Richard Dawkins blew onto the stage at the Melbourne Convention Centre, blinding us all with science and leaving us breathless with his speech about gratitude. Yes, gratitude. Here were the main points.
Life is highly unlikely, especially our own existence. We don’t know how many times life has arisen in the universe. It may be that there’s a bubbleverse — a collection of universes that appear as bubbles in foam. In which case, our universe was one of the successful ones. In our universe, there are six different physics constants, and if any of them had been different, the universe would not have arisen. Twiddle the gravitation constant, and the universe might have collapsed onto itself in the first few femtoseconds. But why should we say that a god twiddled the knobs?
Dawkins: To postulate a divine knob-twiddler…
Audience: (Ribald laughter)
Dawkins: … Why is that funny? To postulate a divine tuner…
Audience: (Raucous laughter)
We should feel gratitude to be alive. But gratitude to who?
We have inbuilt urges, even though cognitively we may no longer have the need for such urges. Feelings of gratitude (like the ones religious believers express to a god) may be hold-overs from earlier useful urges. For example, beavers locked in concrete rooms try to build phantom dams with imaginary logs. People feel the urge for sex (because of the drive for reproduction) even when they know it won’t lead to reproduction. So our gratitude impulse could be part of our inbuilt calculator for fairness and reciprocity. This might have evolved so we wouldn’t let others cheat us, and it may have even led to mathematics. These urges of gratitude are nothing to be ashamed about.
Best question during Q&A after the talk: “When do you think we will able to criticise Islam without fearing for our lives?”
Were I in his place, I might have set my jaw and said, “Islam sucks. I ain’t askeert,” while mentally calculating my life insurance.
Dawkins instead suggested that he was not overly eager to insult Muslims. But (speaking to a hypothetical Muslim): “I may refrain from insulting you. I may refrain from publishing a cartoon of your prophet. But it’s because I fear you. Don’t think for one minute that it’s because I respect you.”
Worst question: A woman said that she was a believer, and that she was going to give gratitude that night… to god. (Boos, and people shushing the boo-ers.) Her question was about DNA: what is it, and could he explain how it had arisen?
Now I’m a human, so I’m pretty good at detecting intentions when someone asks a question, and I detected high levels of self-righteous smarm. It’s possible to ask that question in a way that says “Gee, I don’t really understand DNA, and could you explain it to me?” This wasn’t like that. She was saying “How do explain DNA without god, Mr Smarty-Dawkins?”
I don’t care if someone gives Dawkins a bit of stick; he can hack it. But it was a real shame that she decided to waste everyone’s limited question time with a question she hadn’t bothered to look up by, say, reading the relevant chapter in Dawkins’ book The Greatest Show on Earth.
That said, it was really great to hear Dawkins give us the run-through on DNA, which was basically out of the book. It was still a far better answer than she deserved.
27 May 2010 at 5:51 pm
We could be one of the successful universes, but it's just as likely that "life" is nothing but a fungal infection in the grand scheme, screwing with the natural harmony that is the universe.
I read it somewhere that "Life is the universe becoming conscious of itself." If that's the case the universe itself is an organism in it's infancy.
We can never know, nor are we supposed to. Religion is nothing but a primitive mind trying to grasp something that it's just not wired for. Like an amoebas grasp of quantum mechanics. We don't know how it works because we're quite simply not capable of it at this stage in our evolution.
If we don't kill ourselves first, we might get a glimmer of the hope of the beginnings of an idea in another 60 million years or so.
23 February 2011 at 11:55 am
Hi, Daniel,
Only just stumbled across your blog, but it looks really interesting.
I was at the Global Atheist Convention last year too, and I'm also from Perth, so obviously cyberspace is small too 🙂
I got a lot out of Dawkins's talk, and I also remember thinking how disingenuous that Christian questioner was. It really felt like she was belittling the magnificence of the real universe by saying she would be thanking her god for it. I think everyone except her would have come away from that thinking she had been firmly put in her place, not with insults or aggression, but with simple truth.