An interesting post from http://www.hughhewitt.com/ about an interview with Richard Dawkins, the author of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Hugh interviews atheist Richard Dawkins
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
HH: Special hour of the Hugh Hewitt Show with Richard Dawkins, a fellow of New College, Oxford, where he taught for many, many years, the author of many bestselling books. He’s also a member of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow of both of those, and of course, well known to the world at large as the author first of The Selfish Gene, and most recently, his brand new book, The Greatest Show On Earth. Professor Dawkins, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
RD: Thank you very much.
HH: Thirty years ago, I took Stephen J. Gould’s course in natural selection as an undergraduate, and we had to read The Selfish Gene back right after it had come out. And The Greatest Show On Earth, your new book, kind of produced déjà vu in me. How much has changed in the case for evolution in the past thirty years?
RD: Well first of all, I’m gratified and surprised that Stephen J. Gould made you read The Selfish Gene. I thought he’d have been very hostile to it.
HH: No, it was really quite a remarkable book. But this is, you know, thirty-two years ago.
RD: Yes, well, I haven’t changed my views on how evolution works. But there’s not a lot of The Selfish Gene in The Greatest Show On Earth, because The Selfish Gene was about a different way of looking at natural selection, and The Greatest Show On Earth is about the evidence that evolution is a fact, the evidence that it’s true. So The Selfish Gene rather assumed that evolution was a fact, whereas The Greatest Show On Earth shows the evidence that it is.
HH: And in the past, in the thirty-odd years that have separated the publication of The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show On Earth, what has science shown that was not known thirty-odd years ago when you wrote The Selfish Gene?
RD: Lots of new molecular data, molecular genetics. It was, of course, going in 1976, but an awful lot more is now known, lots of species, not just the human species, but lots of other species have now had their genomes completely sequenced. And so it’s now possible to see coming together a whole detailed tree of life, which is much more detailed than we ever had before. So we know the history of life much more thoroughly than we ever did before.
HH: I thought you would say the molecular, and of course, the Lenski experiments are all new since that time as well.
RD: Just wonderful stuff, yes. I mean, a beautiful illustration of how you can speed up evolution, because bacteria have a generation time of about half an hour.
HH: But in terms of the fossil record, has there been anything that is the central discovery of the last three decades that you think fill in…
RD: There’ve been lots of nice, new fossils have been discovered. We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. We, I mean, it would be an obviously true fact even if not a single fossil had ever been formed.
HH: I know, that’s a central argument of The Greatest Show On Earth, but I was just asking in terms of the last thirty years, what would be the most important fossil record discovery?
RD: Well, Lucy and other human fossils, including Ardipithecus Ramidus, which was published only, I think, a week ago, was discovered a bit earlier than that. There have been some nice, new fossils in Wales, nice, new fossils of, what else have we got, some early lemur-like creatures, early primates, some, oh, well, lots of new stuff on the Burgess Shale, and similar Cambrian invertebrate fauna, especially from China. So yes, lots of exciting fossils.
HH: Okay, of course, you have changed a lot in over thirty years. You were not a celebrity then. You are a celebrity now, and you were known primarily for your scientific views then. Now, you’re known for not only your scientific views, but for your anti-faith views. Fair characterization?
RD: Yes, it’s probably true. I mean, my anti-faith stance was very clear in The Selfish Gene. I made no secret of it. But I guess it is better known now, yes.
HH: Are you familiar with David Berlinski?
RD: I have come across him, yes.
HH: He’s very much in agreement with you on the evidence for evolution, but very much opposed to your conclusions regarding what that means for the concept of God.
RD: I’m surprised to hear that he’s in agreement about the evidence for evolution. I thought he was an anti-evolutionist.
HH: No, The Devil’s Delusion makes it clear that he believes very much there is evidence there, but he…
RD: Okay, well, he’s changed his tune then.
HH: He goes on to write that your arguments, “Go from what God is, He is unlikely, to whether He exists, it would appear not, inferences of the sort that are typically not deductive. They do not impart certainty to their conclusions.” How do you respond to that, Professor Dawkins?
RD: I’m not sure that I really understood that. I mean, he accepts evolution, but then, tell me again what he said after that?
HH: That your argument runs from what God is, that God is unlikely, to whether He exists, it would appear not. Inferences of this sort are typically not deductive. They do not impart certainty to their conclusions.
RD: Well, that’s of course true. I mean, you can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely. That’s a pretty good, not exactly a final conclusion, but it’s certainly worth saying.
HH: Isn’t the universe itself unlikely, though?
RD: Well, but it’s there, isn’t it? And we’re in it, so we can see what we see. We find ourselves in a universe. So however unlikely, it clearly did happen.
HH: And so that’s what his argument is, is that you can’t say yes, we have to accept the universe as unlikely, but we can accept that God is unlikely, just because the one unlikely is event is visible to us, and the other unlikely event isn’t.
RD: I think there is a difference there. I mean, for the universe to come into existence, physicists are working on understanding that. And the beginning of the universe, as physicists would now understand, it would be a supremely simple event. And admittedly, it’s still something that requires a lot of understanding. It’s a very difficult thing to understand. But for God to exist, a God capable of developing the laws of physics, a God capable of answering prayers and forgiving sings, and reading our thoughts, and all that kind of thing, that requires, that’s an immensely complicated entity. That’s the kind of entity which we now explain by evolution, that’s the kind of entity that comes into being as a result of a long, slow, gradual process, long after the beginning of the universe.
HH: But the universe is itself awfully complicated, Professor Dawkins. Where did it come from?
RD: Well, the universe is not awfully complicated at the beginning. It has become very complicated through such processes as evolution by natural selection.
HH: No, I’m talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?
RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It’s a simple process.
HH: And what preceded the big bang?
RD: Well, physicists won’t answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.
HH: What do you think?
RD: I’m not enough of a physicist to understand what I’m saying, but I have to say that that’s what physicists say.
HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
RD: I don’t consider the question, because I recognize that it’s an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.
HH: Dr. Francis Collins, are you familiar with him?
RD: Yes.
HH: Head of the Human Genome Project until recently…
RD: Yes.
HH: His new book is The Language Of God. He writes in it that the idea that scientific revelations would represent an enemy in the pursuit of understanding the book of Genesis is ill-conceived. How do you respond to that?
RD: Well, I understand Dr. Collins’ point of views, that there is a compatibility between evolution and religion. How he manages to get that to the book of Genesis, however, I don’t know. The book of Genesis, after all, was not written by any philosopher or scientist of any great wisdom. The book of Genesis was written by tribesmen who had no privileged information at all. And so he, Collins would make a much stronger case if he would give up on the book of Genesis, and say that there is a compatibility between his conception of some sort of God and evolution. I wouldn’t follow him there, but it would be an awful lot easier to follow him than if he says it’s compatible with the book of Genesis. Why the book of Genesis, not any other origin myth of which there are thousands all over the world?
HH: So you don’t believe a Creation is compatible, or God is compatible, with what you know of the physical universe?
RD: I think it’s very unlikely, but what I’ve just said was that I would find that a lot easier to accept that I would the book of Genesis, for which there is absolutely no positive reason to find any acceptance for.
HH: Dr. Collins also writes on Page 164 of The Language Of God, that Richard Dawkins is the master of setting up a straw man and then dismantling it with great relish. Are you two not friendly?
RD: We’re very friendly. We’ve had several encounters. We had one hosted by Time Magazine, which was a very friendly encounter. He’s an extremely nice man, and so am I. And we had lunch together, I gave him lunch in my Oxford college, New College. We had a very amicable discussion, and we agree about most things, just not on the supernatural.
HH: Professor Gould, whom I referenced earlier, is quoted in your book, and quoted in Collins’ book, excuse me. And Gould says to say it for all my colleagues, and for the umpteenth million time, science simply cannot by its legitimate methods, adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm it nor deny it. We simply cannot comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will fine Ms. McInerney, and have their knuckles rapped for it. Your reaction, Professor…
RD: Yes, I mean, that’s a very politically expedient thing to say, of course, because if you’re trying to, if you’re an educator, as he was and I am, trying to get scientific education on the rails, and to stop the anti-evolution Creationists in education, you want to get the sensible religious people on your side. You want to get the bishops and vicars and people on your side. And of course, they do believe in evolution. However, to say that science cannot say anything whatsoever about the existence of God, I think that is complete nonsense. When you think about what most people’s conception of God is, it is of a miracle-working being who raises people from the dead, who turns water into wine, who walks on water. These are all scientific claims, and they’re all, as Gould of course would agree, false.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
HH: Special hour of the Hugh Hewitt Show with Richard Dawkins, a fellow of New College, Oxford, where he taught for many, many years, the author of many bestselling books. He’s also a member of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow of both of those, and of course, well known to the world at large as the author first of The Selfish Gene, and most recently, his brand new book, The Greatest Show On Earth. Professor Dawkins, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
RD: Thank you very much.
HH: Thirty years ago, I took Stephen J. Gould’s course in natural selection as an undergraduate, and we had to read The Selfish Gene back right after it had come out. And The Greatest Show On Earth, your new book, kind of produced déjà vu in me. How much has changed in the case for evolution in the past thirty years?
RD: Well first of all, I’m gratified and surprised that Stephen J. Gould made you read The Selfish Gene. I thought he’d have been very hostile to it.
HH: No, it was really quite a remarkable book. But this is, you know, thirty-two years ago.
RD: Yes, well, I haven’t changed my views on how evolution works. But there’s not a lot of The Selfish Gene in The Greatest Show On Earth, because The Selfish Gene was about a different way of looking at natural selection, and The Greatest Show On Earth is about the evidence that evolution is a fact, the evidence that it’s true. So The Selfish Gene rather assumed that evolution was a fact, whereas The Greatest Show On Earth shows the evidence that it is.
HH: And in the past, in the thirty-odd years that have separated the publication of The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show On Earth, what has science shown that was not known thirty-odd years ago when you wrote The Selfish Gene?
RD: Lots of new molecular data, molecular genetics. It was, of course, going in 1976, but an awful lot more is now known, lots of species, not just the human species, but lots of other species have now had their genomes completely sequenced. And so it’s now possible to see coming together a whole detailed tree of life, which is much more detailed than we ever had before. So we know the history of life much more thoroughly than we ever did before.
HH: I thought you would say the molecular, and of course, the Lenski experiments are all new since that time as well.
RD: Just wonderful stuff, yes. I mean, a beautiful illustration of how you can speed up evolution, because bacteria have a generation time of about half an hour.
HH: But in terms of the fossil record, has there been anything that is the central discovery of the last three decades that you think fill in…
RD: There’ve been lots of nice, new fossils have been discovered. We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. We, I mean, it would be an obviously true fact even if not a single fossil had ever been formed.
HH: I know, that’s a central argument of The Greatest Show On Earth, but I was just asking in terms of the last thirty years, what would be the most important fossil record discovery?
RD: Well, Lucy and other human fossils, including Ardipithecus Ramidus, which was published only, I think, a week ago, was discovered a bit earlier than that. There have been some nice, new fossils in Wales, nice, new fossils of, what else have we got, some early lemur-like creatures, early primates, some, oh, well, lots of new stuff on the Burgess Shale, and similar Cambrian invertebrate fauna, especially from China. So yes, lots of exciting fossils.
HH: Okay, of course, you have changed a lot in over thirty years. You were not a celebrity then. You are a celebrity now, and you were known primarily for your scientific views then. Now, you’re known for not only your scientific views, but for your anti-faith views. Fair characterization?
RD: Yes, it’s probably true. I mean, my anti-faith stance was very clear in The Selfish Gene. I made no secret of it. But I guess it is better known now, yes.
HH: Are you familiar with David Berlinski?
RD: I have come across him, yes.
HH: He’s very much in agreement with you on the evidence for evolution, but very much opposed to your conclusions regarding what that means for the concept of God.
RD: I’m surprised to hear that he’s in agreement about the evidence for evolution. I thought he was an anti-evolutionist.
HH: No, The Devil’s Delusion makes it clear that he believes very much there is evidence there, but he…
RD: Okay, well, he’s changed his tune then.
HH: He goes on to write that your arguments, “Go from what God is, He is unlikely, to whether He exists, it would appear not, inferences of the sort that are typically not deductive. They do not impart certainty to their conclusions.” How do you respond to that, Professor Dawkins?
RD: I’m not sure that I really understood that. I mean, he accepts evolution, but then, tell me again what he said after that?
HH: That your argument runs from what God is, that God is unlikely, to whether He exists, it would appear not. Inferences of this sort are typically not deductive. They do not impart certainty to their conclusions.
RD: Well, that’s of course true. I mean, you can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely. That’s a pretty good, not exactly a final conclusion, but it’s certainly worth saying.
HH: Isn’t the universe itself unlikely, though?
RD: Well, but it’s there, isn’t it? And we’re in it, so we can see what we see. We find ourselves in a universe. So however unlikely, it clearly did happen.
HH: And so that’s what his argument is, is that you can’t say yes, we have to accept the universe as unlikely, but we can accept that God is unlikely, just because the one unlikely is event is visible to us, and the other unlikely event isn’t.
RD: I think there is a difference there. I mean, for the universe to come into existence, physicists are working on understanding that. And the beginning of the universe, as physicists would now understand, it would be a supremely simple event. And admittedly, it’s still something that requires a lot of understanding. It’s a very difficult thing to understand. But for God to exist, a God capable of developing the laws of physics, a God capable of answering prayers and forgiving sings, and reading our thoughts, and all that kind of thing, that requires, that’s an immensely complicated entity. That’s the kind of entity which we now explain by evolution, that’s the kind of entity that comes into being as a result of a long, slow, gradual process, long after the beginning of the universe.
HH: But the universe is itself awfully complicated, Professor Dawkins. Where did it come from?
RD: Well, the universe is not awfully complicated at the beginning. It has become very complicated through such processes as evolution by natural selection.
HH: No, I’m talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?
RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It’s a simple process.
HH: And what preceded the big bang?
RD: Well, physicists won’t answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.
HH: What do you think?
RD: I’m not enough of a physicist to understand what I’m saying, but I have to say that that’s what physicists say.
HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
RD: I don’t consider the question, because I recognize that it’s an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.
HH: Dr. Francis Collins, are you familiar with him?
RD: Yes.
HH: Head of the Human Genome Project until recently…
RD: Yes.
HH: His new book is The Language Of God. He writes in it that the idea that scientific revelations would represent an enemy in the pursuit of understanding the book of Genesis is ill-conceived. How do you respond to that?
RD: Well, I understand Dr. Collins’ point of views, that there is a compatibility between evolution and religion. How he manages to get that to the book of Genesis, however, I don’t know. The book of Genesis, after all, was not written by any philosopher or scientist of any great wisdom. The book of Genesis was written by tribesmen who had no privileged information at all. And so he, Collins would make a much stronger case if he would give up on the book of Genesis, and say that there is a compatibility between his conception of some sort of God and evolution. I wouldn’t follow him there, but it would be an awful lot easier to follow him than if he says it’s compatible with the book of Genesis. Why the book of Genesis, not any other origin myth of which there are thousands all over the world?
HH: So you don’t believe a Creation is compatible, or God is compatible, with what you know of the physical universe?
RD: I think it’s very unlikely, but what I’ve just said was that I would find that a lot easier to accept that I would the book of Genesis, for which there is absolutely no positive reason to find any acceptance for.
HH: Dr. Collins also writes on Page 164 of The Language Of God, that Richard Dawkins is the master of setting up a straw man and then dismantling it with great relish. Are you two not friendly?
RD: We’re very friendly. We’ve had several encounters. We had one hosted by Time Magazine, which was a very friendly encounter. He’s an extremely nice man, and so am I. And we had lunch together, I gave him lunch in my Oxford college, New College. We had a very amicable discussion, and we agree about most things, just not on the supernatural.
HH: Professor Gould, whom I referenced earlier, is quoted in your book, and quoted in Collins’ book, excuse me. And Gould says to say it for all my colleagues, and for the umpteenth million time, science simply cannot by its legitimate methods, adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm it nor deny it. We simply cannot comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will fine Ms. McInerney, and have their knuckles rapped for it. Your reaction, Professor…
RD: Yes, I mean, that’s a very politically expedient thing to say, of course, because if you’re trying to, if you’re an educator, as he was and I am, trying to get scientific education on the rails, and to stop the anti-evolution Creationists in education, you want to get the sensible religious people on your side. You want to get the bishops and vicars and people on your side. And of course, they do believe in evolution. However, to say that science cannot say anything whatsoever about the existence of God, I think that is complete nonsense. When you think about what most people’s conception of God is, it is of a miracle-working being who raises people from the dead, who turns water into wine, who walks on water. These are all scientific claims, and they’re all, as Gould of course would agree, false.
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