Uploaded August 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In this episode, I talk to featured speaker Richard Dawkins about the impact of his life’s work, the threat of postmodernism, and his upcoming CSICon talk.
Register now to attend CSICon 2023: skepticalinquirer.org/csicon
This video interview is part of the series I am conducting with the speakers appearing at CSICon 2023. This conference is run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and will take place in Las Vegas from October 26–29. (You can find all the details and register right here.) For this episode, my guest was none other than the conference’s featured speaker Professor Richard Dawkins!
Dawkins is one of the most recognized evolutionary biologists in the world and has enormously impacted atheistic discourse over many decades. He is the author of (at least) eighteen books. Among them are The Blind Watchmaker, Outgrowing God, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, The Selfish Gene (in which the behavioral concept “meme” was introduced), The God Delusion (which contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist), Unweaving the Rainbow, and his autobiography, A Brief Candle in the Dark.
Dawkins is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Royal Society, and the Royal Society of Literature. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science in 2006. His talk for CSICon 2023, “Science, the Poetry of Reality, Jewel in Humanity's Crown,” is scheduled for Thursday at 8:15 p.m. following the opening reception. This is the description from the conference’s website:
The lecture will extol science as perhaps humanity's greatest and proudest achievement. That invites accusations of “scientism” and arrogance. Science knows what it knows (a lot), but it also humbly knows what it doesn’t know (also a lot). There may be questions too deep even for science. But if science can’t answer them, no other human endeavor can either. Given that we were designed simply to survive and reproduce, the wonder is that we have produced the geniuses that we have.
Science comes under attack from the fashionable belief that it is no more true than indigenous tribal myths and alternative, subjective “ways of knowing.” These attacks are influential but easily rebutted. Science has well-developed methods—for example, the double-blind trial—to eschew subjectivism.
The human benefits of science need no listing. But they're not the main reason I would stand up for science as a sublime triumph of our species up there with Shakespeare and Beethoven. We uniquely know how, where, and why we came into existence.
In our conversation, Professor Dawkins and I discussed his upcoming CSICon talk and a broad range of other topics, including why something as clearly phony as homeopathy persists in having adherents, the threat of postmodernism to science, the impact of his work on those struggling to leave religion behind, and his recent tour down-under where he “walked right into a controversy” in New Zealand.”
I also asked Dawkins if he would again be wearing a costume to the Halloween party. If he does, that may dash the hopes of another CSICon speaker, Melanie Trecek-King, of winning the prize for top costume. You will have to attend the CSICon Halloween party this year to find out what will happen!
You can find all my other CSICon 2023 interviews archived here. Also, my conversations with the speakers from last year’s conference (along with this year’s interviews) have been collected here.
In this episode, I talk to featured speaker Richard Dawkins about the impact of his life’s work, the threat of postmodernism, and his upcoming CSICon talk.
Register now to attend CSICon 2023: skepticalinquirer.org/csicon
This video interview is part of the series I am conducting with the speakers appearing at CSICon 2023. This conference is run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and will take place in Las Vegas from October 26–29. (You can find all the details and register right here.) For this episode, my guest was none other than the conference’s featured speaker Professor Richard Dawkins!
Dawkins is one of the most recognized evolutionary biologists in the world and has enormously impacted atheistic discourse over many decades. He is the author of (at least) eighteen books. Among them are The Blind Watchmaker, Outgrowing God, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, The Selfish Gene (in which the behavioral concept “meme” was introduced), The God Delusion (which contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist), Unweaving the Rainbow, and his autobiography, A Brief Candle in the Dark.
Dawkins is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Royal Society, and the Royal Society of Literature. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science in 2006. His talk for CSICon 2023, “Science, the Poetry of Reality, Jewel in Humanity's Crown,” is scheduled for Thursday at 8:15 p.m. following the opening reception. This is the description from the conference’s website:
The lecture will extol science as perhaps humanity's greatest and proudest achievement. That invites accusations of “scientism” and arrogance. Science knows what it knows (a lot), but it also humbly knows what it doesn’t know (also a lot). There may be questions too deep even for science. But if science can’t answer them, no other human endeavor can either. Given that we were designed simply to survive and reproduce, the wonder is that we have produced the geniuses that we have.
Science comes under attack from the fashionable belief that it is no more true than indigenous tribal myths and alternative, subjective “ways of knowing.” These attacks are influential but easily rebutted. Science has well-developed methods—for example, the double-blind trial—to eschew subjectivism.
The human benefits of science need no listing. But they're not the main reason I would stand up for science as a sublime triumph of our species up there with Shakespeare and Beethoven. We uniquely know how, where, and why we came into existence.
In our conversation, Professor Dawkins and I discussed his upcoming CSICon talk and a broad range of other topics, including why something as clearly phony as homeopathy persists in having adherents, the threat of postmodernism to science, the impact of his work on those struggling to leave religion behind, and his recent tour down-under where he “walked right into a controversy” in New Zealand.”
I also asked Dawkins if he would again be wearing a costume to the Halloween party. If he does, that may dash the hopes of another CSICon speaker, Melanie Trecek-King, of winning the prize for top costume. You will have to attend the CSICon Halloween party this year to find out what will happen!
You can find all my other CSICon 2023 interviews archived here. Also, my conversations with the speakers from last year’s conference (along with this year’s interviews) have been collected here.
