Richard Dawkins and George Cardinal Pell in an Australian TV debate – excellent

Of general interest but of particular interest to those studying AS, this televised debate is excellent. I suggest all AS students watch and note its content for assistance with the Science and Religion chapter.

Click here: Dawkins & Pell

Below is a rough guide to the debate using the questions being asked by the audience to move through the content.

1.20          Is goodness dependent on God?

5.40          Why bother being good?

7.20          Without religion aren’t we only left with Darwinian survival of the fittest?

14.0          Mr Dawkins – are you an atheist or an agnostic?

21.0          How does the ‘Big Bang’ create ex nihilo?

28.40      Cardinal Pell clarify the dichotomy between science and religion

                        And clarify the concept of the soul (31.20)

38.40      Why does Cardinal Pell require different standards of evidence for the issue of climate change and the existence of God?

41.0          What happens to atheists after death?

47.18      Is it OK to teach children that God does not exist?

50.10      Why is there suffering?

54.45      How can the Catholic Church oppose ‘gay marriage’?

57.80   Are there health benefits to belief?

Free will

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophical idea of free will.
Free will - the extent to which we are free to choose our own actions - is one of the most absorbing philosophical problems, debated by almost every great thinker of the last two thousand years. In a universe apparently governed by physical laws, is it possible for individuals to be responsible for their own actions? Or are our lives simply proceeding along preordained paths? Determinism - the doctrine that every event is the inevitable consequence of what goes before - seems to suggest so.
Many intellectuals have concluded that free will is logically impossible. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza regarded it as a delusion. Albert Einstein wrote: "Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion." But in the Enlightenment, philosophers including David Hume found ways in which free will and determinism could be reconciled. Recent scientific developments mean that this debate remains as lively today as it was in the ancient world.
With:
Simon Blackburn Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
Helen Beebee Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham
Galen Strawson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading

Listen in:

Duty

Melvyn Bragg examines duty, a concept that has excited philosophers through history. With guests AC Grayling, Angie Hobbs and Annabel Brett.