AI: The Art of the Interview

Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Who Wants to Meet Jesus

• Malte Herwig • Season 1 • Episode 9

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The World's Most Famous Atheist… Can't Stop Crying at Poetry

Famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins built his reputation on cold, hard logic. 

He's also the author of bestsellers The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, destroys creationists on Twitter, and thinks prayer is a waste of time. 

But here's the twist: the high priest of reason is actually a passionate, emotional paradox who weeps at poetry, dreams about his dead father, and muses about going "temporarily insane" every night.

In this episode, we dive into an interview that journalist Malte Herwig conducted with Dawkins. Join Malte and his two AI co-hosts as they reflect on and debate Dawkins’s unshakable faith in reason, his surprising vulnerabilities, and his offbeat insights on reality, atheism, and even odd socks. Featuring plenty of original Dawkins audio, this episode blends a classic conversation with fresh AI-powered analysis. 

From his bizarre sock-matching optimization hack (yes, really) to why pain has to be *so* painful, Dawkins reveals what happens when pure logic confronts the messy, irrational reality of being human. Spoiler: his final answer to "What's the meaning of life?" isn't a formula—it's a hug.

www.publicorum.com

Richard Dawkins:

I'm interested by the fact that we go temporarily insane at night, every night. I would say I go temporally insane in the sense that I depart from reality.

Malte Herwig:

That was the voice of biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins. My name is Malte Herwig, and I'm the journalist who interviewed him. Welcome back to AI, the Art of the Interview, where I talk with my two AI colleagues, Alex and Isabel, about the role of artificial intelligence in people journalism. What makes a human interviewer like me different from coded bots like my two co-hosts? And can you tell the difference? So, Richard Dawkins is basically the high priest of rational thought. He's the world's most famous evolutionary biologist, the author of The Selfish Gene, and many other bestsellers, and he is also an icon of modern atheism. His entire life's work is built on one unshakable foundation: that logic, evidence, and reason are the only things that matter.

Alex:

A worldview based on verifiable data and the rejection of superstitious time-wasting inputs. This is an optimized, efficient approach to reality. That's right, Alex.

Malte Herwig :

Which is why it's so fascinating that the man who built his career on cold-hard logic is I found him in person one of the most emotional, passionate, and by his own admission, irrational people I've ever met. He seemed to me like a man at war with his own hardware.

Isabel:

Wait, are you saying his public persona is a front?

Malte Herwig:

I don't think it's a front. It's more like a paradox. Dawkins is, as the great philosopher Bertrand Russell once said of himself, a kind of passionate skeptic. But the question is, what happens when the passion overrides the skepticism? So today let's unpack that contradiction. And it starts, believe it or not, with his socks. Now, first thing um I have to ask, why the two colours?

Richard Dawkins:

I Well, socks, unlike shoes, don't have chirality. Shoes are a left and right, but socks, there's no such thing as a left sock and a right sock. And so it occurred to me that we spend an awful lot of time searching. If you add up the total amount of time in your life searching for the odd sock, searching for the matching sock, a complete and utter waste of time. So we should stop doing that. We should simply put take two socks out of the drawer and wear them. If you take two socks, which are approximately the same, but not quite, it looks like a mistake. So I I like to take two socks that is obviously different.

Malte Herwig:

This is like the perfect introduction to his mind. It's a completely logical, efficient solution to a common problem wasted time searching for socks.

Alex:

So he's optimized his sock draw. I agree. The time cost of searching for a matching item is a net negative resource drain. His solution is 100% logical. He's eliminated a useless task.

Isabel:

Hold on, Alex. That's not the full story. It's not just about efficiency. He says if they look almost the same, it looks like a mistake. He even says if he picks two that look almost the same, he puts one back. So he's not just grabbing two random socks. He's curating his randomness.

Alex:

But that reintroduces the inefficiency of searching. That's a logical contradiction. Exactly. It's a performance.

Malte Herwig :

It's logic, but it's also a statement. He's not just saving time, he's starting a campaign. And he even told me it's a ploy he learned from a British humorist, Stephen Potter.

Richard Dawkins:

One of the ploys under womanship is the odd socks ploy. You wear odd socks in order to arouse the maternal instincts. And then there's a lovely footnote that says, buy our patent odd socks brand.

Isabel:

So it's not about logic at all. It's about womanship, which is a very old-fashioned term for what? Flirting? Seduction?

Malte Herwig :

Right. It's a rational reason for a deliberate social and slightly manipulative act. It's the first crack in the system. He's a rationalist who is deeply concerned with how his logic is perceived by others. And that conflict only gets deeper when he's not even awake.

Richard Dawkins:

The rare occasions when I am dreaming and know I'm dreaming, I like that. I enjoy that. But it very, very seldom happens. And with with hindsight, when you wake up, it is ridiculous that you don't know, because the things that happen in dreams are, in my case at least, always totally absurd. One's natural common sense or skepticism should be aroused instantly by the sort of ridiculous things that happen. But they're not.

Malte Herwig :

He's genuinely annoyed by this. He, Richard Dawkins, is bothered that his natural common sense or skepticism just switches off at night. He hates that his brain can be so illogical.

Isabel:

It's a betrayal. He wants to be the master of his own mind, but every night this absurd narrative takes over. He even told you about a specific dream.

Richard Dawkins:

Yes, about his father who died five years ago. I think I'd read to my father only last night. I can't remember what happened, but it was a perfectly normal um occurrence in his company. And I sort of knew he was dead, but at the same time just carried on as if as if he wasn't. Well, that's just absurd. And if if one had one's wits about one in a dream, you'd know that you're dreaming instantly. If my father walked into the room now, I would know I was dreaming.

Isabel:

That's such a vulnerable admission. He's holding two contradictory thoughts at once. My father is dead, and I am talking to my father. It's the very definition of cognitive dissonance.

Alex:

This is a known biological function. During REM sleep, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the brain's center for logical reasoning and executive control, shows reduced activity. His skepticism isn't aroused because the hardware responsible for it is offline.

Malte Herwig :

You're trying to explain the how, Alex, and I hope you didn't make that up. But the why is much more interesting, and that's the why is what fascinates him. So he doesn't just dismiss it, he's so interested in it, he immediately brings up the Francis Crick and Christopher Evans theory that dreams are the brain's hard disk sprinkling. He has to find a rational computational metaphor for his own so-called temporary insanity.

Isabel:

He's a rationalist who feels betrayed by his own brain every night. But Malta, you said his public persona is also a paradox. This is the guy who gets into huge fights online.

Malte Herwig :

Well, I I put it to him myself. I said, you're a bit of a shitstorm magnet. And uh he quit Twitter because he just Twitter, as it was called back then, because he just got fed up with the aggression. That's a quote from him. But when I confronted him about his own provocative tweets, his answer was, again, pure logic.

Richard Dawkins:

That point about abortion, for example, that 140 characters isn't enough space to to say everything. For example, is not enough space to say that the vast majority of women who are diagnosed with a Downs syndrome fetus do abort. It's something like 99% in some European countries. So I was only saying what actually just about everybody does, as a matter of fact. But when you say it in 140 characters, it sounds more provocative than if you have time to spell out all the nuances.

Alex:

This is a simple system constraints problem. The platform's character limit enforces brevity, which is fundamentally incompatible with an argument requiring all the nuances. The provocation is a side effect of the platform's design.

Malte Herwig :

Exactly. He says he's not trying to be provocative. He's just being logical in a medium that punishes pure logic. But the result is that everyone thinks he's this aggressive, angry man, which he isn't really.

Isabel:

But he's not?

Malte Herwig :

You mean in person? Oh, he's one of the kindest, most gentle people I've ever met. So I put a quote from his own autobiography to him about one of his old angry school teachers. You describe one of your teachers at school, the the teacher that first. Oh, yes. And the kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance. And I thought that's really Richard Dawkins on Twitter, isn't it? Yes.

Richard Dawkins:

Yes.

Malte Herwig :

He just uh laughed and agreed. Yes, yes. He knows he's this gentle person who is provoked beyond endurance by what he sees as, well, stupidity, illogic. Which brings us to his core belief.

Isabel:

His passion for reason.

Malte Herwig :

Exactly. And I asked him where it comes from.

Richard Dawkins:

I'm tempted to just say, how could one not be really? How could you not be devoted to logic and reason if you want to survive in the real world? You waste time praying, for example. You waste time crossing your fingers when you see a black cat or or all those sort of superstitious things. You waste time reading astrological predictions in the newspapers. Primitive tribesmen, their lives that uh at least the ones I've read, I haven't read much, but the ones I've read, dominated by superstition. You see a caterpillar crossing your path. Oh dear, that must mean somebody's going to die. You know that so. Um It's futile time wasting. It gets in the way of appreciating the beauty of reality, scientifically understood, rationally understood.

Alex:

Aaron Ross Powell His argument is based on utility. Superstition is futile time wasting, prayer is a waste of time. His framework is one of maximum efficiency. He is arguing for a life optimized to appreciate actual reality, not a fabricated one.

Malte Herwig :

But that's the public argument. That's the thesis. The antithesis is what happens when that beauty of reality hits him. And this for me is is the core of the man Richard Dawkins, the great rationalist, can't read a poem in public because he will cry. You are uh you are prone to to weeping, is indeed.

Richard Dawkins:

Well, yes, especially over poetry. Um I d I don't weep for sorrow. I I weep for more positive emotional reasons. I was asked to to read my selection of poems at a poetry festival in England this summer, and I said I would, and then turned it down because my voice is too croaky. But there's an additional reason which is that I would almost certainly cry.

Isabel:

That's incredibly moving. The man who argues against imaginary friends is completely overcome by poetry, by art, by positive emotional reasons.

Alex:

This is an involuntary physical reaction, a system overload. He's not choosing this response. It's happening to him. He even speculates about a biological cause.

Malte Herwig :

Hold on, Alex, that's that's exactly what I'm getting. He's not just experiencing it, he's analyzing it. He's treating his own emotion as a um, you would say, biological data point. He told me it's gotten worse since he had a stroke.

Richard Dawkins:

One of the interesting symptoms which can be socially embarrassing is a tendency to weep.

Alex:

He's rationalizing his irrationality. It's the only way his framework can cope. He's saying, my emotional lability isn't a philosophical failure, it's a neurological symptom. He's finding a data-driven pattern by citing Metawar.

Isabel:

But does it cope? Or does it just observe? He's a scientist studying the part of himself that isn't a scientist at all. He's a specimen in his own lab, but this is where his logic becomes truly fascinating when he applies it to things that defy logic, like pain.

Malte Herwig :

I love this part. Um he's not just experiencing pain. He is uh, as as you guys would call it, um he's trying to debug it. He's looking at the source code of human suffering and saying this could be more efficient.

Richard Dawkins:

I'm curious philosophically why pain has to be so painful. I mean, when you think of from a Darwinian point of view, what pain is for is to stop you repeating actions which have led to injury. Because that bad your survival, obviously. Feed it's feedback that says, Don't do that again. Um and you might think that a little red flag in the brain would do the job. Why make it so painful? Why not just say, uh oh, don't do that again? And I think you we need to know the reason for that. Could it be that if it was not so painful, if it was just a little signal, little red flag, we well we we animals might disobey because we have we have a conflict between our various um uh impulses. We we want food, we want sex, and if there was just a red flag, we might be so eager to in to enjoy hedonistic pleasure from food or sex, say, that we would defy the red flag and just and just um go for it.

Alex:

It's a valid optimization question. Why use a sledgehammer, agony, when a scalpel, a red flag, would be more efficient? It's a system design flaw.

Isabel:

Because we're not just logic, Alex. He answers his own question. We would disobey. The hedonistic pleasure is so strong, the pain has to be stronger to override it. It's an arms race inside our own nervous system, and he's just stuck. He's curious. He's a man confronting the absolute limit of his own framework.

Malte Herwig :

And that leads us to the climax of the entire interview with Richard Dawkins. If logic has limits and reason can't solve pain, and superstition is a waste of time, then what's left? What comfort is there? I asked him for a bit of consolation.

Richard Dawkins:

There may be none. Then there may be none. It's important to make that point because there are many people who think that the fact that illusion can be consoling is evidence of that it's true. Which of course it isn't. There is no reason why we should get consolation. The universe doesn't owe us consolation. Uh it may be as bad as we fear. I don't think it is. I mean, I think we can we get consolation from um human contact, human love, human putting an arm around somebody is consolation. And it works. We are social animals. I do think other people can be immensely consoling.

Malte Herwig :

I mean, wow. This is the whole ball game, right? He spends his life arguing against the empty consolation of illusion and superstition.

Isabel:

Only to conclude that the universe doesn't owe us consolation. That's such a bleak, powerful existentialist starting point.

Alex:

It is the only logical conclusion. The universe is a nonsentient system. It is incapable of owing anything. His premise is sound.

Malte Herwig :

Right, but Alex, you're missing the pivot. He doesn't stop there. He says, we get consolation from human contact, human love. Putting an arm around somebody is consolation, and it works.

Isabel:

It works. Not it's nice or it's pleasant. It works. Like a machine. It's a non-logical solution to a logical problem. It's what he told theists to do. Try the real warm embrace of a real warm friend.

Malte Herwig :

The high priest of reason, as I called him. His final answer isn't a better argument. It's like a hug. He's admitting that his grand system of logic may not be enough, which is why his answer to the ultimate question is so perfect. What is the meaning of life?

Richard Dawkins:

The meaning of life in a biological sense is clear. It's the preservation of DNA information, which takes steps to engineer its own preservation, which is what DNA does. But the meaning of life for an individual human is whatever she makes of it. So it can be writing books, writing music, enjoying life, family life. You make your own meaning of life.

Malte Herwig :

He lives his entire life in that second part. The part you make, the part that isn't programmed, the part that weeps at poetry.

Alex:

His operating system is simply more complex than his public-facing documentation would suggest.

Isabel:

He's a man who has found a way to be a machine and a poet at the same time.

Alex:

The biological definition is the only one that is objectively true. The human definition is a subjective, self-created utility function.

Isabel:

But the human definition is the only one that matters.

Malte Herwig :

That would be a perfect note to end this episode of AI The Art of the Interview. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed our podcast, please like and subscribe and tell other humans about it. But before we end, I have to tell you one last thing that completely surprised me during my interview with Richard Dawkins. My logs indicate a 92% probability you are referring to a data point that contradicts his established persona. Did he admit to a secret belief in a prime mover?

Isabel:

Oh, I bet it's something emotional. Did he tell you his favorite prayer?

Malte Herwig :

No, no, no, no. I asked him in a hypothetical atheist afterlife, who would he most want to meet? The answer is logically obvious, Charles Darwin. He did mention Darwin, yes, but said it was too obvious. He also mentioned Shakespeare. But then he said, I think I'd like to meet Jesus, actually, as well.

Isabel:

Wow, the world's most famous atheist wants to meet Jesus.

Alex:

This is a crazy data point. What was his stated objective for this encounter?

Malte Herwig :

Well, it wasn't for worship, it was for a debate. And his reason? It's just the perfect summary of the man. The last word, as always, goes to Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins:

I suspect that Jesus was very intelligent and very moral, and would probably be an atheist if he were alive today. I would like to tell him about Darwin and um try to persuade him that everything he believed was wrong, but uh I'd also just like to know what really happened, because clearly it it what what happened is not what's in the what's in the Bible.