It’s very unfortunate when you inadvertently
find people agreeing with you who they’re
the last people who wish to agree with you.
I mean I despise Trump.
I despise everything that he stands for.
But it’s perfectly true that many people
think that I ought to be on his side because
he has these draconian illiberal horrible
policies towards Muslims, trying to stop Muslims
entering the country.
What a horrible thing to do.
What an impolite unwise illiberal inhumane
thing to do.
And so I’m embarrassed if people on the
alt-right agree with something that I say
for the wrong reasons.
There’s not a great deal about religion
in Science in the Soul.
Most of what I have to say about that is in
my earlier book The God Delusion, so I can
rehearse that if you wish.
To me as a scientist the main argument is
a scientific one.
I think that the hypothesis that the universe
was created by a supernatural intelligence
is a scientific hypothesis, it’s a bad hypothesis,
it’s a false hypothesis, but it has to be
judged on its scientific merits.
The universe would be a very different kind
of universe if there was a supernatural creative
intelligence in it than if there wasn’t.
So much of my argument is a scientific argument.
There is no positive reason to believe in
anything supernatural.
If you look at all the reasons that have been
offered none of them stand up, none of them
hold water.
We have in the form of Darwinian evolution
we have a superb theory of why living things
have come into being, why they are the way
they are, why they look as though they’ve
been designed and they undoubtedly do look
as though they’ve been designed.
The illusion of design in living things is
immensely powerful and it’s no wonder that
until Darwinian came along almost everybody
believed that it was created by a supernatural
intelligence.
But we now have Darwin, we now have Darwin
and his successors.
We now know how life came about.
And the complexity and the beauty, the elegance
and the illusion of design of life has always
been by far the most powerful argument for
the existence of supernatural gods and that
is completely blown out of the water.
The secondary argument is whether religion
has evil effects, whether religion as bad
effects and on balance I think it does.
The real problem is that religious faith prides
itself on not needing support.
You can’t argue somebody out of their faith
they simply say that’s my faith you have
to accept it.
And that means that if their faith tells them,
if their religious upbringing tells them that
they must do bad things like blow things up,
kill apostates, throw gay people off high
buildings, et cetera, if their religion tells
them that then you can’t argue them out
of it because it comes from their faith, and
faith by definition has no argument, faith
by definition and shelter behind the wall
that says no it’s my faith I don’t have
to defend it it’s just there, it’s just
faith, that I think is potentially very evil.
That’s very far from saying that every religious
person is evil.
Of course, many people do good things because
of their faith and that’s great, but the
fact that faith can lead to and does lead
to significant numbers of evil things and
the horrific repression of women, for example,
in certain theocracies and of gay people in
theocracies, the sentences of apostates to
death, the joyless suppression of the music
and art and fun in certain countries because
of religious indoctrination, religious faith,
the fact that this can follow from religious
faith the people who do these awful things
don’t think they’re terrible they think
they’re doing good, they think they’re
being righteous, they think they’re obeying
the will of their god and that they’re going
to go to paradise because of it, that I think
because it has the potential to be evil we
have to regarded that as an evil.
