The Joe Rogan Experience - #1366 - Richard Dawkins

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Richard Dawkins, FRS FRSL is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. His latest book "Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide" is available now.

All right, here we go, Mr. Dawkins. Thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of your work, and we have a new book out, Outgrowing God. When does it come out? Is it out now? It is out now. It is now. Like this week, right? Last week, I think, yes. I read The God Delusion in preparation for this.

Can you pull that microphone right up to your face? Just get it about a fist away from your face. You don't have to move. Okay. The microphone will move for you. Okay. 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. Has there ever been a time where you've gotten fatigued from this, where you're like, I just leave this to somebody else?

Well, obviously not, because I just produced another one. It's not so hard as you think. I mean, you remember it as hard, but actually, if you read it again, I think you'd find it was not as hard as you remember. I didn't mean hard in a negative sense. I mean, you push. You're so enthusiastic about your atheism. I'm enthusiastic. Yes.

I'm also humorous. I mean, I like to think it's a funny book. But a lot of people do think it's hard in the other sense. And sometimes when they read it again, they realize, actually, no, it's more humorous. It's not so edgy, not so hard-hitting as they originally thought it was. 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. I think maybe so they associate you with having this almost aggressively atheistic stance. Yes. Well, perhaps you're thinking of Bill O'Reilly.

I'm not sure. I mean, he's aggressive, all right. Yeah, in the other way. I did once had to tell him, will you please stop interrupting me and let me talk? And so that might give the slight impression that I'm aggressive. Now, what was that BBC documentary that you had done? I've done several. The one where you had gone and interviewed a bunch of different religious people?

Yes, that was not BBC. That was Channel 4, which is the commercial station. And yes, I interviewed Ted Haggard. Yes. And a guy who ran a thing called Hell – not Hell Holes, Hell Houses, where they tried to terrify children. I mean, freak them out with horrible little playlets. Yes. The devil coming on with horns and glowing eyes.

playlets yeah the devil coming on with horns and glowing eyes and and i actually participated in a reenactment of that play in los angeles back in the day a comedy reenactment um bill maher was in it a bunch of other comedians were in it and we read word for word the the script and we acted it out in front of a live audience so So people would come through the hell house, this haunted house. But instead it was people knew it was all comedians reading it. And they're like, is this really the words that they said? It was so preposterous that it actually,

without being a parody, it actually played out like a comedy. Well, when we filmed it, we filmed them doing the play. And then we filmed me interviewing the perpetrator, Michael, somebody or other. Yeah.

And I said to him, what's your target audience? And he said 12. And I said, really? Are you really serious that you'd like to? 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. I thought that was a deeply immoral thing to say, but I think he was sincere. Pete Well, I would agree with you. It's very

disturbing. There's a great documentary on it as well for someone who wants to see the thought process behind them creating this. 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 had a counter to it in advance. Like, if you have a soft position, look at chapter one. If you look at this, look at chapter two. And you outlined that in the preface before you got into it. Yes. Well, I tried to be as persuasive as possible. The new book, Outgrowing God,

is sort of aimed at a younger audience. And I like to think that 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. I'm not sure. 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? It's amazing the way they split and diverge and diverge and diverge. It's as though they somehow can't get along with each other

and maybe new leaders arise who have a leadership complex or something and want to found their own sector. Time and time again, you have breakaway religions, breakaway faiths. I don't know what the psychological reason for it is, but what I have noticed is that they usually 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.

That kind of makes sense to a biologist looking at diverging species. 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, put it into your songs and put it into your Pledge of Allegiance and all these, which of course was not until the 1950s, 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. You're right that they put an enormous amount of energy and effort and expense and time and cost in share. And cost in share.

I mean some of the extreme sects which whip themselves with horrible weapons, actually bleed, scar their own backs. It's very, very surprising to a biologist. We would think that they would be more interested in surviving and reproducing. But no, there's something about religion that makes them go to extremes of costliness. And I don't get it, I must say. I've thought about this so many times. 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, from being a finite, a thinking conscious, finite life form that's aware of its own demise, aware it's coming. So it has to formulate some purpose and some meaning. And a hope of an afterlife as well.

Yes, that is the purpose and meaning, right? Yes, I suppose that's right. Yes, I think that's right. 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. I'm less understanding of people who make up stories to comfort either themselves or other people. I mean, a made-up story should not be comforting. I don't understand how a made-up story can be comforting. Of course, if you make it up and persuade somebody else, then they could find it comforting. On the

other hand, is an afterlife really all that comforting? When you think about half of them believe they're going to go to hell. So it's anything but comforting. 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. I mean, these are time spans beyond our comprehension. How unbelievably boring it would be. Would it though?

I mean, I don't know. 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. In the moment, I can enjoy it. 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 general anesthetic, which is what's going to happen.

Right. Gonzo. Alkohololites. Maybe. Yeah. Or maybe not. Have you had any experience with psychedelics? No.

No? Do you have any interest in that? I've been offered to be accompanied on a trip by a very nice woman friend. Yeah? And I've never so far dared take her up on it. How come? 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. 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. 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. so she could kind of accompany me and stop me jumping out a window or anything. Well, there's so many stories in so many ancient religions that seem to originate with the consumption of some sort of a psychedelic.

Yes. And there's many, including John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Jesus was a mushroom. Yes. 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. You would assume that you've transcended this life and gone into this other realm where God exists. I once thought that I would try a psychedelic when I was on my deathbed. That's it. But what if it was amazing? And you're like, I could have gotten so much done

with this if I had tried this out when I was 30. Yes, maybe you're right. I don't think anybody should do anything. I mean, I used to. I used to encourage people to do things all the time. Now, my thought is do whatever compels you, whatever you feel like it. 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. Yes, yes.

Well, don't you think the lights go out? I don't know. You know, I don't know. I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences that make me wonder what um what thoughts are and what what consciousness is and whether or not there's some way that it transcends well i wonder what consciousness is but it's pretty clear that it's to do with brains and brains decay and so i i wouldn't hold out much hope for you well you might be right be right. Well, certainly consciousness does have to do with brains. We know brain damage severely perturbs consciousness.

But there's some interaction with certain chemicals that makes this experience far different than what it is when we're on the natch. I believe that. It's still brains, though. Yeah. Still brains, but that's it. Reductionist. Nothing wrong with reductionism.

Nothing wrong with it. Not saying there is. What is the fiercest opposition that you've ever had to your work? Fiercest or most cogent? Well, let's try both. Fiercest meaning who has become the most angry at your work. And most cogent meaning? Ted Haggard, maybe.

That guy, really? Yeah. Well, he's such a preposterous person. For folks who don't know, he was a guy who was pretty anti-gay, right? And then it turned out he was smoking meth and having sex with gay prostitutes and, you know, the whole deal. And which is whenever someone to me is ridiculously anti-gay, I always assume that they're gay. I always assume, well, this guy's he's just trying to like divert divert attention. Yes.

Well, he was very hostile and in a very weird way. It's all on television. That was before his scandal. Oh, yes. You got a hold of him before the scandal. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was. He was very hostile with you.

I remember that. He was aggressive, like angry. He almost tried to run us over in the car park afterwards. I think he didn't know who I was when he interviewed me. And then I think he went away afterwards and Googled me. Was there Google back then? I don't think there was. I think there was, yes.

Netscape Navigator, I think, maybe. Maybe it was. Yeah. So he was the fiercest in terms of his reaction. He had a very nasty, snarly face. And he looked the fiercest, yes. Yeah. Has anybody had

a good debate with you about it where they had some good points? Not good points, no. I mean, I've had very amicable debates with religious people, bishops, archbishops and people like that, the chief rabbi of Britain.

Very amicable and the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is such a nice man and intelligent in the literal sense that he finishes your sentences for you. And so he clearly understands exactly what you're trying to say

and gets there before you finish the sentence. But then for some weird reason doesn't agree with it. And that's like... Excuse me. It gets there before you finish the sentence. But then for some weird reason, doesn't agree with it. Yeah, that is the conundrum. Super intelligent people who are deeply religious and who believe everything, everything from the resurrection to the Virgin Mary to everything. I assume that he would believe possibly in the resurrection because they regard that as a kind of non-negotiable part.

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. 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. didn't really happen or that's not important, just symbolic or something like that. But he really believes in the whole lot. What was his interpretation of things like death for adultery and things along those lines? I didn't ask him about that. I simply don't know.

Well, what's fascinating to me is not just the old religions, but really the young religions. The young religions, as I've gotten older, are more interesting. Things like Mormonism and more particularly Scientology, which is even more preposterous, probably the most preposterous one that we have. Those are really interesting to me. They are interesting, but because they're so young that we can see how they grew up. You can see the actual process. Because they're so young that we can see how they grew up. You can see the actual process.

Mormonism, I'm depressed by how successful it is. Actually, Scientology as well. But Mormonism since, I mean, we know Joseph Smith was a charlatan. Everything about him screams charlatan. And yet plenty of respectable people, including presidential candidates, men in suits, appear to believe it. 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. 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. The original manuscripts were destroyed in a fire in Chicago, and so he was safe from anybody exposing his translation. It was discovered that actually some of these manuscripts had survived, and they had not been destroyed. 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. This is absolute cast-iron demonstration that Joseph Smith was a complete fake and charlatan. This is fully documented. And yet they go on believing that he was a prophet.

And he was 14, too, when he came up with it, which is even more bizarre. Was he? Yeah. 1820. He was 14 years old. I didn't know that. He was a little kid. Yeah.

Just a boy with a fantastic imagination, and it sort of caught fire. Yes. The golden plates, which disappeared. Yeah. And the seer stone. Yeah. The seer stone. Looking into a hat.

It's just so strange to me that it persists, but the people that practice the religion are so nice. They are some of the nicest cult members I've ever met in my life. Yes, I suppose so. Mormons, they're my favorite. They're absolutely my favorite. Even when they come on your doorstep and sort of... They haven't. If they did, maybe I'd change my tune. You all my favorite. Yeah, okay. They're absolutely my favorite. Even when they come on your doorstep and sort of – They haven't. Okay.

If they did, maybe I'd change my tune. You all right over there, Jamie? Good? Okay. 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. Again, these actually arose in living memory and the worship of John Frum in some of the islands in the Pacific where you can see what happened. 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. And 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. This is all within living memory. And something like that, it's just so transparent that something like that went on in the early church. 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 well and he even announced he was going to do it yes they still believe it 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 them through this concept of Dianetics. I'm sure you read Lawrence Wright's book. I haven't read it, but I mean, I know the story. The book is fantastic. It's just so crazy.

And it's so strange that to this day, people are clinging to it. And it makes you wonder, like, what is it about the systems of belief that are so intrinsically attractive to people? So uniquely a part of being a person, these these belief systems? I think I get it when there's childhood indoctrination involved. But in the case of Scientology, some of the celebrities who joined it, that's not childhood indoctrination. No. That's just sheer rank stupidity. I think there's also an element of being a part of a tribe.

Yes. 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. And South Park before they came along and sort of exposed a lot of this stuff, 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. 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. And they also seemed to be helping each other,

that Hollywood directors who were also Scientologists would look towards hiring Scientologists producers and actors. The kind of Freemasonry that – Yes, yes. There's some strange thing that we are all very attracted to being a part of a tribe and being a part of uh even if the belief system is ridiculous if we are in a group that subscribes this belief system it's very attractive to people that's a very important point and tribalism is a very important part of human human nature a very a very bad part, I think. Yeah. The rewarding part as well, right?

Well, I suppose so. Steven Pinker, you probably had him on at some point. 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? Does my tribe believe this? Yes. is this part of my tribe? Does my tribe believe this? And Jonathan Haidt also makes the same point about Republicans and Democrats. 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. 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, that sort of irrationality, and to instead evaluate claims on the basis of evidence, critically evaluated scientific evidence. But it's hard because people have other motives, like emotion, tribalism, things like that.

Well, people find great comfort in these belief systems. It gives them sort of – I've often said that it gives them some sort of like a scaffolding for their by, something that they can climb on to ease some of the confusion of the unknown. I'm sure that's true, but I don't understand why anybody therefore thinks that therefore the religion is true. Why would you think that? Because it provides you with a scaffold you can climb on. That makes it true. 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 going to be true or not. And it doesn't make it true just because it's comforting or provides you with a scaffold to climb on. Well, it's almost like it's a spiritual system, like a placebo effect, like a spiritual placebo effect. And by believing that this is true, it gives you this comfort

and allows you to condense your thoughts into a better path. The placebo effect, of course, is very real. And doctors know about it it but did you know that the placebo effect works even if the patient is told it's a placebo yes i mean that i don't get i mean that's incredible isn't it yeah it's very strange well it's sometimes people doing things and knowing that they're doing things gives them this sort of feeling of uh of momentum of accomplishment, of progress. And I think so many people are just so adrift and don't have focus that even just telling them, hey, you're going to be a part of this program, this program to treat XY disease, whatever it is,

and here's this thing, like just focusing on it. I think the main reason why so many people believe in homeopathy, which not only doesn't work but cannot work, is the placebo effect. It's part of they're going to get better anyway, of course, but it's also the placebo effect that homeopathic, I won't say doctor, homeopathic practitioner gives them a nonsensical piece of medicine. And they believe it's going to work. And so it does. medicine and they believe it's going to work and so it does and and so the placebo effect is important um the cfi center for inquiry has actually got a lawsuit going on at the moment against pharmaceutical shops selling homeopathic remedies alongside uh genuine ones we can't stop

them actually selling homeopathic remedies, but we can try and do is stop them putting them on the same shelf as though there's no difference between them. But my colleague Nick Humphrey, who's a psychologist, a very insightful one, thinks you could actually even justify homeopathy on the grounds that homeopathic practitioners are allowed to prescribe placebos. They call them homeopathic, but they are placebos. Whereas real doctors are not allowed to prescribe. They used to. Real doctors used to prescribe placebos all the time.

But they're now no longer allowed to because it violates human rights. But homeopaths are allowed to, bizarrely, because they don't call them placebos. If they did, they wouldn't be allowed to. 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. I would not be totally surprised if it worked. I haven't looked into it enough. I would absolutely be surprised if homeopathy works.

It cannot work because there's no active ingredient. I can't wait to tell you the story of chiropractic medicine then. 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. It was done in the 1800s and there's no science behind it at all. But yet so many people have found pain relief. And chiropractors Yes. in terms of like rehabilitation, like cold laser and all these different massage remedies and all these different things that actually physically work. I know a woman who is a horse chiropractor. She does chiropractic on horses.

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 because the dilution is such that there's nothing there physically. There's no chemical reason. Well, they say it can work because water has a memory. But if they could prove that water has a memory, they'd get the Nobel Prize for physics, and they're not going to. One of the things that I really enjoyed about your book was when you explained to people that everyone who practices a religion is an atheist. You're just an atheist in regards to Zeus or Apollo. Or the 999 other gods.

Yes. And that's a home run with this argument. Some of us just go one god further. Yes. argument because just go one god further yes but that really is a home run because this is this concept of you know i i me and my friends jokingly would always say praise odin when anything would happen it was pretty good or cool yes we say praise odin and i started doing it online and people really got into saying praise odin about certain things i rather like that yeah some people got mad at me they actually got mad that I was, you're mocking

Christianity by saying praise Odin. But of course you are. Why not? I wasn't even really. I was just having fun. I was having fun because Odin seemed like a cool god, you know. It's an old school god. I mean, it's the god of the Vikings. Douglas Adams wrote a lovely

book called The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, in which the Norse gods are part of it. 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. And Thor is out there doing mischief with his great hammer. At one point, Odin gets Thor super glued to the floor and thinks it's a wonderful story. The vast number of different religions, I mean, the incredible number. I mean, how many actual religions are there?

Thousands. Thousands. Yes, I did. I forget how many thousands. And many of them share similar belief systems. many of them share similar belief systems. 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. And there's so many that you see like, oh, and they probably told this to someone else. And then these people moved and traveled on. And it's, it's just amazing that that concept is alien to people. 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.

And it was like a big deal in the family. Everybody would talk about it. And there was no anger. Everybody loved my aunt. She's a great lady. But it was just strange that he was converting to this other religion. I remember I was five years old when this was going on. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean another

religion? Yes. I was like, what's going on? Yes. And they were like, oh, she's Jewish. I go, what does that mean? What do you mean she's Jewish? Yes. And they had explained it to me.

Yes. I go, okay, but she believes in God. Like, yeah, they believe in God. Okay. So why is it a different thing? Well, they believe Jesus was a different kind of a thing it was they don't they don't necessarily believe you the guy that we think he was but it but if it had been Hindu they'd have had to explain to you they believe in hundreds of God's new and yes yes yeah and then we'd have to go way back yeah it's just when you first hear that I mean I'm that was put probably put the first seeds of doubt in my head when I was a young boy. When I was like, well, there's more than one.

Like, I'll never forget that moment because we're all sitting around the dinner table. And I was just a little kid. And I'm thinking, what do you mean? There's another one? I think that's a very powerful way of getting to children is to just simply tell them that. Yes. Telling them nothing but facts. You're not indoctrinating them.

Right. You're just telling them. 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. That would be a very good educational exercise. Has there ever been a civilization that existed without a belief in a higher power? I don't think there has, no.

Of course, there are plenty of individuals who educate that do not believe in a higher power. But I think it's probably true to say that every – I mean anthropologists might deny them. There might be some tribe that doesn't, but I suspect they all do. Well, there's been some tribes that worshipped animals, and particularly animals that they survived off of. Yes, yeah. And river gods and thunder gods and moon gods and sun gods and fire gods and things, yes. 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? I do. I'm not sure that it'll come soon, but I do,

and I look forward to that time, of course. I think we're moving in the right direction, and the figures bear that out. 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. And the number who say they have no religion is now about 25%. That's a lot. That's a great deal. Peter Robinson That is a lot.

Richard Wagner And that compares to any one particular Christian denomination and yet politically, that group, the nones, the no beliefs have no lobby. They have no powerful pressure group. 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, et cetera. But the atheist lobby hasn't got its act together or is only just now beginning to get its act together. Well, politically, I think people are terrified of the concept because it's such a long branch to go out on. One of the things that you brought up in The God Delusion was 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%. They think that you've got to have a belief in some kind of higher power in order to be moral. But the weird thing is that it doesn't have to be the same higher power as the one you believe in. Anyone will do as long as there is one. But if you don't believe in a higher power, you must be immoral.

be immoral. And that is totally ridiculous when you think about the 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 that a great deal, of course, you would be stoning adulterers to death and stoning people to death for breaking the Sabbath and doing sacrifices, human sacrifices and animal sacrifices, all sorts of horrible things, which of course do go on now in Islamic countries, especially 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. So that – we can see what you get when you get your morality from an Abrahamic scripture. And yet there are still people in this country who say you cannot be moral unless you

believe in a higher power. What do you think, let's extract this concept of a higher power, let's get rid of it, let's get rid of it. Where do you think people get their morals and their ethics from? That's a profoundly difficult question. We clearly don't get them from religion 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. 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. And within any one of those centuries, you could take people who are in the vanguard of moral progress. 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. But even Abraham Lincoln, for example, made a speech where I quoted in Outgrowing God in which he said, of course, nobody would seriously think that black people are the equal of white people. Nobody would seriously say that black people should be allowed to vote or should be allowed to marry white people. This is Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and was, as I say, in the forefront of progressive thought. Charles Darwin, again, was in favor of freeing

the slaves. He was passionately anti-slavery. But he too thought that there was no question about black people being equal of white people. They obviously weren't. And Huxley, Thomas Huxley, again, Darwin's bulldog, thought the same way. Now, those people were at the forefront, as I say. Bulldog thought the same way. Now, those people were at the forefront, as I say. Today, they would still be in the forefront, and they would be horrified to look back on what they said in the 19th century. Well, something is changing as the centuries go by. In Outgrowing God, I call it something in the air, which, of course, doesn't explain

anything. 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, congressional debates, judicial decisions by judges, juries, newspaper articles, journalism, all these things together conspire together to produce something in the air, something that defines a given century or maybe even a given decade with the moral values of that decade. Then 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. It's just different than it was back then. And it continues to be different. And now with the internet, we have so much more access to these conversations. And it's not just about being at a dinner table with the right people. You can watch YouTube

videos of yourself debating religious scholars. So that progress of something in the air has, as it were, taken an accelerated pace because of the internet. And I think that's a very hopeful sign. Of course, the internet also can be used for the opposite purpose. But I think that's a very hopeful sign. Of course, the internet also can be used for the opposite purpose. 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. It was off the radar. They didn't even consider it. It wasn't something that they thought was possible. Now they do because they got the Internet.

And 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. And these are being downloaded by large numbers of people. The first PDF download of the Arabic edition of the God delusion was downloaded 13 million times, Arabic edition, 13 million times. So now they are being exposed to the possibility of atheism, which wasn't a possibility. Of course, there's still the internet is also exposing them to Islamic propaganda, but they've had that all along from imams, mullahs, and their madrasa schools. 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. Do you think that people need a structure? And is it possible to give them a secular structure that mimics religion?

There's certainly some sort of a community aspect to religious worship. I don't feel that very strongly myself, but I'm aware that many other people do. And there are people who are interested in starting up sort of atheistic or secular meetup groups on Sundays and lectures. Yeah, my worry is that that will become a sex cult. Yeah, I never thought of that. Always seems to have someone who gets in control who winds up having a – Well, as religious cults usually do. I mean there's extraordinary stories.

There's that awful man, what was he called, who ended up taking his followers to a South American jungle. Jim Jones. Jim Jones. Jim Jones. Diana. And, I mean, he had this gigantic harem of all the young women. They always do. Yes. Waco, he had one.

Exactly the same. They all do. Yes. Yeah. Well, okay. I mean, I don't think that's happening so far with the secular ones. I hope not. 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.

Well, that would not surprise any naive Darwinian who would say, what on earth do you think do you become the dominant chimpanzee becomes dominant for? That's what it's all about. There's got to be a way to avoid that though. I mean, maybe the exposing nature of the internet would be the thing that

the actual thing that mitigates that. I'm not personally that interested in meet-up groups and community centers and things. I know other people are. I mean, all I really care about is scientific truth. And that's what I'm trying to propagate. That's very admirable. But I think for some people,

it represents a bonding of the community. You could have concerts and lectures and book clubs. But 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. Yes. Well, Jesus would probably on the whole provide a fairly good moral scaffolding. Not totally, but he was ahead of his time anyway.

So you do think he was a real person? Most of the scholars I've talked to say he probably was. 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 it not be surprising? I mean, it's a common name and there are plenty of wandering preachers. 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. Well, why couldn't people just drink water either? Why did they have to drink wine? He's trying to get people drunk?

Well, that's a separate question. But I mean, I think the point I'm making is that it's a very big difference to say, did he exist? And maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Who cares, really? That's very different from saying that a miracle worker who really did do miracles rather than countering tricks existed. Yes. What was the – you said that you wrote this. It's a beginner's guide, outgrowing guide. Well, it's for young people. I originally wanted to write a book for young children. And publishers didn't want to do that. 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, my acquaintance. He loved it. And I think, but really I'm hoping it will be read by people of all ages. But really I'm hoping it will be read by people of all ages. There's one thing that does happen to some people that are indoctrinated very young that the experience is so negative to them that they rebel. And they rebel and then they seek out other ways of thinking and then you find them eventually abandoning their religion. There's a woman named Megan Phelps. Do you know who she is? I think I do, yes. She's Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church.

She was his granddaughter. Yes. Amazing woman. Yes. And she wound up communicating with people through all things Twitter. Yes. And met her husband. So she rebelled against her father.

Yes. Her grandfather. Yes. She wound up leaving the church and wound up realizing that she was trapped in some sort of a Christian cult and a very hateful one. Yes. They're the God hates fags people. Exactly. And the same was true of Nate Phelps, who was Fred Phelps' son.

And he also escaped. He escaped on his 18th birthday. And became an atheist. And became, I think he's actually spoken at some of our conferences from time to time. Yeah, there's hope in that. Yes, there is. It's just when, I like when people can,

and she, I've had her on the podcast. She's such a unique woman. And she's so kind. And she's so thoughtful and intelligent. It's hard to believe that she's only been out of this cult for a few years. I mean, Twitter's only been around for 14 years. Why wasn't she ruined by it, you're saying? Yeah, right, yeah.

Why wasn't she ruined by it, and why – she is so intelligent. How did she exist in that structure while being so intelligent? I agree. she exist in that structure while being so intelligent. I agree. But of course, I feel the same way about apparently intelligent people who believe obvious nonsense. Yeah. And it's hard to understand.

It seems to be a part of what we are, though. It seems to be a part of what human beings are. It exists in so many different civilizations. Yes. of what human beings are. It exists in so many different civilizations. Yes, but decreasing numbers of actual individuals. Right. In places like Holland and Scandinavia, hardly anybody is religious. Really? What are the numbers there? Apart from immigrant Muslims who still are,

but apart from them, I don't know. They're pathetically small. Is there any evidence that that is reaching the Muslim world as well and that people are? Well, as I was saying, the downloads of my books have been encouraging. 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. And 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. And I think it's going to increase and I'm really encouraged by that. 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. Like I have a very good friend, my friend Ari. He is Jewish, but he is an atheist. And he identifies with being a Jewish person. He has Jewish relatives. His father is a Holocaust survivor. 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, but he doesn't observe. No, I understand that. I think especially for people of Jewish heritage who have relatives killed in the Holocaust, I think it could be a matter of kind of loyalty to their murdered relatives. I could easily get that. And I think that there are probably cultural Muslims who probably not for the same degree of loyalty but really think of themselves as Muslims. I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican in a way. I mean, I sort of, you know, I can sing the hymns and my family observes Christmas in a desolate sort of way.

When someone sneezes, do you say bless you? I never did say bless you actually. What do you say? Gesundheit? I don't say anything but I have no objection to saying Gesundheit or Gesundheit because it's religious, not religious. I don't want to say religious, not religious, but my college at Oxford had a fellow who was a famous philosopher, a famous atheist, A.J. Eyre. And when he was senior fellow, he used to say grace at dinner. And when he was asked why, he said, I will not utter falsehoods, but I have no objection to uttering meaningless statements. And that's what I feel.

Now, when you set out to write this book and write it for young people, how did you structure it in your mind? Did you address – did you think of it as addressing young people with questions that are trying to find – Sort of, yes. It's in two halves. The first half is debunking God. It begins with what we were talking about earlier, the sheer number of different gods, and then moves on to the Bible and how unreliable a source of information it is. And both the Old Testament and the New Testament, they get a chapter each. 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.

And then the second half of the book is about science. 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. 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. So that's most of the second half. That's a weird one, right?

The argument that it's too complicated for it to not be of a divine. Well, I'm not sure it's weird. It's kind of understandable until you've thought about it for a bit because complicated things don't just happen. about it for a bit because complicated things don't just happen. 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 and they're very, very improbable things, statistically improbable. The components of a computer or a camera, if you jumble them up at random,

they wouldn't work, obviously. So it's kind of pardonable that people should think there must have been a designer. But then you think a bit further and you realize that the designer himself would need just the same kind of explanation. And therefore the designer is not an explanation that flies. And philosophers before Darwin, philosophers like Hume realized that

but didn't have anything to put in its place. Darwin came along and gave them that which you need to put in its place. And Hume would have loved Darwin if only he'd lived long enough to meet his ideas. So I think we have to have sympathy for people who think that complexity must mean design. But nowadays, we know better. And that's what the second half of Outgrowing God is about. Who designed the designer? That's the big conundrum for people who believe in God. Yes, it is. And they shrug it off.

They say, oh, well, he didn't need a designer. He was always there. Well, my favorite one is, why did he wait until 6,000 years ago to leave the world? I know, exactly. Yes, that was Christopher Hitch's favorite one. We have in the Center for Inquiry a program. It actually came over from the Richard Dawkins Foundation when we merged called TISE, the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, which is teaching teachers how to teach evolution. don't have science degrees and they don't really know how to counter,

how to combat the pushback that they get from children and parents and school boards and things specifically against evolution. And so we are teaching teachers how to teach evolution. I mean, we run workshops. We've now run one in every state of the union. And that, I think, is one of the projects of CFI, which is closest to my heart. So back to this book.

Sorry, folks, we had a little bit of a technical difficulty. What was your motivation for this? You were just trying to figure out a way to sort of cut off these notions at the root and explain to young people? Yes. I mean, I'm worried about childhood indoctrination and the fact that people who are religious almost certainly adopt the religion of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. And so we've got a kind of pseudo-genetic inheritance going on. And I really hate that. I mean, that's wicked. That's indoctrination of children. So I've always wanted to try to break that chain going

down the generations. So I've always wanted to write a book for young people. And of course, it's highly necessary when you see the enormous and pernicious influence of fundamentalist religion, especially in this country, actually. Yes. 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. How do you condense it and sort of simplify the path and introduce them to the works of these great scientists that have sort of established these ideas for them? It's actually a very simple idea,

but it plays out in very complex ways. 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, non-random selection of randomly varying genes, could really be responsible for producing something as complicated as a human body. And so it's a matter of getting around, beating that barrier of incredulity. If the idea was more complex, in a way it might be easier. That's the fact that the idea is so simple. I think that may be why it took so long for Darwin to come on the scene. When you

think about it, the middle of the 19th century is rather late, 200 years after Newton did, for the face of it, much cleverer things. And and yet it was another 200 years after Newton before Darwin came along I think the reason for that is that the idea is just too simple 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. Are there any examples that you point to in nature where observable evolution has occurred? Because there have been some where we've seen observable evolution over the course of the last X amount of years.

Yes. I mean, Darwin himself made great play of domestication, which is very fast and which has occurred in historical times. So we can see how wolves have been changed into Pekingeses and poodles and Labradors and Spaniels. And that's a very, very major change to have occurred in only a couple of thousand, a few thousand years. And we see the same with cabbages and with roses and with horses and all sorts of other things.

That's artificial selection, not natural selection. Everybody knew about artificial selection, of course. Farmers and gardeners, pigeon fanciers all knew about it. 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. Nature does it for you. Nonrandom survival is the equivalent of a human breeder doing the breeding. So that's what Darwin did. And as for examples of natural selection, we do have some. The famous peppered moths in Britain is one of them.

Mosquitoes, I think. Can you explain the peppered moths to people? Yes. It's really interesting. Peppered moths, this is a moth called Biston betularia, which lives on tree bark. It sits on tree bark. It's perfectly camouflaged. It looks like tree bark.

So it's light colored. 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. And so the moths stood out. They became conspicuous and they were picked off by birds. But mutant moths were black and the mutant black moths were not picked off by birds. 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, and the light-colored ones became almost extinct in those areas. colored ones became almost extinct in those areas. 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. And this was worked out beautifully by a man in Oxford, actually, called Bernard Kettlewell. 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. That's one that we can trace, that we can trace. Yes, because the Industrial Revolution was only a couple of hundred years ago so that that's an excellent example for people to see like this happens look at this over 500 000 years look at this over 10 000 years i mean this is this is what happens this is how random selection well this one happened over only 100 years or 200 years

but that this is how a human being came to be. That this same process... That's right. And the creationists don't like the pep and moth story. They say, oh, well, that's just one gene. They try to say that the same process will not give rise to major

changes like from reptiles to birds or mammals. But it just is the same process over a much, much longer period. And what can be achieved in a couple of hundred years is small. What can be achieved in a couple of thousand years is wolf to Pekingese. What can be achieved in a couple of million years is Australopithecus to Homo sapiens. What can be achieved in 100 million years is shrew to human.

And 1,000 million years would be bacterium to human. Well, maybe not. Maybe 2,000 million years. But it's just a – 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 to buy into this concept of some sort of intelligent design. to buy into this concept of some sort of intelligent design? Yes. Well, timescales are, we have no concept of millions of years. 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, wondering what it was like, what the Epic of Gilgamesh, what was it like then? That's nothing compared to evolutionary time. It's not even yesterday. It's a couple of minutes ago. It's ridiculously short time. Well, you have a hard out at 4 o'clock, and that time has come.

So I want to thank you for being here, and I want to thank you for your commitment over the years to educating people. You have an amazing amount of endurance for this stuff and because of that a lot of people have shifted their ideas and gravitated towards science It's been a pleasure, thank you very much

Richard Dawkins, ladies and gentlemen, bye bye That was great Good, thank you, and I have to sign this.