♪ (intro style jazz music) ♪
[Dawkins] Well Steven, I find myself somewhat in awe, both as- with one of the world's
most distinguished scientists, but also a physicist; where physics is in some
sense a sort of senior science, the bedrock of all other sciences- I'm a mere
biologist. I suppose biology has the complexity, but physics has
the fundamentals.
[Weinberg] Of course, we physicists feel that way, but we're much too polite to say so.
[Dawkins] (amused chuckle)
Yes, um, it has been said that, um, where as most distinguished
scientists tend not to be religious believers, um, there's a slight
tendency for biologists to be even more atheistic than-
[Weinberg] I've heard that, yes. [Dawkins]...than physicists. You have heard that.
Do- what do you make of that, if anything?
[Weinberg] Oh, I don't know, perhaps it's just the biologists have bloodied their knuckles
so much fighting over evolution that they've become a little bit more militant,
and um, I think physicist perhaps tend to... um since they hope that
they're approaching some ultimate understanding of the laws
of nature, uh, they tend to use god as a metaphor for that,
Einstein famously did, uh, Hawking has, um, without necessarily meaning very much by it.
[Weinberg] Um- [Dawkins] That's been, um, always my impression
that, that most physicist that say they're religious, if you actually probe a bit deeper
it turns out that they're religious in the Einsteinian sense.
[Weinberg] Yes. [Dawkins] Um, but you probably know some
genuinely, I mean genuinely Christian or genuinely Jewish who really really do believe.
[Weinberg] Oh, absouletely. [Dawkins] Yeah.
[Weinberg] Um, I know a number of general relativists, for some reason,
people who work in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, uh, who are
devoutly religious. Uh, I don't know why that in particular.
I knew one astrophysicist who said that he was an orthodox Jew, but didn't
[Weinberg] believe in God. [Dawkins] Yes, I mean, nobody ever says they're
[Dawkins] an orthodox Christian but don't believe in God. [Weinberg] (chuckling) But that, I mean, because Judaism
[Weinberg] puts so much more of an emphasis on, uh, observance, as compared to belief, that
it makes sense in a way. I think Hinduism, in that sense, is like Judaism; that what's
much more important is the dietary rules, and the keeping various Sabbaths and
holidays, uh, you're honoring a tradition, and in Judaism, nobody ever catechizes
you about what you believe. Uh, in fact, obviously many of my friends are
Jewish and uh, I've asked them what they understand about the afterlife
[Weinberg] and they don't have the foggiest idea. [Dawkins] Yeah.
[Weinberg] It's not part of the official religion to have a definite idea about the afterlife.
[Dawkins] Yes. I mean I think... [Weinberg] Very different from Christianity.
[Dawkins] Yes, and I think also in Judaism there's a tradition of continual questioning, isn't there?
Continuing sort of the examining and turning your beliefs over and...
[Weinberg] I suppose so, yes. The Talmudic tradition. Uh, of course, Christianity's more like
Islam in that way; it's really important that you believe in specific things and,
um, you're likely to get killed by someone if you don't believe the right thing.
[Dawkins] Particularly someone of almost the same religion but uh... [Weinberg] Yeah, that's right.
[Dawkins] ...but not quite. Um, the- whenever I'm asked sort of, what's the most convincing
evidence you could think of which would really convince you that there's some kind
of supernatural being, uh, I think once upon a time, say in the time of
William Paley, uh, biology was all... was... was it, because the prodigious
complexity of life, and the beauty of it, the... the um, the sheer intricacy
and the stunning illusion of design which living things, uh, project.
Paley himself said... I think something like, um, "The heavenly bodies are not
best fitted to demonstrate the existence of the creator."
[Weinberg] You know, it... I think that's just an accident of the time that Paley lived,
because at that time the physical scientists had done a good job of
explaining the solar system. Uh, although there were still things
that were not well understood. But, you know, you go back earlier, everything
seemed to require a divine explanation. Even Newton, uh, thought that, uh, although
he could account for the way they planets moved, um, and the tides, and the fall of
fruits, uh, he could not account for the fact that there was a difference between
dark matter and light matter. Between the sun and the planets, and in a letter to
Bentley, he, uh, said that that was the sort of thing that required divine, um,
intervention to explain. Why the sun shone and the planets did not.
[Dawkins] Nevertheless, the eye, as the instrument that sees things with sunlight, uh, surely
Newton would have regarded that as even more of an evidence of the divine,
[Dawkins] wouldn't he? I don't know e... [Weinberg] I don't know. I don't know that he ever
speculated about that. He had great hopes for a unification of all the sciences in terms
of various forces acting on corpuscles of matter. Uh, I don't know how far he went
in, in thinking that would apply to living things. That's an interesting question. I... doubtless
Newton scholars could tell us, but I don't know the answer.
[Dawkins] Yes. [Weinberg] But it's um, it's true that uh, by the early
19th century, when Paley wrote, uh, the outstanding problem that seemed to
require a divine explanation was the problem of life, and uh, I believe Cardinal Manning,
at least, this is what I've learned from Lytton Strachey's biography of him.
Cardinal Manning, uh, became a devout Christian by reading Paley's book.
[Weinberg] He was so convinced. [Dawkins] Well, Darwin himself was, I mean Darwin
himself read Paley as an undergraduate at Cambridge.
[Weinberg] Oh, I didn't know that. [Dawkins] They all had to, but Darwin was particularly
impressed by it, and uh, I think on the voyage of the Beagle he probably thought
that what he was seeing, when he roamed through the Brazilian jungle and things,
was, was evidence of um, of God. But although it's often said that it was Darwin
who finally killed that kind of Paleyism, and I think that's probably right,
nevertheless, even before Darwin came along, it's never seemed to me to be a very
logically coherent argument. I could have imagined, indeed as David Hume did, that
before Darwin came along, one would have said, well, I don't understand where this
illusion of design comes from. But a supernatural designer doesn't help.
We're still left with a, with a, with a mystery. Uh, and so although it's very nice that
Darwin did come along, and actually answer the question, even before Darwin came
along we didn't actually, so to speak, need him in order to reject the idea
[Dawkins] of a supernatural designer. [Weinberg] We physicist are somewhat in that
position; is we hope for a uh, set of very simple laws of nature that will
account for everything we see, but when we have them, there will always be a
[Weinberg] question, well, why those laws? [Dawkins] Exactly.
[Weinberg] And many people say, in fact a Jesuit has argued to me that that's where God
comes in, that God, ordained the laws, and he is the ultimate explanation.
And of course the response to that is, well, [chuckling] you know, what- have you really
helped at all with that? What explains God? What explains why God is the way God is?
Uh, if you, if you have some specific understanding of that three letter word,
G-O-D, then you have the mystery: why is God that way rather than some other way?
And if you don't have any specific understanding of what you mean by...
I hear the thunder, I hope he's not getting annoyed with us...
(laughter)
Um, if you don't have any specific understanding of what you mean by
[Weinberg] G-O-D, uh, then what are you talking about? [Dawkins] Yes, quite.
[Weinberg] Then it, then it's just an empty word. [Dawkins] I suppose a biologist would put
an additional spin on that, which is not just why is God this way rather than
that way, but, in order to do what he's supposed to be doing, which is say,
ordaining the laws of physics, to say nothing of forgiving our sins and listenting
to our prayers and things, he would have to be a complex entity, which is exactly
the kind of entity that we are setting out to explain. And which Darwin, in fact, does
explain. And so in a way, um, Darwini... the Darwinian theory raises our
consciousness to the fact that any God worthy of the name would have to be
[Dawkins] much more complicated than an eye or a... [Weinberg] Yeah.
[Dawkins]...brain or a heart, and therefore particularly- (rolling thunder)
[Dawkins] I love this, this is really great. Uh, particularly demanding of
just the kind of explanation which he purports to provide.
[Weinberg] Yes, once in the, just to change the subject for a moment, uh once in a debate
about this sort of thing, uh, someone in the audience said, uh, uh, your view of
that there isn't God is not falsifiable. And I said, yes, it is falsifiable, a bolt
[Weinberg] of lightning could come down and strike me dead, and then it would, my view would [Dawkins] (laughter)
be falsified. And I suppose, listening to the thunder, reminds me. But going back
to what we were saying, yes, uh...