[CH] 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, who's just written another attack on yourself, Richard, 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 there's been published. In his review of you, he says "Mr Dawkins … 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 …" But none of the books in those religious libraries solve it either! The whole point is that it remains insoluble and it's used to keep people feeling baffled and inferior.
[RD] But I want to come back to the thing about mystery in physics, because isn't it possible that our evolved brains … because we evolved in what I call middle world, where we never had to cope with either the very small or the cosmologically very large, we may never actually have an intuitive feel for what's going on in quantum mechanics but we can still test its predictions, we can still actually do the mathematics and do the physics to actually test the predictions, 'cause anybody can read the dials on a …
[DD] Right, I think what we can see is that what scientists have constructed over the centuries is a series of tools, mind-tools, thinking tools, mathematical tools, and so forth which enable us to some degree to overcome the limitations of our evolved brains, our stone age, if you like, brains, and overcoming those limitations is not always direct. Sometimes you have to give up something. Yes, you'll just never be able to think intuitively about this but you can know that, even though you can't think intuitively about it.
[RD] Yeah, that's right.
[DD] There's this laborious process by which you can make progress and you do have to cede a certain authority to the process but you can test that and it can carry you from A to B in the same way. If you're a quadriplegic, an artificial device can carry you from A to B. It doesn't mean you can walk from A to B but you can get from A to B.
[RD] And the bolder physicists will say "well, who cares about intuition? I mean, just look at the math!"
[DD] Yeah, yeah, that's right, they are comfortable with their … living with their prostheses.
[SH] Well, the perfect example of that is dimensions beyond three, because we can't visualise a fourth dimension or a fifth but it's trivial to represent it mathematically, and so we can move in that dimension.
[DD] And now we teach our undergraduates how to manipulate n-dimensional spaces, and to think about vectors in n-dimensional spaces, and they get used to the fact. They can't quite imagine … what you do is you imagine three of them and, say, you wave your hand a little bit, and say more of the same, but you you check your intuition by running the maths, and it works.
[RD] But see, it's easy to do some … say you're a psychologist looking at personality, and you say there are fifteen dimensions of personality, and you could think of them as being fifteen dimensions in space. And anybody can see that you're … you can imagine moving along any one of those dimensions with respect to the others, and you don't actually have to visualise fifteen dimensional space.
[DD] No. And you give up that demand, and you realise …
[RD] Yes, yes.
[DD] I can live without that. It would be nice if I could do that but hey, I can't see bacteria with the naked eye, either. I can live without that but …
[SH] I think there's one…
[CH] Yeah, I was challenged on that, I was challenged on that on the radio the other day by someone who appeared to be fairly … who said "I believe in atoms on no evidence, 'cause I've never seen one". Not since George Galloway said to me that he'd never seen a barrel of oil …
[SH] Right! that's cute …
[CH] Yes but you realise that people at this point, they're wearing themselves right down to their uppers, I mean they're desperate when they get to this stage. The reason I say it is because I think it could … I don't want us to make our lives easier but it makes the argument a little more simple.
[CH] We are quite willing to say there are many things we don't know. What Haldane, I think it was, said, you know, the Universe is not just queerer than we understand, it's queerer than we can understand. We know there'll be great new discoveries, we know we'll live to see great things but we know there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty. That's the whole distinction; the believer has to say not just that there is a god, the deist position, that there may be a mind at work in the Universe, a proposition we can't disprove, but they know that, mind, and can interpret it. They're on good terms with it. They get occasional revelations from it …
[SH] They have a book that is a verbatim screed.
[CH] … they get briefings from it. Now any decent argument, any decent intellect, has to begin by excluding people who claim to know more than they can possibly know. You start off by saying "well, that's wrong to begin with, now can we get on with it?", so theism's gone in the first round.
[DD] Yep.
[SH] Yeah.
[CH] It's off the island, it's out of the show.
[SH] That's a footnote I wanted to add to what Dan was saying. That even if mystery was somehow something we had to just … a bitter pill we have to swallow in the end, we are cognitively closed to the truth at some level, that still doesn't give any scope to theism.
[DD] Absolutely not, because it's just as closed to them as it is to …
[SH] And also we claim perfect transparency of revelation.
[CH] And also they can't be allowed to forget what they used to say when they were strong enough to get away with it, which is this is really true, in every detail, and if you don't believe it, we'll kill you.
[SH] we'll kill you, yes.
[CH] We'll kill you, and it may take some days to kill you, but we will get the job done, yeah.
[SH] Yes, we'll kill you slowly.
[CH] I mean, they wouldn't have the power they have now, if they hadn't had the power they had then.
[DD] Right. And you know this, what you just said Christopher, actually, I think, strikes terror, it strikes anxiety, in a lot of religious hearts. Because it just hasn't been brought home to them that this move of theirs is just off-limits. It's not the game. You can't do that. And they've been taught all their lives that you can do that - this is a legitimate way of conducting a discussion. And here, suddenly we're just telling them 'I'm sorry, that is not a move in this game'. In fact it is a disqualifying move.
[SH] Right. It's precisely the move you can't be respected for making.
[DD] Yes.
[CH] Adumbrate the move for me a bit, if you would, or for us. Perhaps only for me. Say what you think that move is.
[DD] Somebody plays the faith card.
[CH] Yes.
[DD] They say look, I am a Christian and we Christians, we just have to believe this and that's it. At which point, I guess the polite way of saying it is well, okay, if that's true you'll just have to excuse yourself from the discussion because you've declared yourself incompetent to proceed with an open mind. Now …