PART I
RICHARD DAWKINS: One of the things we’ve all met is the accusation that we are strident or arrogant or vitriolic or shrill. What do we think about that?
DANIEL C. DENNETT: Yes. Well, I’m amused by it because I went out of my way in my book to address reasonable religious people,*1 and I test-flew the draft with groups of students who were deeply religious. And indeed, the first draft incurred some real anguish. So I made adjustments and made adjustments, and it didn’t do any good in the end, because I still got hammered for being rude and aggressive. And I came to realize that it’s a no-win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude.
DAWKINS: Without being rude.
DENNETT: You know, they sort of play the hurt-feelings card at every opportunity, and you’re faced with the choice of, Well, am I going to be rude? Or am I going to—
DAWKINS: Say nothing, yes.
DENNETT: —articulate this criticism? Or I mean am I going to articulate it or am I just going to button my lip and—?
SAM HARRIS: Well, that’s what it is to trespass a taboo. I think we’re all encountering the fact that religion is held off the table of rational criticism in some kind of formal way, even by, we’re discovering, our fellow secularists and our fellow atheists. It leaves people to their own superstitions. Even if it’s abject and causing harm, don’t look too closely at it.
DENNETT: That was of course the point of the title of my book; there is this spell, and we’ve got to break it.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: But if the charge of offensiveness in general is to be allowed in public discourse, then without self-pity I think we should say that we too can be offended and insulted. I mean, I’m not just in disagreement when someone like Tariq Ramadan,*2 accepted at the high tables of Oxford University as a spokesman, says the most he’ll demand when it comes to the stoning of women is a moratorium on it. I find that profoundly much more than annoying. Not only insulting but actually threatening.
HARRIS: But you’re not offended. I don’t see you taking things personally. You’re alarmed by the liabilities of certain ways of thinking, as in Ramadan’s case.
HITCHENS: Yes, but he would say, or people like him would say, that if I doubt the historicity of the prophet Mohammed, I’ve injured them in their deepest feelings. Well, I am, in fact – and I think all people ought to be – offended, at least in their deepest integrity, by, say, the religious proposition that without a supernatural, celestial dictatorship we wouldn’t know right from wrong.
HARRIS: But are you really offended by that? Doesn’t it just seem wrong to you?
HITCHENS: No, I say only, Sam, that if the offensiveness charge is to be allowed in general, and arbitrated by the media, then I think we’re entitled to claim that much, without being self-pitying or representing ourselves as an oppressed minority. Which I think is an opposite danger, I would admit. Mind you, I also agree with Daniel that there’s no way in which the charge against us can be completely avoided, because what we say does offend the core, the very core, of any serious religious person, in the same way. We deny the divinity of Jesus, for example. Many people will be terrifically shocked and possibly hurt. It’s just too bad.
DAWKINS: I’m fascinated by the contrast between the amount of offence that’s taken by religion and the amount of offence that people take against nearly anything else. Like artistic taste. Your taste in music, your taste in art, your politics. You can be, not exactly as rude as you like, but you can be far, far more rude about such things. And I’d quite like to try to quantify that, to actually do research about it. To test people with statements about their favourite football team, or their favourite piece of music, or something, and see how far you can go before they take offence. Is there anything else, apart from, say, how ugly your face is [laughter], that would give such—?
HITCHENS: Or your husband’s or wife’s or girlfriend’s faces. Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because I regularly debate with a terrible man called Bill Donohue of the Catholic League,*3 and he actually is righteously upset by certain trends in modern art, which tend to draw attention to themselves by blasphemy.
HARRIS: Piss Christ.
HITCHENS: Yes, for example, Serrano’s Piss Christ,*4 or the elephant dung on the Virgin.*5 And indeed, I think it’s quite important that we share with Sophocles and other pre-monotheists a revulsion to desecration or to profanity. That we don’t want to see churches desecrated.
DAWKINS: No, indeed not.
HITCHENS: Religious icons trashed, and so forth. We share an admiration for at least some of the aesthetic achievements of religion.
HARRIS: I think our criticism is actually more barbed than that. We’re not merely offending people, we’re also telling them that they’re wrong to be offended.
ALL: Yes.
HARRIS: Physicists aren’t offended when their view of physics is disproved or challenged. This is just not the way rational minds operate when they’re really trying to get at what’s true in the world. Religions purport to be representing reality, and yet there’s this peevish, and tribal, and ultimately dangerous response to having these ideas challenged.
DENNETT: Well, and too, there’s no polite way to say to somebody—
HARRIS: ‘You’ve wasted your life!’
DENNETT: ‘—Do you realize you’ve wasted your life? Do you realize you’ve just devoted all your efforts and all your goods to the glorification of something that’s just a myth?’ Even if you say, ‘Have you even considered the possibility that maybe you’ve wasted your life on this?’ There’s no inoffensive way of saying that. But we do have to say it, because they should jolly well consider it. Same as we do about our own lives.
DAWKINS: Dan Barker’s*6 making a collection of clergymen who’ve lost their faith but don’t dare say so, because it’s their only living. It’s the only thing they know how to do.
HARRIS: Yes, I’ve heard from one of them, at least.
DAWKINS: Have you?
HITCHENS: I used to run into this when I was younger, in arguments with members of the Communist Party. They sort of knew that it was all up with the Soviet Union. Many of them had suffered a lot and sacrificed a great deal and struggled manfully to keep what they thought was the great ideal alive. Their mainspring had broken, but they couldn’t give it up because it would involve a similar concession. But certainly, if anyone had said to me, ‘How could you say that to them about the Soviet Union? Didn’t you know you were going to really make them cry and hurt their feelings?’ I would have said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be absurd.’ But I find it in many cases almost an exactly analogous argument.
DENNETT: When people tell me I’m being rude and vicious and terribly aggressive in a way, I say, ‘If I were saying these things about the pharmaceutical industry or the oil interests, would it be rude? Would it be off limits? No.’
DAWKINS: Of course it wouldn’t.
DENNETT: Well, I want religion to be treated just the way we treat the pharmaceuticals and the oil industry. I’m not against pharmaceutical companies – I’m against some of the things they do – but I just want to put religions on the same page with them.
HITCHENS: Including denying them tax exemptions, or, in the English case, state subsidies.
DENNETT: Yes.
DAWKINS: I’m curious how religion acquired this charmed status that it has, compared to other things. Somehow we’ve all bought into it, whether we’re religious or not. And some historical process has led to this immunization of religion, this hyper-offence-taking that religion is allowed to take.
DENNETT: What’s particularly amusing to me, finally – and at first it infuriated me, but now I’m amused – is that they’ve managed to enlist legions of non-religious people who take offence on their behalf.
DAWKINS: And how!
DENNETT: In fact, the most vicious reviews of my book have been by people who are not themselves religious but they’re terribly afraid of hurting the feelings of the people who are religious, and they chastise me worse than anybody who’s actually religious.
DAWKINS: Exactly my experience.
HARRIS: And I think one of you pointed out how condescending that view is. It’s like the idea of penitentiaries: Other people need them; we must keep the felons safely confined.
There’s one answer to that question which may illuminate a difference I have with, I think, all three of you. I still use words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘mystical’ without furrowing my brow too much, to the consternation of many atheists. I think there is a range of experience that’s rare and is only talked about – without obvious qualms – in religious discourse. And because it’s only talked about in religious discourse, it is just riddled with superstition, and it’s used to justify various metaphysical schemes – which it can’t reasonably do. But clearly people do have extraordinary experiences, whether they have them on LSD or they have them because they sat alone in a cave for a year, or because they just happen to have a nervous system that’s especially labile. People can have self-transcending experiences, and religion seems to be the only game in town when talking about those experiences and dignifying them. So this is one reason it’s taboo to criticize it, because we’re talking about the most important moments in people’s lives and we appear to be trashing them, at least from their point of view.
DAWKINS: Well, I don’t have to agree with you, Sam, in order to say that it’s very good that you’re saying that sort of thing. Because it shows that, as you say, religion is not the only game in town when it comes to being spiritual. Just as it’s a good idea to have somebody from the political right who’s an atheist, because otherwise there’s a confusion of values, which doesn’t help us, and it’s much better to have this diversity in other areas. But I think I sort of do agree with you, but even if I didn’t, I’d think it was valuable to have that.
HITCHENS: If we could make one change, and only one, mine would be to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural. You, Sam, had a marvellous quotation in your blog from Francis Collins,*7 the genome pioneer, who said whilst mountaineering one day he was just overcome by the landscape and then went down on his knees and accepted Jesus Christ.*8 A complete non-sequitur.
HARRIS: Exactly.
HITCHENS: It’s never even been suggested that Jesus Christ created that landscape.
HARRIS: A frozen waterfall in three streams put him in mind of the Trinity.
HITCHENS: Absolutely! We’re all triune in one way or another. We’re programmed for that. That’s very clear. It wouldn’t ever have been a four-headed God. [Laughter] You know that from experience.
But that would be an enormous distinction to make, and I think it would clear up a lot of people’s confusion – that what we have in our emotions, the surplus value of our personalities, aren’t particularly useful for our evolution. Or we can’t prove they are. But they do belong to us, all the same. They don’t belong to the supernatural and are not to be conscripted or annexed by any priesthood.
DENNETT: It’s a sad fact that people won’t, in a sense, trust their own valuing of their numinous experiences. They think it isn’t really as good as it seems unless it’s from God, unless it’s some kind of a proof of religion. No, it’s just as wonderful as it seems. It’s just as important. It is the best moment in your life, and it’s the moment when you forget yourself and become better than you ever thought you could be, in some way, and you see, in all humbleness, the wonderfulness of nature. That’s it! And that’s wonderful. But it doesn’t add anything to say, ‘Golly, that has to have been given to me by Somebody even more wonderful.’
DAWKINS: It’s been hijacked, hasn’t it?
HITCHENS: It’s also, I think, a deformity or shortcoming in the human personality, frankly. Because religion keeps stressing how humble it is, and how meek it is, and how accepting, almost to the point of self-abnegation it is. But actually it makes extraordinarily arrogant claims for these moments. It says, ‘I suddenly realized that the universe was all about me. And felt terrifically humble about it.’ Come on! We can laugh people out of that, I believe. And I think we must.
DENNETT: And I am so tired of ‘If only Professor Dennett had the humility to blah, blah, blah.’ And humility, humility. [Laughter] And this, from people of breathtaking arrogance.
HITCHENS: They shove one aside saying, ‘Don’t mind me, I’m on an errand for God.’ How modest is that?
HARRIS: This is a point I think we should return to: this notion of the arrogance of science. Because there is no discourse that enforces humility more rigorously than science. Scientists in my experience are the first people to say they don’t know. If you get scientists to start talking outside their area of specialization, they immediately start hedging their bets, saying things like, ‘I’m sure there’s someone in the room who knows more about this than I do, and, of course, all the data aren’t in.’ This is the mode of discourse in which we’re most candid about the scope of our ignorance.
HITCHENS: Well, actually, a lot of academics come out with that kind of false modesty. But I do know what you mean.
DAWKINS: Any academic should do that. The thing about religious people is that they recite the Nicene Creed every week, which says precisely what they believe. There are three Gods, not one. The Virgin Mary, Jesus died, went to the… what was it? Down for three days and then came up again – in precise detail, and yet they have the gall to accuse us of being overconfident, and of not knowing what it is to doubt.
DENNETT: I don’t think many of them ever let themselves contemplate the question which I think scientists ask themselves all the time: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ ‘What if I’m wrong?’ It’s just not part of their repertory.
HITCHENS: Would you mind if I disagree with you about that?
DENNETT: No.
HITCHENS: A lot of the talk that makes religious people not hard to beat, but hard to argue with, is precisely that they’ll say they’re in a permanent crisis of faith. There is, indeed, a prayer: ‘Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.’ Graham Greene says the great thing about being a Catholic was that it was a challenge to his unbelief.*9 A lot of people live by keeping two sets of books.
DENNETT: Yes.
DAWKINS: Exactly.
HITCHENS: It’s my impression that a majority of the people I know who call themselves believers, or people of faith, do that all the time. I wouldn’t say it was schizophrenia; that would be rude. But they’re quite aware of the implausibility of what they say. They don’t act on it when they go to the doctor, or when they travel, or anything of this kind. But in some sense they couldn’t be without it. But they’re quite respectful of the idea of doubt. In fact, they try and build it in when they can.
DAWKINS: Well, that’s interesting then. So when they’re reciting the creed with its total sort of apparent conviction, this is a kind of mantra which is forcing them to overcome doubt by saying, ‘Yes, I do believe, I do believe, I do believe!’ Because really they don’t.
DENNETT: Sure. And—
HITCHENS: And of course, like their secular counterparts, they’re glad other people believe it. It’s an affirmation they wouldn’t want other people not to be making.
DAWKINS: Yes, yes.
HARRIS: Well, also there’s this curious bootstrapping move, where they start with the premise that belief without evidence is especially noble. This is the doctrine of faith. This is the parable of Doubting Thomas. So they start with that and then add this notion, which has been hurled at me in various debates, that the fact that people can believe without evidence is itself a subtle form of evidence. Francis Collins, whom you mentioned, brings this up in his book.*10 The fact that we have this intuition of God is itself some subtle form of evidence. And it’s a kind of kindling phenomenon: once you say it’s good to start without evidence, the fact that you can proceed is a subtle form of evidence, and then the demand for any more evidence is itself a kind of corruption of the intellect, or a temptation, to be guarded against, and you get a kind of perpetual-motion machine of self-deception, once you can get this thing up and running.
HITCHENS: But they like the idea that it can’t be demonstrated, because then there’d be nothing to be faithful about. If everyone had seen the Resurrection and we all knew that we’d been saved by it, well, then we would be living in an unalterable system of belief, and it would have to be policed. Those of us who don’t believe in it are very glad it’s not true, because we think it would be horrible. Those who do believe it don’t want it to be absolutely proven so there can’t be any doubt about it, because then there’s no wrestling with conscience, there are no dark nights of the soul.
HARRIS: There was a review of one of our books, I don’t remember which, but it made exactly that point: what a crass expectation on the part of atheists that there should be total evidence for any of this. There would be much less magic if everyone was compelled to believe by too much evidence. Actually, this was Francis Collins.
HITCHENS: Well, a friend of mine – Canon Fenton of Oxford,*11 actually – said that if the Church validated the Holy Shroud of Turin, he personally would leave the ranks. [Laughter] Because if they were doing things like that, he didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t expect, when I started off my book tour, to be as lucky as I was; Jerry Falwell*12 died on my first week on the road. That was amazing. And I didn’t expect Mother Teresa*13 to come out as an atheist. [Laughter] But reading her letters, which I now have, it’s rather interesting. She writes that she can’t bring herself to believe any of this. She tells all her confessors, all her superiors, that she can’t hear a voice, can’t feel a presence, even in the Mass, even in the sacraments. No small thing. They write back to her, saying, ‘That’s good, that’s great, you’re suffering, it gives you a share in the Crucifixion, it makes you part of Calvary.’ You can’t beat an argument like that. The less you believe it, the more it’s a demonstration of faith.
HARRIS: The more you prove it’s true.
HITCHENS: Yes, and the struggle, the dark night of the soul, is the proof in itself. So, we just have to realize that these really are non-overlapping magisteria. We can’t hope to argue with a mentality of this kind.
DENNETT: We can do just what you’re doing now. That is, we can say, ‘Look at this interesting bag of tricks that have evolved. Notice that they are circular, that they’re self-sustaining, that they could be about anything.’ And then you don’t argue with them, you simply point out that these are not valid ways of thinking about anything. Because you could use the very same tricks to sustain something which was manifestly fraudulent.
And in fact, what fascinates me is that a lot of the tricks have their counterparts with con artists, who use the very same forms of non-argument, the very same non sequiturs, and they make, for instance, a virtue out of trust. And as soon as you start exhibiting any suspicion of the con man, he gets all hurt on you and plays the hurt-feelings card, and reminds you how wonderful taking it on faith is. There aren’t any new tricks; these tricks have evolved over countless years.
HITCHENS: And one could add the production of bogus special effects as well. One of the things that completely convicts religion of being fraudulent is the belief in the miraculous. The same people will say, ‘Well, Einstein felt a spiritual force in the universe,’ when what he said was the whole point about it is that there are no miracles. There are no changes in the natural order, that’s the miraculous thing. They’re completely cynical about claiming him.
HARRIS: And every religious person makes the same criticism of other religions that we do. They reject the pseudo-miracles and the pseudo-claims and certainties of others. They see the confidence tricks in other people’s faith. And they see them rather readily. Every Christian knows that the Qur’an can’t be the perfect word of the creator of the universe and that anyone who thinks it is hasn’t read it closely enough. We make a very strong case when we point that out, and point out also that whatever people are experiencing in church or in prayer, no matter how positive, the fact that Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and Christians are all experiencing it proves that it can’t be a matter of the divinity of Jesus or the unique sanctity of the Qur’an.
DENNETT: Because there are seventeen different ways of getting there.
HITCHENS: By the way, on that tiny point, and I hope this is not a digression, it’s useful to bear in mind that when you get, as I did this morning on ABC News, the question, ‘Well, wouldn’t you say religion did some good in the world, and there are good [religious] people?’ – and you never don’t get that argument, and by the way there’s no reason you shouldn’t – you say, ‘Well, yes, I have indeed heard it said that Hamas provides social services in Gaza.’ [Laughter] And I’ve even heard it said that Louis Farrakhan’s group gets young black men in prison off drugs.*14 I don’t know if it’s true – I’m willing to accept it might be. It doesn’t alter the fact that the one is a militarized terrorist organization with a fanatical anti-Semitic ideology and the second is a racist, crackpot cult. I have no doubt that Scientology gets people off drugs, too. But my insistence, always, with these people is that if you will claim it for one, you must accept it for them all. Because if you don’t, it’s flat-out dishonest.
HARRIS: Or you can invent an ideology, which, by your mere invention in that moment is obviously untrue, and which would be quite useful if propagated to billions.
HITCHENS: That’s right.
HARRIS: You could say, ‘Here is my new religion. Demand that your children study science and math and economics and all of our terrestrial disciplines to the best of their abilities, and if they don’t persist in those efforts, they’ll be tortured after death by seventeen demons.’ [Laughter] This would be extremely useful, far more useful than Islam. And yet what are the chances that these seventeen demons exist? Zero.
DAWKINS: There’s a slipperiness, too, isn’t there, about one way of speaking to sophisticated intellectuals and theologians and another way of speaking to congregations and, above all, children. And I think we’ve all of us been accused of going after the easy targets, the Jerry Falwells of this world, and ignoring the sophisticated professors of theology. I don’t know what you feel about that, but one of the things I feel is that the sophisticated professors of theology will say one thing to each other and to intellectuals generally, but will say something totally different to a congregation. They’ll talk about miracles, they’ll talk about—
DENNETT: Well, they won’t talk to a congregation.
DAWKINS: Well, archbishops will.
DENNETT: Yes, but when the sophisticated theologians try to talk to the preachers, the preachers won’t have any of it. [Laughs]
DAWKINS: Well, that’s true of course, yes.
DENNETT: You’ve got to realize that sophisticated theology is like stamp collecting. It’s a very specialized thing, and only a few people do it.
DAWKINS: And of negligible influence.
DENNETT: They take in their own laundry, and they get all excited about some very arcane details, and their own religions pay almost no attention to what they’re saying. A little bit of it does, of course, filter in. But it always gets beefed up again for general consumption, because what they say in their writings, at least from my experience, is eye-glazing, mind-twisting, very subtle things that have no particular bearing on life.
HITCHENS: Oh, no, I must insist! [Laughter] I must say a good word here for Professor Alister McGrath,*15 who in his attack on Richard said it wasn’t true, as we’ve always been told and most Christians believe, that Tertullian said, ‘Credo quia absurdum’ – ‘I believe it because it’s ridiculous.’ No, it turns out – and I’ve checked this now, although I don’t know this from McGrath – that in fact Tertullian said the impossibility of it is what makes it believable.*16 That’s a fine distinction, I think. [Laughter] And very useful for training one’s mind in the finer points. In other words, the likelihood that something could have been made up is diminished by the incredibility of it. Who would try and invent something that was that unbelievable?
That actually is, I think, a debate perfectly well worth having. What I say to these people is this: You’re sending your e-mail, or your letter, to the wrong address. Everyone says, ‘Let’s not judge religion by its fundamentalists.’ All right. Take the Church of England, two of whose senior leaders recently said that the floods in North Yorkshire were the result of, among other things, homosexual behaviour – not in North Yorkshire, presumably.*17 Probably in London, I’m thinking. [Laughter]
DENNETT: God’s aim is a little off. [Laughter]
HITCHENS: One of these, the Bishop of Liverpool,*18 was apparently in line to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Now, this is extraordinary. This is supposed to be the mild and reflective and thoughtful and rather troubled Church, making fanatical pronouncements. Well, I want to hear what Alister McGrath is going to write to these bishops. Is he going to say, ‘Do you not realize what complete idiots you’re making of yourselves and of our Church?’ Did he do that? If he did it in private, I’m not impressed. He has to say it in public. Why are they telling me that I [can’t] judge the Church by the statements of its bishops? I think I’m allowed to.
DAWKINS: The academic theologians, bishops and vicars will attack us for taking scriptures – or for accusing people of taking scriptures – literally: ‘Of course we don’t believe the Book of Genesis literally!’ And yet they do preach about what Adam and Eve did, as though Adam and Eve did exist – as though they somehow have a licence to talk about things which they know, and anybody of any sophistication knows, are fictions. And yet they will talk to their congregations, their sheep, about Adam and Eve as though they did exist, as though they were factual. And a huge number of people in those congregations actually think they did exist.
DENNETT: Can you imagine any one of these preachers saying, as such a topic is introduced, ‘This is a sort of theoretical fiction. It’s not true, but it’s a very fine metaphor’? No. [Laughs]
DAWKINS: They kind of, after the fact, imply that that’s what they expect you to know.
DENNETT: Yes, but they would never announce it.
HARRIS: Another point there is that they never admit how they have come to stop taking it literally. You have all these people criticizing us for our crass literalism – we’re as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists – and yet these moderates don’t admit how they have come to be moderate. What does moderation consist of? It consists of having lost faith in all of these propositions, or half of them, because of the hammer blows of science and secular politics.
DENNETT: And the crass literalism of the critics.
HARRIS: Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions, and moderates argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith – that faith is somehow self-enlightening. Whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside; it’s been intruded upon by science.
HITCHENS: On that point, which I was wanting to raise myself, about our own so-called fundamentalism, there’s a cleric in Southwark, the first person I saw attacking you [Richard] and me in print as being just as fundamentalist as those who blew up the London Underground. Do you remember his name?
DAWKINS: I don’t remember his name.
HITCHENS: He’s a very senior Anglican cleric in the Diocese of Southwark.*19 I went on the BBC with him. I asked him, ‘How can you call your congregation a flock? Doesn’t that say everything about your religion? That you think they’re sheep?’ He said, ‘Well, actually I used to be the pastor in New Guinea, where there aren’t any sheep.’ Of course, there are a lot of places where there are no sheep – the Gospel’s quite hard to teach as a result. [Laughter] He said, ‘We found out what the most important animal to the locals was, and I remember very well my local bishop rising to ask the Divine One to “Behold these swine”.’ [Laughter] His new congregation.
But this is a man who deliberately does a thing like that. That’s as cynical as you could wish, and as adaptive as the day is long. And he says that we who doubt it are as fundamentalist as people who blow up their fellow citizens on the London Underground. It’s unconscionable. Thus, I don’t really mind being accused of ridiculing or treating with contempt people like that. I just, frankly, have no choice. I have the faculty of humour, and some of it has an edge to it. I’m not going to repress that for the sake of politeness.
DENNETT: Would you think it would be good to make a distinction between the professionals and the amateurs? I share your impatience with the officials of the churches – the people who have this as their professional life. It seems to me that they know better. The congregations don’t know better, because it’s maintained that they should not know better. I do get very anxious about ridiculing the belief of the flock, because of the way in which they have ceded to their leaders, they’ve delegated authority to their leaders, and they presume their leaders are going to do it right. Who stands up and says, ‘The buck stops here’? Well, it seems to me it’s the preachers themselves, it’s the priests, it’s the bishops. And we really should hold their feet to the fire.
For instance, just take the issue of creationism. If somebody in a fundamentalist church thinks that creationism makes sense because their pastor told them so, well, I can understand that and excuse that. We all get a lot of what we take to be true from people whom we respect and whom we view as authorities. We don’t check everything out. But where did the pastor get this idea? And I don’t care where he got it. He or she is responsible because their job is to know what they’re talking about, in a way that the congregation is not.
DAWKINS: We have to be a little bit careful not to sound condescending when we say that. In a way, it’s reflecting the condescension of the preacher himself.
HITCHENS: Yes. Because I’ll take things that you and Richard say on human natural sciences – not without wanting to check, but I’m often unable to – but knowing that you are the sort of gentlemen who would have checked. But if you say, ‘The bishop told me it so I believe it,’ you make a fool of yourself, it seems to me – and one is entitled to say so. Just as one is entitled, when dealing with an ordinary racist, to say that his opinions are revolting. He may know no better, but that’s not going to save him from my condemnation. And nor should it. And exactly, I think it’s condescending not to confront people, as it were, one by one or en masse. Public opinion is often wrong. Mob opinion is almost always wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can’t avoid this—
I wanted to introduce the name ‘H. L. Mencken’*20 at this point, now a very and justly celebrated American writer. Not particularly to my taste – much too much of a Nietzschean and what really was once meant by ‘social Darwinist’ at one stage. But why did he win the tremendous respect of so many people in this country in the 1920s and ’30s? Because he said that the people who believe what the Methodists tell them, and what William Jennings Bryan*21 tells them, are fools. They’re not being fooled; they are fools. They should—
DENNETT: Shame on them for believing this.
HITCHENS: Yes, they make themselves undignified and ignorant. No mincing of words there, and a great admixture of wit and evidence and reasoning. It absolutely works. The most successful anti-religious polemic there’s probably ever been in the modern world – in the twentieth century, anyway.
HARRIS: I think we just touched upon an issue that we should highlight: this whole notion of authority. Because religious people often argue that science is just a series of uncashed cheques and we’re all relying on authority: ‘How do you know that the cosmological constant is… ?’ whatever it is. So, differentiate between the kind of faith-placing in authority that we practise without fear in science, and in rationality generally, and the kind of faith-placing in the preacher or the theologian, which we criticize.
DAWKINS: But what we actually do when we, who are not physicists, take on trust what physicists say, is that we have some evidence that suggests that physicists have looked into the matter – that they’ve done experiments, that they’ve peer-reviewed their papers, that they’ve criticized each other, that they’ve been subjected to massive criticism from their peers in seminars and in lectures.
DENNETT: And remember the structure that’s there, too; it’s not just that there’s peer review. But it’s very important that [science is] competitive. For instance, when Fermat’s last theorem was proved by—
DAWKINS: Andrew Wiles.
DENNETT:—Andrew Wiles, the reason that those of us who said, ‘Forget it, I’m never going to understand that proof,’ the reason that we can be confident that it really is a proof is that—
HARRIS: Nobody wanted him to get there first. [Laughter]
DENNETT: —every other mathematician who was competent in the world was very well motivated to study that proof.
DAWKINS: To find it, yes.
DENNETT: And believe me, if they grudgingly admit that this is a proof, it’s a proof. And there’s nothing like that in religion – nothing like that!
HITCHENS: No religious person has ever been able to say what Einstein said – that if he was right, the following phenomenon would occur off the west coast of Africa during a solar eclipse. And it did, within a very tiny degree of variation. There’s never been a prophecy that’s been vindicated like that. Or anyone willing to place their reputation and, as it were, their life on the idea that it would be.
DAWKINS: I was once asked at a public meeting, ‘Don’t you think that the mysteriousness of quantum theory is just the same as the mysteriousness of the Trinity or transubstantiation?’ And the answer of course is, [it] can be answered, in two quotes from Richard Feynman. One, Richard Feynman said, ‘If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory.’ He was admitting that it’s highly mysterious. The other thing is that the predictions in quantum theory experimentally are verified to the equivalent of predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair. And so, quantum theory is massively supported by accurate predictions, even if you don’t understand the mystery of the Copenhagen interpretation, whatever it is. Whereas the mystery of the Trinity doesn’t even try to make a prediction, let alone an accurate one.
HITCHENS: It isn’t a mystery, either.
DENNETT: I don’t like the use of the word ‘mystery’ here. I think there’s been a lot of consciousness-raising in philosophy about this term, where we have the so-called new mysterians. These are people who like the term ‘mystery’. Noam Chomsky*22 is quoted as saying there are two kinds of questions – problems and mysteries. Problems are solvable, mysteries aren’t.*23 First of all, I just don’t buy that. But I buy the distinction, and say there’s nothing about mystery in science. There are problems; there are deep problems. There are things we don’t know; there are things we’ll never know. But they aren’t systematically incomprehensible to human beings. The glorification of the idea that these things are systematically incomprehensible I think has no place in science.
HITCHENS: Which is why I think we should be quite happy to revive traditional terms in our discourse, such as ‘obscurantism’ and ‘obfuscation’, which is what they really are. And to point out that these things can make intelligent people act stupidly. John Cornwell,*24 who’s just written another attack on yourself, Richard, actually, and who is an old friend of mine, a very brilliant guy, wrote one of the best studies of the Catholic Church and fascism that has been published. In his review of you, he says that Professor Dawkins should just look at the shelves of books there are on the Trinity, the libraries full of attempts to solve this problem, before he’s certain. But none of the books in those religious libraries solve it either. The whole point is that it remains insoluble, and is used to keep people feeling baffled and inferior.
DAWKINS: I want to come back to the thing about mystery in physics. Because isn’t it possible that with our evolved brains – because we evolved in what I call Middle World, where we never have 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 – because anybody can read the dials on an instrument.
DENNETT: 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 – that 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, as you say, to think intuitively about this. But you can know that even though you can’t think intuitively about it, 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 that 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.
DAWKINS: That’s right. And the bolder physicists will say, ‘Well, who cares about intuition? I mean, just look at the maths.’
DENNETT: Yes, yes, that’s right. They are comfortable with living with their prostheses.
HARRIS: Well, the perfect example of that is dimensions beyond three, because we can’t visualize the fourth dimension or the fifth. But it’s trivial to represent them mathematically.
DENNETT: 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 that they can’t quite imagine them. What you do is, you imagine three of them and wave your hand a little bit, and say, ‘More of the same.’ But you check your intuition by running the math, and it works.
DAWKINS: 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 can imagine moving along any one of those dimensions with respect to the others, and you don’t actually have to visualize fifteen-dimensional space.
DENNETT: No, and you give up that demand. And you realize, ‘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.’
HITCHENS: I was challenged on the radio the other day by someone who said that I believed in atoms on no evidence, because I’d never seen one. Not since George Galloway said to me that he’d never seen a barrel of oil…*25 [Laughter] But you realize that people, at this point, are wearing themselves right down to their uppers. I mean, they’re desperate when they say—
I don’t want us to make our lives easier, but it makes the argument a little simpler: we are quite willing to say there are many things we don’t know. But what Haldane,*26 I think it was, said is that the universe is not just queerer than we suppose, it’s queerer than we can suppose. 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 that they know that mind.
HARRIS: Exactly.
HITCHENS: And can interpret it. They’re on good terms with it. They get occasional revelations from it. 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 is gone in the first round. It’s off the island. It’s out of the show.
HARRIS: That’s a footnote I wanted to add to what Dan was saying. Even if mystery is a bitter pill we have to swallow in the end and we are cognitively closed to the truth at some level, that still doesn’t give any scope to theism.
DENNETT: Absolutely not, because it’s just as closed to them as it is to—
HARRIS: Exactly. And yet they claim perfect inerrancy of revelation.
HITCHENS: 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—’
HARRIS: We’ll kill you. [Laughs]
HITCHENS: We’ll kill you, and it may take some days to kill you, but we will get the job done. They wouldn’t have the power they have now, if they hadn’t had the power they had then.
DENNETT: And you know, what you just said, Christopher, actually I think strikes terror, 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 just not the game; you can’t do that. And they’ve been taught all their lives that you can do that – that it’s 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.’
HARRIS: Precisely the move you can’t be respected for making.
HITCHENS: Adumbrate the move for me a bit, if you would. Say what you think that move is.
DENNETT: Somebody plays the faith card. They say, ‘Look, I am a Christian, and we Christians, we just have to believe this, and that’s it.’ At which point – and I think this is the polite way of saying it – you say, ‘Well, OK, 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.’
HITCHENS: OK, that’s what I hoped you were saying.
DENNETT: 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, you’re clearly – first of all, that’s just arrogant. It is a bullying move, and we’re just not going to accept it.
HARRIS: And it’s a move that they don’t accept, when done in the name of another faith.
DENNETT: Exactly.
HITCHENS: 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 we cannot scientifically disprove the existence of God?*27 Do you have a view of this?
DENNETT: Which God? I haven’t read the book.
HITCHENS: Any. Either a creating one or a supervising one, and certainly an intervening one – I think that’s fairly exhaustive. My view has always been that since we have to live with uncertainty, only those who are certain [should] leave the room before the discussion can become adult. Victor Stenger seems to think that now we’ve got to the stage where we can say with reasonable confidence that it is disproved. Or that it’s not vindicated. I just thought it would be an interesting proposition. Because it matters a lot to me that our opinions are congruent with uncertainty.
HARRIS: I think the weakest link is this foundational claim about the texts – this idea that we know the Bible to be the perfect word of an omniscient deity. That is an especially weak claim. And it really is their epistemological gold standard. It all rests on that. If the Bible isn’t a magic book, Christianity evaporates. If the Qur’an isn’t 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 couldn’t have been uttered by a person for whom a wheelbarrow would have been emergent technology?’ you have to say no. If the Bible had an account of DNA and electricity and other things that would astonish us, then OK, our jaws would drop and we’d have to have a sensible conversation about the source of this knowledge.
HITCHENS: Dinesh D’Souza*28 – by the way, one of the much more literate and well-read and educated of our antagonists; I’m going to be debating him soon – makes this statement in his new book:*29 He says that in Genesis, which people used to mock, it says, ‘Let there be light,’ and then only a few staves later you get the sun and the moon and the stars. How could that be? Well, that’s actually, according to the big bang, that would be right.
DAWKINS: Yes, but that’s not impressive.
HITCHENS: The bang precedes the galaxies, believe me. [Laughter]
HARRIS: Well, I try to demonstrate this cast of mind in a very long endnote in The End of Faith where I show that with the eyes of faith, you can discover magical prescience in any text. I literally walked into the cookbook aisle of a bookstore, randomly opened a cookbook, found a recipe for, I think it was, wok-seared shrimp with ogo relish or something, and then came up with a mystical interpretation of the recipe. Anyone can do this. You can play connect-the-dots with any crazy text and find wisdom in it.
HITCHENS: Well, Michael Shermer*30 did that with the Bible Code, hidden messages in the Bible. Very, very good. You can absolutely write yesterday’s headlines from it, any time you like.
HARRIS: 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?
DENNETT: [Laughs] I can’t think of any.
DAWKINS: 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. Victor Stenger doesn’t think it is true, but many physicists do. It certainly doesn’t in any way suggest to me a 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 got to be a lot more fine-tuned himself than—
HITCHENS: Why create all the other planets in our solar system dead? [Laughs]
DAWKINS: Well, that’s a separate question.
HITCHENS: Bishop Montefiore*31 was very good at this – he was a friend of mine. He said you had to marvel at the conditions for life and the knife edge on which they are, as though it is a knife edge. Yes, our planet is, a lot of it, too hot or too cold.
HARRIS: Right, and riddled with parasites.
HITCHENS: And it’s completely too hot or too cold, as it were, 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 no, I’ve not come across a single persuasive argument of that kind. But I wouldn’t have expected to, because, as I realized 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 as well as for theism – is what I suppose I would 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. Religion does, or can, help people to avoid hubris, I think, morally and intellectually.
DAWKINS: But that’s not an argument that it’s true.
HITCHENS: No, no. There aren’t, and cannot be, any such arguments.
HARRIS: Well, maybe I should broaden this question.
DENNETT: No, no, wait a minute. I can give you several discoveries which would shake my faith right to the ground.
HITCHENS: Rabbits in the Precambrian.*32
DAWKINS: No, no, no.
HARRIS: I’m looking for an argument not so much for the plausibility of religious belief but one that suggests that what we’re up to – criticizing faith – is a bad thing.
DAWKINS: Oh, that’s much easier. Somebody could come up with an argument that says that the world is a better place if everybody believes a falsehood.
DENNETT: Oh, that. Yes.
HARRIS: Is there any context in your work or in dialogue with your critics where you feel that such an argument has given you pause?
DENNETT: 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 view – namely, free will is such an important idea that if we gave up the idea of free will, people would lose the sense of responsibility and we would have chaos. And you really don’t want to 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. OK, could I imagine that my irrepressible curiosity could lead me to articulate something, true or false, which would have such devastating effects on the world that I should just shut up and change the subject? I think that’s a good question, which we all should ask – absolutely! 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. I think you should ask that question. I do.
DAWKINS: 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 often do, which is to say, ‘This is so politically obnoxious that it cannot be true.’
DENNETT: Oh, yes.
DAWKINS: Which is a different—
DENNETT: Which is a different thing entirely. No, no.
HITCHENS: It would be like discovering that you thought the bell curve on white and black intelligence was a correct interpretation of IQ. You could say, ‘Now what am I going to do?’ Fortunately, these questions don’t, in fact, present themselves in that way.
HARRIS: I’ll tell you one place where it’s presented itself to me. I think it was an op-ed in the L.A. Times – I could be mistaken. But someone argued that the reason the Muslim population in the US isn’t radicalized 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 in western Europe. Now, I don’t know if that’s true, but if it were true, that could give me a moment’s pause.
HITCHENS: That would be of interest. James Wolfensohn,*33 lately of the World Bank, recently the negotiator on Gaza, says he firmly believes that he had tremendous influence for good with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas because he was an Orthodox Jew. If so, I think it would be disgusting – and he shouldn’t have had the job in the first place. Because we know one absolute thing for certain about that conflict, which is that it’s been made infinitely worse by the monotheisms. If it were only a national and territorial dispute, it would have been solved by now. But his self-satisfaction in saying so, even if it were true, would turn me even more against him.
*1 Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking Adult, 2006).
*2 Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962): Swiss Islamic academic and writer; Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University.
*3 Bill Donohue (b. 1947): US sociologist; President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
*4 Andres Serrano (b. 1950): US artist and photographer.
*5 The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) by British artist Christopher Ofili (b. 1968).
*6 Daniel Barker (b. 1949): US atheist activist and former Christian preacher; joint President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Dan Barker’s collection was one of the strands later woven into ‘The Clergy Project’: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clergy_Project.
*7 Francis Collins (b. 1950): US geneticist and physician; Director of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.
*9 Graham Greene (1904–91): English novelist; converted to Catholicism just before his marriage; later described himself as a ‘Catholic atheist’.
*10 Francis Collins, The Language of God (New York: Free Press, 2006).
*11 John Fenton (1921–2008): Anglican priest and theologian; Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, 1978–91.
*12 Jerry Falwell (1933–2007): US Southern Baptist pastor and evangelist; co-founder in 1979 of the Moral Majority.
*13 Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (1910–97), known as Mother Teresa: Catholic nun and missionary; founder in 1950 of the order of the ‘Missionaries of Charity’.
*14 Louis Walcott, later Farrakhan (b. 1933): US black nationalist and leader of the US religious group Nation of Islam.
*15 Alister McGrath (b. 1953): Northern Irish priest and theologian; Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University.
*16 ‘Certum est, quia impossibile’: De Carne Christi, 5.
*17 See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1556131/Floods-are-judgment-on-society-say-bishops.html, in which the Rt Rev. Graham Dow (b. 1942), Bishop of Carlisle 2000–9, is quoted to this effect.
*18 James Jones (b. 1948): Anglican priest; Bishop of Liverpool 1998–2013.
*19 Colin Slee (1945–2010): Anglican cleric; Provost of Southwark from 1994; Dean from 2000 to his death.
*20 Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956): US writer and scholar of American English.
*21 William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925): US Democratic politician and orator; anti-evolution activist, representing the World Christian Fundamentals Association at the Scopes trial of 1925.
*22 Noam Chomsky (b. 1928): US linguist and multidisciplinary scholar; highly influential in study of mind and language.
*23 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. ix.
*24 John Cornwell (b. 1940): British academic and writer; works include Hitler’s Pope (1999), a critical work on Pope Pius XII.
*25 In May 2005, British anti-war activist and MP George Galloway (who would debate with Christopher Hitchens in September on the Iraq War) was alleged to have profited from the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq, which he denied in testimony before a US Senate committee, saying: ‘I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader – and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one…’
*26 John Burdon Sanderson (J. B. S.) Haldane (1892–1964): British, later Indian, scientist and statistician.
*27 Victor Stenger (1935–2014): US particle physicist, philosopher and popular science writer. Works include God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist (New York: Prometheus, 2007), in which he came as close as anyone has done to saying that the existence of God has been disproved.
*28 Dinesh D’Souza (b. 1961): US Indian political commentator, writer and film-maker; president of The King’s College, a Christian school in New York, 2010–12.
*29 Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington DC: Regnery, 2007).
*30 Michael Shermer (b. 1954): US science writer and historian of science; founder of the Skeptics Society. For ‘Michael Shermer decodes the Bible Code’ (23 July 2007), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk3VgQgxiqE.
*31 Hugh Montefiore (1920–2005): English Anglican priest and theologian; Bishop of Kingston, 1970–8; Bishop of Birmingham, 1978–1987.
*32 Said to have been J. B. S. Haldane’s response when asked what could shake his belief in evolution.
*33 James Wolfensohn (b. 1933): Australian American lawyer, financier and economist; president of the World Bank Group, 1995–2005; UN/Quartet special envoy for Gaza disengagement, 2005–6.