[RD] Then why would you not wish it?
[CH] And then, the other thing is, would I want this argument to come to an end, with all having conceded that …
[SH] You wouldn't like to retire and move on to other stuff?
[CH] 'Hitchens really won that round, now nobody in the world believes in God'? Now, apart from being unable to picture this, I'm not completely certain that it's what I want. I think it is rather to be considered as sort of the foundation of all arguments about epistemology, philosophy, biology, and so on. It's the thing you have to always be arguing against, the other explanation.
[RD] It's an extraordinary thing. I don't understand what you're … I mean, I understand you're saying that it'll never work, I don't understand why you wouldn't wish it.
[CH] Because, I think, a bit like the argument between, Huxley and Darwin. Sorry, excuse me, Huxley and Wilberforce, or Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, I want it to go on.
[RD] Because it's interesting.
[CH] I want our side to get more refined, and theirs to be ever more exposed. But I can't see it with one hand clapping.
[SH] I mean, you don't want it to go on with the Jihadists, I mean, there's a certain face of this …
[CH] No, but I don't have a difference of opinion with the Jihadists.
[SH] Well, you do in terms of the legitimacy of their project …
[CH] No, not really, no, there's nothing to argue about with that, I mean, there it's a simple matter of survival. I want them to be extirpated.
[SH] Alright, well move it down to the people who are blocking stem cell research.
[CH] No, that is a purely primate response with me, the recognising the need to destroy an enemy in order to assure my own survival. I've no interest at all in what they think.
[RD] Sounds like you're (inaudible)
[CH] No, I mean, really … we haven't still come to your question about Islam, but no interest at all in what they think. Only interested in refining methods of destroying them.
[SH] Okay.
[DD] In other words, you've simply given up.
[CH] A task in which, by the way, one gets very little secular support.
[SH] Yes, that's notable.
[CH] Most atheists don't want this fight. The most important one is the one they want to shirk. They'd far rather go off and dump on Billy Graham, 'cause on that they know that they can't, so there's no danger.
[DD] Well I think that because we find the idea of exterminating these people just abhorrent, and we think that, besides, it will (inaudible) them.
[CH] No, I said 'extirpating'.
[DD] Extirpate?
[CH] Yes, complete destruction of the Jihadist forces. Extermination, I think, has to be applied more as a species, or, sort of …
[RD] No, but Christopher, it sounds as though you like argument. You like having … it's almost the theatre of having an intellectual argument, which would be lost.
[CH] Well, I'd rather say the dialectic actually, Richard. In other words, one learns from arguing with other people.
[RD] Yes.
[CH] Now I think all of us around this table have probably enhanced, or improved, our own capacities as reasoners.
[RD] Yes, but I mean, there are plenty of other things to reason about. Having won the battle against religion, we can go back to science, or whatever it is we practice. And we can argue and reason about that, and there's plenty of arguments, really worthwhile arguments to be had.
[CH] But it'll always be the case that some will attribute their presence here to the laws of biology, and others will attribute their presence here to a divine plan that has a scheme for them. And you can tell a lot, in my view, about people, from which view they take. And, as we all know, only one of those views makes sense. Well how do we know that? Because we have to contrast it with the opposite one, which is not going to disappear.
[SH] Well let me make an analogy here. 'Cause you could've said the same thing about witchcraft at some point in recent history. You could say that every culture has had a belief in witches, a belief in the efficacy of magic spells. Witchcraft is ubiquitous, and we're never going to get rid of it, and we're fools to try. Or we can try only as a matter of dialectic, but witchcraft is going to be with us. And yet witchcraft has, almost without exception … I mean, you can find certain communities where …
[CH] Not at all, not at all.
[SH] No, I mean real witchcraft, not witchcraft as in its religious …
[CH] Witchcraft is completely ineradicable; it spreads like weed, often under animist and Christian religions.
[SH] No, no, I don't mean …
[DD] But not in the western world.
[SH] I mean frank witchcraft,
[CH] The Washington Post …
[SH] The witchcraft of the evil eye, and instead of medicine, you have the …
[CH] You think you've gotten rid of that?
[SH] I think fundamentally we've gotten rid of that, yes.
[RD] But in any case …
[CH] Not at all.
[RD] don't you want to get rid of it?
[CH] Not at all. There's currently a campaign to get Wiccans registered to be buried in Arlington Cemetery.
[SH] Well, modulo the Wiccans …
[DD] But Wiccans are to witchcraft as Unitarians are to … (laughter)
[SH] Right, they're not real. What I'm talking about a willingness to kill your neighbour, because you think that there is some causal mechanism by which they, through their evil intent, could have destroyed your crops psychically, you know, or cast an evil eye upon your … I mean it comes in ignorance of medical science. I mean, you don't know why people get sick, and you suspect your neighbour of ill-intent, and then witchcraft fills the void there.
[CH] No, I wouldn't say in such a case that one didn't wish to be without it, that we'd have lost something interesting to argue with.
[SH] But, we are effectively … I mean, we're not dealing with the claims of witches intruding upon medical - and don't go to alternative medicine and acupuncture here - I'm talking about real witchcraft, you know, medieval witchcraft.
[CH] Well I was about to deal with that very thing, and The Washington Post publishes horoscopes every day.
[SH] Astrology is yet another …
[DD] Yes, and that is …
[CH] You think … I'm …
[DD] Astrology is a pale …
[CH] Astrology is not going to be eradicated, even after I stop reading my horoscope.
[SH] Okay, but it doesn't need to be eradicated.
[RD] No, but you're confusing whether it's going to be eradicated and whether you want it to be eradicated. And it sounds as though you don't want it to be eradicated, because you want something to argue against, and something to sharpen your wits on.
[CH] Yes, I think that is, in fact, what I …
[DD] But in fact, instead of thinking about eradication, why not think about it the way an evolutionary epidemiologist would, and say what we want to do is we want to encourage the evolution of avirulence. We want to get rid of the harmful kinds, and … I mean, I don't care about astrology, I don't think it's harmful enough. I mean it was a little scary when Reagan was reportedly using astrology to make decisions, but that, I hope anomalous, case aside, I find the superstition that astrology is important to be relatively harmless. If we could only do the same thing, if we could only relegate the other enthusiasms to the status of astrology, I'd be happy.
[SH] Right.
[CH] Well, look, you don't accept my - or you don't like my - answer, but I think the question should be, is going to be, asked of us. It was asked of me today actually, again on the TV: "Do you wish no one was going to church this morning in the United States?"
[SH] Right.
[DD] What's your answer?
[CH] Well, I've given mine, Richard's disagreed. Well, the answer I gave this morning was "I think people would be much better off without false consolation, and I don't want them trying to inflict their beliefs on me. They'd be doing themselves and me a favour if they gave it up. So, perhaps in that sense, I contradict myself, I mean I wish they would stop it, but then I would be left with no one to argue with.
[RD] (laughs) Well, I just don't …!
[SH] But, you have many other subjects!
[CH] And I certainly didn't say that I thought if they'd only listen to me, they would stop going. Okay, so there are two questions here. So that was my very experimental answer, but I'd love to hear … would you like to say that you look forward to a world where no one had any faith in the supernatural?
[RD] I want to answer this. Whether it's astrology, or religion, or anything else, I want to live in a world where people think skeptically for themselves, look at evidence. Not because astrology's harmful, I guess it probably isn't harmful, but if you go through the world thinking that it's okay to just believe things because you believe them without evidence, then you're missing so much. And it's such a wonderful experience to live in the world, and understand why you're living in the world, and understand what makes it work, understand about the real stars, understand about astronomy, that it's an impoverishing thing to be reduced to the pettiness of astrology, and I think you can say the same of religion. The universe is a grand, beautiful, wonderful place, and it's petty and parochial and cheapening to believe in djinns, and supernatural creators, and supernatural interferers. I think you could make an aesthetic case that we want to get rid of …
[DD] Well, fine, I …
[CH] I could not possibly agree with you more.
[DD] But, let's talk about priorities.
[RD] Okay.
[DD] If we could just get rid of some of the most pernicious and nauseous excesses, what would be the triumphs we would go for first? What would really thrill you as an objective reached? Let's look at Islam, and let's look at Islam as realistically as we can. Is there any, remote chance of a reformed, reasonable Islam?
[RD] Well, isn't the present, savage Islam actually rather recent? Isn't it the Wahabi … I mean, doesn't …?
[DD] You have to go back quite a ways, I think, to get …
[SH] Only up to a point. I mean, I think there's … and again none of us are the … whether we're equipped to do it, we're not the most persuasive mouthpieces of this criticism. I mean, I think it takes someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or a Muslim scholar, somebody like Ibn Warraq to authentically criticise Islam, and have it be heard by people, especially the secular liberals of the sort who don't trust our take on this, but it seems to me that you have different historical moments in the history of Islam that are distinct, one where Islam really has … you have some Muslim or you have a Caliphate, or you have some Muslim country which has a reign of Islam and is unmolested, for whatever period of time, from the outside, and then Islam can be as totalitarian and happy with itself as possible, and you don't see the inherent conflict, and the inherent liability of its creed. I mean, Samuel Huntington said that Islam has bloody borders. It's at the borders that we're noticing this problem and the borders of Islam and modernity, at this moment, the conflict between Islam and modernity. But yes, you can find instances in the history of Islam where people weren't running around waging Jihad, because they had successfully waged Jihad.
[DD] But what about women in that world?
[RD] Exactly, the suffering of women within those borders.
[DD] Yeah, yeah. Even in the best of times.
[CH] But there's obviously some kind of synchronism, and we know quite a lot now. There have been some wonderful books; Maria Menocal's book on Andalusia, for example, on periods where Islamic civilisation was relatively at peace with its neighbours, and doing a lot of work of its own on matters that were not Jihadist. And I saw myself, during the wars in post-Yugoslavia, that the Bosnian Muslims behaved far better than the Christians, either Catholic or Orthodox, and were the victims of religious massacre, and not the perpetrators of them, and were the ones who believed the most in multiculturalism. So it can happen. You could even meet people who said they were Atheist Muslims, or were Muslim-Atheists, Muslim-Secularists in …
[DD] Wow!
[CH] In Sarajevo, you could, yeah. Which is a technical impossibility, but the problem is this; whether we think, as I certainly very firmly do believe, that totalitarianism is innate in all religion, because it has to want an absolute, unchallengeable, eternal authority.
[DD] In all religion.
[CH] It must be so. A creator whose will can't … our comments on his will are unimportant. You know, his will is absolute, it cannot be challenged, and applies after we're dead as well as before we're born. That is the origin of totalitarianism. I think Islam states that in the most alarming way, in that it comes as the third of the monotheisms, and says nothing further is required.
[SH] Right.
[CH] There have been previous words from God, we admit that, we don't claim to be exclusive, but we do claim to be final. There's no need for any further work on this point.
[SH] And we do claim that there's no distance between theology and …
[CH] The worst thing in our world, surely the worst thing anyone can say is 'no further enquiry is needed'.
[RD] Oh yeah.
[CH] You've already got all you need to know. All else is commentary.