Richard Dawkins is one of the most influential philosophers, evolutionary biologists, social influencers, inventor of the term 'meme' and best-selling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. In this episode, Richard Dawkins discusses his views on the nature of God, evolution and the existence of a creator behind the laws of physics and evolution, and whether or not there is a creator at all. He also discusses the evolution of the human mind and how it relates to our understanding of the universe and the search for God, and how we can learn from the theories of Alfred Russel Wallace and C.S. Lewis, two of the world's most influential thinkers on the subject of religion and spirituality. And, of course, there's a bit of Russell Brand thrown in for good measure. See it first on Rumble, where you can catch up with Russell Brand! See it FIRST on Rumble! Subscribe to Rumble on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on your favourite streaming platform. If you like what you hear, please consider recommending it to a friend who might be in need of a good friend. Thanks for listening to Awakening Wonders! - Russell Brand. - Music: "Awakening Wonders" by Shadydave - "Intro" by Fountains of Consciousness (feat. John McDade and "Outro Music: "Goodbye Outer Space" by Jeffree Star - "Good Morning America" by Suneaters) Join us on SoundCloud: & "Awakenings Wonders" on Soundcloud: Subscribe & Share Us on Apple Podcasts Learn more about Awakening Wonders: Good Morning, Good Morning America - Subscribe to Awakenings? or Good Morning Earth by Subscribe To Our Podcasts? and Subscribe to Our Story? Subscribe on iTunes - Subscribe on Podchaser and Subscribe on Podcasts & Subscribe to Weebly Leave Us On Podcharity Send Us On Social Media - Subscribe & Review Us On Airdrocks & Weepus Music by You'll Get 7 Days of Good Morning's New Music by Instapreneurs? - Good Luck & Good Luck Thank You'll Hear Us Out There? If You're Looking Out There's a Friend's Reviewed By Meepus & We'll See Us On The Same Day & Good Morning Or Good Luck?
00:00:01.000It's Friday and of course every Friday, as you by surely are now aware, I have an in-depth conversation with intellectuals, visionaries, radical thinkers and spiritual leaders.
00:00:10.000Joining me today is one of the most influential philosophers, evolutionary biologists, social influencers, inventor of the term meme.
00:00:19.000He's the best-selling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion and I'm very excited to be communicating with Professor Richard Dawkins.
00:00:27.000Dickie Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, the foremost atheist in the land, talking to me, one of the world's most religiousist folks.
00:00:35.000Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can f*** off.
00:01:31.000I've been looking forward to speaking to you for a very long while because, well, quite a lot of things as a matter of fact.
00:01:38.000I wonder, mostly, where you feel the conversation about deism and theism If there is anything that you would amend around your evolving discourse from the point where it became in a sense one of the key components of the cultural conversation around faith and atheism in I guess it was maybe the late 90s when the selfish genes certainly came to my attention.
00:02:08.000I wonder if your views have altered and What, if anything, do you see as being valuable in a spiritual perspective?
00:02:19.000Most of my books have been about evolution and starting in 1976 with The Selfish Gene and then I suppose the main book on atheism is The God Delusion which was I believe 2006.
00:02:36.000I regard religion as scientifically interesting in the sense that if religious belief is true If there is a creator of the universe, then it's a very, very different kind of universe from if there isn't.
00:02:55.000And so it's a very profoundly important scientific question whether there is a creator of the universe, an intelligent being who lurks behind the laws of physics, the laws of science, or whether there's not.
00:03:09.000Because if there is, then it's an utterly different scientific enterprise that we're engaged upon.
00:03:15.000We would be engaged upon trying to work out how his mind works.
00:03:19.000Whereas if there isn't one, as I believe, then it's an entirely different kind of enterprise.
00:03:24.000So I do think it's a very important question.
00:03:27.000Lewis said that there's a sort of, obviously he was famously an atheist who became a Christian at some point in his life, said, used the phrase, the idea that nature is haunted.
00:03:40.000He used the idea of the nuministic and numinism as one of the coordinates around which a discussion in favor of a omnipotent, omniscient being might center.
00:03:56.000I wonder if within your studies of evolutionary biology, and of course it's perhaps the most obvious question anyone could ask you, if even within the patterns that you observe there is a sense of intelligence or even teleology?
00:04:16.000No there isn't but there's a very very strong illusion of it and this is one of the main things that Darwin faced The living world especially has an amazingly strong appearance of design.
00:04:30.000You've only got to look at any animal.
00:04:31.000Look at your dog, look at a tree, look at an insect that beautifully mimics a leaf or a stick or something of that sort.
00:04:41.000It looks as though it's got design written all over it.
00:04:45.000And it was the genius of Darwin to see that that didn't have to mean there really was a designer.
00:04:56.000I don't know that Darwin explicitly said that there wasn't a designer, like the theory of natural selection prohibits the idea that there is an intelligence or a God or a creative force or creative component behind the processes of evolution.
00:05:11.000And what do you think about Alfred Russel Wallace's contribution to those theories and how they aligned with some of these interests, for example, in sort of mysticism?
00:05:25.000Wallace and Darwin definitely independently arrived at the same idea.
00:05:33.000Darwin had it first but he didn't publish and so it was, as you know, it was Wallace's paper that he sent to Darwin in 1858 which spurred Darwin on to write The Origin of Species.
00:05:47.000So Wallace and Darwin independently discovered it.
00:05:49.000Wallace actually described himself as more Darwinian than Darwin at one point.
00:05:55.000He even thought that Darwin was a bit too mystical.
00:05:59.000Surprisingly, that obviously surprises you.
00:06:02.000And so it should, because later on in his life, as you know, Wallace did become quite mystical.
00:06:09.000He became interested in communicating with the dead.
00:06:13.000And so there was a bit of a box and cox relationship between them over sexual selection, which, as you know, is the idea that Not just survival, but attraction to the opposite sex, or ability to fight for the opposite sex, was an important aspect of natural selection.
00:06:37.000And with respect to attraction of the opposite sex, things like the peacock's tail, Darwin was content to say that peahens just like beautiful, magnificent, embroidered tails.
00:06:54.000Wallace thought that was too mystical and Wallace wanted there to be a fully rational explanation for sexual selection and so that's one of the main disagreements between Wallace and Darwin.
00:07:07.000Darwin was thought to be on the more mystical side rather than Wallace but then later on in life Wallace, as I say, became a spiritualist and was interested in communicating.
00:07:17.000Wallace thought that we survived our death and Wallace wanted to communicate with the dead.
00:07:22.000So, as I said, it was an interesting kind of reversal of roles.
00:07:25.000Also, him saying that Darwin's not Darwinian enough, the nerve!
00:07:30.000You know you say it's an important scientific question and I can appreciate why it would be, but I'd love you to unpack that further over the course of our conversation, but also it's an important social... there's an important social implication I feel one, I guess the reason that I, when I speak with atheists, I usually end up becoming quite passionate.
00:07:55.000I believe in God, myself, and these are some of the things I've always wanted to ask you about.
00:08:03.000We see that distinction that Wallace seems to draw between the rational and the spiritual, identifying that there are certain categories where rational discourse is necessary and ought be pursued to its zenith or nadir, certainly pursued to the point of exhaustion, and yet there is territory that remains.
00:08:21.000I feel consistently, Professor, But there are limitations to what a human might know.
00:08:28.000There is a limit to our understanding.
00:08:33.000The potential for knowledge is unlimited.
00:08:36.000As with the range, the limitations with what we can decipher through the senses, the amount of the electromagnetic light spectrum that we can witness, the amount of olfactory and audible information that we have access to.
00:08:52.000And if there is limitation even within the sensory realms that we can identify because we have the instruments there is observable limitation.
00:09:01.000Is it reasonable to suggest that there might be entire dimensions and realms of data to which we do not have access and the assumption that because we cannot measure them they are not there.
00:09:16.000Is such a sort of a limiting premise and whilst I understand what the science is and science is about what can be measured and what can be observed, is this not an important time to once again mark the bifurcation that Wallace appears to note that the rational has its realm and the mystery has its realm also?
00:09:32.000Well this is this is very interesting.
00:09:34.000As a matter of fact the last chapter of my book The God Delusion does use that very analogy of The electromagnetic spectrum, we can only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum and it extends hugely in either direction from the visual.
00:09:51.000And so I have every sympathy with the idea that there's a lot that we don't understand, that's certainly true.
00:09:59.000And there may be a lot that we cannot understand.
00:10:02.000I think there may be physicists I think are open-minded about whether there are questions that physicists will never be able to understand because of the limitations of the human mind.
00:10:13.000And I would look at this as not at all surprising because our brain, for me as a Darwinian, our brain was fashioned by natural selection.
00:10:25.000on the darwinian on the african plains and it's a device to help us to survive and reproduce in africa at that time and in a way the astonishing thing is that we have advanced so far beyond that i mean who could have foreseen einstein who would have foreseen um quantum theory the fact that the human brain that was built to survive as a hunter-gatherer can actually do relativity, can actually do advanced physics, can actually do poetry, can do philosophy, can do mathematics.
00:10:59.000So already we've advanced far beyond what a utilitarian might think that we ought to.
00:11:06.000And the question is, is there a limit?
00:11:09.000Are there some important truths that the human brain can never master?
00:11:15.000Are there beings in the universe, extraterrestrial beings perhaps, who already understand things that we cannot understand?
00:11:24.000I love the science fiction book The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.
00:11:30.000The Black Cloud is a superhuman intelligence and it approaches Earth and gets in touch with humans and they ask him to teach them its advanced knowledge and two of them volunteer to be taught.
00:12:12.000I would like to I'd like to live another 500 years to see how far the human brain can advance in understanding these things and as I say I don't know.
00:12:37.000This potential for limitless intelligence if not consciousness itself in there and as you say the potential for advanced beings is you know sort of impossible to rule out also you know sort of difficult to prove although it's curious that there are the conversation around UFOs is radically ordered literally in the last couple of years we have someone on here Jeremy Corbell who's Forever releasing CIA and military files, observation of artifacts and then just over the weekend non-human craft and they seem to be sort of more credible than these reports have ever been before.
00:13:15.000When I spoke to the science entertainment speaker Neil deGrasse Tyson, he used the I'm sure famous example of the two percent difference in DNA between us and chimps represents all architecture and art and the litany of wonderments that you outlined and to imagine a creature 2% more advanced of us
00:13:33.000suggests I suppose perhaps literally unimaginable realms. You reference to of
00:13:40.000course quantum theory and Einstein and on the precipice of each of
00:13:43.000these epochs there was this hubristic assumption that we were at the summit of
00:13:51.000all human understanding. In fact it appears when looking back at
00:13:55.000history that part of our condition has always been to imagine that the contemporary
00:13:59.000height of our knowledge and understanding represents the absolute height.
00:14:02.000When we get into quantum theory and you strike me as a man who might be
00:14:06.000somewhat irked by the mystification and woo-woo-ification of quantum theory so I'm
00:14:12.000not going to agitate you through any of that but it does appear that
00:14:17.000sort of that that in In that sub-particular realm, Newtonian and indeed Einsteinian physics appear to sort of fall away at the fundament, as it were.
00:14:29.000And I want to again turn our attention to something that you alluded to, that it's an important scientific question.
00:14:39.000If there is a God, an intelligent creator, behind the universe, haunting nature, as C.S.
00:14:46.000Lewis says, this is a very different proposition than if it's a set of random events, or selective events actually, the opposite of random.
00:14:56.000From a social and cultural perspective, the presence of, uh...
00:15:04.000Theism, and I know that this is something that you've spoken about in depth, that you've outlined incredibly articulately of course, the damage that can be done and has been done by religion, the ridiculousness of saying this baby is a Christian, or it kind of made me laugh, like let's say it's a Tottenham fan or something of a baby, and all of this I appreciate.
00:15:34.000But now that we live in a somewhat, I want to say, simultaneously nihilistic, peculiarly puritanical, oddly free of redemption and salvation, a sort of a materialistic, hollow, listless, joyless society, I wonder if this extraction of the mystery isn't a little costly.
00:16:01.000I don't feel that human beings, in order to flourish, thrive and communicate lovingly, require a retrospective tumbling into idiocy and superstition.
00:16:12.000But the humility that comes along with the acceptance that is found at our current frontiers,
00:16:19.000i.e. the famous hard problem of consciousness, the potential therefore that consciousness
00:16:24.000precedes matter, the odd combination as observed by Huxley that exists between the acknowledgement
00:16:34.000of the nuministic and a credo and set of morals and traditions that are somehow connected
00:16:50.000there is an awesome creature on the, not creature, a creator, at the end of the tendrils of the uncanny, and that somehow this bestows upon us a set of duties and obligations.
00:17:05.000But there are Aspects of spiritual life that are aligned to morality that are valuable.
00:17:13.000And I wonder what you think of the terrains, the sort of psychic terrains that are found through psychedelic experience, through shamanic experience, through the utilization of non-sensory stimulation, which by its nature is difficult to corral into data sets and to lean into empiricism.
00:17:34.000I wonder if you feel as I do that there is a cargo there that we are feeling the lack of in our current decline.
00:17:41.000You covered a whole lot of ground there.
00:17:58.000Because that I agree with it, but I feel strongly about that and I think that this is one of the faults of extreme Islam that it is joyless and hating of music, hating of dancing, hating of everything that makes life fun.
00:18:12.000And so I find that there's a difference between Evangelical Christianity, for example, and Islam.
00:18:22.000Evangelical Christianity has this, you know, love of music and... But there are also aspects of Islam that are abundant and voluptuous, Sufism for example.
00:18:32.000There have been, there have been, that's true.
00:18:34.000But some of the militant Islam at present actually squashes any attempt at enjoyment and fun.
00:18:44.000And also the austerity that's in our culture, in our sort of very economically-led, materialistic, rationalistic culture, like the sort of the joylessness of contemporary cancel culture, for want of a better word, the piety, the puritanism, the moral certainty.
00:18:59.000And I think that's a more significant cultural influence at present than militant Islam, which post-Covid, everyone seems to have gone off it.
00:19:15.000But then you came on to mysticism and the capacity to feel awe, the capacity to respond aesthetically to the universe.
00:19:29.000And you would be wrong, I think, if you thought that a scientific worldview led down that path.
00:19:38.000I think that a scientific worldview, well you had Neil deGrasse Tyson on and he's an eloquent spokesman for an aesthetic, a poetic response to the universe and I subscribe to that.
00:19:52.000So I think you can get much of what you associate with the mystics that you admire without actually
00:20:04.000You could stay within the realm of the natural, the materialistic, and yet have all the aesthetic
00:20:11.000response that you do have to the universe and to life.
00:20:19.000But also the other thing we touched upon there, Richard, was the nature of consciousness and
00:20:27.000our inability to explain it entirely is a byproduct of neurological networks, some inadvertent
00:20:34.000consequence of the patterning and evolving out of Africa there.
00:20:39.000Also, Wallace's latter life, spiritualism, and I know one anecdotal example of, albeit a brilliant and significant scientific figure, leaning towards spiritualism doesn't mean that that's necessarily a progression because of course we discussed earlier or touched upon the idea that you would regard it as a deterioration but what are the other so there's two areas that we from my admittedly grooming and diffuse question that you didn't cover and one is the the emergence of consciousness for there is nothing in biological processes that can indicate from whence consciousness emerges that you called it the hard problem it is the hard problem and all
00:21:18.000Philosophers and scientists admit that it's a hard problem.
00:21:21.000It's an unsolved problem, but unsolved problems are there to be solved.
00:21:26.000It doesn't mean because it's so far unsolved that it's never going to be solved.
00:21:30.000And I am materialist enough to be convinced that it has to have a solution.
00:21:37.000Consciousness must be a manifestation of brain stuff, the materialistic brain stuff.
00:21:44.000I don't understand how that came about but science has a history of not understanding and then later understanding.
00:21:52.000So I wouldn't write off just because we don't understand something yet we're not never going to.
00:21:56.000Often though, these pivotal points represent significant shifts, and I wonder what may lie ahead of us.
00:22:10.000Each of these points that I referred to previously as sort of hubristic plateaus that endured under the assumption that they were summits, That the idea that when we get into the quantum like that how do you what do you think is the relationship between consciousness and the double slit experiment and do because I guess that the woo-woo mystical approach that I promised I wasn't going to use on you but sort of now want to a little bit is that is it an indication that consciousness itself could be the prima materia
00:22:51.000Of, inverted commas, reality or perhaps even the universe?
00:22:58.000I'm familiar with the idea and I'm familiar with the idea that consciousness resides in every particle in the universe, that kind of thing.
00:23:06.000Consciousness, whatever else it is, I think it's a manifestation of complexity and so it'll be the complexity of brains, Complexity of computers in the future perhaps, a complexity of whatever passes for brains in extraterrestrial life, but complexity means massive organization of different units connected together in complicated ways.
00:23:30.000Particles, electrons, atoms are much too simple to have anything remotely approaching consciousness.
00:23:40.000Perhaps they're a gradient of consciousness and in fact beyond particles having consciousness or being... I suppose what I'm suggesting is not sort of panpsychism but that the quality of consciousness is within material.
00:23:56.000But rather that material emerges from consciousness, that consciousness is a precondition for being and it's only at advanced states of evolution where consciousness becomes accessible, that as intelligence becomes more complex, as the mechanics of the mind become more complex, there's also an And I know that sounds sort of slightly hocus-pocus but perhaps only in the same way that radio signals and the potential for electricity always existed but until the mechanics were developed to access them they were redundant and irrelevant and I think that if you know with the hard problem of consciousness there with the what Terence McKenna memorably and beautifully described as the free miracle of the Big Bang, give us one free miracle and we'll describe the rest,
00:24:44.000It seems to me that within that which is unknown, one idea recurs to me, and this is of unity, that separateness, that material, ought not be the defining lens through which we understand
00:25:05.000reality but the potential of a oneness and for me like your interest you're a scientist and you're
00:25:10.000an eminent and well-respected scientist and I'm embarrassed even to put before you theories dreamt
00:25:17.000up in crack houses and bedsits in the years between 1994 and 2001 but what I am I suppose
00:25:28.000saying is that the impact that it has on your discipline to consider whether or not there's an
00:25:37.000omnipotent force or some sort of cohesive deity or an author of the universe or however you
00:25:42.000want to regard it um You know that it's so significant and important and it changes everything.
00:25:49.000I feel like it changes everything in the way that we organize cultures, observably so.
00:25:53.000It feels to me that since the enlightenment, since we've had an A rational, individualistic, materialistic, egocentric culture.
00:26:03.000It seems to me that what the mechanics that emerge from that are indeed rather selfish.
00:26:09.000And that the metaphors that we use are somehow creating a culture that is antithetical to a what might be a favorable outcome were we to use a
00:27:07.000And whilst in botany and biology it's possible to emerge that which looks like intelligent design is a kind of, I believe, a kind of teleology, an intention spilling into the world and adapting in harmony with its environment from which it cannot be separated, that When it comes to organizing a society, the ideas that might be derived from the acceptance of, gosh what am I trying to say, that unity and love underscore reality, that the meaning can be derived from it, that a sort of an open-heartedness to it rather than a sort of a foreclosing cynicism,
00:27:47.000These are emotional words and words like love to me are things that emerge from nervous systems, especially human ones.
00:27:57.000And to regard something like love, something emotive like that as lurking in the material world doesn't sound at all convincing to me.
00:28:11.000And I think you've got the cart before the horse.
00:28:16.000Things like love emerge late in evolution as a consequence of the evolution of complicated highly complicated nervous systems and they don't come first.
00:28:30.000Now you also earlier on used words like egocentric and selfish and things again.
00:28:36.000I don't think That kind of language belongs in, when you're talking about science, materialism, again, selfishness is something that emerges from living things.
00:28:54.000And I've written a book about that, Selfish Gene, which is actually about selfish gene rather than selfish individual.
00:29:01.000It's not the right level of language to use for pre-living entities like pure physics.
00:29:11.000So you would say then that there are discrete categories.
00:29:14.000There is the domain of science where the lexicon and nomenclature of science are appropriate.
00:29:19.000Then there is the domain of morality and the domain of social engineering.
00:29:24.000And those latitude domains are appropriate where you have life and especially where you have human life.
00:29:33.000Do you feel, Professor, that there, and this is not something that I would attribute to you or certainly make you culpable for, but that's not an authority that I would claim to have, but that almost, in fact, since you've risen to prominence, that the language of science has entered into the realm of politics, society, that there's no question that, in fact, isn't it somewhat disingenuous to claim that these two worlds aren't fused?
00:30:03.000Galileo, right? I suppose that there's this assumption that science and religion are
00:30:09.000at odds with one another, which I would say is, you know, who's that dude Bruno, the guy
00:30:14.000that imagined the countless, and was burned at the stake?
00:30:18.000Yeah, yeah, that guy. But, you know, in a sense that the true religion, true religion
00:30:25.000and open-mindedness, and open-mindedness to unity, to non-judgment, to beauty, to service,
00:30:29.000to kindness, to quite simple values, is not at odds with scientific inquiry, but acknowledges
00:30:36.000that there is a different type of language required.
00:30:38.000I think since the advent of You know, whenever rationalism, materialism, say post-enlightenment thinking becomes the sort of dominant purview, that we do use scientific discourse and scientific language.
00:30:52.000And my God, look at the last couple of years as science, some of which has subsequently been proven to be somewhat shaky, shall we say, is used to underwrite political action, is used to underwrite social policy.
00:31:11.000Very broadly, the idea of social Darwinism, the idea that it's sort of acceptable, like the utilisation of Darwinian ideas to legitimise... Oh well, that's appalling.
00:31:24.000You should never use scientific ideas, inject them into ideology in that way.
00:31:30.000And that was a terrible thing that happened in the late 90s, early 20th century.
00:31:35.000And then I was going to say like during the pandemic that some of the use of data and the way that that data was conveyed and I would again say that my argument would be that science or particularly pharmacology is a subset of an economic system it's not its own separate silo only the the clinical trials that are taking place are the clinical trials that are profitable Where do these places get their grants from?
00:32:50.000And then, closer to home, even your analysis of Islam is the deployment of scientific critiques to a realm where, like, I'm not Muslim, But I hold the faith of Islam in high regard and I would say that the problem, the critiques one could level at Islam, one could equally level at secularism.
00:33:18.000You could say, oh look these atrocities were carried out in the name of Islam, These atrocities were carried out in the name of Christendom.
00:33:25.000These atrocities were carried out in the name of late capitalist imperialism.
00:33:31.000The atrocities are what's significant and how people undergird them whether it's through science or capitalism or Islam or Christianity is not as relevant and I feel it's just a sort of a it's just a particular moment in time where religion was used to undergird violence and now People will use different ideas.
00:33:51.000Christianity had its bad moments in the Middle Ages and Islam is having its bad moments now.
00:33:57.000And there's been sort of a collision of cultures in both cases that for me reduce the significance of the doctrine or dogma or however you regard those faiths.
00:34:12.000For me, my analysis would be this is the pursuit of power that's significant here.
00:34:16.000But I suppose what I want to come back to is that It seems to me there is the domain where it's absolutely necessary that we do our best to understand the natural, physical and chemical world and use those findings to better understand the world and to, I would say, help one another.
00:34:36.000Increasingly it looks like that is hijacked by economic interests, certainly in some of the ways that we just sketched out just then.
00:34:45.000But what but what but do you acknowledge that given that we've said there's a limitation to that to human understanding currently and there is a sort of a requirement it seems to me for understanding and conversation beyond the current remit and in my view ream it full stop of what can be understood, measured,
00:35:07.000weighed, you know, and using consciousness and what precedes the big bang as just two sort of off-the-cuff
00:35:12.000examples. I wonder what is the place of faith in forming a culture? What is the place of
00:35:19.000trust? Like ideas that are unscientific, definitely. Because we don't understand something, the
00:35:26.000appropriate response to that is to work on it, to try to understand it.
00:35:32.000The appropriate response is not to say, because science doesn't understand X, therefore religion does, therefore what some mystic has said or some religious person has said must be the truth because science hasn't got the answer.
00:35:45.000The fact that science hasn't got the answer doesn't mean that anything else has got the answer.
00:35:49.000And when we talked about those deep profound problems, the deep mysteries, when I was talking about the black cloud, There may be things that science will never understand, but if science doesn't understand them, nothing else will.
00:36:01.000That's where I would stick my toes in.
00:36:05.000Ben, what of perennialism, what of the consistent emergence, not only of myths and archetypes throughout culture, but also of ideals and hierarchies of behaviours that somewhat consistently emerge?
00:36:20.000Well, ideals, moral ideals are another matter.
00:36:23.000I wasn't talking about morals, I'm talking about truth, I'm talking about understanding of the universe, understanding of the deep.
00:36:55.000Oh, well, moral truths are another matter, and we can talk about moral truths, but that's not what I'm actually mainly concerned about.
00:37:02.000What are the ones that are beyond science?
00:37:07.000Truths about the universe, dark matter, dark energy, consciousness, the origin of the laws of physics.
00:37:14.000These are profoundly difficult problems which science doesn't yet know the answer to.
00:37:19.000All I'm saying is that if science doesn't know the answer to it, nor does religion.
00:37:24.000Uh and that it would that you don't think sort of a kind of a poetic or intuitive or mystical understanding with and when you uh inventory them in that manner I'm inclined to agree that a scientific understanding an empirical demonstrable understanding would be valuable um but what I feel that we're um the um what do I want to say the interface that we're operating at is that I'm saying that say if you want to sling together sort of post-enlightenment
00:37:54.000values with a little bit of Nietzsche, "God is dead and we can't get the
00:37:57.000blood off our hands" or "we have killed him we can't get the blood off our hands"
00:38:00.000is that what it where we find ourselves now is that in our culture if you look at
00:38:06.000the sort of the morality that was formed during the pandemic period lent
00:38:10.000into scientific understanding for its authority for its moral authority for
00:38:16.000example you know it is immoral if you don't undertake these these medical
00:38:20.000procedures it's immoral if you don't remain within your home well it turned out that
00:38:25.000that morality was incorrect and one might argue that different interests were
00:38:31.000being served by that being presented as a moral decision when in fact it
00:38:37.000wasn't just to be less cryptic for example the Pfizer never clinically trialed
00:38:44.000their vaccines for transmission and yet the way that the vaccines were
00:38:48.000presented to the public was as a remedy against transmission
00:38:53.000Right so I know this is not your field of expertise but this is but one example of how in the way that the church once would have been used as the sort of storehouse of a collective morality the institution of science is currently being used and I would say it's equally fallible and similarly being utilized to undergird the interests of the powerful that all the while that people were being burned at the stake and martyred and slung off cliffs that really they were not like this is You happy with this, God?
00:39:22.000But really, we're interested in power and in the same way.
00:39:54.000You need to stop and let me get a word in.
00:40:00.000The advice about vaccine and whether it prevents transmission.
00:40:09.000As I understand it, what appears to be moral advice was kind of more what they thought to be common sense and which might not have been actually, based upon what you could call the measles model, where a disease like measles Where it is actually a public good, it's actually a social good to get vaccinated.
00:40:41.000Because the more people who are vaccinated, the less chance the epidemic has to get going.
00:40:48.000And so if you refuse to be vaccinated, you are in a sense, a problem, a social problem.
00:40:55.000And I think the advice that was given over COVID was taking off from the measles model.
00:41:03.000I know epidemiologists were saying at the time that in those instances you do not do that during a pandemic you wait till after the pandemic people were trying to and those people curiously another weird coincidence were being censored almost as if yes there were an agenda conscious or otherwise to create conditions remember that there was an urgent need for hurry there was nobody quite knew it was it was brand new this was unknown territory and so Possibly what was going on was that the measles model was the best that the advisors could come up with.
00:41:34.000And if they were wrong, then people can be wrong and they need to climb down and say they were wrong.
00:41:41.000I don't know whether they were or not.
00:42:32.000That's actually true and sort of publicly acknowledged.
00:42:34.000We don't need to get down to that of course.
00:42:36.000Because in a sense, Professor, I'm really merely using it to say that the presence of power is what is significant in both the cases of science and religion.
00:42:44.000Neither of those... I think that's unfair.
00:43:09.000I mean I'm only continuing because you're continuing.
00:43:11.000They communicated it with a good degree of certainty and this erroneous assumption that they made was very profitable for some of those powerful interests in the world and allowed governments to govern and regulate in ways that are increasingly becoming difficult.
00:43:22.000I wouldn't wish to make the economic accusation at that point.
00:43:26.000I think it was a fair point that Epidemiological wisdom at the time, and still is, that vaccination is a public good and if there's some disease where it's not the case that vaccination is a public good because vaccination does not actually guard against transmission,
00:43:45.000Then that that's something we need to take account of in the future.
00:43:50.000But I don't think I would wish to point fingers and say there was economic interests which which were overriding this case.
00:43:56.000I think it was if there was a I'm not even saying there was a mistake, but if there was a mistake and I think it was an honest mistake.
00:44:02.000We've got some incredible information on this which to outline now would take us such a
00:44:07.000long while but there's some quite credible sources that make it appear like the institutions
00:44:16.000of the media, the government, the pharmaceutical industry, unelected global bodies like the
00:44:21.000WEF, WHO, philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who
00:44:27.000had previously run pandemic, had gamed out what might happen in a pandemic situation,
00:44:35.000conveniently aligned to generate a scenario where the outcomes were favorable to governments
00:44:43.000whose general tendency, one might argue, based on their name, is to govern and regulate and
00:44:49.000legislate and to corporate interests whose, broadly speaking, exist in order to generate
00:44:56.000profit and that might sound unduly cynical but I'll just take as just one sort of simple example
00:45:00.000at the beginning of the pandemic Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer, said it would be unconscionable
00:45:05.000to profit from this pandemic and that they would ensure that that didn't happen and yet by the end
00:45:09.000of the pandemic, curiously, Pfizer had profited by $108 billion. If I remain silent, if I remain silent.
00:45:15.000If I remain silent, it's not because I accept what you're saying, it's because I just don't know enough.
00:45:21.000And also, to tell you the truth, it's something we cover in such detail elsewhere, citing credible sources all the time, and it's not something I claim to be an expert in either.
00:45:30.000But what I'm interested in is the utilization of science as the sort of godhead, forgive the phrase, of a new sort of moral authority in order to bypass Ordinary discernment and a way that it's become, in that instance for example, I would say undemocratic.
00:45:47.000I wouldn't call it moral, I'd say it was more that science has to give the best advice available and it's not a case of moral advice, it's a case of just expedient advice.
00:45:57.000It should never be fused with morality, it should always be this is expedient, this is what we know right now and morality is not our domain, we do not have the tools for morality.
00:46:08.000So, Professor though, I guess where I would like to sort of advance this conversation, and is there anything, how come you're doing this?
00:46:16.000Well, last year's book was Flights of Fancy, about flight, but I'm also starting a podcast of my own, I think that's probably why I'm doing it.
00:46:25.000Well, it's called Poetry of Reality, and science is the poetry of reality, and I haven't really started it yet, but I want to advise, ask your advice about how to run a podcast.
00:46:37.000I think it's, to tell you the truth, the advice I'd give you seem to me to be areas where you would not struggle, remain rigorously truthful to what you believe in, speak to people that you are interested in, be entirely willing to have conversations with people with whom you thoroughly disagree, and enter those conversations In good faith.
00:47:46.000And you similarly seem to be trying to derive from it some ethos, some ethic, some way that we might live.
00:47:51.000I know that I'm so, what do I want to say, incredibly grateful to you for your rigour, for your work, for your fortitude, for your willingness to endure, I imagine, many difficult and challenging conversations and it must have been incredibly difficult to create the body of work that you've created.
00:48:10.000But where I am, it seems sometimes it does seem to me that you are I'm almost determined to arrive at a materialistic outcome with the kind of zeal that one might attribute typically to someone of a particular religious persuasion in the same manner that I am determined to believe in God in the same way that I lean into Joseph Campbell's observation when watching a vine wind its way across a trellis that it appears to be moving to the warmth
00:48:38.000That there is, and as you say, these patterns only appear to be like intelligence, but I feel that that is, that is a matter of perspective, and like an argument that you must have batted off a thousand times, the strawberriness of a strawberry can never be understood, and indeed that is the poetry, the poetry that science can never approach.
00:48:58.000The reason that poetry is required, the reason that scripture is required, is when it comes to the most important matters in our life, death, Grief.
00:49:11.000What use is it, Professor, to turn to this is the endocrinal outcome, and this is what we imagine has happened neurologically?
00:49:20.000I mean, I love it, and I'm fascinated by it, and it's beautiful, and I'm grateful for it, but I feel like it exists here, in this territory, and over here we have this, we have access to something that might never be measured, or might
00:49:34.000be measured. Perhaps one day we will have the tools.
00:49:36.000Perhaps one day we will have the tools, but I can imagine that they will be so refined and so glorious, and I have
00:49:42.000this faith that they are going to lead us to unity and love. And
00:49:45.000if I can, because I saw that you got a bit irritated when I used that word 'love',
00:49:48.000I wonder this, tell me what you think, this is just a personal theory,
00:49:51.000I'm glad I've got the opportunity to run it by you. I wonder if love is the sort of felt
00:49:57.000understanding of unity, a kind of sense that I have a duty to a child, or a sense that I have an affinity with another,
00:50:04.000that love implies duty, that it implies connection, that each
00:50:08.000The idea that separateness, the idea that I am this separate biological entity is temporal and spatial and an animalistic interpretation of a narrow strata of reality which can never really be measured because we don't have the instruments, we don't have the instruments, we don't have the bandwidth but we can intuit it, that we sense it, that this is the job of the shaman, the job of the priest, the job of the mystic, the realm of of the psychoactive and psychedelic experience, that these are not just fluctuations and the flatulence of a busy mind, that there is something here that is vital.
00:50:47.000And I wonder how you approach those questions in yourself and where it leaves you with regard to the joy and the grief and the stuff I said an hour and a half ago at the beginning of the question.
00:50:54.000I never had a psychoactive experience, in which case I'm obviously deficient.
00:51:01.000Um, I, um, I, um, understand what's meant by words like love and empathy and, uh, they are, they mean a lot to me, uh, on a personal point of view, personal level.
00:52:10.000I wonder then if awe might have a, I mean of course it must, a biochemical component that one might with the right instrument be able to measure and observe the impact of the numinous But there will always be an ulterior imperture in the same manner that we've dealt at once with atoms and then electrons and then bosons, quarks and whatever the hell that was.
00:52:41.000But then it appears that we can never reliably say, ah, this is the genesis.
00:52:49.000And I... What am I trying to say to you?
00:52:53.000I'm trying to say that I don't know what I'm trying to say.
00:52:59.000I think I said some quite good things there.
00:53:00.000You keep using the word numinous and I'm curious what you mean by it.
00:53:07.000He goes He goes, if I told you that there was a tiger in the next room, you would feel you would feel afraid.
00:53:17.000And if I told you there was a ghost in the next room and you believed it, you would also feel afraid, but not afraid in the same way that you would be afraid of a tiger.
00:53:30.000No one cares what a ghost is going to do, like in Scooby Doo.
00:53:34.000But you are aware that your understanding of reality is glitching and twitching and being challenged.
00:53:41.000He then said, imagine if I were to say there is a mighty spirit in the room next to you.
00:53:46.000You might feel that you might feel yourself on the edge of something and as Shakespeare said, and here my genius is rebuked.
00:53:53.000That the knowledge that there is a great power and I don't feel that we're at odds by Perceiving it in nature or fetishizing its particular understanding over what it somehow suggests at its root.
00:54:10.000I feel that in a sense we're talking about the same thing but I suppose what I'm trying to draw from it or extract from it is the possibility that there is something in religious thought that is valuable culturally.
00:54:25.000and necessary in fact and that if we allow science to encroach continually
00:54:33.000upon that territory what will happen is that this materialism - there's a word that's come up several times - that
00:54:38.000materialism will lead, that does lead to, because it has led to and this is where we are, a
00:54:44.000kind of, what do I want to say, a grimly metastasized capitalism where all that
00:54:48.000matters is that which can be measured.
00:54:51.000And in science, all that matters is that which can be measured.
00:54:57.000No other science would be of any value.
00:54:58.000Of course, conjecture will exist there.
00:54:59.000But in the establishment of a society, in the establishment of a culture, in the establishment of a family, If all that matters is that which can be measured, you will get individualistic, materialistic, ultimately nihilistic, pious, moralising but oddly unforgiving cultures with no real values.
00:55:21.000And I think, and my faith is, my belief is, that we need to reintroduce the mystery.
00:55:25.000And I don't want it to be just like some sort of mad dogma or some stupid thing that's used to make people feel bad about the way they are or who they have sex with or something.
00:55:34.000I want it to be something that I know what a tiger is.
00:55:38.000I have no idea what a great spirit is.
00:55:41.000And so I would not be impressed if you said there was a great spirit in the room next door.
00:56:24.000I don't feel that that should be laid at science's door.
00:56:28.000Science is bigger than that, more important than that.
00:56:31.000And I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the only escape from materialism in the demeaning sense, in the economic sense, is religion.
00:56:47.000I think religion is relatively unequipped, too small to deal with these big problems that we're dealing with.
00:57:01.000Beyond the coincidence of the shared semantic term, I feel that there is a corollary between materialism in the two senses, because I feel that there...
00:57:42.000And I'm saying that secularism... Secularism, yes.
00:57:47.000Secularism, we have to separate church and state, we have to get religion out the bloody way and let the business of the state be the business of the state.
00:57:53.000But somehow man worships, even, and I'm sure for you this might be somewhat hackneyed, but you're pretty evangelical and zealous and pretty devout and those things, regardless of the object, they're interesting qualities to have as a person.
00:59:04.000So we're gonna have to somehow get along because for the next six months we're going to be in a caravan together touring the British Isles you preaching materialism and me wandering around with like um burning sage and I'm only wearing a blanket and stuff and I'm like Richard I'll pray for you Richard I've bought you a crystal yeah yeah I've prayed for it like that and given you like you believe in crystal healing by the way I believe that fundamental to the human experience, obviously, is consciousness.
00:59:34.000That consciousness is a thread that we are all strung upon.
00:59:37.000That if we have emerged from consciousness, that we are its avatars and its angels.
00:59:43.000Now, when you start to codify something that's that mystical into this particular trinket as an attribute, I acknowledge that it's absurd.
00:59:56.000I adore all that I can understand about science.
01:00:00.000I adore it when people can explain to me, this is how this has evolved, and look we can prove, look the monkey, the capuchin monkey on this side is like this, and on that side of the mountain like that.
01:00:08.000I mean, oh my god, you geniuses, it's so magical.
01:00:11.000And yet for me there is something more.
01:00:52.000And I feel that what that we may endeavour to do is create the conditions where we have a sense that we are pursuing something together that we are respecting individual and community freedom we are acknowledging the observable fact that we are all here together potentially in limitless space potentially the only example of conscious life in the universe and that this ought be revered and honored and that there
01:01:25.000The earliest forms of religion say, because it seems like what you don't like at institutional religions where it's sort of like people at some point or another get a gun or a candelabra and say that our religion is about this.
01:01:39.000What about the earliest forms of religion where people revered their food source and acknowledged that they needed to have an intuitive relationship with that food source that was somehow sacralized and ritualized?
01:02:17.000Well, everyone, because I think people might not be willing to start farms and go hunting for stags if they don't believe that there is some intuition.
01:02:27.000That there is the sensory realm, there is that which is observable, and there is that which might be observable by some advanced Oh, I accept that that's historically how it happened.
01:02:37.000I mean, of course, that's the relationship that people had with their animals they hunted and the crops that they grew and so on.
01:02:44.000I mean, that's historically what happened.
01:02:47.000It wasn't the best way to do it, but that's the way it was done.
01:02:51.000Yes and do you feel that there is something do you feel there is nothing in it you see it just as cold and full of edges and that where the edge ends there is nothing there is nothing between the edges of things but it's not alive with possibility.
01:03:08.000I don't know what you're saying there.
01:03:11.000That between us, in the space between us, and within you, the experience of you being Professor Richard Dawkins, and the experience of me being Russell Brand, that there might be some commonality, and that evidence of that commonality might be found in the ability for us to share this linguistic experience.
01:03:28.000course yeah the ability for us to interpret the vibrations in the air like
01:03:33.000this over the I feel that somehow your ability to understand mechanics micro
01:03:39.000mechanics evolutionary biology has somehow stripped if I may offer you is
01:03:47.000it not insulting stripped away the sort of somehow wonder and awe
01:03:52.000And I know you say, oh, I do feel wonder at a mountain or some discovery of Isaac Newton or whatever, I'm sure, or indeed Darwin, your great hero, like, but I think it's... I feel that there was a relationship between what I'm saying and love, a kind of intuitive... You talked about what's passing between us, which is words, and it's waves of pressure, sound pressure waves, and it goes in the ear and it's interpreted in an amazingly complicated way.
01:04:20.000A mathematical analysis of the waveform, Fourier analysis.
01:04:30.000And do you feel that this happened as a result of single cellular entities evolving as a result of their relationship with their environment, the precise conditions for which were afforded to them, and ended up in this mathematically impossible miracle of our current communication?
01:04:46.000And beyond this you think that there is nothing to revere or marvel at?
01:04:51.000There's plenty to reveal and marvel at, but it's not supernatural.
01:04:56.000It's natural, and it's beautiful because it's natural, and maybe one day it will succumb to understanding.
01:05:03.000We understand a lot more than we used to.
01:05:06.000We understand what sound waves are now.
01:05:08.000We understand, in principle, how they're analysed by the brain.
01:05:14.000It's interesting that you use the word succumb.
01:05:17.000Because of course so much of our history has been about the subjugation of nature, the management of nature.
01:05:23.000And you get the semantics around natural and supernatural.
01:05:28.000This for me is like, for me, the God in nature, the idea that nature is somehow haunted through arithmetic and geometry and through a thousand patterns that appear poetic and indeed have inspired the title of your forthcoming podcast.
01:05:48.000For me, I would not extract the possibility of theism being evident and stitched throughout all of that.
01:05:57.000And I put it to you, Professor Richard Dawkins, that your problem has always been about the dogma derived from this evident and observable mystery, rather than the mystery itself.
01:06:05.000And that that mystery could just as easily be utilised to create more harmony and to create more hope.
01:06:10.000And I don't think it's possible to create that harmony and hope if you foreclose it all the time going, we'll understand this in a couple of weeks, this is codswallop.
01:06:16.000And giving people a wallop with a microscope every time they try to write a poem.
01:07:29.000So, all right, I think we've got quite a lot out of this.
01:07:33.000Obviously, you can read more of Professor Richard Dawkins' work on his new Substack and on the Professor's YouTube channel at The Poetry of Reality.
01:07:43.000We'll post a link in the description there.
01:07:46.000Sorry I didn't do enough of your questions, or indeed any of your questions.
01:07:49.000I was really caught up in my own line of inquiry there.
01:07:56.000I don't know what these questions are.
01:07:58.000Tell me, I'll ask them, there's other people, and if you're interested in them you can answer them, if you feel... People have sent them in.
01:08:05.000That's right, and if you feel the lure of Oxford, simply dismiss them with a wave of the hand, as if it was me, sort of trying to say that a spider's web's an example of Jesus.
01:08:15.000Camilla says, I've been so excited for this conversation.
01:08:17.000I used to read Richard's books growing up.
01:08:19.000Since then, my views have shifted and evolved.
01:08:20.000Richard, have your views shifted over time?
01:08:28.000Jimmy Greenwood said, why not acknowledge... Oh, he's going to hate this.
01:08:32.000Why not acknowledge that a soul or spirit exists?
01:08:34.000Otherwise one can miss out on so much you're going to really piss him off with this question.
01:08:38.000Denying religions is fine, but atheism is not dissimilar to other religions, a belief system, and creates division in much the same way as churches.
01:08:45.000God is simply a handy three-letter word to describe soul connection.
01:08:51.000Rich asks, if God is not part of the observable universe but rather the transcendent cause of the universe, is it possible for us to confirm or deny this idea of God as humans without some kind of revelation from God?
01:09:04.000I don't think, well that begins with an if.
01:09:21.000Paul said, yes, when I was a child, I speak as a child, I thought of it as a child, I understood as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
01:09:29.000Paul saying that, and I think that you're strawmanning Christianity there.
01:09:34.000But we'll talk about this off-air when we go, when we do our caravan show.
01:09:38.000Join us next week when I'll be joined by Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi talking about the censorship industrial complex and looking ahead to our live show in London on June the 22nd.
01:09:46.000You can buy tickets now if you want to come and see me, Matt and Shelley Schellenberger in London.