The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[SH] Yeah, yeah. Well there's one other chip I'd like to put on the table here. There's this phenomenon of someone like Francis Collins or the biologist you just mentioned, someone who obviously has enough of the facts on board, you know, enough of a scientific education to know better, and still does not know better or professes not to know better, and there I think we have a cultural problem where. And this was actually brought home to me at one talk I gave. A physics professor came up to me at the end of the talk and told me that he had brought one of his graduate students, who was a devout Christian, and who was quite shaken by my talk, and all I got from this report was that this was the first time his faith had ever really been explicitly challenged. And so it's true to say that you can go through the curriculum of becoming a scientist and never have your faith explicitly challenged, because it's taboo to do so, and now we have engineers who can build nuclear bombs in the Muslim world, who still think it's plausible metaphysics that you can get to paradise and get seventy two virgins, and we have people like Francis Collins who think that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus, because you are in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist.

[CH] Or according to our friend, the great Pervez Hoodbhoy, the great Pakistani physicist, there are people who think you can use the djinns, the devils and harness their power for the reactor.

[SH] It's almost tempting to fund such a project.

[CH] Yeah!

[DD] Haha, yes!

[CH] And it seems, and I gather that … again, I can't get over him still, that the respected, Tariq Ramadan of Saint Anthony's College, Oxford says in his book, I'm told, that he believes in djinns too. I hope I'm not doing him an injustice, I've been told that in his book, 'In the Steps of the Prophet', he says as much, so one is up against things that are flat-out primitive and superstition.

[DD] I think it may be easier than we're supposing to shake peoples' faith. There's been a moratorium on this for a long time. We're just the beginning of a new wave of explicit attempts to shake peoples' faith. And it's bearing fruit, and the obstacles it seems to me are not that we don't have the facts or the arguments, it's these strategic reasons for not professing it, not admitting it. Not admitting it to yourself, not admitting it in public because your family is gonna view it as a betrayal, you're just embarrassed to admit that you were taken in by this for so long. It takes, I think, tremendous courage to just declare that you've given that all up and if we can find ways to help people find that courage, and give them some examples of people who have done this and they're doing just fine, they may have lost the affections of a parent or something like that, they may have hurt some family members, but still I think it's a good thing to encourage and I don't think we should assume that we can't do this. I think we can.

[RD] Yes, it's almost patronising to suggest that we couldn't and to suggest that it shouldn't. On the other hand, I think we all know people who seem to manage this kind of split brain feat of, as Sam said, believing one thing on a Sunday and then something totally contradictory or, incompatible the rest of the week. And there's nothing I suppose neurologically wrong with that, I mean there is no reason why one shouldn't have a brain that's split in that kind of way …

[DD] But it is unstable in a certain way but, and I'm sure you're right, that people do this and they're very good at it, and they do it by deflecting attention from it. Let's start focusing attention …

[RD] But how you can live with a contradiction? How you can live with it?

[DD] by forgetting that you're doing this and by not attending to it. I think, what I would love to do is to invent a memorable catchphrase or term that would rise unbidden in their minds when they caught themselves doing it, and then they would think oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh! right! and they think this is somehow illicit, just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they're doing.

[CH] I'm afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit.

[DD] You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance?

[CH] No, practicing it.

[RD] Actually practicing it.