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 religion and spirituality, and why he believes there is no evidence for a creator of the universe. He also discusses the scientific evidence for the existence of a God, and his thoughts on whether or not there is such a thing as an intelligent being behind the laws of physics, or whether there isn't one at all. Richard Dawkins is an atheist, a philosopher, a writer, a thinker, a public speaker, a scientist, and a public intellectual. He's also the founder of The Dawkins Institute, a scientific journal, and the author of several books, including The Goddelusion, which explores the idea that God is not real at all, but rather is merely a figment of our imagination. Richard Dawkins has been described as the most famous atheist in the land, and is considered by many to be one of humanity's most influential thinkers and critics as a leading voice in the field of theism and theism. If there is a God or a creator, then why does he think there is one? Why does he believe it exists? What is it important to have a God? And why does it matter if there isn t? or isn t a Creator ? And what is it even possible? if there is not a Creator? Stay tuned for Part 2 of this conversation with Richard Dawkins, coming soon! I'm looking for your thoughts, thoughts, theories, ideas, theories and thoughts on the future of the future? - and what are you looking for? If you have any thoughts on God, please tweet me and let me know what you think about it! Timestamps: 3:00:00 - Is there a creator out there? 4:30 - Is God real? 5:15 - What do you think? 6:00 - What is God a real being? 7:40 - What would you like to see in the universe? 8:20 - What are you think of evolution? 9:10 - Why does God exist? 11:00 | What is the role of evolution in evolution? / Is there an evolutionary theory? 12:30 13:30 | What does God do? 15:00 Is there any such thing?
00:00:55.000It'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.
00:01:03.000Joining me today is one of the most influential philosophers, evolutionary biologists, social influencers, inventor of the term meme, he'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.
00:01:21.000Dickie Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, the foremost atheist in the land, talking to me, one of the world's most religiousist folks.
00:01:29.000Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can f*** off.
00:02:24.000I'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.
00:02:32.000I wonder, mostly, where you feel the conversation about deism and theism currently resides.
00:02:43.000If 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.
00:03:02.000I wonder if your views have altered and What, if anything, you see as being valuable in a spiritual perspective?
00:03:12.000Most of my books have been about evolution, 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.
00:03:30.000I regard religion as scientifically interesting.
00:03:36.000in 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.
00:03:48.000And 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.
00:04:02.000Because if there is, then it's an utterly different scientific enterprise that we're engaged upon.
00:04:08.000We would be engaged upon trying to work out how his mind works.
00:04:13.000Whereas if there isn't one, as I believe, then it's an entirely different kind of enterprise.
00:04:18.000So I do think it's a very important question.
00:04:21.000Lewis said that there's this 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.
00:04:33.000He 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.
00:04:49.000I 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?
00:05:09.000No 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.
00:05:23.000You've only got to look at any animal.
00:05:25.000Look at your dog, look at a tree, look at an insect that beautifully mimics a leaf or a stick or something of that sort.
00:05:35.000It looks as though it's got design written all over it.
00:05:39.000And it was the genius of Darwin to see that that didn't have to mean there really was a designer.
00:05:50.000I 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.
00:06:05.000And 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?
00:06:19.000Wallace and Darwin definitely independently arrived at the same idea.
00:06:27.000Darwin 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.
00:06:40.000So Wallace and Darwin independently discovered it.
00:06:43.000Wallace actually described himself as more Darwinian than Darwin at one point.
00:06:49.000He even thought that Darwin was a bit too mystical.
00:06:53.000Surprisingly, that obviously surprises you.
00:06:55.000And so it should, because later on in his life, as you know, Wallace did become quite mystical.
00:07:02.000He became interested in communicating with the dead.
00:07:06.000And 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.
00:07:31.000And 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.
00:07:48.000Wallace thought that was too mystical and Wallace wanted there to be a fully rational explanation for sexual selection.
00:07:55.000And so that's one of the main disagreements between Wallace and Darwin.
00:08:00.000Darwin was thought to be on the more mystical side rather than Wallace.
00:08:03.000But then later on in life, Wallace, as I say, became a spiritualist and was interested in communicating.
00:08:11.000Wallace thought that we survived our death and Wallace wanted to communicate with the dead.
00:08:16.000So as I said it was an interesting kind of reversal of roles.
00:08:19.000Also that him saying that Darwin's not Darwinian enough, the nerve!
00:08:23.000But like you know you say it's an important scientific question and I can appreciate why it would be and I'd love you to unpack that further if you know 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.
00:08:48.000I believe in God, myself, and these are some of the things I've always wanted to ask you about.
00:08:57.000We 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.
00:09:14.000I feel consistently, Professor, But there are limitations to what a human might know.
00:09:22.000There is a limit to our understanding.
00:09:27.000The potential for knowledge is unlimited.
00:09:30.000As 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.
00:09:46.000And if there is limitation even within the sensory realms that we can identify because we have the instruments there is observable limitation.
00:09:55.000Is 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.
00:10:09.000is 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 well this is this is very interesting um as 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.
00:10:45.000And so I have every sympathy with the idea that there's a lot that we don't understand, that's certainly true.
00:10:53.000And there may be a lot that we cannot understand.
00:10:55.000I 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.
00:11:07.000And 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.
00:11:19.000On the Darwinian, on the African plains.
00:11:23.000And it's a device to help us to survive and reproduce in Africa at that time.
00:11:29.000And in a way, the astonishing thing is that we have advanced so far beyond that.
00:11:34.000I mean, who could have foreseen Einstein?
00:11:36.000Who could have foreseen quantum theory?
00:11:39.000The 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.
00:11:53.000So already we've advanced far beyond what a utilitarian might think that we ought to.
00:12:00.000And the question is, is there a limit?
00:12:02.000Are there some important truths that the human brain can never master?
00:12:08.000Are there beings in the universe, extraterrestrial beings perhaps, who already understand things that we cannot understand?
00:12:18.000I love the science fiction book The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.
00:12:23.000The 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.
00:13:22.000With your reference to the black cloud, I felt the eerie and uncanny shadow of AI appear.
00:13:31.000This potential for limitless intelligence, if not consciousness itself.
00:13:38.000And as you say, the potential for advanced beings is impossible to rule out, but also difficult to prove.
00:13:47.000Although it's curious that the conversation around UFOs has radically altered literally in the last couple of years.
00:13:52.000We 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.
00:14:09.000When 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
00:14:27.000suggests I suppose perhaps literally unimaginable realms. You referenced too
00:14:34.000of course quantum theory and Einstein and on the precipice of each of
00:14:37.000these epochs there was this hubristic assumption that we were at the summit of
00:14:45.000all human In fact, it appears when looking back at history that part of our condition has always been to imagine that the contemporary height of our knowledge and understanding represents the absolute height.
00:14:56.000When we get into quantum theory, and you strike me as a man who might be somewhat irked by the mystification and woo-woo-ification of quantum theory, so I'm not going to agitate you through any of that, but it does appear that sort of that But in that sub particular realm, Newtonian and indeed Einsteinian physics appear to sort of fall away at the fundament, as it were.
00:15:21.000And I start to I want to again turn our attention to something that you alluded to, that it's an important scientific question.
00:15:32.000If there is a God, an intelligent creator, behind the universe, haunting nature, as C.S.
00:15:39.000Lewis says, this is a very different proposition than if it's a sort of a random, sort of a set of random events, or selective events actually, the opposite of random.
00:15:50.000From a social and cultural perspective, the presence of, uh...
00:15:57.000Theism, 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.
00:16:27.000But now that we live in a somewhat, I want to say, simultaneously nihilistic, peculiarly puritanical, oddly free of redemption and salvation, a sort of materialistic, hollow, listless, joyless society, I wonder if this extraction of the mystery isn't a little costly.
00:16:55.000I don't feel that human beings, in order to flourish, thrive, and communicate lovingly,
00:17:01.000require a retrospective tumbling into idiocy and superstition, but the humility that comes
00:17:08.000along with the acceptance that is found at our current frontiers, i.e. the famous hard
00:17:15.000problem of consciousness, the potential therefore that consciousness precedes matter, the odd
00:17:23.000combination as observed by Huxley that exists between the acknowledgement of the nuministic
00:17:34.000and a credo and set of morals and traditions that are somehow connected to this nuministic
00:17:43.000there 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.
00:18:00.000Aspects of spiritual life that are aligned to morality that are valuable.
00:18:06.000And 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.
00:18:27.000I wonder if you feel, as I do, that there is a cargo there that we are feeling the lack of in our current decline?
00:18:35.000You covered a whole lot of ground there, shifting around.
00:18:39.000I know, but you can do all that, can't you?
00:18:40.000I remember with Jordan Peterson you wouldn't have that.
00:18:48.000Let me go back first of all to you're talking about the puritanical joylessness.
00:18:51.000Yes, because that I agree that 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, hating of everything that makes life fun and that so I find that there's a difference between Evangelical Christianity, for example, and Islam.
00:19:15.000Evangelical Christianity has this, you know, love of music and... But there are also aspects of Islam that are abundant and voluptuous, Sufism for example.
00:19:25.000There have been, there have been, that's true.
00:19:28.000But some of the militant Islam at present actually squashes any attempt at enjoyment and fun.
00:19:38.000And 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.
00:19:53.000And I think that's a more significant cultural influence at present than militant Islam, which, post-Covid, everyone seems to have gone off it.
00:20:08.000But then you came on to mysticism and the capacity to feel awe, the capacity to respond aesthetically to the universe.
00:20:22.000And you would be wrong, I think, if you thought that a scientific worldview led down that path.
00:20:31.000I 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.
00:20:46.000So I think you can get much of what you associate with the with the mystics that you admire
00:20:55.000without actually being supernatural about it.
00:20:58.000You could stay within the realm of the natural, the materialistic, and yet have all the aesthetic
00:21:05.000response that you do have to the universe and to life.
00:21:13.000But also the other thing we touched upon there Richard was the nature of consciousness and
00:21:16.000was the nature of consciousness and our inability to explain it entirely is a by-product of
00:21:21.000our inability to explain it entirely is a byproduct of neurological networks, some inadvertent
00:21:25.000neurological networks, some inadvertent consequence of the patterning and evolving out
00:22:11.000Philosophers and scientists admit that it's a hard problem.
00:22:15.000It's an unsolved problem, but unsolved problems are there to be solved.
00:22:19.000It doesn't mean because it's so far unsolved that it's never going to be solved.
00:22:24.000And I am materialist enough to be convinced that it has to have a solution.
00:22:31.000Consciousness must be a manifestation of brain stuff, the materialistic brain stuff.
00:22:38.000I don't understand how that came about but Science has a history of not understanding and then later understanding so I wouldn't write off just because we don't understand something yet we're not never going to.
00:22:50.000Often though these uh these pivotal points represent a significant shift and I wonder if what May lie ahead of us.
00:23:05.000Each of these points that I referred to previously as sort of hubristic plateaus that's endured under the assumption that they were summits, that the idea that when we get into the quantum...
00:23:23.000What do you think is the relationship between consciousness and the double slit experiment?
00:23:30.000I guess 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 of reality or perhaps even the universe?
00:23:51.000I'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.
00:24:00.000Consciousness, whatever else it is, I think it's a manifestation of complexity and so it will 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.
00:24:24.000Particles, electrons, atoms are much too simple to have anything remotely approaching consciousness.
00:24:34.000Perhaps 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 but 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 access to it 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
00:25:23.000redundant and irrelevant and I think that if you know with the hard problem
00:25:27.000of consciousness there with the what Terence McKenna memorably and beautifully
00:25:32.000described as the free miracle of the Big Bang, give us one free miracle and we'll
00:25:37.000describe the rest, it seems to me that within that which is unknown
00:25:43.000there's one idea recurs to me and this is of unity.
00:25:50.000That separateness, that material, ought not be the defining lens through which we understand reality, but the potential of a oneness.
00:26:01.000And for me, your interest, you're a scientist, and you're an eminent and well-respected scientist, and I'm embarrassed even to put before you theories dreamt up in crack houses and bedsits in the years
00:26:15.000between 1994 and 2001. But what I am, I suppose, saying is that the impact that it has on your
00:26:27.000discipline to consider whether or not there's an omnipotent force or some sort of cohesive deity
00:26:33.000or an author of the universe or however you want to regard it.
00:26:39.000It's so significant and important and it changes everything.
00:26:42.000I feel like it changes everything in the way that we organize cultures, observably so.
00:26:47.000It feels to me that since the Enlightenment, since we've had an irrational, individualistic, materialistic, egocentric culture, it seems to me that what the mechanics that emerge from that are indeed rather selfish, and that the metaphors that we use are somehow creating a culture that is antithetical to What might be a favourable outcome were we to use a different image system?
00:27:17.000And again, I'm not asking scientists to start glibly accepting, oh yeah, no, there probably is a God.
00:27:25.000But what I am, I suppose, asking is, is it possible to say that in the material realm, as Alfred Russel Wallace appears to have accepted, There is a necessity for critique and rigor and analysis and there can't be any sort of woo-woo acceptance that female peahens just like the look of those tail feathers, honey.
00:27:46.000But elsewhere there is an unknowable mystery.
00:28:00.000And 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, but 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,
00:28:40.000These are emotional words and words like love to me are things that emerge from nervous systems, especially human ones, and to regard something like love, something emotive like that as Lurking in the material world doesn't sound at all convincing to me and I think you've got the cart before the horse.
00:29:09.000Things like love emerge late in evolution as a consequence of the evolution of highly complicated nervous systems and they don't come first.
00:29:24.000Now you also earlier on used words like egocentric and selfish and things again.
00:29:30.000I don't think That kind of language belongs in when you're talking about science, materialism.
00:29:42.000Again, selfishness is something that emerges from living things.
00:29:47.000And I've written a book about that, Selfish Gene, which is actually about selfish gene rather than selfish individual.
00:29:53.000But nevertheless, it's not the right level of language to use for pre-living entities like Pure physics.
00:30:05.000So you would say then that there are discrete categories.
00:30:08.000There is the domain of science where the lexicon and nomenclature of science are appropriate.
00:30:12.000Then there is the domain of morality and the domain of social ethics.
00:30:18.000And those latitude domains are appropriate where you have life and especially where you have human life.
00:30:27.000Do 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?
00:30:59.000I suppose there's this assumption that science and religion are at odds with one another, which I would say is, you know, who's that dude Bruno, the guy that imagined the countless, you know, was burned at the stake?
00:31:13.000But, you know, in a sense that True religion and open-mindedness, and open-mindedness to unity, to non-judgment, to beauty, to service, to kindness, to quite simple values, is not at odds with scientific inquiry, but acknowledges that there is a different type of language required.
00:31:32.000I 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.
00:31:46.000And my God, look at the last couple of years, 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.
00:32:05.000Very broadly, the idea of social Darwinism, the idea that it's sort of acceptable, like the utilisation of Darwinian ideas to legitimise polity.
00:32:17.000You should never use scientific ideas, inject them into ideology in that way.
00:32:23.000And then that was a terrible thing that happened in the late 90s, early 20th century.
00:32:29.000And 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.
00:33:44.000And 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 you could say oh look these atrocities were carried out in the name of Islam these atrocities were carried out in the name of Christendom these atrocities were carried out in the name of late
00:34:22.000Capitalist imperialism, the atrocities of 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.
00:34:44.000Christianity had its bad moments in the Middle Ages and Islam is having its bad moments now, perhaps you could say that.
00:34:51.000And 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.
00:35:06.000For me, my analysis would be this is the pursuit of power that's significant here.
00:35:09.000But 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.
00:35:30.000Increasingly it looks like that is hijacked by economic interests, certainly in some of the ways that we just sketched out just then.
00:35:39.000But 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 remittable stop of what can be understood, measured,
00:36:01.000weighed, you know, and using consciousness and what precedes the Big Bang as just two sort of off-the-cuff
00:36:06.000examples. I wonder what is the place of faith in forming a culture? What is the place of trust?
00:36:14.000Like ideas that are unscientific, definitely.
00:36:17.000Because we don't understand something, the appropriate response to that is to work on it,
00:36:25.000The 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.
00:36:38.000The fact that science hasn't got the answer doesn't mean that anything else has got the answer.
00:36:43.000And when we talked about those deep profound problems, the deep mysteries, I mean 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.
00:36:55.000That's where I would stick my toes in.
00:36:59.000Ben, 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?
00:37:14.000Well, ideals, moral ideals are another matter.
00:37:16.000I wasn't talking about morals, I'm talking about truth, I'm talking about understanding of the universe, understanding of the deep.
00:37:49.000Oh, well, moral truths are another matter, and we can talk about moral truths, but that's not what I'm actually mainly concerned about.
00:37:56.000What are the ones that are beyond science?
00:38:00.000Truths about the universe, dark matter, dark energy, consciousness, the origin of the laws of physics.
00:38:08.000These are profoundly difficult problems which science doesn't yet know the answer to.
00:38:12.000All I'm saying is that if science doesn't know the answer to it, nor does religion.
00:38:18.000And that you don't think sort of a kind of a poetic or intuitive or mystical understanding, and when you inventory them in that manner I'm inclined to agree that a scientific understanding, an empirical demonstrable understanding would be valuable.
00:38:35.000But what I feel that we're, 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
00:38:48.000values with a little bit of Nietzsche, God is dead and we can't get the
00:38:51.000blood off our hands or we have killed him we can't get the blood off our hands, is
00:38:54.000that where we find ourselves now is that in our culture if you look at the
00:39:00.000sort of the morality that was formed during the pandemic period lent into
00:39:04.000scientific understanding for its authority, for its moral authority,
00:39:09.000for example you know it is immoral if you don't undertake these these medical
00:39:14.000procedures, it's immoral if you don't remain within your home, well it turned out that
00:39:19.000that morality was incorrect and one might argue that different interests were
00:39:25.000being served by that being presented as a moral decision when in fact it
00:39:31.000wasn't just to be less cryptic, for example the Pfizer never clinically trialed
00:39:37.000their vaccines for transmission and yet the way that the vaccines were
00:39:42.000presented to the public was as a remedy against transmission.
00:39:47.000Right, 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 utilised 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, are you happy with this God?
00:40:16.000We're interested in power and in the same way but well we can show you the data this is you know that's being used in the same way and it's about power it's about something that's abstracted and from that you can deduce that science is neither good or bad it's about sort of cold hard facts and religion is neither good or bad it's an attempt to deal with the unknowable and to derive from the unknowable a sense of meaning and purpose and and if you want to apply empiricism to this professor that what are the results of a successful religion.
00:40:48.000You need to stop and let me get a word in.
00:40:53.000The advice about vaccine and whether it prevents transmission.
00:41:03.000As I understand it, what appears to be moral advice was kind of more what they thought to be common sense, which might not have been actually, based upon what you could call the measles model, where a disease like measles
00:41:29.000where it is actually a public good, it's actually a social good to get vaccinated.
00:41:35.000Because the more people who are vaccinated, the less chance the epidemic has to get going.
00:41:42.000And so if you refuse to be vaccinated, you are in a sense, a problem, a social problem.
00:41:49.000And I think the advice that was given over COVID was taking off from the measles model.
00:41:57.000Epidemiologists 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, and if they were wrong, then people can be wrong, and they need to climb down and say they were wrong.
00:42:35.000I don't know whether they were or not, as you said, it's not my field, but I don't think You can be too censorious about this.
00:42:44.000I think you have to say that the pandemic came upon us so suddenly.
00:42:49.000It wasn't clear what had to be done and an honest attempt was made to give the best advice.
00:43:05.000I'm not suggesting that it was deliberately duplicitous but But the set of assumptions when corralled together do not look favourable, i.e.
00:43:17.000they censored credible sources that offered contradictory information.
00:43:26.000That's actually true and publicly acknowledged.
00:43:28.000We don't need to get down the rabbit hole.
00:43:29.000Because in a sense, Professor, I'm merely using it to say that the presence of power is what is significant in both the cases of science and religion.
00:44:02.000I mean, I'm only continuing because you're continuing.
00:44:04.000They 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 were increasingly becoming difficult.
00:44:16.000I wouldn't wish to make the economic accusation at that point.
00:44:19.000I 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
00:44:39.000Then that's something we need to take account of in the future, but I don't think I would wish to point fingers and say there was economic interests which were overriding this case.
00:44:50.000I think it was if there was a mistake.
00:44:51.000I'm not even saying there was a mistake, but if there was a mistake, then I think it was an honest mistake.
00:44:56.000We've got some incredible information on this which to outline now would take us such a long while, but there's some quite credible sources that make it appear like that the institutions of the media, the government, the
00:45:11.000pharmaceutical industry, unelected global bodies like the WEF, WHO,
00:45:15.000philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
00:45:20.000who had previously run sort of pandemic, sort of had gamed out what might happen in a pandemic
00:45:26.000situation, conveniently aligned to generate a scenario where
00:45:33.000the outcomes were favorable to governments whose general tendency,
00:45:38.000one might argue, based on their name, is to govern and regulate and legislate
00:45:43.000and to corporate interests whose, broadly speaking, exist in order to generate profit.
00:45:49.000And that might sound unduly cynical, but I'll just take as just one sort of
00:45:53.000simple example. At the beginning of the pandemic, Albert Ball, the CEO of Pfizer, said it would be unconscionable
00:45:58.000to profit from this pandemic and that they would ensure that that
00:46:01.000And yet by the end of the pandemic, curiously, Pfizer had profited by
00:46:15.000And also, to tell you the truth, this is 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.
00:46:23.000But 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.
00:46:41.000I 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.
00:46:50.000It 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.
00:47:19.000Well, it's called Poetry of Reality, and science is the poetry of reality.
00:47:25.000And I haven't really started it yet, but I want to advise, ask your advice about how to run a podcast.
00:47:31.000I 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.
00:49:32.000That 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.
00:49:52.000The 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.
00:50:04.000What use is it, Professor, to turn to this is the endocrinal outcome, and this is what we imagine has happened neurologically?
00:50:13.000I 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...
00:50:24.000Access to something that might never be measured.
00:51:31.000That these are not just fluctuations and the flatulence of a busy mind, that there is something here that is vital.
00:51:40.000And I wonder how you approach those questions in yourself and where it leaves you with regards to the joy and the grief and the stuff I said an hour and a half ago at the beginning of the question.
00:51:48.000I never had a psychoactive experience, in which case I'm obviously deficient.
00:51:55.000I understand what's meant by words like love and empathy and they are They mean a lot to me on a personal level.
00:53:03.000I 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 imperature in the same manner that we've dealt at once with atoms and then electrons and then bosons, quarks and whatever the hell it is.
00:53:34.000But then it appears that we can never reliably say, ah, this is the genesis.
00:53:43.000And I... What am I trying to say to you?
00:53:47.000I'm trying to say that I don't know what I'm trying to say.
00:53:52.000I think I said some quite good things there.
00:53:54.000You keep using the word numinous and I'm curious what you mean by it.
00:54:02.000He goes, if I told you that there was a tiger in the next room, you would feel you would feel afraid.
00:54:11.000And 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.
00:54:24.000No one cares what a ghost is going to do, like in Scooby Doo.
00:54:28.000But you are aware that your understanding of reality is glitching and twitching and being challenged.
00:54:35.000He then said, imagine if I were to say there is a mighty spirit in the room next to you.
00:54:39.000You might feel that you might feel yourself on the edge of something and as Shakespeare said, and here my genius is rebuked.
00:54:47.000That the knowledge that there is a great power and I don't feel that we are at odds by perceiving it in nature or fetishizing its particular understanding over what it somehow suggests at its root.
00:55:04.000I 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.
00:55:19.000and necessary in fact and that if we allow science to encroach continually upon that
00:55:27.000territory what will happen is that this materialism, there's a word that's come up several times,
00:55:32.000that materialism will lead, that does lead to, because it has led to and this is where we are,
00:55:37.000a kind of, what do I want to say, a grimly metastasized capitalism where all that matters
00:55:50.000No other science would be of any value.
00:55:51.000Of course, conjecture will exist there.
00:55:53.000But 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.
00:56:15.000And I think, and my faith is, my belief is, that we need to reintroduce the mystery.
00:56:19.000And 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.
00:56:28.000I want it to be something that Makes people be able to endure and love and I feel that we need it.
00:56:33.000Indeed it is a scientific endeavor because I believe people require it.
00:56:52.000When you come on to Equating a scientific materialistic worldview with materialism in the other sense, materialism in the sense of a cheap sort of economically only caring about money and selfishness and things.
00:57:18.000I don't feel that that should be laid at science's door.
00:57:22.000Science is bigger than that, more important than that.
00:57:24.000And I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the only escape from materialism in the demeaning sense, in the economic sense, is religion.
00:57:40.000I think religion is relatively unequipped, too small to deal with these big problems that we're dealing with.
00:57:54.000Beyond the coincidence of the shared semantic term, I feel that there is a corollary between materialism in the two senses, because I feel that the...
00:58:36.000And I'm saying that secularism... Secularism, yes.
00:58:41.000Secularism, 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, but somehow man worships.
00:58:49.000Even, you know, 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.
00:59:58.000So 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.
01:00:15.000Hey, Richard, I've bought you a crystal.
01:00:54.000I 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.
01:01:46.000And I feel that what we may endeavor 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.
01:02:12.000And that this ought be revered and honoured and that there...
01:02:19.000The earliest forms of religion, say, because it seems like what you don't like are institutional religions where it's sort of like people at some point or another get a gun or a candelabra and say our religion is about this.
01:02:32.000What 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?
01:03:12.000I have one, 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.
01:03:21.000That 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.
01:03:30.000I mean, of course, that's the relationship that people had with their animals they hunted and the crops that they grew and so on.
01:03:38.000I mean, that's historically what happened.
01:03:40.000It wasn't the best way to do it, but that's the way it was done.
01:04:02.000I don't know what you're saying there.
01:04:04.000That 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.
01:04:22.000course, yes. The ability for us to interpret the vibrations in the air.
01:04:26.000Like, there's sort of, I feel that somehow your ability to understand mechanics,
01:04:32.000micro mechanics, evolutionary biology, has somehow stripped, if I may offer you this,
01:04:40.000I hope it's not insulting, stripped away the sort of somehow wonder and awe.
01:04:46.000And 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 is 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.
01:05:14.000A mathematical analysis of the waveform, Fourier analysis.
01:05:24.000And 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?
01:05:39.000And beyond this you think that there is nothing to revere or marvel at?
01:05:44.000There's plenty to reveal and marvel at, but it's not supernatural.
01:05:50.000It's natural, and it's beautiful because it's natural.
01:05:54.000And maybe one day it will succumb to understanding.
01:05:57.000We understand a lot more than we used to.
01:05:59.000We understand what sound waves are now.
01:06:02.000We understand, in principle, how they're analysed by the brain.
01:06:07.000It's interesting that you use the word succumb.
01:06:10.000Because of course so much of our history has been about the subjugation of nature, the management of nature.
01:06:17.000And yet, and you get the semantics around natural and supernatural, this 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.
01:06:41.000For me, I would not extract the possibility of theism being evident and stitched throughout all of that.
01:06:51.000And 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, and that that mystery could just as easily be utilised to create more harmony and to create more hope.
01:07:03.000And 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.
01:07:10.000And giving people a wallop with a microscope every time they try to write a poem.
01:07:15.000I was just saying it's a joke, you know, that's what you're like.
01:08:23.000So, all right, I think we've got quite a lot out of this.
01:08:27.000Obviously, 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.
01:08:37.000We'll post a link in the description there.
01:08:39.000Sorry I didn't do enough of your questions, or indeed any of your questions.
01:08:42.000I was really caught up in my own line of inquiry there.
01:08:50.000I don't know what these questions are.
01:08:52.000Tell me, I'll ask them, there's other people, and if you're interested in them you can answer them, if you feel... You mean people have sent them in?
01:08:59.000That's right, and if you feel the lure of Oxford, simply dismiss them with a wave of a hand, as if it was me, sort of trying to say that a spider's web's an example of Jesus.
01:09:09.000Camilla says, I've been so excited for this conversation.
01:09:11.000I used to read Richard's books growing up.
01:09:13.000Since then, my views have shifted and evolved.
01:09:14.000Richard, have your views shifted over time?
01:09:21.000Jimmy Greenwood said, why not acknowledge... Oh, he's going to hate this.
01:09:26.000Why not acknowledge that a soul or spirit exists?
01:09:28.000Otherwise one can miss out on so much you're going to really piss him off with this question.
01:09:31.000Denying religions is fine, but atheism is not dissimilar to other religions, a belief system, and creates division in much the same way as churches.
01:09:38.000God is simply a handy three-letter word to describe soul connection.
01:09:45.000Rich 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?
01:09:58.000I don't think, well that begins with an if.
01:10:01.000It's a conditional and I think the answer is he isn't.
01:10:14.000Paul 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.
01:10:22.000Paul saying that, and I think that you're strawmanning Christianity there.
01:10:27.000But we'll talk about this off-air when we go, when we do our caravan show.
01:10:31.000Join 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.
01:10:40.000You can buy tickets now if you want to come and see me, Matt and Shelley Schellenberger in London.