Poetry of Reality | Richard Dawkins & Peter Boghossian
In this conversation, Professor Dawkins and Peter discuss various impediments to rationality and clear thinking. Specifically, Richard is unsettled by the substitution hypothesis (the idea that belief is the brain’s default and that as one religion fades another will necessarily take its place). While he acknowledges that Woke dogma has mapped onto traditional religious terrains, including the replacements of white privilege for original sin and trans ideology for Catholic transubstantiation, Professor Dawkins muses that he’s wasted his life if humans are destined to jump from one form of delusion to another.
Richard and Peter also discuss: Fermi’s paradox, natural selection, extraterrestrial genetics, identifying sex based upon skeletons, Lamarck versus Darwin, the ideological capture of science journals, tribal belief, and two mysteries unanswered by science.
From 1995 to 2008 Richard Dawkins was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is an internationally bestselling author and legendary evolutionary biologist. He is an advocate for scientific literacy and an outspoken critic of creationism. His most notable books are The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, both selling millions of copies internationally. Richard’s latest book is Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. Richard hosts The Poetry of Reality podcast and is on the board of the Center for Inquiry. Richard and Peter’s previous in-person, public conversations can be found here and here.
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Thank you, Peter, for such an honest open conversation! Dawkins is a genuinely funny person when you give him a chance. I used his joke, about Anglican schools inoculating him as a child in a conversation with my woke loved one and she laughed, and it was great to hear her laugh again. Thanks for helping me work on becoming a better listener in the moments that matter most.
Science is not even close to afinal understanding of nature which is a Dawkins delusion.shared by most ontological reductionists. The Big Bang theory for instance is full of problems dark matter etc. Now we have to look at the age of the universe that's potentially different than than what it was claim to be for decades. I know about The Big Bang because I have a son who's a quantum physicist and a daughter who is a plasma physicist. So I hear that argument all the time. The other issue with evolutionary biology basically is the position that the brain has cease to evolve.
Perhaps it has and perhaps it hasn,'t but the fact is that our understanding of the universe it's obviously contingent upon the complexity of our brain should humble us,. Why then should we believe that today's scientific paradigm is complete in our understandings? I mentioned again the work of Thomas Kuhn .