…their own opinions vastly greater weight than they ought to have. This is of course a standard tactic among militant atheists. Richard Dawkins is the primary example. Richard Dawkins, when he was a professor at Oxford, was not a professor of zoology or…

…weight than they ought to have. This is of course a standard tactic among militant atheists. Richard Dawkins is the primary example. Richard Dawkins, when he was a professor at Oxford, was not a professor of zoology or evolution. He was a professor of the…

…Animals and plants are like machines. We're like machines. In fact, we are machines. We're lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically programmed computers. Second, matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made…

…Those have been allowed absolutely free run on the Internet. They're put up on the main website, talks by people like Richard Dawkins, for example. The difference here is that my talk was flagged up as being pseudo-scientific because Jerry Coyne didn't like…

…suppose you'd say PZ Myers, said on their websites. But if there'd been a similar attack by say, Christian fundamentalists on Dawkins, they would have ignored it. But if it's by scientific fundamentalists, then they pay attention. And what's more, don't just…

…I mean, I guess the real question at the end of the soul is who would win in a fist fight between you and Richard Dawkins? Well, I didn't think that. Just kidding. Just a little background. So some people say your more recent book is a direct rebuttal…

…didn't think that. Just kidding. Just a little background. So some people say your more recent book is a direct rebuttal to Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. I was wondering if you could talk about that and answer the next question. You know, I…

…interesting. I like that you're putting it out there. You know, direct science. All right, so then what is the beef with Richard Dawkins? Can you address that and his book and what this rivalry is? Well, Dawkins is a credulous materialist. He just takes…

…so then what is the beef with Richard Dawkins? Can you address that and his book and what this rivalry is? Well, Dawkins is a credulous materialist. He just takes the entire materialist worldview for granted. He just assumes the whole lot is true. He…

…science back is dogma, scientific dogma. And, you know, science doesn't have to be atheistic either. I mean, it's got linked in Dawkins' mind to a kind of atheist agenda and ideology. I think, you know, the question of whether God exists or not is…

…to these guardians of materialist science, personified by the various skeptics who appear in the book, Lewis Walpert, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, that Sheldrake directs his heretical science, partly I think as a riposte to these missionaries…

…pencil, looking bored, staring into the distance, and didn't turn around to look at the evidence behind him. And Professor Richard Dawkins, who until recently was Professor of Public Understanding of Science, came to interview me for his recent TV series…

…It's a high-grade debunking program. The director then said, cut. And I asked him if it was true. He said, yes, it was another Dawkins polemic. He didn't tell me when they asked me to take part that I was going to be portrayed as an enemy of reason…

…whole universe would cease to exist. So it's not as if God's just there to start it off. And most atheists like Richard Dawkins, who attack Christianity, are attacking the view of a God outside nature who designs the laws of nature and starts the…

…that are non-religious and religious or spiritual. And yet the kind of atheistic anti-religious tone of atheists, public atheists like Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers or Jerry Coyne, a couple of American militant atheists, the tone they set makes most people…

…people of similar cultural background, because this would apply to the transmission of cultural forms. It's slightly similar to Richard Dawkins' idea of memes. The morphic fields of cultural units would spread by morphic resonance. Of course, he wouldn't think…

…and separate from the rest of nature. Militant materialists go around saying they believe in science and reason. I mean, Richard Dawkins, for example, has the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. But what they mean by reason is their worldview.…

…of nature. Militant materialists go around saying they believe in science and reason. I mean, Richard Dawkins, for example, has the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. But what they mean by reason is their worldview. And I find the best way…

…us that DNA controls life and everything depends on this selfish gene, which is ruthless and competitive. And when you read Richard Dawkins on the subject, he's making up myths about DNA. It's not scientific language to say DNA is selfish and ruthless and…

…where the different kinds of atheists are coming from. And the most superficial and trivial kind is the kind of Richard Dawkins' New Atheist type. But there are more serious atheist arguments, and his book is a wonderful introduction to them. Before…

…of chemical forms, of crystals, of social forms, and indeed of cultural forms like languages, cultural ideas, what Richard Dawkins calls memes, like memory units that propagate through societies. This hypothesis leads to many testable predictions. In the…

…is all about the selection of genes. And, of course, the whole of this idea was very persuasively popularized by Richard Dawkins in his famous book, The Selfish Gene. So the gene-centered theory of inheritance was completely dominant. When I put forward…

…if you see it through the lens of kind of mechanistic rationalism, that's how you'd see it. I dare say that's how Richard Dawkins would see it. But if you see it through the lens of morphic resonance, it makes great sense. And these different cultures,…

…and energy are there, but they assume they're totally unconscious. And Lawrence Krauss, for example, a leading atheist, great friend of Richard Dawkins, wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing. two or three years ago to prove you don't need God. But…

…their own opinions vastly greater weight than they ought to have. This is, of course, a standard tactic among militant atheists. Richard Dawkins is the primary example. Richard Dawkins, when he was a professor at Oxford, was not a professor of zoology or…

…than they ought to have. This is, of course, a standard tactic among militant atheists. Richard Dawkins is the primary example. Richard Dawkins, when he was a professor at Oxford, was not a professor of zoology or evolution. He was a professor of the…

…agriculture, genetic engineering, factory farming, and so on. They're just machines. And we're machines too, lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically programmed computers. The second dogma is the total amount of matter…

…pencil looking bored staring into the distance and didn't turn around to look at the evidence behind him. And Professor Richard Dawkins, who until recently was Professor of Public Understanding of Science, came to interview me for his recent TV series called…

…It's a high-grade debunking program. The director then said, cut. And I asked him if it was true. He said, yes, it was another Dawkins polemic. He didn't tell me when they asked me to take part that I was going to be portrayed as an enemy of reason…

…we are impartial. Some of us at least have remained impartial. And the third thing is that when he was telling us about Richard Dawkins' responses and some of our well-known scientists, I have a certain sort of that we don't want to look at the evidence…

…machine, the Earth's a machine, animals and plants are machines, and we're machines. We're lumbering robots, in the words of Richard Dawkins. Our brains are genetically programmed computers. So we live in an unconscious world. The whole world out there, all…

…of human thought perspective, going back, you went all the way to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Descartes and then to Richard Dawkins and sort of modern day philosophers and atheists. Yes. Oh, that's a very good question to end with. Well, I can't…

…Set Free is actually, I think, a better title because it's more what the book's about. The Science Delusion plays off Richard Dawkins' title, The God Delusion. it's not really a response to Dawkins. What it is is a critique of the whole materialist…

…it's more what the book's about. The Science Delusion plays off Richard Dawkins' title, The God Delusion. it's not really a response to Dawkins. What it is is a critique of the whole materialist world view which modern science is based on. So what I do…

…be in a sacred space, beautiful music echoing through it, well-trained choir, lovely organ music, free of charge. And even Richard Dawkins says that Choral Evensong is his favorite service. So, and with the British Pilgrimage Trust and the guided pilgrimages…

…The universe is a machine, animals are machines, plants are machines, humans are machines, lumbering robots in Richard Dawkins' evocative phrase. Everything is basically mechanical. Machines differ from organisms in that organisms have their own self-organizing…

…to alternative practitioners and so forth. They're not all scientific fundamentalists and true believing materialists. Such people exist and Richard Dawkins has done us all a good favor by crystallizing those views and making them fully explicit. This is…

…religious fundamentalism by scientific fundamentalism. What we've got at the moment is a kind of scientific fundamentalist like Richard Dawkins attacking creationists. The really interesting area of this discussion is not at those absurd extremes but in the…

…pattern of activity in human brains. It's not out there. And I think this coming on strong with the atheists like Dawkins who've been putting forward this view of materialism inevitably antagonize anyone who's at all religious or has spiritual views and…

…to alternative practitioners, and so forth. They're not all scientific fundamentalists and true believing materialists. Such people exist, and Richard Dawkins has done us all a good favor by crystallizing those views and making them fully explicit. This is…

…reasons. But it's not because they're all fanatically committed to ideological materialism. There are some who really are. Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. There are a number of people for whom this is a kind of lifelong crusade. But a lot…

…Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, PSYCOP. And his whole life was committed to this kind, like Francis Crick, like Richard Dawkins. There aren't so many of these old-style militant atheists around anymore. It was a kind of generation that's fading…

…be possible. Things are changing in that sense. And I think the extreme fanatical atheist, materialist, reductionist types of the Maddox, Richard Dawkins type. There are very few of them in the younger generation. There are a handful. I mean, but even the…

…and all inside the head. So he sort of, but this is a far cry from the kind of militant dogmatism of the Dawkins generation. Definitely. And I think that everything you've just mentioned, I have done deep dives down those rabbit holes. I think that we…

…people of similar cultural background, because this would apply to the transmission of cultural forms. It's slightly similar to Richard Dawkins' idea of memes. The morphic fields of cultural units would spread by morphic resonance. Of course, he wouldn't think…

…agriculture, genetic engineering, factory farming, and so on. They're just machines. And we're machines too, lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically programmed computers. The second dogma is the total amount of matter…

…will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Perhaps this perspective is conveyed most vividly in evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' description of human beings as quote, lumbering robots. If human beings are robots or computers then all we take…

…randomly mutate. That plays a part in inheritance and evolution, but it's no longer the dominant explanation it seemed when Richard Dawkins wrote his book The Selfish Gene. That's terribly old-fashioned now and biology has moved on. Philosophy of mind is…

…dogmatically dictatorial mechanistic view on the whole of the nhs and on medicine and for some people Francis Crick was one, Richard Dawkins is another, and this chap at UCL is another. This is an ideological campaign. It's not really to do with people's…

…health at all. Well, that ideology, of course, is what makes people be very selective with their results. So you mentioned Dawkins there. Now, obviously, we assume the title of your book, The Science Delusion, you're playing on Dawkins' book, which was the…

…results. So you mentioned Dawkins there. Now, obviously, we assume the title of your book, The Science Delusion, you're playing on Dawkins' book, which was the God delusion for anybody that doesn't know. I personally found the God Delusion where he was…

…many that do seem to work, but he didn't mention them. So, you know, I mean, this I think is very rife. And did Dawkins ever respond to your book and indeed to the title? No, well actually my publishers insisted on the title. The American title I…

…slightly prefer, Science Set Free, because it's about setting science free. I didn't write the book because I was angry about Dawkins. I wrote the book because I thought that science has become much too dogmatic. He's a symptom of this dogmatism, but…

…a real hunger to explore the connections that we're part of. I should add I had a very interesting conversation with Richard Dawkins about this, no less, about four weeks ago, trying to get clarity about what he thought about these apparently unnecessary…

…controversial book. and you question the dogmas of science. Was it a kind of a reply to the God delusion written by Richard Dawkins? Well, in a sense, but I didn't really... It's not personal in the sense that Dawkins is the best-known proponent of…

…delusion written by Richard Dawkins? Well, in a sense, but I didn't really... It's not personal in the sense that Dawkins is the best-known proponent of mechanistic materialism, the idea that matter is unconscious, there's no purpose in the universe, there's…

…just mentioned. But actually, many scientists personally are actually much more open to these possibilities. The number of people like Dawkins who are hardcore materialist atheists, even in Britain, according to recent surveys, is not more than about 25% of…

…used to it. Somebody has to do it. Someone has to do it. But they're afraid, you see. But the thing is that Dawkins and his friends don't actually represent the majority of you. Yes. They pretend they do, and most people assume they do, but actually…

…functioning depends on memory, which we normally take for granted. So a given idea like Newton's theory of gravitation or what Richard Dawkins would call a meme, a particular sort of idea or image, would be subject to morphic resonance. And the more people…

…done by the genes. Evolution is just about random mutation and natural selection of gene frequencies. This is the basis of Richard Dawkins' work, for example. His book The Selfish Gene is based on that model. Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of…

…by it, but people who people who've made science into a kind of religion, scientism, you know, people who've made Richard Dawkins is an example of someone who's made science into a kind of religion. They're usually militant atheists. There are lots…

…transfer in biological beings. Sheldrake pokes holes in Darwin and natural selection, but also shows that the neo-Darwinians, like Dawkins, aren't even true followers of Darwin. He shows that the physical constants in physics are sometimes actually averages of…

…adaptations or behavior from their parents sometimes called Lamarckian inheritance but Darwin was a Lamarckian Neo-Darwinians, like Richard Dawkins, reject that aspect of Darwin. But since the beginning of the 21st century, Lamarckian inheritance is really…

…And panpsychism is actually growing in strength as we speak because old-style hardcore materialism of the kind advocated by Richard Dawkins and others, is becoming less and less plausible, particularly with the rise of consciousness studies, where there's now…

…nature. He started by reacting against the theology of Paley, the blind watchmaker, well the watchmaker God of Paley that Richard Dawkins has described as the blind watchmaker. He was reacting against a theological view that treated animals and plants as…

…Jews, but atheist Jews don't challenge Judaism. I mean, I had a literary agent in New York who was also the agent for Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You know, it was atheist central. We had to part ways in the end because I just,…

…extension because the secularism of our society and the atheist polemics are now infiltrating and there's large numbers of underground Dawkins followers in Pakistan, in the Arab world and elsewhere. It's become a kind of underground forbidden thing which you…

…way you can inherit things. And that's the basis of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, which is heavily gene-centered, popularized by Richard Dawkins in his famous book, The Selfish Gene. Well, what happened in that period of scientific history was that in…

…Animals and plants are like machines. We're like machines. In fact, we are machines. We are lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase. with brains that are genetically programmed computers. Second, matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made up…

…to feel that the atheism was a little shrill and shallow. Impressions that have been amply confirmed in recent years by Richard Dawkins. But I still didn't know where else I could go. So as holistic science anyway became the thing I really wanted…

…known skeptics. I had a public debate with Professor Lewis Walpert at the Royal Society of Arts. I had an encounter with Richard Dawkins last year. which is written up on my website in an article called Richard Dawkins Comes to Call. And the various…

…Arts. I had an encounter with Richard Dawkins last year. which is written up on my website in an article called Richard Dawkins Comes to Call. And the various sceptic organisations don't like this at all. So it's very controversial, but what I've…

…just like gays in the 1950s. And so I think that's the change of science, that this dogmatic materialism, which is, as Dawkins and others point out, hostile to religion. I mean, you can paper over the cracks, but basically it's hostile to religion because…

…And we are like machines. Our brains are computers, our eyes are cameras, our hearts are pumps. In the words of Richard Dawkins, we are lumbering robots. We are just machines. That's the first assumption. Of course, this isn't really a testable theory,…

…I speak for all religion. He would never dream of doing that. But within the world of science, Someone like Richard Dawkins, whose title at Oxford was Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. can speak about the public understanding of science,…

…don't. Many of them aren't scientists in the first place. And there are some who are scientists who speak like that, like Richard Dawkins, most obviously, and these American ones who attack my TED Talk, Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers. But the majority of people…

…what's happening inside our heads. So this is actually the frontier of the debate today. Old style atheism, the sort of Richard Dawkins old school atheist thing is kind of blanket hostility to everything to do with religion and spirituality in favour of a…

…so much of the culture of professional science, were passionately anti-Christian. And we see that tradition continue today in people like Richard Dawkins, who equates science with atheism. Um, So I think that this loss of sense of connection is not true of…

…model is completely gone. I think that something that also boosted this was the whole ideology of the selfish gene. Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, came out in 1974. And it portrayed genes as selfish, ruthless, competitive. In fact, it perfectly…

…world at the moment I find with in certain quarters and I have to deal with these extremely dogmatic skeptics like Richard Dawkins and these people are absolutely certain they're right these dogmatic atheists who are on the rampage at the moment are…

…cultures. And I think cultural inheritance depends on morphic resonance. Sometimes people talk in terms of memes, M-E-M-E, Richard Dawkins phrase, units of cultural inheritance. It's too granular and atomistic a way of thinking. I think morphic fields…

…on changing the title to The Science Delusion. And I said, well, I don't really want to have a title that plays off Dawkins, because it gives too much importance to his book. And it's also not really what this book's about. It's about the materialist…

…too much importance to his book. And it's also not really what this book's about. It's about the materialist worldview, which Dawkins' and other materialist theses is based, and indeed, which is the foundation of the whole atheist or new atheist movements.…

…based, and indeed, which is the foundation of the whole atheist or new atheist movements. But I said it's not really a riposte to Dawkins, and I don't want to be locked into that view. He said, well, we insist on this because sales and marketing say it…

…is deluded. They said, well, why call it that? I said, well, it plays off a book called The God Delusion. by Richard Dawkins. They said, Richard who? Whereas in Britain, he's ranked as one of our all-time great public intellectuals and is constantly in…

…value of spiritual practices. The new generation of militant atheists have actually taken up spiritual practices. Old style atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett just rejected the whole lot. But the new style like Sam Harris, one of the so-called…

…Animals and plants are like machines. We're like machines. In fact, we are machines. We're lumbering robots, in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are genetically programmed computers. Second, matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made…