does god exist is religion a force for good or evil can religion and science go hand in hand to find some answers i've come to oxford home to the oldest university in the english-speaking world and the place where i studied as an undergraduate one of the jewels in this city's crown is the oxford union the debating chamber that's witnessed such legendary orators as winston churchill benazir bhutto and of course kermit the frog i've come back to the union today to sit down with the world's most famous atheist professor richard dawkins to put faith on trial and to ask is religion evil muslims riot in protest against a truly awful film demonizing islam dozens are killed the quran is found guilty can be burned a christian pastor in florida tries to burn a copy of the quran and ignites global pandemonium even buddhists are at it attacking the muslim minority rohingyas in western berlin and of course the conflicts plaguing the modern middle east are often blamed on ancient hatreds between the children 911 was this religiously inspired terrorism thousands died yet here's the thing societies without faith haven't fared much better communism banned all religions as joseph stalin and mao zedong systematically slaughtered millions of their own country is science any better since galileo and darwin scientists have sought to stamp out ignorance and unravel the mysteries of the universe but science has also poisoned the environment unleashed killing on an industrial scale and now threatens our entire planet my guest today however stands firmly on the side of science and has provoked controversy with his attacks on religion ladies and gentlemen professor richard dawkins one of the most prolific thinkers of his generation he shot to fame in the 1970s with his research into genetics and his book the selfish gene transformed evolutionary biology his most famous work the god delusion sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages richard thanks so much for joining us here on al jazeera before we go any further i just want to check something are you an atheist for all practical purposes yes nobody can actually say for certain that anything doesn't exist but i'm an atheist in the same way as i'm an a leprechaunist and an a fairyist and an a pig unicornist so you're not 100 sure god doesn't exist but you're sure enough to make it practically i'm as sure as you are sure that fairies and leprechauns don't exist and do you see an equivalence between the idea of god and the idea of a fairy and a leprechaun the evidence for both is equally poor you say in the god delusion one of my favorite sentences that jumps out of the page that the god of the old testament is a petty unjust unforgiving control freak a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser a misogynistic homophobic racist infanticidal genocidal filicidal pestilential megalomaniacal sadomasochistic capricious malevolent bully as a piece of rhetoric superb but do you really believe that congratulations on getting megalomaniacal right by the way most people most people fumble on that yes if you've actually read the old testament i think you would have to agree uh it is it's hideous it's an anti the god of the old testament who is a monster but also the god of the quran the new testament the hindu scripture well um the god of the quran i don't know so much about the god of the new testament is widely advertised as being a bit a bit more gentle and certainly on the whole he is there are things about the new testament that i find in a way almost more objectionable than the old testament but the sheer horror of the character i i said he was the most unpleasant character in all fiction uh because i regarded as fiction of course um and yes he is i mean he's he's jealous he's vindictive he's callous he's cruel and this is a god that is worshipped by loved by adored by followed by millions billions of people i hope not i hope that the god that is adored by millions of people is a grown-up kind of god who is no longer i hope that most people who the kind of people i would like to know who worship and admire him regard those stories as not literally true now there are some who do regard them as literally true and uh i i suspect they either haven't read the old testament or um they're not the kind of people i would wish to know because because you don't you do not what want to worship a character like that by all means worship some kind of um great spirit of the universe some kind of creative intelligence who who created the universe but don't worship this vile vindictive monster of the old testament why throw around these sweeping statements about religion not the god of the old testament but religion itself being evil i mean do you believe religion is evil no but you say plenty of times in this book that religion is evil you said in a speech famously that i think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils comparable to the smallpox virus virus but harder to eradicate i do think that yes because what i'm talking about there is faith where faith means belief in something without evidence because if you believe something without evidence then that justifies anything you you're no longer vulnerable to somebody coming back at you and saying hang on a minute let me argue the case if you believe it without evidence which is what faith is then you don't argue the case you say no i'm not arguing that case this is my faith it's mine it's private i don't dis i don't dissent from it i don't retreat from it you're just going to have to accept it now that is evil and yet you spend so much of your time debating people of faith so clearly people of faith are interested in having discussions they're not just all blind believers insisting on their way of nobody said anything about all of them i mean the vast majority of religious people are perfectly good nice people um as you are there's no suggestion i've ever made that all religious people are evil of course not there is a logical progression that goes from believing in faith having faith that that your god tells you to do something and doing terrible deeds like suicide bombing like flying planes into into skyscrapers the vast majority of people of faith don't do such terrible things but those people who do terrible things do it believing that they are righteous and good and they think that they're doing the will of their god so they are they're not evil people they're actually good people by their own lights they believe they're doing good things and that's why religion is evil because it can make you do evil things believing that they are good do you really believe that people who go out and carry out suicide bombings it is faith religion is to blame not geopolitics not the world not their lives not what's going on around us it's religion plain and simple not always it's not in the case of the tamil tigers for example um but i think in a great majority of cases it is and i think it certainly makes it a hell of a lot easier the evidence is plain that that in many um islamic suicide bombers you talk to them those who fail you talk to them afterwards they've got paradise on the brain they they're desperate to go to a martyr's heaven and that's what they think about professor robert pape of the university of chicago studied every known case of suicide terrorism 315 cases and he came to the conclusion that there's quote little connection between suicide terrorism and islamic fundamentalism or any of the world's religions the tap root of suicide terrorism he says is nationalism it's about land it's about power it's about politics it's not about faith faith is just a cover what do you know that he doesn't know well i've seen other other evidence there are different people say say different things i've seen plenty of of testimonies of uh suicide bombers who have said precisely that they do it because they want a martyr's paradise you include the seven seven bombers in that case as well uh yes i believe so have you watched their suicide videos uh i'm not sure that i have no they talk about afghanistan they talk about iraq they talk about crusades they talk about war between the west and the muslim world they talk about invading armies i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of real world stuff in there i'm not saying of course not that faith doesn't play a role but i'm just interested in this idea that you think faith is is the issue you say you said in a very famous column you wrote four days after 9 11 that this came from religion there are enormously good reasons for people to take political action and this this we see in northern ireland we see it in afghanistan we see it in in sri lanka where the tamil tigers operated so yes there are political reasons but the promise of of a martyr's heaven which is we cannot deny that this is part of islamic doctrine um martyrs go straight to paradise yes but not terrorists not murderers not criminals well they believe that because they're told it by their imams but then what about the majority of the world's muslim clerics in ulama who came out and condemned 9 11. strange i'm delighted they did but they were pretty quiet about it what about the argument that says human beings are prone to violence they're prone to carrying out crimes against their fellow man you can blame religion you can blame politics you can blame economics lots of factors lots of excuses why what i don't get why do you only focus on religion for fairness why don't you also isolate the other factors there are lots of other factors and i'm i'm quite happy to say that yes there are there are lots of rain if you look at the wars of history um some of them have been about religion plenty of them have not been about religion i never said religion is the the sole cause of wars and and uh violence you you may not have said that but you would accept that the new atheists people like sam harris the late christopher hitchens have blamed a lot of history's wars on god and religion and you make a similar suggestion under god delusion yeah i would blame a lot of history's wars but the most terrible wars in history the two major wars of the sec of this 20th century are nothing to do with religion those are at that point yeah and the cold war and vietnam yes i would of course yes so when you have a situation where some of the world's worst crimes were carried out not by believers how then does that square with your idea that it's religion that causes good people to do bad things religion that's driving violence your original statement against religion at the start of this dogmatic belief in something like religion or something like marxism or something like nazism these are all or need patriotism i mean my country right or wrong these are all pernicious beliefs which can drive people to do to do terrible things and in the second world war um hitlerism was driven by by by racism by a sort of subvagnerian pagan religion which hitler revived um stalin's atrocities were were motivated by a dogmatic belief in marxism and atheism stalin happened to be an atheist but he was never motivated soviet union was not based on scientific rationalism on the alienation of religion and god um stalin persecuted the church he pas stalin persecuted just about everybody are you saying that the soviet union the leaders of the soviet union were not driven by a hatred of religion and a belief that science and human progress and materialism was the way forward they believed that materialism science human progress there was a kind of mark there was a marxist slant on those on those words and they were hideously misused mao zedong when he invaded tibet told the dalai lama that religion is poison the subtext to the late christopher hitchens book was religion poisons everything can you blame people of religion for saying hold on we've heard these ideas before that religion poisons everything and it leads in one direction it's an incidental fact that mao zedong and stalin happened to be atheists they incidentally wasn't it wasn't core to communism it i i think it was not core to communism no so when karl marx was talking about religion being the opiate of the masses that was just a throwaway line yeah i mean that was that was um uh an out of context um statement i mean what what on earth do you think that's got to do with atheism i don't know let me put a statement in context to you albania one of the world's worst dictatorships tyrannies that we've seen in the last hundred years article 37 of albania's communist constitution declared quote the state recognizes no religion and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people what do you think you're saying i mean that's an appalling thing to say of course it is why is that an appalling thing to say what do you disagree with in that statement why would i want to support atheistic propaganda i support science and truth but you don't support spreading atheism i support spreading science and truth if that happens to be atheism i support it i'm not going to start bullying people into into being atheist i'm not going to start trying to compel people to be to be atheist that was what the albanians were doing it's nothing to do with whatever you liked it of course but you'd like to persuade them not to be believers i'd like to raise consciousness in a gentle civilized way using argument rational argument from evidence in your book you cite lots of evidence for the bad things religions what i wonder is if you were being fair wouldn't you have also included some of the good things that religion's done my passion is for scientific truth i don't much care about what's good and evil actually i care about what's true i mean do you actually believe in your muslim faith you believe that muhammad split the moon in two do you believe that muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse for example i'd pay you the compliment of assuming that dude that you don't no i do i believe in miracles you believe that yes you believe that muhammad went to heaven on a winged horse yes i believe in god i believe in miracles i believe in revelation i mean the point here is that let's assume i'm wrong richard i'm wrong let's assume i'm wrong i'm wrong i'm happy to concede that richard i'm happy to concede it i'm wrong all religions are wrong god does not exist we're all mad the issue is we exist we've existed for a while i think even christopher hitchens said and you've said in your writings we're not going anywhere so my question to you is why not acknowledge for example the good things that williamson do you accept that religion has done good things despite all of our mad beliefs and our miracles i accept that individual religious people have done an enormous number of good things not driven by religion well i mean who knows mean spiritually you won't give any credit taking somebody like um uh martin luther king for example reverend martin luther king yes um obviously he was a he was a cleric um so so um i imagine that that fed into the good things that he did plenty of other things did he was a great admirer of gandhi and he was a great admirer of non-violence he was a brilliant uh and wonderful great man would you disconnect mlk's non-violence and gandhi's non-violence from their very strongly hell religious beliefs they didn't well um i think that's it's not a thing that i really care about actually i mean i i think they do you care about it richard saying that people carry out violence in the name of god and i cite you an example of very famous people who've done good and non-violence in the name of god and you say i'm not interested if god doesn't exist then doing something good in his name is it's great that something good gets done but there's no evidence at all that believing in god makes you more likely to do good things i can't see any noble logical connection between being religious and doing good things let's concede that god does not exist let's concede that religion is false my problem here is trying to understand why some of the new atheists are so anti-religion when religious people clearly are doing lots of good things and they're doing it in the name of god i've never denied that religious people are doing good things and non-religious people are doing good things i care about what's true i'm an educator i'm a scientist and i want people to understand the truth about the universe in which they live that's what i care about and i regard religion as a a distraction uh and in some cases a pernicious distraction from true education uh which i which i love and value the way you value love your god can you not do both well so long as they don't divide rituals but but um if you if you if you actually believe muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse that's an anti-scientific belief and that could be wrong but is wrong but that doesn't change that doesn't change how do you know it's wrong oh come on you're a man of the 21st century i'm just asking it comes back to my original question the rational position the rational position is the agnostic position why up there what i mean the rational position i i didn't say up there i didn't pick a place why would a woman horse be that be the way to get to heaven if it's not up there i asked i asked i asked a question about you asked about proof i'm all for saying i can't prove it but can you prove he didn't do it i mean this is this is the end old debate fly to heaven i'm just asking on your criteria i'm just asking you no i can't prove it and i can't prove it it wasn't a golden unit but i'm fascinated that you'd rather i'm fascinated you'd rather talk about uh what animals the prophet may or may not have used 1400 years ago rather than talk about what muslims or islam is doing in the world today good or bad well that seems to be the distraction if anyone's distracted it seems to be you well that that's your that's your view i'm fascinated by how somebody a a respected sophisticated journalist in the 21st century can believe that a prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse let me ask you this are all people who hold beliefs in god and in miracles in the supernatural do you regard them all as intellectually inferior to you i regard those beliefs as intellectual nonsense i don't regard the individuals as intellectually inferior to me because many of them palpably are not if you go back in history then all bets are off because before before darwin for example um it it's not at all surprising that before darwin people believed in all kinds of things which they wouldn't believe in now there are many people many scientists today who say they're religious and if you actually ask them what they believe in many cases it turns out what they believe is in some sort of deistic god some sort of [Music] intellectual spirit some sort of um uh creative intelligence that lay at the root of the universe perhaps invented the laws of physics something like that i don't agree with this book but it's an excellent book very well argued you're very passionate clearly there's one section in the book where you talk about bringing up children oh yes and you talked about education you talk about a story when you you tell a story about being in in ireland and talking about the catholic child abuse scandal and there's one quote on page 356 which i will read out to you horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up catholic in the first place you believe that being brought up as a catholic is worse than being abused by a priest there are shades of being abused by a priest and uh i quoted the i i quoted the example of a woman in america who wrote to me saying that when she was seven years old she was sexually abused by a priest in his car and at the same time a friend of hers who also seven who was protestant or was of protestant family i should say died and she was told that because her friend was protestant she had gone to hell and would be roasting in hell forever and she told me that of those two abuses she got over the physical abuse it was the yucky which she got over it but the mental abuse of being told about hell she took years to get over and with respect richard you're an empiricist you're a rationalist one letter from one woman in america isn't really but the basis to extrapolate and make sure sweeping conclusions is of course true and i'm not basing it on that it seems to me that that telling children such that they really really believe that people who sin are going to go to hell and roast forever forever that your skin grows again when it when it peels off with with with with burning it seems to me to be intuitively entirely reasonable that that is a worse form of child abuse that will give more nightmares that will give more genuine distress because they really believe that they don't believe it's not a problem of course you also let me just feel i mean i've been put on the spot about this health far thing um i we haven't really been put on this in what sense have you been put on the spot well i i i sense that you think it's somehow obvious that that having a priest if you're a small girl having a priest i would be very interested in asking the audience whether being told about heaven and hell as a child being brought up as catholic is worse than that was worse than being abused by a priest okay let's have a show of hands is it worse to be abused by a priest and if you believe it's worse for a priest to abuse a child than to bring up your child catholic raise your hands are they both as bad as each other raise your hands so we have a three-way split in the audience let's finish this section with one last related subject on this question a personal question from me you talk about how um to teach children that there is one god or that god created the world in six days that is child abuse to even teach your children religion is child abuse so i have a daughter i teach her about islam and the horse am i guilty of child abuse do you teach her the world was created in six days no because islam doesn't teach that really i'm delighted to hear that i ask again am i guilty of child abuse for teaching my child stories from the quran yes or not good to know we are going to talk more about science and we're gonna go back to the audience to ask some questions to professor dawkins in part two we'll be back after the break [Music] welcome back we're talking about religion and its impact on the world good bad evil we're joined here by our guest evolutionary biologist professor richard dawkins richard science is your great passion and you're a great believer in science you're an evangelist for science a promoter and defender of science but what would you say to those people who say there are some quite important questions genuine questions that science cannot answer why are we here what's the meaning of life where does morality come from and that if religion wants to have a cracker answering those what's science is objection i'm not sure i'd accept that science can't answer those particular questions i think there are other questions science probably shouldn't try to answer like what is what is right and what is wrong those are those are questions that are not the immediate concern of science but um what's the meaning of life um why is there why is there anything how did it all start those seem to me to be uh scientific questions or potentially scientific questions if there are some questions of that sort that science can never answer then we should at least keep trying to answer them and if science can't answer them religion having a crack at answering them if there's no reason to think that religion has any any any basis for an answer then why would religion have a crack why would you bother to listen to religion having a crack at answering them um i mean one thing i would say is there may be questions that science can't answer like the origin of of everything but if science can't answer them then religion certainly can't and nothing else can either why why is it so the science or nothing well yes because because science is is is the method of getting what's true i mean if you take something like um how did the universe begin which is a very baffling deep question um how did life begin another baffling deep question both those questions are are unanswered the best methods we have of of approaching those are the methods of science because these are the methods that that look at evidence that that evaluate evidence in all sorts of sophisticated ways what has religion got to do with that other than just looking at the the writings of somebody who wrote a few centuries ago i mean why would you bother to to read those writings so the great philosophers and theologians in history have grappled with these big questions and thought about spiritual issues moral issues the transcendent they're all wasting their time uh yes they're wasting their time what about why does my life have meaning what's its worth well where does my dignity come from your your meaning and your dignity are up to you and mine are up to me and and these are not questions that science would attempt to answer um each person finds their own meaning in their in their own life and and good luck to them and what's what's wrong with religion religion offering moral certainties is if as you say science can't answer moral questions science can't offer moral certainty but i don't see that religion can either you don't think that the religious values we have today the moral codes we live by today are originally derived from judeo-christian values islamic values hindu values not really no i mean there are i mean things like the golden rule things like treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself um these are ancient uh values which are which crop up all over the world they've been adopted by many religions you can find justifications for them in moral philosophy you can find justifications for them in evolutionary biology which is my own my own subject i don't seriously think you're going to base your morality on on religion because if you do then you've got to say well do i base it on scripture i hope you don't base it on scripture because if you do then you're going to have some pretty horrible values unless you deliberately cut out those parts of scripture which which which are unacceptable to modern morality do you believe science is omnipotent that it can answer all questions i've already said no i've already said it can't answer moral questions but questions about the real world questions about reality questions about the origins of things uh why life is the way it is why the world is the way it is why the universe is the way it is uh yes science is the way to answer that some of your critics have uh argued that you are willing to hold religion up to a very it put it under the microscope hold it to account scrutinize it criticize it you don't do the same to science or scientists or some of the bad things that have come out of science well bad things that come out of science um if by that you mean horrible weapons uh nuclear weapons gas chambers nuclear eugenics yeah these are these are terrible things which are um technology that arises out of science and it's certainly true but if you want to do terrible things with technology but terrible weapons for example science is the best way to do it because science is the best way to do anything and even bad things even bad things i mean that that's right if you want to develop a terrible weapon you're not going to do it in any other way than than by science the trick is not to want to develop a terrible weapon and that's a political decision and you do not you do not see science and religion as occupying two different compartments that can live side by side they are in conflict with one another in so far as religion attempts to um talk about reality and has an alternative vision of reality i think they are incompatible yes despite the fact as we discussed earlier many of our leading scientists are believers i think it's baffling i mean what they impact practice do is they leave their their religion at the door when they go into the lab and and so they get on with their their side they say they don't well i know they do but um well okay isn't it because religion answers all sorts of human needs and spiritual urges which science never can isn't that the real issue that you can't get away from religion may answer human needs i mean for example if you're terrified of dying religion may answer the need for comfort and consolation or if you if you miss a loved one who's died and you hope to see them one day in heaven then religion answers a need it doesn't make it true and one last thing and then we'll go to the audience do you what do you say to those people who say you talk a great deal about the power of science the truth of science you have people like sam harris who say morality can be determined by science you have quite charismatic forceful people going around the world proselytizing on behalf of science that science is actually the new religion that you guys are pitching i wouldn't say it's a new religion i mean it certainly does some of the things that religion traditionally has tried to do uh like to answer the deep questions of existence and and it does that and it does it successfully in a way that religion never has but it isn't a religion because it's not based upon any holy books it's not based upon faith it's not based upon revelation it's not based upon tradition it's based upon evidence and there's a huge difference and anything that we do not have evidence for that's not scientifically testable you would dismiss well scientifically testable is is putting the bar rather highly but uh i do think that that evidence is the only good reason to believe anything yes so love beauty aesthetics i mean that that there's obviously important questions and and um if you ask that some question like um how do you know that your wife loves you um it's from evidence i mean it's not science it's not scientifically testable evidence but it's evidence it's little looks in the eyes little catches in the voice it's it's um that is evidence that's not that's not just internal revelation okay let's open up to the audience we've been talking about god evil war terrorism bringing up your children living a good life religion and happiness science versus religion who would like to answer the first question yes you if the almighty god appears suddenly on the cloud or on the earth or part of the universe what is your reaction are you going to believe or are you going to go against him what would it take for you to believe in god not just yeah i mean popping his head through the clouds yeah that that's the thing i've i've worried about a lot um obviously it would do wonders for the book the reason i worry about it is that is that obviously as a as a scientist i'm committed to the view that i would change my mind if evidence came along and so it's a very important question what would that evidence look like and i've talked about it with my colleagues a great deal i used to think yes if there was a great deep paul robeson voice coming out of the cloud saying i exist and then then yes obviously i would i would believe it but have you ever seen a really really good conjuring trick there are things that i've seen done that it seems to me to be god that's got to be a miracle and yet you know it's not and so that there is a real problem there that that we are easily fooled um let's take another question from a gentleman here very interesting i was extremely amused when you described faith as a sort of brooking no no argument um this university of course began uh with the study of theology most of the people here would have been studying theology at the beginning of the university and indeed the way in which it was taught was not professorial you didn't have lectures mostly mostly you had discussions debates people didn't write monographs they collected discussions notes of discussions people disagreed about their faith absolutely i mean everybody had a different opinion and everybody expressed it and everybody was heard the idea that so the question is um do you really think that your your view of faith brooking no argument measures up to really any experience of of how people think about their face you talked about the evidence that your wife loves you i think for most religious people the evidence that there's a god is rather like that well obviously i would be mad to suggest that theologians don't argue they argue all the time and always have they fight wars over their arguments so clearly they argue i'd say when i say brook no argument i don't mean that they don't argue when you say that theologians um have have disputes and interesting discussions um i i take it that from your garb um you take what a position one way or the other on whether the transubstantiation um whether the bread and wine really is the body and blood of a first century jew or is merely symbolic but what evidence you bring to bear on such an argument i cannot imagine it would not be a real argument at all it would be a false argument it would not not be an argument which could be settled by by real evidence just deal with the point about the evidence level when you refer to love of your wife when you say that you're that your wife loves you and you do you you're getting evidence from looks and the looks in the eye and catches in the voice was the phrase that i actually used um and the question has said that's the way religious people feel about god yes they feel that about god but there's no evidence that they're getting any cues at all i mean they're their god is an imaginary god inside themselves uh they feel that they're getting little looks from the eyes of god and sounds from the voice of god but why should we believe them since we can't see or hear any evidence to that effect let's take another question gentlemen here in the second row with regards to uh to religion you've given an example where the the islamic faith and the muslims basically they wrap themselves up in bombs because that's what they believe in islamic faith but i disagree with you because there are more than a billion muslims living in the world today who actually believe in the quran and the scripture which you said everybody started believing in the scripture then that would be horrible but i i disagree disagree with you because more than a billion people billion muslims believe that if you kill one innocent person it's as if as you've killed the entire humanity so today humanity is about seven billion people so more than a billion muslims do not strap themselves up and actually go and you know commit two sides the problem with many scriptures and i think the quran is no exception is that you can find a verse that says so and you find another verse that says the opposite and so you have to you have to pick and choose i mean is it not the case for example you always choose the bad ones well no i mean i i'm i'm suggesting that you shouldn't be in a position of having to choose i mean you shouldn't base your your your life on on a holy book which has contradictory verses where you can choose one verse when you want to make one point and another verse when you want to make make another point i mean isn't it the case that that the penalty for apostasy is death you can't take these things and just hold i could hold up an example of we mentioned earlier sam harris has said there are some views that are so irrational people should be put to death for them should i hold all atheist him of course i won't hold him to them let me put it to you in is is the penalty for apostasy death no good i'm delighted to hear that why didn't the quran doesn't say it is well then some islamic scholars do okay but that's debate and discussion there's arguments going on things take place ever centuries okay let's have an atheist make a point and join the debate lady there's waving a hand actually in the quran mankind refers only to muslims and excludes infidels which is all the rest of us so that's a small point but i really my question to professor dawkins is how does he feel about the encroachment of all religions extremists evangelist christians and a lot of muslims into the politics and everyday life and how does he feel about uh a religion influence trying to influence politics and and public you know how do you feel about religion influencing politics and public life people should be free to to speak them their minds i mean i'm a great believer in in free speech and so members of parliament should speak their minds and if their minds are influenced by their their religion then that's that's fine what i would object to i think is the view that somehow religion has a privileged right to speak because it's religion and i think you'll probably agree with that as well if if you stand up in parliament and make an excellent speech in favor of something which religion has a view on like abortion say if you make your points well and win the vote by making your points well that's fine but what you shouldn't be allowed to get away with is saying because it's religion therefore uh this is what we should do lady there in the heskoff as a social scientist we sort of the model of the rational actor is somewhat discredited we don't look at all actors at all times is acting rationally in fact we assume that they don't but that was the prelude to my question my question was really would you accept that it's not so much religion that causes conflict but sincere commitment to some belief that you think is morally important and in that sense do we get rid of morality well i think i partly said that when i said that in the great wars of the of the 20th century these were driven by non-religious motivations but they were driven by my country right or wrong kind of patriotism um that's a little bit different from morality we're talking about at least it's it's not religious i was interested in what you said you in your preamble when you said that in i take it you're a social scientist and you're no doubt right to suggest that since social scientists are studying the human animal um you notice that people actually don't behave rationally well unfortunately that's true um but that doesn't mean we shouldn't behave rationally just because people don't uh let's take a question from an atheist or an agnostic gentleman they're in the black jocket there three rows down in the middle i think when i when i've read your book which i thought also was excellent it became very apparent to me that evolution nature has given the human species some very very powerful survival instincts we're aggressive men want to spread their genes we want to gather as much resources together as we can to to help our genes continue and survive and as a result of that there's been a lot of very very dark episodes in our history the roman empire which was terribly oppressive hedonistic the vikings who stole raped pillaged the persians so on so forth do you not think that it was actually the ideas of religion that took human the human race the human species from beyond these base survival instincts and started to give them a new paradigm for thinking which was not necessarily in the interests of their their the the instincts that they have for survival it's perfectly true that uh that uh a sort of um selfish gene view of uh life which is what i've mostly mostly written about is a very unpleasant view of life and and if if you followed the the creed of the selfish gene literally and actually lived your life according to it it would be a very unpleasant world in which to live it would be a sort of thatcherite work i mean i've i've often said that while i'm a passionate darwinian when it comes to explaining the way life is i'm a passionate anti-darwinian when it comes to organizing our lives would the world be a better place if religion disappeared tomorrow uh yes it's about all the good things we discussed do you recognize that but you'll still have the nazi holocaust to communism you wouldn't have the charities that's fine you would have the charities but but um i mean it's only your assumption but i want to finish it because because the question actually challenged me by saying that it was religion that helped us to escape from the unpleasantness of the of the selfish gene um i don't actually think that is true i think that we have escaped by a long and slow process of civilization in which religion no doubt played a part if you look historically over the very long time spanish of history we're getting better we're getting nicer we're getting more charitable uh we're getting kinder getting less cruel i wouldn't give religion the credit for that i think i would give a much more complicated mixture of civilizing processes uh the the credit for it and religion is probably a part of that okay let's take one last question uh gentlemen there in the blue jumper i'm going to make it to the last question professor dawkins as an atheist is it not the case that you either believe in the universe just popping into existence without a cause which is worse than hocus pocus or in this thing called the multiverse which has as much independent empirical evidences as hades controlling the underworld right the the the phraseology you you use is is somewhat biased somewhat somewhat slanted um the uh popping into the universe popping into existence out of nothing the multiverse theory is used in this context to explain the fact that some physicists believe that the physical constants are too finely adjusted it's as though it's a put up job it looks as though the physical constants are so finely adjusted that if you change any one of them then the universe would collapse yes now the multiverse hypothesis is a kind of darwinian way of solving that problem it says there are billions and billions of universes all of which have different settings of their fundamental constants a tiny minority of those billions and billions of universes have their constants set in such a way as to give rise to a universe which lasts long enough to give rise to galaxies stars planets chemistry and hence the process of evolution such but do you understand it it does make me chuckle that you mocked me for believing in a prophet that flies into a heaven but you believe in lots and lots of universes that you can't show me prove to me testimony a lab as a basis of getting out of believing in a god and a prophet i'm astonished that you should compare the two i'm comparing the lack of evidence for the two well you cannot use your own intuitive common sense in order to diss physics i mean if if you could do that we wouldn't need physicists i mean they they are very sophisticated people they do mathematics but there are physicists like paul davis who have dissed the multiverse series being nonsense well paul davies would rather take the view that there's something mysterious in the origin of the universe and that's another perfectly respectable physicist view as stephen weinberg the nobel prize-winning it's respectable if a physicist holds a view about mystery in the universe but not if anyone else holds it if we're talking about the origin of the universe that is a problem in physics yes let's end with a couple of quick questions if as christopher hitchens the late christopher hitchens wrote religion is inerradicable and as you put it harder to get rid of than smallpox doesn't this basically mean that whatever motivations you have no matter how passionately you're driven and loved for the truth you are essentially wasting your time i would never admit to wasting my time trying to propagate the truth and i think i can claim a modicum of success with the people that i've written read my books the people who've attended my lectures it's a doctrine of despair to say that we're stuck with religion for all eternity um the religions of ancient greece and ancient roman the vikings of all dead nobody believes in jupiter or thor anymore and i have great hopes that the same is going to be true of the of the god of abraham and one last thing there's a new book out from one of this country's well-known philosophers called religion for atheists which makes the case that no matter how false religion is no matter how imaginary god may be there are some lessons there are some institutions there are some values that atheists could usefully borrow i've heard that argument but i've heard people say that we that humans do need some sort of um rituals and they need some sort of um gathering places meeting places um i can sort of see that is not a thing that interests me very much i don't feel any great need for for uh for ritual i don't feel any great need to fill the alleged vacuum that will be left when religion goes i think there's plenty to fill it already it's been a fantastic discussion it's a pleasure to have you here on al jazeera thank you all to the audience here in the oxford union chamber and thanks to you all at home for watching goodbye and dare i say god bless you