Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Alex O'Connor Exposes the Weaknesses of Richard Dawkins || SLP497

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Alex O'Connor Exposes the Weaknesses of Richard Dawkins || SLP497 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: In this interview, Richard Dawkins says that he has no respect for any Christian debater that he has ever faced.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Who's the most formidable debate opponent that you have had in your career on this question of God's existence?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think there are any.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Never mind.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Atheist Alex O'Connor sat opposite him, and he did better than any Christian on the planet ever could do.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: The questions that Alex O'Connor asks Richard Dawkins are exactly the questions that any Christian would want answered, and Richard Dawkins has no answer.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday on Twitter, I put out a link to this video, which was premiered on Sunday evening.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Religion is still evil.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Alex O'Connor is interviewing the granddaddy of the new atheism, Richard Dawkins.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And as I put on Twitter, this might just be the death rattle of the new atheism.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: In this very video, Alex O'Connor looks back on the heyday of the new atheism as a past thing, and he seems to think that we've moved beyond it.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this video absolutely, I think, signals the death knell for the new atheism, and we'll have a look at why.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: One thing to watch as you look at this video is Alex O'Connor himself.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: I put it to you that if you showed this video to somebody who did not know that Alex O'Connor was an atheist, they would not have guessed it from this video.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I submit to you that somebody coming to this video cold would assume that Alex is asking exactly the right questions that a Christian critic of Richard Dawkins would ask.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: So kudos to Alex, really, for asking exactly these questions.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: I would not have changed a single question.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: These are all the questions that I want to put to Richard Dawkins.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And Richard Dawkins, these are all the questions that he ought to answer, and yet he flubs each and every one of them.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Professor Richard Dawkins, welcome to the show.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Payan Hersey Ali recently, despite you being perhaps the world's most famous atheist, described you as one of the most Christian people that she knows.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'd have asked this too.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Why did she say that?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: I adore Ayan.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's good.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_03: I think the the respect in which we differ is that for me, what really matters is the truth claims of Christianity.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: And for her, what really matters is the morality.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's true, actually.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins is very much pressing into the truth part of the three transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Ion Hersey Ali, in in whatever journey that she is on, is pressing into the goodness aspect, and there's also the beauty aspect that's really worth considering as you try and think about what it is that is transcendent.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I would say that Richard Dawkins is pursuing the truth thing to the exclusion of goodness and beauty.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that narrow focus does not serve him well in his seeking after truth.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think for her, Christianity is a bastion against something worse.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: And for her, I think she she wants a faith which will help people to stand up against worse faiths.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: And she singles out uh Islam, she singles out China, I think, and Putin and wokeism.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Wokism, yes.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he's referring to her article called Why I Am Now a Christian that was published in Unheard in November.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell And um I'm with her on on all those.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: And uh to the extent that I think that a religion might be valuable for political reasons, I would go along with her.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: But I think it's the wrong way to approach religion.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think that what really matters about a religion is whether it's true.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Which is an interesting post-Christian view of Christianity.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's the sort of view that you can take of Christianity only once you've gone through Christianity and you've learnt the supremacy of the logos and this understanding that reason and and particularly uh a scientific truth is at the top of the tree in terms of how we explore the world.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, only Christianity has given us the sorts of perspectives on the world that would make us privilege scientific truth over everything else.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And now the Christian revolution, as it goes on, has produced scientists that then look back on the foundations of that Western scientific method and now say, ah, we don't need the tree that has given us this particular branch, but that is to soar at the branch that you're actually sitting on, I would say.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: And to adopt a religion for uh it's almost as though one is saying, Well, I don't believe this nonsense, but it's a very good idea if other people do.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: There's something patronizing.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's not what that's not what Ayan Hersy Ali is saying, and she is in church Sunday-based Sunday learning a little bit more, as she says in that article in Unheard.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: She's not just saying that it's good that the maid believes, even if the master of the house doesn't.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she is saying that the fruits of various beliefs show themselves in the moral and political outcomes that those particular roots give rise to.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And one way of figuring out which roots are to be trusted is to have a look at the fruits.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very ancient thing, Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7, by their fruits you shall know them.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And she's looking at that not simply in an interpersonal sense, in terms of personal virtues, but she's looking in terms of cultures and civilizations and the kinds of fruits that they bear.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: She's not saying we better fake a belief so that we can somehow squeeze certain virtues out of ourselves and prune back other vices on other trees.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that is not the way that faith works, that's not the way that horticulture works.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: She is saying, how do we identify the roots that are actually productive in the good, the true, and the beautiful?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's that's where Ayan's thinking is taking her.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's it's a particularly cynical view to th to simply say, let's pretend as though cultural Christianity is true so that we can have a bulwark against Russia and China and wokeism.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's not really what Ayan is saying.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell There's something patronizing about that.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: She doesn't do that.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: She goes, she she says, I believe in it, I I am a Christian.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um and therefore it's not patronizing.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: But I think the the fundamental motivation is a political and a moral one.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: I I presume as both an atheist and as a person with an understanding of not just biological but also mimetic evolution, having coined the term meme, you'll have to think of religion as essentially something which serves some kind of social function.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: That that must be why it exists, that's why it evolved.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Given that that's the case, is it really so inappropriate to think about religion in terms of how it serves us socially?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: If that, fr from our uh shared worldview, must be what religion really is?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect question, beautifully put by Alex O'Connor.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he's doing what great debaters do, which is saying, given the premises that you already agree to, um, doesn't that stand in contradiction to some of the conclusions that you're making?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Given that you're s you say that you stand on this thing, but uh it it seems like you're undermining the thing that you're standing on.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: So Richard Dawkins spoke of memes as well as genes as playing a huge part in our evolution.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and memes could be um anything that helps our species to survive that's not just genetically passed on via reproduction, but is socially passed on in culture and things like that.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and Alex is therefore making this excellent point that if religion is a human universal, then clearly religion is adaptive, and it is a meme that has been passed on, and it has certainly helped us.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: If it hadn't helped us, we would not have evolved to have religion.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yet in every culture and civilization, there are these needs, there are these wants, there are these desires, there are these yearnings, there are these um cultural kind of manifestations that we name as religions, and somehow the man who invented memes also says that religion is somehow maladaptive to survival, and somehow it's a delusion, the God delusion.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it does seem like a contradiction, doesn't it?
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: That the man who invented memes and says that we pass things on culturally that help us to survive also can look at this human universal call religion and think that it's a delusion.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that does seem to be a contradiction.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it it is exactly the right question to ask Richard Dawkins.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Here's how he answers.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: From an academic point of view, I think it's a very interesting question.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: What religion is all about, what does it serve a social function?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um does it does it even have an evolutionary benefit?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Does it even have an evolutionary benefit?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the he's sort of granting that as could it possibly have an evolution?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, of course, by your own logic, Richard Dawkins, of course it would have an evolutionary function if it is this human universal that it absolutely is.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and so he kind of passes it off to one side and says, well, that's an interesting academic question.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, is it is it so interesting that you've pressed into it?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um is it so interesting that you want to bring about the the fruits of um this academic study into popular imagination?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: You're a popularizer of science.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you not popularizing this aspect of science?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because there are people like E.O.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wilson, there are people like Jonathan Haidt that are constantly talking in these terms and saying that of course religion has cultural benefits, of course it is adaptive for our survival.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and why are you not trying to popularize that?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because it would work completely against your number one bestseller, the God delusion.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: And uh th that interests me as an academic.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: Uh to me, though, it's a huge step to go from even saying it's a good thing, even saying that that I I wish there were more Christianity in the world, even from to say that is is nothing to do with believing it.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's truth claims.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, truth claims like there is a divine creator who made the universe and and made the laws of physics, there is divine um creator who who made the world, who who listens to our prayers, who who forgives our sins, um, who sent Jesus to be born of a virgin and then and then had him crucified.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, those are all truth claims.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, none of that matters as long as it helps us fight Putin.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: As far as Well, as that that's the difference between me and uh and Ayan.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: I I suspect that that that she doesn't really believe any of that.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: So this is interesting.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: So so actually what Alex is doing is saying, look, on an evolutionary point of view, if those beliefs help us to outcompete another civilization, then they are as true as true can be, aren't they?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um Alex at this point is he's not taking Ayan's side.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Alex at this point is saying, if what you wrote in the Selfish Gene is true, and if there are such things as memes, and if they replicate themselves so that cultures can outcompete competing cultures, then that is as true as true as can be.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like that that like what what is that stands above survival, right, in the evolutionary scheme?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins at this point has a transcendent view of truth as as this thing that arbitrates in cases where one society might outcompete another society.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: But why is there this thing?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: How could there be this thing?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's an incredibly theological thing to think.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins has has this leftover from Christianity where he believes in a logos that can arbitrate between these different competing societies.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Alex O'Connor is saying, well, hang on, Richard, if you are uh if you are a thoroughgoing naturalist, then what right do you have to to believe in this truth that stands above?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you take the Aion Hersey Ali route, even if that's what you think she is cynically doing?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it is, but if you think she is cynically adopting Christian-ish views because it helps you against Putin-ish views, well, that is as true as we can get, isn't it?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Where does truth lie?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's where Alex is trying to press Richard Dawkins.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think Richard is understanding where Alex is going with these questions.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I've seen many Christians reacting to this uh story of Ion's conversion, issuing a similar skepticism as many atheists have been, saying, well, we care about Christianity as a set of truth claims.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: We care about it saying something real about the world.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: If somebody can become a Christian just by uh preferring it as a as a as a more comfortable worldview, what does that say about Christianity?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Alex is exactly right.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: It is a perfectly Christian thing to do to say, oh, Ian might be using Christianity instrumentally.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: There is something higher than the survivability of a culture.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: There is something, there is a truth that remains true even if adhering to that truth means the death of your culture.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very Christian thing to say, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: That that truth trumps tribe, truth trumps survival.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not like by what standard are you going to make that claim that truth stands above survivability?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: By what standard is written.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you see what Alex is doing?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's saying, I understand why Christians might be skeptical of Ion's conversion.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you skeptical of Ion's conversion?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: If Christianity is a meme that helps the West survive, then why not throw your lot in with Christianity?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Why not jump in with both feet?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Richard Dawkins says, oh, but I've I need to I need to care about whether it's true.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Why why is truth the thing that stands above the survival of the fittest?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And doesn't the the idea of capital T truth standing above survivability sound incredibly theological?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I said a moment ago that, well, for us, religion just is uh a a social tool, essentially.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that the ability to adopt Christianity just because of its social function is evidence in favour of our case that that's all religion is.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and so Alex is saying, okay, so why get worked up about Ayan, even if she was cynically using Christianity in order for our society to outcompete other societies.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that isn't that what evolution does?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Why why would we object to that?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's a Christian thing, Richard, to object to Aion's conversion, right?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's a Christian thing to point out that instrumental use of a meme called religion um i is not a valid reason to convert.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually a Christian thing to say that.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you taking issue with Ayan?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: I think we agree about that.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: I think where we perhaps don't agree we no, I wouldn't say we disagree.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_03: I would say um that our fundamental motivation is a bit different because I think that for you well, w if if I ask you what you think the the worst thing about Christianity is, I suspect you say something, something moral, something about um the problem of evil, something about the uh the the horrific ideas of the of Paul and and the early f Christian fathers, um that that that that we're all born in sin and and you and we needed the death of Jesus to save us.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's the kind of thing that I suspect drives your atheism.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he's identifying that Alex is more pressing into the goodness issue and the morality issue, and and I think looking at Alex's channel, um, he's very much into you know ethics and ethical veganism.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: He tr you know he tried that and he's still into uh ethical sustainability in this world.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: He very much presses into the goodness thing.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Richard, as he's about to say, presses more into the truth thing.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's irrelevant.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, for me, I I talk about it, but for me what really drives it is the scientific question is is there a creator underneath the universe?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Because if there is, then it's a profoundly different kind of universe from a scientific point of view.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: From if there isn't.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: To me, that's the big question.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: The problem of evil, to me, wouldn't shouldn't be a real problem because you just say, well, there could be an evil God, and and um that that so that that that's a lesser question for me.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think I actually do broadly agree with you.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: And that when when I explain why I don't believe in God, I do make reference to things like the problem of evil, but it's difficult for me to frame those as moralistic objections.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: I it's more that when considering a particular worldview like Christianity, I think what would I expect the world to look like?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: And especially considering how suffering is built into the evolutionary system, it makes it very difficult for me to believe that this is being supervised.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: But like you say, this could just be an evil god.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Just on the evil god question, um uh evil and goodness are not equal opposites, as though God might as well be evil as good.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: They are not mirror images of one another.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, goodness and evil are a lot like light and darkness.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I can understand why there is an original light that then means when it is obstructed causes shadow and darkness, but I cannot imagine an original darkness that somehow yields light.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the the Christian position is is that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: The source of life is himself light, is himself love, is himself goodness.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that the source of all things, the source of all life being darkness, the source of all life being in fact destruction and death and evil, actually doesn't make sense in the same way that God is good makes sense.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's just a sidebar on the question of God could just as well be evil as he is good, and therefore, you know, y you pays your money, you take your chance.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really interested in your characterization of the existence of God and the beginning of the universe as a scientific question.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I wanted to probe this a little bit because I I had a I had a thought that was inspired by something that C.S.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis had said on the relationship between science and religion.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I have this image in my head of uh people who are who are really optimistic about the progress of science and the scientific method.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: So much of Richard Dawkins' outlook on the world relies on Christianity, on a belief in laws up above, a world out there that is open to investigation, and minds in here, that even though, on Dawkins' understanding, this is just the result of the mindless processes of survival of the fittest, somehow my mind is able to plumb the depths of the mysteries of the cosmos, and that with the further implementation of this process of experimentation and refining your hypotheses over time, we will converge on a grand unified theory of everything when we suddenly understand it's a profoundly theological view.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a profoundly Christian view, but it's invisible to Richard Dawkins because Christianity has been so successful, it's the air that we breathe, it's in entirely invisible, but we depend on it for each breath.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Richard Dawkins has depended upon this Christian revolution, and so many aspects of his worldview are shaped by Christianity, and yet he absolutely wants to rail against the Christianity that has shaped his worldview.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Hi folks, it's Thomas Thoroughgood here, media producer at Speak Life.
• 19:44
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• 19:49
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• 19:56
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• 20:00
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• 20:06
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• 20:11
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• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, back to the podcast.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Alex here is going to press into that idea of progress and say, it doesn't matter whether you can progress in an understanding scientifically of the cosmos, you have still left every question about its source and origins entirely untouched.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: And this example from C.S.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis is a brilliant one to press into.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Years ago, we used to say so much was down to God.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: We used to not know why the planets orbited the sun and we said it was because angels was pushing them.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: We used to not know why there was so much complexity in biological life, and we said that God did it.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: But look how we're discovering these laws.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: We're discovering the law of natural selection, we're discovering the laws of gravity, you know.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: And there seems to be this trajectory such that when we say, well, where did it all come from in the first place, one day we'll get there.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you agree with that as a as an optimistic trajectory for for the scientific method.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: Clearly there's a trajectory, and uh I would preface that uh the big problem of design, as William Paley put it, was he's life.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: He said something like the physical world is not the best place in which to to um demonstrate the existence of the of the creator because it's too simple.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I think he was right.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: And um he was also right when he said that the the really big problem for religion is is uh is life.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: And his hi to both him his his whole book is based upon looking at design in the in the living world.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: Darwin solved that.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Darwin solved the big one.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Darwin in eighteen fifty nine came out with the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what he wrote.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't write The Origin of Life.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: He depended upon the Origin of Life.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote about the origin of species.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: And why does everyone always leave out the subtitle?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Survival, the Struggle for Life.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: So A, Richard Dawkins is not solving the big question for you.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Here are some big questions that you might want to figure out.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: How have we got everything from nothing?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: How have we got order from chaos?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: How have we got life from non-life?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Which is this question, the question of the origin of life.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we get minds from mindless matter?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like those four questions are orders of magnitude more difficult than the problem of the origin of species.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: How do you get speciation?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Are you kidding me?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's the big question?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Are you kidding me?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: The origin of everything, the origin of order, the origin of life, and the origin of minds are orders of magnitude more improbable and more important than figuring out the the speciation of life on planet Earth, the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Darwin has given us knowledge.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Has he solved the big one?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Sidebar, that's a sidebar.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where Alex is going is even if you do solve every question, even if you're at the blackboard and you come up with the equation and you put the chalk down and you say, There it is, it's solved.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Even then, you haven't done anything to put a dent in belief in God.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because the source of life is not a super being within the world that can be explained away with your science.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like Betty the Botanist.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always telling the story of Betty the Botanist.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine she's there in the laboratory working late into the night.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Next morning, Gareth the lab assistant comes in.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Betty says, Thank you so much for giving me the specimen yesterday.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: I've run all sorts of spectral analyses on the specimen, and I've discovered pharmacological properties that are going to help us in the fight against Alzheimer's disease.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for giving me that specimen.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: And Gareth, the lab assistant, says, Betty, what are you talking about?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday was February the 14th.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was Valentine's Day.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: I gave you a long stem rose, Betty.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Do you understand what I gave you?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is, does Betty understand the rose?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: And on one level, Betty understands the rose better than anyone else on planet Earth.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Give that woman a Nobel Prize, okay?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: On another level, Betty is a moron.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Betty does not understand the rose as the love gift, but she's going in and doing the spectral analyses.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: She's map mapping the genome of the rose and thinking that that exhausts the meaning of the rose.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Richard Dawkins, I'm afraid, is trying to map the genome and considering that he has exhausted the meaning of life.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: As though we can press into these questions and exhaustively map scientific knowledge of the universe, and the existence of God somehow recedes into every corner until we press him completely out of the universe, and therefore there is no God anymore.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's like Betty thinking she's understood the roads because she's mapped the genome.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: She hasn't.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: She's got a lot of great scientific knowledge.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the questions that science is set up to answer are not the same questions that theology is set up to answer.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: It never has been.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And yet Richard somehow thinks that these two levels of understanding are in competition.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a fallacy.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it means that Richard can write the most intelligent, brilliant books on biology and the most ridiculous, moronic books on theology.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And those those two things those two things are say the same author of The Selfish Gene also gave us the God Delusion.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, his review on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is hilarious.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: He says, imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British birds, and you have some idea of what it's like to read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: Terry Eagleton goes on to say that so much of Dawkins' writing in The God Delusion bangs at open doors or shoots at straw targets.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to agree, Richard Dawkins is a brilliant biologist, he is a terrible philosopher, and a terrible theologian, obviously.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And to imagine that being brilliant in one arena makes you fit to answer the questions of a different arena is ridiculous.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, why would we listen to Richard Dawkins on the question of God?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, this person is a great chartered accountant, and so we're we'll we'll listen to him as he writes the God delusion, right?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: This person is fantastic at architecture, and so he he must be fit to answer the question of God.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: What are we on?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: These are totally different levels of understanding.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And this analogy that Alex O'Connor is bringing is really helping to tease apart these different realms of understanding.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_03: And um we have some r remaining problems.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: The the arc is still hasn't really reached its end.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: We still have some problems with the origin of the laws of physics, the origin of the universe.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that's the fact that Darwin solved the big one should give us give us confidence.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: How is the origin of species the big one?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: He's just talked about the origin of the universe and the laws that give rise to everything else.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that means we're living in a cosmos and not a chaos.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, okay.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: That was the really difficult one, the the the amazing, apparent design in the living world.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that is such an such a a staggeringly overwhelming impression of design.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: There's no question about that.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_03: And that was the one that Darwin solved.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, Darwin solves the problem of complexity within living organisms, but I think it might be a step too far to say he solved the problem of life.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Ha ha Alex O'Connor.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: I go through this video and I ask myself, if Alex O'Connor was in fact a secret Christian, asking these questions of Richard Dawkins, would he utter a single syllable different to what he has uttered in this video?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I come to the conclusion, no.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think if it turns out that Alex O'Connor has been running this decade-long PsyOps operation, being a secret Christian within the uh the new atheism and within anti-theist YouTube, if he was a secret Christian, I don't think he would say one word different to what he says to Richard Dawkins in this interview.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's and and kudos again to him.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: He just comes back.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually actually Darwin did not solve the origin of life.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um Yeah.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because of course, one of the questions that we have to throw into that bundle of things yet to explain, the origin of the world physics.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: The origin of life and life.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's not part of Darwinism, of course.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: That's a separate question, and Darwin acknowledged that.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, rowback.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Complete rowback.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well done, Alex O'Connor, honestly.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, I don't know any Christians who would do better in this interview than Alex O'Connor has done.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Richard Dawkins is now rowing back.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's the big question, isn't it?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually, yeah, the origin of life is completely beyond Darwinism.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: And that that is an unsolved problem.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: It may never be solved in the sense we we may never actually know what the answer is.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think the best we can probably hope for is a model which is so elegant that we may say, well, that's so elegant, it's got to be true.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Beauty! We found beauty, we've had goodness, we've had truth.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Ah You can't do without all three of the transcendentals.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can't simply be a person of truth.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins must find himself pr pronouncing upon the goodness of the God of the Bible.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: He just I mean, page one of the God Delusions, just he rants at the goodness of the God of the Bible, or you know, his his badness, right?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And even in science, the symmetry of an equation, the the aptness of a model to map onto reality, there's an elegance to it, right?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's a there's a simplicity to it, there's a there's there's something profound about it that you cannot describe without reaching for aesthetic terms.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's an elegant theory.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um Richard Dawkins, even though he is sort of king rationalist, he can't help reaching for the other two of the transcendentals.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I think he would have a much healthier outlook on the world if he integrated the the good and the beautiful into his vision of the true.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: But that's very a bit different from having direct evidence.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: At present we don't really have that.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um we have various possible ideas, some of them more plausible than others.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I think we know the kind of question we're trying to answer.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: We're trying to answer how did the first self-replicating entity come into existence.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a big question.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_03: It only had to happen once.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big question.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, that's the big question that you said was the big question that Darwin answered.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: And now you're rowing so far back that you're like, I'm not sure we'll ever actually get a qu an answer to that question.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um Well done, Alex.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, like the kinds of questions that he's asking and then the pushback that he that he offers.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it's exactly what a Christian would do.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um like the unlike the rest of evolution, which where it happened over and over and over again, the same thing happened over and over again, all over the world, different continents, different species, different kinds of animal and plant, and so on.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um The origin of life could have been a very, very improbable event because it only had to happen once.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and therefore we are potentially allowed to postulate something very unlikely, something very implausible.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: I find that quite an interesting point, actually, that that um that that I mean if you take it to an extreme, so suppose we are the only planet in the universe which has life, which is we can't rule that out.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's highly unlikely, but we can't rule it out.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: If that's true, then that means that the origin of life on this planet was a stupendously improbable event.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: Call it a miracle.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: And therefore, when chemists try to postulate a possible scenario for the origin of life, they're not looking for a plausible argument.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: They're looking for a very implausible argument.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's fascinating, yeah.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: I don't believe that, because I think that probably it was uh not that improbable an event, and therefore and therefore the likelihood is that there's lots of life all over the universe.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but um even to say a m a million different life forms all over the universe, since the number of possible places where there could be life is so large.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: A million is actually a very small number.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Check out the appeals to mystery going on here.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: We started with rock solid confidence that the arc of scientific progress is long, but it bends towards the grand unified theory of everything.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that is an entirely Christian-ish view that is the result of centuries of Christianization in the West, and and we just take for granted that yes, the human mind is able to do that, and the laws of physics are such that we can tend towards us, e even us, even little old old Homo sapiens, on this insignificant rock that that is nowhere near the center of the universe, and we don't know how large the universe is.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: But somehow, Homo sapiens are heading towards understanding the the mysteries of the whole in a theological sense, such that all claims to theological knowledge are expunged by our ever-increasing knowledge that will flood the world as the waters cover the sea, and our knowledge will increase.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: And like it's an incredibly sort of Christian thing.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then when we don't understand, and when ignorance is pointed out, like Alex points out, our our current ignorance on this matter, there comes an appeal to mystery.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this, well, if you if you have enough planets and you have enough time, at some point the impossible becomes possible.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, again, this sounds incredibly theological to me.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there is the faith that we are heading towards those things, and whatever objections are put in our way, we just appeal to mystery, and at some stage we will get it.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um these are very Christian-ish intuitions that Christian scientists have alongside atheist scientists.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but let's just be aware of the air that we breathe.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Let's be aware of the Christian presuppositions that are going on underneath all this kind of stuff.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And let's be aware that we still haven't gotten to the point of Alex's analogy, and that will be very tasty.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: What we'll do is we'll jump through Alex saying, yes, there are tiny chances of things that that that happen that still happen if you give them enough uh enough time.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um we'll jump through him saying that because he is heading somewhere in his line of questioning, and it's very important to see where he's heading.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_02: Let's push the the question even further back still, because I wanted to ask you, you you mentioned about the the origin of the laws of physics, for example.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: The story that we tell is something like we discover all of these laws, and so this gives us an idea that science is moving in a direction, and that eventually what we we may well discover the origin of the laws themselves.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: But th that seems to me like a separate question.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the way I want to explain this is by sort of borrowing and adapting uh, as I say, something C.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: S.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis said.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um Lewis talks about the relationship between Hamlet and Shakespeare a fair bit, or the character in a book and and his author.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I can ask, you know, why did uh why did Sherlock Holmes move into Baker Street?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: And you can either say, Well, it's because uh, you know, he he was looking for a roommate or something like that.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: Or you could say, because Arthur Conan Doyle wanted him to.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: And both of those seem to be true in a different resolution of thought.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: And neither of those answers compete with one another, right?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: It it could be there's low rent on Baker Street, and Arthur Conan Doyle needs him to be in Baker Street in order for his plot to advance, right?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Both of those things can be true at once, and neither of them compete with one another.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's exactly the same with scientific truths and theological truths, okay?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: You could answer every single question that Sherlock Holmes has, and none of that precludes the need for Arthur Conan Doyle.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the the author and the character are very, very different things.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, what I'm imagining here is us discovering Hamlet by Shakespeare on the table in front of us, and immediately, crudely, you look at it and say, Well, that must have been designed, you know, that must have an author.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't just do the William Paley thing, you know, it's complex.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: What I say is, well, look, Professor Dawkins, I I've I've done some research onto this little book, and I've discovered that it obeys certain laws.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I've noticed that at the end of certain sentences there are these little dots.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: And if there's a big dot, it used it usually means that it's the end of a sentence.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: And there are two different kinds of each letter.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's a big A and a little A.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: And if it's the beginning of a sentence, it's a new one.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: Also, we've discovered this thing called iambic pentameter.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it it seems that the way these sentences are constructed seem to follow this law, this law of literacy.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I said to you, Now where did this book come from?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: And you say, I still think there was an author of this book.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: I still think someone created it.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Ah, but look at all the progress that we've made just by describing it in terms of these things that we're calling laws of literature.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: I've discovered all of these laws of literature, iambic pantameter and sentence construction and grammar and all of this stuff.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Surely one day these laws of literacy will will go on to explain the origin of the laws of the literacy or the origin of the text itself.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: Surely that would surely that would be where this is going.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, I'm making a category error if I do that.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And is there not a fear that we're doing that when we say that science will one day explain the origin of the very thing that science is about?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh I mean, if Alex is not a Christian, he's doing the very, very good impression of one.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: And if a Christian was in the same position as Alex was, I defy any Christian to do a better job of interviewing Richard Dawkins than Alex O'Connor does.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, again, kudos to Alex O'Connor.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you get the point, don't you?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's such a vital point to grasp.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: Hamlet understanding iambic pentameter does not explain away the need for Shakespeare.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And a scientist coming up with a grand unified theory for everything does not preclude the need for God.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and you can press into both kinds of truth, scientific truth and theological truth, and they are not in competition with one another.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right, Richard Dawkins?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's see how he responds.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: I take confidence from the from as I said before, from Darwin's success, because everything that you said about full stops and capital letter at the beginning of the sentence and I like pentameters and things, you could have said that about life, and people did say that about life.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: And we we notice that living things are remarkably well designed, that birds are beautifully designed to fly, and and fish are beautifully designed to to swim, and so on.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: And full stops do a great job of ending a sentence, and capital letters do a great job of starting sentences.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I am Big Pentabada has ten syllables in it, and like, okay.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: How does that get rid of Shakespeare?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the complexity is all there, the the detail of the of the of the design is is incredibly impressive.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: There's a poetry to reality, you might say, Richard.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it would have seemed absolutely I suspect this is why it took so long for Darwin to come on the scene, actually, because it just seemed so obvious that it had to it had uh had an author uh but but behind it.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: Darwin solved that.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: There isn't an author.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: What is he on?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Darwin solved that.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: He there isn't an author.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's like saying a grammatical historical interpretation of Hamlet done from the ground up obviates the need for Shakespeare.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: He's just like, what?
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: What the what?
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean it's it's natural selection does the trick.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: So Alex kind of nods.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: What's going through his head at this point?
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because Richard Dawkins has just basically says that that the rules of poetry, the rules of syntax somehow obviate the need for for an author by saying like survival of the fittest means you you don't need God.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: Where is the where is the analogy with Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes left with?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose the analogy would be that um what Darwin did was close the question on the complexity of life.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: But he didn't close the question on where life came from, as we've already agreed.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I s I suppose what I'm putting forward is that maybe Or an And even if you solve the question of the origin of life, you've got other questions like the origin of everything from nothing and order from chaos and minds from mindless matter.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if you get to the end of answering all those questions, you still haven't gotten away with with excluding God from the equation.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because Hamlet can know everything about his realm.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: He can not only be the Prince of Denmark, he can be the king of Denmark, he can be the king of the whole world, he can understand his world in great detail, but none of that excludes Shakespeare.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: All of it, in fact, depends upon Shakespeare.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: And none of our search for a grand unified theory of everything excludes the God who unifies truth.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, the fact that human beings, and especially human beings who have taken a particular path through history, Christianized history, and have come to a modern scientific method in which we understand humanity to be a certain way, the laws of physics to be a certain way, the world out there to be a certain way, to understand that triangulation, to understand progress, to understand that we need to reform the the ignorance of the past and jettison old ideas and move towards a a grand theory in the future.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: All of that is incredibly Christianized, and none of that gets rid of Jesus Christ.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of it actually points towards Jesus Christ.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean uh Dawkins is not getting this.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: The laws of physics, laws of biology, laws of science are not the kind of thing that can explain the origin of the laws of physics, the origin of the laws of biology, that kind of stuff.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: Where maybe it's sort of uh opering on a on a Well, it could be.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we we haven't got there yet.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't got there yet.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: A is an incredibly Christian kind of belief in progress.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: And B, once you put the chalk down on the grand unified theory of everything, you are still Hamlet living in Shakespeare's world.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: All I said was that that Darwin's success should give us confidence.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um Very Christian confidence.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_03: There will come a time when we understand the laws of physics.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_03: I think we're not far off.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: The physicists aren't far off that now, in fact.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: I will let you have a look at the rest of this video.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: Religion is still evil.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Alex O'Connor interviewing Richard Dawkins.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, fascinatingly, within the video, Alex O'Connor talks about the heyday of the new atheism and looks back upon it.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me that he is exactly right in identifying that the best days of the new atheism are entirely behind them.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: And what we are seeing now is, I would say, the death throes of the new atheism and a movement into something that is ready, finally, to deal with religious truth.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Finally ready to deal with something that has grounded Richard Dawkins' assumption that that truth can stand above the swirl of power plays and competition for survival, that truth somehow will win the day and set us free, and that we will somehow ascend towards a unification under this grand truth.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think so many more people are realizing that yes, Richard Dawkins is a lot more Christian than he thinks he is, that some of his presuppositions are entirely the fruit of a Christianization of the world, that so many of his presuppositions entirely depend on a view of the world that has been shaped by the Bible.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they've come to see that the reductionism of simply elevating truth deforms us.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: We do need goodness, we do need beauty, and we do need the personal reality of a God who can unite all these things in himself rather than these abstract values to which we are sent.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people are waking up to the fact that Jesus has built this world, and that, yes, we can go out into his world and discover all sorts of scientific truths, but that by doing so we have not exhausted the meaning of the world any more than Betty the Botanist has exhausted the meaning of the rose.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Have a look at the rest of this video on Alex O'Connor's channel.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you like, let me know what you think in the comments.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: But if you want to find out more about Christianity, why don't you do the 321 course?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that we put on here at Speak Life.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can do it online, you can do it in person.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Go to 321course.com and you can see life according to Jesus.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: It shows us how Jesus sees God, Jesus sees the world, Jesus sees ourselves.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that'll give you a refreshing view of what Christians are actually saying, and not the straw targets that Richard Dawkins has made a career out of targeting.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: Where is the new atheism heading?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fascinating question to ask, and we will keep on pulling at these threads.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: We might do some more videos about this particular interview.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: It is just so fruitful to consider.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: So why don't you give us a like and a subscribe?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because we'd love to see you again as we see all things through the lens of Jesus.