The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

The Reverend Michael Bray is a leading advocate of murdering abortion doctors. He also takes biblical literalism to the extreme of advocating the death penalty for adultery and homosexuality. His friend and coconspirator, the Reverend Paul Hill, was executed for murdering an abortion doctor and his bodyguard. Bray strongly defends Hill’s action and thinks he’s now being rewarded in heaven. Bray himself served 46 months of a 10-year jail sentence for conspiracy and possession of illicit explosives. What follows is an audio recording of a long conversation I had with him in a public park in Colorado. He struck me as a deeply confused individual but at the same time sincere, a mind addled and perverted by religious faith, walking evidence of Steven Weinberg’s well-known aphorism, which I quote at the end of this recording: for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

There’s a kind of conventional wisdom among broadcasters that an interview has to be adversarial. The interviewer must probe in a critical kind of way. You must have arguments. This was brought home to me some years ago when I had a conversation on stage in London, a very large audience with Steven Pinker, and it went very well. The audience liked it, and the BBC, who weren’t there, got wind of it and decided they’d like to have a reprise of it later in the evening, in the News Night programme. So they asked us whether we would do it, and we agreed. Then the BBC producer rang me up and she said to me, “What’s the nature of your disagreement with Dr. Pinker?” I said, “Well, I don’t think there is a disagreement. I think we agree about most things.” She said, “No disagreement?” The interview was promptly cancelled.

That’s just an illustration, and it came to mind again when I did an interview with Steve Pinker in Boston, at Harvard. It was part of the programme I did for Channel Four in 1998 called The Genius of Charles Darwin. We had a very long conversation lasting about an hour, I suppose, and we agreed about just about everything. But I think it is illuminating. I think it’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever done. It’s two people who pretty much agree about everything we discussed, and it’s as though one person was having a conversation with himself. But it’s somehow better than that. I think that when you have two people who agree with each other in that kind of way, each one raises the game of the other. Let’s see if you agree, listen to this conversation between me and Steve Pinker.

The savage missiles hurled at Kathleen Stock in the stocks of Sussex University gives the lie to the pretense that her tormentors should be pitied as an oppressed minority who just want to peacefully get on with their life. I’ve long admired her gentle courage in the face of vicious bullying. When we finally met at the Dissident Dialogues Conference in New York this May, I felt an instant affinity. It was a pleasure to conduct the following interview.

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Derren Brown is one of our leading conjurers, specializing in mentalism, the illusion of reading people’s minds. I interviewed him for my Channel 4 TV documentary, Enemies of Reason. We talked about cold reading and how the technique is used by frauds who pretend to communicate with the dead, as well as by honest conjurers. Derren himself is an honest conjurer and a sharp critic of charlatans who abuse their skills, lucratively pretending to supernatural powers, which of course, they don’t have. I have just listened to the interview again, and I must say I find it one of the more interesting interviews I have done. See if you agree.

Satish Kumar was one of those I interviewed for my Channel 4 documentary, ‘Enemies of Reason.’ He began by telling a nice story about Bertrand Russell, whom he met as a young man and who supported him. We moved on to holism, which seemed harmless enough, but as the interview wore on, he became more and more mystical, culminating in the treeness of trees, I couldn't help wondering what Bertrand Russell would have said.

I have long wanted to meet John McWhorter. He’s an extremely well-known public intellectual and opinion leader who, in my opinion, always talks sense. I have this rather eccentric idea that before becoming a public intellectual, you need to earn your credentials by having something important and interesting to be intellectual about, and John McWhorter qualifies in a big way. He is a world authority on linguistics, the study of the extraordinary phenomenon of human language, which I think is one of the most important and interesting subjects out there. 

We both spoke at the Dissident Dialogues conference in New York this year, and I seized the opportunity to invite him onto The Poetry of Reality. I was delighted and honored when he accepted. I began by asking him about linguistics, including the vexed question of the origin of language.

Only later did we move on to his more controversial book, a book that I strongly recommend, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a hero, a staunch fighter against the violent intolerance and bossy control freakery of Islamism. She is also a personal friend of whom I am very fond. When she recently announced her conversion to Christianity, I assumed that she must be no more than a political Christian, regarding Christianity as a bulwark against Islam. I have some sympathy with the view that if you must have a religion at all, Christianity is hugely better than the leading alternative. In Hilaire Belloc’s words, “Always keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.”

I agreed to have a public conversation with her in New York, in which I was all prepared to emphasize the distinction between a political Christian and a true believing Christian, who actually thinks Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. I think the distinction is a really important one. I don’t think a political Christian is a real Christian, any more than the kind of cultural Christian I am myself.

When we met on the stage at the Dissident Dialogues meeting in New York, I was wrongfooted when Ayaan began with a personal statement which seemed to suggest that she really is a believing Christian, not just a political Christian. Well, her form of words was “I choose to believe.” I’m not sure what to make of that. Anyways, see what you think; here is the recording of our New York meeting.

(This is part 2 of Richard's interview with Alister McGrath.)

 I interviewed Alister McGrath for my Channel 4 documentary, Root of All Evil. He is a theologian, a nice enough fellow, but I wouldn't go out of your way to listen to this interview unless it's to remind yourself what an empty, vacuous, non-subject theology is. 
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I interviewed Alister McGrath for my Channel 4 documentary, Root of All Evil. He is a theologian, a nice enough fellow, but I wouldn't go out of your way to listen to this interview unless it's to remind yourself what an empty, vacuous, non-subject theology is.
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In 2008, touring America to promote The God Delusion, I spoke to a large audience at the University of California at Berkeley. It was a nostalgic visit for me, as I had spent two eventful years there as a young man. Today I stand by everything I said in the lecture.