Interview with Athiest Richard Dawkins

I think Richard Dawkins can explain Athiesm better than I can godfather4g64 and why it makes perfect sense to me.


The flying spaghetti monster


You've written about going to church as a boy. When did you become an atheist?

I started getting doubts when I was about 9 and realized that there are lots of different religions and they can't all be right. And which one I happened to be brought up in was an arbitrary accident. I then sort of went back to religion around the age of 12, and then finally left it at the age of 15 or 16.

Did God and religion just not make sense intellectually? Is that why you turned against religion?

Yes, purely intellectually. I was never much bothered about moral questions like, how could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world? For me, it was always an intellectual thing. I wanted to know the explanation for the existence of all things. I was particularly fascinated by living things. And when I discovered the Darwinian explanation, which is so stunningly elegant and powerful, I realized that you really don't need any kind of supernatural force to explain it.

Why do you call yourself an atheist? Why not an agnostic?

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

When you're talking about God, are you really talking about the God of the Bible -- Yahweh of the Old Testament?

Well, as it happens, I am because I have an eye to the audience who's likely to be reading my book. Nobody believes in Thor and Apollo anymore so I don't bother to address the book to them. So, in practice, it's addressed to believers in the Abrahamic God.

In your book, you say atheists are widely reviled, especially in the United States: "the status of atheists in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago." Doesn't it all depend on where you live? I know various cities and academic communities in the U.S. where it would be a lot harder to be an evangelical Christian than an atheist.

Yes, I should have qualified that. As you rightly said, it is highly respectable to be an atheist in Britain and most of Europe. In America too -- of course I should have acknowledged, and I apologize to my American friends -- large parts of America, just about 50 percent of the United States of America, is intelligent and atheistic. Although the figures won't necessarily show that.

It's interesting that you link those two words -- intelligent and atheistic. Are you saying the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist?

There's a fair bit of evidence in favor of that equation, yes.

That sounds like an elitist argument. Do you want to cite that evidence?

It's certainly elitist. What's wrong with being elitist, if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive? I'm very, very keen that people should raise their game rather than the other way around. As for citing the evidence, a number of studies have been done. The one meta-analysis of this that I know of was published in Mensa Magazine. It looked at 43 studies on the relationship between educational level or IQ and religion. And in 39 out of 43 -- that's all but four -- there is a correlation between IQ/education and atheism. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist. Or the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist.

You are quite upfront about your goal with this book. You are hoping that "religious readers who open it will be atheists by the time they put it down." Do you really think that will happen?

No, I describe that as presumptuous. It's an ambition. I was hoping, in the best of all possible worlds, that would be the consequence of reading my book. I'm too realistic to think that it's going to happen in very many cases.

What is so bad about religion?

Well, it encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life. And that's very sad. But it's even sadder if they are actively discouraged from understanding by a systematic attempt in the opposite direction, which is what many religions actually are. But that's only the first of my many reasons for being hostile to religion.  

Science isnt as infallable as people believe. There are so many things science can't explain. Not that long ago it was scientific fact that the earth was flat and the centre of the universe. Science explains the how, where and when. It doesn't explain the why. According to Newtons law an object at rest will stay at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The universe started as a singularity and then exploded at the big bang. If all the matter and energy in the universe was contained in that singularity something outside that had to have acted upon it to make it explode. If evolution is random it would take way longer and there would be way more failed off shoots than there are. Humans didn't one day just randomly evolve from monkeys by accident. Something guided it in the right direction. People always look at things as black and white and either creationism or evolution and no one ever thinks that maybe God created man through the process of evolution. This author says how inteligent people are more likely to be athiest but the truely intelligent will recognize the limits of human comprehension and realize the arogance of thinking they have the answer to everthing. There are many levels of existence beyond what we are currently experiencing.  
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Yea but What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where cahnce and intelligent design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small peices. Each of the small peices is slightly improbable, but not probitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improvable events are stacked up in a series, the end product of the accumulaion is very very improbably indeed, improbably enough to be so far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form subjects of the crationists wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point because he insists on treating the gensis of statistical improbability as a single, one off event. He doesnt understand the power of ACCUMULATON.

Lets supose that one side of a mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagella motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution by contrast goes around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy! The principle of climbing the gentle slope as opposed to leaping up the prcipice is so simple, one os tempted to marvel that it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and discover it. By the time he did, nearby three centuries had elapsed since Newtons Annus mirabilis, although his acheivement seems on the face of it, harder than Darwins.

You say you have experienced god directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didnt vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). Individuals in assylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other peoples heads. We humour them but dont take their internally revealed beleifs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous.  

Your first arguement is just proving my point. Who decided to evolve eyes, fins, wings, flagela seperately and then put them together in the right combinations to create a sucessful creature. And those people who claim they know God and do evil things are lying and confused. Jesus wouldn't tell some one to murder women. He wouldn't tell Bush to start a war. Allah wouldn't tell Muslims to bomb innocent people, and Yahweh wouldn't tell Jews to bomb Muslims back at unparralled levels. The problem isn't with religion inherintly it's with man's interpritation of it. Those who know the REAL truth know what's right and wrong and those who don't will never understand.  
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ONCE AGAIN, SCROTUM SACK.. YOU PROVE YOUR STUPIDITY.... Dawkins was in the movie Expelled and interviewed by Ben Stein... Dawkins is a raging retard... him and you and people like you are fools.. Darwin didnt even explain where life begins.. he starts his theories after the first organism is here on earth,,, funny how he skipped the most important part, and that is where life begins... Got news for you fool... only an idiot would think you evolved from a brainless amoeba... and your great grand daddy is a gorilla... You will meet your maker one day, and its not going to be pretty... Eternity is an awful long time, especially when its in the Horrors of Hell !!!!  

I am continually astonished by those theists who, far from having their consciousness raised in the way that I propose, seem to rejoice in aturaly selection as "Gods way of acheiving his creation" They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achive a world full of life. God wouldnt need to do anything at all! Peter Atkins in the book just mentioned takes this line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins Enlightment: dues otiosus - literally God at leisure, unoccupied reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist. My memory vividly hears Woody Allen's perceptive whine: If it turns out that there is a God, I dont think that he's evil, But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underacheiver.

Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour always assume that bilogical adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name for "the jackpot or nothing" fallacy is "irreducible complexity" Either the eye sees or it doesn't. Either the wing flies or it doesn't. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice - which is exactly getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer" Hunt the Slipper device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
What is the use of half an eye? and What is the use of half a wing? are both instances. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moments thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed cant see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 percent of a wing could save you if you fall from a  slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a  fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 percent of a wing to 100 percent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable.  

and you say that we cram our religion down your throats. GOD does exsist. no matter if you believe that he created the world or that he created the molecules that evolved into the world. something cant come from nothing, something has to come form something or someone. believe in evolution if you want, but you cant deny that there is a god. i dont even care what god you worship.  
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the godfather has spoken

PASCAL'S WAGER

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You had better believe in God because if you are right, you stand to gain eternal bliss, and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it, the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however.

Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I dont. Pascal's wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can  DECIDE to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gentlrys Holistic Detective agency, where we meet the robotic electric monk. A labor saving device that you buy "to do your believing for you". The de luxe model is advertised as "Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City".

But why, in any case do we so readily accept the idea that one thing you must do if you want to please god is BELEIVE in him? Whats so special about believing? Isnt it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldnt the designer of the universe HAVE to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not beleived in him. "Not enough evidence God, not enough evidence" was Russell's reply. Mightn't God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And while we cannot know which way God would jump, we dont need to know in order to refute Pascal's Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds, Would you bet on Gods valuing dishonestly faked beleif over honest skepticism???

Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightnt Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed doesn't the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal's whole logic? Pascal was probably joking when he promoted his wager, just as I am joking in my dismissal of it. But I have encountered people, for example in question session after a lecture, who have seriously advanced Pascal's Wager as an argument in favour of beleiving in God so it was right to give it a breif airing here.

Is it possible, finally, to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him etc. I wont pursue the question here, but readers might like to bear it in mind when we come to later chapters on the evil consequences that can flow from religious belief and observance.  

the whole athiest theory is that everything is just there. everything cant just be there. a car doesnt just appear. it took a man to build it. a baby doesnt form from nothing, it has to be made. nothing can just appear, it has to be made. how can two molecules colliding form such a unique planet, and why didnt it make more of our planets. there is no life on other planets. if molecules collided wouldnt everything be more random. why are things in the universe so perfectly alligned. how come the suns gravity pull is different on every planet if they all started from the same place. wouldnt everything be crammed together right next to the sun. this is just a small bit of questions that your athiestic evolutionist scientists cant answer.

at a large science convention in 2001, a creationist asked the evolutionist speaker where he thought the molecules came from that mysteriously made the universe. the evolutionist stood quite for almost a minute until he asked for another question. if the scientist who are telling us to believe in evolution dont even know the full knowledge of evolution, how can anyone believe it. i know why, creation is old news, its not the new hot thing, thats why many of the people that left creationism to evolutionism have left to scientology. the beliefs of our becoming to be is just a fad. if you think creation is fake then, just call me old school, ill stick with the original beliefs. just to let you know, im trying to make this compatible to your thinking. the more we stray from the originals the worse off we become.  
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the godfather has spoken

creationism is fake, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that its just that, a story in a book and nothing more. They made up the story before modern science found 60 million year old dinosaur bones, and found that at one time Africa and S. America were jointed together 200 million years ago in a Super-Continent called "Pangea"

There is NO WAY the earth was made instantaneously by some unknown called God. God does not exist, your trying to argue that all unknowns must mean that its god behind them, when there is no proof whatsoever that their is a god behind all unknowns.

You may have an explanation for where stuff came from, but its so outlandish and modern science has had such an easy time disproving them as just that, storys, that its impossible to beleive them for anyone who thinks "logically". BUt you dont think logically, you just hear a story thats been told and assume it to be the truth, regardless of any living proof backing it up or not.

I can read more passages out of "The God Delusion" if you continue to have doubts.

If Humans really came from 2 people, than why are thier so many variations in the Human race? You got whites in Europe, Asians, Indians, Arabs, how can so many different varieties come from just 2 people? Its physically impossible, even through thousands of generations of inbreeding.

 

lincoln was not an atheist. he was a god fearing man. einstien said "with out GOD, nothing is pausible". einstien was not an aethist. benjamin franklin suggested that george washington be swarn into office with a bible. benjamin franklin was not an aethiest. thomas jefferson said "by the grace of GOD, this country will be free." that doesnt sound like an aethiest. he also suggested that the american constitution be written in the eyes of GOD, that is why at every writing of the constituion a pastor started it off with a prayer, and ended it with a prayer. mark twain was not an atheist. there is a famous quote of his that is used by you atheists. "there are things beyond this world, my mind can not yet apprehend. to think that one man created.... is beyond the mind of thought". darwin, ya he was an atheist who doubted his own beliefs. an i dont know who them other two idiots are. oh, heres an atheist, al gore. even super liberals mock his stupidity. heres a new slogan for you, you can paste al gores face on a poster and below it write " if al gore believes in it than it must be true, he invented the internet."

to answer your different people question. have you ever heard of the tower of babel. not only that, there is somthing in our skin called pigment, have you ever heard of it. i myself suffer from a pigment disorder. i am italian, italians have an olive complexion, i am white. i know a black couple that had a white baby, and no, there was no cheating involved, they had a paternity test. pigment changes in everybody.

at least i have answers. you have suggestions. all of my beliefs have a beginning and an end. your belief extends past the mind of reasoning. your so called scientific tools can only carbon date a few thousand yrs back, but yet they say that something is millions of yrs old. hmmmmmm, does anybody see a common circle that is going on here. your belief is based on lies, and the only way to make it substainable is to keep on lying. there are wholes all over your beliefs that can and will never be answered by your scientists. the same scientist that said we were having a global warming epidemic 2 yrs ago, and are now claiming that were going through another ice age at the end of 2008.  
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the godfather has spoken

Why would it be so bad for them to have been atheists? Does atheism equal wickedness? Does faith itself make one good? or is there more?

The biography by Lincoln's close associate, William Herndon, should remove most doubt about Lincoln's infidelity. Also, Robert Ingersoll, John E. Remsberg, and Joseph Lewis have compiled some thorough studies on Lincoln's lack of religious belief (links below). Follow these arguments and compare how the same thing happened to Paine and others (and is now happening to Jefferson of all people) and you will see that certain people live in their own world and follow no rules when it comes to historical inquiry -- they will claim any hero that it is convenient for them to claim and that they can get away with.

When the country has a genuine hero, the tendency among all citizens is to claim that hero as their own. Thus, whoever you are, Lincoln was just like you. Also, if one's system involves a method that alleges to make people moral (or worse, that one cannot be moral without that method), advocates of that method will naturally claim national heroes as their own. And since Christianity began to flourish shortly after the time of Lincoln, the myths of his piety flourished along with the factual accounts of his heroism.



Abraham Lincoln was an Athiest like me.
he was a deist northern liberal (hey, like me!) -- someone interested in freeing slaves from the hateful, greedy southern christians.

and (this will come as a HUGE shock to you) -- the southern christians used bible scriptue to legitimize and support the owning of blacks as slaves.

isn't that cool? makes ya just love that bible, doesn't it...

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." -Abraham Lincoln

Heres one of Albert Einstein's many athiest quotes.

"Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections."
- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp


As for THomas Jefferson.

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787


Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790), American public official, writer, scientist, and printer who played a major part in the American Revolution.

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
[Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758]

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."


"He (the Rev. Mr. Whitefield) used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard." [Franklin's Autobiography]  

lincoln was a GOD fearing conservative republican. check your history books. the north used the bible to show that all men are created equal. the liberals tried to use the bible to make them slaves. just like you atheist, they only show you what they want you to see. you try to convert people to your religion with half truths and lies. the smithsonian just put out a publication about abraham lincoln, go read it. if benjamin franklin was an atheist, then how come he started every almanac with a bible verse and a prayer.
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782" in this satement, he was talking about catholicism. during this period of time the catholic church of england was prosecuting those who would not conform. that is why those men started our country. they wanted a country that feared god but didnt force religion. in the letters to his nephew, he told his nephew to follow his own path, to learn all. heres a quote for you. "I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man," thomas jefferson in the Letter to the Danbury Baptists. how about you read this, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin French & English by Thomas Jefferson. in most of the statement that you atheists use are when he talks about the fallible and uninspired men who try to interprit the bible for their own will.

heres one for you. george washington, his first inaugural speech," upon the belief of god we have founded this country. may the strentgh of god bless the nation."

your quotes are cut segments of actual statements. more lies that your atheism has to create to try to turn the world into utter anarchy. with out god there is no fear, without fear there is no truth, without truth there is no life. hence, there cannot be life with out god. plain and simple.  
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the godfather has spoken

heres another quote i found.
einstien, "Well, I do not think that it is necessarily the case that science and religion are natural opposites. In fact, I think that there is a very close connection between the two. Further, I think that science without religion is lame and, conversely, that religion without science is blind. Both are important and should work hand-in-hand. It seems to me that whoever doesn't wonder about the truth in religion and in science might as well be dead."

if you read all of einsitiens statements you will see that he is a man torn asunder between two beliefs. in one statement he acknowledges that there is a god, and then in the next statement he denies that there is a god. he was a man torn between forced religion and the science of the unknown.

here is an atheist you might want to look into, adolf hitler. wow, he was such a good man.

an atheist killed lincoln and jfk. oswald moved to russia and became an atheist before he murdered jfk. booth was a liberal who believed that blacks should not have any rights.  
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the godfather has spoken

I said exactly what Einstien said at the begining of this thread but this guy doen't listen and is hopeless. I guess he has not much else going for him uther than thinking he is king of the Import Tuner Forum.  
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