The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol, an idea.
The population of atheists in this country is going through the rule, rejecting
faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I tell the truth,
it's because I tell the truth, not because I put my hand on a
book and made a wish and working together for a more rational world. Take
the risk of thinking feels so much more happiness. Truth, Fusian wisdom will
come to you that way. Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking.
This is the Thinking Atheist podcast, hosted by Seth Andrews. He was
known as one of the four horsemen of the New atheist movements. And already
at that first sentence, I find myself shifting in my chair. You've heard
me resist the term new atheists. I guess I understand it. We saw
a resurgence in these conversations about the non belief in gods just after the turn
of the millennium two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, two thousand
and eight, Richard Dawkins had just released his book The God Delusion, A
Book that Changed My life. Christopher Hitchins had the book God Is Not Great.
He was traveling Bible Belt states, doing speaking engagements and debates. He
was on television about every five minutes. Sam Harris released a few books,
The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. And then rounding out
the four we had Daniel Dennett. He was known as the nice one.
He had the book Breaking the Spell Religion as natural phenomenon. He did a
lot of examinations of the evolution of religion, why people's adherents to God belief
and superstitions and superstitious rituals might be explained evolutionarily. These were the horsemen,
the new atheists. But were they saying anything new? I mean, the
science was certainly better in the new millennium as we began to understand belief in
the brain, evolved tendencies toward this thinking or that thinking, conditioned response,
cultural reinforcements, all of these other elements related to human psychology, brain chemistry.
That information was certainly better than it was back in the days of Robert
Ingersoll, George Bernard Shaw Bertrand Russell Mark Twain, etc. But as far
as rejecting dogma and thinking freely to say, honestly, even courageously, I
don't believe I am an atheist. I mean, that's that doesn't seem all
that new to me. But four horsemen has always bothered me because it seems
to anoint in a point these four men as the shepherds of a flock.
You know, they were there, the horsemen, waving the standards, swords
drawn at the front of the army, leading us toward battle, and we
followed in lockstep. It just comes off that way to me, and it
gives a little bit of ammo to some apologists who'd like to say that atheists
have just traded one religion for another, the religion of atheism, and these
are their preachers, these are their shepherds, And I just you know,
it's different when I was part of a church and the pastor would preach something,
I was conditioned to accept it. Ever, notice how pastors don't finish
their sermons with a Q and a time. But if you go to a
free thought event, there's a ton of Q and A And even those who
have expertise and experience and take the stage, they are listening even as they
are presenting. But this type of engagement is not new, and so I
resist this clumsy framing of new atheism. But whatever. I'm totally digressing.
We're talking today about one of the horsemen who just passed away on the nineteenth
of April twenty twenty four, Daniel Dennett, the philosopher. He succumbed to
lung disease. He's the second one of these four that we lost. Of
course, we lost Christopher Hitchens to asofageal cancer back in December of twenty eleven.
I actually did a ten year anniversary tribute for hitch It's in the podcast
archive. You can just scroll back and find that show from twenty twenty one.
Now, it's interesting that Daniel Dennett is a known name, but a
lot of people don't know much about him. And here in the wake of
his passing, I thought it might be a good opportunity to introduce you to
some of what Daniel Dennett said and much of who he was. Daniel Dennett
in Memoriam, including many recordings of his own voice, his own thoughts,
in his own words. Daniel Dennett born the twenty eighth of March nineteen forty
two, Boston, Massachusetts. His mother had a master's degree in English.
She was an educator. His father had a doctorate in Islamic studies from Harvard
and I am not kidding was a counter intelligence agent for the government. Daniel
Dennett's dad was killed in a plane crash when Dan was only five, and
after that they were living overseas in Lebanon. Dan's mother moved him back to
Massachusetts before he was even a teenager. Though he was apparently just a natural
philosopher. He just thought like a philosopher. A camp counselor told him when
he was just eleven, He told him, you will be a philosopher.
In nineteen sixty three, Daniel Dennett graduated with a BA in philosophy from Harvard.
A doctorate from Oxford would soon follow. He became a professor at the
University of California from nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy one, and then he
moved to Tuff's University in Massachusetts. A few other bullet points off the resume.
Daniel Dennett was a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Humanist Laureates of
the International Academy of Humanism. He was named two for Humanist of the Year
by the American Humanist Association, and of course, he was a much sought
after author and public speaker in my own journey. I think what I found
most interesting and continue to find most interesting about Dennett's work is how he speaks
to the evolution of religion. Because a lot of times we talk about religion
as an idea. It's a bad idea if it's a superstition and all the
harm that it propagates. But we don't often understand the evolutionary reasons that people
may gravitate to the idea of gods or spirits or some sort of other worldly
metaphysical agency. But Daniel Dennett this was totally his wheelhouse. Several years ago,
he was on a broadcast called Closer to Truth, which was hosted by
Robert Kohn. Here's a clip, It runs over five minutes, but I
wanted to include the complete thought, what are some of the methodologies that we
should begin to think about looking at a study of religion? Well, I
think we have to think not just historically, but biologically. We have to
realize that homeless sapiens us we descended from earlier Hamanids. We have a share
a common ancestor with a chimpanzee. Going back about six million years, a
lot has changed, and as Darcy Thompsone said, everything is the way it
is is it got that way. So let's look at the history as best
we can. We have to do a lot of extrapolation and some speculation and
see what religion adds to the mix that makes us so different from all other
animals. And I think we can do that. I think we can see
both what its origins were in superstition, which grew out of an overactive adoption
of the intentional stance when it's something. And this, by the way,
is a mammalian feature we share with say dogs. If your dog here's the
thud of snow falling off the roof, and jumps up and barks, the
dog is in effect asking who's there, what's that? But who it's assuming
there's an agent, might be a dangerous agent out there, This assumption that
when something surprising, unexpected, puzzling happens, to treat it as an agent
until you learn otherwise. That's the intentional the intentional stance, and it's it's
an instinct, not just in us, an entirely appropriate instinct. I don't
want to get eaten running around on the plane. It's on a hair trigger.
And so that's right. You don't want to wait around it is you
want to you want to to fire have a lot of false positives, a
lot of false alarms right now in the dog. The dog just goes back
to sleep after a minute. But we, because we've got language, we
mull it over in our heads, and pretty soon we've conned up a hallucinated
agent, a little forest god, or a talking tree, or an elf
or something what made that noise? Now mostly those are just harmless little quirks
that we have in our heads, and we soon forget them. Every now
and then one comes along which has a little bit more staying power. It's
sort of unforgettable, And so it grows and we share it with a neighbor,
and the neighbor says, what do you mean a talking tree? Nah,
there's no talking trees, you see. Oh yeah, I could have
sworn that tree with talking. Pretty soon the whole village is talking about the
talking tree. Maybe they're all saying it's crazy, all such thing as a
talking tree, but they're all talking about the talking tree. The talking tree
idea has entered the world. It has made multiple copies. Everybody in the
village has a copy of the talking tree idea. What's it for. It's
for itself. It's just it's just happened because it could. It's like a
it's like a virus. And it may be from time to time that one
of these little quirks gets randomly reinforced by I don't know, a good fishing
catch or some animal, and then suddenly the good result is like an operant
condition back to that little quirk, and it gets. In fact, the
f Skinner did some experiments with pigeons on just that randomly reinforcing them, and
pretty soon they were doing quite elaborate little dances. And and sure, these
are these This isn't religion, This is just superstition, and it melds perfectly
in with their lore, their physical law, their their natural lore. But
sometimes they get the idea, well, if you if you say a little
prayer to the to the talking tree before you go hunting, then then you
do a little better on the hunt. And and and so it goes.
And the line between good law, I mean, true accurate law about where
where the food is and so forth, and the sort of embellishment they don't
drive. They don't think of it as a religion. And gradually these ideas
which naturally infiltrate into their community and get copies in all the heads locally,
they sort themselves out. There's competition, there's there's only so much room in
people's heads for these things, and the ones that are unforgettable, the ones
that really are catchy, will get copied and passed on and passed on and
passed on. These are the memes. Those are what Richard Dawkins would call
memes. That's right. They're cultural items that reproduce in people's brains, and
their only purpose is their own propagation. What are they for? They're for
themselves. It's like when I first started studying religion, people said, oh,
evolutionary account of religion, what do you think religions are good for?
Dan, They've got to be good for something, after all, every every
human group that's ever been studied has some kind of religion. And I said,
well, yeah, every group that's ever been studied has the common cold
too. What's it good for? It's good for self. And these ideas
are just good for themselves. They're good at reproducing in minds, whether they're
good habits or bad habits of mine. They're good at sem producing some one
s. That's a neutral comment. It's not positive. Now those are if
you like, the wild memes, because they don't really belong to people.
People don't take care of them. They're they're not. Now they're going to
get themselves domesticated. And now, just the way sheep acquired shepherds, and
it was very much to their genetic benefit, millions, hundreds of millions of
sheep. Now, so some of these wild ideas got shepherds as well.
They got stewards, They got people who would devote their lives to spreading these
ideas, to protecting them, to teaching them, and so forth. Now
we've begun the domestication of these wild memes. It's interesting how many people don't
realize the word meme comes from that nineteen seventy six book I think it was
seventy six, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. He was talking about genetics,
the replication or imitation one to another. And now we talk about it
in terms of things that are copied and spread rapidly, usually on the Internet,
whether it's a picture, video, text, idea, whatever, the
meme, but it has a scientific origin. Oh God, I guess we'll
open up the free will Gan of worms and the thoughts, the perspectives,
the opinion of Daniel Dennett coming up next. Thanks for listening and thanks for
your support Patreon dot com, slash seth Andrews. You get the show two
days early and totally commercial free, and your support is appreciated. Continuing to
talk about Daniel Dennett, now I mentioned free will. This conversation makes my
brain hurt. I'm not a philosopher. I don't think like philosophers. I'm
still debating whether philosophy, which is this exploration of knowledge and life and purpose,
you know, these existential conversations if philosophy is is it beneficial or is
it just this sort of stuffy, snobby time wasting naval gazing. You know,
should these be scientific questions? And then is philosophy actually rooted in science
or is it something else? I mean I literally just stop, I just
say quit it. I want to go and share memes, right, And
I don't know if you feel the same way. There are some people who
love to wade in or swim in the ocean of philosophy. Knock yourself out.
But one of the big conversations I had to do with free will,
does the brain automatically decide for us what we're going to do, what we're
going to say, how we think the entirety of our being, and we
just think we have agency, but it already happened, it was already predetermined.
Or is there a choice? Do we really have free will? Daniel
Denniz thought that we actually do have agency, we can choose, and that
those who say free will does not exist may be harming the species. About
a decade ago he sat down and shared his thoughts. This is probably a
three or four minute clip. This is from the Big Think broadcast. Let
me trot out one of my recent favorites, which I devised to jangle the
nerves of neuroscientists who've been going around saying that neuroscience shows that we don't have
free will. I think their reasons for saying that are ill considered, and
moreover, that what they're doing is apt to be mischievous and doing some real
arm. So I concocted a little thought experiment, a little intuition pump,
to suggest that So this is the case of the nefarious neurosurgeon who treats a
patient who has obsessive compulsive disorder by inserting a little microchip in his brain which
controls the OCD, the obsessive compulsive disorder. Now there is such a chip.
It's been developed in the Netherlands and it works really quite well. That's
science fact. But now you've come to science fiction. So the neurosurgeon,
after she's operated on the guy, sewed him all up. So, okay,
you're OCD is under control. Now you'll be happy to learn. But
moreover, our team here will be monitoring you twenty four to seven, and
we're going to be controlling everything you do from now on. You'll think you
have free will. You you'll think you're making your own decisions, but really
you won't have free will at all. Free will is an illusion that we
will maintain while controlling you. Goodbye, nice life, sends him out the
door. Well, he believes her. He's had a shiny lab and you
know, lots of degrees and diplomas and all that. So what does he
do? Well, he thinking he doesn't have free will anymore, he gets
a little self indulgent, a little bit aggressive, He a little negligent in
how he decides what to do, and pretty soon, by indulging some of
his worst features, he's got himself in trouble with the law, and he's
arrested and he's put on trial. And at the trial he says, but
your honor, I don't have free will. I'm under the control of the
team at the neurosurgery clinic. I'd say, what's this and they call the
neurosurgeon to the stand. I said, did you tell this man that you
were controlling as every movie? He didn't have free will? He says,
yeah, I did. Yeah, but I was just messing with his head.
That was just a joke. I didn't think he'd believe me. Now
right there, I think we can stop taking deep breath and say, well,
she did something really bad. She really harmed that man. In fact,
her little joke telling him that actually accomplished non surgically pretty much what she
claimed accomplished surgically. She disabled him by telling him he didn't have free will.
She pretty much turned his free will off and turned him into a morally
incompetent person. Now, if we agree that she did a bad thing,
if nobody recommends people play jokes like this, what are we to say about
the neuroscientists who are telling the public every day. We've shown in our neuroscience
labs that nobody has free will. I think if the neuroscientists recognize that what
my imaginary neurosurgeon did was irresponsible, they should think Sarah seriously about whether it's
irresponsible of them to make these claims about free will. You know, here,
I am in my own life, and I've come to the conclusion that
even if I don't have free will, even if my brain's going to do
what it does automatically, I'm still operating as if, like I have an
illusion of but I'm conducting myself with the idea the desire to do the right
thing. So even if it's a foregone conclusion and I'm acting it out,
even if it's make believe, it's it's something that should happen. And then
I thought, well, if I'm pretending I have agency, was that make
believe also a foregone conclusion in my brain? And I had no choice about
choosing to make believe. You see what I'm talking about? All right?
Well, you free will debaters, I passed the baton to you. You
just go off into your little room, find that basement, sit around the
card table, and you can debate all night. Just don't invite me,
Okay, I just don't have the bandwidth for it. But Daniel Dennett used
to do a lot of speaking about purpose, generating purpose, being handed purpose,
especially from a higher power. There was a speech that he did and
this is one of the favorites that I found online. It was back in
two thousand and seven at a TED conference. Now TED stands for Technology,
Entertainment and Design, and these conferences are really slick. They've got like twenty
minute speeches and they bring in thinkers and scientists, philosophers and just everyday people
from all around the world to present. So this is a TED conference two
thousand and seven with multiple presenters. Rick Warren was on the roster. Rick
Warren is a world famous Baptist pastor. He founded the mega Church, one
of the biggest churches in the United States. It's called Saddleback Church, Lake
Forest, California, and Rick Warren really rose to fame. It's saddled Back
by the way, he was excommunicated from his own church and from the Southern
Baptist Convention entirely. They kicked him out. You want to know why he
committed the sin of hiring a female pastor, because the Southern Baptist Convention apparently
thinks it's the year eleven hundred. But Rick ain't hurting because he published in
two thousand and two. He's got a lot of books, but the one
that he's known for published twenty two years ago. It's called Purpose Driven Life,
a book which is beloved by Christians. It exploded all of these years
later. It's been translated into one hundred and thirty seven languages. It has
sold fifty million copies. Imagine the Royalty checks on that. So Rick Warren
is speaking at ted about his book, which makes several claims, and Daniel
Dennett followed up with the rebuttal. But the claims go like this, Okay,
people should obey God's word even when it doesn't make any sense. And
he also said to have meaning in life, you have to deny natural selection.
With Rick Warren sitting in the audience, Daniel Dennett took the stage to
push back just a little bit. Here's a clip, Well, this from
a Purpose Driven Life. The Bible must become the authoritative standard of it for
my life. The compass I rely on for direction, the council I listen
to for making wise decisions, and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything.
Well maybe, okay, but what's going to follow from this? And here's
one that does concern me. Well, remember I quoted him before with this
one. Surrendered People obey God's word even if it doesn't make sense, and
that's that's a problem. Don't ever argue with a double He's better at arguing
than you are, having had thousands of years to practice. Now, Rick
Warren didn't invent this clever move. It's an old move. It's a very
clever adaptation of religions. It's a wild card for disarming any reasonable criticism.
You don't like my interpretation, you've got a reasonable objection to it. Don't
listen. Don't listen. That's the devil speaking. This discourages the sort of
reasoning citizenship it seems to me that we want to have. Okay, So
there's Dan Dennett and he's right there, face to face, eye to I
taking Pastor Warren to task, and he issued an idea, a proposal for
how we might better prepare or educate the next generations. This clip is along
when it runs just over four minutes from that same Ted talk in two thousand
and seven. Here's my proposal. I'm going to just take you a couple
of minutes to explain it. That education in world religions, on world religions
for all of our children, in primary school, in high school, in
public schools, in private schools, and in homeschooling. So what I'm proposing
is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history,
so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world,
about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music,
their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. And that this should be
presented factually, straightforwardly, with no particular spin, to all of the children
in the country. And as long as you teach them that, you can
teach them anything else you like. That I think is maximal tolerance for religious
freedom. As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you
may, and as early as you like it, whatever you like, teach
them whatever creed you want them to learn, but also let them know about
other religions. Now why do I say that, Because democracy depends on an
informed citizenship. Informed consent is the very bedrock of our understanding of democracy.
Misinformed consent is not worth it. It's like a coin flip it's just not
it doesn't count. Really, democracy depends on informed consent. This is the
way we treat people as responsible adults. Now, children below the age of
consent are special case. Parents. I'm going to use a word that the
pastor Rick just used. Parents are stewards of their children. They don't own
them. You can't own your children. You have a responsibility to the world,
to the state, to them to take care of them. Right,
you may teach them whatever creed you think is most important, but I say
you have a responsibility to let them be informed about all the other creeds in
the world too. Now, the reason I've taken this time is I've been
fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. One reviewer for a Roman
Catholic newspaper called it totalitarian. It strikes me as a practically libertarian. Is
it totalitarian to require reading, writing, and arithmetic. I don't think so.
All I'm saying is and facts facts only, no values, just facts
about all the world's religions. Another reviewer called it hilarious. Well, I'm
really bothered by the fact that anybody would think that was hilarious. It seems
to me to be such a plausible natural extension of the democratic principles we already
have that. I'm shocked to think anybody would find that just ridiculous. I
know many religions are so anxious about preserving the purity of their faith among their
children that they are intent on keeping their children ignorant of other faiths. I
don't think that's defensible. I've got more Daniel Dennett clips, audio clips,
and just a few, but first I want to cover some of his thoughts,
written thoughts. These are his words my voice, from various books,
publications, speeches, TV shows, etc. Nineteen ninety five from his book
Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Then I was trying to say that you can't have science
without philosophy. Quote. Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises because
more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved
or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of
the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to
ask and answer the question why. Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside
down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to
this ancient and inescapable question. Here, science and philosophy get completely intertwined.
Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best,
decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that
they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving.
But there is no such thing as philosophy free science. There is only science
whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. The Darwinian Revolution is both
a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the
other. As we shall see, it was the philosophical prejudices of the scientists,
more than their lack of scientific evidence, that prevented them from seeing how
the theory could actually work. But those philosophical prejudices that had to be overthrown
were too deeply entrenched to be dislodged by mere philosophical brilliance. It took an
irresistible parade of hard on scientific facts to force thinkers to take seriously the weird
new outlook that Darwin proposed. Let me lay my cards on the table.
If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever
had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone
else in a single stroke. The idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the
realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time,
cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it's not just a wonderful
scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. My admiration for Darwin's magnificent idea
is unbounded. But I too cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it
seems to challenge, and want to protect them. The only good way to
do this, the only way that has a chance in the long run,
is to cut through the smoke screens and look at the idea as unflinchingly,
as dispassionately as possible. Now, you put scientists in philosophers in a room
and you read that quote to them, and then just watch chaos breakout.
And I don't know the answer to this. I tend to think that scientific
answers may not require philosophy. I mean, we're talking about hard data experimentation
and coming up with hypotheses. It's not philosophy, is it. But again,
this is above my pay grade. You tell me what you think.
From television, on a show called The Genius of Charles Darwin, Dennett said
that the earth has grown a nervous system and it's us. There's a line
from Breaking the Spell that I really liked, a couple of paragraphs where we
talked about the difference between you and I relying on authorities on a specific subject
or in a field, right scientist to our legitimate, vetted, peer reviewed,
credible experts. We have to at some point rely on that expertise because
they are an authority. Well, what's the difference between that and religious believers
saying that God is their authority, or a pastor or a member of the
clergy or whatever is their authority. Isn't there a difference? Daniel Dennett thought,
So, here's what he said. Quote. Surely just about everybody has
faced a moral dilemma and secretly wished if only somebody, somebody I trusted,
could just tell me what to do. Wouldn't this be morally inauthentic? Aren't
we responsible for making our own moral decisions? Yes? But the virtues of
do it yourself moral reasoning have their limits. And if you decide, after
conscientious consideration, that your moral decision is to delegate further moral decisions in your
life to a trusted expert, then you have made your own moral decision.
You have decided to take advantage of the division of labor that civilization makes possible
and get the help of experts specialists. We applaud the wisdom of this course
in all other important areas of decision making. Don't try to be your own
doctor, the lawyer who represents himself as a fool for a client, and
so forth. Even in the case of political decisions like which way to vote,
the policy of delegation can be defended. Is this a dereliction of one's
duty as a citizen. I don't think so, but it does depend on
my having good grounds for trusting the delegates judgment. That's why those who have
an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a
problem if they themselves haven't conscientiously considered on their own whether their pastors or priests,
or rabbis or immams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives,
then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand. This is perhaps
the most shocking implication of my inquiry, and I do not shrink from it,
even though it may offend many who think of themselves as deeply moral.
It is commonly supposed that it is entirely exemplary to adopt the moral teachings of
one's own religion without question, because, to put it simply, it is
the word of God, as interpreted always by the specialists to whom one has
delegated authority. I am urging, on the contrary, that anybody who professes
that a particular point of moral conviction is not discussable, not debatable, not
negotiable, simply because it is the word of God, or because the Bible
says so, or because that is what all Muslims, Hindus, seeks etc.
Believe, and I am a Muslim, Hindu seekh should be seen to
be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously,
excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not
conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing Dennett said this. He said, there
are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of
fundamentalism of all species, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and
Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Then I find it interesting that
he used the word infections on the issue of the soul. From Dan Dennett.
This is two thousand and four. In a BBC documentary called The Atheism
Tapes. He said, I was once interviewed in Italy and the headline of
the interview the next day was wonderful. I saved this for my collection.
It was, Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots
of tiny robots. And I thought, that's exactly right. Yes we do
have a soul, but it's mechanical, but it's still a soul. It
still does the work that the soul was supposed to do. It is the
seat of reason, it is the seat of moral responsibility. It's why we
are appropriate objects of punishment when we do evil things, why we deserve the
praise when we do good things. It's just not a mysterious lump of wonder
stuff that will outlive us. Here is an interesting one that I don't think
I agree with. And again I've got more quotes coming up in Daniel's voice.
This is from Dennett in Breaking the Spell. He said this. Since
September eleventh, two thousand and one, I've often thought that perhaps it was
fortunate for the world that the attackers targeted the World Trade Center instead of the
Statue of Liberty, or if they had destroyed our sacred symbol of democracy,
I fear we as Americans would have been unable to keep ourselves from indulging in
paroxysms of revenge of a sort the world has never seen before. If that
had happened, it would have befouled the meaning of the Statue of Liberty beyond
any hope of subsequent redemption, if there were any people left to care.
I have learned from my students that this upsetting thought of mine is subject to
several unfortunate misconstrules. So let me expand on it to ward them off.
The killing of thousands of innocence and the World Trade Center was a heinous crime,
much more evil than the destruction of the Statue of Liberty would have been.
And yes, the World Trade center was a much more appropriate symbol of
al Kada's wrath than the statue of Liberty would have been. But for that
very reason, it didn't mean as much as a symbol to us. It
was mammon and plutocrats and globalization, not Lady Liberty. I do suspect that
the fury with which Americans would have responded to the unspeakable defilement of our cherished
national symbol, the purest image of our aspirations as a democracy, would have
made a sane and measured response extraordinarily difficult. This is the great danger of
symbols. They can become too sacred. An important task for religious people of
all faiths in the twenty first century will be spreading the conviction that there are
no acts more dishonorable than harming infidels of one stripe or another, for disrespecting
a flag across a holy text. Now I get his meeting, and I
do agree with eighty five percent of it. We are seeing in this country
the deification of symbols. You must stand and salute and say the pledge toward
the flag. It is mandated because you are free right. And if you
desecrates, if you tear burn whatever the flag you have, become a heretic
in a way, you should be burned at the stake. We are creatures
who respond to symbols that we have imbued meaning to. Somebody sets a history
book on fire, fine, somebody burns a Bible or the Koran, and
it's chaos. So I do understand and agree with his position that symbols that
we take personally will almost always produce an irrational and sometimes very dangerous response rooted
in emotion much more over reason. What I don't necessarily buy is the idea
that our response to the World Trade Center wasn't also an irrational emotional response.
Remember when the towers fell, everybody was saying, drop the nuke, turn
the Middle East to glass. Fuck those people. I mean, that's all
we heard. And it was this weird reductive thing where it wasn't just the
terrorist, it wasn't just Islamic extremists. We heard people a lot of people
saying it's the Muslims, those people practicing idolatry in league with Lucifer who hate
America want to burn us to the ground. Let's burn them to the ground
first. And the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are symbols, symbols of
America and American freedom that people do still take personally. I'll let you discuss
this further, but I take as larger point. Maybe we're more in love
with the Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe that's it. I just don't get
misty about the freedom icons anymore. Is that just cynicism that comes with age?
I don't know. You know, whenever people stand up and put hand
over heart and sing, oh beautiful, fool spacious guys right for amber ways
of green, and everybody's starting to feel that vibration of America freedom and their
bones, and I just tend to throw up a little bit in my mouth.
It might just be a me problem. Then. The Statue of Liberty
is remarkable, it's lovely, it's beautiful. I'm glad it is there.
I hope it represents the best of us. But seeing it does not produce
in me the emotional response that Dennett is talking about. Maybe I'm just projecting
me instead of assessing correctly the culture itself. What do you think about that?
Let me take a short break. I've got more in memoriam. Hang
on. We're taking a few minutes this week to remember the late Daniel Dennets,
supposedly one of the four horsemen of atheism, and we've talked a little
bit about that already. He passed away on the nineteenth of this month.
I think there are some who might be worried that we are deifying Daniel Dennet.
I do not. I think we listen, we observe, we analyze,
we assess, we agree, we disagree. And he said some problematic
things. I remember think he went after feminists at one point, and I'm
trying to remember exactly what was said. You can elaborate or correct me,
but I just it just rang false with me. As we talk about equality
for all, and in my own life, I embrace the word. I
think the word feminism is just fine. You can call it egalitarianism. But
this idea of trying to promote gender equality across the board, I don't think
that fight is over. But it's not like I look at Dan and disagree
and say screw that guy, because I feel like he brought a lot to
the conversation. He was massively involved in something called the Clergy Project. I
probably should have mentioned this earlier in the broadcast because it's such a big deal.
You may have heard about it, but let me elaborate. This is
the creation of a group of pastors secretly atheists, yet they remain in the
pulpits wondering, what in the hell am I going to do now? Man?
I know that feeling. I work for a job where I was producing
videos for mostly churches. At midlife, I think I was pushing forty.
What am I going to do if I shouldn't be promoting churches? Because I
don't want to do this anymore. But this is my skill set. Where
am I going to go? Well? The genesis of the Clergy project takes
us back to nineteen eighty four. Now stick with me. I'll try to
make this quick. Dan Barker he's the current co president of the Freedom From
Religion Foundation, A former evangelical preacher and I mean hardcore Pentecostal speaking in tongue's
Bible literalist pastor Dan Barker. But in nineteen eighty four he appeared on Oprah
Winfrey's show called Am Chicago. This is before she went global, and Dan
came out as an atheist right there on television, and right away he started
to get mail from pastors all around the United States who were saying I saw
your interview. I can't tell anybody I don't believe either, but I'm still
a preacher. I don't know what to do next. I just had to
tell somebody. Dan Barker started to compile their stories well. In two thousand
and eight, Dan Barker was featured in an article in Psychology Today. It
was called an Atheist in the Pulpit. After that went public, more and
more mail started coming in. This whole time, Richard Dawkins had been speaking
with Daniel Dennett about what might be done with all of this, with the
letters, with these poor people, non believing clergy looking for a way out.
Now we jumped to twenty ten, qualitative researcher Linda Lascola and Daniel Dennetz
helped to fuel and operate a pilot study called Preachers who Are Not Believers.
That study included many of the folks who had originally sent letters to Dan Barker.
So it's all starting to come together. The full scope of this research
project would culminate in a book released in twenty thirteen called Caught in the Pulpit,
Leaving Belief Behind, and around that time, actually just a bit earlier,
the Clergy Project was formed pastors who reached out and went through a strenuous
vetting process to make sure they weren't fakes or moles trying to rat out their
fellow pastors by pretending there was a very intensive background check. The Clergy Project
that first had like fifty pastors involved, and today it has hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of people who are still preachers, and yet they are atheists desperate
to find a way out. Clergyproject dot org, and don't be hard on
these people. I know what it's like to feel like you're financially held hostage.
Many of these pastors would talk about how their own sermons changed. Instead
of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark and Moses and the Exodus and the Nativity
story and Jesus on the Cross and Heaven and Hell, they were preaching more
about good people doing good things, embracing the moments, kind of a humanistic
thing. They were preaching humanism, and they were slowly starting to take all
of the magic and all of the literal Bible dogma, etc. And they
were just sort of taking it and suddenly sweeping it out, hoping nobody else
would notice. They became motivational speakers in a way, and their sermons reflected
that, afraid to tell their peers what happens if you're a pastor and you
go, hey, Bob, I don't think I buy any of this anymore.
And then Bob tells the church board or the religious organization, which is
the umbrella for the denomination, and you find yourself on the street with no
options. Clergyproject dot org is a re for them, and Daniel Dennett was
a big part of it. What about consciousness? There was a Google talk
that Daniel Dennett did about ten years ago. We talked about things called intuition
pumps and other tools for thinking, and these were his thoughts on consciousness.
I think the consciousness is like reproduction and metabolism and self repair, healing,
blood clotting. It's a very interestingly complex and deeply recursive biological phenomenon. It
is not in the interesting sense. And there's many senses of consciousness, in
the sense that we in this rumor consciousness, which is this sort of anchoring
its home base from our own experience and our reading of literature. You know,
we read novels and things like that. We have this sense of what
a conscious life is like I think we're the only creatures that have that kind
of conscious life. I don't think dogs have it. I don't think dolphins
have it. They're sentient, they're awake, they feel pain, but they
don't have most of what makes human consciousness so important. And I think that
that phenomenon is in the end software, and I think it has to be
installed. I think so it is an implication of my view. And don't
try this at home, don't test this that if a human baby could be
raised entirely without any interaction with other human beings, have cut off from language,
if it could grow to adulthood without benefit of all the thinking tools that
would normally be installed in the course of just growing up in a social community,
I think that human being would have a mind so profoundly different from ours
that we would all pretty well agree it wasn't he or she wasn't really conscious.
Now that may be a very eccentric notion of consciousness, but if you're
wanting to know do I think that if you look for a better notion of
consciousness, or one that isn't so eccentric, and you start thinking about what
it is, you know the capacity to experience color and flavor, and to
have quality, as philosophers say, I think that's all pretty badly confused,
and I've tried to say how and why over the years, But part of
what makes it confusing is that people want consciousness to be, to use a
technical term, super califragilistic xpialidocious. And if you're not talking about something that
is super califragilistic xpialidocious, they think you're not talking about consciousness. And there's
a quote my friend Lee Siegel is a philosopher and a magician, a very
fine stage magician, wrote a wonderful book on Indian street magic called Net of
Magic, and there's a passage in there I love to quote and he says,
I tell my friends I'm writing a book on magic, and they ask,
do you mean real magic? And by real magic they mean pharmaturgical acts
and so forth, And he says, no, not real magic, sleight
of hands, you know, stage magic. And then he goes out and
says, in other words, the kind of magic you can actually do is
not real magic. Real magic is the kind of doesn't exist. Interesting that
Daniel Dennet would often talk about, and I agree with this, by the
way that the majority of people who say they believe in God actually believe in
belief. This is Daniel Dennett interviewed on the Science Network May fifteenth, two
thousand and nine. I guess it's my favorite chapter in the book is about
belief and belief. I began to notice that arguing against the existence of God
is sort of pointless in most circumstances, because it's not so much that people
believe in God as they believe in belief in God. And in fact,
more people believe in belief in God than believe in God. How do I
know that, Well, with very few exceptions, people who actually believe in
God also believe and belief in God. That is, they think it's a
good thing. They are all for it. They're proud of the fact that
they believe in God. They think it's good. Once in a while you
will encounter somebody who actually deeply, bitterly regrets the fact that they can't shake
their belief in God. They wish they could, but they're just it's a
weakness. That's a rare individual. So all those people believe in belief in
God, and then the people who don't believe in God, they believe many
of them just believe in belief in God. So there's more all told.
And the more I thought about it, the more I explore this, I
discovered how true that is. For instance, I would say, with few
exceptions, the most hysterical and vitriolic criticisms of my book have been from people
who themselves declare themselves not religious, they don't need them life, but they
are the self appointed defenders of religion, and they believe in belief in God,
and they view me as mounting an attack on this, and in a
way that I am. I'm saying the belief and belief in God is what
is really standing in the way. It's what's doing all the work today,
and let's do one more to finish us off today. On the question of
a universe that has no meaning, and I've heard this from apologists, So
if you don't believe in God, how could you have any purpose? If
the universe doesn't care? Why bother Daniel Dennett's thoughts on that. There's two
ways of looking at it. There's the old fashioned way, which is the
trickle down theory of meaning. Our lives can't have meaning unless we are the
lesser products of something. Even more meaningful than we are God. We're God's
creations, God's army, God's tools, God's toys, God's playthings. That's
what gives us meaning. We inherit it from the big The other way of
looking at it is the bubble up theory of meaning, which says the universe
starts off without any meaning and there really is no point to it, but
it's possible for life to evolve, and it does, and we eventually show
up, and we are meaning makers and we care. Initially, we just
care because that comes along with our instincts as part of our biology. But
as we think and reflect and care, things being to matter more to us,
and what could be more important than the things that matter the most to
us? That's who we are. And we can meet in rational exploration and
mutual persuasion and decide, here are the things that are really important? Do
we all agree? Now, maybe there's always going to be a few outliers,
people that just don't get the point of it or think go their own
way, well, okay, as long as they don't hurt us. But
pretty much there's agreement about what ought to be done, what a good life
is, what a good life for others is there's always rooms for improvement once
you've got that, and that's homegrown ethics. It's not an edict from on
high. You don't have to be told by an eternal being what's right and
wrong. You figure out what right and wrong is, then you're motivated to
act on this. And I look around the world and see so many wonderful
things that I love and enjoy and am the beneficiary of, whether it's art
or music, or medicine or clothing and food and all the rest. I'd
like to add a little to that. That's the way that rather than thanking
God is non existent benefactor, the way to thank the human beings that created
all this is to create a little bit more if I can, and add
to the goodness in the world. Daniel Dannet born on the twenty eighth of
March nineteen forty two, assed away on April the nineteenth, twenty twenty four,
at the age of eighty two. Go out there and spread some goodness,
make some meaning, and thank you for listening. Follow The Thinking Atheist
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