it's funny how just about every time someone claims to be an "ex-atheist" my bullshit meter inexplicably explodes. hmmm.

I am amazed by just how well Dawkins is able to speak and get his points accross. I have heard no proponents of religion come anywhere close to being as eloquent, and make as much sense as Dawkins does, and this interview is another prime example.

Absolutely. Dawkins breezed through these questions. The thinly veiled belittlements (the whole "faith" in scientific method schpiel) from some of the audience members and (towards the end) from Dr.Casey speaks volumes of the type of arguments commonly employed by religious pseudo-scientists and the people that support them. Dawkins never "concluded" life exists elsewhere from Earth, just stated a probability. One has to wonder whether Casey truly didn't know the difference or if it was a last ditch attempt to discredit his whole argument by picking out a rather obscure and insignificant passage to make him appear hypocritical as the interview concluded.

I felt Dawkin's frustration at the thickness of the stupidity hanging in the air all around him.

One has to wonder whether Casey truly didn't know the difference or if it was a last ditch attempt to discredit his whole argument by picking out a rather obscure and insignificant passage to make him appear hypocritical as the interview concluded.

Exactly , the whole thing was completely out of context, Dawkins wasnt making a simple "Aliens probably exist and they must be super-intellegent" statement, the whole point, which was preceded by a musing on how mind-bogglingly huge the universe is, thus making it probable that many planets have life, not just earth etc. Was to show how someone or something might be so intelligent and sophisticated they would seem like Gods to us, but that even so, we would instantly know they werent designed, they had come about, just like us, by gradual, natural selection over millions of years..

It wasnt by any means any serious measure or assumption of how probable extra-terrestrial life might be.

All in all if anything could be said about it, it is that Dawkins is the exact opposite of close-minded like some claim.

This reminds me of an obscure quote:
"I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia — less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe — can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities — and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans." -Stanley Kubrick

This would have been a good video if the host hadn't continually interrupted.

That was a beautiful quote AnimalsForCrackers, and one that I had not heard before, but in essence it describes exactly what Dawkins was talking about in "The God Delusion".

That one dimwit in the audience with the monotone, non-stop delivery made me laugh. Some pathetic argument about Dawkins having "faith" in science therefore he's like all unquestioning theists. Really, where do some people get their brains from?

Well, you know what THEIR answer to that would be...Give me a G-O-D!

this is unfortunately dead - anyone got a replacement? I'd love to see it.

Video replaced by a working, but slightly lower quality one.. sorry it was dead..

thanks for the fix! nice sift.

It must've felt, to Dawkins, like in The Neverending Story, where Artax sinks in the sludge of despair... It must be tough to swim in a sea of stupidity.

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This published video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by EDD.

Awarding rasch187 with one Power Point for fixing this video's dead embed code.

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