Rabbi Sacks in conversation with Richard Dawkins

REThink - Debate with Rabbi Sacks and Richard Dawkins

Moderator: It's my pleasure to introduce the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, and the most famous modern-day exponent of the atheist perspective - writer, thinker, evolutionary biologist, and perhaps I could say patron saint of non-believers, Professor Richard Dawkins. Welcome to you both. Just before we start the conversation, a couple of practical things.

I'm delighted to see we've got... The people kind of wanted to get in, we've got a few more people in. You can live tweet. We'll try and take questions for those who are watching the live stream at home. The hashtag is BBC Rethink. And we'll have time for questions at the end, so make sure they're good ones. I'm sure they will be.

Well, to start with, I mean, in a way, it starts with two books, and I've brought them here for a bit of shameless publicity. Richard Dawkins' “The God Delusion,”and your book, Chief Rabbi, “The Great Partnership, God, Science and the Search for Meaning.” And I suppose, in a way, I'd start with you, because your book is the second one, and it's a sort of response to The God Delusion.

Why did you feel the need to write a book arguing that science and God are compatible? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, can I begin, first of all, by saying what a privilege it is to be here, and what a privilege it is to be here with Professor Richard Dawkins, who is, first of all, one of the great science writers of our time. I love reading everything he's written, with one minor exception... from The Selfish Gene to The Magic of Reality. And secondly, because Jews love an argument, and there's no-one better to argue with than Richard Dawkins.

In fact, Richard, you argue with rabbis so well, I'm surprised you aren't Jewish yourself. So it's a privilege. I think where I start and where I've argued in The great partnership is that Judaism really is a religion that takes its stand alongside Richard Dawkins.

We value the integrity of science. We value an evidence-based approach to natural phenomena. We make a blessing overseeing distinguished scientists.

Maimonides says, if you want to come to the love and fear of God, study science. And I think we also try and do science. I think, as I mentioned to Richard before, we are one-fifth of a percent of the population of the world.

There are only 13 million Jews in the world. I know we make a lot of noise, but there are actually very few of us. But we have won 20% of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 26% in Physics, 27% in Medicine and 41% in Economics.

So we enjoy science and we do it. Where I think I disagree with Richard is that Richard sees religion and science inevitably in conflict. And I see them as two different sorts of things altogether.

Science can tell us about the origin of life. Religion tells us about the purpose of life. Science explains the world that is. Religion summons us to the world that ought to be. But I do nonetheless value science because, as Richard says, always follow the evidence. 

And I think there was a lovely story on this just six days ago. You know, when in 2000 the genome was decoded, it was discovered that only 2% of the genome actually codes for proteins. And as you know, the other 98% was dismissed as junk, junk DNA. Last week, six days ago, the result of 1,600 experiments by 450 scientists in 32 different institutions discovered that actually that 98% that people thought was junk isn't junk at all.

It's absolutely essential for the maintenance of life. Now, for those people who think that 98% of religion is junk, I hope they might someday rethink that one as well. 

Moderator: Thank you.

The Chief Rabbi is being very polite, but one of the things he did say in that book was that you felt a need to write a riposte to a kind of hardline atheism that you felt was quite aggressive. And I think that was a direct reference to “The God Delusion.” Professor Dawkins, looking back, are things as they were when you wrote it? And what do you make of the accusation that the tone of the book was jeering, that you sort of set up a confrontation with faith? 

Professor Richard Dawkins: It's a gentle book. It's not a confrontational book at all. It's widely reputed to be a confrontational book, but if you actually read it and read it now rather than sort of read it through the lens of the various reviews and things that have said it's a confrontational book, you'll find that it has a very reasonable tone, a very quiet tone. Those places which appear to be confrontational are actually humorous.

I mean, there's the beginning of Chapter 2, which says the God of the Old Testament is the most unpleasant character in all fiction. I mean, that's a joke. And so is the next bit, which says He's infanticidal, genocidal, and so on.

My wife Lala and I, when we were going around the country, going around America reading bits aloud, we would use that passage in order to break the ice and get a laugh at the beginning of the thing. 

But I wanted to come back to… what was the other thing you asked me? Is it inevitable there's confrontation? 

Moderator: Yes, and I suppose given that it's been a couple of years since you wrote the book and there's been so much discussion since about the idea of atheism, about religion and science having perhaps an incompatibility, is what concerned you enough to write the book then still of concern now? How has the situation changed? 

Richard: No, I think it's still there. And I think that what the Chief Rabbi said about science answering the ‘how’ questions and religion answering the ‘why’ questions, that's a very good aspiration. If there was such a thing as a ‘why question,’ then I guess that would be right. But what I would deny is that ‘why’ questions are legitimate questions at all. I mean, ‘why’ questions are fully legitimate where you're talking about human motivation.

You ask the question, why did I come to Manchester today? And you'll get an answer. And that's a perfectly sensible question. But if you ask why is there a universe? or why are there mountains? In the sense of purpose, these are not legitimate questions at all.

There's no reason to suppose that ‘why’ questions have any legitimacy, any right to be asked or answered. 

Moderator: Chief Rabbi?

Rabbi Sacks: That is one of the great dividing lines, not just now between Richard and myself, but really throughout history. There are those people who see the universe as fundamentally, in a global sense, meaning less. And ultimately, Greek civilisation came to that conclusion and gave us that profound art form that we know as tragedy. At the end of the day, our feeling that there is a purpose in life, that there is meaning, that we can, as it were, shape our own redemption, is always hubris, which is punished by nemesis. And that is the essence of Greek tragedy. 

Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope. Because it does believe that life has a purpose.

Now, why is it that there are these differences? I want to give you an example, since we're in the holy city of Manchester, from football, if I may. You can get... Imagine a visitor, the anthropologist from Mars, who comes along and comes to Manchester and sees City and United and sees everyone, absolutely everywhere - as Bill Shankly said, much more important than life and death. And wants to know, why are you getting so excited about 22 people chasing this spherical object round a field? In order to explain, not the how of football, what are the rules, how do you win, but why people take it so passionately. You've got to step outside of the system. Look at the history of human conflict and the role of games as a substitute conflict.

In other words, the meaning of a system lies outside the system, right? Now, if you are a polytheist or you're a Greek philosopher or you're Richard Dawkins, you don't believe there is anything outside the system. There is nothing outside the universe, so there is no why. 

Whereas we believe that there is a God who transcends the universe, therefore there is a why.

Ultimately, is the universe meaningful or meaningless? This is probably going to divide Richard and myself. 

Richard: The parable of football, of course, works for human affairs, but it is human affairs. That's what I meant when I said that meaning in the sense of purpose works for human affairs.

But as you've said, Chief Rabbi, the whole question is, does it work for non-human affairs? Does it work for the universe? Actually, I mean, it sort of works for animals and plants because the Darwinian rationale gives a kind of meaning to purpose. The purpose of a bird's wing is it flies and that keeps the bird alive, which passes the bird's genes on. So that's another kind of metaphorical usage of the word purpose.

But ultimate purpose, it's no good just giving us parables about football. You have to actually give a reason to suppose that there is some kind of purpose in the physical universe. And I've never seen any such reason.

So I think the onus is on you to provide a reason why we should think that. 

Rabbi Sacks: The reason why we should think it is when you step back and say, now, why does the universe exist? Now, that's not a scientific question, I agree with you. It's absolutely not.

But why would an infinite Creator who, by definition, lacks nothing, create a universe? And the short answer that Judaism gives, the Abrahamic monotheisms give, is that God created the universe out of love. Love seeks to create otherness. And therefore the simplest answer I would give is that God created the universe in love and forgiveness, asking us to love and forgive others.

Moderator: Let's look at evidence. 

Richard: Yes, because when you say, why would God do it? That, of course, presupposes God's there in the first place. And that's the whole issue. So it's not good enough to say, why would God do it and do it out of love? If you want to do that, then I would start to get a bit curious about why he waited 14 billion years before humans came on the scene. 

Rabbi Sacks: Because that's how long it took, Richard. 

Richard: Well, fair enough.

Rabbi Sacks: I know, you and I are impatient. God is much more patient than we are. 

Richard: The more serious point is that you presuppose that there is such a thing as God, and that's the whole argument. That's what we're talking about. 

Rabbi Sacks: Totally, absolutely. But given the fact that we are divided between your taking of the view, there is no transcendent meaning, and I'm convinced that there is. Within that, I think we can agree that if you want to understand the physical world, do it by the methodology of science. And that's where we're on the same wavelength. 

Moderator: Can we talk about the methodology of science? Because it's a big part of your book, the idea of evidence and questioning.

And one of the things you say is that religious people are often very quick to jump on scientific evidence to prove something that was previously only in scriptural text, but then they want an opt-out when there isn't any proof. Maybe if you just explain a bit about your fundamental concern about how evidence is used by religious thinkers. 

Richard: Well, on the one hand, religious thinkers will say, we don't need evidence, we do it by faith. On the other hand, if there's the slightest sniff of a possibility of evidence, then, as you say, they will jump on it. I'm not quite sure what the Chief Rabbi's motive was in bringing up this fascinating new DNA work. I mean, I do think it is fascinating.

I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on it because they think that's awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary, of course. It's exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, is to find usefulness in the living world.

By the way, it is a very fascinating fact that the Chief Rabbi… the evidence he's given that whereas we thought that only a minority of the genome was doing something, namely that minority which actually codes for protein. And now we find that actually the majority of it is doing something. What it's doing is calling into action the protein-coding genes. So you can think of the protein-coding genes as being the sort of toolbox of subroutines which is pretty much common to all mammals. I mean, all mice and men have the same number, roughly speaking, of protein-coding genes, and that's always been a bit of a blow to the self-esteem of humanity.

But what the point is, that that was just the subroutines that are called into being. The programme that's calling them into action is the rest, which had previously been written off as junk. This is a fascinating start.

Moderator: You mentioned creationists, though. Is the problem essentially with creationists for you, the fundamental interpretation, the literal interpretation? The Chief Rabbi has written much about the fact that it's wrong to always take things literally, and is that really where your worry is? It's not with the more symbolic interpreters of faith? 

Richard: No, I would say I have a bigger worry with literalism, and that is a big problem. We don't have it so much in this country, but in America it's a very serious problem. And so serious theologians like the Chief Rabbi, who don't take it literally are, as it were, less of a problem. But as a matter of fact, I have been quite surprised at... I mean, people have always been tackling me for saying, why do you go for the easy target? Why do you go for the low-hanging fruit, the creationist idiots? So you ought to be tackling serious theologians. Well, I've been talking to some serious theologians, and I'm quite surprised how close to literalists some of them are.

I mean, some of them... I've met bishops who actually believe Jesus turned water into wine and that kind of thing. So I'm not sure there's that much difference between the low-hanging fruit and... I mean, what about the burning bush and parting of the Red Sea and things? Is that symbolic or is that literal? 

Rabbi Sacks: Red Sea. 

Richard: Parting of the Red Sea, yes.

Rabbi Sacks: Totally literal. 

Richard: There we are. 

Rabbi Sacks: The National Maritime Institute in America in September 2010 published, and you can still find it on the Web, a computer simulation of the Reed Sea, a particular point in the bitter lakes in the Nile Delta, at which a 63-mile-an-hour east wind would part the waters... 

Richard: How about Adam and Eve? 

Rabbi Sacks: Hang on, hang on, hang on.

Now, the fact that you can give a simple scientific explanation for it is to miss the point of the story in time. 

Moderator: But doesn't it matter to science? 

Rabbi Sacks: Hang on, hang on, hang on. I just want to say what kind of narrative we're talking about, what kind of fact we're talking about.

And here it is. We have a picture of the weakest of the weak, a group of escaping slaves, and a group of the strongest of the strong. I mean, the ancient Egypt of the pharaohs was the longest-lived and greatest empire the world has ever known. It lasted for 3,000 years. It was absolutely at its height in the time of Rameses II. It had the latest military technology, the horse-drawn chariot.

So you have the strongest of the strong against the weakest of the weak. And here comes the one place on earth, the one circumstance in which the weak can cross over because they're on foot, and the ones who are in horse-drawn chariots are trapped and stuck in the mud. 

Moderator: But the key is to have God intervene to make it happen.

Rabbi Sacks: The essence of the story, the essence of the story, to quote Vaclav Havel, is the power of the powerless, and the powerlessness of power. 

Moderator: But to be fair, Chief Rabbi, that's not the question that Professor Dawkins has raised. 

Rabbi Sacks: The whole of the Hebrew Bible is a polemic against power.

But we're asking about facts in this point of the discussion. And do you believe that God actually intervened as a fact, as a physical fact? 

Rabbi Sacks: Of course, but Richard is interested in how was it done? How did he do that thing? And I'm interested in why was it done, and I repeat, it was done because the Bible is a polemic against power. So Richard is looking at the technical details. How did God manage that? Yes, we now know. 

Richard: I'm not interested. I don't think it happened at all.

Moderator: Professor Dawkins. 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, if it happened, that's how it happened. Okay.

Richard: But what about Adam and Eve? I mean, what do you think about that? Is that symbolic or literal? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, Adam and Eve is clearly a parable because there was no first human, and there may have been a mitochondrial Eve, but, I mean, that was somewhere else in another country. And besides, the wench is dead. Exactly so.

So, no, I mean, Adam and Eve are really, I mean, if you trace it back 6,000 years ago, obviously the Bible is telling us the story about the first dawn of civilisation. I mean, there was an art 25,000 years before that. 

Richard: So Adam and Eve is symbolic, but the parting of the Red Sea… I mean, how do you decide which bits are symbolic? 

Rabbi Sacks: Very simple. The rabbis in the 10th century laid down the following principle. If a biblical narrative is incompatible with established scientific fact, it is not to be read literally.

And that was eight centuries before the word ‘scientist’ was coined, so they weren't just doing it to please Richard Dawkins. They were doing it for their own intellectual integrity. 

Moderator: But many people do believe it literally, and it's an increasingly vocal number of people in different faiths now.

Rabbi Sacks: Exactly so, and in Judaism, we take a strong view on this, and we have now for 2,000 years, and we say reading the Bible literally is heresy. Why so? Because we believe, and it's the fundamental, a fundamental of rabbinic Judaism, that there is an oral tradition alongside the written tradition, and simply to read the words as they're written is heretical in Judaism. 

Moderator: One specific one I do want to bring up, which you discuss in your book, which is Abraham and Isaac, and the idea that God called Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Do you believe that literally happened? 

Rabbi Sacks: I believe it literally happened, and I believe that whole narrative was critically misunderstood with disastrous consequences. But here I'm going to make a very strong statement. We know the Bible regards the worst sin of all, and it runs through all the prophetic books, as child sacrifice.

Furthermore, we know child sacrifice actually happened on a massive scale. All the archaeological digs at Carthage, as well as the Mayans and Aztecs, with all the ancient societies, performed child sacrifice. And we know well into Roman law, there was a principle of patria potestas, which says a child is the property of its parents, and therefore a parent can dispose of a child as he wishes.

And God is saying to Abraham, this child for whom you've waited, you remember all those years they were waiting for a child, just one child, this child for whom you're waiting, I want you to give him back to Me. The second Abraham disowns Isaac, God says right now, have him back, but know that you are his guardian, not his owner.

Every child belongs to me. In other words, a parent may not sacrifice a child. The Bible is an extended polemic against child sacrifice.

Richard: Why, why, why? If God wanted to tell Abraham and tell the Jews not to sacrifice children, why didn't he just tell them? I mean, why put Abraham and Isaac through that horrific ordeal in order to make a symbolic gesture? 

Rabbi Sacks: I’ll tell you why. Because every self-respecting god in those days - Ra, Kamosh, Baal, and all the rest of them said sacrifice your child. So if God said to Abraham, ‘Abraham, don't sacrifice your child,’ Abraham might have found that pretty hard to take. But taking him all the way up there and then slamming on the brakes left an impression on Jews, not just on Abraham, to this day, that we have become a child-focused religion. I don't know any religion... 

Richard: Well, I'm delighted to hear that, but the original story seems to me to be the most appalling child abuse. 

Rabbi Sacks: 100%. 

Richard: Child abuse.

Rabbi Sacks: I agree with you, Richard, and you are reading it - forgive me for saying this - the Christian way. 

Moderator: Well, I think that's really important. 

Rabbi Sacks: You are reading it the Christian way.

Moderator: You were told that story as a child, as an example by a teacher, wasn't it, of obedience, that this was a good thing, am I right? 

Richard: I don't remember. 

Moderator: In “The God Delusion,” I think you write about how that story was first told to you, and you were horrified. And actually, the teacher was giving it as an example of obedience to God, which is a good thing, which is exactly your concern.

Rabbi Sacks: You see, Richard, I don't think you've fully understood. You know, in Ireland, you know, the story, you know, a gunman stops a car and says, ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ And the driver says, ‘No, I'm Jewish.’ And the gunman says, ‘Are you a Jewish Catholic or a Jewish Protestant?’ I don't think you fully appreciate, Richard, that there are Christian atheists and Jewish atheists. And you are a Christian atheist. And you read the Bible in a Christian way. And Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament.

It has to, because it says we've gone one better. We have a New Testament. So you come prejudiced against what you call the Old Testament. And that's why I did not read the opening to Chapter Two in your book as a joke. I read it as a profoundly antisemitic passage. 

Richard: Anti-Semitic? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes. 

Richard: What a ridiculous thing to say.

Rabbi Sacks: Shall I read it again, Richard? 

Richard: Please do. 

Moderator: Can you summarise what was the gist of it? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes. 

Richard: No, just read it.

Rabbi Sacks: Let me just read it. Guys, if you find this funny... 

Moderator: Very, very briefly... 

Rabbi Sacks [reading]: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Now…

Moderator: Let Richard answer that, I think. Professor Dawkins. 

Richard: How you can call that antisemitic, I don't even begin to understand.

Rabbi Sacks: Does anyone here understand? 

Moderator: Let Professor Dawkins understand. It's anti-God, says Professor Dawkins.

Richard: It's anti-God.

Rabbi Sacks: It's anti-the Jewish God, Richard. Does anyone understand? 

Richard: And the Christian God. 

Rabbi Sacks: Put your hand up, please, if you would understand why I might be offended by that.

Richard: That's different from calling it antisemitic. I can see why you might be offended by it. I can see why a Christian or a Muslim might be offended by it, too. But not antisemitic. 

Moderator: Can I take it on from the issue that's raised there, which is about how you raise children, because a lot of these stories are ones that we've been brought up in, and it's all very well two informed adults having a discussion about literal versus symbolic, but take faith schools, take the fact that there's tradition, particularly in the Jewish community. With tradition, there comes a point where you have to accept what you're told to believe.

I mean, perhaps you'd like to take this first. You've described child abuse in a sense. Your bigger concern is about the faith upbringing rather than, in some cases, other kinds of abuse.

Richard: Well, I want to be very clear that I do think that religious education is important. I don't think that children should be left ignorant of religion. I think they should be taught about religion, about the great world religions.

What they should not be taught is ‘you are a Christian,’ ‘you are a Catholic,’ ‘you are a Protestant,’ ‘you are a Jew, therefore you believe X.’ I think it's right to say there are people called Christians, there are people called Catholics, there are people called Muslims, and these are the things that they believe, and that's very important. I think it's extremely important to be given a sight of the holy books of the world because they inform world literature. What I do not think is that children, when they're too young to understand, should be told, you are a Catholic child, this is what you believe.

That, I think, is wicked. 

Moderator: Presumably ‘you are a Jewish child’ would be of the same concern. 

Rabbi Sacks: I certainly believe, and I explained this to Richard, that in Judaism the first duty of a parent to a child is to teach the child to ask questions. And our holiest ritual, Passover, begins with the questions asked by a child. 

But I do believe that children have the right to belong somewhere. I mean, for instance, Richard, you taught your daughter English.

Am I right? 

Richard: Well, yes, I mean, she learned English, yes. 

Rabbi Sacks: But supposing that she really wanted to be Italian, isn't that child abuse, confining her? 

Richard: No, it's not the same thing. It really isn't. We're talking now about beliefs about the universe, about morality, about the place of humanity in the world. That's very different from speaking English or speaking Italian. It really is.

And by the way, I'm extremely happy about children being brought up in a culture, being brought up with certain customs and habits, whether they're dietary or dress or anything like that. I'm not happy about being taught, ‘Because you are born into this faith, therefore you believe that such and such happened in history.’

Rabbi Sacks: Richard, I agree with you.

I mean, for me, and I think for most of us, bringing up children in a Jewish way is teaching them to be part of a culture and a history and a civilisation, teaching them the festivals, teaching them to be literate, because you have to begin somewhere, but at the same time to be critical. And we have a lot less emphasis on faith and belief in Judaism, much more on practice, because we do see faith as something that you need to think deeply about, that you need to come to your own conclusions about. We have broad parameters, but we are not a religion of a creed in precisely the way that, say, Christianity or Islam are.

Moderator: But with young children in faith schools, there are all kinds of issues about who gets a place at a Jewish faith school, you know, what's the lineage of the mother in some cases. I mean, with children that young, can you really say they're being raised to ask questions? To some extent, aren't they taught to believe certain things? 

Rabbi Sacks: No, I think they're taught to sing certain songs and to observe certain practices, but I love doing these programmes with the BBC because it allows me to show some of the stuff that actually happens in our schools. And I remember three years ago, doing a programme - three or four years ago - in a school under my aegis in Birmingham, where more than half the children are Muslim.

And it was just lovely listening to Muslim parents saying, ‘Well, we actually moved into this part of Birmingham in order to be able to send our kids to a Jewish school.’ So here in this school are Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Hindus and so on. 

Richard: How old are they? 

Rabbi Sacks: Five, five to eleven.

Richard: You see, when you talk about a five-year-old child being a Muslim child, that's just not right. What you mean is a child of Muslim parents. That's exactly my point.

You're conceding what the whole of society does concede, which it is correct to label a child with the religion of its parents when the child is too young to have done its thinking for itself. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, that's why we don't really emphasise creed. We don't have a confirmation, as you do in Christianity.

It's very interesting if you... In Judaism, we are a community of practice. In terms of a community of faith, the borders are fuzzy, I would call it that. 

Moderator: Well, that's one interpretation. One person on Twitter was suggesting to me today that there's a concern about the fact that there can seem to be a quasi-racial element to Jewish identity, that people can feel excluded if they're married in. That these things can cause real frictions in families and couples because the faith identity is so overriding. Do you accept that there can be problems with that? 

Rabbi Sacks: Judaism is built around two things. One, descent. You're Jewish if you have a Jewish mother. And the other is consent. You're Jewish if you or your parents converted to Judaism.

So we've tried to keep that mix because if we were only an ethnic community, then you could raise your challenge about racism. But we've always accepted converts and obviously, one of the most beautiful books in the Bible, the book of Ruth, is about such a person, a Moabite, not ethnically Jewish, who comes to join the Jewish people and then her great-grandson becomes King David. So Judaism is ethnically open.

And if you stand by the Western Wall in Jerusalem, you will find Jews from every ethnicity under the sun. 

Richard: But would you accept that it's wrong to label a five-year-old child a Muslim child? 

Rabbi Sacks: No more than it's wrong to label a five-year-old an English child. 

Richard: I see.  Well, I think we really do disagree about that. 

Moderator: I want to move on to look at the bigger moral framework. In your book, Chief Rabbi, you talked about religion being fundamental to the way a healthy community operates and you cite research that suggests people who are religious are more likely to donate to charity and have good social networks.

Professor Dawkins, what do you say to that argument, that only religion has really provided the fundamental ethical framework? And, for example, with scientific research and, say, fertility treatment, it's run way ahead of ethics, and religion has often been the thing that's tried to rein it in. 

Richard: It's certainly true that scientific advances do raise moral questions which need to be talked about. And my colleague, the moral philosopher Jonathan Glover, has written a book explicitly saying we need to think in advance about what the scientific advances are going to make in the way of moral dilemmas.

So that's important. I think it is really unrealistic to suggest that we need religion in order to come to moral decisions or that actually we, as a matter of fact, do use religion. As I look historically at the way our moral values have changed, they have changed hugely over the centuries, over the decades, within any given century.

You can more or less label what decade a piece of ordinary fiction in the 20th century comes from, by looking at the moral values which the characters in it, whether they're racist or sexist. You can tell whether it's late 20th century, mid-20th century or early 20th century or 21st century. My point is that the moral zeitgeist which all of us in a society share labels us as being, shall we say, early 21st-century citizens much more than it labels us as being religious or non-religious.

There's far more in common between a liberal, enlightened Jew and a liberal, enlightened atheist today, morally speaking, than there is between either of us and somebody of 200 years ago or even 100 years ago. And so the moral zeitgeist advances historically for non-religious reasons and religious people and non-religious people advance hand in hand from decade to decade. 

It's not to do with religion. It's to do with advances in moral philosophy, in legal philosophy, in the general discourse of society. That's what's changing. That's what gives us our moral values.

Moderator: Chief Rabbi.

Rabbi Sacks: First of all, I want to agree with Richard that you do not have to be religious to be moral. I would never be party to such a claim. We know the people who saved lives, often at risk to their own, during the Holocaust. Some were religious, some were secular. 

I think the only thing they had in common is that they took for granted that they had to do what they had to do because that's what a human being does. And I think that moral sense is common to all of us.

It's tremendously important not to let people say you have to be religious to be moral. 

Secondly, though, I quoted in the book the evidence here, because Robert Putnam, the Professor of Sociology at Harvard, did all the research on this. And he came up with this extraordinary finding, as you know, that in America, it may not be true in Britain - although he tells me it is in Britain - that religious people are more likely to give to charity, more likely to do voluntary work, more likely to help a neighbour with housework, more likely to help somebody with a job, more likely to get involved in civic and voluntary associations and so on.

And his finding was that religion is the predictor of all these things, of altruism, more than any other factor - age, income, educational level or ethnicity. But he said, and I think very wisely, that in his view this has got nothing to do with religious beliefs and everything to do with the power of religion to create communities.

In other words, Richard is right in saying that we may not need religion to know what to do, but it's that constant rehearsal - in ritual, in prayer and in community - that encourages people to do what they know they ought to do.

Moderator: This sounds dangerously like a Darwinist argument, that religion has survived because actually it provides something for human survival. 

Richard: Well, no, 

Rabbi Sacks: Well Richard believed that. Darwin Believed that.

Richard: I think it's a very interesting point of view.  It's a very interesting point of view, what the Chief Rabbi has just said, that it's not religion per se, but it's a sense of community. Before accepting the findings, I think I would want to look a little bit in more detail at what's going on there. 

The giving to charity. If the charity includes tithing in the broad sense, giving to a church, then... 

Rabbi Sacks: No, no, whether religious or secular causes. 

Richard: OK. It would be important to tease that out. I suspect that my earlier point, that the century or the decade in which we live is going to be more important in any case... 

Rabbi Sacks: I agree with you up to a point, Richard.

And here I would only say that one of the great things of religion - although you don't have to be religious - but religion has traditionally done this, is stood up against the zeitgeist, when the zeitgeist has been leading us dangerously down the wrong road. That's the prophetic imperative. The person who stands up and says, look, I think we're going down the wrong road. A, we've become too consumerist and materialist as a society. B, there's too much inequality. Some people making much too much and many people are suffering as a result. I think to stand up against the zeitgeist is one of the great things religion has done.

And it's done for all of us, really. I think that's one of the good things that it's done. 

Moderator: Professor? 

Richard: I want to pursue the very interesting point you were making, that it's a sense of community rather than... And that, I think, is an arguably good point.

I certainly don't think we get our morals from religion. I certainly hope we don't. I mean, I hope we don't get them from Scripture. I certainly hope that. And I also hope we don't get them from a kind of feeling of sucking up to God. And I'm sure you would agree about that.

So do we get it from a sense of community? That's an interesting point. 

Rabbi Sacks: That is the point made by two evolutionary biologists, David Sloan Wilson and what's his name, “In search of Darwin's God”? 

Moderator: I just want the professor to finish his point. 

Rabbi Sacks/Richard: Miller. Kenneth Miller.

Richard: I think it's an interesting point. And I think it's arguable that in the post-religious age, which I look forward to, we're going to need to put in place some sort of substitute for the sense of community, which religions over centuries of history have put in place. 

Rabbi Sacks: Can I ask you something, Richard? 

Moderator: Very briefly.

Rabbi Sacks: You're looking forward to a post-religious age, but then scientists in the 18th century were looking forward to it. Why didn't it appear? 

Richard: Don't ask me. I mean where did we go wrong?

Moderator: That's a ‘why’ question, Chief Rabbi.

Richard: Well, I think the broad sweep of history is in the right direction. It's a sore tooth sort of zigzagging... We have our temporary reverses, but we're generally heading in the right direction, as polls suggest.

Moderator: Can I ask points of agreement then? Because we've established some interesting points of strong disagreement. Where do you think you have common ground? Do you want to take that first, Professor Dawkins? 

Richard: We're both very nice people. And we share with many other people a sense of goodwill towards humanity and indeed towards sentient beings generally.

We would agree about a very large number of moral questions if actually faced with them, if there's a particular dilemma. I don't think we would ever agree about the legitimacy, the role of supernatural explanations for anything. And as a scientist, I'm interested in that. And I think that we are poles apart on that. 

Moderator: On miracles instead of the supernatural. And, Chief Rabbi, your thoughts on where you do agree?

Rabbi Sacks: I think we agree on the integrity of science, on the power that it has given us and the immense dignity that it represents.

Richard accepts that as a fact. I accept that as what the Bible means when it says God made us in His image. But nonetheless, we both cherish science as one of the great human achievements.

And it is my belief that we will always need a sense of that which is beyond us in order… A, to never lose sight of human dignity. The thing that really scares me is the kind of scientist like B.F. Skinner, the behavioural psychologist who wrote this book called “Beyond Freedom and Dignity.” I think freedom and dignity, and hope, are the three things for which it's very hard to find scientific evidence.

Moderator: I want to take questions. I know there will be some. We have a microphone somewhere.Do you want this one? I've got another one. Take that one back as well. There you go. And if you want to say, if you've got a particular place you're coming from, for those who can't see you.

Questioner: Hello, I'm Matthew Firth. I'm the chaplain to the University of Cumbria.

I just want to ask a question, sort of a basic question about the existence of God and how that relates to the scientific method. So my understanding of studying astrophysics and so on, for my first degree, is that we're very much embedded in this world, and science is almost a game which we play in this world with experiments and so on, which reveals some of its structure and beauty and so on. It tells us real things about the real world and it's incredibly powerful to do that.

But we are embedded in our experimental games in this world. So why is it that I sort of detect, maybe in your writings, Professor Dawkins, almost an a priori assumption that there can't be something beyond the world which can reveal itself in the world? And sort of an extra small point, what sort of evidence would you need to see in the world of this thing coming in to reveal itself in the world? 

Richard: I'm very excited to think that there is a very great deal beyond what we understand at present. And I would like - it won't happen - but I'd like to live another 200 years to see the extraordinary advances which I'm quite sure are going to come.

I think that the science of the next couple of hundred years is going to be magnificent and will be far beyond anything that any scientist today can imagine. And that, I think, is a very, very exciting possibility, probability. What I don't see is any merit at all in calling that supernatural.

You can call it super-present understanding, but not supernatural because that's giving in. That's more or less admitting in advance we cannot understand it. This is something which by definition is not understandable. Whereas the science of the future I'm talking about is something we don't yet understand.

It may be beyond the understanding of the majority of people. It may be beyond the understanding of everybody. We may meet aliens from outer space who've got a new physics which no human can grasp.

These are all very exciting, exhilarating possibilities. But to call it supernatural is a cowardly evasion that's giving way before you even start to investigate. It seems to me to be an aspect of human dignity to be determined to try your utmost to understand, not to lie down under it and say, ‘Oh, it's supernatural, we're never going to understand that, we can't understand it. By definition, it's supernatural. 

Moderator: Thank you. OK, I'm going to take the gentleman near the back with the glasses. Yes, in the shirt. Try and get as many in as we can. 

Questioner: Hello, I'm Stuart Langhorne, Head of Religious Studies at Lancaster Royal Grammar School.

I'm very pleased to hear Professor Dawkins support religious education in schools. We have “The God Delusion” as a set text for our A-level students, some of whom are here tonight. 

Moderator: Can we get you to the question? 

Questioner: I'd be interested to know what the Chief Rabbi would recommend as a set text to go along with it?

Rabbi Sacks: Well, it’s called “The Great Partnership,” actually. Paperback, very cheap, and... Pardon? Of course, for you, certainly. 

Moderator: Right, next question, please. We've got one over here. Yes, the gentleman over there, and then I'll come back and take someone on this side. Yes, the gentleman over here. You can stick your hand back up. 

Questioner: Hi, my name's Mark Burkis. I'm, first of all, very grateful to Richard Dawkins for having written such a fabulous book, and I'm really pleased to be able to listen to the conversation tonight.

But, just going back to a more serious point that you made earlier, you took some offence about a perception of antisemitism. Because Richard Dawkins had challenged something that was held to be important about your God. Taking that one step further to the level that the Iranian top brass took with Salman Rushdie, what's your take on Salman Rushdie's attempt to challenge some thinking in Islam, and was the Ayatollah right to issue the fatwa? 

Moderator: This is a question to the Chief Rabbi?

Questioner: Yes. 

Rabbi Sacks: Had Salman Rushdie been Jewish, we would have welcomed him as an absolutely standard member of the Jewish community. It didn't even register on the Richter scale in terms of Jewish challenge.

Everyone in Judaism challenges beliefs, and I have the great pleasure of knowing, of course, Steven Pinker, who is Richard Dawkins' counterpart in the States, and his wife, Rebecca Goldstein, who just published a wonderful novel called “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” a work of fiction. In Judaism, we accept open arguments, and we do not rule people out at all. I was not concerned that Richard was an antisemitic at all.

I was concerned that he was using an antisemitic stereotype, which has run through a certain strand of Christian reading of what is called the Old Testament, as a result of which thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jews died in the Middle Ages, because that's how people spoke about the God of the Old Testament. And it really terrifies me to see the power of these stereotypes persisting into atheism. It really bothers me.

In other words, I can live with an atheism that says, ‘Look, I can't make head or tail of this. For me, this is music to which I'm tone deaf.’ That is the atheism I discussed with a person who I came quite close to in his last years, the late Sir Isaiah Berlin.

He said to me, ‘Chief Rabbi, don't talk to me about God when it comes to religion, I'm tone deaf.’ He asked me to officiate at his funeral. He did not believe, but he did not mock or insult those who believed.

Moderator: But to flip the question, implicit in it, is a concern that Islam is different. Islam expects special treatment. And is that a concern? It's the elephant in the room, isn't it? That you can't say things about Islam that people can say about other faiths.

Rabbi Sacks: You cannot have a free society in which people are not permitted to challenge religious orthodoxy. We have to have the confidence of our beliefs to create a society in which people are free to challenge our most sacred beliefs. 

Moderator: And you're free to be offended.

Rabbi Sacks: And I am, yeah, of course I'm free to be offended. 

Moderator: What are your thoughts on this issue that's been raised? 

Richard: For me, one of the most horrible aspects of the Salman Rushdie affair was the way non-Muslim intellectuals in this country and in America took the part of the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was utterly disgraceful to see senior clerics and senior scholars in this country saying, ‘Oh, Salman Rushdie got what he asked for. He deserved what he got.’ 

Moderator: And politicians. And politicians.

Richard: The threats that were made not only against him but against his publisher. There was a terrible story told by the publisher Penguin Books, whose daughter was threatened at her school and parents were complaining about this girl being at the school because they said, ‘What if the Muslims attack the school and they get the wrong girl?’ So the publisher of Penguin said, ‘The wrong girl? Who is the right girl in that case?’ 

Rabbi Sacks: Richard, this is where you and I take a stand side by side. We really do. I am not going to allow my religious beliefs to say that there should not be freedom to challenge those beliefs or any beliefs because without a free society, truth will never emerge from conversation. 

Questioner: In which case, may I suggest that it's not right to take offence and accuse someone of being antisemitic when all they've actually done is challenge your belief. 

Rabbi Sacks: I don't think Richard is remotely antisemitic. He's a really, really nice guy. Please understand that. I love this man. I really do. But when I read this book, I said, that is not Richard speaking. That's 1,700 years of what is technically known as the Adversus Judeus literature.

Moderator: Let Professor Dawkins answer that.

Richard: It was me speaking. I confess I was totally ignorant of the 1,700 years of which you speak and I'm sorry about that. But nevertheless, I think the moral values that are embodied in the behaviour of the God of the Old Testament are very deplorable indeed. All the stuff about slaughtering the Amalekites and things. Terrible stuff. 

Rabbi Sacks: Richard, just answer me one question. How many Jewish commentaries to the Bible did you read before writing that paragraph? 

Richard: I fully accept that enlightened Jewish commentators would repudiate these horrific stories. I wasn't talking about them. I'm talking about the God of the Old Testament as he actually appears in the text of the Old Testament. 

Rabbi Sacks: But you regard anyone who reads the Bible literally as a fundamentalist.

So please don't read the Bible as a fundamentalist. 

Richard: 40% of the American people read it as fundamentalist. 

Rabbi Sacks: I agree and I'm as terrified of that as you are.

Moderator: I'm going to take a question. There's a student near the back there. 

Questioner: I've got a question for Professor Dawkins. I was just wondering if you see any sort of positive social contribution for religion whatsoever and whether in like an ideal world for you, how religion exists whatsoever?

Richard: I see enormous social value in the contributions of individual religious people. I do not see social value in religion itself.

And I've said before that I take on board the Chief Rabbi's very interesting point that such social value as there may be comes from the sense of community that religion may build up, as opposed to the actual religious beliefs, which I do not think have any social value at all. 

Rabbi Sacks: Could I just add to that? Because, you know, courtesy of the BBC, we saw a most stunning example of this a couple of weeks ago. That is a German Jewish refugee who came to this country in 1939, called Dr. Ludwig Gutmann, who was asked by this country in 1943 to open the first medical facility for paraplegics in Stoke Mandeville Hospital. And who came and saw how paraplegics were being treated. They could never lead a normal life. They were kept sedated and left to die, 80% of them. Life expectancy in those days, three months after being admitted. 

And here was a guy who, through centuries of ingrained Jewish belief, who knows perfectly well that every human being is in the image of God, and therefore freedom, dignity and hope are built into the human situation, did by extraordinary obstinacy, against lots of medical objections… got them to sit up, to sit in wheelchairs, to play games and created the paraplegic, the Paralympics. Now, I don't think it was accidental that Ludwig Gutmann was a Jew from an Orthodox Jewish family.

And I don't think it is accidental that faith carried him through the objection of all the nurses and the doctors who said, ‘Leave them to die.’ So I think faith does make a difference in where we see human dignity, where nature doesn't see human dignity at all. 

Moderator: Ok. The man in the dog collar.

Questioner: The man in the dog collar, Richard Burrage, Dean of King's College London. I'd like to connect two of Professor Dawkins' statements together about he's looking forward to religionless future and it being child abuse to teach a child of five to be a person of a certain religion. And I don't know, Professor, forgive me, I don't know enough about your personal history whether you've been blessed, and I will put in brackets, by God, question mark, with children.

But I wonder if you brought your children up in your religion because atheism and theism are both religions. We both look at the world, we look at the evidence and I decide, rationally on the basis of the evidence I see to believe in God,and you decide not to believe in God. And in your religionless future, there'll be no place for atheism either.

What did you teach your children and why is that different from what I teach my children? 

Richard: I would teach any child to think for herself, to ask questions, to be critical. I would teach a child not what to think, I would teach a child to say, ‘When anybody tells you anything, ask them what the evidence is.’ If the evidence is too difficult to understand for a child, ask them, is it the kind of thing which people know because of evidence?

I did write an open letter to my daughter when she was 10, which was published, and in it I said all those things. I cautioned her that evidence was the only reason to believe things about the real world and I cautioned her against three bad reasons to believe things, which were tradition, revelation and authority. And the thing that's wrong with tradition and authority is that it's arbitrary which tradition you happen to come from.

You happen to be brought up in a Jewish tradition, or a Muslim tradition, or a Christian tradition, or a Hindu tradition. 

[Someone from the audience comments]

Richard: There is no atheist tradition. The atheist tradition is simply think for yourself, be critical.

[Someone from the audience comments] 

Moderator: Professor Dawkins has given his answer. 

Richard [continues to answer audience member]: If you wish to label, think for yourself a belief system, well, is it a coincidence... 

Moderator: Please let Professor Dawkins answer. 

Richard: Is it a coincidence that the vast majority of religious people have the same religion as their parents? If they're born in Afghanistan, they're Muslim. If they're born in... 

Audience member: I don't. 

Richard: Well, good, I'm very glad to hear it. I'd like to be able to get a response from your parents. Are you of the same religion as your parents? 

Audience member: No. 

Richard: In what respect different? 

Audience member: I'm a Christian. 

Richard: And what are they? 

Audience member: They were non-believers.

Richard: OK, well, fine, good for you. I mean, I congratulate you. 

Audience member: I thought for myself I decided to become a Christian. Thinking for yourself is something you and I both share.

Moderator: OK, thank you. I don't think there's a disagreement there. I just wanted to get your response briefly, Chief Rabbi, because you... [turns to Richard] Sorry, I forgot the third one. There were three things you said you taught. Revelation,.

Richard: Revelation, tradition, and authority. 

And I thought you might have a bit of concern about that. The three things that you were teaching…

Rabbi Sacks: Well, you know, there's a very famous story that goes back over 2,000 years. A student comes to a famous rabbi, called Hillel and says, ‘Teach me the whole of Judaism, but without belief in authority.’ So Hillel says, ‘OK, OK, I'm going to teach you the alphabet, you know, ABC.’

So the guy goes home, day one he's learned ABC. The next day he comes for the second lesson, and Hillel says, ‘I'm going to teach you the alphabet. It goes CBA.’

And the man says, ‘Hang on, yesterday you said ABC and now you say CBA. Which is it?’ And Hillel says, ‘Well, you see, you've got to rely on me to learn even the alphabet.’ So I think you probably need to accept some authority before you can believe anything.

Moderator: Thank you. We have time for one more. I'm going to take the young man in the middle here.

Questioner: Thanks. I'm Tom Fawcett from Stockport Grammar School and I have a question for Professor Dawkins, if that would be OK. I wouldn't claim that a belief in a deity is necessary to have morality. But what I would ask is, surely in the absence of a divine lawgiver, morality loses its intrinsic value. It's not written into the fabric of the universe. You cite the moral zeitgeist argument. Surely that deprives morality of any philosophical legitimacy. It's merely a human construct. Why should I be altruistic? Why should I care about anyone else when fundamentally morality has no further value? 

Moderator: Thank you.

Richard: This is a question I very often get. It's an extremely common point of view. I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not.

We are on our own without a God and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world?

And we decide, in conclave together, that that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's true.

It's a moral decision which we take as individuals and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to get that sort of value system from religion, I want you to ask yourself whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition, then I beg you don't get it from your holy book because it's, to repeat that opening line of Chapter 2 of my book, the morality you will get from your holy book is hideous.

Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it from sucking up to your God. Don't get it from saying, ‘Oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good.’

That's a very ignoble reason to be good. Instead, be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that you've decided together with other people the society we want to live in. A decent, humane society. Not one based on absolutism. Not one based on holy books.

And not one based on sucking up to, looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky. 

Moderator: Thank you. Final word to you, Chief Rabbi.

Rabbi Sacks: Well, you know, that was a super question and actually that's my life story. I did not begin life wanting to be a rabbi. I went to university to study philosophy because I wanted to know how shall I live.

I studied it at two pretty good universities. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, was pretty well recognised as the finest moral philosopher.