DAWKINS: I think there is a lot in that. I of course was talking about that aspect of religion where the psalmist says the heavens declare the glory of God. Science can do a lot better than that. The questioner is asking about another thing that religion can do, which is consoling people in bereavement and similar situations. On that I would say three things. First, I mainly agree with you. Science is not on the whole going to console you if you lose a loved one. The second thing I would say is that the fact that religion may console you doesn't of course make it true. It's a moot point whether one wishes to be consoled by a falsehood. The third thing I would say is that although science may not be able to console you in the particular case of a bereavement from a car accident, it's not at all clear that science can't console you in other respects. So, for example, when we contemplate our own mortality, when we recognize that we're not here forever and that we're going to go into nothingness when we die, I find great consolation in the feeling that as long as I'm here I'm going to occupy my mind as fully as possible in understanding why I was ever born in the first place. And that seems to me to be consoling in another sense, perhaps a rather grander sense. It is of course somewhat depressing sometimes to feel that one can't go on understanding the universe; it would be nice to be able to be here in 500 years to see what people have discovered by then. But we do have the privilege of living in the 20th and very soon in the 21st century, when not only is more known than in any past century, but hugely more than in any past century. We are amazingly privileged to be living now, to be living in a time when the origin of the cosmos is getting close to being understood, the size of the universe is understood, the nature of life in a very large number of particulars is understood. This is a great privilege; to me it's an enormous consolation, and it's still a consolation even though it's for each one of us individually finite and going to come to an end. So I'm enormously grateful to be alive, and let me take up what Steve was talking about, the question of how you can bear to get up in the mornings. To me it makes it all the more worthwhile to get up in the mornings -- we haven't got that much time, let's get up in the morning and really use our brief time to understand why we're here and what it's all about. That to me is real consolation.

QUESTION: Both of you seem to agree that science has killed off Soul One; I agree with you. Just to play devil's advocate a little bit: it obviously hasn't killed off the belief in Soul One and it's possible that it will never do so -- in the sense that a world in which no one believed in Soul One would not be what you called an ESS, an evolutionarily stable state. In other words, just as a world in which everybody was nice to each other is not an evolutionarily stable state, because cheats prosper -- it may be that a world in which nobody believed in Soul One would be a fantastically fertile breeding ground for cults who did believe in Soul One. If that's the case then you'll never get rid of it.

RADFORD: Who wants to deal with the New Age question?

DAWKINS: Yes. G. K. Chesterton said when people stop believing, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. I presume that's what the questioner has in mind. I am interested in cults. The so-called organized religions are of course just old cults. They started off as cults and they've acquired a respectability that's simply due to the long time that they've been with us. I'm interested in them. I don't know why the questioner thinks it's not an ESS. It's not to me obvious that a world in which nobody believed in Soul One is necessarily ripe for invasion by cults, except insofar as I think one of the main reasons why people do believe the things that they believe is somewhat analogous to viral infection. And the reason for this has a good Darwinian basis. When we are children it is very important that we should learn as quickly as possible certain extremely important things. The language of our society, the social rules of our society, various rules for how to stay alive in a hostile world. So it's very easy for a Darwinian to believe that children will be preprogrammed with a rule that says, Believe what your parents tell you, or believe what your society's elders tell you. And of course a rule like that is not going to be discriminating. It's going to work both for the sensible things -- rules for how not to die of snake bite or falling off of cliffs or how to learn the language of the society. But the self-same rule is also going to be a natural sponge, or a natural soaker-up of New Age nonsense, and nonsense of any other kind. So, a biologically sensible rule -- Believe what you're told when you're young, and when you grow up pass on the same stuff to your own children -- that is a recipe for the long-term survival for the beliefs themselves. Or the rule might be, Believe so-and-so, and spend as much time as possible persuading other people to believe it as well; that's a recipe for epidemics of infectious beliefs. So I think that in that sense I agree with the questioner.

QUESTION: I followed what Richard Dawkins has said over the years and I admire him for his defense of science, but in the end, I think -- as Engel would say it, in a reaction against theology etc., we can come to an explanation it's very one-sided; and I think with Steven Pinker, I'm surprised that he's surprised that people don't accept his theories, because after all we're dealing with consciousness, which is social and historically developed over millions of years of human society, and you can't say in the end that that resides in people's genes. If we take the example if you say about morality -- surely morality is something that's been developed over the years. Why is it that in America we get individuals that go out shooting people -- surely that's a symptom of American society.