Slashdot Mirror
Ask Richard Dawkins About Evolution, Religion, and Science Education
Richard Dawkins is an author and an evolutionary biologist. For 13 years, he held the Simonyi Professorship at the University of Oxford. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene helped popularize the gene-centric view of evolution and coined the word "meme." Several other of his books, including Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden, and The Greatest Show on Earth have helped to explain aspects of evolution in a way non-scientists can more easily understand. Dawkins is a frequent opponent of creationism and intelligent design, and he generated widespread controversy and debate in 2006 with The God Delusion, a book that subjected common religious beliefs to unyielding scientific scrutiny. He wrote, "One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding." Most recently, Dawkins wrote The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, a graphic book that aims to introduce kids to science. He's also recently begun a video series titled "Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life" about how our world would look without religion. Mr. Dawkins has graciously agreed to answer some questions for us. Post your suggestions in the comments below, but please limit yourself to one question per post. We'll post his responses sometime next week.
Oh, that is wonderful. My first child is due next month. You commented on the difference between a just-about-to-be-born fetus and a just-recently-born baby; would you also comment on the difference between a blastocyst and a baby? In my experience as an expectant father, there seems to be a big difference between a blastocyst and a near-term fetus, so there must be an even bigger one compared to a fully born baby. For me, the important distinction is that when it's inside a woman, it's part of the woman, literally and figuratively and legally; and women are empowered to do as they choose with their bodies.
It's not really a religious issue, though, from my perspective -- not for Christians anyway. The Bible defines life as beginning with breath, while tattoos are explicitly prohibited. It's not clear to me why Christians get so bothered about abortion, which is not prohibited in their holy book, but never seem to spend much energy picketing tattoo parlors.
How about the religions that are believed by the young earth creationists (which includes all three of the religions you mentioned)? Or the religion that persecuted Galileo? Or the religions which refuse to acknowledge the over whelming evidence in support of evolution? It's nice that the old book has those passages, but it has a lot of passages that people ignore these days, the fact is that a sizable percentage of religious people do reject scientific evidence when it disagrees with their faith. That's not to say everyone who is religious does so, only that it's far more common in people who are heavily religious.
Because of the laws of thermodynamics.
The laws of thermodynamics are convenient aren't they? They're so poorly understood by most people that it's easy to claim that things are impossible due to the laws of thermodynamics, even when they aren't, and people have a hard time arguing back. The best part is, you don't really need to understand the laws of thermodynamics yourself in order to claim that they make something impossible.
The universe isn't a perpetual motion machine - it needs something outside itself to come into existence.
A. The universe may, in fact, be a perpetual motion machine. It depends on a number of factors, such as whether or not the laws of conservation of matter and energy are true and exactly how you define motion (for example, do photons move?). Understand that the heat death of the universe does not mean an entire universe at absolute zero, it just means an entire universe in which you can no longer exploit energy to do work.
B. Why would a non-perpetual motion machine need something outside itself to come into existence, and how do you resolve the obvious paradox of how that something itself came into existence?
Something outside of space and time - therefore something immaterial and eternal - and powerful. I'm speaking of space-time itself and even the laws of physics. Particles can't come from a void without physical laws.
It's curious that you say that particles can't come from a void without physical laws. It seems that you're strongly suggesting that whatever the universe arose from is governed by some sort of physical laws. If that's the case, you've just offloaded the mysteries of the universe onto a mysterious extra-universal thing which itself must have some sort of origin governed by some sort of physical laws. This sort of thing either requires an infinite series of creative forces: creator, then meta-creator, meta-meta-creator and so on, or it requires that, somewhere along the chain, something simply came into being or somehow created itself. If you can believe that about some sort of extra-universal creator, then why can't you believe it about the universe itself?
Also, if you need another reason - the anthropic principle. There are not enough sub atomic particles in the universe for there to be a life-possible planet statistically - the numbers will blow your mind if you look at them.
Oh please. We don't have the kind of information to realistically calculate those statistical odds. Even with the size of the universe truly known, depending on your base assumptions, the estimates can be off by hundreds of orders of magnitude. Even if we actually had some clue on those base assumptions, we don't even have any real clue how big the universe is. We are pretty sure that the universe is so big that there are parts of it expanding away from us so fast that the light from them will never reach us though. If the universe actually is infinite, then that means that statistical probabilities of life evolving are meaningless and it simply has to happen somewhere. If it's not infinite, it's still of mind-boggling and unknowable size so we can't realistically ever give the odds of life springing up somewhere. The fact that it sprang up on Earth rather than somewhere else is meaningless statistically. Wherever you go, there you are.
Anyone with an open mind will see that God is really the only rational, logical explanation
What about pantheons of gods? Cosmic eggs? Various kinds of heavenly cow? Flying spaghetti Monsters? Unfathomable cosmic horrors from beyond the gulfs of space and time? Ascended lower life-forms from the far future travelling outside of time to create their own past? The universe being sneezed into existence by the Great Green Arkleseizure? Self-transforming machine elves? It's all just a simulation (hey look, another explanation that just shifts the question to where did the m