God in Stephen Hawking's A briefer history of time

My Intro:
Yesterday I finished reading Stephen Hawking's ‘A briefer history of time’. Reading it, I must candidly admit, my inadequacy in Physics stood thoroughly exposedJ Most of the concepts were more than handful for me. With such commoditized science books a layman like me tends to broadly understand the conclusions the author draws. That’s that. The reasoning involved in drawing those conclusions is either too detailed or too complex to understand. That said, I still would recommend this book to you guys for it makes one appreciate the vastness & complexity of the universe we live in and how insignificant our existence really is. Questions, which plague us forever, get discussed in elaborate detail: How did the Universe start? Where is it headed? Time’s nature? There are also lots of interesting anecdotes about different scientists who have made significant contributions in arriving at the current level of understanding. Hawking’s ruminations on God interested me most. I have given them below:

Excerpts from the Book

Page 15, Chapter 3: The Nature of a Scientific Theory

There is this question about initial state of the universe. Some people feel that science should be concerned with only the first part; they regard the question of the initial situation as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that God, being omnipotent, could have started the universe off any way He wanted. That may be so, but in that case God also could have made it develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that God chose to make it evolve in a very regular way, according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state.

Page 23, Chapter 4: Newton’s Universe

Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it didn’t accord with his idea of an absolute God. In fact, he refused to accept the lack of absolute space, even though his laws implied it. He was severely criticized for this irrational belief by many people, most notably by Bishop Berkely, a philosopher who believed that all material objects and space and time are an illusion. When the famous Dr.Johnson was told Berkely’s opinion, he cried, “I refute it thus!” and stubbed his toe on a large stone.

Page 87, Chapter 9: Quantum Gravity

Is it really possible for scientists to calculate what all our actions will be in future? A glass of water contains more than 1024 molecules (a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros). In practice we can never hope to know the state of each of these molecules, much less the complete state of the universe or even of our bodies. Yet to say that the universe is deterministic means that even if we don’t have the brainpower to do the calculation, our futures are nevertheless deterministic. This doctrine of scientific determinism was strongly resisted by many people, who felt it infringed God’s freedom to make the world run as He saw fit. But it remained the standard assumption of science until the early years of twentieth century. One of the first indications that this belief would have to be abandoned came when the British scientists Lord Rayleigh and Sir James calculated the amount of blackbody radiation that a hot object such as a star must radiate.

Page 93, Chapter 9: Quantum Gravity

Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science. Einstein objected to this very strongly, despite the important role he had played in the development of these ideas. In fact, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to quantum theory. Nevertheless, he never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement “God does not play dice.”

Page 102, Chapter 9: Quantum Gravity

In the classical theory of gravity, there are only two possible ways the universe can behave: either it has existed for an infinite time, or else it had a beginning at a singularity at some finite time in the past. For reasons we have discussed earlier, we believe that the universe has not existed forever. Yet if it had a beginning, according to classical general relativity, in order to know which solution of Einstein’s equations describes our universe, we must know its initial state – that is, exactly how the universe began. God may have originally decreed the laws of nature, but it appears that He has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not intervene in it. How did He choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? What were the boundary conditions at the beginning of time? In classical general relativity this is a problem, because classical general relativity breaks down at the beginning of the universe.

If there is no boundary to space-time, there is no need to specify the behavior at the boundary – no need to know the initial state of the universe. There is no edge of space-time at which we would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. We would say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would just BE. As long as we believed the universe had a beginning, the role of a creator seemed clear. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, having neither beginning nor end, then the answer is not so obvious: what is the role of a creator?

Page 134: Chapter 11: The forces of Nature and Unification of Physics

There seem to be three possibilities:
There really is complete unified theory (or a collection of overlapping formulations), which we will someday discover if we are smart enough
There in no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately but are never exact
There is no theory of the universe: events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner

Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God’s freedom to change His mind and intervene in the world. Yet, since God is all powerful, couldn’t God infringe on His freedom if He wanted to? It’s a bit like the old paradox: can God make a stone so heavy that He can’t lift it? Actually, the idea that God might want to change His mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, He knew what He intended when He set it up!

With the advent of quantum mechanics, we have come to recognize that events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy: there is always a degree of uncertainty. If you like, you could ascribe this randomness to the intervention of God. But it would be a very strange kind of intervention, with no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose. Indeed, if it were, it would by definition not be random. In modern times, we have effectively removed the third possibility above by redefining the goal of science: our aim is to formulate a set of laws that enables us to predict events only up to the limit set by uncertainty principle.

God vs. Science

My Intro:
Must read: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132,00.html

Referenced Article
God vs. Science
We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for miracles and for MRIs. But are the worldviews compatible? TIME convenes a debate

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins' expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.

If Dennett and Harris are almost-scientists (Dennett runs a multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the--nondivine--origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described "atheist-reductionist-materialist" biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan's unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, out this month.

Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don't really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn't get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science's strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both MRIs and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony--that, indeed, science is of God.

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a "strong Christian defense" of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline's major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins

Collins' devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins'. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis' map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science's largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate TIME arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:

TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you believe that science is compatible with Christian faith.

COLLINS: Yes. God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

TIME: Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, famously argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, airtight boxes. You both seem to disagree.

COLLINS: Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.

DAWKINS: I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin's theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God--it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been--may I call you Francis?

COLLINS: Oh, please, Richard, do so.

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues ...

COLLINS: It's not so private. It's rather public. [Laughs.]

DAWKINS: ... It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you have described humanity's moral sense not only as a gift from God but as a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years--some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology--relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God--especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I'm glad we identified it.

TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn't the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives?

COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.

TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?

COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

COLLINS: Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

TIME: Do the two of you have any concluding thoughts?

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

With reporting by With reporting by David Bjerklie, Alice Park/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Jeff Israely/Rome

IS SCIENCE KILLING THE SOUL?

My Take:

Just one word: Awesome!! Debate between Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker chaired by Tim Radford. For those who don't know them already: Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. I have read his book "The God Delusion". You can read more about him at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins. I haven't heard of Stevn Pinker before reading this article. Turns out to be a big name as well. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker)


Referenced Article
IS SCIENCE KILLING THE SOUL?
Richard Dawkins & Steven Pinker

Chaired by Tim Radford


Introduction by

On February 10, 1999, The Guardian-Dillons Debate at the Westminster Central Hall in London featured Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker in an event chaired by Tim Radford, Science Editor of The Guardian. Sold out weeks in advance, the evening attracted 2,300 attendees, with hundreds waiting outside. It was one of the toughest tickets in London in years.

The evening echoes an event held in Munich last November, "The Digital Planet", for which a thousand people turned out in a driving rainstorm to see and hear Dawkins and Pinker as well as Daniel C. Dennett and Jared Diamond introduced by Douglas Adams. More than a hundred journalists were in the audience. The lobby of the hotel looked more like the press center for a presidential election campaign.

Clearly, something is happening with this group of intellectuals.

While The Guardian-Dillons series is characterized as a "debate", Dawkins and Pinker, who are in general agreement across broad areas, presented what I would characterize as a "a high level seminar." As Dawkins pointed out: "The adversarial approach to truth isn't necessarily always the best one. On the contrary, when two people disagree strongly, a great deal of time may be wasted. It's been well said that when two opposite points of view are advocated with equal vigor, the truth does not necessarily lie mid-way between them. And in the same way, when two people agree about something, it's just possible that the reason they agree is that they're both right. There's also I suppose the hope that in a dialogue of this sort each speaker may manage to achieve a joint understanding with the other one, better than he would have done on his own."

-JB


Is Science Killing The Soul?

Chaired by Tim Radford

TIM RADFORD: My name is Tim Radford; I'm the science editor of The Guardian. And I'm here to do a very strange thing, I'm here to introduce two people who obviously need no introduction whatsoever, otherwise you wouldn't be here. There are I gather 2,300 of you, and there are another three or four hundred weeping and gnashing their teeth outside. So you knew why you were coming. You thought you knew what you were going to hear. What you are going to hear is from two great story tellers of modern science. Science is a story, we're story-telling animals, we tell each other stories to explain why we're here, and since we don't know the outcome of our narrative, we conduct these things in the form of a story-so-far. This is what science does for us, but of course we've always done that. live later.

There are three great stories in science. One of them is where the universe came from. One of them is where life came from. And the third is where we came from. Now this last aspect breaks into several different aspects, really. One is: who is this person called a human -- or indeed who is this person called a person? Where did he come from, or she? Why are we here? What are we doing, where are we going? And how did we get here, and why did one particular group of creatures on the plains of Africa suddenly pick up a stone and start playing with it, scratching things, or skinning things, doing things, going places, colonizing the globe. The second question is not about the entity called human, but the identity within that entity. What is this mind for? Why is it so big? Why could it encompass absolutely anything? Why does any mind seem to be able to encompass absolutely everything? It's all we've got, but we're not that conscious of it. We think we're occupying reality, but of course it's only our brain that tells us this. We have people here who can explain this much better than I can.

What's going on? Well, we have reached a curious situation in science in which it's possible for people to propose that science might be able to provide all the answers. Neither of the two guests tonight actually make these claims, but there are scientists who do claim such things. And one of the pieces of machinery that they use is sometimes known as Darwinism, or the theory of evolution, or just the action of natural selection upon random mutation. It doesn't really matter, because we're just going to call it tonight, Darwinism. At least I am. Professor Dawkins will actually have a better explanation if you ask him.

Is it important to us? Yes it is important. Natural selection is the environment. We started altering our environment back at the beginning of the 19th century. We have now comprehensively changed it, so we run the world for our benefit, and every now and then it gets a bit fragile at the edges, we have to start worrying about the ozone layer, or the carbon dioxide crisis -- but we have changed the environment. More alarmingly, we have begun to understand how we could change ourselves; we could take charge of our own genes. We aren't doing it yet. You hear talk about designer babies; there are no such things, but we have reached the stage where we have to ask ourselves whether we want some of our babies. We can now see what kind of baby we might be about to have, and people are suddenly thrust into the position of having to ask themselves, what is a gene, what does it do, and how will it all turn out? So these are very important questions, and they do actually concern us. These questions are not academic.

Nor are they new. There's a wonderful passage in the Book of Job, Chapter 38, I think, in which the poet who composed Job speaks as if God, and asks Job a series of questions which begin, Hath the rain a Father? Who hath begot the drops of dew? out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath engendered it? the waters are hid as with stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?? Now that of course is great poetry, and one of the issues that we are discussing here is whether science is killing the soul in the sense of poetry. All I point out to you is that that is a series of questions about the hydrological cycle, you cannot say that it's just poetry, they are also real questions which demand real answers, which people are supplying, scientists among them.

We have with us tonight two extraordinarily gifted writers. One of them is Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, and he's the man who more than two decades ago introduced the notion of the selfish gene, upsetting a lot of people, creating a debate that hasn't stopped yet. He followed this up with a series of dazzling books, of which the latest is called Unweaving the Rainbow, which is not just about Darwinism, but about science itself, and about our understanding of the planet we live on. The other is Steven Pinker, who is a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he leapt onto the best-seller list about three years ago with a wonderful book called The Language Instinct, which was just about this remarkable ability that 3-year-olds have to learn any grammar that happens to be lying around, with the implication that either babies are born knowing, in principle, all the languages that have ever been invented, or yet to be invented, -- or that there is a universal grammar and it's already composed in their own brains. If so, what a remarkable thing the brain is. I'll let them talk about that. The subject tonight is "Is Science Killing the Soul?" You will not find this a straight-forward head-to-head debate in which one man says yes and the other says no. It all depends, as Professor Joad used to say, on what you mean by soul. Richard Dawkins.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Thank you very much, Tim. But the word debate does appear up on the notice there. It may turn into more of a dialogue than a debate. I suspect that Steve Pinker and I are perhaps largely of the same mind here, so there's a risk that anybody who's come here expecting a confrontation will go away disappointed by too much agreement. I don't know if this will happen, but if it does, I don't think there's any need to apologize. The adversarial approach to truth isn't necessarily always the best one. On the contrary, when two people disagree strongly, a great deal of time may be wasted. It's been well said that when two opposite points of view are advocated with equal vigor, the truth does not necessarily lie mid-way between them. And in the same way, when two people agree about something, it's just possible that the reason they agree is that they're both right. There's also I suppose the hope that in a dialogue of this sort each speaker may manage to achieve a joint understanding with the other one, better than he would have done on his own.

Is science killing the soul? This is a cunning title, because it cunningly mixes two different meanings of soul. The first and oldest meaning of soul, which I'm going to call Soul One, takes off from one set of definitions. I'm going to quote several related definitions from the Oxford dictionary:

"The principle of life in man or animals -- animate existence."

"The principle of thought and action in man commonly regarded as an entity distinct from the body, the spiritual part of man in contrast to the purely physical."

"The spiritual part of man regarded as surviving after death, and as susceptible of happiness or misery in a future state."

"The disembodied spirit of a deceased person regarded as a separate entity and as invested with some amount of form and personality."

So Soul One refers to a particular theory of life. It's the theory that there is something non-material about life, some non-physical vital principle. It's the theory according to which a body has to be animated by some anima. Vitalized by a vital force. Energized by some mysterious energy. Spiritualized by some mysterious spirit. Made conscious by some mysterious thing or substance called consciousness. You'll notice that all those definitions of Soul One are circular and non-productive. It's no accident. Julian Huxley once satirically likened vitalism to the theory that a railway engine works by "force-locomotif." I don't always agree with Julian Huxley, but here he hit the nail beautifully. In the sense of Soul One, science has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so.

But there is a second sense of soul, Soul Two, which takes off from another one of the Oxford dictionary's definitions:

"Intellectual or spiritual power. High development of the mental faculties. Also, in somewhat weakened sense, deep feeling, sensitivity."

In this sense, our question tonight means, Is science killing soulfulness? Is it killing esthetic sensitivity, artistic sensibility, creativity? The answer to this question, Is science killing Soul Two?, is a resounding No. The very opposite is the case. But it is a question worth pursuing, because there have been many people, from genuinely great poets all the way down to Brian Appleyard and Fay Weldon, who've given a strong Yes answer to the question, Is science killing the soul? It's Soul Two that Keats and Lamb meant when they thought that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow when he unwove it.

"Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things,
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine‹
Unweave a rainbow . . ."

Well, I've written a book which is one long reply to that particular kind of anti-scientific attitude. In the sense of Soul Two, science doesn't kill the soul, it gives the soul constant and exhilarating re-birth.

Turning back to Soul One -- in the first chapter of Steve Pinker's book How the Mind Works he says, "I want to convince you that our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder-principle. The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, is designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems, each contrived to overcome its own obstacles." In the same paragraph, he moves on to Soul Two when he says, " . . . I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening of the imagination comparable to learning that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies or that a drop of pond water teems with microscopic life." Well, awakening of the imagination is a pretty good definition of Soul Two. And in that sense, far from killing the soul, science may prove to be its greatest awakener.

Carl Sagan wrote, shortly before he died,

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

Well it's common enough for people to agree that religions have got the facts all wrong, but "Nevertheless," they go on to say, "you have to admit that religions do provide something that people need. We crave a deeper meaning to life, a deeper, more imaginative understanding of the mystery of existence." Well, in the passage I've just quoted, Sagan seems to be criticizing religions not just for getting it wrong, which many people would accept, but for their deficiencies precisely in the sphere in which they are supposed to retain some residual virtue. Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.

Now, there are, of course many unsolved problems, and scientists are the first to admit this. There are aspects of human subjective consciousness that are deeply mysterious. Neither Steve Pinker nor I can explain human subjective consciousness -- what philosophers call qualia. In How the Mind Works Steve elegantly sets out the problem of subjective consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what's the explanation. Then he's honest enough to say, "Beats the heck out of me." That is an honest thing to say, and I echo it. We don't know. We don't understand it.

There's a cheap debating trick which implies that if, say, science can't explain something, this must mean that some other discipline can. If scientists suspect that all aspects of the mind have a scientific explanation but they can't actually say what that explanation is yet, then of course it's open to you to doubt whether the explanation ever will be forthcoming. That's a perfectly reasonable doubt. But it's not legitimately open to you to substitute a word like soul, or spirit, as if that constituted an explanation. It is not an explanation, it's an evasion. It's just a name for that which we don't understand. The scientist may agree to use the word soul for that which we don't understand, but the scientist adds, "But we're working on it, and one day we hope we shall explain it." The dishonest trick is to use a word like soul or spirit as if it constituted an explanation.

Consciousness is still mysterious. And scientists, I think, all admit it. But we ought to remember that it's not that long ago that life itself was thought to be equally mysterious. I'm going to quote from a book, A Short History of Biology by Charles Singer, a reputable historian of science, published in 1931, where he says, about the gene,

". . . despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a 'mechanist' theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself. . . . If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me except in its living surroundings any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started, in the presence of a power called life or psyche which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions."

That was 1931. In 1953, Watson and Crick drove a coach and horses through it, blew it out of the water. Genes are isolatable, they can be taken out of bodies, they can be sequenced, they can be put in bottles, they can be written out in a book and stored away in a library, and then at any time in the future they can be simply typed back into a machine and the original gene reconstituted. It could be put back into a living creature where it will work exactly the way it originally did. In the context of the gene, the understanding, the explanation is more or less total. And it was completely unexpected only a few decades ago.

My suspicion, my hunch, my hope, is that the same thing is going to be done for the conscious mind. Probably within the next century. Soul One will finally be killed, and good riddance. But in the process, Soul Two, far from being destroyed, will still be finding new worlds to conquer.

I'm going to end my prepared remarks by saying a little bit about Darwinism, because Darwinism is something which obviously Steve Pinker and I have in common in our approach to science. This, I think, may be the one place where possibly some slight disagreement may emerge. For me, Darwinism is not actually, surprisingly enough, the theory of the selfish gene. It's the theory of the selfish replicator. Darwinism is a much more general idea than the particular version of Darwinism which happens to explain life on this planet. Darwinism in this more general universal sense refers to the differential survival of any kind of self-replicating coded information which has some sort of power or influence over its probability of being replicated. DNA is the main kind of replicating entity that we know on this planet that has that property. When we look at living things on this planet, overwhelmingly the kind of explanation we should be seeking, if we ask what the functional significance is an explanation in terms of the good of the genes. Any adaptation is for the good of the genes which made that adaptation.

STEVEN PINKER: I'm going to discuss an idea that elicits wildly opposite reactions. Some people find it a shocking claim with radical implications for morals and every value that we hold dear. Other people think that it's a claim that was established a hundred years ago, that the excitement is only in how we work out the details, and that it has few if any implications for our values and ethics. That is the idea that the mind is the physiological activity of the brain, in particular the information processing activity of the brain; that the brain, like other organs, is shaped by the genes; and that in turn, the genome was shaped by natural selection and other evolutionary processes. I am among those who think that this should no longer be a shocking claim, and that the excitement is in fleshing out the details, and showing exactly how our perception, decision-making, and emotions can be tied to the activity of the brain.

Three new sciences are now vividly rooting our mental processes in our biology. Cognitive neuroscience, the attempt to relate thought, perception and emotion to the functioning of the brain, has pretty much killed Soul One, in Richard's sense. It should now be clear to any scientifically literate person that we don't have any need for a ghost in the machine, as Gilbert Ryle memorably put it. Many kinds of evidence show that the mind is an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events. If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone -- the person may lose an ability to see, think, or feel in a certain way, and the entire personality may change. The same thing happens gradually when the brain accumulates a protein called beta-amyloid in the tragic disease known as Alzheimer's. The person -- the soul, if you want -- gradually disappears as the brain decays from this physical process.

We know that every form of mental activity -- every emotion, every thought, every percept -- gives off electrical, magnetic, or metabolic signals that can be recorded with increasing precision by Positron Emission Tomography, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Magnetoencephalography, and other techniques. We know that if you take a knife and section the corpus callosum (which joins the two cerebral hemispheres) you have the equivalent of two minds -- perhaps even two souls -- in the same skull. We know that if you look at the brain under a microscope it has a breathtaking degree of complexity -- on the order of a trillion synapses -- that's fully commensurate with the breathtaking complexity of human thought and experience. We know that when the brain dies, the person goes out of existence. I consider it to be a significant empirical discovery that one cannot communicate with the dead, and excellent evidence that Soul One, in Richard's sense, does not exist.

A second science, behavioral genetics, has shown that there is a fascinating degree of specificity in our genome. You've all heard of the remarkable studies of monozygotic twins reared apart, who are remarkably similar in intelligence, personality, and attitudes -- even in their opinion on the death penalty and their tastes in music and clothing. And just in the past year there have been discoveries of genetic markers, and in some case genes and even gene products, associated with mental traits such as intelligence, spatial cognition, control of speech, the desire to seek sensation, and the tendency to be overly anxious.

The third science that's connecting mind to biology is evolutionary psychology, which takes an approach to understanding the mind that has long been fruitful in understanding the organs of the body. We can't make sense of an organ like the eye without considering it to have a function, or a purpose - not in a mystical, teleological sense, but in the sense of an illusion of engineering. That illusion, we now know, is a consequence of Darwin's process of natural selection. Everyone agrees that the eye is a remarkable bit of natural "engineering," and that may now be explained as a product of natural selection rather than as the handiwork of a cosmic eye-designer or as a massive coincidence in tissue formation. But the eye by itself is useless -- unless it's connected to a brain. The eye does not carry out its function by dumping optical information into a yawning chasm. Rather, the eye is hooked up to parts of the brain -- anatomically speaking, the eye is an extension of the brain -- and those parts contain circuits for analyzing the incoming visual material, for recovering the shapes and colors and motions in the world that gave rise to the stimulation of the eye. The perception of a world of colored 3-D objects, in turn, feeds into a system of categorization, allowing us to make sense of our experience, to impute causes to events, and to remember things in terms of their significant categories. And in turn, those categories themselves would be useless unless they were organized in service of certain goals, goals set by our emotions. Beginning with the eye, we have a chain of causation that leads to the study of faculties of mind, or modules, or subsystems, each of which can be seen as an adaptation akin to the adaptations in the organs of the body. Recent research has shown that aspects of the psyche that were previously considered mysterious, quirky, and idiosyncratic -- such as phobias, an eye for beauty, the tendency to fall in love, a passionate desire for revenge in defense of honor -- turn out to have a subtle evolutionary logic when they are analyzed in the way in which we have always analyzed the organs of the body.

I find these developments to be exhilarating; they are a fulfillment of the ancient imperative to know thyself. They also have important practical implications. Alzheimer's Disease, to cite just one example, will be one of the leading causes of human misery in the industrial world over the next several decades, as we live longer and stop dying of other things. Successful treatment of Alzheimer's will not come from prayer or wishful thinking or reasoning about soul one; it will come from treating memory and personality as biochemical phenomena.

Nonetheless, as I mentioned at the outset, not everyone shares this excitement. Sometimes the reaction of people who learn about these new sciences is uneasy ambivalence. The American author Tom Wolfe wrote an article called "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," a mixture of admiration and apprehension over the frontiers of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. A reviewer of my book How the Mind Works, alluding to the rock and roll band, said that I was describing people as Meat Puppets, and several reviewers, to my puzzlement, asked whether, if I were right, life would be worth living. I am puzzled by these reactions, which are never backed up by argument, only by indignation and high dudgeon. But I'll do my best to recover the values and reasoning that lead to them, and to show why I think they are misguided.

One reason I find the reaction strange is that I can't imagine how anything coming out of the laboratory, computer, or theoretician's notebook could possibly subtract from what is the meaning of life, or Richard's sense of Soul two. Why keep on living if our minds are the physiological activity of the brain? Well, for starters there's natural beauty, and works of great art, and ethical ideals, and love, and bringing up children, and enjoying friends, and discovering how the world works -- I could go on. Why should the worth of any of those activities depend on the existence of a ghost in the machine?

Clearly there can be reasons that some people feel threatened by the idea that the mind is the activity of the brain, and here are my guesses about what they are. One is that since natural selection is not a process that is guaranteed to produce niceness, many typical human motives will not necessarily lead to ethically desirable outcomes. Much of the research in evolutionary psychology has shown that many ignoble motives have some basis in natural selection. An example is the desire, most obvious in men, to defend one's honor and reputation, by violence if necessary. Another is the characteristically male motive to seek a variety of sexual partners. It's easy to work out why those motives evolved, and there is by now an enormous body of evidence that they are widespread among humans. But people reject the explanation because of what they think is the subtext. If these motives are part of our nature, if they come from the natural world, well, everyone knows that natural things are good -- natural childbirth, natural yogurt, and so on -- so that would imply that promiscuity and violence aren't so bad after all. And it implies that since they are "in the genes," they are unchangeable, and attempts to improve the human condition are futile.

I think both parts are wrong -- the first part is so obviously wrong that it has been given a name, the naturalist fallacy, the idea that what we find in nature is good. What we find in nature is not necessarily good; as Richard has put it, the universe is not good or bad, it's indifferent. Certainly violence and philandering and all of the other sins are immoral whether their cause is the genes, or the wiring of the brain, or social conditioning, or anything else. It behooves us to find the causes, but the causes don't change the moral coloring of those acts.

Also, the human mind, I argue, is a complex system of many interacting parts. Even if one motive impels people to do immoral acts, other parts of the mind that can subvert its designs. We can think of the long-term consequences, and we can imagine what society would be like if everyone acted on a particular motive. The part of the mind that has those thoughts can disengage the part of the mind that has less noble motives.

I think a second discomfort with the biological approach to the human mind is the worry that it somehow makes our ideals a sham or less real. Life would be a Potemkin Village, where there's only a facade of value and worth, but really biology is showing that there's nothing behind the facade. For example, if we love our children because the genes for loving children are in the bodies of those children and so the genes are benefiting themselves, doesn't that undermine the purity or the value of that love? If our ethical ideals, our sense of justice and fairness, were selected for because it did our ancestors good in the long run, would that imply that there's no such thing as altruism or justice, that deep down we're really selfish?

I think that this reaction is based on a misreading of Richard's metaphor of the selfish gene. It's not because of what Richard actually said in his book The Selfish Gene, which is crystal clear. But here's how it could be misread: the theory says that one can make powerful predictions about the process of natural selection by imagining that the gene has a selfish motive to make copies of itself. Of course no one ever thought that a gene has real motives in the sense that people have motives, but it this is a valuable way to gain insight about the subtleties of natural selection, especially when it comes to social interactions, and it leads to many correct predictions.

Here is the distortion. People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish. It's an unholy hybrid of Freud's idea of unconscious motivation and the straightforward modern theory of the natural selection of replicators. Now, I think I'm safe to say that it was not intended by Richard, and it doesn't follow from the logic of the theory. The metaphorical motives of the genes are not somehow a more fundamental or honest version of the real motives of the entire person. Indeed, sometimes the most "selfish" thing a gene can do, in this metaphorical sense of selfish, is to build a brain that is not selfish -- not selfish at an unconscious level, not selfish at any level -- even if the genes are themselves metaphorically selfish. When we love our children we aren't at any level of the brain calculating that it will increase our inclusive fitness. The love can be pure and in and of itself in terms of what's actually happening in the brain. The selfishness of genes explains why we have that pure emotion.

The idea that morality itself would be a fiction if our moral reasoning came out of some evolved moral sense is also a non sequitur. The fear comes from the fact that we know that many aspects of human experience are in some sense figments. The qualitative distinction between red, yellow, green, and blue, for example, is not out in the world; it's just the way our brain imposes arbitrary cuts in the continuous spectrum of the wavelength of light. Well, if the qualitative difference between red and green is a figment -- it's just the way we're built, it doesn't have any external reality -- could right and wrong also be a figment? Would the sense of worth that comes from pursuing justice and fairness be a sham, just a way of tickling our pleasure centers and making us feel good because of the flow of chemicals or the wiring diagram of the brain?

Not at all. This supposed devaluation of morality does not follow from the idea that we have an evolved moral sense. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real things in the world. We have a complicated system of depth perception and shape recognition that prevents us from bumping into trees and falling off cliffs. The fact that our ability to recognize an object comes from complicated circuitry of the brain does not mean that there aren't real objects out there. Indeed, the brain evolved in order to give us as accurate a representation as possible of what is objectively out in the world.

That may also be true, at least according to some philosophical arguments, for morality. Many philosophers believe that some abstract entities, such as numbers, have an existence independent of minds. That is, many philosophers and mathematicians believe that the number three is not just a figment in the way that the color red is, but that it has a real existence, which mathematicians discover and explore with their mathematical faculties; they don't invent it. Similarly, many moral philosophers argue that right and wrong have an existence, and that our moral sense evolved to mesh with them. Even if you don't believe that, there's an alternative that would make the moral sense just as real -- namely, that our universal moral sense is constituted so that it can't work unless we believe that right and wrong have an external reality. So if you want to stop short of saying that moral truths exist outside us, you can say that we can't reason other than by assuming that they do. In that case, when we get down to having a moral debate, we still appeal to external standards of right and wrong; we aren't reduced to comparing idiosyncratic emotional or subjective reactions.

The final disquiet, I think, that is elicited by the naturalist or biological approach to the mind, is that it robs us of responsibility. If we act only because of ricocheting molecules in the brain, shaped by the genes which in turn were shaped by natural selection -- if it's billiard balls all the way down and all the way back -- then how can we hold someone responsible for his actions, given that there is no "he" that caused them? I agree this is a fascinating puzzle, but I don't think it has anything particular to do with cognitive neuroscience or behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology. It's a problem that is raised by any attempt to explain behavior, regardless of the nature of the explanation. You all remember the scene in "West Side Story" in which the gang of juvenile delinquents explains to Sergeant Krupke, "We're depraved on account of we're deprived":

"Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand, It's just our bringing up-ke, That gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, naturally we're punks!"


Sondheim's lyrics send up the psychoanalytic and social-science exculpations of bad behavior that were popular in the 1950s, and the non-biological excuses continue. In the 1970s, Dan White was given a light sentence for murdering the mayor of San Francisco because his mind was addled from too much junk food, the infamous Twinkie Defense. In the 1990s, the lawyer for the Menendez brothers argued her way to an acquittal based on her client's diminished responsibility because of childhood sexual abuse. Any time someone explains behavior, biologically or otherwise, a thoughtless observer can imagine that the explanation absolves the actor of responsibility. According to an old saying, to understand is not to forgive. If a moral system locates responsibility in a ghost in the machine, we need to revise the moral system, because the ghost is being exorcised, but we still need the notion of individual responsibility. Any ethical theory that is challenged by some outcome from the laboratory is a defective, or at least an incomplete, ethical theory.

Yesterday I was on the radio with a professor of divinity who said it was crucial that we retain the idea of a unified self, a part of the brain where it all comes together -- the ethical system of two billion people depends on it, he said. I replied there's considerable evidence that the unified self is a fiction -- that the mind is a congeries of parts operating asynchronously, and that it's only an illusion that there's a president in the Oval Office of the brain who oversees the activity of everything. He said, "I hope that's not true, because if it is we'll have to change our ethical system." I think this is an unwise way of doing moral reasoning. He might be right; I suspect that he's wrong; but whether he's right or wrong, we don't want the morality of killing and raping and lying and stealing to depend on what comes out of the psychology lab down the hall. We need our ethical system to be more robust than that -- it's always wrong to kill people, and we need an ethical system for which that's axiomatic.

To conclude -- we look with wry amusement at the debates in cosmology of three or four hundred years ago, in which great moral significance was attached to the debate between the geocentric and heliocentric theories. It was considered not to be just an empirical question of science, but a problem of great moral weight whether the earth went around the sun or the sun went around the earth. Now we look back and see that this was all rather silly. Either one theory is true or the other one is true, and people had to find out which is which. Any notion that meaning, purpose, ethics, morals and so on hinge on that contingent fact of cosmology came from unsound reasoning. I suspect that the idea that meaning, purpose, and morals hinge on a Soul one, a ghost in the machine, will have the same fate. The ghost in the machine has been exorcised, and meaning and values are none the worse for it. Thank you very much.

RADFORD: If there is a sense of good which is independent of us, who put it there? If a sense of god is a product of evolution, why do we all have such a consistent idea of a divine experience. When one reads the lives of the saints, one comes across the same phenomenon. We can't all have the same brains, or we don't all have the same brains -- why are all these things -- I know these questions are going to be asked, so I'll get them in now, if you don't mind. Richard? Or who wants to start with that one.

PINKER: As for the first question, who put them there -- it may be like the question, "Who put the number three there?" It would be best to get a real moral philosopher to defend the theory of moral realism, but I'll do my best. Perhaps morality comes from the inherent logic of behavior that has consequences for other agents that have goals. If one of the goals is to increase total well-being, then certain consequences may follow in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem follows from the construction of a triangle. Moral truths may exist in the same sense that mathematical truths exist, as consequences of certain axioms. That's my best rendition of the premises of a theory of moral realism.

As for the second question, why do so many people and cultures end up with similar views of a deity or spiritual theme? -- these beliefs may come from two mental faculties that may not have evolved specifically for spiritual belief, but may have evolved for other things, and as a byproduct give us particular notions of gods and deities. One of them is what psychologists call a "theory of mind"; by "theory" they don't mean a scientist's theory but a folk theory. We all tacitly subscribe to the "theory" that other people have minds. We don't think of other people as mechanical wind-up dolls. Even though we can't know what someone else is thinking, we do our best to make guesses. We look at their eyes, we read between the lines, we look at their body postures, and we assume that they have minds, even though we can't see them directly. Well, it's a short step from imputing an unverifiable entity called the mind to another body, to imputing a mind that exists independently of a body. Beliefs in souls, spirits, devils, gods, and so on, may be the products of a theory of mind or intuitive psychology that has run amok, and is postulating entities divorced from their physical home.

The other part of the explanation comes from a conclusion that anthropologists have drawn about what you find in common in all the world's religions -- not just the major proselytizing religions, but the animistic beliefs of hunter-gatherer tribes. Ruth Benedict put it succinctly: the common denominator of religions is that a religion is a recipe for success. She didn't necessarily mean this to apply to the most sophisticated theologies, but in general, what people do in common when they think of deities is to pray to them for recovery from illness, for recovery from an illness of a child, for success in love, for success on the battlefield, for good weather, for the crops coming up, and so on. I don't want to say that sophisticated theology can be reduced to praying for good weather, but if you look at what's common across cultures that's what you find.

RADFORD: Richard?

DAWKINS: I think that there's been a historical trend from animism where every tree and every river and every mountain had a spirit, to polytheistic religions where you have Thor, and Wotan, and Apollo and Zeus and things, then a trend towards monotheism (and finally zerotheism or atheism). Interestingly enough I was looking into the law of charity the other day, and found that one of the things that defines a charity for tax purposes is the furtherance of religion. But in British law it's got to be monotheistic religion. Now, there's a large Hindu population in this country. I imagine they might have something to say about that.

But I was actually wanting to steer the question in another direction. Having worked from polytheism to monotheism, I wanted to use that as an analogy in a quest to try to derive some joint enlightenment by talking to Steve about something -- actually, I want to learn something from Steve. So may I change the subject? You, Steve, talked about the illusion that the mind is a unity. Now, I imagine what lies behind your saying that it's an illusion is that actually there is in the mind a whole lot of entities which are actually pretty distinct. They may be even be pulling in different directions, but I imagine that there's been some Darwinian benefit in the move from poly-minds to mono-mind. There's a book by a South African biologist, Eugene Marais, The Soul of the White Ant. "White ants" are termites. Any social insect colony behaves in some ways like a single entity. It's as though it's got one purpose. Actually, of course, it's thousands of little worker termites, all doing their own little thing. And no one termite has any general concept of the whole picture, so when the termites build these huge great mounds, each individual termite is just following little tiny rules. If you see a bit of dirt of such and such a height, put another bit on top of it. There are rules which, when summed over all of the termites, lead as an emergent property to the growth of the mound as a whole. A final strand in this argument goes back to the genes. The fundamental message of the selfish gene is that genes are separate entities all pulling their own way in their own separate selfish way. But yet we have this gathering together of genes into individual organisms. And that reminds me of the illusion of one mind, when actually there are lots of little mindlets in there, and the illusion of the soul of the white ant in the termite mound, where you have lots of little entities all pulling together to create an illusion of one. Am I right to think that the feeling that I have that I'm a single entity, who makes decisions, and loves and hates and has political views and things, that this is a kind of illusion that has come about because Darwinian selection found it expedient to create that illusion of unitariness rather than let us be a kind of society of mind?

PINKER: It's a very interesting question. Yes, there is a sense in which the whole brain has interests in common in the way that say a whole body composed of genes with their own selfish motives has a single agenda. In the case of the genes the fact that their fates all depend on the survival of the body forces them to cooperate. In the case of the different parts of the brain, the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit, presumably in the frontal lobes, that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction. In How the Mind Works I alluded to a scene in the comedy movie All of Me in which Lily Tomlin's soul inhabits the left half of Steve Martin's body and he takes a few steps in one direction under his own control and then lurches in another direction with his pinkie extended while under the control of Lily Tomlin's spirit. That is what would happen if you had nothing but completely autonomous modules of the brain, each with its own goal. Since the body has to be in one place at one time, there might be a circuit that suppresses the conflicting motives. And in cases of neurological disease or brain damage, and even perhaps in psychiatric conditions, we may be seeing a relaxation or an imbalance or a defect in some of the mechanisms that coordinate different parts of the brain. Perhaps in an obsessive-compulsive disorder, motives that we all have, such as checking to make sure that the stove is off and washing our hands, ordinarily might be repressed by some other part of the brain that says "yes, it's good to do that, but not too much; there are other things to do as well." Obsessive-compulsive disorder may come from an imbalance among these different mechanisms.

QUESTION: I just wanted to bring up the very obvious point of biological reductionism which I think is raised by some of the speakers here -- in that while I agree about there being no ghosts in the machine I'm a little bit worried about what it's getting replaced with is seemingly a rather simplistic way of looking at the world as being the outpourings of the human genome project. And in that, I'm worried that I don't hear for example that human behaviors like aggression and so forth are the product of very social processes, shared processes, between groups, between people who are unfamiliar with one another, who have misperceptions of one another and so forth -- the kinds of processes that social psychologists talk a great deal about. What we're being offered instead is a sort of reductio ad absurdum biological form of reductionism. Are we just going from one form of ghost to another. It's not a ghost, but a rather simple way of looking at the world.

PINKER: I don't think any complex behavior can be explained directly in terms of the genes, which is why I emaphasized evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Behavior is produced by the trillion-synapse human brain, which assesses situations, absorbs values from the people that we grow up with, assesses the long-term consequences of actions, tries to impress other people, and many other things. All of the phenomena that we call culture are real and utterly indispensable, but they have to be connected to the emotional and learning mechanisms that our brain makes available. I think any behavior has to be explained at many levels; our inborn emotions and learning mechanisms are one important level, perhaps the most important level, but not the only level.

RADFORD: Can you break the notion of culture down into a reductionist argument?

DAWKINS: Reductionism is one of those words that makes me want to reach for my revolver. It means nothing. Or rather it means a whole lot of different things, but the only thing anybody knows about it is that it's bad, you're supposed to disapprove of it.

QUESTION: What we need is for science, cognitive science in particular, to evolve further, so we begin to grasp the mystery that is subjective experience. Dr. Pinker said that the mind is the activity of the brain, and went on to describe ways in which cognitive neuroscience etc explained that. But in a way -- I can't help thinking of the analogy of the television set. It would be naive to suppose that the program that you watch is actually produced within the television set, and yet somebody from another planet who didn't know about television might assume that the program was generated within the television set.

DAWKINS: Steve can give a serious answer; I'm going to say something about television sets. My friend Douglas Adams has a wonderful story about television sets. He imagines somebody who believes that there's a little man inside the television set who's juggling the pictures and making it all happen. Well, he's taken on one side, and it's explained to him all about cathode ray tubes and scans and radio waves, and the whole principle about television sets is explained to him, and he nods and he says, yes, yes, I think I've got that, right, I understand that, hmm, very interesting. But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there?

PINKER: I want to distinguish what is truly mysterious about consciousness from what is merely an unsolved scientific problem in the process of being solved. Obviously consciousness is not a total mystery, because when you go in for surgery a man puts a mask over your face and gas comes in and he can on demand make you unconscious and bring you back to consciousness. More generally, we are learning more and more every day about the neural basis of consciousness -- what goes on in the brain when you have a conscious experience -- down to itty bitty details: why one thing looks redder or tastes saltier than another, and countless other details of perception, memory, and emotion. The part that remains a mystery is why the purely subjective aspect of experience should exist at all. Some philosophers, such as Dan Dennett, argue that that isn't a scientific problem and may not even be a coherent question -- since, by definition, pure subjective experience has no observable consequences, we're wasting our time talking about it. I think that goes too far, but it is possible that the existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science. When cognitive neuroscience completes the story of how the brain works and predicts every last itch, every last nuance of color and sound in terms of the activity of the brain, one can still wonder why it feels like something to see and touch and taste. My own hunch is that this unsatisfied curiosity may itself be an artifact of how our brains work. It may be a question like "What occurred before the Big Bang?," or "What's outside our finite universe," or "What does a 4-dimensional object look like?" The puzzlement may come from a mismatch between our ways of thinking and knowing and the nature of reality as revealed by our best science. Our brains are organs that think and know in particular ways, and if they cannot come to grips with the discoveries of our best science (such as the discovery that brain activity causes subjective experience), that may just be our problem, a limitation of our own common-sense intuition in fully appreciating the lessons of our science. The science itself may be fully complete.

DAWKINS: It stills feels like a hell of a problem to me.

QUESTION: I want to ask about the problem of free will. It seems to me an implication of what you're both arguing that free will may be an illusion. Have I misunderstood?

PINKER: Again, it depends on what the meaning of "free will" is. I don't mean to sound like President Clinton -- but there's "free will" in the sense of the Soul one, the ghost in the machine, an utterly capricious and unpredictable process, an absence of even statistical predictability, where you just can't tell what someone is going to do. In that sense, as soon as you understand something about human behavior, and as soon as you can predict something about behavior, free will has evaporated. I think that sense of free will doesn't exist. On the other hand, there may be a sense of free will that we need as a construct, or an idealization in our system of moral reasoning, to get the answers to come out right. We may want to distinguish between people who are literally in a fugue state and hallucinating, and people who are compos mentis and who can be held responsible for their actions in the mundane sense that punishment may deter them and others. It may be that free will is the most convenient way of summarizing that difference, in which case it would continue to exist, but in a scientific translation, that is, a brain state within certain normal conditions.

QUESTION: Professor Dawkins, at the start of your talk, you said that the traditional religions were not only false but also failed to provide a deeper meaning than science and in that sense were not more soulful. I agree with that, to the extent that they attempt to provide an explanation, but another thing that the religions do is give comfort to people if they lose people in car accidents or to cancer and so on, and as far as I've experienced it, the scientific view cannot give people this kind of comfort. So in that sense the religions, even if they're false, are more soulful. And I wonder how you would respond to that.

DAWKINS: I think there is a lot in that. I of course was talking about that aspect of religion where the psalmist says the heavens declare the glory of God. Science can do a lot better than that. The questioner is asking about another thing that religion can do, which is consoling people in bereavement and similar situations. On that I would say three things. First, I mainly agree with you. Science is not on the whole going to console you if you lose a loved one. The second thing I would say is that the fact that religion may console you doesn't of course make it true. It's a moot point whether one wishes to be consoled by a falsehood. The third thing I would say is that although science may not be able to console you in the particular case of a bereavement from a car accident, it's not at all clear that science can't console you in other respects. So, for example, when we contemplate our own mortality, when we recognize that we're not here forever and that we're going to go into nothingness when we die, I find great consolation in the feeling that as long as I'm here I'm going to occupy my mind as fully as possible in understanding why I was ever born in the first place. And that seems to me to be consoling in another sense, perhaps a rather grander sense. It is of course somewhat depressing sometimes to feel that one can't go on understanding the universe; it would be nice to be able to be here in 500 years to see what people have discovered by then. But we do have the privilege of living in the 20th and very soon in the 21st century, when not only is more known than in any past century, but hugely more than in any past century. We are amazingly privileged to be living now, to be living in a time when the origin of the cosmos is getting close to being understood, the size of the universe is understood, the nature of life in a very large number of particulars is understood. This is a great privilege; to me it's an enormous consolation, and it's still a consolation even though it's for each one of us individually finite and going to come to an end. So I'm enormously grateful to be alive, and let me take up what Steve was talking about, the question of how you can bear to get up in the mornings. To me it makes it all the more worthwhile to get up in the mornings -- we haven't got that much time, let's get up in the morning and really use our brief time to understand why we're here and what it's all about. That to me is real consolation.

QUESTION: Both of you seem to agree that science has killed off Soul One; I agree with you. Just to play devil's advocate a little bit: it obviously hasn't killed off the belief in Soul One and it's possible that it will never do so -- in the sense that a world in which no one believed in Soul One would not be what you called an ESS, an evolutionarily stable state. In other words, just as a world in which everybody was nice to each other is not an evolutionarily stable state, because cheats prosper -- it may be that a world in which nobody believed in Soul One would be a fantastically fertile breeding ground for cults who did believe in Soul One. If that's the case then you'll never get rid of it.

RADFORD: Who wants to deal with the New Age question?

DAWKINS: Yes. G. K. Chesterton said when people stop believing, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. I presume that's what the questioner has in mind. I am interested in cults. The so-called organized religions are of course just old cults. They started off as cults and they've acquired a respectability that's simply due to the long time that they've been with us. I'm interested in them. I don't know why the questioner thinks it's not an ESS. It's not to me obvious that a world in which nobody believed in Soul One is necessarily ripe for invasion by cults, except insofar as I think one of the main reasons why people do believe the things that they believe is somewhat analogous to viral infection. And the reason for this has a good Darwinian basis. When we are children it is very important that we should learn as quickly as possible certain extremely important things. The language of our society, the social rules of our society, various rules for how to stay alive in a hostile world. So it's very easy for a Darwinian to believe that children will be preprogrammed with a rule that says, Believe what your parents tell you, or believe what your society's elders tell you. And of course a rule like that is not going to be discriminating. It's going to work both for the sensible things -- rules for how not to die of snake bite or falling off of cliffs or how to learn the language of the society. But the self-same rule is also going to be a natural sponge, or a natural soaker-up of New Age nonsense, and nonsense of any other kind. So, a biologically sensible rule -- Believe what you're told when you're young, and when you grow up pass on the same stuff to your own children -- that is a recipe for the long-term survival for the beliefs themselves. Or the rule might be, Believe so-and-so, and spend as much time as possible persuading other people to believe it as well; that's a recipe for epidemics of infectious beliefs. So I think that in that sense I agree with the questioner.

QUESTION: I followed what Richard Dawkins has said over the years and I admire him for his defense of science, but in the end, I think -- as Engel would say it, in a reaction against theology etc., we can come to an explanation it's very one-sided; and I think with Steven Pinker, I'm surprised that he's surprised that people don't accept his theories, because after all we're dealing with consciousness, which is social and historically developed over millions of years of human society, and you can't say in the end that that resides in people's genes. If we take the example if you say about morality -- surely morality is something that's been developed over the years. Why is it that in America we get individuals that go out shooting people -- surely that's a symptom of American society.

RADFORD: You've just raised a huge question, which could keep us happy all night, I'll try to get our two guests to answer it. Why do things go wrong? The question is a serious one. If evolution is for the best, if a religious sense provides us with the stability to go through life, why do things go wrong? There's a whole Robert Bresson film devoted to this one, it's called The Devil Probably; there's a Kurt Vonnegut statement as well. Who wants to take this one on?

DAWKINS: That's not what I gathered the question was. Nobody's ever said evolution is for the best, except insofar as it's for the best of the genes, and that's another matter. I don't think there was a question there at all; I think that was a statement, which we should be grateful for.

PINKER: I think that evolution and genetics and neuroscience are essential parts of an explanation of human behavior, but that doesn't mean that people are sealed in a barrel, oblivious to the standards of behavior set by other people, and unable to make decisions based on them. Quite the contrary -- one of the things our brains are designed to do is learn the contingencies of the social world we find ourselves in. Obviously there is variation among cultures, which is made possible by the fact that people innovate and people learn other people's innovations. Also, the optimal way to behave in a given situation depends on how other people behave and react to one's own behavior, and those contingencies vary from place to place and have to be learned. There are large differences, orders of magnitude, in rates of violent encounters across different countries, although the psychology of the violent encounters is strikingly similar. The rates differ because of differences in the cultures and social values, those values aren't like a gas that seeps out of the earth and that people merely breathe in. They emerge from a bunch of minds interacting in a group, exchanging ideas, assessing one another, making decisions. So culture itself, even though it's part of any explanation of behavior, itself has to be tied to the psychological and ultimately neurological mechanisms that allow cultures to arise to begin with.