There are those who fear reason
as cold, bleak, cheerless, unpoetic.
That's not just untrue, it's the very opposite of true.
Science is the poetry of reality.
The fact that you exist
should brim you over with astonishment.
You and I and every other living creature
are machines of ineffable complexity.
This complexity and its powerful illusion of design
is why so many people succumb to the god temptation.
The temptation to evade, by invoking a designer,
the responsibility to explain.
The god temptation is an evasion of responsibility
because it invokes the very kind of thing
it is supposed to be explaining.
I am a biologist.
So I speak first of the biological version of the god temptation.
The false argument destroyed by Darwin.
There is also a cosmological version.
The fundamental constants of physics are said to be fine-tuned,
so that in the fullness of time
eyes and peacocks, humans and brains will come into existence.
The god temptation here
is to invoke a divine knob-twiddler
who adjusts the dials of the physical constants,
so they have the exquisitely precise values required
to bring evolution and eventually us into being.
'God did it' can never be an explanation for anything.
It is sheer intellectual cowardice.
If you'll stoop to magic into existence
an unexplained peacock-designer,
you might as well magic an unexplained peacock
and cut out the middle man.
Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel sympathy for such cowardice.
The complexity of a living body,
everyone of its trillion cells,
is so mind-shattering to anyone who truly grasps it.
The temptation is overwhelming.
It is like when you see a brilliant conjuring trick.
You have to smack yourself and say 'No!',
however loudly my senses and my instincts
are screaming 'miracle', it really is not.
There is a rational explanation.
In the case of a conjuring trick,
we know it is not a miracle.
Honest conjurers like Jamie Ian Swiss,
James Randi and Penn & Teller tell us so.
In the case of nature's apparent miracles,
Charles Darwin plays the role of honest conjurer.
But conjurers only tell us that it is a trick.
Darwin tells us exactly how nature's trick is done:
cumulative natural selection.
Darwin's brilliant explanation
has withstood 150 years of sustained attack
and emerged without a scratch.
Physicists are well on the way
to desposing of the cosmic god temptation, too.
My book, The God Delusion,
celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2016,
provoked a score of what came to be called 'fleas',
religious folks with plagiaristic jacket designs and parasitic titles
like The Dawkins Delusion or Deluded By Dawkins.
The 'flea' name came from a line of W. B. Yeats,
'Was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?'
Some of our best theologians --
if indeed theology is a subject that can be good at all,
if indeed theology is a subject at all --
some of our best theologians pathetically try to argue
that far from being complex, god is simple.
There is no limit to the explanatory purpose
as to which the 'simple god's' infinite power is put.
Is science having a little difficulty explaining X, no problem!
Don't give X another glance!
God's infinite power is effortlessly wheeled in to explain X,
along with everything else.
And it's always a simple explanation
because after all, there is only one god.
What could be simpler than that?
The effrontery of it is beyond astounding.
This supposedly simple god had to know
how to set the nuclear force 10 to the 39 times stronger than gravity.
He had to calculate with similar exactitude
the requisite values of half a dozen critical numbers,
the fundamental constants of physics.
Do you, with your prodigiously complex brain,
understand quantum mechanics? I don't.
Yet god, that paragon of ultimate pure simplicity,
not only understands it, but invented it?
Plus Special and General Relativity,
plus the Higgs Boson and Dark Matter?
Finally, the icing on the cake,
on top of being the ultimate mathematics and physics genius,
this simple god has enough bandwidth
to listen to the prayers of billions of people simultaneously
in all the world's languages.
He hears their confessed sins
and decides which should be forgiven,
he weighs up which cancer patient shall recover,
which earthquake victims shall be spared,
even who shall win a tennis match.
Or a parking space.
God may be almighty, all-seeing,
all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving,
but the one thing he cannot be --
if he is even minimally to meet his job description --
is all-simple.
The statistical argument against the divine designer
remains intact and inescapably devastating.
God also presents a tempation to laziness
when we define our allegiancies.
'I am Christian, of course I don't believe that supernatural stuff.
But I was baptized, we go to church at Christmas,
and I am certainly not Jewish or Muslim.
So I guess that makes me a Christian?'
'By 2050, the population of Ruritania
will be predominantly Muslim.
It is simple demography.
Just compare the birth rates
of the different communities in Ruretania.'
That makes the lazy assumption
a child of Muslim parents is defined as a Muslim.
Would you define a child of logical positivist parents
as a logical positivist?
Would you define a child as a Keynesian
on the basis of her parents' economic school of thought?
One of the reasons I formed
the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in the USA,
is to combat America's legendary religiosity,
a form of obstinate backwardness
that has serious implications for the rest of the world.
'What church do you go to?'
The question is presumptuous to the point of rudeness.
Yet, informant after informant tells me
how often it is thrown at newcomers
to certain neighbourhoods in America.
As casually and automatically as a comment on the weather.
That the newcomer might not attend a place of worship at all,
simply does not cross the friendly neighbourhood mind.
It does not cross the mind of a typical American politician either.
Which is why they drag God into every speech,
why they bend over backwards to appease religious lobbies
when taking important decisions
on abortion, stem cell research and the teaching of evolution.
The Reason Rally is the antidote to all of this.
Today in Washington, we celebrate science
and urge the retreat of superstition.
It is people like you who have travelled far to be here,
who support secular organisations with your time and money,
who are courageous enough to make their atheism known,
that are the hope for the future.
I am sorry doctor's orders stopped me being in Washington today,
except by this minor miracle of science.
But I hope to see you at the next Reason Rally!