Richard Dawkins in conversation with Peter Boghossian
Vložit
- čas přidán 6. 11. 2013
- Richard Dawkins in conversation with Peter Boghossian, October 11th at Portland State University
You can see more of Richard Dawkins on Facebook at: RichardDawkinsFoundation
Learn more about Peter Boghossian and his upcoming television series, The Reason Whisperer, on Facebook at: thereasonwhisperer
Who needs God or religion when we have Dr. Richard Dawkins to listen to as our voice of conscience. Let us come come worship and bow down before the great thinkers of our society. Men such as Dr. Richard Dawkins and Peter Boghossian could never be wrong, we must trust the science, and exercise blind faith their religious redirect which we call science. Let us follow the evidence wherever it leads us, even if it leads us to a burning end. Such men of reason and great logic ought to be trusted, and obey no matter how fallible they are. Let us follow him with all of our heart, mind, body and soul, since he is the author and the Finisher of our faith. Praise him.
Q: "Why shouldn't you offend people?"
A: Because we live in a hypersensitive age, and a highly litigious age, with cowards in positions of authority, with entitled children of entitled parents, and for many of us, we just want to keep our jobs and get through the day without suffering the tirades and wrath of easily-triggered short-tempered people.
We have not the wisdom, the vocabulary, the patience, the impetus, nor the veracity to set the record straight and carry on the good fight.
And we don't all have the safety and security to offend because we still need to pay the bills.
That's a good summary of the dilemma. Unfortunately, if you give a mouse a cookie, it will claim to be offended if you don't give it a drink of milk. In other words, deliberately taking offense has proved to be far too powerful a weapon for professional "victims" to relinquish the use of injustice. How, then, do we support one another in recapturing the rational ground?
That's true, but not a reason.
But this has to be measured against the cost of suppressing the truth. And it's disingenuous to pretend that anyone realistically can offend securely, precisely because of the climate you mention. This is not an adequate answer.
I have goosebumps. This is so inspiring!
I loved the humour and the wonderful relaxed way the discussion progresses. And what a discussion. Educational and so informative. Thank you.
Tremendous interview! Thank you!
It's hard to imagine what it would take for God to convince us that he was God (if it existed).
Human technology is less than 1,000 years old (more or less) and in a 13.6 BILLION year old Universe there could be (maybe MUST be) a civilisation that's a *_million years_* more advanced than us. That's only 1/13,000th of the age of the Universe. How advanced would that civilisation be? And how could we possibly distinguish it from a god?
well how can we know it exists?
Xiao'sChannel That's a good question. It might be impossible to convince everyone. Perhaps if the civilisation is advanced enough we may as well treat it as a god even though it might not be the creator of the Universe which is generally in the definition of a god.
Nice interview, thank you for sharing!
A great interview! I'd like to re-read it if it could be found somewhere in text. The idea of predominant, culturally neutral god images under that Persinger helmet could convince me that there might be some sort of a superb god. But then, I suspect that Persinger's "homeopathic" magnetic fields are too weak to have any real impact, anyway.
i went to a comprehensive school in the 60's / 70's, that's a state school, what the US would call public, and although it wasn't the best, it wasn't bad and we were lucky enough to have a brilliant art teacher who let us listen to music (the beatles, who, hendrix, whatever) while we worked, but also he would get us to talk about current events, and drugs, ans civics in general, what i would see as total free speech, and not only did he set me up for a career in graphics and film effects, but i think my brain works pretty good.
i also tried LSD when i was in my mid teens, and although i wouldn't recommend it (i now suffer paranoia when on any kind of dope or drugs) i never was tempted to jump out of windows or convinced of anything extraordinary, all my hallucinations had some grounding in reality and i was fairly aware that i was under the influence all the time, with a few exceptions most of my "trips" were unremarkable - as i say i'm an artist and it never even helped my art. ut i am a fairly "sober" kind of person. bottom line - drugs aren't worth the risk, and none seem to ACTUALLY enhance your brain power.
Time stamp for me 12:28 - 15:27
Just found this discussion today:
As a lover of all things scientific, philosophical, debate worthy AND of Jesus Christ and His word, I enjoy listening to things like this in the way that an athlete (which I am assuredly not) might enjoy a new obstacle course to conquer. Challenges to our beliefs are meant to do one of two things:
-Either they will strengthen them as we work the challenges out or...
-We realize that our beliefs are not logically sustainable and we change them.
HOWEVER...I find it interesting that so many people who don't believe in God do the very thing they claim we believers do and that is interpret evidence in a way that justifies whatever worldview we bring to the table. A few times in this discussion it was said something akin to "it just can't be that..." (fill in the appropriate theistic belief phrase) because there are just so many other alternatives so we have to work through all of them first."...
Well...why not seriously and objectively look into the evidence that SUPPORTS a theistic worldview and a Judeo-Christian worldview at that!? Let's at least be consistent shall we?
I agree with Dawkins, why should not we offend people?
Certain ideas and certain people deserve to be offended.
Keep offending and you will get your answer
I'd be interested to hear their take on the mandelbrot set, when they were talking about PI and what God's signature would potentially have to look like in order for them to believe in him.
Yes. Fractals are life. Fractals are truth.
Everything is as significant as it is insignificant.
changing from a religion of belief to now not belief is not anything truly important without real actions
Imagine what they’d make of cancel culture today ?
Well it's been 2 years my friend and guess what both of them have come down hard on it. And it's nice to have people who are brave enough to stand up for reality.
Back when the left liked these guys.
Yeah, those two became Nazis recently
Dawkins already says Islam is not a race in this convo, he probably read that in Mein Kampf.
@@fukpoeslaw3613 You're ridiculous.
PB: why did you write a memoir?
RD should have answered: God told me to.
I wish you believed in reason.
the just changed the things not broken the addiction
Dawkins has a mancrush on the Hitch! Don't we all?
I would myself, had the late Hitch not been against abortion.
Suture the future into a book from the past, better make it fast - the book won't last.
Trór / Thor, king of Thrace is Richard Dawkins, FRS's 11th cousin 95 times removed.
+Jungle Jargon 12 comments in a row?? You really need to start taking your meds again.
When someone repeatedly attacks the character of their debating opponent, rather than disproving their opponent's argument, then you really need to take a minute, step back, and evaluate the situation. Why not just prove god? It would resolve the matter instantly!
The repeating problem:
1. Theists claim a god or gods exist.
2. Skeptics ask for proof before accepting the claim.
3. Since no proof is offered, the skeptic rejects the claim, and takes the label atheist", meaning "without theism". The skeptical atheist is still awaiting proof.
4. Theists retort with various attacks and excuses.
Many theists have a vested interest in maintaining their position, whether it be family, tradition, community, job, culture, sense of identity, hope for the future, comfort in the face of obstacles, and other emotional support. Some are dependent on the money, power, and privilege. It is difficult to change one's way of thinking.
Religious belief and skepticism can be understood at the molecular level as enlarged grey matter in, and comparatively excessive dopamine flow to, specific regions of the brain, namely the amygdala vs. the anterior cingulate cortex and ventral medial prefrontal cortex.
Religious adherence can be reduced and even eliminated when critical thinking is encouraged over emotional evaluation and dogmatic thinking.
the problem with fine tuning is, if god can't make life other than where the dials are set then he's following someone else's rules of physics, god should be able to set all the dials to anything at all and get what he wants. also, wouldn't those dials be spot on perfect, cos some of them can be twisted quite a long way before everything falls apart, why would god let the numbers be inaccurate? sloppiness? and as far as nature is concerned, all those numbers are "1", we base the speed of light on the length of someone's arm. maybe no other laws of physics are at all possible, we only have one universe as a sample.
i've always thought PI is the registration number of universes, each universe has a unique ID of it's own, and somewhere there is a universe that has circles of PI = 3.0
that like when addict stop doing drugs or alcohol to now be 24/7 inside a church
15:00 We can, but I spilt a can of soda over the control panel. At this stage, it seem humanity won’t have the replacement technology for at least another 400yrs. Lucky I really like this thing called CZcams and it makes waiting not so bad.
This is a JOKE, it’s fun to write creatively, or at lest try to.
Who is "Comrade Lawrence"? Lawrence Krauss?.. Someone worth idolizing :)
I think he was referring to the zoologist Konrad Lorenz.
no one is ever worth idolizing.
"Islam is Right About Women" is a meme I wish went viral.
It highlights ever so perfectly the doublethink of the NPCs/wokels.
It bothers me that they have lapel mics but this recording didn't use that feed. Instead, it uses the mic on the camera, which is among or behind the audience. Everything the audience does and says is far more audible than what the speakers are saying.
I say skip the trip, its not worth it. You'll have increased mental input, but it won't make you smarter, more creative, or more able to process stimuli. Even if you have some revelation, you won't remember it when you come down. The best you can hope for is to be with some people you like, laugh your ass off, enjoy the music playing loud and not sleep (or eat, as food tastes totally foreign unless its cold drinks) for 24 - 48 hours. I tripped at the first Star Trek Movie, not for the first time and it was just a freaky paranoia fest.
There is a God test that would work to prove God's existence. And all powerful God could make you or me God. If I am God I'm pretty sure I I will be convinced of my own existence.
How would you know you’re not delusional?
I can think of a way God could prove himself to us. First he opens up the sky and says "Here I am, your loving God, let there be no more doubt." Then we get speeches, updates and miraculous/impossible supernatural displays on a regular basis, that each generation gets to see with their own eyes.
I've argued with a friend about this and he just couldn't seem to answer the question of "why is there a debate at all? Why doesn't he just appear and settle this argument we're having right now?"
Friend: "But he has! He sent his holy messenger yadda yadda...."
But why do we have to rely on the testimony of someone who died thousands of years ago, instead of regular updates that we personally get to see? Imagine trusting in a government that you're assured was installed 2,000 years ago but nobody has heard from since.
How would you distinguish that from delusion or aliens?
I hear from the constitution daily
Why would you want a God who did that?
@@markela18 Because then I could make an informed decision as to what God wants us to do and who's claims about God's commands I should trust. Plus I could actually be sure that there's a God at all; I find it too hard to swallow "you should obey God, but you don't get know for sure if there's even a God to obey"
@@Durzo1259 on the contrary, anyone can know God. Its a matter of being open to his way of finding him and he will reveal himself. If the only way you would accept to know him is the way you describe above then it seems you don't really want to know if he exists. I may want to go to Paris from New York to see it for the first time. If the only acceptable way for me to do this is travel by car you understand than that I will never go.
The Pi thing theoretically would best prove to change mind. Since it would be hard for just simple aliens to do it. If not Pi maybe something similar, some some signature in some fundamental things, that can't be changed, without changing our universe.
Basically it's close to fine tuning. Basically a signature in the 'fine tuned' parameters on which whole universe is based.
However, this signature must be really obvious and easy to confirm by other people. Because some people with lack of critical thinking sometimes see patterns and 'signature' in simple accidents, like Jesus on the toast. And some people see secrete messages in the bible, using silly algorithms that potentially allow to find any message you want in the bible.
Other idea, is that it must be not a single fact, but a set of non contradictory facts, that could be confirmed independently. Like since, that based on years and years of research, improvements, criticism. If something could be proved more and more, and confirmed, and investigated - that could prove extraordinary claim. But any single event, always could be a hallucination or trick. So basically, yeah, it's should be something based on reason.
Ideally multiple cases of signatures in maths and physics, that is not just people seeing patterns in the random noise, but very clear signatures, that would be confirmed by many people. If not God, at least it would be prove of some being outside Universe who created it.
And I should admit, Carl Sagan idea with signature in the Pi, is extremely cool!
The image of circle drawn in binary inside number Pi =) It's so cool idea, that it's sad that it's just a fantasy)))
Alexander Zakusilov
Pi is infinite, so it contains all possible writings.
Pi exists independently of the Universe. It's not a constant that can be tweaked. It's the area of a circle surrounded by a square of area 4, or ratio of circumference to diameter.
And like rstevewarmorycom says, Pi is infinite, so you can likely find any finite subsequence you care to look for in there.
Also, the binary encoding of pi is an arbitrary human choice, pick another base, and you get a different sequence with a different pattern. There's nothing cosmologically significant about base 2, although with another base, you're again likely to find a pattern you're looking for, just in a different place.
What you can find in there is constrained mostly by your imagination, and computation capability.
And now the new religion of diversity, equity and inclusion? I hope that this new religion is better and that it totally doesn't spill out into the streets during a pandemic. That would be a tragedy
I see what you did there.
Even if Christianity were true you still wouldn't have a good reason for believing in it. Think about it for more than just 5 seconds. You are born into this world knowing nothing. You are told what to believe by your parents, and they were told what to belive for many more generations before you. What if the people 5 generations ago were wrong about anything? How would you be able to correct that belief? We know today that people were wrong about a ton of things 5 generations ago. How many other mistakes were made along the way from 100 generations ago? In all likelyhood Christianity would have been corrupted and your beliefs would be incorrect today. Religion is stupid if you ignore the other million reasons it's stupid.
The more you listen to Dawkins the more you realize that he's a person deeply in pursuit of God. His Antitheism is more a reaction of his disgust with the anti-intellectualism of those who proclaim to already know the truth.
LOL. You've confused his deep pursuit of truth for pursuit of a god. Yours, presumably. The irony is you're proclaiming to know a truth.
@@TagSpamCopTruth can be a God.
15:05 PB: ..What would persuade you (that God exists)?
RD: Well Im starting to think that nothing would! Which in a way goes against the grain, because I‘ve always paid lip-service to the view that a scientist shoould change his mind when evidence is forthcoming. The problem is, I cant think what that evidence would look like.“
So Dawkins and all those nutty religious types have something in common after all, it seems.... neither one will change their view, no matter what! Got it.
Exactly. That idea has been suggested by Anthony Flew.
No. He's willing to change his mind. He just has no idea what would be convincing that wouldn't also be questionable. But why is it on him to figure out what would be convincing. Shouldn't any extant god already know this or be able to figure this out? Why do the lab rats have to explain to the researcher how to make the experiment work?
But it's easier to feign superiority with a strawman, isn't it?
I submit that the universe may be the result of a "Escape From the Planet of the Apes" like time paradox. Man, or some other creature, grew in this universe to gain enough scientific knowledge to create the universe. Or perhaps it is all a computer simulation. While I have no proof that this is the case it does have the virtue of making some kind of sense. Which is more than theologians can claim.
You can't go back in time and alter the universe you came from, that's a contradiction.
We don’t need religion, we have Richard Dawkins. I would love to see his autobiography turned into a movie - they did this for the late Stephen Hawking.
So Dawkins is your Jesus.....I see
It’s easy to criticize the silly dogma people claim are truth. But they fail to realize the real truth in religion is spirituality. The concept of God is deeply personal and internal not necessarily external. They can’t accept the idea that God might be undefinable by its very nature. They continually address the beliefs but not the deep relationship people have with God.
Jordan Peterson describes it well in his very first podcast, in which he describes the reality of our macro perception, and how inaccurate that may be in comparison to reality; that there are many things impossible for us to perceive, from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. The way he describes it is mind-blowing, and belief in God is the perception of being part of and at one with the fabric of the universe. This is how HC Anderson describes the death of The Little Mermaid. It's a feeling of belonging and connection. As Carl Jung said, there's a human need for a belief, and most atheists aren't as happy as Dawkins. Maybe they have everything else they need for happiness, but if you're lacking any of them it's faith that keeps you going.
@@frosksdeadteeth5163 I’ll check out that episode. Good looking out!
I feel sorry for both of these men. 😔
Because?
God is an unfalsifiable concept, a metaphysical one. Just as it can't be falsified, it can't be proven either. Y'all should read Kant.
The benevolent God is falsifiable and has been falsified.
I'm too modest to believe in God or any supernatural explanations. 😁
Actually, he's too much of a narcissist not to believe in God. Truly a shame.
@Christopher Norris It's an observation. Narcissists do not see the need to bow down to an all powerful God. They only believe it's about them.
@MIFNP or like anyone, they want a shred of evidence or they read how horrible the old testament is
What would convince me??? It would have to be the "Thomas Test"
"Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." John 20:25
Nawh, anybody could dummy that shit up.
24:30 Only gotten worse.
The evidence of a supernatural Maker is not so much the constants, although you can never have working parts, without having a Maker, but the real evidence of your Maker is the living organisms that have significantly sequenced written directives that make every living thing there is as a unique life form.
I can't help but to point out the hypocrisy of insulting creation science which has yet to be proven wrong after insulting those who are intolerant of hearing opposing ideologies. Also I feel that it is important to remind this Dr that evolution is in fact still a theory due to the actual scientific method being applied correctly against it's findings. To force one's theory onto the public as fact is to do the exact same hypocrisy that he himself despises about religious people who believe their religious beliefs. It's become difficult for me to respect this "Dr" as an acceptable representative of his own beliefs.
After just reading your first sentence, it is obvious to everyone you dont even understand basic concepts of science, and then any further discussion with you would only be a waste of time.
You need to respect culture because it feels very strange to them to break from their customs. They need to be the ones to break from their own customs. *You should not be the one to force your will on them to change.*
I am a multicultural person myself.
You were fed lukewarm nonsense that should be spit out.
Yes, the Maker does require having super human intelligence. That is the point.
Jungle Jargon
You're a brainwashed jerkoff. If a god existed, that god would know what would convince people. If a god has not done that yet, either he doesn't exist, or doesn't want us to know, in which case, fuck him.
The evidence of your Maker looks like Richard Dawkins. You exist so your Maker exists and objects did not make you.
Is that clear?
***** You would not exist, if you were not made to exist by a preexisting written set of directives that make you a human instead of a Myocastor coypus.
@@JungleJargon
You're a moron.
Yes, and being gay is not a race either. It is an action, not a biological state.
So arrogant, this man want´s to see the Lords second coming only to belive in Him... and says that even that would not be enougth.
I was there. He's not arrogant at all.
@@mikegutierrez8478 Saying that even if he was before God, he will still not belive? What more a man's need?
@@doriansmith5667 How arrogant to claim that a thinking man ought to take the word of others on something that they have not --- and never will --- encounter! Belief and faith do not generate reality.
@@doriansmith5667 Which god? Will you recognize Kahless when you're standing at the gates of Sto-vo-kor?
@@TagSpamCop 🤣🤣🤣
I've read most of Dawkins' books, including the *God Delusion.* They illustrate so well his self-delusion. As a Mormon I found the *God Delusion* particularly delusional. Pretty ironic.
I woul love to know what a mormon’s definition of “delusion” is. Maybe you could spell it out in a delusional language like J. Smith.
LOL. Tell us all about Kolob and how the truth of Mormonism was revealed through seer stones in a hat by a known con artist who was arrested for the same scam, then explain Dawkins' "delusion."
Birds born in a cage think that flying is an illness.
@@TagSpamCop
LOL. You believe random code copying errors and natural selection invented your brain?