Christopher Hitchens vs John Lennox | Is God Great? Debate

you [Music] [Music] evening a normal being here and I completely hosting Oxford University's mathematician professor John Lennox and acclaimed journalist Christopher Hitchens and what I'm sure will be a memorable evening for all of us of course as most of you know this event was originally slotted to be between author and political observer Dinesh D'Souza and mr. Hitchens but due to a major family surgery in India yesterday mr. D'Souza could not join us professor Lenox however was planning to be in the very seats that you now occupy and so when we discovered that we asked him if he would was willing to participate rather than spectate and he is graciously agreed it was very providential or if you prefer mr. Hitchens perspective it was almost providential almost I had to get that in there mr. Hitchens I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of that we also thanked fixed-point foundation for loaning professor Lenox to us this evening and helping us promote the event since he actually was in town for a fixed-point function now with the help of more people that can be named dr. Andy Westmoreland dr. Brad Creed University Relations Department Student Involvement University fellows many volunteers and our own tireless group of officers just to name a few we are now pleased to be hosting a very high-profile event on a very important topic indeed what topic could be more important and this is the socratic club's entire purpose to thoughtfully engage and explore life's so-called great questions I will state publicly that the Socratic club is a Christian organization modeled after the Oxford organization of the 1940s and 50s which CS Lewis presided over but just because we have an opinion on these issues does not mean that we are incapable of objectivity if an idea cannot properly take its stand in the marketplace of ideas without collapsing if it cannot survive without constantly being guarded from outside attacks then it is not worth believing in the first place we however think that Christianity can take its tant and it is with such confidence that we invite thoughtful opposition such as mr. Hitchens to engage us and what we hope will be a very fruitful dialogue CS Lewis once noted in any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there are always the there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter the opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor and that the outsider saved us and us the absent are easily refuted complacent dogmatism thrives and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility each group here is not the best but the worst that the other groups can say Christian though he was I think that this is a sentiment which any thoughtful person can agree with and is exactly the problem we are trying to combat we want to bring the best of both sides to bear I think you will agree with me that we have done fairly well deceive me we have not put the worst of each side out here but rather some of the best minds that each has to offer it is with this in mind that we hope you will listen carefully and respectfully to what each man has to say this evening finally before I turn over the floor I would like to remind you that filming and flash photography are prohibited fixpoint foundation is filming the event and if you would like to get footage of the event you may contact them afterwards or on their website I will now turn over the floor to this evenings moderator dr. Christopher Michos dr. matrice is a professor of English here at Stanford the director of the recently founded University Fellows Program and recent winner of the Macon teaching award of which he was very deserving if I may say so he's also the faculty sponsor of the Socratic Club and something of a mentor to myself personally if my classes have been any indicator at all I think that I can say he has the gift of moderating in the Socratic style which happens to be very fitting for his role this evening and it is with that that I turn the floor over to dr. Chris matrix I try to get it thank you very much Michael and on behalf of the Sanford faculty administration and staff I welcome everybody to campus this evening now before we begin the actual debate I want to briefly and very briefly introduce our two speakers and then go over the ground rules for this evening now our first participant sitting immediately to my left is mr. Christopher Hitchens mr. Hitchens a journalist the literary critic and a political commentator who is one of the most widely recognized public intellectuals of our day and although is the author of 17 books he is perhaps best known for his most recent book God is not great how religion poisons everything an international bestseller that among other things mounts a vigorous challenge to religious faith in its role in contemporary global society an independent thinker who resists classification he has carved out a unique place for himself in America's current political and social landscape please join me in welcoming to Birmingham mr. Christopher Hitchens [Applause] our second participant this evening is Professor John Lennox dr. Lennox is professor of mathematics at Oxford University and fellow in mathematics and the philosophy of science at green templeton College Oxford early in his career as senior scholar at Emmanuel College Cambridge professor Lennox attended the last lectures of CS Lewis and since that time he has emerged as a Christian apologist in his own right although his speaking engagements have taken him all over the world he is perhaps best known to Birmingham audiences for his role in The God Delusion debate at UAB back in the fall of 2007 at this event dr. Lennox debated fellow Oxford professor and leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins on the existence of God a debate that not only surprised many in the international academic community for its spirited collegiality but also helped to set an example for the possibilities of cordial but productive debate across ideological lines please join me in welcoming back to Birmingham dr. John Lennox now I know we're all ready to go but I do need to say a few words about the format tonight it's outlined a little bit in your program we'll begin with opening remarks each speaker will be allotted 15 minutes uninterrupted to offer these opening remarks as the speaker nears the end it is a lot of time I will signal him with the statement one minute remaining near the end of that minute I will signal again 30 seconds remaining and it should the speaker continue on I will be put in the unenviable position of having to cut him off and turn the floor over to his opponent the same will happen at the 10-minute time lotted for rebuttal again as we near the time I will tell the speakers of one minute to go then I'll remind them of 30 seconds to go and then I will once again if they keep going be put in the unenviable position of having to cut one of our speakers off I spoke to both of the gentlemen backstage I told them how much I dislike being unand beat so they have assured me that they will stay and act like perfect gentleman and stay within their allotted time now the rebuttal period will be followed by questions from the audience but we're going to do this a bit different than you might have done in another kind of discussion like this we do not have microphones where you can queue up instead we handed note cards to you this evening when you entered if at any time during the discussion between the opening comments or the allotted time for rebuttal you have a question please write that question down on that index card during the break between speakers say when mr. Hitchens has finished his 15 minute opening remarks if you wish pass your question to your right and we have volunteers who will pick up those questions in the aisle between segments those questions we put in order for me excuse me and then I will take those questions and ask them of our two guests this evening so without any further delay let's begin our debate and mr. Hitchens says the honor of opening first thank you well let me begin by thanking all of you ladies and gentlemen for coming I thank you Christopher for that suspiciously turfs grudging introduction and by confessing that I'll have difficulty when I get back to the north persuading my smart friends in New York that was a Socratic Society in Birmingham Alabama at all I mean I told my publishers when I started I wanted I want to begin in Dixie I don't want to do the usual book tour I want to take the campaign through the south and they said but why would you want to do that I mean who doesn't know that it's one long white sheet toga party crosses crackling merrily on the lawn in the night breeze later on they repair to an illegal still couch to reflect gloating ly on their multiple offenses against chastity particular emphasis on the loss of virginity with domestic or even semi wild animals so it's always a pleasure for me to go back so they the liberal consensus and say to them you know you'd be surprised by how quite a lot of that isn't really true I stick up for you guys when I can I really do now I'm guessing that tonight I'm not speaking to a largely or predominantly Muslim or Jewish audience if I was believe me I would find try and find a way of unsettling you I'm guessing that those of you who are believers are probably of the Christian kind as you know the Atheist position is the following that over the many hundreds if not thousands of gods and religions that humanity has invented in its time we have three roughly at only three not roughly only three alternatives in considering them one is that all of them are true one is that all of them are false and the other is that only one of them is true the first proposition is self-evident the absurd they can't all can conceivably all be true indeed there are mutually exclusive forms of Christianity as just to take only one religion that all our false seems at least possible that only one is true is the position say of my opponent dr. Lennox it must be the hardest single position to take but in the spirit of it I'll assume Christianity and I'll just remind you of a novel that probably most of you won't have heard of but was once very famous it was it was called when it was dark has anyone heard of it or read it it was it was a huge bestseller just before the first world war was my man called guy thorn and the meson son of the novel is this that news comes from Palestine that a grave has been opened and in this grave the stone rolled away from the tomb on a stone inside is the body of a man who's been scourge crucified had the crown of thorns pressed down on his head and has a terrible wound in his side almost perfectly preserved could have er and on the news of this on the news of this terrible archaeological discovery those the world undergoes a complete moral collapse because without the resurrection or with the brother with definite proof that there was no such thing that the resurrection was a fabrication there's no further moral restraint on humanity people are coupling like beasts in the streets they give themselves up to plunder and theft and rape and murder and perjury without conscience the the midnight of civilization falls upon an unhappy world until it's finally discovered that the whole thing was a fabrication put around by sinister Jewish people and journalists another untrustworthy riffraff as a stunt and then people can go back to being moral again well you see where perhaps you can guess where I might be headed with this in my view if every one of the gods that have been discredited instead of the only the two or three left to us that haven't yet been completely shown up as man-made fabric and joined Thor and Ashtaroth and twits a bottle and the Aztecs and all the others all of these were proven to be fraudulent and false the man-made I believe are moral dilemmas would be exactly the ones we face now all of us atheist agnostic philosophical Socratic or true believer we would still have to wonder about the purpose of our existence here we would still have to wonder about the origins of the cosmos and of nature we will still have to wonder about our duties to one another we will still have to wonder about how to build the just City how to reflect on truth and on beauty all of these dilemmas would remain exactly the way they are unaltered by any supernatural dimension and our subject tonight is the supernatural dimension itself that the chieftain of that dimension the other concept of God so I want to begin by clarifying why it is that I believe there is no such entity or person and I want to go on to say why I'm relieved when I reflect that this is so why I think it would be horrible if it were true or otherwise and I think I'd have to begin with the distinction between theism and deism even Thomas Aquinas is famous five proofs of the existence of God for example are strictly speaking hardly theological at all they are essentially only deistic they are about first causes or uncaused potential or relations causes they derive the idea of a creator from various gaps and from observation of the rhythms and the patterns of nature and the cosmos and they postulate that these rhythms and patterns would make no sense without the first cause in short they postulate nothing more than the argument from design which as you all know is subject to a refutation that says well if there was a designer then the designer must himself have been designed and threatens those who offer the case with them an infinite regression into chaos however I would say it's not possible to refute this argument conclusively or after your final only one can point out as I will some gross absurdities and inconsistencies in it I but for this evening and for the purposes of tonight why don't I simply grant that it could be true that there was an original creator and that that's a good and elegant explanation for how at least the cosmos in the process of life on earth two quite different things got started why don't I just grant the deist his point after all in the time that I've written the most about of the time of Thomas Jefferson and the time of Thomas Paine both of those gentlemen deists an intelligent person would probably have had no choice but to believe something very like that there's no superstition to it there's no there's nothing Supernatural about it but it leaves the theist like my learning opponent with all if I make this concession it leaves him with all his work still to come he still has to show somehow not only that there is a God but that he he himself understands the mind of that God knows the will or can interpret the will and wishes of that deity on such weighty questions as what is good what is evil what foods may be requisite or what foods may be profane what sexual partnerships are allowed what sexual positions indeed are licit or Elizabeth what days of the week are wholly or otherwise whether when or whether it is requisite to mutilate the genitals of children major questions where someone has to say yes I know we must do this because I happen to know what God wants us to do now it's my submission ladies and gentlemen I think it's a fairly modest vlog that brilliant as a mathematician dr. Lennox maybe no person no other human being no other primate no fellow mammal of mine over clever they may be is in any position to say that they know God's will or God's Word or God's desire or intention this information is not accessible to human beings and therefore my first statement is this those who do claim that they know already in a sense discredited they are deluded and in a sense they are they're the first ones who have to concede that the argument goes on with out them because we have to be awed all of us more and more all the time more and more awed at that as we discover how much more there is to know by how little of it we do know or can know it's only those who say that they know they are certain who we have to distrust a priori if I can use that expression very well hoping I've established that point just for the sake of the debate we don't have a word a deist that I think we should I would say I wasn't a deist as well as an atheist I don't believe there was a prime mover I don't believe there was a first cause of a divine kind I think we have better and further and brighter explanations for the origins of things than the idea of a supernatural first course and some also would say we don't even really need the word atheist because after all I don't require a special term when I tell you I don't believe in a tooth fairy you don't say well what's the word for someone who doesn't do that when I say I don't believe in witches and I don't believe in the biblical injunction to kill them either they don't say why do you what is it to be a non-believer in witches in witchcraft when I say to a Muslim your prophet believes in dust devils and jinns and the haunting spirits of the of the desert bed Meza shows what nonsensical peasant superstition is involved in the in the Muslim profession of faith you know one says to me what word are you using to say you don't believe in dust devils and jinns I think I can be generally credited with having good reasons for my doubt however I think that the challenge is a fair one because I think we are divided as between those of us to attribute our presence here to the laws of biology and the laws of physics and those of us who and we are modest in doing that I think we say we submit ourselves to the evidence and even if it comes up with conclusions that aren't very welcome to us we will accept them if they're well-founded and those who are conceited as I would say arrogant enough in fact to think that they are here as the consequence of a Divine Design there's all the difference in the world between those two worldviews and the big difference is one of them has evidence for it and the other doesn't and one of them will say in advance what would refute it I can tell you if you ask me what evidence we've presented would mean I'd have to change my mind and the theist will never do that he will never tell you in advance show me this and I'll stop believing it there's always an infinite replenishment of the infinitely renewable resource of faith going on in fact it's the humility of it that makes me laugh at it in a way the most they say that they're humble these believers in God they want to be written up as modest because they think that of course that God tells them they're worms originally sinful ingrates incurable made out of dust in one narrative out of a clot of blood in the qur'anic now if bad off to a pretty shaky start can condemn since an original fall of man nonetheless cheer up the universe is designed with you in mind this is a depraved form of sadomasochism in my view it's not good for you to go from this terrible objection and serfdom in the one instance to this belief that you are the center of creation and the object of the cosmos in the other it's a terrible alternation a neurotic alternation between being much too server and much too arrogant but just locally what was it what would it be to believe this suppose you did believe that everything that brought us here was by design well we know that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed just on this planet have become extinct so heaven has already watched almost a hundred percent of its creation die off often in very unpleasant callous circumstances we thought it arms right and that's billions of years of geological time some people say the most AP ins has been around for a hundred thousand years some as long as a quarter of a million no one says less than 100,000 Francis Collins the great Christian believer who did the human genome project says certainly a hundred thousand I'll take a hundred Richard Dawkins thinks it's more I'll take a hundred what does it mean if we're divinely supervised and divinely created and what looked out for it means that for 98 or so thousand of those years humans Homo sapiens were being born dying part of them in childbirth I would think life expectancy maybe of 20 years maybe 30 people dying essentially of their teeth the hideous diseases living in permanent fear where the earthquakes coming from where the lightning strikes coming from why is always where were these diseases that hit us we don't know about microbes have no idea that's to say nothing about the fights with neighboring tribes over women over land over meat over subsistence that the torture the violence the cruelty that goes on I don't need to underline all of it I hope you can picture it for yourself ninety-eight thousand first ninety-eight thousand years heaven watches this going on with perfect insouciance at something like two to three thousand years ago decides right we have to intervene now we have to do something about this well what would be the best way of intervening to try and redeem this other bleak picture what about having somebody tortured to death in an obscure part of the Middle East that ought to cure it or if you're a Muslim what about getting an illiterate epileptic shepherd to start babbling and saying that she leads me talking to an archangel or what or what about inventing the figure of Moses in the mountain has never yet been found by any java firm at Sinai that's what you have to believe is I've got a minute right that's what you'd have to believe and that's why I ask myself why do the worshippers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer of his creations dialogue the rest suffer misery and the redemptive offers just don't somehow take of being cruel and capricious and bungling and and incompetent why and callous as a father and so since this is as far as I can get now I have to tell you why I don't think the idea of an eternal father is a good one in any case when I next get the chance to draw breath thank you for staying with me thus far well good evening ladies and gentlemen and thank you very much for coming it's a great pleasure for me to be back again in this university and I'm delighted to once more meet Christopher Hitchens it's a delight to meet an Englishman who's an American citizen on his own territory I agree very much with Christopher Hitchens it is repudiation of many of the evils that he claims have been done in the name of God but I've learned to distinguish between the greatness of God and the inexcusable evil that has been done by those professing his name and so I do not the juice that God is not great and that religion poisons everything after all if I fail to distinguish between the genius of Einstein and the abuse of his science to create weapons of mass destruction I might be tempted to say science is not great and technology poisons everything what is more as I look back at the evils of atheist regimes of the 20th century I might also be tempted ladies and gentlemen to say atheism is not great it has poisoned everything as it is I hold that science shows some of the greatness of God the famous physicist James Clerk Maxwell who discovered electromagnetic theory inscribed above the door in his laboratory in Cambridge University the words greater the works of the Lord studied by all who delight in them yet Christopher Hitchens says thanks to the telescope and the microscope religion no longer offers an explanation of anything I find it impossible I find it if possible as a scientist to take such a statement seriously as if using a microscope and a Rembrandt painting could disprove the existence of Rembrandt himself the idea that God and science are mutually exclusive explanations of the universe is as wrong as saying that internal combustion and Henry Ford are mutually exclusive explanations of the automobile they are complementary explanations one explains how it works the other why it exists to think that as the reach of our instrument increases the greatness of God the Creator somaye diminished is to make the mistake of confusing mechanism with agency when you can discover the law of gravity didn't say now I know how the universe works I don't need God know his wonder at how it was done increased his admiration for the Creator who done it that way and udin wrote the most famous scientific treatise of all time the principia mathematica in the hope that it would persuade the thinking man to believe in a deity telescopes can show us the wonder of the night sky but science didn't put the stars there more did the laws of biology and physics ladies and gentlemen they describe what is there they don't put it there Stephen Hawking says the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question why there should be a universe for the model to describe he then asks why does the universe go to all the bother of existing does it need a creator yes it does need a creator Allan Sandage widely regarded as one of the fathers of modern astronomy discovered quasars said I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos there has to be some organizing principle God to me as a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence why there is something rather than nothing and another giant of cosmology Arnold Penzias won his Nobel Prize for discovering an echo of the Big Bang but Penzias could see how unimaginably greater is the God who conceived of this beginning to space-time of the first place astronomy says leads us to a unique event a universe which was created out of nothing one with a very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life and one which has an underlying one might say supernatural plan Einstein at the brilliant insight that the speed of life was an absolute constant but what shall we say of the creative mind that said let there be light and there was light to measure the speed of light is one thing to create light is another far from science showing God is not great as Christopher Hitchens suggests the very opposite is the case it was belief in God that motivated the advance of science in the 16th and 17th centuries Galileo Copernicus Kepler Newton expected to find low in nature because they believed in a great lawgiver now so often we hear the new atheist talk about faith and deprecating it but I want to tell you that scientists are all people of faith as Einstein saw they believe that the universe is accessible to the human mind and physics cannot explain that for the simple reason that you can't do physics without believing that the universe is intelligible so scientists required faith and yet I read Christopher Hitchens saying if one must have faith to believe in something then the likelihood of that something having truth or value is considerably diminished pardon well one must have faith that the universe is intelligible to do science so I'm to deduce am I that the likelihood of science having truth or value is considerably diminished exit science then and I presume the Christopher Hitchens like most of the rest of us believes in his own existence yes am I to take it then that the likelihood he really does exist is considerably diminished his statement is a self refuting statement and I find it ironic all that the so-called you atheists are so passionate about ridding the world of faith that they appear to be blind to the fact that them themselves are driven by faith they believe that their minds can grasp truth they believe in science they believe that God is not great yet mr. Hitchens informs us at a classic oxymoron our principles are not a faith our beliefs are not a belief the mind boggles ladies and gentlemen that is not the only irony for the new atheist offer no brown for the faith that they themselves cannot do a knight after all if human life has been cobbled together by mindless unguided processes why should we trust our cognitive faculties and the validity of any belief that they produce atheism and science included John Gray gets it exactly right modern humanism is the faith or through science humankind can know the truth and so be free but a Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible the human mind serves evolutionary success not truth well this reduces all rationality to zero and far from atheism being great it seems to me that it is irrational anti-scientific and incoherent even though emotionally its proponents seem unable to take this on board as the early pioneers of science all the rational justification of science is provided by the existence of the Creator who created not only the universe but the human mind that studies it in the beginning was the word and the Word was God all things were made by him at bigs perfect sense to me as a mathematician science is important but it has its limitations it cannot answer the questions of a child what are we here for what is the meaning of life nor can it tell us whether literature or art is good or bad hence an atheism that insists that science is the only way to truth diminishes human beings this is very obvious to many of my Russian friends we thought we could abolish God and retain a value for human beings but we found we couldn't do away with the greatness of God ladies and gentlemen and you can do a wave of a nobility of human beings endowed with all the potential of hearts of minds made in God's image you also do away with their freedom you are left with a mindless unguided process of somehow through humans up at its endless lottery to exist without ultimate hope for a tiny moment only to be crushed by the same blind forces that produce them some freedom that another evidence of the greatness of God consists in the ordinary freedoms that we often take for granted here's an influential German atheist thinker Jurgen Habermas and he says this christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty conscience human rights and democracy the benchmarks of Western civilization to this day we have no other option we continue to nourish ourselves of this source everything else is postmodern chatter it was Christianity not eight years of incidentally that originally gave us the universities that educated the New Atheists gave them the Liberty that permits them to propagate their views and the law that protects them as well as the rest of us and yet Christopher Hitchens insists that the God he does not believe in is a tyrant and a bully as we just heard I don't actually believe in such a god either it is so alien to my own knowledge and experience but I might point out as an aside that atheism is no solution to tyranny either as the bloodbath of the 20th century shows only too well but there's another deep problem here to say that God is not great is a moral statement to say is not a tyrannical is a moral statement and that must be based on some moral standard otherwise you couldn't distinguish evil from its opposite but if there is no eternal base for values external to humanity - mr. Hitchens or anyone else's standards be anything but limited human conventions ultimately meaningless product of a blind unguided evolutionary process how can random locations and blind selection produce any morality at all let alone the kind of apparently invincible morality that justifies the new atheist and tolerance of religion John Gray points out that the new atheist defend liberal freedoms without asking where they come from hard atheists like Nietzsche Camus and Satre will want to know how atheists can rationally justify their absolute sounding commitment to timeless values without implicitly invoking God they would say you cannot and Richard Dawkins gets close to hard atheism when he says that in the universe of blind physical forces you won't find any reason or rhyme nor any justice the universe has the properties that we should expect if there is no design no purpose no evil and no good DNA neither knows nor cares DNA justice and we dance to its music but of Hitler pulped or you and I are simply dancing to our DNA no one can blame us for anything all morality is gone so the claim that God is not great being a moral plane dissolves into utter meaninglessness and here we meet a strange contradiction that the atheism seems to me ironically to deny the one thing that upholds moral values that is justice for millions ladies and gentlemen there is no justice in this life and according to atheism they will never get it after death since death the end so the terrorists who danced their DNA on the bodies of their victims get away with it they will not get away with it ladies and gentlemen but as here is another aspect of the greatness of God that he is the ultimate judge of mankind there is to be a judgement at which justice will be done fairly in England at the moment atheists have paid for an advertising campaign where buses carry a message there's probably no gods who stop worrying and enjoy your life why is it that atheists associate God with worry is that they fear to meet a misjudge they don't like judgement but I can't help noticing sometimes how judgemental they are German Marxist thinker Max Horkheimer said a very interesting thing he feared there might not be evolved since then there would be no judgement and no justice and here we have a dilemma the problem of my human guilt of the one hand and my desire for justice and the other I want justice but what will justice say to me and what about God is he really the despot they make him out to be no there's yet more to his greatness God is not only the Great Creator a judge he's a God of grace and love and the central claim of Christianity is this that as an expression of his love God Himself became human the word became flesh Christ shows us as none other the greatness of God he made unique claims to be the truth to be the Son of God and backed them up by a life and teaching without parallel but his moral teaching was not his main message his stated mission was to deal with the moral chasm that separates us humans from God by taking our fins on himself ladies and gentlemen we scientists cannot even tell you what energy is so won't don't be surprised if I cannot completely explain to you the deepest mystery of our universes history the death and resurrection of Jesus yet just as we see the effect offered use energy without completely understanding it what I do observe is the transformation the peace the hope that comes into the lives of ordinary men and women who learn to place their faith their confidence their trust in Christ as Savior and God I see in them and experience in myself a transcendent sense of purpose that atheism does not have and a hope that atheism does not know it is here ladies and gentlemen I submit to you that the greatness of God is supremely manifest thank you [Applause] if you have questions please write them on the index card and pass them to your right well let me do this in reverse order and see if I have enough time left over to complete my first burst as it were I think I gave you fair warning ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters that dr. Lennox would have to claim to know more than he can possibly know and he by no means let me down he knows that he's saved he knows who's saved him he even knows who hung the stars in the sky how he knows this I don't know it was a bravura performance in its wave and I don't think if you're gonna claim to know who put the stars up there that you should be citing Albert Einstein if there's a copy of my portable atheist on sale afterwards and I hope there is if it isn't it is available to find bookstores everywhere I have several pages of painstaking denials that I understand that he had had or ever had had any belief at all of any sort in a personal God or a savior or a divine revelation he was at pains to repudiate this and he thought it was both sinister and childish as well as unscientific the furthest he would go would be an illustration of the distinction I labored in vain to make between deism and theism between but in a name you might give to a process or an order or a law of nature and the idea of an intervening vengeful supervising caring God a personal one that's that's the only distinction I hope to make and it was one that dr. Lennox treated as if it was non-existent as you may have noticed I'm Stein may not be used by those who believe in revelation or personal God now okay on the something and nothing question let's stay with science for a moment Edwin Hubble noticed a few years ago as many of you will know that the universe was continuing to expand and at quite a rapid rate away from itself and but it was thought by people who are still thinking in what you might call Newtonian term that though that rate of expansion was remarkable and rather alarming it would obviously have to start slowing down decelerating the certain point to the contrary recently been discovered by very brilliant physicist Lawrence Krauss that in fact the rate of expansion is increasing and quite rapidly the universe is expanding very very fast very soon if we hadn't been around at this particular point in time there wouldn't be enough evidence left around in the red light shift for us to know that the Big Bang had ever even taken place we're only picking that up from signals from a long time ago which will soon be unintelligible I'm saying soon using billions of years as a index of time of course light-years if you will not like us the distances you know semi distances and times that are rightly called astronomical what does this mean it means that though there is now something after all I am here I do firmly believe and I'm very happy to see all of you here too especially those who paid for your ticket it means that very soon there will be nothing a lot of nothingness is headed our way it's going to be all over quite soon you can see it coming read the last cloud seven hells it's going to explode away it's going to fall apart and if that is a couple of things don't happen sooner than that we can already see the Andromeda galaxy in the night sky you can actually see it some nights without really a dove a telescope headed directly on collision course for our own we have an appointment ladies and gentlemen with the Andromeda right it's going to crash right into ours there's something now enjoy it while you can nothing is coming whose design is that may I inquire all perhaps before that is very possible before any of this happens we won't have to worry about it because our Sun will simply swell up into a red dwarf our oceans will boil a life on this planet will become extinct and then the Sun will collapse into itself and go but the way that millions and millions and millions of other stars have we can see them imploding and exploding and shooting themselves to death all over the sky as it is nothingness a lot of nothingness so those who want to claim the credit for the something whose what gears he's going to claim the credit for the nothingness and who went to all this trouble this fantastic explosion of of nothingness these infinite spaces of nothingness and with with the destiny of destruction written in every galaxy in order to create this one privileged planet with this one brain shivering uncertain vulnerable primate species on it that's only been here for a hundred thousand suffering years and has anyone offered redemption for two thousand look first upon this picture and on that look at the absolute extraordinary scale that's proposed on the one hand and the the absolutely God not even microcosmic on the other and I don't believe you can possibly take any claim of religion seriously here whatever is the explanation for this people who say well since we don't know we may as well say it's God are simply drumming their fingers they're wasting their time and they're trying to waste yours now on this question of who's boss and why I don't think the Eternal Father idea is a good one I'm sure I'm not the only father here three children my job as a father is to get out of their way to do my best for them and then make room for them what if I was to say to them oh don't worry I'll always be here not as in I'll always be here for you as in I'm never going away you'll never see the back of me you'll never get to say goodbye daddy no no I'll always be here in fact I'll be here long after you've died in fact I'm rather looking forward to that because then I couldn't a sit in judgment on you this is not even the benevolent form of despotism is it when you allow yourself to think about it it's somewhat worse than I was saying before about the way the religion makes people first be terribly abject and then terribly solipsistic and arrogant and conceited if it were true that all these things are attributable to an external father who is unknowable except by those who claim as doctors annex those sources of information denied to me and many other people what would it mean at the minimum it would mean we were living under an unalterable unchallengeable dictatorship which might or might not be benign we've no students it would be benign in my view benign dictatorships are the worst but that's another story it would mean we were subjected to everlasting round-the-clock surveillance waking and sleeping we would never have a private moment everything we did and thought would be known and supervise and invigilator and neither rewarded or punished even Big Brother in the in nineteen George Orwell's 1984 couldn't be absolutely sure what all his subjects were thinking but there was the crime of thought crime you could be charged with it under the divine dispensation no problem your conviction of thought crime before you even had the thought because everything is Noble and how would the God who convicted you know because he'd already created you full of dirt and sin and wickedness that's part of the design and the horror of it the fascistic element of it is this you're created sick and then you ordered to be well so you're creating full of dirty thoughts and wickedness and wrong ambitions and and and and impure and foul nature and then you're told you better you better cure yourself pretty fast otherwise I won't be answerable for the consequences this is the worst imaginable kind of on freedom and I have to say I just trust those who wish that it were true in my opinion the first of the original emancipation the original the first emancipation that humans must undergo is the freeing of themselves from this man made and man mind forged manacle it might be asked why don't I want it to be true why don't I wish it to be true well I'll tell you because once you admit that this this desperate exists you will find yourself in the real world in the here-and-now subjected to the rule of man-made power purely man-made power rule by other primates and other mammals who claim the right to do anything they want with you because they have got on their side and because their rule is divine that's that's that this is not a theoretical danger Alice it is a different way if you like and take up dr. lenses point about the origins of morality if you think that we wouldn't know right from wrong we have no concept of good and evil or the right action or the wrong action or the right thought or the wrong thought if we didn't have the permission of a supernatural celestial dictator if that's where our ideas of good and evil come from then let me ask two questions of you at first okay I'll ask the questions and I'll leave it with the questions and I hope I'll get a response later you must now ladies and gentlemen if you believe this you must tell me of a right action performed or a right statement moral statement made by a believer such as dr. Leonard that I could not make myself or couldn't state myself something that only he could do as a believer that was right and moral and I could not do because I'm not a believer I've asked this question in a lot of places now and to a lot of people including senior bishops and archbishops knows I have not yet had an answer to it and there must be a good answer if they are to make the claim that faith licenses morality and ethics and then my second question corollary question much easier please think of a wicked action done by someone purely because they are personally safe think of an evil thing said or an evil thing done that is only done because the person is religious you've already thought of what the suicide bombing community is entirely religious faith-based the genital mutilation community is entirely faith-based you know how it goes well these two questions hang in the air I will bow out let you brood on them I hope you'll feed some of them back to me and once again my thanks and dr. das Lana [Applause] well no I love be able to deal with all of these but let me do my very best to talk about them you've missed completely my point about Einstein's ladies and gentlemen I hope you noticed I didn't mention anything at all about Einstein's belief in God because I'm completely aware of all that Christopher Richardson said the point I made was that Einstein believed that all scientists had faith that isn't a completely different thing of faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe that was real faith and my argument had nothing whatsoever to do with Einsteins belief in God he mentioned in his initial speech that the idea of the Creator had been completely refuted by the question you must ask who created the Creator and you get into an infinite regress I discussed that with Richard Dawkins in my debate and absurd if you have to ask the question who created the Creator that means you believe in a created God and created gods or are a delusion we've known up for centuries and we don't need to be told it if you say who created the Creator it means also that you cannot conceive of anything that's eternal and I don't know what mr. Hitchens views on the universe are or a mass energy but the incapacity to believe in eternal is essentially the issue my final point on that would be this I said to Richard Dawkins I can ask you the same question because you believed that the universe created you so I would like to know who created your Creator but he doesn't seem to have an answer to that now then you refer to the universe at its expansion and collapse from the beginning to the end and you said what's the point of the whole thing I I would agree with you if I believed that the universe was a permanent phenomenon but one of the things I understand from the new testament is that the universe never was meant to be a permanent phenomenon but is a stepping stage I cannot go into what the Bible has to say about the notion of new heavens and a new earth but I would simply want to say that this is something that is very clear in the Bible itself which claims that the universe will end up in a massive heat death this is something not new with science and the point is that God is going to have a new manifestation and that is why his plans are much bigger than we see within the confines of this present universe but there was quite a lot of emphases in Christopher Hitchens talk on certainty he said those who are say they are certain are discredited but he was absolutely certain when we spoke that um supernatural is to be ruled out that no one can know the mind of God how is he so certain about that if you can't be certain about anything ladies and gentlemen I think this is actually important because I would not like to give you the impression that my certainty is the certainty of arrogance it's rather this that I believe behind this universe that is a God who loves you and me so much that he's taken the initiative and revealed himself to us and the key question that underlines this whole discussion is this is there such a thing as revelation because then it's not a question of arrogance it's a question simply of accepting things for which there is evidence so I would zero into the central claim of Christianity which is this that God became human the word became flesh and as a scientist I want to say that my response to that is is there any evidence for it that Jesus is whom he claimed to be he claimed to be revealing God and if christopher hitchens for example reveals something about himself to me and it's not arrogance for me to believe it but I will never know him unless he's prepared to do that it's exactly the same with God unless he reveals himself to me of course I cannot get to know him but if he reveals himself then that's a completely different situation so it's got a stand or fall on the question as to whether there is any evidence for Christ's claim to be God because if he is God then certainly there are some things that we can know about God for the simple reason that he has told them to us and for me of course the central evidence is the fact that Jesus Christ literally rose from the dead on the third day now I'm sad when I hear Christopher Hitchens caricature of God as a celestial big brother always watching us trying to spoil our fun that is an invented God ladies and gentlemen because the God that I know is a God that cares for me and this created the possibility of a real relationship with me I might as well say who would want to be married and have a woman or a man in their home constantly watching them constantly supervising them constantly looking out for them that would be absurd because it's to take one aspect of watching over and to distort it into a universalized explanation ladies and gentlemen aren't you glad that they're police in this country watching over you aren't you glad that there are people incidentally I think mr. Hitchens and I are enjoying the fact that you're watching us tonight and it's not inhibiting us at all we're enjoying it there's a watching that's good and there's a watching that's bad and if you abolish it God's watching I noticed that we ended up in the Orwellian situation and Eastern Europe with Big Brother watching what did people think of that in 1989 they voted very clearly against that atheist kind of supervision and it was in fact the Christians that led the silent revolution of eastern Germany that knocked the wall down there's a false kind of watching and I agree with mr. Hitchens on it but there's a true kind of watching but as the relationship with God is not something that's forced it's a real relationship of love we've been given freedom I heard a real caricature of the biblical story in saying that God had created a fake God made a perfect world ladies and gentlemen but he made us in his image with the capacity of real freedom and real choice so that if we say no to God God will honor that choice I wonder what mr. Hitchens would want God to do with people that say no to him he thinks the difficulty with the idea that God will honor the choice of those that say no why is that because God hates them and is some cosmic tyrant of course not it's because God actually loved them now these things are sometimes hard to grasp because there are so many distortions of God around in the world and that's why again and again I come back to look at the person of Christ who reveals God to me to look at his love and his friendship and his care and if I ask myself the question would I like to be in the company of that person permanently my answer is a resounding yes I can think of nothing more liberating and nothing more utterly magnificent that expresses the greatness of God now we heard a challenge from mr. Hitchens that he throws out all over the place can we think of a right action that can be made only by a Christian and not by an atheist it's actually a very subtly interesting question to me because there are certain presuppositions behind it that I'd like to briefly deal with in closing one is this from where I sit ladies and gentlemen whether a person is an atheist or a Christian or anything else they are made in the image of God and therefore they are moral beings therefore they're capable of seeing good and doing good and sometimes my atheist friends could put me to shame so there is a basic moral compass which makes mr. Hitchens question a little bit and beside the point but if I were going to answer his question directly I not convinced that William Wilberforce would have liberated slavery as he did if his motivation had been atheism but as I noticed that Wilberforce liberated slaves only to have slavery reintroduced by Nazi Germany and communism in the 20th century there is no guarantee ladies and gentlemen that the abolition of God will mean the abolition of the captivity of man but my final answer to his question is this can I name in a good action that no atheist could do yes I can I can name one that no person of whatever worldview could do and that is to give his life for the sins of the world it is that that characterized Jesus Christ as the one who was God and that is unparalleled in its majesty and in its confirmation that God is truly great [Applause] boy okay thank you well now I earned my bread all right I've received some questions from the audience and put them in order that I think will be provocative on the questions of the individually address to our speakers but be more than happy to have them respond to the answers that the other gives so we'll start with mr. Hitchens one of our guests tonight wants to know if your beef really is it more with say the concept of original sin and universal depravity than it really is with religion in general that you have a very specific view of what religion is and that's what you have a problem well yes I mean all religions are equally untrue I did because I don't think there is a supernatural dimension to be appealed to or to be used as an explainer of what we don't currently know about our species or by the cosmos you get along much better if you exclude that assumption and you that means you don't in power if you can exclude it if you can limit it you can limit it to a private belief a belief people keep in their homes and so forth which is of course more than entitled to do it means you don't find that you're dealing with a class of witch doctors mullahs priests rabbis and others who make a living in politics by saying that they have special rights because they're doing God's will which has been a curse to humanity throughout its entire existence and currently I think in the form of theocracy in its various bullying threats represents a very direct immediate threat to the survival of our species so yes we'd be better off without you like to respond to that job sorry I missed the thing that exactly that I need to respond to yeah that's right I guess the UMaine we'd be better off without the doctrine of original sin perhaps a new Harrison John was was it was safe obviously that wasn't my main objection I mean if the action was to religion itself by the way now you prompt me I meant to say I never said or meant to say that I attacked bad behavior that was undertaken we're about on in the name of as you put it religion I think you were trying to be generous to me I do insist that this kind of bad behavior is innate in religion is part of religion itself it's not an abuse of it or something undertaken in the name of it's a direct consequence of the willingness to believe in the supernatural and the willingness to believe in it in a supernatural dictatorship in particular but I think that is the case in some situations and it is the case with some people who've named the name of Christ but what I notice here is this that Christ for bad that kind of behavior he told his followers not to take up the sword why because his kingdom was not of this world so people who behave like that in the name of Christ aren't followers of Christ they're disobeying him and I would want to argue that as we look as his character his attitude this kind of evil behavior is not endemic to Christianity it's endemic in caricatures and perversions of Christianity that's too easy I mean where for example where is it not written that I come not to bring a peace but a sword surely it is is it not written that those who follow me shall be departed mr. Partin be cast into everlasting fire not a very gentle or Pacific remark is it not said that if you don't give up your family if you don't give up forest if you don't give up everyone who loves you and everything you love to sacrifice yourself for me you're not worthy these are strongly coercive and implicitly authoritarian or even totalitarian statements and the CS Lewis rightly says it's one of the very rare occasions when I agree with them said you may not say that the preachments of Jesus is now so far all right even if you don't accept the religious basis of them Louis quite correctly says if you don't accept that this man was the son of God you'll have to notice that many of his statements and sermons are either wicked or insane or both it's only on the belief that the world is very soon coming to an end and that he himself has the right to claim a Masonic role in this conclusion that any of it can make any sort of sense at all and everyone here knows at least some of the examples of what would be counted as wicked or insane if the Masonic claims were found to be questionable which they have been okay I would want to question that very seriously because as I said Christ for bad the use of the literal sword so when he said I kid not to bring peace of the sword we can see exactly what that means by the fact that he has his message results in the division in society that is I have got to I've got the choice to decide for him or against him and he will honor that choice which ever way it goes the one sword he didn't come to bring was the physical sword because when one of his disciples used it to cut the ear of somebody Christ put the ear back on okay so they say okay well the so they say comment make segue into the next question this one's for Professor Lennox one of our audience members wants to know if you're correct about there being a deity he wants to know where she wants to know why jehovah why not Oh silence why not Buddha why in the words of one our guest here why is one myth or folktale more true than another well first of all I don't think that all myths I think there are many myths around in the world and certainly the question is an important question because it makes the distinction between the kind of deism or even theism that responds to the design in the universe and so on and says why this one God my answer that ladies and gentlemen is very simple I have to decide that like I decide everything else on the basis of the evidence and the evidence in the case of the life death resurrection of Jesus Christ has convinced me that he is God incarnate so I base my faith on that evidence and of course each one of us must make up our own mind now if we had time I could explain that evidence in detail but the the point of the question is how can we decide we have to decide on the basis of evidence just as people who take the Atheist view they think the evidence points that way and mercifully we're still a free enough society that we can make these decisions but we must make them personally okay Christopher's life is part of it well you'll have noticed that there are many moments in the New Testament Gospels one of them I'll take for simple reason that it's easy to remember that the Messiah will come to Jerusalem riding an ass or a donkey there are many others who including what town you'll be born in and so for where it says in the text and this was done so that the prophecy should be fulfilled that it should be done because they they knew what the prophecies were a virgin will conceive for example as another wonder the word in Hebrew alma actually just means marriage of a young woman doesn't mean unpenetrated young female at all but it's all reverse engineering it says right there in the text we were telling you this happened because that would mean that the prophecies had come true so I think you might suspect a little mind you someone who is telling you literally as they're going along why they're telling you this so that they're the conditions of prophecy fulfillment can be met but there's a much graver problem even than that naivete which is that these prophecies are of a Jewish Messiah to come and the Jewish religious authorities of the time considered and who were the nearest much closer to being eyewitnesses if the story is true at all much closer than the authors of any of the Gospels they were the people who were the religious authority in the area he was a member if he existed of their congregation they thought he was the sorcerer and a fraud and an imposter and convicted him of blasphemy because though he in fact never said that he was God I don't think I mean there are some Christians I know who do say that Jesus is God though some who say he only claimed to be the son of the critical question is he's asked art thou the Christ are you the Messiah and he gives us an idea of evasive answer at this point but it's enough to make the Sanhedrin rend its garments so all you're seeing in this tale if it be true at all if it have any truth to it is the origin of Jewish Christian fratricide a B of the the Jews who have nurtured the idea of prophecy and the Messiah through their prophets for generations who believe the Messiah has not yet even considered deigning showing up and those who tell the Jews why are you wasting your time the good news has already happened why did you just get with the program I submit that neither of these propositions is worthy of the consideration of an intelligent or educated human being its Bronze Age peasant Palestinian superstition and and the competition over it and interpretations over it have made humanity's life even more miserable and it was going to be other one well as I know this and re Lennox has a response and I thought and in the third form of plagiarism that it takes which is the plagiarism of Islam from both Judaism and Christianity the competition between monotheism has become really outright menacing and the real responsibility of citizens is to is to hold it down is to resist the aquatic bullying and the superstitions that underlie it but I want to move on to another question but I'll just give you just a few seconds to respond very briefly to that well if you're going to call it Bronze Age superstition you'd be better to get it right because one of your statement there is just false Jesus claimed to be God and they stoned him why did they stone him because you being a man make yourself God the notion that he never claimed to be God is simply false and you say prophecy is irrelevant and superstition and all of that one of the things that I find very interesting about the Christian faith is it's not a mere philosophy it's geared into history and when Jesus came there were various things that were predicted he fulfilled them but the biggest of all was the fact that he fulfilled ideas that had been current in Israel for centuries that some day that would become a person who would die for his people thinnies now that is a huge thing of course and it seems to me that those prophecies when they are fulfilled provide part of the evidence that this thing is much bigger than some little local thing happening and Palestine although it happened there but is geared into whole revelation through history itself so I don't find it a product of Bronze Age superstition they were not superstitious in any more sense for example when he mentioned the virginal conception of Christ away they just say a word about that that when Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant he didn't suddenly believe in a miracle he wanted a divorce sure why because he knew exactly as we do where babies come from he wasn't stupid nor was he pre-scientific and it took a lot of convincing for him to accept what I believe to be the true solution but this was a unique miracle of God encoding himself at the humanity okay so for you for your promise to do it quickly so if your wife is pregnant and you know it's not new the only alternative is the very spirit that's up David David Hume heals David Hume deals with this quite well he says in the case of the laws of nature being suspended you have to ask yourself have they been suspended in my favour or am i possibly under a misapprehension I think it's Thomas Paine who asks and which is more likely that the laws of nature suspended or that a Jewish girl Chantal afeard we have to grow up out of this stuff you know now your problem dr. Lennox John if I may say so yes your game not with me your problem is with Monsignor Ronald Knox one of the greatest Christian apologists person Anglican there an Anglo Catholic then finally a Roman Catholic who in his book of apologetics very directly says Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be God it's not my problem he came sometimes to be the son who left he will run away with that idea and two Jews he was asked that when he's asked a direct question are you the expected one the awaited one the one we want the Messiah he gave a slightly evasive but they thought profane answer now this is my account of this is correct I'm sorry to say okay I regret I think I do need to cut off the conversation I'll give you one last well its hi I'm fascinated that he codes David Hume I'm talking about the suspension of nature David Hume has got about the worst analysis of miracles I've ever read in my life first of all he didn't really believe in the law of cause and effect on which you base laws of nature secondly the laws of nature are not suspended in a miracle it's God fees and you event in if I put a hundred pints plus a hundred pounds or hundred dollars in my drawer tonight 100 plus 100 200 if I find $50 in the drawer tomorrow I don't say the laws of arithmetic have been broken I say the laws of Alabama have been broken but but let me make the point from where well there it was wait a minute I know very well then you will then you admit there's no conundrum no no there's no problem to be solved you know kay yes my knowledge I think of the all thing there is the knowledge not of it's covered by the laws of Alabama is a fact but just a second my knowledge that one plus one equals two I know that law so to speak tells me that another event has been fed into the system and that's exactly what happens my knowledge that dead men don't normally rise by observation means that if one does rise not the laws of nature have been suspended or broken but God who created the universe and built into it those laws which are not causes but our descriptions of regularities he's perfectly free of course as the Creator to feed a new event in and then the laws of nature take over and the baby is born nine months later I think humans completely wrong about this of course I will I will let that or that on that assumption on that assumption then there's nothing there's nothing exceptional in do you believe that the Sun Stood Still at midday so Joshua if computers battleground but I just knew you in fact believe that I mean this yes so that is how it was perceived but let me go back to what you directed you've just said Christopher you've just you have just said that there's nothing exceptional in it there is something exceptional in it but the claim that the laws of nature are suspended as if they cause things is not true it's that God has done something very exceptional he is fed an event in and the way we recognize that is because we already know that regularities you didn't know the laws of nature you said believe that everything was a miracle okay do you want me to do one word or not okay and out of wedlock baby isn't something that requires a natural supernatural explanation it's its own explanation the son standing still at midday or the daughter of jairus being raised from the grave or Lazarus being raised the baby neither them with anything you notice to say to themselves about this event the the account in the gospel of at the time of the crucifixion all the graves and Jerusalem opening and all that the tenants of all graves coming out and walking around the city and greeting people informally rather suggesting the resurrection in the greater Jerusalem area wasn't that big a deal if you're willing to believe any of this that's the sort of thing you're willing to believe okay well let's thank you very much we'll move on to our next question that was too good in exchange to interrupt this is for mr. Hitchens and again we'll do a little bit of free play on this I bet we will yes we will imagine that looks those came to hazards that we were there are you willing to accept view of Peter singers that man has no ultimate dignity meaning hope or value if not why not know then the Y naught is problematic of course because though there is whether you are a materialist or supernaturalists no particular reason to say that human life has any enormous innate value after all religion disposes of people in heaps and mounds and says go out so we depart into eternal fire or your dust you're nothing if you don't have our faith you're nothing less than nothing you're worse evil wicked so for so these are it's not as if by assuming a God you suddenly find that life is all worthwhile after all it's if it was that simple we wouldn't have to be having this discussion I think this if essentially I asked myself why do I care why do I care not just about myself and my children why do I think I often care in general well if I didn't I wouldn't belong to a species that would have got this far it's not a platitude no sounds but I think there's some force to it if we didn't have human solidarity if we didn't realize that we are brothers and sisters one with another that we have responsibilities duties to another that these are not merely reciprocal in evolutionary terms in other words you'd be nice to me I'll look out for you whether they can involve real ties real bonds of affection friendship even love if we didn't know that we were I'm able to think like that and we we exempt quite a large minority of human sort born without this the sociopaths and Psychopaths who I suppose we have to consider also made in God's image if you accept that tautology we it means nothing really unexplained that that would tell us why we had warm feelings for one another and also explain why we were here instead of having joined the species that went all the other ones that went out of business under the same divine supervision I might add including humanoid species like the cro-magnons and the Neanderthals so it's quite clear buried each other with care and with love looked out for one another and so forth and so but somehow didn't make some divine grade do you see where I'm going with this I do hope so well Peter Singer what he thinks is extremely disturbing I agree actually very much with Christopher that we find ourselves with these failings and morality within us I don't think that's the issue because my Christian faith guarantees those to Christopher Hitchens as it does to me the problem is the rational justification of this against the view of someone like singer who is taking his extrapolations from evolution to a logical conclusion and ending up with you that a newborn baby is of no more value than a dog a chimp or a pig in other words devaluing human beings and that seems to me to be a very serious direction in which society is going if you teach people that they're no different from animals it may just be they'll start to behave like animals so what prevents me from going down that line is that I deny completely his premise and his premise is there's nothing unique about human beings I want to say there's something absolutely unique about them they are of course animals but they're more than that they're created in the image of God and that gives them infinite value and dignity and we will jettison that at our peril and I think it's being jettisoned in the name of a very seriously flawed philosophy which is as nature predicted exactly what will happen if you attempt to live out a theism to its consequences it'll end up in madness I think a chief justice and says somewhere that were where animals are worshiped humans tend to be sacrificed and if you look at ancient cultures and some not so ancient that would tend to be true I remember when if it wasn't single as one of his disciples said that he his own baby daughter was no more to him than would be say a rat or a flea or or let's leave it at that I remember thinking my first thought was I'm glad I'm not his daughter but my my second thought is I'm glad I'm not his pet rat either exactly but it seems he doesn't have a great deal of sort of love to spare for anyone or or anything look an animal rights can be overdone and certainly have been by especially people who object to medical experiments in a hysterical manner but we have learned a great deal in the recent past about our kinship with in commonalities with other creatures and we've discovered amazing things about the capacity including the capacity for family life solidarity society building and so on among pigs monkeys dolphins and others and we know because of the genome program of a kinship with other much less advanced creatures and that we are only ourselves half a chromosome away from being chimpanzees the one thing this is impossible the square wave is the idea of us being made an image of God that that's that's pretty over it clearly isn't anthropomorphic like animalistic alee whichever way you slice it we are we are we are primates so in what okay in that case in the image of what daughter the others made it gets you know where it strictly meaningless state etc State there's no value my geneticist friends in Oxford when their similarity between the chromosomes and so on the DNA of animals with humans was discovered they said well we always told you so it shows that it doesn't lie in the chromosomes there's a lot bigger story to be told I think and it would be very premature to de close the discussion on that basis Stephen Jay Gould was it he who said that we're not ninety-eight percent chimpanzee were 100 percent human compatible state of Alaska the question a moment that's connected there's just a word on the format because we did get started a little bit late I do want to still keep some 35 minutes we set aside for this control-m take this is a very important moment in evening so I don't want to sell that short so we may go a little bit past 8 o'clock to make sure that we have this a full exchange this next question does address some of the issues brought up in the last exchange 63% of Americans do not accept evolution and that percentage may even be higher in the audience for this evening the question for you John would be what are the long-term consequences of this kind of mistrust of science well I think first of all this could be a discussion for an entire debate shut up six minutes I would I would want to know first of all what you mean by evolution if you mean simply what Darwin observed that is the fact that natural selection produces variation and so on then that's not a particularly controversial thing we can observe it if you mean by evolution the notion that by unguided my professor's life originally arose and comes to be what it is I myself as a scientist find that unconvincing and I find it unconvincing as a mathematician particularly because of the heart of life there is the database of DNA and when we notice anything with a semiotic nature language that is language like 3.5 billion letters in exactly the right order we immediately make an inference upwards not downwards to say that by whatever the mechanisms involved of getting this it bares the tell-tale mark of an intelligent standing beside it so it seems to me that there's a very healthy scientific debate to be had about the reach of evolution and so we need to define our terms very carefully but not being an American I can't really predict what's going on in here the fact that people are suspicious seems to me to show that there's a real debate to be had and all the evidence is certainly not in my opinion on one hat on one side the figures on the American belief in things I virgin birth and the devil and their doubts of things are my opinion wildly exaggerated and padded and they're produced by leading questions asked of the sort of people who happen to be in their kitchens all day and there's nothing else to do and what they tend to show mainly when you interrogate them is they don't even know what it is they don't believe in I would instance Governor Mike Huckabee for example who says of course he doesn't believe that he's descended from apes well theory of evolution is not that governor Huckabee is descended from apes he may know something about his family tree but I've also suspected in my time but it wouldn't invalidate the general proposition so usually the people who don't know about Darwinism are the ones who say they don't believe in it which isn't a fair test of anything I'll just add on this point of not being descended from but having things in common with our primary cousins we do as Darwin says there the unmistakable stamp of our lowly origin we do grow a coat of hair when we're in the womb and then shed it in the womb at about 3 and 1/2 months we do have vestigial tails we do have appendices that are for the breaking down of stuff on the Savannah that we no longer need to eat and we do have wisdom teeth another dentition that we don't a longer require because we've we were we were adapted to an environment that we a savanna environment that we've long ago abandoned so saying that you're 100% human is only another way of saying that you're very much 98% primate voila it's otherwise it's a distinction without a difference [Applause] I'll ask this question this is addressed to Christopher but again for both of you to address and I believe one of your early books letters to a young contrarian so this may be a interesting answer to give what advice do you have for someone who has left D ISM but but was raised in an institution like Sanford or in a church and is still in that institution what advice would you give that person you'll feel so much better if you leave it behind you and go and study literature instead and the consolations of philosophy and the beauties of science I think the real these are things that infinitely more awe-inspiring and wonderful and majestic than any invocations of the burning bush or like or the immoral doctrine of vicarious redemption whereby a single human is made the scapegoat for all sins and we we absolve ourselves not just of sin but of our responsibility but throwing our sins on him a disgusting idea fortunately never happened the question that the cultural question that remains I think is this how people going to live when they've given up the supernatural and the superstitious are we still going to need I would say we are still going to need the numinous and the transcendent that's that's a nation us too as reason as is morality and so the great struggle is going to be how we find consolation and and beauty and reflection in where we have come to terms with the fact that we don't have a divine dictator to solve our problems for us and that the heavens are empty and there are prayers and not answers and that we're alone with one another and have to make the best of it I submit that that's that's going to be the great problem for civilization from now on and a lot of a lot of energy moral as well as aesthetic is going to have to be put into solving it but the beginning of wisdom is to realize you must emancipate yourself from the idea that you're that you are a plaything of a supernatural boss fortunately that's not true John well I don't live in America but I would be very sad to think that in any university a person that changed their worldview in either direction would no longer feel comfortable because I work at the University of where there are all kinds of worldviews and that to my mind is the wonderful thing about being there so I would very much hope my person could still find a lot of room and space that's why universities are so important that people are free to make these decisions and discuss them so as to you would agree with that Chris very much so yeah yes exactly I'm delighted by the way that Christopher admitted that in that answer that he believes in the transcendent that might lead me to ask the question where it comes from the perhaps for another time there it comes that's a perfectly good question it comes from this effusion I think I can expect for my myself because I think look as James says in the varieties of religious experience you may not doubt that people have them before you shouldn't they rate you should grant that they do you can't make them applicable objectively they're they're subjective to the person concerned but I would say it's roughly where the erotic meets love meets landscape meets music and poetry it's a a junction a lot of people I hope will be familiar with if not I recommend that you try it and then try it again even more intensely for example I wrote a book once of a famous building called the Parthenon which without which I could not be without which our civilization couldn't be pre-christian by the way as as is a huge amount of the civilization that hubba Mouse claims to be inspired by that to one side the symmetry and the beauty when the frozen music and poetry of the Parthenon and of the Greek style is an indispensable thing if it were to be destroyed I would feel sort of orphaned but I have no interest in the religion that used to animate it the cult of Pallas Athena is dead and voyage to me so is the idea of Athenian imperialism so the so-called mysteries of Eleusis and the rest of it all that's left from the other schools of philosophy that are worth studying so again it's going to be a question how do we how do we assimilate what was to previous generations and previous religions and extinct faiths something so important how do how do we keep the value that is innate in that without surrendering to the cults and illusions that's so much animation it these are these are very important cultural issues and I submit that we can do it challenge give you the last response on this and then we'll move to our close I'll just briefly I just find it a bit difficult to see how a mindless unguided process produces the aesthetics and all these transcendent experiences ok well that may then segue into the closing remarks actually we'll reverse the order the opening remarks and professor Lennox will go first and have five minutes and then after that mr. Hitchens will wrap up the evening okay well ladies and gentlemen I've very much enjoyed this spirited debate and Christopher Hitchens is certainly a very worthy opponent in my closing remarks I just want to address very briefly a point that has not been addressed he said in his opening remarks just in passing about man-made gods that is gods are the figment of our imagination well I would agree that if God does not exist then Freud can show us clearly how Christianity is an opiate a comfort blanket a flight from reality into an imaginary fantasy heaven of wish fulfillment but if God does exist then Freud will equally convincingly show us how a theism is a comfort blanket a flight from the reality of coming face-to-face with our Creator the polish Nobel Prize winner for literature chess woth me wash wrote a true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals our greed our cowardice our murders are not going to be judged ladies and gentlemen Freud could give you an explanation in both directions but what Freud cannot do is manfred lutz the brilliant German psychiatrist as pointed out Freud cannot help you at all on the question of whether God exists or not and that really is the basic question behind our consideration tonight is God great of course presumes that there is a God to be great and I have argued tonight that there is evidence in the universe of the existence of God but in particular that God has revealed himself to us not only in creation but also in that inbuilt moral sense that we all and it seems to be to be enormous ly important that we see that there's real evidence that points upwards and doesn't point downwards but I want to conclude by reading to you a Times column of article written by an atheist Matthew Farris he says this as an atheist I truly believe that Africa needs God missionaries not aid money are the solution to Africa's biggest problem the crushing passivity of the people's mindset now a confirmed atheist I become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs government projects and international aid efforts these alone will not do education and training alone will not do in Africa Christianity changes people's hearts it brings a spiritual transformation the rebirth is real the change is good those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the know-how that accompanies what we call development will make the change a whole belief system must first be supplanted and I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another removing Christian evangelism from the African equation says an atheist may leave the continent of the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike the wish which doctor the mobile phone and the machete at the heart of the Christian message is something so utterly great and good that no mere human could do it and that is the fact that Christ died for the sins of the world Christopher Hitchens finds it repellant as he says in his book the idea of one man dying for another as one man cannot take another man's sins he is absolutely right ladies and gentlemen when Jesus told a man that his sins were forgiven the people around at the time were as outraged as Christopher Hitchens who can forgive sins they said but God alone but that is exactly the issue if Jesus is merely a man like all others then of course it's outrageous but he isn't he is man but he never was merely man and that's why his death is utterly unique and five million throughout history and in our world today find peace and forgiveness in his name at lunchtime miss legends told us he didn't like the imagery of the Shepherd and the sheep that occurs in the New Testament because Shepherds are usually out to fleece their sheep and beat them but he missed the point ladies and gentlemen because when Jesus Christ said he was The Good Shepherd he was making a contrast between himself and earthly shepherds he said he was there to protect them when the wolves come that he was there not to kill the Sheep but to be a most unusual Shepherd that he would give his life for the Sheep and as for fleecing them and eventually destroying them what did he say he said this I shall lose not one of them I think this is one of the most magnificent images because it says the exact opposite of what Spitzer Hitchens wants it to say ladies and gentlemen God is not only great christ has shown us that he is immeasurably great I run Abel I can't I can't afford myself I find I haven't it in me to make this an assumption what I need to prove and I can't get I can't get comfort this way you'll have to bear with me it ladies and gents when I can't I can't applause as easily as you do conservation or fill in that form I still have unanswered questions challenges to myself that I feel I must deal with to my question can a could a moral action be performed by a believer and not performed by me dr. Alex Judith notice said there's a moral action that believeth or before that I couldn't and that was to offer myself as a sacrifice for the redemption of humanity I think you will see that there's a catch in that answer in that the average person unbeliever can't simultaneously be claiming to be the son of all perhaps you'd rather say God himself and that's before you have to decide whether vicarious Redemption scapegoating is a moral action in the first instance so if I may say so modesty I think then my question still serves that anyone who heard it would have to say it hadn't yet been answered and that's why a great theologian at that I'm a Navy brat myself I'm from ports with him as a famous story about a young officer undergoing a rigorous examination for the capacitor captain and he's told you picture himself on a Leawood shore with a very strong wind driving him towards the rocks he's asked what he's going to do he says well cram or horse a tall sail and steer to starboard hard down on the tiller not the wheel said but the wind keeps coming it's you're still being driven odd what he's going to do now sort of cram on more sail and keep the wheel very hard down away from the leeward side and but but you're still being driven onto those rocks young man what are you going to do now is cram on more sail and keep the keep the rudder and the tiller hard down on the on the starboard side and it he's interrupted so where are you getting them where you getting all this extra sail from and he says same place you're getting all your extra wind from I want to warn you as I close them against the dangers of tautology if everything that cannot be explained everything that is mysterious to us numinous say or transcendent must therefore be laid to the charge or the credit of a supernatural being then nothing remains to be explained everything is in potential explicable there isn't there's no problem to begin with there's no point in this argument of course there's no mystery there's no need for for cogitation there's no need for reflection it must be part of a divine plan I hope you can see the fallacy that protrudes from that conclusion - where does the transcendent come from I'm happy to say I don't really know what the Wellsprings of the transcendent are in me or are in us but it does no good to say oh don't you know they come to you by divine permission nothing is added nothing is added by that explanation all that that assumption I didn't rise to a challenge about atheist regimes in the 20th century and I really should take a minute I hope I've got a minute for this I'll be very brief if you take out the word fascism from any history of the 1920s and 30s any decent history and replace it with the words the Catholic right wing you don't need to change anything matches were just another name for the extreme right-wing forces of the Roman Catholic Church that's true whether it's Portugal Croatia Poland Hungary Italy and all of these regimes and movements had a countess Pacific Concorde with the Vatican you may not say that fascism as a secular atheist movement not if you don't want to do great violence to history the churches of Germany celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler every year so 1945 by order and his first significant Treaty of the Nazi regime was with the Vatican a Concorde that gave the church a monopoly over the education of German children in in response for a pact that abolished Catholic parties that might challenge the rule of Hitler that's not secularism excuse me it's not atheism either quite wrong to say that it is it's a form of paganism as a matter of fact that would have involved as well as a compromise of Christianity the revival of some Nordic myths that those were secular atheistic either the culture of o-town and Odeon is not atheism in the case of the Soviet Union where the population have been told for centuries that the Tsar was like the Pope divinely inspired and divinely empowered and where serfdom was justified by the Russian Orthodox Church which was a state Church if yours Joseph Stalin seminarian graduate seizing now if you do now to exploit a reservoir of credulity and stupidity in passivity and civility like that you shouldn't be in business and what did he do he replicated the same thing there was an inquisition a heresy hunt a promotion of himself as the as the divine one from whom all blessings float and all the rest of it and to this day the Russian Orthodox Church which never ceased to support Starlin has under Putin actually begun to produce icons I can show them to you if you doubt me you can look them up on the Weekly Standard website any of you tonight icons of the Russian Orthodox Church showing Joseph Stalin with a halo around his head this is not atheism nor is it secure ISM if William Wilberforce was indeed animated by Christianity I'll make this I have to make this my closing point in his campaign against slavery he should have been because it was about time that there was a Christian who said that this trade had gone on long enough and any Christian should have felt responsible for saying so because for the entire period of its existence slavery and the slave trade had been justified directly by reference to the Christian religion and by direct references to the warrant for slavery that's contained in Holy Writ and in Scripture and that's why we like the captain who wrote Amazing Grace because he'd been the captain of a slave ship he was just as much of a Christian when he was doing the first thing as he was when he was doing the second the chances though that a member of the American anti-slavery society Thomas Paine Benjamin Franklin the others was not a Christian would be extremely high the chances that until very very very late in the 19th century the defender of slavery would be a Christian was statistically enormous it therefore proves absolutely nothing about Christianity that some of its members finally turned against one of their fellows to practices and impositions and if I was Christian I would avoid this argument very carefully as tending to show that there is no basis in faith for morality that our morality is innate to us it's very nice when sometimes religion catches up to morality for a change thank you please help me in the fight over my gentlemen for the budget on behalf I just want to say on behalf of the University and the socratic Club I want to thank you for coming here this off taking this opportunity evening and it's been a pleasure to provide the birmingham community with this forum so thank you very much for your attention there will be a book signing in the back shortly thank all of you for coming [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: Fixed Point Foundation

Views: 643,028

Rating: 4.7257795 out of 5

Keywords: John Lennox, Christopher Hitchens, God, Debate, Atheism, Apologetics, Christianity, Faith, Science

Id: 5OXPlUCGScY

Length: 113min 25sec (6805 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TheInfidelephant]

Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens wipe the floor with Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe over the motion "The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World."

[u/CommunistAtheist]

Not only is this Atheist Experience debate as entertaining as the others, but it contains the mother of all burns in it:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dN5IBiF4l00

[u/Hq3473]

Rip Hitch.

[u/Shabanana_XII]

Personally, I like WLC and Hitchens, because I thought WLC did a solid job.

For my atheist friends here, however, Bill Nye and Ken Ham is a classic smackdown against the theist.