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Richard Dawkins Had Peter Boghossian on His Show
They’re both involved with the University of Austin
On August 5, 2023, Peter Boghossian appeared for an hour-long conversation with his host, Richard Dawkins. The episode is called “‘Is Religion Inevitable?’ — Richard Dawkins Reveals All” and it’s on the Poetry of Reality show that you can find on YouTube.
Although it’s three months old, one reason this episode is still relevant is that both men mention their work for the new University of Austin—not to be confused with the The University of Texas at Austin, though sadly it will be—which last month received its approval from the state of Texas to award degrees and has opened applications for its first class. The school announced this two days ago. If you analyze this podcast episode, you’ll get a clue about what the University of Austin exists to do.
What Happened in the Episode
‘Deranged woke beliefs’
Boghossian says: “One of the things that I noticed since maybe 2013, maybe 2012, was that, as religiosity decreased, deranged woke beliefs increased.” (3:03–3:19)
If people don’t believe one thing, they believe another
Together, Dawkins and Boghossian hypothesize that humanity overall is migrating away from religion and turning toward another belief system. Dawkins says: “In the Catholic religion, you know, the wine literally turns to blood…When somebody stands up and says ‘I am a woman,’ or [sic] they’ve got a male body — that’s transubstantiation.” (5:20–27, 5:39–46) “They really believe that they have become the other sex,” Dawkins adds. (6:53–57) “It’s remarkable how obvious it is that those are delusions,” Boghossian replies. (6:58–7:03)
If we were to investigate this hypothesis, one rather obvious line of inquiry is whether individual Catholics “since maybe 2013, maybe 2012” have abandoned Catholicism and refocused their own spiritual energies on being trans-friendly, because that seems to be the more precise formulation of what Boghossian is saying. If, by contrast, he’s making a much more general observation that some people believe one kind of thing that is religion and others believe another totally…
