Richard Dawkins - Evolution vs. Religion?

Richard, you have of course famously dealt with both evolution and religion in different perspectives, and I'd like to get your overview thinking on putting the two words together. I'm personally less interested in the pedagogical approach of what should be taught in schools because science should be taught, and that's a political issue. I'm not so interested in that, but interested in things like how religion came about, how the tension between evolution and religion seems in most cases today, at least at the leadership level of religions, have accepted evolution. How do you reflect on this whole process? You've dealt with both for decades. I'm not quite sure what you're asking there. Just asking you to reflect on evolution and religion. Well, I think supernatural religion is a very interesting scientific theory, which is wrong, but it's profoundly important in the sense that if it were right, it would be a very different kind of world we live in. So I'm not one of those who says, well, it's nothing to do with science, you can believe if you like, and leave me out of it. It is a very important scientific theory. If there really is some kind of brooding great spirit at the base of the universe which creates everything and supervises everything, then that is a totally different kind of universe from one where there is no such creature. I think it's a scientific question. It doesn't mean you can answer it scientifically necessarily, but I think we can think about it scientifically, and I do so and have concluded that it's highly unlikely that there is such a great spirit. Where it affects my own field of evolutionary biology, of course, is that it's a direct competitor in that there are organised religion, Christianity and Islam and Judaism all subscribe to, in their fundamentalist form, subscribe to a book which proposes a myth which is scientifically false. So to that extent, I have to be involved in controversy because evolution is true and we need to educate people about it. Many people in those traditions that you refer to now take evolution on board. Sometimes they do it in a theistic way, sometimes they do it in a way that operates at the quantum level, so there's no interruption of the mechanism of the world. Some do it deistically. One person told me that it's much more difficult for God to have worked through evolution, and it's a much cleverer God to work through evolution, because just to say, there's the dinosaur, just create it, that's easy. If you can create it, great. But to do it through evolution, starting with the plasma at the Big Bang and going through evolution to get that dinosaur, I mean, that's really clever. No, it's pathetic. It's very unimpressive because why on earth would he choose to use the one method where he's not necessary? Write himself out of the script. To fool you. No, I think there's no support in biology. I think that if there's any support for supernaturalism, I don't think there is, but if there was any, it might come from physics, where you might say something like the fine-tuning of the universe. I don't think that's a good argument, but that's better than any biological argument anyway. As religion has come up with these sort of ways to take evolution on board, is your feeling mixed? Happy in a sense, then, because science is taught as science and you don't have that barrier in many cases anymore, even though they're saying things that you would think are wrong. Well, I'm not sure I'm happy. Happy that religions at their highest level now take evolution on board so they're not opposing the teaching of evolution. Well, I suppose in one way I am, because, yes, I mean, I'm glad of that, although in America, at least, that's not really totally true. No, it's certainly not totally true, and there's a large percentage that it's not. More in the Islamic world. Yes, that's correct. Both are correct. So there is a great deal of opposition, and I think that the so-called sophisticated theologians who accept the scientific worldview don't impress me very much because I don't think they've really thought through the negative impact that that has on their religious worldview. You had mentioned that it's a scientific theory that there is a supernatural reality or being, but perhaps cannot be accessed or tested scientifically, but it's a scientific theory. I'd like to parse that a little bit and understand that because I would have thought that it's not a scientific theory and it is unaccessible by the scientific method, which doesn't give it any more reification, but it's a self-protecting mechanism, like a moat around a castle. I see what you're saying. On the other hand, do you take my point that I made earlier that it would be a totally different kind of universe? You've probably seen that cartoon, a great blackboard full of formulae, and here a miracle occurs. I think it's both a scientific theory and a betrayal of science, but it is a scientific theory in the sense that, as I said, it would be a very different kind of universe if there was a creator. All bets would be off then. It would be a completely different enterprise that we're engaged upon when we try to understand what's going on. It could be that, but it wouldn't have to be that. You'd be totally free to say at any moment God could just intervene. And that's not terribly coherent. No.