Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much to the Munk family, great philanthropists for making this possible. Seven minutes, ladies and gentlemen, for the foundational argument between religion and philosophy leaves me hardly time to praise my distinguished opponent. In fact, I might have to seize a later chance of doing that. I think three and a half minutes for metaphysics and three and a half for the material world won't be excessive. And I have a text — and I have a text and it is from, because I won't take a religious text from a known extremist or fanatic, it's from Cardinal Newman, recently, by Mr. Blair's urging, beatified and on his way to canonization, a man whose Apologia made many Anglicans reconsider their fealty and made many people join the Roman Catholic church and is considered, I think, rightly a great Christian thinker. My text from the Apologia: The Catholic church, said Newman, holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail and for all the many millions on it to die in extremist agony than that one soul, I will not say will be lost, but should commit one venial sin, should tell one willful untruth or should steal one farthing without excuse. You'll have to say it's beautifully phrased, ladies and gentlemen, but to me, and here's my proposition, what we have here, and picked from no mean source, is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality. Its essential fanaticism, its consideration of the human being as raw material and its fantasy of purity. Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that: created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent — exigent, I would say more than exigent — greedy for uncritical praise from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. However, let no one say there's no cure: salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said — it must be said, would have to admit, makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims. Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I'm asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but of their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed, not man-made code. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, Beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord? No, it is — as the great physicist Steven Weinberg has very aptly put it, In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things you'll need religion. Now, I've got now 1 minute and 57 seconds to say why I think this is very self-evident in our material world. Let me ask Tony again, because he's here, and because the place where he is seeking peace is the birthplace of monotheism, so you might think it was unusually filled with refulgence and love and peace. Everyone in the civilized world has roughly agreed, including the majority of Arabs and Jews and the international community, that there should be enough room for two states for two peoples in the same land, I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can't we get it? The UN can't get it, the US can't get it, the Quartet can't get it, the PLO can't get it, the Israeli parliament can't get it, why can't they get it? Because the parties of God have a veto on it, and everybody knows that this is true. Because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peacem there will never be compromise. There will instead be misery, shame and tyranny and people will kill each others' children for ancient books and caves and relics, and who is going to say this is good for the world? And that's just the example nearest to hand. Have you looked lately at the possibility that we used to discuss as children in fear, what will happen when Messianic fanatics get hold of an apocalyptic weapon? Well, we're about to find that out as we watch the Islamic republic of Iran and its party-of-God allies make a dress rehearsal for precisely this. Have you looked lately at the revival of czarism in Putin's Russia, where the black-cowled, black-coated leadership of Russian Orthodoxy is draped over an increasingly xenophobic, tyrannical, expansionist, and aggressive regime? Have you looked lately at the teaching in Africa and the consequences of it of a church that says, AIDS may be wicked but not as wicked as condoms. That's exactly no seconds left, ladies and gentlemen. I have done my best. Believe me, I have more.
Do I have four, is that right?
That sounds alright. I've got four minutes?
Yeah, good. Then hold your applause, for heaven's sake. Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world, and all I'm arguing is that it would be better if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism. Logically, if Tony is right, I would be slightly better off, not much, but slightly better off, being a Wahabi Muslim or a Twelver Shia Muslim or a Jehovah's witness than I am, wallowing as I do, in mere secularism. All I'm arguing, and really seriously, is what we need is a great deal more of one and a great deal less of the second. And I knew it would come up that we'd be told about charity, and I take this very seriously, because we know, ladies and gentlemen, as it happens, we're the first generation of people who do really, what the cure for poverty really is. It eluded people for a long, long time. The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine — religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works — works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of — now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. But it won't bring — I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won't bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of their teaching. That still goes on. I'd like to hear a word of apology from the religious about that, if it was on offer, after all, otherwise I'd be accused of judging them by the worst of them, and this isn't done, as Tony says so wrongly, in the name of religion, it's a direct precept, practice, and enforceable discipline of religion, is it not, sir, in this case? I think you'll find that it is. But if you're going to say, all right, the Mormons will tell you the same, You may think it's a bit cracked to think Joseph Smith found another bible buried in upstate New York, but you should see our missionaries in action. I'm not impressed. I'd rather have no Mormons, no missionaries quite honestly, and no Joseph Smith. Do we grant to Hamas and to Hezbollah, both of whom will tell you, and incessantly do, Look at our charitable work. Without us defending the poor of Gaza, the poor of Lebanon, where would they be? And they're right, they do a great deal of charitable work. It's nothing compared to the harm that they do, but it's a great deal of work all the same. I'm also familiar with the teachings of the great Rabbi Hillel. I even know where he plagiarized the story from — if he had access to the stuff. The injunction not to do to another what would be repulsive done to yourself is found in the Analects of Confucius, if you want to date it, but actually it's found in the heart of every person in this room. Everybody knows that much. We don't require divine permission to know right from wrong. We don't need tablets administered to us ten at a time in tablet form on pain of death to be able to have a moral argument. No, we have the reasoning and the moral suasion of Socrates and our own abilities. We don't need dictatorship to give us right from wrong, and that's my lot, thank you.
Oh I have a second one?
Oh my God — an amazing test of audience tolerance. Well alright, well how splendidly you notice we progress, ladies and gentlemen. Now it's okay, some religious people are sort of all right. I think I seem to be bargaining one of the greater statesmen of the recent past down a bit. Not necessarily opposed to that. Just to finish on the charity point, I once did a lot of work with a man called Salgado, some of you will know him, great man, great photographer. He was the UNICEF ambassador on polio questions. I went to Calcutta with him, elsewhere. Nearly got rid of polio, nearly got rid of polio, nearly made it join smallpox as a disease, a thing of the past, a filthy memory, except for so many religious groups in Bengal and elsewhere, Afghanistan, West Africa and so on, telling their children, Don't go and take the drops, it's a conspiracy. It's against God. It's against God's design. By the way, that argument isn't terribly new, when smallpox was a scourge, Timothy Dwight, the great divine who was the head of Yale, said taking Dr. Jenner's injection was an interference with God's design as well. That's sort of, by the way — you need something like UNICEF to get major work done if you want to alleviate poverty and misery and disease, and for me, my money will always go to organizations like Medecins Sans Frontiers, like Oxfam, and many others, who, strangely enough, go out into the world, do good for their fellow creatures for its own sake. They don't take the Bible along, as people do to Haiti all the time, we keep catching them doing it. Their money is being spent flat out on proselytization. It's a function of the old thing that was hand in hand with imperialism. It's the missionary tradition. They can call it charity if they will, but it doesn't stand a second look. So much on the business of doing good, except perhaps to add, since I have you for some extra minutes, Mr. Blair and I at different times gave quite a lot of our years to the Labour Party and to the Labour movement, and if the promise of religion was true — had been true, right up until the late nineteenth century in, say, Britain, or North America or Canada, that good works are what's required and should be enough, and those who give charity should be honored, those who receive it should be grateful, two rather revolting ideas in one, I have to say, there would be no need for human and social and political action, we could rely on being innately good, which we know we can't rely upon, and which I never suggested that we could or should. So, now what would — and I'm intrigued now, so religion could be a good thing after all, sometimes, we think, is now the proposition. What would a religion have to do to get that far? Well, I think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. It would have to say no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. No, we can't offer you miracles. Find me the church that will say, Forget all that. Faith healing, no. It would have to give that up. It would have to give up the idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who is judge, jury, and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn't finished with you even when you died. That's quite a lot for religion to give up, don't you think? But who would not say we would be better off without it if it was, or what Tony Blair would like it to be like it to be, an aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realizations of human solidarity, the knowledge we are all in fact bound up with one another, that we have responsibilities one to another, and as I do when I give blood, partly because I don't lose the pint forever, I can always get it back, but that there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you.
Perfectly good question, but sounded — seemed to be phrased as a call for common humanism. I mean there's no — I didn't hear anyone say, Wouldn't it be better if everyone at least joined some church or other? Not a bit of it. Common humanism is, I think, not made particularly easier by the practice of religion and I'll tell you why: there's something about religion that is very often, at any rate, in its original monotheistic and Judaistic form, actually is, ab initio an expression of exclusivism. This is our God. This is the God who's made a covenant with our tribe. You find it all over the place. It isn't always as sectarian as foundational fundamentalist Judaism was and sometimes still is, but it's not unknown. I mean, it's always struck me as slightly absurd there'd be a special church for English people, although I can sort of see the point. It strikes me as positively sinister that Pope Benedict should want to restore the Catholic church to the claim it used to make, which is it is the one true church, and that all other forms of Christianity are, as he still puts it, defective and inadequate. How this helps to build your future world of co-operation and understanding is not known to me. If you tell me in the Balkans what your religion is, I can tell you what your nationality is. You're not a Catholic, you know less about Loyola than I do. But I know you're a Croat, and I know you're a Croat nationalist. Religion and, in fact any form of faith, because it is a surrender of reason, it's a surrender of reason in favor of faith, is a fantastic force multiplier, a tremendous intensifier — I was trying to say — of all things that are in fact divisive rather than inclusive and that's why its history is so stained with blood, not just of crimes against humanity, crimes against womanhood, crimes against reason and science, attacks upon medicine and enlightenment, all these appalling things that Tony kept defending himself from that I didn't even have time to bring up. No, but if you would just look at the way the Christians love each other in the wars of religion in Lebanon, or in former Yugoslavia, you will see that there is no conceivable way that by calling on the supernatural, you will achieve anything like your objective of a common humanism which is, I think you're quite right to say, our only chance of, I won't call it, salvation. Thank you.
I only think we should do this because the two questions were in effect the same and both very well phrased, and because I never like to miss out a chance to congratulate someone on being humorous, if only unintentionally. It's very touching for Tony to say that he recently went to a meeting that bridged a religious divide in Northern Ireland. Well, where does the religious divide come from? 400 years and more, in my own country of birth, of people killing each others' children, depending on what kind of Christian they were, and sending each others' children in rhetoric to hell, and making Northern Ireland the place, the most remarkable in northern Europe for unemployment, for ignorance, for poverty and for, I would say, stupidity too. And for them now to say, Maybe we might consider breaching this gap. Well, I should bloody well think so. But I don't see how. If they had listened to the atheist community in Northern Ireland, which is a real thing, and if they had listened to the secular movement in Northern Ireland, which is a real thing and I know many people who have suffered dreadfully from membership in it, not excluding being pulled out of a car by a man in a balaclava and being asked, Are you Catholic or Protestant? He said, I'm Jewish atheist, actually. Well are you a Protestant Jewish atheist or a Catholic Jewish atheist? You laugh, but it's not so funny when the party of God has a gun in your ear at the same time. And that was in Britain, and still is, to some extent, until recently. Rwanda: do I say that there would be no quarrel between Hutu and Tutsi, people in Rwanda? Belgian colonialism made it worse, but there are no doubt innate ethnic differences, or there are felt to be in Rwanda. But the fact of the matter is Rwanda is the most Christian country in Africa. In fact, by one account — that's to say, numbers of people in relation to numbers of churches — it's the most Christian country in the world, and the Hutu power genocide, at any rate, was preached from the pulpits, actually the pulpits of the Catholic church, as many of the people we are still looking for wanted in that genocide are hiding in the Vatican along with a number of other people who should be given up to international justice, by the way, quite a number of people. So since Tony seems to like religious people best when they are largely non-practicing, but just basically faithful, I will grant him that much. I say it's not entirely the fault of religion that this happened in Rwanda, but when it's preached from the pulpit as it was in Northern Ireland and in Rwanda, it does tend to make it very, very much worse. Thank you.
Relatively simply, the United States has uniquely a constitution that forbids the government to take sides in any religious matter, or to sponsor a church, or to adopt any form of faith itself. As a result of which, anyone who wants to practice their religion in America has to do it as a volunteer. It's what de Tocqueville wrote about so well in his Democracy in America. Ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut during his tenure as president, saying — you'll be familiar with the phrase I'm sure: Rest assured, because they had written to them out of their fear of persecution in Connecticut, Rest assured that there will ever be a wall of separation between the church and the state in this country, and the maintenance of that wall, which people like me have to defend every day against those who want garbage taught in schools and pseudo science in the name of Christ and other atrocities. The maintenance of that wall is the guarantee of the democracy. By the way, for a bonus, can anyone tell me who the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut thought was persecuting them?
The Congregationalists of Danbury, Connecticut, well done. Also, that argues, by the way, for the existence of a very small but real fan base of mine somewhere in this room. Yes, now, it doesn't seem to matter very much now but it mattered then. Give those Congregationalists enough power, as they did have in Connecticut, and just you see just how unfurry they look compared to how dare so they behave now that we've disciplined them. Thank you.
Well, I hadn't anything specially to add there, I think I would rather give another person a chance for a question.
Absolutely, I say good luck to it. The way I phrase it in my book, available at fine bookstores everywhere, is that I propose a pact with the faith, the faithful. I say — I'll take it again, I'll quote from the great Thomas Jefferson, I don't mind if my neighbor believes in 15 gods or in none, he neither by that breaks my leg nor picks my pocket. I would echo that and say that as long as you don't want your religion taught to my children in school, given a government subsidy, imposed on me by violence, any of these things, you are fine by me. I would prefer not even to know what it is that you do in that church of yours. In fact, if you force it on my attention, I will consider it a breach of that pact. Have your own bloody Christmas, and so on. Do your slaughtering, if possible, in an abattoir. And don't mutilate the genitals of your children. Because then I'm afraid it gets within the ambit of law. All right, don't you think that's reasonably pluralistic and humanitarian of me? I think it is. Why is it a vain hope on my part? Why is that? Has this pact ever been honored by the other side? Of course not. And it's a mystery to me, and I'll share it with you. If I believed that there was a savior who had been appointed or sent by — or a prophet — appointed or sent by a God who bore me in mind, and loved me, and wanted the best for me, if I believed that and that I possessed the means of grace and the hope of glory, to phrase it like that, I think, I don't know, I think I might be happy. They say it's the way to happiness. Why doesn't it make them happy? Don't you think it's a perfectly decent question? Why doesn't it? Because they won't be happy until you believe it too. And why is that? Because that's what their holy books tell them. Now, I'm sorry, it's enough with saying in the name of religion. Do these texts say that until every knee bows in the name of Jesus and so on, there will be no happiness? Of course it is what they say. It isn't just a private belief. It is rather, and I think always has been, and it's why I'm here, actually a threat to the idea of a peaceable community, and very often, as now, and frequently, a very palpable one. So I think that's the underlying energy that powers the friendly disagreement between Tony and myself.
Well, I don't remember, in fact I don't think you can point out to me any moment where George Bush said he was under divine order or had any divine warrant for the intervention in Iraq. In fact, I'm perfectly certain that...
He might not have minded at some points giving that impression. But he wanted to give that impression about everything that he did. George Bush is someone who, as with his immediate predecessor, after various experiments in faith, ended up in his wife's church, most comfortable place for him to be. She's, after all, is the one who said to him, If you take another drink, you scumbag, I'm leaving and taking the kids, which is his way of saying he found Jesus and gave up the bottle. We know this to be true. Now, and like a good Methodist — I was in Methodist school for many years myself — like a good Methodist, George Bush says the following: I've done all I can with this argument and with this conflict. From now on, all is in God's hands. That's quite different, I think. It would have made him a perfectly good Muslim, as a matter of fact. A combination of fatalism with a slightly sinister feeling of being chosen. Anyway. No, what was — surely what's striking most to the eye of those who observe the debate on what Tony Blair and I agree to call teh liberation of Iraq is the unanimous opposition of the leadership of every single Christian church to it, including the president's own and the other Prime Minister's own. The Methodist church of the United States adamantly opposed, the Vatican adamantly opposed, as it had been to the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. Not the first time in the world that a sort of sickly Christian passivity has been preached in the face of fascist dictatorship, and of course I was very surprised by the number of liberal Jews who took the same about a regime that harbored genocidal thoughts towards them, and if it comes to that — but I'm not the arbiter of what's rational in the mind of the religious thinker given the number of Muslims put to the sword by Saddam Hussein's regime, quite extraordinary to see the extent to which Muslim fundamentalists flocked to his defense. But I don't expect integrity or consistency from those quarters. But those of us who worked with the people, with Iraqi intellectuals like Kanan Makiya, with the Kurdish leadership, the secular left opposition of the popular — excuse me, the patriotic union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi Communist Party, you have to give it credit for this, many feminists and other secularists who worked for many years to bring down Saddam Hussein are very proud of our solidarity with those comrades, those brothers and sisters. We are still in touch with them, we have nothing to apologize for. It's those who would have kept a cannibal and a Caligula and a professional sadist in power who have the explaining to do. Thank you.
A visitor goes to the Western wall — anything he can do. A visitor goes to the Western wall, sees a man tearing at his beard, banging his head on the wall, shoving messages into it at a rate of knots, wailing and flailing, watches with fascination. When the guy finally breaks he says, Excuse me, I couldn't help noticing you were being unusually devout in your addresses to the wall, to the divine. Do you mind if I ask you what you're praying for? He said, I was praying that there should be peace, that there should be mutual love and respect between all the peoples in this area. And he said, What do you think? says the visitor. He says, Well, it's like talking to the wall. But there are people who think talking to walls is actually a form of divine worship, in this part and it's another instance, not that I didn't bring it up laboriously myself, but I don't mind it again, of the difference between Tony and myself. When he says — when he uses his giveaway phrase in the name of religion, rather than as a direct consequence of scriptural authority, which is what I mean when I talk about this. No one's going to deny, are they, that there are awards of real estate made in the Bible by none other than Jehovah himself, that land is promised to human primates over other human primates, in response to a divine covenant. No, that can't be denied. When David Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of what he still called a secular state he called in Yigael Yadin and Finkelstein and the other Israeli archaeologists, professional guys, and said, Go out into the desert and dig up the title deeds to our state. You'll find our legitimate — that was instruction to the department of archaeology. They went, after they conquered Sinai and West Bank. They went even further afield looking for some evidence Moses had ever been there. They didn't find any because there never has been and there never will be any. But you cannot say that the foundational cause, casus belli in this region, the idea that God intervenes in real estate and territorial disputes, isn't inscribed in the text itself. And not only in the Jewish text but thanks to a foolish decision taken in the early Christian centuries where it was decided not to dump the New Testament and to start again just with the Nazarene story — great Christian theologians like Marcian were in favor of that. Why do we want to bring the darkness and tyranny and terror and death and blood and cultism of the first books along with us? Surely we should start again? No, we're saddling ourselves with all that. So this is a responsibility for the Christian world too. And need I add that there is no good Muslim who does not say that Allah tells us we can never give up an inch of Muslim land and that once our mosques are built there can be no retreat. It would be a betrayal, it would lead you straight to hell. In other words, yes, yes, they gibber and jabber, all of them, the three religions. Yeah, yeah, you're quite right, God awards land, it's just you've got the wrong title. No. This is what I mean when I say religion is a real danger to the survival of civilization, and that it makes this banal regional and national dispute which, if reduced to its real proportions, is a nothingness, if it makes that, not just lethally insoluble, but is drawing in other contending parties who really wish, openly wish, for an apocalyptic conclusion to it, as also bodied forth in the same scriptural texts, in other words that it will be the death of us all, the end of humanity, the end of the world, the end of the whole suffering veil of tears, which is what they secretly want. This is a failure of the parties of God and it's not something that happens because people misinterpret the texts, it's because they believe in them, that's the problem. Thank you.
Admirable question, thank you for it. The remark Tony made that I most agreed with this evening, I'll just hope that doesn't sound too minimal, was when he said that if religion was to disappear, things would by no means, as it were, automatically be okay. I mean, he phrased it better than that. But it would be what I regard as a necessary condition would certainly not be a sufficient one, at any rate religion won't disappear, but the hold it has on people's minds can be substantially broken and domesticated. He's quite right about that, of course. I hope I didn't seem at any point to have argued to the contrary. I come before you after all as a materialist. If we give up religion, we discover what actually we know already, whether we're religious or not, which is that we are somewhat imperfectly evolved primates on a very small planet in a very unimportant suburb of a solar system that is itself a negligible part of a very rapidly expanding and blowing apart cosmic phenomenon. These conclusions to me are a great deal more awe inspiring than what's contained in any burning bush or horse that flies overnight to Jerusalem or any other of that — a great deal more awe inspiring, as is any look through the Hubble telescope at what our real nature and future really is. So he was quite right to say that, and I would have been entirely wrong if I implied otherwise. I think I could say a couple of things for religion myself — would, in fact. First is what I call the apotropaic. We all have it: the desire not to be found to be claiming all the credit, a certain kind of modesty, you could almost say humility. People will therefore say they'll thank God when something happens that they are grateful for, or — there's no need to make this a religious thing. The Greeks had the concept of hubris as something to be avoided and criticized. But what the Greeks would also call the apotropaic, the view that not all the glory can be claimed by a load of primates like ourselves is a healthy reminder too. Second, the sense that there's something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates. I think it's very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and in architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion. And I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I'll mention it briefly. I couldn't live without the Parthenon. I don't believe any civilized person could. If it was to be destroyed, you'd feel something much worse than the destruction of the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. But — and we would have lost an enormous amount of besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry and grace and harmony. But I don't care about the cult of Pallas Athena, it's gone. And as far as I know it's not to be missed. The Eleusinian mysteries have been demystified. The sacrifices, some of them human, that were made to those gods, are regrettable but have been blotted out and forgotten. And Athenian imperialism is also a thing of the past. What remains is the fantastic beauty and the faith that built it. The question is how to keep what is of value of this sort in art and in our own emotions and in our finer feelings the numinous, the transcendent, I will go as far as the ecstatic, and to distinguish it precisely from superstition and the supernatural which are designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile and which sometimes succeed only too well. Thank you.
I'm not ready.
I didn't know it was coming. And, Tony, what do you say, would you rather have another question? There are so many people who've got them.
In other words, don't run away with the idea I've run out of stuff, ok? Yes, I'd rather be provoked if someone could do that.
Five minutes each?
I think a way I might do it actually is by commenting on what Tony just said because he succeeded in doing what I had hoped I might get him to do earlier which is to allow me to drive him back onto the territory of metaphysics with which I began because we did need to transcend that and thus to get beyond questions like, Well, are religious people good? Are they bad? and other things that are very important. Does religion make them behave better or worse? and so forth. I'll give you and I'll challenge Tony on an example: I mentioned earlier our attachment to the Labour and socialist movement in our lifetimes. For a very long time we had in that movement a challenger, apparently from the left, the communist movement, which has only been dead a very short time now and actually hasn't died everywhere yet and which said it had a much more comprehensive and courageous and thoroughgoing answer than we did to the problems created by capitalism and imperialism and other things and really proposed a fighting solution. And if I was to point to you the number of heroic people who believed in that and the number of wonderful works of especially fiction, novels and essays written by people who believed in it — you could probably, all of you mention one of your own. If you were a Canadian — I hope they still teach about him in school, the great example of Norman Bethune, heroic doctor who went to volunteer in China during the civil war on the communist side, did amazing work, invented a form of battlefield blood transfusion, just one among many examples. It was the communists in many parts of Europe who barred the road to fascism in Spain and kept Madrid, for many years, from falling to Franco and Hitler and Mussolini. Ghandi may take credit for the Indian independence movement — too much in my view — but no one would deny the tremendous role played by the Indian communists in doing this, in helping to break the challenge — excuse me, break the hold of Great Britain on their country. As a matter of fact, some people find it embarrassing to concede this, but I don't, as a supporter of it myself, the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela's party, at least half of its members of the central committee and executives were members of the communist party until quite recently, very probably including Mandela himself. There's no doubt about it, there was real heroism and dignity and humanism to those people but we opposed it. We said it wouldn't work. Why won't it work? It's not worth the sacrifice of freedom that it implies. It implies that these things only can be done if you'll place yourself under an infallible leadership, one that, once it's made the decision has made that decision and you are bound by it — you might conceivably notice where I'm going here. It's why many of the people, the brilliant intellectuals who did leave it, left it very often for as high reasons of principle as they joined it in the first place and the names of their books are legion and legendary. The best known is called The God That Failed, precisely because it was an attempt at a bogus form, a surrogate of, religion. But let no one say, and when the history of it comes to be written, no one will be able to say that it didn't represent some high points in human history. But I repeat, it wasn't worth it that the sacrifice of mental and intellectual and moral freedom and that was the purpose of my original set of questions on the metaphysical side. Are you — consider yourselves and consider this carefully, ladies and gentlemen, brothers, sisters, comrades, friends — are you yourselves willing for the sake of certain elements of the numinous, perhaps for a great record of good works, as it's proposed by Tony, are you willing to say that you give your allegiance to an ultimate redeemer, because you're not really religious if you don't believe that there is a divine supervision involved. You don't have to believe it intervenes all the time. If you don't believe that, you're already half way out the door, you don't need me. But are you willing to pay the price for a permanent supervisor? Are you willing to pay the price of believing in things that are supernatural, miracles, afterlives, angels? Are you willing to admit, perhaps this most of all, are you willing to admit that human beings can be the interpreter of this divine figure? Because a religion means that you will have to follow someone who is your religious leader. You can't, try as you may, follow Jesus of Nazareth. It can't be done. You can try and do it, it can't be done. You'll have to follow his vicar on earth, Pope Benedict XXVI as presently, the — his own claim, not mine — the apostolic succession, the vicar of Christ on earth. You have to say that this person has divine authority. I maintain that that, and what goes with it, is too much of a sacrifice of the mental and intellectual freedom that is essential to us, to be tolerated, and you gain everything by repudiating that and standing up to your own full height and you gain much more than you will by pretending that you're a member of a flock or in any other way any kind of sheep. Thank you.
If you don't mind...
If you don't mind, it would be Christopher, and Hitchens.
Chris Hedges is a horrible...
Yes you did.
Chris Hedges is a horrible apologist for liberation theology.
That's better.
Sorry, I exist too, if you see what I mean.
May as well start by establishing that ontological claim.
Well, Friederich Nietzsche famously said that God was dead and Sigmund Freud can be rendered as having said that God was dad. And I think both of them were probably right. The concept of God is, like everything else in our vocabulary, man-made. It's an invention of human beings. Unless you take the view that God made us, in which case there'd be a lot to explain: how many — why did we, in that case, make so many gods? It does seem to be much, very much more probable that men and women made many gods than any one god made all men and women and the rest of creation. And, as well as being man-made, it's fear-made. It is the unexpressed, or partial expressed, wish for a protector, a parent, someone who will never desert you, someone who will do, in a way, your thinking for you, especially on questions of moral philosophy. At its best it's that, it's a wish to be loved more than you probably deserve. And at its worst it's the underdeveloped part of the human psyche that leads to totalitarianism, that wants to worship and that wants a boss, that wants a celestial dictatorship and that's the bit that's now threatening to destroy our secular civilization. And so you're quite right to start where you do. It used to be believed — I mean, the number of gods now is infinite and a new god is created almost every day by some cult or other — but it used to be that there was a belief that gods were in the trees, in the woods, in the springs, in the sea, in the clouds and so forth — polytheism of a kind. Then, something a bit more polytheistic like Olympus where there was at least a location for the divine, but it was multi-faceted. And then monotheism, getting it down to one. So I regard this as progress of a sort because they're getting nearer the true figure all the time.
Which, by the way, is why the Vatican, in it's old days, was very upset by the concept of zero, didn't like zero at all, the most important number of all, the number without which you can't do anything, which wasn't there in Roman numerals.
And unfortunately also struck them as a sinister import from — impartimus infidelium, from pagan lands, but also the trouble — the concept of zero was very troubling for theism and must be and does indeed remain so. It's one of the many, many ways in which theism is not compatible with the scientific world view.
Why would you...
Well, I don't think that — you couldn't accuse that of being an incorrect statement, he would accuse it of being an incomplete one. I didn't give all the reasons why people believe in God. After all, you did write a whole book that argues that the belief in God can be very useful to people in times of crisis, did you not? I mean that's...
No, and I don't think it is the reason why many people do.
But remember there are two questions — I better now say, lest I be accused of not having exhausting the entire subject in my first response — I'd better say there are at least two questions. One is this: is there a god, a creator, a prime mover, an uncaused cause, whatever you like to call it? And this was the question answered at a certain point not very long ago in our history by the deists — people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and many others who said that the order of the universe seemed to suggest that it couldn't just have been random, that there may have been a designer but that the designer didn't take any part in human affairs. And that, in the late seventeenth, early eighteenth centuries — sorry, late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries — was probably a very intelligent position to hold. It was pre-Einstein, pre-Darwin. It was probably as far as you were likely to get with philosophical speculation. But believing that there might be a cause or a mover or a creator is one thing but believing that there is a supervising, intervening entity who cares who wins the war, who cares who you sleep with and in what way, who cares what you eat and on what day, and — in other words, who makes you the center of the whole cosmos, is another thing altogether. So people who say, I believe in God, I'm a deist, have all their work in front of them before they can say that they are really religious.
No.
There's nothing in the natural, cosmic order, or — that's the macro level — or the mirco level, that's to say the constituent of our own DNA and the things that we have in common with the other animals and indeed other forms of life, like plants, but isn't susceptible to a much better explanation.
In other words, as the great physicist Laplace said when he demonstrated his working model — his orrery, as it's called — of the solar system to the emperor and Napoleon said, Well I see there's no God in this system, and Laplace said, Well, Your Majesty, it works without that assumption.
I can't paraphrase him properly, but you really ought to get a hold of — it's easy to find on Google — a lecture given by Lawrence Krauss, who I regard as the greatest living physicist, and it's about the quantum and it's about a whole universe from nothing. It's exactly how you get from nothing to something, in fact quite a lot of things. One means by which this happens is the following: every second that we're speaking a star the size of our sun or bigger goes out, blows up or goes out. That's been the case every single second since the first moment of the Big Bang. It's a lot. That'll be a lot of suns going out as we speak. And there's a lot of annihilation, isn't it? It's a lot of destruction. It's on a — it's rather what you might call almost a wasteful scale. It does have the positive outcome though that we are all constituted of those materials. We are made of star dust. Now I find that a rather more majestic and wonderful and even beautiful idea than, say, the idea of the burning bush. A bit more impressive, gives you more to think about.
One has the virtue of being true and provable and studyable, which the other doesn't. And I do think that the verifiability of something is a virtue.
Yes. We don't have bodies, we are bodies. Until 50,000 years ago there were four other kinds of biped, humanoid, not unlike us, still living on the planet, died leaving no descendents. We're the only survivors of those people, that family. We're the last — we don't know if they had gods or not.
No religion invented appears to have known that these creatures even existed because the religious are forced to believe that the only really significant event that happened in the human story happened about 3,000 years ago.
Now, all of this massive Big Bang cosmological churning and destruction and annihiliation — which is paralleled, by the way on our own earth where 99 percent of all species that have already been on the planet have ever gone extinct, leaving no descendants. All of this could be part of a plan. There's no way an atheist can prove it's not. But it's some plan, isn't it, with mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time and all of this set in motion on a scale that's absolutely beyond our imagination in order that the Pope can tell people not to jerk off. This is stupid.
I'm — we'll leave it right there.
It's pathetic, I'm sorry to say, to say of the cosmological and the genetic that these are deterministic processes. They're not at all. They're full of extraordinary randomness and in the genetic case of mutation — Stephen Jay Gould, the great paleontologist, wrote a book which I recommend to you called The Burgess Shale, which is — it's the side of a mountain in Canada, in the Canadian Rockies, that sheared off so you can read — you can see the inside of a mountain. You can see it as if you were looking at a blackboard and you can see the growth and development of the species. And you realize it's not a tree, it's more like a bush. There are various branches that go off and go nowhere and there are others that succeed and different kinds of failure and different kinds of mutation. His most exciting thought, most revolutionary thought is this: if you could, so to speak, put all of that onto a tape and rewind it and then press play again, there's no certainty it would come out the same way. In fact, there's every reason to believe that it would not. So there's nothing predetermined. There's nothing deterministic about this at all. Thanks to our understanding of our genetics, which are also not predetermined because they're the result of random mutation and natural selection as everyone now knows. That's why we can have, sad to say for the kosher, but we can have skin transplants and organ transplants from pigs, who are much closer to us than we used to think. We can also sequence the DNA of viruses and learn how to immunize ourselves from it. It works, in other words. But yes, it can be tampered with, it can be engineered for good as well as for ill. There's nothing deterministic about it at all. It's much more exciting, it's much more interesting, it's much more rewarding, it's verifiable. And yes, there are elements, I was trying to say, the miraculous, the awe-inspiring, the tragic, the majestic in this that there simply are not in the incantations of Genesis where the supposed authors claim to know the divinity, the creator, on personal terms. This is nonsense. It's for children.
They sure don't.
Again, piling on completely unnecessary assumptions, and also inviting a question that will make you uncomfortable.
If you say that, No, it's because God has given you free will, I have to ask you how do you know that?
One who...
If you answer my question...
If you answer my question with another question...
I will still answer it
Even though your question is an answer to mine — not an answer, a response to mine.
The view I take about free will is that of course we have free will, because we have no choice but to have it.
I was and still am, to some extent, a dialectical materialist and I also think there are some ironies in the universe as well as in history. But to say, Of course we have free will, the boss says we've got it, is to make a mockery of the whole concept and it's also to invite the question what kind of tyranny is this that you want? You want an all-supervising, all-deciding person. I asked you first, what sources of information so you have about this person's existence that I don't have, that are denied to me? I'd like to know. And second, why do you want it? Why do you want to arrive at a terminus of unfreedom where there is a celestial authority upon whom all things depend and from which all things flow? Why do you want that and how on earth do you know that there's any case to be made for its existence?
I think you're only free when you've declared against it, frankly. That's the beginning of freedom is the emancipation from the tyranny of theocracy, yes.
Almost no scientist is.
Once you've said granted, you've made my point.
Thank you for making me free, what's that?
I'm not granted all sorts of freedom. I mean...
Of course scientists are right to that — to this extent. There are — Einstein says, The miraculous things about the laws of nature is they're never suspended. That's what so amazing about them, is they're immutable. Religion claims that, on occasions, the laws of nature are suspended in order to prove what they wouldn't otherwise prove.
You're right that science has made many things more comprehensible to us and it's explained things that religion used to take credit for. In other words, now we know there's a germ theory of disease. Diseases are not curses or revenge from heaven. Same with earthquakes and so on. The stuff they used to teach us, and many of them still do is nonsense — evil nonsense as well as ignorant nonsense. But, it's also taught us, just in my lifetime, an enormous amount more about how little we know. We're much, much more ignorant than people who lived before Galileo. Because we have now an increasingly large idea of the fantastic expanse of the unknown. That's precisely the moment at which to say that skepticism is what's necessary, inquiry, debate, doubt. Where's faith in this? Where's the usefulness of faith there? There's no use to it at all. Socrates, who, as far as I know, existed, but may well not have done, it doesn't matter to me. No one will insult me if they say, Socrates, your great hero, didn't exist. Try it on a Muslim, try it on a Christian that their prophets didn't exist, or tell people that Moses is a myth. They start hurling themselves about making menacing noises very often. Socrates said you're only educated when you've understood how ignorant you are. And you're only going to even find that out by doubting everything all the time. There's all the difference in the world between that outlook and that mentality and the mentality of faith. And second, on metaphysics, which you, I noticed, take refuge in several times already this evening like, What is love, Is something poetic or is it prosaic? Very good questions, but metaphysical ones. Those who say, God exists and intervenes in the world, in other words, those who say there is a religious god, the god of religion, are saying that redemption is unoffered to human beings, that salvation is unoffered to them, and that if they reject the offer they can be in really big trouble. Now don't start talking on like this or, if you don't mind, to a debate partner like me as if religion was a private matter because everybody knows that if it was there wouldn't be anything to argue about. It's precisely because it claims to be a total solution, a complete solution to all problems, available on pain of death, sometimes, in some forms, but available to you if you'll only have enough faith. Well we just found out that faith is probably the most overrated of the virtues and the one most — least useful to use in the real dilemmas that we actually have to face.
Gods, maybe.
Couldn't think of anything to say.
Sorry.
You weren't quick enough.
I could've said that.
None of which mention goodness.
Ok.
You're welcome.
I say in my book, available in fine bookstores everywhere, that as long as I don't have to hear about it, I don't mind what people believe. If they say, Well, thanks to Joseph Smith and his gold plates I have real faith now and I've got a family and I have friends and I have a real system and so on, and I say, fine, fine, just don't come to my front door with it. Don't ask for a tax break for it. Don't ask my children to be taught it in the schools.
And I ask them a question — I ask the question in the book, people think they have a personal relationship with a creator and they're the possessors of a wonderful secret and it must feel — I've never felt it, I presume it feels great. Why doesn't it make them happy? They're not happy. They can't be happy until everyone else believes it too. They go out and proselytize, very often — and here's — I can't let your last answer go — very often in the guise of charity. You notice how often religion, rather than ask the questions that I put like how do you know there's a god, what evidence do you have for it? Which you say, Well, lots of good people do good things because they're religious. Well let's take the most recent impressing case. Richard Dawkins and I and a few others, in response to the Haiti earthquake, set up an emergency charity for people of non-belief to give to because so many charitable organization are, in fact, proselytizing groups. So, we raised about two million in a weekend and all that money goes straight — and, by the way — thank you. If you go to Richard's website you can find out more about how to donate to this because it's permanent, it's going to stay into being. All that money went straight to Doctors Without Borders, of course, and the International Red Cross which, though it has a cross isn't a religious organization. Both of these organizations are already in Haiti, they're proven. None of the money goes to support any missionary activity. None. And the Scientologists and all the others who turned up in Haiti, and the other that turned up in Haiti to kidnap babies to convert them to their faith and there are Catholics who turned up and said, standing in the ruins of their own cathedral with a quarter-of-a-million Haitians buried under the rubble, God spoke here today and you should listen to his message. Don't tell me that's good. Don't tell me that's good. That's wicked. It's proselytizing. It's proselytizing with the helpless, using them as objects of charity and conversion. It's lying to people.
It's wrong to lie.
It's wrong to lie to people. And it's giving them false hopes and false explanations for their plight. Now, we're not guilty of any of that. And now I'll ask you another question: where in the Decalogue does the word goodness appear? Where? It's a good swathe of Exodus for you. Where in Exodus does the word goodness appear? Where, in this commandment-rich territory does the word goodness or the enjoinment to be good occur? This should be a softball for you.
Yes. Yes, that's fair.
That isn't what I said.
Yes, it's not — I mean, as I know you know, that isn't at all what I said. I don't say bad things are done in the name of religion or by authorities, I say it's religion itself that is the problem. I go out of my way to make clear that I don't take refuge in any other position. Now, in Leviticus and in Exodus if you're a neighbor, you better not — and you — this person, you're supposed to love him — this person had better not be an Amalekite, a Midianite, a Moabite, better not be a witch, the desctruction of whom is enjoined.
Better not be a homosexual, the stoning of whom is enjoined. Better not be a slave, the terms of enslavement of which are all laid out. Now, these are primitive, tribal, agricultural — most of the commandments, by the way in the Decalogue, are addressed to the property-owning classes. Here's what you can't do with your servants. Here your servants must also obey this commandment. Why are the commandments addressed only to people who have staff? Why are the women — rather a large objection I would have thought — why are women counted as part of the animal and chattel that's disposable by these holders of property? It's — couldn't it be any more obvious that this is a man-made phenomenon and at a time when people were not at their best and full of fear and ignorance and greed and covetousness of other people's property?
Well cherry-picking is an odd word to use for something that's thrust upon you. I've got no choice but to study the Decalogue.
I point out it says it suggests to property owners and enjoins them to keep women as property and they say, Oh, you're cherry-picking, you're nitpicking. I'm not.
There's now — here's exactly the nub of my question:
If what you say is true not that I — and I've never said, I wouldn't — I couldn't be interpreted as having said no religious person can do a good thing.
If what you say is true, this should be true and you should find it easy to point it out:
There must be something, not that they can do or do but that I cannot do that's a good thing. Either a moral statement made or a moral or ethical statement performed that a person of faith could perform that I cannot.
You must be able to identify that if your point is to have any force at all.
No, I said a moral or ethical.
Oh come on, get real. I mean, pronouncing an incantation...
Isn't a moral action.
No, it isn't.
And anyway, it is something I could do.
Do you — well, wait. First, I'm sorry for your loss, as the Irish say, sorry for your trouble. Second, I'm still going to have to insist, I don't think anyone in the audience can consider that's an answer to my challenge.
One has to say a moral or ethical statement or action that an unbeliever could not perform...
No.
No, if it's goodness it would be morally capable...
Well, let's not go that far.
Well then, ok, alright.
Since you won't answer it I'll just leave the question to the audience.
If anyone can come up to me and say, Here's a moral thing you couldn't do — not don't do but could not do — that only a religious person could do, I'd be very interested to hear of it. No one's been able to come up with any point.
Second, there's a brief corollary: think of a wicked thing done or an evil thing said that is done precisely because of faith. You've already thought of one.
I didn't say that.
No it's not.
It still doesn't — so to you it's not a problem that the suicide murder community, the genital mutilation community, these are all faith-based communities?
And while we're on the subject of charity, who doesn't hear Hamas saying, The reason we're loved by our people is because we provide social services. We help the needy. We're the only people who come out and do that. Which is, by the way, I'm horrified to have to say, is true. But do you excuse them for that because they are charitable?
Do you not think that they bless they're children a whole lot?
I bet you can — I've heard them do it.
You try being a Muslim child and not be blessed the entire time. That's part of the authority that they claim. They claim to own these people.
This is all faith-based.
I think despair is quite a good starting point myself. I mean I think it's very good to know that we're born into a losing struggle. I think that the stoicism that comes from that and the reflection that comes from that is very useful. I'm not very impressed by people who say, Well, I wish it wasn't true so I'll try and act as if it isn't. It is true. Everything is governed by entropy and decline and annihilation and disaster and you're born into a losing struggle and because you're a mammal primate, a primate mammal, you know you are and you know you're going to die and there'll be a lot of struggle and pain along the way. I don't want a world without anxiety and grief and pain and struggle. I can't get it.
But those who offer it to me, I spurn the gift. I don't want what you want. I don't want the feeling of an eternal love and peace. Love and peace, very, very overrated in my view. One reason — one of the many reasons — I should despise all religions equally, and I do in a way — 
...but one way in which I prefer Judaism to its rivals is that the emphasis is more on justice than on love.
Misanthropic? It doesn't mean I have to hate people.
It means I respect them enough not to offer them false consolation.
The realm of illusion will not help you to cure this condition.
Gosh. Well, if you'll pardon me, I won't share any of my griefs with you. But I've never had one or had any — know anyone who's had the faintest consolation from religion and indeed being told, as the Christians tell them, that they're off to a better place and so on, I think is positively wicked thing to do. I think lying to the dying for a living — what self-respecting person can do that? And once you've faced...
Because the person saying it cannot possibly know it to be true.
They don't have access to information that was denied to me.
Yes, yes, it's a lie.
Try it, try it.
Well, it offers the chance of living without illusion, which I think — it says philosophy and literature will do a great deal more for you. They're much more — there's a lot more morality in them. There's a lot more ethical discussion in Dostoyevsky, say, than in any of the holy books. Or George Eliot...
For now I'm presenting. For now I'm presenting. I can't do...
I can only appear in my own person here. I'd even say, to some extent, this works for me. Irony, I think, is tremendously useful, as is philosophy, especially the philosophy of Spinoza, especially in times of anguish. And the realization that there's no false consolation can actually cheer you up. Once you face the fact that you're born into a losing struggle things immediately appear a great deal more manageable in some ways. And of the remarks against this made, not one of these remarks couldn't have been made by a devout member of the Muslim brotherhood. And what I want to ask him is this: if anything of what he says is true, is he really saying that he would prefer me not to be myself, not to be an unbeliever and someone who believes in irony and the unillusioned world, but I'd be morally better off if I was a Wahabi Muslim, for example, or a Roman Catholic.
I mean, according to you, I would be a better person if I was a person of faith.
Alright.
You imply. I want to know if you really mean that.
Well, violence — there's no mystery about violence. Violence arises because we are primates, imperfectly evolved. Our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenaline glands are too big. There are various other deformities of this kind, sexual organs designed by committee, all the rest of it. And we're greedy and fearful and — but — and covetous of other people's property. And also, surprisingly, it's probably our biggest defect given that the reason we're so successful is there's almost no genetic difference between us. If we were dogs we'd all be the same breed, fantastically little variation. But we're incredibly prone to tribalism and ethnic and racial — what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences. So of course if a tribe, let's say, that's calling itself the children of Israel, for the sake of argument, decides they should kill all the other tribes that get in its way, take their women as slaves, butcher their men, take their land, take their cattle and so battle this way across to Caanan and take every elses land and burn down their — that's going to happen whether there's a god or not or whether there's religion or not but it'll happen very much more intensely if they believe they have the mandate from heaven to do so. It's a terrific force multiplier. I think there would have been a quarrel between the Hutu and the Tutsi of Rwanda, say, once Belgian colonialism had established that there were these two different character groups — types, tribes — but a terrific force multiplier that the Catholic church was as strong as it was in Rwanda, the most Christian country in Africa, made it infinitely worse. What makes the Isreal-Palestine two-state solution ungettable? Because there's a chunk of people on both sides who say they have God in their corner and God gave only their group the land and they can negate the votes of everybody else including the whole of the international community, by the way, just because of their faith. Northern Ireland is the same. There wouldn't have been a Republican nationalist dispute. It's infinitely worse because of religion. So I think that the possible — the corollary I'd like to hope would be that the less religion there was the less violence there would be but I can't in good Darwinian conscience say that. But I think the more that people refuse orders that were divine, as for example, to take the preposterous allegation that the Rabbi makes that the wars of the twentieth century were secular wars: the belt buckle worn by every soldier in the Nazi army that says, Gott mit uns — God on our side — I don't think that was a help, do you? Things were bad enough as they were. On page 70, I think it is, of Mein Kampf Hitler says that in taking on the filthy virus of Judaism I know I'm doing the work of the Lord and I'm called, I'm summoned by the Lord to do this work, a book — one of the very few books that the Vatican didn't ban in that period, by the way. And I don't think that was a help, either. So I'd say, on the whole, we'd be better off without the belief either in a supreme dictator, because that leads to violence, or the idea that God takes sides in our pathetic, mammalian disputes. Thank you.
So did the slave owners.
Comrades, I just — I'm sorry.
Brothers and sisters.
Comrades, friends: I suppose it is somewhat to the credit of some Christians that in the waning decades of thousands of years of slavery that were biblically mandated, some of them belated joined things like the American Anti-Slavery Society, stars of which were Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, non-believers, right? Whereas to the last day of the confederacy, the flag of the confederacy said Deo vindice — God on our side — and every justification for that slavery came from the Bible where indeed it's not hard to find it.
Not hard to find it at all.
Yes.
Well the Reverend Al Sharpton is another case of the damage done to society by religion because once it was agreed by the rest of America that black people are best led by preachers and once it was agreed to write out of the Civil Rights record the heroic black secularists like Bayard Rustin and the great black union leader Philip Randolph — who actually organized, with the help of the United Automobile Workers, the march on Washington — once all that had been forgotten and we decide, Yeah, black people, they really love their preachers, then once Dr. King is gone then it's one succession of junk demagogues after another, all of them given the mantle because they're in holy orders. There's no fraudulance you can't get away with in this country if you can get the word reverend put in front of your name.
Sharpton's a very conspicuous example of that.
Mr. Hedges.
Implied in what David says is that a person exists who would say, Now that I don't believe in God I'll stop giving money to charity. I don't care any more. I don't know — I don't think there is such a person and if that were so it would be a very strange religion that they'd been professing, wouldn't it?
I'll tell you.
This is what religion is down to. It's very impressive to me.
It's very often the first thing, when debating with Catholics, they always change the subject to charity right away. With Jews it's usually a little later.
And with Muslims it's all the time because what else can they — they don't want to defend their faith...
They don't want to defend their faith, they don't want to say — they feel uneasy talking about redemption, salvation, all these kinds of things, but look at the good work we've — if you talked to the Mormons they'll say, You may not think much of Joseph Smith, and I say you got that right, but, boy you should see our missionaries in Peru.
Excuse me what has this got to do with the existence of God or the validity of religious claims? It has nothing to do with it. It's always introduced as a time-wasting tactic. Nothing to do with it.
Excuse me, I have not conceded that it is to a greater extent. Let me give you an example: with the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, whose wonderful work on the primary producers of the third world you ought to be familiar, the great — one of the great photographers, he's the ambassador as the UNICEF cause of the United Nations Children's Fund for the eradication of polio. I went with him all over Bengal. We got it down to the point where except for a few bits of Afghanistan and El Salvador, polio was almost gone from the world, it could go with small pox. Not a small thing, done by UNICEF, a secular organization and we nearly got — a date was announced where we were pretty sure it would be gone and it spread back because largely Muslim groups in Nigeria and also in parts of Bengal and Afghanistan told people, Don't go get your children inoculated. It's a plot by scientists and Jews and others to sterilize Mulisms. And that, plus the Hajj, plus the wonderful devotional habit of going to Mecca all the time and taking all your own diseases with you has meant that polio is back all the way across Africa now. So I'm not going to have it said that in order to do good you've got to be more religious than someone who...
All the practical evidence is the other way and it's nothing to do with the claims of faith. Nothing.
Oh...
Appreciate it.
We're braced.
No, all that science is going to do is keep on teaching us how little we know and multiplying the distance between our own attainments and our desire to master these matters. Many of these questions will remain undecidable which is the way I like them. Religion and science can coexist in the same person, that's true and I know Francis Collins. He writes brilliantly on the genome but if you've read C. S. Lewis you don't need to read him on religion, it's unbelievably naive. Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist, a very strong if rather superstitious Christian, thought the Pope was the antichrist — might have been on to something there — but a very weird — full of very weird beliefs and thought if you knew the measurements of the old temple you'd know more than if you understood gravity. Alfred Russel Wallace, who did most of Darwin's work for him, was a spiritualist who would go to table rapping sessions listening to burblings from the beyond. Joseph Priestley was a Unitarian and believed in the phlogiston theory.
But it's really only until — I would say it's only until Albert Einstein — not until I mean — Albert Einstein, I mean, that you get a scientist who's also essentially a philosopher of pure mind. That's the great breakthrough and now you can have private beliefs and be a scientific person but no one says my science helps to vindicate my religion, no one says that anymore. That's not doable.
Well, the most commonly taken universal absolute moral statement is what's sometimes called the Golden Rule which, well, Rabbi Hillel says, Don't do to another person what would be repulsive to you. Others say, Do as you would be done by, just putting it another way. It's in the Analects of Confucius, it's — very few societies don't have it, so I think that's what we'd have to take as the nearest to an absolute. It's obviously subject to various relativities, alas. For one thing, it's only really as good as the person saying it. Should I not do to Charles Manson what I don't want him to do to me? Well, if you see what I mean. I mean, should we say, Don't lets do to Charles Manson what we wouldn't want done to ourselves? Obviously not. It's just like the contradiction between the Old and the New Testaments. The Old Testament says an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth which would lead to a very eyeless and toothless world. And then the Nazarene says you can't condemn anyone unless you can cast the first stone. Actually that bit was knitted into the Bible quite late and it was most certainly a fabrication. But it's believed in by many Christians who, you know, as you know will believe practically anything, but... If you can't condemn anyone without being yourself without sin then we can't even arrest Charles Manson unless we were sinless ourselves. So these moral absolutes are actually more full of moral relativism than you might think and they certainly — the reason people want there to be absolutes is this: they want there to be an absolute authority who can give them to you because wouldn't that save you from all the trouble of thinking out ethics for yourself, which is where I started. Why not take that chance? More enjoyable, less subject to appalling commandments to stone witches and murder homosexuals...
Excuse me, do you or do you not believe that human beings are evolved primates.
Well again, I'd commend to you someone who's much more expert on this subject, I started by mentioning Lawrence Krauss' lecture on a whole universe from nothing but where's the grandeur, where' the divinity in the hiccup? And who produces the hiccupper? All you get from this is an infinite regression. Who creates this creator? Who — it gets you nowhere. And again, if you do make the assumption which I can't dispute or certainly cannot refute that there is a first cause or an uncaused cause, it still doesn't mean that there's a god who takes sides, answers prayers, enjoins moral.
No, but I mean — so I'm afraid you only — you compel me to somewhat to repeat myself.
Yes.
I didn't say that they're lying.
I say someone who goes to tell a child that if they don't behave well they'll go to hell is lying.
Someone who goes to the deathbed of a dying person and says, You're going to a better place, is, I think, a charlatan, a neauseating charlatan.
No, a point of agreement between the rabbi and myself is that the human species — mammalian, primate, so on, that it undoubtedly is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns — does have a need for, I would say, the transcendent, would be one word, the numinous, even the ecstatic, wouldn't trust anyone who hadn't felt this and it has obviously to do with landscape, light, music, love, and I think also a permanent awareness of the transience of all things and the melancholy that invests all this so that it isn't just gaping happily at a sunset while listening to music. You're doing that knowing that it can't last for very long, very important part of the awareness. People who didn't have this would, I think, be beyond autistic. But there's no need for the supernatural in this at all. There's no supernatural dimension of which this gives you a share. And yes, of course, for poetry and literature we are rather stuck with the pathetic fallacy, if you know what I mean, the pathetic fallacy is giving human attributes to material things, so we're tempted to do that too.
Just on the word evil though: I personally find it's a word you absolutely have to have. I decided this in Iraq, as a matter of fact, after I'd seen the — Saddam Hussein's attempt with chemicals weapons to destroy the Kurdish people of northern and seen the, as it were, the stench of evil and I thought there's something else you can say about Saddam Hussein: psychopathic dictator, mass murderer, genocidalist, bad guy as some people used to call him, things of this kind, wasn't up to it. There was a surplus value to totalitarianism, a sort of a numinous bit, a shimmer around it that meant that evil is a word we could not do without.
Yes.
The — as I said, I think that all religions are wrong in the same way in that they privilege faith over reason but they're not all equally bad in the same way all the time. I mean if I had been writing in the 1930s I would certainly have said that the Roman Catholic Church was the most dangerous religion in the world because of its open alliance with fascism and anti-Semitism, which — the damage from that our culture has never recovered from and never will but at the moment it's very clear to me that most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form, the horrible idea of wanting to end up with Sharia, with a religion-governed state — a state of religious law — and that the best means of getting there is jihad — holy war — and that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this, I think is absolute obscene wickedness and I think their religion is nonsense and...
In its entirety. The idea that God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia and he's able to write this down perfectly and it contains the answers to all human — don't waste my time, it's bullshit.
Also that God speaks — the archangel Gabriel speaks only Arabic, it seems, is crap.
And this is — wait — actually no because remember, Islam makes one very important claim for itself. All religions claim to be revealed truth, that they are all founded by divine revelation, but Islam rather dangerously says, Ours is the last and final one. There can't be any more after this. This is God's last word. Now that's straight away a temptation to violence and intolerance and if you note, it's a temptation they seem quite willing to fall for.
Second, I had another motive, which is this: if you remember Dick Gregory, the older comrades here will, great black comedian and civil rights activist, when he came to write his memoir he called it Nigger.
It upset a lot of people, including his old mum who called him and said, Why are you doing this? and he says, Momma, every time you hear that word again, they're selling my book. So every Allahu akbar reminds people that we're in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion and that there are...
Look, he believes in the prophecy of Mohammed, I'm sorry to say I think he's being at best conned. Yeah.
I was very struck — because this is the core question, so we might as well revisit it. I was very struck this week reading — I'm sure you saw it — the Pope's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, who runs the choir school in Regensburg. He's discovered recently there's been some unpleasantness at the school of which he was the steward for about twenty or thirty years. He said he didn't know about any of that and surely claims not to have taken any part in it but he did say he used to smack the boys around quite a lot, he said, until Bavarian law changed and made it illegal for teachers to hit children. Well I don't want to be told any more that without religious people we wouldn't know what morality was. He didn't know this until the secular law intervened and taught him how to behave. Now, wait, wait, wait, what is the whole racket of The Church in this protecting itself from it saying they were all ordered don't go near the courts, don't go near the police, we'll sort this out among ourselves and they say they're the people who prevent us from succumbing to moral relativism? I'm not hearing it from them. I'm sorry, it's insulting to be talked to in that way. The great recent governer of this state, Mr. Romney, wants to be president. Ok, there's a constitutional issue here: Mormons are supposed to say that their prophet, as they call their leader, his word is sovereign over any one else's, including the Constitution of the United States. So Romney has to say, and finally people did force him to answer the question, Well, do you think that about your prophet? He said, No, the Constitution takes precedence in all cases. Fine, so to the extent that he's an acceptable person is to the extent he's not a Mormon. The discipline of secularism is necessary to civilize these superstitions. I hope very few of you begin your day by thanking God that you're not a female or a goy, for example.
I think a very large number of people don't — and I say this based on experience debating in a large number of churches and synagogues — go there for some of the reasons the Rabbi gives: community, Tocquevillian reasons, you might say, American communties, self-help, often they run a school, this kind of thing. They don't really believe the holy books. They don't think they have been specially noticed by God or can expect any special favors from Him. But they see, as it were, no harm in it. And there's a great deal of schism among those who do believe, an enormous amount of schism, so when people say in opinion polls that — or when you read that 90 percent of American believe in the virgin birth and in Satan and so forth I don't believe it at all. I don't believe it. And I don't believe that people have doubts about it would tell someone who rang them up in their kitchen on the telephone either. I think that underneath this there's a huge crust of doubt and a great resentment against American theocrats. They — if you want to know how to piss of an American Protestant in the south say, Are you one of those Jerry Falwell people? They hate that, rightly.
Well no, I think that the supposed religious monolithic nature of America is grossly overstated. It doesn't describe reality. And it is certainly true, as one of the questioners mentioned, that the number of those who say, not that they're atheists, we're still a very small minority, but those who say they have no faith and no allegiance to any church has doubled in the last few years and that's according to a decent opinion survey, the Pew one, not a random poll.
And it'll double again.
Shalom. Thank you very much for coming ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Rabbi, for a very generous introduction. I don't know how I'm going to fill up fifteen minutes. After all, the burden of proof is not with me. But I can probably make a that is going to take some time, making the case. But I think I can probably make a fist of it. I prefer to argue, and I do in my book, that the belief in a supreme being or creator is actually a pernicious belief. It does great moral and intellectual damage to our poorly evolved primate species and I'm hoping that we will, in the course of this evening, get to the point about the ill effect of religion but I'm not going to duck the obligation imposed upon me by the motion before us which is to give the reasons why we're so lucky as to be furnished with so little evidence for such a horrible proposition. And falsity, after all, is a subdivision of perniciousness. Religion, however, does stand — having started in that pejorative manner — does, in a way, stand to our credit. We are, after all, imperfectly evolved primate mammals though we are, and aware of our kinship with other such creatures, we do have the gift of pattern seeking in our minds and we will pursue this gift often at our own expense, but at a great hazard and often with great ingenuity. That has a plus side and a minus side. It often means — it very often means, you will have observed it in your own lives and those of others — that we prefer junk explanation to no explanaition at all, or a conspiracy theory to no theory and religion takes its place in our evolution in this precise manner. It's the first and worst explanation we came up with. It's the best we could do when we didn't know we lived on a cooling planet with big fissures in its crust; when we didn't know there were microorganisms that had power over us, we didn't have dominion over them, to the contrary; when we didn't know we lived on a spherical planet; we didn't know we revolved around other spherical bodies. Everything was terrifying, new, mysterious, and often lethal. It was our first attempt at philosophy in that way; first attempt at cosmology; first attempt at geography, biology, all the rest of it; a hopeless attempt belonging to the bawling, fearful, ignorant childhood of our species but very necessary, and it possesses still the advantage of having come first. The terrible advantage over the mind and ever learning that it possesses is its originality and the history of human emancipation is the struggle to get away from this terrifying, foolish, ignorant first try. And I can see we have still some distance to travel but we have made a start. Now, you can argue it because it's still here. We know a little bit, of course. We don't now think that the Aztecs were really on to something. We don't think that all faith-based is better than none. We don't think you need to wrench a living heart out of a chest cavity to make the sun come up every day. We've been through the list of gods, it's in my edited collection, The Portable Atheist, Mencken actually drew up a list of very nearly 10,000 gods who used to be worshipped and aren't any more. As my friend Richard Dawkins says, everyone's an atheist. Nobody believes in the sun god Ra any more; nobody believes in Quetzalcoatl any more; nobody believes in Juno and Venus any more. You're all atheists as far as that's concerned and you look with pity on those who support, or ever did, such cults. All we say is, Make it consistent. Just go one god more and you're nearly there. Peter Devries puts it — Peter Devries, poor guy, brilliant novelist and great essayist, poor guy was brought up Dutch Reformed in Illinois, says in his wonderful discussion of religion, Slouching Towards Kalamazoo it's called, I recommend it: People used to be polytheistic — they believed in many, many, many gods. Then, for some reason, they decided to narrow it down to one. They're getting nearer to the true figure all the time. This is the struggle I want to invite you to join, ladies and gentlemen. The easiest way I think to clear your mind of such remaining illusions as you may possess or labor under, is the following: The great words of Laplace, the first person to develop what's called the a model of how the cosmos and the universe would look as if it was viewed for the first time from the outside. The circulation of the heavenly bodies and the planets and he showed it to the Emperor Napoleon who wanted to know how this great genius, the only rival to Newton in his time, Laplace, had managed this, and he demonstrated to the Emperor how it worked and the Emperor said, But there's no God in this machine, and Laplace said, Well, it works very well, your Highness, without that assumption. Not just science but our own other reflections have told us there is nothing remaining to be explained that could be only be explained by the existence of a supreme being, creator, or first cause. The universe, and our lives too, all operate exactly as you would expect them to if there was no such thing. Why does the delusion persist? Well we might get to that. I think it has a lot to do with wish thinking and not wishing only for desirable things either, such as the survival of death, but also wishing for things that are less desirable such as the triumph of ourselves over others with God on our side, having made a special covenant with, say, just one tribe in Bronze Age Palestine, the most reactionary idea probably ever invented by the religious. But you'll see analogies of it everywhere God is discussed. Or the need for a terrifying, supreme dictator. Nietzsche is said to have said that God is dead; Freud is said to have said God is dad. Others clearly believe that we would be better off, in fact we wouldn't have any ideas of our own, if he couldn't submit to a celestial totalitarianism, a final, unaswerable authority in the heavens. This is wish thinking, but of a very unpleasant kind. It shows, again, how poorly we have evolved ourselves from the fearful primate and mammalian speices that first crawled out of the mire. Now, there are global and cosmic versions of this — I have time I think, a few minutes remaining to deal with them both. Start with the cosmic, why not? There are, I think, it's four thousand billion observable galaxies now? Anyone who claims to know a lot about all of these has sources of information denied to me but we know a little bit about them and a lot more than we used to do. And Edwin Hubble noticed, rather famously, a few decades ago, that they're all moving away from each other rather rapidly — that's what's called the Red Light problem, or observation. Very rapidly indeed, in fact. Now, this has very important implications because it was thought until nine years ago that, because of gravitational factors, that rate of expansion would surely by now be slowing, they'd still be expanding, moving away from each other fast, but less fast all the time. No, the rate is going up, the speed is increasing. Lawrence Krauss has a wonderful piece in the upcoming Scientific American on this absolutely crucial point. It means that within measurable time there will be no signs left in the observable universe that the Big Bang ever occured at all. Everything will have disappeared out of sight, there'll be no markers, nothing to take to take observations from. I mention this because it's often said that, How can something come out of nothing? It's the clever, clever question every religious deamgogue and businessman always begins by asking you. Well, we known we've got a bit of something in this universe and we know nothingness is coming. So, some design, huh? Nothingness is not just innate, programmed, it's the next big thing, and we at least had some somethingness. As if, to make assurance doubly sure, the Andromeda galaxy is headed directly — directly in a collision course with our own. Measurably, it's already filling the sky can be seen with the naked eye. In five billion, which is to say fucking soon, ladies and gentlemen, it's on us and if it hasn't happened before then, our sun goes into a red giant, then a red dwarf, we become a crisp. That'll be nothingness programmed instead of somethingness. Some design, huh? Well, let's move then while you ponder that to the tiny suburb in which we actually do know we live, this little corner, just our solar system. Every other rock in our solar system is completely inhospitable to life, either too hot or too cold, as is most of our planet, which as we know — have good cause to know is on a knife edge of climatic survival as we speak. We could become extinct at any moment. In fact, when we still lived on the Savanna of Africa, the environment to which we were adpated and have fled but where we still betray the scars of our lowly origin by the coat of fur we grow in the womb and then shed, by the appendix, by our terrible dentition, and by many other things. Our adrenal glands are too big, our prefrontal lobes are too small; we're not the finest primates that could've evolved. It's estimated by the people who've done the DNA work on this that we were down as a species to less than a few thousand because of climatic events and other nightmares and catastrophes before the decision was made to abandon the Savanna and seek coooler territory. We could very easily have joined the 99.9 percent of every other speices that has ever been in existence on this tiny planet and become extinct. That close. What are we flattering ourselves about? What's so great about our anthropic principle that we should attribute this to design or designer? Some design, huh? And some designer too. Who but a serf wants it to be true? Who but someone who doesn't like to do their own thinking wants or needs this to be true in the face of all, not just some, but all of the available evidence before us. I've put it like this it's the only hypothesis of my own that I've ever come up with. It's a version of, on this point anyway, it's a version of Joseph Schumpeter's hypoethsis about creative destruction as the energy of capitalism: In order to believe in — not a deistic god, in other words a creator, a first cause, an imponderable starter, which of course only leads you to an infinite regression because how could there be a starter who wasn't himself started or herself begun? Who created the god who made the creator who invented the inventor who designed the designer? Any fool can see the fallacy appearing right over the shoulder of this hypothesis, but suppose it's not just a theistic question — excuse me a deistic question — but a theistic one? A god who answers prayers; a god who intervenes; a god who didn't just start this but cares how it winds up; who cares what you do to your private parts or to those of your children and insists on their being mutilated; who knows what you should eat and what day of the week; who knows with which gender you may or may not recreate yourself or be recreational with, and so forth. The deist has all their work still ahead of them to prove that there is such a being. Here's what you'd have to believe to be a theist — I've already shown the absurdity of deism, I hope. To be a theist you'd have to believe this: How long do you think, ladies and gentlemen — I have three minutes, I shan't — I won't need them all — how long do you think the human species as a distinct Homo sapiens has been on the planet? Any one want to shout a guess? Ok, well Richard Dawkins thinks 250,000 years — a quarter of a million. That's considered to be on the high end. Francis Collins, who's become a friend of mine, a very devout Christian, who, as you will know, sequenced the human genome project and did the final report on the full-out discovery of that unravelment which showed us our kinship with other creatures and indeed with other non creatures, other forms of vegetation and junk that's in our — that undoubtedly proves us to be part of the creational soup, he thinks minimum 100,000. He's not quite sure if it's 250,000. Alright, I only need 100,000. 100,000 years since we dared to separate from, became separate from the Cro-magnons and the Neanderthals as our own species, Homo sapiens. Here's what you'd have to believe to be a theist: For 100,000 years humanity is born, perhaps 25 percent of it dies in childbirth or very shortly afterwards. Life expectancy, I don't know, 25 for a very long time, infant mortality extraordinary, but after-childbirth deaths I mean, killed by microorganisms we didn't know existed, by earthquakes that we thought were portense, by storms that we didn't know came from our climate system, by other events that arise from our being born onto a cooling planet with deep cracks in its crust — faults in its crust. Then man-made things: turf wars, fights over women, fights over territory, over food, so on. Very, very slow, gradual, exponential upward progress we might like to think. Pretty slow, but at least we can claim out of our own self respect, man-made. And for the first 96,000 years of this experience heaven watches with folded arms, us go through this, with indifference, without pity and then around 4,000 years ago decides, Gee, it's time to intervene. And the best way of doing that would probably be in Bronze Age Middle East, making appearances to stupified, illiterate peasants, which could later be passed on. The news would get to China after about a thousand years after that. That's what you have to believe. Aren't you glad you can't be made to believe that? Aren't you glad there's no theocracy any more within range of you that can make you believe that? Do you know what it's like living in countries where you can be made to believe it? Do you know what the penalties are for not believing it? They're just exactly congruent with the stupidity of the belief itself. We would be better off, ladies and gentlemen, if we grew out of it. We'd be would better of we'd grown out of it a long time ago. I've only had fifteen minutes to show its falsity. The rest of the evening, I hope, can be devoted to its wickedness, but the falsity is part of the wickedness too and thanks for hearing me out. Thank you.
Well, as some of you already know, never buy crackling from a mohel. The Rabbi's in the uplift business. C'est son metier, as was once said. He thinks it's a point against me that some of the conclusions I draw are not so just to make one happy. I'm unused to arguing in this style. I will simply point out that that's what I'm expected to do in a debate that's organized along these lines against someone who thinks that evolution by means of natural selection, which is a hypothesis, theory, which, if tested, always works; which allows us to sequence the DNA of the influenza virus, so that next time it comes, unlike 1919, it won't kill us all; because we know of its kinship with ourselves; because we know we ourselves evolved from sightless bacteria; because we have the computer models by which the eye was evolved in forty different ways at least among different species so there's nothing left to argue with except with people — or about — except with people like Rabbi Boteach and Governer Huckabee of who, head as he is of a, what I would describe as a non-philo-semitic Christian organization, believes that Adam and Eve were real and indeed quite recent people. In my experience there's nothing to be done with points like this except to underline them. Governer Huckabee in fact doesn't even know what he doesn't believe. When putting up his chubby hand to say he was among those in the room who didn't believe in the theory of evolution he said, No, I don't believe that I'm descended from a monkey. Well, as you know, the theory of evolution does not demand that you believe anything remotely like that. It points to a common ancestry between other primates and ourselves. If we were descended from monkeys we'd probably look quite a lot like Governer Huckabee. I just have to spend a second on the taunt about being a fundamentalist. To be a fundamentalist is to insist that something can be advanced on faith alone and without evidence. I will submit myself to your fairmindedness, ladies and gentlemen, and ask if anything I said to you or am saying now requires that of you, that you take and act of faith or leap of faith as if it were an ethical thing to do, or that you take one at all for anything I say. Of course I don't. There's nothing in common between me and any other faith-based person of any kind. It's one of the last-ditch arguments that our foes, the foes of science and science education and the theory of evolution by natural selection as the explanation for our presence here, have had to come up with in their desperation. Hatred, yes, I plead guilty to that. One of the many things I don't like about Christianity is that it tells me to love my enemies. I don't do that and I don't want you doing it for me either. Go love your own enemies, don't be loving mine. I'll get on with the business of destroying, isolating, combatting the enemies of civilization. I don't need any and I don't need any sickly advice from Nazareth from the man who, after all the Old Testament horrors that we know about, none of them included the punishment of hell, there's no hell in the Old Testament. It's to the credit of the Jewish people, actually. When God and Moses are done with injoining genocide on you which, by the way, they do, according to those books. I don't know where — which books the Rabbi's been reading. But he might want to tell you what happened to the Amalekites. Where are the Midianites? What happened to all these people? We know what we were told to do to them. So glad to think that those books are fictional because if they were true we would all be spattered with the blood of others to please a hideous authority. But no punishment: Once he's done with you, once the earth closed over you, that's it, there's no torture of the dead. Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild, do you get that. My same point about the overrated figures of Dr. King and Mahatma Ghandi. It's a very bad thing, it seems to me, that especially among — in white, liberal society, the plaster saint of Martin Luther King has become iconographic. It's led to two bad consequences that I can think of. One: The great black secularists and socialists and trade union leaders, some of whom spoke at this very podium — Bayard Rustin, A Philip Randolph, and others, the people who actually organized the March on Washington, with their white friends, secular friends like Victor Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, the people who actually put this great movement of liberation onto the streets — are airbrushed from history. White people are given deliberately the impression, Well black folks sure like their preachers and their pulpitmen. And, as a result, anyone who can claim to be a preacher, a fraud, a demogogue, a crook, like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, is automatically awarded the right to represent black America. This is not progress. Very well? Hope you understand me. That's not — it's not Dr. King's fault, that's not Dr. King's fault. But — as I say in my book — but it is that fault of those who make a cult out of him and who dare to say that without religious permission we wouldn't know how to demand equal rights for our African American brothers and sisters. Well excuse me, we don't need religious permission for that and the case for it had been made by the secular left long before Dr. King started preaching and that's precisely why he was always attacked in his lifetime, for having Communist and Socialist and Marxist friends, which he did, who had done most of the spadework. So, let's again be very clear what we're talking about. I'm sorry I do not believe the Dalai Lama's claim either to be hereditary king or hereditary God and I think anyone who does believe it is a fool. And there hasn't been even the pretense of an election in the Tibetan exile community that he's now been leading for almost half a century in Dharamsala in India. It is still run as an absolute despotism. People who like that sort of thing like that sort of thing. More to the purpose — and you'll let me know Mr. Chairman when I'm coming to the — I have rather a crazy salad of slanders to respond to and I don't want to miss any of them out. If you want to saw off the end of your penis, you're welcome. You're not to do it to a child who hasn't asked for it. Same with the genitals of a little girl. If she thinks later on she'd be better off without them, let her take, or have taken to her, a sharp instrument. If it proves it's good for AIDS, which it might well be, I've heard it's been said it's good for cervical cancer, let it be decided by the grown-up. It is not right, it is not moral, it is in fact wicked to submit children to mutilation of their genitalia, or to anyone, without their consent. Do you understand that this elementary point only needs to be made because of wickedness enjoined by religion? The Rabbi here's a fairly humane guy, he wouldn't, if he didn't think God was involved, ever consider mutilating the genitals of a child. But because it's a covenant with God anything can be done. Now don't you see, you laugh, but you should be crying. I said crying! Ok, suit yourself. Now, I'm not here to defend Zeus or Juno or Aphrodite, I say — I listed them in the list of barbaric and forgotten gods. The Jews who celebrate Hanukkah which, by the way I think you will have to agree, only became promoted in the United States among Jews — it's a relatively minor holiday — because of its nearness to Christmas day. The Jews who particularly care about their holiday are not arguing against the worship of Zeus. They're arguing against, as the Rabbi perfectly well knows, the idea of the Apicurus — what in orthodox Judaism is known as the heretic, the unbeliever. The Apicurus: the follower of Epicurus. Epicurus and Lucretius were the secular Hellenists, the ones who discovered that the world was made of atoms and if the gods, if they do exist, do not concern themselves with human affairs because, among other things, they avoid unnecessary pain. Now there's a discovery that's worth having. And the Jews want you to turn away — the Orthodox Jews want you to turn away from the unbelievable scholarship and originality of Humanism, of Epicurus and Lucretius, to look at a candle, Hey look, goggle at this, it burned an extra day or two, or is it eight? This is what retards human intelligence and human civilization. Now of course you may — I'll close on this because I don't want to trespass on your time or the Rabbi's — of course you can be an atheist and you can be a genocist; you can be a fascist; you can be a Stalinist; you can be a nihilist; you can be a sadist. Atheism — unbelief, the repudiation of the supernatural, is not a necessary — excuse me — is not a sufficient condition for wisdom or for enlightenment. But it is, and I say it joylessly, humorlessly, gloomily, pessimistically, it is a necessary one. Thanks.
Do you wanna sit? Well if I can't be erect I'd at least rather be upstanding. I have to sit for this. He says I gotta sit.
Alright. There was a terrible moment, I think it was when Lawrence Krauss was talking about the Andromeda galaxy when — and it's heading towards us — when someone got up and said to him, Doctor, did you say it was going to collide with our galaxy in five billion years or five million? Lawrence said, Five billion. The guy said, That's a huge relief. I thought he said five million there for a second. Now, on the fabrication point I can't sit still, or stand still if I was standing, be accused of that. The argument about Einstein and the state of Israel has nothing to do with religion at all. There may have been a religious element in his opposition to a Jewish state. He was for a state for Jews, but not for a Jewish state, a distinction that a lot of people have forgotten. The same distinction that was made by I. F. Stone, Judah Magnes, and others, often in debates under this roof, as a matter of fact. I don't know how much influence that had on his decision to reject the offer from Ben-Gurion, who at one point said to his cabinet, What are we going to do if he say yes? But I would be very surprised if there was nothing to do with it. At any rate it has no bearing whatever on the fact that Einstein believed only in Spinoza's god. In other words not, as Rabbi Shuley would have you believe, in God as an intervening or supervising or caring force but as one Spinoza identified, the pantheistic one. These distinctions are, I think, important and worth stressing. On the claim that Stephen Jay Gould did not believe in evolution, I really do not know where to begin. I think the best thing to do would be to read any chapter of any of his books, and in fact I think the I might indeed recommend the one where he has a very famous, very celebrated disagreement with Richard Dawkins on the question not of whether evolution occured, because nobody denies that. That it occured, we know. It's in the record of molecular biology and it's in the fossil record. There's a lot of argument about how and there is a certain amount of argument about the punctuations and a lot of those gaps only just now being filled in, only just now we're discovering intermediate species, partly vertebrate yet amphibian, for example, a very, very important one, recently in northern Canada. It's in Gould's book on the Burgess Shale that the most sobering point is made, a point that even I as a materialist find rather shaking — I don't, by the way, deny things because they don't cheer me up. It's not my attitude to evidence, but, I would like to think too that, you know, I was a little bit more than the primate that I so evidently am. But in Stephen Jay Gould's account of the Burgess Shale, which I think is his best book, is the most beautiful, the most finished, and the most polished of his books, he says there's a Cambrian vertebrate, little creature called Pikaia gracilens, that has the beginnings of a backbone. It could've got washed out in one of the great subsequent dyings outs, it could've done. If it had, human beings would have never appeared. This is the first we can find of a vertebrate. It could very easily have gone but it didn't, and as a result we're here having this conversation. You can say that's miraculous if you like. You can say that only God would have thought of such a thing. But — and that's the way you'd think if that's the way you thought. Because there will always be people who will say, Oh well, we used not to think about these fossils, we thought that was all nonsense. It was argued until very recently by the godly, God put the bones in the rocks to test our faith. At least we don't deny they're there, they're just there as a test. Now you have animatronic dinosaurs playing with animatronic children in the creation museum that just opened in Ohio. And there are those who say, We didn't used to think about that the Big Bang could possibly be true. In fact the Big Bang itself is a term, like Tory, like suffragette, like impressionist and other terms, originally evolved as a term of abuse, as a term of mockery, instead adopted by its exponents. Big Bang was what Fred Hoyle used to say to try and dismiss the idea. He'd say, Some people thought that it began with a big bang. Now we know there was a time when everything was inside something about the size of a baseball that's now four thousand billion galaxies. And what my daughter wants to know is what was outside the baseball. And I don't know. But we know that much. People say, Oh well, nothing so amazing could've happened without God. So, there's a name for this kind of argument, a very old and important name — also comes largely from work at Oxford university though it's actually attributable largely to Sir Karl Popper — it's called unfalsifiability. It's an argument you can't beat because it isn't an argument. If you say, Well, no I see how complex everything is. It would have to be God who is responsible, there's no was I can disprove that. There's no way I can falsify it. And unfalsifiability, counter-intuitively, is, quite rightly considered to be a test, not of the strength of an argument, but of its extreme weakness — in fact, of it's non-existence as an argument. Now I left unanswered a point about social Darwinism and — if I could have — ok — it was in fact at the Scopes trial that the contention of William Jennings Brian, not just that evolution had not occurred, but that it shouldn't have occurred because it would mean that only the fittest would survive. Now, we don't want that to be true and we can actually take steps to make sure, as humans, that it isn't absolutely the only rule of existence. When the Rabbi quite misrepresented what I said about abortion, I was talking about how nature aborts so many unborn children, not how humans do or should or might have to, but how nature takes care of it, and I said because when we were on the Savanna and sharing the territory and diminishing in size as a tribe ourselves and having to bear live young in an environment full of predators, probably if we bore eight or nine children, some of them sickly with lolling heads and diarrhea, we wouldn't be able to pick them up and carry them and run away with them fast enough. It's a fact. Because it's a fact and because it's unpleasant and, because as Darwin says, it betrays, has with it, as everything about us does, the lowly stamp of our original origin, doesn't mean it isn't so. So the beginning of wisdom I would say is the recognition of what science has been able to teach us and neither to deny that, as the Rabbi does in one tone of voice, or to claim that it shows how clever God is, with another tone. Make up your mind, you can't have it both ways and actually you're wrong twice. Thanks.
Very good. But it won't have escaped your attention rabbi or the audience I think that I was asked to answer a direct challenge by the Rabbi a moment ago and I won't have it said that I didn't. On the matter of whether an Israeli court ever ruled that Dr. Baruch Goldstein was right and he couldn't refuse to help on non-Jew on the Shabbat, I refer you to my great mentor in Spinoza studies Dr. Israel Shahak, S-H-A-H-A-K, his book The Jewish Religion and Its Attitude To Non-Jews, he the very brave professor of chemistry at The Hebrew University who brought that case and lost it in the high court in Jerusalem and a very celebrated write-up of the topic in Haaretz. I would of course never make such a suggestion...
Excuse me, and the Rabbinical courts also. He lost the whole case, very important. Look it up, the book is easily found, it's published by Pluto Press. Also, if you look up the history as told by him and his colleague, Dr. Norton Mezvinsky of Dr. Baruch Goldstein you will discover things that will make you glad that, as I said in a talk which you can also look up at the Spertus Institute — Jewish University in Chicago — recently, very glad but it seems the Jews have a gene for atheism. The great Jewish contribution has always been to Humanism and to human solidarity and it is that, and not the wailings and bleatings to an empty sky, that distinguish it. Now...
Yes, and to the topic — well, to the question of — I'm sorry, I could hardly let such a challenge go in all decency — now, I can do the rest very quickly, it's called the ontological argument: It says that if you can name the idea of a god, surely there must be something existent, or real at any rate, that you're talking about. It's not the teapot that Bertrand Russell postulates on orbiting the sun; to talk about is is to postulate it. Well, this of course is a piece of circular reasoning, but I hope I helped to clarify it in my opening statement by saying there's every difference between being a deist and a theist. Science and reason cannot disprove the existence of a first cause or creator. It cannot do that. We can only say that everything works without that assumption and there is no evidence on the other side of the case. This seems to ask to license unbelief. To the theistic argument, of a god who is actually interested in answering prayers, cares who you marry, who you go to bed with, what you eat and whose — which side wins in a war, or so forth, we say that this is human propaganda, self-evidently man-made and the so-called miraculous evidence for it has been repeatedly and conclusively falsified and disproved.
It's the religious — it's the Rabbinical court.
I said the — yeah, high Rabbinical court.
I did not say — I did not say the Israeli...
You mentioned character assassination...
You be very careful now.
No, you be very careful, sir.
You be very careful, sir.
I gave you — I gave — I've given...
This is, this is — wait a minute. A second ago you mentioned the term character assassination. Be careful your character doesn't committed suicide in front of this everyone in this room.
I gave careful chapter, name, author, and book citations knowing that I'm televised, willing to stand up for what I said. Don't you try and misquote me in front of everybody.
You'll only succeed in looking even dumber than you do now.
And a hundred books riding on it.
Hundred books.
Hundred books riding on it, big boy.
I'll be there.
You want him to say more about this?
I think you're in a minority on that point. I mean, I thought we both answered that question to the best of his ability.
Rabbi, you asked for this. You asked for this.
You asked for white noise. You asked for white noise and you got it.
Well all the evidence so far is the other way. I mean, the heavens get emptier, if you like, all the time. I think the unravelling of the DNA string is probably the most conclusive recent thing to shows us both that racism, of which, I'm aware of, Rabbi Shuley and I at least agree, and creationism are alike, illusions. We are part of the natural order. We're not a specially created species, we have no unique privilege, we are only too aware that Darwin was right on the point of the stamp of our lowly origins. It's best to begin, I think, from that realistic understanding because, bleak though it may be — at least it's realistic — it doesn't mean we have to live without irony; doesn't mean we have to live without humor; doesn't mean we have to live without solidarity or any of the other things that make life bearable and possible. You may or may not have noticed that Rabbi Boteach has been contradicting himself directly all evening: He began by saying our good qualities, our heroic and noble and gentle and generous qualities, are innate in us. He's quite right in saying that. Yes, they are innate in us, or in most of us, those who are psycho- or sociopathic. That is precisely the point: Religion borrows its morality from us, not we from religion. God is man-made and I can very briefly underline this point and make it not just an assertion on my part by putting it in the form a dialectical question: Name me, if you can, a noble action performed or a noble thought uttered by a believer in God that could not be uttered by a non-believer, alright? I've issued this challenge in innumerable places and spaces now and have not yet had a response. I await one. There's another question that goes with it, a corollary question: Name a wicked action performed or a wicked thing said by someone purely because of their religious faith. You don't even have to blink before you've thought of one. I rest my case. Thank you.
What?! Well, no maybe they've heard enough of us, maybe they've had enough of us. Well then, just — I should hate to leave it like that. Since he's been so generous as to claim so many atheists among his friends I should say that some of my worst enemies are Jews. And certainly those who didn't get the news, again rather discrepently delivered, that either God did or did not make a covenant with the Jewish people. I think, of course you're right in saying that he didn't because there's no such person and the events described in those books never took place. Israeli archaeology has conclusively shown that the books of Moses are false propaganda. It's a jolly good thing because otherwise there would have been a covenant that said you can kill everyone in Canaan and take your property as long as you keep your covenant with me and as long as you mark it in your flesh. Now don't go saying that that was not part of that fictional religion while it was strong. And I ask again, what happened to the Amalekites, what happened to the Midianites if this fiction is all that it is? It was actually Lord Alfred Douglas who, I think, said in a famous, nasty little poem, How odd of God to choose the Jews to whom someone in Oxford replied, Not odd of God, The Goyim annoy'im. But I will say that those who flirt with this kind of specialness — it's true that every naiton — almost every nation — has a feeling of being favored by the divine, not a covenant at Mount Sinai exactly, a location that has yet to be discovered but let's say Joan of Arc or indeed Rule Brittania! a song, when I lived in England, I refused to sing, precisely because, as most of my friends would decline, precisely because it did express a concept of racial and national superiority and to say that it did earn English and British people dislike, that we're simply victims blaming ourselves and people don't like us for shouting out about our supremacy is absurd and self-pitying.
I didn't, I didn't. You did.
I didn't, big boy, you did.
Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, who made the comparison?
Well if the kippour fits why don't you just wear it? Well now if...
Well I have a...
I haven't gotten my trousers off yet.
You would take, perhaps, the name of Rabbi yourself, the head of The National Religious Party, very much sought-after Israeli politician as well as Rabbi...
And also the — and I direct you again...
I direct you again to Dr. Isreal Shahak's essay, The Significance of Baruch Goldstein. From now on, I'm sorry, I can only be polite to someone who has a receipt and a book. Thanks for coming.
Hundred books.
Hundred books.
Well, am I audible? Am I audible to all? Yes. Well, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, friends, thanks for coming out, as Senator Larry Craig actually did say at his press conference. Thank you, Mr. Hewitt and Dr. Craig for being among the very many, very, very many Christians who have so generously and hospitably and warmly taken me up on the challenge I issued when I started my little book tour and welcomed me to your places to have this most important of all discussions. I can't express my gratitude enough. And thanks to the very nice young ladies who I ran into at The Elephant Bar this afternoon where I hadn't expected a posse of Biola students to be on staff, but where I thought, God, they're everywhere now! Now, what I have discovered in voyaging around this country and others in this debate and debating with Hindus, with Muslims, with Jews, with Christians of all stripes, is that the arguments are all essentially the same for belief in the supernatural, for belief in faith, for belief in God, but that there are very interesting and noteworthy discrepancies between them and one that I want to call attention to at the beginning of this evening is between those like my friend Doug Wilson with whom I've now done a book of argument about Christian apologetics, who would call himself a presuppositionalist, in other words, for whom really it's only necessary to discover the workings of God's will in the cosmos and to assume that the truth of Christianity is already proven and what are called — they include Dr. Craig with great honor and respect in this — the evidentialists. Now, I want to begin by saying that this distinction strikes me first as a very charming distinction and second as false, or perhaps as a distinction without a difference. Well, why do I say charming? Because I think it's rather sweet that people of faith also think they ought to have some evidence and I think it's progress of a kind. After all, if we had been having this debate in the mid-nineteenth century, Professor Craig or his equivalent would have known little or probably nothing about the laws of physics and biology, maybe even less than I know now, which is, to say, quite a lot in it's way. And they would have grounded themselves, or he would have grounded himself, on faith, on Scripture, on revelation, on the prospect of salvation, on the means of grace, and the hope of glory and perhaps on Paley's natural theology. Paley, who had the same rooms, or had had the same rooms later occupied by Charles Darwin in Cambridge with its watchmaker theory of design that I know I don't have to expound to you but which briefly suggests that if an aborigine is walking along a beach and finds a gold watch ticking he knows not what it's for or where it came from or who made it but he knows it's not a rock, he knows it's not a vegetable, he knows it must have had a designer. The Paley analogy held for most Christians for many years because they were willing to make the assumption that we were mechanisms and that, therefore, there must be a watchmaker. But now that it's been — here's where the presuppositionalist-versus-evidentialist dichotomy begins to kick in — now it's been rather painstakingly and elaborately demonstrated to the satisfaction of most people, I don't want to just use arguments from authority, but it's not very much contested any more, that we are not designed as creatures, but that we evolved by a rather laborious combination of random mutation and natural selection into the species that we are today. It is, of course, open to the faithful to say that all this was, now that they come to know it, now that it becomes available to everybody, now that they think about it, and now that they've stopped opposing it or trying ban it, then they can say, Ah, actually, on second thought the evolution was all part of the design. Well, as you will recognize, ladies and gentlemen, there are some arguments I can't be expected to refute or rebut because there's no way around that argument. I mean, if everything, including evolution, which isn't a design, is nonetheless part of a divine design than all the advantage goes to the person who's willing to believe that. That cannot be disproved but it does seem to be a very poor, very weak argument because the test of a good argument is that it is falsifiable not that it's unfalsifiable. So this I would therefore — this tactic, or this style of argument, which we've had some evidence of this evening, I would rebaptize or when I dare say rechristen it as retrospective evidentialism. In other words everything can, in due time, if you have enough faith, be made to fit. And you too are all quite free to believe that a sentient creator deliberately, consciously put himself — a being, put himself or herself or itself to the trouble of going through huge epochs of birth and death of species over eons of time in which 99 percent — in the course of which at least 99.9 percent of all species, all life forms, ever to have appeared on earth have become extinct, as we nearly did as a species ourselves. I invite you to look up the very alarming and beautiful and brilliant account by the National Geographic's coordinator of the genome project. By the way you should send in your little sample from the inside of you cheek and have your African ancestry traced. It's absolutely fascinating to follow the mitochondreal DNA that we all have in common and that we have in common with other species, other primates, and other life forms and find out where in Africa you came from. But there came a time, probably about 180,000 years ago, when, due to a terrible climatic event, probably in Indonesia, an appalling global warming crisis occurred and the estimate is that the number of humans in Africa went down to between forty and thirty thousand. This close, this close — think about fine tuning — this close to joining every other species that had gone extinct. And that's our Exodus story is that somehow we don't know how because it's not written in any Scripture, it's not told in any book, it's not part of any superstitious narrative but somehow we escaped from Africa to cooler latitudes was made, but that's how close it was. You have to be able to imagine that all this mass extinction and death and randomness is the will of a being. You are absolutely free to believe that if you wish. And all of this should happen so that one very imperfect race of evolved primates should have the opportunity to become Christians or to turn up at this gym tonight, that all of that was done with us in view. It's a curious kind of solipsism, it's a curious kind of self-centeredness. I was always brought up to believe that Christians were modest and humble, they comported themselves with due humility. This, there's a certain arrogance to this assumption all of this — all of this extraordinary development was all about us and we were the intended and the desired result and everything else was in the discard. The tremendous wastefulness of it, the tremendous cruelty of it, the tremendous caprice of it, the tremendous tinkering and incompetence of it, never mind at least we're here and we can be people of faith. It doesn't work me, I have to simply say that and I think there may be questions of psychology involved in this as well. Believe it if you can, I can't stop you. Believe it if you like, you're welcome. It's obviously impossible, as I said before, to disprove and it equally obviously helps you to believe it if, as we all are, you're in the happy position of knowing the outcome, in other words we are here. But there's a fallacy lurking in there somewhere too, is there not? Now it's often said, it was said tonight, and Dr. Craig said it in print, that atheists think they can prove the nonexistence of God. This, in fact, very slightly but crucially misrepresents what we've always said. There's nothing new about the New Atheists, it's just we're recent, there's nothing particularly — Dr. Victor Stenger, a great scientist, has written a book called The Failed Hypothesis, which he says he thinks that science can now license the claim that there definitely is no God, but he's unique in that, and I think very bold and courageous. Here's what we argue: We argue quite simply that there's no plausible or convincing reason, certainly no evidential one, to believe that there is such an entity, and that all observable phenomena, including the cosmological one to which I'm coming, are explicable without the hypothesis. You don't need the assumption. And this objection itself, our school falls into at least two, perhaps three sections. There's no such thing, no such word though there should be, as adeism or as being an adeist but there if was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by making the appropriate propitiations and adopting the appropriate postures and following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death I don't believe that and for a priori reasons don't. If there was such a force, which I cannot prove by definition that there was not, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious product — production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us, answered prayers, cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all, cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means, cared what we ate or on what day, cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. That you cannot get from deism to theism except by a series of extraordinarily generous, to yourself, assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation, to redemption, to salvation or to suspensions of the natural order in which hitherto you'd be putting all of your faith — all your evidence is on scientific and natural evidence or, why not, for a change of pace for a change of taste say, Yes, but sometimes this same natural order, which is so miraculous in observation, no question about it, is so impressive in its favoring the conditions for life in some ways, but its randomly suspended when miracles are required. So with caprice and contempt these laws turn out to be not so important after all as long as the truth of religion can be proved by their being rendered inoperative. This is having it both ways in the most promiscuous and exorbitant manner, in my submission. Bear in mind also that these are not precisely the differences, between Dr. Craig and myself I mean, morally or intellectually equivalent claims. After all, Dr. Craig, to win this argument, has to believe and prove to certainty. He's not just saying there might be a God because he has to say that there must be one otherwise we couldn't be here and there couldn't be morality. It's not a contingency for him. I have to say that I appear as a skeptic who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery, and all innovation and that I doubt these things. The disadvantage, it seems to me, in the argument goes to the person who says, No, I know, I know it it must be true, it is true. We're too early in the study of physics and biology, it seems to me, to be dealing in certainties of that kind especially when the stakes are so high. It seems to me, to put it in a condensed form: extraordinary claims, such as the existence of a divine power with a son who cares enough to come and redeem us, extraordinary claims require truly extraordinary evidence. I don't think any of the evidence we heard from Dr. Craig, brilliantly marshalled as it was, was extraordinary enough to justify the extreme claims that are being made, backed by it. Hypocrisy, said La Rochefoucauld, is the compliment that vice pays to virtue. Retrospective evidentialism strikes me in something of the same sort of light. It's a concession made to the need for fact. Maybe we better have some evidence to along with our faith. But look what Dr. Craig says in his book. He says — I'll quote directly — he says, Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter. He adds not vice-versa but a good editor would've told you you don't have to put the vice-versa in, it's clear enough as it is. I'll say it again, Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter. That's not evidentialism, that's just faith. It's a priori belief. It's rephrased in another edition. It says, Therefore the role of rational argumentation in knowing Christianity to be true is the role of a servant. A person knows Christianity is true because the Holy Spirit tells him it is true. And while argument and evidence can be used to support this conclusion they cannot legitimately overrule it. Now, then he goes on to say the Bible says all men are without excuse: Even those who are given no reason to believe, and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve, have no excuse but because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit. That would have to be me. But you see where this lands you, ladies and gentlemen, with the Christian apologetic: You're told you're a miserable sinner, who is without excuse; you've disappointed your God who made you and you've been so ungrateful as to rebel; you're contemptible; your wormlike; but you can take heart, the whole universe was designed with just you in mind. These two claims are not just mutually exclusive but I think they're intended to compensate each other's cruelty and, ultimately, absurdity. In other words, evidence is an occasional convenience. Seek and ye shall find, I remember being told that in church many a time as a young lad. Seek and ye shall find. I thought it was a sinister injunction because it's all too likely to be true. We are pattern-seeking mammals and primates. If we can't get good evidence we'll go for junk evidence. If we can't get a real theory we'll go with a conspiracy theory. You see it all the time. Religion's great strength is that it was the first of our attempts to explain reality, to make those patterns take some kind of form. It deserves credit. It was our first attempt at astronomy; our first attempt at cosmology; in some ways our first attempt at medicine; our first attempt at literature; our first attempt at philosophy. Good, while there was nothing else it had many functional uses of mankind. Never mind that they didn't know that germs caused disease, maybe evil spirits caused disease, maybe disease is a punishment; never mind that they believed in astrology rather than astronomy — even Thomas Aquinas believed in astrology — never mind that they believed in devils; never mind that things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves were thought of as punishments, not as natural occurrences on the cooling crust of a planet. The pattern seeking has gone too far and it's gone, I think, much too far with what was until recently thought of as Christianity's greatest failure — greatest of all failures: cosmology, the one thing Christianity knew nothing about and taught the most abject nonsense about. For most of its lifetime Christianity taught that the earth itself was the center of the universe and we had been given exclusive dominion as a species over it; could not have been more wrong. How are we going to square the new cosmology, the fantastic new discoveries in physics with the old dogmas? Well, one is the idea of this fine tuning about which I've only left myself three and a half minutes. I'll have to refer some of this to later in the discussion. This is essentially another form of pattern seeking on the basis of extremely limited evidence. Most physicists are very uncertain, as they have every right to be, in fact I would say for physicists as they have the duty to be, at the moment, extremely uncertain about the spatio-temporal dimensions of the original episode, the Big Bang at it's sometimes called. We're in the very very early stages of this inquiry we hardly know what we don't know about the origins of the universe. We're viewing it from an unimaginable distance, not just an unimaginable distance in space, perched on a tiny rock on an extremely small suburb of a fairly minor galaxy, trying to look, to discern our origins, but also at a very unbelievable distance in time and we claim the right to say, Ah, we can see the finger of God in this process. It's an extraordinarily arrogant assumption. It either deserves a Nobel Prize in physics, which it hasn't yet got I notice — I don't know any physicists who believes these assumptions are necessary — or it deserves a charge of hubris. Let me make three tiny quick objections to it as it stands — and I'm no more a physicist than most of you are. I'll make these lay objections. One: Was there pre-existing material for this extra-spatio-temporal being to work with or did he just will it into existence, the ex nihilo? Who designed the designer? Don't you run the risk with the presumption of a god and a designer and an originator of asking, Well, where does that come from, where does that come from? and locking yourself into an infinite regress? Why are there so many shooting stars, collapsed suns, failed galaxies we can see? We can see with the aid of a telescope, some we can see with the naked eye the utter failure, the total destruction of gigantic unimaginable sweeps of outer space. Is this fine tuning, or is it extremely random, capricious, cruel, mysterious, and incompetent? And, have you thought of the nothingness that's coming? We know we have something now and we speculate about what it might have come from and there's a real question about ex nihilo, but nihilo is coming to us. In the night sky you can already see the Andromeda galaxy, it's heading straight for ours on a collision course. Is that part of a design? Was it fine tuned to do that? We know that from the red light shift of the Hubble telescope, or rather Edwin Hubble's original discovery, the universe is expanding away from itself at a tremendous rate. It was thought that rate would go down for Newtonian reasons. No, it's recently been proved by Professor Lawrence Krauss the rate of expansion is increasing. Everything's exploding away even faster. Nothingness is certainly coming. Who designed that? That's all if before these things happen we don't have the destruction of our own little solar system in which already there's only one planet where anything like life can possibly be supported. All the other planets are too hot or too cold to support any life at all and the sun is due to swell up, burn us to a crisp, boil our oceans, and die as we've seen all the other suns do in the night sky. This is not fine tuning, ladies and gentlemen, and if it's the work of a designer then there's an indictment to which that designer may have to be subjected. I'm out of time, I'm very grateful for your kindness and hospitality. Thank you.
There is a terminological problem here which may conceal more than just terminological difficulty: The proposition that atheism is true is a misstatement of what I have to prove and what we believe. There's an argument among some of us as to whether that we need the word at all. In other words, I don't have a special name for my unbelief in tooth fairies, say, or witches, or in Santa Claus. I just don't think that they're there. I don't have to prove atoothfairyism; I don't have to prove asantaclausism; I don't have to prove awitchism. It's just, I have to say, I think that those who do believe these things have never been able to make a plausible or intelligible case for doing so. That's not agnosticism because it seems to me that if you don't think that there is any evidence you're wrong to take refuge in saying you're neutral. You ought to have the courage to answer the question which one is regularly asked, Are you an atheist or not? Yes, I will say, I am. You can't tell anything else about me. You can't tell anything else about what I think, about what I believe, about what my politics are or my other convictions. It's just that I don't believe in the existence of a supernatural dimension. I've never been shown any evidence that any process observable to us cannot be explained by more satisfactory and more convincing means. The great physicist Laplace, when showing his working model of the solar system to the Emperor Napoleon, was asked, Well, you're model seems to have no room for God in it, for a deity, and he said, Well, Your Majesty, it still all operates without that assumption. Now, here's what you would have to believe if you thought that this was all designed — Dr. Craig gave a slight parody of what I think about this — It could be true, but you'd have to imagine, let's say the human species has been — Homo sapiens has been with us, some people say as long as quarter of a million years, some say 200,000, some say 100,000. Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins oscillate about this. It's not a very big argument. I'll just take 100,000 if you like. You have to imagine that human beings are born, well actually most of them, a good number of them aren't born, they die in childbirth or don't long outlive it. They're born into a terrifying world of the unknown, everything is a mystery to them, everything from disease to volcanic eruptions. Everything is — life expectancy for the first — I don't know — many, many tens of thousands of years would be lucky to be in the twenties, probably dying agonizingly of their teeth, poorly evolved as the teeth are and from other inheritances from being primates such as the appendix that we don't need, such as the fact that our genitalia appear to be designed by a committee, other short comings of the species, exaggerated by scarcity, by war, by famine, by competition and so on and for 98,000 years or so heaven watches this with complete indifference and then - to an audience member whose cell phone has gone off we know where your children go to school, by the way — heaven watches this with total indifference and then with 2,000 years to go on the clock thinks, Actually, it's time we intervened. We can't go on like this, why don't we have someone tortured to death in Bronze Age Palestine? That should teach them; that should give them a chance at redemption. You're free to believe that, but I think the designer who thought of doing it that way is a very, or was a very cruel, capricious, random, bungling, and incompetent one. The news of this — Dr. Craig talks as if, Ok, but since then they'll be more people born so it might have been a good time in terms of population growth, well, there are a huge number of people who still haven't even heard of this idea. The news hasn't penetrated to them, or where it has, it's been brought to them by people who Dr. Craig doesn't think of as Christians, such as Mormons, for example, and it's taught to them in many discrepant and competitive and indeed incompatible and violently irreconcilable ways. And there's been a lot of argument in the church and the churches all this time about, well, Ok, what is the answer to that? What about all the people who never could've heard the good news or who never will hear it or still haven't been reached by it and who've died not knowing about it? What happens to them? How can they be saved? Well the argument is that it's all somehow made retrospective. And as, with so many of these arguments, I just comment on these, well how convenient. Becuase if you're willing to make assumptions of this kind then really evidence is only ancillary to what you are advancing. Now I didn't have to chance — Oh, and just on Mr. Wright, sorry I scrawled a little note to myself — in your first round, Doctor, you said that N. T. Wright, who is an impressive person, says that no explanation of the success of Christianity is possible that doesn't rest on the terms of its being true, in other words Wright says, It was so successful, it must have been that the people were so strongly motivated to believe it, that it must have been true. I regard that as a very, very unsafe assumption. Or, if it is a safe one, then it must surely apply to Islam and to Mormonism. I mean, these are two very, very, very fast growing religions; have people prepared to sacrifice enormously for it; have ancestors who were absolutely determined of the truth of it at the time and who made extraordinary conquests in its name. If you're going to grant this for one religion it seems to me you have to be willing, not just willing, you may indeed be compelled to make this concession for all of them and that, I think, would be not just an unsafe assumption but for most of you here a distinctly unwelcome one. Now, I didn't get the chance, because I outtalked myself, I'm sorry for it, to get to the moral dimension and I'm interested in the fact that objective morality is the one that Dr. Craig chooses. Usually the arguments about morality are whether the morality as, so to say, absolute, or whether it's relative. As to objectivity I think it's a very good compromise word by the way and I'm very happy to accept it. But the problem with morality is this, in respect of religion: You can't prove that anyone behaves any better if they refer to this problem upward to a supreme dictator of a celestial kind. There are two questions that I've asked in public and I'll try them again because I try them on every audience. They're very simple ones: First, you have to name for me — challenges, let's say, rather than questions — you have to name for me an ethical action or an ethical statement or moral action or moral statement made or undertaken by a believer that I couldn't undertake or say, I couldn't state or do. I haven't yet had an example pointed out of that to me. In other words, that a person of faith would have an advantage by being able to call upon divine sanction. Whereas if I ask you to think of a wicked act undertaken by someone in the name of God or because of their faith or a wicked statement made, you wouldn't have that much difficulty, I think, in coming up with an example right away. The genital mutilation community, for example, is almost exclusively religious; the suicide bombing community is almost exclusively religious; there are injunctions for genecide in the Old Testament; there are injunctions, warrants for slavery and racism in the Old Testament too. There's simply no way of deriving morality and ethics from the supernatural. When we come to the question of the absolute, well, the most often cited one is the Golden Rule, the one that almost everyone feels they have in common. The injunction not to do to others as you wouldn't want them to do to you. This doesn't in fact come from the Sermon on the Mount or from Christianity, or it doesn't originate with it. It's certainly adumbrated by Rabbi Hillel, a Babylonian rabbi, and it's to be found in The Analects of Confucious, too. But it has, since we're talking about objective, relative, and absolute, a crucial weakness in it, unfortunately: We'd like to be able to follow it but it's really only as good as the person uttering it. In others words, if I say I won't treat you as I don't want you to treat me, what am I to do when confronted with Charles Manson? I want him treated in a way that I wouldn't want to be treated myself. Anything else would surely be completely relativistic. So the argument isn't at all advanced by saying that I couldn't know any of this; I couldn't have any moral promptings; I couldn't decide for myself if I see a pregnant woman being kicked in the stomach that, because she's pregnant, that's obviously worse than if it was just a regular woman being kicked in the stomach. This is part of my patrimony as a human being, it's part of the essential emotional solidarity that I need to have with my fellow creatures to make us realize that we are brothers and sisters, one with another. We are dependent upon one another; we have duties; we have expectations of one another and that if we didn't have these, and try to fulfill them, we couldn't have gotten as far as we have. We couldn't have evolved as a species; we couldn't have ever had a society. There's never been a society found where rape and murder and perjury are not condemned. These moral discoveries long — or absolutes, if you want to call them that — long predate the arrival of anything recognizable as monotheism. It's a bit like the argument of free will. People say, Well, how do you have free will? Do you think you do have it? Well, it's a very, very difficult subject indeed. Some religions say you don't in effect have it, that all is determined by heaven, you're really only a play thing in a larger game. I take that to be that some of the point of Calvinism. There are some schools of Islam also that say, It is only as Allah wills. There's no will of yours really involved as long as you're willing to make the prostration and the obedience. So the connection between religion and free will isn't as simple and easy as some people think it is. But I would say, yes, I think we have free will. When asked why I think so, I would have to take refuge in philosophical irony and say, Because I don't think we have any choice but to have free will. Well at least I know at this point that I'm being ironic and that some of the irony is at my own expense and it's a risk I have to be willing to run. But the Christian answer is, Of course you have free will, the boss insists upon it. This somewhat degrades the freedom and redefines the idea of will and it seems to me also that there's something degrading in the idea that saying that morality is derived in the same way; that it comes from on high; that we, ourselves, are not good enough; that we don't have the dignity; we don't have the self respect; we don't have the character to know a right action or a right statement when we see it or when we want to perform it. It's this servile element in religion — it's not strictly speaking the subject of our debate this evening, I know, but I'm damned if I completely forgo it — it's the idea that, buried in the religious impulse, is actually the wish to be unfree, is the wish for an immovable, unchangeable, celestial authority, a kind of heavenly North Korea that will take our decisions away from us and commit us only to worship and praise and thank a Great Leader and his son, the Dear Leader, forever and ever and ever. I'm so glad that there's no evidence that this is true. Thank you.
That's what it means.
Well, I mean, there are different schools of atheism as you say, but there's no claim I know how to make that says atheism is true because atheism is the statement that a certain proposition isn't true. So I wish you'd get this bit right because — there you go again. I've just devoted a little time to this. I said it is not, in itself, a belief or a system, it simply says you can by get by better, probably, we think, without the assumption and that no one who wants you to worship a god has ever been able to come up with a good enough reason to make you to do it.
Right. On some days I'm a great no, I'm not going to do you that much of a favor — on some days I'm a great admirer of Thomas Huxley who had the great debate with Bishop Wilberforce in Oxford at the Natural History Museum about Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, who was known as Darwin's bulldog — we would now say Darwin's pitbull — and who completely trounced the good bishop. But, I can't thank him for inventing the term agnostic and I can't thank him for some of his social Darwinist positions either, some of which are rather unattractive.
Yes, because I think agnosticism is evasive. To me, yes, if you talk about the power of the Holy Spirit and so forth, to me that is meaningless, it's, to me, I'm sorry, I've tried, it's white noise. It's like saying, There is only one God and Allah is his messenger. It's gibberish to me.
There are many of us, I'm sorry there are just many of us to whom, of whom this is the case. It may be true, it is true that religion...
Feel free ... press away.
I think once I have said that I've never seen any persuasive evidence for the existence in something, and I've made real attempts to study the evidence presented and the arguments presented, that I will go as far as to say, have the nerve to say, that it does not therefore exist except in the minds of its...
Except in the Henry Jamesian subject of sense that you say of it being so real to some people in their own minds that it counts as a force in the world.
I think I've come unwired.
You sure?
Well I would rather, I think — I'm wondering if I'm boring anybody now. I would rather say — I'd rather state it in reverse and say I find all the arguments in favor to be fallacious or unconvincing. And I'd have to add, though this isn't my reason for not believing in it, that I would be very depressed if it was true. That's quite a different thing. I don't say of atheism that it's at all morally superior, that would be very risky. I wouldn't admit that it was at all morally inferior either, but we can at least be acquitted on the charge of wishful thinking. We don't particularly...
Well, you know, I'm not sure that I would agree.
No, I mean, I think...
Given the stakes, Doctor — sorry — given the stakes, I mean you're not saying, we're not talking about unicorns or tooth fairies or leprechauns here, we're talking about an authority that would give other humans beings the right to tell me what to do in the name of God. So, for a claim like that if there's no evidence for it it seems to me a very — not a small question.
Because you're making a very, very, very large claim. Your evidence had better be absolutely magnificent, it seems to me, and it's the lack of magnificence I think that began to strike me first.
That could be true, yes. It could well be true.
Yeah. I don't want to be too much of a reductionist, but it's entirely possible that it is purely evolutionary and functional. One wants to think that there's a bit more to one's love for the fellow creature than that. But it doesn't add one iota of weight or moral gravity to the argument to say that's because I don't believe in a supernatural being. It's a non sequitur.
Ah, well, I'd like to know first: You said that the career of Jesus of Nazareth involved a ministry of miracles and exorcisms. When you say exorcism, do you mean that you believe in devils too?
So you believe that Jesus of Nazareth caused devils to leave the body of a madman and go into a flock of pigs that hurled themselves down the Gadarene slopes into the sea?
Right. That would be sorcery, wouldn't it though?
Right. And do you believe he was born of a virgin?
And I know you believe in the resurrection but...
As a matter of biblical, what shall we call it, consistency, it's said in one of the Gospels that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves of Jerusalem were opened and all the tenants of the graves walked the streets and greeted their old friends. It makes resurrection sound rather commonplace in the greater Jerusalem area.
That's what I said, it says at the time of the crucifixion.
I mean, do you believe that?
You see the reason I'm pressing you is this: Because, I mean, we know from Scripture that Pharoahs' magicians could produce miracles. In the end, Aaron could outproduce them, but what I'm suggesting to you is even if the laws of nature can be suspended and great miracles can be performed, it doesn't prove the truth of the doctrine of the person who's performing them. Would you not agree to that?
So somebody could be casting out devils from pigs and that wouldn't prove he was the son of God?
But if...
Well, it was though to be blasphemous to have claimed to be the Messiah, to be exact. I mean, the people who got the closest look at him, the Jewish Sanhedrin, thought that his claims were not genuine so, remember, if you resting anything on eye witnesses, the ones who we definitely know were there thought he was bogus. But ok, I think I've got a rough idea — asuming you make that assumption of his pre-existing divinity, that it's a presuppositionalist case, I can see what you're driving it.
I've got another question for you which is this: How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?
Well, could you name. Fair enough, I'll see if I can't narrow that down. That was a clumsily asked question, I admit. Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false?
Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false preaching?
Would you name one, then?
That's quite a lot.
Do you, therefore — do you think it's moral to preach false religion?
So religion is responsible for quite a lot of wickedness in the world right there?
Right.
So if I was a baby being born in Saudi Arabia today, would you rather I was me, or a Wahabi Muslim?
Would you rather it was me — it was an atheist baby — or a Wahabi baby?
As bad as that, ok. Are there any — I'm sorry, I've only got a few seconds and it's a serious question, I shouldn't squander it — are there any Christian denomenations you regard as false?
Could I know what they are?
I think it's — you'll correct me if I'm wrong — it's Tertilian, isn't it, who says something like, it's variously translated credo quia absurdum? That the very improbability of the thing, the very unlikelihood of it, the unlikelihood that anyone would fabricate such a thing, for example, that a Jew could be brought to believe something so extraordinary, is testimony to its truth. I'm sure there can't be anyone here who doesn't thinks that's a little too easy, a little too facile. I myself, for example, have followed the career of a woman known vulgarly in the media as Mother Teresa, an Albanian named Agnes Bojaxhiu, a Catholic fanatic operating in the greater Calcutta area, and I watched every stage of her career as a candidate for, and then the recipient of, beatification and shortly, canonization. The canonization will require, as the Vatican demands, the attestation of a miracle performed by her posthumous intercession. And the miracle's already been announced, a woman in Bengal, fortunately already a devout Catholic, by pressing a medal of Mother Teresa to her stomach, made a tumor go away, or so she says. All the witnesses to this have since recanted, all the doctors have given a much better explanation of how she was cured of the swelling and the growth and what the medicines were and so forth, but they're still stuck with it. They have to go ahead with this process because — which will lead to countless, untold suffering in India because it will appear to license the bogus charlatanry of shaman, medicine and intercessary medicine rather than the real thing. All of this will have to be gone through, this awful display, in the name of faith. And I just happened to have watched it at every stage and I can tell you it's depressingly easy to get a religious rumor started. You can count on an enormous amount of pre-existing credulity among illiterate, frightened, ill-educated populations. There isn't a literate, written-down, properly attested witness of any real sort in the Gospels. It is, and you may as well admit it, and stick to it because it's what you're good at, it involves an act of faith. Second, on the matter of my moral question: Yes, it's true that Doug Wilson said that tithing was something I couldn't do, but then not just — I'm not moving the goal posts here — I don't think I'd regard giving all my money to the New Saint Andrews church as a moral act. The only challenge that I've had so far that I really couldn't get out of — I should share it with you — was I was told well you couldn't do this: You couldn't say, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. No, but nor could you as people of faith, you wouldn't dare. It would be blasphemy to do it. There's only one person who can do that even on your account so, with respect, ladies and gentlemen, I think both my challenges stand. It hasn't been shown that I couldn't be a moral person despite my unbelief and it has certainly not been demonstrated that unbelief with guarantee you against — excuse me that the belief will — I'll say it again — that unbelief will ensure you against wickedness. You mentioned things like apartheid and Nazism. Well, let me just run it by you. Partly this often comes up because people say, What about the crimes and wickedness of the secular world? The apartheid system in South Africa was actually a creation of the Dutch Reformed Church. It was justified theologically as the giving of a promised land to one Christian religious tribe in which everyone else was supposed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. It wasn't until the Dutch Reformed Church, under pressure, agreed to drop their racist preachments of many years that the apartheid system could be dismantled. The dictatorship in Greece in 1967 to '74 was proclaimed by the Greek Orthodox Church as a Greece for Christian Greeks. The Russian Orthodox Church at present, maybe this is one of the churches you don't recognize as Christian, I don't know, but it's currently become the body guard of the Vladimir Putin dictatorship in Russia. They are now producing, the Russian Orthodox Church, actual icons with halos around them of Joseph Stalin for distribution to extreme Russian nationalists and chauvinists for whom the church has become the spiritual sword and butler. In Nazi Germany prayers were said every year on the Fuhrer's birthday by order of the churches for his survival and well being. The first concordat signed by Hitler and by Mussolini, in both cases, was with the Vatican. If you take out the word facist from any account of the 1920s and '30s, any reputable historical account, and you insert the words Christian right wing, or actually Catholic right wing, you don't have to change a word of the rest of the sentence. And the third member of the axis, the Japanese empire, was led by someone who actually claimed he was himself a god and to whom everyone in Japan was a serf and had to admit his god had indivinity and it was said to all of them, Where would we know without the Emperor? How would we know what to do? How would we know what a right action was? Without him there would be screwing in the streets. There would be chaos, no one would know their bearings. Without our god, we would be rudderless. Many Japanese people, in fact, it is pitiful to report, still actually believe that. Now, I want to say, in other words, that religion is the outcome of unresolved contradictions in the material world, that if you make the assumption that it's man-made then very few things are mysterious to you; if you make the assumption that religion is man-made then you would know why — it would be obvious to you why there are so many religions; when you make the assumption that it's man-made you will understand why it is that religion has been such a disappointment to our species that despite enumerable revivals, enumerable attempts again to preach the truth, enumerable attempts to convert the heathen, enumerable attempt to send missionaries all around the world, that the same problems remain with us. That nothing is resolved by this. That we — if all religions died out or all were admitted to be false instead of, as all believers will tell you, only some of them are false, in other words, we're faced with the preposterous proposition that religion — either all of them true, or none of them true, or only one exclusive preachment is true. And none of these seem, to me, coherent and all of these seem to be the outcome of a man-made cult. Assume that all of them were discredited at the same time, all of our problems would be exactly what they are now: How do we live with one another? Where, indeed, do morals and ethics come from? What are our duties to one another? How shall we build the just city? How shall we practice love? How shall we deal with the baser, what Darwin called the lowly stamp of our original origins, which comes, not from a pact with the devil, or an original sin, but from our evolution as well? All these questions, ladies and gentlemen, would remain exactly the same. Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you've taken the first step to becoming free. Thank you.
The allusion I was making was not to the man-made, in the ordinary sense nature of religion, that you can tell from studying some of its codes that it's — humans have inventing it. That's why so many of the injunctions in the Old Testament are as you quite rightly say, concerned with agriculture, shall we put it delicately?
But, it's more that it's man-made, it's designed to keep women in subordination.
Yes.
I don't know of any good advice about having sex with animals — in favor of it, I mean to say. Look, there are things that if people do, incest is one and cannibalism is another, if you do them, you'll die out. A society that permitted it would — there were societies in New Guinea that did practice cannibalism and there's a terrible disease that you get called Kuru if you do it and it seems to me, if you like, there are some rules that are self-enforcing. That's not what I — when I was talking about sexual repression, I was talking about the enormous number of prohibitions on sex between men and women and on the evident fear of female sexuality and the superstitious dread, for example, of female menstrual blood, things of this kind.
I think I have to have another bite at this tempting cherry. You see, if it's true that, as I think it is, that nature is pretty indifferent, pretty callous, pretty random, then who is the designer? Many people say, concerning the ban on homosexuality, for example, in the Old Testament, they'll say, Well, homosexuality is against God's law and against Nature's law. Well, in that case, why does Nature see to it that so many people are born homosexual? Or, if you want to rephrase it, why does God have so many of his children preferring sex with their own gender? It doesn't help — it doesn't — in clarifying and elucidating this. It doesn't help to assume a supernatural authority. Whereas, if you look at the reasons given by Maimonides and the other sages for the practice of circumcision, it is precisely to dull and to blunt the sensation of an organ which I don't think even — well, I'll leave it there.
It's explicitly designed, in other words, to reduce sexual pleasure, make it more of a painful duty than a celebration. Well you asked for it.
Well, physics isn't an ideology. Physics isn't a belief system. It's a science.
I mean you could — any more than Marie Curie discovering radium makes her practice morally different. I mean, it's not comparing like with like. What I'm talking about are specific religious injunctions to do evil. To mutilate the genitalia of children, for example. To take the pastor, Douglas Wilson, who Dr. Craig was just mentioning, with whom I've crossed swords several times this year, and recently in Dallas: I happened to be mentioning to him about the commandment to exterminate the Amalekites in one of our debates and he said that commandment is still valid. If there were any Amalekites it would be his job to make sure they were all put to the sword and some of the virgins left over for slavery, purposes better imagined perhaps than described. I think this is a very serious problem. I'm not taking refuge in the common place that sometimes religious people behave badly and that that would discredit religion, that would be a very soft option. I'm saying that there are specific biblical, scriptural injunctions to do evil.
No, I completely concur with what you say there. I mean, I just wanted to say that I think those commandments are injunctions to do evil but I would much prefer to say that the tribe that thought it was hearing these instructions from God, to kill all of its rivals, exterminate all its rivals for the Holy Land, might possibly have had, I think it's overwhelmingly probable it did have, the need to seek and claim divine approval for the war of greedy extermination, annexation, and racist conquests it was going to undertake anyway. In other words, I don't think there was an authority issuing that commandment whether it was morally good or otherwise, as a matter of the truth. But I would add, and I think the concession is very well worth having, that there is absolutely no proof at all that Christianity makes people behave better.
Even thought that's irrelevant to whether it's true.
Well I find it — you see this is where I find it hard to accept the grammar of your question. It's as if, if I was only willing to concede the supernatural — you want to say transcendent, I want to say supernatural — then my life would have purpose. I think that's a complete non sequitur. To me, at any rate, I'll have to just make the confession. This is as real to me subjectively as any William Jamesian apprehension of the divine. I don't get your point at all.
Well, I think it has it exactly the wrong way around. You see, as I was beginning to say earlier, we didn't have time in the question period, I wouldn't say that atheism was morally inferior, I wouldn't concede that for a second. I don't want to make a claim for its superiority either, but there may be a slight edge here: We don't believe anything that could be called wishful. In other words, we don't particularly welcome the idea of the annihilation either of ourselves, as individuals — the party will go one, we will have left and we're not coming back — or of the entropic heat death of the universe. We don't like the idea, but there's a good deal of evidence to suggest that is what's gonna happen. And there's very, very little evidence to suggest that I'll see you all again in some theme park, one nice and one nasty experience. There's absolutely no evidence for that at all. So I'm willing to accept on the evidence conclusions that may be unwelcome to me. I'm sorry if I sound as if I'm spelling that out, but I will. Now you want to know what makes my life meaningful? Generally speaking it's been struggling myself to be free and, if I can say it without immodesty — Mr. Hewitt kindly said it for me, too flattteringly beforehand — trying to help others to be free too. That's what given a lot of meaning to my life and does still. Solidarity with those who want to be as free as I am, partly by luck and partly by my own efforts and the efforts of others. Well one obstacle to liberty, and that's why I mentioned it and gave so many examples of it in history and in the present day, is the poisonous role played by fellow primates of mine who think they can tell me what to do in the name of God because God's told them that they have this power. So, that's one thing I'd like to be shot of right here in the here in now. And my suspicion is, if you really ask the religious whether they want power and what's the world they care about, the next one or this one, it'll be this one every time, because they too know perfectly well that this is the only life we've got.
But then, I return your question to me — I return it to you in a different form: If there's going to be a resurrection, an ingathering, if in the end all the injustices will be canceled, all tears dried, all the other promises kept, then why do you care what happens in this brief veil of tears? Why do the churches want power in the here and now? Why do they want to legislate like things for abortion or sexuality or morality? Why bother? I mean, isn't it just as much the case, as Dostoyevsky says about atheism, that without God all things are possible, that with God all things are thinkable to?
Agreed, agreed, but there are perfectly good humanist motives for doing all those things and if you want to have a reason for caring about the survival and health and well being of others, the idea that you might depend on them for the only life you've got, and they on you for solidarity, is just as good an explanation for right action.
Par contre, if people think God is telling them what to do, or they have God on their side, what will they not do? That's what I meant by the reverse of the Dostoyevsky question. What crime will not be committed? What offense to justice and to reason will not be, is not regularly committed by people who are convinced that it is God's will that they do that? It's with God that all is possible.
Tell that to...
Auschwitz is the outcome of centuries in which the Christian Church announced — believed that the Jewish people had called for the blood of Jesus of Nazareth to be on their head for every generation. It's only in one verse in the Bible, I know, but it happens to be the verse the Church picked up on. I don't say Jesus would have been a guard there, that's not the point, the point is that this is not an abberation of religion, it is a scriptural injunction as is the one to kill the Amalekites...
As is the one to mutilate the genitals of children.
Well you should tell that to the Vatican. I mean we know — Paul Johnson and his very friendly history of Christianity says that, up to 50 to 60 percent of the Waffen-SS were practicing, confessing Catholics in good standing. No one was ever threatened with discipline by the church with excommunication, for example, for taking part in the Final Solution. The only Nazi ever excommunicated by the church was Joseph Goebbels and, if you like, I'll tell you why...
His wife was a divorced Protestant.
Excuse, excuse me, Christianity does have some standards.
They're all for both of us.
Just on the devil's advocate point, when the Vatican asked me to testify against Mother Teresa, I discovered, which I did, I discovered that the office of devil's advocate has been abolished now. So, I come before you as the only person ever to have represented the devil pro bono.
Yeah, now, I'm not one of — I was very intrigued by that reply and largely agree with it. If I was a believer, I would not feel God owed me an explanation. I'm not one of those atheists who thinks you can go around saying — complaining — if you make the assumption that there is a deity then all things are possible, you just have to be able to make that assumption. At our debate in Dallas the other day I mentioned the case of Fraulein Fritzl, the Austrian woman who was imprisoned in a dungeon by her father for quarter of a century and incestuously raped and tortured and kept in the dark with her children for 25 years and I thought — I asked people to imagine how she must have beseeched him, how she must have begged him, and how the children must have, and how they must have prayed, and how those prayers went unanswered, and those beggings and beseechments went unanswered for 25 years and Douglas Wilson's reply to me was, God will cancel all that and all those tears will be dried, and I said well if you're capable of believing that then obviously what that woman went through and what her children went through was perfectly worth while and her father was all that time, without knowing it, and apparently not particularly wishing it, an instrument of the divine will and as I have said to you before this evening, had occasion to say, you're perfectly free to believe that if you wish.
I do.
It's a time for this great question to come up again. I think there are two reasons for it: one is the emergence of a very aggressive theocratic challenge in various parts of the world. We are about to see a long-feared nightmare come true: The acquisition of apocalyptic weaponry by a Messianic regime in Tehran which is already enslaving and ruining a formerly great civilization. We see the forces of Al Qaeda and related jihadists ruining the societies of Iraq, of Afghanistan, Pakistan. We see Jewish settlers stealing other people's land in the name of God in the hope that this will bring on a Messianic combat and the return of the Messiah. And even in our own country we're not free from people who want to have stultifying nonsense taught to our children in school and in science class. So, there's that, it's in the news all the time. And then there's the existence of a very small group, of which I'm very proud to be a part, that says it's time to take a stand against theocratic bullying and is willing to go anywhere to debate these matters and put these great questions to the proof. So, and thank you for giving me the chance.
Thank you professor, very generous introduction. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. My first duty, which is also a pleasure, is to thank the University of Notre Dame for inviting me onto its terrain. And Mr. O'Duffey, in particular, in an institution that's also identified, I believe, with the great history and people of Ireland, for taking the revenge of arranging for English weather to greet me. Now, I could — I've been given fifteen minutes, which isn't that much, but I could do it, in a way, in two, like this, as a proposition: When Getrude Stein was dying — some of you will know this story — she asked, as her last hour approached: Well, what is the answer? And when no one around her bed spoke she rephrased and said, Well in that case, what is the question? And I'm speaking tonight — we are speaking tonight — we've met tonight at an institution of higher learning, and the greatest obligation that you have is to keep an open mind and to realize that, in our present state, human society, we're more and more overborn by how little we know, and how little we know about more and more, or, if you like, how much more we know, but how much less we know as we find out how much more and more there is to know. In these circumstances, which I believe to be undeniable, the only respectable intellectual position is one of doubt, skepticism, reservation and free — and I'd stress free and unfettered inquiry, in that lies, as it has always lain, our only hope. So you should beware always of those who say that these questions have already been decided. In particular, to those who'll tell you that they've been decided by reservation — excuse me, by revelation, that there are a handed-down commandments and precepts that predate, in a sense, ourselves and that the answers are already available if only we could see them and that the obligation upon ourselves to debate ethical and moral and historical and other questions is thereby dissolved. It seems to me that is the one position — it's what I call the faith position — that has to be discarded first. So, thank you for your attention and I'm done, except that it seems that I have a reputation for demagogy to live up to. When I come to a place like this I read the local paper — the Campus Observer, in this case — and I was sorry to see that Dinesh and I are not considered up to the standards of Father Richard McBrien, whose exacting standards, I dare say, are out of our reach. And I was also sorry to see myself and others represented in other papers, and in particular by a distinguished cleric in St. Peters on Good Friday, who made a speech through which His Holiness the Pope sat in silence, Father Cantalamessa, saying that people like myself are part of a pogrom, a persecution comparable only to that of the Jews with the church in mind. This is the first I've ever been accused of being part of a pogrom or a persecution, but as long as it's going on I'll also add that it's the only pogrom that I've ever heard of that's led by small, deaf and dumb children whose cries for justice have been ignored and while that is the definition of the pogrom I'll continue to support it because I think it demonstrates very clearly the moral superiority of the secular concept of justice and law over Canon Law and religious law, with its sickly emphasis on self-exculpation in the guise of forgiveness and redemption. That's not the only reason why religion is a problem: it's a problem principally because it is man-made. Because, to an extent, it is true as the church used to preach when it had more confidence, that we are, in some sense, originally sinful and guilty. If you want to prove that, you only have to look at the many religions that people have constructed to see that they are indeed the product of an imperfectly-evolved primate species, about half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee, with a prefrontal lobe that's too small, an adrenaline gland that's too big and various other evolutionary deformities about which we're finding out ever more; a species that is predatory, a man is a wolf to man, Homo-homini lupus, as has well been said, a species that's very fearful of itself and others and of the natural order and, above all, very, very willing, despite its protestations of religious modesty, to be convinced that the operations of the cosmos and the universe are all operating with us in mind. Make up your mind whether you want to be modest or not, but don't say that you were made out of dust, or if you're a woman out of a bit of rib, or if you're a Muslim out of a clot of blood and you're an abject sinner, born into guilt but add, Nonetheless, let's cheer up: the whole universe it still designed with you in mind. This is not modesty or humility, it's a man-made false consolation, in my judgment, and it does great moral damage. It warps — it begins by warping what we might call our moral sense of proportion. I wish that was all that could be said, though I think that's the most important thing. I ought to say why I think it ought to be credited and I ought to add that my colleagues Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have been very generous in this respect. This debate would be uninteresting if religion was one-dimensional. Religion was our first attempt to make sense of our surroundings. It was our first attempt and cosmology, for example, to make sense of what goes on in the heavens. It was our first attempt and what I care about the most, the study of literature and literary criticism. It gave us texts to deliberate and even to debate about even if some of those texts were held to be the word of God and beyond review and beyond criticism, nonetheless the idea is introduced and it had never been introduced before. It's our first attempt at health care, in one way. If you go to the shaman or the witchdoctor or you make the right propitiations, the right sacrifices and you really believe in it you do have a better chance of recovery. Everybody knows it's a medical fact: morale is an ingredient in health and it was our first attempt at that, too. It was our first very bad attempt at human solidarity because it was tribe-based but nonetheless it taught that there were virtues in sticking together. And it was our first attempt, I would say, also — this is not an exhaustive list — at psychiatric care and dealing with the terrible loneliness of the human condition, at what happens when the individual spirit looks out, shivering, into the enormous void of the cosmos and contemplates its own extinction and deals with the awful fear of death. This was the first attempt to apply any balm to that awful question. But, as Charles Darwin says of our own evident kinship with lower mammals and lower forms of life, We bear, as he puts it in the Origins of Species, We bear always the ineffaceable stamp of our lowly origin. I'll repeat it, the ineffaceable stamp of our lowly origin. Religion does the same thing. It quite clearly shows that it's the first, the most primitive, the most crude, and the most deluded attempt to make sense. It is the worst attempt, but partly because it was the first. So the credit can be divided in that way. And the worst thing it did for us was to offer us certainty, to say, These are truths that are unalterable; they're handed down from on high; we only have to learn God's will and how to obey it in order to free ourselves from these dilemmas. That's probably the worst advice of all. Heinrich Heine says that if you're in a dark wood on a dark night and you don't know where you are and that you've never been through this territory before you may be well advised to hire as a guide the local mad, blind old man who can feel his way through the forest because he can do something you can't. But when the dawn breaks and the light comes, you would be silly if you continued to operate with this guide, this blind, mad old man, who was doing his best with the first attempt. To give you just two very contemporary examples: to have a germ theory of disease relieves you of the idea that plagues are punishments. That's what the church used to preach, that plagues come because the Jews have poisoned the wells, as the church very often preached, or that the Jews even exist and are themselves a plague, as the church used to preach when it felt strong enough and also was morally weak enough and had such little evidence. You can free yourself from the idea that diseases are punishments or visitations. If you study plate tectonics you won't do what the Archbishop of Haiti did the other day speaking to his sorrowing people after his predecessor had been buried in the ruins of the cathedral at Port-au-Prince along with a quarter of a million other unfortunate Haitians whose lives were miserable enough as it was, and to say, with the Cardinal Archbishop of New York standing right next to him that God had something to say to Haiti and this is the way he chose to say it. If you study plate tectonics and a few other things you will free yourself of this appalling burden from our superstitious, fearful, primate past. And I suggest, again, to an institution of higher learning, that's a responsibility we all have to take on. If we reflect — some people say the great Stephen Jay Gould, who I admired very much, from whom we all learned a great deal about evolutionary biology, used to say, rather leniently I think, that, Well, these are non-overlapping magisteria, the material world, the scientific world and the faith world. I think non-overlapping is too soft. I think it's more a question, increasingly, of it being a matter of incompatibility, or perhaps better to say, irreconcilability. Just if you reflect on a few things I'll have time, I hope, to mention. My timer, by the way, isn't running so I'm under your discipline, Professor. You'll give me...
Very good. When we reflect that the rate of the expansion of our universe is increasing — it was thought until Hubble that we knew it was expanding but that surely Newton would teach us that the rate would diminish. No, the rate is increasing, the Big Bang is speeding up. We can see the end of it coming increasingly clearly. And while we wait for that we can see the galaxy of Andromeda moving nearer towards the collision that's coming with us, you can see it in the night sky. This is the object of a design, you think? What kind of designer, in that case? To say that this must have an origin and now we know how it's going to end, why ask why there's something rather than nothing when you can see the nothingness coming only replaces the question. Faith is of no use in deciding it. And that's on the macro level. From the macro to the micro: 99.8 percent of all species ever created, if you insist, on the face of this planet have already become extinct, leaving no descendants. I might add that of that number, three of four branches of our own family, Homo sapiens — branches of it, the Cromagnans, the Neanderthals, who were living with us until about 50,000 years ago, who had tools, who made art, who decorated graves, who clearly had a religion, who must have had a god, who must have abandoned them, who must have let them go, they're no longer with us, we don't know what their last cries were like. And our own species was down to about 10,000 in Africa before we finally got out of there, unforsaken this time or so far. To move from the macro, in other words, to the micro: our own solar system is only half way through it allotted span before it blows up and as Sir Martin Ryle, the great Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology at Cambridge, and incidentally a believing Anglican says, By the time there are creatures on the earth who look as the sun expires they will not be human. It will not be humans who see this happen if our planet lives that long. The creatures that watch it happen will be as far different from us as we are from amoebae and bacteria. Faced with these amazing, overarching, titanic, I would say awe-inspiring facts — like the fact that ever since the Big Bang every single second a star the size of ours has blown up. While I've been talking, once every second a star the size of our sun has gone out — faced with these amazing, indisputable facts, can you be brought to believe that the main events in human history, the crucial ones, happened 3,000 to 2,000 years ago in illiterate, desert Arabia and Palestine? And that it was at that moment only that the heavens decided it was time to intervene and that by those interventions we can ask for salvation? Can you be brought to believe this? I stand before as someone who quite simply cannot and who refuses, furthermore, to be told that if I don't believe it that I wouldn't have any source for ethics or morality. Please don't pile the insulting onto the irrational and tell me that if I don't accept these sacrifices in the desert, I have no reason to tell right from wrong.
One minute, good. Then I'll have to prune and you'll be the losers, but I'll have a — there's a rebuttal coming. Alright, look at the contemporary religious scene. I return to religion as well as faith and belief: Israeli settlers are stealing other people's land in the hope of bringing on the Messiah and a terrible war. On the alternative side, as it thinks of itself, the Islamic jihadists are preparing a war without end, a faith-based war based on the repulsive tactic of suicide murder and all of these people that they have a divine warrant, a holy book, and the direct word of God on there side. We used to worry when I was young, what will happen when a maniac gets hold of a nuclear weapon? We're about to discover what happens when that happens: the Islamic republic of Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon and by illegal means that flout every possible international law and treaty. Meanwhile in Russia, the authoritarian, chauvinistic, expansionist regime of Vladimir Putin is increasingly decked in clerical garb by the Russian orthodox church, with its traditional allegiance to czarism, serfdom and the rest of it and Dinesh would have to argue — I'll close on this — Dinesh would have to argue that surely that's better than there be a mass outbreak of secularism in Russia and Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia and I would call that a reductio ad absurdum and I'll leave you with it and I'll be back. Thanks.
I never hear Dinesh doing that without thinking what a wonderful Muslim he would make. You try telling a hundred people in Saudi Arabia that you don't think the Prophet Mohammed really heard those voices. You're going to be really outvoted. And yes, Dinesh, I have noticed there are religious revivals going on, pay a lot of attention to them. I don't find them as welcome, perhaps, as you do. And on your detective hypothesis, don't you think there's something to be said for considering unfalsifiability when constructing a hypothesis? For example, Albert Einstein staked his reputation. He said, If I'm wrong about this, then there will not be an eclipse at a certain time of day and month and year off the west coast of Africa and I will look a fool. But if I'm right there will be one, and people gathered thinking, He can't be that smart, and he was. Professor J. B. S. Haldane used to be asked, Well, what would shake your faith in evolution? This was when it was much more controversial than it is now and I'm impressed to find that Dinesh believes in Intelligent Design which really does require, I would think, a leap of faith, but there it is. Haldane said, Well, show me rabbits' bone in the Jurassic layer and I'll give up. Now can you think of any religious spokesman you've ever heard who would tell you in advance what would disprove their hypothesis? Of course you can't, because it's unfalsifiable. And we were all taught, weren't we, by Professor Karl Popper, that unfalsifiability in a theory is a test not of its strength, but of its weakness. You can't beat it. The Church used to say, No, God didn't allow evolution. Instead He hid the bones in the rocks to test our faith. That didn't work out too well. So now they say, Ah, now they know about it, it proves how incredibly clever He was all along. It's an infinitely elastic airbag. And there's no argument that I can bring or that anyone can bring against it, and that's what should make you suspicious. Then a question for Dinesh — I know I'm supposed to be answering them as well as asking them, but it does intrigue me when I debate with religious people — he announced, I have his words, he was going to talk without reference to Revelation, Scripture, or Scriptural Authority. Now, why ask yourselves then — I'll ask you, why is that? Why do I never come up against someone who says, I'll tell you why I'm religious: because I think that Jesus of Nazareth is the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father except by Him and if you'll believe on this you'll be given eternal life. I'd be impressed if people would sometimes say that. Why do the religious people so often feel they must say, No we don't — well that's all sort of metaphorical. In what sense are they then religious? You'll notice that Dinesh talked about the operations of the divine and the creator only in the observable natural order. That's what used to be called the deist position. It was the position held by skeptics like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson by the end of the eighteenth century. It was as far as anyone could see before Darwin and before Einstein. There appeared to be evidence of design in the universe. But there was no evidence of divine intervention in it, very important point. The deist may say, and I would have to say, it cannot be disproved that there was a first cause and it was godly. That cannot be disproved, it can only be argued that there's no evidence for it. But the deist, having established that position, if they have, has all their work still ahead of them to show there is a god who cares about us, even knows we exist, takes sides in our little tribal wars, cares who we sleep with and in what position, cares what we eat and on what day of the week, arbitrates matters of this kind. That's the conceited, that's the endless human wish to believe that we have parents who want to look out for us and help us not to grow up or get out of the way. And so it surprises me that there are no professions of real religious faith ever made on these occasions. Now, I suppose I should then say what my own method in this is, since I was challenged on that point. Take the two figures of Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates. I believe Jesus of Nazareth operates on the fringe of mythology and prehistory. I don't think it's absolutely certainly established there is such a person or that He made those pronouncements or that He was the son of God or the son of a virgin or any of these things. And I would likewise have to concede that we only know of the work of Socrates through secondhand sources, in the same way, second or thirdhand. Quite impressive ones in some cases, from Plato's Apology, but it can't be demonstrated to me that Socrates ever walked the streets of Athens.
How many?
That's five. Just quickly then: if it could shown to a believing Christian the grave of Jesus opened and the body of him found and the resurrection disproved — if that could be archaeologically done for the sake of argument — it would presumably be a disaster for you. You'd have to think, Then we're alone. Then how are we going to know right from wrong? What can we do? I maintain with Socrates that on the contrary, the moral problems and ethical problems and other dilemmas that we have would be exactly the same as they are: what are our duties to each other? How can we build the just city? How should we think? How can we face the possibility of our loneliness? How can we do right? These questions would remain exactly as they are and as they do. And so all that is necessary is to transcend the superstitious, transcend the mythical, and accept the responsibility, take it on ourselves that no one can do this for us. And I would hope that in a great university, that thought might carry the day. Thank you.
I think — well, both. I'll stand up for your question and see if I can do both. But I know people are impatient to get to the next segment. Bring it on.
Well, because of religion's own very large claims. And because — something I didn't have time to go into — because not all these religions can be simultaneously true. I mean, there are enormous numbers of competing religions, it's another reason that it's obvious to me that they're man-made. It's what you would expect if it was man-made: there'd be lots of religions with incompatible claims and theologies and that this would lead to further quarrelling. Either one of them is completely true, as the Roman Church used to say, it was the one true church, some of its members still do, or all of them are false, or all of them are true, which, of course, can't be true. Now to Dinesh and the matter of anomalies and the question of ex nihilo: half the time when I debate it's people saying nothing can come from nothing, you can't get something from nothing, so since there is something, someone must have wanted there to be something — not I think a very impressive syllogism. I can't do it all this evening, but it's very easy for anyone to go and see Professor Lawrence Krauss deliver his brilliant lecture online called A Whole Universe From Nothing which explains to you how indeed you can get very large numbers of things from nothing with the proper understanding of quantum theory and then tonight Dinesh says, Really there was nothing and the Hebrews were so clever that they knew that and therefore they must have been right about God as well. This is ridiculous. The ancient Hebrews also thought that God made man and women out of nothing, or out of dust and clay, whereas we have an exact knowledge, or an increasingly exact knowledge of precisely the genetic materials in common with other creatures from which we were assembled. And then not content with that, he says biblical prophecy is true in respect to Palestine. This is an extraordinary thing and you were right to mention the Holocaust. If it's true that God wanted the Jews to get back to Palestine, then it must have been true that he wanted their exile to be ended — the Galut as it's known to Zionism, the exile, the wandering — and we know how that wandering was ended: by Christian Europe throwing living Jewish babies into furnaces. Well that must be part of the plan then, musn't it? And some rabbis used to claim that, by the way. They used to claim that the Holocaust was punishment for exile. And then people started to desert the synagogue, so they shut up about it until the '67 war. And then when the Israeli army got the Wailing Wall back they said, Ah, we shouldn't have spoken so quickly. Actually, this was what God always had in mind: the conquest by Jews of Palestinians. Well you see how brilliantly that's worked out. I don't think it's wise or moral or decent to try and detect the finger of God in human quarrels. I think the enterprise is futile and it incidentally shows the absurdity of all arguments from design. Thank you.
Well, was it to me first? Well in that case I can start with a compliment to Dinesh because in one of his books he tells the story of asking his father in India, Daddy, everyone around here seems to be Hindu, with quite a few Muslims. Why are we Christians? And his father said, Because, Dinesh, my lad, the Portuguese inquisition got to this part of India first, which is, in fact, the full and complete explanation for that.
So, you can tell Dinesh is well brought up in this respect and he's made the most of it. Obviously in my case, this does not apply because — I mean, obviously if you ask someone in Buffalo, Why'd you go to the Roman Catholic church? he'll say, Because my parents were from. It's the overwhelmingly probable explanation. Why'd you go to a Greek Orthodox church? My parents were born in Thessaloniki. Of course this is true. But there are a lot of people who convert. In fact, quite a large number of Muslims on their way out of Islam embrace Christianity, which is a very risky thing to do. It must be something they care a lot about and I think one should take seriously. And there was relatively easy for me, being born in England and emigrating to America, to leave the Church of England behind. That, believe me, is no sweat. Our great religious poet — our great Christian poet George Herbert refers to the sweet mediocrity of our native church. What do you get if you cross an Anglican with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who comes to door and bothers you for no particular reason. So, enough from me.
That's right.
No, no, it was for Dinesh.
The person violating the principle of William of Ockham here, I think though, Dinesh, is you. I mean, everyone remembers what Laplace said to Napoleon when he produced his — he was the greatest scientist of his day — his orrery, the solar system as viewed from the outside, never been done before in model form and the Emperor said, Well, there doesn't seem to be any God in this apparatus, and Laplace said, Well, Your Majesty, it happens to operate perfectly well without that assumption. So it does. Dinesh asked earlier and I should have taken him up on it, isn't it the case that the three questions where are we from? where are we going? and why are we here? there are three nopes from our side. That's not true at all. It was incredible that he alleged it. To the question of where are we from, both in the macro and the micro term, where did we come from, the cosmological, the Big Bang and the micro, the unraveling of the human string of DNA and our kinship with other animals and indeed other forms of non-animal life. We are enormously to a greater extent well-informed about our origins and what we don't know we don't claim to know — very important. My admitting that I don't know exactly how it began is not at all the same as Dinesh's admission that he doesn't know either because he feels he has to know, because if it's not a matter of faith and not a matter of God he can't say he believes in it a little bit, it must be a real belief to be genuine, and it must have some explanatory value. And he doesn't hold it very strongly and it doesn't explain anything for which we have better explanations. Likewise about where we're going: we have a very good idea now of the time and the place, if you like — the time anyway when our universe and sun and indeed the cosmos will come to an end. Dinesh might say, Well then if you look at the Bible it proves right all those who said the end of the world is at hand. There's biblical authority, it just proves me right all along. Yes, except that they said that by repenting you could prevent this outcome, which you cannot, ladies and gentlemen, ok? As to why are we here, good question, to which there's so far no good answer and I suggest you keep the argument about that open and sharpen the questions and consider the infinite possible variety of answers and train your mind that way. Don't say you already know why you're here, that someone wants you to be here, that you're fathered, that you're protected, that it's all part of a divine plan. You can't know that and you shouldn't say it. There.
There's a factual and a theoretical comment to be made on that. First, I think you're flat our wrong on the Inquisition, not that the numbers game is crucial, but the Inquisition in the Americas caused Father Bartolomeo de las Casas to convene a great meeting at the University of Salamanca to consider whether the Christian world should ever have gone as conquistadors because the genocidal price paid by the people of old Columbia, pre-Columbia, was so high. Slavery, burning, torture — no one knows the numbers are but they're horrifying. Second, the Thirty Years War has to be considered a war of religion and we don't know how many were killed there either but the retarding of civilization was absolutely gigantic as well as the appalling harvest of innocent population. Third, at the beginning of the First World War — a clash of empires — all the leaders were, in a sense, theocrats. The Ottoman Empire was a theocracy by definition; Kaiser Wilhelm II was the head of the Protestant Church in Germany; the czar of Russia was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia; the King Emperor of Britain, George V, was the head of the Church of England, as you say, rightly founded on the family values of Henry VIII. Civilization has not recovered from the retarding process of that war either. In fact, we never will get over what happened in that war, and those are wars of religion. Just to stay with the point of fact and on the secular, the allegation that the other killers are secular: of the first one you mentioned, Adolph Hitler, it has to be said that — I can almost give you the page reference of Mein Kampf, where he says that his desire to slaughter the Jews is because of his fealty to the work of the Lord. He regards it as a holy cause, that's in Mein Kampf. Maybe he doesn't have the authority to say that, but you can't call him secular. On the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it read, Gott mit Uns. Every single one of them, God on our side just as the confederacy had Deo Vindice as its official motto in the Civil War for slavery. It's been calculated by the Catholic historian Paul Johnson that up to one-third of the SS were confessing Catholics. If you change the word fascism  — if you take it out of the history of the 1930s, just remove it, pretend it doesn't exist, call it a propaganda word, insert instead extreme Christian right wing, you don't have to alter a thing about the spread of fascism from Portugal through Spain across to Croatia, to Slovakia where the head of the Nazi puppet regime was a priest in Holy Orders, Father Tiso. Vishy, Austria, you know the story, or if you don't you should or anyone here who considers themselves a Catholic should know that. This is not, I'm sorry to say ladies and gentlemen, secularism. Of the others, I would actually say Pol Pot had a very extreme idea of the restoration of the old Buddhist authority known as the Angkor, but let me not quarrel too much. What was wrong with these heroic mass murderers? That they all thought they could bring about an ultimate history. They all thought that, with them, history would be consummated; history would, in fact, come to an end. They were Messianic. The whole problem to begin with is the idea that human beings can be perfected by force or by faith, or by conquest, or by inquisition. That can take an explicitly religious form or just another messianic form but it reinforces the point I began with: take nothing for certain, don't believe in any absolutism, don't believe in any totalitarianism, don't ask for any supreme leader in the sky, or on earth for that way lies madness and torture and murder and always will.
Yes, we do.
Not so.
Good.
I'll be very quick.
Oh good.
No, I should be quick. In that case, Dinesh, you gracefully withdraw the allegation that National Socialism and fascism were secular or atheistic and I'm grateful for your generosity. Second, that people change sides in religious wars for opportunist reasons doesn't particularly surprise me. You can spend a lot of time telling a Protestant in Northern Ireland, who has a picture of King William painted on the side of his house, that when King William fought the Battle of the Boyne, his ally was the Pope. The Protestant sort of knows this — the Ulster Protestant — but he doesn't really believe it's true; happens to be true. Of course it's opportunistic. Why is it opportunistic? Because religion is man-made, as I began by saying. It's what you would expect if religion was the creation of aggressive, fearful primates. It's exactly what you would expect and the same would be true of its non-religious attempts to create paradise. Because it's asking too much of people and it leads to fanaticism and torture and murder and war, so all you've succeeded in doing is replacing the question. No, there's no teleology; no, there's no eschatology; no, there's no ultimate history; no, there's no redemption; no, there are no supreme leaders here or anywhere else. Thank you.
I'll try and be terse but, first, I earnestly entreat you, ladies and gentlemen, to watch Professor Krauss' lecture for yourself and not accept that version of it. On the nothing question as it touches on ourselves: as it happens, it's rather more marvelous than almost anything in any holy book. All the elements from which we and our surroundings are made are from exploded stars, from the stars that blow up and die at the rate of one every second and have been doing that since the Big Bang. Isn't it rather magical to think we're all made out of stardust. Never mind, as Professor Krauss said, never mind the martyrs, stars had to die so that we could live. This is a very essential reflection to be having and it dwarfs the religious explanations. You didn't notice Dinesh that the gentlemen asked at the end, Couldn't it have turned out another way? which I think was possibly the crux of his question. I'd recommend another study to you. Professor Stephen Jay Gould, who I mentioned flaterringly earlier, despite my disagreement with him about the non-overlapping magisteria, did a marvelous paleontological book called The Burgess Shale. This is a half of mountain that has fallen away in the Canadian Rockies, revealing the whole interior core of a great mountain. So you — and you can read of, as if on a screen the — it's more like a bush, actually, than a tree — all the little tendrils of evolution of reptiles, birds, plants and so on, as they sprout up, branch up, and so on. And many of stop, nothing happened to them. They were quite promising but they went nowhere. And it doesn't go up like a tree, it goes all over the place like a bush. Well, says Professor Gould, it's one of the most unsettling vertiginous thoughts I've ever heard from a paleontologist. Suppose that we could — which, in a way we can, rewind this, as if onto a tape — get the Burgess Shale, get the outlines, rewind it, play it again. There's absolutely no certainty it would come out the same way, that all those branches would go off and diverge and die out or flourish in the way in the way that they do — as they did. It's completely governed by uncertainty.
Any number of conceivable outcomes up with which evolution could have come, it's another version of our selfishness, our self-regard, I might say, our solipsism, that we cannot uneasily convince ourselves that all of this happened so that the Pope could condemn masturbation, say.
It's so nice that — and how much we've progressed. No one now argues against the evolution of the eye. Now the argument of the evolution of the eye is completely conceded, and then it's used against Stephen Jay Gould. The thing to read there is Richard Dawkins' chapter on the multiple evolutions of the eye including the fish who have four is to be found in Climbing to Mount Improbable to which I also recommend you. As for — I agree that it's overwhelmingly likely that our planet is the only one that supports life. Certainly we know in our own little suburb of the solar system that all the other planets don't support life. They're either much too hot or much too cold as are large tracks of our planet and we have every reason to know now that we live on a climatic knife edge and in the meantime, our sun is preparing to blow up and become a red dwarf. I ask you, whose design is that?
Choose well.
Tread softly for you tread on our dreams.
Well, if I'm not mistaken that was a meaning of life question though, wasn't it? Whence forth meaning? Good, a good way of winding up, if you like.
I missed something there. It went passed my bat. And slightly put me off my stroke as well, just a second. Where was I? Yes, meaning. But before I go to that, just a two things on Dinesh in his last remarks. I don't think it can fairly be said in front of an audience like this that the refusal to take a faith-based position which has no evidence — in other words, a belief that there is an afterlife or a belief that there is a supreme being — if I say, I don't believe it because there's no evidence for it, it isn't even casuistry to say that that is, on my part, a faith-based statement. It's instead a refusal of faith and a refusal to use it as a method of reasoning. So, it's not comparing like with like at all. Second, not just completely to defend Sigmund Freud, Dinesh is right in criticizing Freud's Future of an Illusion to the extent that when people are subject to wish thinking, we might expect them to be purely hedonistic, only to want the best, to say, Let's imagine a comforting future while we are about it, is something that will cheer us all up. As a matter of fact we're not as nice as all that. We don't want everyone going to hell — excuse me, we don't want everyone going to heaven. As the old English sect used to say, We are the pure and chosen few and all the rest are damned. There's room enough in hell for you, we don't want heaven crammed. And the great existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people, but actually what many people mean is hell is for other people and they have just a strong a wish thought that other people suffer eternally as they have the thought and the wish for themselves that they should be in paradise. You can see it very explicitly when you see other versions of the paradise myth like the Muslim one, or early Christian versions where part of the pleasure of being in heaven was knowing that other people were burning forever. And that's what you'd expect from a predatory, fearful, partly-evolved, primate species that was making up a religious story about itself. It sounds exactly as you would expect it to do. Alright, well believing in none of that, in fact thinking it's an evil and futile belief, people have the nerve to ask me, Well, if you don't believe in heaven or hell, what gives you life meaning? Do you not detect a slight insult as well as a slight irrationality to that question? You mean I'd have much more meaning in my life if I thought that I would die and I'd be given one chance, or would have been given, while I was alive, one chance, that if I'd make a mistake, I'd be condemned eternally, that that was the kind of judge I'd be facing. And in the mean time, it would advisable to live my life in propitiation of this supernatural dictator. That would lend more meaning to my life, than my view counter to Pascal, contre Pascal, that if there's any such church, I'll be able to say, At least I never faked belief in you in order to win your approbation, sir, or ma'am, as the case may be, and if you are as reported, you have detected my thoughts, and at least I wasn't a hypocrite. Pascal says, No, at least pretend you believe, it's win-win. This is corrupt reasoning. It's the reasoning of the huckster and it lends no meaning to life at all. Still, why do I care? For example, why do I care? Why do I care about Rwanda? Why do care about my Iranian friends fighting theocracy? Why do I give up my own time to them? Well I'll tell you why, and I say it, I suppose, at the risk of embarrassment: it gives me great pleasure to do so. I like to that I'm — since we only have one life to live that I can help people make it free as best I can and assist them in their real struggle for liberty, which in its most essential form is the struggle against theocracy, which is the original form that dictatorship and violation of human rights actually takes. I enjoy doing it and I enjoy the sort of people it makes me come in contact with. And I like giving blood. Passively, I mean. I don't like spilling it but I don't mind having it run off me in a pint because, strangely enough, it's a pleasurable sensation. And you know that someone else is getting a pint of blood and you aren't losing one because with a strong cup of tea or bloody Mary, you'll get it back — or both, you'll get it back. So it used to appeal to me in my old socialist days, it's the perfect model for human solidarity. It's in your interest to do it. Someone else benefits, you don't lose and if like me you have a rare blood group, you hope that other people do the same thing so there's enough blood when your own turn comes. And it's an all-around agreeable experience and it's not like being fearful of judgment. It's much more meaningful than that. I think it's often believed of people like myself there's something joyless in our view. Where is the role in the atheist world, the unbelieving world, for the numinous or the ecstatic or the transcendent? Well, come on, those of us who can appreciate poetry and music and love and friendship and solidarity are not to be treated as if we have no imagination, as if we have no moral or emotional pulse, as if we don't feel things at nightfall when music plays and friends are around, as if we don't get great pleasure. When we meet, we don't meet to repeat incantations we've had dinned into us since childhood. We don't feel so insecure that we must incant and recite and go through routine and ritual. We meet to discuss our differences and to discuss the challenges to our world view from people like Dinesh. We try and use the method of the Socratic dialogue even when its conclusions are unwelcome to ourselves and though, therefore I can't recommend atheism as morally superior, I can say that at least it faces the consequences of its belief with a certain stoicism. We might wish for eternal life but we're not going to award it to ourselves as a prize for work we haven't yet done. So my closing recommendation is: why not try the stoical and Socratic life for yourself? Why not examine more close the tradition, the great tradition that we have, from Lucretius and Democritus that goes through Galileo, Spinoza, Voltaire, Einstein, Russell, and many others. A tradition, I think, much greater than the fearful and the propitiatory and the ritualistic. I've been enormously grateful for your kindness for having me here. I want to thank you again. Good night.
Well, thank you Georgetown, thank you ladies and gentlemen for coming. Thank you, Michael, for that suspiciously terse introduction, which of all the introductions I've heard to myself, is certainly the most recent. Thank you, seriously, to the Ethics and Public Policy Center and for your work, for conceiving this idea, for encouraging me to do it, for bringing us, Dr. McGrath, all the way from our common alma mater of Oxford and for the regular seminars that you may not know that Michael does all the time on these matters of faith versus reason which is, after all, the ground on which we are met this evening. I always come before events like this with antagonists like Dr. McGrath with a slight sense, a very slight sense — I hope it doesn't sound self-pitying — of inequality. My views are, if I say it for myself, tolerably well advertised and if they're not, it's partly your fault because what I say is fairly intelligible, very plainly stated, if — you know what I think if you care to find out. When I debate with Jews and Muslims and Christians, I very often find, I say, Well, do you really believe there was a virgin birth? Do you really believe in a Genesis creation? Do you really believe in bodily resurrection? and I get a sort of Monty Python reply: Well, there's a little bit of metaphorical, really. I'm not sure, and I'm going to find out — I'm determined to find out this evening which line on this my antagonist does take and I want you to notice and I want you to test him on it because I think it's fair and I'm going to talk to him and to you as if he did represent the Christian faith. I can't do all three monotheisms tonight. I may get a whack at the other two in the course of the discussion, I can only really do his and I'm going to assume that it means something to him and that it's not just a humanist metaphysics and I think I'm entitled to that assumption. The main thing I want to dispute this evening — because I'm either drowning in time with twenty minutes, it's either too much or too little — is this: you hear it very often said by people of a vague faith that, well it may not be the case that religion is metaphysically true; its figures and its stories may be legendary or dwell on the edge of myth, prehistoric, its truth claims may be laughable; we have better claims — excuse me, better explanations for the origins and birth of our cosmos and our species now, so much better so, in fact, that had they been available to begin with, religion would never have taken root. No one would now go back to the stage when we didn't have any real philosophy, we only had mythology, when we thought we lived on a flat planet or when we thought that our planet was circulated by the sun instead of the other way around, when we didn't know that there were micro-organisms as part of creation and that they were more powerful than us and had dominion over us rather than we, them, when we were fearful of the infancy of our species. We, we wouldn't have taken up theism if we'd known now what we did then, but allow for all that, allow for all that, you still have to credit religion with being the source of ethics and morals. Where would we get these from if it weren't from faith? I think, in the time I've got, I think that's the position I most want to undermine. I don't believe that it's true that religion is moral or ethical. I certainly don't believe of course that any of its explanations about the origin of our species or the Cosmos or its ultimate destiny are true either. In fact, I think most of those have been conclusively, utterly discredited, but I'll deal with the remaining claim. It is moral — okay, and I can only do Christianity this evening — is it moral to believe that your sins, yours and mine, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, can be forgiven by the punishment of another person? Is it ethical to believe that? I would submit that the doctrine of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is utterly immoral. I might, if I wished, if I knew any of you, you were my friends or even if I didn't know you but I just loved the idea of you — compulsory love is another sickly element of Christianity, by the way — but suppose I could say, Look, you're in debt, I've just made a lot of money out of a God-bashing book, I'll pay your debts for you. Maybe you'll pay me back some day, but for now I can get you out of trouble. I could say if I really loved someone who had been sentenced to prison if I can find a way of saying I'd serve your sentence, I'd try and do it. I could do what Sydney Carton does in a Tale of Two Cities, if you like — I'm very unlikely to do this unless you've been incredibly sweet to me — I'll take your place on the scaffold, but I can't take away your responsibilities. I can't forgive what you did, I can't say you didn't do it, I can't make you washed clean. The name for that in primitive middle eastern society was scapegoating. You pile the sins of the tribe on a goat, you drive that goat into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. And you think you've taken away the sins of the tribe. This is a positively immoral doctrine that abolishes the concept of personal responsibility on which all ethics and all morality must depend. It has a further implication. I'm told that I have to have a share in this human sacrifice even though it took place long before I was born. I have no say in it happening, I wasn't consulted about it. Had I been present I would have been bound to do my best to stop the public torture and execution of an eccentric preacher. I would do the same even now. No, no, I'm implicated in it, I, myself, drove in the nails, I was present at Calvary, it confirms the original filthy sin in which I was conceived and born, the sin of Adam in Genesis. Again, this may sound a mad belief, but it is the Christian belief. Well it's here that we find something very sinister about monotheism and about religious practice in general: It is incipiently at least, and I think often explicitly, totalitarian. I have no say in this. I am born under a celestial dictatorship which I could not have had any hand in choosing. I don't put myself under its government. I am told that it can watch me while I sleep. I'm told that it can convict me of — here's the definition of totalitarianism — thought crime, for what I think I may be convicted and condemned. And that if I commit a right action, it's only to evade this punishment and if I commit a wrong action, I'm going to be caught up not just with punishment in life for what I've done which often follows axiomatically, but, no, even after I'm dead. In the Old Testament, gruesome as it is, recommending as it is of genocide, racism, tribalism, slavery, genital mutilation, in the displacement and destruction of others, terrible as the Old Testament gods are, they don't promise to punish the dead. There's no talk of torturing you after the earth has closed over the Amalekites. Only toward when gentle Jesus, meek and mild, makes his appearance are those who won't accept the message told they must depart into everlasting fire. Is this morality, is this ethics? I submit not only is it not, not only does it come with the false promise of vicarious redemption, but it is the origin of the totalitarian principle which has been such a burden and shame to our species for so long. I further think that it undermines us in our most essential integrity. It dissolves our obligation to live and witness in truth. Which of us would say that we would believe something because it might cheer us up or tell our children that something was true because it might dry their eyes? Which of us indulges in wishful thinking, who really cares about the pursuit of truth at all costs and at all hazards? Can it not be said, do you not, in fact, hear it said repeatedly about religion and by the religious themselves that, Well it may not be really true, the stories may be fairy tales, the history may be dubious, but it provides consolation. Can anyone hear themselves saying this or have it said of them without some kind of embarrassment? Without the concession that thinking here is directly wishful, that, yes, it would be nice if you could throw your sins and your responsibilities on someone else and have them dissolved, but it's not true and it's not morally sound and that's the second ground of my indictment. Michael, you will tell me when I'm trespassing on the time of Dr. McGrath, won't you? On our integrity, our basic integrity, knowing right from wrong and being able to choose a right action over a wrong one, I think one must repudiate the claim that one doesn't have this moral discrimination innately, that, no, it must come only from the agency of a celestial dictatorship which one must love and simultaneously fear. What is it like, I've never tried it, I've never been a cleric, what is it like to lie to children for a living and tell them that they have an authority, that they must love — compulsory love, what a grotesque idea — and be terrified of it at the same time. What's that like? I want to know. And that we don't have an innate sense of right and wrong, children don't have an innate sense of fairness and decency, which of course they do. What is it like? I can personalize it to this extent, my mother's Jewish ancestors are told that until they got to Sinai, they'd been dragging themselves around the desert under the impression that adultery, murder, theft and perjury were all fine, and they get to Mount Sinai only to be told it's not kosher after all. I'm sorry, excuse me, you must have more self-respect than that for ourselves and for others. Of course the stories are fiction. It's a fabrication exposed conclusively by Israeli archaeology. Nothing of the sort ever took place, but suppose we take the metaphor? It's an insult, it's an insult to us, it's an insult to our deepest integrity. No, if we believed that perjury, murder and theft were all right, we wouldn't have got as far as the foot of Mount Sinai or anywhere else. Now we're told what we have to believe and this is — I'm coming now to the question of whether or not science, reason and religion are compatible or I would rather say reconcilable. The great Stephen J. Gould — the late, great Stephen J. Gould said that he believed they were non-overlapping magisteria; you can be both a believer and a person of faith. Sitting in front of me is a very distinguished — extremely distinguished scholar Francis Collins, helped us to unlock the human genome project, who is himself a believer. I'd love to hear from him, I hope we hear from him. I don't believe that he says his discoveries of the genome convinced him of the truth of religion. He holds it, as it were, independently. I hope I do you no wrong, sir, in phrasing it like that. Here's why I, a non-scientist, will say that I think it's radically irreconcilable, I'd rather say, than incompatible. I've taken the best advice I can on how long Homo sapiens has been on the planet. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, many others, and many discrepant views from theirs, reckon it's not more than 250,000 years, a quarter of a million years. It's not less, either. I think it's roughly accepted, I think, sir you wouldn't disagree. 100,000 is the lowest I've heard and actually I was about to say, again not to sound too Jewish, I'll take 100,000. I only need 100,000, call it one hundred. For 100,000 years Homo sapiens was born, usually, well not usually, very often dying in the process or killing its mother in the process; life expectancy probably not much more than 20, 25 years, dying probably of the teeth very agonizingly, nearer to the brain as they are, or of hunger or of micro-organisms that they didn't know existed or of events such as volcanic or tsunami or earthquake types that would have been wholly terrifying and mysterious as well as some turf wars over women, land, property, food, other matters. You can fill in — imagine it for yourself what the first few tens of thousands of years were like. And we like to think learning a little bit in the process and certainly having gods all the way, worshipping bears fairly early on, I can sort of see why; sometimes worshipping other human beings — big mistake, I'm coming back to that if I have time — this and that and the other thing, but exponentially perhaps improving, though in some areas of the world very nearly completely dying out, and a bitter struggle all along. Call it 100,000 years. According to the Christian faith, heaven watches this with folded arms for 98,000 years and then decides it's time to intervene and the best way of doing that would be a human sacrifice in primitive Palestine, where the news would take so long to spread that it still hasn't penetrated very large parts of the world and that would be our redemption of human species. Now I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that that is, what I've just said, which you must believe to believe the Christian revelation, is not possible to believe, as well as not decent to believe. Why is it not possible? Because a virgin birth is more likely than that. A resurrection is more likely than that and because if it was true, it would have two further implications: It would have to mean that the designer of this plan was unbelievably lazy and inept or unbelievably callous and cruel and indifferent and capricious, and that is the case with every argument for design and every argument for revelation and intervention that has ever been made. But it's now conclusively so because of the superior knowledge that we've won for ourselves by an endless struggle to assert our reason, our science, our humanity, our extension of knowledge against the priests, against the rabbis, against the mullahs who have always wanted us to consider ourselves as made from dust or from a clot of blood, according to the Koran, or as the Jews are supposed to pray every morning, at least not female or gentile. And here's my final point, because I think it's coming to it. The final insult that religion delivers to us, the final poison it injects into our system: It appeals both to our meanness, our self-centeredness and our solipsism and to our masochism. In other words, it's sadomasochistic. I'll put it like this: you're a clot of blood, you're a piece of mud, you're lucky to be alive, God fashioned you for his convenience, even though you're born in filth and sin and even though every religion that's ever been is distinguished principally by the idea that we should be disgusted by our own sexuality. Name me a religion that does not play upon that fact. So you're lucky to be here, originally sinful and covered in shame and filth as you are, you're a wretched creature, but take heart, the Universe is designed with you in mind and heaven has a plan for you. Ladies and gentlemen, I close by saying I can't believe there is a thinking person here who does not realize that our species would begin to grow to something like its full height if it left this childishness behind, if it emancipated itself from this sinister, childish nonsense. And I now commit you to the good Dr. McGrath. Thank you.
Michael wanted to do this sitting down, but I'm — it's the old demagogue in me; I need the pulpit, I need the podium, and if I can't be erect at least I can be upright. By the way, do you know why the Amish girl was excommunicated? Two men a night. Look, I'm going to take the Doctor's excellent points in order, if I may, and you will I'm sure have minds orderly enough to recall the order in which he made them. On the empirical evidence, so-called adduced, that a religious faith can lead to greater health and well-being, I, in a sense, do not doubt it. In other words, I can easily imagine those who think they are the special object of a divine design, feel better for thinking so. I just think it's going to be very important for anyone claiming this to see the dismaying trap door that is right under their feet. If you're going to claim this for one, how are you not going to claim it for all? Do we not hear incessantly that the Hamas organization in Gaza is a provider of welfare to the poorest of the poor? Have we not heard this? Do we not hear that Louis Farrakhan's crackpot racist organization, the Nation of Islam, gets young people off drugs? For all I know, it's true. It not only says nothing about the truth or validity of their theology, but it must say a certain amount at least about our willingness to think wishfully or cultishly, which was, if you like, part of my point to begin with. As to the center versus the fringe, I get this all the time, Don't judge religion by its fundamentalists and its extremists. No, why should I? I don't have to. I judge it by its foundational texts and I judge it by the statements of its authorities. Take a case from the Koran, just for once, does it — actually, it's not the Koran, excuse me, take a case from the Muslim foundational documents, the Hadith, which have equal conical authority. They say if someone becomes an apostate, leaves or changes their religion, they must be killed. The sentence is death. Don't anyone be telling me that's a metaphor. Oh, it's just intended as just a sort of admonition. No, it means what it says and it's been applied to a couple of people who now have to live, friends of mine, as a matter of fact, as political refugees in Washington, D.C., who know how true the impact of that Hadith is. There's no wiggle room there, so the question for a Muslim must be asked, Do you think this is the word of God or don't you? Because if you don't, you're saying that God shouldn't be able to tell you to do an evil thing and if you do, you're saying he should. In either case, faith falls as a reinforcement of ordinary morality. Recently — Dr. McGrath is a member of the Church of England, the Anglican communion, the Episcopalian communion, but what George Herbert, my favorite religious poet after John Donne, the sweet mediocrity of our native church — or something — he referred to, the sea of Canterbury. Everyone thinks it's the mildest of all, and it not only calls itself a flock, it looks very sheep-like. However, the Bishop of Carlisle recently — tipped I'm told to be the next Arch Bishop of Canterbury, really said that the floods in Northern Yorkshire that devastated a large part of England in the Summer and killed and dispossessed a large number of people were a punishment for homosexuality. Now to connect meteorology to morality seems to me, I have to say, flat out idiotic, whichever way you do it. If there was a connection between meteorology and morality, which religion has very often argued that there is, I don't see why the floods hit Northern Yorkshire. I could think of some parts of London where they would have done it a lot more good, just as the hurricane that devastated New Orleans, we found, punishment for sin as it must have been, left the French Quarter alone. You have to make up your mind on this, you either think God intervenes or he doesn't. I'm clear, I say I don't think so. Will Dr. McGrath say that He does intervene and that we can tell when He does or will he not say so? You have to ask him, you have to hear his answer, does he say He sometimes intervenes, or does he say, He moves in mysterious ways? My position is clear, his remains I think distinctly opaque. It was the Arch Bishop of Canterbury, Jeffrey Fisher, who said the following: That a thermal nuclear war would only hasten our transition into a more blessed state into which we were bound to eventuate anyway. If I had told you that remark and asked you to guess, you could have said Mahmoud Ahmadinajad said it or some other fanatical verminous Mullah. No, the Archbishop of Canterbury said it and why shouldn't he? Because another immoral and sinister thing about religion is that lurking under it at all times in every one of its versions is a desire for this life to come to an end, for this poor world to be over. The yearning, the secret death wish that's in all of it, let this be gone, let us move to the next stage, is present at all times. Unless it's repudiated, which I invite Dr. McGrath to do. But if he does so, I don't see what eschatological sense he can claim to remain a Christian. And he can't take it a la cart. If you claim or accept the one version, you have to accept the other. If it's true in general that religion does one thing and some people do good from it, then you have to accept all the wicked acts that are attributable to it as well, and I think you'll find that those don't quite equalize at the margin, depressing though that conclusion would be. I have a challenge which I have now put in print on the Christianity Today website, in Holy Blossom Synagogue in Toronto the night before last and in many other places, and on the air, and on the web, and it's this: If it's to be argued that our morality or ethics can be derived from the supernatural, then name me an action, a moral action, taken by a believer or a moral statement uttered by one, that could not have been made or uttered by an infidel, a non-believer. I have tried this everywhere on a large number of people, and I've not yet had even one reply. But if I was to ask you can you think of a wicked action that could only have been performed by someone who believed they were on an errand from God, there isn't one of you who would take 10 seconds to think of an example. And what does that tell us? I would say it tells us a lot. And here's the bogus answer to it that was only very gently mentioned by Dr. McGrath this evening: Well what about atheist nihilism, what about atheist cruelty, what about 20th-century totalitarianism? I take this seriously enough to have put a chapter in my book about it — available, by the way, in fine bookstores everywhere — and I can only summarize it now and I will do it so very tersely as I can. First, Fascism, the original 20th-century totalitarian movement, is really, historically, another name for the political activity of the Catholic right wing. There is no other name for it — Francoism, Salazarism, what happened in Croatia, in Austria, in Barbaria and so on — the church keeps on trying to apologize for it, can't apologize for it enough, it's the Catholic right, Mussolini. You can't quite say that about Hitler, National Socialism, because that's also based on Nordic and Pagan blood myths, leader worship and so on, though Hitler never repudiated his membership of the church and prayers were said for him on his birthday every year until the very end on the orders of the Vatican. And all of these facts are well known and the church still hasn't found any way to apologize for that enough. And whatever it is, you can call that, you can't call it secular. You may not call it secular. By the way, Joseph Goebles was ex-communicated from the Catholic Church. 50 percent, according to Paul Johnson the Catholic historian, of the Waffen SS were confessing Catholics, none of them was ever threatened with ex-communication, even threatened for it — with it for taking part in the final solution. But Joseph Goebles was ex-communicated for marrying a Protestant. You see, we do have our standards. Now, ok, moving to Marxism, moving to Leninism. Ok, in Russia in 1917, for hundreds of years millions of people have been told the head of the State is a supernatural power. The Czar is not just the head of the Government, not just a king, but he stands between heaven and earth. And this has been inculcated in generations of Russians for hundreds of years. If you're Joseph Stalin, himself a seminarian from Georgia, you shouldn't be in the totalitarianism business if you can't exploit a ready-made reservoir of credulity and servility that's as big as that. It's just waiting for you to capitalize on. So what do you do? Well we'll have an Inquisition, for one thing; we'll have miracles, for another, Lysenko's biology will produce four harvests a year; we'll have harvestry hunts; we'll tell everyone they must be grateful only to the leader for what they get and they must thank him and praise him all the time and that they must be aware all the time of the existence of the counter-revolutionary devil who waits to — you see where I'm going with this. Uh, Michael? Oh do I really need two? Ok, I'll tell you my North Korea stories another time. Here's — its surrogate, it is and the very best and the very worst, the examples I've been talking about, are a surrogate for Messiahnism for the belief in ultimate history and the end of days and the conclusion of all things which is, I've tried to argue, I hope with some success, the problem to begin with. The replacement of reason by faith, the discarding of the one thing that makes us important and useful and different from other primates in favor of something that requires no evidence and just requires incantation. Not good for you. If Dr. McGrath or anyone else could come up with an example of a society which had fallen into slavery and bankruptcy and beggary and terror and misery because it had adopted the teachings and the precepts of Spinoza and Einstein and Pierre Bayle and Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, then I'd be impressed and that would be a fair test on a level playing field, but you will find no such example. Indeed, the nearest such example that we do have is these great United States, the first country in the world to have a Constitution that forbids the mention of religion in the public square, except by way of limiting it and saying that the State can take no interest in establishment of faith. Best known under the rubric of the wall of separation. My new slogan is, Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall. Hope you'll join me in it. Very quickly in my last minute: Yes, Dr. McGrath, you're right, there is something about us as a species that is problematic, it isn't just explained by religion. Something about us that tempts us to do wrong. It's pretty easily explained, I think. We are primates, high primates, but primates. We're half a chromosome away from chimpanzees and it shows. It especially shows in the number of religions we invent to console ourselves or to give us things to quarrel with other primates about. If anything demonstrates that God is manmade, not man God made, surely it is the religions erected by this quasi-chimpanzee species and the harm that they're willing to inflict on that basis. I think on the point of Christology that you closed with I ought not to take any more of the audience's time but be prepared to discuss and I hope I've yielded back some of my time to questions and I'm grateful, again, for your indulgence. Thank you.
So whoever asked that only just came into the room, right? I mean, I can't believe that I didn't say what I thought about it, but I won't repeat it because actually what Dr. McGrath just said I thought was unusually good on this point. You'll recall what he said on the Dostoyevskian matter. If God exists, we have to do what he says, if he doesn't, we can do what we like. Now just apply this for a second in practice and in theory. Is it not said of God's chosen people and is it not said to them by God in the Pentateuch that they can do exactly as they like to other people? They can enslave them, they can take their land, they can take their women, they can destroy all their young men, they can help themselves to all their virgins, they can do what anyone who had no sense of anything but their own rights would be able to do, but in this case with divine permission. Doesn't that make it somewhat more evil? In Iran where I've been — I've been to all three axis of evil in those countries by the way, and I think I'm the only writer who can say that — you're not allowed to sentence a woman who is a virgin to death even though she may have committed in the eyes of the Mullahs a capital crime, perhaps by showing her hair too often or her limbs. She can't be sentenced to death. But religious law means she can be raped by the revolutionary guards, and then she's not a virgin anymore, then they can kill her. Do what though wilt shall be the whole of the law used to be considered the motto of Satanism, as I recall. Divine permission given to people who think they have God is on their side enables actions that a normal, morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate. The mutilation of genitalia of children, who would do that if it wasn't decided that God wanted it? Just as when a poet in England gets the poet laureateship they start to write drivel instead of poetry, for some reason. It's the King's scrofula the other way around. Morally normal and intelligent people find themselves saying fatuously wicked things when this subject comes up. The suicide bombing community is entirely faith based. The genital mutilation community is entirely faith based. Slavery is mandated by the Bible. You keep hearing how many abolitionists were Christians, well it was about time that they took a stand against it, having mandated it for so long. So it's not even a tautology, I think, to say that there's a relationship between the human impulse to do evil, to be selfish, to be self-centered, to be greedy, and a contrast between that and faith because given only faith, mountains can be moved and millions of people who would never normally acquiesce in evil are brought to it straightaway and with ease and with self-righteousness. There, that's my answer to that. And the questioner did not answer my challenge: name an ethical statement made or action performed by a believer in the name of faith that couldn't have been by an infidel. And name, if you can — this is easier — a wicked action that could only be mandated by faith and then you'll see how silly your question was, whoever you were.
Well that's easy to do, I mean I could say — look, an atheist could be a nihilist...
I'm not looking for consensus, baby, I'm just not in the mood. I'm not in the vain, as King Richard says, I'm not in the vain. No, I'm glad he condemns religious violence. Does he condemn the promise of other peoples territory to the chosen people, for example? Does Jesus say or does he not say, I come to bring not peace, but a sword? He does say that. Should I take that literally or metaphorically? Fine. Is genital mutilation of a small boy as mandated by Jews and is it often mandated by Muslims, or not? Is there a paradise to which people can hope to get by dying for their faith or isn't there? Has holy war been proclaimed by both the Pope and by the mullahs or not?
These are problems not for me. For me it's simple: we're primates. This is what we would expect to happen if there was no God.
It's what we would expect to see if faith was pointless, but it's an endless mystery where none exists if you think there's an intervening finger from on high, then it becomes mysterious.
Don't mention it. You're welcome.
Which of them is yours? I'd really like to know.
No, please.
Not imposed? Did you really say not imposed? What if you reject this offer, what are you told? What have you been told by centuries of Christians if you reject this offer that took place by means of a torture to death of a human being that you didn't want and should have prevented if you could? What if you reject the offer? And if you accept it you have eternal life and your sins are forgiven. Oh, great. What a horrible way to abolish your own responsibility and get your own bliss. I don't want it. Oh, you don't? Well then you can go to hell. This is not imposed? This hasn't been preached to children by gruesome elderly virgins backed by force for centuries? This hasn't poisoned whole societies? No, of course it's imposed, it's not voluntary. The Pope of Rome, as I call — the Bishop of Rome, Mr. Ratzinger, Herr Ratzinger — has recently said actually it's worse than that: only my version of Christianity can get you salvation, there is only one way. I say it in Georgetown. There's only one. You presumably don't believe that because you're an Anglican, but on what basis do you tell the Pope that he's a heretic? Once you grant this stuff, once you start with this white noise chat about redemption, where's it going to end? Of course there's nothing voluntary about it and I must say the book of Revelations seems one of the less voluntary texts of the — all it does is look forward gleefully to Apocalypse, and to the passing away of this veil of tears into our ultimate destruction. This is morality? I don't think so.
You're in the right church but the wrong pew. I mean, yes, of course I've emancipated myself from all that nonsense and I wish you would do too. I'm saying what is the belief, and when you say it's voluntary, it's up to you, it's entirely optional, I don't think it's any more optional than Abraham saying to his son do you want to come for a long and gloomy walk, because God seems to be telling me to do something that had better be moral. Otherwise, it would have to be said that God had taken a perfectly normal person and asked him to commit an atrocity. Now where else could that have come from? Millions of people every year celebrate this act of sadomasochism as if it proved that God loved us so much that he'd make us kill our own children and then he decides to love us so much he'll kill one of his own. You said in a debate with Richard Dawkins, I have it down, you said that the great thing about God is He knows what it's like to lose a son. Now I want you ladies and gentlemen to ponder that expression for just a moment. First, it's self-evidently — if the story is true, which I don't think it is — it's self-evidently not the case, even in the narrative. He doesn't lose a son, He lends one. He doesn't offer one because no one's demanded it. There's no problem that has so far been identified in the human species that demands a human sacrifice. For what problem, for what ill is this a cure? There's no argument, there's no evidence that there is. No, it's imposed upon you. I'm doing this because the prophets said I would and I'm going to have the boy tortured to death in public to fulfill ancient screeds of Bronze Age Judaism. But wait, I don't want it. I don't need it. I don't feel better for it. I feel very uneasy about it. Well that's a pity, because then you're going to be cast into eternal fire. This is no way to talk. I don't like to be addressed in that tone of voice. So, to all this I have to return a slight non serviam, if I may be so bold, and take my chances morally, that that's the more ethical thing to do. I don't want torture, don't want human sacrifice, don't want authoritarian blood lettings, smoking temples and alters, incantations of priests around, don't want it, can't think of a single thing it will make better about our veil of tears.
Oh yes, by all means. I'm sorry if I bang on a bit about this.
After 98,000 years of abstention?
Well it's a question one often asks oneself. For example, why do I care, why do I mind about other primates? I think I know that, because I hope that they will, at the very lowest, as I said, because I hope they'll mind about me in return. I'll give you an example:
Why, indeed. Why does one do the right thing, or what one hopes is the right thing, when no one's looking? Why does a Muslim cab driver go to all the trouble to come back to my apartment building when I didn't have his number to return a large sum of money I left on his back seat, said it was his religious duty. But if I allow him to say that that's his religious duty, what am I going to say when he says it's his religious duty to veil his wife or to blow himself up, or to impose Sharia Law? If you grant it once, you have to grant the whole thing, you can't do it a la cart. Now I'll give you an example from my old socialist days — this will bring moisture to the eyes of Dr. McGrath, as well. It was our favorite example, Professor Peter Townsend's book on the gift relationship, you remember? Why does the British National Health Service never run out of blood, though you're not allowed to charge for it, you have to give it free? Never runs out of blood. Because people like to give blood. They want to feel useful. I like to do it, I like it very much and I'm not a masochist and I don't particularly like being stuck, but I lose — I like the way that I lose — someone gains a pint and I don't lose one because I replenish it quite quickly. Someone's instantly better off, I haven't had to abnegate myself by giving anything away. I like the fact that I'm helping someone who I don't know and, as it happens, I have a very rare blood group indeed, and one day I'm going to have to count on other people feeling the same way. So, human solidarity will get you quite a long way ethically and there's every reason why that should be in our genes, in our, so to speak, inscribed — we wouldn't have gotten this far if we didn't have these qualities. To say we couldn't have them without celestial permission seems to me to be simply slavish. And if we're all made in God's image, then how come there are so many sociopaths who don't notice the existence of other people or so many psychopaths for whom it's a positive pleasure to inflict pain? None of these — all of these are easily, easily solved questions if you make the assumption of evolution by natural selection and consider us as an animal species. If you detect the finger of God in all of this, you invent myriad problems that do not exist and cannot be solved and that are actually a waste of our mentality. Ockham's Razor disposes of all the supernatural assumptions that have ever been made. We have better and more elegant explanations for everything that happens in our cosmos and in our biology now and if we had had these to begin with, there would never have been the foothold for the death cult of Christianity or Islam or Judaism.
No, no, sorry, if I may, not that I — I wanted to speak to this and I will later I wanted to later, transcendent and the nominous are very important, but they are not to be confused with the supernatural.
No.
I think it should stand alone. No, next, I would say.
Don't let me — well, I mean some of the early Christian church fathers I think, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, I think Marcian was among them, did contemplate starting a movement that was just basically Christian, based on what was understood or believed about the apparent, very opaque, brief life of Jesus of Nazareth and not inherit, not forced upon themselves, as St. Paul had suggested, the ghastly, gruesome Jewish books of the Old Testament — to start again. I think they might have done better to do that because, having decided that they inherit all of that, they do inherit, in particular, the most wicked and immoral doctrine of the lot which is original sin in Adam and the expiation by the sacrifice of children, human sacrifice of children, than which I don't think any morally normal person can think of anything more repulsive. So that it is, I'm afraid, innate that there is to be cruelty and violence and fantacism in the religion and the responsibility is not expiable. Bizarrely — I mean many people think, well, the Old Testament, it's true it's full of blood letting, it recommends genocide, extermination, slavery and all the dispossession, all of these things. The New Testament is more meek and mild. I've given you my comment on that, it's the first time that hell is mentioned, but it is in the Christian version that another called different kind of immorality is proposed, the worst kind of immorality yet, which is the wicked idea of non-resistance to evil and the deranged idea that we should love our enemies. Nothing, nothing could be more suicidal and immoral than that. We have to defend ourselves and our children and our civilization from our enemies. We have to learn to educate ourselves in a cold, steady dislike of them and a determination to encompass their destruction. Who here heard anyone after September the 11th in holy orders actually say, oh, well we must turn, learn to love these people. Did they dare say that then; of course not. They saw the emptiness and the futility and the immorality of what they would have been caught saying if they even tried it. We have to bear all this stuff in mind. This is not moral teaching at all. We have to survive our enemies, we have to learn to destroy them, especially because they, too, are motivated by the hectic, maniacal ideas of monotheism which really seeks and yearns for the destruction of our planet and the end of days. That's why it's not moral. That's why we have to outgrow it and defeat it.
Primates.
Fellow primates.
There's no need to dehumanize people who are set on dehumanizing themselves and on the murder of others and on a cult of death. There's no need to dehumanize them. They've done all that for themselves.
Like someone once accused me of trying to assassinate his character and I said No, your character committed suicide a long time ago. They've done the dehumanizing work for us, thanks, and they are fellow primates. Of course there's no question of redefining them as another species, but there is a very important question of whether we intend to assert our own values as superior to theirs and is worth defending against them. And Christianity with the sickly relativism that you've stressed so often this evening disarms us for this very important struggle, that's why the Arch Bishop of Canterbury is this evening groveling at the feet of the mullahs in Iran saying we should leave them alone and let's try not to hurt their feelings. As he groveled at the feet of Saddam Hussein, as actually every Christian church has been doing in the recent past saying well, you know, faith is better than no faith. Any faith is better than none. They all agreed to condemn Solomon Rushdie for blasphemy rather than the people who tried to kill him for money for writing a novel, for example. They all condemned the Danish cartoons because blasphemy against any faith is an offense to all.
Ok? Well this is serious, ladies and gentlmen because this stuff could kill you, ok?
Yeah, but I think the Christian just war tradition is a nonsensical tautology. It says that you can only go to war when you're sure you're in the right, when you're sure you can win, when you're sure that the violence is going to be proportional, and so on. You can't know any of this, Aquinas couldn't have known it, nor could the later thinkers about it like Grotius. They couldn't have known, they said, Wouldn't it be nice? It's just wishful thinking again. I know a just war when I see one. And we're engaged in one now. And our faith-based forces are of no — are about as much use as the Pope's balls in this struggle, ok?
I know.
I wanted this to come up.
I'm not in a hurry. My mission statement is I won't go until — if anyone can claim that I didn't answer a question. So, I'll be on...
I'll be on the steps outside having a smoke and a miniature.
There's one more?
Sure.
Well they don't in and of themselves, but I just would submit — I really will be quick this time and I know I've been a little verbose up until now — the likelihood that what Edwin Hubblesaw through that telescope — the red light escaping at speeds that none of us here are really capable of imagining towards the ultimate expansion and collapse of the universe and the heat death — that all that happened so we could be sitting here is to me, in the very, very highest degree, improbable. That a process of evolution by natural selection just on our own tiny little planet which in its own tiny little solar system is the only one on which life can be supported, everywhere else just in our little system, all the other rocks are either much too hot or much too cold to support life as is much of our planet which we know has for a long time been, not recently either, on a climatic knife edge and which is still cooling, only one, and on this planet, 99.8 percent of every species that ever evolved died out. This is an extraordinary way I think to make sure that Homo sapiens comes to Georgetown. It is the, only the most extraordinarily self-centered species, could imagine that all this was going on for our sake, that's why I don't like people saying that their religious faith is modest or humble. It's the reverse. It's unbelievably solipsistic and that's why you get people apparently abject, much too abject for my taste like Mother Teresa. Oh, I'm so humbled I can hardly bother to feed myself, but out of my way because I'm on a mission from God. No, this is arrogance, as a matter of fact, and it claims to know what it cannot know. I could say that Einstein was right when he said the miracle is — of the natural order — the miracle is there are no miracles. Understand this paradox. The natural order doesn't interrupt itself; the sun doesn't stand still at midday; God doesn't catch a child as a kid falls out of a window or heal lepers around him and none of that ever happens. The miracle is there's a force that holds it altogether that's consistent and unvarying. That's wonderful. Okay. He may show there's a mind somewhere in the universe, but to say we know what that mind is, to move from the deist position to the theist one, we know what God wants us to eat or not eat, we know in what positions he wants us to make love or with whom. We know his instructions on — is an unbelievable piece of conceit and in my opinion it's the reason why, I may be a very poor spokesman for my side of this argument, but I think anyone that who thinks about it has to vote that given the amount of uncertainty that we have and given how much we now know, how much more we know about how little we know — the definition of education in our civilization — the only people who have to lose in this argument are those who say they do know and who claim, Yes, I do know what God wants, I do think He sent His son, I do think there was a resurrection, I do think there's salvation, claiming to know things they cannot conceivably know. I mean to put it differently in a mild way, if Dr. McGrath has such extraordinary sources of information as the ones he's claimed to have available to him, I can't understand why he's only occupying a chair at Oxford University.
You should be, with the knowledge you've got, you should be a real mensch. And I'm afraid you don't know any more than I do about whether there was ever a Jesus of Nazareth, a resurrection, a miracle, a virgin birth or anything. You couldn't know any more than I do, you can't. You just claim that you do. I'm afraid that means, I think, that you lose this round.
Very nice of you to have me back.
Thank you for saying so.
Well, it's the most commonly asked question of unbelievers, or perhaps I should say atheists, and I regard it, though you put it very politely, as a slightly insulting one. But the suggestion that you make is that if I don't respect a celestial dictatorship that's unalterable, nothing is going to prevent me from lying, cheating, raping, thieving, and so on. Well, I can't exactly tell you why I don't do those things, or why I enjoy, say, going to give blood, which I do. After all, I don't really lose a pint, but somebody gains one, and I have a rare blood group, and I might need some blood one day myself, so it seems an all-around very satisfying transaction. In a sense, do I need to say much more than that?
Well, I think I would probably be capable of giving some good reasons. I think for one thing, it would be an outrage to their conscience. Let's don't consider the interest of the other person for a moment. And after all, some people do need to be shot, but you stipulated innocence. Well, it would be an outrage to your conscience if for some reason, we do — we are aware of doing ill or doing good. The test I apply in my book, a fairly good, pragmatic, American test, is what do you do when no one's looking? The fact is someone is looking. You have an internal conversation with yourself where you don't want to look or feel bad. I don't think this comes from God. I think it comes as part of our evolution. Darwin points out, and others have noticed since, that there are animals who behave ethically to one another. They have solidarity; they have family groups; they seem able to feel sympathy; they certainly come to each other's aid, in the case of some of the higher mammals. I think our morality evolved, and I don't believe that my Jewish ancestors thought that perjury and murder and theft were okay until they got to Mount Sinai and were told no dice. But there's another insulting, if I may say this, implication to the question, which is that those who do subscribe to the idea of an all-seeing permanent surveillance from a celestial dictatorship are therefore going to behave well. Now, there's absolutely no evidence for that proposition at all. And some of the things that are enjoined by the Ten Commandments, such as not envying other people's property, which in my view, is a great spur to innovation, as well as the thought it's impossible not to have, actually don't lead to moral preachments, nor do commandments to mutilate the genitals seem to me to be moral preachments, nor does the idea of terrifying children with stories of hell appear to me to be moral. There's a great deal of wickedness that's attributable purely to religious belief. Morally normal people wouldn't do these things if they didn't think God was desiring them to do so.
So I return the question in that form.
Yes, it's necessary for human society to evolve, that to be certain, and it's found in all societies, whichever god they worship, or whichever cult they practice, that courage is respected, cowardice is not, murder is forbidden, theft is very much frowned upon. There are different sexual morays, not very, very widely different. The incest taboo seems to be very common, so does the one on cannibalism. I mean, the societies that don't follow those teachings, or rather follow teaching, I mean, societies that violate those laws tend to die out of horrible diseases or of in-breeding.
Yes, it does, and I have to say it rather startles me to think of a society where that wouldn't be the case.
Well...
Very well, and I wish great luck to your friends, and there are many other Christians I know who do marvelous work in North Korea, for example, where the people are trying to escape from a prison slave state there, and also for keeping the issue of Darfur in front of the public. I think the Evangelical movement deserves a great deal of credit. But here's my challenge, which you don't have to answer now, but let's say I'd love an answer by the end of our discussion. You have to name a moral action taken or a moral statement uttered by a person of faith that could not be taken or uttered by a non-believer. I haven't yet found anyone who can answer me that. There's a perfectly good secular reason for opposing especially the exposure of girl — it's often worse than exposure, by the way, in China. I mean, they bury alive all the stifling girl babies. I mean, it will in the end mean there aren't enough women. There's every reason why the Chinese are going to discover — I mean, alarming — I wrote this in Vanity Fair once, that an officially communist society will very soon have no word for brother or sister, let alone uncle or aunt. And that, as they say, will not stand. It has to change. They'll discover that they've ruined their own demography, as well as to having done, in the meantime, things that are revoltingly cruel. But when you talk about innocent children, remember, it is surely the Scripture that tells us that children are born in original sin, and are insensate.
I actually don't think it is. I think that science has provided us with explanations for things that religion used to think it did explain. I think that has to be simply conceded, not just about the origin of the cosmos, but by the origin of species, including our own, and the commonality, as shown by the Genome Project, between ourselves and other animals, and indeed other vegetables — no, not other vegetables, I mean, plant life. Our DNA is extraordinary in demonstrating that, and it simply abolishes the need to think about a prime mover.
You can — in other words, it's an optional belief. Dr. Collins is absolutely welcome to say he believes in God, and even though he can't seem to argue that as well as he does elsewhere, that he's a Christian. But it's, as I say in my book, it's an optional belief now. It's been optional ever since Laplace, when demonstrating the workings of the universe, was asked, Well, there doesn't seem to be a God in this design of yours, he said, Well, it actually operates perfectly well without that assumption. So you can make it if you want, but it's completely superfluous. It can't be integral to it; it doesn't explain anything. Einstein did say he was not an atheist, but he went on to say that he had no belief whatever in a personal God. He was a Spinozist, which is a very exact way of saying that you do not believe that God intervenes in human affairs.
And if you don't believe that God intervenes in human affairs then I think you're not a Christian, because a theist may very well say, Well, the order of the universe seems to imply some kind of authorship, but that's as far as one can go. Religion means you have to say you know what God wants, and what is in His mind. For example, I don't understand why my partner in this discussion has such a modest job, if he knows as much as to know that God gave me a conscience. I mean, if he has sources of information as extraordinary as that, he should be much better known than he is.
Could I just add one tiny thing?
I obviously want everyone to go and rush out and buy my book, but there is another book by Professor Victor Stenger that's recently been published called God, the Failed Hypothesis. He's a much better scientist than I am, probably not as good, though, as Professor Stephen Jay Gould, celebrated atheist. I very much envy you having had him as a professor. Here's an example of what I mean, then. And since we mentioned Einstein, what Einstein says is that the miraculous thing about the universe is that there aren't any miracles in it; that the beautiful thing about science, and particularly about physics, is its extraordinary regularity, symmetry, beauty, predictability and so on. So that's the extraordinary thing, that miracles do not occur, because this natural order is never disturbed. Now there, it seems to me as a pretty flat contradiction. Who really would be a Christian if it didn't claim — if Christianity didn't claim that miracles could be worked by faith?
No, no it doesn't at all, because do the religious say that these things cannot be explained? They do not. They say there is a God, and we know what He wants.
They make a claim they cannot conceivably sustain, and when challenged on it, they say well, of course you can't believe it if you don't have faith. This is irritating. It's the exact negation of what Einstein just said.
Well, no, I'm afraid I think that the crimes of religion are innate in it. And the reason why I think it's wicked ab initio is this: First, as I have said, it depends upon the worship of an absolute and unchangeable power. It's simplicity totalitarian. Second, it degrades our human self-respect by saying that we wouldn't act morally if it were not for the fear of this celestial dictatorship, and it degrades the idea that we could do the right thing for its own sake. And then third, it seems to me absolutely invariably to based on sexual repression, and out of fear and disgust, robbing the sexual act, the most important thing that we do. And the misery and the violence that comes from that seems to me inevitable, and to be laid not at the door of those who misuse religion, but at the door of those who interpret it correctly.
Well now, well, I mean, I get this at every stop. You know, I've been debating this up and down the country with men of faith, and women, too, for some weeks. And I've realized that I'd have to write a different book for each one of them because you cannot make the assumption that people actually do subscribe to what the scriptural texts actually say. But if you're telling me that Christianity does not say that there's an eternal punishment for sinners, then I'm very happy to find that you're not, to that extent, a believer.
Well of course I don't believe in original sin. It's a preposterous idea, and a wicked one, too.
Well actually, if you think that this is only a brief veil of tears, and a preparation for a later life, what does it really matter what does happen here?
Well, that's incredibly cruel. As I open my book by saying that's telling people they've been created sick, and then ordering them to be well.
Sure.
Well, there doesn't exist a shard of convincing evidence that He ever did. The Gospels were written a great deal after the events they purport to describe. And they contradict each other on every important aspect of the life story. I actually do think there must have been such a person, but it's only by a process of induction that is not flattering to the myth. In other words, the fabrication of the story of Bethlehem is designed to fulfill an ancient prophecy, and because that's where it's supposed to happen and all this, so that an invention has to be made of a tax by Caesar Augustus and a census and all this, and that explains why the Holy Family is in that place instead. Well, if the thing had been invented out of whole cloth, then they would just have had Him born there, and have done with it. But the fact that all this fabrication has to be made to make it come right suggests that there was someone born in that — roughly that area at around that time who was a preacher of some sort. But there isn't a trustworthy word — I'm probably, if I'm not trespassing on the territory of my partner here — there isn't a trustworthy word, as you know from reading Bart Ehrman and others, in any of the Gospels that you could remotely say was historical evidence.
It's all hearsay, though.
Well, I mean it's not — there's nothing attested by anyone you could reasonably describe as a reliable witness, in anything you could reasonably describe as a reliable form.
Except for the counterintuitive evidence that — there's so much fabrication, that it would seem needless if there hadn't been a real person to be telling these fibs about.
Yeah, sure.
Well, I don't say at every point, but I mean I'm, annoyingly, I'm just for once in a hotel that doesn't have a Gideon Bible. But...
I just invite anyone listening to this to read any — actually they'd better quickly read all four of the accounts of either the birth or the death, and see if they can make them agree.
Well, I mean, you force me to press you. I mean, do you think that at the time of the crucifixion, the graves in the greater Jerusalem area opened and many of the dead came out and walked the streets? That's one account.
It's not sustained, but you do think that happened?
Yes.
I find it absolutely flabbergasting, because among other things, that surely degrades the idea of resurrection by making it commonplace.
If it can happen to — if just the graves had opened and anyone can get up and walk around, what's so special about the proposed resurrection of the Nazarene?
Well, while you are making things up, why not throw that in?
No one, whether Tacitus nor Joesphus or any other chronicler of the period seems to think there was an earthquake.
Well, I find — it's what Bertrand Russell used to call the argument of evidence against interest, or as my friend, you probably know him, John O'Sullivan says...
He says if the Pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job. If he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be onto something. Bart Ehrman did the best a man could do to keep up his belief, and he appears to have been — I hope I, again, don't trespass into my partner's field of expertise — but to have been quite a renowned scholar of the Gospels, in several languages, in the believing Christian community. I'm right, am I not, in saying this?
And he came to the conclusion that it was mythical?
Most of the stories, including some of the ones that I used to most enjoy contemplating when I was being taught the Bible at school, are inserted even later than one had, so to say, feared.
Yes.
Oh, it isn't particularly relevant. It's just it was the one that struck me, because it used to be one of my favorite stories. That's all.
But I mean, the totality of Dr. Ehrman's work, the book is called Misquoting Jesus.
Well, I can't wait to read your reply to it, because I've tried and failed to find someone who will take the book on from a Christian point of view, so perhaps I've now found one.
Excuse me?
He's been an opponent of Christianity for thirty years?
My understanding was very different from that. I'm going to have to check.
I suppose I'd rest my case on the statement that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If we were going to be asked to believe that the laws of nature are suspended and that virgins give birth and that dead people walk again, we want to be sure that we're getting pretty impressive testimony. And this falls short of being testimony, really, at all.
Well, it's hearsay.
It's hearsay from a very backward, illiterate society. And usually, passed on by people with a very strong interest in getting it believed.
I don't know that I'm really qualified enough to pronounce on that. I mean, there is a big argument, for example, about whether Homer ever existed, or whether it's the work of many hands. There's no agreement, really, about the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare, though it seems fairly certain they all were written by one person. That's much closer to us.
The likelihood that this — Shakespeare doesn't say you have to believe things that would otherwise be completely unbelievable on unsupported oral testimony. I say in my book, for example, it doesn't matter to me that we only have second-hand evidence for the existence of Socrates. We can't say for certain there was such a person. His teachings and his methods remain with us, and we call them Socratic. That's just — that's quite enough for me. But I'm not telling you, or anyone else, that if you don't agree with me about Socrates, you're going to go to hell, or if you do, you're going to go to Heaven, and your sins will be forgiven you.
Extraordinary claims are made that are not verifiable, but extraordinary demands are made in their name upon us, which hold that because of this, there are things we mustn't do and things we must.
And we also have to believe — excuse me, it's — these are only the micro parts of what's unbelievable. To me, the essentially unbelievable thing is this: What should be agree on for the lifespan of Homo sapiens now? We know pretty much how long we've been on the planet. Dr. Roberts, what's your view of that?
What's your view of how long Homo sapiens has been on the planet? Our species?
Yes, I mean, I think it's — there isn't an absolute certainty, but let's say — except for the absolute literalists who think that's the age of the earth — well over 150,000 years.
In the course of which time enormous numbers of people are born, don't live frightfully long, die, usually of their teeth, or by violence of some others, or in childbirth, or of nameless diseases that they can't identify because they don't know about the germ theater of disease, and so on. And it goes on and on like that. And only about 6,000 years ago does heaven decide to intervene in remote parts of the Middle East. Now I find that unbelievable on its face. I don't just think it isn't true, I cannot see how anybody could believe that, or wish it to be true.
Oh, no, no. I'm sorry, I'm not an endorser of — I mean, I'm not, there's no such thing as a Socratist, but I admire his method of argument.
Well, I don't know how you can assert it, because you're not comparing like with like.
Well, that's incredibly decent of you.
I do very much appreciate, and I'm very sorry I can't return the compliment to Dr. Roberts, but I shall.
Well, because I was going on — I was clearing the ground for what I wanted later to say about the Koran, about the way in which a text is given authority by pruning the stuff, the garbage out of it, the discrepant bits, the contradictory bits, and so forth, making certain things canonical, discarding others, and because I was very fascinated by what I'd read about the Gospel of Judas.
The gospel of Judas has a lot about Jesus in it.
Well, it did surely — it answers a question that is raised necessarily by the accepted account of the last Passover, which is this: Why is Judas considered to be a bad person when he's only doing God's will?
Well, you certainly have me there. I don't think it's historical at all.
I mean, I think it's another fabrication, but still, it makes a mystery a little less mysterious.
I mean, why do you think, I'll put the question to you this way: I know you're not a Catholic, but the Church of Rome waited until 1965, twenty years after the end of the final solution in Europe, to acquit the Jewish people of the charge of deicide, not some Jews, but all Jews. Why do you think it took them so long?
But it had been dogma preached very fervently for a long, long time in the name of someone who claims — you don't support his claim, I don't know on what basis you don't — to hold the keys of St. Peter, and who shares a lot of your beliefs. Now I think I do know why, because we — if these events, or some version of it did occur, the certainty is that there a lot of Jews around. And if they're told that they're absolved of responsibility, then it becomes extremely difficult to say to the rest of the human race you were responsible for Calvary as well. That's why they couldn't let them go. That's why this massive injustice was committed, not as an aberration of Christianity, but as part of its central teaching, for the greater part of its existence, and hasn't been sincerely, in my view, repudiated.
Well, it ought to be said, and I add it, that Maimonides, the great Jewish sage, thought it was one of the best day's work the Jewish people had ever done, that the elders did exactly the right thing by putting to death this ghastly heretic and imposter.
But, but, but, so I mean, I've no sympathy with Judaism, either. But it is said, is it not, that the Jews called for his blood to be on their heads and on their descendents to the remotest generation, and echo of the preamble to the Ten Commandments where it is said that the sins of the fathers will be visited on their children. I do not regard this as moral preaching. Do you?
Is it right to say that the sins of the father shall be visited on their children, and their children's children? Is it moral to say that, let alone truthful?
No, no. That's not correct. They may go on sinning; they're doomed to, apparently. But they've got to suffer for yours?
And their children's children are going to be held responsible for your sins? That's what it says.
You're not going to go on and tell me that there is historical authority for the events described in the New Testament — I mean, sorry, the Old Testament.
You're surely not going to do that.
Yes, there is, but...
But it was a very much smaller kingdom than was thought, a very much more modestly sized and no evidence whatsoever for the captivity and the exile and the wandering.
No, but they had the strongest motive in the places where they could dig, for doing this, and the Sinai's been gone over with a fine tooth comb by now, by a lot of other very highly qualified archeologists and there just is no evidence for it at all.
Ah, no, but with WMD, you can use the argument from design because you were dealing with a regime that had possessed, and had used, and had a record of concealment of WMD, so there's a very fair induction to be made in that case. Please, sir, that wasn't very.
No, look. I have a question.
Sorry — why does it matter to you to want to adopt these texts — these horrible texts as your own? Why don't you just let it go? Why don't you just say it's a pity that St. Paul, in talking, I think, to the Galatians, says, you know, we adopt all these books and these prophecies as our own because we think they were vindicated? Why — how does that make human life better?
How does it help us to be ethical? Why impose this extraordinary strain on yourself? You're never going to be able to prove it, and you should be relieved.
That there's any authenticity, let alone any morality in these horrible old Jewish texts. Why bother — why adopt them when you could discard them?
I've read a little, not a great deal. It didn't encourage me to go on to the end.
Well, I mean, as someone who has some Jewish ancestry, and a Jewish daughter, and who is indeed very impressed by the survival of the Jewish people, and very committed to it, I can't agree with you, no, because if there's been a supervising hand, it's been an extremely brutal one. It's the reason I think why so many Jews, I think probably the majority now, are non-believers, are secular in one form or another, or atheist, and why the Jewish contribution to atheism has been so extraordinary, from Spinoza to Einstein.
But there have been — I'll tell you something: The rabbi, after the end of the Second World War, the revelation of the Final Solution, the shoah, the rabbis went rather quiet. They hadn't got anything much to say about how this had happened, or whether God really had done it as a punishment for the exile. The rabbis who did think would've rather kept it to themselves. That's why this constitution of the state of Israel is as secular as it is. After the 1967 war, which is forty years ago, as you know, this week, a number of rabbis did start to get up and say, A-ha, now we see the Finger of God! The Holocaust was all meant so this could happen, so that we could establish rule over Arabs. Well, I can't imagine anything more evil being said, or stupid, I have to say.
Well, then don't, please, don't say that God is behind all these things.
Why insult your deity by making him responsible for...
No, no. The S.S. were confessing Catholics.
He never repudiated his Church, Hitler.
No, it did not because The Roman Church issued instructions that his birthday was to be celebrated from the pulpit every year until the very end, as you know.
No, I don't say he was a Christian in my book. I say that he didn't repudiate it and he certainly took great care to get the support of the churches. But he wanted to replace everything with Aryan blood myths and the worship of himself, that is certainly true.
Oh, no it's not harsh enough. I agree. But it is, you probably don't believe...
But it is believed by Catholics that God picks his vicar of Christ on Earth.
And it is, therefore — of course I think it's a nonsensical belief, but if it be true, then at the very eve of the Second World War, He decided to appoint a vicar of Christ who was pro-Hitler. That's a lot to swallow, isn't it? I don't hold God responsible for these things, bear in mind. I'm not insulting Him, as you do. I'm not saying that He takes responsibility in these, and I don't think there's any such person. I free myself from this incredibly strenuous, impossible belief. But you saddle yourselves.
No, no, no. Actually, I'm sorry to have to say, and it is — I will say for the first and only time — I think you completely misrepresented what I write, and also what I think. I say it's childish to blame God for things going wrong. It's idiotic. If there was such a person, I'd have more respect for His majesty than to say He owes me an explanation. You know, if there's a God, why have I got cancer? What a silly question. It would be, I wouldn't have any idea why He would want that. I would just have to accept it. But I mean, I don't, I do not go in for this game at all, and I don't know why anybody does.
But I mean, I am a bit astounded to find that we don't think that God designed us and the universe after all, or that if He did, He did it with such tremendous cruel ineptitude. I mean, again, it's not my problem. I don't think this way. As for free will, I think we have it, but I think we have no choice but to have it.
Well, they invite these kind of — I mean, after all, did you not just say to me that if I contemplated the history of the Jews, I would have to see that God was planning everything for them? Well, I say that if you say that, then you've just accepted on behalf of a deity whose mind you appear to know — how, you don't say — an enormous responsibility.
Why just this century? I'm sorry if I'm being dense.
Well, when I think about the twentieth century, I suppose I think of so many of its unanticipatable horrors. I mean, we behaved worse in the last century, probably as a species, than we ever had before. And you know what examples I'm alluding to, I suppose. And the implication of religion in all of these was pretty, pretty gross. I'm thinking — I have a long chapter in my book about the role of the Church, for example, in supporting the rise of fascism.
I don't think they're ever going to be able to — I frankly don't think Christianity's ever going to be able to live that down.
Well, it's not — I have a long chapter on that objection, too. In fact, this ought to come up now, oughtn't it? I mean, secular criminality.
Well, I say in my book that's — if the axis of fascism, almost entirely a Catholic movement, all the way from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, concordat between the Vatican and Hitler that lasts until the very end, and continues to shelter Nazi wanted war criminals after it's over and help them to establish other dictatorships in South America; the Japanese, led by someone who actually was a god, not just a godly person, but a god himself, according to those who believed in him, who no doubt thought he was the fount of all ethics in Japan and that there would be rape and pillage if people stopped believing in him. Turning to Stalinism: Look, in 1917 in Russia, when the regime falls, millions of Russians for hundreds of years have been told that the head of their government is a person just a little below God. He's the czar, the absolute ruler and owner of a country. He's also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. That's the inculcation of servility, incredulity in the huge, uneducated population. If you're Josef Stalin — who studied as a seminary student, by the way, for most of his life — you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you can't exploit a reservoir of servility and incredulity like that. He replicates it perfectly. There's an inquisition; there are show trials to expose heretics; there are miracle — Lysenko's biology — there's the constant worship of the leader. Everything comes from the top; everyone has to say thank you all the time for the great benefits. It's a replication of the same thing. And by the way, the Russian Orthodox Church continues to support him, which it did. If you want to point out to me a society that went into famine and dictatorship and mass murder and war and torture as a result of adopting the principals of Lucretius and Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine, then we'd have a level playing field.
Oh, well, I think you'll find, I hope you'll find, I'm sure you'll find, that I do say that I thought that John Paul II was an extraordinary human being.
And in that respect, and in others too, though terrible things to be laid to his charge, as well. By any standards, he was a great mammal. This might be the time to reiterate my earlier challenge, because we still have some time left. I still want to be informed of a moral preachment, or a moral action made by a believer that couldn't be made by an unbeliever.
Because otherwise, you see, religion becomes optional. You can have a nice Pope, you can have a nasty Pope. You can have an honest priest, you can have a dishonest priest. You can have a fraudulent Church or a frugal and scrupulous one. But it's just, it could just as well be a private belief. Now that's unfortunately not really possible in religious terms, is it, because you have to believe there is a supernatural power to which you owe some duty. You make yourselves believe this. I still can't understand why you'd want to.
Gosh. Well, I mean, I think it does as much good as aerobic dancing would do, frankly. I don't mean to be rude, but I don't see, I don't see that it's a moral action. You also seem to suggest that in some way by not praying for my children, I'm not as moral as you are.
I'm not sure you meant to say that.
It's not really an answer to my challenge, is it?
I don't say, please don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't dream of saying that it was an immoral action. But I must tell you what I think, which is that it is an irrelevant one. I mean, it isn't of itself a good thing, and it isn't an action, either.
Islam is sweeping all before it as well, so it's a great time to be faith based.
Well, I say in the book that religious belief is ineradicable. It's innate — it's not innate in all of us. There are a certain number of people who always have been born and always will be, who now have to be taken seriously and can't be silenced and burned and imprisoned and tortured anymore, for whom it isn't possible to believe, of who I am, as you can see, one. But it is still — it's a belief I have to resist, sometimes. You know, if we were sitting together and a huge, rusting fridge fell out of the sky and hit only you and left me alone, I would sort of think that was a bit of luck, though it would be a vile thing to think, wouldn't it?
I couldn't stop myself. And we're afraid of death, and we seek for passions where none exist. One of the most awful things in the Bible, I used to think when I was a child, was seek and ye shall find. Of course you will if you seek — if you look for a pattern and you hope there's a God, and you don't want to die, and you hope an exception will be made in your own case. You're very likely to become vulnerable to religion. But I mean, you have to allow me to be unimpressed.
No, I've not.
It sounds like a very sickly title, I must say.
It's like Mere Christianity. I hate that sort of pseudo-modesty that Christians sometimes have.
Well, it doesn't involve believing just in an accident. I mean, there was an extraordinary event that brought the universe into being, which the word Big Bang, originally invented by Professor Fred Hoyle, was originally designed to scorn that idea, to make it sound silly. But in fact, it's now pretty much accepted. I just have to refer you again, I think, to Victor Stenger's book, which has a much closer engagement than mine does with the sciences. It seems to me, though, that the really unbelievable thing, the thing that cannot be believed, is that we on this very tiny speck of a planet in a solar system that has otherwise only dead planets, and the death of which we can all anticipate almost to the hour — the heat death of our known universe — that it's on the very, very edge of a whirling, unimaginable space with other galaxies, that we are the point of all this creation. It's just not possible for me, at any rate, to believe that.
Well, that makes two of us.
You can't possibly say that you derive your faith from it, can you?
Because Christianity comes from a time when people thought the sky was bowl and they had no idea that the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun instead of the sun around it. Indeed, Christianity threatened with torture and death anyone who tried to investigate the subjects you've just been presenting us with.
You see, suppose that you could infer a Creator who's interested — sorry, suppose you could infer a Creator or an intelligence from these calculations, which is a hypothesis that so far when tested has proved to be inadequate. But suppose, let me grant it to you. All your work is still ahead of you. That doesn't suggest in the smallest degree that He's interested in what happens to you or me.
Yes, and I just think our cranial capacity isn't up to that.
So why claim to know things you can't possibly know? I keep asking you, I will keep asking you: Why do you impose this extraordinary burden on yourself?
Well, you better — you should publicize them better. They haven't penetrated yet.
No, no. I think you have.
I wouldn't dream of doubting that you think you have. But I don't think you could make it real to anybody else.
I don't think that people who report seeing UFO's and so on are lying. I think they did. I think they really do think they saw them. I just do not think we're being visited by such craft.
Well actually, I was a friend of a bishop of the Church of England, a very decent and gentle man called Hugh Montefiore, who converted from Judaism to become a Christian, who became a very senior figure in the Anglican Church, because of a personal visit that he had from Jesus Christ when he was one of the few Jews at a Protestant boarding school. And he wrote a book also saying that the conditions for life on this planet seem to be so extraordinary, that the knife edge balance on which we live, that it testifies to the divine, and I don't — I can't say that old Bishop Hugh was lying when he said he'd had a personal visit from Jesus. It did change his life. He acted for the rest of his life as if it had happened.
What?
No, I probably should have done.
It's a very interesting book that he wrote, but he's worth Googling.
Well, I think we do probably need something on the order of the transcendent in our lives and I think humanism fulfills these needs, incidentally. I mean, if you say that for you, as for me, the beauties of science, the consolations of philosophy, the study of literature as the source of ethical and moral questions — that's enough for most people's lifetimes. And to turn away from this, and to say, Well, I'd rather go for the ancient texts that come from the childhood of our species, is first, I think, to refuse a wonderful offer, and second, it makes it impossibly arrogant for the questioner to assume that that'll make you behave better. I mean, surely, he knows that many people are absolutely convinced that there's a God greater than themselves, are convinced that that God is telling them to do evil. The example you just gave of people who have personal experiences that must be considered valid must be valid for everybody in that case. In that case, it is true that the archangel Gabriel told the prophet Mohammed what to do. It was — it seems to have been very convincing to him and to many other people. Do you accept the validity of that or not?
Do you accept that Louis Farrakhan can get people off drugs by faith?
Are you impressed? Well, how do you accept it for one and reject it for another?
Well, how, there's no standard for doing that, though, is there? It's the most subjective possible thing, and actually, you don't get terribly reassured, do you, if someone comes up to you in the street and says I'm on a mission from God and He's given me some instructions. Why does that not delight you if someone comes up and does that?
Yeah well, I'd love to be with you the next time someone says that — comes up to both of us and says they're hearing voices and it's God. You're going to throw your arms around him and say, You, too? What luck!
I don't think so. I don't know why I don't think so, but I just don't.
No, there isn't. You couldn't believe — it wouldn't be a matter of belief, would it? It would have to have something to do with proof.
Just a tiny little bit, a smidgeon of evidence here and there wouldn't kill, would it? There isn't any, that's the thing.
It's just, you can't, you don't judge people by what they think of themselves. You'd be a immoral if you did.
You'd be failing them by not saying, Look, I'm really sorry, man, but I think you're in trouble and you need help.
Indeed they do.
Very well. Well, since you've both been kind enough to read my book, you — I don't expect you'll remember every bit of it — but you will grant me that I spend some time describing my encounters in Northern Uganda with people who are there in a selfless way, trying to repair the damage done by the horrible religious Christian group called the Lord's Resistance Army. And I say, Well, which of you is really the faithful one? I mean, to me, it doesn't matter because there are very large numbers of people who do that kind of work all over the world and I've met them, and can introduce you to them, who do so for its own sake, for the sake of their fellow men, for their brothers and sisters. And they don't demand any divine warrant, and they're not suspected of proselytization, either.
Now, so any — it's like in my original challenge. You have to name an ethical action that an atheist couldn't take.
There are millions of unbelievers who do charitable work. I don't say charity poisons everything. But in order to say that confronted with, say, AIDS in Africa, that that's bad, though P.S., it might be God's punishment...
So I mean, and though AIDS is bad, with condoms are worse, and must be forbidden, for a really foolish, wicked thing like that, you need to be a person of faith.
Well, I would say — I'd have to say both.
I'd have to say both. Well, the Lord's Resistance Army says that nothing will be okay in Uganda until everyone agrees with the Ten Commandments.
No, Jesus doesn't, no.
But Moses does.
And you adopt Moses as one of your heroes.
Who comes to bring not peace but a sword?
So we need divine permission for love? Excuse me?
Who needs divine permission for love?
Or to be told to love? Isn't it rather odd to be told to love? It's always seemed bizarre to me.
Ordered to love, I don't, it's — something is cranky there.
And ordered to love others as much as you love yourself and your loved ones. That's, by the way, making an impossible commandment of people — making a command that can't be met. Therefore, you can always accuse people of falling short of it, you can always find them guilty.
So you think all this is directed at you?
You think all this is directed at you? You think the universe is designed with you in mind?
Incredibly — in the guise of modesty, that seems to me an extraordinarily arrogant statement.
Well, will you promise me to think about it at least once?
Gosh. Well, I must say, you have a very high opinion of yourself.
I think you're a pretty decent chap also.
But I think that's a very, very extreme idea.
Oh, so you're conscripted into this?
I mean, I just never know with which proposition I am arguing.
Uh-huh. Onward Christian soldiers. Well, that has a wonderful history.
Ah, well, it's just the way I am. I mean, I'm a polemicist, if you like, and one has to get people's attention first of all.
And that may sound to you, as it somewhat slightly sounds to me, as a vulgar answer, but it is the truth, right? One can't write a book saying, God is not that brilliant.
Well, yes. I might have had another one, but I can't let Dr. Roberts' last observation go uncommented upon. I most certainly do not say that he's stupid and I say in my book that many people of high intelligence and fervent conscience have been devout believers. I say that I think the belief is stupid and unfounded and false and potentially, latently, always wicked, because it is both servile in one way, and arrogant in another. And that's why I dare to say that it's, ab initio, a poison. But I certainly do not say of people who have faith that they are dumb. Isaac Newton was practically a spiritualist. Alfred Russel Wallace, who did a lot of Darwin's work for him, had weird, supernatural beliefs as well. These things are compatible with high intelligence and great morality. But we would be better off if we left them behind.
Good grief, so it hadn't really sunk in on me that as you were being ordained when I was nine, I was just getting out there completely. I was nine when I thought I saw through it when my biology teacher told me that God was so good as to have made vegetation green because it was the color most restful to our eyes. And I thought, Mrs. Watts, this is nonsense. I knew nothing about chlorophyll or photosynthesis, nothing about the theory of evolution, nothing about adaptation, nothing of the sort. I just knew she'd got everything all wrong. And, of course, the argument against faith, against religion, falls into two essential halves, not necessarily congruent, but I believe congruent: the first is it's not true. Religion comes from the infancy of our species — I won't say race because I don't think our species is subdivided by races — infancy of our species when we didn't know that the earth went around the sun, we didn't know that germs caused disease, we didn't know when we were told in Genesis you're given dominion over all creatures that this did not include microorganisms, because we didn't know they were there, so we didn't know they had dominion over us. When diseases broke out it was blamed on wickedness, or sometimes on the Jews, or if it was by Jews on the Amalekites, or as you will. We didn't know anything about the nature of the earth's crust, how it was cooling, earthquakes, storms, all of this were a mystery. Well, we are, at least to that extent, a reasoning species. Even a conspiracy theory is often better than no theory at all. The mind searches for form, we're now stuck with the forms that we found in our infancy, in our primitive, barbaric past. Well, that could be fine, still. No nation can be without mythology or myth or legend. And there are people who say, Well, it's not exactly true. Virgins don't conceive, ok, bushes don't burn forever, — although why that would be so impressive, I've never understood — Dead men don't walk, and so on and so forth. Ok, alright, it's not really true. It does come from a rather fearful period of the Dark Ages. But, at least it's nice to believe it. It teaches good precepts. This, I think, is very radically untrue. I give in my book the example, which I'll give you now, of a person very much influential on my youth, and I know on the Reverend's too, Dr. Martin Luther King. My friend Taylor Branch's book about Dr. King — I would rather call him doctor than reverend because, I'm sorry to say, I think it's a higher title of honor — Taylor Branch's trilogy about him is called Parting the Waters, The Pillar of Fire, and At Jordan's Edge. And everybody literate here knows the story of Exodus and understands what Dr. King meant when he demanded that his people be free of bondage. But, if you think about it for a second, it's a very good thing that the good doctor was only using this metaphorically. If he'd really been invoking the lessons of Genesis and Exodus, he would have been saying that his people had the right to kill anyone who stood in their way, to exterminate all other tribes, to mutilate their children's genitalia, to make slaves of those they captured, to take the land and property of others, to engage in rather long and hideous and elaborate arguments about ox goring, and finally, which is the sentence that ends that — or the verse that ends that section of the book, should not suffer a witch to live — the warrant for witch burning. In other words, in these books there are the warrants for genocide, for slavery, for the torture of children for disobedience, for genital mutilation, for annexation, for rape and all the rest of it. It's a very good thing that this is man-made. There are those who say that they wish they could believe and I suppose a decent atheist could say that, if only for a lack of evidence, he wishes he or she could. I can't be among their number. I'm very glad it is not true that there is a permanent, unshakeable, unchallengeable celestial supervision, a divine North Korea in which no privacy, no liberty is possible from the moment of conception, not just until the moment of death but well after. I've been to North Korea and now I know what a prayerful state would look like. I know what it would be like to praise God from dawn until dusk. I've seen it happen. And it's the most disgusting and depressing and and pointless soulless thing you can picture. But at least with North Korea you can die and you can leave. Christianity won't let you do that because — I'll mention another thing about the Old Testament: the Old Testament may have — and any Jews and Christians who like it may like this too — they may have genocide, rape, racism, and all the rest of the things I've mentioned, but it never mentions punishment of the dead. When you're done, when you're in the mass grave into which you've been thrown as an Amalekite, it's over. Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild is the concept of hell introduced. Eternal torture, eternal punishment for you and all your family for the smallest transgression. I have no hesitation in saying this is a wicked belief. I've also no hesitation in saying — and I musn't trespass on the Reverend's time — that we don't need it in two senses. One, it's wicked and two, we have and always have had, a much superior tradition. We know that Democritus and Epicurus worked out in ancient Athens the world was made of atoms, that the gods did not exist and certainly took no interest in human affairs and would be foolish to do so and would be wicked if they did. We have the tradition that brings us through Galileo and Spinoza and Thomas Paine and Voltaire and Thomas Jeffesron and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, men of great wisdom and insight by all means struck by the awe-inspiring character of our universe, by all means open to devotional music and architecture and poetry, by all means aware of the transcendent. But look through the Hubble telescope if you want to see something that is awe inspiring and don't look to blood-stained old myths. Now, Why now? Why am I doing this now? people ask. Well, I'll tell you why now: because in the last few years it's become impossible to turn a page of a newspaper without being, as the religious would say, offended. In other words I don't think I sound self-pitying if I say I'm offended that a cartoonist in a tiny democratic country in Scandinavia — Denmark — can't do his job without a death threat and that no American magazine or newspaper would reprint those cartoons either to elucidate the question or in solidarity. I'm offended that civil society in Iraq is being destroyed, leveled by the parties of God. I'm offended that people in this country believe that they have the right to advocate the teaching of garbage to children under the fatuous name of Intelligent Design. Just as I believe that where religion ends philosophy begins, where alchemy ends chemistry begins, where astrology ends astronomy begins and now the people would say, Well let's give equal time to astrology in the schools. It's nonsense — dangerous and sinister nonsense. The Pope says, AIDS may be bad, but condoms are much worse. What kind of moral teaching is this? And how many people are going to die for such dogma? You see what I mean. So, I just — I'll be very brief: and end to this, an end particularly to the cultural fringe that says that if someone can claim to be religious spokesman they are entitled to respect. I have to say it in your presence, sir: I think that the title Reverend is something people should be more concerned to live down than to live up to. Thank you.
Feel free.
Damn right.
I take it kindly.
Very well, that's a very generous response. Do you mind if I take it in reverse order? The belief that there are weapons of mass destruction, or rather the conviction that Saddam Hussein was interested in weapons of mass destruction, you could, I suppose, describe as an argument from design. In other words, he had them before, he'd known how to conceal them, he'd used them several times, he seems to be prepared to risk his entire political career on the idea of reacquiring them. I would say that was not a belief that had no evidence and I would say that anyone who treated him as if he was innocent on the subject would be a sap, actually — would be my short word for it. Second, on the Civil Rights movement, you — I expected you to be more assertive. I don't know what Dr. King's private convictions about religion were. I know that he studied Hegel, I know that he studied Marx. I know that among his very close entourage were a large number of secular socialists and communists, you know their names too. Samuel Levinson is probably the best known but — among the black civil rights leadership, Bayard Rustin, secular socialist, Philip Randolph, secular socialist, trade union leader, these were the building blocks for the march on Washington, as was Victor Reuther and many others. The belief that it is illegal as well as evil to keep black Americans in subjection does not require any supernatural endorsement. It had been proved repeatedly in law and in morality and in ethics and demonstrated in practice. The only thing that has always been consistently justified by the churches was initially slavery, the right to hold someone as a slave, biblically warranted, and the right to keep the races separate which is endorsed by a church that, just to give a contemporary example, one of the current candidates for the Republican nomination is a member of a church — the so-called Mormon Church of Latter-Day Saints — that until 1965 had it as an article of faith that the Bible separates the Sons of Ham and makes them lesser. Well, I don't have to discredit a text like that because I don't think it has any authority. So, in a sense, I return the question to you. Now, I didn't say that God was misused. I hope I didn't — I wasn't so poorly understood by everybody. I said that the idea of God is a dictatorial one to being with. The belief in a supreme, eternal, invigilating creator who knows what you think and what you do and cares about it and will reward or punish you and watches you while you sleep is, I think, a horrific belief, a man-made one fortunately. I'm very glad there's no evidence for it. Let me — in case I was misunderstood let me assert again: I think it's innately an awful belief. However, the cleverest theologian, and there have been some, has never been able to demonstrate that such a person exists. It's impossible to do so. It's not possible either for me to demonstrate conclusively that no such person exists. That cannot be done either. But one thing can be done: a person who claims not to know only that this person exists, a task beyond our brain, but to claim to know His or Her — I'll accept your correction, Reverend — mind, to say, I know because I'm in holy orders what this entity wants you to do, what He wants you to eat, who He wants you to go to bed with and how He wants you to go to bed with them, what you may read, what associations in private you may form, what thoughts you may have, that person is out of the argument now, it seems to me. We know that no one knows that. So the claim made by the religious that they know God, they know His mind, that they can tell us what to do in His name is, I think, exploded. Further, it is not argued by my side at any rate nor by no one I know on it that the — our presence here on the planet is something that is susceptible to a smooth, logical, reasonable explanation. To the contrary, we are still very much in doubt as to precisely how we came to be human and to separate ourselves from some of our common ancestors. We also know that of the species that have been on this small planet on this tiny solar system since the beginning of measurable time of the number that have — were ever in existence, more than 98.9 percent have become extinct. A certain solipsism I think is required to believe that we, as the resulting species, are somehow the center of the created cosmos. This is not modesty, as the Christians call it. It's not humility. It's an unbelievably arrogant claim to make. But at least it makes up for the other claim we're supposed to put up with which is, Well, yes, but we're also miserable sinners, conceived in filth and doomed to abject ourselves. Both of these positions are too extreme, too strenuous, too fanatical, and both of them reinforce each other in unpleasant ways and both should be outgrown by us. Voila.
I hate it when that happens.
I think I better stick to the reverse order. No, well that's why I — very good time to attack him was before he would get back what he lost by way of WMD. He didn't have any then and he wasn't going to get them back, either any more than he was going to improve his relations with Al Qaeda. They were as good as they were ever going to get and that was fine by me. Maybe an argument for another time but, believe me, I'm not reluctant to have it. Then we are of one mind, essentially, I mean, after all, I did not deny what's common knowledge that Dr. Martin Luther King was the Reverend Martin Luther King and was indeed at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
No, no, I said I cannot say to you that I know that he was a believing Christian, no I cannot. I mean neither can you say that to me any more than, we seem to be of one mind on this too, that none of us can prove or disprove the existence of God. The differences between us — I don't say that I'm an ordained minister because I don't think I could push it that far. On the — since you're evidently an agnostic, it's a confession that I'm very welcome to have, not extracted from you, but heard you make. Now here's the question: you say these texts are misused, I say that they are not. The Old Testament says or does not say that Abraham was doing a noble thing by offering to sacrifice his son to prove himself loyal to God or to the voices he was hearing in his head? It says that was a noble thing for him to do, he was rewarded for it by a great posterity and a great long life. Offering to murder his son because of hearing voices in his head. This is not moral teaching to me. Is it not the case that the Old Testament says that the Amalekites must all be destrored down to the last child, every one among them, leave not one? Yes, it does say that. Bishop of Landaff in a debate with Thomas Paine said, Well, when it says keep the women, as Paine had pointed out, he said, I'm sure God din't mean just to keep them for immoral purposes. Well what does the Bishop of Landaff know about this? Kill all the men, kill all the children, and keep the virgins. I think I know what they had in mind. I don't think it's moral teaching. To this day there are nutbag settlers, some Israeli citizens, some of them American, some of them Israeli-Americans, trying to settle the West Bank in the name of this prophecy, throw other people off their land and establish a theocracy that will bring on the Messiah and, they hope, Armageddon and the end of the world. Well I think the United States Supreme Court should hear argument that not one American dime can be used constitutionally for that project, ok? It's high time, cut it off. These people mean to —  these people mean us real harm and I'm not going to dilate about whether their Muslim brothers say about us when the — the Koran does not say that you may be killed for changing your religion but the Hadith, the so-called sayings of the prophet, which are taken just as seriously, do say that. So when someone says, I'm a Muslim and I'm telling you, Mr. Rushdie, if you apostatize from this faith, you're dead, he's not misquoting the texts, sir, he's not. He's quoting them accurately. I think I'll phrase it as understatedly as I can: I think we can do without a lot of this.
I think enough already would cover a lot of this stuff.
They're not — are they separable?
Well fine.
Ok, once again in reverse order if I may: religion gets its morality from us. I think it's very easy to demonstrate that. I'll do it from one of each of the two testaments.
I've spent a lot of time with my Bible, ok? My Bible, I do.
Or the Babel as they call it in Dixie. I do. In the — there's a very famous parable in the New Testament where the alleged Jesus of Nazareth tells a story about a man from Samaria — we call it the good Samaritan — who, finding a fellow creature in enormous distress and pain, goes well out of His way to alleviate his suffering and to follow up to make sure that His sympathy hasn't been a waste of time, to do the aftercare if you like. We know one thing about this person from Samaria: he cannot have been a Christian. Jesus is telling this story about someone He's heard of who acted, as far as we know, from no other prompting other than elementary human solidarity. What other prompting do we need? Our species would not have survived, we wouldn't be met here if we didn't have, as well as many selfish instincts, the need, and often for our own sake, to be of use to others, to combine with them, to take an interest in them, to care for them, and to worry when they're in pain. No supernatural authority, as with the Civil Rights Movement, is required for this. Morality comes from us, religion claims to have invented it on our behalf. Then, ok, another example from the older testament: is it really to be believed that, until they got to the foot of Mt. Sinai, the followers of Moses believed that, up until then, adultery, murder, theft, and perjury were ok? They're suddenly told, Oh hey, we got some new ideas for you. I don't think so. It's a bit of an insult to the ancient Jewish faith, of which Jacob and I are both rather disgraceful ornaments in our different ways. I think our ancestors were smarter than that and even if they weren't smarter, they wouldn't have got that far if they were under the contrary impression. The Golden Rule is something you don't have to teach a child. There's no need to say, And if you don't follow this rule, you'll burn in hell forever. That's immoral teaching. Now I hope I've made myself clear. On the — but I'm wondering if I have because you face me, Reverend, with two very unwelcome thoughts: either I have been completely inarticulate in everything I've said this evening or you have misunderstood me.
I prefer myself — or, these are not mutually exclusive. And I should've seen that coming.
I thought I said with storm ground we cannot know if there was a creator whether of ourselves or of our cosmos. You may wish to assume one but that's the best you can do. The evidence is all that the cosmos evolved and the evidence that there was a single mind purposeful creator of it is nil. There's no evidence for that at all. By all means believe it as long as you don't try to make me believe it or teach it to my children.
On that I have to insist. That's not a difference of opinion.
Again, in reverse order.
I incline in your direction, sir. Said it before — very suggestive thing that you just said: if there was no one in charge, how would we know how to act morally? This is indeed, this is a very profound observation. It's argued by Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, he said, Without God anything is permissible. Some people believe that. Some people believe that without the fear of divine total surveillance and supervision everyone would do exactly as they wished and we would all be wolves to each other. I think there's an enormous amount of evidence that that's not the case, that morality is innate in us, that solidarity is part of our self-interest in society as well as our own interest and very much to argue the contrary that when you see something otherwise surprising to you, such as a good person acting in a wicked manner, it's very often because they believe they're under divine orders to do so. Steven Weinberg puts it very well, he says, Left to themselves, evil people will do evil things and good people will try and do good things. If you want a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion. For example — I simply do not believe — I do not believe that my Palestinian friends I've known now for years, think that to blow yourself up outside an orphanage is a moral act — or inside one is a moral act, or an old person's home in Netanya is a moral action, that anything in their nature makes them think this, but their Mullahs tell them that there is, that a person doing this is a hero. I do not think that any person looking at a newborn baby would think, How wonderful, what a gift and now let's just start sawing away at its genitalia with a sharp stone. Who would give them that idea were it not the godly? And what kind of argument from design is this? Babies are not born beautiful, they're born ugly, they need to be sawn a bit because the handywork of God is such garbage. Well honestly, this is what I mean when I say that those who think there's any connection between ethics and religion have all their work still ahead of them and after thousands of years, still have it all ahead of them more and more. There.
I should have raised that question myself and I realize also...
But I've never yet been in one of these meetings where it didn't come up and — but I still owe you yet another answer. When you say you've had this confirming emotion in your own life, of course, I would not be so presumptuous as to challenge you. Indeed, I believe people when they say that they have experienced miracles. I believe that they think that they have. I think I'm obliged to credit them if it comes to that as long as they keep it to, if you like, if I can put it like this, modestly as I dare, to themselves. If I believed that I was saved because once a baby boy was born and, before mutilated, made the extraordinary discovery that he escaped the female birth canal, mother was a virgin — or at least that her birth canal was only one way — and that thus I was — a sorry thing, by the way, religions' distastes for these regions, don't you find? And something to put you on your guard: suppose I thought, ok, now I know that, that must prove his teachings are true, which it doesn't seem to me that they do, but suppose I did, and I'm going to be saved by it, I'd think that was a wonderful secret. It would make me happy. It should make me happy. It doesn't make people happy. They can't be happy until I believe it too. My children must be taught this stuff. So sir, no ma'am, no day, no way, no shape, no form. You keep your illusion private. And I hope it does make you happy and there's perhaps some reason why it would but then — no, we're told the Pope's authority to say you can't have a condom comes from his ability to certify a miracle, a disturbance in the natural order. I think it was David Hume who put it slightly vulgarly, this was again about the virgin birth I think: which is more likely, that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie? There has to be an answer to this kind of question. As to the secular bad behavior, well, I used to be a believing Marxist and I've had this argument about Communism in different forms all my life and I really — there's a very — you confront me with an intensely serious question, though, actually, secular criminality on the political level wasn't really possible until pretty much the late eighteenth century because the religious monopoly on violence and cruelty and torture and slavery and so on was so intense. It has to be said that some of my non-believing forebearers seized the opportunity to behave in the same way, sure. There's no question about it. And I'll put it like this, to take the best known case: up until 1917 the czar of Russia was not just the ruler and owner of Russia and all the Russian people and everything in it, but he was also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was considered by church and the people to be something a little more than divine — excuse me, a little more than human. Not as high as Hirohito, but a bit higher than the Pope in secular and temporal power. If you were Stalin you'd be crazy if you don't take advantage of a people who'd had centuries of indoctrination of that kind. Of course you would want to see if you couldn't replicate that and to see about reproducing it, emulating it, trading on it, taking advantage of it. You'd be nuts if you didn't do it. So the answer, I think, which is a very long process, will be a long, cultural process, is to try and move people up to a cultural and intellectual level where they above that kind of appeal, where they're not credulous, where they don't take things on faith, where they don't make gods or idols or images out of anybody including fellow human beings and that they learn the pleasures of thinking for themselves. How about that for a modest proposal?
Well religion is not the belief that there is a god, after all. Religion is the belief that God tells you what to do. So, if we have to talk about religion, we are not talking — theism believes in the existence of a creating being but it has no prescriptions for morality. You can't as — a theist cannot say, I think that this universe is so well-designed that it implies a creator, therefore don't be going to bed with another member of the same sex. Theism — deism, excuse, did I say theism that time? Deism, excuse me, is therefore not a religion. This is a first for me, I've never yet met someone in holy orders who has said that the words of the holy books have nothing to do with God. I know there's a lot of laxity in the churches these days, and I've been trying to encourage it, but, I mean, it seems to me — I could have been pushing at a slightly more well-defended door. Jefferson, who could have been a great paleontologist, a great botanist — well was, in fact, all of these things, couldn't shake the feeling that the sheer order and beauty of it implied something. But he had these great discussions with his French counterparts: How come the shells — the sea shells you find them so high up on the mountain tops? What is that? He had no idea. He died after 1819. The great day in 1819 is the day that Mr. Lincoln is born and Mr. Darwin is born, same day. I know which one of them was the greater emancipator, too. Jefferson couldn't see as far, we just didn't have the horizon. Now can you hold to the deist belief if you choose, if you like, but the overwhelming evidence is that we do have an explanation for the origins of the species, ours and all others and that each new discovery made, in however remote a part of the earth's surface, in paleontology will confirm, or not confute, or not contradict, the body of knowledge that we have so painstakingly erected. So everything else added to that is a work of what the Church of England used to call supererogation. It's needless, it's unnecessary. Ockham's razor disposes painlessly of it.
It's gone. It's history.
Could be.
What people usually want to know is was the prayer answered?
I don't mind.
Well, I thought is was. It sounded interrogative. I mean, I don't want anyone to think I'm dodging anything is all.
Oh we will, we will.
Slow down, I can't hear a word you're saying.
That would be correct, yes.
Yes, I can picture it but not without horror.
This isn't about my penis, is it?
You still don't know how that prayer was answered, Reverend. That's what you might call a premature ejaculation on your part.
And I'm sorry, but I only have on ex-wife and not even she, in her most adamant moments, would describe our marriage as failed. I will say this, by the way, I hope I encourage anyone here who might be over in any difficulty, if you have a child with someone you really can never be divorced from them and she and I are very proud of our children and they are rather happy with us. It's a pity we couldn't get along better, but... Anyway, don't let me get too husky about this. On with the show, skipping lightly over the genitalia. Isaac Newton was a spiritualist, as far as we know. He seems to have believed in a number of weird and crackpotted theories. Joseph Priestley, the great Unitarian and rationalist and defender of the American Revolution, forced to flee from England to Philadelphia after the monarchists and Tories burned his laboratory, discoverer of oxygen, believed in the phlogiston theory, the most exploded theory that we know of. You'll find the coincidence or coexistence of superstition and mania of all kinds with great scientific achievements all over the place... People who are real physicists, Fred Hoyle was actually one of them — the late Fred Hoyle, the man who believed in steady state and disbelieved what he contemptuously called the Big Bang, was also a man of odd, intermittent faith. It doesn't matter. What you could not do is say that your evidence as a physicist or a biologist supported your private religious beliefs. It would be a coincidence. Whereas if you're Richard Dawkins, the coherence between what you have found and what you have contributed to science and the extreme unlikelihood of the existence of any god is pretty striking. Hope that's clear.
Of the illogical. Yeah, I understand.
Well, you first.
Alright then. There's a poem by Philip Larkin called Church going which I hope anyone here who has not read — that sentence is going nowhere — I hope anyone who hasn't read that poem will let me do them a favor and look it up for themselves before next — this time tomorrow, which would perfectly express my point of view. A wonderful statement by the greatest English poem of this period about the experience of visiting a church. Not wanting to be able to believe but not being able to dismiss the seriousness, the history, the tradition, the beauty of it. I couldn't do without the poems of George Herbert or John Dunne either, which have strictly devotional poems. I think you could fake being a devotional painter. You could be a painter who didn't believe in God and pretend you did for patronage. You couldn't fake being John Dunne or George Herbert. I couldn't do without their work. I couldn't do without gothic architecture or devotional music either. I wouldn't trust anyone who did, who had no feeling for this and people who don't know what the numinous and the transcendent feel like, who don't experience anything when combinations of landscape and music and poetry and also the melancholy of one's own life, the realization that we're going to die and that our children actually need us to do so, other melancholy reflections of this kind are, to that extent, not poetic, not human, not literary, not civilized. But the supernatural adds to this absolutely zero, it seems to me, and in some ways subtracts from its grandeur and its seriousness. So I'm one of those who Pascal is actually thinking about, or was thinking about, when we wrote. He wrote to the person who is so made that he cannot believe. There are millions of us, there always have been, there are now, there are going to be many more of us in the future. We're just a little bit fed up with being treated like freaks in American culture.
I am happy to yield to the... well, at the risk of being callous...
I don't think that we should be paying for chaplains. I don't think the US government should be employing any. James Madison's a coauthor of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom and of the First Amendment and therefore was very adamant on the point and very clear. There shouldn't be — it's flat out unconstitutional to pay or employ a chaplain to open the proceedings of Congress or to be in the armed forces. We can't have chaplains on our payroll. That's that. People who want to pray can't be stopped but they can do it — of all the solitary activities, apart for the search for — never mind — surely that's one that doesn't need a paid state mediator. It's a negation of the American Revolution. So, that first. Second, yes, modernity, involving as it does, a huge exchange of technology and population and innovation, in a very churning and vertiginous manner, of course means that a lot of lives have to be lived in a very insecure and risky way and it's not at all unlike our nature as a species to try and cling to stability, certainty, and consolation in those cases. It explains itself, it seems to me. What is notable, though, is it hasn't come up in thousands of years with any superior explanation to the old ones. It still is going back to myths that were discredited and exploded many years ago. And these, of course, turn out to be false consolations whereas the consolations of philosophy and of the aesthetic and of the beauty of science and of reason and so on, available to us all the time and really able to explain why things happen, why terrible wounds are inflicted in Afghanistan, and so forth. No, no, that won't do. Let's, like some absolute loser, find the person who Paley means who says — finds a watch on the beach and thinks, I don't know what this is for but it seems to tick. It must be for something, but doesn't understand it. We find this wonderful truffle and open it and look at the chocolate and throw it away and then munch on the wrapper. I don't understand it but I'm one of those who are not made this way.
Sorry.
Just throwing myself around.
Yeah well, you see, I don't love our enemies and I don't love people who do love them. I hate our enemies and think they should be killed and I think that they want to kill me. And I think we can do it with half the budget or maybe twice but I'm absolutely sure that there should be no country that has a budget that can threaten ours and I'm not sentimental about the point. I wanted to have another whack at that very question...
The people who preach Allahu akbar had better find out that there's a stronger force than them and one that also has unalterable convictions and principles and that can also be offended and that they offend it at their peril. That's what I think. Now, to the last question, I just want to have one more run at it.
I know, but if you don't mind.
When I started hurling myself around like a shout-and-holler person, it was because I suddenly though of.
The questions that they come and ask these chaplains are, Why, why, why? Why does it happen that the nicest guy in my unit just took a round through the throat, you know, and, I've just been to this village where all the children are being killed and where — you can fill this in for yourself — Why, why, why, why? That's the question, isn't it? Well, have you ever heard of any spokesman of any religion give an answer to that question? They've had thousands of years to think about it. No, they haven't come up with a question at all, unless to say, as they used to, when it was a plague or a war or a tsunami, Well it's probably a sign of sin. You're being punished. The Archbishop of Canterbury in England two years ago says he really worries how God could be so mean as to unleash a tidal wave towards Christmas time in Asia. You can't believe you're listening to this stuff. Now if you ask me, ok, I'll say — Why did this happen? Why did the best guy I know get cancer of the throat or get mugged or slaughtered, or whatever it was? I'll say, Because we belong to an imperfectly evolved species where the adrenaline glands are too big, the prefrontal lobes are too small and we bear every sign of the stamp of our lowly origin and only by realizing the fact that we are mammals are we likely to be able to talk any sense about it. And if you say, Well, why did that city fall down or be overcome by waves or that volcano kill all those children? I'll say, Well, hate to break it to you, but we live on a cooling planet whose crust hasn't quite settled yet. These are to be expected and there is no other explanation for them and don't believe anyone who says there is. Well, this is not perhaps perfect ethical instruction, but it does conform to the hippocratic injunction, primum non nocere, at least I'm not lying to these people. At least what I say can do them no harm and at least it cannot increase the illusions they already have and usually when you go to that village and ask, Why are the children being killed? it's because someone who believed in God thought that they had it coming.
Sounds like dialectical interference.
Ha, well, what an incredibly stupid question. First, I've said repeatedly that this stuff cannot be taken away from people. It is their favorite toy and it will remain so as long — as Freud said in The Future of an Illusion it will remain that way as long as we're afraid of death and have that problem which is I think likely to be quite a long time. Second, I hope I've made it clear that I'm perfectly happy for people to have these toys and to play with them at home and hug them to themselves and so on and share them with other people who come around and play with the toys, so that's absolutely fine. They are not to make me play with these toys. I will not play with the toys. Don't bring the toys to my house. Don't say my children must play with these toys. Don't say — my toys might be a condom, here we go again — are not allowed by their toys. I'm not going to have any of that. Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation. Is that finally clear? Have I got that across? Thank you.
I am of one mind with the Reverend in saying that there has been no divine revelation. There could not be such a thing. But I'm a little disappointed in you.
Just a fraction disappointed.
But you can live with it. I can see that you can.
You're man enough, you're man enough to.
I can absolutely vouch for that.
I mean, look, I dare say the question was supposed to helpful to my side but I don't it so for two reasons. One, it's too approximate. I mean, just as you hear people say — something I think is really fatuous — there are no atheists in foxholes. You've heard it. There are very few atheists on death row, either, but I wouldn't make that a case for my side. It's just not the way I argue. I do notice that Christians, or other believers, tend to say if a baby falls 25 floors and lands with a bounce on the lawn and is unharmed they attribute it to a divine intervention and if it falls two feet off a table and cracks its skull and dies they just say that's bad luck. I have noticed that tendency and this is, I think, a version of that. The burden of proof, in any case, is not on our team, if you will. We don't say disbelief in God will make you a better person or make you more moral. We are arguing against those who say that a belief in an unprovable supernatural will make you more moral. Now that we know is not true. That we know is not true because there's not just a lot of ordinary crime committed by the faithful but there's a lot of extraordinary crime such as suicide bombing and genital mutilation and many other things that's committed because of and only because of faith. I rest my case.
No, there is no corollary, as I was careful, I think scrupulous in saying, there's no corollary of the atheists side to that.
Those who argue that religion is a source of morality have, as always, and as so far this evening, all their explaining still ahead of them and that's with 2,000 years of failure to chalk up. Pretty wet performance, isn't it?
And our tradition has no — we've never had to take anything back. We've never had to say, Look, we were teaching the children that the world was flat for too long. We'll have to change this for now. Or we've never said you'll go to limbo if your child dies unbaptized. We've had nothing of this sort on our conscience and every discovery made by independent, corroborative, disinterested research tends to support what we suspected in the first place.
That went straight past my bat.
I believe we do, for the most part, have an innate need for ceremony and ritual, yes. I think that that seems to be a finding of all anthropologists in all societies at all times. This doesn't mean that they have to take the form of, say, human sacrifice, thought some of the better and more elaborate ones have taken that form, or say the investiture of a monarch where one would be better off with a republic, and so forth. I mean, the knowledge of this needs or innatenesses is also an awareness that these impulses must be, so to say, domesticated, civilized. Actually, the best argument I know for religion, which is — perhaps I owe an apology to the gentleman I was rude to a few moments ago — which is, in a way, an atheist argument, is religion, though it's based on complete falsity and fantasy does at least give a form and a shape to people's atavistic and superstitious and barbaric and other worshiping tendencies. It domesticates and organizes them. That's what many people believe the Roman Catholic Church has been doing for a while and I would be prepared to concede that is it wasn't for the teachings on virginity, the denial of the right of contraception, and many other horror shows. They can put on a good ritual, I'll give you that but don't go believing that if you put a wafer on your tongue you're going to change the cosmos because you know, there's no truth to that at all.
Ah!
Well that's extremely handsome of you.
Yes, it is. It is.
It's more like a sacrament, actually.
It's more like a sacrament.
This is America, baby. I'm only going to be nice to people with receipts from now on. That's how moral I am.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for coming. Thank you, Dr. Turek for that very spirited opening to the evening. I should say first it's a great honor to be in the capital of the great state of Virginia. I'm, in a small way, a biographer of Thomas Jefferson and his memorial, as you know, omitted the mention of his presidencies and vice presidencies and preferred to focus on his work at the university and his authorship of the Virginia statute on religious freedom which is the embryo and basis of the first amendment to our Constitution which makes this the only country in the world that has ever decided that God and constitutional matters should be separated and it's in defense partly of that civilizational impulse that I rise this evening to satirize the idea that we're here by somebody else's permission and owe that person an explanation, which is what it is to be a theist if not a deist, at any rate. I almost never watch television and I'm usually glad that I don't, but now I'm glad that I — sometimes I'm forced by my daughter to watch Family Guy because you may have possibly seen the moment when the chubby father comes down in the morning and looks at his cereal in the bowl, accepting one of your more sophisticated challenges, and he says, Look at this, it say oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, and his daughter says, Those are Cheerios, dad. But I accept the ontological challenge and I accept it in this way: the answer to the question with which we confront ourselves tonight, or are confronted, if you prefer, does god exist, is to me, yes, it does. It must do. It must do because it is so real to those who believe in it. There are people of whom it may be said that for them God does exist, I've become perfectly persuaded to this by now. There is no form of persuasion that would make me ascent to this proposition. Some of us are born — we're born, too — in an answer to Blaise Pascal's own problem, the one that made him write his Pensees and address them to those who are so made that they cannot believe. Those of us to whom almost everything that Dr. Turek just said would be the mere equivalent of white noise. I suppose it's my job this evening to explain ontologically how that is the case. Perhaps I'll do it by force of example. Recently, very recently, in fact as little ago in time as last year, the Vatican announced that limbo, the destination of the unbaptized child soul, no longer exists. There is no such place. St. Augustine was in error, it appears, in sending so many children, at least the souls of so many unbaptized children to this destination for so long. Among the comments that I heard about this, one of the mildest, actually, was that of a woman raised in the Catholic faith whose child had died before baptism could take place who had for many years believed that that's where her unbaptized child had gone and she said, They can't tell me that place doesn't exist. It's been as real to me as anything possibly could be for so long. They've no right to tell me now that this no longer exists. Ontologically, limbo exists for those who believe in it just as God does. I'm not here to deny that. It's only a few decades now since the rival church of Rome, the Church of England, announced really no one actually goes to hell. It could be that after you die you're forbidden God's grace, but there's no real place of eternal, unending, infinite torture and torment with which those who claim the grace of God and the redemption of Jesus made a living for so many years and how do they make their living? By lying to children. Think of it: hundreds and hundreds of years of people proudly earning their keep by lying to children and terrifying them and saying that because they could do that they're morally superior to us. Reason, common sense, decency, ordinary decency rebels against this kind of mind-forged manacle, how ever charmingly or humorously it's expressed. But hell exists in the minds of several people I've spoken to just today on this campus in the intervals of other conversations. For them it's real, and I don't say that it's not. What I want to show is that it can, if it does exist, nonetheless be abolished, like many other mind-forged manacles and man-made tyrannies that confront us. And in fact, that this belief in a supreme and unalterable tyranny is the oldest enemy of our species, the oldest enemy of our intellectual freedom and our moral autonomy and must be met and must challenged and must be overthrown. I want to argue for nothing less than that. It's actually rather wonderful, isn't it, that religious authorities used to say they were infallible. Say — just take the last the Pope, just the last. I know I'm not talking with a Catholic apologist this evening, but nonetheless The Church, when people say The Church, they know which one they mean, they mean the one in Rome. The one where when Stephen Hawking was invited and was asked at the conference on The Church and science if there's anything he'd like to see in Rome while he was there. He said he'd like to see the records of the trial of Galileo. Don't please be invoking Mr. Hawking by the way as if he was a deist. The last Pope, just in the last decade of his tenure apologized. He said, We were wrong about the Jewish question. We probably shouldn't have said for so long the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ. We were probably wrong in forced conversion of the peoples of the Indies, as they were thought of — the isthmus and the southern cone of our hemisphere. We were certainly wrong — we owe an apology to Muslims for the atrocities of the crusades. We owe an apology to the Eastern Orthodox churches for the incredible butchery to which they, our fellow Christians, were subjected by us, The Roman Catholic Church. And we probably owe an apology to the Protestants for saying so many awful things about them and torturing and burning and killing them, too. So having now said that we were completely wrong and completely cruel and completely sadistic and completely violent and retarded human civilization for that many centuries in that many countries and continents, we quit and now we can go back to being infallible all over again. There are people who, on faith, will accept being spoken to in that tone of voice and in that way but I, ladies and gentlemen, am not one of them and I don't think there's any form of persuasion that should allow you to be spoken to as if you were serfs or slaves either. Proceeding with the ontology with which I began, the Aquinas point that if you can conceive of something, whether it's a ghost, a phantasm or a deity, if you can conceive of something it is, in some sense, real if it's real in your mind and showing with the obvious fallacy that has always attended that, is it nonetheless possible for an atheist to say — a proclaimed atheist to say, as I do — proclaim myself to be — that God positively can be said not to exist? No. It's a very common misunderstanding about my fraternity, sorority. I'll just take a moment to clear it up. The atheist says no persuasive argument for the existence of God has ever been advanced or adduced without convincing rebuttal. No argument in favor stands or has been found to stand the test of argument and evidence. We cannot say that we know that there could be no such entity. Among other things, we're too reverent of the extraordinary time of discovery, innovation, pushing back of the frontiers of knowledge and understanding that's taken place just in our own time to make any such remark. But, by saying this we say, I think, quite a lot. There is no valid or coherent or consistent argument that would not work, if it comes to that, for the existence of any God. Now, I noticed it was by a slight work of elision, a bit of tap dancing there that Dr. Turek went from being a deist to a theist, and then from being a theist to a Christian. Now I know he does not believe in the existence of the sun god Ra. I'm practically certain he doesn't believe in the existence of Zeus. If you'll pick up a copy of my portable atheist, a selection of the finest writings by non-believers down the years, and just turn to the three pages where Menken — H.L. Menken lists the easiest-to-name 3,000 gods that used to be worshiped and are no longer accepted to exist by anybody. You'll spare me the trouble of reading them out. No, he thinks he doesn't just know, Dr. Turek, that there is a god, he knows which one is the right one, from a potentially infinite list. Actually, from a list that's as long as the number of people there are or have ever been in the human species because if you ever argue with a theist or a deist, as I do every day, you'll find they all believe in a god of their very own. Indeed they often say a personal god. Indeed they often say a personal savior. So out of what are we reifying a concept that applies to all of us? Out of nothing but wish thinking and nonsense and fear and ignorance and above all — and I'm not quitting on this point — servility. Everyone in this room is an atheist. Everyone can name a god in which they do no believe. Let them advance the case that the one in which they believe is the superior one. Let Dr. Turek be the first person I've ever met to do that convincingly this evening and I will show him due respect. I don't think the task can actually be undertaken. Now, the same tap dancing hopes you will not notice deism and theism are quite different things. The deist argument says that there is so much order apparent in nature and in the cosmos and in the universe that it might be unwise to assume that such order has no one interested in ordering or designing it. That assumption might be an unsafe one. The philosopher Paley and his natural theology said design implies a designer. He came up with that very famous image of the watch. If you come across a watch if you're a primitive tribesperson in the Sahara, you may not know what it's for, but you know that it's not a rock or a vegetable. You know it has purpose and someone made it that way. Until quite recently, that was the default position of most intelligent people, including Mr. Jefferson who, despite his intermittent atheism, in my judgment, was a theist — I'm so sorry, was a deist, was a deist. He would debate — among the many skills he had was a very advanced level of paleontology. He would debate with the greatest paleontologists of his time, the Compte de Buffon. How comes it — how can it be that we find sea shells so high on the mountains in Virginia. How can this be? Not even the most intelligent people of that day — and it's very recent, it's an instant in historical time — had any idea how that could be. There isn't anyone in this room who wasn't educated and brought up knowing exactly how that is. It's just a shame that Jefferson and many other intelligent and humane and well-educated and literate people just couldn't see that far. He wasn't to know that Darwin was born in his day on the same day, actually in 1809 as Abraham Lincoln, the very same day the two great emancipators. Darwin, in my judgment, the greater of the two. Now we know — we know this proposition to be true, the proposition that was ridiculed so pathetically, I have to say, I thought, by Dr. Turek. There is no explanation for the origins of our species, for the origins of our cosmos, for the origins of our globe itself, there's not one explanation left which requires the existence of a deus ex machina. In every case we have a better or sufficient explanation. I think that assertion of mine will stand any challenge this evening. I'm looking forward to hearing some more of them. Of course Darwin used creationist images. He actually set out to vindicate Paley's theology, thought he could do it by his study — taxonomical study of nature. Einstein used God images when he spoke of the extraordinary majesty of the cosmos. It's in us. It's in our vocabulary. It's hard-wired in us, you might say to use images of awe-inspiring, godly, Mozartean, you might say or even Shakespearean images when talking about these things but when we come to the actually analysis of them we find that we don't need the prime mover at all and that most of the prime mover explanations, if not all of them have been positively misleading so that the deist may propose a designer and I may not be able to show you convincingly that there may not be such a person but the theist has all their work still ahead of them. From this designer, how do we get to the designer who answers prayers? Did you hear a thing, I mean, just a phrase, even an implication, even a suggestion from anything my opponent said that you could, by an argument from design, prove answered prayers? Or prove that someone born of a virgin was therefore the son of a god? Or could prove that resurrections occur and that by people being tortured to death thousands of years ago, we are now redeemed, that we are vicariously forgiven, our own offenses by human sacrifice? How does deism help you to that? It doesn't. It quite simply doesn't and cannot and the attempt to build from one to the other is a conjuring trick of a very vulgar, I think, kind. We live in the childhood of our species so when Stephen Hawking says that if we could understand the event horizon that surrounds the black hole we would, in some sense, know the mind of God, he proves that our vocabulary is still that of our infancy. He makes no concession to the idea of a theist or theocratic dispensation. I better ask now how I'm doing for time. Good, not sure I'm going to need all that. But I'd like to try and reply and fight on my feet when I can and I made some notes about what Dr. Turek had said and I feel that they were challenges to me that I would be ignoble if I didn't respond to. The first and, I thought, frankly the most egregious was this: I find it extraordinary that it can be said on a university campus, in this year of grace, that without God, humans are capable of doing anything, that there is no moral restraint upon us if we don't concur in the idea that we are the property and creation of a supreme being. I'm making the assumption that all of you check in now and then with some sort kind news outlet and have a view of what's going on in the rest of the world. Isn't it as plain as could be that those who commit the most callous, the most cruel, the most brutal, the most indiscriminate atrocities of all do so precisely because they believe they have divine permission? Shall I answer my own question? Shall I insult you by adding more? Who can't think of an example of this kind? Let me put the question in another form than I've put it in now. Every forum from Youtube to C-Span to the wireless to the print to the radio to the television and in innumerable forums to those who say that without God there can be no morality, you are to ask yourself two questions: you are to name a moral action undertaken or a moral and ethical statement made by a believer — I dare say you can do it. You are then to say that you cannot imagine a non-believer making this moral statement or undertaking this moral action. Can you think — can you now think — can any of you think — you don't have to answer, you have all night and you have my email and I've done this with everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to even lower people. You name me the ethical or moral statement that a believe can make and a non-believer cannot and there's a prize and I'll tell you about that later. Now there's a second question: think of something wicked that only a believer would be likely to do or something wicked that only a believer would be likely to say. You've already thought of it. The suicide bombing community is entirely religious. The genital mutilation community is entirely religious. I wouldn't say that the child abuse community is entirely religious, I wouldn't, but it's bidding to be entirely religious. It operates on the old Latin slogan, No child's behind left. How dare anybody — how dare anyone who speaks for religion say of us, the secular and the non-believers that we are the immoral ones. It is itself a wicked thing to say, itself and absolutely indefensible thing to say. No, the decapitation on the bus is going to be done by someone who thinks God is telling him to do it. Smerdyakov is actually the stupidest character in Dostoyevksy's novel and he's the one who makes this proposition. Everyone has to understand, everyone has to understand that it is those who feel that the divine is prompting them, who feel they are permitted anything and everything and it is though those who are the leading, the most salient, most violent and vicious opponents that the values and civilization that Thomas Jefferson stood for and promulgated. Just on the question of fine tuning, I have a number of responses. We have to postpone some of the naturalistic questions for later when I know they'll come up again. You mentioned Edwin Hubble and the way that he saw the red-light shift and saw that the universe was not just expanding, but expanding very fast, away from itself, that the Big Bang had not stopped. Lawrence Krauss, great physicist, probably the next Nobel Prize winner for — has noticed that most peoples' assumption was wrong, that though this expansion was taking place, it was thought, the rate of speed of expansion must surely be declining. People still think in Newtonian terms in this way. No, says Krauss. He's pointed out and now it's agreed by all. No, the Hubble rate of the red-light shift is increasing. The universe is dissipating itself at high speed and the speed is getting greater. What does this mean? Well, it answers the question of why is there something instead of nothing? Because now we have something. We're all here because there's something, and nothing is coming right for us. Very soon a physicist wouldn't be able to tell the Big Bang had ever taken place, so far sprung apart will the whole system be. And meanwhile, look in the sky at night and you can see the Andromeda galaxy headed straight for us on a direct collision course. Who designed that? Who made it certain that every other planet in our solar system is either too hot or too cold to support life, as is most of our own planet, and that in just one tiny, irrelevant solar system already condemned to heat death and implosion. Some design, wouldn't you say? But these are just the paltering, minor objections that I have to the theistic world view. The main one is the one with which I began. Religion — theism, not deism, theism, I underline — theism says that all our manifold problems — what is the good, how shall we live it, how shall we know it, how to explain suffering, how to confront the possibility of our own molecular irrelevance, all these question that must disturb and detain us all — can be solves by referring them upward to a totalitarian judgment, to an absolutist monarch — the other thing that the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom was supposed to rebut, repudiate, disown.
I promise you, 30 seconds. There is no totalitarian solution to these problems. There is no big brother in the sky. It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us, waking and sleeping, who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, who can — thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are, and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true it to wish to live as an abject slave. It is a wonderful thing, it is a wonderful thing, in my submission, that we now have enough information, enough intelligence, and I hope, enough intellectual and moral courage to say that this ghastly proposition is founded on a lie and to celebrate that fact and I invite you to join me in doing so. Thank you.
Well I think I'll just invite Dr. Turek to do the following: make available to us on a sheet of paper, which I'm sure he has, the thesaurus of quotations that he's found from this and that, scientists and physicists and natural scientists and so forth, and you'll find when you read them, when you look at them — I was writing them down as he went through them — all of these are statements of uncertainty. All of them. They're statements of all we know is how little we know. That's been, for many years, my definition of an educated person, someone who knows enough to know how ignorant they are. It's actually is the only — it's not my own original definition, it comes from the Greek, but it's the only definition that works and no one working and toiling in the field of science could possibly say anything less or more of themselves, especially at a time like this, but, there you have it right away. The theistic and deistic explanation has to be based on a certainty that there is a supervising and, if you want to be a theist, a caring and intervening creator who manages these matters and there hasn't been a single sentence so far from Dr. Turek in support of that proposition. Let me give you an example. If you — do you — the event horizon of Stephen Hawking that I just mentioned — I'll take the cosmological one, just to begin with — the event horizon is the lip of the black hole. It's where the — suppose you could travel towards a black hole and see it and see the lip of it and notice it before you went in and over and down, that's what's known as the event horizon if it exists. Hawking had a gravely ill colleague in Cambridge who said if he knew he was definitely going to die, that's the way he'd like to go, falling into the event horizon lip of the black hole because in theory you'd be able to see the past and the future and time, except you wouldn't have quite enough time to do so. But, that would be a grand way to check out if you were a physicist. Turn away from this, says the — turn away from that — these incredible, majestic, awe-inspiring thoughts, say the theists. Think about the burning bush instead. Think about the trivial miracles witnessed by sheep herding peasants in Bronze Age Palestine and think about the death that they feel that we should incur for their sins. It was stated by Dr. Turek that the sins of these people, the transgressions of these people and the debt they owe their creator bind all of us as sinners. What a shame we're not perfect. What a shame there's nothing we can do about it. What a shame we're created already in prison and have to earn our emancipation. I tell you again, this is servility to the ultimate power. Now, there are people in this audience much better equipped than I to say that there is so far nothing in our natural world — to move away from the cosmological — there is nothing in our natural world, the globe we live on, that cannot be explained by random mutation combined with evolution by natural selection. Nothing works without that assumption. Everything works with it. There are lots of things that remain to be decided. But it's not a theory, or not just one. It does work, it is operational. It does not require a prime mover. Ockham's razor says we should dispose of unnecessary, needless assumptions and that's what I propose we do in this case. I'll put it another way: how long would you say Homo sapiens has been on the planet? Francis — not Crick, excuse me, the author of the — the supervisor of the human genome project — Collins, my new best friend and occasional debating enemy, thinks not more than half a million years. Richard Dawkins thinks it could be as much as three quarters of a million. I can sink the number actually, if you like. We know that we left — the species left Africa about 75,000 years ago, having probably shrunk down to about two or three thousand people as a result of a terrible climactic disturbance, probably from Indonesia, probably from a predecessor of Krakatoa, which meant that we were this close to joining the 99.8 percent of all species every living on the surface of this planet who became extinct. Some design, by the way. Profuse creation of millions and millions and millions of life forms all to be wiped out with not even anyone to testify to their previous existence. We nearly joined that lot, managed to get out of it just in time. Let's call it — I don't want Francis' million or half a million or Richard Dawkins' 75,000, whichever way — just give me that amount of time. Suppose we've only been around for 75,000 years. Monotheism — Christianity, Judaism, Islam — shows up, what, four or five thousand years ago at the most. So if you give me my most microscopically small assumption of human existence, for at least 70,000 years heaven watches as the human species is born, dies, usually of its teeth, usually at about 20, usually its infants having about a 9, 10, 2 percent chance of living. You can — I don't have to draw you a picture — watches this with indifference. Thousands and thousands of generations, miserable, illiterate, starving, hungry. To say nothing of the wars they'll fight with each other, to say nothing of the cruelties they will inflict as well as the ones they will suffer just from existence and only three or four, perhaps five thousand years ago heaven decides it's enough of that, it's time for an intervention, and the best way to do it would be in the most primitive part of the Middle East. Not in China where people can read and have looked at telescopes. No, in the most primitive part of the Middle East basically by offering human sacrifice to them. This is a doctrine that cannot be believed by anyone who studied anything scientific, anything historical, anything archaeological, anything paleological, anything biological. No, can't be believed by anyone. It can be only be believed by someone who wants to be a play thing and a slave of a pitiless, totalitarian power. How glad we should be that the evidence for this ghastly entity is nil. Good. Thanks.
That's very generous.
How many times do we do that?
Wouldn't — could I just propose, unless you really have three that you're dying to — I don't have three I'm trying to duck, but that seems a long time for the audience to have to wait, it seems to me. Could we do two, maybe, and get to their questions?
You have six? I'm your witness then.
Ok.
Well, we don't know — I remember being asked by one of my children once when they said, Well, what was there at the Big Bang? and I said, Well you have to imagine, — this shows how poverty-stricken our own vocabulary is and I suspect how poverty-stricken our own capacity is. In other words, I think there are some things not that we don't understand or know but that we cannot so we're reduced to sort of primitive images — but I said, Suppose you picture all of matter, the whole matter, condensed into — I got this from Hawking, I think, or one of his colleagues — condensed into something like a very small, dense, black suitcase of the kind you see people carrying money in crime films and it's about to fly open. That's what you'd have to be able to — and everything that's ever going to be is inside that. That was the best I could do and I don't think many people could do, if I do say so myself, that much better. But I was completely unhorsed because the kid said, Well, what was outside the suitcase? and I thought well, I can't — I can't do that and I don't know anyone who can. And that, in a way, would be my whole point. I don't have to know, you do. You're the one who says you know, not me.
The theist or the deist say, Oh, come one, we know this is only possible with an author. It's only possible with a creator. It's only possible with a master and commander. It's only possibly with a dictator. You're welcome, I don't need five minutes.
Don't say being. What ground do you have to say being?
No you don't.
No you do not.
Where are you getting this choice from?
How do you get — I can answer the same question in the way I did before — how do you get so much nothing from something? You look into the night sky if you're in, say, the Carmel peninsula — you can't do it from many parts of Virginia now, but you are in certain parts of California, as I was just recently — you can look into the night sky and see the universe is blowing up and bursting into flames every night of the week, several times. They had something and it's all nothing now. Who's the author of that? Who mandated that? Who's the creator of that? Who's the dictator who demands that sacrifice?
You're making a rod for your own back here.
Oh, they do?
Wait, wait, wait, wait...
Sorry...
Do the religious among you — excuse me — did the religious among you, ladies and gentlemen, to understand, I did not, that there will be an intervention to make an exception in our case, that this will not happen to our cosmos, that God will prevent the heat death of...?
I had no idea. I had no idea. It's...
Have it your way. It sounds fatuous to me, I've got to say.
You — I'm not the one who has to answer the question. Excuse me, you're the one who has to answer it. You're the one who claims to know. You say there was a creation moment and a creator. I want to know why you're changing the subject and saying to me how do I not know this when you're the one who has all the information.
I also want to know — no, I also want to know this: I want to know what sources you have that are not available to me. How do you know that an intervention will occur to prevent the entropy and implosion and destruction of our solar system?
Well it's...
Is this an artificial separation?
It doesn't entail that belief, no. But it makes it...
It makes it seem a very capricious designer. Shall we say — rather, as I said, it's an old verse of Fulke Greville's: Created sick, commanded to be well. Why would people be told, Ok, I can create you but I'm going to create you with original sin, misery, shame, death of children, disease and so on, just to see if you can pass a test that would mean I might not send you to hell. I don't say that that didn't happen. I say that I'm very glad that the evidence for it is very scanty. And I accuse those of who do believe it, and I can't have been surely misunderstood on this point, of having — harboring a very sinister desire to live in a totalitarian system.
The desire to be a slave.
Masochism.
I regard masochism...
I'll say that I think masochism is a sinister and creepy impulse, yes.
Alright. I won't take a minute to ask. In the — I don't just support and try and help out those who dissent from the ridiculous belief of Christianity, the horrible idea of vicarious redemption. In other words, the idea that by watching another person suffer, an innocent person suffer, that you could be freed, not just from your debts or your sins, but your responsibilities. You could cast your sins on a scapegoat. I don't just oppose that disgusting belief, I oppose it for the Judaism from which it's plagiarized and the Islam that plagiarizes from it and I give publicity and exposure whenever I can to those who were brave enough in old times to oppose this nightmarish belief. And one of the great opponents of the Islamic totalitarianism in ancient Persia was the great Omar Khayyam, perhaps the greatest poet of all Persia, whose Rubaiyat is known at least to some of you and my favorite verse of this comes from the Robert translation and it takes the form of a question — the quatrain is in the form of a question. It says, And do you think that onto such as you, a maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew, God gave a secret and denied it me? Well, well, what matters it? Believe that too. This magnificent astronomer and scientist and physician and humanist of Persia who opposed the cruel, sadistic, verminous, ignorant Mullahs of his day, I borrow the question: what is your authority for saying that you know something that I don't?
And has to come again.
How convenient.
Well, I got him to say it. You see, if we were only discussing ontological questions that would be all very well and it could be quite amusing. I could say that you require a higher degree of standard of proof for your proposition than I perhaps do for mine and you'd probably accept that, and so forth, and we could go back and forth. We'd be paltering again with the essence of the matter which is this: that the difference between the theist and the deist is as follows: the deist says it make not make some kind of sense without a designer. The theist says, When I tell you what to do, Christopher, I have God on my side. The deist says he can tell what God wants of me, what length I should shave off the end of my penis, if I'm a boy or have a male child, or off the clitoris if it's a female child. He knows to the exactitude what the proportions of that should be, what the diet should be, what the dietary laws ought to be, who I should sleep with and in what position and various other — you can — and since God doesn't ever directly appear and say, Do it this way, it's done for Him, and this is really convenient, by human representatives who claim to act in His name. So that's why I think your standard of proof should be a great deal higher because if you — the reason this point is important to you is because it would mean real power in the only world that actually exists, which is the material world, of you over me. And you wonder why I'm not keen.
That sounds like casuistry to me but I certainly think that everything that I am capable of thinking, saying, feeling, and so forth, does depend on my continued existence as a, what should we say, a mass of molecules, or... Yeah I — shoot me in the head and I can't go on like this. And I won't be coming back to bother you, either.
Nor am I going anywhere after that's happened.
And I don't wish it otherwise, by the way. I don't wish otherwise. Sir.
Would that that were the case.
Well, it's a false distinction. I mean, I don't — that's not what I say. I mean, I say that the great abortive agent is, I'd say, nature. I don't say God. Of course, God does not decide that so many pregnancies are not carried to full term. Nature knows, in the case of our species, as with every other mammal and primate, that some fetuses are not going to make it and flushes them out. That's just a brute fact. We wouldn't be here if that wasn't the case because we are, as you know, adapted biologically to an environment which we've abandoned, The Savana. That's why we have appendices that are designed for grass eaters. You know all this, it's all very well-knowable. You can't be having of sickly, half-baked children and get away from the predators. So nature is the great abortive agent. I certainly don't blame God for it. I do, as a humanist, believe that the concept unborn child is a real one and I think the concept is underlined by all the recent findings of embryology about the early viability of a well-conceived human baby, one that isn't going to be critically deformed, or even some that are will be able to survive outside the womb earlier and earlier and earlier and I see that date only being pushed back and I feel the responsibility to consider the occupant of the womb as a candidate member of society in the future and thus to say that it cannot be only the responsibility of the woman to decide upon it, that it's a social question and an ethical and a moral one and I say this as someone who has no supernatural belief. So, your question ought to have been this: how do I have any ethical opinions since I don't believe that I'm created and I don't believe I'm going to heaven?
Right, but ok, but I mean — isn't it entailed by it? Have I — well I appeal to the audience, have I not answered the question about the termination of pregnancy?
Which bit have I not answered? You'd better prompt me, then.
Well I didn't — it isn't according to me. I don't say God does that.
Nature does that.
Yes.
Well once again, I'm sorry if my work so obscure. I don't say that I have a moral right to terminate a pregnancy. I have given all the reasons that I think hedge that question ethically and morally very sternly, very stringently. And in any case it's not like saying that every living child of the Amalekites should be destroyed and an injunction by God to Moses to say he's been too merciful and he spared too many children and enslaved too few women and didn't make the genocide complete. I'm sorry I've never been accused of and I expect not to be, if I'm lucky enough in my life, of any such thing. And the idea there's a moral equivalence between the two or handling the really difficult question of an unviable fetus and what should be done about it isn't a moral equivalence at all.
No, but I think — no, but I think the presumption — I've long said that the presumption is that the unborn entity has a right on its side and that every effort should be made to see if it can be preserved and I think that's an ethical imperative. What I do say in the book is I think The Roman Catholic Church makes this argument immoral when it could be a moral one by saying that contraception is not going to be allowed, by saying that contraception is the moral equivalent of abortion. In other words to say that contraception is also murder, which is a nonsensical and disproportionate position. I quote some serious Catholics in my book — William F. Buckley the late is one, is another one — by saying if The Church says that contraception and abortion are morally the same, it degrades the opposition to abortion. And by making absurd arguments, as it has in the past, Aquinas believed every single sperm contained a micro embryo inside it and thus that, if you like, I hope I don't offend anyone, handjobs are genocide. As for blow jobs, don't start. That an ectopic pregnancy, in others words, a direct threat to the life of the mother, a Fallopian tube pregnancy is, instead of a direct threat to the life of the mother and an obvious no-starter for a human embryo, because that's going anyway, is someone who should be allowed to vote. This is nonsense. It's casuistry. It's immoral. It's superstition and it prevents people from thinking seriously about matters that humanism can decide for itself, for heaven's sake, without any supernatural intervention.
Oh, well, since I apparently I answered your last question with a question of my own I'll make it my question to you. I'm very keen to know how it is that you, in a sense, that you dare to say that without a belief in religion I would have no source for ethical or moral.
You seem to hint at it.
Did he not?
So that — just if I — ok, good. So that if I say that for me it's enough to be willing to love my fellow man and perhaps hope that my fellow man or woman will give me some of the same consideration in return and that, after all, the Samaritan, of whom we've all heard, was the only one to help after the priests and Levites had passed by and the Samaritan also, though he's talked of by Jesus, can't have been a Christian because he appears in a story told by Jesus so there can't be any Christianity before that. Somehow he knew the moral thing to do was to help his fellow person without religious instruction.
And that that's actually the whole point of the parable, though it's not the way it's usually told.
And this was only available to us 2,000 year ago?
You'll have to let me press you a little bit on that. I mean, William Hewitt Gladstone spent a huge amount of his life — and he was a great scholar of Latin and Greek — showing that every one of the Greek Socratic and other moral precepts, all they were were just prefigurations of Christianity. This was the best the Greeks could do before Jesus arrived.
They couldn't face the idea that these solidarities and moralities and understandings are innate in people and don't require divine permission. I just have to ask you, if you can do it plainly, which side do you come down on, do you think we need divine permission to act humanly to each other?
Suppose that we were having this discussion before the existence of molecules was understood.
No, it's not because the discussion about where does the good come from was being conducted before Lucretius developed the atomic theory, before Democritus and Epicurus, I should better say, understood that the whole world was made up of atoms and molecules. Before that was known, people were arguing why do we behave one way to our fellows and we call it good and another way and we call it wicked?
The molecular — I don't think you can build in a molecular distraction to that.
Well, did I not just acquit myself of that charge and say that the argument preceeds the knowledge of the atomic and molecular structure.
Not that I think, by the way, that the atomic and molecular structure is irrelevant and it could be that we might find out that there are, who knows, pheremones or this or other phenomena that do have an influence on our moral conditioning. There still wouldn't, to a morally normal person, relieve them of the responsibility of saying that I feel I know what's right. I feel some things my children don't need to be told, they already know.
Whereas to tell a child, You go to this church which means you'll go to heaven but your little playmates don't go to that church and therefore will go to hell, seems to me to be an unpleasant thing to be saying.
Maybe I'm in a minority.
Actually, an evil thing to be saying...
That's something only a religious person would dream of saying.
Religion. And morality — to answer your next question, morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
You're saying that Hitler was a humanist?
I've lived to hear it said.
And in Virginia. Hitler was a Catholic.
Hitler was a Catholic, so was Mussolini.
Both of them had an official political concordat with the Catholic churches. Both of them wanted the worship of themselves as well as of God.
And their third main ally, Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, not content just to be theocratic, was himself a god. So anyone who says that fascism and Nazism were secular is an ignoramus on a gigantic scale.
I'm not going to be called a Hitlerite because I'm a humanist let's get that clear.
This question's been asked — Socrates answered it like this, when he was on trial for his life — accused of blasphemy, by the way — he said that he had an inner daimon, was the way he put it, not a demon, but a daimon, an inner spirit, an inner critic, a conscience would be one way of putting it, and that he knew enough to know, even when he was making the best speech of his life, that if he was making a point that was somehow dishonest or incomplete or shady, the daimon would tell him, Yeah that was clever, but you shouldn't have tried it. He knew. Any person of average moral equipment has the same knowledge. I hope you'll — if you don't I'm very sorry for you. Adam Smith called it the internal witness who we all have to have a conversation with all the time. It's been — C. S. Lewis decided to call it conscience and to attribute it to the divine but he didn't improve on what Adam Smith said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments or what Adam Smith said when standing trial for his own life. It's been sometimes colloquially defined as why do people behave well when nobody's looking? I don't believe there's anyone in this hall who doesn't know what I mean by that. Why, when it won't do you any good when you decide, I could've kept that wallet I found in the back of the cab seat, but I'm not, I'm going to turn it in and see — find its real possessor. There are those people to whom those thoughts do not occur, who are deaf to that idea, who only think of themselves, who wouldn't worry about the internal daimon or censor or companion and there are, of course, people who only get pleasure from being unpleasant to other people and inflicting cruelty on them. The first group we call the sociopathic and the second group we call the psychopathic. My only — they occur in nature and in society. My only problem is with those who think we're all made in the image of God, the one explanation that absolutely doesn't work at all, that gets you no where, that explains nothing.
Oh really?
Well my question is this: would anyone in the audience like to join this conversation?
Yeah, I am.
Well, I can only answer for myself. What cheers me up? I suppose mainly gloating over the misfortunes of other people. I guess that...
I guess that has to be — yeah, mainly crowing over the miseries of others. It doesn't always work but it never completely fails. And then there's irony. There's irony and — which is the gin in the Campari, you know, the cream in the coffee. Sex can have diminishing returns but it's amazing. No, that's pretty much it, then it's clear onto the grave.
And has to come again because He didn't get it right the first time. I agree with you that the grammar of the question is wrong but for a different reason. I don't see what's moral about Christian preaching. For example, apart from the horrible idea of vicarious redemption — I'll say it again in case I missed you the first time what I mean by that — I could pay your debt, even if I didn't know you. If I was a friend I could say, You're in debt? I'll pay. In extreme cases people have been known to say, I'll serve your sentence in prison. I'll do that for you. What I cannot do is relieve you of your responsibility. I can't say, Throw your sins on me, they'll melt away. Immoral. People are not allowed to be, you're not entitled to be relieved of your responsibilities. And vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is a very primitive and horrible scapegoating idea that belongs to the barbaric period of human history.
Completely it's own — no, not all pardons, I didn't say that. I said vicarious redemption is an immoral doctrine. It's also immoral of the Nazarene to say, Take no thought for the morrow. Not to clothe, not to eat, not to invest, leave your family, leave your children, leave everything, give up the world, no investment, no thrift, no thought for the future, just follow me. That's only moral if you are a sure believer in the idea that the world is about to come to an end, which was the case with this apocalyptic.
He said the prophecy is that the world is coming to an end real soon. There's no point in caring about it or anything else. That's not a moral preachment to me at all. There are many other ways in which I fail to see any bad behavior can ever be described as unchristian. And of course it's completely laughable to say Christians build hospitals. Just as many Christians have bombed hospitals that have built them and as many Muslims have built hospitals as Christians have and as many Babylonians have built great buildings as Christians have. If that's the best you can do, that's the best you can do.
Ah.
Well, there are two — I have two responses to that. One is what would she have said before she knew about DNA?
Yes, that's right.
That's correct.
That's correct, and Christianity thought it could explain everything and then it found out more things...
Wait, it's a very simple — same as your point about molecules that I said that these arguments predate Epicurus, Lucretius and the atomic theory. Christianity used to say it can explain everything. All you need to know is that there's an all-powerful, all-loving, all-intervening, all-knowing, omniscient god. Ok, well then wait, wouldn't DNA explain more? Ah, well that only shows that God's even cleverer than we thought. So it's an infinitely expanding tautology. There are many — there are some Christians who accept, in fact it was actually a Catholic physicist at The Univerity of Louvain in Belgium, who first came up with the idea of what we now call the Big Bang. And most popes, not all, most popes have accepted it. Some thought of it as a challenge to Christianity. The Pope Leo, who he went to — I can't think of the scientist's name for a second, maybe someone here can help me — he went to the pope and said, Looks like this is how things started, and the pope said, If you like, I'll make it dogma that every Catholic has to believe it, and he said, That would slightly be missing the point Your Holiness.
Well, because it is true to say that religion, as Stephen Jay Gould said, that religion and science belong to non-overlapping magisteria. I think these magistria are, in many ways, incompatible and in many ways irreconcilable but it is no more true to say that the existence of the complexity of DNA shows that God was more ingenious than we thought than it is to say that it necessarily shows by its self-revealing ingenuity that we don't need the hypothesis of God. Both of these positions would be, in my opinion, somewhat reductionist, though I would have to say that I think the second one is more persuasive and more elegant.
Will that do?
No, religion says it does know, excuse me.
Religion is not a process of scientific inquiry. Religion is an affirmation of faith. It says it already knows.
It says it already knows.
And you have scientific evidence for the view that an intervention will occur to prevent the implosion.
I can't forget it.
It's the only thing you've said all evening that I'm going to remember.
No, no. I mean, don't say...
Look, do yourself and your faith the honor of saying it's faith.
Don't say it's science based. You won't get away with it.
No.
No, because a miracle — a miracle is a...
Very good. Now, gosh — a sentence or two from David Hume on miracles would clear all of this up.
A sentence of two from David Hume would correct what you said. A miracle is defined not as part of the natural order but as a suspension of the natural order.
You can't say of the Big Bang, which is the foundation of the natural order, that it's a suspension of what it starts. You may not do that. However, if you meet someone in the street who you yesterday saw executed, you can say either that an extraordinary miracle has occurred or that you are under a very grave misapprehension and David Hume's logic on this, I think, is quite irrefutable. He says, What is more likely, that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor, and in a way that you approve, or that you've made a mistake? And in each case you must — and especially if you didn't see it yourself and you're hearing it from someone who says that they did. I would go further and say the following: I'll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who's mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say — I don't say that's impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn't prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The daughter of Jairus was raised, didn't say a thing about what she'd been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I'll give you all the miracles and you'll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.
There's a — I mean, I'm just going to put my — repose my trust in the audience here. There's an obvious difference between a singularity and a miracle. And I — I mean, I think it would be embarrassing to try and explain it. It would be patronizing to...
Well, I'm happy to agree with that. I think that's true. But I have to add only that there are — we've all — some of us have been lucky enough to see it or meet people who've done it and all of us have read about it — there are people who will, when a grenade is lobbed through the window throw themselves onto it before it can blow up. It does happen. There are people who die under torture without giving away the whereabouts of their comrades. There are people who go do bomb disposal work and sit diffusing a huge device. They know that at any minute — it does happen. It's always happened. It's common to every known human society, it's a part of every heroic narrative of every known society that's ever been. Those who do it are honored. They are sung as we say — in the times when there was no literate — no literal record — and it doesn't require divine sanction or permission. It is, we're proud to say, if not innate in us — we'd be too humble to say that — it's innate in our species. It's something we can all aspire to.
We do not get it from Big Brother. If we did that would degrade it. It would mean it wasn't heroic, it wasn't brave, it wasn't individual, it wasn't exemplary — didn't deserve anything.
Well, because it would be in the hope either of a reward from Big Brother or for fear of punishment from it. It would abolish morality.
It destroys ethics. It means the individual example is dust. How many more times do I have to say this?
Wait a second, It's ok, I already know some people will clap at anything. Are you — do you mean to say that the human — that the body of a mammal or primate is not a chemical composition?
Oh good.
Why do act as if this has only just been discovered and as if it's a theological point?
I say that in spite of — No, I would rather say that in spite of the fact that I am a primate — or, notwithstanding, perhaps I'd better say, that I am a primate, nonetheless I'm capable of thinking about heroism, self-sacrifice, example and so forth.
Don't turn to me and say, How can you say that and be a primate?
I'm a primate. I can't alter the fact that I'm a primate. I can conceal it better than some people can.
That's the best I can do.
You're a primate as well and you'll agree, both of us, that it shows, ok?
In most of the debates — I wish I had though of this this evening, actually. In most of the debates I've taken part in, and I wish I had thought of it this evening too, we took a vote before the debate, including registering the undecided and then had one and the end, just to see — basically to see where the undecided had gone and I was always surprised by how many people had come or at least were willing to consider themselves as having come with an open mind. I — my view is this: very few people have that much difficulty thinking of themselves as objects of a divine plan. The great advantage religion has is our own solipsism. It's the same as people who don't really believe in astrology but they'll take a quick peek to see what's happening to Taurus today and if it says, Well, might be a good time for a flutter on the stock exchange, not to think, Hang on, the planets don't really move to determine my investments, but maybe, you know... It's not impossible it could all be about me. I think about it quite a lot actually because I have the same birthday as Thomas Jefferson, April the thirteenth, except that I don't because he was born under the old calendar and I think though it says on his tomb he was born on the thirteenth of April, he was actually born on something like the twenty-fifth of April, under the old calendar. I've often wondered how the horoscope people manage the transition, the time when everyone had to change which star sign they were. I dare say it got done easily enough. Religion works for most people because to have — people, in a sense, horribly do want it to be true, that they are supervised, that God looks out for them, that they might be rewarded or that they might be punished. It has this terrible, servile advantage. That's why I consider it to be morally superior to be an atheist, to say I would rather live without that ghastly master-slave mentality.
I could only say that if there was — I'm very relieved to find, having studied what I think of as the best evidence and arguments from physicists, biologists, paleontologists, students of mythology, history, archaeology and so on, very relieved to find that there's no evidence for it at all. If I thought it was true, I would consider myself condemned to live under a tyranny and I've spent my entire life repudiating that idea and helping, I hope, others to think the same. But, there is not a chance, of course, there isn't a single chance that anyone will find that, hey, after all, we can definitely know that a virgin conceived or that a condemned felon walked again and it's quite absurd for anyone to argue in scientific terms as if any of that is even thinkable. What I don't understand — I suppose I should close by — is why anybody should be so contemptuous, I suppose is the word, or insecure about their own faith as not to call it that. Did you hear him say at any point this evening, This is my faith. I believe it inspite of the evidence to the contrary. I lay my life on it. I believe I'm redeemed by it. I think I will live eternally because — no, he has no confidence to say anything like that. Instead he tried to mix it up in an area in scientific inquiry where he's no more competent than, hey, even I am. And that is where he made his big mistake. Thanks.
Well, I thought I just wrapped.
Gosh. When asked what I think the most erotic words in the language I sometimes think, when asked what I think are the most erotic words in the language, I sometimes think slowly, captive audience. No, you know what? If I hadn't made my case by now, brothers and sisters, I don't think I will make it in the next five. I ask you to excuse me. If anyone thinks that there's a question, having — who's heard me, that thinks there's a question that I answered poorly or inadequately, or badly or failed to answer at all and would like to challenge me I'd happily give them five minutes but I have, so to say, shot my bolt otherwise. Is there anyone who would like to challenge me? Yes? Please.
Well it's not my — it isn't my whole career, for one thing. It's become a major preoccupation of my life though in the last eight or nine years, especially since September 11, 2001 to try and help generate an opposition to theocracy and its depredations. That is now probably my main political preoccupation, to help people in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Israel resist those who sincerely want to encompass the destruction of civilization and sincerely believe they have God on their side in wanting to do so. A thing — maybe I will take a few minutes just to say something that I find repulsive about, especially monotheistic, Messianic religion. With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over. Whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real, authentic spokemen, not the sort of pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it, those who talk — there was a famous spokesmen for this in Virginia until recently, about the rapture say that those of us who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind. If we're in a car, it's your lookout, that car won't have a driver anymore. If you're a pilot, that's your lookout, that plane will crash. We will be with Jesus and the rest of you can go straight to hell. The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity — if you don't believe that there is to be an apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnatioan, a final one, then you're not really a believer, and their contempt for things of this world shows through all of them. It's well put in an old rhyme from an English exclusive bretheren sect. It says that, We are the pure and chosen few and all the rest are damned. There's room enough in hell for you, we don't want heaven crammed. You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk. They cannot wait, they cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the world. They can't wait for, what I would call without ambiguity, a final solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers, paid for often by American tax dollars, deciding that if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land and all the non-Jews out of it then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of the Messiah and there are Christians in this country who consider it their job to help this happen so that Armageddon can occur so that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilization and trying to acquire learning and knowledge and health and medicine and to push back — can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over. That, to me, is a hideous thing in eschatological terms and end time terms on its own, hateful idea, hateful practice and a hateful theory but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it, who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes, ethnicities, who say — who openly say they love death more than we love life and who are betting that with God on their side, they're right about that. So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, I'm not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can't be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can't be good to one another, it means we can't think without this. We must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of sado-masochism and the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can't wait to bring it on. I say this is evil. And though I do, some nights, stay at home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity. Thank you.
First, because it's based on a fantastic illusion. Let's say that the consensus is that our species, we being the higher primates, Homo sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says it may be 100,000; Richard Dawkins thinks maybe quarter of a million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be Christian you have to believe that for 98,000 years our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25, dying of their teeth, famine, struggle, indigenous war, suffering, misery, all of that. For 98,000 heaven watches it with complete indifference and then 2,000 years ago thinks, That's enough of that, we should — it's time to intervene. The best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Not — don't let's appear to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization, let's go the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am glad this is the case? To get to the point of — the wrongness in the other sense of Christianity. Because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, that is the one of vicarious redemption: You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay our debt if I love you; I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much, I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away because I can't abolish your responsibility and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish thinking and I don't think wish thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important of all, the word love. By making love compulsory, by saying you must love. You must love your neighbor as yourself, something you can't actually do. We'll always fall short so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear, that is to say a supreme being, an eternal father. Someone of whom you must be afraid but who you must love him too. If you fail in this duty, you're, again, a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy and that brings me to the final objection and I'll condense it, Dr. Olasky, which is this is a totalitarian system. If there was a god who could do these things and demand these things of us and who was eternal and unchanging, we would be living under a dictatorship from which there was no appeal and one that could never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round — and I could say more — it's an excellent thing that there's absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.
Christopher. Would you mind calling me Christopher? I'm sorry, it's only because it's my name.
Thank you.
Very well.
Now, here we are. I haven't known Douglas Wilson for very long, but he does strike me as a very sweet and decent and generous and humane person and thus he obviously doesn't know how insulting, how rude he's just been. Not just to me...
Not just to me — not just to your humble servant the carjacker, but to you also, ladies and gentlemen. I think it's a fantastically rude thing to say that if it wasn't for Christianity, I and you wouldn't know right from wrong. It's an extraordinary thing to say. The awareness of the difference between right and wrong is innate in human beings and it can be found and noticed, being observed and enforced and upheld in societies where Christianity has never yet penetrated. To say that no one — let me give an example from the Old Testament. The story, as you know, the wandering in the Sinai and the wandering in the desert is all made up, it's a Jewish foundational myth but, the Ten Commandments, four or five of which do actually contain moral injunctions, some of them are nonsensical, some of them are theocratic, some of them are self-contradictory, but the ones that say, on the whole, Avoid murder, theft, and perjury, are, I would consider, sound and I would dare say every in this room would without necessarily having to be told. Are we to assume that my mother's ancestors, the ancient Jewish people, got all the way to Mount Sinai under the impression that murder, theft, and perjury were all ok? And only when told from on high, Stop with that! suddenly thought maybe they are such bad ideas after all. Of course not. There couldn't have been a Jewish society or enough Jewish solidarity to get them that far if they, for one thing, if they thought these things were fine until God says that they are. This is not how morality is formed at all. To the contrary, as far as I can tell, religion gets its morality from humans. It's a feedback loop and then it says — tells them to think of things that aren't sins as if they were. For example, coveting your neighbor's goods, a perfectly healthy thing to do. The ambition of jealousy and emulation is a necessary spur to innovation and to progress. Then described, quite ludicrously, as a sin and you're made to feel guilty about it when you shouldn't. That's the irrational superimposition on ordinary human solidarity and morality that is attempted by all religion, not just Christianity.
To the contrary. I said they had those things without being told by God.
Just to go back to that episode in Sinai: I say that the knowledge that murder, theft, and perjury should be avoided was already present in Jewish and every other known society before the injunctions come from heaven and these injunctions, these are the religious ones, the ones that only God could tell you: Well, you've got to circumcise your children, you have to mutilate your children's genitals; you have to avoid eating pigs; you have to be prepared — in fact you are enjoined to slay the Amalekites down to the last child and only keep a few young women alive for purposes better imagined than described, and do the same to the Mideonites and others — genocide is made a holy obligation. That's the added bit, that's what religion adds to morality. It negates it, in other words. The Golden Rule, so called, the one that any--most children don't have to be taught — in other words, don't treat other people as you wouldn't want to be treated yourself, or more positively, treat others as you would wish them to treat you — certainly appears in The Analects of Confucius, a very long time ago. Most people would not say Confucionism was really a religion. It also appears — it's been beautifully expressed by Rabbi Hillel, a Babylonian rabbi. Christianity adds absolutely nothing, in other words, to our awareness of the difference between good and evil but does shift a lot of good things into the evil side and a lot of evil things into the good side and ends up in a universe of howling moral confusion.
Well let me rush to seize the outstretched paw there. And, while we're on the subject of Lewis — one of my least favorite authors — Lewis does make a very, very important observation, I would call it a concession as a matter of fact, where he says there's one tone of voice he can't stand hearing, and you hear it a lot, it was very much present in the work of a great hero of mine, his biographer I am, Thomas Jefferson, say Christianity may not be theologically true but Jesus was a wonderful, morally exemplary human being with extremely lovely preachments that deserve attention whether you believe in the Gospel or not. C. S. Lewis quite rightly says that's absolutely ridiculous. That's the one thing you cannot say, because if this man was not the son of God then the things that He was saying were absolutely immoral, some of them wicked or mad. They make no sense or they make sense only as injunctions to do evil. As for example: Take no thought for the morrow, care not to clothe or to eat, don't worry about your family, leave your family, who cares about your children, don't invest, don't grow, don't sew, there's no point. It's all coming to an end very soon. The kingdom of God is coming, which he thought would be in the lifetime of his disciples. Then it does make sense, of course. Who cares then? But otherwise it would be an immoral preachment. So I think we've already made quite a lot of progress in that I think in front of most audiences, this one's probably more qualified on the matter — in front of most audiences, morality is talked about as if it was what innate and what was common to us and religion is judged by whether it is moral or not where as, as Doug Wilson points out, that's not true.
That works for me. No, let's bring it on.
That Christians have done? I'm sure. Yes, I know people who I regard as nicer than myself who do what they do, it seems to me, because they are Christian. I like to think they would do it — they'd be that way if there had never been any Christianity and I think there's every possibility that that is so. I can't deny that they give me the impression and they say to themselves that this is because of their faith.
That, I have to say I think there's a slight element of casuistry there in that, you say if an immoral thing was done by a Christian that would mean — because the person was a Christian — that would mean because it was immoral it couldn't have been Christian by definition. So, that's a little too convenient, isn't it?
For example, the injunction to spread the news of Christianity, to prosthelytize, has in the hands of, perhaps not of your church but, shall I say the Roman Catholic Church, led to appalling crimes being committed which the Church itself is said to have apologized for.
They can't say they didn't do this for Jesus or in the name of God.
Well, you see, this is the difficulty that I'll have to bring up now. You, I think, are not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, but if you were one you would believe his Holiness the Pope is the vicar of Christ on earth and is chosen by God for that job so and order given by the Pope does rather commit a Catholic to say that, I'm doing this for Christianity. So when they say that all Jews are collectively responsible for the murder of Christ, as they did until 1964, that's in the name of God as far as anyone can tell. Now if, as I suspect, you don't believe that, what I want to know is how do you know that you're a better Christian than the Pope? The Pope, by the way, thinks you're going straight to hell because there's only one true faith and you're not part of it. So this is all part — one of the worst things about Christianity, it seems to me, is how much its adherents love each other. There's not the least of the wickedness that's imposed on the world is religious warfare between Christians about interpretations of essentially uninterpretable because nonsensical and irrational and contradictory Scriptures.
No, I don't think so. I found it in the ditch and decided to leave it right there where it belongs.
Well, isn't the danger of what you just proposed that of an infinite regression in that who's going to cause this cause, where does this being come from? Who created this creator? I've never known anyone who can get past the infinite regression objection to that. And in any case if you were to advance that theory successfully — if you were to say to me, or if you were to get me to say, I can't answer that. I can't disprove it. It could be true. All you would've done was establish the possibility that deism was a reasonable position to hold. Which, I would say that until Darwin and Einstein it probably was. It was the sort of thing that an intelligent person might have to end up believing because the orders and rhythms of the nature and the cosmos don't seem very likely to be accidental. But if you've established deism you've got all your work still ahead of you to be a theist. You have to show that this god, this person who went to all this trouble with physics, cares who you sleep with or how or whether you should eat a pig or not or what day you should observe as holy. Now, I don't see how you get from your uncaused cause to that, to the idea that we are divinely created, supervised by someone who cares for us. That's something for which there can never be made any evidence. You either have to believe that or not. And as I'm sure Pastor Wilson will confirm you have to have faith in order to believe it to begin with, so...
And some of us, I'm afraid, there's no help for this. As Pascal described us: We are so made, we are so constituted that we cannot believe.
We can't. A lot of humans are created that way.
And we presume we're also in the image of God.
Ah.
Can I have a comment? Your question has also occurred with considerable force to early Christian thinkers who don't try and explain it away as Pastor Wilson has just done — or just, rather failed to do. But you said, No, there has to be an answer to that. Also, what about the people who live now in Borneo, say, who've never met a Christian, never heard of the Bible, don't know the Jesus story? What about them, are they condemned by their ignorance? There is indeed a term invented by, I think Ignatius of Loyola called invincible ignorance to cover this. It's a form of innocence. It means it's not your fault, you couldn't have heard the Good News. In the Apostle's Creed it is said of Jesus that after suffering under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, he descended into hell, you'll remember that. Well I've heard it argued by some Christians that He went to hell in order to retrospectively recruit all those who had been boiling there awaiting His arrival. Seems to me this is a fantastically cruel way of explaining things but at least it does square the circle that otherwise cannot be squared, believe you me.
Sure, but I'm only saying that these people — it's a place of confinement I think we might add. Certainly is in that — no, indeed, I mean, there is no hell; it's a detail worth pointing out. There is no hell in the Old Testament. There's no hell in the Old Testament. There's no mention of it. Once God is finished with you, once all the Amalekite children have been killed, that's the end of them. There's no punishment of the dead. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who says, If you don't listen to my meek and mild message you can be — depart into everlasting fire. You've always got that option if you don't like my meek and mild stuff. So yes, I think it's very — it's not a matter of pedantry at all. The difference between hell, Hades, infinite, eternal punishment and not is very important. One of Christianity's specifically horrible contributions to human mythology and delusion is the idea, the terrifying idea that you could be tortured forever.
Horrible by — well, good question.
No. Horrible, well — shall I say — let me ask anyone here who doesn't think it's a horrible idea to put up their hand. So it doesn't seem to require much explanation, does it, as a horrible idea?
Do you feel you need a standard to keep your hand down at the moment? Or did I just say something that was so morally self-evident?
Oh, I think they're using their heads, Douglas.
Why do we care? Very good point. Or, a very good question. I ask myself a lot why that is. I think it is because I am one of the higher primates.
No, it appears to be — no, it's not much of a rallying cry but it has the merit of being true. It appears to be part of the equipment, intellectual and moral equivalent, of our primate species that it does have the need to help its fellow creatures as well as to torture, kill, rape, enslave, and exploit them. It does have a feeling, a quite strong one, that there's a human need to help and that you might need help yourself someday so be nice to your neighbor so why not?
Not everyone has this. There are quite a lot of people, also presumably made in the image of God, I think a superfluous assumption to be making, but, also made in the image of God, according to you, who were born sociopathic; they don't care about other people; they can't be made to; they just won't and don't. They're a problem for the rest of us. And then there are people who are born psychopathic who positively need to see others suffer...
And have a bad time.
Same as you, I would say.
No. No, you knew all that before you'd ever read the Bible.
You knew that well before anyone ever introduced you to Christianity. Don't tell me you didn't or I'll have to be seriously alarmed about what you were like as a little boy.
No, come on.
Well, I just don't think that the idea that there's a creator who supervises you and watches over you and intervenes in your life is a good or sufficient explanation of any of this, that's all.
It's a burdensome assumption that makes — well, in that case, where are all the psychopaths and sociopaths coming from? They're all made in the image of God as well.
Why would God want to do that — make someone innately wicked and a menace to their neighbors from the moment they were born, because of the way they are?
Well, it's observable in other species, as you know. We're not the only primates who have families and solidarity and look out for each other and so on. There are other species as well.
Yes, that's right.
Well, random mutation and natural selection produce quite a lot of discrepant results. There are no results that cannot be explained by random mutation combined with natural selection. Whereas, if you add a supernatural dimension, you explain everything and nothing. Something that explains everything doesn't explain very much. That's the notorious disadvantage of it. I like to give blood, for example. I positively enjoy doing it. When Dr. Olasky and I both used to be Marxists and one of the great things about the socialist instinct, I used to think, was people have a human need to help — there's a great book about blood donation called The Gift Relationship. The British National Health Service is not allowed to pay for blood. You can't buy it or sell it but it never runs out of it. There are always enough people to give. I positively enjoy it and also have a very rare blood group — AB negative. I might need a blood donation myself one day. It's in my interest that the blood donor habit is kept up and I don't lose a pint when I give blood; I get it back after about an hour after a nice strong cup of tea. So I've given someone a pint of blood and I haven't lost one. Very nice — it gives me pleasure. Do I have to explain why that's so? No. If I said it gives me pleasure because it puts me in well with my Lord and supreme celestial dictator, I think you might think less of me, perhaps than you — I was about to say than you already do — than you would if I had just left it where I had just left it. Now do you see?
And I take and place bets on that and I get great pleasure out of that too.
No, it's central to the self-definition of the human. People who can't feel that emotion, I think, we are entitled to describe in some way less than human. There are three ways in which I think Christianity gets this wrong: One is by making an injunction that's much too strenuous. You're not just to be good to neighbor and treat them as you would wish them to treat you, you must love them as yourself. In other words, you must be self-abnegating. I think that's unhealthy. You are not, in fact, ever going to succeed in doing that. You might find one person you love as much as yourself or even more in your life and you're very lucky if you do, there's a wonderful feeling, but it can't be enforced on you. We can't be told that's what you must do, that spoils the point of it. And it has another disadvantage which is because it's too strenuous and it can't be lived up to. In fact, you're always guilty; you've always fallen short. So organized masochism, another unpleasant feature, it seems to me, of Christianity: contempt for one's own self-respect and integrity is enjoined. Then there's the compulsory love: You must love someone, the Supreme Father, who you must also fear — you're also told you ought to fear. Actually, that is many people's relationship to their fathers. But that means that the divine doesn't improve on what the human mammalian family has already discovered for itself. And then the third, perhaps the most immoral of all, is the injunction to love your enemies. That I will not do. I know who my enemies are. At the moment the most deadly ones are Islamist theocrats with a homicidal and genocidal agenda. I'm not going to love them. You go love them if you want; don't love them on my behalf. I'll get on with killing them and destroying them, erasing them and you can love them. But the idea that you ought to love them is not a moral idea at all. It's a wicked idea and I hope it doesn't take hold, especially on any of you seemingly serious, decent, young people. What a disgusting order to love those people.
Destroy them.
The Irish foreign minister was making a speech to the United Nations during the debate on the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 and urged them to settle their dispute in a Christian fashion. I'll never forget it. Now, just — that's an observation. I have a question for you: I've only known you today and I've heard you now, maybe seven or eight times just in the last ten minutes, say what God wants us to do about quite a lot of things, quite important ones. Here's my question for you: How do you know that God wants us to do them? See, I wouldn't be able to begin a sentence by saying, I know what God wants. I wouldn't. And to you it seems to be second nature. I insist on knowing: How do you make a claim that I couldn't make? How do you know something that as far I know nobody could know: the mind of God? I need an answer to this question.
Very good.
No I don't.
I'm not ordering them to do so.
I didn't say that.
By what standard by the way?
That's why it's a good question because to me the answer isn't as obvious as it is to you.
Yes, why not?
Must be very handy; you can just assume what you have to prove.
Not just like.
Right.
But if this scripture was the Koran, does everything you say still hold?
Why not? How do you know they've got the wrong god?
If you were born in Saudi Arabia, then, would you be better off being an atheist than a Muslim?
If a soul, a person, is born in Saudi Arabia, would that person, in your judgment, be wiser to be an atheist than to become a Muslim?
Thank you.
Yes.
Well, if I have understood you correctly, what you're really asking me is would I think it made sense to describe to the Saddam Hussein regime as evil? Well, I wrote a long essay and it's in a little book of mine called The Long Short War: A Postponed Liberation of Iraq, about that very question. How would one derive such a term as evil? I personally believe I've witnessed the operations of radical evil in the world, in fact in northern Iran. It's something to do with the smell that's given off by genocide but also by torture. In other words, by being crueler than you need to be to stay in power, by being cruel for its own sake. This sort of surplus value of dictatorship and torture and genocide. The exorbitant bit, the evil part, the part that isn't necessary for the job to be done. It's purely a celebration of horror for its own sake. That's the nearest — that surplus value element to it is the nearest I've been able to get and I can promise you that if you were a person of ordinary morality as we all are, you would know it too when you saw it. By what standard, I'm about to be asked? You would know that too. You'd know what standard you were using when you had that reaction, believe me. Did we only take out Saddam Hussein because we could? No, because there's no regime we couldn't take out if we wanted to. And there are many regimes we wish we could. In Burma, for example, or Zimbabwe — a Buddhist dictatorship in Burma, a Catholic dictatorship in Zimbabwe — never mind, just teasing. But we don't because there are actually certain norms of secular international law that have to be breached — at least one of four have to be breached before a state can be said to have sacrificed its sovereignty and laid itself open to intervention.
Yes, that's sad but true. The universe doesn't care — doesn't know, as a matter or fact, this is going on. The heavens don't notice it. They're not even indifferent.
They're not even indifferent, they're unaware. I can't make them be aware. I might, like you, wished that they were aware, and that God would punish or prevent these things, but He doesn't and I can't make myself believe something because it might be nice to believe it — a big difference between us. Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange Fascist Party, very active chap in his life, was asked of by the priests who, of course, always surround dictators on their deathbeds, holding up crosses and offering them absolution, if they'll say — everything you've ever done will be forgiven if you will just now say that you'll accept Jesus as your personal savior — how about that for an immoral action, by the way? Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was asked to forgive all of his enemies. And as he was slipping away he said, I have no enemies; I killed them all.
That's why I'm in favor of getting rid of Saddam Hussein when he's in his prime. That's the short answer to your question.
No, I don't. I don't think that the problems and miseries and strugglings and sufferings of humanity can be resolved by referring them to a supernatural totalitarian, unanswerable, unchallengeable authority. I don't think there's a totalitarian solution to our many, many woes and sufferings. I just don't and I'm glad to think there is such a solution available.
No, and I do not think that stars move in their courses and can be moved to pity by the sufferings of my fellow creatures. They don't know we're here; evolution doesn't know we're here.
It won't notice when we've gone.
Well, we've seen one of the tortures that's inflicted on us by existence is that we are, most of us, condemned to care.
We do feel the sufferings of others as well as our own.
It still hurts.
It does.
Then insult is added to injury: You're told that these sufferings are sent by God, that they can be ennobling to us, that they're sent as a test.
You talk as if — you really do talk as if I advocate for evolution, that I say I wish evolution was true, that it's not an opinion of mine or a conclusion of mine, it's a desire or a piece of propaganda on my part. Convinced as I am that all the evidence suggests that the cosmos began with a big bang, the universe is expanding very fast, and that the rate of expansion is increasing, and that the galaxy Andromeda is headed on a direct collision course with our own so that we know now — we know, we can watch it in the sky, we can watch it through a telescope, that the something we have now will very soon be nothing. I know that to be true. You say, Well then, where does your morality come from? and I say, Wait a minute: First of all, is this true or is it not? What about the evidence? Now, just about the origin of our own tiny species, never mind the cosmos, all the evidence — absolutely all of it says that we are here because of the operations of random mutation and natural selection. There is no other satisfactory explanation for our presence here. You say, Well, that just means we're animals. Well, what if it's true? What if it's true? What if all the evidence is in its favor? Then it's not my opinion, it's not my propaganda. I can't make myself believe something that's in direct contradiction to all the known facts.
Well, do I not seem to do so?
The need for our species of solidarity and for survival is a perfectly good explanation.
Sure, well that's often enjoined, as you know, is enjoined in the Bible. The destruction of other races is necessary for the children of Israel to get to the stolen property that they've been awarded in Sinai.
I object to being told that it's a moral preachment, that's all.
I don't like being told it's God's will. I can see why one tribe of Bronze Age bandits might want to kill and take the property and the young ladies of another tribe, I can see that. But to invent a story that says God gave them permission to do it, I think is wicked.
And stupid too, actually.
And aesthetically, somehow, not pleasing. Let me add — now, where do aesthetics come from if we're just primates? I don't know, exactly. But there is — we have enough surplus in our cortexes to allow for art and music and indeed love. Just as well, I often think. But I don't regard it as a divine gift. And there's absolutely no evidence that it is.
Oh, sorry.
No, objective morality is from human solidarity, the need for survival. We couldn't be having this conversation if we were not moral animals. We wouldn't have gotten this far. We wouldn't have evolved language.
Or civilization. So, I know I've said this before.
Only slightly better than my saying they should listen to me because I'm doing God's will. Slightly, but measurably superior to that. And less arrogant. Considerably less arrogant.
And aesthetically more pleasing.
Absolutely.
Yes. Where does that come from, by the way? That's God's will as well. Evil is God's will too.
Well that's — isn't that a little trite or tautologist?
Of course it would have to be the case because we're all sinners.
Because that's how we've been made by God. This isn't very much nutrition, I don't think. It's not very satisfying; doesn't tell you very much. I mean, I know the Devil was once in heaven as a co-ruler and there was a falling out but I've never thought that was a terrifically good explanation of the Problem of Evil either.
Oh, please it's my pleasure, but thank you.
No, very decent of you.
It's the slightly — it's what Macaulay called the Whig Interpretation of history, that there is an improvement over time in our compassion, that we include more and more people and award more and more rights. But yes, I find I can't say I don't believe that.
There are some terrible backslidings. I mean, Fascism is worse, much worse than anything that went before it. And many, many huge improvements occurred before that colossal reaction set in. So it's unwise to just accept the Whig Interpretation, that it's a — evolution is a fairly straight line.
Our brains are in fact getting bigger, but very slowly.
Well, fortunately, nature does most of that for us. I mean, most abortions take place spontaneously in the womb. Nature knows this one isn't going to work out. It's called miscarriage, it happens all the time. If we're adapted, as you know, our bodies are adapted to life on the African Savanna, adapted to an environment that we fled from, but if there had been humans with two or three lolling-headed, disabled babies on that Savanna, to take care of, they wouldn't have survived. Everyone would've been killed by the predators. So on the whole, nature takes care of this for us. I'm not in favor of exterminating the unfit, no. I hope I didn't say anything that would lead you to the contrary impression. And if you ask me, Isn't that just because of some compassion that I couldn't explain the origin of? The answer is actually No, or Not entirely. There would be a utilitarian explanation as well. As when we encounter a terrifying new disease like AIDS, you learn a great deal from combating it. You improve your game in medicine and in research. If you treat every human being, however disabled, mentally or physically they are, as if they're worth the full value, you gain experiences that are well worth having for the betterment of the species in general.
Only on the fantastic assumption that you can't have morality without religion. A case you haven't even advanced one argument for yet.
Well that's certainly true. Religion is subject to evolution as well. Most religions no longer believe half of what they used to preach. I would actually say that was progress.
Because I don't avoid all terms of that value judgment doesn't mean that I embrace all of them either. I think sin is probably one you can do without. Wrongdoing I can understand; evil, I've told you, I think is important because it's the surplus value, the cruelty and horror for its own sake, self-endangering, self-destructive, suicidal as well as horrible, in other words. Crime, of course, can be understood and to call something a crime is a pretty severe condemnation. The word sin, as you've just heard, is completely incoherent because it's failing to do God's will which means you must know what God's will is which, by definition, no primate can. And, I'm afraid, Douglas has yet again failed to inform us of how he knows something that we don't. By what right — quo warranto — by what right, he says, he knows what God's mind is. I'm going to have to repeat this question and I can tell you that at the end of this session the question will still be an open one.
It's a pleasure.
Ok. To the hypothetical person or persons you mentioned, my answer would be I wish them all the best of luck. And if it works for them I'm very happy for them. I just don't want them trying to teach that Bible in the school attended by my daughter or to try and legislate from that book in the common law of the United States or to try and have a supernatural intervention taught in science class. I won't have any of that. Aside from that, we can coexist. I make that demand of all religions, by the way. And incidentally you'd have to grant it to all religions of you thought that someone's life could be improved by reading a holy book, and that they'd then be less materialistic and a nicer person and so on. Well then — you know, it's said, and I believe it may well be true that Louis Farrakhan's racist, crack-pot, cult organization gets young black men off drugs and jail — maybe it does — by handing them the Wahabi Quran. Well, what have you proved there? Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. But as long as they don't try to hurt me with it, I'm fine. Now as to the likelihood that I'd have a revelation — I keep being told that that's what I'm secretly looking for, that I couldn't be like this if I wasn't some kind of a seeker. It's very irritating. That's like being told you may not believe in Jesus but He believes in you. A fantastically annoying thing to have said.
David Hume — I suppose you've all read David Hume on miracles. If you haven't, you must. It's the most elegant philosophizing on the question of miraculous apparition that has yet been. He says if something appears to have happened that is not consistent with the laws of nature — the laws of nature have been suspended — there are two contingencies: Either that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor or that you're under a misapprehension. Which is the likeliest? It's always likeliest that you're always under a misapprehension. And if you're hearing about this from someone who claims to have seen it and you were though getting it second hand the odds that it's a misapprehension that's being spread are exponential increased. So if I heard voices telling me to do something and that this was on behalf of a deity, I would check myself in, of course, and I hope that you would, if you saw someone in the street raving and saying — let's not say raving, that would be to prejudice it — but if someone came up to you and said, You know, I'm on a mission from God today and I've got various things I've got to do and I hope you'll help me do them because God's will has to be done through me, why is it you edge away from people like that rather than towards them, if they're on the same bus as you? What saving instinct makes you say, I'm going to move to another seat now, rather than say, Ooh, I wish you'd share! Why is that? You know very well why it is.
People who say they are doing God's work are to be distrusted.
Well, to that hypothesis I would say that it was unfalsifiable and those of you should know if a proposition can be described as unfalsifiable it falls as by definition weak, or unsustainable. I couldn't possibly disprove that, in other words. There would be no way of proving that that wasn't so, which means it's a hopeless proposition. It would also leave — but suppose it to be true, then you'd have to ask, Well, which other authority is instilling us with the temptation, in some cases the need, to rape, steal, perjure, kill, and so forth. Is that coming from the same great imprinter or another one? Is there, in fact, spiritual warfare going on between demons and angels going on all around us that we can't quite see? That's also an unfalsifiable proposition. It could be true, there's just no evidence for it and I must say, old-fashioned, call me if you will, that when there's no evidence for a proposition, my inclination is to doubt it. There, I've said it.
Can I just say something on this question, because it goes very strongly to my point about the totalitarian character of religion: What sort of person wants His subjects, who He created, He made, to reward Him by incessantly — and remember it says everlastingly, evermore praising God and saying, Holy, holy, holy. And then always thanking and never stopping. It seems a rather capricious and tyrannical demand, doesn't it to you? Doesn't it to me? I've actually been — I used to wonder when I was a kid, they say well — I could work out what hell might be like very easily, everyone can. Convincing accounts of heaven are harder to come by unless you look in the Quran, but the Christian one seem to offer everlasting praise and I remember thinking, What would that be like? I mean, after the first week of saying, Thank you, at the top of my voice wouldn't things start to seem a little subject to diminishing returns, possibly even for the person listening to them, as well? We'd never want to hear anything from you but that? That's all that's demanded of me. I've been to North Korea, I've seen a state where that's what people have to do. They have to worship and thank all day, all the time. Everything they get is from the infinite love and generosity of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader who, by the way, are a father and son reincarnation which would make North Korea just one short of trinity, in case that detail interests you at all. You know, there is one reason I'd have in my own life to wish sometimes to say, Thank God, and, in a sense, to wish I could mean it, and the word for it is apotropaic. An apotropaic is the gesture you make to avoid hubris, in other words, so that if your book is a best-seller you don't just say, Hey, I must be a better write than I thought! You want to be able to say, It's nice to think that not everything is done by hand. And so, the idea of thanking is a good way of indulging the apotropaic. But don't go taking it too literally, or condemning yourself to a life of groveling, an infinity of groveling because that would be caving into the sado-masochistic, totalitarian core of religious faith.
No, it isn't, it's the most religious state on the planet.
I have a very thick skin.
I have to say you're not — it's not rude at all as phrased, but it was rude of you not to be paying attention earlier. And you didn't do yourself any favors, either. I didn't say, Look at how superbly moral we primates are. I said the morality we do have is innate in us and it's a necessary condition for survival as a species, I didn't saying how wonderful it was. Nor do I say how wonderful it is that we're also programmed to rape, steal, cheat, and lie, and I don't blame any celestial deity for that either because it's because we are animals, not sinners, animals, poorly evolved primate species that these things are innate in us. It doesn't need to look for a supernatural explanation. How could I prove this all wasn't a power play on my part? I couldn't. What was your other question? There was a closing one.
Well, we do.
Surely, and among Fascists, very much so. And in particular among Communists. It's what they actually call it: brotherhood. I don't see how that represents any kind of challenge to anything I've said. Our species is divided into sub-groups and tribes. I don't think we are subdivided by race; I think we're all the same race, but there are different ethnicities and tribalisms and certainly a very large number of solidarities. The attempt made by the Bible to define these is the most laughable one.
The Sons of Ham and the Sons of Noah and all the rest that were in there and the belief held by many Christians for a very long time, and by some of the Mormon persuasion to this very day, that black people are a special creation not quite human and condemned to be that color before they were born. None of this, as you'll see, means that religion can shed any light on this stuff at all.
All of these things can be discussed as if there was no supernatural dimension and as problems they remain exactly the way they would be if there was no supernatural dimension.
It doesn't undermine my position at all if there's no instruction to what to do there. When human interests and human rights — interpretations of right — collide, that doesn't condemn my position at all. It's what you would expect of an evolved, primate species. It's Hegel's definition of tragedy as a conflict between two rights. These things will occur. You can't resolve them by referring them upward to a celestial totalitarianism. You will get no help from that quarter.
Sir.
Well you're asking, excuse me, you're addressing your question to the wrong person. It's not I who looks forward to the end of the world and to the apocalypse and to the last days. It's not I who says that my belief can't wait for that to happen, that that'll be the happy day when the trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed. I don't look forward to that at all.
Ask someone who believes any of this.
Because with the short life that I have been given by evolution and natural selection, I'm not going to be pushed around by theocrats in the short time I do have.
Yeah. I have been — here I am. There's no getting around it. I don't attribute my presence here, as some so arrogantly do, to a divine plan. I don't think I'm the object of a divine plan. Do I look to you as I'm the object of a divine plan?
Thought not. Whereas — but the explanation that I'm here because of the laws of operation, the laws of biology is perfectly satisfying to me and it doesn't leave anything unexplained. It doesn't mean everything is explained, however, that would be reductionist. But I don't look forward — no, I don't look forward to the destruction of the world. I don't look forward to the end of the world at all. It's those who believe in divine creation and divine dispensation who look forward to that. You should be asking them, and perhaps yourself, why that is. I do think religion does conceal a death wish, not very carefully either.
Yeah, but when Buddhists and other say, you know, if only I would join their — I'd cease to suffer from pain and struggle and anxiety and so on and I say, I don't believe you can give that to me, I don't. But if you could, I wouldn't think it was worth the having. I like conflict; I like anxiety; I like struggle; I like combat; I like all these things; they make life worth living for me. I don't want there to be permanent peace and tranquility and banality. I don't want it at all, ok?
By the way, what does the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
Make me one with everything.
No, wait...
Wait, sir. The other shoe has to fall. So the hot dog vendor gives him his slathered dog with everything and the Buddhist hands over 20 bucks, starts to munch, waits for a bit, ketchup on his saffron robes, and nothing happens. And he says to the hot dog vendor, What about my change? And the vendor says, Change comes only from within.