PART II
HARRIS: Two issues converge here. One is the question, ‘What do we want to accomplish?’ What do we reasonably think we can accomplish? And then there’s this article of faith that circulates, unfortunately, even among people of our viewpoint, that you can’t argue anyone out of their beliefs.
So is this a completely fatuous exercise? Or can we actually win a war of ideas with people? Judging from my e-mail, we can. I’m constantly getting e-mail from people who have lost their faith and were, in effect, argued out of it. And the straw that broke that camel’s back was either one of our books, or some other process of reasoning, or the incompatibility between what they knew to be true and what they were told by their faith. I think we have to highlight the fact that it’s possible for people to be shown the contradictions internal to their faith, or the contradiction between their faith and what we’ve come to know to be true about the universe. The process can take minutes or months or years, but they have to renounce their superstition in the face of what they now know to be true.
DAWKINS: I was having an argument with a very sophisticated biologist who’s a brilliant expositor of evolution and still believes in God.*1 I said, ‘How can you? What’s this all about?’ And he said, ‘I accept all your rational arguments. However, it’s faith.’ And then he said this very significant phrase to me: ‘There’s a reason that it’s called faith!’ He said it very decisively, very – almost – aggressively: ‘There’s a reason that it’s called faith.’ And that was, to him, the absolute knock-down clincher. You can’t argue with it, because it’s faith. And he said it proudly and defiantly, rather than in any sort of apologetic way.
HITCHENS: Well, you get it all the time in North America from people who say you’ve got to read William James*2 and to be able to judge other people’s subjective experiences, which is something that’s by definition impossible to do. ‘If it’s real to them, why can’t you respect it?’ This wouldn’t be accepted in any other field of argument at all. The impression people are under is the critical thing about them.
I had a debate with a very senior Presbyterian in Orange County. I asked him – because we were talking about biblical literalism, of which he wasn’t an exponent – but I asked him, ‘Well, what about the graves opening at the time of the Crucifixion, according to Matthew? And everyone getting out of their graves in Jerusalem and walking around greeting old friends in the city?’ I was going to ask him, ‘Doesn’t that rather cheapen the idea of the Resurrection of Jesus?’ But he mistook my purpose: he thought I wanted to know if he believed that had happened. And he said that as a historian, which he also was, he was inclined to doubt it, but that as a Presbyterian minister he thought it was true. Well, all right then. See, for me, it was enough that I got him to say that. I said, ‘In that case, I rest my case. I don’t want to say any more to you now. You’ve said all I could say.’
HARRIS: Well, there’s one other chip I’d like to put on the table here. There’s the phenomenon of someone like Francis Collins, or the biologist you just mentioned – someone who obviously has enough of the facts on board, and enough of a scientific education, to know better and still does not know better, or professes not to know better.
I think we have a cultural problem here. This was brought home to me at one talk I gave. A physics professor came up to me at the end of the talk and told me that he had brought one of his graduate students who was a devout Christian and who was quite shaken by my talk, and all I got of this report was that this was the first time his faith had ever been explicitly challenged. So it’s apparently true to say that you can go through the curriculum of becoming a scientist and never have your faith challenged, because it’s taboo to do so.
And now we have engineers in the Muslim world who can build nuclear bombs and who still think it’s plausible that you can get to paradise and get seventy-two virgins. And we have people like Francis Collins who think that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus because you’re in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist.
HITCHENS: Well, according to our friend Pervez Hoodbhoy,*3 the great Pakistani physicist, there are people who think you can use the jinns, the devils, and harness their power for a reactor.
HARRIS: It’s almost tempting to fund such a project.
DENNETT: I think it may be easier than we’re supposing to shake people’s faith. There’s been a moratorium on this for a long time. We’re just the beginning of a new wave of explicit attempts to shake people’s faith, and it’s bearing fruit. And the obstacles, it seems to me, are not that we don’t have the facts or the arguments. It’s the strategic reasons for not professing it, not admitting it, not admitting it to yourself, not admitting it in public because your family’s going to view it as a betrayal. You’re just embarrassed to admit that you were taken in by this for so long.
It takes, I think, tremendous courage to just declare that you’ve given that all up. And if we can find ways to help people find that courage and give them some examples of people who have done this and they’re doing just fine – they may have lost the affections of a parent or something like that. They may have hurt some family members – but still I think it’s a good thing to encourage them. I don’t think we should assume that we can’t do this. I think we can.
DAWKINS: Yes, and it’s almost patronizing to suggest that we couldn’t. On the other hand, I think we all know people who seem to manage this kind of split-brain feat of, as Sam says, believing one thing on a Sunday and then something totally contradictory, or incompatible, in the rest of the week. And there’s nothing, I suppose, neurologically wrong with that; there’s no reason why one shouldn’t have a brain that’s split in that kind of way.
DENNETT: But it is unstable in a certain way. And I’m sure you’re right that people do this, and they’re very good at it. And they do it by deflecting attention from it. Let’s start focusing attention—
DAWKINS: But how can you live with a contradiction in your—?
DENNETT: By forgetting that you’re doing this and by not attending to it. I think what I would love to do is to invent a memorable catchphrase or term that would rise unbidden in their minds when they caught themselves doing that. And then they would think, ‘Oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh, right! And they think this is somehow illicit.’ Just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they’re doing.
HITCHENS: I’m afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit.
DENNETT: You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance?
HITCHENS: No, practising it. Take the case of someone who’s a member of MoveOn.org.*4 They think the United States government is a brutal, militaristic, imperial regime. It crushes the poor and invades other people’s countries. But they pay their taxes, and it’s very, very rare that they don’t. They send their children to [public] school. They do their stuff. You know, they don’t act all the time as if 10 per cent of what they believe is true. Partly because it would be impossible. Say, with people in the 1950s, members of the John Birch Society, who thought President Eisenhower was a communist. OK? You get up in the morning, you believe that: the White House is run by the Kremlin. But then you have to go and get the groceries, and do all that stuff.
HARRIS: Too many commitments. Yes.
DAWKINS: You still have to go and do it.
HITCHENS: But you absolutely wouldn’t be challengeable in your belief. It’d be very, very important to you. But there’d be no way in your life, your real life, of vindicating or practising the opinion that you have. And I’m sure that the same is true of people who say, ‘Well, I shouldn’t really prefer one child to another, or one parent to another, but I do. I’m just not going to act as if I do.’ All kinds of things like this. Senator Craig*5 saying he’s not gay. Thinking in his own mind that he’s absolutely sure he’s not, but he can’t manage his life by saying he is or he isn’t.
So, a question I wanted to ask was this. We should ask ourselves what our real objective is. Do we in fact wish to see a world without faith? I think I would have to say that I don’t. I don’t either expect to, or wish to, see that.
HARRIS: What do you mean by faith?
HITCHENS: Faith, as often as it’s cut down or superseded or discredited, replicates, it seems to me, extraordinarily fast, I think for Freudian reasons – principally to do with the fear of extinction or annihilation.
HARRIS: You mean faith in supernatural paradigms?
HITCHENS: Yes. Wish thinking. And then the other thing is: would I want this argument to come to an end, with all having conceded, ‘Hitchens really won that round. Now nobody in the world believes in God’?
Now, apart from being unable to picture this, [Laughter] I’m not even completely certain that it’s what I want. I think it is rather to be considered the foundation of all arguments about epistemology, philosophy, biology, and so on – that it’s the thing you have to always be arguing against. The other explanation.
DAWKINS: I find that an extraordinary thing to say. I don’t understand what you’re saying. I mean, I understand you’re saying that it will never work, but I don’t understand why you wouldn’t wish it.
HITCHENS: Because – I think, a bit like the argument between Huxley*6 and Wilberforce*7 or Darrow*8 and William Jennings Bryan – I want it to go on.
DAWKINS: Because it’s interesting.
HITCHENS: I want our side to get more refined and theirs to be ever more exposed. But I can’t see [this happening] with one hand clapping.
HARRIS: You don’t want it to go on with the jihadists?
HITCHENS: No, but I don’t have a difference of opinion with the jihadists.
HARRIS: Well, you do, in terms of the legitimacy of their project.
HITCHENS: No, not really. There’s nothing to argue about with that. I mean, there it’s a simple matter: I want them to be extirpated. That’s a purely primate response with me – recognizing the need to destroy an enemy in order to assure my own survival. I have no interest at all in what they think. We haven’t yet come to your question about Islam, but I have no interest at all in what jihadists think. I’m only interested in refining methods of destroying them. A task for which, by the way, one gets very little secular support.
HARRIS: Yes, that’s notable.
HITCHENS: 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.*9 Because on that, they know that there’s no danger.
DENNETT: I think that because we find the idea of exterminating these people is abhorrent, and we think that besides, it will—
HITCHENS: No, I said ‘extirpating’.
DENNETT: Extirpate.
HITCHENS: Complete destruction of the jihadist forces. Extermination, I think, applies more to a species.
DAWKINS: But, Christopher, going back to your point: It sounds as though you like argument. You like having – it’s almost the theatre of having – an intellectual argument, which would be lost.
HITCHENS: Well, I would rather say ‘the dialectic’, Richard. In other words, one learns from arguing with other people. And I think all of us around this table have probably enhanced or improved our own capacities as reasoners in this context.
DAWKINS: But 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 practise, and we can argue and reason about that. And there’s plenty of arguments, that are really worthwhile arguments, to be had.
HITCHENS: It will 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.
DAWKINS: Well, that’s what—
HITCHENS: You can tell a lot, in my view, about people from which of these views they take. And as we all know, only one of those views makes sense. But how do we know that? Because we have to contrast it with the opposite one, which is not going to disappear.
HARRIS: Let me make an analogy here. You could have said the same thing about witchcraft at some point in recent history.
HITCHENS: Yes.
HARRIS: You could say that every culture has had a belief in witches, a belief in the efficacy of magic spells, witchcraft is just 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 for ever. And yet witchcraft has vanished, almost without exception. I mean you can find certain communities where—
HITCHENS: Not at all. Not at all. Witchcraft is completely ineradicable and spreads like weeds, often under animists and Christians.
DENNETT: Not in the Western world.
HARRIS: I mean frank witchcraft. The witchcraft of the evil eye, and instead of medicine you have—
HITCHENS: You think you’ve got rid of that?
HARRIS: Fundamentally, we’ve gotten rid of that. Yes.
DAWKINS: In any case, don’t you want to get rid of it?
HITCHENS: There’s currently a campaign to get Wiccans registered to be buried in Arlington Cemetery.
HARRIS: I’m talking about a willingness to kill your neighbours because you think there’s some causal mechanism by which they, through their evil intent, could have destroyed your crops psychically, or cast an evil eye upon your child. This comes with ignorance of medical science.
HITCHENS: Yes, it does.
HARRIS: You don’t know why people get sick, and you suspect your neighbour of ill intent, and then witchcraft fills the void there.
HITCHENS: I wouldn’t say in such a case that one didn’t wish to be without it, that we’ve lost something interesting to argue with.
HARRIS: But we’re not dealing with the claims of witches intruding upon medical practices. Don’t go to alternative medicine and acupuncture here. I’m talking about real witchcraft, medieval witchcraft.
HITCHENS: Actually I was about to do that very thing. And the Washington Post publishes horoscopes every day.
HARRIS: Astrology is yet another matter.
DENNETT: Yes, but astrology is a pale—
HITCHENS: Let’s take them out of it. Astrology is not going to be eradicated.
DENNETT: OK. Well, but it doesn’t need to be eradicated.
DAWKINS: 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.
HITCHENS: Yes, I think that is in fact what I want.
DENNETT: 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 encourage the evolution of avirulence. We want to get rid of the harmful kind. 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 relegate the other enthusiasms to the status of astrology, I’d be happy.
HITCHENS: Well, look, you don’t like my answer. But I think the question should be – it is going to be asked of us; it was asked of me today, actually, on TV. They said, ‘Do you wish no one was going to church this morning in the United States?’
DENNETT: What’s your answer?
HITCHENS: Well, I’ve given mine, and Richard has disagreed. But the answer I gave this morning was that 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. And I certainly didn’t say that I thought if they would only listen to me they’d stop going, OK? So, there are two questions here.
But I’d love to hear: would you like to say that you look forward to a world where no one has any faith?
DAWKINS: Yes, I want to answer this. Whether it’s astrology or religion or anything else, I want to live in a world where people think sceptically 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 OK 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 jinns and supernatural creators and supernatural interferers. I think you could make an aesthetic case that you’d want to get rid of faith.
HITCHENS: I could not possibly agree with you more.
DENNETT: But let’s talk about priorities. If we could just get rid of some of the most pernicious and noxious excesses, what would be the triumphs you 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?
DAWKINS: Well, the present savage Islam is actually rather recent, isn’t it?
DENNETT: You have to go back quite a way, I think, to get the—
HARRIS: Only up to a point. And again, whether or not we’re equipped to deliver it, we’re not the most persuasive mouthpieces for this criticism. It takes someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali,*10 or a Muslim scholar, someone like Ibn Warraq,*11 to authentically criticize 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 distinct historical periods in the history of Islam. You have a caliphate, or a Muslim country where Islam reigns and is unmolested from the outside, and then Islam can be as totalitarian and happy with itself as possible, and you don’t see the inherent liabilities of its creed. The political scientist Samuel Huntington*12 said, ‘Islam has bloody borders.’ It’s at the borders that we’re noticing this problem; it’s at the borders of Islam and modernity. There is a 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.
DENNETT: But what about women in that world?
DAWKINS: Exactly. The suffering of women within those borders.
DENNETT: Even in the best of times.
HARRIS: Of course.
HITCHENS: But there’s obviously some kind of syncretism. We know quite a lot now. There have been some wonderful books, María Menocal’s book on Andalucía, for example,*13 – on periods when Islamic civilization 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 post-Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Muslims behaving far better than the Christians, either Catholic or Orthodox. They were the victims of religious massacres and not the perpetrators of them, and they 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 Muslim atheists.
DENNETT: Wow!
HITCHENS: In Sarajevo, you could, yes. 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.
DENNETT: In all religions.
HITCHENS: Must be so. The Creator whose will can’t be challenged. Our comments on his will are unimportant. His will is absolute, 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. This is the last. 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.’
HARRIS: ‘And we do claim that there is no distance between theology and civil matters.’
HITCHENS: That is the worst thing in our world. In our world, surely the worst thing that anyone can say is, ‘No further inquiries needed. You’ve already got all you need to know. All else is commentary.’ That is the most sinister and dangerous thing, and that is a claim Islam makes that others don’t make in quite the same way.
DENNETT: Well, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment on that point.
HITCHENS: There’s no regard for Islam in Christianity or Judaism, but there is [regard for these other faiths] in Islam. They accept all the bits of Judaism. They love Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son. They love all that. They absolutely esteem the Virgin Birth, the most nonsensical bits of Christianity. They think all that is great. ‘You’re all welcome to join, but we have the final word.’ That’s deadly. And I think our existence is incompatible with that preaching.
DENNETT: Let me just play devil’s advocate for a moment, so at least we’re clear what the position is.
HITCHENS: I’d rather speak for the devil pro bono myself. [Laughter]
DENNETT: We can all speak for the devil. I’m sure a lot of people think we’re doing just that.
I, for one, think that the fact that something is true is not quite sufficient for spreading it about, or for trying to discover it. The idea that there are things that we should just not try to find out is an idea that I take seriously. And I think we at least have to examine the proposition that there’s such a thing as knowing more than is good for us.
Now, if you accept that so far, then a possibility we have to take seriously – even when we reject it, we should reject it having taken it seriously – is the Muslim idea that indeed the West has simply gone way too far, that there’s lots of knowledge that isn’t good for us. It’s knowledge that we were better off without. And the fact is that many Muslims would like to turn the clock back. They can’t, of course. But I have a certain sympathy for a Muslim who says, ‘Well, yeah, the cat’s out of the bag. It’s too late. It’s a tragedy. You in the West have exposed truths to yourselves, and now you’re forcing them on us – truths that the species would be better off not knowing.’
HITCHENS: I’m absolutely riveted by what you say. I’d really love an instance, in theory or practice, of something you think we could know but could forbid ourselves to know. Because that is harder for me to imagine in a world without faith, I must say.
HARRIS: Well, you brought up the bell curve. If there were reliable differences in intelligence between races or genders—
HITCHENS: But I don’t think any of us here do think that that’s the case. You must have thought of something you could believe but wish you didn’t know.
DENNETT: Oh, I don’t think it’s hard to dream up things which, if they were true, it might be better for the human race to go on not knowing them.
HITCHENS: Could you concretize it just a little more? I’m completely fascinated.
DAWKINS: The hypothetical is one thing. But Christopher’s asking, ‘Have you ever suppressed something that—?’
HITCHENS: Was there something you had in mind?
DENNETT: No. No, I haven’t.
DAWKINS: No.
HITCHENS: Can you imagine yourself doing so, by the way? I can’t.
DENNETT: Oh, I can imagine it. I hope it never comes up.
HARRIS: Take the synthesizing of bioweapons. Should Nature publish the recipe for smallpox?
DENNETT: Yes, exactly. There’s all those—
HITCHENS: Well, all right. But that wouldn’t be a knowledge of which we should remain innocent. That would be more like a capacity.
HARRIS: Certainly you can conceive of a circumstance where someone can seek knowledge the only conceivable application of which would be unethical, or the dissemination of which would put power in the wrong hands. But, actually, you brought up something which I think is crucial here. Because it’s not so much the spread of seditious truths to Islam or to the rest of the world that I think we’re guilty of in the eyes of our opponents. It’s that we don’t honour facts that aren’t easily quantified or easily discussed in science. The classic retort to all of us is, ‘Prove to me that you love your wife’ – as though this were a knock-down argument against atheism: you can’t prove it. Well, if you unpack that a little bit, you can prove it. You can demonstrate it. We know what we mean by ‘love’. But there is this domain of the sacred that is not easily captured by science, and scientific discourse has ceded it to religious discourse.
DENNETT: Well, and artistic discourse.
HARRIS: Yes.
DENNETT: Which is not religious, necessarily.
HARRIS: But I would argue it’s not even well captured by art, in the same way that love is not well captured by art. And compassion isn’t. You can represent them in art, but they’re not reducible to art. You don’t go into the museum and find compassion in its purest form. And I think there’s something about the way we, as atheists, merely dismiss the bogus claims of religious people that convinces religious people that there’s something we’re missing. And I think we have to be sensitive to this.
HITCHENS: Absolutely. That’s why they bring up the argument about when has secularism ever built anything like Durham Cathedral or Chartres, or produced devotional painting or the music of—
DENNETT: Bach.
HITCHENS: I guess it would have to be Bach, yes.
HARRIS: But I think we have answers to that.
HITCHENS: Yes, we do.
HARRIS: And you provide a very good answer: If there had been secular patronage of the arts at that point, then (1) we can’t know that Michelangelo was actually a believer, because the consequences of professing your unbelief back then was death. And (2), if we had a secular organization to commission Michelangelo, we would have all that secular artwork.
HITCHENS: I didn’t actually say that the corollary held.
HARRIS: Which?
HITCHENS: I think it’s true that we can’t know, with devotional painting and sculpture, whether the patronage did or didn’t have a lot to do with it. But I can’t hear myself saying, ‘If only you had a secular painter, he would have done work just as good.’ I don’t know why – and I’m quite happy to find that I don’t know why – I can’t quite hear myself saying it.
DAWKINS: What? That Michelangelo, if he’d been commissioned to do the ceiling of a museum of science, wouldn’t have produced something just as wonderful?
HITCHENS: In some way, I’m reluctant to affirm that, yes.
DAWKINS: Really? I find it very, very easy to believe that.
HITCHENS: That could be a difference between us. I mean, with devotional poetry – I don’t know very much about painting and architecture, and some of the devotional architecture, like, say, St Peter’s, I don’t like anyway and knowing that it was built by a special sale of indulgences doesn’t help, either. With devotional poetry, like, let us say, John Donne*14 or George Herbert,*15 I find it very hard to imagine that it’s faked or done for a patron.
DAWKINS: Yes, I think that’s fair enough.
HITCHENS: It would be very improbable that people wrote poetry like that to please anyone.
DAWKINS: But in any case, what conclusion would you draw? If Donne’s devotional poetry is wonderful, so what? That doesn’t show that it represents truth in any sense.
HITCHENS: Not in the least. My favourite devotional poem is Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’.*16 One of the best poems ever written. It exactly expresses… I wish I had it here; well, actually I do have it here; if you like I can read it. But I wouldn’t trust anyone who believed any more, or any less, than Larkin does when he goes to a wayside Gothic church in the English countryside. Who felt – I don’t say ‘believed’; I shouldn’t say ‘believed’ – who felt any more than he does. He’s an atheist. Or who felt any less. There’s something serious about this poem. And something written into the human personality as well as the landscape. But it goes without saying that it says nothing about the truth of religion.
DENNETT: I don’t see how this is anything other than a special case. Other special cases of which would be that you just couldn’t – I can’t think of a perfect example – Only by being lost at sea for two years in a boat, say, and surviving, that’s the only way you could conceivably write an account of that. It could not be fiction. And it’s glorious, wonderful art. And it’s right. That can be true, and we just accept it. That’s true. And Donne’s poetry: only very extreme circumstances could make it possible, and we can be grateful, perhaps, that those extreme circumstances existed and made it possible.
HARRIS: In his case, yes. But you wouldn’t recommend being lost at sea to everyone.
DENNETT: No, no.
HITCHENS: No. I wouldn’t recommend the worldview in ‘Death Be Not Proud’*17 to anyone, either. The sonnet is wonderful, but it’s complete gibberish if you look only at the words. It’s the most extraordinary gibberish, if you look only at the words. But there’s an x factor involved, which I’m quite happy to both assume will persist and will need to be confronted.
HARRIS: Right. You raised this issue, though, of whether or not we would wish the churches empty on Sundays, and I think you were uncertain whether you would. And I think I would agree. I would want a different church. I would want a different ritual, motivated by different ideas. But I think there’s a place for the sacred in our lives, but under some construal that doesn’t presuppose any bullshit. I think there’s a usefulness to seeking profundity as a matter of our attention.
HITCHENS: Sure.
HARRIS: And our neglect of this area, as atheists, at times makes even our craziest opponents seem wiser than we are. And it takes someone like Sayyid Qutb,*18 who is as crazy as it gets – he was Osama bin Laden’s favourite philosopher. He came out to Greeley, Colorado, around 1950 and spent a year in America and noticed that his American hosts were spending all their time gossiping about movie stars and trimming their hedges and coveting each other’s automobiles, and he came to believe that America, or the West, was so trivial in its preoccupations and so materialistic that it had to be destroyed. Now, this shouldn’t be construed as my giving any credence to his worldview, but he had a point. There is something trivial and horrible about the day-to-day fascinations of most people, most of the time. There is a difference between using your attention wisely, in a meaningful way, and perpetual distraction. And traditionally only religion has tried to enunciate that difference. And I think that’s a lapse in our—
DAWKINS: I think you’ve made that point, and we’ve accepted it, Sam. Going back to the thing about whether we’d like to see churches empty: I think I would like to see churches empty. What I wouldn’t like to see, however, is ignorance of the Bible.
HITCHENS: No, very right!
DAWKINS: Because you cannot understand literature without knowing the Bible. You can’t understand art, you can’t understand music, there are all sorts of things you can’t understand, for historical reasons – but those historical reasons you can’t wipe out. They’re there. And so even if you don’t actually go to church and pray, you’ve got to understand what it meant to people to pray, and why they did it, and what these verses in the Bible mean, and what this—
HARRIS: But is it only that? Just the historical appreciation of our ancestors’ ignorance?
DAWKINS: You can more than just appreciate it. You can lose yourself in it, just as you can lose yourself in a work of fiction without actually believing that the characters are real.
DENNETT: But you’re sure you want to see the churches empty? You can’t imagine a variety of churches, maybe by their lights an extremely denatured church: a church which has rituals and loyalty and purpose and music, and they sing the songs and they do the rituals, but where the irrationality has simply been laundered out.
DAWKINS: Oh, OK, so you go to those places for funerals and weddings—
DENNETT: Yes, and also—
DAWKINS: —and you have beautiful poetry and music.
DENNETT: And also perhaps for—
DAWKINS: Group solidarity.
DENNETT: Group solidarity, to create some project which is hard to get off the ground otherwise.
HITCHENS: I think there’s one more tiny thing. I haven’t been tempted to go to church since I was a very small boy, but one reason that makes it very easy to keep me out of church is the use of the New English Bible.
DAWKINS: Oh, and how! Yes! [Laughter]
HITCHENS: There’s really no point in going. I can’t see how anyone does go, and I can see why people stay away. They’ve thrown away—
HARRIS: All the poetry. Yes.
HITCHENS: —a pearl richer than all their tribe.
DAWKINS: Absolutely.
HITCHENS: They don’t even know what they’ve got. It’s terrible. If I were a lapsed Catholic and I brooded about how I wanted my funeral to be, which is not something I’d—
DENNETT: You’d only want the Latin Mass.
HITCHENS: Yes!
DENNETT: Absolutely.
DAWKINS: But there’s another issue there, which, of course, is that when it becomes intelligible, the nonsense becomes more transparent, and so if it’s in Latin, it can survive much better. It’s sort of like a camouflaged insect. It can get through the barriers because you can’t see it. And when it’s translated into not just English but modern English, you can see it for what it is.
DENNETT: But now, seriously: Do you therefore delight in the fact that churches are modernizing their texts and using the—
DAWKINS: No, I don’t. It’s an aesthetic point. No, I don’t.
HITCHENS: That’s the worst of both worlds.
DENNETT: That’s what it seems to me. Yes.
HITCHENS: And we should be grateful for it. We didn’t do this to them. [Laughter]
DENNETT: That’s right. We didn’t impose this on them, they did it to themselves.
HARRIS: We weren’t clever enough.
HITCHENS: We don’t blow up Shia mosques, either. We don’t blow up the Bamiyan Buddhas. We don’t desecrate. We would, for the reasons given by Sophocles in Antigone, have a natural resistance to profanity and desecration. We leave it to the pious to destroy churches and burn synagogues or blow up each other’s mosques. And I think that’s a point that we ought to, we might, spend more time making. Because I do think it is feared of us – which was my point to begin with – that we wish for a world that’s somehow empty of this echo of music and poetry and the numinous, and so forth. That we would be happy in a Brave New World. And, since I don’t think it’s true of any of us—
DAWKINS: No. No, it’s not.
DENNETT: No, definitely.
HITCHENS: I think it’s a point we might spend a bit more time making. That the howling wilderness of nothingness is much more likely to result from holy war or religious conflict or theocracy than it is from a proper secularism, which would therefore I think, have to not just allow or leave or tolerate or condescend to or patronize but actually, in a sense, welcome the persistence of something like faith. I feel I’ve put it better now than I did at the beginning.
HARRIS: Well, what do you mean by ‘something like faith’?
DENNETT: How like faith?
HITCHENS: Something like the belief that there must be more than we can know.
DENNETT: Well, that’s fine.
HARRIS: Dan Dennett believes that. That’s not faith.
DENNETT: Yes, sure!
HARRIS: We know there’s more than we presently know and are likely to know.
HITCHENS: That was my original point in saying that if we could find a way of enforcing the distinction between the numinous and the superstitious, we would be doing something culturally quite important. Richard and I debated at the Methodist Central Hall with Scruton*19 and that rather weird team who kept on saying – Scruton, particularly – ‘Well, what about good old Gothic spires,’ and so forth. I said, ‘Look, I wrote a book about the Parthenon. I’m intensely interested in it. I think everyone should go there, everyone should study it, and so forth. But everyone should abstain from the cult of Pallas Athena. Everyone should realize that probably what that beautiful sculptural frieze depicts may involve some human sacrifices. Athenian imperialism wasn’t all that pretty, even in the Age of Pericles.’ The great cultural project, in other words, may very well be to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic of religion while discarding the supernatural.
DENNETT: And I think acknowledging the evil that was part of its creation in the first place. That is, we can’t condone the beliefs and practices of the Aztecs, but we can stand in awe of, and want to preserve, their architecture and many other features of their culture. But not their practices [laughs] and not their beliefs.
DAWKINS: I was once a guest on a British radio programme called Desert Island Discs, where you have to choose the eight records which you’d take to a desert island and talk about them. And one of the ones I chose was Bach’s Mache dich, mein Herze, rein. Wonderful, wonderful sacred music.
DENNETT: Beautiful.
DAWKINS: And the woman questioning me couldn’t understand why I would wish to have this piece of music. Beautiful music, and its beauty is indeed enhanced by knowing what it means. But you don’t actually have to believe it; it’s like reading fiction.
DENNETT: Exactly.
DAWKINS: You can lose yourself in fiction, and be totally moved to tears by it, but nobody would ever say you’ve got to believe that this person existed or that the sadness that you feel really reflected something that actually happened.
HITCHENS: Yes. Like the Irish bishop who said that he’d read Gulliver’s Travels and for his part he didn’t believe a word of it.*20 [Laughter] It’s the best of locus classicus, I think – of all of that. Clearly, we’re not cultural vandals, but maybe we should think about why so many people suspect that that’s what we are. If I were to accept one criticism that these people make, or one suspicion that I suspect they harbour, or fear that they may have, I think that that might be the one: that it would be all chromium and steel and—
DENNETT: And no Christmas carols and no menorahs and no—
DAWKINS: Anybody who makes that criticism couldn’t possibly have read any one of our books.
DENNETT: Well, that’s another problem, too. And of course it isn’t just our books, it’s so many books. People don’t read them. They just read the reviews, and they decide that’s what the book is about.
HITCHENS: We’re about to have the Christmas wars again, of course; this being the last day of September. You can feel it all coming on. But whenever it comes up, when I go on any of these shows to discuss it, I say it was Oliver Cromwell*21 who cut down the Christmas trees and forbade… It was the Puritan Protestants, the ancestors of the American fundamentalists, who said Christmas would be blasphemy.
DAWKINS: Yes. It’s the Bamiyan Buddhas again.
HITCHENS: Do you at least respect your own traditions? Because I do. I think Cromwell was a great man in many other ways as well. Christmas is actually a pagan festival.
HARRIS: We were all outed with our Christmas trees last year.
DENNETT: Yes.
DAWKINS: I have not the slightest problem with Christmas trees.
DENNETT: We had our Christmas card, with our pictures of—
HITCHENS: It’s a good old Norse booze-up. And why the hell not?
DENNETT: Well, but it’s not just that.
HITCHENS: I like solstices as much as the next person.
DENNETT: We have an annual Christmas carol party, where we sing the music. And all the music with all the words, and not the secular Christmas stuff.
DAWKINS: And why not?
DENNETT: And it’s just glorious stuff. That part of the Christian story is fantastic – it’s just a beautiful tale! And you can love every inch of it without believing it.
DAWKINS: I once, at lunch, was next to the lady who was our opponent at that debate in London.
HITCHENS: Rabbi Neuberger.*22
DAWKINS: Rabbi Neuberger. And she asked me whether I said grace in New College when I happened to be senior fellow. And I said, ‘Of course I say grace. It’s a matter of simple courtesy.’ And she was furious that I should somehow be so hypocritical as to say grace. And I could only say, ‘Well, look, it may mean something to you, but it means absolutely nothing to me. This is a Latin formula which has some history, and I appreciate history.’ Freddie Ayer,*23 the philosopher, also used to say grace, and what he said was, ‘I won’t utter falsehoods but I have no objection to uttering meaningless statements.’ [Laughter]
HITCHENS: That’s very good. The Wykeham Professor.
DAWKINS: The Wykeham Professor, yes.
HITCHENS: Did we answer your question on Islam?
HARRIS: I don’t know. Well, I’ll ask a related question. Do you feel there’s any burden we have, as critics of religion, to be evenhanded in our criticism of religion, or is it fair to notice that there’s a spectrum of religious ideas and commitments and Islam is on one end of it and the Amish and the Jains and others are on another end, and there are real differences here that we have to take seriously.
DENNETT: Well, of course we have to take them seriously, but we don’t have to do the network-balancing trick all the time. There are plenty of people taking care of pointing out the good stuff, and the benign stuff. And we can acknowledge that and then concentrate on the problems. That’s what critics do. Again, if we were writing books about the pharmaceutical industry, would we have to spend equal time on all the good they do? Or could we specialize in the problems? I think it’s very clear.
DAWKINS: I think Sam’s asking more about—
HARRIS: Well, we could criticize Merck if they were especially egregious compared to some other company. If we were focusing on the pharmaceutical industry, not all pharmaceutical businesses would be culpable to the same degree.
DENNETT: Yes, right, well, so then the question is what? Is there something wrong with just—
DAWKINS: Sam’s asking about whether we should be evenhanded in criticizing the different religions, and you’re talking about evenhandedness regarding good versus bad.
HITCHENS: Whether all religions are equally bad.
DAWKINS: Yes, whether Islam is worse than Christianity.
HARRIS: It seems to me that we fail to enlist the friends we have on this subject when we balance this. It’s a media tactic, and it’s almost an ontological commitment of atheism, to say that all faith claims are in some sense equivalent. The media says the Muslims have their extremists and we have our extremists. There are jihadists in the Middle East and we have people killing abortion doctors. And that’s just not an honest equation. The mayhem that’s going on under the aegis of Islam just cannot be compared to the fact that we have two people a decade who kill abortionists. And this is one of the problems I have with the practice of atheism: it hobbles us when we have to seem to spread the light of criticism equally in all directions at all moments, whereas we could, on some questions, have a majority of religious people agree with us.
A majority of people in the United States clearly agree that the doctrine of martyrdom in Islam is appalling and not at all benign, and liable to get a lot of people killed, and that it is worthy of criticism. Likewise the doctrine that souls live in Petri dishes: even most Christians, 70 per cent of Americans, don’t want to believe that, in light of the promise of embryonic stem-cell research. So it seems to me that once we focus on particulars, we have a real strength in numbers, and yet when we stand on the ramparts of atheism and say it’s all bogus, we lose 90 per cent of our neighbours.
DAWKINS: Well, I’m sure that’s right. On the other hand, my concern is actually not so much with the evils of religion as with whether it’s true. And I really do care passionately about the fact of the matter: is there, as a matter of fact, a supernatural creator of this universe? And I really care about that bogus belief. And so, although I also care about the evils of religion, I am prepared to be evenhanded, because they all make this claim, it seems to me, equally.
HITCHENS: I would never give up the claim that all religions are equally false. And for that reason: because they’re false in preferring faith to reason. And latently at least, they’re equally dangerous.
DAWKINS: Equally false, but surely not quite equally dangerous. Because—
HITCHENS: No. Latently, I think so.
DAWKINS: Latently, maybe. Yes.
HITCHENS: Because of the surrender of the mind. The eagerness to discard the only thing we’ve got that makes us higher primates: the faculty of reason. That’s always deadly.
DENNETT: I’m not sure that—
DAWKINS: It’s potentially dangerous.
HITCHENS: The Amish can’t hurt me, but they can sure hurt the people who live in their community if they have a little totalitarian system.
HARRIS: But not quite in the same way.
HITCHENS: The Dalai Lama claims to be a god king, a hereditary monarch, an inherited god, in essence. It’s a most repulsive possible idea. And he runs a crummy little dictatorship in Dharamsala. And praises the nuclear tests. It’s limited only by his own limited scope – the same evil is present.
HARRIS: But if you added jihad to that, you’d be more concerned.
HITCHENS: Well, look, every time I’ve ever debated with Islamists they’ve all said, ‘You’ve just offended a billion Muslims,’ as if they spoke for them. As if, and there’s a definite threat to this, a menace, a military tone to what they say. In other words, if they’d said, ‘You’ve just offended me as a Muslim,’ that doesn’t sound quite the same, does it? If they were the only one who believed in the prophet Mohammed. No, no, it’s a billion. And, by the way, what’s implied in that is, ‘Watch out!’ I don’t care. If there was only one person who believed that the prophet Mohammed had been given dictation by the Archangel Gabriel, I’d still say what I was saying.
HARRIS: Right, but you wouldn’t lie awake at night.
HITCHENS: And it would be just as dangerous that they believed that. Yes, it would. Because it could spread. The belief could become more general.
HARRIS: But in the case of Islam, it has spread, and it’s spreading, and so its danger is not only potential but actual.
DAWKINS: Yes. I can see no contradiction. You’re talking about different things.
HITCHENS: Yes, but over space and time, all that, I think, tremendously evens out. I mean, I didn’t expect, and I’m sure neither did you, that in the sixties there would be such a threat from Jewish fundamentalism. Relatively small numbers, but in a very important place, a strategic place, in deciding to try and bring on the Messiah by stealing other people’s land and trying to bring on the end. It’s numerically extremely small, but the consequences that it’s had have been absolutely calamitous. We didn’t use to think actually that Judaism was a threat in that way at all, until the Zionist movement annexed the Messianic, or fused with it – because the Messianists didn’t use to be Zionists, as you know. So you never know what’s coming next.
HARRIS: Well, that I certainly agree with.
HITCHENS: And I agree that I’m not likely to have my throat cut at the supermarket by a Quaker. But the Quakers do say, ‘We preach non-resistance to evil.’ That’s as wicked as a position as you could possibly have.
HARRIS: Given the right context, yes.
HITCHENS: What could be more revolting than that? Saying you see evil and violence and cruelty and you don’t fight it.
DENNETT: Yes, they’re free riders.
HITCHENS: Yes. Read Franklin*24 on what the Quakers were like at the crucial moment, in Philadelphia, when there had to be a battle over freedom, and see why people despised them. I would have then said that Quakerism was actually quite a serious danger to the United States. So, it’s a matter of space and time. But no, they’re all equally rotten, false, dishonest, corrupt, humourless and dangerous, in the last analysis.
HARRIS: There’s one point you made here that I think we should say a little more about, which is that you can never quite anticipate the danger of unreason. When your mode of interacting with others and the universe is to affirm truths you’re in no position to affirm, the liabilities of that are potentially infinite. To take a case that I raised a moment ago, stem-cell research, you don’t know in advance that the idea that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception will turn out to be a dangerous idea. It seems totally benign, until you invent something like stem-cell research, where it stands in the way of incredibly promising, life-saving research. You can almost never foresee how many lives dogmatism is going to cost, because its conflicts with reality just erupt.
HITCHENS: Well, that’s why I think the moment where everything went wrong is the moment when the Jewish Hellenists were defeated by the Jewish Messianists – the celebration now benignly known as Hanukkah. That’s where the human race took its worst turn. A few people re-established the animal sacrifices, the circumcision and the cult of Yahweh over Hellenism and philosophy. And Christianity’s a plagiarism of that. Christianity would never have happened if that hadn’t happened and nor would Islam. I have no doubt there would have been other crazed cults and so forth, but there might have been a chance to not destroy Hellenistic civilization.
HARRIS: You’d still have the Dalai Lama to worry about.
HITCHENS: Well, it’s not a matter of numbers, it’s a matter of, if I may say so, memes and infections. I would have certainly said in the 1930s that the Catholic Church was the most deadly organization, because of its alliance with fascism, which was explicit and open and sordid. Much the most dangerous church. But I would not now say that the Pope is the most dangerous of the religious authorities. No question that Islam is the most dangerous religion, and probably because it doesn’t have a papacy that can tell it to stop something, make an edict saying—
HARRIS: Yes. No top-down control.
HITCHENS: By all means, yes. But I would still have to say that Judaism is the root of the problem.
HARRIS: Although it’s only the root of the problem in light of the Muslim fixation on that land. If the Muslims didn’t care about Palestine, we could have the settlers trying to usher in the Messiah all they want. There would have been no issue. It’s only the conflict of claims on that real estate. Both sides are at fault, but the only reason why 200,000 settlers could potentially precipitate a global conflict is because there are a billion people who really care whether those settlers tear down the Al-Aqsa mosque and—
HITCHENS: Which it’s their dream to do. Because they have the belief that one part of the globe is holier than another – than which no belief could be more insane or irrational or indecent. And so just a few of them, holding that view and having the power to make it real, is enough to risk a civilizational conflict, which civilization could lose. I think we’ll be very lucky if we get through this conflict without a nuclear exchange.
HARRIS: That leads us to a very good topic. What are our most grandiose hopes and fears here? What do you think could be accomplished in the lifetime of our children? What do you think the stakes actually are?
DENNETT: And how would you get there?
HARRIS: And is there something we could engineer, apart from mere criticism? Are there practical steps? With a billion dollars, what could we do to effect some significant change of ideas?
HITCHENS: I feel myself on the losing side politically and on the winning side intellectually.
DENNETT: You don’t see anything to do?
HITCHENS: In the current zeitgeist, I don’t think we would be accused of undue conceit if we said of ourselves, or didn’t mind it being said of us, that we’ve been opening and carrying forward and largely winning an argument that’s been neglected for too long. And that’s certainly true in the United States and Britain at this moment, it seems to me. But in global terms I think we’re absolutely in a tiny, dwindling minority that’s going to be defeated by the forces of theocracy.
HARRIS: So you’re betting against us?
HITCHENS: I think they’re going to end up by destroying civilization. I’ve long thought so. But not without a struggle.
DENNETT: Well, of course you may be right, because it can be a single catastrophe.
HITCHENS: That’s my big disagreement with Professor Dawkins: I think it’s us, plus the 82nd Airborne and the 101st,*25 who are the real fighters for secularism at the moment, the ones who are really fighting the main enemy. And I think probably, among secularists, that must be considered the most eccentric position you could possibly hold. That’s tooth-fairy belief among those people. I believe it to be an absolute fact. It’s only because of the willingness of the United States to combat and confront theocracy that we have a chance of beating it. Our arguments are absolutely of no relevance.
HARRIS: You may have many more takers, although not on the territory of Iraq. I mean, it may be that we need the 82nd Airborne to fight a different war in a different place, for the stated purpose.
HITCHENS: Voilà! By all means, there are reservations to be expressed by me, which I’ll happily give you. But in principle, I think that’s a very important recognition.
DAWKINS: Unfortunately we’re running out of time.
HITCHENS: And possibly tape. [Laughter]
DAWKINS: I think we’ve had a wonderful discussion.
DENNETT: Yes, great.
DAWKINS: Thank you very much.
DENNETT: We’ve got a lot to think about.
*1 Kenneth R. Miller (b. 1948), professor of biology and Royce Professor for Teaching Excellence, Brown University.
*2 William James (1842–1910): US philosopher and psychologist; author of The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902).
*3 Pervez Hoodbhoy (b. 1950): Pakistani nuclear physicist; promoter of free speech, education and secularism in Pakistan.
*4 US progressive public policy advocacy group, formed in 1998.
*5 Larry Craig (b. 1945): former US Republican Senator for Idaho (1991–2009). Arrested for ‘lewd conduct’ in June 2007; subsequently pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of ‘disorderly conduct’; stated that he was not, nor ever had been, gay.
*6 Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95): English biologist and champion of Darwinian evolution, notably at the 1860 debate on the subject held by the British Association in Oxford, where he spoke in opposition to Samuel Wilberforce.
*7 Samuel Wilberforce (1805–73): Anglican cleric; Bishop of Oxford from 1845; took part in the 1860 debate on evolution, opposing Darwin’s assertion that humans and apes shared common ancestors.
*8 Clarence Darrow (1857–1938): US lawyer; defended the teacher John Scopes in the ‘Scopes trial’ of 1925, in opposition to Bryan.
*9 Billy Graham (1918–2018): US Southern Baptist minister and evangelist, renowned for the large indoor and outdoor rallies at which he preached.
*10 Ayaan Hirsi Ali (b. 1969): Dutch American scholar and activist; born in Somalia; vocal critic of Islam and advocate of the rights of Muslim women. See p. 2 above.
*11 The pen name of an anonymous critic of Islam; one of the founders in 1998 of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society.
*12 Samuel Huntington (1927–2008): US political scientist and presidential adviser; propounded in 1993 his theory of ‘the clash of civilizations’, presented in book form as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
*13 María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002).
*14 John Donne (1572–1631): English poet and cleric; Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1612; wrote both secular and religious poetry and prose.
*15 George Herbert (1593–1633): Welsh poet and cleric; Canon of Lincoln Cathedral from 1626.
*16 Philip Larkin (1922–85): English poet and writer; librarian of Hull University from 1955. ‘Church Going’ appears in his 1955 volume The Less Deceived.
*17 Also known as ‘Sonnet X’: poem by John Donne, part of the Divine Meditations sequence, composed in 1609 and first published (posthumously) in 1633.
*18 Sayyid Qutb (1906–66): Egyptian Islamic radical; leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
*19 Roger Scruton (b. 1944): English conservative philosopher and writer.
*20 Letter from Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope, 17 November 1726.
*21 Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658): English radical Protestant, soldier and politician; leader of Parliamentary forces in Civil Wars; Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, 1653–8.
*22 Julia Neuberger (b. 1950): British rabbi and member of the House of Lords; senior rabbi of the West London Synagogue from 2011.
*23 Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–89), known as A.J. or ‘Freddie’ Ayer: British philosopher; works include Language, Truth and Logic (1936), in which he propounded the ‘verification principle’; Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford from 1959.
*24 Benjamin Franklin (1706–90): leading figure of the American Enlightenment and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States; member of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776; President of Pennsylvania, 1785–8.
*25 Airborne infantry divisions of the US Army, specializing in air assault operations; active in Iraq and Afghanistan.