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RD: No, and the virtue of using evidence is precisely that we can come to an agreement about it. But if you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they're right, but they believe different things - they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do.
SM: If religion is an obstacle to understanding what you're saying, why is it getting it wrong?
RD: A creator who created the universe or set up the laws of physics so that life would evolve or who actually supervised the evolution of life, or anything like that, would have to be some sort of super-intelligence, some sort of mega-mind. That mega-mind would have had to be present right at the start of the universe. The whole message of evolution is that complexity and intelligence and all the things that would go with being a creative force come late, they come
as a consequence of hundreds of millions of years of natural selection. There was no intelligence early on in the universe. Intelligence arose, it's arisen here, maybe it's arisen on lots of other places in the universe. Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we
need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.
SM: So religion is peddling a fundamental untruth.
RD: Well, I think it is yes.
SM: And there is no possibility of there being something beyond our knowing, beyond your ability as a scientist, zoologist, to-
RD: No, that's quite different. I think there's every possibility that there might be something beyond our knowing. All I've said is that I don't think there is any intelligence or any creativity or any purposiveness before the first few hundred million years that the universe has been in existence. So I don't think it's helpful to equate that which we don't understand with God in any sense that is already understood in the existing religions.
The gods that are already understood in existing religions are all thoroughly documented. They do things like forgive sins and impregnate virgins, and they do all sorts of rather ordinary, mundane, human kinds of things. That has nothing whatever to do with the high-flown profound difficulties that science may yet face in understanding the deep problems of the universe.
SM: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are - well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good - not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.
RD: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting - it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.
SM: You have rejected religion, and you have written about and posited your own answers to the fundamental questions of life, which are - very crudely - that we and hedgehogs and bats and trees and geckos are driven by genetic and non-genetic replicators. Now instantly I want to know, what does that mean?
RD: Replicators are things that have copies of themselves made. It's a very, very powerful - its' hard to realize what a powerful thing it was when the first self-replicating entity came into the world. Nowadays the most important self-replicating entities we know are DNA molecules; the original ones probably weren't DNA molecules, but they did something similar. Once you've got self-replicating entities - things that make copies of themselves - you get a population of them.
SM: In that very raw description that makes us - what makes us, us? We're no more than collections of inherited genes each fighting to make its way by the survival of the fittest.
(interview continues on next page)
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