The Four Horsemen, episode 1   ::   Dawkins Richard

Just as one is entitled when dealing with an ordinary racist to say that his opinions are revolting, he may know no better but that’s not gonna save him from my condemnation and nor should it. And I think exactly it’s condescending not to confront people as it were one by one or en masse. So public opinion is often wrong, mob opinion is almost always wrong.

[SH] Well, let’s linger on this issue before …

[CH] Religious opinion is wrong, religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can't avoid this. And I wanted to intrude the name H L Mencken at this point, now a very justly-celebrated American writer, not particularly to my taste, much too much of a Nietzschean and what really was once meant by Social Darwinist at one stage but why did he win the tremendous respect of so many people in this country in the 20s and 30s? Because he said the people who believe what the Methodists tell them or what William Jennings Bryan tells them are fools. They’re not being fooled, they are fools. They should …

[DD] Shame on them for believing me.

[CH] Yes. They make themselves undignified and ignorant and, no mincing of words here, and a grated mixture of wit and evidence and reasoning. It absolutely works; the most successful anti-religious polemic there’s probably ever been in the modern world. In the twentieth century, anyway.

[SH] I think we just touched upon an issue that we should really highlight. This whole notion of authority, because religious people often argue that science is just a tissue of uncashed cheques, you know. We're all relying on authority, how do you know that the cosmological constant is whatever it is? You know? So I think you two are well-placed to do this, differentiate the kind of faith-placing in authority that we practise without fear in science and rationality generally, and the kind of faith-placing in the preacher or the theologian that we criticise.

[RD] Well, what we actually do when we who are not physicists take on trust what physicists say is we have some evidence to suggest that physicists have looked into the matter, that they've done experiments, that they've peer-reviewed their papers, that they've criticised each other, that they've been subjected to massive criticism from their peers in seminars and on lectures and things. And they've come through with …

[DD] And remember the structure that's there, too. It's not just that there's peer-review but it's very important that it's competitive. For instance, when Fermat's Last Theorem was proved by …

[RD] Andrew Wiles.

[DD] Andrew Wiles, the reason that those of us who … forget it, I'm never going to understand that proof but the reason that we can be confident that it really is a proof is that …

[SH] Nobody wanted him to get there first, yeah!

[DD] Every other mathematician who was competent in the world was very well motivated to study that.

[RD] To find out, yeah.

[DD] And believe me, if they begrudge him that this is a proof, it's a proof! And there's nothing like that in …

[SH] No, because we're the antithesis of that.

[CH] No religious person's ever been able to say what Einstein said, if I'm right,

[DH] the following solar event will occur off the west coast of Africa in …,

[CH] I forget how many years and months from now, and it did, within a very tiny degree of variation; there's never been a prophecy that's been vindicated like that, or anyone willing to place their reputation and, as it were, their life on the idea that it would be.

[RD] I was once asked at a public meeting "Don't you think that the mysteriousness of Quantum Theory is just the same as the mysteriousness of the Trinity or the Transubstantiation?" And the answer, of course, can be answered in two quotes from Richard Feynman. One, Richard Feynman said "if you think you understand Quantum Theory, you don't understand Quantum Theory". He was admitting that it's highly mysterious. But the other thing is that the predictions of Quantum Theory experimentally are verified to the equivalent of predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair. And so, Quantum Theory is massively supported by accurate predictions. Even if you don't understand the mystery of the Copenhagen Interpretation, or whatever it is. Whereas the mystery of the Trinity doesn't even try to make a prediction, let alone an accurate one.

[DD] You know, I don't like …

[CH] It it isn't a mystery, either.

[DD] I don't like the use of the word "mystery" here. I think, I think there's been a lot of consciousness-raising in philosophy about this term, where we have so-called mysterians, the new mysterians. These are people who like the term "mystery". Noam Chomsky is famously quoted to say "There's two kinds of questions, there's puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles are soluble, mysteries aren't". And first of all, I just don't buy that. I buy that but I buy the distinction and say 'there's nothing about mystery in science. There's puzzles, there's deep puzzles, there's things we don't know, there's things we'll never know, but they aren't systematically incomprehensible to human beings. The glorification of the idea that these things are systematically incomprehensible, I think, has no place in science.

[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.