[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.
[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.
[CH] But now, in which case, could I ask you something, all three of you who are wiser than I on this matter, what do we think of Victor Stenger's book that says you can now scientifically disprove the existence of God? Do you have a view on this?
[DD] Which god? I haven't read the book. Which god?
[RD] Any kind of …
[CH] Any. Either a creating one, or a supervising one, and certainly an intervening one. I mean, I think that's fairly exhaustive. My view had always been that since we have to live with uncertainty, only those who are certain leave the room before the discussion can become adult. Victor Stenger seems to think now we've got to the stage where we can say with reasonable confidence, it's disproved. It's not vindicated or a better explanation proposed [inaudible]. I just thought it'd be an interesting proposition, because it matters a lot to me that our opinions are congruent with uncertainty.
[SH] Right. Well, I think the weak link …
[CH] And in other words, we doubt.
[SH] I was a big fan of his book and actually blurbed it but I think the weakest link is this foundational claim on the texts. This idea that we know that the bible is the perfect word of an omniscient deity, and it really is the claim, it's really the gold in their epistemological gold standard. I mean, it all rests on that, that if the bible is not a magic book, Christianity, in this case, evaporates. If the Koran is not a magic book, Islam evaporates. And when you look at the books and ask yourself is there the slightest shred of evidence that this is the product of omniscience? Is there a single sentence in here that could not have been uttered by a person for whom a wheelbarrow would've been emergent technology? You have to say no. I mean, if the bible had an account of DNA and electricity, and other things that would astonish us then, okay. Our jaws drop, suitably, and we have to have a sensible conversation about the source of this knowledge.
[CH] You know, Dinesh D'Souza makes this statement in his new book. He's going to be, by the way, one of the much more literate and well-read and educated of our antagonists I'm going to be debating soon. He says that in Genesis, which people used to mock, they said 'let there be light' and then only a few staves later you get the sun and the moon and the stars.
[SH] Right.
[CH] How could that be?
[SH] Yes.
[CH] Well, according to the Big Bang, that would be right.
[RD] Yeah, but that’s pretty pathetic.
[CH] The Bang precedes the galaxies. Believe me, I think it's pathetic too, but …
[SH] Right. Well, I try to demonstrate this cast of mind in, I think, a very long end note in ‘The End of Faith’, where I say, “any text can be read". Well, with the eyes of faith you can make magical (?prescience/impressions) out of any text. So, I literally walked into a book store, the cookbook aisle of a book store, randomly opened a cookbook, found a recipe for wok-seared shrimp with ogo relish or something, and then came up with a mystical interpretation of the recipe. And you can do it! I mean, you can play connect the dots with any crazy text and find wisdom in it.
[CH] Michael Shermer did it with the Bible code.
[SH] Right, I haven’t seen that, but, yeah.
[CH] The hidden messages in the Bible. Very, very good. You can write yesterday’s headlines from it anytime you like. Yeah.
[SH] I have a question for the three of you. Is there any argument for faith, any challenge to your atheism that has given you pause, that has set you back on your heels where you felt you didn’t have a ready answer, etc?
[DD] Actually I can’t think of anything.
[RD] I mean, I think the closest is the idea that the fundamental constants of the universe are too good to be true. And that does seem to me to need some kind of explanation. If it’s true. I mean, Victor Stenger doesn’t think it is true but many physicists do. I mean, it certainly doesn’t in any way suggest to me creative intelligence because you're still left with the problem of explaining where that came from. And a creative intelligence who is sufficiently creative and intelligent enough to fine-tune the constants of the universe to give rise to us has, to got to be a lot more fine-tuned himself than …
[CH] Yeah, why create all the other planets in our solar system dead?
[RD] Well, that’s a separate question.
[CH] Well say we think he was that good. Bishop Montefiore was very good at this; he was a former friend of mine. He’d say that you have to marvel at the conditions of life and the knife-edge on which they are. And I'd say well, it is a knife edge. Yes, a lot of our planet is too hot or too cold.
[SH] Right. Riddled with parasites.
[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.