An Unexpected Discussion on the Virgin Birth | Richard Dawkins

Truth, as we know, is a tricky business. Do you think there are differences in the truth claims between different writers of fiction? Like, is Doki more profound than No? Well, I wouldn't call fiction truth claims anyway. I mean, he's a... Then on what grounds do we rank order the fiction in terms of quality? Like, Doski is a profound purveyor of fiction on the philosophical front—unbelievably deep and profound. There's something true about what he's writing about. It's nothing to do with the truth—the truth that science is concerned with. The truth of science is the truth that gets us to the Moon. I mean, this has nothing to do with whether one writer of fiction has a sort of insight into human nature. That goes without saying. I accept that.

Okay, so how do we deal with the notion that—on the purely factual side—how do we deal with the idea? Let's take the... No, you talked about clitoridectomy; let's talk about the oppression of women. Yes, we make a scientific case that that's inappropriate, or is it the case that we're making it on some other grounds? Like, I see in the Judeo-Christian tradition one of the earliest pronouncements is that both men and women carry the image of God—both. That sets a certain tone to everything that follows, and it is a remarkable proclamation given its radical age that both men and women carry the image of God and are to be treated as something with intrinsic value outside of the domain of power and politics.

It isn't obvious to me, having thought about this a lot, how we deal with that in the pure realm of fact because one of the facts is if I can oppress you, why the hell shouldn't I?

Yeah, my job is to keep things on track here. I think there are a number of questions which Professor Dawkins has asked quite directly that we still haven't really heard an answer for.

Okay, okay, and Professor Dawkins asking about the Virgin birth, you started talking about metaphor. You started talking about myth. I think anybody listening to this conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the Virgin birth won't work. Maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about. But I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you, do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, he means something like a biological fact. By the way, saying "I don't know" or saying "I'm not qualified to comment" is an answer to that question. But is that your answer—that you don't know?

I said earlier, and I would hold to this, is that there are elements of the text that I don't know how to—that I'm incapable of fully accounting for. I can't account for what the fundamental reality and significance of the notion of the Resurrection is. My knowledge just ends. Sure, but I know that whatever happened as a consequence of the origination and the promotion of the Christian story was powerful enough to bring Rome to its knees and demolish the Pagan Enterprise. So, there's some power in that story—that's remarkable.

Let's stick to the Virgin birth. Well, the Virgin birth results from a mistranslation of Isaiah. You know that. I'm like these sorts of questions; they're po—what would you say? They don't strike me as—they're not getting to the point.

Has a purpose. Well, and look, I understand that there's perfect reasons to debate this. I know that, and I know that your question is more than valid, but it's beside the issue as far as I'm concerned.

It's partly because, well, when we started this conversation, I said, for example, that it appears to be the case that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We see the world through a story, and so that's a remarkable thing.

That's a remarkable discovery, and it's emerged probably in the last 60 years in multiple disciplines because we have to prioritize our facts. We prioritize them according to a particular pattern, and there are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards life abundant. There are other patterns—the pattern of Cain, for example—that lead to absolute bloody devastation. I don't know exactly how to construe that sort of truth, but we talked about the oppression of women, for example. It's like, how do you make a case on purely factual grounds that women should be treated as equals? It's a moral question.

And I know that's...Exactly. I was dealing with a dual question, which is did Jesus have a Father? And a Heavenly Father, like almost all mythological heroes. So, he wasn't born of a virgin then?

So, you're saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin? I said, first of all, that I don't know how to mediate the fact-value dichotomy in that case. I said the same thing about the resurrection—it's not a value; it's a simple fact. I mean, did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That's a factual question. It's not a value question.

You must understand what you're being asked here—that even if you think that, say, the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events, Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth. That's the kind of truth he's interested in, and even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the gospel authors were getting at, that first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about.

So, I think Professor Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective. Maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong, but if you just take it for a moment, maybe this is how we find out that it is wrong.

Let's take a scientific approach. Ask the question: did this occur?

I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to undermine the validity of the entire—what would you say?—deep mythological enterprise.

We weren't doing that. Suppose we were asking out of interest. Suppose that we were all here devout Christians—maybe even Eastern Christians—and we thought this is interesting over dinner. Do you think it really happened? Like scientifically, would your answer just be, I don't know?

Yes. And you wouldn't consider it... I mean, it's not an inappropriate question to ask just on a point of interest, right? Did this really occur? And I think so often people are asking you that, and especially given the context of this conversation, we've heard everything that you're saying about metaphor and myth, but because the question is still being asked, did it really happen? You know that's what you're being asked, and the way—just so easily said yes. I wonder why you struggle to do that in so many other circumstances.

I think because I don't look at the situation the same. The way that Dr. Dawkins and I look at the situation are really quite different at many, many, many levels. You know, so even on the meme question, for example, you know, like I know the literature on the history of religious ideas. I see how these ideas have battled across millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that Dr. Dawkins is putting forward with regards to meme. I know that literature. Dr. Dawkins doesn't know that literature, and it's very difficult for me to communicate from within the confines of that literature because it's extensive and deep.

And we're dealing with things that we don't understand—the relationship between metaphoric truth and value predicated truth and factual truth. We don't understand that; it's a big problem. We cannot—there's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts. And that's a fact. And it's a fact that's been detailed out in great detail in the last 60 years by people from a variety of different disciplines.

We have to prioritize the facts. That's a value hierarchy. There may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts, but you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts. That's a big problem.

Okay, let's talk about that as perhaps a slight detour here because I think we do need to come back to this Christ Resurrection thing. But Professor Dawkins, would you say that underlying the scientific enterprise is a fundamentally unscientific assumption? You can make scientific investigations in the world, but in order to do so, you need to choose what to prioritize. You need to choose what to investigate. You also need to value the truth. You need to have a value and a motivation for doing it in the first place. Those kinds of things cannot be scientifically justified.

Does the scientific enterprise have an unscientific assumption at its base?

I suppose it does. I mean, I think that maybe just be Jordan and Richard, but by the way, I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact. And I think myth is kind of vaguely interesting, but it's not the be-all and end-all of my life. I think it's somewhat secondary to scientific fact—sort of facts that tell us how old the universe is, how old the world is, the history of life, the engineering achievements of Landing a spacecraft on a comet.

These are the things that science can do, and as I said, the predictions of quantum theory—to come back to that—but predictions of quantum theory which are verified to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth.

Now, that is, however difficult quantum theory is to understand; that is what you can get from quantum theory. Now, the mysteries of the Bible, if they are mysteries, aren't in the same league. I mean, they just don't cut it.

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See that?

That—well, okay, so let me respond to that. So, one of the things that I've tried to study is the preconditions for the scientific enterprise itself. You appeared to agree with Alex that there might be presumptions, axioms that need to be accepted—I don't want to put words in your mouth because I want to get this right—before the scientific enterprise can begin. So, I've tried to think those truths.

Let me lay out a couple of them. This is partly what I've done while trying to make the case, for example, that you're more of a Christian than you think you are. So, for example, I think that the scientific enterprise is motivated by the axiom presumption that truth tends towards a unity. I think that it's predicated on the notion that there is a logical order that's intrinsic to the cosmos, that that fundamental order is good, that it's intelligible to human beings, and that discovering that order and aligning ourselves with it makes for life more abundant.

I think that the scientific enterprise is also predicated on the idea that the truth will set you free, and I think all of those axioms are religious and derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition. If you don't believe that, you have to account for why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else in the entire history of humanity, for example, and why it's also under assault from, like, all quarters now, as that underlying metaphysic disappears.

You don't have—you haven't had to be concerned with the mythological substrate in your lifetime in some sense because it was intact, and so the universities could flourish, and you had your freedom—remarkable freedom—to pursue your scientific enterprise wherever you wanted, and people ed you for it.

Like that time is threatened and seriously so, and I think it's partly because these metaphysical assumptions have now become questionable. And that's part of the reason that I'm attending to them. It's not because I don't admire the accuracy of quantum prediction, for example, or celebrate what Musk is doing with his capability of sending rockets to Mars. It's like, more power to the technological enterprise, but you know what's happening in the universities? It's awful, and that's not a scientific problem; it's under...

Okay, I agree about that.

Okay.

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