[00:00:02] Richard Dawkins Create clip Dan Dennett is a year younger than me, almost to the day. Can you hear me at the back? But I must admit that I've grown to think of him as a sort of intellectual, elder brother. Since the deaths of Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, I've been rather short of intellectual heroes to consult on difficult questions. Thank goodness we still have Dan Dennett. A year or so ago, it seemed that it might be a close run thing. I remember the shock followed by deep bloom that was cast over a large group of people in the New York theater when we were informed that Dan had collapsed and was undergoing emergency surgery, which seemed so we were informed, unlikely to succeed heroic surgery to save an intellectual hero not just a national treasure, but a world treasure, at least to the world of the mind. Many of you, I'm sure we'll have read the stirring testimonial that he read while he was in recovery. It was actually called thank goodness. It was widely published all over the Internet and was read out to those gathered in San Diego for the Beyond Belief Conference.

[00:01:15] Richard Dawkins Create clip Dan mentioned his religious friends who had prayed for his recovery. He was touched by their efforts, but he chose to interpret their words as meaning that they had bean thinking off him. And he added, I'm not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said they were praying for me. I've resisted the temptation to respond. Thanks. I appreciate it. But did you also sacrifice a goat? I feel about this the same way I would if one of them had said I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health. What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects. Don't expect me to be grateful or even in different. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it. Dan considered the impulse he might have felt to say Thank God for his recovery. He asked himself whether his near death experience had bean some kind of epiphany. I find his response to this so stirring that I again want to read it out for you.

[00:02:36] Richard Dawkins Create clip Yes, I did have an epiphany I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say thank goodness, this is not merely a euphemism for thank God we atheist don't believe there's any got to thank I really do mean thank goodness there is a lot of goodness in this world on more goodness every day and this fantastic human made fabric of excellence his genuine irresponsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now. To whom then do I owe a debt of gratitude to the cardiologists who's kept me alive and ticking for years and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse the pneumonia to the surgeon's neurologist, anesthesiologists and the profusion ist who kept my system's going for many hours under daunting circumstances to the dozen or so physician assistants and two nurses and physical therapists and X ray technicians and a small army of flea bottom ists So death that you hardly know they're drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals kept my room cleaned at the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case. Wheelchair me to X ray and so forth.

[00:03:55] Richard Dawkins Create clip Thes people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India on the United States, of course, and I have never seen Maur impressive mutual respect, as they have as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, the physicist Alan Cormac, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the CT scanner. Alan, you have posthumously save yet another life. But who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there's the whole system of medicine, both science and the technology, without which the best intentions efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees past and present of Science, Nature Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements detecting on correcting them.

[00:05:09] Richard Dawkins Create clip I think you can see why Dan Dennett is my intellectual hero. He's one of today's most distinguished philosophers, but among philosophers, I would describe him as a scientist philosopher. Many philosophers call themselves philosophers of science, but rather few of them take the trouble to learn much science, to immerse themselves in the scientific literature, to talkto working scientists and understand what makes them tick. One of the things that strikes me about reading Dan's books is how much science I learn from them. New science, new experimental results, fascinating scientific research often still unpublished but which Dan knows about because he keeps his ear to the scientific ground and travels to visit laboratories, where he's always an honored guest. He is indeed a scientist as much as he is a philosopher, and he's also a superb explainer where other philosophers are mainly interested in showing off how clever they are to their colleagues. Dan really, really wants to be understood. He seems to make no distinction between a book written for Lay People on a book written for professional philosophers, and this is something I also aspire to when writing for professional scientists.

[00:06:31] Richard Dawkins Create clip Clarity is clarity, and it doesn't matter who you're writing for There should be no need to write separate popular books, which dumb down the books that are written for professionals. Dan thinks long and hard not only about the philosophy itself, but about the best way to explain it. He's a great corner of phrases, an inventive divisor of metaphors, a vivid painter of mental images, intuition. Pump is one of his phrases, and it well describes exactly what he does when he's explaining something difficult to his readers. His celebrated lecture Where AM I? Is a tour de force of the explainers art, combining comedy and high drama with the usual weapons of the lecturer notions like Sky Hook and Crane, the Cartesian Theater, the Library of Mendel Universal Acid. All these are superb intuition pumps crafted to assist the reader to accompany him on an exciting mental adventure. He's a leading thinker in a wide range of important philosophical topics, philosophy of mind, the problem of free will consciousness, evolution and, of course, religion. Breaking the spell is a pivotal contribution to the rather exhilarating revival, which secularism is enjoying at the moment in all these fields. As I said, I look up to him as an intellectual hero, elder brother he may be, but also dynamic are for Terri Ble of the mind.

[00:08:11] Richard Dawkins Create clip And there's no paradox in the contrast. It's a huge pleasure and honor to me to present this award to Dan, and the fact that the award is in my name redoubles the pleasure and quadruples the honor. Dan, it's beautiful

[00:09:10] Daniel Dennett Create clip Before you leave the stage. Richard, I would like to present you with the Dan Dennett Award is it is not quite as glorious. Is that what this is? Is a a Jesus action figure? Did I that I found in that I found in a gift shop in Vermont? It has been autographed by Julia Sweeney by you and by me and by Sam Harris. And we're going. We're going to get a few more signatures, I hope from from Diane. You see Ali on from Hitch, and I think that probably although I'm going to give this to you the suitable place for this award is in next year's auction. Don't you think that inappropriate? But for now you are the keeper of the Jesus action. Well, I actually have a have a whole talk to give, but it's got some pictures. It's got some power point. I hope I can keep you awake and let's see if if the power point is going to work, Um, I got my first slide up. Well, that's not it.

[00:10:43] Daniel Dennett Create clip Um, I love it, Sam. Sam gave us a talk, which he quarreled with the very idea of atheism being a term. Well, I'm gonna try to outdo him in sort of chutzpah for an atheist group if somebody can find the where my power point is. Okay, there we go. Uh, can everybody see good reasons for believing in God? Um, as many of you know, I'm having. So I've signed a lot of copies. Hears this is the hard back of my book breaking the spell. Many of you have not seen the British paper back cover, which I have to show you here because of half the next slide that I want to show you, which I think is good news for atheists everywhere. This was sent to me by a friend. It's from the British of scandal Gossip magazine. Now they pester their men for attention. What is it with Dawson's Creek's Joshua Jackson? He's on a beach with this stunning girlfriend, German actress Diane Kruger, and he wants to read a tome on rational atheism so you may not have realized it, guys. But atheism is a chick magnet now. Long, long ago, most people really did believe in God on some people still do.

[00:12:28] Daniel Dennett Create clip I'm talking here about the basic primitive phenomenon of belief, like, for instance, the belief that Mount Everest exists just straight, ordinary, everyday, uncomplicated belief in a proposition. Now you can believe that Mount Everest exists. I'm not no whole lot about Mount Everest. Trust Mount Everest exists. It's just one of these four peaks. Which one is it? I doubt if any of you can pick out the picture of Mount Everest from these four mountains, but that does not disqualify you from believing the proposition that Mount Everest exists. It's one of them, and you could still tell me a bit about Mount Everest enough to convince me that you are, as it were, competent to believe that Mount Everest exists that's ordinary, everyday, straight up belief. You don't have to be ableto pick Mount Everest out of a lineup unnecessarily, and you still you know enough about it so that you know what you're talking about when you say that Mount Everest exists. Now let's try another case. I can't even read this proposition. Alfa.

[00:13:41] Daniel Dennett Create clip Probably Hair and Sun Dog are yes, Are Rivera are something like that now. I haven't the faintest idea what this means, because it's in Turkish, but I believe it's true. And the reason I believe it's true is that I went to a trusted Turkish colleague and said, Move in. Please give me a sentence of Turkish. Do not tell me what it means, but just it's got to be true. And so he gave me this sentence and I'm happy to say that I've told you. If you know what it means, don't tell me. I want to keep using this example and I want to be able to say truly cross my heart. I haven't the faintest idea what this proposition means, but I would bet a large sum of money that it's true. Okay, notice. I've got no nothing up my sleeve. This is magic. This isn't supernatural. It's a very simple state of affairs. I've got somebody to give me a proposition that they warrant is true. And I think I trust you. I'm gonna believe you. Okay? Nothing special about that. Well, here's another proposition. Proposition Beta e equals M. C squared.

[00:15:01] Daniel Dennett Create clip How many of you believe that? Right. How many of you understand it? Uh, I use this example. By the way, I gave a talk about my book at Fermi Lab outside Chicago to an audience of about 250 of the world's great physicists. And as I put this on, I said, I don't think this example is gonna work in this crowd. I said, How many of you believe in all the hands up? How many of you understand it? Of course. All the hands went up, But then, as they were sort of laughing about that, one of them stood up and said, Yeah, the experimentalists think they understand it, but they don't really. Now, do I believe Alfa and beta? Well, I don't understand Alfa at all. I sent me, understand? I I can make some basic Helder break manipulations. I couldn't derive it. Really. I couldn't use it in any way, so I don't really qualify. But that's all right, because I can do what we all do. All the time, and that is we can pass the buck to the experts.

[00:16:18] Daniel Dennett Create clip I don't have to understand it, but there have to be people that really understand it, and this is, oddly enough, curiously enough, this is one of the great powers of language. One of the unsung powers of language is that you can use language to give yourself formula that you can use without understanding them. You, you, we knew the believing. We leave the understanding that the experts and this is in fact a very useful tactic. There are. There are scientists who use formula in their work that they themselves really don't know how to drive, really don't know how to use. But there's a sort of a chain of authority that they can trust so that they can use them with confidence. Compare that situation when science with religion, with religious formula, even the experts claim not to understand. In fact, they make. They don't confess that they don't understand. They insist that they don't understand. They make a a special, marvelous glory of the fact that the central propositions of their faith are incomprehensible even to the experts.

[00:17:37] Daniel Dennett Create clip Now, this is just bizarre. I mean when you think about it from take a Martian perspective on this. This is just strange. Is the devil How on earth did this strange state of affairs arrives? That's what I want to talk about. First of all, I think I will will get no disagreement from this crab. There simply are no good reasons for believing that God exists. Christopher was very, very eloquent on this score. This Africa, Come on, there just aren't any good reasons. The arguments are all from hunger, and there's plenty of good reasons for believing that God does not exist. But but there are several good reasons for declaring a belief in God now, really, there aren't any good reasons for believing rather many good reasons for not believing you. And I'm sure you share with me. Sometimes you kind of plate people talking about their belief in God. And you just want to exclaim, How can anybody believe this stuff? And the answer is I like him. They don't actually, they don't now there are unreflective folks and there are plenty of them who believe Allah. My proposition, Alfa with one in Turkish that whatever it is that those free say that our precinct, it's true.

[00:19:16] Daniel Dennett Create clip But remember, that's not really believing the proposition that just believing that that formula, whatever it means, it's Turkish. To me, it's true and and it doesn't bother them. They just except this on the authority of their religious leaders, leaders of their community, their elders. This is not an unusual state of affairs, and most people are too busy living their lives to be very reflective. So those people believe that the things that they are asked to say in church or in the mosque are true, and they don't really care too much about the fact that they really haven't got much of a clear idea, even a clue what they mean. That's not their issue. They just don't think about that's how come they aren't gob smacked and bewildered and embarrassed by the religious propositions. They don't believe them. They just believe that whatever those formula say, whatever they mean if they mean anything is true. But what about the reflective folk? They have a problem. They can see as clearly as we can that there are no good reasons for believing God they can. They can see just the way we do that? Says why? By the way, I don't waste much breath on arguments against the existence of God or refuting arguments for the existence of God. Because, quite frankly, I met very few people that give them any stock. Anyway, these people have reflected people they know. They know there aren't any good arguments, any good reasons to believe in God.

[00:21:01] Daniel Dennett Create clip But they think that belief in God is for some reason obligatory. That's what I want to look at, what their reasons are for thinking that belief in God is obligatory. What they do, given their belief, is a contrived to believe in God. And that's a phenomenon which is quite distinct from believing in God. Here's a good line from Cardinal Ratzinger, who's been mentioned several times before. He's now Pope Benedict the 16th. He talks about what the Catholic faithful are required to profess, required to profess. So Catholics then have this category in which all good Catholics fall of being professors. Well, needless to say, I know nobody who's that word. I want to reserve professors for, for a kn altogether a more reasonable patient, the one that I myself hold. So I'm going to call them declare er's. So what are religious folk required to declare? Well, they profess a belief in God. Why on earth do they do it? Why on earth did they do it? Remember, reasons for declaring belief in God are not identical. Two reasons for believing in God, these air, too different states. And they have different reasons. And I'm going to talk about reasons for declaring belief in God, the reflective folk who go on declaring their belief in God.

[00:22:52] Daniel Dennett Create clip And we know there's many We're not talking about bumpkins. We're talking about educated people, college educated people who go on declaring their belief in God. They're not stupid. Well, some of them are. But then some atheists, they're not radically misinform. They are worried about something that we atheists should actually take very seriously. I'm going to now give you several good strategic reasons now their strategic, because they're not reasons for believing in God, reasons for trying to believe in God or declaring your belief in that for believing in God and their strategic and the first, most obviously is fear. And I don't need to tell you about that. We heard eloquently from Ion here, she Ali about fear. We've heard about the fear of many people, their fear of God, their fear of a vengeful god of a God who demands this belief. But actually a much more interesting category of fear is the fear of the reflective folks who think they are obliged to support the belief in God. And what they're mainly afraid of, I think, is catastrophic collapse of consensus now.

[00:24:37] Daniel Dennett Create clip Hitch earlier was talking about a failed state. A failed state, as we know only too well these days is, is a truly depressing, an ugly, awful situation. When you have a failed state, it's very hard for any force on Earth to pull a failed state back into sanity. Nobody trusts anybody that smart people leave the country. There's nothing but corruption and warlords and violence. It's just it's just a horrible, catastrophic abandonment of civility, reliability, trustworthiness and everything else. I failed state is a very grim and a terrible state of affairs. And confronted with the prospect of a failed state, I want you to put yourself in the position of somebody of some authority in a state which is on the brink of becoming a failed state. And the people are asking you, Is it safe to go to market? Is it safe? Is it safe to plant my crops? Is it okay? Can I go shopping? And you don't know that it is? You rather doubt that it is. There is a trim. There are very good reasons under these circumstances. Toe lie, very good reasons. I think each one of us here would be strongly tempted to lie under these situations and for a very good reason, saying No, no, it's too late. This is that to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

[00:26:25] Daniel Dennett Create clip If there is a small chance that you can salvage things, just goose the society a little bit into a sense of confidence, you may be able to save it. So what you say may have a huge ripple on effect. And so there's a tremendous reason, a very good reason to live. And this is, I think, the state of a great many people who are reflected people who go on declaring there a belief in the existence of God. They're terribly afraid that if that belief somehow falters, we will have a societal collapse. No, this sort of issue is not just about religion. Think about hyperinflation. We have a number of phenomenon in the world in which social consensus is a sort of treading water that holds everything up. As soon as people start losing confidence in the currency and the currency starts, the hyper inflate inflate, and then we get hyper inflation and it all goes to hell. And if you can forestall that and calm people down and re establish their confidence in things, you can do some real good in the world. But of course, it may require telling some white lies.

[00:27:49] Daniel Dennett Create clip The gold standard I was thinking about this other is a really nice case where people are terribly afraid. If we abandon the gold standard, uh, confidence and currency would just be so volatile that this was really dangerous. That's one of the best reasons. Not a good one, but not a bad one, either. For maintaining the gold standard as a sort of fetish, really, to protect the confidence of the community in a currency. And I think something like this is going on in the belief by so many religious people that they have to cling tenaciously with white knuckles to their religious declarations. Runaway cynicism can even lead to the death of communication. We have stops fable about the boy who cried wolf and a similar phenomena have been seen auguring imagined. Uh, and so we have this this kind of fear, which is not unreasonable. It's It can be very well informed if we think it's false. Fine, but with some problems with that, too. By the way, another great example. This is in Doug Hoff Stater's wonderful column about luring lottery. Some of you may remember that in Scientific American, a sort of catastrophic loss of of, uh, trust.

[00:29:22] Daniel Dennett Create clip Now suppose we think that well, okay, then you've shown us that this is reasonable. But you know, they're just wrong. Giving up the belief in God is like giving up the gold standard. Life goes on community confidence, trust security. It's just not such a big problem. Okay, so we want to explain this to these people. Can we reason with him? No. Why? Because we should expect them to shun the opportunity to discuss our disagreement rationally, because the very discussion of the issue undermines the consensus. Don't talk about it. Don't even think about it. There's been some very elegant research by the psychologist Philip Tech. Lock on Sacred values. What makes the value sacred is don't even think about. You should feel guilty for even thinking about it. Even if you decide the right thing about it, it's to protect us from subversive criticism, which might lead to a catastrophic collapse of values. So there's fear in several different varieties. And what I've tried to do is to show you that in your own lives, in your own circumstances, you can imagine the case where you would be gripped by that fear and you would think the right thing to do here is to grit my teeth and lie, maintain a pretense to save a situation from catastrophe.

[00:30:52] Daniel Dennett Create clip Another is loving. We've heard a lot about that today. It's so wonderful. The speakers today we're in just vivid and compelling. They illustrated my issues just right down the line. The prospect of disappointing or enraging are hurting, or those we love. This this so terrible. I actually hope all of us that it overpowers our candor. We just can't face telling the truth when grandma or mother or our sisters or somebody else that we love. We're afraid that's gonna hurt. And so many people are trapped in a pretense from which any escape would be in their eyes of betrayal. Our overtures are skeptical. Overtures, therefore, threatened to expose them. No wonder they loathe us. No wonder they love us were threatening them within a choice between betrayal and lying, which they do not like. There's a lovely new book I Wish it Were Here just Came Out. I'm not sure is actually out, as it is called Philosopher's Without Gods. It's a collection of essays put together by the philosopher Louise Anthony, By the way, my little piece, thank goodness which Richard quoted From, is in their brand new essays about these air philosophers, some of whom actually had had religious training, went to religious schools. And they're all atheists now, and they've written essays about their life.

[00:32:38] Daniel Dennett Create clip One of the best is Buy my dear late friend David Lewis, and it's called Divine Evil, and this issue came up. Hitch actually spoke about this. Louis develops the following argument. I'm just going to give you the barest bones of it. The Christian God, he points out, is a god of judgment and punishment. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, in fact, eternal punishment for on repentance, centers and disbelievers. If you write, read the Bible literally, as it said, and at least in North Korea, you get to die. It's not eternal punishments, but in heaven or in hell, it's eternal. Is this infinite pain that seems to be the implication of the Christian Bible? Well, that's that's nasty. Richard has said that. How could you ever respect anybody who not only believed in but worship to God? That was the perpetrator of infinite pain? It's so un proportional to whatever your crime is an eternity of suffering. This is This is so This is just outrageous. Can we admire the believers, Louis Ass And he says, only if they're ignorant of the nature of the perpetrator.

[00:34:03] Daniel Dennett Create clip I'm sorry for the long quote that it's good and I'll pass through it quickly, he says. David Lewis's We dodged the consequence by keeping it all in soft focus, consoling ourselves with the thought that hellfire and brimstone are mere conceits. That grown up theorists have gotten beyond the cartoons and areas. That is probably the stance most favored by those who worship the perpetrator starting from their trust in God. They suppose that there must be There must be some nice version of the story, one that will not literally end with billions of damned souls writhing in eternal agony. Non believers have been able to excuse their religious friends on the grounds that they're probably not clear headed about the commitments of their worship. How could you condone that your friend worshipped such an evil perpetrated? He very usefully compares this God with Hitler. We can think of them as good people who have not seen the perpetrators dark side and bring in the problem of divine able to their attention, David Lewis says slyly. I am presenting them with the choice they have previously avoided.

[00:35:16] Daniel Dennett Create clip And then he ends with a lovely punch line. I may be making it impossible for myself to admire many whom I have previously liked and respected. That is. Part of the dynamic of this issue is that if we push hard as we should on our friends and those we admire and respect, we may awkwardly find ourselves in the position of no longer being able to admire and respect those that we have previously fought rather well off now that we've removed there confusion and imposed this knowledge on him. So there's two and here's 1/3 reason, and that's guilt. The guilt of the deceivers is just part of this. That is the guilt of the the priests and the leaders who know better. It's just stunning how much guilt there is among the priests and imams and pastors of this world when they know very well that the things that they are saying in their pulpits are not what they believe. But it propels the infectious guilt of the deceived. They passed the buck to the deceived on. Let the people in the congregation police themselves eye on here. See, Ali in this stupendous book is, to me very eloquent on just exactly this topic.

[00:36:55] Daniel Dennett Create clip I'm calling it the mutual policing of the devout. She doesn't need to fear the imam or to listen to the imam. She can just get from her sisters from her brother from her aunt's from her family from her plan. They're all involved in enforcing the pretense of the beliefs and making her feel terribly guilty and afraid for not maintaining them. It reminds me of of this stunt, which some of you may have done where you get a circle of people and everybody sits down in the lap of the person behind them. And it's also supporting you can. You can all sit down, which is a sort of a nice trick, But But in this instance, it's not so nice because you don't have is a whole society that is supporting itself on nothing but the enforcement by its own members, of the obligations that have come from somewhere and who knows where anymore. You can cancel out the priests, the imam's, the whole group just goes right on perpetuating this terrible cycle of guilt. Uh, Boyd and Richardson. I'm a professor. I can't resist getting a little bit academic here. A boy and Richard said, have a lovely paper on second order punishing. Uh, it's an evolutionary model, which shows that when you have second order punishing, that is when you not only punish your people in your group for transgressions, but you punish those who refuse to punish that. This this creates a potent situation. We're just about any taboo at all can be maintained simply by the cycle of punishment that's created. And of course, punishment doesn't have to be corporal punishment. It could be just disapproval. It could be just banishment. It could be just a shame and so forth.

[00:38:56] Daniel Dennett Create clip We got to break this cycle. How do we do it? Well, ion here she Ali in her book gives a wonderful example of what broke it for her. And I was so glad that she mentioned it today. I already had this slide in here because I was going to mention it. It was a detail that just knocked me out. When I read it in the book, Nancy Drew, who would have thought that the Nancy Drew books would have been just dynamite to her? They gave her, as she said, Tales of freedom, adventure of equality between girls and boys, trust and friendship. I want you to remember that and think about all the different sorts of Nancy Drew germs that you can spread around in different places, and it won't work for everybody. We want to spread thousands of different ideas of this sort, recognizing that all it takes is one of these to get into the right mind, and we've broken the cycle for one person who would. I guess, that Nancy Drew would break the cycle for this amazing woman. But by her own testimony, it did.

[00:40:13] Daniel Dennett Create clip Well, there's another way of doing it. Consider the successful campaign of the gays and you were just speaking about this just a minute ago. Here's here's queer eye for the straight guy. What a brilliant advance that program has made. Not everybody likes it. Some people hate it, but it has simply shifted the balance off of what's considered normal. What's considered acceptable. It is simply changed the playing field, I think, inalterably in a very good direction. We have gay roles and sitcoms. We have the gay congressman Barney Frank. This is a wonderful progress in this attention, this consciousness raising that Richard talks about and we wanna have more of it. And I think that inspired by the successful hijacking of the word gay, the word brights, as as coined by Paul Geiser and mingle Futrell is is a worthy shot. And I know a lot of you hate the term, but a lot of homosexuals hated the term gay when it came out to. It may take a few years for this to catch on, and it some of you may never want to use it. And thats true. Some gays never wanna call themselves gay either. But they all are grateful to the change in consciousness that the word gay has provided. And maybe the word rights could do the same thing.

[00:41:41] Daniel Dennett Create clip I don't think this audience don't have to give the website you know about about the brights network, something as I say. A lot of you don't like the word. Oh, it's so arrogant it. So it suggests that if you're not bright, your dim well, actually, of course it does. But we don't say that any more than the gay say that the heterosexuals are Gillom. There happens to be a nice, positive, upstanding word for the opposite of gay. And that's straight. Both gay, Straight to rice. Positive words. So I've suggested that if the non brights wanna have a name for themselves, they should call themselves the Supers. That's a nice word. Super because they believe in the supernatural, and we don't so Vega be the super's on. We could be the brights, and they're both nice words, but I haven't seen many of them taking me up on this, but I think it is a good suggestion. More recently, just just before coming here, I thought about this a bit, and I decided, you know, actually, I think there may be another species of non bright, not just supers.

[00:43:09] Daniel Dennett Create clip There may be Merc ese now supers and murky Zehr, two distinct species of non brights. And they really are now that I've been thinking about it quite different. And so this is maybe just a aesthetic matter of difference in taste. Merck ease. They shun clarity. They like mystery philosophers. Call them Mysterion. They want things to be kept soft focus. They want to turn down the lights, break the spell. They are in general, in favor of the sort of gauze filter over everything so that nothing is very clear. They like things to be murky. Supers want there to be supernatural things. They want riel magic. They want miracles. And these are really distinct ways of not being bright. For instance, Tom Nagel is a murky but not a super time. Nagel, the philosopher one of my one of my favorite floss, is also one of my favorite opponent. Here's Tom, I quote him. This is the passage that the odious Leon Wieseltier claims I pulled out of context and misrepresented Tom niggles use. Here's what Tom says. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and actually hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that.

[00:44:34] Daniel Dennett Create clip He's an anti theist, so he certainly is no super. That's in his book, The Last Word, but he is a murky. He's a very urbane, humane Mysterion, and it's immensely appealing to many people, so we don't have just the enemy of the Super's toe to fight. That's not our only opponent. We also have to have as a targeted opponent the Merc ease of this road, and they will take offense if we call them supers. They're not supers. They have no truck with miracles or or or supernatural beings. They're just Merck ese, and they think that by being murky by having everything murky, they're protecting something important. It's never quite clear what if they could get clear about it? They wouldn't have to be murky, so we need lots of equally engaging examples of brights leading fulfilling moralize I mean, Tom Nichols a wonderful guy. He's done brilliant work is lovely work in political and judicial philosophy. He's a He's a really fine example of what a philosopher could be. I admired him tremendously, And so for me, it's a problem that he, uh, is such an honorable and exemplary fellow. And yet he's a murky, so we have to. We have to. We have to confront the murkiness, and we have to provide examples of equally marvellous brights to give people just role models for what a bright congee.

[00:46:11] Daniel Dennett Create clip Now we have Pete Start, and I do hope that he's the first of many who will come out of the closet and admit that they're atheists. I'm often asked, When do you think there will be an atheist president ever? I said, Oh, we've had lots of atheist presidents. They just wouldn't admit it. And certainly, as Richard was saying, We know they've got to be atheist, congressman, atheist, senators. And maybe maybe we can make the situation change enough so that they will come out and they will come out. That's the point of Richard's proposal. So there we have three good strategic reasons for declaring belief in God. And here's another one. The Concorde policy. This was vented. My whole talk here was beautifully Press it. So I can I can sort of speed over this. The Concorde fallacies when one makes a hopeless investment one, sometimes reasons I can't stop now. Otherwise, what I've invested so far will be lost. Iraq Well, Christopher Hitchens gave us two examples. He also gave us the example of Billy Graham.

[00:47:21] Daniel Dennett Create clip You know, hey, at this point in my life, what am I gonna do? I devoted my whole life. There's no there's so many religious leaders out there who, laid in their life, are trapped by the Concord Fallacy. I think we should feel actually a fair amount of sympathy for them, even if we heartily disapprove of the of their inability to have the courage to come forward. But we should recognize that it takes tremendous courage for them to do this. If you want to read a very moving book on this, I recommend John Updike's novel in The Beauty of the Lilies about Clarence Wilmot, a Protestant minister who loses his faith, finds the courage after many years in the pulpit to announce his atheism. And then you watch his life plummet there. After this is this is this is this is a conquered fallacy is a very compelling, if ignoble reason. And then finally just play an embarrassment. I don't remember. You know how many of you follow chess or computer chest? But when deep thought was playing in one of its matches, it made a move. I'm I moved 12 and I moved 13. That took the move back, and the commentators roared with laughter. They said this was hilarious. Boy, it showed that a computer was incapable of embarrassment.

[00:48:55] Daniel Dennett Create clip No, no human player would do that, even if they could see. Oops. Darn, that was a mistake. They just It just takes too much out of you. Is that oops? Sorry. Made a mistake. Uh, we hate to make mistakes, and we hate even Lord of admit to making mistakes. And there are a lot of people out there who I would hate to admit. Oops. Sorry. This religion thing I've been doing for the last five years of my life is just you know what? Sorry. A big mistake it takes. It takes an unusual courage to acknowledge that or just weirdness. So the outcome is what I've called belief and belief. Some people believe in God, How many? It's very hard to say, actually, because some people believe in belief in God and there are more people who believe in belief in God and believe in God. Well, how do I know that? Well, all the people who actually believe in God also believe in believe. I mean, I don't know about you, but I have not really encountered anybody who goes around saying, Oh, and I just wish I could get rid of this belief in God. It's so embarrassing, you know? You know, if you believe in God, you're proud of it.

[00:50:15] Daniel Dennett Create clip But then there's all the other people, so they all believe in believe in God. And then there's all the people who believe in belief in God but don't believe in God. Well, what is the proportion restoration will never know? Because those who believe in belief in God behave exactly the way people behave who believe in God, except that they won't say run into a hail of bullets, expecting God to save them. There aren't many people who believe in got that way so we just don't We can't tell. Maybe we're tiptoeing around, and very few people actually believe in God. They just believe in believe. So what we've seen is the evolution of the God concept in the last few 1000 years from yeah, way a really sharp, craggy rail Mount Everest type God to the ground of all being. They, uh, uh, low. You can barely tell it's a mountain. Now, is this evolution homing in on the best concept? That's what the religious theologians like to say. You know, this is this is a theory and we are getting closer and closer.

[00:51:25] Daniel Dennett Create clip We're getting the better concept of God all the time. Is that what it is? Or is it the erosion in the face of skepticism? And I think it's pretty clear that it's erosion in the face of unrelenting skepticism over actually several 1000 years, the weathering of the God concept at an almost imperceptible rate. It's very important that the weather and go on without our started noticing it. It happens every time a preacher tweaks a phrase in his sermon. Two. Avoid irritating or arousing any skepticism in somebody out in the congregation. If the congregation has been frowning a little bit. He's going to start watering down the doctrine just a little bit. Won't even realize he's doing it. Gradually over the years, the concept of God is watered down. Water down, water down, water down. Uh, these personal revisions air passed on without notice, not just from creatures from individuals. Parents talk to their children till gradually. What started out as a really a Mount Everest type concept of God becomes a sort of amorphous, cloudy, mysterious concept that nobody really knows what it is. Even mystery is elevated and considered itself to be wonderful, and we get the privatization of the concepts. This is particularly true in the in the say, the mega churches in this country where we don't care what your concept of God is. Just so long as you're one with Jesus and you come to the church. And so they're actually allowing you to freelance it and come up with your own concept of God, whatever you like, it doesn't matter. They've begun to realize that it doesn't matter what concept of God you have, because nobody believes it anyway.

[00:53:26] Daniel Dennett Create clip So we get the almost comical confusion of today if it were sped up. It's very important. This happened very imperceptibly. This is like the heating up, the pail of water with the frog in it. If it were sped up, it would just be hilarious. The revision, piled on revision piled on revision all in one direction. Here's a quote. It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us. Now that's a joke. That's a wonderful joke by Peter de Vries in his hilarious novel A Mackerel Plaza, Back in 1958 God is so great that the greatness precludes existence. That is not a joke that is said, that is said in all po faced seriousness by a Buddhist scholar in a book published in 1989. As I say, you speed it up and it would just be hilarious. So the picture of God, which started out just as a sort of eroded mountain. Now the fog has rolled in, and it's really just about impossible to tell to get your bearings or figure out what you're attacking of what you're criticizing.

[00:54:45] Daniel Dennett Create clip And so we have this Alice in Wonderland world of theism today and my suggestion to you is don't be angry. Be amused. Be proud. We've got them on the run. They've been on the run. Actually, they've been on the run for 1000 years. That's the erosion that we see in this God. Carter. We have rid of the yeah way Mount Everest long ago. And now we're into the fog. We're almost there. We're almost there. And so what's left to them? Not very much. We get a lot of name calling. Richard was talking about this today. Here's this lovely quote. I love this kind of atheist or agnostic commentator. Discuss any aspect of religion for more than 30 seconds without referring to religious people in missiles. Extremist, mental, deficient, fastest enemies in the public. Good krypto Nazis. Contra meant irrational is authoritarian death spots and so forth. Well, I think I haven't. I've actually gone out of my way to say these people are intelligent. They're well informed. They're just trapped.

[00:55:55] Daniel Dennett Create clip That's from Jack Berlin about having said this. He goes on to call us the soccer hooligans of Reason to discourse. This is Sam and Pitch and Richard Stanley Fish. No need to say much about him. He quoted this with approval. Now these tactics I think of as a testimonial to the power of rational skepticism, and we should respond to them firmly. But gently, a little good natured, chiding or teasing can work wonders. I was asked by ABC News earlier today about the new apologetics, this new movement that's arising mainly within the Catholic Church, but not just the new apologetics. And I think this is wonderful. These advocates are useful to us because they aren't strawman. They are creating articulate arguments for there, there, various creeds, which they're now prepared, they say argue for wonderfully they embarrassed many of the faithful. What we're supposed to believe what? Because you can't articulate these views without articulating some some fairly drastic claims, which a lot of the faithful just they never imagined they were signing up for that.

[00:57:15] Daniel Dennett Create clip So I think that I do not regret the occurrence of this new wave of apologetics spokespeople. There, there fish in a barrel, we get to expose their tricks. One of my favorite is witnessing. I'm gonna pass this on to you because I think this is a little little social bit. You really should have in your kids and I go to an authority, the Cardinal Dulles in a book and an article of his called The Rebirth of Apologetics, he said. He's very candid. I don't think he realizes how candidates being, He says. Personal testimony calls from epistemology quite distinct from the scientific in which interpretations profit by this are not accepted on authority but tested by critical problem. But when we proceed by testimony, he's talking about religious testimony. The situation is very different, without in any way compelling us to believe the witness calls for a free ascent that involves personal respect and trust. To reject the message is to withhold confidence in the witness. In other words, witnessing is deploy off, personalizing in such a way that you have no choice either, but to mumbo and bite your limbs. They were okay, or you're gonna have to be rude and say, Well, you're just diluted, and most of us don't want to do that.

[00:58:44] Daniel Dennett Create clip Here's how you should respond politely to somebody who does the personal witnessing thing you say, Look, you're playing the witnessing card, you leave me no choice. But to be rude, I can't accept what you say so. I have to tell you that I don't accept it. And that does in Pune your honesty and your and makes you I simply say you're incredible. Not in the good sense. If that's rude, you leave me no choice. Do you realize you might say that you're using that old con artist trick? You know, con artists have known for many years that if if the mark starts getting skeptical and critical, they play the hurt feelings card. What, you don't trust me? It's a con. Now a lot of people use a car without knowing that they're using a con. You can gently point out to them. What you just did is a variation on an old con artist trick. Do you really want to do that? Then there's the business about metaphor. This is such a shell game.

[00:59:52] Daniel Dennett Create clip Does God judge or does he judge? Does he listen or does he listen? Is God merciful or merciful? Are we to take these terms literally or metaphorically? This God punish are Does he what if Now what I think we need to do is to point out to people who rely on this, that they're unembarrassed exploitation of this convenient dodge, as if they'd never noticed that their availing themselves of a parlor trick. We should make them embarrassed. When they do this, we should show them that this is just a cheap trick. I have a bad joke. Lucy thinks rock is to die for. Daisy thinks rock is to die for Lucy's thinking of Rock Hudson does. He's thinking of rock music. They don't really agree on anything. Now I submit that many people, the different concepts of God are Maur different than Rock Hudson on rock music. But people said, Hey, we're not atheists. We all believe in God in our own ways. Yes, and Lucy and Desi both believe in rock. It's it's just a bad pun.

[01:01:12] Daniel Dennett Create clip Now, why do people do this? They do it because of belief in belief in God. And it has belief and believe in God has eclipse belief in God as a reason. And we should recognize that and start adjusting our strategies to meet that. So I've given you five actually good strategic reasons for declaring your belief in God. Even though you don't believe in God for believing in God, I don't have to tell you there are better reasons for not believing in God. And we know and they've been rehearsed for us here, or are we perhaps wrong? Let's be open minded and think this fear that the opposition has of catastrophic collapse of society. For instance. What if they're right about that, then where then we're being vandals? This is the what's behind the I'm an atheist, but line that Richard and others have written about. These are the people who share our atheism but are really afraid that we're doing a lot of harm when we press the case well, I'm going to concentrate on one example who has not been used in this regard. And that's David Sloan Wilson in his book Darwin's Cathedral, which is a very interesting book in many ways. But it has a bombshell at the end that I think nobody's really commented on in this book. David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist. He's he's battled with Richard for years over the issue of group selection on That's a long Story for Another Day and another group of people. But I want to concentrate on just one aspect of David Sloan Wilson's work in this book, Darwin's Cathedral, David introduces a distinction between what he calls factual realism and practical realism. This is what he says.

[01:03:12] Daniel Dennett Create clip It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the world. But this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism. A factual realism based on literal correspondence and a practical realism based on behavioral adapted nous. Okay, he illustrates it. An atheist historian who understood the real life of Jesus but whose own life is a mess as a result of his beliefs would be factually attached to and practically detached from reality. So he ought to believe a myth, even that the expense of his factual knowledge in orderto keep his life, not a mess. That seems to be the implication. Rationality, says Wilson, is not the gold standard against which all other forms of fodder to be judged adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged along with all other forms of thought. If this were a philosophical audience and it weren't so late at night, I would take issue with that. But I just draw your attention to these passages. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth, who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective.

[01:04:27] Daniel Dennett Create clip If there is a tradeoff between the two forms of realism such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true than factual realism will be the loser every time. So he seems to be giving what he thinks of is an evolutionary Larry endorsement for practical realism over factual realism. Indeed, he goes on to say, many electoral traditions in scientific theories of past decades have a similar silly and purpose driven quality. Once their cloak of factual plausibility has been yanked away by the hand of time. If believing something for its desired consequences is a crime, then let those who are without guilt cast the first stone. No, I want to point out the fundamental difference between factual realism and practical realism is that the truth or falsity of the factual realist series is always an issue. Imagine if a priest were to say, Well, of course, there isn't really a God who listen to your prayers. That's just a, ah useful fiction, an oversimplification, even the Unitarians. Don't just blurt out the fact that these may be useful fictions, since it's quite apparent that their utility depends on their not being acknowledged to be fictions.

[01:05:44] Daniel Dennett Create clip In other words, practical realism has advised and uh, recommended by David Sloan. Wilson is paternalistic and disingenuous. It appears, he says, that factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adapted behavior at times, a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better at what at motivating behavior. Well, you know, I think he's right about that. Is this a recommendation that one should lie when it will lead to adaptive behavior? Does Wilson recognize the implications of this position? Let us consider fat practical realism off Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld in a chilling article some several years ago by Ron Suskind, White House correspondent. We get the following quote. The aide to President Bush said that guys like me were and what we call the reality based community, which he defined as people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. He goes on. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment, principles and empiricism. He cut me off. That's not the way the world really works anymore, he continued. Were an empire now. And when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will real act again, creating other new realities which even study, too. And that's how things will sort out were histories, actors and you, all of you will be left to just study what we do.

[01:07:32] Daniel Dennett Create clip There's practical realism for you Mount. It seems to me that David Sloan listen, hasn't thought this through. He may be, though, is saying that we're actually confronted with a sort of tragedy. It may be that our quest for scientific truth has somehow trapped us. It's too late for practical reality. That was for bygone days. We're stuck now with factual reality, which sometimes won't motivate us. We just know too much. We can never again act honestly, honestly, follow the path of practical realism. I don't believe it, but that might be the position that he holds well. If so, we will just have to learn to do the best we can, guided by our knowledge, and we will have to set practical realism. Besides, it's too late for that. There's no going back, but I'm actually optimistic. Here we see the Vatican 20 years ago. If I had stood up and said in a few years, the Soviet Union will be without worries will not exist anymore. People would have laughed if I said apartheid, we'll be gone. In just a few years, people would have left.

[01:08:57] Daniel Dennett Create clip Sometimes institutions, phenomena that seemed to be massive and have tremendous inertia can just pop like a bubble. So how do we know until we try? Maybe within our children's lifetime, the Vatican will become the European Museum of Roman Catholicism on. Maybe Mecca will become Disney's Magic Kingdom of Allah. If you think that's funny, just bear in mind that the Haghia Sophia in Istanbul started off as a church. Then it was a mosque. And today it's a museum. Thank you

[01:09:46] Richard Dawkins Create clip from the bottom of my heart, Great.