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Nov. 17, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:45
THE GOOGLE EFFECT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep459
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Coming up, I'm going to look at the impact of Google in manipulating search results and the impact that has on elections.
What does it tell you when the FBI director Christopher Wray refuses to confirm or deny whether they were FBI agents dressed as Trump supporters causing trouble on January 6th?
I'll discuss the lively skirmishes between Elon Musk and his disgruntled Twitter employees.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
As I reflect upon the dismal results of the midterms, I'm trying to think about all the different ways in which the playing field could have been manipulated.
you can say unleveled, either by the Democrats explicitly or by their allies in the media, in the tech community, and so on.
And I'm reminded of the work of one particular psychologist.
This is Dr. Robert Epstein, who has been studying the impact of Google in manipulating search results.
Now, who is Dr.
Epstein? Well, here we go.
He's a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
This is in California.
He's been a research psychologist for 40 years.
He's been on the board of Psychology Today and Scientific American Mind.
He's a PhD from Harvard University.
He's written 15 books, more than 300 scientific and mainstream articles.
And he has really been focusing since 2012, so now for a decade, on what tech platforms in general, but specifically Google.
See, Google is in a very unique position because...
Think about it. Google has become kind of a, well, a verb.
Let's Google it. And let's Google it means let's get more information about it.
Let's run a search.
And while there are a couple of other smaller search platforms, much, much smaller, Google really has a virtual monopoly.
And this makes Google, in a way, more powerful than the other platforms.
And let's remember, Google also owns YouTube.
So Google has that kind of combined power.
What Robert Epstein has found is that Google has systematically manipulated search results, and they do it particularly to influence elections.
He's been arguing that they've been doing this for a while, but it's quite possible that they have even ramped it up in recent elections.
Now, Google sort of denies they're doing this, but Epstein's evidence seems to show that they do it.
And he says that Google has, quote, the ability to shift attitudes, opinions, beliefs, purchases, and votes without people knowing it.
Now the key point here is without people knowing it.
Google uses a technique called ephemeral content.
And this means fleeting content, content that appears but then disappears.
And that's the key point. If it disappears, it's really hard to then go back and look at it because it's here and it's gone.
It's almost like one of those apps where I send you a photo and you get the photo for 15 seconds and then the photo's gone.
So I've sent it to you. You've seen it.
It's had an impact on you, but then it disappears.
So, here's Dr.
Epstein. Fleeting content like search results, news feeds, search suggestions that appear before our eyes impact our thinking and behavior and then disappear, leaving no trace.
You can't go back in time and see what the search results people were shown, at least not under normal circumstances.
And what Epstein does is he does these experiments to show that, first of all, this is pervasive.
This is happening not, even though in his experiments he exposes people to content on a short-term basis and then measures the impact on their thinking, he goes, listen, try to imagine what's going to happen when you get this kind of content multiple times a day, every single day, on and on and on.
So, he says that the impact of Google is made even worse and is in some ways even more insidious because it is driven by computer algorithms.
See, if somebody were to tell you that there's a guy behind the curtain and he's manipulating searches so that he tells you what you should see, you're going to be automatically suspicious.
Like, who is that guy? What's his agenda?
On what basis is he making these selections?
But because Google is running algorithms, you tend to think, well, listen...
You know, if I search for 2,000 mules or I search for Dinesh, I'm going to be getting the most common sites.
But no, you're not.
You're not getting the most common sites.
Google's algorithm is fixing what you're actually seeing.
This is the key point.
And according to Robert Epstein, quote, if you have been using Google for more than a decade, they have the equivalent of three million pages of information on you.
He goes, if that number sounds ridiculously high, bear in mind they're collecting information about you over more than 200 different platforms, not just Gmail, YouTube, the Google search engine, Android phones, but if you have a Fitbit fitness tracker, you could be sending physiological data to Google 24 hours a day.
And so Google owns all these other subsidiary companies, all of which are vacuuming data and sending them to Google.
He goes, if you visit websites that use Google Maps, which millions of websites do, or that use Google Analytics to track traffic to their websites, Google can legally track everything you do on those websites.
Google can easily demote websites so that they appear infrequently or not at all.
They can block access to websites.
You may think it's a website.
No one can stop access to it.
Google can, so you can't get access to that website through Google.
This is a very powerful company and I think one of the questions the Republican House needs to look at is how is Google using their power?
It may be time to rein in this monopoly and a first step, House can't do it all by itself, but what it can do, a necessary first step, is to get the facts out, to conduct an investigation and expose Google for what Google is actually doing.
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Feel the difference. FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared just a day or two ago at a hearing before Congress and was asked a question by Representative Clay Higgins, the Republican of Louisiana.
Did the FBI have confidential human sources embedded within the January 6th protesters on January 6th of 2021?
And Ray replies, as I'm sure you can appreciate, I have to be very careful about what I can say about when we do and do not and where we have and have not used confidential human sources.
A non-answer. And Higgins then asks, did you have confidential human sources dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol on January 6th prior to the doors being opened?
Now, this is an excellent and very precise question.
Did you have confidential human sources, FBI informants, in other words, dressed as Trump supporters, so creating the impression that the Trump supporters are doing this, inside the Capitol prior to the doors being opened?
In other words, in a sense, was it the FBI pretending to be Trump supporters that opened the doors?
This is a very, not only a good question, but a question that if the FBI is not involved, if they haven't orchestrated this, if they didn't open the doors with the intention of luring people inside the building, the simple answer should be no.
And And here's Ray.
Again, I have to be very careful about what I can say.
To which Higgins says it should be a no.
He continues, can you not tell the American people no?
We did not have confidential human sources dressed as Trump supporters positioned inside the Capitol on January the 6th.
And Ray replies, you should not read anything into my decision not to share information about confidential human sources.
Now, this has sort of been the FBI's sort of gambit and game for a while.
We're not going to be able to share information about our sources.
You might remember that Ted Cruz in 2021 questioned FBI official Jill Sanborn pretty much the same series of questions.
The FBI orchestrated January 6th.
Was the FBI letting people in the building?
Was the FBI driving the plot forward?
One question upon another.
And all she kept saying is, I can't say.
I can't say. I won't say.
And so, but...
I think all of this is very revealing because we now have independent evidence that the FBI had and has infiltrated, to a great extent, groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
We also have a legitimate question about Ray Epps.
Was Ray Epps an FBI informant?
And again, just simply for them to say we're not able to discuss the matter, think about it.
These are the relevant questions about January 6th, not the sort of nonsensical...
Paths taken by the January 6th committee.
Did one staffer send an email to another staffer?
This kind of nonsense, all trying to sort of implicate Trump.
So they're looking in the wrong place.
Here's the right place to look, which is to say, to what degree was this a government-run operation, really from start to finish, with some yahoos in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as the pawns Of a manipulative deep state.
That's the real question.
And notice that the FBI is ducking the question, which doesn't surprise me because they are the deep state.
Now... Recently, last couple of days, an interesting article in the New York Times.
Feds had informants in Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
This is Julie Kelly's summary of the article.
But in the summary, Julie points out, she's drawing on the reporting of a guy named Alan Fewer at the New York Times, that the vice president of the Oath Keepers, Greg McWhirter, By the way, this guy's a former sheriff's deputy.
He owns a tactical gun range and gun shop in Montana.
He's been an FBI informant.
And he was telling the FBI all about the group's activities in the weeks leading up to January 6th.
All of which is another way of saying that the FBI knew the exact role to the degree it was pre-planned at all.
And that's an open question.
But to the degree it was pre-planned, the FBI knew what was going on with the Proud Boys and knew what was going on with the Old Keepers.
Now, by the way, these are portrayed by the left and by the FBI as like dangerous militia groups of the, you know, sort of like a domestic homegrown ISIS. And so here's an interesting question.
If this is a domestic ISIS, if they're planning all this nefarious sedition and insurrection, if the FBI was being told weeks before, why didn't they stop it before it occurred?
And Mike Pence says, oh, my life was in danger.
The Capitol was in danger.
Congressmen and senators were in danger.
The whole thing was very disturbing to democracy.
Yeah, the FBI was in a complete position, first of all, to have nabbed these plotters beforehand and held them for questioning.
January 6th would simply not have occurred.
And so the question then becomes, why did it occur?
Why did the FBI allow and perhaps even encourage the plot to go forward?
Here's an interesting detail from the New York Times.
This McWhorter guy not only works for the FBI, he encourages Oath Keepers to buy guns and ammunition from him.
He offers all kinds of discounts before the 2020 election.
It's almost as if the FBI put him up to it.
Hey listen, you know what?
If we're gonna have a plot and we're gonna bust a plot, it'd be really nice to have some ammunition and guns involved.
Why don't you sell these guys a bunch of your weapons and your ammunition and that way we can grab them, nab them, whoa, we got the ammunition!
And so we will ultimately have busted a plot that we ourselves helped create.
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Several weeks ago, I looked at my email and I got an invitation from a member of the German parliament.
To come to Germany and sponsor or host a screening and discussion of 2,000 Meals with the German Parliament.
And it's one of those things where it's a big trip and what are the conditions and how is this going to work?
So I did what I do in these situations.
I ignored it. He's like, Dinesh.
But Then I was contacted by a big German kind of publishing house, but also a company that has a movie platform.
And they were like, we're the largest conservative publisher in Germany.
And we also have a video platform.
We've already negotiated to publish your book, 2,000 Mules in German.
And we also want to have your movie both on our platform and dubbed in German with DVDs.
I'm like, wow. I mean, yes, when 2000 Mules came out, there was interest in the EU. There was actually a screening and discussion of the film by a couple of Dutch members of parliament.
So it's not like there's no European interest, but this kind of convergence of interest in Germany sort of puzzled me.
And then Debbie spotted this from ABC News just yesterday.
Berlin court orders rerun of chaotic 2021 state election.
This is very interesting. This is an election from last year, 2021.
It was held in the German capital.
In fact, it turns out multiple elections were going on at the same time.
A state election, which means this is the state of Berlin.
Berlin, by the way, is the capital of Germany, and it is a city, but it's also a state.
So in the state of Berlin, there were state elections.
There was also an election for the city's 12 district assemblies.
The German national election was going on at the same time.
And then there was a local referendum that was also on the ballot.
So Germans in Berlin were voting on all these different things.
Well, as it turns out, there was...
And this sort of reminds me a little bit now of Maricopa County, although maybe it was even worse...
Huge lines at polling stations.
Some polling stations ran out of ballot paper during the day.
Other polling stations produced ballot paper, but it was for the wrong district.
So there was the wrong information on the ballot, not applicable to what the voters were voting for.
And a huge number of ballots were invalidated because they were for the wrong ballot or the wrong place or the wrong cause.
And also the election was supposed to end at 6 p.m., But it turns out that voters who were in line were allowed to vote long after 6 p.m., but results of the election were already being called, and exit polls were being revealed, and how people voted, and people were being declared winners and losers, and lots of people were still in line and hadn't voted at all, so their votes weren't even counted.
And presumably, if you hear an election's been called, think about it, you're in line.
You're going to think, well, what's the point of me staying in line?
I may as well go home and eat dinner.
And so the German court, to its credit, looked at all this and they go, this was not the safest and most secure election in German history.
First of all, they weren't stupid enough to have made that claim in the first place.
But they go, this is unacceptable.
This is not an election that we can trust the result.
Time to redo it.
Now, you may think, this is Germany.
This will never happen in America, Dinesh.
Well, it does happen in America, and it has happened.
In 2018, an election board ordered a redo of a congressional election in North Carolina, and it produced a different outcome than the original election.
So, interestingly, the Republican won in both cases, but it was a different Republican.
The first guy, Mark Harris, withdrew, and another guy named Dan Bishop ended up being the winner.
So, it turns out that the German courts have ordered a new district assembly election, a new state election, and separately the federal parliament has said we have to rerun the national election from last year in Berlin.
They're not redoing it around the country, there's no need to, but they're redoing it in the critical area of the nation's capital.
So, I think all of this is a way of saying that these are problems that we're now beginning to realize are occurring in other countries as well.
Look at what's happening in Brazil, massive crowds appearing almost daily before the German government, but also before the German military, basically saying, listen, I'm sorry, in Brazil, German? Oh, German. Sorry.
I'm talking about massive Brazilian crowds demanding that the Brazilian military investigate abuses that were apparently quite widespread in Lula country, in the area around Rio de Janeiro.
And this kind of confirms Debbie's point that the left, not just in Venezuela, not just in America, but also in Brazil and everywhere, is pretty much the same.
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Now, interestingly, when Trump was president, they were all over him for the slightest misstep or the slightest mispronunciation.
You remember the big controversy over Trump using the pronunciation Thailand instead of Thailand?
Thailand. People went, this is outrageous.
He doesn't even know how to say Thailand.
And this is a complex matter, and I kind of got involved in that.
I pointed out, first of all, that virtually everybody on the entire continent of South Asia pronounces it Thailand.
They pronounce it the way it's spelled.
They pronounce the H. Now, interestingly, in the Thai language, there is no real H. And so they say Thailand.
But that is simply an anomaly of the Thai language.
Let's remember that the names of different places are pronounced differently around the world.
The French say Paris, we say Paris.
And so it goes.
Same with Italy, Venezia, we say Venice.
And so you would think that all of this is like a triviality.
Why are you getting on Trump?
But this just shows you how they were like, let's get him on that.
Now with Biden, what's increasingly obvious is that this guy is a mental infant.
Or at least he has to be treated like a mental infant.
You might remember some months ago a note card surfaced.
Biden sort of clumsily held it where you could see it.
And it was reproduced on social media and on TV. And I did a segment on it and it said things like, take your seat.
As opposed to going and sitting in someone else's seat.
And the kind of instructions you'd give to...
Debbie taught elementary school.
The kind of instructions you'd give to a five-year-old.
Listen, take your seat.
Don't speak unless spoken to.
Things like this.
And Benny Johnson...
On social media, I had something yesterday where the same thing happened a second time.
Biden had a note card.
He apparently turned in a certain way so you can actually read the note card.
And the note card has...
It's like in all caps.
Again, it has that notion that we're talking to somebody who's really not all there.
We have to treat this person.
So here are a few of the instructions.
One... You will take a photo.
And the you is all caps, as if to say Biden might be confused about who's it.
You will take a photo.
You will sit.
You is all caps. Again, you will deliver opening remarks.
So this is an embarrassment.
The press doesn't cover things like this because they look away from it.
And that really shows you that this is the media we're dealing with.
They're not giving us any coverage and certainly no critical coverage at all.
Let's remember, this is the same Biden who recently confused Cambodia and Colombia.
I mean, we're not talking even about countries that are next door to each other.
Why are we talking about...
It starts with a They both do start with a C, and they do both end with an A. That is true.
But so does California.
So what we're dealing with here is Fetterman.
Fetterman is pretty much in the same situation.
I now see news reports saying that, well, yeah, you know, we kind of have to acknowledge that Fetterman has to be treated differently in the Senate because the man is mentally impaired.
Here is a news article.
Senator-elect Fetterman will not be able to answer questions in the usual way.
In the usual way.
As if there's another way he's going to answer questions.
Telepathically. Sign language.
Nodding his head up and down no matter what the question is.
He can't answer questions in the usual way as he continues to recover from a stroke one of his advisors said on Twitter.
So this is a disgrace.
In fact, I find it hard to believe that this is the actual will of the voters of Pennsylvania, or for that matter, the actual will of the voters in America.
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I'm calling this segment Twitter Tales and I'm going to be focusing on the extremely interesting but also entertaining skirmishes between Elon Musk and his current and in some cases former, recently former, employees at Twitter.
Before I launch into that, though, I want to make a serious point, and that is that Elon Musk is really showing how it's done with regard to cleaning up Twitter.
Just think about it. You've got this company.
A technologically sophisticated platform, but it's like infested with ideological rats.
Horrible people, people who take pleasure in blocking, censoring, and controlling other people.
In other words, little monsters.
And you can't just come in and say, these are my new directives.
You have to kind of go in and start fumigating the place and getting rid of rats.
And so Musk has been doing that.
He's been firing rats, which is to say getting rats out of the building.
Very good thing. He has also been making it clear that the rats that stay need to be committed to the vision of the company.
So in other words, if you're a rat and you have a different view of what Twitter should be, or frankly a different view of the work expected out of you, and I'm going to come to that, Musk has a very surprising demand of his workers. He expects them actually to work.
And this, as we'll see, is producing some convulsions at Twitter, where for apparently months, if not years, the attitude has basically been Twitter is a place to hang out, eat free meals, watch TV, go on social media, and then essentially get online and start knocking, banning, deplatforming, and restricting people.
So it was really fun in the old days, and in that sense, Elon Musk is seen as a spoiled sport for bringing the fun to an end.
The skirmishes between Musk and the employees seem to focus on three areas.
One... Elon Musk is firing people who openly abuse him on Twitter.
These are his own employees who tell him he's an idiot.
He doesn't know what's going on.
He doesn't really know what programming really is.
I mean, think about it. This is a guy who's built a massive company.
Most of these people are little twerps.
And they're like, you don't know anything about coding.
You don't know anything about marketing.
You don't know anything about running a company.
And then Elon Musk replies, you're fired.
And they're like, wait, wait, what?
I thought dissent was permissible.
Yeah, dissent is permissible generally in most companies, but you know what?
There are mechanisms and forums for dissent, such as making a confidential report, raising a point at a meeting, as opposed to blasting your boss on a public forum and insulting him.
Which is a fireable offense pretty much anywhere.
Number two, Elon Musk is now saying that people by and large should pay for their own meals.
Most people around the country are going, well, isn't that universal?
Doesn't everybody who works for a company pay for their own meals?
Look, even when companies do provide meals, they very often charge for them.
When I was a fellow scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, we had a really nice dining room with, by the way, our own chef.
I couldn't believe the luxury of it.
This was kind of new to me.
Well, I mean, I was used to the White House mess, which was really nice too.
But at AEI, we could invite people as guests for lunch.
And then at the end of the month, we got a bill.
And I think it was a subsidized lunch because the bill wasn't all that formidable.
But nevertheless, it was not free.
And so Elon Musk is saying, first of all, he's not even really against providing meals at all.
He's simply saying with a lot of people working at home, he goes, our lunch services aren't really taken advantage of.
There's very low level of food.
And moreover, he goes, very often for dinner, we don't even provide dinner because everyone's already left the building.
Almost no one came to the office and, quote, they don't even bother serving dinner because there's no one in the building.
And yet, this is the attitude of Twitter employees, quote, he fired three-fourths of the employees, by the way, not true, an exaggeration.
Now he's planning to starve the rest of them.
As if to say, these people don't, there's no other way for them to get food, even in the San Francisco area.
And Elon Musk's third demand, which apparently is also perceived as unreasonable by these Twitter slugs, is that if you want to work at Twitter, you have to show up to work in person.
It's not going to be enough anymore to say, listen, I'm basically sitting on my couch in my living room, or I'm at the gym putting in some work while I'm on the treadmill.
No, you have to actually show up at Twitter and work there.
And you have to be willing to work long hours.
In part because this is a platform that is not making money.
So Musk is introducing normalcy, normal business practice to Twitter.
And this is a guy who's built massive companies, so he certainly knows what he's doing.
It's just comical to see these unbelievable spoiled brats at Twitter.
Free lunch.
I should be able to abuse my boss.
I don't have to show up to work if I don't want to.
And Elon Musk is saying, well, the rules are changing.
There's a new sheriff.
Well, there's a new boss, at least, in town.
There seems to be no question America's currently in decline.
Crime and inflation are skyrocketing.
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What I basically said is, frustrated and angry and out of a job, Nancy Pelosi believes it's now her turn to get hammered.
Now, obviously, this is called a double entendre.
A double entendre is a phrase with a double meaning.
Paul Pelosi got hammered with a hammer.
And what I'm saying is that Nancy Pelosi, who I often call Vodka Nancy on this podcast, decides that she's going to get hammered, obviously, in a different way.
To console her for having lost her job as Speaker of the House.
She no longer gets to tear up the, not that she'll tear up Biden State of the Union, but she no longer gets to perform on this massive public stage that she's enjoyed.
Now, it is kind of funny because, you know, Debbie's instinct is right to the degree that there are a couple people, even in my feed on social media, like, Dinesh, how can you say that?
Implying that I'm saying that Nancy Pelosi should...
Should be hammered in the way that Paul Pelosi...
And these are people who just can't read.
They not only can't read, but they can't think.
They've never heard of a double entendre.
Let's look that one up. Is that French, Dinesh?
What language are you speaking?
You're really going way over our heads now, you know.
And, um, and I'm like, look, I mean, anyone who can, anyone who has an appreciation, and look, and it's not as, you know, it's not, if I'm being harsh, I mean, the left is 10 times more harsh.
Every single day in my feed, I get these Vanity Fair, and Debbie, you see these too, screeds against Trump.
They're unbelievably vicious.
So these people want the right to be vicious against us.
We're not even allowed the right to have some ironic humor at their expense.
So... So my response to this is, I do not apologize.
Shove it. If you can't understand English, consult a dictionary.
All right. But I do want to talk about Paul Pelosi because there's a very interesting report.
You might remember that a couple of weeks ago, in fact, on November 4th, an NBC reporter named Miguel Alma-Guer did a news report in which he said, listen, we found out two interesting facts about this Pelosi incident.
The first one is that even though we're being told that the police, you know, opened the door and went in, it was actually Paul Pelosi who came to the door and opened the door himself.
And number two, far from exiting the building and running for his life and going into the arms of the police or the protection of the police, he turned around and walked back into the building where his attacker, David DePape, was, then proceeded to hit him with a hammer.
So all of this would suggest very odd behavior on the part of Paul Pelosi, not to mention that his state of mind did not appear to be that he was threatened.
Let's remember, when he called the cops, he didn't say, I'm being attacked.
He said, let's do a wellness check on me.
So, this guy, Miguel Almaguer, does this report, and right away, NBC springs into action.
They take down his report.
They delete it from their website.
Later, I read that they have put him on some kind of demotion or suspension.
So, they're penalizing him for it.
But guess what? It turns out that a local NBC reporter, also the same network, has done a report that says pretty much exactly the same thing as Miguel Almaguer, and that report is on the NBC website.
It hasn't been taken down.
So we're talking now about NBC's San Francisco affiliate KNTV. Anchor Jessica Aguirre introduces the topic and then goes to her reporter, and this is Bigad Shaban.
And this guy says there are now contradictory reports about the door.
He says that federal prosecutors in their written complaint claim that the police opened the door, but he says that, in fact, the San Francisco DA had previously stated, Mr.
Pelosi opened the door with his left hand.
So it's the detail here that's kind of convincing, not just that Pelosi opened the door, But think about it.
If you're opening a door, by and large, in a normal posture, you're leaning toward the door and Pelosi opens the door with his left hand.
And then the reporter Shaban quotes, he cites a source familiar with the investigation who personally watched the police body camera footage from that night, who says that, quote, "'Officers knocked on the door of the Pelosi home, then backed away, and the video clearly shows Paul Pelosi opened the door with his left hand,' end quote." So I think what's going on here
is that NBC News is being a part of a coverup and they're covering for Paul Pelosi.
And the reason that the cover-up kind of works is because the police, the San Francisco police, are also in on it.
This This is hardly a massive surprise for the simple reason that the local police in a place like San Francisco are going to be pawns of somebody as powerful as the Pelosi family.
They're not going to want to do things that upset the Pelosi's.
They're going to want to try to place Paul Pelosi in the best light.
And while that may be politically understandable, it doesn't allow you to manipulate and lie about facts.
And then when you get a major network like NBC, that becomes...
Party to the lying, it's particularly shameful and disgraceful.
NBC says that the article that Almaguer put up originally, quote, violated their standards.
What standards? What exactly are the standards that were violated?
Are we dealing here with Almaguer doing something in which his reporting fell below the standards?
Or was his real crime the crime of actually telling the truth and placing that as Pelosi incident in a more ambiguous light than the authority's?
And the Pelosi family would rather have it be out there.
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I'm doing a kind of mini-course in Christian apologetics by focusing on my book called What's So Great About Christianity?
I've got the hardcover.
You can pick it up in paperback from Amazon, Barnes& Noble, pretty much anywhere.
Chapter 2 of the book is called Survival of the Sacred, Why Religion is Winning.
And it's a little bit of a mischievous chapter because it focuses on a topic that may seem surprising, and that is the topic of the evolutionary or adaptive value of religion, of faith, of believing in the transcendent, of believing in God.
I'm not speaking here specifically about Christianity.
That comes later in the book, actually soon.
But here we're talking about why this notion that life is not the only life, and that there is more to life than what life itself offers in material terms.
Why is that an enduring belief?
Why does that seem to have survived in all these different cultures, really from the dawn of mankind?
Now, it turns out that the continuing relevance of religion and its explosive growth, which I've talked about in the last few segments, the atheists have sort of noticed this, and so have a lot of evolutionary biologists, and they're really a little baffled.
They're a little confused.
Now, let's look at why.
It isn't just because they thought that as society becomes more modern, more educated, more developed, it would automatically become more secular.
They did sort of think that.
But you can call it a sociological assumption.
But they also have a kind of scientific or evolutionary basis for wondering, what is the adaptive value of religion?
Now, the Darwinists think there has to be, I'm now reading from the book, has to be a biological explanation for why, in every culture since the beginning of history, man has found and continues to find solace in religion.
So here's Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins is the author of probably the leading book of the so-called New Atheists, who I'll be discussing periodically, people like Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and others, many of whom, by the way, I've debated one-on-one.
And here's Dawkins.
He goes, religion, quote, poses a major puzzle to anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way.
So here I just want to outline what that puzzle is.
The puzzle is this. Scholars assume that religious beliefs are an illusion.
So now we're talking about obviously scholars of a kind of atheist or agnostic disposition.
They go, well, listen, in the case of religion, people believe stuff that is not in any way attested to by scientific experiments or even our direct senses.
We believe in things like angels.
We believe in things like there's an invisible God.
You can't see him, but he does exist.
We believe in, I'm not quoting the anthropologist Scott Atron.
He goes, Now, the key word here is materially because people like Atron believe that the material world is kind of all there is.
Even if you look at our thoughts and emotions, they go, well, yeah, but that's nothing more than the firing of your neurons.
You experience it as something perhaps immaterial, but there's a material explanation and basis for it.
So, Atron and others believe that religion requires a commitment to what they call, quote, factually impossible worlds.
Now, whether these worlds are factually impossible is something we'll get to later, but the assumption here is that, listen, this concept of, let's say, heaven or hell, or even the ancient Greek concept of the afterlife, the starting premise of these scholars, these evolutionary scholars, is that that's preposterous.
They can't be a place like that.
But if it is preposterous, let's just kind of...
A lot of good argument is going with what your opponent is saying.
Let them have their premises and let's kind of tease out the implications.
So this is how they think.
They go, listen, if religion means believing in stuff that doesn't exist, whole worlds that don't exist, a god that doesn't exist, then the question for the evolutionary biologist is, well...
What is the adaptive significance of these beliefs for people?
In other words, let's think about it this way.
From the evolutionary biologist's point of view, we are evolved creatures.
We have evolved from lower forms, from other animals, and we have evolved on one basis and one basis alone.
Survival and reproduction is how we came to be who we are.
Natural selection has produced us.
So the question then becomes that as human beings, we've developed the capacity to survive and And to reproduce.
And in order to survive, you've got to have a kind of, let's call it a realistic assessment of the situation.
If you believe in nonsensical stuff, let's say, for example, I am a caveman and I believe in imaginary rabbits.
I believe that I can eat these rabbits because I imagine them to be real, even though they're no real rabbits.
Well, obviously somebody like me is going to starve.
I'm going to die out.
My genes are not going to be reproduced.
Only people who believe in real rabbits and figure out a way to catch them are going to be able to survive and have children of their own.
So this is the problem we're dealing with.
I'm going to quote the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
The ultimate measure of evolutionary value is fitness, the capacity to replicate more successfully than the competition does.
And so on the face of it, this is my point, I'm just setting up the problem.
I'll deal with it more tomorrow, Friday.
But religion seems to be useless from an evolutionary point of view.
It costs time and money.
It induces its members to make sacrifices that undermine their own well-being for the benefit of others, people who are in a way not related to them.
And who are sometimes total strangers.
Think of it. Religious people build cathedrals and pyramids that seem to have really no value from the point of view of survival.
The ancient Hebrews sacrificed their fattest calves.
And even today, people will slaughter goats and chickens on altars.
Religious people forego foods.
The cow is holy to the Hindus.
The pig is unholy to the Muslims.
Christians will give tithes and financial offerings in church.
The Jews keep the Sabbath.
So the evolutionary biologist is really puzzled.
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