Dawkins - Science in the Soul NZ tour
Jessica Macfarlane (August 1, 2018)
In the last issue of this publication it was mentioned some skeptics were pulling out of this talk due to the nature of the allegations against Lawrence Krauss. He was accused of sexually assaulting a number of women. That case continues, and his name persists in the link to the show at the Isaac Theatre Royal.
At the event in Christchurch on 11th May 2018 however, the audience was plentiful and enthusiastic.
The show comprised a kiwi two man team of Mikey Havoc, local media personality, and Allan Blackman, AUT Chemistry Professor and 95bFM's “Dear Science” radio show host.
The following are some highlights of the show, which ranged from topic to topic following prepared questions from the hosts and then random ones from the audience.
Aliens
When asked about the possibility of life outside of Earth Richard said he would ‘stick his neck out' to say Darwin's explanation of natural selection could be used to explain any life in the universe, but an interesting point of difference may be in the DNA which may for example be flat and not 3D as it is on earth. He guessed it would probably be carbon/protein based, because the science backed up that model as a stable and likely one.
Richard mentioned he supports SETI which is looking for signs of aliens by trying to detect signals like prime numbers in space.
He brought up the theory that life on earth may be a result of contamination from life on Mars and said it would be tremendously exciting if a different genetic code sample was found.
Intelligent Design
Simply put, Intelligent Design is a rebranding of Creationism. This was done in order to bring this idea into schools to replace teaching of evolution.
In fact Richard says, in the famous Intelligent Design book ‘Of People and Pandas' which was intended to be used as a text book, they used (his words) a “word processor” to replace the words such as ‘Creationism' with ‘Intelligent Design” and it got unstuck with one of the replacements. A case of copy and paste gone wrong.
To further explain the copy and paste error, Richard told the story of a book with male lead ‘David'. The author on completing the work thought he was more of a ‘Kevin' than a David, so used find and replace, but came unstuck when the action of the novel moved to Italy and involved a certain statue by Michelangelo.
The Banana video
As a way to break up the audience questions the audience was treated to a hilarious grainy old Youtube video showing Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron talking about “the atheist's nightmare”, that is, a banana, and how it perfectly fits into the hand as if that was proof it was designed.
Rowan Taylor (right) of The Sunday Assembly, and son Quillan with their new signed copies of Science in the Soul by Richard Dawkins
In reply to that Richard said: “We should teach children to think for themselves” “If you indoctrinate them you get bananaman”.
Replying to audience questions he explained that for some, religion may be comforting, but that that does not equal being true and he's interested in the truth.
Education
Richard expressed his concern that children were being “brainwashed in schools from birth” via the teaching of religion, and that he was helping to support teachers in their efforts to teach evolution by supporting T.I.E.S. – the Teacher's Institute of Evolutionary Science, because when it comes to teachers of evolution, it's important that we “arm them with the necessary knowledge to combat this nonsense”.
He continued on the importance of education saying that if you have control of children they will tend to believe the same thing as their parents, but that it was very important not to label children. He said he was very angry at another event which was held for atheists when someone referred to the attendees children as ‘atheist children' and he told them in no uncertain terms that they were not ‘atheist children', they were ‘children'.
As a way to explain this he said, if the parents believe in existentialism, would you call their child an existential child? No dear audience you would not.
Evangelist vs logic
At some point in the proceedings we were shown a clip from Richard's documentary “The Root of all evil?” where Ted Haggard and Richard are discussing evolution. But is wasn't so much a debate as a monologue by the pastor, who clearly didn't understand what evolution actually meant, but was very sure it was bad and not something he wanted anything to do with. The audience was very much on Richard's side on this one, laughing and cringing, as he stood there and listened as Ted rambled on about his straw men and bible passages, and then after he was asked abruptly to leave there was riotous applause perhaps at Richard's bravery to speak to the man in the first place, but also for having to re-live such a horrible encounter again, via the huge projection behind him on the stage.
Death and the Soul
In reference to an afterlife, he could not think of anything more frightening than spending an eternity praising God who he called a ‘celestial dictator', which got some laughs and applause from the audience. Definitely a like-minded audience in attendance.
Speaking of death reminded Richard about the book that had brought him on this tour and he mentioned that when it comes to the 'Soul' part of 'Science in the Soul', he had a specific meaning in mind. He'd looked up the term ‘Soul' in the Oxford dictionary, and it was the 2nd definition not related to the spiritual one, but to the emotionally powerful one that applied to his book.
Pigs' brains & morals
In a change of direction, in response to Mikey Havoc's morality related question about pigs having their living brains extracted and studied, Richard confirmed he found that research troubling, and in answer to the question of was it all worth it in the name of science, he said in his opinion, it was not. This produced some claps from the audience as well as some surprised eyebrows and knowing nods.
With relief the conversation turned quickly back to God, and Richard commented that “obviously” God was ‘the most unpleasant character in all fiction' it was a sick joke getting morality from the Bible.
He continued that values point to your place in history, bringing up the figure of US President Abraham Lincoln who was a man of his time, but was most definitely a racist when measured by the moral laws of our time.
He explained that the changing laws relating to our changing moral philosophy did not come from the Bible, but outside of that.
There is hope now we've landed on a comet (video of 5 frames put together showing snow/stars) that we can land a device that can nudge it out of a collision course with Earth.
Alternative medicine
Professor Allan Blackman made the skeptic in me very happy by bringing up the topic of debunking pseudoscience.
In reply Richard mentioned that homeopathy was most certainly nonsense, and that he was reminded of James Randi who had worked out the dilution in a particular homeopathic solution was so great there would be only one molecule present in the whole solar system.
He mentioned his memory of a Homeopath's response to doing a double blind test, the homeopath said we shouldn't do the tests that way - “they never work”. The joke was not lost on the audience.
In a surprise turn though, he said that Chinese medicine he'd be more inclined to try, but if it does work it would become “medicine”. That comment made me think, yes, that may be true, but , harm to endangered animals and humans aside, if they had worked wouldn't they have already become medicines by now?
Curves and fractals
A question came up about bad media reporting. For example there seemed to be so many conflicting studies on coffee and the latest was about it causing cancer.
Biology is complicated and doing a test your response might be U-shaped and you'd get a positive result on one side, and a negative result on the other, so studies shouldn't be so quick to be published. Scientists shouldn't rush into print.
Talk of science brought Richard to enthusiastically talk to us about “Onezoom”, a computer programme using a fractal to show the interconnected branches of the tree of life. We were treated to a video showing the fractal zooming in through the homo sapiens branches, finishing up at the final destination with Carolus Linnaeus, known as the “father of taxonomy” for inventing the classification system of class, order, family, genus, species and so on.
They are watching you
An audience member asked if Facebook and CCTV had in a way, replaced God as omnipresent, all seeing eyes which affect our behaviour? It was a smart audience in Christchurch that night.
Richard said they could be right, and spoke of a friend's experiment with an honesty box for make your own coffee. In the setup she had a printed list of ingredients like milk or sugar, showing the cost of each and, on the top she placed a picture. The surprise was that she actually got more money for the week when she put a picture of two eyes on the list of ingredients, than for the week when she put a picture of flowers on it, so it was his conclusion that it's plausible to conclude that if someone is watching you it has a subliminal effect on our behaviour.
Cynical children
An audience member brought up the subject of children and wondered if they are too skeptical these days. Richard's eyes light up to this point and he replied that when it come to children “I'm not worried about cynicism”, and for example everyone agrees that for Santa it's reasonable to by cynical.
He doubled down on his point and said “Kids could do with more cynicism”.
Politics
Briefly moving into the political spectrum, in reply to a question about Brexit, Richard said hadn't met any intelligent Trump voters, but had met three intelligent Brexit voters.
He expressed his umbrage at the decision to let the public decide on whether the UK should split with the EU, and his frustration that experts were not trusted and called upon more.
As an example he explained that he thought politicians should also have to display some form of expertise in their field to be able to govern, just as a pilot should not be just like us, but have the proven ability to fly a plane, and that we want a surgeon who knows anatomy.
Returning to Brexit, he said allowing the public to vote on Brexit was ‘criminal irresponsibility'. Some voters were quoted as saying it would be “nice to have a change”.
The Church
The topic of church substitutes came up, and after Richard had suggested perhaps lectures or meetings, audience members helpfully shouted out some more ideas, including Sunday Assembly, and someone shouted as loudly as they could from the back “Skeptics in the pub!”. I think there might have been some pub attendees there by the response to that.
Richard put to rest any speculation on his habits regarding a worship alternative by saying on a Sunday “I'd rather stay in bed”.
Past and future books
Richard talked about his book the God Delusion, and that the inspiration for that came from George Bush. The fact that Bush used to “talk to God” every day had forced him to put pen to paper.
He revealed he's currently writing a book for children “OMG I think I'm an atheist!”. I was left wondering if this was really a thing, and if he was just pulling our collective legs, and so far there has been no googleable news on this new book, so I suppose we'll all have to hurry up and wait to see if that really happen.
Where is the debate?
Apparently the tour had met some protesters in Auckland, but all was quiet in Christchurch, so when a guy came up to ask a question and started by saying he was a Christian, my heart leapt in the expectation that we'd see a great thought out counter to the question from Richard, but unfortunately, that did not happen. The young man who came up was having a lot of trouble formulating what he was trying to ask, to the extent that he said ‘my question is' at least half a dozen times until finally our Mikey Havoc cut him off to a relieved cheer from the audience. His question was trying to ask something about materialism, and God who was “immaterial”, and maths and science which were also “immaterial” and that wasn't Richard a “materialist”.
Richard generously did respond to him to confirm that he was a materialist, but possibly not in the sense that the young man had understood.
Finish up the evening, Richard asked, if people want a book to base their moral code on ‘Why should people necessarily opt for the Bible when there are plenty of other good books out there, why not Tolkien for example.
Good evening Christchurch
After the talk, I bumped into Rowan Taylor and family. Rowan is co-organiser with partner Kim of the Sunday Assembly here in Christchurch, and recognised me as I had turned up one Sunday to give it a go.
Providing a kind of church experience minus the religion, according to the website it's all about aiming to ‘live better, help often and wonder more'. Rowan mentioned there was a new music person at the assembly to help get people in the mood. Any Sunday assembly attendee readers out there? Please let us know your experience: editor@skeptics.nz.
His Partner Kim mentioned her book “Animal liberation and Atheism” which might be an interesting topic to explore for another journal.
It was lovely to meet them and his two sons; Caidan, who asked a question about Brexit, and Quillan who kindly posed for the photo with his father at the foot of the stairs to the private room where Dawkins fans with extra deep pockets met up with the man himself after the show for drinks and a chat.
Back into the cold night I felt satisfied that science was the hero of the show, I'd learned some things and had a laugh, but I couldn't help feeling slightly disappointed that there wasn't more of a tussle with someone of differing views.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/Search-Extraterrestrial-Intelligence
“cdesign proponentsists” was the key evidence in a trial over the legitimacy of teaching Intelligent Design as a science.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cdesign_proponentsists
Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron on the “atheist's nightmare”
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Banana_argument
Onezoom—interactive evolutionary species map
The Root of all Evil? Aka The God Delusion