89. Richard Dawkins — Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 12 fiercely funny, mind-expanding chapters, Richard Dawkins explains how the natural world arose without a designer — the improbability and beauty of the “bottom-up programming” that engineers an embryo or a flock of starlings — and challenges head-on some of the most basic assumptions made by the world’s religions.

In this wide-ranging conversation Shermer and Dawkins discuss:

how Outgrowing God encapsulates his life’s work in two broad areas: (1) science, reason, and evolution theory; (2) God, Religion, and Faith. A “Dawkins 101” book and a perfect gift to friends and family.
his commitment to the truth, as best explained by science.
Is the Bible a “Good Book”?
Is adhering to a religion necessary, or even likely, to make people good to one another?
why religion is over-determined
separating religion from God beliefs
Is religion and belief in God an evolutionary adaptation or a byproduct (or both)?
Why we don’t need God in order to be good
How do we decide what is good?
human nature: selfish/selfless, violent/peaceful, better angels/inner demons
breaching the Is-Ought barrier
the future of atheism
career advice for young scientists and scholars
getting courage from science
the multiverse: “You Cannot be Serious!”

Richard Dawkins is a fellow of the Royal Society and was the inaugural holder of the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestor’s Tale, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Science in the Soul. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Michael Faraday Prize of the Royal Society, the Kistler Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year Award, and the International Cosmos Prize of Japan.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations
0:10.4	with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
0:17.0	Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. As usual, I introduced my guest's new book by holding up the cover,
0:25.2	but I only have the audio cover.
0:27.6	Because I didn't get the hard copy, but that's okay. It's outgrowing.
0:32.0	Oh yeah, yeah, no okay it's outgrowing. Oh yeah yeah no it's a beginner's guide.
0:36.0	I enjoyed as usual listening to your you reading your own books which I saw you
0:42.3	tweeted that you appreciate that as well and yes
0:46.1	I think I've heard most of your books I suspect origin of species that you read was the
0:50.3	most difficult one you had to read was the most difficult one you had to read. It was the most difficult to read most
0:53.4	certainly. I had to really study each sentence in order to decide which word or
1:00.0	syllable even to emphasize in the sentence. So it was a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah and I always
1:06.5	enjoyed that you had Lala reading passages where people, someone else was speaking in
1:10.6	some of your books. That was always fun. It helps to do that when you got a quote.
1:14.1	Yeah, we tried that with the moral arc actually. It was a pretty long book so I hired a
1:19.9	advertising voice, a radio voice, a woman to do it because I thought, well that's great that
1:26.4	Richard Hellala, I'm going to hire this woman to do this and she sounded great.
1:30.1	And we were going to pay her pretty good money and she was super excited about doing it that all of a sudden she went dark on us and I thought
1:36.6	uh-oh she must have got to chapter four on why religion cannot be the source of moral progress and sure
1:42.3	enough like a week later we get this email
1:43.9	from her say well I've been praying to Jesus about this I went oh no and
1:50.1	apparently Jesus told her no you are not to read the moral arc.
	...

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