Dawkins lectures on superiority of scientific inquiry over the supernatural

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Saying the real world provides plenty of poetic magic, famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins urged a full house in the Shepherd School of Music’s Stude Concert Hall not to resort to a “lazy” supernatural explanation of reality.

Photo by: Jeff Fitlow Saying the real world provides plenty of poetic magic, famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins urged a full house in Stude Concert Hall not to resort to a "lazy" supernatural explanation of reality.

“The more you think about it, the more you realize that the very idea of a supernatural miracle is incoherent nonsense,” he told the audience.

In the Oct. 10 lecture on his latest book, “The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True,” Dawkins laid out three distinct meanings of magic. Supernatural magic includes mythology from fairies to religious miracles; stage magic is designed to trick an audience; and poetic magic involves “deeply moving, exhilarating” experiences like hearing beautiful music or seeing a star-filled sky.

“What I hope to show in this book is that reality — the facts of the real world as understood through the methods of science — the real world is magical in this third sense,” he said.

The book, Dawkins’ first one to be designed for young readers, asks a number of fundamental questions about the nature of reality and then sets out several mythical explanations before demonstrating the scientific answers. “The idea of talking about myths is not to mock them,” Dawkins said. “Many of them are quite wonderful in their way.” But Dawkins’ goal, he explained, is to establish the supremacy of science in accounting for reality — from rainbows to earthquakes to evolution.

“I don’t want to give the impression that science knows everything,” he said. “But the excitement of science lies in those things that we don’t know.” The fact that there are unresolved questions, Dawkins insisted, “doesn’t mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phony explanations involving magic, the supernatural, miracles, which don’t actually explain anything at all.”

Dawkins, who was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford until his retirement in 2008, went into some detail on the book’s chapter titled “Who Was the First Man?” He proposed a thought experiment in which a modern human takes pictures of each of his ancestors, going back more than 400 million years ago. While the changes would be imperceptible from one picture to the next, by selecting one from 3 million years ago the human would discover a member of a different species, homo erectus. And going back much further, the human would encounter something like a modern bush baby, a salamander-like creature and, eventually, a fish.

Because of the gradual nature of evolution, Dawkins concluded, there is no one answer to the question “Who was the first man?”

Scientists, Dawkins said, are constantly updating their store of knowledge and are perfectly willing to accept new information that upsets what had been held to be the truth. He was scathing in his indictment of those who refuse to explore new possibilities. “Don’t ever be lazy enough, defeatist enough, cowardly enough to say, ‘I don’t understand this so it must be supernatural, it must be a miracle,'” he said. “What a pathetic way to respond to a new finding! Say instead: ‘It’s a puzzle. It’s strange. It’s a challenge that we should rise to.'”

Returning to the theme of magic, Dawkins finished his remarks with a paean to the scientific method. “The truth has a magic of its own,” he said. “The truth is more magical in the best and most exciting sense of the word than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic — the magic of reality.”

Dawkins’ lecture was sponsored by Rice’s HERE (Houston Enriches Rice Education) Project and The Institute for Humanist Studies.