The Atheism Tapes Presents Lengthy Interviews with Arthur Miller, Daniel Dennett & Richard Dawkins About Religion and Unbelief

The his­to­ry of religion(s) is a fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject, one that should be cov­ered, in my hum­ble opin­ion, as an inte­gral part of every lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion. But the his­to­ry of atheism—of disbelief—is a sub­ject that only emerges piece­meal, in oppo­si­tion­al con­texts, espe­cial­ly in the wake of recent fun­da­men­tal­ist upris­ings in the past decade or so. We cov­ered one such his­to­ry recent­ly, the 2004 BBC series Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, made by direc­tor Jonathan Miller and fea­tur­ing such high-pro­file thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Den­nett, Arthur Miller, and physi­cist Steven Wein­berg.

Miller’s series orig­i­nal­ly includ­ed much more mate­r­i­al than he could air, and so the BBC agreed to let him pro­duce the out­take inter­views as a sep­a­rate pro­gram called The Athe­ism Tapes. It’s a series in six parts, fea­tur­ing inter­views with Eng­lish philoso­pher Col­in McGinn, Wein­berg, Miller, Dawkins, Den­nett, and British the­olo­gian Denys Turn­er. At the top, watch Miller’s intro to The Athe­ism Tapes and his inter­view with Col­in McGinn. It’s an inter­est­ing angle—Miller gets to quiz McGinn on “what it means to be a skep­ti­cal Eng­lish philoso­pher in such a seem­ing­ly reli­gious coun­try as the Unit­ed States.” Many read­ers may sym­pa­thize with McGinn’s dif­fi­cul­ty in com­mu­ni­cat­ing his unbe­lief to those who find the con­cept total­ly alien.

Direct­ly above, watch Daniel Den­nett (after the intro) dis­cuss the rela­tion­ship between athe­ism and Darwin’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry. Miller is a won­der­ful interviewer—sympathetic, prob­ing, informed, humor­ous, human­ist. He is the per­fect per­son to bring all these fig­ures togeth­er and get their var­i­ous takes on mod­ern unbe­lief, because despite his own pro­fes­sions, Miller real­ly cares about these big meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions, and his pas­sion and curios­i­ty are shared by all of his inter­vie­wees. In the intro­duc­tion to his inter­view with play­wright Arthur Miller (below), Jonathan Miller makes the provoca­tive claim that Chris­tian­i­ty believes “there’s some­thing pecu­liar about the Jews that makes them pecu­liar­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to pro­fane dis­be­lief.” Watch Arthur Miller’s response below.

One would hope that all man­ner of people—believers, athe­ists, and the non-committal—would come away from The Athe­ism Tapes with at least a healthy respect for the integri­ty of philo­soph­i­cal and sci­en­tif­ic inquiry and doubt. See the full series on YouTube here. Or pur­chase your copy on Ama­zon here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, with Jonathan Miller

Richard Dawkins Makes the Case for Evo­lu­tion in the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary, The Blind Watch­mak­er

Philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness