The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1366 - Richard Dawkins

00:00:00.000 Alright, here we go.

00:00:01.000 Mr. Dawkins, thank you very much for being here.

00:00:03.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:03.000 Thank you.

00:00:04.000 I'm a huge fan of your work, and we have a new book out, Outgrowing God.

00:00:08.000 When does it come out?

00:00:08.000 Is it out now?

00:00:09.000 It is out now.

00:00:10.000 It is now.

00:00:11.000 Like this week, right?

00:00:12.000 Last week, I think.

00:00:13.000 I read The God Delusion in preparation for this.

00:00:16.000 Can you pull that microphone right up to your face?

00:00:17.000 Just get it about a fist away from your face.

00:00:19.000 You don't have to move.

00:00:20.000 Okay.

00:00:20.000 The microphone will move for you.

00:00:22.000 Okay.

00:00:23.000 I'm a huge fan of your work, and I always wanted to ask you, you go so hard against religion, and you have for so long.

00:00:31.000 Has there ever been a time where you've gotten fatigued from this, where you're like, I just leave this to somebody else?

00:00:37.000 Well, obviously not, because I just produced another one.

00:00:40.000 It's not so hard as you think.

00:00:42.000 I mean, you remember it as hard.

00:00:44.000 But actually, if you read it again, I think you'd find it was not as hard as you remember.

00:00:48.000 I didn't mean hard in a negative sense.

00:00:51.000 I mean, you push.

00:00:53.000 You're so enthusiastic about your atheism.

00:00:56.000 I'm enthusiastic.

00:00:56.000 I'm also humorous.

00:00:58.000 I mean, I like to think it's a funny book.

00:01:00.000 But a lot of people do think it's hard in the other sense.

00:01:02.000 And sometimes when they read it again, they realize, actually, no, it's more humorous.

00:01:08.000 It's not so edgy, not so hard-hitting as they originally thought it was.

00:01:15.000 Well, I think that's probably because you've had some interviews in the past where you have talked to some fiercely religious people and you've had some cantankerous interactions with them. 0.99

00:01:24.000 I think maybe so.

00:01:25.000 They associate you with having this almost aggressively atheistic stance.

00:01:31.000 Yes, well, perhaps you're thinking of Bill O'Reilly.

00:01:34.000 I'm not sure.

00:01:35.000 I mean, he's aggressive, all right.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, in the other way.

00:01:39.000 I did once have to tell him, will you please stop interrupting me and let me talk?

00:01:43.000 And so that might give the slight impression that I'm aggressive.

00:01:48.000 Now, what was that BBC documentary that you had done where you had...

00:01:51.000 I've done several.

00:01:53.000 The one where you had gone and interviewed a bunch of different religious people?

00:01:57.000 Yes, that was not BBC. That was Channel 4, which is the commercial station.

00:02:02.000 And yes, I interviewed Ted Haggard and a guy who ran a thing called Hell Houses.

00:02:11.000 Where they tried to terrify children.

00:02:15.000 I mean, freak them out with horrible little playlets.

00:02:20.000 The devil coming on with horns and glowing eyes.

00:02:25.000 I actually participated in a reenactment of that play in Los Angeles back in the day, a comedy reenactment.

00:02:33.000 Bill Maher was in it, a bunch of other comedians were in it, and we read word for word the script and we acted it out in front of a live audience so people would come through the Hell House.

00:02:46.000 This haunted house.

00:02:47.000 But instead, people knew it was all comedians reading it.

00:02:50.000 And they're like, is this really the words that they said?

00:02:52.000 It was so preposterous that it actually, without being a parody, it actually played out like a comedy.

00:02:58.000 Well, when we filmed it, we filmed them doing the play.

00:03:00.000 And then they filmed me interviewing the perpetrator, Michael somebody or other.

00:03:06.000 And I said to him, what's your target audience?

00:03:09.000 And he said, 12. And I said, really?

00:03:11.000 Are you really serious that you like to...

00:03:14.000 He said, hell is such a terrible place that anything I can do to persuade children not to sin and they must acknowledge Jesus and so on is worth it.

00:03:27.000 I thought that was a deeply immoral thing to say, but I think he was sincere.

00:03:32.000 Well, I would agree with you.

00:03:33.000 It's very disturbing.

00:03:37.000 There's a great documentary on it as well for someone who wants to see the thought process behind them creating this.

00:03:43.000 But one of the things that I really enjoyed about The God Delusion is that you kind of outlined every single possible argument against atheism and then how to counter to it in advance.

00:03:54.000 Like, if you have a soft position, look at chapter one.

00:03:59.000 If you look at this, look at chapter And you outlined that in the preface before you got into it.

00:04:04.000 Yes.

00:04:05.000 Well, I tried to be as persuasive as possible.

00:04:08.000 The new book, Outgrowing God, is sort of aimed at a younger audience.

00:04:13.000 And I like to think it can be read at any age, but being aimed at a younger audience is a bit shorter and perhaps a bit easier to follow.

00:04:22.000 I'm not sure.

00:04:23.000 Why is it that you think that there are so many religions and that basically every single civilization throughout human history has had some sort of deity, some sort of higher power?

00:04:37.000 It's amazing the way they split and diverge and diverge and diverge.

00:04:42.000 It's as though they somehow can't get along with each other.

00:04:47.000 Maybe new leaders arise who have a leadership complex or something and want to found their own sector.

00:04:53.000 Time and time again, you have breakaway religions, breakaway faiths. 0.99

00:04:59.000 I don't know what the psychological reason for it is, but what I have noticed is that they usually… They hate the religion which is the closest to their own more than they do more distant ones and that has a certain biological ring to it too.

00:05:13.000 That just kind of makes sense to a biologist looking at diverging species.

00:05:18.000 Well, it almost seems like if you were studying human beings, if you were something that was completely alien to our civilization, our culture, and you were looking at this strange tendency To believe in something that there's no proof of and devote a massive amount of energy into defending that,

00:05:37.000 put it into your songs and put it into, you know, your Pledge of Allegiance and all these, which of course was not until the 1950s.

00:05:44.000 But all the different things that people have done in so many different cultures in regards to religion, it almost seems like a natural aspect of being a human being.

00:05:54.000 You're right that they put an enormous amount of energy and effort and expense and time.

00:06:04.000 Yes.

00:06:25.000 And I don't get it, I must say.

00:06:28.000 I've thought about this so many times.

00:06:30.000 Do you think that it is in some way a counter to the sort of existential angst that comes from being a finite life form?

00:06:39.000 From being a finite, a thinking conscious, finite life form that's aware of its own demise, aware it's coming.

00:06:45.000 So it has to formulate some purpose and some meaning.

00:06:48.000 And a hope of an afterlife as well.

00:06:51.000 Yes, that is the purpose and meaning, right?

00:06:53.000 Yes, I suppose that's right.

00:06:55.000 Yes, I think that's right.

00:06:58.000 I can understand why people might want to believe a priest who comes along and tells them you don't have to worry about death because you're going to survive it.

00:07:06.000 I'm less understanding of people who make up stories to comfort either themselves or other people.

00:07:14.000 I mean, a made-up story should not be comforting.

00:07:17.000 I don't understand how a made-up story can be comforting.

00:07:19.000 Of course, if you make it up and persuade somebody else, then they could find it comforting.

00:07:23.000 On the other hand, is an afterlife really all that comforting?

00:07:28.000 When you think about half of them believe they're going to go to hell, so it's anything but comforting.

00:07:35.000 And also, even if you're not going to hell, if you're going to heaven, eternity in heaven, I mean, Sitting in heaven for not just billions of years, but trillions of years.

00:07:47.000 I mean, these are time spans beyond our comprehension.

00:07:50.000 How unbelievably boring it would be.

00:07:54.000 Would it though?

00:07:55.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:07:56.000 I enjoy life, but if I had to live my life over and over again, infinitely, if I had an infinite number of this exact lives, I don't know how I'd approach that.

00:08:10.000 In the moment, I can enjoy it.

00:08:12.000 I could do with maybe 200 years, but after that – no, I mean, I think that eternity is what's frightening about death, and eternity is best spent under a local – under a general anesthetic, which is what's going to happen.

00:08:27.000 Right.

00:08:28.000 Gonzo, alcohol the lights.

00:08:31.000 Maybe.

00:08:31.000 Yeah.

00:08:32.000 Or maybe not.

00:08:33.000 Have you had any experience with psychedelics?

00:08:35.000 No.

00:08:36.000 No?

00:08:36.000 Do you have any interest in that?

00:08:37.000 I've been offered to be accompanied on a trip by a very nice woman friend.

00:08:42.000 And I've never so far dared take her up on it.

00:08:46.000 How come?

00:08:48.000 I asked advice of a cousin of my father who's just recently died who was a major expert on psychedelics and I think he was the one who introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline for example.

00:09:00.000 And he judiciously advised against, he said that the horrors of a bad trip are so awful that he wouldn't advise somebody to go into it.

00:09:11.000 My friend who's offering me this trip says it would be a relatively low dose and she would take another low dose so she could kind of accompany me and stop me jumping out a window or anything.

00:09:25.000 Well, there's so many stories in so many ancient religions that seem to originate with the consumption of some sort of a psychedelic.

00:09:32.000 Yes.

00:09:33.000 And, you know, there's many, including John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom on the Cross.

00:09:39.000 Jesus was a mushroom.

00:09:40.000 Yeah.

00:09:42.000 I mean, you could see the connection if you were a primitive person with no access to science and you found some mushroom growing under a tree and consumed it and had this unbelievable experience.

00:09:53.000 You would assume that you've transcended this life and gone into this other realm where God exists.

00:10:00.000 I once thought that I would try a psychedelic when I was on my deathbed.

00:10:04.000 That's it?

00:10:05.000 But what if it was amazing?

00:10:06.000 And you're like, I could have gotten so much done.

00:10:09.000 With this.

00:10:09.000 If I had tried this out when I was 30. I don't, you know, I don't think anybody should do anything.

00:10:17.000 I mean, I used to.

00:10:19.000 I used to encourage people to do things all the time.

00:10:22.000 Now, my thought is do whatever compels you, whatever you feel like it.

00:10:26.000 But I would think that a person like yourself, who has this sort of rigorous belief that the lights go out and then that's it, I would think that that would be attractive to just at least dip your toes in.

00:10:38.000 Yes, yes.

00:10:39.000 Well, don't you think the lights go out?

00:10:40.000 I don't know.

00:10:42.000 You know, I don't know.

00:10:43.000 I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences that make me wonder what thoughts are and what consciousness is and whether or not there's some way that it transcends where we are now.

00:10:53.000 Well, I wonder what consciousness is but it's pretty clear that it's to do with brains and brains decay and so I wouldn't hold out much hope if I were you.

00:11:01.000 Well, you might be right.

00:11:04.000 Well, certainly consciousness does have to do with brains, and we know brain damage severely perturbs consciousness.

00:11:10.000 But there's some interaction with certain chemicals that makes this experience far different than what it is when we're on the natch, as we are right now.

00:11:20.000 I believe that.

00:11:21.000 It's still brains, though.

00:11:22.000 Yeah.

00:11:24.000 Still brains, but that's it.

00:11:25.000 Reductionist.

00:11:26.000 Nothing wrong with reductionism.

00:11:28.000 Nothing wrong with it.

00:11:29.000 Not saying there is.

00:11:30.000 What is the fiercest opposition that you've ever had to your work?

00:11:37.000 Fiercest or most cogent?

00:11:39.000 Well, let's try both.

00:11:41.000 Fiercest meaning who has become the most angry at your work, and most cogent meaning...

00:11:49.000 Ted Haggard, maybe.

00:11:50.000 That guy, really?

00:11:51.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:11:52.000 Well, he's such a preposterous person. 0.99

00:11:54.000 For folks who don't know, he was a guy who, he was pretty anti-gay, right? 1.00

00:12:00.000 And then it turned out he was smoking meth and having sex with gay prostitutes and, you know... 1.00

00:12:06.000 The whole deal. 1.00

00:12:07.000 Yes. 0.98

00:12:08.000 Which is, whenever someone, to me, is ridiculously anti-gay, I always assume that they're gay. 0.92

00:12:13.000 I always assume, well, this guy, he's just trying to, like, divert attention. 0.94

00:12:18.000 Yes.

00:12:19.000 Well, he was very hostile.

00:12:21.000 And in a very weird way.

00:12:25.000 It's all on television.

00:12:27.000 That was before his scandal.

00:12:29.000 Oh, yes.

00:12:30.000 You got a hold of him before the scandal.

00:12:32.000 Oh, yeah.

00:12:32.000 Yeah.

00:12:33.000 Yeah, he was.

00:12:34.000 He was very hostile with you.

00:12:35.000 I remember that.

00:12:36.000 He was aggressive, like angry.

00:12:38.000 He almost tried to run us over in the car park afterwards.

00:12:42.000 I think he didn't know who I was when he interviewed me.

00:12:45.000 And then I think he went away afterwards and Googled me.

00:12:48.000 Was there Google back then?

00:12:49.000 I don't think there was.

00:12:50.000 I think there was, yes.

00:12:51.000 Netscape Navigator, I think, maybe.

00:12:52.000 Maybe it was.

00:12:53.000 So he was the fiercest in terms of his reaction.

00:12:59.000 He had a very nasty, snarly face, and he looked for the fiercest, yes.

00:13:04.000 Has anybody had a good debate with you about it, where they had some good points?

00:13:11.000 Not good points, no.

00:13:12.000 I mean, I've had very amicable debates with religious people, bishops, archbishops and people like that, the chief rabbi of Britain.

00:13:23.000 Very amicable.

00:13:24.000 And the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is such a nice man.

00:13:32.000 He's intelligent in the literal sense that he finishes your sentences for you.

00:13:36.000 And so he clearly understands exactly what you're trying to say and gets there before you finish the sentence.

00:13:41.000 But then for some weird reason doesn't agree with it.

00:13:46.000 Excuse me.

00:13:50.000 Yeah, that is the conundrum.

00:13:53.000 Super intelligent people who are deeply religious and who believe everything, everything from the resurrection to the Virgin Mary to everything.

00:14:01.000 I assume that he would Believe possibly in the resurrection because they regard that as a kind of non-negotiable part.

00:14:08.000 What surprised me was that he turned out to believe in all the other miracles as well, which I thought sophisticated theologians just don't do.

00:14:18.000 I thought they said, oh, that's just a metaphor or it didn't really happen or that's not important, just symbolic or something like that.

00:14:27.000 But he really believes in the whole lot.

00:14:30.000 What was his interpretation of things like death for adultery and things like that?

00:14:35.000 I didn't ask him about that.

00:14:37.000 I simply don't know.

00:14:39.000 Well, what's fascinating to me is not just the old religions, but really the young religions.

00:14:45.000 The young religions, as I've gotten older, are more interesting.

00:14:50.000 Things like Mormonism and more particularly Scientology, which is even more preposterous, probably the most preposterous one that we have.

00:14:56.000 Those are really interesting to me.

00:14:58.000 They are interesting, but because they're so young, you can see how they grew up.

00:15:02.000 You can see the actual process.

00:15:06.000 Mormonism, I'm I'm depressed by how successful it is, actually Scientology as well, but Mormonism since...

00:15:15.000 I mean, we know Joseph Smith was a charlatan. 0.96

00:15:17.000 Everything about him screams charlatan. 0.86

00:15:20.000 And yet...

00:15:23.000 Plenty of respectable people, including presidential candidates, men in suits, appear to believe it.

00:15:31.000 In the case of, I mean, I discuss it in Outgrowing God, in addition to the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith purported to translate another book called the Book of Abraham, which was in a different language, some ancient Egyptian language,

00:15:47.000 And he published his full translation of the book of Abraham which he said was all about Abraham's journey to Egypt and lots of detail about Egypt and Abraham in Egypt and things.

00:16:00.000 The original manuscripts were destroyed in a fire in Chicago and so he was safe from anybody exposing his translation.

00:16:13.000 It was discovered that actually some of these manuscripts had survived and they had not been destroyed.

00:16:19.000 And modern scholars who actually knew the language, including some Mormon scholars, translated it again, a true translation, which had nothing whatever to do with Abraham or Egypt.

00:16:32.000 This is an absolute cast-iron demonstration that Joseph Smith was a complete fake and charlatan.

00:16:39.000 This is fully documented. 0.74

00:16:41.000 And yet they go on believing that he was a prophet.

00:16:45.000 And he was 14, too, when he came up with it, which is even more bizarre.

00:16:48.000 Was he?

00:16:48.000 Yeah.

00:16:49.000 1820. He was 14 years old.

00:16:51.000 I didn't know that.

00:16:51.000 He was a little kid.

00:16:52.000 Yeah.

00:16:53.000 Just a boy with a fantastic imagination, and it sort of caught fire.

00:16:59.000 Yes, the golden plates which disappeared.

00:17:01.000 Yeah, and the seer stone.

00:17:03.000 Looking into a hat.

00:17:06.000 It's just so strange to me that it persists, but the people that practice the religion are so nice.

00:17:13.000 They are some of the nicest cult members I've ever met in my life.

00:17:18.000 Yes, I suppose so.

00:17:19.000 Mormons, they're my favorite.

00:17:21.000 Yeah, okay.

00:17:21.000 They're absolutely my favorite.

00:17:22.000 Even when they come on your doorstep and sort of… They haven't.

00:17:25.000 Okay.

00:17:25.000 If they did, maybe I changed my tune.

00:17:27.000 You all right over there, Jamie?

00:17:30.000 I'm also very interested in the, perhaps even more recent things, the cargo cults of the Pacific, where, again, these actually arose in living memory.

00:17:45.000 The worship of John Frum in some of the islands in the Pacific, where you can see what happened.

00:17:52.000 And this gives you an insight into what must have happened with Jesus, where, you know, the Gospels weren't written down until decades after Jesus' death, if he ever lived, which he probably did.

00:18:06.000 So having seen how easily the cargo cults arose, people who worshipped John Frum, worshipped Prince Philip, believed that cargo planes were sent by their ancestors and would build dummy airfields with dummy control towers and radar dishes and dummy planes on the airfield and things.

00:18:26.000 This is all within living memory.

00:18:29.000 And something like that, it's just so transparent that something like that went on in the early church. 0.83

00:18:37.000 Well, the Scientology story to me is the most bizarre because it was literally, I mean, if you wanted to have a crazy religion, like what would be the most ridiculous religion for people to believe in? 0.59

00:18:48.000 Well, and he even announced he was going to do it. 0.84

00:18:51.000 They still believe it. 0.81

00:18:53.000 But if you're going to have the most ridiculous religion, you would say, well, get a fiction author, particularly a bad one, a bad science fiction author who walked around in a jacket with medals on that he gave himself, and have that guy create a religion, a guy who is really self-diagnosing his own psychological issues and trying to deal with him through this concept of Dianetics. 0.92

00:19:16.000 I'm sure you read Lawrence Wright's book. 0.95

00:19:18.000 I haven't read it, but I mean, I know the story.

00:19:20.000 The book is fantastic.

00:19:21.000 It's just so crazy.

00:19:23.000 And it's so strange that to this day, people are clinging to it.

00:19:26.000 And it makes you wonder, like, what is it about these systems of belief that are so intrinsically attractive to people, so uniquely a part of being a person, these belief systems?

00:19:39.000 I think I get it when there's childhood indoctrination involved.

00:19:42.000 But in the case of Scientology, some of the celebrities who joined it, that's not childhood indoctrination. 1.00

00:19:48.000 That's just sheer rank stupidity. 0.99

00:19:50.000 I think there's also an element of being a part of a tribe. 1.00

00:19:53.000 Yes.

00:19:55.000 Especially the celebrity thing, because I've met quite a few of them out here, especially in the early days, the 90s before the internet came along and sort of exposed a lot of this stuff.

00:20:03.000 And South Park, before they came along and exposed it, there was quite a few people that thought there was a career advantage to being a part of Scientology.

00:20:12.000 There were so many successful actors that were a part of Scientology, and they seemed to be disciplined and focused, and they were avoiding drugs, and all the pitfalls of Hollywood fame and stardom.

00:20:25.000 And they also seem to be helping each other.

00:20:28.000 That Hollywood directors who were also Scientologists would look towards hiring Scientologists producers and actors.

00:20:36.000 They're kind of Freemasonry then.

00:20:38.000 Yes, yes.

00:20:39.000 There's some strange thing that we are all very attractive. 0.80

00:20:43.000 Attracted to being a part of a tribe and being a part of even if the belief system is ridiculous.

00:20:50.000 If we are in a group that subscribes this belief system, it's very attractive to people.

00:20:55.000 That's a very important point and tribalism is a very important part of human Human nature, a very bad part, I think.

00:21:04.000 The rewarding part as well, right?

00:21:05.000 Well, I suppose so.

00:21:07.000 Steven Pinker, you probably had him at some point.

00:21:10.000 He makes the point that so much of what we believe, we humans generally believe, is not about evidence, but is about, is this part of my tribe?

00:21:22.000 Right.

00:21:22.000 Does my tribe believe this?

00:21:23.000 Yes.

00:21:27.000 Jonathan Haidt also makes the same point about Republicans and Democrats.

00:21:30.000 There's a fierce tribalism going on and it accounts for so much of what people believe as opposed to actually looking at the evidence.

00:21:42.000 The Center for Inquiry, which my foundation has just merged with, is of course all about trying to get people off that sort of thing, a sort of irrationality.

00:21:49.000 And to instead evaluate claims on the basis of evidence, critically evaluated scientific evidence.

00:21:57.000 But it's hard because people have other motives like emotion, tribalism, things like that.

00:22:05.000 Well, people find great comfort in these belief systems.

00:22:10.000 I've often said that it gives them some sort of scaffolding for their structure of the world, their ethics, their morals.

00:22:18.000 They can use religion as some sort of a mechanism to help them get by, something that they can climb on to ease some of the confusion of the unknown.

00:22:31.000 I'm sure that's true, but I don't understand why anybody therefore thinks that therefore the religion is true.

00:22:38.000 Why would you think that because it provides you with a scaffold you can climb on?

00:22:42.000 That makes it true. 0.92

00:22:43.000 I could understand you erecting a scaffold that was, say, gymnastics or a certain diet or something like that, but a belief about the universe That's either got to be true or not.

00:22:56.000 And it doesn't make it true just because it's comforting or provides you with a scaffold to climb on.

00:23:01.000 Well, it's almost like it's a spiritual system like a placebo effect, like a spiritual placebo effect.

00:23:09.000 And by believing that this is true, it gives you this comfort and allows you to condense your thoughts into a better path.

00:23:19.000 The placebo effect, of course, is very real, and doctors know about it.

00:23:23.000 But did you know that the placebo effect works even if the patient is told it's a placebo?

00:23:28.000 Yes.

00:23:28.000 That I don't get.

00:23:30.000 Incredible.

00:23:30.000 That's incredible, isn't it?

00:23:31.000 Yeah, it's very strange.

00:23:33.000 Well, sometimes people doing things and knowing that they're doing things gives them this sort of feeling of momentum, of accomplishment, of progress.

00:23:43.000 And I think so many people are just so adrift I think the main reason why so many people believe in homeopathy,

00:24:02.000 which not only doesn't work but cannot work, Is the placebo effect.

00:24:08.000 It's partly they're going to get better anyway, of course, but it's also the placebo effect that a homeopathic, I won't say doctor, a homeopathic practitioner gives them a nonsensical piece of medicine.

00:24:20.000 And they believe it's going to work and so it does.

00:24:24.000 And so the placebo effect is important.

00:24:27.000 The CFI, Centre for Inquiry, has actually got a lawsuit going on at the moment against pharmaceutical shops selling homeopathic remedies.

00:24:46.000 I think?

00:25:07.000 Whereas real doctors are not allowed to prescribe.

00:25:10.000 They used to.

00:25:11.000 Real doctors used to prescribe placebos all the time.

00:25:14.000 But they're now no longer allowed to because it violates human rights.

00:25:18.000 But homeopaths are allowed to, bizarrely, because they don't call them placebos.

00:25:24.000 If they did, they wouldn't be allowed to.

00:25:25.000 Well, I have a similar thought about chiropractic work, that chiropractors do relieve pain for some people, but there's no reason why it works.

00:25:35.000 I would not be totally surprised if it worked.

00:25:39.000 I haven't looked into it enough.

00:25:40.000 I would absolutely be surprised if homeopathy works.

00:25:43.000 It cannot work because there's no active ingredient.

00:25:46.000 I can't wait to tell you the story of chiropractic medicine then.

00:25:49.000 It was created by a guy who is a magnetic healer who was murdered by his own son and his son took over the business and started saying that it can cure everything from leukemia to heart disease, everything, all by manipulating the spine.

00:26:01.000 Yes.

00:26:01.000 It was done in the 1800s and there's no science behind it at all.

00:26:05.000 But yet so many people have found pain relief and chiropractors today It's weird to lump them all in together, but many chiropractors today do do good work because they incorporate legitimate modalities in terms of like rehabilitation,

00:26:22.000 like cold laser and all these different massage remedies and all these different things that actually physically work.

00:26:29.000 I know a woman who is a horse chiropractor. 1.00

00:26:33.000 But the point I'm trying to make is that whereas it's an empirical question whether chiropractic works, in the case of homeopathy it cannot work.

00:26:43.000 Right.

00:26:44.000 Because the dilution is such that the… There's nothing there physically.

00:26:48.000 There's nothing there.

00:26:48.000 Right.

00:26:48.000 There's no chemical reason.

00:26:49.000 Well, they say it can work because water has a memory.

00:26:54.000 But if they could prove that water has a memory, they'd get the Nobel Prize for physics and they're not going to.

00:27:01.000 One of the things that I really enjoyed about your book was when you explain to people that everyone who practices a religion is an atheist.

00:27:10.000 You're just an atheist in regards to Zeus or Apollo.

00:27:14.000 Or the 999 other gods.

00:27:16.000 Yes.

00:27:16.000 And that's a home run.

00:27:20.000 Some of us just go one god further.

00:27:22.000 Yes, but that really is a home run because this concept of, you know, me and my friends jokingly would always say praise Odin when anything would happen that was pretty good or cool.

00:27:35.000 We say praise Odin and I started doing it online and people really got into saying praise Odin about certain things.

00:27:40.000 I rather like that, yes.

00:27:41.000 Some people get mad at me.

00:27:43.000 They actually got mad.

00:27:45.000 You're mocking Christianity by saying praise Odin.

00:27:47.000 Of course you are.

00:27:48.000 Why not?

00:27:49.000 I wasn't even really.

00:27:50.000 I was just having fun.

00:27:51.000 I was having fun because Odin seemed like a cool god.

00:27:55.000 It's an old school god.

00:27:59.000 The god of the Vikings.

00:28:00.000 Douglas Adams wrote a lovely book called The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul in which the Norse gods are part of it.

00:28:07.000 And Odin in that book has got old and senile and he just lies in bed all the time and asking for clean sheets every day.

00:28:16.000 And Thor is out there doing mischief with his great hammer.

00:28:19.000 And at one point, Odin gets Thor super glued to the floor and thinks it's a wonderful story.

00:28:27.000 The vast number of different religions, I mean, the incredible number.

00:28:33.000 I mean, how many actual religions are there?

00:28:36.000 Thousands.

00:28:37.000 Yes.

00:28:37.000 I forget how many thousand, but...

00:28:39.000 And many of them share similar belief systems.

00:28:43.000 And it's really interesting when you see how they're like, you know, the Noah's Ark story is very similar to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

00:28:51.000 And there's so many that you see like, oh, they probably told this to someone else and these people moved and traveled on and...

00:28:59.000 It's just amazing that that concept is alien to people.

00:29:04.000 When I was a boy, I was raised Catholic, and I had an aunt who was Jewish, and my uncle married my aunt, and he had to convert to Judaism.

00:29:12.000 And it was like a big deal in the family.

00:29:14.000 Everybody would talk about it.

00:29:15.000 And there was no anger.

00:29:17.000 Everybody loved my aunt.

00:29:18.000 She's a great lady.

00:29:19.000 But it was just strange that he was converting to this other religion.

00:29:22.000 I remember I was five years old when this was going on.

00:29:24.000 And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:29:26.000 What do you mean another religion?

00:29:28.000 I was like, what's going on?

00:29:29.000 And they were like, oh, she's Jewish.

00:29:31.000 I go, what?

00:29:32.000 What does that mean?

00:29:33.000 What do you mean she's Jewish?

00:29:34.000 And they had to explain it to me.

00:29:37.000 I go, okay, but she believes in God.

00:29:39.000 Like, yeah, they believe in God.

00:29:40.000 Okay, so why is it a different thing?

00:29:43.000 Well, they believe Jesus was a different kind of a thing.

00:29:46.000 They don't necessarily believe he was the guy that we think he was.

00:29:50.000 But if it had been Hindu, they'd have had to explain to you they believe in hundreds of gods.

00:29:55.000 Yeah, and then we'd have to go way back.

00:29:58.000 Yeah.

00:29:59.000 It's just, when you first hear that, I mean, that probably put the first seeds of doubt in my head when I was a young boy.

00:30:07.000 When I was like, well, there's more than one?

00:30:09.000 I'll never forget that moment, because we're all sitting around the dinner table, and I was just a little kid.

00:30:14.000 And I remember thinking, what do you mean?

00:30:16.000 There's another one?

00:30:18.000 I think that's a very powerful way of getting to children is to just simply tell them that.

00:30:24.000 Telling them nothing but facts.

00:30:25.000 You're not indoctrinating them.

00:30:26.000 You're just telling them.

00:30:28.000 There are lots of different religions and Hindus believe in hundreds of gods and Jews believe in one god and Muslims believe in one god and they don't believe in Jesus and just lay out all the different religions.

00:30:42.000 That would be a very good educational exercise.

00:30:45.000 Has there ever been a civilization that existed without a belief in a higher power?

00:30:50.000 I don't think there has, no.

00:30:52.000 Of course, there are plenty of individuals who educate that do not believe in a higher power.

00:30:58.000 I think it's probably true to say that every – I mean anthropologists might deny them and there might be some tribe that doesn't, but I suspect they all do.

00:31:07.000 Well, there's been some tribes that worshipped animals and particularly animals that they survived off of.

00:31:12.000 Yes, yeah.

00:31:13.000 And river gods and thunder gods and moon gods and sun gods and fire gods and things, yes.

00:31:21.000 When you look at human civilization and you go back to the origins of religion and you look towards the future, do you envision a time where humanity is free of what you would consider irrational belief systems or belief systems that are not based on fact?

00:31:37.000 I do.

00:31:38.000 I'm not sure that it'll come soon, but I do, and I look forward to that time, of course.

00:31:44.000 I think we're moving in the right direction, and the figures bear that out in history.

00:31:49.000 Even in America, which is off the scale of Western civilizations, even in America, the number of people who now subscribe to a religion is dropping dramatically,

00:32:05.000 and the number who say they have no religion is now about 25%.

00:32:08.000 That's a lot.

00:32:09.000 That's a great deal.

00:32:11.000 And that compares to any one particular Christian denomination.

00:32:15.000 And yet, politically, That group, the nuns, the no-beliefs, have no lobby. 0.87

00:32:22.000 They have no powerful pressure group.

00:32:27.000 So politicians will go out there and suck up to, I don't know, the Irish lobby, the Polish lobby, the Jewish lobby, the Catholic lobby, etc.

00:32:35.000 But the atheist lobby... 0.78

00:32:37.000 Hasn't got his act together, or is only just now beginning to get his act together.

00:32:41.000 Well, politically, I think people are terrified of the concept because it's such a long branch to go out on.

00:32:49.000 One of the things that you brought up in The God Delusion was...

00:32:53.000 The willingness of people to vote for a gay candidate for president, a black candidate for president, a woman candidate for president, but then an atheist, which is I believe 40 percent?

00:33:03.000 They think that you've got to have a belief in some kind of higher power in order to be moral.

00:33:09.000 But the weird thing is that it doesn't have to be the same higher power as the one you believe in.

00:33:14.000 Anyone will do as long as there is one.

00:33:17.000 But if you don't believe in higher power, You must be immoral. 0.96

00:33:23.000 And that is totally ridiculous when you think about the...

00:33:28.000 Horrible immorality of, for example, both the Bible and the Koran, which are horrific in the sense that if you actually got your morals, if you got your moral values from the Old Testament or the Koran, and they share a great deal of course, 1.00

00:33:44.000 you would be stoning adulterers to death and stoning people to death for breaking the Sabbath and doing sacrifices, human sacrifices and animal sacrifices. 0.60

00:33:55.000 All sorts of horrible things, which of course do go on now in Islamic countries especially. 1.00

00:34:02.000 Gay people getting thrown off high buildings and women being beheaded for the crime of being seen with a man, not their husband and that kind of thing. 0.81

00:34:12.000 So we can see what you get when you get your morality from Islam. 1.00

00:34:19.000 An Abrahamic scripture.

00:34:21.000 And yet there are still people in this country who say you cannot be moral unless you believe in a higher power.

00:34:27.000 What do you think – let's extract this concept of a higher power.

00:34:33.000 Let's get rid of it.

00:34:34.000 Let's get rid of it.

00:34:35.000 Where do you think people get their morals and their ethics from?

00:34:38.000 That's a profoundly difficult question.

00:34:40.000 We clearly don't get them from religion.

00:34:44.000 And yet we get them from somewhere, and you can demonstrate that by the fact that the moral values of any particular century are markedly different from those of other centuries, even decades.

00:34:58.000 So in the 21st century, we here now have moral values which are really significantly different from 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago.

00:35:10.000 And Within any one of those centuries, you could take people who are in the vanguard of moral progress.

00:35:20.000 For example, in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley would have been on the liberal progressive end of the spectrum and other people would have been on the opposite end.

00:35:35.000 But even Abraham Lincoln, for example, He made a speech that I quoted in Outgrowing God in which he said, of course, nobody would seriously think that black people are the equal to white people.

00:35:47.000 Nobody would seriously say that black people should be allowed to vote or should be allowed to marry white people. 1.00

00:35:54.000 This is Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and was, as I say, in the forefront of progressive thought.

00:36:02.000 Charles Darwin again was in favor of freeing the slaves.

00:36:06.000 He was passionately anti-slavery, but he too Thought that there was no question about black people being equal of white people. 0.86

00:36:14.000 They obviously weren't.

00:36:16.000 And Thomas Huxley, again, Darwin's bulldog, thought the same way.

00:36:22.000 Now, those people were at the forefront, as I say.

00:36:26.000 Today, they would still be in the forefront and they would be horrified to look back on what they said in the 19th century.

00:36:34.000 Well, something is changing as the centuries go by.

00:36:38.000 In Outgrowing God, I call it something in the air, which of course doesn't explain anything.

00:36:43.000 But what I mean by that is that it's not literally hovering in the air, but it's a collection of conversations between people, dinner party conversations, parliamentary decisions,

00:37:00.000 congressional debates, judicial decisions by judges, juries, newspaper articles, journalism, all these things together Conspire together to produce something in the air,

00:37:15.000 something that defines a given century or maybe even a given decade with the moral values of that decade.

00:37:26.000 The knowledge base, which is just so superior today in terms of what the general public has access to in terms of what we understand about human beings.

00:37:36.000 It's just different than it was back then.

00:37:38.000 And it continues to be different.

00:37:40.000 And now with the Internet, we have so much more access to these conversations.

00:37:45.000 It's not just about being at a dinner table with the right people.

00:37:49.000 You can watch YouTube videos of yourself debating religious scholars.

00:37:53.000 That's right.

00:37:54.000 That progress of something in the air will, as it were, take on an accelerated pace because of the internet.

00:38:00.000 And I think that's a very hopeful sign.

00:38:02.000 Of course, the internet also can be used for the opposite purpose.

00:38:05.000 But I think there's a kind of asymmetry there because especially if you look at benighted areas of the world like Afghanistan and Pakistan where… Until recently, the idea of being an atheist was simply inconceivable.

00:38:20.000 It was off the radar.

00:38:21.000 They didn't even consider it.

00:38:23.000 It wasn't something that they thought was possible.

00:38:27.000 Now they do, because they got the internet.

00:38:30.000 We've got a project within CFI of downloading, free of charge, as PDFs, several of my books, including The God Delusion, and will be Outgrowing God as well.

00:38:42.000 And these are being downloaded by large numbers of people.

00:38:45.000 The first PDF download of the Arabic edition of The God Delusion was downloaded 13 million times.

00:38:57.000 They are being exposed to the possibility of atheism, which wasn't a possibility.

00:39:03.000 Of course, the internet is also exposing them to Islamic propaganda, but they've had that all along, from imams, mullahs, and their madrasa schools.

00:39:13.000 But now they've got it coming the other way as well, and I have great hope that the internet will mark a turning point.

00:39:20.000 Do you think that people need a structure and is it possible to give them a secular structure that mimics religion?

00:39:27.000 There's certainly some sort of a community aspect to religious worship.

00:39:30.000 Yes, possibly.

00:39:31.000 I don't feel that very strongly in myself but I'm aware that many other people do and there are people who are – I'm interested in starting up sort of atheistic or secular meet-up groups on Sundays and lectures.

00:39:45.000 Yeah, my worry is that that will become a sex cult. 0.92

00:39:48.000 Yeah, I never thought of that.

00:39:50.000 Always seems to have someone who gets in control who winds up Well, as religious cults usually do.

00:39:57.000 I mean, there's extraordinary stories.

00:39:58.000 That awful man, what was he called, who ended up taking his followers to a South American jungle.

00:40:04.000 Jim Jones.

00:40:05.000 Jim Jones.

00:40:06.000 And, I mean, he had this gigantic harem of all the young women. 0.62

00:40:12.000 They always do.

00:40:13.000 Yes.

00:40:13.000 Waco, he had one.

00:40:15.000 Exactly the same.

00:40:15.000 They all do.

00:40:16.000 Yes.

00:40:16.000 Yeah.

00:40:18.000 Well, okay.

00:40:19.000 I mean, I don't think that's happening so far with the secular...

00:40:22.000 I hope not.

00:40:23.000 The worry is that once someone gets into a position of being the person who gets to speak, the alpha, the one who's on the stage addressing people and giving them the doctrine, that he becomes far too attractive for his own good.

00:40:38.000 Well, that would not surprise any naive Darwinian who would say, what on earth do you think the dominant chimpanzee becomes dominant for?

00:40:49.000 That's what it's all about.

00:40:51.000 Exactly.

00:40:52.000 There's got to be a way to avoid that though.

00:40:54.000 I mean maybe the exposing nature of the internet would be the thing that – the actual thing that mitigates that.

00:41:04.000 I'm not personally that interested in meet-up groups and community centers and things.

00:41:09.000 I know other people are.

00:41:10.000 I mean all I really care about is scientific truth and that's what I'm trying to – That's very admirable, but I think for some people it represents bonding of the community.

00:41:21.000 You could have concerts and lectures and book clubs.

00:41:24.000 I think when they get together and they talk about all the values that Jesus proposed, if Jesus is the higher power, it gives them this sort of, again, moral scaffolding to live their life.

00:41:35.000 Yes.

00:41:36.000 Well, Jesus would probably on the whole provide a fairly good moral scaffolding.

00:41:40.000 Not totally, but he was ahead of his time anyway.

00:41:44.000 So you do think he was a real person?

00:41:47.000 Most of the scholars I've talked to say he probably was.

00:41:50.000 The evidence is not great, of course, but I think I don't think it's that big a deal actually because he, I mean a wandering preacher called Yeshua or Yehoshua would not be surprising.

00:42:06.000 I mean it's a common name and there are plenty of wandering preachers.

00:42:10.000 What would be very surprising would be if he raised Lazarus from the dead and walked on water and turned water into wine and that of course didn't, did not happen.

00:42:21.000 Well, why couldn't people just drink water either?

00:42:23.000 Why do they have to drink wine?

00:42:24.000 He's trying to get people drunk?

00:42:26.000 Well, that's a separate question.

00:42:28.000 But I mean I think – the point I'm making is that it's a very big difference to say did he exist?

00:42:35.000 And maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

00:42:36.000 Who cares really?

00:42:39.000 That's very different from saying that a miracle worker who really did do miracles rather than conjuring tricks existed.

00:42:45.000 Yes.

00:42:46.000 What was the – you said that you wrote this, it's a beginner's guide, outgrowing God.

00:42:52.000 Well, it's for young people. 0.98

00:42:53.000 I originally wanted to write a book for the young children.

00:42:58.000 And publishers didn't want to do that.

00:43:02.000 So they kept pushing the age range up and so it stabilized at about 15. But I think 14 – well, the first chapter has been read by one 10-year-old of my acquaintance.

00:43:16.000 He loved it.

00:43:17.000 And I think – but really I'm hoping it will be read by people of all ages.

00:43:24.000 There's one thing that does happen to some people.

00:43:28.000 That are indoctrinated very young, that the experience is so negative to them that they rebel.

00:43:35.000 And they rebel, and then they seek out other ways of thinking, and then you find them eventually abandoning the religion.

00:43:43.000 There's a woman named Megan Phelps. 0.90

00:43:44.000 Do you know who she is?

00:43:46.000 I think I do, yes.

00:43:47.000 She's Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church.

00:43:50.000 She was his granddaughter.

00:43:53.000 Yes.

00:43:53.000 Amazing woman.

00:43:54.000 Yes.

00:43:54.000 She wound up communicating with people through all things.

00:43:58.000 Twitter.

00:43:59.000 Yes.

00:43:59.000 And met her husband.

00:44:00.000 So she rebelled against her father.

00:44:02.000 Yes.

00:44:03.000 Her grandfather.

00:44:04.000 Yeah, she wound up leaving the church. 0.82

00:44:05.000 And wound up realizing that she was trapped in some sort of a Christian cult and a very hateful one.

00:44:13.000 Yes. 1.00

00:44:13.000 They're the God hates fags people. 1.00

00:44:15.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:44:15.000 And the same was true of Nate Phelps who was Fred Phelps' son. 1.00

00:44:22.000 And he also escaped.

00:44:23.000 He escaped on his 18th birthday.

00:44:25.000 Wow.

00:44:26.000 And became an atheist and became – I think he's actually spoken at some of our conferences from time to time.

00:44:34.000 Yeah, there's hope in that.

00:44:35.000 Yes, there is.

00:44:37.000 It's just when – I like when people can – and she – I've had her on the podcast.

00:44:41.000 She's such a unique woman, and she's so kind, and she's so thoughtful and intelligent.

00:44:46.000 It's hard to believe that she's only been out of this cult for a few years.

00:44:50.000 I mean, Twitter's only been around for 14 years.

00:44:54.000 Yeah, right, yeah.

00:44:55.000 Why wasn't she ruined by it?

00:44:57.000 She is so intelligent.

00:44:59.000 How did she exist in that structure while being so intelligent?

00:45:03.000 I agree.

00:45:04.000 But of course, I feel the same way about apparently intelligent people who believe obvious nonsense.

00:45:13.000 It's hard to understand.

00:45:16.000 It seems to be a part of what we are, though.

00:45:19.000 It seems to be a part of what human beings are.

00:45:21.000 They exist in so many different civilizations.

00:45:24.000 Yes, but decreasing numbers of actual individuals.

00:45:30.000 Right.

00:45:31.000 And in places like Holland and Scandinavia, hardly anybody is religious.

00:45:36.000 Really?

00:45:37.000 What are the numbers there?

00:45:38.000 Apart from immigrant Muslims who still are, but apart from them. 1.00

00:45:42.000 I don't know. 0.99

00:45:43.000 They're pathetically small. 0.97

00:45:45.000 Right. 0.97

00:45:45.000 Is there any evidence that that is reaching the Muslim world as well and that people are? 0.97

00:45:51.000 Well, as I was saying, the downloads of my books have been encouraging.

00:45:58.000 We have this thing called – CFI has a thing called the Translation Project, which is specifically in order to do that, in order to take my books and we hope other people's books as well and put them into PDFs and then have them available for free download.

00:46:15.000 I hear evidence from Iran, from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, from individuals who say, yes, there's now quite a substantial groundswell of anti-religious, anti-Islamic opinion.

00:46:30.000 And I think it's going to increase, and I'm really encouraged by that.

00:46:34.000 One of the things about being Muslim, in my eyes, is very similar to being Jewish, is that Jewish people, there are many Jewish people that are not religious, but they are Jewish.

00:46:47.000 Like, I have a very good friend, my friend Ari.

00:46:50.000 He is Jewish, but he is an atheist.

00:46:53.000 And he identifies with being a Jewish person.

00:46:57.000 He has Jewish relatives.

00:46:58.000 His father is a Holocaust survivor.

00:47:01.000 But he looks at it like a thing that he's a part of, like a great long tradition that he's a part of.

00:47:09.000 But he doesn't observe.

00:47:10.000 No, I understand that.

00:47:12.000 I think especially for People of Jewish heritage who have relatives killed in the Holocaust.

00:47:17.000 I think it could be a matter of kind of loyalty to their murdered relatives.

00:47:23.000 I could easily get that.

00:47:25.000 And I think that there are probably cultural Muslims who probably not for the same degree of loyalty but clearly think of themselves as Muslims.

00:47:37.000 I suppose I meant cultural Anglican in a way.

00:47:40.000 I mean I sort of I can sing the hymns and my family observes Christmas in a desolary sort of way.

00:47:49.000 When someone sneezes, do you say, bless you?

00:47:51.000 I never did say, bless you, actually.

00:47:53.000 What do you say?

00:47:54.000 Gesundheit?

00:47:55.000 I don't say anything, but I have no objection to saying Gesundheit or Gesundheit, of course, not religious.

00:48:03.000 My college at Oxford had a fellow who was a famous philosopher, a famous atheist, A.J. Eyre.

00:48:11.000 And he, when he was senior fellow, he used to say grace at dinner.

00:48:15.000 And when he was asked why, he said, I will not utter falsehoods, but I have no objection to uttering meaningless statements.

00:48:22.000 And that's what I feel.

00:48:23.000 LAUGHTER Now, when you set out to write this book and write it for young people, how did you structure it in your mind?

00:48:30.000 Did you think of it as addressing young people with questions that are trying to find… Sort of, yes.

00:48:38.000 It's in two halves.

00:48:39.000 The first half is debunking God.

00:48:42.000 It begins with what we were talking about earlier, the sheer number of different gods.

00:48:46.000 And then moves on to the Bible and how unreliable a source of information it is.

00:48:52.000 And both the Old Testament and the New Testament, they get a chapter each.

00:48:56.000 And then there's a couple of chapters on morality and why you don't need, well, not only do you not need religion to be moral, you better not have religion if you want to be moral.

00:49:06.000 And then the second half of the book is about science.

00:49:10.000 Because I think that One of the, possibly the major reason people still cling to religion is a belief that the world is so complicated, especially the living world is so complicated that it cannot be explained by purely scientific means.

00:49:30.000 And so I've set out to disabuse them of that and to show how Even the most radically complicated and beautiful and elegant pieces of animal design can be and are explained by science.

00:49:48.000 So that's most of the second half.

00:49:50.000 That's a weird one, right?

00:49:51.000 The argument that it's too complicated for it to not be of a divine… Well, I'm not sure it's weird.

00:49:57.000 It's kind of understandable until you've thought about it for a bit because complicated things don't just happen.

00:50:05.000 Complicated things like these cameras and this computer and things like that… We all know they had to have an engineer design them and factories to build them.

00:50:16.000 And they're very, very improbable things, statistically improbable.

00:50:20.000 The components of a computer or a camera, if you jumbled them up at random, they wouldn't work, obviously.

00:50:28.000 So it's kind of pardonable that people should think there must have been a designer.

00:50:33.000 But then you think a bit further and you realize that the designer himself would need just the same kind of explanation.

00:50:40.000 And therefore the designer is not an explanation that flies.

00:50:45.000 And philosophers before Darwin, philosophers like Hume realized that, but didn't have anything to put in its place.

00:50:55.000 Darwin came along and gave them That which you need to put in his place.

00:51:01.000 And Hume would have loved Darwin if only he'd lived long enough to meet him, to meet his ideas.

00:51:07.000 So I think we have to have sympathy for people who think that complexity must mean design.

00:51:16.000 But nowadays we know better, and that's what the second half of Outgrowing God is about.

00:51:21.000 Who designed the designer?

00:51:23.000 That's the big conundrum for people who believe in God.

00:51:26.000 Yes, it is.

00:51:27.000 And they shrug it off.

00:51:28.000 They say, oh, well, he didn't need a designer.

00:51:30.000 He was always there.

00:51:32.000 Well, my favorite one is, why did he wait until 6,000 years ago to leave the world?

00:51:36.000 I know, yes.

00:51:36.000 I know, exactly.

00:51:37.000 Yes, that was Christopher Hitchens' favorite one.

00:51:42.000 We have in the Center for Inquiry a program, it actually came over from the Richard Dawkins Foundation when we merged, called TIES, the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, which is teaching teachers how to teach evolution.

00:51:57.000 Because middle school teachers in this country apparently are not, don't have science degrees and they don't really know how to counter, how to combat evolution.

00:52:09.000 The pushback that they get from children and parents and school boards and things specifically against evolution.

00:52:19.000 And so we are teaching teachers how to teach evolution.

00:52:22.000 I mean, we run workshops.

00:52:24.000 We've now run one in every state of the union.

00:52:26.000 And that, I think, is one of the projects of CFI which is closest to my heart.

00:52:31.000 Trevor Burrus So back to this book.

00:52:33.000 Sorry, folks, we had a little bit of a technical difficulty.

00:52:36.000 What was your motivation for this?

00:52:38.000 You were just trying to figure out a way to sort of cut off these notions at the root and explain to your own people?

00:52:51.000 People who are religious almost certainly adopt the religion of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

00:52:57.000 And so we've got a kind of pseudo-genetic inheritance going on.

00:53:02.000 And I really hate that.

00:53:04.000 I mean, that's wicked.

00:53:05.000 That's indoctrination of children.

00:53:07.000 So I've always wanted to try to break that chain entirely.

00:53:11.000 Going down the generations.

00:53:13.000 So I've always wanted to write a book for young people.

00:53:19.000 And of course, it's highly necessary when you see the enormous and pernicious influence of fundamentalist religion, especially in this country, actually.

00:53:27.000 Yes.

00:53:28.000 Now, the science aspect of it, this is, I mean, obviously when you're talking about the science of evolutionary biology and natural selection and random mutations and all these different things that lead to a thing becoming a human being over the course of billions of years, it's such a complex idea for people to grasp.

00:53:49.000 How do you condense it and sort of simplify the path, introduce them to the works of these great scientists that have sort of established these ideas for them?

00:54:00.000 It's actually a very simple idea, but it plays out in very complex ways.

00:54:06.000 And I think the main problem from a didactic point of view is that The results are so complex that it's hard to believe that anything so simple as natural selection,

00:54:21.000 non-random selection of randomly varying genes could really be responsible for producing something as complicated as a human body.

00:54:32.000 And so it's a matter of...

00:54:36.000 Getting around, beating that barrier of incredulity.

00:54:41.000 If the idea was more complex, in a way it might be easier.

00:54:44.000 That's the fact that the idea is so simple.

00:54:46.000 I think that may be why it took so long for a Darwin to come on the scene.

00:54:52.000 When you think about it, the middle of the 19th century is rather late, 200 years after Newton did The face of it, much cleverer things, and yet it was another 200 years after Newton before Darwin came along.

00:55:07.000 I think the reason for that is that the idea is just too simple.

00:55:13.000 It's almost ridiculously simple to be big enough to achieve the feat of explaining the complexity of any part of an animal, really, let alone a whole animal.

00:55:27.000 Are there any...

00:55:30.000 Examples that you point to in nature where observable evolution has occurred?

00:55:35.000 Because there have been some where we've seen observable evolution over the course of, you know, the last...

00:55:41.000 Yes, I mean, Dawid himself made great play of domestication, which is very fast and which has occurred in historical times.

00:55:51.000 So we can see how wolves have been changed into Pekingeses and Poodles and Labradors and Spaniels.

00:55:59.000 And that's a very, very major change to have occurred in only a couple of thousand, a few thousand years.

00:56:07.000 And we see the same with cabbages and with roses and with horses and all sorts of other things.

00:56:15.000 That's artificial selection, not natural selection.

00:56:18.000 Everybody knew about artificial selection, of course.

00:56:21.000 Farmers and gardeners and pigeon fanciers all knew about it.

00:56:26.000 Darwin's great insight was to say you don't need a human selector, you don't need a human breeder to do the transformation from wolf to Pomeranian.

00:56:39.000 Nature does it for you.

00:56:41.000 Non-random survival is the equivalent of a human breeder doing the breeding.

00:56:49.000 So that's what Darwin did.

00:56:52.000 And as for examples of natural selection, we do have some.

00:56:58.000 The famous peppered moths in Britain is one of them.

00:57:03.000 Mosquitoes, I think.

00:57:04.000 Can you explain the peppered moths to people?

00:57:05.000 Yes.

00:57:05.000 It's really interesting.

00:57:11.000 Thank you.

00:57:12.000 It lives on tree bark.

00:57:13.000 It sits on tree bark.

00:57:15.000 It's perfectly camouflaged.

00:57:16.000 It looks like tree bark.

00:57:17.000 So it's light colored.

00:57:19.000 And then the industrial revolution in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries caused the woods around industrial areas like Manchester and Birmingham to become blackened.

00:57:33.000 And so the moths stood out.

00:57:36.000 They became conspicuous and they were picked off by birds.

00:57:39.000 But mutant moths were black.

00:57:43.000 And the mutant black moths were not picked off by birds.

00:57:46.000 And so what happened was that the percentage of black moths in the populations around industrial centers like Birmingham and Manchester, they became much more numerous.

00:57:58.000 And the light-colored ones became almost extinct in those areas.

00:58:03.000 But at the same time, the light-colored moths in rural areas, far from industrial pollution, like Devon and Somerset, stayed with their original color.

00:58:16.000 And this was worked out beautifully by a man in Oxford actually called Bernard Kettlewell.

00:58:24.000 And he showed, he actually went and sampled in these different areas and also did experiments showing birds actually picking off light-colored moths in dark areas and vice versa.

00:58:39.000 That's one that we can trace, that we can trace.

00:58:42.000 Yes, because the Industrial Revolution was only a couple of hundred years ago.

00:58:46.000 So that's an excellent example for people to see.

00:58:49.000 Like this happens.

00:58:50.000 Look at this over 500,000 years.

00:58:52.000 Look at this over 10,000 years.

00:58:54.000 This is what happens.

00:58:56.000 This is how random selection… Well, this one happened over only 100 years or 200 years.

00:59:01.000 But that this is how a human being came to be.

00:59:05.000 That this same process… That's right.

00:59:09.000 The creationists don't like the pep and moth story.

00:59:11.000 They say, well, that's just one gene.

00:59:14.000 They try to say that the same process will not give rise to major changes like from reptiles to birds or mammals.

00:59:26.000 But it just is the same process over a much, much longer period.

00:59:31.000 And what can be achieved in a couple of hundred years is small.

00:59:35.000 What can be achieved in a couple of thousand years is wolf to Pekingese.

00:59:40.000 What can be achieved in a couple of million years is Australopithecus to Homo sapiens.

00:59:48.000 What can be achieved in a hundred million years is shrew to human.

00:59:54.000 And a thousand million years would be bacterium to human.

00:59:58.000 Well, maybe not.

00:59:59.000 Maybe two thousand million years.

01:00:03.000 But when you're living in the present and you're thinking of yourself and you're thinking of biological life, it's hard for a person to see things on those scales, which is one of the reasons why I think for many people that aren't educated in these sort of subjects,

01:00:19.000 to buy into this concept of some sort of intelligent design.

01:00:25.000 Yes.

01:00:26.000 Well, timescales are, we have no concept of millions of years.

01:00:32.000 We can just about cope with, I mean, even thousands of years, even going back to the ancient Egyptians, we get a kind of frisson of awe.

01:00:42.000 You know, wondering what it was like, what the epic of Gilgamesh, what was it like then?

01:00:46.000 That's nothing compared to evolutionary time.

01:00:48.000 That's just, it's not even yesterday.

01:00:50.000 It's a couple of minutes ago.

01:00:51.000 It's ridiculously short time.

01:00:54.000 Well, you have a heart out at 4 o'clock, and that time has come.

01:00:57.000 So I want to thank you for being here, and I want to thank you for your commitment over the years to educating people.

01:01:03.000 You have an amazing amount of endurance for this stuff.

01:01:06.000 And because of that, a lot of people have shifted their ideas and gravitated towards science.

01:01:11.000 It's been a pleasure.

01:01:12.000 Thank you very much.

01:01:13.000 Thank you very much.

01:01:14.000 Richard Dawkins, ladies and gentlemen.

01:01:15.000 Bye-bye.

01:01:18.000 That was great.

01:01:19.000 Good.

01:01:19.000 Thank you.

01:01:20.000 And I have to sign this.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 21, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1366 - Richard Dawkins

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript