Where can I find a transcript of abc tv discussion on Dawkins book God the Delusion?

Question

The TV discussion took place in December or November 2006 - the last one for the year. The panel included Germaine Greer.

Answer 1

well from my opinion i would just go to www.abc/god the delusion.com

Answer 2

Transcript
JENNIFER: Hello. Now to the books and first up, the God Delusion, in which evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, attempts to convert the world to atheism.

JENNIFER: Well those images are from a documentary called the Root or All Evil, to be seen on ABC TV in 2007, and this book you’d have to say, there’s nothing subtle, or tactful about it, it is a full frontal assault on religion, especially on, the big three, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, what he says is that he wants to take down the abnormally thick wall of respect that surrounds religion and he says he wants to raise consciousness against faith, for science, Jason, do you think, he’s got any chance of doing that, raising consciousness?

JASON: Well I think he’ll raise consciousness, but I can’t imagine that anybody with strong faith is going to be converted to atheism by, by the book to be honest.

JENNIFER: It’s very passionately fought

JASON: Oh it’s certainly very passionate but if you’re, if you’re beliefs are, are, are strong, I don’t think, I think you’ll have arguments against his arguments quite, quite convincing ones quite probably [Jennifer: Mmm] I’m speaking as, as a, sort of, liberal agnostic here but I wasn’t entirely convinced by, by the book, by any means,

JENNIFER: He, he really would say, you’re just pathetic, I mean, he marks a case again agnosticism is completely unacceptable, you have to be an atheist, or a person of the faith

JASON: Well, I don’t think that’s true actually, I don’t think that’s true

JENNIFER: Well I mean, that is one of the questions Germaine that I mean, can you read this book, can anyone read this book with an open mind? Because it is so extreme, I mean, you, you had a catholic education didn’t you?

GERMAINE: Yes and what I’ve always said is; if I’d been taught by the Jesuits, I’d probably be still a Catholic [Frank: Here, here!] as I was taught by the poor old [all laugh] as I taught by the, by the poor old presentation nuns, they disproved every argument that they tried to present me with because they just couldn’t handle it, they couldn’t do it, and when I went to university I got involved in, the rationalist club, the thing I argued then, and I would still argue it now, is, it is really time the rationalists, or the atheists, if you prefer to call them that, stop talking about God, because if we’ve agreed there isn’t one, can we just get on with it? It, how, what would an atheist wedding be like? I went to a wedding the other day where God got paraded backwards and forwards as the best friend of the most dreadful celebrant, a vulgarian idiot, too beautiful innocent children pledging themselves to each other for life, and they’re being misrepresented by this grim version of illiterate religion, it was just awful and I thought, you know, why can’t they stand up and say, we, these, this is who we are, this is what we think about each other, we are committing ourselves to each other for life, we, we hope we can make it, we’ll do our best, and so on and so on, but they, it’s not like that, they hardly spoke at all, and were the ministers of the sacraments [Jennifer: Mmm] the whole thing was vile, now, Dawkins is shrill in this book [Jason: Mmm] in a way that you think he doesn’t really have to be

JENNIFER: But he says it’s so evil that you’ve got to make this aggressive assault on it

GERMAINE: But you know what’s really interesting about it? He notices that religion is universal, he also notices that it follows ethnic lines, that generally religion and a nationality are sort of somehow clipped together [Jennifer: Mmm] and he doesn’t ask himself as a geneticist, whether religion is adaptive, and if he did, he would see that the answer is yes. Religion operates in the interest of the gene, because what religion does is make the group conscious of itself as a group, encourage altruism within the group, impose very strict duties with regard to the group and encourage opposition and sometimes bitter opposition to all other groups. Instead of thinking about it, instead of doing the socio-biology of religion which is what I’d expect from Dawkins, he just gets upset about its evident evil, it kills people, you know, yes, but that’s in the interest of the gene Richard, remember the selfish gene

JENNIFER: Well that’s his book

GERMAINE: he forgets his own argument in the book

JENNIFER: So you’re saying it’s actually the, the book itself is

GERMAINE: Is a mess

JENNIFER: bad science

GERMAINE: Some bad, some very bad science, and it’s a mess. It’s not properly organised intellectually [Jennifer: Ok well] let’s face it, he also doesn’t understand another thing, there’s another kind of atheist, and that’s the kind of atheist I am

JENNIFER: Ok, we’ll come back to that [all: laugh] we’ll come back to that because we have a believer with us, Frank I mean, it is a valid point I think, which is that you come to it with ones own prejudices, beliefs, what ever you call them, how did you find it? Could you read it fairly?

FRANK: Oh, I think I could read it fairly and I enjoyed reading it, and I read it one the weekend, I still went and celebrated mass quite happily I’d have to say, so he hasn’t changed my life radically, ah, I remember anecdotally I gave a, I was very privileged to give a lecture there in the Sheldonian a while ago at Oxford on Land Rights and he was there and he was very respectful and all of that which people were a bit surprised at but now I realise that, why they were surprised

JENNIFER: He was plotting against you at the time

FRANK: Well, you know, I wasn’t just there as a Jesuit but I was talking in part about, why would you recognise Aboriginal Land Rights if you didn’t believe in the validity of their spirituality with the land but obviously that’s all nonsense and you get rid of that sort of stuff...

JENNIFER: Well, well no to be fair, he doesn’t actually talk about Buddhism, he doesn’t talk about aboriginal spirit [Frank: No] he talks really about the big three, [Germaine: Mono-theism] mono-theism, and he says it’s evil, dangerous, and destructive to the world ...

FRANK: So that would mean that if you had a spirituality which then hadn’t been articulated in some way in terms of a written theology that maybe it’d be alright...

JENNIFER: Well more to the point that you don’t have something which is obstructive to science, because he says that’s the answer. [Frank: Yes] Science is answer, evolution is the explanation

FRANK: Well with all respect to aboriginal traditional religion, I don’t think you’d say that it would provide any clearer way to accommodating science than Christianity would so I, I think that’s, that’s a problem for him, but I mean, to my mind it’s a, it’s an engagingly provocative book and ah,

JENNIFER: Persuasive?

FRANK: Well I don’t think so in that, if you apply the test to himself, I mean, if the altruism is to be expected then why don’t we get someone who’s acting more altruistically and respectfully in his writing? I think here we’ve seen maybe the gene’s got a bit lost

JENNIFER: Yes and there’s a very good line in one of the crits saying that for a man who’s criticising the intolerance of religion, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book

MARIEKE: Well he is a fundamentalist in his own regard I mean he is just, I found it so insistent that I felt I was being dragged kicking and screaming into his way of thinking, there was no other way, and I, I like Jason, was more of an impartial agnostic, or pathetic as you put it,

JENNIFER: Well he puts it

MARIEKE: But, but I know the worst kind, I mean the fence sitting is just so furious, I found, I found myself feeling quite defiant, thinking well I’m, I’m very interested in what you have to say but if you’re going to be so insistent on it then I’ll just make my own bloody mind up

JENNIFER: What, if you make me choose, I won’t choose you?

MARIEKE: Yeah, yeah

JASON: He’s in, he’s interesting about science, or rather he’s not interesting about science because he sees no flaws in science at all, and it’s all very well for him to, to, to put the blame for all sorts of nasty things on religion but he doesn’t actually recognise that science has, has caused an awful lot of ah, destruction in the 20th century

JENNIFER: Do you think he over burdens science with having the answers though? That he, he seems to

FRANK: Sure but he has to

MARIEKE: How can he, how can he do it any other way?

FRANK: If you don’t have, I mean, if

JENNIFER: Well because it’s not really honest

FRANK: a man with this passion for life does have to have some notion of the transcendent, you know, like Germaine going to the wedding, yes, you know, this wedding, I mean, we want to find the expression of the love of these people who want to make a commitment to each other which is beyond themselves, which is beyond time, we want to leave God out it, fine, leave God out of it but how do we do it?

GERMAINE: Now that’s the annoying thing, that um, atheism hasn’t been able to elevate its humanism, you, you and I both know what the word really means [Frank: Mmm] but you know what most people think it means, um, we haven’t been able to imbue the idea of people as autonomous and ah, with anything like the mystic power that religion can give, we haven’t been able to build any aura around it and so he talks about you know, the correlation between atheism and education, but he could also talk about, as a scientist, the correlation between religion and fertility, which aught to be a strong argument for him, we atheists don’t reproduce very much, so what is it that we lose? You know, we lose a notion of continuity or eternity or an existence beyond the ego, that’s the problem that atheists have got, they’ve got to imbue this real world in their view, with resonance, and they can’t do it.

JENNIFER: You’ve said this Jason, we’ve been chatting that, that, where is the sense of ineffable, of grandeur of the, of the bigger story?

JASON: Well I, I mean, I think one of the great, the great shames is that he doesn’t consider the legacy of, of religion, I mean where, without religion, where would so much art, culture, literature would not be, not be with us, and that would be a great, a great shame, I mean one of my, one of my

JENNIFER: But he would say that’s probably false prophecy, or false propaganda

JASON: Well, I think, I think

FRANK: It’s not false art

JENNIFER: No, but there’s [All: laugh] quite, quite

JASON: One of my, one of my ah, going to Evensong say, in Canterbury Cathedral, which I used to do when I lived in Canterbury, and it was, it was just the most beautiful experience, now, I don’t necessarily believe in God, or the Church of England’s God, but it was still the most wonderful, spiritual, beautiful occasion, [Jennifer: Mmm] and I think it would be a great shame if that experience was, was, was lost to us all

GERMAINE: Well you might think that but I have to say as someone who teachers, or has taught until very recently in University, that my students don’t know anymore what the Christian tradition is, the word Eucharist means nothing to them, they, if you talk about the act of grace in Shakespeare, to them it’s double dutch, we have actually lost that intellectual tradition, now we could have studied it the way we study any historical phenomenon and we could have could have been aware that it’s part of our intellectual heritage, in fact it’s already gone and one of the things [Jason: Which is a tragedy] yes, but one of the things which is really annoying, and it was annoying about this wedding, is that we have reinvented DIY religion which is thin, stupid, ugly, vulgar ah, plastic, awful and the people are going for it like mad, I mean, I live in the mountains where all these ah, you know self obsessed people go to meditate about themselves basically, and there’s a DIY religion blooming on every doorstep [Jason: Laughs] and it is disgusting and it is a flight from reason that if I were in Dawkins position, and I think even not being in it, I’m, I find it extremely annoying

JENNIFER: Where do we think he best makes his case? Where is his strongest argument? I mean, there’s, it’s a big book, lots of arguments but, where’s his strongest?

FRANK: Well, to me as a religious person, he best makes his case as I said, in the confrontation look, those of you who are decent, rational religious type people, don’t you realise you’re creating the space for the straw man that I’ve set up? And that’s something I’ll take away from it, and I don’t have the answer to it

GERMAINE: I like him best when he’s being funny [Jennifer: yeah] my sister told me once about a, her Geology lecturer who gave, used to give a lecture on the, on Noah and Arc that was so funny, he talked about the insane notion that you put all the biota in a boat 40 cubits, what ever it was, the mythical measurement was and it was done with a great deal of humour and, and it was hysterical and it was extremely memorable. When Dawkins does that kind of thing, when he, and when he takes the texts and breaks them over his knee and you know, I was a Catholic child, I was taught that the Bible was not allegory, it was literal truth [Frank: Chuckles] and that if I, and that I could prove the existence of God by rational proof, it could be syllogistically demonstrated and all that, that was what I was taught, so I couldn’t take any refuge in anything soppy [Frank: Laughs] like saying, like you know it’s [Jennifer: symbolic] it’s all, it’s all a metaphor, I wasn’t allowed to say any of that, I mean, and the result is of course that I’ve ended up being the kind of atheist that Dawkins doesn’t deal with at all, that he would find very disturbing, and we must have the argument one of these days, I would have to say to him; look, Richard, my thing is this; I’m not sure whether God exists or not, it’s, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not subject to logical proof, but I do know that if God does exist, I am against him, now that’s an argument that a scientist should have a think about, you know, I don’t want there to be a single controlling principal of this universe, and if there is, there is such an enormous weight of suffering, after spending, you know, months in Ethiopia, as far as I’m concerned, the problem of evil is not answered and therefore it must be possible for me to say; I oppose you and by the way, if there is a Hell, I’m going there because everybody I care about is there already [All: laugh]

JENNIFER: I think, I must admit, I think it was a fascinating book and ah, The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Now debate can continue, I’m sure we’ll get back to this later, but also on the website and in your houses no doubt but we’ve got to move on. Recently I had the chance to speak to the man the New York Times described as the world’s most famous art critic, you know of whom I speak, Robert Hughes, he’s an exquisite writer, in Time Magazine, in many acclaimed books and in his newly released memoir, Things I Didn’t Know. I wanted to find out where his love of books, and of language began.