[SH] There are two issues that converge here. One is the question what do we want to accomplish?, what do we reasonably think we can accomplish? And then this article of faith that I think circulates, unfortunately, among people of our viewpoint that you can't argue anyone out of their beliefs. It's a completely fatuous exercise, or can we actually win a war of ideas with people and, I think, certainly judging from my e-mail, we can. I mean, I'm constantly getting e-mail from people who have lost their faith and in effect been argued out of it. And the straw that broke that camel's back was either one of our books or some other process of reasoning, or incompatibility of what they knew to be true and what they were told by their faith that I think we have to just highlight the fact that it's possible for people to be shown the contradictions, internal to their faith or the contradiction between their faith and what we've come to know to be true about the universe, and the process can take minutes or months or years but they have to renounce their superstition in the face of what they now know to be true.
[RD] I was having an argument with a very sophisticated biologist who's a brilliant expositor of evolution, and he still believes in God. And I said how can you? What's this all about? And he said I accept all your rational arguments, however it's faith. And then he said this very significant phrase to me: "There's a reason that it's called faith!" He said it very decisively, almost aggressively, that there's a reason that it's called faith. And that was, to him, the absolute knockdown clincher. You can't argue with it because it's faith and he said it proudly and defiantly rather than in any sort of apologetic way.
[CH] Oh, you get it all the time in North America from people who say you gotta read William James and to have had, to be able to judge other people's subjective experiences with something that's by definition impossible to do.
[SH] Right
[CH] If it's real to them why can't you respect it? I mean this wouldn't be accepted in any other field of argument at all. The impression people are under is the critical thing about them. I had a debate with a very senior Presbyterian in Orange County and I asked him, because we were talking about biblical literalism, of which he wasn't an exponent, but I said well what about the graves opening at the time of the crucifixion according to Saint Matthew? Matthew, I'd rather say, and everyone getting out of their graves in Jerusalem, walking around greeting old friends in the city. I was going to ask him, doesn't that rather cheapen the idea of the resurrection of Jesus? But he mistook my purpose, and wanted to know if I believed that had happened, that was what he thought. And he said that as an historian, which he also was, he was inclined to doubt it, but that as a Presbyterian minister, he thought it was true. Well, alright then. You see, for me it was enough that I got him to say that. I said in that case, I rest my case. I don't want to say anymore to you now. You've said all I could say.
[SH] Yeah, yeah. Well there's one other chip I'd like to put on the table here. There's this phenomenon of someone like Francis Collins or the biologist you just mentioned, someone who obviously has enough of the facts on board, you know, enough of a scientific education to know better, and still does not know better or professes not to know better, and there I think we have a cultural problem where. And this was actually brought home to me at one talk I gave. A physics professor came up to me at the end of the talk and told me that he had brought one of his graduate students, who was a devout Christian, and who was quite shaken by my talk, and all I got from this report was that this was the first time his faith had ever really been explicitly challenged. And so it's true to say that you can go through the curriculum of becoming a scientist and never have your faith explicitly challenged, because it's taboo to do so, and now we have engineers who can build nuclear bombs in the Muslim world, who still think it's plausible metaphysics that you can get to paradise and get seventy two virgins, and we have people like Francis Collins who think that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus, because you are in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist.
[CH] Or according to our friend, the great Pervez Hoodbhoy, the great Pakistani physicist, there are people who think you can use the djinns, the devils and harness their power for the reactor.
[SH] It's almost tempting to fund such a project.
[CH] Yeah!
[DD] Haha, yes!
[CH] And it seems, and I gather that … again, I can't get over him still, that the respected, Tariq Ramadan of Saint Anthony's College, Oxford says in his book, I'm told, that he believes in djinns too. I hope I'm not doing him an injustice, I've been told that in his book, 'In the Steps of the Prophet', he says as much, so one is up against things that are flat-out primitive and superstition.
[DD] I think it may be easier than we're supposing to shake peoples' faith. There's been a moratorium on this for a long time. We're just the beginning of a new wave of explicit attempts to shake peoples' faith. And it's bearing fruit, and the obstacles it seems to me are not that we don't have the facts or the arguments, it's these strategic reasons for not professing it, not admitting it. Not admitting it to yourself, not admitting it in public because your family is gonna view it as a betrayal, you're just embarrassed to admit that you were taken in by this for so long. It takes, I think, tremendous courage to just declare that you've given that all up and if we can find ways to help people find that courage, and give them some examples of people who have done this and they're doing just fine, they may have lost the affections of a parent or something like that, they may have hurt some family members, but still I think it's a good thing to encourage and I don't think we should assume that we can't do this. I think we can.
[RD] Yes, it's almost patronising to suggest that we couldn't and to suggest that it shouldn't. On the other hand, I think we all know people who seem to manage this kind of split brain feat of, as Sam said, believing one thing on a Sunday and then something totally contradictory or, incompatible the rest of the week. And there's nothing I suppose neurologically wrong with that, I mean there is no reason why one shouldn't have a brain that's split in that kind of way …
[DD] But it is unstable in a certain way but, and I'm sure you're right, that people do this and they're very good at it, and they do it by deflecting attention from it. Let's start focusing attention …
[RD] But how you can live with a contradiction? How you can live with it?
[DD] by forgetting that you're doing this and by not attending to it. I think, what I would love to do is to invent a memorable catchphrase or term that would rise unbidden in their minds when they caught themselves doing it, and then they would think oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh! right! and they think this is somehow illicit, just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they're doing.
[CH] I'm afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit.
[DD] You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance?
[CH] No, practicing it.
[RD] Actually practicing it.
[CH] I mean take the case of someone who’s a member of moveon.org. They think that the United States government is a brutal, militaristic, imperial regime who crushes the poor and invades other peoples' countries, but they pay their taxes and, it's very, very rare that they don't. They send their children to school, they do their stuff, you know, they don't act all the time as if ten percent of what they believe is true. Partly because it would be impossible, say, with people in the fifties who were members the John Birch society, who thought President Eisenhower was a communist. Okay, you get up in the morning, you believe that. The White House is run by the Kremlin but then you have to go and get the groceries, and do all that stuff. You still have to go and do it.