(Updated: typo fix)
Depending on your beliefs, this is either the Four Horsemen plotting their strategy for world domination, or the conversation you'd most like to join.
It begins by feeling a little like a meeting of a support group, but pretty soon, there's some decent debate: over agendas, priorities, whether to treat all opponents equally, and hoped-for outcomes. You might be surprised to learn that not all of them want completely to do away with religion, at least in some senses.
Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Hitchens, in conversation:
(h/t: George and John)
4 comments:
A stimulating and entertaining two hours. I find myself agreeing most often with Dawkins. I get impatient with Dennett getting fairly simple ideas expressed. I always cringe a little at Hitchens pugnacious style and pro-war positions although they're entertaining and possibly correct. His erudition is always awesome though. Harris is a little too sympathetic to spiritualism and the transcendent experience, but I like his take on losing adherents with a too broad argument and urging specific positions that most Christians might agree with such as stem cell research and petri dishes of cells already having souls.(not)
Wouldn't it be nice to have an NPR radio program where discussions such as this could happen every week. Atheist Hour on NPR. Thanks for the link.
TC:
Glad you liked it. I did have you in mind when I posted.
I agree with a lot of your reactions.
On Dennet, yeah, he takes a long time, sometimes, to make his point. But I like him better since seeing him give a lecture. I think he just has a little trouble in fact-talking company.
On Hitchens: I, too, don't like his hawkishness. I am troubled, however, by the thought that I agree with him so completely on so many other things -- what if he's right?
On Harris: Yes, he does bring the Buddha a little too much. But he's supposed to be finishing up his Ph.D. in neuroscience, and one of the hot topics in that field is consciousness, so it makes sense that he'd be interested in "spiritual experiences." I must confess that I have some belief that there are such things. They may well be nothing more than altered states of the mind that we'll someday be able to explain in terms of electrochemistry, but I think there is something real about people going into trances, having visions, or even experiencing that feeling of sudden insight.
I'd add one point, which didn't really come up as much in this conversation as it usually does when Harris gets going: He, like Hitchens, seems to have a more hostile view of Muslims (or maybe Islam) than I'd like. I agree that Islam seems in desperate need of its own Enlightenment, but whenever Westerners start going down the path that Harris is on, I always worry that about the moderates who get tarred with the same brush as the extremists. I buy the argument about religions in general that the moderates have some responsibility for shielding the extremists, but there's already too much blind hatred and knee-jerk reacting towards Islam here in the US. So I worry.
The lecture by Dennett is the best one I've seen and better than others on the internet. Incidentally in the debate whether Dennett spells his last name with one or two Ts, notice that in the picture of his book at the start of the lecture he spells it with two Ts. BTW I noticed that Dennett seems to have a deformity of his lower lip. Maybe that's part of the reason he sometimes speaks haltingly and wears the Darwinish beard. His lecture is excellent as you know. Thanks.
On the same page with the Dennett piece there is a link to the debate between Scott Ritter (anti-Iraq war marine) and Christopher Hitchens (pro-Iraq war advocate.) Ritter holds his own against Hitchens and both make some of the best arguments I've seen for and against the war.
All this time, and I've been misspelling his name? Ouch. Well, thanks for the correction, and I'll try to keep it in mind: DenneTT.
For other readers, the video of the Hitches/Ritter debate lives here. I haven't watched it yet, but I plan to.
Thanks, TC.
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