Christopher Hitchens Richard Dawkins Sam Harris - 19 Mar

STEPHEN FRY

RICHARD DAWKINS

Science is often accused of arrogantly claiming to know everything, but the barb is capaciously wide of the mark.

DANIEL C. DENNETT

Any who search the transcription of our discussion for either a monolithic shared creed or a contradiction suppressed for political reasons will come up empty-handed.

SAM HARRIS

Is there a distinction between believing things for good reasons and believing them for bad ones?

RICHARD DAWKINS, DANIEL C. DENNETT, SAM HARRIS, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

STEPHEN FRY

Do you believe in God?

A question of little value. Which god? Ganesh? Osiris? Jove? Jehovah? Or one of the tens of thousands of animist gods worshipped every day around the globe?

Oh, very well then, if youre going to get clever any god.

Do I believe in any god?

Look, theres a creation, isnt there? Therefore there must be a Creator. Nothing comes from nothing. Something must have started it all.

Ill overlook your reckless use of therefore and go along with you, out of interest. Just to see where it gets us.

Well then.

Well then, what?

Youve agreed theres a Creator.

Well, I havent agreed, but Ive come along with you to see where its going. Who is this Creator you have conjured up on the grounds that they must exist?

Well, we cant say.

And more important, who created this Creator?

Thats just silly.

But youve just told me that nothing comes from nothing and that something must have started it all. Why am I not allowed to use this principle to wonder where your Creator comes from?

Well, you must admit that Love and Beauty cant be explained by science. That theres something other

We have all had heated, sophomoric and ultimately futile conversations like this as students quibbling and quarrelling earnestly about turtles-all-the-way-down regress and challenging each other to prove the unprovable, long into the wine-fuelled night. We have all listened to those of faith stating their position, first by adducing half-understood scientific thinking and discovery

Quantum physics itself shows that we cant be certain of anything.

then dropping them contemptuously:

Science doesnt have all the answers. It cant even explain what most of the universe is made of! Anyway, theyre only theories.

To this day, the No true Scotsman fallacy is alive and well:

Buddhism has a lot to teach us, you know. Its been shown to have real psychological and cognitive value.

You mean like those Buddhist monks who helped the Burmese army ethnically cleanse the Rohingya to the point of genocide?

Oh, but they werent proper Buddhists.

Such scenes play out every day, and it is important that they should. The rounds of punch and counterpunch may get wearisome, aggressive and tiresomely circular, but let us never forget that this is a big subject and the claims made by theists, religionists and believers are the most momentous claims there can be. About anything. You dont have to boast a PhD or have read Thomas Kempis, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and the teachings of Siddhartha (or indeed On the Origin of Species and Principia Mathematica) to be able to take part in such wrangling and disputation. But boy, isnt it wonderful when you can eavesdrop on four who have. It warms the heart, tickles the soul and fires up the synapses. And that is exactly what this book allows us to do listen in on four people who have thought hard and fought hard (for they have been publicly battered and battled like few intellectuals in our time) without losing their wit, humour and sense of proportion.

So who are they, these Four Musketeers of the Mind? What do they want with us and the world? Why should we care?

Let us meet them one by one.

SAMHARRIS (Aramis) is a neuroscientist, moralist, author and enthusiastic exponent of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (a martial art most noted, I am told, for its close grappling and ferocious ground fighting). He is equally trained and proficient in forms of meditation that an Englishman of my caste finds incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing. I cant even say the word mindfulness without blushing. Harriss influential books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation were followed by a later book and subsequent highly popular podcast series called Waking Up, which focus on his great interest in exploring how morality and spirituality can flourish outside religious teaching.

DANIELDENNETT (Athos) is a philosopher. Perhaps the best-known philosopher alive. A few years ago, that would have been like calling someone the best-known fluid dynamicist alive or the most famous coleopterist the world has ever seen, but these days philosophy and its branches are hot. More people are choosing it as an undergraduate subject, it seems, than ever before. As a UC Berkeley alumni magazine headline neatly phrased it, Philosophys Popularity Soars: Devotees Find Its More Than An Interesting Path to Poverty. Professor Dennett writes on the mind, evolutionary biology, free will and much else besides. His book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon caused plenty of fluttering in academic, intellectual, religious and political dovecots. His co-authorship with Asbjrn Steglich-Petersen of The Philosophical Lexicon has alone guaranteed him eternal glory. Like Einstein, Noah and the Kennedys, Professor Dennett is a keen sailor.

RICHARDDAWKINS (dArtagnan) is responsible for introducing evolutionary biology and Darwinism to generations. His books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, never out of print, continue to inspire, inform and amaze. As the first holder of Oxford Universitys Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, he acquired a worldwide reputation as a sceptic, passionate rationalist, proud atheist, and witty exposer of charlatanism and fakery couched in pseudoscientific language. In all that time, he has pursued an academic career as a leading ethologist and biologist. He gave our language the word meme, and in his work as a scientist has hugely expanded our understanding not just of the genotype but of the whole evolutionary package that makes life, the phenotype. His Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science stands as a global cynosure for free thought.