Well there's one other chip I'd like to put on the table here. There's this phenomenon of someone like Francis Collins or the biologist you just mentioned, someone who obviously has enough of the facts on board, you know, enough of a scientific education to know better, and still does not know better or professes not to know better, and there I think we have a cultural problem where. And this was actually brought home to me at one talk I gave. A physics professor came up to me at the end of the talk and told me that he had brought one of his graduate students, who was a devout Christian, and who was quite shaken by my talk, and all I got from this report was that this was the first time his faith had ever really been explicitly challenged. And so it's true to say that you can go through the curriculum of becoming a scientist and never have your faith explicitly challenged, because it's taboo to do so, and now we have engineers who can build nuclear bombs in the Muslim world, who still think it's plausible metaphysics that you can get to paradise and get seventy two virgins, and we have people like Francis Collins who think that on Sunday you can kneel down in the dewy grass and give yourself to Jesus, because you are in the presence of a frozen waterfall, and on Monday you can be a physical geneticist.
[CH] Or according to our friend, the great Pervez Hoodbhoy, the great Pakistani physicist, there are people who think you can use the djinns, the devils and harness their power for the reactor.
[SH] It's almost tempting to fund such a project.
[CH] Yeah!
[DD] Haha, yes!
[CH] And it seems, and I gather that … again, I can't get over him still, that the respected, Tariq Ramadan of Saint Anthony's College, Oxford says in his book, I'm told, that he believes in djinns too. I hope I'm not doing him an injustice, I've been told that in his book, 'In the Steps of the Prophet', he says as much, so one is up against things that are flat-out primitive and superstition.
[DD] I think it may be easier than we're supposing to shake peoples' faith. There's been a moratorium on this for a long time. We're just the beginning of a new wave of explicit attempts to shake peoples' faith. And it's bearing fruit, and the obstacles it seems to me are not that we don't have the facts or the arguments, it's these strategic reasons for not professing it, not admitting it. Not admitting it to yourself, not admitting it in public because your family is gonna view it as a betrayal, you're just embarrassed to admit that you were taken in by this for so long. It takes, I think, tremendous courage to just declare that you've given that all up and if we can find ways to help people find that courage, and give them some examples of people who have done this and they're doing just fine, they may have lost the affections of a parent or something like that, they may have hurt some family members, but still I think it's a good thing to encourage and I don't think we should assume that we can't do this. I think we can.
[RD] Yes, it's almost patronising to suggest that we couldn't and to suggest that it shouldn't. On the other hand, I think we all know people who seem to manage this kind of split brain feat of, as Sam said, believing one thing on a Sunday and then something totally contradictory or, incompatible the rest of the week. And there's nothing I suppose neurologically wrong with that, I mean there is no reason why one shouldn't have a brain that's split in that kind of way …
[DD] But it is unstable in a certain way but, and I'm sure you're right, that people do this and they're very good at it, and they do it by deflecting attention from it. Let's start focusing attention …
[RD] But how you can live with a contradiction? How you can live with it?
[DD] by forgetting that you're doing this and by not attending to it. I think, what I would love to do is to invent a memorable catchphrase or term that would rise unbidden in their minds when they caught themselves doing it, and then they would think oh, this is one of those cosmic shifts that Dennett and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are talking about. Oh! right! and they think this is somehow illicit, just to create a little more awareness in them of what a strange thing it is that they're doing.
[CH] I'm afraid to say that I think that cognitive dissonance is probably necessary for everyday survival. Everyone does it a bit.
[DD] You mean tolerating cognitive dissonance?
[CH] No, practicing it.
[RD] Actually practicing it.
[CH] I mean take the case of someone who’s a member of moveon.org. They think that the United States government is a brutal, militaristic, imperial regime who crushes the poor and invades other peoples' countries, but they pay their taxes and, it's very, very rare that they don't. They send their children to school, they do their stuff, you know, they don't act all the time as if ten percent of what they believe is true. Partly because it would be impossible, say, with people in the fifties who were members the John Birch society, who thought President Eisenhower was a communist. Okay, you get up in the morning, you believe that. The White House is run by the Kremlin but then you have to go and get the groceries, and do all that stuff. You still have to go and do it.
[SH] Too many commitments, yeah.
[CH] But you absolutely wouldn't be challengeable in your belief. It'd be very, very important to you, but there would be no way in your life, your real life, of vindicating or practicing the opinion that you have. And I'm sure the same is true of people who say well I shouldn't really prefer one child to another or one parent to another but I do, I'm just not gonna act as if I do.
[SH] Right.
[CH] All kinds of things of this kind.
[SH] But what do you think, as educators …
[CH] Or Senator Craig saying he is not gay. Thinking in his own mind he's absolutely sure he's not, but he can't manage his life by saying he is or that he isn't. So, a question I wanted to ask was this: we should ask ourselves what our real objective is. Do we, in fact, wish to see a world without faith? I think I would have to say that I don't. I don't either expect to, or wish to, see that.
[SH] What do you mean by 'faith'?
[CH] Well I don't think it's possible, because it replicates so fast, faith. As often as it's cut down, or superseded, or discredited, it replicates, it seems to me, extraordinarily fast, I think. For Freudian reasons, principally to do with the fear of extinction, or annihilation
[SH] So you mean faith in supernatural paradigms?
[CH] Yes, the wish. Wish thinking.