Christopher Hitchens at the "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" FODI

this is ABC for ax thank you very much guys we have it very moving welcome to country earlier from Glenn and I'm now moved to say that we're going to move quickly from the sacred to the profane I've been reading Christopher Hitchens work for many years now I almost said religiously but I thought better of that in the past decade I've been lucky enough to interview him on many occasions by satellite link from remote studios in various parts of the United States and because we tend to do that live for him where he's sitting usually turns out to be some ungodly hour but excuse another punt as we know mr. Hitchens is a rather ungodly person now with Christopher Hitchens being the sort of fellow that he is with a kind of healthy appetites that he has and frankly that we expect of him he has on occasion been somewhat the worse for wear during those interviews there was one particularly memorable occasion when he spent much of the interview doing a very amusing live commentary on the technical expertise of the sound man and the camera crew that's when I knew that one of his hidden talents was for John Cleese impersonations now there is I suspect a very special Hitchens archive somewhere out there in some corner of YouTube so let me know if you find it will you I have to say cometh the hour cometh the man because no matter how little sleep he's had no matter what his state of occasional dishevelment is and no matter how incompetent the studio crew Christopher Hitchens has always risen to the occasion he's a man who must be heard and who should be heard and I may be somewhat biased here but I regard him as among a handful of public intellectuals in the world who have the capacity to really lead a new public discourse and the courage and the inclination to adopt contrarian positions and defend them with great passion and great subtlety moreover Christopher Hitchens is never to my knowledge ducked a debate although many of his opponents have ducked debates with him and having seen him in action up close I frankly don't blame them I met Christopher for the first time in New York on September the 11 2002 it was our job to sit together for a few hours and talk in front of a live camera on a windswept building across from that ghastly hole in the ground with the World Trade Center and its surrounding buildings had one year before being amputated from the New York skyline by the actions of a small group of Islamic terrorists now when I was asked by the ABC to go to New York and do the first anniversary broadcast I had only one condition that is I'll do it if we can persuade Christopher Hitchens to join us the reason for that was simple Christopher had thought more deeply and more profoundly about September 11 and its implications than anyone I'd read or heard talking about it at that time and his own battles with Islamic extremism dated back to the fatwa against his friend the writer Salman Rushdie and you can see consistent streams of thought about God and religion flowing through the book that he's here to talk about tonight are the ideas that he's going to talk about tonight the book is God is not great our religion poisons everything if you haven't read it I can tell you that Islam is not the only nor even the primary target this is not his Satanic Verses Christopher is an equal opportunity and multi-faith debunker so if you're a Christian Roman Catholic Orthodox or otherwise if you are a Hindu if you're a religious Jew if you're a Muslim Buddhist and Gnostic or even just an occasional visitor to a Shinto shrine you can expect to be offended or at least have your views challenged in ways you perhaps didn't expect ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the podium journalist writer lifelong contrarian and militant atheist Christopher Hitchens thank you your reverence for that suspiciously terse grudging introduction thank you ladies and gentlemen very much for coming thank you for laying on an evening of weather to remind me of my English boyhood in other ways to make me feel at home as I always do when I visit Sydney which is the only place I've so far visited where if you'll stay in the neighborhood I am staying you go for your daytime or it might be a nighttime constitutional walk and you wondered exactly how to get back in stock so I want to say excuse me you find yourself saying and I headed for the rocks question I've asked myself many a time and on and on many a midnight stroll but it only in City do they say yeah and no worries good place for Dangerous Ideas a chitchat in other words a risk-taking kind of a spot rocks no worries I'm sorry for that reason to part if there isn't to have missed your darkness at dawn a moment the other day because a lot of my early training in the apocalyptic came from the study of Australian letters when I was a boy I was very fond of the writing of Nevil Shute Charlie Callas it's particularly loved in the wet no highway member no Highway perhaps I'm giving away my age a bit but but of course and most I think most memorably on the beach were the last people on earth wait in Australia to see what kind of death is going to be brought to them on the prevailing winds there were lots of ways I now realize tons of ways in which Neville Shu couldn't write but he could write about the inevitable and about the possibility of extinction in other words that nature might not know we were here a great challenge to our self-esteem to our solid season that there could be a point in evolution where evolution that hadn't noticed we arrived wouldn't even notice that we'd gone either and beautifully done as some of you will have seen by Stanley Kubrick on the screen whereas the inevitable gets nearer all the time the churches decide it's time for a moment of uplift and outcome the Salvation Army girls with their tambourines and their tins and the churches to open their doors and there's a big banner saying repent there is still time brother it reads and it mocks what's coming it doesn't know it's doing it last attempt to fill up those empty spaces in the church and at the close the streets are empty and it's a dusty howling wilderness but the banner there is still time brother is still flapping in the in the wind to mock all our illusions and it's the attempt to live without illusions that I believe is the most dangerous but the most worthwhile and in some ways the most enjoyable undertaking despite its risks of all and that's why I'm here and that's why you're nice to have me now cosmology is a real bastard in a lot of ways it's made it ever harder has been making it ever harder for us to think too highly of ourselves ever since Galileo deposed us from our very conceited position the one we'd chosen for ourselves of course and had pointed out to us by a comforting Church at the center of what was thought of as creation now it's almost a commonplace because of the the knife-edge of climatology on which we understand ourselves to live and when we see the rest of our just our tiny little Tsavo of a solar system an unimportant speck in an unimportant suburb of a little-known galaxy just in our neighborhood every other planet is either too hot to live in or too cold and lots of our planet is one of those or the other and the rest is on a knife-edge as we've increasingly come to understand and so the probability of our being here forever is nil and the possibility that will last as long as our planet isn't that great but suppose we do here's something to cheer you up your thoughts I came just to make you laugh or just to make you cry not a bit of it before I'm done well we'll see I was at a festival in Heian why and if any people have been a wonderful town on the English Welsh border where there's now a beautiful annual literary festival a couple of years ago one of the speaker's was Sir Martin Rees so Martin is the professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University and he's also got the wonderful title of the astronomer royal which even a republican like myself can imagine wanting to have just as I live in Washington I've never wanted a political job but if I was to be given grace and favored by the president it would be the Bureau of Alcohol firearms and tobacco anyway I can't be the astronomer royal but I can quote what Samarkand said in an extraordinary speech called Dark Materials which was the Joseph Rotblat Memorial Lecture and there was a paragraph in it that completely arrested me and I'm going to as they say share it with you most educated people said so Martin are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection but many tend to think that humans are still somehow the culmination of that our son however is less than halfway through its lifespan it will not be humans who watch that Suns demise 6 billion years from now any creatures that then do exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoeba I find that an arresting thought in some ways a depressing one in some ways an inspiring one it certainly makes me feel that one muscle consider evolution as producing us as its last word that would be a sort of insult to any scientific process we happen to know that even in the measurable distance of the last few thousand years the progress is going forward in our brain formation I think our job is to remain without illusions integral intact keep our planet that where's best we can and pass it on so that this experiment gets more interesting and if you allow me to say so what I just quoted to you from Samara and unless I much mistake my audience is genuinely or inspiring you think of watching good I mean really or inspiring not like seeing a burning bush would be all inspiring really or you think of creatures gradually watching the Sun die and they're not us and they're as far from us as bacteria our ancestors are from us if that isn't mind expanding if there isn't all inspiring then you don't have the capacity for all and you won't be able to get it from a holy book either in other words it's not a matter of whether your life will cry it's a matter of how you think and what you think and the realization that comes with it is congruent with many things I believe but not with the idea that truth can come from desert revelations made to schizophrenic sand epileptics it's the strange thing isn't it when you are on a bus now and someone starts talking about the how they've got a message from God I didn't maybe I'm different you move nearer them or I thought so now Sir Martin as it happens is a mild and skeptical but church-going member of the Anglican Communion his family's been going to the same church in Cambridge and I think for a very long time it's a practice he makes it doesn't have anything at all to do with his scientific work or beliefs and why should it I'm coming now to the point that I warn Tony I wanted to stress and we're going to talk about later of the famous observation made by Stephen Jay Gould wonderful biologists and paleontologists that religion and science are non-overlapping magisteria as he put it there's no necessary reason why they should be in conflict the two ideas can coexist in the same mind I was a great admirer of goulds but I think I want to disagree in here's now of course a great scientist can also be a person of faith Joseph Priestley for example who more or less discovered oxygen as we understand it and who's the barratry who was smashed for profanity by monarchist and loyalist mobs in burning him and drove him over to Philadelphia he was a Unitarian the great man of science and the Enlightenment but he believed in the phlogiston theory Alfred Russel Wallace who did most of Darwin's early work for him not just on selection but on continental drift as well working to your near North that he used to call the Far East Indonesia love nothing better than spiritualist seances really liked a bit of table turning and table wrapping and burbling swim the beyond to sweeten his day the greatest scientist Cambridge ever produced possibly arguably Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist he kept a furnace permanently going in his rooms which is several times set fire to in case he the moment would come when he would work out how to turn lead into gold believed that the Catholic Church was the Antichrist may have been on to something was obsessed with the measurements of the he thought it would be better to know the temp the measurements of the original temple than to find out about gravitational theory anyway but a great scientist it goes it goes on and there were many brilliant German physicists rivals and contemporaries of Einstein working in the same field who believed that there was area in science and Jewish science and there were two different types of physics so of course these things can can coexist but it seems to me that they are it's not a matter of their coexistence or their overlap as to whether or not they are compatible whether or not they're ultimately reconcilable for example this is I'm talking now not just about what people think but about how it was a Catholic not as a Catholic physicist but actually a man in holy orders Georg Lamech of the University of Leuven who in the 20s anticipated the idea of the big bang quarreled with Einstein about it said that he didn't call it the Big Bang that conversation he thought of it as the egg that from which the universe suddenly burst and was right and Einstein had to admit that he was probably the first to get on to this use of the theory of relativity he took it to the Pope Pope Pius xi it was and the Pope was so impressed being warned that this theory was likely that he offered to father Lamech professor the mare she said if you like I'll make it dogma I'll say that people have to believe it it would naturally very nice of you your holiness but that would be some missing the point of a scientific experiment it's the that's what I mean by saying this mentality is not congruent not compatible it's not really reconcilable and i think we're going to increasingly have to face this weather the weather we've driven by evidence or by reasoning staying with the macro for a bit one gets asked you get asked if you're me but I believe as well how come there's something and not nothing so very good questions actually very important question it's asked from the point of view of something from the point of view of the only species we know of anywhere that could ask that question looks out on the vast expanses of nothingness where nothing is happening and where there is no life so it is you have to make the assumption that you are there and that you're it so you know how all that does it rather alters the the question two went being asked in that way but still it's a good question but it doesn't have any very helpful answers or not if you consider for example Edwin Hubble was the first to notice that Newton was wrong and that the universe is not just expanding away from itself the red so-called red light shift at a terrific speed but you would expect the speed in Newtonian terms to be the rate of its expansion I mean to say velocity to be declining to the contrary Hubble notice it's speeding up it's getting faster all the time all subsequent experiments have shown this in fact we hadn't discovered the Big Bang when we did and we were trying for it now examining the red light some of that evidence would already of blown past us if you can get your mind around this as as around some Arjun Reese's imagery of our cosmic future as a professor halt dein used to say the universe is not just stranger than we imagine it's stranger than we can imagine but we know this much that it's blasting apart very very fast a great deal of nothingness is certainly coming to us there's an enormous amount of nothingness in our future and even if we aren't prepared to weigh for that or to wait for species change to overtake us we can see already in the night sky the andromeda galaxy on collision course with our own that's certainly going to happen whether we destroy ourselves or the sun blows up or not before that probably not collision course now is this part of a plan you study how to ask yourself is that part of a plan if so whose plan is it but so much nothingness is built right in and is headed straight for us so anyone who wants to ask the first question has to be willing to consider its corollary question and the certainty in the second case unlike the first of a of an answer so if you think that all this is going on in these gigantic fields of gravity and right with you in mind then you really do have a self centeredness problem you might put it another way I have tried to put it another way I'll try it on you our first speaker tonight said that his people have been around for a hundred thousand years that we know about that's certainly true that we there is a difference of opinion about how long our species in general has been on the planet it's a it's a flash of a second in evolutionary time Richard Dawkins thinks it might be as long as 250,000 years we hit a quarter of a million Francis Collins the man who did the DNA decoding the human genome project whose by the way another Christian scientists or rather scientist who is a Christian will make that mistake again you know what Mark Twain said about the work of Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science threatened founder of it her books chloroform in print this is an aggression it's a decoration Francisco says at least a hundred thousand years we can show we've been around for that laws quite a long time I'll take I'll take a hundred never mind I don't need a quarter of a million for my point make it a hundred thousand hundred thousand years people have been our species have been around on this speck born usually dying actually a great number of them in childbirth would have got beyond being born for the first day she also ninety or thousand years nearly a hundred not living more than 25 to 30 years at the most then probably dying of their teeth if they were lucky or of the other needless mammalian things that show us that we bear the stamp as Darwin put of our lowly origin the appendix we don't need anymore innumerable other shortcomings of our design we've designed to live on the savanna that we've escaped from terrible disease suffering misery malnutrition and fear where the earthquakes come from why is there an eclipse what are the shooting stars doing and awful cults of sacrifice to try and ward off what are in fact natural events and war and rape and the kidnap of other peoples and the enslavement of them all this goes on gradually gradually inching up to the point where you can brew beer the breakthrough my view domesticate animals separate one kind of corn from another symmetrical progress but terrible struggle sacrifice pain misery and above all fear and ignorance and you have to believe this if you believe in monotheism for the first 97-98 thousand of this heaven watches with indifference oh there they go again people this that whole civilizations just died out well what are you going to do they're raping each other again they've they're poisoning that they think that the other tribe is poisoned the well so they're going to kill all their children well it's just watch all that three thousand years ago at the most is decided now we got to intervene now you have to believe it you have to believe it and the revelation is must be must be personal must appear so we'll pick the most backward the most barbaric the most illiterate the most superstitious and the most savage people we can find in the most stony area of the of the world we won't appear to the Chinese who can already read we were appear in the Indus Valley where they know a thing or two and they already you know they were very far about snow will appear to this brutal enslaved hopeless superstitious crowd and will force them to cut their way through every all of their neighbors with slaughter genocide and racism and settle on the only part of the Middle East where there's no oil and all subsequent revelations occur in the same district and without this we wouldn't know right from wrong now ladies and gentlemen comrades and friends brothers and sisters I know I'm capable of parody and it's not only at my lowest of sarcasm and I've proved it to you and sometimes I've got paid for it but in seriousness now do I really do I seriously misrepresent the situation you must believe something like that happened or did not in order to address the whole question of where monotheism counsel I would say it can't be proved that that isn't how we came to understand the morality and the need for it but I would regard it in the light of the other evidence I've touched upon as being in the very highest degree improbable that that is the way we discovered how to think how to decide how to live with one another what our duties are to each other and so forth and I have submitted to you in all no I'm not going to say humility I just submitted to you okay and again if this was the plan was it made by someone who likes us well that's another question and if so why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out and part of what plan was that you see if it is a plan or design and one cannot positively prove that it is not it only restates the original problem the planner must be either very capricious really toying with his with his creation very or very close and or very clumsy very tinkering and fantastically wasteful throw away 99.9% of what you've made or very cruel and very callous or just that's very indifferent or some combination of all the above and so it's no good saying that he moves in mysterious ways or that he has purposes that are opaque to us because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicates on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it I've known in other words I've never met anyone in Holy Orders or out of it who isn't also primate and neither have you thus when the local prince of the church who I was sorry to miss on Tony's show Cardinal Archbishop George Pell takes leave to tell me and he's going to tell you under this roof that his own words without God we are nothing my reply is your eminence please don't talk to me in that tone of voice I'm I'm not a slave and I'm on the side of anyone who is in their emancipation and it's the mind forged manacles that are often the hardest to break I'm sorry to tell the Cardinal Archbishop and I wish I could say it to his face I have to some of his colleagues as you might say that his he's wrong twice he's first wrong in his concept of a deity in other words as someone without whom we would be nothing and he's wrong second to declare that we are worthless without agreeing with his concept of that concept and I demand to know how he knows his Eminence is claiming to know more than a primate can possibly know and he's showing that he knows much less than most primates probably should so if if someone says to me and I've heard it in my travels without the Dear Leader we are lost we're nothing it used to be said in Italy on the mostly appear your dual chair has temporary Johnny the leader is always right what Cellini is always right ein Reich ein Volk ein Fuhrer only we only need one leader one people and one regime all of this has the smack of that hotel chair and without the leader we'd be lost we'd be have no choice but to commit suicide I say we've come this far with Jim let's drink it now without him we're nothing with most of those sort of invocations one hears instantly or rather I would say one smells instantly the unmistakable reek stench of the totalitarian temptation or we should be armored it should be an agent us to resist it and where it isn't we should learn how to build it up as a matter of survival but instead what it is morality asks us to overcome doubt to overcome skepticism to leave it behind to suspect the faculty that of ours is the most precious of all the ability to philosophize the ability to think for ourselves the ability to challenge existing Authority no that's all to be distrusted that could be a temptation the evil one it's not an accident says that it's the tree of knowledge of good and evil that at all costs you must avoid because anything to do with knowledge could immediately turn profane so we know nothing about the quantum except that there is such a thing that's as far as we've got with it now we know it works we know if you use it we can you can measure an extraordinary number of things to an amazing degree but we don't know how it works we don't know about galaxy formation we know a lot about our GN Abel we can't yet use it to cure ourselves we're miles from doing any of that we are when I went emphasize the the incredible amount we don't any longer we don't know about the cosmological and the uncertainty principles adumbrated both Werner Heisenberg all we know is that we know much less and less but at least we know less and that's about much more and more so is this a time to say we don't need any further inquiry all we need is faith in the boss I would say not it's just as when I am asked well rather when the question is put is there free will the believer will say yes because we've been given it of course it's free will the big guy says 'set who am I to disagree well that seems to me to be absolutely self cancelling nonsense if I say my answer when I'm asked is is the free will I say yeah I think this free will we have free will we have no choice at least I at least I know I'm being ironic the people the people who say free will you've got to have it it's a rule we've got to have free will it says it don't even know they're being literal this is the difference between not just the ironic in the literal mind but between the inquiring and the philosophical the scientific mind and the religious one and that's why they are not just non-overlapping or rather overlapping but in a hostile manner but they're irreconcilable in my judgment Socrates like Jesus may well not have existed we don't have any absolute proof he's certainly like Jesus didn't write anything down he only exists for as a concept in the minds of his followers I don't mind about that I don't it doesn't bother me because I don't say that he died and my sins were as a result forgiven or that he didn't really die so they're forgiven all over again except that apparently he's got to come back and die again before or it's a the whole experiment has to be rerun to be convincing no I say what Socrates taught me is exactly that the definition of an educated person is knowing how little they know and being modest and humble in that sense not in the sense of self-abnegation but saying please give me the strength to realize that I'm that I'm only on the first step of a voyage of of inquiry and discovery and that method is the one that has set more people free than any faith against this again the Prince of the church will tell you well again to rather totalitarian thought love is compulsory and you have to love someone who you also are forced to fear in fact who you're enjoying to fear I've always found there's something rather creepy about the idea of compulsory love let alone to someone who is a fear figure it's a sinister idea I think a rather abject idea sort of sadomasochistic concept of a relationship it's a prostrating idea and it crucially devalues love by making it something that can be extorted or that should be extorted as well as poisoning the well of intellectual inquiry a it's a taint to the Wellsprings of our better our finer emotions and now I've mentioned poison I suppose I have to go from the mega lo well macro mega lair feel if you like to the micro to this very simple question that we're stuck with and I must not trust us too much on the time I have with the Rev insurance but take the simplest case about whether our whether our morality is innate or not at every time I'm asked this question if you didn't believe in God how would you know what was good and what wasn't every time I'm asked to speak on this The Daily News allows me to give a different answer and give a different example take the simplest case of what I believe is innate our instinct for our children you don't have to be a parent to have this you see it chill the child trying to rush into the traffic if you're not a parent something tells you what you probably ought to be doing about it the care and love and protection of children is it stinked in us in that in fact in many other species too that don't claim to be divinely ordered around it's something we all share without having to have it explained to us we may say that we that those who don't have it the psychopaths who don't seem to have it or who take delight in breaking this this command mental rule we say that their best deal but again I refer you to the animal kingdom that doesn't allow such transgressions now our whole culture is currently being convulsed rightly I think over an offense committed more than three decades ago against the woman young woman of thirty eight a girl 13 by famous mount who was stupid enough to try and see vanity fair and thus incurred my curse and displeasure it's good that all this such an argument could go on for so long I think legally and morally because it shows that individual rights are paramount - just as it was right but France should convulse itself and suspend all other business until the question of captain Alfred Dreyfus had been settled one way or another it shows not just that justice is important but that the individual is the only unit of currency in which this kind of thing can be discussed now the the very best I found you can say in mr. Polanski's defense would be that there was some kind of sick complicity involved that either the girl or her ambitious parents or the general context of permissiveness or something of the sort gave him the feeling that it was probably okay or not that bad to give her a muscle relaxing drug as well as some booze and then don't ask yourself why he wanted her muscles relaxed please because then you have to read the court transcript and you'll find out and it's pretty horrible horrifying and I think people are quite right to be instinctively outraged to think no if I can think of the worst thing I've ever done you're already thinking of that the thing about yourself you'd least like to have generally known complete silence very satisfying most of you I imagine a thinking yeah but I wouldn't do that I wouldn't do that I wouldn't and and I would no one needs to tell me why I wouldn't have either so that's all I want to say about that but I'm much more outraged currently by what happened not three decades ago but three weeks ago - miss Fazio Yousef a Yemeni girl who died in childbirth in a hospital in Yemen hemorrhaging to death trying to give birth to it already dead baby the result of her having been married compulsively but legally at the age of 11 that's what happened to Fazio Yousef on our watch she died in childbirth trying to give birth to a dead baby husband three times her age who was legally married to her as it's estimated that one quarter of the young womanhood of Yemen already is married at the very very latest line the age of 15 and though there have been moves in the Yemeni Parliament to raise the age at which a young lady may be betrothed these moves have been blocked even as recently as last September after this outrage by a political party which I will not tell you the name of this political party but it is not the Yemeni secular party in in Iran the age of consent doesn't come up by the way because there is no consent to any sex outside marriage in Islamic Society in any case and many many kinds of it are punishable by by death with the agent which young bill may be married was moved up finally the Islamic Revolution put it back to nine and he was moved up to eleven which you might say was progress of a kind now you see this isn't just backward countries we're talking about and let's not beat about the bush the Prophet Mohammed was betrothed to his favorite wife I show when she was six wasn't thought fit that he could marry her then in the full sensor and but he put it off till she was nine and across a vast swath of the world worse things in roman polanski has even thought of doing are done as a matter of law and of course and in the name of no not in the name of but because of the preachings of god's anointed and then the religious turn to you you say secularism must be moral relativism your ethics are situational and i say well let's just hear that again because given that I've taken the simplest moral baseline it's possible to take the protection of defenseless children isn't it true that all the leading religions of the world are Abrahamic yes we'd love to stress it we adore to say that we have will this wonderful multicultural thing in common and what was Abraham most famous for apart from having a wife who had a baby when she was a hundred and one which is an advance over dying in childbirth when you're 11 having been raped probably by a close male relative if you really want the truth apart from that Abraham's most famous for saying if God wants me to kill my boy of course I will and the only difference between the monotheism's is that some say was Isaac and some say was Ishmael I don't particularly care but that but there are annual festivities on the part of the faithful to say we wish we two were capable of such faith and we we want to beat our breasts in sympathy with those who are why do the Jewish people blow the ram's horn the shofar because the shofar symbolizes the RAM who has sacrificed instead the blood sacrifice is main thing and there has to be a child involved this seems to me to be disgraceful and that at what and what's taken for granted that goes with it because it was practiced on Isaac - in the form of the Covenant and imitated by others the genital mutilation of the young to seal the pact with God to say nothing matters to me not the life or health or bodily integrity of my child never mind that what has to be proved is without God I am nothing I'll kill for it and I'm not just willing to say that I'm willing to prove it and I'm willing to use my children's bodies as the theater of this enactment of faith well civilization in my submission ladies and gentlemen begins where that evil nonsense leaves off and we have to advance the time when more and more people will be able to civilize themselves by outgrowing religion and leaving this awful nonsense behind and with that and with that I think I have realized that if you haven't copped my drift by now I might as well go and sit in that chair anyway very nice to to come thank you have a quick drink of water while you care much now 1 it's like your book how many minutes was that by the way I just let you know I think if I guessed it right I think was 38 okay I cheated them over 7 minutes that's all right we can till I yield back the balance of my time as they say in the Senate let's start if we can with a portrait of the artist as a young contrarian and I'd like to know did you ever as a young man or a boy actually have any religious faith I am terrified that someone here might have bought my book and have read my answer that question if you haven't by the way it's available at fine bookstores whatever I'll make it I'm a quick but I never did I think a lot of people have the same experience as me I was not I wasn't an ultra hit by any faith or any church or anything like that I didn't have a reverse Damascus of losing my faith what I did was more like discover that I didn't believe I think probably there are fair number of people here who know what I'm talking about had the same experience the way I discovered it was this I had a nice teacher called mrs. warts an old trout when I was at a boys school in Devon sure I must have been about 10 and she was on nature teacher nature walks come on boys shows different kinds of tree flower I used to know the difference but that's nothing but she was also a scripture teacher I used to enjoy scripture lessons cuz it was my first I didn't know this but it was my first work as a literary critic was going through well who it was called searched the scriptures they'd give you a text of a piece of gummed paper that the government would send because it was an officially Anglican country my country of birth the Queen is the head of the church as well as the state you know all this and the Armed Forces I hope she has a long life of any because the mayor she checks out her bat-eared chinless resentful Islam fancying son will become the head of the church and the head of the state in the Armed Forces at that instant which is what you get if you found a regime on the family values of Henry the eighth but I digress again so the government would send these papers aren't you've given one and gum it in your little book and it would give it a chapter and a verse and you'd have to look that up and say what led up to and what led away from this verse so they wouldn't give you the story just the verse and you'd have to tell of what story or parable that this verse was the culmination really well worth doing and talking to do some close textual analysis um one day mrs. Watts made a fatal mistake and she she tried to combine her Scripture teaching with her nature teaching and she said swept away by faith she said and boys you notice how beautiful the greenery is the trees the fields the shrubs the leaves they're lovely shades of green which she showed is amazing because it's the color that's the most restful and lovely to our eyes so God must be very good because imagine if he'd made the leaves in the grass orange or or purple or something really clashing and horrible to the eyes but he didn't he made a green which was much nicer and I thought I was ten I thought that's I didn't know I didn't know anything about chlorophyll say they're all photosynthesis but I don't know that much about it now well phototropism or natural selection or anything I didn't know anything like that and that no one had ever told me that it might not be true what was in the Bible so but I thought knows that substitute knows it's obvious to me I knew the guys came after the trees that the natural vegetation had been there before the human I was how I knew this I don't know but I did know it turns out to be true and I could never get over it I Sergeant notice more and more discrepancies and absurdities and you know how it is you can't be a little bit for reticle that's partly why I favor compulsory religious instruction in schools because I know of no other way to guarantee the steady mass production of atheism do you know it never occurred to me when I asked that question it was an invitation to recite the first chapter no Willie but you've done so what the man's hobby is still fine paperback fish listen God is not great I mean you can tell and everyone here can tell that your use of language is mesmerizing the book is a is a polemic and as such it's quite intoxicating as well I think but for this conversation I've been looking for the flaws in your argument and here's what I think the main one is you've exposed every conceivable facet of religions capacity for evil but you've made virtually no admissions at all about its capacity for good so I wonder why you refuse to do that well I thought there were not books making that point so I would write one stressing the dark side of the night but I'm not going to pretend I don't know what you mean I mean it is another question that I know I always know I'm going to be faced with so I don't think I doc it so much Esther trying to serve a tit my way of resolved this to try and make it condense is this you have to point out to me I've tried this with quite leading theologians and members of various regions and important clerical spokesmen I said you give me an example of a moral action taken or moral statement made by believer because of their faith that I couldn't make as a person who doesn't have it and I have not so far had anyone points such a thing out to me except the the well let me come to that in a second because I haven't yet had a convincing answer offered but the corollary question is this can you name me a wicked action undertaken or a wicked statement made by someone purely because of their religion and you've already thought of what everyone here can think of one right away and you've thought of another one too now you think to answer my own question I was once told what I've thought of something it's a statement and I said okay tell me and it was kind of forgive them for they know not what they do and I said yes but I by definition couldn't make that statement for obvious reasons I mean I'm not in the position of having such a father or being able to make such an appeal to him so it isn't it isn't something I'm forbidden to do by faith it's something no Christian could say either but it was a good try I have come up with a remark because I try very hard to to argue against myself and it came to me the other day that left for when Sir during the early struggle of the Solidarity movement in Poland was interviewed as the shipyards were being surrounded by the Polish militia and army and his little band of resistors and dissidents was in there with the with the hard fairly hard core of the Polish working class around it but a perilous situation and he was asked by an interviewer aren't you scared aren't you afraid and he said with complete composure he said I'm not afraid of anyone but God and I thought well I think that's a nonsensical statement but I think it's a very noble one and I wouldn't be able to make it it is a bit contextual however that was the favorite statement of General Edwin Walker the right-wing crackpot who was the founder of the John Birch Society in the United States as well the man who Lee Harvey Oswald practiced assassination on First Try dry Ron you might say but I would have to say I'm aware of what a statement like that can mean to people well in the same way as I'm aware of what a stained glass window or a psalm or a mosque can mean to people that alas it can't mean to me indeed and there is a passage in your book actually I mean you say that you can't think of something that you couldn't have done immoral actions you couldn't have done without having religion fair enough but you do in your book single out on one occasion it seems to be the closest you've come to praising anybody who is certainly religious it's dr. Martin Luther King and what inspired him and you write about the placards that appeared at his rallies carrying the words I am a man yes carried by itinerant black workers and I'm just wondering whether you can't regenerate is the most ground down garbage workers in Memphis yeah yeah okay but can you not see in that the capacity for good in religion because everything that he said and did was based upon biblical teaching well I go on to say is that that's precisely not the case you see the Taylor branch's biography of him following his Kings own biblical annexations the first volume is called I think the pillar of fire the second volume is called the parting of the waters the third is called crossing the Jordan it's all the images that of the exodus from slavery but I say in my book and I'll repeat as I never tire of doing so why it's a very good thing that dr. King isn't basing himself on the biblical because if he was he'd be telling his followers you have the right to kill anyone who gets in your way and to enslave them and to take their women as your concubines and to murder their children and to steal their land that's what the children of Israel told they can do by way of the first five or so books of the Bible except dr. King would probably tell you that he drew his inspiration from parts of the Sermon on the Mount well which is considered the main source of Christian pacifism yes but he's the the the stuff he talks about it as Moses going to the mountaintop indeed I say I think what it is the most moving speeches the night before he dies or his murder he says I've been to the mountaintop and I know I'm not going to see Canaan it's far enough for me I've seen all I have to and it's it's eerie watching it because you know what he doesn't which is he isn't going to make it he's not going to make it to sunset the next day as it happens it was a favorite speech of his he made it on dozens of occasions it was part of his repertoire less a little less theory when you know that but I just say I'm very glad that Moses was not in fact his mentor because if so King would have been a bloodthirsty conquering racist and slave manga which it's a good thing he wasn't the great the great problem with the King legacy as this it's meant that for every school child in America the legacy of black secularism in the civil rights movement has been completely abolished the people who actually organized the march on Washington a philip Randolph for example fantastic black trade union leader a Bayard Rustin brilliant black socialists intellectual the people actually did it and philip Randolph proposed the first march in Washington during the years of Franklin Roosevelt all these people are gone and it's the prevailing view among most white liberals that black people only really respond to preachers and as a result an enormous number of black frauds have been foisted on the population as long as they can get the word Reverend in front of their name Jeremiah Wright Jesse Jackson the al Sharpton I mean you know sure Syrian frauds of the lowest kind everyone thinks well they must be ok because these black guys they sure love them some some ministers oh it's not a good thing Christopher I'll press you on this point I'll press you on this point because your argument is if he was to take biblical text he would have got his followers to turn their swords upon their oppressors but if he actually took his moral compass if his moral campus was in fact based upon the Sermon on the Mount based upon the Beatitudes we turn the other cheek love your enemy as yourself blessed are the peacemakers these are things you don't mention at all in your book and yet they did inform his teachings just a second on the oppressors Moses wasn't telling his followers that they could kill their oppressors he was saying that they had kill anyone who got in their way that's why we don't run into any amount of kites anymore and he explicitly said everything I'm not under a pacifist if Martin Luther King had said to his people you have the right to rebel and resist and use violence against racism I would have been absolutely with him as I have been on other occasions when that's been the case but he would know to be to be consistently if had to say no we can we have the right to enslave people and we have the right to commit genocide that's what the biblical precedent would be as for the Beatitudes that that is it seems to me pacifism in it's strictly a moral sense it says it's wrong to resist evil I don't think that's true I think it's immoral to say that you shouldn't versus evil let's go back to the general proposition then provide a way to say you've love your neighbor as yourself is what I mean by compulsory love it's a very sinister injunction you cannot possibly love another person in the same the same way as you love say your lover or your family or let alone in my case they rate yourself it's asking too much the golden rule says the it's asking too much and it's gone and that's not that's not all that's wrong with it it's asking too much and it's guaranteeing that you will fail and therefore that you'll have to feel constantly guilty if your shortcomings it's demanding the impossible for you on pain of hellfire this is not a good thing it's not good for the morals either the Golden Rule demand for yourself well sorry demand expect for demands of others the self respect that you would demand for yourself that's fine that's doable it's hard but it's feasible it has a contradiction in it the big trapdoor actually which you can ask you about if you like but at least it's not immoral and naught but it's not Christian it comes it appears that the idea of the Golden Rule do unto others as you'd like to be treated you'll see it's appears in the Analects of Confucius it's in the Babylonian Talmud we don't know of any society that didn't have some such common sense of calm around okay look region gets its morality from us we don't get our morality from since you kept going on the point let me go back to King just remove it because the assumption that he never was influenced by the New Testament say Winston said ok I say that his main narrative was Exodus of course he was a good also say he's most inhuman Lutheran so he most is most imperative teaching was out of non-violence now if that didn't come from the Beatitudes where did it come no - I'm saying it did verbs say that's not moral to me that's not moral teaching there are two things wrong with the Beatitudes one is the idea of non-resistance the other is the idea of loving of compulsory love to an impossible degree I don't think these are moral preachments I think their fanatical preachments made by the same person who said take no thought for the morrow know don't care about clothing or investment or education or any of these things just drop everything and follow me that's moral a mad preaching means you don't care about your children's education you don't care about building a house you don't care about thrift about investment about husbandry any of these things why because the world is going to come to an end that's what the preacher was saying and meaning these things are all pointless the world is going to come to an end you're going to be around when it comes to an end it'll happen in your lifetime so throw everything away for the very disastrous apocalypse EPOXI apocalypticism that I began tonight by trying to criticize but Kings non-violence worked well he worked in he was lucky I think because there was a third the other way around but he urged his followers to take out the sword I wouldn't if it hadn't if what he'd tried the first time hadn't worked if it had been resisted much longer they were going to take up if not the sword they were going to resort to violence they indeed a lot of the time did and every negotiation with the Dixiecrat a very highly organized violent reaction was conducted with the knowledge they had not theoretical either practical that if we don't negotiate with this guy there's some much rougher guys we will have to be dealing so there was the believable threat of it's behind the non-violence but as it happens historically the United States couldn't postpone the question of civil rights any longer and it had become a big issue in the Cold War began borrows from two United States in the build war there was a problem majority among at least northern whites in favor of emancipation there hadn't been any mass immigration to the United States for a very long time there was no further excuse to put it off it was really a case of the right man at the right hour but that's that's a relativistic point isn't it let's get back to the general proposition but the struggle for civil rights would have occurred whether there was were the media Christian revelation or not I mean the American anti-slavery society for example was largely begun by people who were of no faith people like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin the likelihood that you'd be a secularist in favor of civil rights would be extremely high almost 100% the likelihood that you'd be an opponent of civil rights and be a Christian roughly 100 percent the other way remember that the whole mandate for slavery and segregation is taken directly from the Bible where it is warranted remember the Ku Klux Klan is a Protestant identity organization it's are specifically declared Lea Valley Christian Protestant group if if people are going to say that biblical inspiration is allowed how are they going to say it's only allowed in their own case let's go back to your general proposition that religion poisons everything and you do tend to argue by analogy anecdote an example so let me do the same thing here if I can I lot like a lot of Australians I've actually spent a good deal of time taking trips to the island of Bali over the years and I simply find it impossible to imagine that barley would be a better place if stripped of its religion so I'll ask you just to to talk to that yes you know to me it's an incredibly appealing place precisely because the rhythms of life and maintained by religious calendar and by strict adherence to principles yes I've been to Bali to there mainly to investigation I don't know if you realize it's a song that you're probably done that may need to investigate religious thuggery in my case and I went partly out of solidarity to that Australian bar in Denpasar Paddy's Paddy's Pub reloaded as it was called by there where all the worst actions and the Ireland were conducted by people of faith but I do I guess know what you mean there are those who say that these Eastern practices aren't really religions I mean they instead of Buddhism for example it isn't want I have I'm in two minds about this most Buddhists claim that they're not religious it's not a god business it's a it's a spiritual practice well in Bali 95% of the people roughly adhere to what they call the Hindu Dharma yes it's a blend of Hinduism Buddhism and ancestor worship to not call that a religion as stretching the point no I agree I mean it's more like it seems to me more like a culture or practice I mean what what what threats do they make against non-believers we don't know I mean it's very also a highly-evolved when you say it's a bit like asking me can I imagine England my country of birth or okay anywhere else in Europe without cathedrals no I can't absolute God or rather if I try I don't I don't like the idea yes what the difference is that 95% of the population don't worship in those cathedrals whereas in Bali people's lives are controlled and run along this religious clock yeah you know there it's the harvest there there are even ways of worshipping your vehicle's machinery sure silly but probably harmless I get what I what I say you wouldn't like to see it gone no would you know what I say in my in my in my introduction is that all of that and more for better and worse I don't it's not I don't mind I mean how tolerant can I get how nice to me to be he's up it's just that I I'm a I'm a just like it very much but I won't I don't expect people to give it up or want them to I insist only that they leave me out of it okay but I don't have to know what they believe they joke that they don't want a subsidy from the government for it that they don't try and teach it to my children that they don't expect me to have to live under it in any way then that's all absolutely fine but therefore for me the chest of religion is in a way whether it proselytizers or not and it seemed to me in Bali that if there ever was a time when they did that they've given it up I'm sure there was a time of terrible spiritual and religious warfare in that part of the world it can't have been the only part of the world where there never was Balinese actually ran from a Islamic invasion that's why they I mean there's that too but I mean I bet among between different Buddhist and Hindu groups they've been terrible episodes of homicide and worse there are some parts of the world where they've calmed down and got over it but it doesn't entitle us to forget what religion was like when it thought it could get away with it okay anyway my principle is absolutely one of coexistence and even of cultural admiration as long as the fangs are drawn and if you say they've been drawn in Bali good on them it it's just it just sub goes against the idea that religion poisons everything which is your your basic what's your well it's a rhetorical well you're describing a culture that they're praising it as far as I know justly to precisely the extent to which it doesn't resemble really religion now is that me having it both ways I mean it certainly it certainly resemble so guess what he resembles a religion to me what and I would say probably to the majority of the Balinese people but what if you get what you guys like what do you get if you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian someone who comes and knocks on your door for no particular reason you Unitarians are religious - they say their parent belief is one God at the most de jure I don't have any I don't have this I don't have the energy for real quarrel with them but I mean I don't I don't terrifically respect it either as long as the all I ask is that it leaves me alone let's bring the principle closer to home and to our home here I mean let's look at another example there's a place called the Oasis here in Sydney it's a shelter for young homeless people was a subject of very moving documentary not so long ago and from that it's clear that the heart and soul of this place is a Salvation Army captain called Paul moulds and his wife now they're non-judgmental as far as I can see they don't seem to be pushing their religion essentially they practice their faith by helping others so can that be poisonous no but what sends in that case is it religious you again you're saying these people are so nice they're hardly religious at all you're making no no won't you join you too is here to pick me example where their faith we had nothing to do with no no we're not mentioning any of that it's not clear at all we just I just like running orphanages now I'll just tell you something most people have faith who'd like running orphanages aren't that nice and I know that Australia is one of the places when I don't need to underline that so again if you're going to accept or claim the one you have to take on the other whereas I'll give an example I like giving blood okay it's thought that I think I should and I was brought up in the idea of the National Health Service but actually positively enjoy it more than shedding it I find it a pleasurable relaxing experience and I give pleasure I get pleasure from the idea that the National Health Service or wherever I am isn't going to run out of blood and I don't lose a pint because I regrow it quite quickly but someone else gets one I like that there's a great book by old socialist cool piece of that's called the gift relationship about how people like to help and they get positive benefit to themselves from helping other people and I also have a very rare blood group indeed and I want to make sure that when it's my turn to hemorrhage there's enough blood around why make a strenuous thing of it I don't say and by the way vote for my party now will come over to my team or so no I've just I've just done a good thing for its own sake how about that add the sake and the sake includes my own and the human species were talking about as a test of your principle then I'm going right back to where we started here because you went on a bit of a tangent but they're sticking to these sticking to these people sticking to captain moulds and his wife just from that I mean they are people of faith that is what drives them to do what they do 24 hours a day okay they're not proselytizing right and perhaps that's the thing that for you to you lets them off the hook but in fact they are still religious and they are evidently doing something good so I'm simply saying your principle doesn't hold up in that case well I don't know enough about them to be sure about that not trying funny I just I don't know but I mean if there's a motive apart from for its own sake then I would be inclined to suspect you however or strands to be sweet they were yes I would say that if there's a hinge of proselytization if if they're so careful to point out they're not doing it I wonder why they're so keen to just claim something I just I mean I just know it but I'm healing I don't know I give I give my money to charities like medicine or frontier or Amnesty International that go and help my fellow creatures without any supernatural inducement or consideration okay this sort of brings us back to and we talked about this the other night but it brings us back to why people seek solace in religion the killer quote of course came from Karl Marx religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature the heart of the heartless world just that it is just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation yeah I mean it's interesting he said it so clearly and so well and doesn't that sort of at least demonstrate why it's still today in existence well and to complete the quotation which is from the his introduction to has some question of Hegel's philosophy of right he goes on to say criticism the religion has is necessary and not sorry criticism has plucked the flowers from the chain not so that men way wear the chain without consolation but so they may break the chain and call the Living flower so what Marx is saying is of course is the consolation and it arises from a deep spiritual hunger but it's false consolation it's not it's not the friend it claims to be and it's always vaguely misrepresented as marx having said the religion was an opiate of the people that it was a mere narcotic a ruling class drug scam which it's of course not its self-generating and it comes I think not just from unhappiness or loneliness or what was sometimes in that same discussion called alienation but from a need that we would have no matter what the material circumstances were for what I would say the numinous would be one word the transcendent would be another the things that we we know about without being able to quantify them music love landscape for a lot of people I think different times of day some combinations of all those things the Nocturne I wouldn't trust anyone who was who was turned deaf on these things but I think the the great intellectual and in some ways cultural task is to satisfy hungers of this kind artistically and aesthetically without them becoming the pretext for superstition or empowering the supernatural or anyone who wants to build power on that and I don't think it's too much to ask there many people I mean this building is in a way testimony to it it's not a cathedral exactly but it's where people can come for music and for a sense of there being something higher and finer than the everyday but it doesn't gratify any cult or any any any ambition that has supernatural well that exploits the supernatural for what are unfortunately rather crudely material purposes Marx thought he had the answer but you'll appeal here to higher values and so on is interesting and the question is whether it really will happen I mean and the question is whether we've gone from dialectical materialism to plain old materialism and whether that's all that's going to be left when you take away or strip away religious thought well I was asked this question earlier on this visit I asked a lot say you the the alternative is the world of McDonald's and condoms and pointless tourism and pleasure-seeking and empty-headed ism and so forth I I fail to see the force of this critique in two ways one is if you if you if you really look at the intestinal life of any religion you'll find it's extremely earthy and materialistic you're going to read tell me that the Catholic Church lives on spirituality you just look at the outlines of its prelate just look at the look at its Canales look at the it's pretty gross look at look at what the how the Islamic Republic of Iran actually conducts business it's a racket it's a shameful obvious racket which includes by the way dealing in things of profiting from things like child prostitution and narcotics look at how the Taliban finances itself these so-called ascetics and self-sacrificing suicidal visionaries it's a crime family it's what it is that's the first thing I've never met a church that isn't completely in and of the material world and Kant wouldn't yield to that now sit second and I tried a bit of this in my shorter address if you don't think that contemplating say the word of Einstein or Edwin Hubble or Stephen Hawking it doesn't have something of the transcendent and the numinous to it I then I feel sorry for you it's almost at some point it's almost ecstatic what their what this was whether the the sheer beauty of the natural world the what I call the awe-inspiring character of physics this this this is really magnificent it's marvelous it deserves almost to be called miraculous who here knows what I mean by the event horizon what couldn't see you if you did but I mean and by the way I don't really know either but here's how Hawking such a brilliant writer about science is how he describes he said the event horizon is the lip of the black hole it's the the aperture itself if you could travel to it in some way and you would get to the edge of the black hole gets the little black hole you'll be at the event horizon and if you could fall in be pulled into it you'd be able to see in some way the past as well as the future except of course you wouldn't have time there's always something but there's a contemplate that for a bit it's not McDonald's and in fact one of Hawking's friends says to him that if he himself were ever diagnosed with a terminal illness and if he could arrange to go it was evolution that's how he would want to do it so no it's it's the same as the people who say that to other forms of totalitarianism not explicitly theocratic are secular an argument that keeps on annoying me and you'll probably want to return to it but just for now I'd say well cuz I never don't get asked that I just say well I'm on this particular aspect of it to say to have this argument fairly you'd have to point to a society not that had been stalin eyes door not safai it or something of this sort but that was based on the on the veneration of veneration of respect for study of Voltaire Lucretius Einstein Galileo Spinoza possibly the greatest ethicist there ever was Bertrand Russell Thomas Jefferson so you'd have to find a society where those were these sort of if you like the moral and philosophical authorities and see how that society had degenerated into slavery cannibalism starvation purges and witch hunts and that experiment our last we have not yet run but that's the one I would propose it's odd when I think about it it's it's really odd in fact that I chose to do this as a devil's advocate interview but let's leave that aside you know we wait absolutely after now um I was asked by oh it's an anecdote chapter denotes an object i was asked who know not chapter 10 again please sir not in case you don't know and haven't got the damn book yet no not just even it it's not in there um I was asked by the Vatican to testify against the sainthood nomination of Mother Teresa against initially heard the ossification and I said yes of course I was very I was very honored to be asked and yes your holiness first time I've ever said that and the last as well so I went to testify and I made a discovery that I thought I'd share with you everyone used to think they knew one thing about the Catholic Church will they were Catholics or not that in sainthood arguments they have a devil's advocate advocate is diabolo and it was true until very recently the last Pope scrapped this office the office doesn't exist any longer I was poly so he could fast-track sainthood he made more sense the last Pope did than his 10 predecessors combined in double so the avocado stir novel I office was shut down no longer is there so I had to testify just in a seminar room with a Monsignor and a deacon and a priest and a tape recorder and a Bible and I realized halfway through I just become the first person in history to have represented the devil pro bono okay which is a distinction of a sort you took us in the into the realms of cosmology a short time ago here's another quote from your book religion has run out of justifications thanks to the telescope and the microscope I mean you're simply arguing that bit simplistic that isn't it yes it is a bit but you are simply arguing that science has killed off religion is that right um I'm saying I think it's incompatible with its the two ways of thinking as well as the two modes of discovery that follow are incompatible with irreconcilable yes I do think so but it's a bit it's a bit crude to say that the microscope the telescope alone will do it I was thinking more about how what we found out about our own human nature mended a microscope we know we know a lot more about what what makes us morally and ethically where we are and what our kinship is with the lower animals as well and they're from the telescope we know more about the origins of our cosmos it's a shorthand for what I was trying to enlarge upon this evening yep the Monday's we visit that the problem is they're going to remain fundamental questions which science almost certainly will never answer for example if the origin of the universe was the Big Bang what caused that to happen how could the entire universe simply pop into existence magically for no reason at all I mean because science won't be able to answer those questions religion will always seek to well I think it's the other way around actually the reason why religion is such great argument to be having is that it is our first attempt at making sense I mean religion is what you get before philosophy so first attempt at philosophy most philosophers began started off as religious as did many ethicists so our first attempt at cosmology first attempt of healthcare by means of miracle alas still and prayer it's a bit itself first attempt to make sense but and science doesn't completely replace all those questions but it says that there's no need for a supernatural attempt to answer them in other words if you say because we don't know what the scientific origins of the Big Bang are which father Lamech didn't know any more than I do or Einstein then there must be a supernatural explanation that isn't logical at all and if there was a supernatural progenitor where did that supernatural progenitor come from who created that so you get nothing out of it but an infinite regression and I think the meanest application to science is more satisfying than that and much more likely to yield an answer that you can at least argue about whereas if you're simply told you have a creator and he has a plan for you it explains nothing and it has reactionary implications because it suggests there are people who can't just tell you what to do if there are plenty of those as it is people who say God tells me to tell you what to do and that's slavery incidentally you make this point yourself don't you about this infinite regression of creators and in fact Aristotle concluded that the logical of all of this would necessitate 47 or 55 gods yes what's the mathematics no idea I just a lot about Aristotle I don't understand and the Soviets in that song but yes from Walla Walla mooo I think it was actually the University of Wollongong I was pronouncing yeah yes yes the restoral was a bugger for NASA yeah Plato yes never mind John Stuart Mill of his own free will 1/2 a pint of Shandy got spectacularly ill but pleasure they say could stick it away offer crater whiskey everything and of course our server was a bugger for the bottle Thomas Hobbes was a slave to his DRAM and Rene Descartes was pissed as a fart I drink therefore I am okay if my wife was there the hell did that yeah I didn't know you're Socrates himself is particularly missed lovely little think of a bugger when he's pissed it's something about the raising of the wrist there's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach you about the raising of the wrist yes okay let's get serious ound was a real person very seldom stable Martin Heidegger was a boozy beggar he could think you under the table David Hume growl consumed shopping Harun Hegel and Vic in Stein was a boozy swine who was just as sloshed astray go I think that's all they wrote as you can see Christopher's widely read okay fast-forward to today acutely aware that they will never be able to answer some of these big questions about existence some scientists are come up with the idea of quantum cosmology and it seems that and I think you almost alluded to this yourself that quantum physics almost has a theological dimension now could this become in fact the new religion well I think that there are signs of we I think that look to back up I think that the temptation to worship has to be admitted as being innate in us I mean there are very few people who are born without it I think I may be one of them but I mean I don't say I'm completely immune to superstition either I mean I'm a primate I think that reason I don't think religion is a radical ball or whether it would be desirable if it could be eradication I think it needs to be if you like domesticated brought under control that very quotation from Marx that I use that in his critique of Hegel shows that he understands that this is a product of the human soul if you wish or human personality it's not just the result of unresolved material contradictions thus it would be it is it's been folly for any communist regime to try and put it down to put that shortly so yes it's possible that people could become worshipers of physics yeah over the quantum just as in my view and it's that's beginning to worry me in some of the the green and environmental movements there's a feeling that we've brought punishment upon ourselves you know that we've sinned and that we've we've and there indeed there are people who look upon I haven't been into this guy our stuff very much we look upon the planet is in some sense something that needs to be propitiated and placated I can hear some echoes of this in some apparently modern and reason based and evidence based movements so yeah it's always there and you always have to be on the lookout for I'm actually talking about physicians are physicians that the quantum physicians yes suppose you'll call them cosmologists put very simply the idea is that things can just happen spontaneously particles can pop into existence without warning and disappear without warning and the corollary of that according to Paul Davies among others is that the entire universe could have just popped into existence I'm reading this book about the quantum noun about Heisenberg there was this discovery that it seems that a particle isn't so much pop into existence that much but it can be there and then being there reassembled with no one knowing where it was in between which is like a poltergeist or something except that it's not because there aren't any poltergeists you can't measure them whereas with this there's a chance I haven't got very far with the book yet but there's a chance of it being or the yielding to analysis it's certainly the only method we have had any luck with in the past and one pinch potential and of course we don't like to think of ourselves as random it's not in us to feel that we're just an accident any more than we can picture our own extinction let alone the extinction of our whole our whole species but it has to be face it's no good saying because that thought is depressing we should banish it in favor of something more uplifting because that means you get all the bad news anyway and in the meantime you'd be fooling yourself let's go to someone you talked about during your talk but didn't sort of we didn't go into any detail Stephen Jay Gould and his work on fossils and the so-called Burgess Shale deep in the Canadian Rockies which actually helped to establish the origins of human life pinning it back onto this tiny little creature called the pacaya grasslands tell us about that yeah there's a there's a the Burgess Shale is this some of you will I'm sure already know this but it's a it's a place in the de Rockies well essentially half of a mountain fell away so you get a side view a cross-section of a mountain looked at from the side very useful because you see all these stem and branches of life than the fossil record you're not drilling down for it you're surveying it like that scientists go there in a big way it's it's the best example we have and what's very striking about it is how many of the branches and sprigs go nowhere they're just taper off Gould in fact it says it's silly to think of evolution as a tree it's much more useful thing there's a big Bush it goes in all directions a tree seems to have a sense of upward further tropic movement this is more like a bush that's growing sideways and so on so the the question is suppose you could scan all this picture onto a tape mixing the metaphor slightly rewind that tape so that back to the beginning play it again there's absolutely no guarantee that it would come out the same way in fact they're likely that it would come out the same way is almost nothing very sobering thought and in the stay in the succession of evolutions that led to ourselves there's one moment where there's a tiny creature called epic hair grasslands grasslands simply meaning graceful meaning bendy which has the beginnings of a vertebrate system of a spinal column and that's the creature from which we got the idea of having a spine and built upon it if it had been left out of the mix there's no homo sapiens either and it's sort of that big and if the tape was replayed it might not show up in the right time and place from which you include randomness and no plan well certainly I would certainly say no plan or because I can't quite say that because no one no one can be that certain no plan that isn't fantastically wasteful capricious arbitrary and run by a designer who half the time doesn't know what he's doing a mad scientist another one and possibly very nasty what I mean in other words you certainly you can't say it's a benign plant no you could you could not say this was a Heavenly Father plan it would the implications of there being a planner of that plan are much more frightening than the implications with being Rhonda we're running towards the end but I want to quickly go to Stephen Jay Gould own philosophy because he mentioned it earlier he was not an atheist and spite of understanding this he was an agnostic who took the view that science and religion ask different questions about life he reached this conclusion if we keep science and religion apart neither one can oppress the other but in fact he wanted to and he said this I believe with all my heart in a respectful even loving Concord at between science and religion er you admire him a lot yeah I do I think he was one of the great educators of all time and that's why it cost me a lot of pain to say why I disagree with him in it and at such length when he was a boy he was a he was a Marxist and I think he over compensated for not being one by trying to be more friendly towards religion than it deserves and I well for the reasons I've already given I don't think it's true that there can be the real coexist they're constantly trying to patrol the same frontier and in the case of religion to cross it in inappropriate ways I mean why should it be but in the United States great country of science and technology and reason this is unceasing attempt to have nonsense taught in the schools with government money they won't quit they've been beaten back they keep coming back from what we they try and smuggle it through customs and used to me when they were strong enough they would bear on the teaching of Darwin until the 20s they could do that in some places now they can't do that the next time I was for equal time sounds fair for what they then called creation science nice try that was its person afford then they said secular humanism is a religion that shot that could shouldn't be taught either the latest is intelligent design I refuse even to call it that I refused to gratify them by using the term it's creationism and the game with equal time demand fairness great American virtue so after the biology class will have the period and then after chemistry which will be time children forget your alchemy books hours this with taxpayers money and then we'll be doing well you can see how the rest will go after astronomy we'll be doing our zodiacs no we're not having it now why don't they say I want to hear it from them that it's possible to be a religious person and not preach garbage in school let them be the ones to propose this compromise and then if I see a genuine hand being extended I might take it but I think Stephen was attributing much more goodwill to the other side than it really manifests I think this have to be a final question really Christopher your critics sort of argue there's no light and shade no room for disagreement in a Christopher Hitchens argument and do you accept ladies and gentlemen yeah do you accept do you accept actually that you are rather evangelical in your promotion of atheism no because I have nothing to have nothing to convert anyone to see that's legend you should regret that giggle I mean you will tomorrow you'll be sorry I have nothing I don't I don't ask us have I tried to persuade you of any one point of view no I've said beware of anyone who says that you don't that you already have all the evidence you need that's been my constant point we only progress we've ever made there can ever hope to make is by continual doubt skepticism the measurement of evidence against theory the practice against theory that's the that's not just as I gave the example of father de mettre and the Pope things cannot be even if they're right established as dogmas I think I rest my case can we end on a more controversial note we can is he like something cheer I mean I think I've got just the thing actually because and it was Professor Richard Dawkins who did this put this kind of slide upon atheism I suspect he wants you all to be called brights I guess because you're brighter than the rest of us yes I wish I really wish I saved my book he and Daniel Dennett another great scientist and teacher I really wish they hadn't done that I think it's wrong perhaps three ways I mean no one could say Father lumetri was stupid for example that's one thing too if it was a test of intelligence it would have the unpleasant suggestion that that's how society should be ordered I mean like the brave new world consider the Alpha and the beta and down to the upside on a circle which is a sinister behaviorist form of utopia and the third is that it gratifies exactly the suspicion of many religious people that they're looked down upon and scorned by the pointy-headed intellectuals and so forth and I obviously promise you if I don't do that even with the real low brows and slopeheads money they're my fellow primates to me so I was gonna show real soon I was gonna fish it I don't I don't have barely evolved once I don't have finish on that once whose eyes are so close to go they could use a monocle are you saved oh shut up okay just to be clear and it's it's obvious obviously to just about everybody of an atheist this person who believes there is no God an agnostic believes that nothing is known or can be known about the existence or nature of God why is that a less rational position than yours sorry I just jumped like a pee on a hot shovel because I'd meant to say this when you said about Steven calling himself an agnostic I was a great I would have been if I'd been around and I still have a great admirer of Thomas Huxley who the man who is that I think uncle of Elvis and Julian who had the great news known as Darwin's Bulldog he had the great debate on Darwin at the Natural History Museum in Oxford with Bishop Wilberforce known as soapy Sam to his parishioners who was a descendant of the great William and Huxley creamed him on that occasion as everyone remembers it was a walkover for our team and so we're all we're all very grateful to Thomas Huxley but I can't thank him for his coinage of the term agnostic which was his bolt-hole term again to try for a compromise where I don't really think the basis for it exists say you don't have to say you don't believe in God you can simply say not all the returns not all the evidence is our or is in yet so I I won't declare now I think that that's wrong twice one you're not saying that you cannot prove that there is no God no atheist has ever said that there is a scientist in America called Victor Stenger who's produced a book called God the failed hypothesis who goes as far now as to say sign can definitively say there isn't but I think that that's a very adventurous position but the Atheist new is there's absolutely no reason ever been advanced by another primate to believe that there is one and when you've got that far you really ought to say there isn't it seems to me not that for that reason I'm not sure and it's completely not on all fours with the other position which is evidence has nothing to do with it faith is much more important not only should you have faith but you'll be saved if you do now that's not I don't know it's not there might be it's not it's unless you do it with like Pascal and say it's a Valga bet it's a wager what have you got to lose which i think is morally creepy as well as evidentially unsound because if some huckster comes to me and says look he may not be there but if he is you but everything to gain by saying you believe into him even if you don't really I'll say well then I don't think much of your God because if there is such person and I spend my life arguing that there isn't and I do my best when I check out if I am which I sure will which I'm well if I find that I'm mistaken and I'm confronted with the guy I would hope you would be able to say at least admire your honesty and and I okay let's close on this ladies and gentlemen the the Christians don't give their God that much credit so doesn't that say something both about the fear base and the fact base and the moral base of what their faith really is I submit that it really does and thus that one is morally healthier as well as much more likely to be studying science and reason objectively if one puts religion behind one ladies and gentlemen save your applause because I'd just like to say thank you we see Christopher Hitchens here probably once a decade or something along those lines and I hope we don't have to wait that long to see him again I've certainly enjoyed talking to him I'm sure you've enjoyed listening to him please thank him properly now thank you gentlemen right can I just I don't know what an encore is in the this environment that perhaps he could just sing one verse one more verse well I have got do it straight through go ahead of the the booze now philosophers yes of what a bullet of one of a little oil in balloon the whirling balloon philosophy department ladies and Bruce's enteric idols great performance at the Hollywood Bowl that's right it's a real honor to be as ke o Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very seldom stable Martin Heidegger was a boozy bigger he could think you under the table David Hume could out consume shop and Harun Hegel a hands Vic and Stein was a beer east wine really was she would know big ensign was a very wide who is just as sloshed as Shore legal there's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach her about the raising of the wrists Socrates himself was permanently piers John Stuart Mill of his own free will on half a pint of Shandy got spectacularly ill but Plato they say could stick it away half a crate of whiskey every day Aristotle Aristotle who was a bugger for the bottle Thomas Hobbes was a slave to his drum and Rennie Descartes was pissed as a fart my drink therefore I um yes Socrates himself who's particularly miss a lovely little thinker a lovely little thinker lovely little think of butter burger when he's pissed okay if the song had a title which it doesn't yet I think it should be called reductio this is ABC fora

Channel: ChristopherHitchslap

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Keywords: Christopher, Hitchens, at, the, Festival of Dangerous Ideas, FODI

Id: kwiHkM126bk

Length: 103min 51sec (6231 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/count_of_wilfore]

"I'm not a pacifist. If Martin Luther King had said to his people 'You have the right to rebel and resist and use violence against racism', I would've been absolutely with him, as I have been on other occasions when that's been the case."

I wish Hitch would've elaborated on his views on using violence against racism. Also, does anyone know of any "other occasions" where he did talk about it?