The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[CH] The other planets are completely too hot or too cold to support it. And that’s just one solar system, the only one we know about where there is life. Not much of a designer. And of course you can’t get out of the infinite regress. But I’ve not come across a single persuasive argument of that kind. But I wouldn’t have expected to because, as I realised when I thought one evening, they never come up with anything new. Well, why would they? Their arguments are very old by definition. And they were all evolved when we knew very, very little about the natural order. The only argument that I find at all attractive, and this is for faith you asked as well as for theism, is what I would, I suppose I’d call the apotropaic. When people say all praise belongs to God for this, He's to be thanked for all this. That is actually a form of modesty. It’s a superstitious one, that’s why I say apotropaic, but it's avoiding hubris. It’s also for that reason, obviously pre-monotheistic. But, religion does, or can, help people to avoid hubris, I think, morally and intellectually and that might be a …

[RD] But that’s not an argument that it’s true.

[CH] Oh, for heaven’s sake! No. There are and cannot be any such arguments, I think.

[SH] Well maybe I should broaden this question.

[DD] Well, no, no. Wait a minute! I think …

[SH] Before you answer Dan, I want …

[DD] I could give you several discoveries which would shake my faith right to the ground.

[SH] No, no! Let me just broaden the question.

[DD] Yep, yep.

[SH] Not only …

[CH] (inaudible) and the Precambrian?

[RD] No, no, no. That won’t work!

(laughter)

[SH] Not only in argument for the plausibility of religious belief, but an argument that suggests that what we’re up to, criticising faith, is a bad thing.

[RD] Oh, that’s much easier.

[SH] That we shouldn’t be, so let's exclude that.

[CH] Ah! Okay, yes, by all means.

[SH] We shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing.

[RD] That's much easier.

[SH] Okay.

[DD] It’s easier to think of a good reason?

[RD] Oh, I mean, if somebody could come up with an argument that says that the world is a better place and everybody believes the falsehood, is there any context though, in your work or in dialogue with your critics, where you feel that that argument has given you pause?

[DD] Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Not so much in ‘Breaking The Spell’ but when I was working on my book on free will,, ‘Freedom Evolves’. I kept running into critics who were basically expressing something very close to a religious few, namely free will is such an important idea, if we gave up the idea of free will, people would lose their sense of responsibility and we would have chaos. And, you really don’t wanna look too closely, just avert your eyes. Do not look too closely at this issue of free will and determinism. And I thought about that explicitly in the environmental impact category. Okay, could I imagine that my irrepressible curiosity could lead me to articulate something true or false …

[SH] That’s dangerous.

[DD] which would have such devastating effects on the world, that I should just shut up and change the subject?

[SH] Right.

[DD] And I think that’s a good question that we all should ask.

[RD] Yeah, it's good.

[DD] Absolutely! And I spent a lot of time thinking hard about that and I wouldn't have published either of those two books if I hadn’t come to the conclusion that it was not only, as it were, environmentally safe to proceed this way, but obligatory. But I think you should ask that question. I do.

[SH] Right.

[RD] Before publishing a book, but not before deciding for yourself do I think that this is true or not? One should never do what some politically motivated critics do, which is to say this is so politically obnoxious that it cannot be true, and which is a different …

[DD] Which is a different thing entirely. No. No.

[CH] No, it would be like discovering that you thought that the bell on white and black intelligence was a correct interpretation of IQ.

[RD] Yes, and you could well suppress publication of …

[CH] You see (inaudible) And now I’ve looked at all this stuff again, I’m absolutely (inaudible) … so you could say, “now what am I gonna do?”

[SH] Right.

[CH] Fortunately these questions don’t, in fact, present themselves in that way.

[SH] I’ll tell you one place where it’s presented itself to me, I think it was an op-ed in the LA times, I could be mistaken, but someone argued that the reason why the Muslim population in the US is not radicalised the way it is in Western Europe, is largely the result of the fact that we honour faith so much in our discourse that the community has not become as insular and as grievance-ridden as it has …

[DD] As in Western Europe?

[SH] in Western Europe. Now, I don’t know if this is true, but if it were true that gave me a moment’s pause.