1. Comment #222583 by robotaholic on July 31, 2008 at 2:49 pm

I love Richard Dawkins interviews

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2. Comment #222596 by sane1 on July 31, 2008 at 3:09 pm

RD audio! - its been too long!

Good to hear about Darwin from the expert.

And the honesty of RD is so refreshing and admirable.

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3. Comment #222609 by Sally Luxmoore on July 31, 2008 at 3:29 pm

He's right - there's a lot that's funny in TGD. Some of the humour for an already atheist reader is in the form of delighted recognition; the truth put very directly in a way not heard before.
At other times it's almost music hall slapstick - 'megalomaniacal bully' etc.
It's a pity some people were too busy being insulted to notice!

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4. Comment #222660 by HourglassMemory on July 31, 2008 at 4:56 pm

Dawkins with skeptical students????
I have to watch that! (I assume it's from the series).
Imagine having lectures with students....and no adults except Dawkins/Hitchens/Dennet/Harris on the podium.
And then "skeptical students" would come up and ask their questions.
That would be putting the seed of doubt while the "soil" in young minds was still soft.
How much of a difference it would make when young people were put in a room with a man who could point out innacuracies in the thinking of the adults they usually communicated with (religious family, pastors, etc).

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5. Comment #222666 by Appleby on July 31, 2008 at 5:06 pm

I don't know... it's starting to look like Darwin has become some kind of atheist prophet. I certainly don't think of him that way.

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6. Comment #222677 by DeepFritz on July 31, 2008 at 5:24 pm

Can't wait for the TV series. Though the school student bit was very disturbing...

"You can hang up fossil dinosaurs infront of my face, talk about how the light from stars of the distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us, display the evidence of rock formation and demonstrate the process of evolution over geological time. But, I will not believe it because it isn't written about in my book of make believe and I believe the world is only a few thousand years old!"

Do you have to be a complete MORON as this kid sounded to believe literally that BS!

Could it be that your 4000 year old holy textbook is wrong? Why can you not even possibly consider that?

One of the things that I have noticed about scientific textbooks is that they get rapidly updated and the information changes as more information comes to hand. Just look for example in textbooks as to how many moons Jupiter has. We have gone from around 15 (at the time of Voyager) to around 82 at last count i think. That is in the last 25 years that our knowledge has increased that much, imagine what we have come to learn in 4000 years...

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7. Comment #222681 by Ishruul on July 31, 2008 at 5:28 pm

"Strong evidence in holy books"

Hmmm...sound a lot like the rightous-self-indulgence brought to us by Joe Moreale.

Still....I miss him...sigh...

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8. Comment #222697 by AfraidToDie on July 31, 2008 at 6:13 pm

150 years ago, Darwin admitting to being atheist would be like being in Iran today and writing a book about being gay. Do any of us have any doubt that Darwin would have been an outspoken atheist today? I have no doubt whatsoevr.

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9. Comment #222704 by Yadsmood on July 31, 2008 at 6:33 pm

Who knows if he would have been "outspoken"? There are numberless atheists who aren't outspoken. Don't equate atheism with militant atheism.

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10. Comment #222707 by J Mac on July 31, 2008 at 6:39 pm

Who knows if he would have been "outspoken"? There are numberless atheists who aren't outspoken. Don't equate atheism with militant atheism.

You don't want atheist to be equated with militant atheist. Yet you equate outspoken with militant.

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11. Comment #222733 by PsyPro on July 31, 2008 at 8:08 pm

Outspoken or not, is not the issue. As a professor, I routinely reveal my perspective: it is obvious to all and sundry (and even my students, who may not feel themselves included in the former all-inclusive set) that I am an atheist, which means nothing except that I don't believe in anything supernatural. In Canada, despite the attempted right-wing hegemony of the PMO (Harper and his minions), that is usually all it takes: religious bs is off the the table, and I have yet to find any exception in over 25 years of being a professor, including two in which my top student and my RA was a Mormon Bishop (he is now a professor in his own right, but still a high-ranking Mormon). Militant atheism is fundamentalist religious cant, and does not exist. How could it? What exactly is one militant about? There is no god is not a battle cry.

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12. Comment #222735 by robotaholic on July 31, 2008 at 8:14 pm

Militant - An individual who engages in violent or overtly aggressive actions, both verbally and physically, on behalf of a cause.

I don't think half the people who are called militant atheists are actually that way. Certainly Richard Dawkins isn't 'militant'.

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13. Comment #222736 by Goldy on July 31, 2008 at 8:18 pm

I can't read militant without memories flooding back :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millie_Tant

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14. Comment #222789 by Teratornis on July 31, 2008 at 10:58 pm

Comment #222677 by DeepFritz:

Could it be that your 4000 year old holy textbook is wrong? Why can you not even possibly consider that?

Because that's exactly what Satan wants you to think, and if you let your mind go there, you risk burning in hell for eternity.

The Christian has had that drummed into his or her head since early childhood, and it's very hard to shake that. The Bible calls Satan the Great Deceiver, so of course the arguments that come from Satan will seem highly convincing. The more convincing the arguments seem, the more that seems to prove they come from Satan.

This is a specific instance of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories come with a unique waterproofing against falsifiability, in that the less evidence there is for a conspiracy, the better and more insidious the conspiracy must be.

Perhaps the only way out of that trap is to realize that there are infinitely many possible unfalsifiable conspiracies, a large subset of which would be all the different contradictory religions that people have dreamed up, but the Christian has been brainwashed to believe that all those other religions are the work of Satan, so it's hard to get one's foot in the door.

Rather than being astonished at the fact that religious people have cognitive systems, why not recognize that everyone has a cognitive system, and almost everyone harbors at least a few equally stupid beliefs?

For example, try talking to drunks about their drinking sometime. It's exactly like talking to religiots about religion. I know, because I talk to both types of deluded people. You can tell drunks about how alcohol kills about 100,000 people in the U.S. each year, which makes alcohol an enormously greater public-health catastrophe than all religions combined, and their belief systems will simply drown this fact behind a torrent of emotional rationalizations.

If it seems hard to imagine that religion can easily cause people to ignore a mountain of scientific evidence, then consider how easily drunks can brush off 100,000 dead Americans each year.

Or consider how astoundingly difficult it is for American SUV-driving gaswasters to face up to their support for Islamic terrorism. When I talk to my fellow Americans about these facts, they seem genuinely surprised, since the whole topic is largely under a taboo. Almost no one seriously questions the state religions of boozing and automobility here. OK, some religious people preach against boozing, and an even smaller group of Amish reject automobiles, but most Americans see no conflict with booze, cars, and God.

Here's how the human brain works, in a nutshell. The human brain builds up a set of beliefs, most of them passively absorbed from peers and recognized authority figures. Once the brain has its belief system, then it sets about automatically filtering all incoming data.

Each item of data which appears to support the belief system gets amplified into emotions of assurance. Every item which contradicts the belief system gets quarantined and attacked. The brain has its own immune system for its beliefs.

The only way to overturn a well-entrenched belief system is for the incoming contradictory evidence to become comprehensive and overwhelming, somehow. Often, it's not only necessary for contradictory evidence to arrive from multiple irrefutable sources, but the supporting evidence must simultaneously somehow get weaker, and the emotional machinery that supports the whole rickety structure of belief needs a wrench or two in the gears.

When a fundamentalist Christian goes to see a movie like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, for example, he or she spends most of the running time resonating strongly with every point the film makes. If you don't believe this, ask my parents how they liked it.

Similarly, whenever an atheist has a public debate with a theist, the theist invariably trots out Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot at some point. The atheist will usually respond with some lawyerly hair-splitting about how the dictators either weren't really atheists (in the case of Hitler) or how their atheism had nothing to do with their crimes against humanity. These arguments don't even begin to impress the theist, for whom the incalculable genocides of explicitly godless Communist regimes could hardly be more obvious support for the theistic world view.

I'm not saying I disgree with the lawyerly hair-splitting rationalizations, just that they are far too weak to counter the emotional impact of all those mass graves that illustrate exactly what religious professionals have told their marks for centuries a life without God is like.

Yes, there are lots of good and wonderful atheists. But that's not how the emotional brain does arithmetic.

Imagine, for example, how nice a married person would have to behave most of the time to make up for shocking and humiliating his or her spouse with just one sordid affair. All the clever hair-splitting arguments in the world wouldn't do much to soften that emotional blow.

I doubt we'll impress the theists with our artful dodging on the atheist dictators question until someone like Billy Graham opens a concentration camp of his own.

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15. Comment #222816 by Dr Doctor on August 1, 2008 at 12:07 am

Proselytize the thoughts of Darwin?

Proselytize!!

What an appalling introduction. Time to complain to the BBC.

--------------------------------------
pros·e·ly·tize Pronunciation (prs-l-tz)
v. pros·e·ly·tized, pros·e·ly·tiz·ing, pros·e·ly·tiz·es
v.intr.
1. To induce someone to convert to one's own religious faith.
2. To induce someone to join one's own political party or to espouse one's doctrine.

To convert (a person) from one belief, doctrine, cause, or faith to another.

---------------------------
"You can hang up fossil dinosaurs infront of my face, talk about how the light from stars of the distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us, display the evidence of rock formation and demonstrate the process of evolution over geological time. But, I will not believe it because it isn't written about in my book of make believe and I believe the world is only a few thousand years old!"

We had someone like him at school, roughly translated his nicknames were: "Thicko", "Twat", "Freak" and "Tosspot"

Which just goes to show, even kids get it right sometimes.

I presume he isn't going to learn how to use a Playstation 3, wear clothes, learn mathematics, french or draw pictures after all - they aren't in his holy book either.

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16. Comment #222824 by ina.j on August 1, 2008 at 1:04 am

i guess i won't be watching the series. can't stand this stuff anymore. it is somewhat like in a dream, when you try to run, but you can't move. Prof. Dawkins places sound, logic arguments, but they just don't get through, are misinterpreted, misunderstood, mostly - simply unheard.

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17. Comment #222825 by Sargeist on August 1, 2008 at 1:10 am

Hmm, the comment about drinking and religious belief is an interesting one, but I'm not convinced. Many people who drink are no doubt aware that many people die from it, in the same way that my father knows that many people die from smoking but he still smokes anyway (though, thankfully, not as much these days.) I think that they simply don't care, or they just think it won't happen to them. But this is not the same as simply ignoring the evidence. And ignoring evidence is what the religious do.

Just my two penn'orth :)

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18. Comment #222940 by agki on August 1, 2008 at 6:21 am

The beginning of the recording referred to a three part television series. Does anyone know when it will be on. Available in the USA?

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19. Comment #223003 by 4horsefins on August 1, 2008 at 8:31 am

yadsmood

I believe your statement begs the statement, don't equate outspoken atheism with militant atheism, a small but significant point.

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20. Comment #223008 by Appleby on August 1, 2008 at 8:41 am

A militant atheist would get upset if someone said they thought Darwin wasn't great.

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21. Comment #223215 by dragonfirematrix on August 1, 2008 at 7:54 pm

I live is Forest, VA, USA. I think the 44% of fundamentalists all live here.

I believe they want all children indoctrinated and recruited into the lies of their religion, rather than the truth of science.

America (hell, the world) is on the decline because of religion, but I am not worried by this. I know some nation will embrace the truth given us by Darwin and science, and that nation (E.g. - EU, China, someone.) will advance the rest of humanity while the believers in religious BS will be "left behind."

May the religious have to pay a horrible price for their ignorance.

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22. Comment #223381 by Border Collie on August 2, 2008 at 6:08 am

'Outspoken, controversial, (typically strident also)' ... can't they think of any new descriptions of RD? I reckon not.

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23. Comment #223977 by Dispiracist on August 3, 2008 at 9:11 pm

Replying to 14. Comment #222789 by Teratornis

I think you've nailed the critical question.

I'm not so sure about the answer. It's very important for neuroscience and psychology.

I heard that beliefs do sometimes collapse when erroneous assumptions are revealed. But I suspect this only occurs when there is low commitment to the false belief. And I've read that torture is effective for some, which might be the real reason for the activities at Guantanamo Bay. (Not to pursue military justice, but to produce secretly committed affiliates some of who might eventually be usefully accepted back in their communities of origin).

The logic of satanic argument isn't needed to explain religious belief. The less logical the initial reason then the more entrenched that belief becomes. False beliefs, more readily disconfirmed than well-established scientific theories, are more likely to be subjected to future repetitive rationalisation as a result of potential disconfirmation.

This is why you don't tend to see cults forming around scientists, despite charismatic scientists and that much of science is spiritually more inspiring than typical religions.

People acquire beliefs tentatively, unrelated to logic or scientific evidence. But these beliefs are conveniently disposable as long as the belief is just a convenient tool. But making a public commitment of a belief establishes a vested interest, which triggers natural defensive processes to maintain consistency and commitment in the face of disconfirmation. It may only be the public commitment aspect, followed by disconfirmation, which triggers the belief protection mechanism.

To get a feel for this, try a personal experiment. Find something you deeply believe in and then look for logical reasons why you believe in it.

I like the example of democracy, because it is such a widely held yet very simple irrational belief. Apostasy is abhorrent, possibly more than atheism. So it's a useful proxy to appreciate the perspective of the religiously afflicted.

If you work carefully you'll find that your logical reasons why democracy is true (i.e. worth running with in the tentative scientific sense) will all be invalid. Your reasons will all conform to easily recognisable fallacies. E.g. The idea that democracy is true because it is newer or better than communism or monarchy is obviously as invalid as the idea Christian doctrine is true because it is better than Hindu or Islam.

People acquire belief in democracy in the same way as religious belief: by conforming to other's beliefs. Democracy's core thesis, that a majority vote legitimatises power, is obviously ludicrous. But people distrust their own judgement when everyone else apparently thinks otherwise. This combination of ease of beleif, and therefore higher liklihood of commitment, along with relatively easy disconfirmability makes belief in democracy a good candidate for religious fervour.

Most people have established a degree of public commitment to democracy, perhaps by voting, so when its invalidity becomes apparent they creatively develop personal reasons to maintain belief. Belief reinforcement, as a consequence of the mental processes protecting a committed position, entrenches the belief. It is the some process by which people learn via repetition and emotional engagement.

It would be an interesting experiment to discover what it takes to shake off this irrational belief. Does knowing that democracy is a ludicrous belief (as Winston Churchill famously stated) result in analysis that terminates or that further reinforces the irrational belief?
If the answer is unclear then it might indicate that logic won't be very helpful.

I'm not sure how changing beliefs can be done efficiently and effectively. Brainwashing would be a nice fantasy, but the reality might be more like brain grinding and polishing. A lot more work. Immunising future generations seems more feasible.

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24. Comment #226951 by RainDear on August 9, 2008 at 1:34 am

Excellent posts from Teratornis and Dispiracist.

Most people simply don't care about any scientific facts, unless the facts concern the simple and concrete steps they have to take when putting food on their table and keeping their families safe. When it comes to their beliefs, they usually adopt the belief system dominant around them.

However, it isn't necessarily the one they were raised with or indoctrinated into as children. I doubt an average creationist would stay a creationist for long, if moved from a creationist community to one where everybody else respected critical, rational and fact-based thinking. Around here where I live, I bet a young earth creationist would soon adjust his thinking, having become too embarassed by his stupidity. Probably the people around him would be too polite to openly ridicule him, but we humans are very good at reading other people's minds about these things. And nobody wants to be a stupid intellectual outcast. We're tribal animals.

It's clear that these scientific facts won't convince a typical creationist, nor will they make an atheist of a deeply religious believer. But they don't need to. These attitudes do not, and don't need to change with huge leaps from one side to another. Small steps are enough.

Before reading Dawkins, Harris or Dennett I called myself an agnostic. So, not wanting to rock the boat, I preferred to stay quiet in the presence of religious people, as if they had the higher ground on moral questions. In the TGD scale, I would have been a 5, technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. Now, after rethinking my position, I'd see myself somewhere between 6 and 7, almost certain there are no gods.

In my case, the change wasn't anything radical, only a small adjustment. But I think I have, over a few casual dinner talks, managed to convince some of my moderately religious friends about certain harms of indoctrinating their children. Yet another small adjustment. All it takes is presenting a few rational ideas, not to a complete fundamentalist, but to someone whose thinking is close enough to yours. A so-called "strident" or "militant" atheist is in a position to talk sense to an agnostic by, say, challenging his intellectual dishonesty. An agnostic is in a position to talk sense to a moderate believer and moderate to a fundamentalist.

It's almost impossible to change one person's opinion by 180 degrees. But it's not an overwhelming task to change a million people's opinion by a few degrees.

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25. Comment #226955 by Ichneumonid on August 9, 2008 at 1:42 am

Excellent point RainDear!

I, too, prior to reading TGD would have said that (technically) I was agnostic, but reading that section tipped my hand. The term 'agnostic' actually becomes totally meaningless the more you think about it, since none of us can be 100% sure that there is or isn't a god(s). Being a (biological) scientist means that I deal with uncertainty all the time, so it didn't take much to tip me into a point where I was happy to say that god(s) nonexistence was well within my 95% confidence interval!

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26. Comment #226965 by oasis-al-reason on August 9, 2008 at 2:29 am

That kid in the classroom - 'even if you show me evidence for evolution, I still believe in my holy book'. He must have been a Channel 4 'plant' or setup, right?. I mean it was just too good to be true.

Or maybe aiming for the next TEMPLETON FOUNDATION prize?

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27. Comment #241002 by Stafford Gordon on September 1, 2008 at 12:45 pm

I was brousing in W H Smiths when I saw a book on special offer; it was entitled THE GOD DELUSION.

I didn't need to know who the author was, the title was enough for me.

I had heard of Richard Dawkins, but unfortunately I was one of those who might have quite easily mixed up his name with that of Steven Hawkin.

I have not been on the fence apropos of religion since the age of about eight; everything about it annoys me, and some of it now frightens me.

So the book was a solid confirmation of my view of life. I had incidentally read 'The Origin of Species'.

I am delighted that the book has been so successful and, of course, been misrepresented by those with no sense of humour; ie, n.b. the religious; although Desmond Tutu has a wonderful sense of humour, so I'm generalising.

I think Darwin's findings are life affirming and that people who refuse to accept them are fools.

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