TED: Daniel Dennet vs. Rick Warren

Usually I try to keep my posts pretty short, but from time to time I have a lot say in one post. This is one of those.

A friend of mine pointed me to this video (25mins) of Dan Dennet where he responds to Rick Warren after speaking at TED. I don’t know where I’ve been the past 2o something years but TED seems to be a great event. It is now on my list of things to do before die.

Basically, every year they get all this famous people and put them in a room and let them share their ideas. So, in 2006 Rick Warren shared his message and then Daniel Dennet (an atheist philosopher) made use of his opportunity to disagree about “The Purpose Drive Life” book. I must admit the guy (Dennet) make some really good points. In a nutshell he says religion is man’s creation; I think he is right, I personally believe today’s religion (Christianity) is far from what God intended it to be. Of course, I know he means it in a different way but I will let that one pass. He also said that you don’t need God to be good, yes, you don’t need God to be good, but good according to who? according to our own standards? because if that’s case, everyone is good, and ultimately life is not about being good or bad.

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Another point Dennet made in his rebuttal, which I think is plausible is the idea of teaching religion in all schools. He believes kids should be educated on the major religions, but he said only “facts” should be taught, he made that emphasis very clear. I can only partially agree with that. I think kids should be taught about different religions in school, that’s great, that way we don’t raise zombie Christians who are so ignorant about Christianity and other religions but how can you pull-off the “Facts only” thing, religion is about faith, is about the believing the unseen.

He also took some excerpts from Rick’s book and shared his disagreement, for example he said he didn’t like how Rick shared some religious ideas using stretched scientific truths, which I think was very clever of Rick, when I read the book five years ago I didn’t noticed that one.

Then he said something that made me jump, this one I must stand up and yell at his face that he is completely wrong. In Rick’s book he talks about how we wouldn’t have a purpose if we were not created, if we were products of chance, natural selection, evolution or whatever you call it, life would have no meaning. Well, Dan didn’t like this and he said that you don’t need God or religion to have a purpose in life, it is possible to be evolution species and have a purpose. Again, we go back to the whole “good without God” thing, yea, you don’t need God to have a purpose in your life, but the only purpose a life without God can have is “eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow we die”. Seriously, if I come to the realization that there is no God, we just came here as a result of a cosmic soup that boiled for billions of years and through a random process of natural selection life as we know it, just happened and this is what it is, WYSIWYG, there is nothing else, there is no more to it; you are born, you exist and then you die and so will happen to billions of people for billions of years until we evolve into some super intelligent green jell-o being, how would I have a purpose, what would that purpose be?

Of course, after watching Dan’s video it only made sense to watch Rick’s video (25mins) I must confess I’ve never been a fan or Rick Warren, once the book became famous it was quite annoying how everything revolved around the book. All the merchandise branded Purpose Driven Life was everywhere, I’m surprised they didn’t issue a Purpose Driven Toilet Paper. I must give credit to the guy though, I thought he was going to be preachy and cocky and he was not, actually his talk was all about he had his own purpose driven crisis once fame and money started pouring it, which really puzzled me because he wasn’t focused on the book, all he talked about was what he did with the money and how is handling fame and how that affected his life. So I don’t understand Dennet’s rebuttal.

Rick Warren said a few things that really impressed me a lot and couple things I wished he didn’t compromised about. He said one of the things he did with all the money he got from the book was to calculate how much money the church paid him for the past 25 years as a pastor and he paid the church back, I don’t know but I thought that shows a lot character. He also said he doesn’t receive a salary from the church anymore and he lives off the 10% of his income and tithes 90%…that’s like amazing right there, although I bet 10% of millions of millions of dollars he makes from the book is a lot of money, something like millions of dollars. One thing I didn’t like is how he stretched the definition of tithing as giving 10% of your income to charity, I think he could have done better than that.

On a final note, whether you are a Creationist or Evolutionist at the end of the day it takes faith to believe either one and if we are going to talk science evolution is just a theory, that means it is still to be proven. So at the end of the day if you present me the two options, one says everything was created by God and unfortunately our finite minds’ knowledge can’t really comprehend beyond God, the other one says of nothing everything sort of happened after billions of years, which one requires more faith to believe?