024 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 024

Air Date: September 27, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Firefly S01E03 “Bushwhacked”)

Jayne Cobb: Is something wrong?

Simon Tam: Oh, no. No, I suppose it’s just the thought of a little Mylar and glass being the only thing separating a person from nothing.

Jayne Cobb: It’s impressive what nothing can do to a man.

Bob Metz: Good morning London. It is Thursday, September 27. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now till noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right.

Welcome to the show this Thursday. 519-661-3600 is the number you can call if you’d like to call in and join the conversation today or put your two bits in on today’s subject. Certainly going into, I guess, what you might call controversial waters today. Today on the show, I’m going to talk about God, about religion, about morality and choice, and about the state and how it all plays in together with these concepts that we carry so deeply in our society. Those of you who were tuned in last week on the show may have heard me talking about faith funding basically within the education context and talked a little bit about evolution versus creation because it was an issue that came up during the provincial election. But I thought this week I might take the conversation a little bit past the basic, just the political points because I know this is a subject a lot of talk show hosts would never talk about really because it’s the kind of thing you don’t talk about. Remember, you don’t talk about sex, politics, or religion. That’s what you’re kind of told never to discuss around the dinner table because of course those are possibly the three most subjective areas in people’s lives. And that’s when you have all sorts of potential for discourse and disagreement, of course.

So first part of the show, I want to concentrate on God, religion, and faith. Is it really all about nothing? And you’ll know what I mean by that question in a moment.

But let me first set the stage here. We may have a so-called separation of state and religion, but I think religion plays a big role in politics and in how people vote. For example, the economist, and this is about a year ago, last October, October 14th actually, wrote that religion is creeping into Canada as normally strictly secular politics. Mr. Harper has never made a secret of his religious leanings.

He is an evangelical Christian, but has kept his own spiritual side largely under wraps apart from ending his speeches with a fervent God bless Canada. And in the 2001 census, 75% of Canadians identified themselves as either Catholic, Protestant, or just Christian. Though only about 25% of them go to church every Sunday.

Estimates on the number of evangelicals range around 10 to 12% of the population. Again, another article, same time last year, same month, October 30th, 2006 from Time Magazine. Very interesting, called America by the numbers, what we believe, and suggests that 9 out of 10 Americans think that there’s something bigger out there.

77% of the US population falls into the three religious groups, Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, and Catholics, which is very similar to Canada’s 75%. So it’s almost the same. So we can sort of extrapolate that these things go right across the continent.

Now this is interesting, I thought. I wouldn’t have used these classifications myself, but this is from the same Time Magazine article. And they say that they basically classified God into four different types of gods that people believe in. 31% believe in an authoritarian God who is deeply involved in daily life and world events.

God is angry at sin and can punish the unfaithful or the ungodly. 53% of African Americans share this view as do 56% of people who strongly believe that God is a he and not a she. 23% believe in a benevolent God who is deeply involved in daily life and world events, but is mainly a positive force, reluctant to punish. People older than 30 are the least likely to hold this conception of God just 13% of them do. 16% believe in a critical God who does not really interact with the world but is unhappy with its current state and will exact divine justice. 21% of the people in the eastern US hold this view while just 14% of Westerners do.

I don’t know what significance it can tie to that, but that’s the stats they come up with. 24% believe in a distant God who does not interact with the world and is not angry. God is more of a cosmic force that sets the laws of nature in motion.

37% of those with household incomes over $100,000 a year take this view and 42% of the Jewish community view God in this way, according to these stats. Then they asked a bunch of interesting questions and broken down again into these four groups. Basically you have the authoritarian, benevolent, critical and distant God, which all happened to basically start with A, B, C and D. They postulated some issues. For example, abortion is always wrong. 23% of the authoritarian God believers agreed with that. 17% benevolent, 5% critical and 1.5% distant, which I was very surprised. In fact, I thought those figures would be much higher. They’re very low, even among Christians. And yet you keep hearing about the Christian right being the supporter of abortion laws, although they probably are big enough numbers. Government should allow prayer in school, just about everybody. Majorities agreed right across the board, 91, 79, 69, 47. Government should increase military spending, 63 and 55% for the A’s and B’s and 46 and 40% for the C’s and D’s. So not very much there. Government should protect the environment better, very high numbers right across the board, 76, 81, 89, 87.

Government should distribute wealth more evenly. 57, 53, 59 and 63%. In fact, it goes up when you get down to the distant God believers. The war in Iraq is justified. Big changes here from the authoritarian God believers who say 63% agree and the distant God believers are down at 29%. And those who trust President Bush a lot, 32% for the authoritarians, 23% benevolent, 12% critical and 9% distant.

So it really drops dramatically. In a general sense, 66% said I have no doubt that God exists. 14% said they believe in a higher power or cosmic force. 11% said I believe in God but with some doubts. And 5% said I don’t believe in anything beyond the physical world. So that’s sort of a backdrop of the statistics of a very broad overview of North American. I know all kinds of questions they actually asked.

What’s really interesting is that I could possibly have fit myself into a lot of the categories depending upon, of course, definition. So nevertheless, given these stats, I imagine that what I’m going to have to say on the show today might be a little upsetting to a majority of my listeners. I apologize but the opinions expressed here are my own. I’m not trying to start a religion. I’m not trying to convert anyone to anything or from anything. I should just let you know I was raised as a Roman Catholic. I was indoctrinated in the Roman Catholic faith. I was actually an altar boy right here in London at St. Mary’s Church.

And that was when services were still done in Latin by the way. You know, Dominus vobiscum, et cum spiritu tuo if you ever knew that when you went to church. And I was even a member of the church choir and I got to tell you I had pleasant memories of most of the whole experiences.

But today I only attend church or religious gatherings on special occasions like weddings and funerals or memorials and things of that nature. But despite this I have no particular problem with using the word God in a generic sort of way. If somebody says God bless you, I take it as a respectful and friendly social greeting. And I think atheists and believers alike say things like, thank God it’s Friday. You don’t have to be a believer to say things of that nature. But whatever else one may or may not believe about God, at the very least if for no other reason than because of its wide and prevalent usage, the term God is a concept. However one may interpret it. I think the meaningful question is whether one’s concept of a God is more or less real or unreal.

And beyond that what purpose the use of the word serves in a person’s life. So before I give my own perspective of God and religion, there’s a couple of ideas that I thought I should address first and foremost. And I think the first one is the interpretation of God as the Creator. Now this gets of course back to the creation versus evolution issue, but that’s not where I’m going. Because the idea of God as the Creator is someone who created existence out of nothingness. In other words, created existence out of non-existence.

And I have a problem with this interpretation. Now last week I briefly touched upon the evolution and creationism debate within the context of just faith-based funding. But personally I don’t see the debate being between evolution and creationism.

I don’t think that’s relevant in the least. It’s not either or. I think the two ideas are mutually exclusive of each other and even if evolution didn’t exist, the argument for creationism, that is, and by this I mean, to create something out of nothing, which in this case means non-existence, is not even imaginable let alone possible. All creative acts must destroy whatever existed before. You can create something out of something else, but the concept of creation from non-existence is a contradiction to me of oxymoronic proportions.

You can’t even talk about it. To believe in creation, as I’ve contextualized it here, you have to first believe in non-existence, which is a non-concept to me. It’s impressive what nothing can do to a man, says Adam Baldwin in our show’s Firefly Opener today. A belief in nothing, which means non-existence, can actually lead to literal interpretations of God and of religious parables and doctrines.

And I think that’s where a danger can originate. Believers often say that atheists believe in nothing, when in fact I think it’s a belief in nothing here being defined as non-existence, not no values. That is a necessary prerequisite to any concept of divine creation. So to say that God existed before creation just still means that something existed and only pushes the argument for creationism one step back. It resolves nothing.

Pardon the pun. So, if you can accept that too, why not simply accept the fact that existence exists? There’s a saying that says, there ain’t no such thing as nothing, honey, because if there was, wouldn’t that be something?

I don’t know who that was attributed to, but it speaks to the fact that there is no such thing as nothing in terms of existence. Even humorously, I remember there’s a Seinfeld episode. You ever see the one where George and Jerry are sitting at the table and they’re writers for this TV show and George says to Seinfeld, he says, let’s do a show about nothing. We gotta do a show about nothing and Seinfeld’s looking at him and he goes, about nothing, what do you mean, about nothing? He says, yeah, let’s do a show about nothing.

And they discuss it for a while and Jerry goes, I think you’ve got something there. And back again, the double negative gives you a positive. So that’s metaphysics and epistemology as humor.

Now, nothingness can only apply to identity of something that previously existed in the form defined, not to existence itself. You can say, how many bananas do you have? You don’t have any, there are none. That’s sort of a nothingness, but you already have a fixed thing to be talking about.

And it has to apply to identity. People talk about nothing or nonexistence as if it were just another form of something, because it’s the only way you can talk about it. So to me it’s not a debate about creationism versus evolution, but between mysticism and reason. To argue that creation exists requires first a convincing argument, not only that nonexistence can exist, and even saying it is a contradiction in terms, but that from nonexistence, existence can come into being. And even that’s a contradiction, because being is existence. That’s what we mean by the supreme being. So, existence exists. That was actually an axiom that Ayn Rand postulated, and science is tending to prove it out.

This is axiomatic, meaning you can’t prove it one way or the other. There’s no first cause, let alone an intelligent design. And you can’t say that existence came into being at some given point in time, because the concept of time is a measurement of distance, and it’s relative, and it exists inside the universe. It’s not like you could say, time was going by, and then the universe came into existence. That’s not even what the concept of time is. Past and future are really theoretical concepts. Only the present exists. The past is what we call determined, which I’ll be getting into a little later today. The future is the undetermined. Both are theoretical in the metaphysical sense. They don’t really exist now. Only the present exists all the time.

There’s that saying, time is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. That’s where you are. You’re at a fixed point in time. And as we learn about time, we find that time is not what we think it is. It’s about space-time is actually the correct term.

It refers to a curvature and a space-time continuum, which I’m not going to get into today. But symbolically, and this is where I can go with the concept, God is the Supreme Being. God did not precede the Supreme Being or existence, because by definition, God is the Supreme Being, and so there you have it. It’s almost a personification of the concept of existence. But speaking of nothing and the concept of nothing and zero, this was not a subtlety to earlier civilizations. I even went and did some research on where zero came from and the concepts of zero. And the symbol actually originated, first of all, zero is a symbol that can indicate both a number or an absence of a number. And it first came into use in the Arabic world in the ninth century, according to my sources.

I know there’s been some debate about that. But prior to that time, numerals only contained nine symbols, and if you had a number like 203, the space for the zero was left blank or indicated with a dash. But the zero has many functions, and it has expanded the field of mathematics and made it possible for us to understand the universe in better ways. Of course, addition or subtraction of a zero leaves a number as it was, the previous number. If you multiply something by zero, you get zero. Now, this is important. It is impossible to divide anything by zero. And that’s because there ain’t no such thing as nothing. Remember that.

What would it be? How many zeros go into a one? Any number. And that’s why we were taught it was either undefinable or infinite.

It could be an infinite number. But in geometry, zeros are used to denote a point of origin from the distances that they’re measured, and or the starting point of positive and negative numbers in math. If you’re talking about a thermometer, zero is how many degrees are measured. If you say it’s temperature zero outside, you’re not saying there’s no temperature.

You’re actually giving a measurement of what the temperature is. So zero in this case does not refer to nothing or non-existence, but to a starting point. And when we say the temperature is zero, of course, that’s just a measurement. But when zero is a value, then it represents an absence of some given identity and quantity. I have zero money in the bank, which is something a lot of us can relate to. But it doesn’t mean your bank, your money, or you do not exist.

It means you do not have a quantity of something you’ve already defined. Now, zero is the smallest number there is, but what’s the biggest number? And no, it’s not a googol. I first learned about a googol in grade school, and I thought it was brilliant when the Google search engine named themselves after that number.

I think it’s something like a one with a million zeros behind it or something, but I’m not even sure about that. But it’s a very large number. But I remember when my grandson was just learning to count and he was playing with electronic calculators, and he asked me one day, he says, Grandpa, what’s the biggest number there is? And when I explained to him that there is no such number, that one can always be added to any number, no matter how big it is, I could tell by the look on his face and the understanding and this astonishment and amazement that for the first time in his life he had glimpsed infinity. Even though he wasn’t even aware of what the word or what the concept was. And that’s why we have to look to mathematics to discover really that we live in a universe that has no beginning and no end, and even though each form in the universe is always changing and does have a beginning and an end.

So here’s my question for you. If you don’t believe in creation, is it possible to believe in a literal God who we call the Creator? Since I personally don’t believe that there was actually an act of creation in terms of non-existence to existence, and I think scientists agreeing, certainly Stephen Hawking is thinking that way, so what role can such a God possibly have? And speaking of beginnings, there’s also a quote in the Bible, I think it’s from Mark or John, I’m not sure, but it goes something like, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

Now symbolically to me that always marked the beginning of consciousness, not of existence, which is another axiomatic concept, because the words we use and language that we use we use to think, not just to communicate, and when we became sentient and could think, that’s when we became something very different from the animals and nature around us. So, we can take a quick break here and when we come back, we’ll continue on with a little bit different aspect of this, not strictly on God, but switching a little bit to the religious aspect. We’re back right after this.

Clip (Serenity)

Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?

River: It’s like seeing your Bible.

Book: I, what?

River: Bible’s broken, contradictions, false logistics, doesn’t make sense.

Book: No, no, you can’t…

River: It’s a great non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphorical parallels already there. Eleven. Important number, prime number. One goes into the house eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah’s ark is a problem.

Book: Really?

River: We’ll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon, only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat.

Book: Give me that. River, you don’t fix the Bible.

River: It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.

Book: It’s not about making sense. It’s about believing in something and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.

Clip (The Colbert Report)

Stephen Colbert: So, as a conservative, you might be pleased to know that marriage and religion are two of the… They’re two of the top two. In fact, they’re all of the top two. They make people happy?

Arthur Brooks: Absolutely. Marriage is one of the best investments you can make in happiness.

Stephen Colbert: Well, I am delighted. Yeah. So your book is crap.

Arthur Brooks: Therefore?

Stephen Colbert: Therefore, you’re right. Okay. So marriage makes me happy, that’s true.

Arthur Brooks: Yes.

Stephen Colbert: And God makes me happy, that’s true.

Arthur Brooks: Well, I didn’t say that. I said religion.

Stephen Colbert: Do you have a book about what makes people angry?

Arthur Brooks: No, but I think I’m working on it.

Stephen Colbert: Are you working on it right now?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, you’re working on it all right.

Bob Metz: Welcome back to the show. This is just right with Bob Metz. And you’re listening to CHRW, 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now till noon. Well, here’s a big question. So, do you really believe in God? And if you do, what type of God might you believe in? It’s funny.

You’d better believe in God, even if it makes you miserable. Did you know? And I’m reading from the CHRW volunteer guide that I was given when I started here. And it says, quote, there still exists in law in the Canada Criminal Code, section 296, which provides for a penalty of no more than two years imprisonment for the utterance of blasphemous libel statements that are derogatory remarks about God. And this law excludes any remark made in good faith as an opinion on a religious subject, providing it was made in decent language, end quote.

So, it’s interesting that a law like that is even still on Canada’s books today, and it speaks to the history of this country and its origins in many religious roots, which you cannot avoid. And I think that’s almost the conclusion I would arrive at at the end of the show. But there are so many concepts of God beyond the ones I discussed in the first quarter of the show there.

I was looking at my universal world reference encyclopedia. It says, all theologians and philosophers are agreed that we can have no adequate knowledge or conception of God, it says. And then it refers to the typical three methods that arrive at some idea of a supreme being, which were negation, eminence and causality.

Some people call that the argument from design. But what’s significant is that they’re due to a philosopher of the Neoplatonic school called Dionysius the Areopagite. And that’s just very interesting that it is from the Platonic school, which is for those of you who understand the difference between Plato and Aristotle. Basically, Plato said there was a supernatural, and Aristotle said, no, it doesn’t matter what you think.

Reality is here and reality is what exists. But of course, a lot of people have many ideas of God. You hear people referring to God the Father. I’ve heard people tell me that God is love.

I’ve heard people tell me God is power. God is infinity, has no beginning, no end, which would be consistent with the supreme being concept in a metaphorical sense. God is perfection, God is beauty, God is unknowable. God is the highest moral order. God is everything.

I’ve actually heard people argue these things. But if God means any or all of these things, then I have to ask, why are you using the word God to begin with? Why not just say love instead of God if that’s what you mean by it? Why not just say beauty? Or use the word that to you God represents? Why do we use that word? I think in a large way it’s a personification, an easy way to talk about things. If you think about it, God is a personification of good. God equals good without the O, and evil equals devil without the D. That old story, it’s just a personification of good and evil. And of course, I think a lot of people view God as sort of almost a santa god, like a santa clause for adults.

Who knows when you’ve been naughty and nice and who will deprive you of his love should you be the former? So I guess the question is, is the God that one believes in a symbolic God or a literal God? And the way I look at it is that a literal God is the unreal God. Only a symbolic God could be a real God, and that God is an abstract concept, not a metaphysical existent in the way some people think. So I personally do not believe in deities in the sense of a pre-existent existent.

It’s even a contradiction to say it. But I have less of a problem with the God concept than people who are called atheists in the hardcore sense of the word, depending on its interpretation. Depending on whether you’re being symbolic or if you’re being literal. And of course a deity I think naturally implies the latter, the literalness of it. For me the best definition of God is a supreme being.

It’s the only definition to me that’s metaphorically consistent with existence in reality. The supreme being, I mean, of everything, the existence of everything, the being of all, which explains how God can be everywhere at all times. And I think that religion was often a way to convey complex concepts to earlier civilizations who didn’t have means of recording their knowledge.

Throughout generations that we have today. But when we say that God is axiomatic and as is the concepts existence and consciousness and identity, we’re saying it cannot be proven or disproven. Which means you require the concept itself to be valid.

It’s sort of self-evident and it’s true without proof. For example, you couldn’t say existence doesn’t exist or you couldn’t make that argument because then your argument wouldn’t exist. You couldn’t say consciousness doesn’t exist. You couldn’t make that argument because you need your consciousness to make the argument.

And so in refuting it, in trying to refute it, you’re demonstrating the opposite. You cannot do that and that’s why they’re considered axiomatic concepts. And in many ways I think God is simply the personification of these axioms. Some people use the word the same way other people might say mother nature. Mother nature is a personification of the forces of nature and the natural environment.

And although we may say mother nature will provide, the truth of the matter is that human knowledge of nature and production are what actually provide for people. Now in that clip we had at the last break, you heard from the Colbert Report, he had a guest on who was talking about what makes people happy. And religion and family, marriage, we’re at the top of the list for a lot of good reasons. But then he made a distinction between the belief in God and religion which got a little spark going there. But I’ve heard it argued many times, a lot of people are religious and don’t have a strong belief in God and of course there are many religions that have no deities.

And let us not forget that fact. But psychologically I’ve heard it argued that if you believe in a literal God in the sense of one that punishes and rewards you, that that could make you very depressed and feel out of control of your life. Because you’re not as aware that your own actions are responsible for yourself. You start blaming God if something bad happens to you, it’s because God doesn’t like you, if something good happens to you, it’s because God is rewarding you. When in fact the things that happen to you are largely in your control but not all. And it doesn’t mean that someone hates or loves you in that sense.

And I think that’s partially why there is a lower happiness quotient. On a more fundamental level, and this can’t be denied, I don’t think, is that there is this issue of knowledge versus ignorance, and it’s not surprising that people will always say God is unknowable, because generally God, and I don’t mean ignorance in a mean sense of the word, I mean ignorance in terms of lack of knowledge, we don’t know something, so we ascribe it to God or a God, in days gone by, there was the God of thunder, or people didn’t know what caused thunder, so they created a God for it, they had the God of love, Venus, God of war, Mars, there were gods for almost every single phenomenon that could be defined, and as soon as the phenomenon was identified and understood, well guess what, the God vanished, and knowledge filled the void of ignorance. So, it’s not surprising that so often we find fundamentalist and literalist religion becoming almost a hater of knowledge, preferring instead to go the mysticism, ignorance, fear, and mindlessness, which they call bliss sometimes, route, all based on a lack of knowledge, or even a hatred of knowledge sometimes, and this is very significant to me, like even in the Bible, Adam is punished for eating from the tree of the fruit of knowledge, because that’s how morality begins, is when you basically discover knowledge, which I’ll be getting into a little bit later, but some people don’t want to know, they want to believe, and so anything to do with knowledge is immediately labeled evil, Satan supposedly destroys souls by means of temptation, and that word by the way, temptation, actually referred to thinking, and it’s interesting that we refer to Lucifer as the light, not the dark, isn’t that interesting?

And so on this level of symbolism, I think religion almost becomes a vehicle of darkness. In fact, the word Lucifer, I think, I looked in an encyclopedia, it says, it’s a name that has been erroneously applied to Satan by some early writers, but was carried over to modern usage. It resulted from a misunderstanding of Isaiah 14-12, where it applies to the king of Babylon, and in Luke 10-18, where Satan is referred to as lightning fallen from heaven, and of course Lucifer is referred to as the morning star. The Hebrew word Satan was originally used to signify the intellect of man, and later about the time of the Babylonian exile, it also came to mean enemy, or enemy of God, like Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian who conquered them, he was referred to as Satan.

However, the word generally meant man’s will or intellect, and interestingly the Greek word for temptation, peirasmos, literally translates as quote from evil, and so since the word was commonly used for evil is bal, spelled B-A-L, temptation then comes to mean independent thought, and of course independent thinking has always been the enemy of churches and religions, because they want followers and not leaders or thinkers in that sense. But there is another side of religion, I would almost call it the generic side of religion. The actual word religion is derived through Old French from the Latin religio, which means taboo or restraint, and it is also akin to the Latin word religare, to hold back or to bind fast. In other words, religion per se, or in the generic sense, is about self-restraint. The ability to restrain our natural impulses is really what distinguishes a human being from the rest of nature, animals can’t do it. And Isabel Paterson, who wrote God of the Machine, got into this in a big way, just talking about man’s ability to restrain himself is what just makes us totally different from the rest of nature. We can actually think in terms of time.

We can restrain our spending today and our gratification today by investing in abstract things like money and savings and capital to make our tomorrows better. Animals cannot do that. And of course when a person is said to exercise religiously or diet religiously or do something religiously, we know that that person has placed whatever they’re doing, their exercise or diet, in a very disciplined order of priority and repeats their practice quite regularly and with purpose, and hence they’re religious. I’m religious about a lot of things. I religiously practice my philosophy of freedom, I like to think.

But regrettably, people who are not seen as being religious tend to be the target of some faith-based religions and faith-based people. I don’t like the word atheism. I think it’s the N-word. It’s just like the N-word if you apply it to racism or the S-word if you apply it to labor, which is scab if you’re not sure, or the D-word if you apply it to the environment or Holocaust issue, which is denier. In fact, it’s almost literally what it is. For me, atheism is a non-word. It describes what someone is not.

I touched upon that briefly last week. And it’s only a word necessitated by the fact that so many faith-based believers exist in the world. I don’t believe in unicorns, for example, but we don’t need a word to describe non-believers in unicorns or in Martians or whatever other abstract fantasy should cross our minds from time to time. I believe in something. Belief does not make something so. I know there’s a lot of people who don’t believe that, pardon the pun. But what is real, I think, exists independently of one’s belief, whether your beliefs are accurate or not. And there are sort of three kinds of belief. One, belief with physical evidence, which is reason, or two, belief without physical evidence, which would be based on faith, or three, belief in actual opposition to, or denial of known physical evidence to the contrary. And those people would be called the members of the Flat Earth Society or something like that, where you actually know something to be true, but you refuse to believe it. Which brings me to an interesting point at this point. The power of belief is unmistakable.

You can’t set it aside. And I’ve had that demonstrated for me many times what you believe as a human being is going to affect you greatly, even if it is unreal. And if you need an example of that, picture yourself or another person in a room with four doors, and he has to figure out how to get out, but he doesn’t believe the doors are real. He doesn’t believe they’re there.

That’s his belief, even in contrary to the facts that the doors are there. Where does that leave him? He’s got no choices. He’s got no options, he’s got no freedom, he’s trapped by his unreality, by his refusal to believe that the doors are there.

And as long as he keeps believing that, he’ll starve himself in that room. And so you actually see that principle enacted in many, sometimes tragic situations. But believing in something, I don’t think belief is exactly the same as faith. Belief can be based on faith or it can be based on reason, even though that might be not as frequently. But nevertheless, I think that when people start departing too far from reality and from the actual laws of nature, pardon the pun, but mother nature will make her consequences felt upon us. And whether you believe that’s mother nature, nature or God, I think that’s something we cannot avoid. And now I’m just going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll be talking about free will and morality and choice right after this.

Clip (Unknown)

Speaker 1: Do you believe in faith?

Speaker 2: The idea that the universe is a vast pre-programmed machine does have a certain appeal. Not for me. I’ve always believed a man makes his own faith, that life is made up of a series of choices.

Clip (TVO’s The Agenda)

Steve Paikin: If, and I appreciate the fact that you have a problem with this, but if people see religion as the source of their morality, and let’s assume for a second that it’s the good part, the stuff we can all agree on, don’t kill, don’t envy, honor parents and so on, where do atheists find their moral code from?

Richard Dawkins: I have denied to you that religious people get their morals from religion. Religious people get their morals from the same place atheists get. Now it’s quite difficult answering where we all get our morals from, but whatever else it is, it isn’t religion. If you ask, where do we get our condemnation of slavery from? Well that’s certainly not from religion, it’s from somewhere else. Now if you press me to say where do we all get it from, I’m not going to answer where do atheists get it from, I’m going to answer where do we all get it from.

Steve Paikin: But can’t you humor me for that?

Richard Dawkins: No.

Steve Paikin: Why not?

Richard Dawkins: Because it’s the wrong way to put the question. We all get our morals from somewhere else, and I’m now going to try to answer where that is.

Steve Paikin: Where is it?

Richard Dawkins: I think it’s from a steadily shifting consensus of moral philosophy, of legal judgments, of parliamentary votes, of journalistic editorials, of dinner party conversations. There’s a whole zeitgeist which is steadily moving, and you can tell that it’s moving because the moral outlook of today is actually quite different from what it was 100 years ago and even more different from 200 years ago. There’s a steadily shifting moral zeitgeist which is fed by this complicated interplay of all the things that I just mentioned, judicial decisions and so on. And it is across all of society, different and different societies, but it tends to move on a broad front. And with hindsight you can pick out bits of the Bible or the Koran or whatever your holy book happens to be. With hindsight you can pick out bits of the Bible that fit with the moral consensus of the century in which you happen to live. But the consensus apparently evolves. It’s a move of the people. I think it moves. That’s right. And you can kid yourself that it has something to do with your holy book because if you search hard enough, you find verses of the holy book that agree with it. You have to ignore all the other verses of the holy book that most emphatically do not agree with it. You don’t therefore get it from the holy book. You get it from this moral consensus, this modern consensus, and modern shifts steadily. And it’s only with hindsight that you are able to graft it on to particular cherry-picked parts of your holy book.

Bob Metz: Welcome back. I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to Just Right on CHRW Radio 94.9 FM. That was author Richard Dawkins in discussion with Steve Paikin on TVO some months ago on when they had quite an interesting debate on the whole issue of religion in general and belief in God. Of course, Richard Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion and was being grilled by a number of people on that show.

It’s very interesting. When I was a kid being raised in Catholic school, I remember being taught in religion class that, quote, God is everywhere all the time. God knows everything that has happened and that will happen. So in fact, God already knows whether we’ll be good people or bad people even before we know that ourselves or before anyone else could possibly determine which of those things would come to pass. And yet despite that, we were taught in religion class. Each of us has a free will. And we were free to choose our destiny even though God already knows what our choices will be. I used to think this was again one of the great mysteries of religion, but as I grew older and looked into philosophy, I discovered that what I didn’t know then but do know now is that what our teacher was telling us in religious terms was about a greater philosophical debate, and that’s namely the debate between determinism and free will, which is very important to get out of the way before you can talk about morality because if you don’t have free will, you can’t talk about morality. And it’s also been an issue within the physics and science sphere as well. Of course, Albert Einstein was known for quoting that God does not play dice. For him, everything was a fixed issue.

And then of course, he always used the term God in a very figurative and symbolic sense. So I could ask, was it inevitable that you’d be hearing what I’m saying now and was it inevitable that you were listening to the station right now to hear this, or did I actually choose to be here and did you actually choose to listen to this show? Believe it or not, there are two entirely opposing yet logical viewpoints to that very question.

And only one is really correct, or maybe you could say both are correct but in a different context. Some people believe that everything that happens is in fact determined, and this belief is called the doctrine of determinism. Other people believe that human beings have a free will, and that belief is called of course the doctrine of free will. And the question of free will versus determinism has very profound implications from everything from philosophy to science to religion to mathematics, and ultimately of course to personal behavior of people. Determinism as defined in some of the dictionaries I was looking at, it says a doctrine that every event is the inevitable result of antecedent conditions, and that in fact human beings do not have free will.

It’s in psychology, it’s the doctrine that personality and behavior are determined by physical, mental and environmental factors. And it implies that if you could know all the interacting elements, you could predict everyone’s behavior with precision, even to the point of what they think, because the electrons that are zooming around in your head that form your thoughts, if you could know what they were based on and what was driving them and what forces were running them, that would be determined, and therefore you could almost argue that really you don’t have a free will in that sense. Now of course on the other hand, free will is defined as the power of personal self-determination. The idea that one’s ability to choose between courses of action is not completely determined by circumstances. And of course in philosophy it’s the term used to describe a person’s ability to choose between alternatives and thought and action as opposed to determinism.

And it is based upon freedom from the necessity and coercion of antecedent physiological and psychological conditions and external restraints. So basically those are some dictionary definitions. In science, interesting I was looking at a book called The God Particle written by Leon Lederman. And he talks about assuming we know the mass of a ball, say. And you can measure its acceleration, its precise motion can be calculated by a formula that says F equals MA, which is force equals mass times acceleration.

Actually took that in school, I remember that way back then. But its path is determined, the ball is determined, it will describe a parabola. But there are many parabolas, a weakly batted ball barely reaches the pitcher. A powerful smash will cause the center fielder to race backwards.

What’s the difference? So Newton called such variables the starting or initial conditions. What is the initial speed? What’s the initial direction? It can start from straight up to almost horizontal where the ball falls quickly to the ground. In all cases the trajectory is determined by the speed and direction at the start of the motion. So you can see how that might pertain to creation concepts that something had to start everything.

But now comes a deeply philosophical point. Given a set of initial conditions for a certain number of objects and given a knowledge of the forces acting on these objects, their motions can be predicted forever. So Newton’s world was completely predictable and determined. So if everything in the world is made of atoms, suppose we know the initial motion of each of the billions and billions of atoms. Suppose we know the force on each atom and we had some mother of all computers that could grind out the future location of all these atoms. Where would they be at some future time?

And we could say that the outcome would be predictable. And among the billions of atoms would be a small subset of atoms called, for example, me, Bob Metz or the Pope or the dog or the cat. And these are atoms that float around in the universe. So if you look at it that way, everything is predicted and determined with free choice that’s merely an illusion created by a mind with self-interest. And that’s why Newtonian science was very deterministic. And the role of the creator, because of Newton, was reduced, you start to reduce philosophers to thinking about winding up the world spring and letting it operate. After that, the world would run on its own but follow all of those laws of motion. And his impact on philosophy and religion was as profound as its influence on physics.

Out of all of that key equation, F equals MA, so many ideas developed. And concepts of probability are known to actuarial experts today and they’re all deterministic. But does that apply to the human being? Do we have free will? And where does morality start? And do we have a choice?

And I would say yes we do. The fact that we live in a determined world, the fact that the past is determined, and the fact that anything we do and choose will also be determined once we’ve done it and acted upon it, does not mean we do not have a choice or free will, in fact, quite the opposite. I disagree a little bit, or maybe not totally disagree, but we go in a slightly different direction than Richard Dawkins did in that interview right at the beginning of this section where he talked about morals being formed by consensus and moral philosophy and parliaments and journalists and dinner parties. Yes, that’s how the message is spread, but what’s the real source of morality?

I don’t think you really address that. And I think, again here, we even have religious stories about it, and it comes back to the Garden of Eden and that kind of story where as soon as we have knowledge and choice, that’s when we have a free will. And that’s the moral, because you cannot choose between good and evil unless you can choose. Let’s face it, you’re locked in a cell, you can’t be very moral, and without knowledge you can’t know what’s right or wrong.

You don’t know whether that fire is hot, will it hurt you, will it harm you, will it be good for you, so you have to learn these things. And of course, a real morality in the world is one that’s based on a standard of life and on reality. I mean, if you wanted to have a moral system based on death, you could have that, but what would the end be? Let’s face it, people who had a moral system based on that wouldn’t be around very long, would they? Ayn Rand always argued that morality ends where a gun begins, mainly insisting that we are moral beings socially as long as we deal consensually with each other. And the minute someone uses force to get what they want from another person, that is an immoral act.

And it’s not just because you say so or out of context, there’s a whole set of metaphysical and epistemological rules that lead to that conclusion. So, as you can see, there are many issues involved with values and choice. Certainly theological virtues of the Catholic Church, which were always faith, hope and charity. And if you go back to the Greek philosophers, the cardinal virtues and principal virtues and morals then were considered justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude.

Those were the four big ones. And of course, I think as we move on, we will discover that the virtues of humanity have to do with freedom and with justice, and they are reality reason, self and consent. And when we come back right after this break, just a quick conclusion of where all this has led to in terms of politics.

Clip (The Fast Show – Sister Mary Immaculate)

Sister Mary Immaculate: Hello. I am Sister Mary Immaculate, but I was sitting on the plane reading my Bible. It’s a lovely little book, the Bible. He dies in the end, by the way. Probably spoiled it for all you Protestants.

Clip (TVO’s The Agenda)

Steve Paikin: Do you have a view as to who Jesus was?

Richard Dawkins: Well, if he existed, which he probably did, he was a Jewish teacher of which there were many. He was one of quite a lot of similar teachers around at the time. And he seemed to have gathered a following. He got his big break in history, I think, when two of them, one when St. Paul took him up. And the second one, 300 years later, when the emperor Constantine was converted. And that led to Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Bob Metz: That last comment, especially about Constantine, I thought was very significant, especially in relationship to politics and government in the past and in the present. There’s one thing I’ve learned from studying religion from a historical perspective. It’s that, and I know this might bother some people, but honestly, I think the history of religion is the history of politics. And that wherever you see religious beliefs, it’s not the other way around. Religious beliefs sort of were a consequence of political conditions of their time.

I was raised in Roman Catholic, in the Roman Catholic faith, and I was kind of surprised to learn when I went into my history studies that really the Roman Catholic Church that we know of today was formed not by a religious person, but by the Roman emperor, Constantine. In 325 AD, at the Council of Nicaea, one of the most meticulously recorded historical events of what we might call ancient times. I mean, you just don’t hear historians arguing about what went on there. And at that time, Constantine, going by memory here, called all the bishops of his empire together because they constantly were arguing and fighting with each other. These were apparently descendants and tribes of the disciples following Christ, who couldn’t get along with each other even for one generation after they split. But they got all the bishops together because Constantine wanted to make sure that they didn’t have all different gods and kept arguing among each other. So they basically had a vote and brought all the bishops together, and they were going to vote that they’re going to have a single god instead of many gods, and they also voted that Christ was going to be divine. The first vote apparently, there were two dissenters to the vote, and they were promptly beheaded on the floor.

And amazingly, wow, the second vote came out unanimous in favor that there is going to be a single god and that Christ is divine. The same guy that the Roman Empire had crucified just before. Interestingly enough, also in my readings, I find things like the image that we’re used to of seeing of Christ in pictures with the man with the beard and the long hair. My understanding from what I read is that that image originated from Constantine’s vision actually of the god Apollo at the time. And that was the image he perceived as being the Christ. You know, religious mythology is so representative of political patterns whenever you see even in a historical context. Even Christ on the Cross, I think, was a whole symbolic story of the collapse of Rome from its republic state to falling to the mob under a so-called democracy. So you can see how issues of that nature, it’s always been governments and religion hand in hand.

They go together. In fact, some of the problems we have today with some of the religions in the world is that they are state religions. And remember, the state is the use of force.

Governments are an agency of force. You can argue that such things are in any way really moral. You know, here we are, we live in a supposedly Judeo-Christian society, a society that was supposedly based on values that we see in the Ten Commandments, etc., etc. And yet as a society, we can’t even in our laws obey the Ten Commandments.

You know, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. Well, seems to me our social system that we have here is exactly based on the opposite of that. We believe in the redistribution of wealth, interestingly enough, even among the religious, who should not think that stealing is okay just because a democratic majority approves, but you have figures like 57%, 53%, 59%, and 63% who think that the government should distribute wealth.

And what they’re not thinking about is where that wealth came from, that someone had to earn it first before it could be distributed in any way. So basically, politics is very much, or sorry, religion is very much a part of politics. You know, certainly dictators and tyrannical regimes have always loved their connection with religion and the things that it could do for them, because it moved the masses, as Hitler was so fond of saying. Anyways, that’s all the time we have for this week in terms of this whole religious subject. Don’t know if that left you with much to think about. Is religion really all about nothing? Well, there ain’t no such thing. And if freedom of religion means anything, it means freedom from religion.

If you have that, then I think you’re okay, and it can mean nothing more or nothing less. So that’s it for this week. We’ll see you next week again when we continue our journey in the right direction. Until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right. See you then. Take care.

Clip (The Fast Show – Sister Mary Immaculate)

Sister Mary Immaculate: Hello, I’m Sister Mary Immaculate. Let me tell you a little story now. When I was a young girl, growing up in Ireland, I’m Irish, incidentally. There was a girl in my class called Bernadette, and I was jealous of Bernadette. And when we made our first holy communion, guess who had the best dress? Bernadette. Only one Catholic shouted it out, Bernadette, and I was jealous. And when we had to do a project, guess who came first? Bernadette.

This works better when the audience isn’t retarded. Bernadette and I was jealous. And there was a boy in the school called Patrick, and we were all mad for Patrick. He’s a great big tall boy, a bit like a brick outhouse.

And guess who he asked to the school dance? Bernadette. Bernadette and I was jealous.

And a couple of years ago, I hadn’t seen her for years, and I was over in Ireland, and I thought, I’ll see what she’s doing now. And Bernadette had put on so much weight, and she was over 400 pounds. And the funny thing happened. I was no longer jealous of Bernadette. It’s a lovely little story, isn’t it? Big fat cow she was. The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t he?