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.

John Perkins: If religions were true, they would not be religion.

Jane Caro: At one point the church fathers debated whether women have souls. And they came to the wrong decision — they decided that we did. We don’t, but they don’t either.

Catherine Deveney: If there is anybody out there who is not an atheist, don’t worry: it’s an intelligence test and you will be eventually.

Robyn Williams: I can give you an argument against reigion in two words: ‘Senator Fielding‘.

Discuss.

Philosopher A.C. Grayling spoke about the shift in the role of religion over the ages, and how humanism can replace it.

In earlier times, says Grayling, science and religion were viewed as competitors. They both made truth claims regarding the origin and destiny of the universe, and they were both covering the same turf.

Now, as science has been taking over the job of explaining the material world, religion has moved to attending to the emotional needs of adherents.

He discussed the claim that religion was a kind of proto-science — a ‘first try’ at explaining the world. He rejects the claim thus: People often ask if humans came from monkeys, and the answer is, no, actually monkeys and humans came from a common ancestor. In like fashion, science and religion also had a common ancestor, which was ignorance. Science has had more success.

How could science have evolved from religion? Science uses trial and error, effort, observation, and reason. Religion uses prayer. Try lighting your house by prayer and see if it works. How different they are. It’s like the difference between a ham sandwich and a bicycle.

Science doesn’t solve our moral problems. It would be like asking a botanist how best to love your wife. But we do have arts, music, and literature. We also have a responsibility to help the less fortunate, and one thing we can do is reduce the opprsession of religious groups upon them.

Humanism is capable of speaking to the enjoyment or refreshment or transcendence of our deep emotions. There’s no spirituality required. And it does this in a much more honest way than religons do.

Grayling: “People ask me ‘Why do you speak against religion when it gives someone comfort when they’re old and alone?’ But how much better would it be if friends and neighbours were there to give that person love?”

It was amazing to hear Taslima Nasrin‘s story. She’s a writer and a former Muslim. One article she wrote denounced the burqa as restrictive and unequal, and that women shouldn’t wear it. Because of her writings about how religion oppresses women, she has attracted demonstrations and violence from her detractors. She has five fatwas against her from Muslim clerics. Says Nasrin, “Don’t you think the believers commit blasphemy by trying to protect their god?”

I first became aware of Nasrin around 2005, when she was exiled from her native Bangladesh, but I had no idea her struggles were ongoing. The Indian government has forced her to leave her home in India, and she now lives in the West.

She told how as a child, her mother told her if she ever said anything bad about Allah, her tongue would fall out. A natural empiricist, she immediately ran to the bathroom, closed the door, and said “Allah is a son of a bitch. Allah is the son of a dog.” Miraculously, her tongue stayed in place, and she knew that her mother was wrong.

In her talk, Nasrin was critical of attempts on the part of Muslims to influence international laws curtailing free speech so as not to upset religious feelings, saying “Without the right to offend, freedom does not exist.”

She sees conflict between not Christianity and Islam, or between East and West. The conflict is between rationalism and irrational religious belief.

She told of how she longs to return to her home in Bangladesh, and how the West doesn’t feel like home to her. Nevertheless, to her, the international community of rationalists, secularists, and atheists are her home.

None of us who has left a religion has any idea what it’s like to have to worry about our safety like she does. And yet she continues to speak out against religion and governmental attempts to appease it. What an inspirational person.

Philip Adams (author, columnist): “Atheist Fundamentalism: The Dangers of Missionary Zeal, Why We Mustn’t Be Like Them”

This was a strange talk. Phillip Adams is arguing that atheists haven’t had much influence on religion at all. He argues we’re not killing religions; they’re committing suicide. Further, the decrease in some religions is not leading to an increase in atheism, but rather an increase in pseudo-science and cults. Certainly atheism is the beneficiary of a lot of that religious mobility. But we can’t take credit for the decrease in conventional religion. These wounds are self-inflicted. We’re winning, but not because of what we’re doing.

We should attack religion when it moves into our area of secularism. But we shouldn’t be disagreeable on areas where we could be making allies. We must use the opportunities to make friends with people who are not our enemies. “Let us not cast them into the outer darkness into which they cast us. Let us be better than them.”

My view: Adams seems to feel that the pace of change is glacial. And yet here we are. The number of atheism and ‘nones’ is growing fast. Are we supposed to just quiet down now? Hell, no.

It’s not about being better. It’s about telling the truth. I say shake the tree. They won’t like it, but they wouldn’t like any amount of push-back. Their idea of a ‘good atheist’ is one that shuts up. What has that gotten us in the last 50 years? Yes, I will pick battles, and in person I’m actually polite. But I didn’t like having an atheist dampening the momentum.

Entertaining, but a bit of a downer. I wonder how I’ll feel about the atheist movement when I’ve been in it for as long as he has (if that’s possible).

I am not stalking PZ, but I bumped into him when no one else was around. I said, “Phillip’s talk was certainly a different view. Not so much ‘in your face’.”

He said, “That’s okay. We need that.”

“You’re more forward about it,” I suggested.

“We need that too,” he said.