In the summer of 2003, I began filming the series
"Atheism, a Rough History of Disbelief".
As part of the process
I talked to a number of writers, scientists, historians and philosophers.
Having secured their cooperation
I was very embarrassed to find that a large proportion of what went on
ended up in the cutting room floor,
simply because the series would have lasted 24 hours otherwise.
But as it happens, the BBC agreed with me
that the conversations were too interesting to be junked,
and with these 6 supplementary programmes,
they made the extremely unusual decision
to go back to the original material and to broadcast at length
some of the conversations which I had.
Conversations with people such as the English biologist, Richard Dawkins,
the American philosopher, Daniel Dennett,
the Cambridge theologian, Denys Turner,
the American playwright, Arthur Miller,
the English philosopher, Colin McGinn,
and the American Nobel-prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg.
Now, the English biologist Richard Dawkins
is probably almost as well-known as an atheist as he is as a scientist.
And it's clear in the conversation we had
that the Theory of Evolution played a very important part
in undermining his own religious belief.
But, as it happens, we met right at the start of the war in Iraq.
So, before we could get to Darwin
we started by contemplating the role that religion had played
in the policies of a Christian British Prime Minister
and a Christian American President.
Blair is obviously, in order of magnitude,
more sophisticated intellectually than Bush.
That wouldn't be difficult. But I suspect that
whereas Bush is just plain naive,
they probably both have some sort of an idea
that there's a war going on between good and evil.
And that, I mean, in Bush's case,
and I think in the case of many Americans,
I suspect that many of them
can't tell the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
I mean, they're all EVIL,
and so that's why it was so easy to switch the American public
from a genuine fight against terrorism after September 11
to a totally irrelevant fight against Iraq
which, after all, could have happened at any time.
But what happened
was that September 11 focused everybody's attention on EVIL.
And the fact that there's a them against us.
And it then became very easy
to muddle up in people's minds anybody evil.
Now, in identifying them as exponents of evil...
I believe, and I'm sure you do,
that they actually think that evil is a principle of some sort
which exists in the universe - a spirit.
Yeah.
Now, do you think that that notion of evil
as an autonomous principle...
is inseparably associated with a religious belief in a deity?
Well, I think it's very similar
and I think that there is a sort of impulse in humans to personify.
And, instead of just recognising that evil and good
are descriptions we give to things that people do -
good things and bad things -
I think there is a tendency to personify,
to think that there is a spirit of good, a spirit of evil,
that implies some kind of a war between them.
You can kill evil by...
having a war against, in this case, evil people
without realising that that may very well spawn a whole lot more people,
who may not necessarily be evil,
who will simply rise up and do things like terrorist acts as a consequence.
So, in other words, in addition to these mortal exponents...
of wicked deeds,
there is, as it were, behind the visible and palpable surface,
some sort of metaphysical principle which outlasts.
I think that's what they think.
Whether directly - I expect Bush actually thinks that literally.
I think Blair kind of subconsciously thinks it, yes.
So, you think that this has been an inevitable consequence
of a larger religious belief in the existence of metaphysical principles
- in the universe. - I suspect so.
I'm sure it goes with a larger religious belief,
whether it stems directly FROM that religious belief,
or whether both of them stem from the same kind of mental predisposition,
which, I dare say, all humans have to some extent, I don't know.
But if, as Richard suggests,
all human beings share a predisposition to believe,
I wanted to know the extent to which
he himself might have experienced belief in his early life.
After all, I had been talking to many people
who, which varying degrees of enthusiasm,
identified themselves as atheists, o disbelievers,
and I was interested in how people arrived at it,
or whether they had had it from the start.
I asked Richard whether HE started life, as indeed I had,
WITHOUT a religious thought.
No, I had a normal Anglican upbringing.
And I think I first started to doubt it
when I woke up to the fact that there were lots of different religions
and they couldn't all be right.
It was just an accident, an arbitrary accident,
that I happened to have been brought up in the Anglican Church.
So, that caused me to have doubts.
And I, sort of, became a non-believer at the age of about nine
as a result of that. However I then reverted to religious belief,
until the age of about 16.
Can I stop you there? I'm interested in these critical moments.
- Yes. - What do you think
prompted the reversion to something you had begun to be doubtful of?
I think it was the argument from design.
I think I started to appreciate the glorious complexity of life,
and didn't, at that time, understand the Darwinian explanation for it.
And so, I think that I did the rather naive thing
of assuming that if something looks as though it's designed,
it probably is designed
and didn't kind of wake up to the alternative explanation
until I was about 16.
Also didn't wake up to the fact that even without a Darwinian explanation
design is a very bad explanation for the complexity of life
because it's got a regression built into it.
I mean, you have to explain the designer,
so it's not even a good explanation.
But finally, I had to... I was about 16 when I discovered Darwinism.
I was taught Darwinism
and then realised that there is a,
not just an adequate explanation for the complexity of life
but a wonderful,
electrifyingly simple explanation -
which is Darwinian evolution.
Now, did it come as a flash of delight
or was there in fact a...
an agonising sense of regret and remorse at what you had lost?
I don't remember any regret. I think it was delight.
And it was a delighted sense of freedom, perhaps, from a...
a view of the world
which was always rather unsatisfactory anyway.
And it was also delight at the positive feeling
that one now had a fully satisfactory explanation
of the way the world was,
and that I had my life before me to try to understand that in detail.
All right, now, if I can go back to that period between 9 and 15.
Nine when you first started to have doubts about it because
there were so many religions,
and 15 when you had the, as it were, the biological road to Damascus
and began to read Darwin.
What form did your relatively undoubting religion take?
I mean, in the way of observance, in the way of prayer.
- In one way or another. - Oh, yes.
Between 9 and 15 I was pretty devout.
I used to... When I got confirmed, I used to pray.
I used to sort of have little fantasies at school,
boarding school, creeping down to the chapel
and praying and having, sort of, visions of angels and... things.
And I remember being prepared for Confirmation
which actually, even at the time, I could see that was a load of rubbish.
I sort of forced myself to go on believing in it
because here was this vicar in his cassock telling me about it.
But it just didn't hang together. It didn't make any sense.
I could follow an argument
that said the world is such a beautiful place it needs a designer.
But that wasn't what it was about at all.
It was all about original sin and... things like that
which, even then, I could sort of see wasn't really coherent.
So, in a sense then, it was more tied to morality -
in the sense of sinfulness -
than it was to the beauty of the creation.
I think the preparation for Confirmation probably was, yes.
I mean, were you constantly told by the minister
that you were, in the nature of man,
an inheritor of some sin?
I don't remember that. I mean, I do remember odd little...
stupidities, such as "disease is a result of sin".
Disease is not a result of bacteria,
or viruses, or cancerous tumours. Disease is a result of sin.
And I can remember being told that
and hearing other people saying it later on
and, you know, apparently taking it seriously.
I mean, they just didn't seem to... to realise
what an extraordinarily unpleasant,
as well as illogical, thing it is to believe.
So when, at the age of 16,
you became acquainted with Darwin,
was it because you were taught about Darwin,
or you began reading The Origin Of Species?
No, it was because I was taught.
And were you taught by people who, as it were,
were AWARE, or seemed to be aware,
of the fact that it would have theological consequences?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, that wasn't the terms in which they put it anyway.
How soon in the lessons did you begin to see
that it did have theological consequences -
that it, more or less, knocked the idea of design on the head?
I DO remember that I understood the principle of Darwinism
before I believed it was really big enough to do the job.
So, I understood the principle of it
and realised that it was a candidate explanation for doing this job
but I still didn't think it was big enough.
It was only later that I decided it was big enough.
In that case, I'll ask you this question,
I'm going to ask you, for the point of view of the viewers to...
It's an awkward question I'm asking you.
... to give us a summary of the most persuasive version...
- Oh, fine. Ok. - ... of Darwinian Theory.
First, I would make a distinction between the fact of evolution
and the actual change from generation to generation
that has led from bacterial ancestors
to all the creatures that we have today by gradual, gradual change -
such as you wouldn't have noticed it, in any particular generation.
That is a matter of fact which can be observed not directly,
but by its aftermath in the form of fossils
and the pattern of living creatures.
Then ask, what is the guiding force that led to it being like that?
Natural selection.
And the most illuminating way I can think of to explain that
is that ALL living things contain
digitally-coded representations of themselves,
digitally-coded instructions for building themselves
and for making more like themselves.
The instructions... survive or they don't survive
depending upon how good the bodies are at surviving
and how good the bodies are at reproducing
and, therefore, passing them on.
Therefore the world becomes filled
with coded instructions for being successful
in building bodies that survive
and reproduce those very same coded instructions.
Now, the objection that is constantly raised
by people who hear this, to me and to you,
extremely persuasive argument,
they say, "Aha! But what is the source of these fruitful novelties
"upon which natural selection exerts its pressures?"
People would say, "Well, surely the novelties themselves,
"even if, they are then... pressure is exerted upon them,
"something has to explain the novelties themselves."
Well, the novelties themselves, of course,
are genetic variations in the gene pool
which ultimately come from mutation
and more proximately come from sexual recombination.
There's nothing very inventive or ingenious about those novelties.
I mean, they are random. And they mostly are deleterious.
Most mutations are bad.
And so, you really need to focus
on natural selection as the positive side.
It's only natural selection that produces
living things which have the illusion of design.
The illusion of design does not come from the novelty.
It comes from what happens to the novelty as it is filtered through.
But the argument was constantly levelled about the...
the imperceptible changes which might, in fact,
as they were developed and recurred,
would have culminated in something as useful as a feather.
They constantly emphasise the fact,
what was it about that early novelty,
before it had accumulated
to the point where it was recognisably doing an adaptive job?
Where could natural selection get its purchase
upon something which was no more than a pimple?
Yes. Well, it's a fair point.
It's one that I've talked about quite a lot.
There cannot have been
intermediate stages which were not beneficial.
There's no room in natural selection
for the sort of foresight argument that says,
"Well, if we're going to persist for the next million years,
"it'll start becoming useful."
That doesn't work.
There's got to be a selection pressure all the way.
So, there isn't a process going on in the cell saying, "Look, be patient."
"It's going to be a feather. Believe me."
Sydney Bremner satirised that beautifully
when he said he imagined some protein arising in the Cambrian
which was kept because "it might come in handy in the Cretaceous."
It doesn't happen like that.
There's got to be
a series of advantages all the way in the feather.
If you can't think of one,
then that's your problem not natural selection's problem.
Natural selection... I suppose that is a sort of
matter of faith on my, on my part since the theory is so coherent
and so powerful. You mentioned feathers.
I mean, it's perfectly possible
that feathers began as fluffy extension of reptilian scales
to act as... heat insulators.
So, the final perfection of the, sort of, wing feathers
that we see in flying birds might have come very much later.
And the earliest feathers might have been
a different approach to hairiness
among reptiles keeping warm.
Over and over again, we come across
cases where an organ starts out doing one thing
and then gets modified to doing another thing.
But it's not very useful
to challenge an individual biologist's ingenuity
in thinking up what particular intermediates might have looked like
because we don't...
I mean, may be we're not ingenious enough to think what they are.
I should have thought, there's a more general argument
which is that we... we shouldn't, in any case, be saying,
"Oh, I can't think what the explanation for it is,
"therefore it must have been designed."
There's a fatal weakness in any argument which says,
"I cannot understand how X could have happened,
"therefore it must have been designed."
It would be as if you took a famous scientific discovery,
think of Hodgkin and Huxley's working out of how the nerve impulse works -
a very difficult problem involving very tough mathematics.
Suppose that they found it too difficult.
Would we have respected them if they'd said something like,
"I can't work out how this nerve impulse works, Hodgkin. Can you?"
"No, Huxley, I can't. Let's just give up and say God did it?"
It's that element of giving up. It's that element of defeatism.
"I can't understand how it works.
"Well, let's fall back on the design explanation."
Yes, even if it doesn't take the form of explicit,
conscious design on the part of a creator,
one idea which seems to me to be the counterpart of what you're saying
was the invoking of the vital principle in the 19th century.
I mean, vital principles, force locomotif and, you know,
none of them explain anything.
They're just redescriptions of the problem.
But they're pernicious because people think they explain something.
It sort of vaguely sounds as though it explains something.
And people are so used to the idea
that complicated things in our human world are indeed designed and made.
But when you've said, "Oh, it was designed by God."
you have explained ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
because you're left with the problem of explaining
where the designer came from.
And so, it's a non-explanation.
We shouldn't even regard it as a candidate explanation.
Why do you think it was,
that for really very intelligent biologists
to invoke something - which we can see now,
it's surprising they couldn't see, was such a vacuous explanation -
as the vital principle to account for the spontaneity of living things?
Well, I suppose it's all very well for us to say
we can see that it's nonsense
but when you didn't have anything better...
I mean, I could imagine...
in the time of Hume, for example,
he would have said, "This is a bad explanation." and he was right,
but he didn't actually have a better one to put in its place.
You have to be quite intellectually courageous
to stick on the philosophical point that it's clearly a bad explanation,
and I think that in a real sense it had to wait for Darwin
who produced a deeply satisfying explanation.
It would have been wonderful to... if...
Hume would have been simply captivated
to have heard Darwin explanation I suspect.
For Richard then,
the Theory of Evolution provided support for his growing disbelief.
But I wanted to know why atheism was such a pressing issue for him.
Why is this argument so important at this point in the 21st century
when you and I can see that it, it's a settled issue
and yet we find ourselves in...
in an embattled position?
And why is the argument so important?
Well, as a scientist, to me it's important
because I DO regard the hypothesis of a supernatural designer,
as a scientific hypothesis.
I think it's a wrong one but it actually IS science.
One can't... I don't have much patience with theologians who say,
"Well, we're really not disagreeing.
"It's just that religion concerns itself with morality
"and science concerns itself
"with the way the universe is and there's no problem between them."
To me there is a problem because the moment you talk about
a supernatural creator, designer, anything...
you are advancing a scientific hypothesis which is either right or wrong.
A universe that has a supernatural intelligence,
a supernatural over-mind in it,
is a very, very different kind of universe
from a purely scientific point of view
from a universe which hasn't.
And it's a very, very interesting difference.
I mean, it's a MASSIVE difference.
And I think it's scientifically interesting
to hold a view of the universe, which I do,
which is that there is no super mind.
Well, there may be minds far superior to ours
but they will also have come into existence
through a slow, gradual, incremental, process.
They were not there from the start.
People holding the opposite view,
that there was a supernatural intelligence,
right from the start, responsible for it all,
are advancing a very, very... diametrically different
scientific hypothesis which has got to be either right or wrong.
Even if we can�t finally decide whether it's right or wrong,
we must at least admit that it is a... a different hypothesis -
a very different hypothesis - and therefore it matters.
But I often encounter religious people
who argue in the following way.
They'll say, "Well, it's not really.
"And we don't think of it as a scientific hypothesis."
"We think of it as something which involves a leap of faith."
In other words, it's not something which, they say, can be proved right or wrong.
There's no way in which it can be proved right or wrong
because it belongs to a domain of existence and entities
about which that sort of proof,
disproof and research are irrelevant.
There is something which they call "the leap of faith"
which identifies you with this creator.
Well, that sort of thing... just leaves me cold.
I can't really even begin to empathise with it.
I understand that it may be, in principle,
impossible to demonstrate on way or the other.
So, there may be no scientific test you could ever do
to decide the question, and that I could believe.
But, to me, that still leaves,
leaves the point that it either is true or it isn't.
A "leap of faith" which just means that a person has
a sort of inside, internal feeling of revelation
which is not shareable with anybody else
and which can't be... demonstrated to anybody else,
to me that just sounds like a mental delusion.
Why is it then that people actually invoke the notion of "a leap of faith"
not as a weakness on their part
but as some sort of virtue which is lacking in people like you and me?
That there is some sort of peculiar willingness,
and a willingness that indicates some sort of spiritual generosity
which we, somehow, don't have.
It's important to stress, in view of our earlier conversation,
that the kind of person you're now talking about
is a very much more sophisticated animal -
than the sort who argues about...
creationism and that kind of thing
because those people really would think
that there was some intervention by the deity in the world.
But your people with their internal revelation...
presumably accept that their god doesn't intervene in the world
otherwise they would have to concede that it is a scientific hypothesis.
So the domain in which he works, or IT works,
seems to be a rather...
strangely-detached-from-the-world domain,
purely concerned with internal feelings that people privately have.
But the implication is that it's a domain...
- from which we are unfortunate enough to be excluded. -That's right.
As I said, it's a lack of some sort of talent...
- generosity, or blindness on our part - Yes.
which cuts us off from the beauty and majesty of this deity.
Like not knowing what it's like to fall in love or something like that.
Being deprived. Being deficient in some important way.
Yes, I can understand that.
And I...
actually could imagine that, that we're not so deprived as...
because you and I probably do have...
feelings that are, that may very well be akin to a kind of mystical wonder
when we contemplate the stars,
when we contemplate the galaxies, when we contemplate LIFE,
the sheer expanse of geological time.
I experience and I expect you experience,
internal feelings which sound pretty much like
what mystics...
feel, and they call it God.
IF - and I've been called a very religious person for that reason -
if I am called a religious person,
my retort to that is, "Well, you're playing with words."
because what the vast majority of people MEAN by religious
is something utterly different
from this sort of transcendent, mystical experience.
What they mean is an entity which interferes in the world,
which actually has some kind of impact upon the world
and therefore IS a scientific hypothesis.
The transcendent sense, the transcendent, mystic sense,
that people who are both religious and non-religious,
in my usage of the term,
is something very different.
In that sense, I probably am a religious person.
You probably are a religious person.
But that doesn't mean we think that there is a supernatural being
that interferes in the world, that does anything,
that manipulates anything, or, by the way,
that it's worth praying to or asking forgiveness of sins from...
etcetera.
But once we concede that, I know -
this is what I call "the clergyman in the laurel bushes" -
that as soon as one makes any concession
in the direction of wonder, awe or a sense of majesty and mystery -
and it's not confined to the large things.
Just simply contemplating mitochondria
produces the same sort of Blakeian feelings
- that he had from grains of sand... - Yes.
... the clergyman in the laurel bushes leaps out and says,
- "Ah, you are one of us after all." - Exactly.
It's happened to me over and over again.
I think it's deeply dishonest and I think it's fooling around with words
and not understanding, or not honestly dealing with,
the way ordinary people use words.
And so, I prefer to use words like religion, like God,
in the way the majority of people in the world would understand them
and to reserve a different kind of language
for the feeling that we share
with possibly your clergymen in the laurel.
But, as soon as one does admit that,
and admits the unknowability of things,
there is always the implication from the religious -
not necessarily from the orthodox religious,
but the people who are susceptible to energies and vibrations
and aromas and so forth -
to the idea that, what they often say, "There must be something."
Well, ok, it just doesn't follow.
My answer when they say "There must be something."
I will say, "Yes, there is. It's everything."
"It's there without any super-added principle."
I think I would hit back harder than that actually
and say that the sense of wonder that one gets
as a scientist contemplating the cosmos, or contemplating mitochondria
is actually much grander
than anything that you will get
by contemplating the traditional objects of religious mysticism.