The Unbelievers Page #6

Ex-muslims like me

in Europe and in north America

are growing in number.

We give speeches,

we publish articles

and books,

and we communicate

with one another.

"Infidel"

was the epithet,

an insult

that was thrown at me

over and over again

by family and former

Muslim friends.

It is a label that I now wear

with pride and joy.

We're in a brand-new

age for religions.

For millennia, religions

did not have to worry

about the flock

acquiring lots of information

about other religions

or about their own religion.

These religions evolved

culturally in a world

of easy-to-maintain

ignorance.

But the new transparency

of information brought about

by technology, cell phones,

the Internet and all the rest

is the first

really drastic change

in the epistemological

environment that religions

have had to face

in several millennia.

Thanks for your attention.

To many, he's known

as an evolutionary biologist.

He's a champion

of science and reason.

He's convinced

many around the world

that it's more than okay

to come out as an atheist.

Please welcome to the stage

our final speaker of day two

of the global

atheists convention,

Richard Dawkins.

I want to take back

"intelligent design."

I want to take back

other hijacked words.

Just as the feminists

have rallied around

the phrase

"take back the night,"

maybe we should take back

"intelligent design"

in the true sense of the word.

Let's take back morality,

let's redesign our morality,

rather than

trying to read

what's right and wrong

in a 3,000-year-old book.

Religion has hijacked

morality for centuries.

Let's take it back

and intelligently design it.

Let's intelligently

design our lives,

rather than be dictated to

by priests and mullahs.

Let's intelligently

design our future

using the gift of foresight,

something that

never existed

before brains...

And for practical purposes,

that means human brains...

evolved.

The ability to design

is one of the crowning

glories of our species.

Bridges, planes, buildings,

all sorts of

ingenious contraptions.

The essence of design

in this true sense

of the word

is deliberate foresight.

Human designers can

look into the future

and see the possible mistakes,

see the possible pitfalls,

try things out

in imagination...

Above all, look

into the future,

which is something

natural selection cannot do.

This is one of the major

misunderstandings

of evolution.

People are so used to the idea

that natural selection

produces apparently

good design

that they think that

natural selection

must be capable

of peering

into the future,

of taking steps

to stop the species

going extinct,

for example.

Never happens.

It cannot happen.

Nature cannot plan

for the future;

the human brain can.

We can look at trends

in the present

and extrapolate into the future.

We can foresee

possible scenarios

that might lead to

our species going extinct

and take steps to avoid it.

Thank you very much.

How many people do you have

to kill to be a murderer?

Just one.

Just one.

How many lies do you have to

tell to be a liar? Just one.

You f***ing suck!

The Bible says...

The Bible says,

"you shall not take the name

of the lord in vain."

What I find humorous

is you will not curse

Allah or Mohammad,

but Jesus is in every one

of your conversations.

Science means knowledge?

When you take the name

of my savior Jesus Christ

in vain,

you do it with

an inherent knowledge,

an intuitive knowledge,

that it is wrong,

that it is born

out of your sinful heart.

My friends, what I'm saying

is you're not just atheists,

you're liars.

Whoo!

I guess the best part

of communicating

is the excitement.

Science turns us on.

Science is fun.

Science excites us.

You can't communicate

unless you're excited,

but on the other hand,

I feel it's so

fascinating for me

that I want to tell

people about it.

Carl sagan said,

"when you're in love,

you want to tell the world."

I'm in love with science,

and I have to tell the world.

But we mustn't run away

with the idea that

science is just fun.

Science is hard.

Yeah.

And so it's not fun

in the sense that

it's just sort of...

Easy, and you can

laze around doing it.

It is hard.

It's hard work.

But it's worth it.

Something I didn't know...

I don't know if you knew...

That the royal society

St. Andrew.

St. Andrew?

Yeah.

Why not doubting Thomas?

He'd be the proper

patron Saint of science.

That'd be perfect.

Doubting Thomas,

because that's what

it's all about.

For me, this is the legacy

of modern civilization.

This is what it's all about,

and this is a legacy

that's worth preserving

and sharing more broadly,

and it's under attack.

Yes, I see the history

of science, modern science,

as weaning off

the wisdom of old books

and onto the wisdom

of observation and experiment.

There's a lovely story about

Galileo being

visited by somebody,

and Galileo showed this person

something through his telescope,

and it contradicted

what he thought before,

and eventually he said,

"Mr. Galileo, your demonstration

"is so convincing,

that were it not

"that Aristotle

positively states

the contrary,

I would believe you."

He was actually looking

through a telescope.

It's surprising in some sense

that we're talked about

as being arrogant for

somehow saying

we create our own importance,

that our knowledge

and our understanding

and the way we live our lives

is what makes our importance.

People don't seem to recognize

that a universe that's

created for us

is a little more arrogant.

Incredibly arrogant, yes.

And for me,

that's the most powerful

and enlivening thing

is the fact that more

unimportant we become,

the more powerful

is the importance of science

for pointing out that

the universe exists

whether we like it or not.

That cosmic humility

is the exact opposite of what

we're often accused of.

Science is responsible

for the justified

humility of humanity,

which is a new thing.

Richard, I remember vividly

the very first time

we had a discussion

that we disagreed.

I argued to you

that I thought that

if you were trying

to convince people

of your point,

the first thing you shouldn't

say is, "everything you

believe is wrong,

and you're really stupid,"

and it's better

to try and sort of

go where they are.

Yeah, I mean, I think

I myself have been

convinced of somebody

telling me,

"everything you believe

is rubbish."

As a student,

I was very

persuaded by

that old

French theologian,

teilhard de chardin,

who wrote a book called

the phenomenon of man,

which is...

Pretentious gibberish,

but it fooled me

when I was a student.

And then I read Peter medawar's

brilliant review

of the book, which is

almost certainly the best

negative book review

ever written.

And I was completely

turned around by that,

even though you might think

I'd have pushed back

and said, "wait a minute.

You're insulting

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