The for­mer Simonyi Pro­fes­sor for the Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Sci­ence and founder of the Foun­da­tion for Rea­son and Sci­ence, Richard Dawkins, was recently invited to appear on The Hugh Hewitt Show where the two dis­cussed reli­gion, Rome, evo­lu­tion and much more.

One par­tic­u­lar exchange (the Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine? inci­dent) has been quoted widely, but what fol­lows is my favourite exchange from the interview.

Richard Dawkins (RD): […]You can never be absolutely cer­tain that any­thing doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely. That’s a pretty good, not exactly a final con­clu­sion, but it’s cer­tainly worth say­ing.
Hugh Hewitt (HH): Isn’t the uni­verse itself unlikely, though?
RD: Well, but it’s there, isn’t it? And we’re in it, so we can see what we see. We find our­selves in a uni­verse. So how­ever unlikely, it clearly did hap­pen.
HH: And so that’s what [David Berlinski’s] argu­ment is, is that you can’t say yes, we have to accept the uni­verse as unlikely, but we can accept that God is unlikely, just because the one unlikely event is vis­i­ble to us, and the other unlikely event isn’t.
RD: I think there is a dif­fer­ence there. I mean, for the uni­verse to come into exis­tence, physi­cists are work­ing on under­stand­ing that. And the begin­ning of the uni­verse, as physi­cists would now under­stand, it would be a supremely sim­ple event. And admit­tedly, it’s still some­thing that requires a lot of under­stand­ing. It’s a very dif­fi­cult thing to under­stand. But for God to exist, a God capa­ble of devel­op­ing the laws of physics, a God capa­ble of answer­ing prayers and for­giv­ing sins, and read­ing our thoughts, and all that kind of thing, that requires, that’s an immensely com­pli­cated entity. That’s the kind of entity which we now explain by evo­lu­tion, that’s the kind of entity that comes into being as a result of a long, slow, grad­ual process, long after the begin­ning of the uni­verse.
HH: But the uni­verse is itself awfully com­pli­cated, Pro­fes­sor Dawkins. Where did it come from?
RD: Well, the uni­verse is not awfully com­pli­cated at the begin­ning. It has become very com­pli­cated through such processes as evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion.
HH: No, I’m talk­ing about the whole cos­mos. Where did that come from, 13 bil­lion years ago?
RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a com­plex process. It’s a sim­ple process.
HH: And what pre­ceded the big bang?
RD: Well, physi­cists won’t answer that ques­tion. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the ques­tion what pre­ceded it is ille­git­i­mate.
HH: What do you think?
RD: I’m not enough of a physi­cist to under­stand what I’m say­ing, but I have to say that that’s what physi­cists say.
HH: So when you con­sider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?
RD: I don’t con­sider the ques­tion, because I rec­og­nize that it’s an intu­itively appeal­ing ques­tion. I rec­og­nize that I, along with every­body else, wants to ask that ques­tion. Then I talk to physi­cists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.

via Pharyn­gula