Instant Genius - Richard Dawkins: Can we live in a world without religion?

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Richard Dawkins is considered one of the top British intellectuals of the 21st Century. He’s known for his opinions on atheism and his books on evolution. In his most recent book, Outgrowing God, he talks about his own experience with religion, and how science offers us a far more convincing and concrete view of the world we live in. We sat down with Richard to discuss his views on faith, flat-earthers and Facebook. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Is religion compatible with science? – John Lennox Does data discriminate against women? – Caroline Criado Perez What does a world with an ageing population look like? – Sarah Harper Are Generation Z our only hope for the future? – John Higgs Is racism creeping into science? – Angela Saini How can we save our planet? – Sir David Attenborough Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If it's really true that people need the sort of fellowship that religion gives them, then it should be possible to provide it in different ways. I think a love of science goes a long way. You can join other people with that. Love of music, love of whatever you love music. Or you can just say, well, truth actually matters, and truth is more important than fellowship. Truth is more important than belonging to a community of like-minded people.

You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, the production editor of BBC Science Focus. Richard Dawkins is considered one of the top British international. intellectuals of the 21st century. He's known for his opinions on atheism and his books on evolution. In his most recent book, Outgrowing God, he talks about his own experience with religion

and how science offers us a far more convincing and concrete view of the world we live in. Editorial assistant Amy Barrett sat down with Richard to discuss his views on faith, flat-earthers and Facebook. So you've had a very interesting career. What has been your favourite part so far? Oh, gosh. Well, I've enjoyed each of my books, and I've enjoyed having written them. I'm not sure I enjoyed actually writing them at the time, but I'm pretty pleased with all of them, actually. And so I've enjoyed their publication and reception and things like that. I'm not sure I can pick out any one absolute highlight. What was it like being tutored at Oxford by Nicholas Timbergen? Well, I don't know whether you know about the Oxford tutorial system, but normally you get tutored by just one or two people in your own college.

In small subjects like zoology, which I read, you tend to get tutored by a different person every term. So I only actually had him for half a term. I had lots of other tutors, and he was a very unusual tutor, because usually they give you a reading list. And you go into the library, and nowadays it's probably going on the Internet. and you go into the library and you write an essay, which is usually a pretty original piece of work

because ideally what you're supposed to do is look at the research literature in the topic you've been given, which could be quite a narrow topic, and read it up. So by the time you've written it, you write the essay, you ought to be pretty much a world authority on the subject because he read up all the latest stuff. You never open a textbook.

Well, Tinberg did a different thing. He just gave me one defil, PhD, thesis, usually one of his own pupils, and I had to read the thesis and criticize it and comment on it and talk about the theoretical background to it, make suggestions for further research. It was a sort of, the undergraduate was in fact, well, in effect, I should say, asked to be a sort of equivalent of a PhD examiner, which I thought was a highly original way of, of doing tutorials. So each week I just had one defil thesis to deal with.

And at what point, going from your zoology degree, what point did you turn your attention to religion and evolution? Well, I'd always been interested in evolution, and Oxford gives you that. The Oxford Zoology Department has a very strong Darwinian tradition. But my actual defil thesis was, was not really about that. And I turned to evolution when I wrote the selfish gene, which was in 1975.

And from then on, I pretty much concentrated on evolution. As for religion, there are odd references in most of my books. Most of my books could be taken as a kind of scientific opposition to religion. but it wasn't until the God delusion that I actually went all out on that topic. And what was your relationship with religion growing up? Well, I went to stand sort of English schools. I went to Anglican schools who had to go to chapel every week and so on. It wasn't real down-the-throat indoctrination like at a madrassar or at a Roman Catholic school, I imagine.

But so I had Anglican Christianity for most of my education until I got to Oxford. And what changed? Oh, evolution, I suppose. I mean, learning about fully appreciating and understanding the power of Darwinian selection. Was it difficult for you to make that change having grown up? No. No? No.

no not at all I mean I already was sort of but kind of worked out that since there are so many different religions they can't all be right and then I was left after that was just a kind of residual sympathy for the idea

that there had to be some sort of creative intelligence and that was destroyed finally when I understood about Darwin and you mentioned the god delusion where 13 years on from when you published the Constitution. What were you hoping to do with this new book, Outgrowing God? Well, I wanted actually it to be a children's book, but the publishers weren't keen on a children's book, so they pushed it up the, up the age scale of it. So now I'm thinking of it

as a book for young people, teenagers, and, but actually I would hope that anybody could read it. I've been aware that at least some people have found the God delusion they've sometimes asked for a sort of easier version of the God delusion it isn't that I think it's a bit easier I think the language is a bit easier but but it doesn't really overlap much it's it's you know the chapter they're about different things it's not it's not God delusion lied though I hope it is light well as it says it is a beginner's guide I guess we found that.

The watchmaker analogy features in the evolution and beyond section of your book, and it's an analogy you've argued against before. Can you explain that analogy for our reading? Well, yes, it originates from William Paley in his book on Natural Theology, in I think 80202 or 803. And he says, if you were walking along and you find a stone, the stone doesn't require much explanation. It's just a stone, and it's much like any other stone,

and you don't really need to eat much of a complicated explanation. But if you find a watch and you look at the watch, you open it up, you see all the cogwheels and screws and springs and things, and obviously somebody had to make it. You had to have a designer. It's clearly doing something useful. It happens to be telling the time, but it's doing something useful.

It had to have a watchmaker. And he said, reasonably enough for his time, Therefore, living things must have a watchmaker as well. There must be a divine designer. And that was a difficult argument to refute. And when Darwin was an undergraduate, he fell for it. I mean, he thought it was wonderful. But of course, we now know later on, Darwin provided the total refutation of it.

I think it always was rather a bad argument, but it was nevertheless, even if it was a bad argument, in the 18th century, it wasn't possible to, I mean, nobody thought of an alternative to it. And so they had to, was kind of stuck with it. It wasn't until Darwin came along that we had an alternative to it. And how did that alternative refute the watchmaker analogy? Well, the living watch is, things like eyes and hearts and livers and kidneys and things are put together by the slow, gradual step-by-step process of natural selection. It's a very, very different process from the way a watch is made. A watch is designed on a drawing board and put together by an intelligent watchmaker all in one go,

whereas living things are put together over millions of years, billions of years, if you start from the beginning, by the slow, gradual step-by-step process, which achieves remarkably watch-like results that look exactly as though they have been designed. Well, not quite exactly as though they have, because in some respects it's bad design. I mean, it's a design that you wouldn't do

if you were a human watchmaker. Things like the eye, for example, with the retina being backwards, as Helmholt said, I send it back, if that were presented to me. And that's what you get when you get design by natural selection. You get bad design because it has its history written all over it. It starts from a primitive beginning and then develops gradually. Even though we've got all this evidence and all these reasons to know that evolution is actually what happened, why do you think we want to believe in the spiritual? Well, a lot of it, I think, is people just don't know better.

They haven't been educated properly. Why would we want to? Well, I suppose there is a strong allure to religion. People want to believe that perhaps they're frightened of dying or perhaps they want to be united with their loved ones after they die and so on. And so there's a kind of strong motivation towards religion from that point of view. And therefore, people are eager. in a way to be seduced by the argument from design by the watchmaker argument.

Sometimes they kind of half by the blind watchmaker argument, by the evolution, but they think, well, there are some things that are so difficult to evolve that surely God must have had a hand in it, must have kind of helped evolution over the difficult jumps. But you're asking me a sort of question about the psychology of people, why they want to believe, but I think it's probably a very complicated matter. You'd have to ask them. In many cases, they simply don't understand evolution. They think it's a theory of chance.

If you think it's a theory of chance, then obviously it can't work. I mean, only a fool would think that you could put together the eye by chance. Natural selection is the very opposite of chance. Can you elaborate on that? Natural selection is the non-random survival of random variations. A mutation is random.

and you have little tiny mutations all the time, often too small for us to notice. And natural selection favors those individuals who survive as a consequence of the contribution that the mutation makes to their survival and the reproduction, of course, because reproduction is what it's all about. Survival is only a means to the end of reproduction.

So genes that either make the animal survive better or make it more attractive to the opposite sex, for example, or make it a better parent, will tend to accumulate in the gene pool. And genes that make them bad at surviving or reproducing will tend to disappear from the gene pool. And so as the millions of years go by, the gene pool becomes filled with genes that are good at making animals survive and good at reproducing. In your book, you talk of examples of bottom up and top-down design. I mean, they were very convincing. Can you sort of explain that those two different ways of building? Yes. Well, I use the example of a cathedral in Spain, which coincidentally looks very, very like a termite mound in Australia.

I've put the two photographs together. And they come about by totally different means. the cathedral is built with an architect's plan and with builders who look at the plan and follow every detail of the plan. So the plan, it's topped down. The architect thought of it, drew it, handed it over to the builders, and they did it. So it's all topped down. Bottom up is how the termite mound works.

Each termite is just following some little local rule, put a bit of mud on top of another bit of mud. And there is nowhere, is there any grand design of a termite mound? It's a great big cathedral-like object. A huge thing. I mean, can be so, so high that it's been, if you scale it up to the, if you imagine on a scale of a termite body, it's like building the Empire State Building. It's a gigantic thing and very, very complicated. But nowhere is there any design for it. There's not in the genes, not in the DNA, not in the termite body. It's a gigantic. brain, nowhere will you find a plan of that mound, that insect cathedral. It's all done by the nervous system being programmed to follow little local rules, little tiny rules about what to

do in your little local area, putting mud on top of other bits of mud. That's how it works. So that's bottom up. And they can produce uncannily similar results. And the body that body that develops by embryology is a bottom-up design. There is no blueprint. It's nowhere where you find in the DNA. You'll not find anything that you could call a blueprint of the body. The body develops by each cell, each protein actually within a cell, obeying little instructions, little sort of chemical instructions,

which when all put together lead to the development of a body. So there's no blueprint, no disease. design, no architect plan, nothing like that. It's all done bottom up. A lot of your books do aim to start a conversation, don't they? And a lot of conversations very much so, yes, yes, they do. What's been the best reaction you've had to one of your books? Is there a particular reader who's stood out? Oh gosh, there's so many. My website, Richard Dawkins.net, has places where people put their comments sometimes

and some of the sums they're very interesting, very good. I wonder that, you know, there's also been some negative reactions as there was to be expected to some of your books. Yes, well, that's true. The selfish gene, I suppose, mostly. And in that case, I think there were two main misunderstandings. One was that the book was an advocacy of genetic determinism. Genetic determinism is a very incoherent idea because determinism, from a philosophical point of view,

is something that philosophers talk about a lot, and probably the majority of modern philosophers take the view that everything we do is actually determined. But genetic, there's nothing special about genetic determinists, right? Just determinism in the sense that everything we do is determined by past events, molecular events, events that have led up to the present situation. And it's tied up with the feeling, do we have free will? We all think we have free will, but we don't know whether we don't, we probably don't really have free will in the ultimate sense.

But there's nothing added by putting the word genetic in front of it. Genenes aren't any more deterministic than anything else. So that was one misunderstanding of the selfish genes. What was the other one? Well, I suppose it was a confusion between embryology and evolution. When I wrote about the selfish gene, I was thinking about the role of genes in natural selection. I was not thinking of the role of, it's really the same misunderstanding the other one, actually. I was not thinking about the role of genes in development.

These are two rather different things. I mean, genes, as it were, flow down the generations, unchanged as they go. That's the viceman separation of the germplasm. If Lamarck was right, that would be a false statement, but Lamarck wasn't right. So genes flowed down the generations, but within each generation, they influence bodies. They influence bodies. the means of embryology. And I think a lot of people thought I was making a claim about the role of genes in embryology.

But I was leaving that out. I was purely thinking about the flow of genes down the generations and the reason why some genes survive and other genes don't, which is natural selection. A lot of the negativity came from members within the scientific community. Well, I'm really talking about that. Right. Yes.

I suppose if you want me to talk about misunderstandings outside the scientific community, the word selfish in the title was taken to mean that I was either thought people are selfish or was saying they ought to be selfish, neither in which I was doing. Selfish gene is a purely academic idea from an natural selection of genes. Genes work for their own good. and in doing so, they may very well program bodies to be unselfish. Indeed, that's mostly what the selfish gene's about, actually. It's mostly about altruism.

It could have been called the altruistic individual. The selfish gene and the altruistic individual, it could have been called. What made you go for the selfish gene, then? Well, the editor at Oxford University Press was very keen on the title. I hankered a bit after the cooperative gene, or the immortal gene. I think the immortal gene would have been rather good, actually, because it still conveys the idea of genes

going down generation after generation of generation. But it also has a more kind of Carl Sagan-y sort of poetry to it. Selfish gene is not a very poetic word, title. Scrabbing, though, eye-catching. That was why the editor liked it. and yes, yeah, but it has led to misunderstanding. How many books have you published now, then? Oh, gosh.

Maybe 14. Which, would you say was the hardest to write and research? The extended phenotype. Oh, actually, possibly the Ancestors Tale, because that's just a great big, huge book with lots and lots of facts. I'm not familiar with it. Oh, gosh, well, it's a huge book. book, jointly with my colleague Jan Wong, and it's about the entire history of life,

but we wrote it backwards. So instead of starting with bacteria and sort of going forward in evolution, if you do that properly, then you've got to follow all the branches of evolution, which you couldn't do, possibly do. because we're human, we're interested in human evolution. And so very often people write the history of evolution, starting with bacteria and going through human ancestors all the way to humans, which gives the false idea that humans are sort of the top of the tree.

You don't want to give that idea. So what we did was to say, you can start from any animal you like or any plant you like and work backwards down the family tree back to bacteria, back to whatever it was, I mean something like bacteria. And that way you don't give the impression that evolution is kind of aiming towards humans. We still wanted to make humans special because our readers were human.

So we started with humans and we said, what your ancestors are like as you go back, back, back, back, back, back, back. And we did it in the form of a pilgrimage to the past. And we used the, we used Chaucerian imagery. So we had a pilgrimage like Chaucer's, Pantabary Tales, going backwards. And we were human pilgrims walking backwards in time. And every now and again, we would be joined by another sidebride. coming in. So we walk back seven million years and we're joined by the chimpanzee pilgrims.

We've been independently walking towards that point. And then together with the chimpanzee pilgrims, we walk backwards and then we're joined by the guerrilla pilgrims. And then we walk backwards again and we're joined by the orangutan pilgrims. Each of these rendezvous points, as we call them, you don't actually need that many of them to get back to the origin of life because remember you're only talking about the unifications with the human line. So for example, almost all the invertebrates join at rendezvous, whatever it is, 26 or something.

Yeah, it's probably not right. And you say you don't have to consider the vast number of of separate convergences, unitings coming on the invertebrates. We also made it Chaucerian in that we had tails like Canterbury Tales. And so at each rendezvous point, we made one of the joining ones, joining pilgrims, so first of all, the chimpanzees, for example, tell a tale. and the tales were lessons that you could lessons about general biology which are particularly relevant to that particular pilgrim.

So for example, when the insects join us, one of the tales told was the grasshopper's tale and the grasshoppers tale is actually about the vexed controversial concept of race. Because it just happens that grasshoppers illustrate this rather will. And so each rendezvous point, there might be two or three tales told by one or other of the joining pilgrims, which were, and that tale is a way of talking about a biologically important point. Wow. That's sort of blending fiction with fact.

Do you create something? Kind of. It's not really fiction, because. Because the tales are not really told in the voice of the pilgrim. We don't try to be a bit twee about it and sort of say, I'm an insect and this is what I, you know, it's not like that. But it sounds like a massive undertaking, really. Well, that's why I remember to add it to my reply about the most difficult. It probably was the most difficult, actually, because it's such a huge undertaking.

And it was only because I had Yan Wong as my colleague. that it was possible to finish it. I almost gave up. I almost handed back the advance to the publisher and said, I can't do it. And then Jan came to my rescue. And so what do you think is next to be you? Well, after Outgrowing God comes out, I'm working now on a book on flight

with an artist who's doing, it's another book for young people, heavily illustrated, she's doing the pictures, she's Yana Lentsova. It's J-A-N-A-L-E-N-Z-O-V-A, Lentz-O-V-A, and it'll be a short book.

It'll be a lot shorter than Outgrowing God. And it'll be about flight, It's called flights of fancy, and it's about flight in animals and humans. So it's about, we go through each of the ways in which you can get off the ground, like being lighter than air, as in a balloon, which only humans do, we think, anyway. Or gliding, soaring, flapping flight. What else is there? I'll think for the moment.

In each case, we do how humans do it and how animals do it. It's quite fun because you've got sort of Leonardo da Vinci's primitive designs for flying flit machines which couldn't possibly have worked. And modern human-powered planes like the Gossamer Condor, Gossamer Albatross, which just about managed to fly. I mean, was a highly fit cyclist peddling away and driving the propellers.

It was just about doing it. Where did that idea come from to focus on them? Well, I wrote a children's book called The Magical Reality a few years ago, which had the form of a whole series of chapters which were a question like, what is an earthquake, what is the sun? Why do we have night and day?

Why do we have summer and winter? And in each case, the chapter began with myths, myths about earthquakes, myths about the sun, myths about night and day, and then went to the science. And I thought maybe I could do another volume of magic reality. And I started on flight. And then flight kind of grew so much.

It looked like a book in itself, a shorter book in itself. So that's how that happened. Why do you think novels or non-fiction books, how did they help? Why are they the right way to educate? Well, they go, I mean, I don't want to downplay fiction. I love fiction. And fiction can actually educate as well. in a more indirect way, I suppose.

If you think about, say, a novel like William Golding, what's that famous building, the one about the boys on the island? Yes, it's Lord of the Flies. Lord of the Flies. I mean, that's fiction, but it clearly has a message which should resonate with people. A Brave New World, 1984.

A lot of science fiction, actually, I find can teach you science rather well. But nonfiction, I suppose, can be a more direct way of saying what's true about the world. William Golding could have written a book saying, I suspect that if you were to Maroon a got a lot of boys on an island, their goats turn into barbarian savages and explain why maybe looking up lots of books on psychology and sociology and things and referencing his thesis that this is what would happen. But he did it as a novel instead, and that's a fine way to do it.

Thinking about all the books that you have published and for the range of audiences that you've connected with, what was your proudest moment? Well, I usually say the extended phenotype, because that I suppose is my most original contribution. It is written for professional biologists and with full references in the way that professional scientists write. I'm also very proud of climbing Mount Improbable, which is my least popular in the sense of sales figures book, I think anyway. I think that's fairly original, but mostly the extended to phenotype. Would you ever have a go at writing science fiction? I've sometimes thought of that.

I've sometimes thought about it. I might need to take lessons in how to do it. I'm not sure. I mean, you've had plenty of time to craft your voice. It's a very convincing voice. Well, it might be worth a go. We're seeing a rise in the number of people who are sort of anti-experts, really. So rejecting things such as anti-vaccine, anti-moon landing, anti-climate change.

Why do you think that is? It's very mysterious because the evidence for, moon landing is utterly overwhelming, the evidence, and they've even got flat Earth as becoming on the rise at the moment, the evidence for the Earth being round is so utterly incontrovertible. You have to wonder what's going on here. Anti-vaxxers is not quite so ridiculous as the others. I mean, it's possible to, you know, you need to look at the evidence in some detail, climate change data, you need to look at the evidence in some detail. So I wouldn't wish to lump the climate change deniers in with the flat earth people.

There's quantitatively a bit, quantitatively much more evidence for the round earth than it is for climate change. I suppose one explanation that I've seen for flat earthism is a kind of fellowship, people who perhaps have been a bit of a misfit in their life find a group of people who are also misfits and they like to club together and the internet provides the sort of clubroom where you can meet people who are like you

and have dotty ideas like you. So probably the echo chamber effect as it's been called in the internet is part of it you maybe need a different explanation of each case. And the anti-vaxxas, there is widespread hostility to big pharma, big pharmaceutical companies. And with some good reason, actually. And so it would be easy enough if you are heavily committed to criticizing big pharmaceutical companies

to think that being an anti-vaxa is part of that. It's sort of on our side. It's sort of our political group. I could understand that. I can imagine that. And what we want is for people to think critically and clearly about each individual case and not lump things together if they're not really lumpable together. In the case of climate change tonight,

I think a fair bit of that is from big business who feel threatened. I mean, the oil industry, for example, is threatened by the need to take very drastic steps to prevent the client, or try to slow down at least climate change. And so part of the opposition in the American Republican Party, it probably stems from the fact that they are sympathetic to big business and to oil companies and the coal industry and things like that. The community that you talk about that sort of flat earth is, for example, sort of form,

it's almost similar to religion, but religion's just such a big scale. I think it is. I think you're right. It is like religion, I think. Not in every respect. It's not supernatural. So once again, we mustn't love things together too much. much, but there's a certain amount in common. It's worth making the comparison. And do you think for that reason that we could never kind of live in a world without religion because it's such a community?

I hope not. I hope you're wrong in terms of speculative than that. If it's really true that people need the sort of fellowship that religion gives them, then it should be possible to provide it in different ways. And I think a love of science. goes a long way you can join other people with that. Love of music, love of whatever you love music and writing, writing so on. Or you can just say, well, truth actually matters, and truth is more important than fellowship.

Truth is more important than belonging to a community of like-minded people. So don't say, does Proposition X fit in with my concerns? of the group of people that I belong to, I'm left-wing, I'm right-wing, I'm liberal, I'm conservative, whatever it is, I think a lot of people sort of immediately jump into a feeling of how does that square with my group, my people, my club. So if we're left-wing, we kind of think everything's got to fit in with that. If we're right-wing, we fit everything. got to fit in with that. I would hope that people could learn to judge each truth claim on its merits and not judge it by whether it somehow fits in with their prior prejudices.

And so this book, you're hoping to provide people with a knowledge that allows them to step outside, maybe their comfort zone and maybe religion is that comfort zone. Yes. Well, If it's a comfort zone, then I don't apologize for destroying it if I do destroy it. I mean, I do actually think truth is ultimately the most important thing there. Having said that, I definitely think that you can find a much better comfort zone than religion. And so I don't just mean destroying comfort zones for its own sake. I hope that science has provided a much better comfort zone.

And finally, I wonder we've talked a little bit about a few of the negatives and the positives of your amazing career. Do you ever feel at any point misunderstood? We've talked about that already. Clearly with the selfish gene, yes. Yes. I think that's the main one, actually. I can't really think of any other major misunderstandings. Is there anything else you want to tell our readers?

I just like to make a passionate plea for truth, objective truth, scientific truth, partly because it's the most, you lead a better life that way, but also because it's so beautiful. I'm sure you know that. I mean, it's so, it's such a privilege to live in the 21st century when we do know so much. we know there's a lot more to know than a lot we don't know but nevertheless compared to our ancestors

we are hugely privileged to know how old the universe is to know where we come from to know that we're a product of evolution to know about the chemical elements that we're made of it's just a wonderful wonderful privilege

and I think it's such a shame to deny children that privilege, which I fear is what so much of religion does. So the real reason why I'm opposed to religion is that it stunts the understanding by children and by everybody really of the wonderful world, wonderful universe in which we live. That was Richard Dawkins, a head of publication of his new book, Outgrowing God, which is available from the 19th of September. You can read an edited version of the interview in the September issue of BBC Science Focus magazine.

In that magazine, we also go on a hunt for Planet 9, consider what cities of the future will look like, and chat to neuroscientist Dean Burnett. There is, of course, much, much more inside. And if you enjoyed that and you want to get straight back into another episode of the Science Focus podcast, I recommend the episode is racism creeping into science, where I speak to Angela Saini about the ongoing revival of race science. Let us know which is your favourite episode with a review

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