[SH] Yeah. Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions and moderates tend to argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith, that faith is somehow self-enlightening, whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside. It has been intruded on by science.
[CH] On that point that I was wanting to raise myself, about our own so-called fundamentalism, there's a cleric in Southwark, the first person I saw attacking you and I in print as being just as fundamentalist as those who blew up the London Underground, do you remember his name?
[RD] No, I don't remember his name.
[CH] Sorry, I don't remember. He’s a very senior Anglican cleric in the diocese of Southwark. I went on the BBC with him just entre parentheses I'll say, when I've said, ‘how can you call your congregation a flock? doesn't that say everything about your religion? that you think they're sheep? He said, "Well actually I used to be a pastor in New Guinea, where there aren't any sheep". Well of course there’re a lot of places where there aren't any sheep! Gospel’s quite hard to teach, as a result. We've found out what the most important animal to the locals was and I remember very well my local bishop rising to ask the Divine One to ‘behold these swine’, his new congregation. But this is the man who deliberately does a thing like that, that’s as cynical as you could wish and as adaptive as the day is long, and he says that we who doubt it are as fundamentalist as people who blow up their fellow citizens on the London Underground. It’s unconscionable. Thus, I don't really mind being accused of ridiculing, or treating with contempt, people like that. I just frankly have no choice, I have the faculty of humour, and some of it has an edge to it, I'm not going to repress that, for the sake of politeness of people.
[DD] Would you think that it would be good to make a distinction between the professionals and the amateurs? I share your impatience with the officials of the churches, the people whose … this is their professional life. It seems to me, they know better.
[SH] Right.
[DD] The congregations don't know better because it’s maintained that they should not know better. I do get very anxious about ridiculing the beliefs of the “flock”, because of the way in which they have ceded to their leaders. They've delegated authority to their leaders and they presume their leaders are gonna do it right. So I think in this, you know, who stands up and says the buck stops here? Well it seems to me it’s the preachers themselves, it’s the priests, it’s the bishops and we really should hold their feet to the fire. For instance, just take the issue of creationism. If somebody in a fundamentalist church thinks that creationism makes sense because their pastor told them, well I can understand that and excuse that. We all get a lot of what we take to be true from people that we respect and we view as authorities. We don't check everything out. But where’d the pastor get this idea? I don't care where. He or she is responsible because their job is to know what they’re talking about in a way that the congregation …
[RD] You have to be a little bit careful not to sound condescending when we say that, and in a way it’s reflecting the condescension of the preacher.
[CH] Yes, because I'll take things you and Richard say on the human and natural sciences, not without wanting to check, but I’m often unable to but knowing that you are the sort of gentlemen who would have checked. If you say, ‘the bishop told me it so I believe it’ you make a fool of yourself it seems to me, and one is entitled to say so. Just as one is entitled when dealing with an ordinary racist to say that his opinions are revolting, he may know no better but that’s not gonna save him from my condemnation and nor should it. And I think exactly it’s condescending not to confront people as it were one by one or en masse. So public opinion is often wrong, mob opinion is almost always wrong.
[SH] Well, let’s linger on this issue before …
[CH] Religious opinion is wrong, religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can't avoid this. And I wanted to intrude the name H L Mencken at this point, now a very justly-celebrated American writer, not particularly to my taste, much too much of a Nietzschean and what really was once meant by Social Darwinist at one stage but why did he win the tremendous respect of so many people in this country in the 20s and 30s? Because he said the people who believe what the Methodists tell them or what William Jennings Bryan tells them are fools. They’re not being fooled, they are fools. They should …
[DD] Shame on them for believing me.
[CH] Yes. They make themselves undignified and ignorant and, no mincing of words here, and a grated mixture of wit and evidence and reasoning. It absolutely works; the most successful anti-religious polemic there’s probably ever been in the modern world. In the twentieth century, anyway.
[SH] I think we just touched upon an issue that we should really highlight. This whole notion of authority, because religious people often argue that science is just a tissue of uncashed cheques, you know. We're all relying on authority, how do you know that the cosmological constant is whatever it is? You know? So I think you two are well-placed to do this, differentiate the kind of faith-placing in authority that we practise without fear in science and rationality generally, and the kind of faith-placing in the preacher or the theologian that we criticise.
[RD] Well, what we actually do when we who are not physicists take on trust what physicists say is we have some evidence to suggest that physicists have looked into the matter, that they've done experiments, that they've peer-reviewed their papers, that they've criticised each other, that they've been subjected to massive criticism from their peers in seminars and on lectures and things. And they've come through with …
[DD] And remember the structure that's there, too. It's not just that there's peer-review but it's very important that it's competitive. For instance, when Fermat's Last Theorem was proved by …
[RD] Andrew Wiles.
[DD] Andrew Wiles, the reason that those of us who … forget it, I'm never going to understand that proof but the reason that we can be confident that it really is a proof is that …
[SH] Nobody wanted him to get there first, yeah!
[DD] Every other mathematician who was competent in the world was very well motivated to study that.
[RD] To find out, yeah.
[DD] And believe me, if they begrudge him that this is a proof, it's a proof! And there's nothing like that in …
[SH] No, because we're the antithesis of that.
[CH] No religious person's ever been able to say what Einstein said, if I'm right,
[DH] the following solar event will occur off the west coast of Africa in …,
[CH] I forget how many years and months from now, and it did, within a very tiny degree of variation; there's never been a prophecy that's been vindicated like that, or anyone willing to place their reputation and, as it were, their life on the idea that it would be.
[RD] I was once asked at a public meeting "Don't you think that the mysteriousness of Quantum Theory is just the same as the mysteriousness of the Trinity or the Transubstantiation?" And the answer, of course, can be answered in two quotes from Richard Feynman. One, Richard Feynman said "if you think you understand Quantum Theory, you don't understand Quantum Theory". He was admitting that it's highly mysterious. But the other thing is that the predictions of Quantum Theory experimentally are verified to the equivalent of predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair. And so, Quantum Theory is massively supported by accurate predictions. Even if you don't understand the mystery of the Copenhagen Interpretation, or whatever it is. Whereas the mystery of the Trinity doesn't even try to make a prediction, let alone an accurate one.
[DD] You know, I don't like …
[CH] It it isn't a mystery, either.
[DD] I don't like the use of the word "mystery" here. I think, I think there's been a lot of consciousness-raising in philosophy about this term, where we have so-called mysterians, the new mysterians. These are people who like the term "mystery". Noam Chomsky is famously quoted to say "There's two kinds of questions, there's puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles are soluble, mysteries aren't". And first of all, I just don't buy that. I buy that but I buy the distinction and say 'there's nothing about mystery in science. There's puzzles, there's deep puzzles, there's things we don't know, there's things we'll never know, but they aren't systematically incomprehensible to human beings. The glorification of the idea that these things are systematically incomprehensible, I think, has no place in science.
[CH] Which is why I think we should be quite happy to revive traditional terms in our discourse, such as obscurantism and obfuscation. Which is what they really are. And to point out that these things can make intelligent people act stupidly. John Cornwell, who's just written another attack on yourself, Richard, and who is an old friend of mine, a very brilliant guy, wrote one of the best studies of the Catholic Church and fascism that there's been published. In his review of you, he says "Mr Dawkins … Professor Dawkins should just look at the shelves of books there are on the Trinity." "The libraries full of attempts to solve this problem before he …" But none of the books in those religious libraries solve it either! The whole point is that it remains insoluble and it's used to keep people feeling baffled and inferior.
[RD] But I want to come back to the thing about mystery in physics, because isn't it possible that our evolved brains … because we evolved in what I call middle world, where we never had to cope with either the very small or the cosmologically very large, we may never actually have an intuitive feel for what's going on in quantum mechanics but we can still test its predictions, we can still actually do the mathematics and do the physics to actually test the predictions, 'cause anybody can read the dials on a …
[DD] Right, I think what we can see is that what scientists have constructed over the centuries is a series of tools, mind-tools, thinking tools, mathematical tools, and so forth which enable us to some degree to overcome the limitations of our evolved brains, our stone age, if you like, brains, and overcoming those limitations is not always direct. Sometimes you have to give up something. Yes, you'll just never be able to think intuitively about this but you can know that, even though you can't think intuitively about it.
[RD] Yeah, that's right.
[DD] There's this laborious process by which you can make progress and you do have to cede a certain authority to the process but you can test that and it can carry you from A to B in the same way. If you're a quadriplegic, an artificial device can carry you from A to B. It doesn't mean you can walk from A to B but you can get from A to B.
[RD] And the bolder physicists will say "well, who cares about intuition? I mean, just look at the math!"
[DD] Yeah, yeah, that's right, they are comfortable with their … living with their prostheses.
[SH] Well, the perfect example of that is dimensions beyond three, because we can't visualise a fourth dimension or a fifth but it's trivial to represent it mathematically, and so we can move in that dimension.
[DD] And now we teach our undergraduates how to manipulate n-dimensional spaces, and to think about vectors in n-dimensional spaces, and they get used to the fact. They can't quite imagine … what you do is you imagine three of them and, say, you wave your hand a little bit, and say more of the same, but you you check your intuition by running the maths, and it works.
[RD] But see, it's easy to do some … say you're a psychologist looking at personality, and you say there are fifteen dimensions of personality, and you could think of them as being fifteen dimensions in space. And anybody can see that you're … you can imagine moving along any one of those dimensions with respect to the others, and you don't actually have to visualise fifteen dimensional space.
[DD] No. And you give up that demand, and you realise …
[RD] Yes, yes.
[DD] I can live without that. It would be nice if I could do that but hey, I can't see bacteria with the naked eye, either. I can live without that but …
[SH] I think there's one…
[CH] Yeah, I was challenged on that, I was challenged on that on the radio the other day by someone who appeared to be fairly … who said "I believe in atoms on no evidence, 'cause I've never seen one". Not since George Galloway said to me that he'd never seen a barrel of oil …
[SH] Right! that's cute …
[CH] Yes but you realise that people at this point, they're wearing themselves right down to their uppers, I mean they're desperate when they get to this stage. The reason I say it is because I think it could … I don't want us to make our lives easier but it makes the argument a little more simple.
[CH] We are quite willing to say there are many things we don't know. What Haldane, I think it was, said, you know, the Universe is not just queerer than we understand, it's queerer than we can understand. We know there'll be great new discoveries, we know we'll live to see great things but we know there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty. That's the whole distinction; the believer has to say not just that there is a god, the deist position, that there may be a mind at work in the Universe, a proposition we can't disprove, but they know that, mind, and can interpret it. They're on good terms with it. They get occasional revelations from it …
[SH] They have a book that is a verbatim screed.