[DD] 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 few, namely free will is such an important idea, if we gave up the idea of free will, people would lose their sense of responsibility and we would have chaos. And, you really don’t wanna 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. Okay, could I imagine that my irrepressible curiosity could lead me to articulate something true or false …
[SH] That’s dangerous.
[DD] which would have such devastating effects on the world, that I should just shut up and change the subject?
[SH] Right.
[DD] And I think that’s a good question that we all should ask.
[RD] Yeah, it's good.
[DD] Absolutely! And 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. But I think you should ask that question. I do.
[SH] Right.
[RD] 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 do, which is to say this is so politically obnoxious that it cannot be true, and which is a different …
[DD] Which is a different thing entirely. No. No.
[CH] No, it would be like discovering that you thought that the bell on white and black intelligence was a correct interpretation of IQ.
[RD] Yes, and you could well suppress publication of …
[CH] You see (inaudible) And now I’ve looked at all this stuff again, I’m absolutely (inaudible) … so you could say, “now what am I gonna do?”
[SH] Right.
[CH] Fortunately these questions don’t, in fact, present themselves in that way.
[SH] I’ll tell you one place where it’s presented itself to me, I think it was an op-ed in the LA times, I could be mistaken, but someone argued that the reason why the Muslim population in the US is not radicalised 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 …
[DD] As in Western Europe?
[SH] in Western Europe. Now, I don’t know if this is true, but if it were true that gave me a moment’s pause.
[CH] That would be of interest. James Wolfensohn, late of the World Bank, recently the negotiator on Gaza, says that he firmly believes that he had tremendous influence for good with the Muslim brotherhood in Hamas, because he was an orthodox Jew. If so, I think it would be disgusting, I have to say, 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 (inaudible). If it were only a national and territorial dispute it would’ve been solved by now. But his self-satisfaction in saying so, even if it were true, would turn me even more against him.
[SH] There are two issues that converge here. One is the question what do we want to accomplish?, what do we reasonably think we can accomplish? And then this article of faith that I think circulates, unfortunately, among people of our viewpoint that you can't argue anyone out of their beliefs. It's a completely fatuous exercise, or can we actually win a war of ideas with people and, I think, certainly judging from my e-mail, we can. I mean, I'm constantly getting e-mail from people who have lost their faith and in effect been 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 incompatibility of what they knew to be true and what they were told by their faith that I think we have to just 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, and 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.
[RD] I was having an argument with a very sophisticated biologist who's a brilliant expositor of evolution, and he still believes in God. And 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, almost aggressively, that there's a reason that it's called faith. And that was, to him, the absolute knockdown 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.
[CH] Oh, you get it all the time in North America from people who say you gotta read William James and to have had, to be able to judge other people's subjective experiences with something that's by definition impossible to do.
[SH] Right
[CH] If it's real to them why can't you respect it? I mean 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 and I asked him, because we were talking about biblical literalism, of which he wasn't an exponent, but I said well what about the graves opening at the time of the crucifixion according to Saint Matthew? Matthew, I'd rather say, and everyone getting out of their graves in Jerusalem, 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, and wanted to know if I believed that had happened, that was what he thought. And he said that as an historian, which he also was, he was inclined to doubt it, but that as a Presbyterian minister, he thought it was true. Well, alright then. You 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 anymore to you now. You've said all I could say.
[SH] Yeah, yeah. Well there's one other chip I'd like to put on the table here. There's this phenomenon of someone like Francis Collins or the biologist you just mentioned, someone who obviously has enough of the facts on board, you know, enough of a scientific education to know better, and still does not know better or professes not to know better, and there I think we have a cultural problem where. And this was actually 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 from this report was that this was the first time his faith had ever really been explicitly challenged. And so it's true to say that you can go through the curriculum of becoming a scientist and never have your faith explicitly challenged, because it's taboo to do so, and now we have engineers who can build nuclear bombs in the Muslim world, who still think it's plausible metaphysics 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 are in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist.
[CH] Or according to our friend, the great Pervez Hoodbhoy, the great Pakistani physicist, there are people who think you can use the djinns, the devils and harness their power for the reactor.