The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[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.

[CH] … they get briefings from it. Now any decent argument, any decent intellect, has to begin by excluding people who claim to know more than they can possibly know. You start off by saying "well, that's wrong to begin with, now can we get on with it?", so theism's gone in the first round.

[DD] Yep.

[SH] Yeah.

[CH] It's off the island, it's out of the show.

[SH] That's a footnote I wanted to add to what Dan was saying. That even if mystery was somehow something we had to just … a bitter pill we have to swallow in the end, we are cognitively closed to the truth at some level, that still doesn't give any scope to theism.

[DD] Absolutely not, because it's just as closed to them as it is to …

[SH] And also we claim perfect transparency of revelation.

[CH] And also they can't be allowed to forget what they used to say when they were strong enough to get away with it, which is this is really true, in every detail, and if you don't believe it, we'll kill you.

[SH] we'll kill you, yes.

[CH] We'll kill you, and it may take some days to kill you, but we will get the job done, yeah.

[SH] Yes, we'll kill you slowly.

[CH] I mean, they wouldn't have the power they have now, if they hadn't had the power they had then.

[DD] Right. And you know this, what you just said Christopher, actually, I think, strikes terror, it strikes anxiety, in a lot of religious hearts. Because it just hasn't been brought home to them that this move of theirs is just off-limits. It's not the game. You can't do that. And they've been taught all their lives that you can do that - this is a legitimate way of conducting a discussion. And here, suddenly we're just telling them 'I'm sorry, that is not a move in this game'. In fact it is a disqualifying move.

[SH] Right. It's precisely the move you can't be respected for making.

[DD] Yes.

[CH] Adumbrate the move for me a bit, if you would, or for us. Perhaps only for me. Say what you think that move is.

[DD] Somebody plays the faith card.

[CH] Yes.

[DD] They say look, I am a Christian and we Christians, we just have to believe this and that's it. At which point, I guess the polite way of saying it is well, okay, if that's true you'll just have to excuse yourself from the discussion because you've declared yourself incompetent to proceed with an open mind. Now …

[CH] That's what I hoped. That's what I hoped you were saying.

[DD] If you really can't defend your view, then sorry, you can't put it forward. We're not going to let you play the faith card. Now if you want to defend what your holy book says, in terms that we can appreciate, fine. But because it says it in the holy book, that just doesn't cut any ice at all. And if you think it does, that's just arrogant. It is a bullying move and we're just not going to accept it.

[SH] And it's a move that they don't accept when done in the name of another faith.

[DD] Exactly.