Dr Richard Dawkins

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a biologist. He is also an atheist. He believes that Darwin's theories of evolution provide the starting point for everything we need to know about our world. Religion can provide no answers at all.

Presenter0:43

He was born in Kenya, but came to England when his father inherited the family estate in Oxfordshire. He began to develop his ideas as a student at Oxford, and later published them in popular books such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. Happy to be seen as a bridge between academic science and the general public, he's not frightened of controversy, and has frequently found himself in dispute with leading theologians. He is Richard Dawkins.

Presenter1:11

It's not surprising, really, that theologians see you as public enemy number one, um, when you've put God on a par with Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. But you don't draw those analogies lightly, do you?

Dr Richard Dawkins1:21

No, I think it's a very serious analogy. I think that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are childhood props. They're aids to children to understand. Well, no, they don't provide very much understanding in that case. And I think that God is very much like that, except that people very frequently don't give up God when they should. When they become old enough to give up God, they persist.

Presenter1:43

But is it more than that? Do you see God not just as an irrelevance, like the Tooth Fairy, ultimately, but as positively harmful?

Dr Richard Dawkins1:51

Certainly can be positively harmful in various ways, obviously in causing wars, which has happened often enough in history, causing fatwas, causing people to do ill to one another because they're so utterly convinced that they know what is right, because they feel it from inside. They've been told from within themselves what is right. Therefore, anything goes, you can kill people because you know that they're wrong and you know that you are right. I mean that is certainly evil. I think a less serious kind of evil is the way it tends to shut off inquiry. You feel that religion provides you with the answers to the world and the universe and why you exist. Therefore you suppress your normal feelings of inquiry, your normal questioning, and therefore don't come to the truly fascinating answers that there are for those questions.

Presenter2:42

which I want to talk to you about, but just uh I want to explore a little bit more uh uh your view of religion, because you obviously do think it's evil. You've called it a virus, haven't you? You've ta you've you've said it's an infectious disease, this business th that we are that is passed on to us when we're children.

Dr Richard Dawkins2:58

I'm interested in the idea of infection, the idea that something spreads from brain to brain to brain in the same kind of way as a virus spreads from body to body to body. It spreads just because it spreads, not because it has any very good positive reason for spreading.

Presenter3:14

Because parents pass it down to children.

Dr Richard Dawkins3:16

In this case, mostly parents pass it down to children, sometimes it may spread sideways.

Presenter3:20

So so just to put your position crudely on the table, as it were, as far as you're concerned, there are no mysteries of life that ultimately will not be explained by science.

Dr Richard Dawkins3:30

There are very profound mysteries of life which it is science's business to struggle to understand, and it may well be that there are some that we shall never understand. But that should be regarded as a challenge. We should feel unhappy at anything we don't understand. We should regard it as a delightful task that we should enjoy facing up to.

Presenter3:51

But the chances of the ultimate uh explanation for those mysteries uh of being uh an invisible, omnipotent creator who oversees us all, is is just not on as well.

Dr Richard Dawkins4:03

Well, it's a non-explanation. I want to sweep aside that kind of non-explanation so that we really have a good go at finding what the true explanations are.

Presenter4:12

Right, so Richard Dawkins will live or die on his desert island according to his innate skills of survival and not because God wills it one way or the other. Is that right?

Dr Richard Dawkins4:22

That is the position of all of us on our island of a planet, let alone me on my desert island.

Presenter4:28

Let's hear some of the music that's going to accompany your struggle.

Dr Richard Dawkins4:31

Well my first record is in paradism from Forays Requiem, sung by the choir of New College, Oxford. I am a fellow of New College and it's uh where I work and where I live and so it has very pleasant associations for me to hear the choir of the college singing. And also when I was at school I was a choir boy as a treble and I think we didn't actually sing Foray's Requiem, but we sang very similar kinds of music and so it will bring back my school days to me.

Dr Richard Dawkins5:24

And all to see what

Presenter6:00

In paradisum from Foray's Requiem, sung by the choir of New College, Oxford, where you've been a fellow for the last twenty five years, Richard Carrines, I should imagine your views have been the subject of many a heated debate in the senior commonwealth.

Dr Richard Dawkins6:07

Yes.

Dr Richard Dawkins6:12

No, I don't think they ever have. I can't believe that. I can't recall any.

Presenter6:14

I can't

Dr Richard Dawkins6:17

Um any time when they've been a subject of debate, no.

Presenter6:20

But but you've undermined the academic existence of some of your colleagues in your time, and you've gone as far as to suggest that theology is not a respectable subject to be taught in our universities.

Dr Richard Dawkins6:29

Yes, I've certainly said that. My theological colleagues are quite intrigued and interested to discuss these matters. When my first book, The Selfish Gene, was published.

Dr Richard Dawkins6:38

Two clergymen of my acquaintance I think indeed they were the two clergymen in New College both independently approached me and said that it reminded them overwhelmingly of the doctrine of original sin.

Dr Richard Dawkins6:50

Did I have anything to comment on that?

Presenter6:52

But you it's very difficult to imagine that they just accept it on on an academic level, because you are saying that everything they believe in and everything they teach uh is hocus pocus, really. You're saying to all of us we should we should now grow up at the end of the twentieth century, we should grow up, mature and leave all of this fairy tale stuff behind us.

Dr Richard Dawkins7:12

Well, that is what I'm saying, but I'm trying to say it in a more positive way. I'm I'm not trying to just s say negative things all the time. I'm trying to say there is a very, very exciting universe out there to be seen if only we shall open our eyes, take off our blinkers and see it. And that's a more positive way of looking at it.

Presenter7:28

But why do you feel so strongly? I mean, after all, what what you're preaching is Darwinism. Darwinism, as every schoolboy knows, has been around for a hundred and forty years or more. Why now? Why should we suddenly if religion hasn't faltered and fallen before it now, why should it do so now because you say so?

Dr Richard Dawkins7:44

Well, my my theological friends wouldn't thank me for al allowing you to suggest that there's an opposition between theology and Darwinism. Respectable theologians, of course, accept Darwinism as they didn't in the

Presenter7:54

They didn't in the beginning.

Dr Richard Dawkins7:55

They didn't in the beginning, but but nowadays, very wisely, they do. The evidence has always been overwhelmingly strong as far as Darwinism is concerned. The people who don't believe in Darwinism are just plain ignorant. That's all there is to them. So there is a need to fight that battle because there is a need to fight a battle against ignorance.

Presenter8:13

So why are you saying then, just to simplify, why are you saying we should dismiss God today in 1995 when we haven't dismissed him before?

Dr Richard Dawkins8:22

Well, some of us have dismissed him before. I mean, it's a matter of if you believe something to be to be right, you don't suddenly say, nineteen ninety five seems to be the right time, the time is right for a change of heart. It has nothing to do with that. What you believe is true you believe is true, and you believe it's true in nineteen ninety five, nineteen eighty five, nineteen seventy five, whenever you happen to think about it.

Presenter8:41

So you believe, then, that that the answer to the most fundamental philosophical question of all, why are we here? is that we are driven by our genes, by the desire of our genes to replicate themselves simply that no more, no less, and there is no need of God?

Dr Richard Dawkins8:58

Yes, that's putting it in a nutshell. Yes.

Presenter9:01

Okay, let's have record number two.

Dr Richard Dawkins9:04

Record number two Paul Robeson singing Passing By

Dr Richard Dawkins9:09

This takes me back to my childhood in Africa, when my father had an old wind up grammophone and a collection of Paul Robeson records, which I loved and still do. The particular song Passing By has associations with Between Me and My Wife Lala as well.

Dr Richard Dawkins9:27

There is a lady sweet and kind Was never faced so pleased my mind

Speaker 29:40

Mm. Uh

Speaker 29:41

I did but see her passing by, And yet I love

Presenter9:52

Paul Robeson singing Passing By and memories of your childhood in Africa, in Kenya and and in Nyasaland.

Dr Richard Dawkins10:03

In Kenya till I was two, and thereafter in Nyasalan till I was eight.

Presenter10:07

And your father was in the colonial side?

Dr Richard Dawkins10:08

He was in the Colonial Agricultural Service, yes.

Presenter10:11

So was it there that you first felt the stirrings of an interest in the natural world?

Dr Richard Dawkins10:17

Not really. Unfortunately, to my regret, I've never really been a naturalist. I've never been much of a bird spotter or insect uh spotter.

Dr Richard Dawkins10:26

My father was, and and um it's it's it's rather a pity that I never was. I suppose my interest in biology came rather later.

Presenter10:33

But it's interesting that you chose it. When you went up to Oxford you went to read zoology. Obviously there was a scientific interest anyway.

Dr Richard Dawkins10:38

Yes, I read zoology at Oxford. My father had read botany. There might have been a certain following in family footsteps there.

Presenter10:45

It was in the jeans, huh?

Dr Richard Dawkins10:46

Well, I know about that. I had always been interested in the sort of philosophical questions which I think biology can help to answer. And it was rather that than natural history, I think, that attracted me at first. I now belatedly have become interested in natural history and wish I'd learned more as a child.

Presenter11:06

So how old were you when you realized that that for you Darwin provided most of the answers, even even to the the deepest practice?

Dr Richard Dawkins11:13

So about sixteen, I suppose, when I learned about Darwinism, at first I didn't believe it. I thought it was um couldn't do the do the job of explaining, and then thought it through and thought it through again, and gradually realized that it was by far the best explanation and

Presenter11:28

Because you had been infected with the virus, as it were. You'd gone to all the uh perfectly proper Christian prep schools and public schools.

Dr Richard Dawkins11:35

Yes, I wouldn't want to exaggerate that. I mean, I'm not one of those people who ever had religion rammed down my throat. I it was done with a very light touch, and I just had the ordinary sort of Church of England, which is the most civilized way to have religion fed to you. It it wasn't oppressive.

Presenter11:51

So it was easy for you to shrug it off when you actually found a scientific answer.

Presenter11:57

But wasn't that because someone

Presenter12:00

Or something or something in you had given you the intellect, had provided you with the intellect to question that religious belief and in the end to dismiss it.

Dr Richard Dawkins12:11

Any child growing up, I suppose, with a bit of luck will have some sort of in inquiring tendency, some tendency to ask questions, to to not accept everything that you're told on trust and to

Presenter12:23

Quite, but my point is therefore the virus wasn't as as virulent.

Dr Richard Dawkins12:26

Oh no, it's it's like any virus, you can you can shrug it off.

Presenter12:31

Record number three.

Dr Richard Dawkins12:33

Record number three is Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantaboli for Strings. This was the earliest piece of what you could call serious music that I suppose I heard. Again, my father had a record of it, played I think by Fritz Kreisler, which was very sort of swoopy with the violin. It's sort of haunted me ever since, and and I more recently got a record of it, in this case played I think on the cello. And I still love it. It's one of my favourites.

Presenter13:59

Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabele, played by Raphael Valfisch, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Geoffrey Simon.

Presenter14:06

Now, how do you Richard Dawkins with your scientific logic

Presenter14:10

explain our appreciation of music like that or or our reaction to

Presenter14:14

lovely poetry or art, I mean, things which arouse an emotional response in us.

Dr Richard Dawkins14:21

There are many things that we don't understand. That's different from saying that we can never in principle understand them.

Dr Richard Dawkins14:27

The kind of understanding that we shall eventually come up with, if we do, will be of the form brains are very, very complicated things, and brains react to sounds and sights in very, very complicated ways. And it isn't

Dr Richard Dawkins14:44

Fruitful to attempt a scientific explanation of in detail why one is moved by music or poetry.

Presenter14:52

But people would say you're copying out in saying that. They I mean, that's exactly what your the people who oppose your views would say, that that is something mysterious and beautiful and God given, that man can make computers, but he can't make computers appreciate music.

Dr Richard Dawkins15:05

Let's take computers. There are many levels on which you could understand computers. You could understand computers in very great detail by looking at exactly what's happening to the electrons going through the transistors in a computer. And ultimately, everybody believes that you will understand computers at that level. That is, in a sense, all that's going on.

Dr Richard Dawkins15:29

But nevertheless, in order to try to understand how the computer is behaving, how it manages to do mathematics or do word processing, you have to look at a higher level. And similarly, if you want to understand human appreciation of music, you certainly will not get anywhere if you talk only about nerve cells. I believe that it's only nerve cells that are that are really there. But nevertheless, we have to talk in terms of what of what those nerve cells are doing at a higher level. We have to move, say, to a psychological level. And we can move to a psychological level. We can use units of discussion, units of description, units of explanation, which are much higher level units than nerve cells.

Presenter16:12

Do you believe, then, that we have a predisposition or that we are preprogrammed to like or to dislike music? I mean, when we are born, are we already what we're going to be? Is it all there?

Dr Richard Dawkins16:24

No, it's certainly not all there. And when one says pre-programmed to like music, I'd prefer to say we're pre-programmed with brains that are going to respond in certain ways given a certain environment. There was probably nothing in the history of our species that led us to be favoured by natural selection if we liked music. There was something in history that led us to be favoured if we had brains that had certain kinds of mechanisms wired up to ears, which incidentally happened to respond to music when music came along. Now music must be tapping into something that was already in the brain for some other reason.

Dr Richard Dawkins17:05

As mathematics is. I mean, we were never actually naturally selected to do mathematics or to do philosophy. But something about the way natural selection shaped our brains has incidentally left us equipped to do mathematics and philosophy and to appreciate music.

Presenter17:20

So so does that rule out i any any space for free will in all of this? I mean, i if if you have a predisposition, you're highly likely are you to to take to mathematics, as it were, and you you wouldn't otherwise. It isn't it isn't that you can suddenly decide.

Dr Richard Dawkins17:35

No, I think that's a misconception because at at the philosophical level free will is a very difficult subject which I should not get into. That's for philosophers. But you're asking a more simple question, which is whether we are born with a predisposition to be good at philosophy or mathematics or music, and if we're born like that, there's nothing we can do about it to change it. I don't believe that. I think that it's possible to take somebody who does not have a particularly strong talent for music and teach them music, or a particularly strong talent for mathematics and teach them mathematics. There is an interaction between a genetic predisposition to be good at something and training to be good at something, and you can make up for a lack of one with an excess of the other.

Presenter18:21

Record number four.

Dr Richard Dawkins18:22

Record number four is Judy Collins singing Michael from Mountains.

Dr Richard Dawkins18:28

This takes me back to my first job in Berkeley, California in the sixties. I get a bit tired of people who call themselves a child of the sixties and always banging on about the sixties. I think the sixties is a

Dr Richard Dawkins18:40

One of the good candidates for great bores of today. Nevertheless, this particular music by Judy Collins is evocative for me of a particular time of my life, and I do love it.

Speaker 118:50

Michael wakes you up with sweets, he takes you up streets, and the rain comes down.

Speaker 118:58

Sidewalk markets locked up tight And umbrellas bright on a grey background There's oil on the puddles in taffeta patterns That run down the drain

Speaker 119:13

In coloured arrangements that Michael would change.

Speaker 119:17

With a stick

Presenter19:18

Judy Collins, singing Michael from Mountains and Memories of Your Time, Richard Dawkins, at Berkeley, California, where you spent two years and then you came back to Oxford in 1970 and you've been there ever since. You'd been back a few years when you decided to write a a bestseller in Inverted Commas, a a popular science book you set out to write. Why did you suddenly decide to do that?

Dr Richard Dawkins19:40

The particular reason for writing The Selfish Gene was that there had been a spate of popular books at the time suggesting that Darwinism works at the level of the group or species. Natural selection favours the fittest group or the fittest species. And that led to the sort of idea that individuals are expected to be generous and unselfish and working for the good of the group.

Dr Richard Dawkins20:05

Because any group whose individuals were selfish would tend to go extinct.

Dr Richard Dawkins20:09

And that's just wrong. I mean, that's a misconception, misunderstanding of Darwinism. Alas, it would be awfully nice if it were true for all sorts of ideological reasons. But it was a it seemed to me to be a straight conflict between what would be ideologically nice and what was actually true. And I wanted to tell people what was true, not so that they should sit down under it and say, Oh dear, we're all selfish and horrible, but rather that so that they should learn to hit back against it. The message of the selfish gene in a sense was

Dr Richard Dawkins20:38

You can expect no help from biological nature if you want to be nice and unselfish and generous, so we've got to work at being nice and unselfish and generous.

Presenter20:47

But you were saying just now that you didn't want people to sit down and say, Oh dear, what a terrible thing But people did, didn't they? People wrote to you. You had a huge mailbag as a as a result of writing what did turn out to be a bestseller and people saying

Presenter20:58

You have robbed me of my religion. I see exactly what you mean. You must be right.

Dr Richard Dawkins21:02

One or two people felt melancholy about it. Uh the vast majority were extremely cheerful about it and and they said thank you for liberating me.

Presenter21:10

But have you never felt any guilt for those others? Because you mentioned earlier on about the the psychological level of it all, and of course there is people have a psychological need for religion, which if they read and understood your book you had taken away from them. And people people need it in bereavement, in illness. They need to believe that there is someone there looking after them, someone who had a reason for making whatever terrible thing it is happen.

Dr Richard Dawkins21:33

Yeah.

Presenter21:34

Yeah.

Dr Richard Dawkins21:34

I think one's over optimistic to think that one changes the minds of religious people that easily.

Presenter21:38

But isn't that what you want to do?

Dr Richard Dawkins21:40

I love to be able to show people some understanding of why they exist and what life is about. That is the mission of my books. I don't see it as a crusade against religion. I'm not really very interested in religion. I'm interested in the truth, and I'm trying to tell people what the truth is. If they choose to interpret it as undermining their religion, then I'm afraid that is their problem.

Presenter22:05

More music.

Dr Richard Dawkins22:06

The next one is Vaughan Williams's Phantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. It conjures up for me visions of the English countryside. I think of clouds scudding across high chalk downland, and I feel I should be reminded of England by this record.

Presenter23:25

Part of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Talis played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the fields.

Presenter23:32

You've talked about genes being selfish, about being bent on their own replication. Let me run some other popular scientific questions past you. D do you, for example, believe that cold viruses cause us to sneeze in order to increase their chances of replicating or finding another host?

Dr Richard Dawkins23:49

It's a very int interesting idea. There's a a large literature on the idea of parasites more generally manipulating their hosts in order to get themselves passed on to other hosts. Now whether cold viruses really make us sneeze for their own good, I'm not sure. But undoubtedly there are various kinds of worms and other parasites that do make their hosts change their behaviour in such a way as to be more likely to pass the parasites on.

Presenter24:17

It's a very interesting reason for sneezing, though, isn't it?

Dr Richard Dawkins24:20

Yes, that's true. I mean, uh an another possibility is is rabies um uh causing dogs to bite, which is of course how they get passed on, and to salivate, to to foam at the mouth, and they they pass out through the saliva into the next victim. That's another possibility.

Presenter24:39

You also believe, don't you, that there are other forms of virus uh what I would call fashion actually, but you believe that that a lot of young people like the same kind of music because they've caught it from each other, as it were.

Dr Richard Dawkins24:52

Yes, I mean, it it's almost in a sense obvious that things like that spread in a virus-like way. I'm sure you could apply the

Presenter24:52

Yeah.

Dr Richard Dawkins25:00

Mathematics of epidemiology to the spread of certain kinds of music, perhaps to the spread of. Well, for example, there's a universal epidemic among students at the moment for the so-called IQ reducer. That's the baseball hat worn backwards. Well, a baseball hat worn forwards is an IQ reducer that reduces your IQ ten points. Turn it round with the silly little bit of elastic at the front and it reduces the IQ a full fifty points, science proves. But are you

Presenter25:28

But are you saying this is more than just a fashion?

Dr Richard Dawkins25:30

No, it is a fashion. It's just another way of putting fashion. You could trace the spread of the backwards facing baseball hat just as you could trace the spread of a measles epidemic, I believe. And I think it would be a fascinating thing to do.

Presenter25:43

Fascinating.

Presenter25:44

More music. Number six.

Dr Richard Dawkins25:47

Part of the second movement of Schubert's string quintet in C major. I wanted some beautiful string music because my daughter Juliet, who is ten, is learning to play the violin and I could imagine her, as as I'm on my desert island, getting better and better at the violin until she sounds something like this.

Presenter27:06

Part of the second movement of Schubert's string quintet in C major, played by the FitzWilliam String Quartet with Christopher Van Kampen.

Presenter27:14

You obviously, Richard, hold your views with deep conviction and you've promoted them reasonably hard as a lecturer and latterly reader at Oxford and through your books and television programmes. But do you crave a wider audience still? How frustrated are you that your message isn't being heard and taken on board more widely?

Dr Richard Dawkins27:35

Not exactly frustrated. I think my message is being heard and taken on board very nicely. Thank you. There is a certain frustration, I suppose, in lecturing to an audience of fifty or a hundred undergraduates and feeling that it would be nice to be lecturing to

Dr Richard Dawkins27:51

a larger audience, really because the scientific matter that I'm trying to get across, and that any scientist is trying to get across, is so fascinating.

Dr Richard Dawkins28:01

Is so powerful in what it can explain, and is so sadly, tragically unknown to.

Dr Richard Dawkins28:09

So many people. I sort of feel that it's terribly sad that a lot of people out there are going to their graves without ever knowing what is perfectly simple and commonplace and in lots of books that they could know. And it is a very positive thing. I sort of feel that part of the conversation we've been having has had a rather sort of negative sound to it, as though I'm constantly knocking and putting down and things. But I'm not that at all. I'm not interested in the point of view that I am portrayed as knocking down. It just isn't important. What is important?

Presenter28:38

You don't like being classed as the militant atheist.

Dr Richard Dawkins28:40

No. I mean, I'd much rather be classed as an enthusiastic scientist who's trying to open people's eyes to how much there is that we do already understand and can understand in the future, and I don't see it as a negative knocking down at all.

Presenter28:53

Let's have record number seven.

Dr Richard Dawkins28:55

Vangelis' Conquest of Paradise from the film fourteen ninety two.

Dr Richard Dawkins29:01

The association for me with this is is a slightly odd one. Having spent my early childhood in Africa, I had the opportunity to go back to Africa just very recently with with my wife. And so there was a great sense for me of going back to my roots, back to my uh childhood.

Dr Richard Dawkins29:20

But also, of course, it's back to humanity's roots because we are African animals. We spent almost all of our of the last oh, many, many millions of years in Africa, and only very, very recently come out of Africa. So we did feel a sense of going back to humanity's roots. This was heightened by the fact that we were going to visit Richard Leakey and to be shown in the the vaults of the Nairobi Museum.

Dr Richard Dawkins29:47

Many of the great fossils of human history, which is a deeply moving experience.

Dr Richard Dawkins29:53

And then we went on to stay with Ian and Auria Douglas Hamilton, who are the famous couple who've worked on elephants.

Dr Richard Dawkins29:59

in their what's called Pink Palace, which is the most astonishing building, a great big 1930s Art Deco palace in the middle of the African bush, well on the shores of Lake Naivasha actually. And it's a really surreal experience to go into this palace in the middle of Africa and to hear blaring out across Lake Naivasha the strains of this magnificent music through very, very large loudspeakers. And it's something that we shall never forget.

Presenter30:59

CONQUEST OF PARADES BY VAN GELIS from the film fourteen ninety two.

Presenter31:04

Uh tell me about Richard Dawkins on a desert island, and what what are your um practical predispositions?

Dr Richard Dawkins31:09

I'm not desperately practical. I think I suffered from the fact that my father is desperately practical, and so whenever there was anything to be done, he would tend to do it. And I wish I'd sort of watched more carefully and learned how to do it. I was sent to Andel, which is a school that's renowned for its practicality and has the finest workshops, I think, in the country. But the trouble with fine workshops is that they're things like high-powered lathes and milling machines, and you don't get them on desert islands. So working with string and bits of driftwood.

Presenter31:35

I learned so much.

Dr Richard Dawkins31:39

Is not sort of thing I'm very good at. It is what my father's good at, so I'm not really sure how I'd manage.

Presenter31:44

And what about your own company? Are you happy with that?

Dr Richard Dawkins31:46

No, not really. I'm not very good on my own. I think I do need company.

Presenter31:52

And what about death? Do you fear that?

Dr Richard Dawkins31:54

Uh not more than I think many people do. Um

Dr Richard Dawkins31:58

Certainly I don't fear it because I know that it's the end. I think I'd rather it was the end than some it or almost any kind of eternity. The time may well come when I welcome it, if I'm ending up in some kind of painful terminal disease, and I shall be very annoyed if the law prevents me from ending my life when I want to end it, because of some idiotic scruples.

Presenter32:22

But what about if you were in that kind of condition, lying alone on your desert island poisoned by a venomous snake or something? Do you think if you were

Presenter32:31

alone and dying a slow and painful death and had no way out, do you think you'd ever be tempted to, um, call on God for help?

Dr Richard Dawkins32:38

No, I think I'd be more tempted to to find some some poison if that if that seemed like the best way out. Uh I don't think I would be tempted to call on God, no.

Presenter32:47

You would never revert to your early childhood beliefs.

Dr Richard Dawkins32:50

Beliefs, I can't imagine so, no.

Presenter32:53

Last record

Dr Richard Dawkins32:55

The area Machedic Meinherze Rhein from Bach St. Matthew Passion.

Dr Richard Dawkins33:01

It's a great favourite of my wife's for one thing. It's hauntingly beautiful for another. You've just been talking about death. It is salutary to think about last things from time to time. Even if one isn't religious, one nevertheless can be moved by religious music.

Dr Richard Dawkins33:22

Yeah.

Speaker 233:22

Cersei, Cersei.

Speaker 133:35

Au fer die seroi.

Dr Richard Dawkins33:46

Uh

Dr Richard Dawkins33:47

Happy Temple

Dr Richard Dawkins33:49

Yeah.

Dr Richard Dawkins33:52

Says Vegra, he's very years old, says Vega.

Dr Richard Dawkins34:10

And Her and Schwichmirn Serse

Presenter34:22

The aria Machedich meinherze Rheind from Bach St. Matthew Passion, sung by Tom Krause, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir George Schulte. If you could only take one of those eight records.

Dr Richard Dawkins34:34

It's very difficult. I think it would probably be the Schubert.

Presenter34:38

The the string quintet in CNA, memories of your daughter and the violin play.

Dr Richard Dawkins34:39

The edge.

Dr Richard Dawkins34:42

Yes.

Presenter34:43

What about your book?

Dr Richard Dawkins34:45

Well, I thought something that I could read over and over again because of the style rather than because of what I learned from it, and so it would be Jeeves' Omnibus by PG Woodhouse.

Presenter34:55

And your luxury?

Dr Richard Dawkins34:57

A solar powered computer.

Dr Richard Dawkins35:00

Really because a computer is so many different things, you can program it to be one toy after another. It's not limited to being one thing. By its very nature, you reprogram it to be something else, and so it would be an infinitely versatile toy and source of amusement. There are lots so many things you can do on it.

Presenter35:17

Richard Dawkins, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Dr Richard Dawkins35:21

Thank you.

Speaker 235:30

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.