This is the transcript of the debate popularly known as The God Delusion Debate whereinworld-renowned atheist and scientist Professor Richard Dawkins debates against his Oxford University colleague Professor John Lennox, who is both a scientist and a Christian theologian. This event was held on October 3, 2007.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Larry Taunton: I’m Larry Taunton, Executive Director of Fixed Point Foundation, and I want to tell you a little something about the debate you’re about to see featuring Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. John Lennox, both men of the University of Oxford.
The question has been asked of us many times, why sponsor a debate on this issue, that is, the new atheism and religion, or in this case, more specifically, Christianity?
Fixed Point Foundation is a Christian organization that seeks to draw public attention to hot-button cultural issues, and since September 11th of 2001, the new atheism and its charges against religion have been one of those issues. Interestingly, many Christians and atheists feel that their views are frequently mischaracterized in the larger cultural discussion.
To address this, we wanted to find individuals who represented the beliefs of their respective camps. We think we have two of the very best in Richard Dawkins and John Lennox. We’re grateful to both men for their cooperation. John and Richard were delightful to work with and enthusiastic about the project from beginning to end. We think you will find what follows informative, challenging, and thought-provoking.
Good evening. I’m Larry Taunton, Executive Director of Fixed Point Foundation, the sponsor of this event. We welcome you to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alys Stephens Center, and we also welcome those who are listening around the world.
Tonight’s debate features two of the great minds currently writing and speaking on this issue, Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. John Lennox. I will not waste time now giving you their biographies, as you will find them in your program, but it has been my pleasure to get to know both of these men.
We have brought you here this evening under rather false pretenses. There’s actually not a debate this evening. Richard Dawkins wanted to come to the Bible Belt to announce his conversion to the Christian faith. Perhaps I’m mistaken. Incidentally, Richard is representing the atheistic position in this debate, if you didn’t know that. And Dr. John Lennox, the Christian one.
There’s something that I would like to say about the debate itself. We have thought that much of the discussion on this issue hasn’t been particularly helpful, as it’s frequently framed as science versus religion. What we are seeking to do this evening is to narrow the discussion just a bit, and hence the name of this debate, The God Delusion Debate.
So this debate will feature and will focus on the book, The God Delusion, and Richard’s assertions therein over and against the Christian faith.
A word about Fixed Point Foundation. We are a Christian organization, and unashamedly so, but we also seek thoughtful civil discussion on meaningful issues. And questions regarding eternity we think are meaningful indeed. We ask that you extend every courtesy to these men, whether you agree with them or not.
Undoubtedly there will be much said this evening that you will take issue with. Nonetheless, we hope you will extend to them a southern welcome.
We’re also pleased to have with us tonight, serving as our moderator, Judge Bill Pryor. Many of you will recall that he was the Attorney General for the state of Alabama and is now a federal judge. Bill, thank you very much.
We ask also that you turn off your cell phones and join me in greeting these men and turning it over to Bill Pryor.
Bill Pryor: Thank you, Larry. Good evening. Welcome to the debate.
You all know the theme, and Larry has introduced it, the God Delusion versus Christianity. There will be a structure to our debate this evening. We will begin with opening autobiographical statements from each of our debaters, beginning with Professor Dawkins and then turning to Dr. Lennox.
When I ask that each of them provide those statements, I will ask them to tell us something about themselves, each of them, and something about the book, The God Delusion.
We will then turn to the six major theses of Professor Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Now, obviously, it’s a long book. We can’t cover everything in it, but we have selected what we think are the six major themes. And to introduce each of those themes, I will read some excerpts from Professor Dawkins’ book and then give him an opportunity to elaborate and then Dr. Lennox an opportunity to respond.
Each of those exchanges should be about five minutes per side. And then what is not reflected in your program is that each of our debaters will finish the program with final statements, with concluding remarks. We will start that with Dr. Lennox, and then we will turn to Professor Dawkins.
So, Professor Dawkins, tonight you will have both the first and the last word, I suppose in the interest of Christian charity. Professor Dawkins, could you begin our discussion with an autobiographical statement? Tell us something about yourself and about the book.
Richard Dawkins: I was born in Africa. I’m a child of what was in those days the British Empire. Descended from a long line of khaki shorts-wearing, hairy-kneed, brown-shoed colonial officers. I had every opportunity to become a naturalist because Africa, as you know, is a wonderful place to be a naturalist. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it was. I never was much of a naturalist, much to my father’s disappointment, I suspect. He is a very good naturalist.
I suppose that’s a preamble to saying that my interest in the science of biology, which is what I specialize in, came more from an interest in fundamental questions than from a love of watching birds or insects or pressing flowers. I wanted to know why we’re all here. What is the meaning of life?
My parents left Africa when I was about eight and I came with them. I was sent to boarding school in England. I suppose part of the point of this autobiographical note is to give a kind of religious background since we are talking about religion tonight.
I had a harmless Anglican upbringing. I could never claim that I had religion thrust down my throat in the way it might have been had I been brought up in a more militant faith. Anglicanism, as you know, is a very civilized version of Christianity. No bells and smells and no creationist lunacy.
I was confirmed into the Church of England and at the time I sincerely believed it. I had a brief period of doubt at the age of about nine, about three years before my confirmation. This doubt was caused by the realization that there are lots of different religions in the world, and I recognized that it was an accident of my birth that I happened to have been born into the Christian faith and I recognized instantly that had I been born in, say, Afghanistan or born in India, I would have believed very different things.
That quite rightly shook my faith in the particular religion that I’d been brought up in. Weirdly, and I now don’t understand why, I seem to have lost those doubts when I was about thirteen and I was confirmed into the Church of England.
I went to Oxford after having lost my faith for good at the age of about fifteen or sixteen. That was because I discovered Darwinism. I recognized that there was no good reason to believe in any kind of supernatural creator, and my final vestige, last vestige of religious faith disappeared when I finally understood the Darwinian explanation for life.
I went to Oxford. I got a doctorate at Oxford eventually. I went to the University of California at Berkeley as a very young assistant professor teaching, in those days, animal behavior. I then went back to Oxford after about two years at Berkeley and continued my career as a student of animal behavior.
About 1972, there was a general strike in Britain and there was no electric power. I couldn’t do my research, and so I thought I would write a book. I started to write a book which eventually became my first book, The Selfish Gene. However, unfortunately, the electric power came on again, and so I shelved the first two chapters of the book that I’d already written, put them in a drawer, and forgot about them until about three years later in 1975 when I got a sabbatical leave and resumed writing The Selfish Gene.
Since then, I’ve written about eight more books: Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, A River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweeding the Rainbow, The Devil’s Chaplain, The Ancestor’s Tale, and most recently, The God Delusion, which is the subject of tonight’s debate.
I regard it as an enormous privilege to be alive, and I regard it as a privilege to be alive especially at the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st century, a privilege to be a scientist and therefore to be in a position to understand something of the mystery of existence, why we exist.
I think that religious explanations, although they may have been satisfying for many centuries, are now superseded and outdated. I think, moreover, that they’re petty and parochial, and that the understanding that we can get from science of all those deep questions that religion once aspired to explain are now better, more grandly, in a more beautiful and elegant fashion explained by science.
Bill Pryor: Dr. Lennox.
John Lennox: Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here. Each one of us has a biography and a worldview. Our set of answers to the big questions that life throws at us. And so a little about my biography.
I’m married to Sally; we have three children and four grandchildren. I work now at the University of Oxford as a mathematician and as a philosopher of science. I was born in the middle of the last century in a country with a tragic reputation for sectarian violence, Northern Ireland. My parents were Christian, but they were not sectarian.
In the book, The God Delusion, Richard, you say that religion teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. Well, whatever other religion this may apply to, it certainly did not apply to the Christianity my parents taught me from the Bible. They encouraged me to be intellectually inquisitive because they were like that themselves. Not in spite of their Christian faith, but because of it.
And I owe them an immense debt for setting me free to read everything from Marx and Russell to C.S. Lewis and developed in those days an interest in the big questions of life. I was very fortunate to get the chance to leave Ireland and go to Cambridge where I could indulge my passion for mathematics and for science in general.
And Cambridge not only gave me the opportunity to develop those intellectual pursuits, but it gave me the opportunity to meet many people of other worldviews who did not share my background and my convictions. As a result, I developed a considerable interest in atheism. An interest which led me subsequently as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow to study in Germany and then travel very frequently to Eastern Europe during the period of the Cold War.
After the fall of communism, I went very often to the academies of science and universities in Russia to discuss and reason about these things and to see at first hand the effect of systematic exposure to atheist indoctrination over the preceding 70 years. And so I too am very privileged to live at this time and to be involved in the public discussion of these issues.
Now reading Richard’s book, I found absolutely fascinating because it strikes me as an impassioned crusade to warn his fellow human beings of the slavery, the oppression, and the mental and possibly physical tortures imposed on them by religion. And I actually feel a lot of sympathy for you on this particular point because I myself am totally opposed to any religion that seeks to impose itself by force or that takes advantage of or abuses people in any way.
You cannot impose truth by force. And both of us, I think, hold that religion should be debated in a rational way as anything else. I share his passion for truth, neither of us mercifully as a postmodern relativist. But as a passionate atheist, Richard is committed to the idea that God is a delusion. For him, ultimate reality, I take it, consists of the impersonal matter and energy of the universe.
I believe the exact opposite. God, far from being a delusion, is real. Ultimate reality is a personal, eternal, and supernatural God who has revealed Himself in the universe, in His word, the Bible, and supremely in Jesus Christ, His Son, who is Lord and God incarnate. I’m very aware that this puts me, according to Richard’s book, firmly in the category of those who sit fluttering among the dove coats of the deluded, sucking my religious dummy or pacifier, as you call it in Alabama.
You suggest that religion builds a firewall in the mind against scientific truth. Well, that might be tragically the case with some religions, but it’s not so with biblical Christianity. Indeed, the reason, ladies and gentlemen, that I’m passionate about truth is that God is the God of all truth.
One of the most famous statements that Jesus ever made was, ‘I am the truth.’ An astonishing assertion that, as C.S. Lewis pointed out long ago, is either megalomaniac, pathologically mistaken, or valid, since he is claiming not merely to say true things, although that is so, but claiming to be ultimate truth itself. The ultimate truth behind everything from the Andromeda Nebula to human life, conscience, and mind.
Please note that what divides us is not science. We are both committed to it. What divides us is our worldviews, his atheistic, mine theistic and Christian.
Now, his book presents to us a grim world. It is a no-holds-barred attempt to deliver people from the dragon of religion, so that they can lead a life of uninhibited self-fulfillment, unencumbered with the background threat of an imaginary God. And he says it looks bleak and cold, especially from the security blanket of religious ignorance.
But, ladies and gentlemen, we need to take it seriously. If that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it is, and we need to face it. But we need to discuss it seriously and look at the evidence. Neither of us wishes to base his life on a delusion. But which is the delusion? Atheism or Christianity? That is for each of us to decide on the basis of the evidence, of course.
Bill Pryor: Thank you. The first thesis of Professor Dawkins’ book, and each of these that’s reflected in your program, is a summary. It’s not a direct quotation, but the summary is: faith is blind, science is evidence-based. I have one excerpt at the top of page 126 to illustrate your argument, Professor Dawkins.
“One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” Could you please elaborate?
Richard Dawkins: Science uses evidence to discover the truth about the universe. It’s been getting better at it over the centuries, in the teeth of opposition from religion, although it has to be admitted that, of course, science grew out of a religious tradition.
Religion, as the quotation that Judge Pryor read out, teaches us to be satisfied with, was it lack of evidence or lack of…?
Bill Pryor: With not understanding.
Richard Dawkins: With not understanding. I think that when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration, and you almost feel a desire to worship something. I feel this. I recognize that other scientists, such as Carl Sagan feel this. Einstein felt it.
We all of us share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life, for the sheer magnitude of the cosmos, the sheer magnitude of geological time. And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator.
What science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator, and it’s a major emancipation. Because humans have an almost overwhelming desire to think that they’ve explained something by attributing it to a maker. We’re so used to explaining things in our own world like these television cameras, like the lights, like everything that we make, the clothes we wear, the chairs we sit on, everything we see around us is a manufactured object.
And so, it’s so tempting to believe that living things or that the stars or mountains or rivers have all been made by something. It was a supreme achievement of the human intellect to realize that there is a better explanation for these things, that these things can come about by purely natural causes.
When science began, the aim to achieve it was there but we didn’t know enough. Nowadays, at the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st century, we still don’t know everything, but we’ve achieved an enormous amount in the way of understanding. We now understand essentially how life came into being. We know that we are all cousins of all animals and plants.
We know that we’re descended from a common ancestor which might have been something like bacteria. We know the process by which that came about. We don’t know the details, but we understand essentially how it came about. There are still gaps in our understanding. We don’t understand how the cosmos came into existence in the first place, but we’re working on that.
The scientific enterprise is an active seeking, an active seeking out of gaps in our knowledge, seeking out of ignorance, so that we can work to plug that ignorance. But religion teaches us to be satisfied with not really understanding. Every one of these difficult questions that comes up, science says, right, let’s roll up our sleeves and work on it. Religion says, oh, God did it. We don’t need to work on it. God did it. It’s as simple as that.
We have no thrusting force pushing us on to try to understand. Religion stratifies the impulse to understand because religion provides a facile, easy, apparent explanation, although as we’ll see later in the evening, it isn’t really an explanation, and it prevents the further work on the problem.
Bill Pryor: Thank you, Dr. Lennox.
John Lennox: There are two issues here. Faith is blind, science is evidence-based. I do not agree with the first one, but I very much agree with the second one. Some faith is blind, and blind faith can be very dangerous, especially if it’s coupled with a blind obedience to an evil authority. And that, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to emphasize, is true whether the blind faith is that of religious or secular people.
But not all faith is blind faith because faith itself carries with it the ideas of belief, trust, commitment, and is therefore only as robust as the evidence for it. Faith in the flying spaghetti monster, much beloved of Richard Dawkins, a delightful idea, is blind because there’s no evidence for the flying spaghetti monster. But faith in relativity theory is not blind because there is evidence supporting it.
I can’t speak authoritatively for other religions, but faith in the Christian sense is not blind. And indeed, I do not know a serious Christian who thinks it is. Indeed, as I read it, blind faith in idols and figments of the human imagination, in other words, delusional gods, is roundly condemned in the Bible.
My faith in God and Christ as the Son of God is no delusion. It is rational and evidence-based. Part of the evidence is objective. Some of it comes from science, some comes from history, and some is subjective, coming from experience.
Now, of course, we do not speak of proof. You only get proof in the strict sense in my own field of mathematics. But in every other field, including science, we can’t speak of proof. We can speak of evidence, of pointers, of being convinced beyond reasonable doubt.
I think it’s important in this context to emphasize that science is limited because there seems to me a creeping danger of equating science with rationality. But what is beyond science is not necessarily irrational. Science cannot tell us, for instance, whether a poem, a work of literature, or a work of art or music is good or beautiful.
Science can tell us that if you put strychnine into your grandmother’s tea, it will kill her. But science cannot tell you whether it’s morally right to do so. And the Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Medawar, who is quite a hero, I think, for both of us, has pointed out that you can easily see the limits of science because it cannot answer the elementary questions of a child: Who am I? What is the purpose of my existence? Where am I going?
Now, Richard has just contrasted science and religion, religion being content with not understanding, whereas science is unraveling the understanding of the universe. And I understand and feel the force of that objection very strongly because sometimes Christians, I admit, have been guilty of a lazy God-of-the-gaps kind of solution. I can’t understand it, therefore God did it. And, of course, God disappears as the gaps close.
But I’d like to point out that there are two kinds of gaps, ladies and gentlemen. There are gaps that science closes, and I call those the bad gaps. But there are also gaps that science opens, and we may come to some of those later. But as for the idea itself, Richard referred to the very important fact that science, modern science as we know it, exploded in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it arose out of a theistic background. And many philosophers of science have studied this and come to the conclusion that’s now called Whitehead’s thesis, that human beings became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in the lawgiver.
I think that is profoundly important because it means, far from religion hindering science, it was the driving force behind the rise of science in the first place. And when Isaac Newton, for example, discovered his law of gravity and wrote down the equations of motion, he didn’t say, marvelous, I now understand it, I’ve got a mechanism, therefore I don’t need God.
In fact, it was the exact opposite. It was because he understood the complexity and sophistication of the mathematical description of the universe that his praise for God was increased.
And I would like to suggest, Richard, that somewhere down in this, you’re making a category mistake because you’re confusing mechanism with agency. We have a mechanism, it does X, Y, and Z, therefore there’s no need for an agent. I would suggest that the sophistication of the mechanism, and science rejoices in finding such mechanisms, is evidence for the sheer wonder of the creative genius of God.
Bill Pryor: Our next thesis is that science supports atheism, not Christianity. And on this thesis, Professor Dawkins, I would like to read two excerpts from your book.
The first is on page 67. You are quoting your colleague, the Chicago geneticist, Jerry Coyne, with approval, and he writes, to scientists like Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, the celebrated Harvard biologist, “The real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism. While religion is the most common form of superstition.”
Several pages earlier, on page 59, you write, ‘NOMA, which is the idea that religion and science do not overlap, non-overlapping magisteria, is popular only because there is no evidence to favor the God hypothesis.’ Would you care to elaborate?
Richard Dawkins: First, I’d like to respond a little bit to what John said on the previous occasion. I feel happier if we could have a bit more of a dialogue rather than this. When you say faith is rational and evidence-based, I mean, if that were true, it wouldn’t need to be faith, would it? I mean, if there were evidence for it, why would you need to call it faith? You say just evidence.
When you said that faith in relativity, in Einstein’s theory of relativity, is evidence-based, that of course it is, but the evidence is all-important. Einstein’s predictions fit in with observed fact and with a whole body of theory, whereas we only need to use the word faith when there isn’t any evidence.
John Lennox: No, not at all. I presume you’ve got faith in your wife. Is there any evidence for that?
Richard Dawkins: Yes, plenty of evidence. Let’s generalize it. Never mind about my wife.
John Lennox: It’s the same with mine, Richard. It’s the same with mine.
Richard Dawkins: Let’s say that in general, how do we know that somebody loves us? Okay. You can use the word faith for that if you like, but it’s not the right use of the word.
John Lennox: Oh, it is.
Richard Dawkins: Because you know your wife loves you because of all sorts of little signs, little catches in the voice, little looks in the eye. That’s the evidence.
John Lennox: Yes, that’s perfect.
Richard Dawkins: That’s perfectly good evidence. That’s not faith.
John Lennox: Yes, it is.
Richard Dawkins: Well, okay, then we’re coming down to pure semantics.
John Lennox: I think you’ve been influenced too much by Kant, you see.
Richard Dawkins: Not explicitly, I have to say. Okay, let’s go on. Which of these statements are we now on?
Bill Pryor: We’re on the stacking for an opening.
Richard Dawkins: It didn’t seem to have much connection with the quotes from The God Delusion.
Bill Pryor: It actually works well with the first.
Richard Dawkins: Okay, it does. You read a quote from Jerry Coyne about the real war being between supernaturalism and naturalism. The context of that quote was the turf wars, in a sense, in American education between creationism and evolution. And within that context, I have been accused of letting the side down because, as you know, there’s a problem with American education that some nutcases are trying to introduce creationism into American schools, which is obviously very bad for science.
And my scientific colleagues are deeply worried by this and are trying to fight it, and all power to them. They complain that I am not helping matters, that I am, in a sense, rocking the boat by saying, quite openly, that it is my understanding of evolution that has led me to atheism. And they point out again, quite rightly, that if I were called up in a court of law testifying in favour of evolution and against the teaching of creationism, and the lawyer said, ‘Mr Dawkins, is it true that evolution has led you to atheism?’ I should have to say yes. Whereupon he would turn to the jury and say, my case rests.
It doesn’t do the cause of science any good to unite evolution with atheism. That was the context of Jerry Coyne’s remark. Coyne was saying, OK, if you’re concerned only with the narrow political battle of saving American science in the schools, then you should button your lip and stop talking about atheism.
If, on the other hand, you think, as Coyne does, that the real war is between supernaturalism and naturalism, then you would say, well, the battle over evolution and creationism is only a skirmish. The real war is over something rather more profound. That was the context of that.
Noma was the second quotation that you read. That’s non-overlapping magisteria. The late Stephen Gould argued that there was no real battle between science and religion because they were about non-overlapping magisteria, different things, ships that pass in the night, no contact between them. They’re about totally different things. I don’t think that for a moment.
I think that religion really is, in a sense, about science. I think that religious claims about the universe are scientific claims. I suspect that John may agree with me about this. Claims about the universe are scientific claims. A universe with a god would be a very different kind of universe from a universe without a god.
Scientific methods are the appropriate methods, or at least the scientific way of thinking is an appropriate way of thinking for deciding whether we live in this kind of universe with a god or that kind of universe without a god. It becomes even more glaring where you talk about miracles, however much sophisticated theologians may profess their non-belief in miracles. The plain fact is that the ordinary person in the pew, the ordinary unsophisticated churchgoer, believes deeply in miracles and it’s largely miracles that persuade that person into the church in the first place.
If there are miracles, they are to be judged by scientific means. If there was a virgin birth, if somebody was raised from the dead, these are strictly scientific claims. They may be difficult to verify, but as I’ve said in the book, The God Delusion, if you could imagine, hypothetically, that DNA evidence could be discovered showing that Jesus never had a father, that Jesus was born of a virgin, then can you imagine any theologian saying, oh, no, not relevant, separate magisteria, science has no bearing on this case? Of course they wouldn’t. Science has every bearing on this case. That’s what I have to say about NOMA and I think I’ve probably run out of my five minutes.
Bill Pryor: Thank you. Professor Dawkins?
John Lennox: Well, I agree with you very much on the NOMA issue, Richard, that science and religion keeping them separate. Actually, if you read the small print on NOMA, it rather disconcerts you because it says that science deals with reality and religion with everything else, and of course I’m not very happy with that.
I certainly agree with you that the modes of logical analysis that science has introduced to you are the right ones to deal with many of the central claims of Christianity. I would widen it a bit. It’s historical science, of course, we’re dealing with events in the past, but Christianity is falsifiable in that technical sense. I would very much support that.
The thesis here is that science supports atheism, not Christianity. I think atheism undermines science very seriously because if you think of the basic assumption that all of us who are scientists have, that is we believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe. It’s interesting to me that scientists of the eminence of Eugene Wigner and Albert Einstein use the word faith. They cannot imagine a scientist without this faith because, of course, they point out that you’ve got to believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe before you can do any science at all. Science doesn’t give you that.
Now, the interesting thing is this. Suppose we now look at that issue against the background of the two worldviews we’re discussing tonight, atheism and theism. Atheism tells you, at least Richard tells us in his book, that since human life has been cobbled together by unguided evolution, it’s unlikely that our view of the world is accurate. Quite so.
And if you are a reductionist, as you must be as a materialist, reducing beliefs to the physics and chemistry of neurological structures, then it raises a very big question, ladies and gentlemen. If, in the end, my beliefs, my theories, my scientific theories are the results, ultimately, of the motions of atoms in my brain produced by an unguided, random, mindless process, why should I believe them?
In other words, it’s like someone sitting on the branch of a tree cutting off the branch on which they’re sitting. And it seems to me that, therefore, atheism actually undercuts the scientific endeavor very seriously. And that, for my mind, is a fatal flaw. An argument that purports to derive rationality from irrationality doesn’t even rise, in my opinion, to the dignity of being an intelligible delusion. It is logically incoherent.
But theism tells us that the reason science is possible, the reason that I can access the universe, at least in part through my human intelligence, is because the same God who created the universe is ultimately responsible for the human mind in here. So that’s the base level.
But when we come up a level now, and look at science itself, we have the fine-tuning of the universe, the fact that the basic constants of nature have got to be very accurate in order to have a universe just like this one. Now, I know that some people prefer, that’s the word that Sir Martin Rees uses, an explanation in terms of a multiverse which actually doesn’t, in my opinion, solve the logical problems.
But I’m very interested in the verdict of Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the microwave background. And he says, astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with a very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.
So that physics itself, looking at the constants and the very, very specified numbers they had to have, comes to that kind of conclusion. And incidentally, the Bible gets very easily dismissed, I’m afraid, also, in The God delusion. Penzias added, “The best data we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”
It’s interesting, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t it, that we only got the idea that the universe had a beginning, evidence for it in the 1960s. It was very exciting. I remember it well. Because for centuries, Europe was dominated by the thinking of Aristotle, which put the Earth fixed at the centre of the universe, everything rotating about it, and everything existing eternally.
The fascinating thing is this, that when evidence began to arrive that there was a finite beginning to space-time, some leading people in the journal Nature, the editor Maddox, said, ‘This is dangerous, we don’t like this because it will give too much leverage to those who believe in creation.’
Now what I find very interesting is this, the Bible is frequently dismissed as being anti-scientific because it makes no predictions. Oh no, that’s incorrect. It makes a brilliant prediction. For centuries it’s been saying there was a beginning. And if scientists had taken that a bit more seriously, they might have discovered evidence for the beginning a lot earlier than they did.
Bill Pryor: Professor Dawkins, I understand your desire, in some ways, to respond to Dr. Lennox, but I think that this next topic and the excerpt I’m going to read will allow you to both advance the discussion of the next thesis, which is that design is dead, otherwise one must explain who designed the designer. I think it will allow you to advance that well.
The quote that I’m going to read, the excerpt is on page 109, and what you wrote is this: ‘The whole argument turns on the familiar question, who made God, which most thinking people discover for themselves. A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape. This argument, as I shall show in the next chapter, demonstrates that God, though not technically disprovable, is very, very improbable indeed.’
Richard Dawkins: First, I find it deeply unimpressive that the Bible, it can be said, to predict the Big Bang. There are only two possibilities, either the universe began or it’s been here forever. Just two possibilities. To get one of them is really not that impressive.
Now… Sorry?
John Lennox: At least it got it right.
Richard Dawkins: Toss a penny, you’ve got a chance of getting it right 50% of the time. Right. Design is dead, otherwise one must explain who designed the designer. Well, we skate over a lot when we say design is dead. I think probably John and I would agree that life is explained. Darwin explains life and no serious scientist doubts that.
So we go back to the previous, a rather more difficult stage in the understanding of where we come from, which is the origin of the universe itself. And that really is genuinely difficult. We don’t know. We understand, essentially, biology, we don’t understand cosmology. In a sense, we could say cosmology is waiting for its Darwin.
John mentioned in the answer to the previous question the idea of the physical constants being finely tuned. And it’s quite true that many scientists, many physicists maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding, just have to be assumed. You can’t provide a rationale for why those numbers are there.
And physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here. The universe would perhaps have fizzled out in the first yoctosecond, and so we wouldn’t be here. Or other things would have gone wrong. It’s tempting, once again, to import the easy, facile idea of a designer and to say that the designer twiddled the knobs of the universe at the Big Bang and got them exactly right, got the gravitational constant right, got the strong force right, the weak force right, and so on.
But it seems to me to be manifestly obvious that that is a futile kind of explanation because, as the quotation says, who designed the designer? You have explained precisely nothing because instead of just saying, ‘Oh, well, the knobs were tuned to the right values anyway,’ you say, ‘Oh, there was a God who knew how to tune the knobs to the right values.’
And if you’re going to postulate that, then you’ve, in a sense, sold the pass. Some physicists solved that problem by not invoking God, of course, but by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, ‘Well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe which is capable of giving rise to us.’
That in itself, I think, is unsatisfying and, as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solved that by the multiverse idea, the idea that our universe is just one of many universes, there’s a sort of foaming bubble, a bubbling foam of universes, and the bubble in which we are is only one of billions of universes.
And each of these universes has different fundamental constants. Most of them have fundamental constants which are unsuited to give rise to the sort of permanence and the sort of chemistry, the sort of conditions that give biological evolution, Darwinian evolution, the chance to get going.
A tiny minority of those universes has what it takes to give rise to Darwinian evolution, ultimately chemistry, and then evolution. And that tiny minority has to include the universe in which we sit, because here we are. The anthropic principle, the principle that we have to be in a universe capable of giving rise to us, plus the principle of the multiverse, provides at least an interim satisfying explanation in a way that a creator couldn’t possibly be a satisfying explanation for the reason that I’ve given.
Then having got ourselves into a universe which is capable of generating stars, capable of generating chemistry, and ultimately capable of generating the origin of life, then biological evolution takes over and now we are on a clear run. Now we understand what happened once biological evolution gets going. Then it’s easy to understand most of what’s difficult.
Most of the difficulty of understanding the universe lies in the vast complexity of life. That’s what really, truly impresses people. That’s why people who believe in God mostly do believe in God, because they look around the living world and they see how impressive it is. So that level of impressiveness is completely destroyed by Darwin. And Darwin, of course, doesn’t explain the origin of the universe. For that, I invoke the Anthropic Principle and the Multiverse. Less satisfying, admittedly, but science makes progress. The one thing you can be absolutely sure is that a creative designer cannot be a satisfying explanation.
Bill Pryor: Dr. Lennox?
Dr. Lennox: The Anthropic Principle, as you stated, Richard, I think is a complete truism. Of course, we have to be in such and such a kind of planet of the kind that we could appear on. That does not answer the question how we came to exist on it. And I fear I have to disagree with you on Darwinism. Darwinism does not explain life. It may explain certain things about what happens when you’ve got life.
But evolution assumes the existence of a mutating replicator. It does not explain how that replicator came to exist in the first place. Now that’s a major discussion. I want to address the question, “Who designed the designer?” because it’s the old schoolboy question: who created God? I’m actually very surprised to find it as a central argument in your book because it assumes that God is created. And I’m not surprised, therefore, that you call the book “The God Delusion” because created gods are, by definition, a delusion.
Now, I know, and I ought to explain, that Richard doesn’t like people who say to him that they don’t believe in the God he doesn’t believe in. But I think that this is possibly touching a sore spot because you leave yourself wide open to the charge. After all, you are arguing that God is a delusion.
And in order to weigh your argument, I said that it is you who’s arguing that God is a delusion. And in order to weigh that argument, I need to know what you mean by God. And if you say, “If there is a God, you have to ask who created God,” that means that you’re reduced to thinking about created gods. Well, none of us believe in created gods. Jews, Muslims, or Christians.
And I think that argument, then, is entirely beside the point, and perhaps you ought to put it on your shelf marked “celestial teapots,” where it belongs.
The God who created the universe, ladies and gentlemen, was not created. He is eternal. This is the fundamental distinction between God and the universe. It came to exist; He did not. And this is precisely the point the Christian apostle John makes at the beginning of his gospel: In the beginning was the Word. The Word already was. All things came to be by Him. God is uncreated. The universe was created by Him.
Now, I don’t know whether Richard has difficulty with the concept of the uncreated. I don’t know, and I’d love to know, whether he believes as a materialist that matter and energy and the laws of nature were always there because if they were, he does believe in something eternal. So perhaps the difficulty lies in believing in an eternal person.
But I want to probe deeper into this because he suggested that introducing God would mean an end of science. God is no explanation since, by definition, God is more complex than the thing you are explaining.
Now, this he states as the central argument of his book. I would not have expected an argument like this from a scientist because explanations in science themselves are usually in terms of increasing complexity. An apple falling is a simple event. The explanation in terms of Newton’s law of gravitation is already stretching the minds of many people, but its explanation in terms of a warp in space-time is stretching the minds of the cleverest.
Simplicity isn’t the only criterion of truth. Let me give you an example. Suppose you’re an archaeologist, and I’m exploring a cave with you, and you’re a Chinese expert, and on this cave you see two scratches. And you say, “Human intelligence,” and I say, “Pardon, they’re just two scratches.” And you say, “But those are the Chinese character rén, which means a human being.”
But I say, “Look Richard, that’s no explanation at all. You’re postulating something as complex as a human brain to explain two scratches. That means that your explanation is more complex than the thing you’re explaining. That’s no explanation at all. You’re postulating something as complex as a human brain to explain two scratches.
That means that your explanation is more complex than the thing you’re explaining. That’s no explanation at all. Now it seems to me that’s exactly what you’re saying in your book. The reason we can deduce something as sophisticated as human intelligence from two scratches on a cave wall is because they have a semiotic dimension. They carry meaning.
And that fascinates me as a mathematician. Because the reductionist is committed to deducing things that carry meaning, and I would include the DNA molecule among them, is committed to explaining those in terms of the basic materials. But as was pointed out a long time ago by a Nobel Prize winner, Roger Sperry, the meaning of the message is not going to be found in the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink.
And it fascinated me too to see that you approved in your book of the physicist looking for a T.O.E., a theory of everything. But that’s a theory where the buck stops. Incidentally, there is no hope for a T.O.E., as Stephen Hawking has said in 2004 on the basis of Gödel’s mathematics and its application to physicists.
So I’m interested that you were prepared, as I understand it, to agree that a T.O.E. was a good thing in physics. It’s perhaps you like a T.O.E., a toe, provided there’s no god attached to it. I think finally, if I might just say, that you seem to be…
Bill Pryor: You time’s up.
John Lennox: Oh, my time’s up. Okay, I’ll stop.
Bill Pryor: Professor Dawkins, my next excerpt, we’re going to change gears to some extent, to the fourth thesis, which is that Christianity is dangerous. I think you’ll like this quote. It comes from the very first page of the book, from the preface. You write, and I have a few excerpts to read.
You write, ‘Imagine with John Lennon a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9-11, no 7-7, no crusades, no witch hunts, no gunpowder plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli-Palestinian wars, no Serb-Croat-Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as Christ killers, no Northern Ireland troubles, no honor killings, no shiny-suited, bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money. God wants you to give till it hurts. Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.’
You then write, on page 303, ‘Even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.’
And finally, you write, on pages 307 and 308, ‘More generally, and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam, what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.’
Richard Dawkins: I am going to reply to what John Lennox said about – who created God. I mean the word created was smuggled in by somebody else, I didn’t. Maybe I did say who created God. That’s not the point. The point is not whether God is a created thing or not. The point is this issue of simplicity, which you rightly went on to talk about.
In order to understand the existence of complexity, we can’t just postulate complexity, we have to go back to simplicity. Now, John used the illustration of an archaeologist, wasn’t it, who found some scratches on a cave, and it was supposed to be a powerful argument that said, well, these scratches are very simple, but the person who did the scratching was complex.
That’s nothing to do with the argument I’m putting. The argument I’m putting is that if we’re trying to explain complexity, we need some kind of an ultimate explanation for the existence of a complex object, an improbable object. Certainly, the scratches on the cave are simple, and certainly the human that made those scratches is complex.
If you found, if you went to another planet, and you found some scratches which indicated the existence of life, you would, of course, we would both postulate the existence of a complex living being. But we would both need an explanation for where that complex living being came from.
And I put it to you that just to say it was always there, or it just happened, is precisely the kind of non-explanation which creationists accuse evolutionists of erecting. They say, how could an eye come about by sheer chance? Well, of course an eye couldn’t come about by sheer chance. It has to come about by a gradual, incremental process from simple beginnings. Exactly the same is true of anything complex.
And that God, you can’t just deduct the issue, you can’t just evade the issue by saying God was always there. You still need an explanation. So it tells you nothing to say that the scratches on the wall are simple. And by the way, the idea that physics is complex because it’s difficult, that’s a confusion of the two meanings of the word simple. Simple meaning easy to understand, and certainly modern physics isn’t easy to understand.
But there is a sense in which it’s simple in the way that biology isn’t. Now, I haven’t got much time to deal with the…
Bill Pryor: I’ll give you a couple of extra minutes.
Richard Dawkins: Well, no, sorry, I didn’t mean to steal that. Let me come on to the thing about Christianity being dangerous. The reading from the preface, the quote from John Lennon, imagine no Taliban and all that, that I think is self-explanatory, and I won’t go into that.
I think what I will do is zero in on the particular point of the third quotation, I think it was, which was about children and the evils of teaching children that certain things are true without evidence, teaching them that faith is a virtue. I would not for a moment say that all religion is bad, all religion is dangerous, or Christianity is dangerous. Certainly only a minority of religious people are bad or do bad things.
The point about teaching children that faith is a virtue is that you’re teaching them that you don’t have to justify what you do, you can simply shelter behind the statement that’s my faith, and you’re not to question that.
What I’m objecting to is the convention that we have all of us bought into, whether we are religious or not, that religious faith is something to be respected, something not to be questioned, and if somebody says that’s my faith, then you simply have to respect it, tiptoe gently away and say nothing more.
In most cases that’s quite harmless, but if you are the kind of person who takes your faith really literally and who believes that Allah has ordered you, or it would be the will of Allah that you go and blow somebody up, then it is the fact that you were educated as a child in a madrasa to believe implicitly in the faith that you were taught and not to question it, which if you happen to be of an unstable turn of mind or if you happen to be of a violent turn of mind, leads to the sorts of terrible acts which are done in the name of religion.
I must stress again, I’m not saying that the majority of religious people do terrible acts, I am saying that faith is a terrible weapon because it justifies the performance of terrible acts which do not have to be justified by reason or evidence. The one gift I would wish to give to any child is scepticism. Don’t believe something just because you’re told it, don’t believe something because it’s your tradition, don’t believe something because it’s in a holy book.
Look for the evidence and question sceptically, and if everybody did that, we wouldn’t be suffering some of the terrible things that are going on in the world at the moment.
Bill Pryor: Dr. Lennox.
John Lennox: I’d dearly love to come back on the first one, Richard. I think there’s a slight obsession with the simple to complex. If you’re building a factory, say, for manufacturing computers, they’ll dig a hole in the ground first, that’s very simple, and it gets more complex as it goes up.
But everything comes from the mind of the planners, and what I’m talking about is inference to the best explanation, and the inference, when we look at the semiotic, say, of DNA and the fact that it carries a biological message, so to speak, to an intelligent designer, seems to me to be much more sensible than the inference to mindless processes that we do not know can do any such thing.
But that’s a big debate, and we’ve both written about it, and you’ll have to be referred to the literature. Because I want to come to this topic about Christianity being dangerous, and I want to agree very largely with a lot of what you say, the danger of fanatical religion that fans the flames of violence.
And quite frankly, I’m ashamed as a Christian of the reputation, particularly in the Middle Ages, the Crusades and so on, that they’re associated with Christianity. But I’d like to point out that the perpetrators of that kind of atrocity were not following Christ, but they were actually disobeying His explicit command, because He prohibited, very famously, as you know, His followers from using physical weapons. My kingdom is not of this world, He told them. He told Pilate.
And it’s very interesting, to my mind, that Christ was actually put on trial for being a fanatical terrorist. That’s very easy to forget, and He was publicly exonerated from the charge by the Roman procurator. Truth cannot be imposed by violence, particularly the truth that Christ had come into the world to bring a message of God’s love and forgiveness.
So I would agree with you, and the danger of training children to be fanatics by not allowing them to question is a very serious one. And I’m so glad that I had parents who encouraged me to think, and part and parcel of the Christian faith, was that thinking.
Now, you asked us to imagine with John Lennon a world without religion. I want you to imagine with John Lennox… a world without atheism, with no Stalin, with no Mao, with no Pol Pot, to name the heads of the three officially atheistic states. A world with no gulag, no cultural revolution, no killing fields. I think that would be a world worth imagining too.
And I must say, I’m very disturbed in your book by what seems to me to be an attempt to airbrush out the atrocities of the communist world. I’ve spent a lot of time visiting that part of the world, and I don’t recognise anything that you say. Atheism was not peripheral to Marxism.
For Marx, the criticism of religion was the foundation of all criticism. And so, it concerns me that a scientist who’s very interested in historical science in the sense of evolutionary biology unravelling history, is content with a very superficial analysis of the period of the Cold War.
And even more disturbed to read things like this, even if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism, they both also had moustaches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what? Well, yes, all three of them had noses in common with the rest of us. But what kind of reasoning is this? We’re not talking about shared characteristics in general, but the motivating ideology that drove these men to murder millions in their attempt to get rid of religion, whether Jewish, Christian, or anything else.
So, I’m very disturbed at your historical analysis. You write that you don’t believe there’s an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca or shatter York Minister or the Cathedral of Notre Dame. But what about the thousands of churches that were demolished in Stalin’s Russia and the forced transformation of them into museums?
Now, I can understand why one would want to rewrite the history of the 20th century to airbrush out the role of atheism. Because one could very easily draw a parallel between the anti-religious agenda of the new atheists and the attempt of communism to obliterate religion. That’s not going the right way, I think.
And I’m sure that you would be rightly insulted, and I wouldn’t suggest it for a moment, if I were to say that because you and Stalin were atheists that you would have approved of the ruthless elimination of millions. You rightly expect me to differentiate between atheists. I would like you to write another book in which you differentiate between religions because they are not all the same. Some support fanaticism, others don’t.
And then, finally, you contend that the teachings of moderate religion are an open invitation to extremism. Well, that is not true of the teachings of Christ. I can’t speak for other religions. But what about the moderate teaching of atheism? I’ve sat beside a young girl of 13 in the GDR who’s just been told as the brightest child in the school that she cannot have any more education since she’s not prepared to swear public allegiance to the atheistic state. I would call that intellectual murder.
And it was committed many times in the name of atheism. But according to you, it’s far worse than bulldozing buildings, but you say there’s not the smallest evidence that atheists do such things. But there is. But perhaps I’ve misunderstood you.
Bill Pryor: Do you want to take a moment?
Richard Dawkins: Well, I’m very happy to give up on the next one.
Bill Pryor: Which would you prefer?
John Lennox: I’m very happy. I’d like Richard to choose what he wants to do because I’ve made some strong statements.
Richard Dawkins: In The God Delusion, I very deliberately made very little of all the individual evils of religion. I mention them occasionally, but I didn’t go on about the Crusades, the conquistadors, anything like that. I am not trying to say that religion, that religious people do bad things.
I agree fully that Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao did terribly bad things. It may even be that atheism was an integral part of the Marxism which led them to do terrible bad things, if indeed it was their Marxism that led them to do bad things. What interests me is that I think that there is a logical path from religion to doing terrible things. And I kind of touched on it in the last answer when I was talking about faith leading you to do things.
There’s a logical path that says if you really, really, really believe that your God, Allah, whoever it is, wants you to do something, you’ll go to heaven, you’ll go to paradise if you do it, then it’s possible for an entirely logical, rational person to do hideous things. I cannot conceive of a logical path that would lead one to say because I am an atheist, therefore it is rational for me to kill or murder or be cruel or do some horrible thing.
I can easily see that there are plenty of individuals who happen to be atheists, maybe even individuals who have some other philosophy which incidentally happen to be associated with atheism. But there is no logical path. Those young men who bombed in the London subway and the buses, those 19 men who flew planes into various targets in the United States in September of 2001, they were not psychopaths. They were not downtrodden, ignorant people. They were well-educated, rational people who passionately believed they were right, they thought they were righteous, they thought they were good, their religion, by the lights of their religion they were good.
The same thing could be said of the hideous things done by the Taliban, the oppression of women. These people believe deeply in what they are doing and it follows logically. Once you grant them the premise of their faith, then the terrible things that they do follow logically.
The terrible things that Stalin did, did not follow from his atheism. They followed from something horrible within him. Christopher Hitchens has made the point that Stalin was in effect a new Tsar of a country which for centuries had been brought up to believe that there was a semi-divine king, the Tsar, and it would have been madness for Stalin not to have exploited this cringing loyalty in the peasantry that had been for centuries subjugated to the Tsars.
It would have been madness for Stalin not to have done that. It would have been madness for Hitler, whether or not Hitler himself was religious, and there’s some dispute about that. There’s a good case to be made that Hitler was religious, but I don’t care whether he was or not.
The fact is that Hitler’s terrible deeds were done by Christians who were… I think I’ll leave that. I think even that’s not relevant. The point I would return to yet again is that you will not do terrible deeds because you are an atheist. Not for rational reasons. You may well, for very rational reasons, do terrible things because you are religious. That’s what faith is about. That’s what faith means.
I suppose you could say that there was a kind of faith that motivated Hitler’s followers and Stalin’s followers as well, but that’s a separate point.
Bill Pryor: Let’s have a brief response. We do want to get through all of the topics tonight, but Dr Lennox?
John Lennox: Well, I would want to argue that there’s a logical path from any ideology that’s fanatical and oppressive to the kind of behaviour you say, whether it’s religion or atheistic, because atheism is a faith, of course, as well.
Richard Dawkins: It’s not.
John Lennox: Of course it is. Well, OK. Don’t you believe it?
Richard Dawkins: You’re an atheist with respect to Thor and Wotan and Zeus.
John Lennox: Yes, that’s right. I don’t believe them, but you believe atheism. It is your faith.
Richard Dawkins: I’m in exactly the same position with respect to your Yahweh, your Jehovah, whatever you call him. I’m in exactly the same position with respect to him as you are with respect to Zeus. And I cannot imagine not believing in Zeus, leading one to do terrible deeds. It’s exactly the same with not believing in God.
Bill Pryor: I’m going to wrap up. I mean it now this time, Dr Lennox, if we’re going to get to the rest of the debate.
John Lennox: Yes, let’s go on. All right. Let’s go on. I think the issue has nothing to do with Zeus and so on. They’re non-existent deities. The issue is to do with two alternative explanations of the universe. And each of us have our faith. I believe there is a God behind this universe. You believe the universe is all there is. The cosmos is all there is. Those are both statements of faith. You have evidence you believe for them.
Bill Pryor: The fifth thesis…
Richard Dawkins: How could a belief in the cosmos lead him to murder?
Bill Pryor: No, no, no. We have a time limit, Professor and Doctor. The fifth thesis is that no one needs God to be moral. I only have one quote. It’s from 226. It’s short. We do not need God in order to be good or evil.
Richard Dawkins: If you think about why you might need God in order to be moral, I can only think of two reasons how that might come about. You might say you need a book to tell you what’s moral. Well, as for that, I sincerely hope that nobody in this room bases their morals on the Christian Bible or the Koran.
Because if they do, then their morals are likely to be hideous. Needless to say, you can find some decent verses. You can find some decent verses in both the Bible and the Koran. And if you pick and choose those verses, then you can say with hindsight, this verse fits in with my view of what’s moral, that verse doesn’t, so I’m going to ignore that verse and choose this verse.
But you didn’t need the Bible in order to do that picking and choosing. You did the picking and choosing on the basis of something else. Something which we all have in common, whether we are religious or not. We’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, moral. Some of us more so than others. Whether we’re moral or not has nothing to do with whether we read the Bible. Some people are kind, some people are sympathetic, some people care about suffering, other people don’t. It has nothing to do with the Bible.
The other reason why you might need religion in order to be moral is that you are either afraid of God, you’re afraid if you’re not moral you’ll get punished, or you’re trying to suck up to God and be good so that you’ll get a reward. Neither of those two is a very noble reason to be good, to say the least.
Now, you might say that that forces me into a challenge. How do I know what’s moral? Well, I don’t on the whole. But the point I want to make is that there does seem to be a kind of universal human acceptance that certain things are right and other things are not. If you look cross-culturally, look at anthropological findings on different cultures, you’ll find there’s a kind of agreement that certain things are wrong and other things are right. There’s disagreement in detail.
The golden rule, do as you would be done by. Do unto others what you would expect them to do to you. This is a very, very widespread principle and it almost amounts to common sense in a way. You certainly don’t need a holy book in order to tell you to do that.
Now, as an evolutionist, I think that it comes partly from our evolutionary past. I think that there was a time in our history when we lived in small kin groups and we lived in small groups where good deeds could be expected to be reciprocated. And under those conditions, we developed a kind of lust to be good, which was parallel to the lust for sex, which has obvious Darwinian advantages.
Now, we no longer live in small villages, in small clans, and so the Darwinian pressure to be good is no longer so strong, nor is the Darwinian pressure for lust as strong as it once was, because nowadays we often use contraceptives, and therefore sexual behaviour does not lead to the reproductive consequence, which is, of course, the Darwinian reason for it.
But that doesn’t matter. The point is that our evolutionary past built into us a lust for sex, and by the same token it built into us a lust to be good, a lust to be friendly, a lust to cooperate, a lust to be sympathetic towards suffering. So I think it partly comes from that, but it also comes from something less easy to define, which is clearly there, because I call it the shifting moral zeitgeist. It’s something that changes from decade to decade.
Living as we do in 2007, there will be a broad consensus of what’s right and wrong, racism is wrong, sexual discrimination is wrong, cruelty is wrong, which characterise we who live in the early 21st century, which would not necessarily have characterised our ancestors in this place 200 years ago.
The consensus has moved on, and I find this a very interesting, fascinating fact, which suggests that there really is a kind of something in the air about what is regarded as moral, and it clearly has nothing to do with religion, because it doesn’t come from scripture. Scripture doesn’t change over the decades in the way that our attitudes to slavery, our attitudes to women, etc., do.
There really does seem to be a powerful shifting zeitgeist effect, which doesn’t tell you anything in itself, but which indicates that there is something in the air, some other force, something which we can understand with sufficient sociological, psychological sophistication. Whatever else it is, it’s not religion.
John Lennox: The question is, do we need God to be moral? If we formulate it as, can an atheist be good? Of course. Because, as I see it, the very fact that human beings all around the world show a common core of morality is evidence for the truth of the biblical claim that we are moral beings made in the image of God.
So what I would want to say is this. Of course we can be good without God in the sense of our personal behavior, but I’m not sure whether we can find foundations for the concept of being good without God. You admit that you cannot get ethics from science. In your book, A Devil’s Chaplain, science has no methods for deciding what is ethical.
And I find it very interesting, reading one of your other books, River Out of Eden, to find what I understand is your analysis of what the universe is like at bottom. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. Now, that seems to me to be saying that good and evil don’t exist, so I don’t even know where you get the moral criteria to discuss it.
If a rock falls off a mountain onto your head and kills you, it makes no sense calling the rock evil. It just exists. If Pol Pot chooses to eliminate a million intellectuals, or the 9-11 terrorists choose to fly hundreds of people to their deaths into the Twin Towers, how could you call them evil if they were simply dancing to their DNA?
Now, that strikes me as a hideous world you’re delivering us into that has no morality at all. And so, therefore, just pushing this a little bit further, if good and evil don’t exist, there is no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, how can it possibly make sense to talk of the evils of religion or of the good of atheism?
Now, I know that you suggest elsewhere that we have to rebel against our genes, but that creates, to my mind, an immense problem with what you say, because if we are nothing but our genes and dancing to the tune of our DNA, what part of us can rebel against them? So, I want to suggest this, that far from atheism delivering an adequate explanation for morality, it dissolves it.
And it’s a problem that’s been around for centuries. How can something mindless and impersonal, like the universe, impose a sense of morality upon us? And David Hume, a philosopher whom you quote, pointed this out very clearly. He said you just cannot get an ought from an is. You cannot derive morality and ethics from matter and energy. You cannot go from facts to values.
And what concerns me greatly is that, although you don’t say it in your book, is that this kind of philosophy that has no base for morals in a transcendent God has got to find morality either in raw nature or a combination of nature and society, and often leads to a kind of utilitarianism.
And we are in serious ethical confusion, I think, in our contemporary world, in the legal sphere, in the ethical, in the medical sphere, and in the business sphere, because the foundations are crumbling. And I want to suggest, I know it’s provocative, but I want to suggest that Dostoevsky was very perceptive, and I’ve had many Russians agreeing with me, when he said if God does not exist, everything is permissible. He’s not saying that people can’t be good. He’s saying that the foundations of morality are removed. And Nietzsche predicted exactly the same thing.
So, I find that trying to get morality elsewhere is something that is doomed to destruction. I would love to spend time discussing the Bible. I think your view of the Bible is a bit one-sided. There are things there to be discussed.
Bill Pryor: We’re about to turn to it.
John Lennox: Okay, fine.
Bill Pryor: The last thesis. Christian claims about the person of Jesus are not true. His alleged miracles violate the laws of nature. I’m going to read two excerpts, Professor Dawkins. The first comes from page 92 of your book. ‘The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal.’
The next comes from page 257: ‘Jesus was a devotee of the same in-group morality coupled with out-group hostility that was taken for granted in the Old Testament. Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare. Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.’
Richard Dawkins: Once again, I can’t let pass. That rhetoric of mine about blind physical forces and indifference and nature neither cares, DNA neither cares nor knows. Maybe you’re right that that portrays a hideous world. Well, maybe the world is a hideous world. It doesn’t make it not true.
That’s the fundamental point that I would wish to leave with you. That you can talk till you’re blue in the face about how it would be nice if such and such were true. It would be nice if the world were friendly to us. It would be nice if the world was not such a hideous one.
But I see it as, first, it tells you nothing about whether it’s true or not. We have to decide whether it’s true or not separately. It gives us, if it is a hideous world, it gives us something to rise above. And we clearly do rise above it. You raised the question, how do we rebel? And you seem to think there was some kind of contradiction.
There is no contradiction with rising above Darwinian dictates. We do it every time we use a contraceptive. It’s easy. Every time you use a contraceptive you are defying the Darwinian imperative to reproduce. You’re enjoying sex using the pleasure that was built into your brains by Darwinism because normally sex leads to reproduction.
You’re cutting off that link and you’re using sex for pure enjoyment without reproduction. That’s defying, that’s rebelling against the selfish genes. And we can do a grand job of rebelling against the hideous, blind, physical forces that put us here. We understand what put us here. We understand that we are here as a result of a truly hideous process, never mind about the effects on humanity.
Natural selection, the process which guides evolution, the process whereby…
Bill Pryor: I’m going to have to cut you off.
Richard Dawkins: Sorry?
Bill Pryor: I’m going to have to cut you off.
Richard Dawkins: Okay. Natural selection is an ugly process that has beautiful consequences. We humans can rise above it. That’s only two and a half minutes.
Bill Pryor: Okay. Well, our time has been used a lot by free exchange.
Richard Dawkins: I understand. I appreciate it.
Bill Pryor: If you would like to take 30 seconds to wrap up.
Richard Dawkins: Well, what about the final wrap up that we’re going to do?
Bill Pryor: We will do that, and that’s our best opportunity if it’s still left. Dr. Lennox.
John Lennox: Which question do you want me to refer to?
Bill Pryor: Well, it’s your choice, I guess.
John Lennox: Well, I think I’d like to make a comment on what Richard just said, because I think you are talking about two different things.
My point was this, that if you believe that the universe is at bottom, there’s no good and evil, you remove from yourself the categories you’re using to discuss morality. That’s my point. You’re assuming it’s true. I’m arguing on the basis of its truth that you’re removing those categories, and therefore you leave yourself powerless to comment.
Richard Dawkins: You make a good point that I’ve removed any absolute standard of morality. The empirical fact, however, is that we all very largely share what we regard as morality. And that’s a very interesting fact.
John Lennox: It goes much further than that. If that’s what you meant, you should have written,
Richard Dawkins: Well, I kind of did.
John Lennox: There’s no good or evil is a very strong, absolute statement, I would have thought. But I want to refer to this…
Bill Pryor: How about the topic?
John Lennox: Let me say something about this thesis about the person of Jesus and so on. Again, I have concerns about the God delusion in its treatment of the authority and reliability of Scripture. Because those who’ve studied it in detail, and I see reference to very few scholars in his book, have come to the conclusion that, say, for example, the historian Luke is one of the most authoritative historians of all ancient history.
And Sherwin White of Oxford, a Roman historian, says that it would be absurd to suggest that Luke’s basic historicity was false, even in matters of detail. And I’m concerned, too, not only about your attitude to history, Richard, but your description of Jesus as belonging to a person who practiced an in-group morality and out-group hostility.
And your interpretation of love your neighbor, which I note doesn’t come from a theologian, but from an anesthesiologist. And I think he just might have put you to sleep a little bit as you read it, because in Leviticus, which quotes love your neighbor as yourself, just a bit further down, it says when a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who lives with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself. Because you were strangers in Egypt.
So in point of historicity, you are totally wrong about the attitude of Jesus. In fact, I would have thought you’d have been very familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan. And in that parable, it was a Samaritan, one of the strangers that showed mercy. And that was precisely the parable that Jesus taught to illustrate the love your neighbor as yourself of Leviticus.
Now, a mistake like that seems to me to be very serious indeed. I mean, I react to it a bit like this. What would you think if I got all my views on Darwin from an engineer and never bothered to read the origin of species? I think you would be distressed by that.
But finally, a word about miracles. This is a massive subject. You claim with David Hume that miracles violate the laws of nature. Well, David Hume’s a very curious person to quote on this topic because David Hume didn’t believe really in the laws of cause and effect on which laws of nature are founded. He didn’t believe in causality and he didn’t appear to believe in the principle of induction. And so that he’s not a very good authority to quote.
Secondly, I do not think that miracles are violations of the laws of nature because the laws of nature describe what normally happens. God, who is the God of this universe and created it with its regularities is perfectly at liberty to feed a new event into the universe. Just as C.S. Lewis makes a point, if I put $2 plus $2 in my desk tonight, $4, if I find in the morning there is $1, I don’t say that the laws of arithmetic have been broken, I say the laws of Alabama have been broken. And I call for a federal judge.
Bill Pryor: Well, the federal judge is going to ask that you continue your remarks with the understanding that you really are needing to conclude them within the next couple of minutes to give Professor Dawkins in the last word. There is a broadcast audience. That is part of the reason for our time limits.
John Lennox: Were those meant to be my concluding remarks?
Bill Pryor: No, I’m giving you an extra minute or so to make your concluding remarks.
John Lennox: My final conclusion for the night.
Bill Pryor: Before giving the last word to Professor Dawkins.
John Lennox: Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s been an interesting discussion. I’ll have to make my remarks very briefly.
I do not think the answer is atheism, though I agree with much of the criticism that Richard makes of religion. I think the book The God Delusion gives the game away in the dedication at the front of the book to Douglas Adams, where he says, isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
Now, you do a brilliant job at getting rid of the fairies, though it must be said that most of them didn’t believe in them anyway. But when you see the beauty of a garden, say a new college in Oxford, do you believe there’s no gardener or no owner? That its sublime beauty has come about from raw nature by pure chance? Of course not.
For gardens are to be distinguished from raw nature by the operation of intelligence. And what you’re doing in your book, I think, is presenting us with an obviously false set of alternatives. Either we take gardens on their own, or the garden plus fairies. But they don’t appear on their own.
They have gardeners and owners, so does the universe. You say there’s no evidence of God, and yet your very description of the universe as a garden bears witness that the evidence is all around you. Atheism, ladies and gentlemen, is not only false, it contains no message that deals with the central problem of human rebellion against God.
History is littered with attempts to build a godless utopia, each one of them based, as the book of Genesis suggests that they would be, on a denial that God has ever spoken, or even that He exists. And I would remind you that the world that Richard Dawkins wishes to bring us to is no paradise except for the few. It denies the existence of good and evil. It even denies justice.
But ladies and gentlemen, our hearts cry out for justice. And centuries ago, the apostle Paul spoke to the philosophers of Athens and pointed out that there would be a day in which God would judge the world by the Man that He had appointed, Jesus Christ, and that He’d give an assurance to all people by raising Him from the dead.
And the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a miracle, something supernatural, for me constitutes the central evidence upon which I base my faith, not only that atheism is a delusion, but that justice is real and our sense of morality does not mock us. Because if there is no resurrection, if there is nothing after death, in the end the terrorists and the fanatics have got away with it.
Bill Pryor: Okay. Thank you. Professor Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins: Yes, well, that concluding bit rather gives the game away, doesn’t it? All that stuff about science and physics and the complications of physics and things, what it really comes down to is the resurrection of Jesus. There’s a fundamental incompatibility between the sort of sophisticated scientist, which we hear part of the time from John Lennox, and it’s impressive and we are interested in the argument about multiverses and things.
And then having produced some sort of a case for a kind of deistic God perhaps, some God, the great physicist who adjusted the laws and constants of the universe, that’s all very grand and wonderful. And then suddenly we come down to the resurrection of Jesus. It’s so petty, it’s so trivial, it’s so local, it’s so earthbound, it’s so unworthy of the universe.
When we go into a garden and we see how beautiful it is, and we see coloured flowers and we see the butterflies and the bees, of course it’s natural to think there must be a gardener. Any fool is likely to think there must be a gardener. The huge achievement of Darwin was to show that that didn’t have to be true.
Of course it’s difficult, of course it had to wait until the mid-19th century before anybody thought of it. It seems so obvious that if you’ve got a garden, there must be a gardener who created it and all that goes with that.
What Darwin did was to show the staggeringly counterintuitive fact that this not only can be explained by an undirected process. It’s not chance, by the way, it’s entirely wrong to say it’s chance. It’s not chance. Natural selection is the very opposite of chance and that’s the essence of it. That was what Darwin discovered.
He showed not only a garden but everything in the living world and in principle not just on this earth but on any other planet, wherever you see the organised complexity that we understand that we call life, that it has an explanation which can derive it from simple beginnings by comprehensible rational means.
That is possibly the greatest achievement that any human mind has ever accomplished. Not only did he show that it could be done, I believe that we can argue that the alternative is so unparsimonious and so counter to the laws of common sense that reluctant as we might be because it might be unpleasant for us to admit it, although we can’t disprove that there’s a God, it is very, very unlikely indeed.
Larry Taunton: We are told that in the earlier part of the last century that G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw engaged in a lively but friendly debate. It may be said that perhaps we haven’t seen anything quite like that until tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking them.
Thank you, Richard. Thank you, John.
For Further Reading:
Capitalism vs. Socialism: A Soho Forum Debate (Full Transcript)
Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham (Full Transcript)
Beyond The “Creation vs. Evolution” Debate: Denis Lamoureux (Transcript)
Jordan Peterson Lecture: Reality and the Sacred (Transcript)
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