities in terms of like rehabilitation,
00:26:22.000like cold laser and all these different massage remedies and all these different things that actually physically work.
00:26:29.000I know a woman who is a horse chiropractor.
00:26:33.000But the point I'm trying to make is that whereas it's an empirical question whether chiropractic works, in the case of homeopathy it cannot work.
00:26:49.000Well, they say it can work because water has a memory.
00:26:54.000But if they could prove that water has a memory, they'd get the Nobel Prize for physics and they're not going to.
00:27:01.000One of the things that I really enjoyed about your book was when you explain to people that everyone who practices a religion is an atheist.
00:27:10.000You're just an atheist in regards to Zeus or Apollo.
00:27:22.000Yes, but that really is a home run because this concept of, you know, me and my friends jokingly would always say praise Odin when anything would happen that was pretty good or cool.
00:27:35.000We say praise Odin and I started doing it online and people really got into saying praise Odin about certain things.
00:30:28.000There are lots of different religions and Hindus believe in hundreds of gods and Jews believe in one god and Muslims believe in one god and they don't believe in Jesus and just lay out all the different religions.
00:30:42.000That would be a very good educational exercise.
00:30:45.000Has there ever been a civilization that existed without a belief in a higher power?
00:30:52.000Of course, there are plenty of individuals who educate that do not believe in a higher power.
00:30:58.000I think it's probably true to say that every – I mean anthropologists might deny them and there might be some tribe that doesn't, but I suspect they all do.
00:31:07.000Well, there's been some tribes that worshipped animals and particularly animals that they survived off of.
00:31:13.000And river gods and thunder gods and moon gods and sun gods and fire gods and things, yes.
00:31:21.000When you look at human civilization and you go back to the origins of religion and you look towards the future, do you envision a time where humanity is free of what you would consider irrational belief systems or belief systems that are not based on fact?
00:31:38.000I'm not sure that it'll come soon, but I do, and I look forward to that time, of course.
00:31:44.000I think we're moving in the right direction, and the figures bear that out in history.
00:31:49.000Even in America, which is off the scale of Western civilizations, even in America, the number of people who now subscribe to a religion is dropping dramatically,
00:32:05.000and the number who say they have no religion is now about 25%.
00:32:27.000So politicians will go out there and suck up to, I don't know, the Irish lobby, the Polish lobby, the Jewish lobby, the Catholic lobby, etc.
00:32:37.000Hasn't got his act together, or is only just now beginning to get his act together.
00:32:41.000Well, politically, I think people are terrified of the concept because it's such a long branch to go out on.
00:32:49.000One of the things that you brought up in The God Delusion was...
00:32:53.000The willingness of people to vote for a gay candidate for president, a black candidate for president, a woman candidate for president, but then an atheist, which is I believe 40 percent?
00:33:03.000They think that you've got to have a belief in some kind of higher power in order to be moral.
00:33:09.000But the weird thing is that it doesn't have to be the same higher power as the one you believe in.
00:33:14.000Anyone will do as long as there is one.
00:33:17.000But if you don't believe in higher power, You must be immoral.
00:33:23.000And that is totally ridiculous when you think about the...
00:33:28.000Horrible immorality of, for example, both the Bible and the Koran, which are horrific in the sense that if you actually got your morals, if you got your moral values from the Old Testament or the Koran, and they share a great deal of course,
00:33:44.000you would be stoning adulterers to death and stoning people to death for breaking the Sabbath and doing sacrifices, human sacrifices and animal sacrifices.
00:33:55.000All sorts of horrible things, which of course do go on now in Islamic countries especially.
00:34:02.000Gay people getting thrown off high buildings and women being beheaded for the crime of being seen with a man, not their husband and that kind of thing.
00:34:12.000So we can see what you get when you get your morality from Islam.
00:34:35.000Where do you think people get their morals and their ethics from?
00:34:38.000That's a profoundly difficult question.
00:34:40.000We clearly don't get them from religion.
00:34:44.000And yet we get them from somewhere, and you can demonstrate that by the fact that the moral values of any particular century are markedly different from those of other centuries, even decades.
00:34:58.000So in the 21st century, we here now have moral values which are really significantly different from 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago.
00:35:10.000And Within any one of those centuries, you could take people who are in the vanguard of moral progress.
00:35:20.000For example, in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley would have been on the liberal progressive end of the spectrum and other people would have been on the opposite end.
00:35:35.000But even Abraham Lincoln, for example, He made a speech that I quoted in Outgrowing God in which he said, of course, nobody would seriously think that black people are the equal to white people.
00:35:47.000Nobody would seriously say that black people should be allowed to vote or should be allowed to marry white people.
00:35:54.000This is Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and was, as I say, in the forefront of progressive thought.
00:36:02.000Charles Darwin again was in favor of freeing the slaves.
00:36:06.000He was passionately anti-slavery, but he too Thought that there was no question about black people being equal of white people.
00:36:16.000And Thomas Huxley, again, Darwin's bulldog, thought the same way.
00:36:22.000Now, those people were at the forefront, as I say.
00:36:26.000Today, they would still be in the forefront and they would be horrified to look back on what they said in the 19th century.
00:36:34.000Well, something is changing as the centuries go by.
00:36:38.000In Outgrowing God, I call it something in the air, which of course doesn't explain anything.
00:36:43.000But what I mean by that is that it's not literally hovering in the air, but it's a collection of conversations between people, dinner party conversations, parliamentary decisions,
00:37:00.000congressional debates, judicial decisions by judges, juries, newspaper articles, journalism, all these things together Conspire together to produce something in the air,
00:37:15.000something that defines a given century or maybe even a given decade with the moral values of that decade.
00:37:26.000The knowledge base, which is just so superior today in terms of what the general public has access to in terms of what we understand about human beings.
00:37:36.000It's just different than it was back then.
00:37:54.000That progress of something in the air will, as it were, take on an accelerated pace because of the internet.
00:38:00.000And I think that's a very hopeful sign.
00:38:02.000Of course, the internet also can be used for the opposite purpose.
00:38:05.000But I think there's a kind of asymmetry there because especially if you look at benighted areas of the world like Afghanistan and Pakistan where… Until recently, the idea of being an atheist was simply inconceivable.
00:38:23.000It wasn't something that they thought was possible.
00:38:27.000Now they do, because they got the internet.
00:38:30.000We've got a project within CFI of downloading, free of charge, as PDFs, several of my books, including The God Delusion, and will be Outgrowing God as well.
00:38:42.000And these are being downloaded by large numbers of people.
00:38:45.000The first PDF download of the Arabic edition of The God Delusion was downloaded 13 million times.
00:38:57.000They are being exposed to the possibility of atheism, which wasn't a possibility.
00:39:03.000Of course, the internet is also exposing them to Islamic propaganda, but they've had that all along, from imams, mullahs, and their madrasa schools.
00:39:13.000But now they've got it coming the other way as well, and I have great hope that the internet will mark a turning point.
00:39:20.000Do you think that people need a structure and is it possible to give them a secular structure that mimics religion?
00:39:27.000There's certainly some sort of a community aspect to religious worship.
00:39:31.000I don't feel that very strongly in myself but I'm aware that many other people do and there are people who are – I'm interested in starting up sort of atheistic or secular meet-up groups on Sundays and lectures.
00:39:45.000Yeah, my worry is that that will become a sex cult.
00:40:23.000The worry is that once someone gets into a position of being the person who gets to speak, the alpha, the one who's on the stage addressing people and giving them the doctrine, that he becomes far too attractive for his own good.
00:40:38.000Well, that would not surprise any naive Darwinian who would say, what on earth do you think the dominant chimpanzee becomes dominant for?
00:41:10.000I mean all I really care about is scientific truth and that's what I'm trying to – That's very admirable, but I think for some people it represents bonding of the community.
00:41:21.000You could have concerts and lectures and book clubs.
00:41:24.000I think when they get together and they talk about all the values that Jesus proposed, if Jesus is the higher power, it gives them this sort of, again, moral scaffolding to live their life.
00:41:47.000Most of the scholars I've talked to say he probably was.
00:41:50.000The evidence is not great, of course, but I think I don't think it's that big a deal actually because he, I mean a wandering preacher called Yeshua or Yehoshua would not be surprising.
00:42:06.000I mean it's a common name and there are plenty of wandering preachers.
00:42:10.000What would be very surprising would be if he raised Lazarus from the dead and walked on water and turned water into wine and that of course didn't, did not happen.
00:42:21.000Well, why couldn't people just drink water either?
00:42:53.000I originally wanted to write a book for the young children.
00:42:58.000And publishers didn't want to do that.
00:43:02.000So they kept pushing the age range up and so it stabilized at about 15. But I think 14 – well, the first chapter has been read by one 10-year-old of my acquaintance.
00:45:45.000Is there any evidence that that is reaching the Muslim world as well and that people are?
00:45:51.000Well, as I was saying, the downloads of my books have been encouraging.
00:45:58.000We have this thing called – CFI has a thing called the Translation Project, which is specifically in order to do that, in order to take my books and we hope other people's books as well and put them into PDFs and then have them available for free download.
00:46:15.000I hear evidence from Iran, from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, from individuals who say, yes, there's now quite a substantial groundswell of anti-religious, anti-Islamic opinion.
00:46:30.000And I think it's going to increase, and I'm really encouraged by that.
00:46:34.000One of the things about being Muslim, in my eyes, is very similar to being Jewish, is that Jewish people, there are many Jewish people that are not religious, but they are Jewish.
00:46:47.000Like, I have a very good friend, my friend Ari.
00:47:25.000And I think that there are probably cultural Muslims who probably not for the same degree of loyalty but clearly think of themselves as Muslims.
00:47:37.000I suppose I meant cultural Anglican in a way.
00:47:40.000I mean I sort of I can sing the hymns and my family observes Christmas in a desolary sort of way.
00:47:49.000When someone sneezes, do you say, bless you?
00:48:42.000It begins with what we were talking about earlier, the sheer number of different gods.
00:48:46.000And then moves on to the Bible and how unreliable a source of information it is.
00:48:52.000And both the Old Testament and the New Testament, they get a chapter each.
00:48:56.000And then there's a couple of chapters on morality and why you don't need, well, not only do you not need religion to be moral, you better not have religion if you want to be moral.
00:49:06.000And then the second half of the book is about science.
00:49:10.000Because I think that One of the, possibly the major reason people still cling to religion is a belief that the world is so complicated, especially the living world is so complicated that it cannot be explained by purely scientific means.
00:49:30.000And so I've set out to disabuse them of that and to show how Even the most radically complicated and beautiful and elegant pieces of animal design can be and are explained by science.
00:49:51.000The argument that it's too complicated for it to not be of a divine… Well, I'm not sure it's weird.
00:49:57.000It's kind of understandable until you've thought about it for a bit because complicated things don't just happen.
00:50:05.000Complicated things like these cameras and this computer and things like that… We all know they had to have an engineer design them and factories to build them.
00:50:16.000And they're very, very improbable things, statistically improbable.
00:50:20.000The components of a computer or a camera, if you jumbled them up at random, they wouldn't work, obviously.
00:50:28.000So it's kind of pardonable that people should think there must have been a designer.
00:50:33.000But then you think a bit further and you realize that the designer himself would need just the same kind of explanation.
00:50:40.000And therefore the designer is not an explanation that flies.
00:50:45.000And philosophers before Darwin, philosophers like Hume realized that, but didn't have anything to put in its place.
00:50:55.000Darwin came along and gave them That which you need to put in his place.
00:51:01.000And Hume would have loved Darwin if only he'd lived long enough to meet him, to meet his ideas.
00:51:07.000So I think we have to have sympathy for people who think that complexity must mean design.
00:51:16.000But nowadays we know better, and that's what the second half of Outgrowing God is about.
00:51:37.000Yes, that was Christopher Hitchens' favorite one.
00:51:42.000We have in the Center for Inquiry a program, it actually came over from the Richard Dawkins Foundation when we merged, called TIES, the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, which is teaching teachers how to teach evolution.
00:51:57.000Because middle school teachers in this country apparently are not, don't have science degrees and they don't really know how to counter, how to combat evolution.
00:52:09.000The pushback that they get from children and parents and school boards and things specifically against evolution.
00:52:19.000And so we are teaching teachers how to teach evolution.
00:53:13.000So I've always wanted to write a book for young people.
00:53:19.000And of course, it's highly necessary when you see the enormous and pernicious influence of fundamentalist religion, especially in this country, actually.
00:53:28.000Now, the science aspect of it, this is, I mean, obviously when you're talking about the science of evolutionary biology and natural selection and random mutations and all these different things that lead to a thing becoming a human being over the course of billions of years, it's such a complex idea for people to grasp.
00:53:49.000How do you condense it and sort of simplify the path, introduce them to the works of these great scientists that have sort of established these ideas for them?
00:54:00.000It's actually a very simple idea, but it plays out in very complex ways.
00:54:06.000And I think the main problem from a didactic point of view is that The results are so complex that it's hard to believe that anything so simple as natural selection,
00:54:21.000non-random selection of randomly varying genes could really be responsible for producing something as complicated as a human body.
00:54:36.000Getting around, beating that barrier of incredulity.
00:54:41.000If the idea was more complex, in a way it might be easier.
00:54:44.000That's the fact that the idea is so simple.
00:54:46.000I think that may be why it took so long for a Darwin to come on the scene.
00:54:52.000When you think about it, the middle of the 19th century is rather late, 200 years after Newton did The face of it, much cleverer things, and yet it was another 200 years after Newton before Darwin came along.
00:55:07.000I think the reason for that is that the idea is just too simple.
00:55:13.000It's almost ridiculously simple to be big enough to achieve the feat of explaining the complexity of any part of an animal, really, let alone a whole animal.
00:55:30.000Examples that you point to in nature where observable evolution has occurred?
00:55:35.000Because there have been some where we've seen observable evolution over the course of, you know, the last...
00:55:41.000Yes, I mean, Dawid himself made great play of domestication, which is very fast and which has occurred in historical times.
00:55:51.000So we can see how wolves have been changed into Pekingeses and Poodles and Labradors and Spaniels.
00:55:59.000And that's a very, very major change to have occurred in only a couple of thousand, a few thousand years.
00:56:07.000And we see the same with cabbages and with roses and with horses and all sorts of other things.
00:56:15.000That's artificial selection, not natural selection.
00:56:18.000Everybody knew about artificial selection, of course.
00:56:21.000Farmers and gardeners and pigeon fanciers all knew about it.
00:56:26.000Darwin's great insight was to say you don't need a human selector, you don't need a human breeder to do the transformation from wolf to Pomeranian.
00:57:19.000And then the industrial revolution in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries caused the woods around industrial areas like Manchester and Birmingham to become blackened.
00:57:43.000And the mutant black moths were not picked off by birds.
00:57:46.000And so what happened was that the percentage of black moths in the populations around industrial centers like Birmingham and Manchester, they became much more numerous.
00:57:58.000And the light-colored ones became almost extinct in those areas.
00:58:03.000But at the same time, the light-colored moths in rural areas, far from industrial pollution, like Devon and Somerset, stayed with their original color.
00:58:16.000And this was worked out beautifully by a man in Oxford actually called Bernard Kettlewell.
00:58:24.000And he showed, he actually went and sampled in these different areas and also did experiments showing birds actually picking off light-colored moths in dark areas and vice versa.
00:58:39.000That's one that we can trace, that we can trace.
00:58:42.000Yes, because the Industrial Revolution was only a couple of hundred years ago.
00:58:46.000So that's an excellent example for people to see.
01:00:03.000But when you're living in the present and you're thinking of yourself and you're thinking of biological life, it's hard for a person to see things on those scales, which is one of the reasons why I think for many people that aren't educated in these sort of subjects,
01:00:19.000to buy into this concept of some sort of intelligent design.