"In the summer of 2003, I began filming the series" ""Atheism, a Rough History of Disbelief"." "As part of the process" "I talked to a number of writers, scientists, historians and philosophers." "Having secured their cooperation" "I was very embarrassed to find that a large proportion of what went on ended up in the cutting room floor, simply because the series would have lasted 24 hours otherwise." "But as it happens, the BBC agreed with me that the conversations were too interesting to be junked, and with these 6 supplementary programmes, they made the extremely unusual decision to go back to the original material and to broadcast at length" "some of the conversations which I had." "Conversations with people such as the English biologist, Richard Dawkins, the American philosopher, Daniel Dennett, the Cambridge theologian, Denys Turner, the American playwright, Arthur Miller, the English philosopher, Colin McGinn, and the American Nobel-prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg." "When I talked to the English philosopher, Colin McGinn, at his apartment in New York, we discussed at some length the meaning of the word "belief", and much of that discussion is in the "Atheism" series." "But to begin with, I just wanted to get from Colin a sense of what it felt like to be a sceptical English philosopher in a country as seemingly religious as the United States." "Sometimes Americans will say, "So, you don't believe in God,"" "and I say, "That's right." "I don't believe in God."" "And they say, "So, do you believe in anything?"" " Oh, yes." " "Do you believe in anything?"" "And I say, "I believe in many things," and I don't make jokes, like "I believe in tables and chairs." I say to them," ""I believe in various ethical causes, and political ideas," ""and other aesthetic values, intellectual values." ""Lots of things that I believe in."" "And they say, "That's all you believe in?"" ""That's all I believe in."" ""Don't you believe in something God-like?"" "Or, "You don't believe in the traditional God." ""Do you believe there's something there?"" "And I say, "No." "There's nothing there."" "And it's very difficult to get across to people who are religious, that when you're an Atheist you mean you don't believe in anything like that whatsoever." "It's not that you think Nature is God, or it doesn't have personal qualities or something like that, you don't believe in anything of that type." "Nothing supernatural." "Nothing miraculous, nothing superstitious." "No ghosts, no telepathy, you know, nothing of that kind." "That's what it's to do with." "It's not I'm picking on God, somehow, picking on the Christian God and not believing in Him, it's jut nothing of that type." "Well, don't you then get the answer, which I get from people who are not necessarily religious," "I mean, they don't believe to any of the three monotheistic religions, they will say, not just simply, "There must be something,"" "to which I would give the same reply as you, but, "Where do you get your spirituality?"" "Otherwise it sounds as though there's a shortage of some sort." "But I've never been able to get from them whether it's like some vitamin deficiency." "Exactly, what exactly do they mean by that?" "I mean, spiritua..." "Can an Atheist be spiritual?" "I guess it's a matter of definition, really." "You certainly can't be if it denotes anything supernatural... but aesthetic and ethical values can approximate to what people would call spiritual." "Most deeply held beliefs about human behaviour might be counted as spiritual, I don't know." "Feelings about nature I suppose might be." "I wouldn't use the word." "It doesn't seem to me to be a good word to use -a risky word to use- but it doesn't mean you don't have any deep views about things." "Or deep convictions about things." "The clergyman crouching in the laurel bushes leaps out and says," ""Aha!" "Your deep feelings are, in fact, unacknowledged... acknowledgements" ""of the god you deny."" "Well, one of my deep feelings is that there is no God, and it's a bad idea to believe in God." "It's been very harmful." "So if that reflects my belief in God, well, that's a strange situation." "As one of my deepest convictions is "there is no God."" "Now, I happen to share Colin's conviction that there is no God." "And, in my case, I never believed it." "So, I wondered if there had ever been a time in Colin's earlier life when he did believe in God." "With me, it was actually quite precisely delineated." "I can't remember the exact dates now, or the exact times." "I think I was about 17 or 18 when the idea of believing in God," " it was Christianity I was exposed to - became real to me and it went on for about a year, I would say, not much more than that." "If you'd said to me when I was 10, "Do you believe in God?"" "I probably would have said yes," "I don't know, but it didn't mean anything." "It was just sort of..." "You go, "Everybody does, don't they?"" "Like cows." "Everybody believes in them." "But then I actually started studying the Bible because I was studying Divinity A-Level." "So I started studying it but we had a very charismatic teacher" " an admirable man, Mr. Marsh, who I wrote about in my autobiography - who was very enthusiastic and was teaching us the Bible, and I was having to learn the Bible." "Studying closely." "Old Testament, New Testament..." "So I know much more about the New Testament than most Christians." "And even now, 25 years later, I know more about it than most religious people." "So I actually know it pretty well." "It's what got me interested in philosophy 'cause at the same time I was getting interested in philosophy, it was through thinking about religion, studying the Bible." "And I think there is a confluence of two factors here, one was the interest in metaphysical questions, basic questions about the Universe..." " You know, what's it all about?" "What does it all mean?" "That kind of question." "And on the other hand, there was an ethical component to it." "Because you find in New Testament, obviously, a very strong emphasis on ethical aspects of life." "I was an idealistic teenager, you know, and it was the '60s, so that had a profound impact on me." "The ethical side." "And I was not brought up in a house where ethical ideas were particularly discussed or, you know..." "And it still has a profound impact on me, the ethical side of it." "So those two things, I think, made me think there's more to life than... the mundane realities that I'd been used to living up there in Blackpool with the amusement arcades and the pubs and fish and chips shops" "and the freezing cold." "And there was this idea of philosophical thought, metaphysical ideas, and then these high ethical ideals." "Good combination." "Good combination." "So I got interested in it and for a period I was influenced by that so I went to university studying psychology and, since I stopped studying the Bible, and I wasn't seeing Mr Marsh anymore for divinity lessons," "I kept it up a bit and I occasionally would talk to people about religion and it just sort of disappeared." "And I remember going out, trying hard to keep up with it, going to some religious meetings and I was sitting listening and I thought," ""This is a load of rubbish." "I just don't think this is true and more."" "I was reading Bertrand Russell, "Why I'm not a Christian", and in a few..." "I don't remember the details, but in a pretty short time" "I just decided it was all wrong." "I also decided you could keep the ethical side and the philosophical side and jettison the rest, so Russell represented to me an alternative to religious idealism." "It was a more secular idealism." "So I realised you could have some of the aspects of religion which appealed to me, but without religion, and the bits that didn't appeal to me - the virgin birth, miracles, strange ideas about how the Universe came around," "those bits it's very hard to believe - you could just cut those bits off and you could keep the good bits." "So you get rid of the theological baggage of religion and then you keep the side of it that you like." "And that's what I've done ever since, basically the same thing." "Was there any crisis in, as it were... unhitching the metaphysical and divine from the ethical to which you continued to subscribe?" "Not in my case." "I think it differs from other people's case." "In Russell's' own description of his fall from theism, he describes it as a deeply painful, traumatic, irrecoverable episode." "He spent his whole life somehow dealing with it." "Not with me." "It was relatively easy." "It just happened quite naturally." "As I say in my autobiography, it was like shedding a skin, the skin comes off and you have a new skin and it seems fine." "Was there a sense of relief as you shed the skin?" "No, I wouldn't say there was relief." "I think there was disappointment." "I would like religion to be true." "I'd like it to be true, because I'd like there to be immortality, rewards for those who've been virtuous and punishments for those who've not." "Especially the punishments would be good." "There's no justice in this world and it would be good if there was some cosmic force that distributed justice in the proper way that it should be and it still is to me a constant source of irritation and pain" "that wicked people prosper and virtuous people don't!" "So there was a bit of disappointment about those aspects of it, but there was some exhilaration too." "Russell has a description which I think is appropriate of a feeling of a godless universe as a kind of exhilarating universe." "There's something hygienic about it." "There's something bracing about it." "Whereas the idea that there's this suffocating presence gazing at your every movement and thought and gauging everything you do..." "It's a bit oppressive to think that way." "Well, OK." "Now, here you are, the philosopher that you thought you might become, you have now very fully become." "Now, in your role as a philosopher," "I'd love you to develop the arguments which were previously simply intuitional skin-shedding." "Now be more systematic and surgical about it and say why, in fact, the notion of a god... is incredible." "Well the one set of arguments is the no-evidence arguments." "Russell puts it by saying, there's no more reason to believe in the Christian God than the Greek gods." "No more reason to believe - there's no positive evidence for it." "There's no theory that you need to postulate God into to explain some natural phenomenon, which can't be explained by some other theory." "People sometimes will say, "Miracles were performed."" "There's never any good evidence that miracles were performed." "The judgement that they were is usually based on a prior opinion that God exists rather than being an independent source for believing that God exists." "So there's no evidence in terms of what anybody has ever observed." "There's no facts about the world that can't be explained without postulating God, so there's no reason to believe in God, any more than there's any reason to believe in Zeus or the Greek gods." "So that's on the side of whether there's any reason to believe it." "There's the question, are there reasons to disbelieve it?" "Any positive arguments against it?" "There are also some arguments FOR, like the ontological argument." " Tell us about that." " The ontological argument." "A very nice argument." "Anselm of Canterbury thought of it, I think in the 15th century." "He argued that the definition of God entails that God exists." "This would be a fantastic result." "Just the mere definition tells us God exists." "So, what's the definition of God?" "The most perfect conceivable being." "Or "the most powerful conceivable being" is an equally good way of putting it." "And then Anselm argues as follows - well, suppose this most powerful or most perfect being did not exist..." "Right?" "Then, he would lack the attribute of existence, but the attribute of existence is one of the perfections or one of the things that makes a being powerful, but since he is, by definition, the most perfect being," "he must have the attribute of existence, therefore God exists." "So, let's go over the argument again!" "Get the definition of God." "How is God to be defined?" "Let's compare this with the unicorn." "How is the unicorn to be defined?" "The unicorn is a horse with a horn growing out its forehead." "Nothing in that definition to implies that the unicorns exist, and they don't." "But let's define God." "An all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing being." "These are some of his characteristics." "And everyone will agree that's the definition of God." "So one of the definitions is he's the most perfect being." "One of his attributes is utmost, unimprovable perfection." "OK?" "That's the definition of God." "Now Anselm argues, but if God didn't exist, wouldn't he be less perfect than a being just like him in all those ways except that THAT being existed?" "Cos to exist is to be more perfect than not to exist." "It's better to exist than not to exist." "God is as good as you can be, as superior as you can be, so he must exist." "So, by definition, God exists." "It's a brilliant argument, but it's wholly unconvincing to everyone who hears it." "They think, "There's something going wrong with that."" "That's a very strange argument." "All right, tell us what's wrong with it." "That's the difficulty." "No-one's ever managed to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with it." "I'll tell you what I think what's wrong with it, though the issue is by no means clear." "I think what's very funny in it, the bit that strikes you as sophistical is the bit that says," ""God's the most perfect." "Existence is one of the perfections."" "It sounds superficially plausible, but what does it really mean?" ""Is one of the perfections." I like to compare this to somebody who said," ""Let's take the most tasty meal conceivable..."" ""The most tasty meal conceivable..." Does that mean anything, to say that?" "There's the most tasty meal I've ever had." "But it's not well-defined, the most tasty meal conceivable or... you know..." "the best football game conceivable, not one I've ever seen." "What does it mean?" "It's not a very clearly meaningful idea." "So if we say we're defining God as the most perfect being, and we don't really lay down very clearly what we mean by perfect, then what does it really mean, the most perfect being?" "We know he doesn't have the most perfect colours, cos he's not coloured at all." "It's not clear what it means." "So we can't always think that phrases like," ""the most perfect conceivable F" are always meaningful." "Sometimes they are." "The most perfect conceivable triangle means one whose angles are precisely 180 degrees." "But the most perfect conceivable moral being - what does that mean?" "It's not so well defined." "That's what I think is wrong, but like many philosophical arguments, just because you can't refute it doesn't mean you should take it all that seriously, or form your common sense beliefs on the basis of it." "All right, so much for the ontological..." " Now, how about the other ones?" " Here's one I like." "People think..." "Psychologically, this is quite important to people." "That's why this argument is probably more important psychologically." "People think, "Without God, life is meaningless." "Where is meaning?"" ""It's just an empty charade of, you know... pointless and purposeless, valueless going from one thing to the next."" "Well, the first reply to make to that is, you don't necessarily need to seek the meaning of life outside of life." "Here's the premise, the assumption of that argument - without there being a being outside of human life, human life would have no meaning." "So the meaning of human life must be conferred by another being." "Here's my question - what gives the meaning to that being's life?" "How does his life, God's life, derive meaning?" "Here's the dilemma, right?" "Either God's life has meaning intrinsically just by his existence, or not." "If it does, then it's possible to have a meaningful life intrinsically so why can't our lives have intrinsic meaning?" "Their meaning doesn't have to be conferred by another being." "But the religious might want to argue, without even reverting to the ontological argument, that the observable fact that we do have values and meanings is in fact evidence of the fact that something has... given the meanings in the same way that the argument for a design" "says something has given the thing design." "Well, there are two points there." "One point is that the existence of values itself is an argument for the existence of God." "Like an evidence argument." "Another point altogether is the idea that morality can only have a foundation if it's based on God's commands or God's desires, God's wishes." "The first one, of course, the thing to say about that is, there's just no reason to think that the existence of values in human society depends on the existence of God." "I mean, why should it?" "There's no clear logical argument for that, any more than the existence of ears is a reason." "There are various aspects of human life - there's art, value, family, all sorts of things that we take to be valuable." "Why do these require us to postulate God to explain their existence?" "A more worrying question for many people is, they don't see that morality can have any foundation, any absoluteness, unless there's a god to certify it, to legitimate it." "You can see that point." "It's a point that was discussed by Plato long ago in the Euthyphro argument." "He makes..." "Socrates makes a completely compelling refutation of that argument and it simply goes as follows." "Suppose you take, as a moral principle, it's wrong to steal." "People say, "Why is that wrong?" "Why is it wrong to steal?"" "Answer - because God says it's wrong to steal." "God commanded you should not steal." "OK?" "The point that Socrates makes in that dialogue is to say - how can God give this moral rule a foundation?" "Either the moral rule is, itself, intrinsically a sound moral rule or it can't be given soundness and legitimacy from an external command." "Suppose, for example, we had the rule, "It's right to murder."" "And somebody said, "That's not right!" "Murder is wrong!"" "And somebody replied, "But God says it's right to murder."" "That doesn't convince you it's right." "If God says that something is right which isn't right, God's wrong." "He can't make something right just by saying it's right." "What God has to do is reflect what's right in his commandments so that's what he really does." "It IS wrong to steal." "It's wrong to steal and wrong to murder." "So God says that it's wrong and he's right to say that." "Why?" "Because it IS wrong in the two cases!" "He doesn't make it wrong by saying it." "He can't do that." "If that was so, we'd have no reason to respect God's morality." "So God appropriates our spontaneous and indigenous values... which get reflected back on this hypothetical entity..." " and validates our beliefs." " Exactly." "So we don't need God to validate our morals." "He couldn't validate them." "He only..." "His validations only work inasmuch as they correspond to what IS morally right and wrong." "He can't make something be morally right when it's not." "Another way to put it is, it can't be a matter of God's free decision or whim what's right and wrong." "People can see what morality is what it is." "They know what they ought to do." "But human beings are weak." "We have weaknesses of the will." "We don't always do what we know very well we ought to do." "And that, in most people, produces the phenomenon of guilt." "Guilt is a powerful negative force in people's minds." "People hate guilt." "Guilt is a bad feeling." "So you need something to prevent guilt." "You need something to make you do what you know is right." "But since human beings are weak, they don't always do what they know is right, but God gives you an extra motive to do what's right, beyond morality itself." "Morality gives you a motive, but it's a motive which is rather fragile." "Rather momentary, intermittent and easily broken." "But if you've got the idea of God, it can give it some more oomph, gives it more power and then you can do what you know is right more easily, more regularly, and that's perfectly sensible." "It's reasonable..." "It's not unreasonable, anyway, for an atheist to think that maybe we need God, or people need God, because without God they can't do what they know is right." "I don't believe that myself." "I think that people are not as morally depraved as religious tradition says." "I think most people will do what's right in normal conditions." "They won't always, but normally they will." "They don't need God." "And I think people who sometimes have lived with God as their moral... support, their moral whatever it is they get from it, when they cease to believe in God, they feel that it was not as difficult to be moral afterwards" "as they suspected it might be." "In fact it was better, because there's a corrupting part to that conception of God which is the idea that you're doing something good because God will reward you and think well of you." "And that's a corrupting idea." "It's much better to do what's good because it's good and ONLY because it's good." "That's your only reason for doing it." "The idea you'll get the warm feeling." ""God's pleased with me." "I did this."" "That's not what morality ought to be about." "Having discussed the various arguments that have been offered in favour of the existence of God." "I asked Colin to summarise some of the best reasons for NOT believing." "Well, the classic argument against is the problem of evil." "Even religious people find this one very uncomfortable." "So the argument is simply, God is meant to be a being who is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, so how come there is suffering and pain in the world?" "Why does God allow it?" "God, if he's all-good, thinks it's bad that this should occur, would rather it didn't occur, like any decent person, and yet he lets it occur." "That would be OK if he couldn't change it, but he's all-powerful and we're told by religious people he intervenes all the time in various ways, so why doesn't he intervene to prevent the death of a child" "or the torture of a prisoner?" "He doesn't do it." "So you don't want to conclude from that that God is actually quite a bad person." "That's a conceivable conclusion you might draw." "But what you conclude from it is the combination of these two characteristics is inconsistent." "He's all-good and he's all-powerful - you need all-knowing too, cos he has to know what's going on - but it's essentially the conflict between all-good and all-powerful and the existence of evil." "The standard reply the apologists of religion will give is," ""God created human beings with free will. " "Now, why did he do that, knowing the results were going to be horrific?" "That was a pretty wicked thing to do." "But let's put that one aside." "The problem with that argument is, not all the suffering in the world comes from the exercise of human will." "Much of it comes from human..." "Not human, natural catastrophes, or disease, accidents..." "All sorts of things can cause tremendous suffering in humans." "If somebody's born with a genetic disease, no human being had any role whatsoever in creating that." "That comes from nature - God's creation, we're told." "So God created a world in which it was inevitable there'd be tremendous suffering by innocent human beings." "But there MIGHT be religious arguments to the effect that he created this obstacle course... for his created creatures endowed with free will in order to bring out the best in them." "And I always find this one, to me, it brings out the hard-hearted, immoral side of this way of thinking about things." "Think about what's being said - you've got the innocent child with some terrible disease, and God's up there saying, "I really need to test some people here."" ""The obstacle course needs to be put here." "I'll pick on this little girl," ""put here through this terrible ordeal, and test the other people."" "If any human being said to you that's what they'd done " "Suppose I decided, in my wisdom, "I need to test some people here." ""I need to improve their moral characters," ""so I'm going to do this terrible thing to their child."" "You'd think I was the wickedest person in the world." "Why isn't God?" "If that's what God does, I have no respect for him." "It's a wicked thing to do." "God shouldn't do that." "If God cares about human beings, he should not allow that to happen." "Having discussed the arguments both for and against religion, we turned to speculation as to the reason why so many people still had a need to believe." "I don't think anybody has any very good ideas about why this is, especially why they believe in it to the extent that they do." "What I would speculate about it" "I think it's less to do with the idea of death and survival of death, and rewards in heaven and punishment in hell." "I think it's a sort of cosmic loneliness." "I think that's what's behind it." "It's hard for people to accept that we are alone, that nobody cares." "Outside of us." "I think there's a kind of constitutive reason for that, which is human consciousness is essentially sealed off from other consciousnesses." "Mine has sealed off from you." "We only know each other indirectly, through the symptoms of the body." "Yet we yearn for contact with other people." "Love is to do with that." "So we have this feeling that we are, as conscious, embodied beings, somehow or other lonely in our essence, cut off in our essence." "And that's a feeling we struggle against." "You can see it in literature, dealing with this theme." "Frankenstein actually deals with it a lot." "So we feel this metaphysical, existential aloneness in the universe and God is a wonderful antidote." "In the case of God," "God, we feel, directly comes into our minds, and we're directly in contact with God." "God doesn't know us through our bodies but intimately in our minds." "And that satisfies a deep craving, I think, in the human soul, for communion with something outside the self." "I'd just like to finish with one thing." "Here you are, like myself reluctant to use the word "atheist" to describe what we are - it's an accusation, rather than a conviction - in a country which, in fact, has become more intensely religious." "Do you find it difficult to uphold such ideas in the America of the 21st century?" "Let me say something about the first point, the label one has." "To be called an atheist, it's a negative view, and it suggests that one is a sort of professional atheist." "That you spend your life arguing against God, the way Russell did." "And I think that's a sort of undignified and pointless procedure." "Once you've decided there's no God, there's not much point in inveighing against it, unless you think huge harm is being done by the belief in God." "But nobody spends their time trying to prove to others that the Greek gods don't exist." "You just decide that they don't, end of story." "So I like to distinguish atheism from antitheism." "Antitheism is opposition to theism." "I am an antitheist, because I believe that religion is harmful." "In human life." "So I am an antitheist." "I'm not just an atheist who..." "Suddenly, my only values are that I don't agree with it." "I'm actively opposed to it." "But then I distinguish that from post-theism or post-atheism, which is the healthy state of mind where you've put all that behind you." "Now, we can't do that yet, because there's lots of religion in the world and lots of bad results of it." "But to me, in the ideal society the question of religion wouldn't arise, or if it did, it wasn't a heavy question for them." "They would say, "You know, those humans used to believe, back in 2003," ""some of them believed there was this god, others didn't..." ""They did TV programmes about why." "What a funny debate that was!"" "So it'd be a post-theistic society where it wasn't an issue."