Peter Singer vs John Lennox | Is There a God? Debate

[Music] good evening i'm larry tong executive director of fixed-point foundation and organization dedicated to exploring some of the big ideas of faith and culture I hope that you can all understand me well I'm from the southern United States and that means we talk with a little bit of a of a drawl so I do hope that Melbourne Ian's can follow my English tonight's big idea focuses on the question of God and his existence is there a god joining me on the stage to debate this question our professor John Lennox of the University of Oxford and and Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University now to be clear these gentlemen will not be debating some vague deity but rather the God of the Bible now you will find in you be the flyer that was placed in your chair you will find the format for the tonight's debate and you will see that these gentlemen each will begin with their opening statements their rebuttals there will be some questions from me and then from from each other and then they will have their closing statements gentlemen I will indicate when you have reached the 15-minute mark with your opening statements and I will let you know when you have reached the 5-minute mark with your rebuttals now a couple of disclaimers I must acknowledge that fixed-point foundation is a Christian organization and that I am a Christian that means I do have an opinion on the subject but I find that all thoughtful people do I have moderated a number of these debates and I do hope that this evening that I can execute my responsibilities with the the fairness that we have exhibited in previous discussions of this type I will endeavor to be fair to move things along and to keep time and to ask questions as needed now as for scoring points I had the opportunity this is my first time in Australia and I have the opportunity to attend an Australian Football League game and I didn't entirely understand what was going on but when someone when someone scored they did this so I thought that tonight I might employ similar signals to let you know when you have scored points we do ask that you show us mark civility to these gentlemen and that you'll save your comments for them that you undoubtedly will have that there will be a book signing afterwards and we invite you to come and meet them at that time so now we begin with our opening statements and if my iPhone will function properly then I will be able to time you we begin with Professor John Lennox well thank you very much for coming ladies and gentlemen I appreciate enormous ly the invitation from fixed-point to discuss the existence of God with Peter figure as a Christian I find Peters recent book the life you can save a personal challenge to live consistently with the ethic of care for others as taught and embodied by Jesus Christ and I think that Peter not only approves off but seeks impressively to follow and I recommend his book it is very sobering I also have in common with him that I shared his concern to stop the inhuman inhumane treatment of animals I do not share all of his views particularly those on infanticide and euthanasia although on these issues I sense a consistency in taking his atheistic worldview to the logical conclusion that natures suggested at hand ethics depends on values and values are certainly in part dependent on world view and it is that atheistic worldview that I hold to be false for I am convinced ladies and gentlemen that there is a God more precisely the God who is the subject of the opening sentence of the Bible in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth I claim further that my faith in him is not blind but his rational and evidence-based rather like my faience indeed in my view science points toward God and in a moment I shall start there since it's so often assumed today that science has made belief in God impossible but it would only be fair and reasonable of me to point out that my first contact with Christianity was through my parents whose ethical integrity springing from a robust Christian faith was my first credible and tangible evidence that Christianity was true I might add that they were Christians without being sectarian I happen to be from Northern Ireland as no doubt some of you will guess and my parents loved me enough to allow me to think and give me space and that is what eventually led me to my science so let's think about science for a moment and the daughter of a famous Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge stands a great mandate for a search put there by that Scottish genius James Clark Maxwell who is ranked by Einstein as second only to Newton it comes from the Hebrew Bible greater the works of the Lord studied by all who delighted them it was put there because the conviction that there is one God affirms the unity and coherence of the world and it gave rise to modern science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as CS Lewis put it men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected Lord nature because they believed in an or Giver one of Australia's most distinguished historians Edwin judge puts it this way Christianity are above all the biblical doctrine of creation is itself the creator of the methodology of modern science we don't hold the Greeks perspective any more in spite of the fact that people keep looking back to it as the origin of science it is not the origin of science the pioneers of science did not believe in a God of the gaps I can't explain it therefore God did it when uten discovered his law of gravitation he didn't say now I know how it works I don't need God no he wrote the most famous book in the history of science the principia mathematica expressing the hope that it would help a thinking person to believe in God and it's not only the fact that we can do science but the results of science that point toward God the heavens declare the glory of God wrote the ancient Hebrew port and in recent years through studying those same heavens we have become aware of the delicate balance the so called fine-tuning of the fundamental forces of nature that's necessary for life to be possible our dough Penzias who won the Nobel Prize for Physics said astronomy leads us to a unique event a universe which was created out of nothing one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life and one which has an underlying one might face supernatural plan but it goes deeper than that Peter and I clearly share a belief in the importance of reason in our respective disciplines of science and ethics and the question arises and what evidence do we base our faith in human reason every scientist for instance assumes that the universe is intelligible to the human mind and Einstein was clever enough to be amazed by this and he said the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible how can it be that a mathematical equation thought up in the mind of a mathematician can correspond to the workings of the universe out there Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner described this is the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics what then is the justification for assuming that human reason is reliable at this point the irony of the Atheist position becomes the parent for my atheist friends in Oxford tell me that the driving force of evolution which eventually produced our human cognitive faculties reason included was not primarily concerned with truth at all but with survival and we all know what has happened and still happens very often to truth when individuals or commercial enterprises or nations motivated perhaps by their selfish genes feel themselves threatened and struggle for survival moreover it appears to me that atheists are obliged to regard fault as some kind of neuro physiological phenomenon now from an evolutionary perspective the neural physiology might well be adaptive but why would one think for a moment that the beliefs generated by it should be mostly true after all is the chemist JBS Haldane pointed out long ago if the thoughts in my mind are just the motions of Athens in my brain a mechanism that has arisen by Minds or some guided processes why should I believe anything it tells me including the fact that this is made of atoms atheist John Gray spells out the implications of this view modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free but of Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible the human mind serves evolutionary success not truth and yet my atheist friends still insist that it is rational for them to believe that the evolution of human reason was not directed for the purpose of discovering truth and yet they say that it is irrational for me to believe that human reason was designed and created by God to enable us to understand and believe the truth there is the sense in that and I believe American philosopher Alvin Cantina gets the heart of this if atheists are right he says that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes then they have given a strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including their atheism their biology and their belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that is nothing at all to do with God that is atheism by its reductionism undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct er understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever including scientific and ethical arguments there's clearly something wrong here and I suggest it is the fundamental assumption on which atheism is based and that is that ultimate reality is impersonal mass-energy and all the rest including mind and intelligence is derivative so that atheism is forced to derive the rational from the irrational I by contrast biblical fie ISM teaches the exact opposite it starts by asserting that ultimate reality is personal and intelligent in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God that the Word was God all things came to be through him so God is primary and eternal it is matter and energy that our derivative God is a person not a theory human beings reflect his image and that is why science can be done that makes sense to me of the scientists whereas atheism does not however there's more to God than intelligence the existence of God they argue gives coherence to the notion of rationality and in particular makes possible the ethical reasoning that is rightly so important to Peter Singer now I agree with you Peter that ethical concern and behavior does not itself require religious belief after all you are yourself an impressive example of this but that's exactly what I would expect to find since in my view whether or not human beings believe in God they are created in his image as moral persons with consensus however just as rationality can be used but cannot ultimately be explained without God the same is true of morality again I would cite history for just as modern science sprang from judeo-christian roots so did the concept of human equality that lies at the base of Western society atheist thinker Jurgen Habermas writes universalistic egalitarianism for which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation the individual morality of conscience human rights and democracy is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love everything else he says is just idle postmodern talk the value of a human being on which search egalitarianism is based consists not in what she can do but in what she is made in God's image my Russian friends how often have they said to me we thought we could abolish God and retain a value for human beings we couldn't we abolish God would we destroyed millions of human beings I would suggest if you do a wave of God you ultimately do away with human freedom because you are left with a mindless unguided process that somehow through humans up at its endless lottery to exist without alternate hope for a tiny moment only to be crushed by the same blind forces that produced them some freedom that an atheist John Gray says about the more vocal New Atheists like Richard Dawkins they defend liberal freedoms without asking where they come from after all his Nietzsche clearly saw if there is no eternal base for values external to humanity how can any of our moral standards be anything but limited human conventions ultimately meaningless products of a blind unguided evolutionary process and Peter I find your recent writings fascinating because although I understand you to believe we are here by chance in the preface of the third edition of practical ethics you suggest that there may well be objective ethical truths that our own dependent of what everyone desires that sounds to be increasingly consistent with my own position and yet to be fair to you the Guardian report of Oxford conference recently says nevertheless Peter is no more inclined to belief in God that we did admit that there is a sense in which he regrets not doing so as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question why act morally only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well I look forward to exploring the reasons Peter why you feel you cannot take that step now science marvelous as it is has its limits and so I come to another piece of evidence and that is revelation in the Bible I claim that God has spoken to this world and in particular biblical Alyce's of the problems with humanity not simply in horizontal terms of behavioral breakdown between people but of vertical breakdown of a relationship of cluster the creator its unique solution for that problem not in terms simply of human ethical development but in terms of something far deeper altogether the restoration of the fractured relationship with God through the salvation he is brought through Jesus Christ a relationship that brings a power to live ethically for God and here we reach what for me is the chief evidence not only for the existence but the nature of God it was Jesus Christ who not only taught the golden rule but embodied it he fed the hungry healed the sick and suffering welcomed society's outcasts brought forgiveness and peace a new life to the lives of multi-millions he is able to do this because though he was a man he uniquely was never only a man but God becomes human come to be the savior of the world this is the central claim of the Gospels the word became flesh and dwelt among us and he made statements consonant with this I of the father of one before Abraham was I am I am the truth now these are staggering claims but we need to pause and reflect that the nature of the physical universe is staggered II complex we don't even know what energy is so we should not be surprised that these far deeper realities are even more complex and just as we believe in our deep physical theories because of evidence my conviction that Jesus is the Son of God is based on the fact of his historical resurrection from the dead that launched Christianity in the world this is of course the crunch issue if he rose from the dead death is not the end of atheism is false if Jesus did not rise from the dead Christianity is false finally ladies and gentlemen I find Christianity intensely stimulating but as I read the Bible I do not only find intellectual satisfaction I sense the voice of God speaking to me now this is intensely personal but I've been asked what evidence points for me and this is an essential part of it I'm not only convinced that there is a God I have increasingly learned to trust him and thy strong reasons for doing so after all Christ died and rose for me and that generates in me a deep sense of utterly unmerited forgiveness acceptance and peace that enables me to face the ugly side of my own nature and with God's help do something about it I have found in him a profound resource when facing life's perplexities uncertainties and hard problems and to sum up it is my relationship with God through Christ that in the end as if supreme evidence that God is real that fills my life with meaning and seds and permeates my marriage family life work and rest and I deserve none of it I would find it very hard ladies and gentlemen not to trust a god like that Thank You professor singer your opening statement thank you very much and I want to thank you Larry for organizing this event for this time coming to my hometown as I still think of Melbourne and John Lennox 2-foot for joining me here and I'm very glad that you at least got to see a football match whatever else happens you'll have learned something on this visit and I want to thank you John - of course for your remarks and the spirit in which you've given them so let me begin with the reasons why I do not believe in God I suppose you could say there is there is at least one positive reason why I don't believe in God and two negative reasons the positive reason is the one that was reputed to have been uttered by Laplace when the Emperor Napoleon asked him where God figured in his account of the cosmos and Laplace famously replied I had no need of that hypothesis in other words to Laplace the universe was sufficiently explicable without positing a god or at least no more explicable if we do posit one so why do so and that despite some of the things that that John has said in his remarks which I will come to either plate an hour in rebuttal I think is still the case we do not need to believe in God in order to explain the universe and belief in God does not really help us to explain it why do people believe in God well I'm asking that as a philosophical question rather than a psychological question there may be some psychological needs for people to believe in God but looking at that as more as a philosophical question we could say that in the Christian tradition particularly in medieval times the tradition attempted to develop rational arguments for the existence of God and to some extent that still exists among Roman Catholic circles among our mentioned three of those famous arguments there was the first cause argument that you need to believe in God to answer the question what caused the universe to exist the answer is of course God created it John says he believes we're talking about the biblical God the God who was supposed to have created the world secondly the ontological argument which works from the definition of God as a being with all the perfections and thirdly the argument from design that the world shows signs of having been designed by a God let me briefly look at these the first cause argument is sometimes today resurrected as something that is compatible with science because people sometimes say haven't we learned through science that the universe began with a big bang that it began around thirteen billion years ago John I think said that it was created from nothing or he quoted a scientist saying it was created from nothing and how could that happen how can you create something from nothing doesn't that suggest that there has to be a God but I think scientists are guilty of sowing a great deal of confusion when they use the word universe in statements such as the universe began 13 billion years ago with the Big Bang if you actually tackle a physicist who studies this issue and ask what do you really mean by the universe in that statement they will tell you if they're honest that what they're talking about is the observable universe or the known universe the universe that we can observe with our telescopes and all the devices we have seems to have begun from some kind of bang few lights development about thirteen billion years ago and to have been expanding ever since but if you ask the scientists well do we know that it began from nothing they will answer no we don't know that at all we can't observe anything beyond before the Big Bang so any statements about what happen was before the Big Bang are not scientific statements they are statements perhaps of religious faith or belief so it may well be that the universe for example has been constantly oscillating been constantly expanding and then collapsing and then expanding again and it's been doing that forever for infinite time that's perfectly compatible with everything that science can tell us so we don't need a god to explain the beginning the universe the universe may have always existed and indeed if we think that as the first cause argument runs everything has to have a first cause then of course that argument applies to God as well if we're allowed to say God needs no first cause then we ought to be allowed to say the universe needs no first cause the ontological argument briefly stated is that we define God as the being who has all of the perfections all of the possible perfections that means a God who is supremely whatever qualities you can think of as being perfect beautiful wise good powerful and so on but then it's claimed that if this God did not exist that would be a failing that would be a lack so this perfect being would like something namely existence therefore God must exist well very very few philosophers nowadays believe that argument if you signed it too like some kind of conjuring trick getting the existence of God out of a mere definition I think your instinct was right I believe that Alvin Plantinga who John cited a while ago is one of the very few philosophers who thinks that that argument does have some merit but I certainly don't existence is not an attribute in the same way that power or beauty or wisdom or goodness our attributes and it's a simple confusion to think that you can define a being into existence in that way certainly the argument from design was once quite a powerful argument it's the it's the watchmakers argument Richard Dawkins has a book the blind watchmaker that says well you know if things happen by evolution how could they all fit together so well seems like everything works well in the universe there are signs of things having been designed certainly people the past thought that animals were created for us to eat and for us to wear their skins and they pointed to other things in nature like the fact that if water did not expand when it froze then ponds would freeze solid and fish would die and so on they're things that people regarded as being beautifully designed including our own organs and the organs of animals which seem to have certain functions and purposes but of course now that we understand the Darwinian theory of evolution that argument has fallen into disrepute we understand much better how it is that we have certain organs how it is that beings exist that they have evolved over barely imaginable periods of time only those that were indeed adapted to their environment and could survive and reproduce left descendants that are still with us and I think the fossil record now shows that and more recently our understanding of genetics shows our own biological relationship with very simple organisms including bacteria with whom we share some genes and then progressively we share more genes with beings more like us until we get up to the great apes to pansies with whom we share something like 98% of our genes so I think evolution is one of the most stirred firmly established scientific theories with a huge amount of evidence for it and we don't therefore need the argument from design to explain how the universe comes to be like it is so the arguments for the existence of God seem to me to be not strong now interestingly in the Protestant tradition those arguments fell into disrepute quite a long time ago and so Protestants began to disavow the arguments and say what really matters is faith but what is faith faith is really just believing in something for which you have neither rational arguments nor good evidence I know that John is a mathematician by training so I'm sure he's familiar with the 19th century mathematician and philosopher William Clifford who wrote a very nice essay about faith using as an analogy a ship owner who was about to send to see a ship full of immigrants we can imagine they were coming to Australia if you like since many immigrants did set sail from England in the 19th century for Australia and as we know of course you only have to go down to the great ocean road and you find many places where some of those ships founded and sank with great loss of life for example around Locard but this ship owner the Clifford imagines does is uncertain whether his ship is seaworthy enough to make the long voyage to bring the immigrants to the new land but he thinks about it he says well look after all there's a divine providence and how could a divine providence allow these good people who are going to establish their futures men women and children even who at least the children innocent of any sin how could he allow them to drown on the way to the new world so I will have faith in God and I won't bother to inspect the ship to see whether it's seaworthy because I have faith that it will reach Australia well of course as I say we know that some ships did not and we would fault this ship owner and say you can't just have faith in that way you need to check the evidence you need to look at it the ship owners faith would have put lives at risk and unfortunately in the real world today faith also puts lives at risk in fact the refusal of the Roman Catholic Church to tolerate the use of condoms even in regions of sub-saharan Africa where the risk of contracting HIV AIDS is extremely high has undoubtedly not merely put lives at risk but cost perhaps millions of innocent human lives we pay a high price for the religious faith of some religious leaders so I don't think the arguments for God are good and I don't think we should rely on faith to replace arguments but I have two arguments against belief in the God of the Bible the first argument is that although we may live in a society in which most religious believers are Christians or since we're talking about the God of the Bible let's group together Christians and those of the Jewish faith most religious believers come from from here come from one of those two religions and if we want to broaden this to the Abrahamic traditions we can include Muslims as well we know as a matter of sociological fact that if they had been brought up in other cultures with different religious beliefs let's say in India they would have been much likely more likely to be Hindus or if they'd been brought up in Islamic countries the Christians and Jews would have been much more likely to be Muslims so there's a kind of relativism about religious belief that should at least lead us to a sceptical attitude towards it is it just kay is it just a coincidence that John is a Christian when his parents were Christians it's surely not just a coincidence it's surely that cultural tradition which made it easier for him to accept that belief although of course many Christians children and many Christians do abandon their belief but I think that should at least make us critical about those traditions but the second argue the second negative argument seems to me much the stronger one and this is that if we're talking about the God of the judeo-christian tradition that God is standardly defined as a being who is all knowing all powerful and all good omnipotent omniscient and omni-benevolent and yet there is suffering in the world how could there be suffering in the world if there were a God who knew about this suffering had the power to prevent it and did not prevent it well Christians of course are not ignorant of this counter-argument and they say many things for example they say but God gave us free will that was a great gift worth all the suffering that occurs but given that we have free will he could not stop us from causing each other to suffer well we might question whether the gift of free will is worth the horrendous amount of suffering that has there has been in the world from no doubt as long as they've been being capable of suffering but putting that aside it's obvious that there is suffering in the world which is not caused by free will for example you will all know that for about a dozen years ending only perhaps was it a year or 18 months ago southeastern Australia had a terrible drought and during that drat many animals died too minute they died simply because the water holes dried up or they could not get enough to eat it was not human action that caused that suffering so there is suffering in the world which is not caused by humans caused by earthquakes droughts and so on Christians sometimes also say that suffering is the result of sin but it's impossible to believe that a small child who is crushed by a falling building in an earthquake has sinned and therefore deserves that suffering and of course the animals that I've already mentioned did not sin and yet they suffer not only at human hands but at the hands of nature I have asked many intelligent thoughtful Christians and I'm asking John Lennox against notes to explain to me how the existence of undeserved suffering not caused by human activity could be compatible with the idea that an all-knowing God created this world knows about the suffering could have predicted the suffering at the time of the creation of the world and did not change things to reduce this vast amount of suffering that goes on in the world today it seems to me wildly implausible that this world is a world that was created by that kind of God it seems to me much more likely that this is simply a world that has arisen through the processes of evolution that we are now increasingly familiar with which are indeed blind and unguided but have nevertheless thrown up beings capable of reasoning and in response to what John said I would say developed capacities to understand the world in their situation because that did have survival advantages but now can use these capacities to understand the world that seems to me by far the more plausible picture of the world we're in than the one that theists attempt to persuade us to accept thank you [Applause] Don you have five to seven minutes well Peter thank you very much we could be here all night I think with a very interesting conversation let me do what I can and hope that we can then discuss these in detail with the moderator first of all Laplace the mathematician when Napoleon asked him where is God in your equations of course he gave the right answer Juniper's went to set in four days I don't need that hypothesis because he was explaining how the thing is mathematically described but if Napoleon had asked the past how is it that there is a universe which is governed by such equations he might have answered a different way and I think the mistake that's being committed here is the difference between mechanism and law as explanation on the one hand and God is agent on the other hand you will not find Henry Ford in the laws of internal combustion or inside one of his motor cars but if you want a complete explanation off the motorcar you will need both types of explanation now that brings me to Peter's next point of the traditional arguments for God and we can't go into all of them of course but let me come to the the argument from design now whatever evolution can or cannot do it is a mechanism and the whole point of this category mistake is this that the existence of a mechanism that does something is not in itself an argument for the absence of an agent that designed the mechanism now as a mathematician I am extremely skeptical about certain aspects of evolution not the ones Darwin observed but as has now been admitted even by Richard Dawkins evolution has nothing to say about the origin of life itself for a very simple reason because evolution needs to get going the existence of mutating replicator there's a fascinating thing to my mind about the origin of it the argument for design updated is this but in every one of the 10 trillion cells of our body there's a database a huge database the human genome is 3.5 billion letters long all in the right order like a computer program now all of our experience and intuition tells us that semiotic language like structure does not arise by natural processes you only have to say the first few letters of your name written in the sand of the Melbourne Beach where you will immediately deduce upwards to intelligent origination whatever the mechanisms involved and it seems to me one of the most powerful arguments from design today is the sheer existence of the longest word in any alphabet that resonates to my mind much better with in the beginning was the word then it resonates in the beginning were simply chance motions and so on so it seems to me quite apart from evolution the existence of this language like structure is very powerful evidence for God now Peter you raised the question I can't resist saying something about this because Richard Dawkins makes it the heart of his book The God Delusion if you say the God created the universe then you have to say who created God who created the Creator but this is a clever question because you see if I ask who created X I'm assuming X is created and the Richard Dawkins had written a book called the created God's delusion I don't think it would have sold many copies it has created gods we've known for centuries our delusion we easily call them idols so it seems to me the question of fumes what the Christian tradition and indeed the Muslim and Jewish traditions deny that is that God is not created but when I had a debate with Richard Dawkins again organized by her friend Larry I said this question is barb because it works both ways if you claim that it's a valid question to say who created God there let me try it on you you believe that the universe created you who created your creator and still waiting for the answer to that question now faith Peter I do not accept your definition that is the definition of blind faith and we all know the difference we sing it in a financial crisis we thought we could plus some bankers didn't we and we discovered that our faith was not evidence-based blind faith is dangerous of course it's the kind of thing that causes young people to fly planes into tall buildings and I would want to emphasize that the Christian faith is not like that it is a commitment based on evidence John in his gospel says at the end of it Jesus did many other things in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book but these are written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that believing you might have life in his name in other words here is the evidence upon which faith is based and what launched Christianity on the ancient world as Paul pointed out to the philosophers and Athens was the fact of the resurrection as a base which they could place their faith in an evidence base that gave them the confidence to preach Christianity so I simply don't accept the definition now brought up by parents who were Christians I was a date Peter can I ask you were your parents atheists my mother was certainly an atheist my father was maybe more actual oh you're perpetuating the faith of your parents too like I am it's not a faith in my view oh of course it's a take don't you believe it I don't have faith in any being I think the point I'm making Peter that this is the genetic fallacy as you well know and the point is and I take the point because when I first got to Cambridge one of the first questions I was asked of course you believe in God all you Irish believe in God you fight about it and for that reason I have spent my life among people that don't share my faith in order to be sure that I'm not being fooled and I have known many people not in the categories that you and I are who have become Christians because of the evidence and they've changed their worldview so I think that is a distinct possibility your biggest question and the hardest one I face is the problem of suffering and we'll have to deal with it when we get Larry to moderate us thank you thank you well I there are a number of things that John said in his opening that I want to talk about but just to go back to the point that he was making before about the uncreated universe he asked me well who is my Creator I mean I I don't have a creator I evolved as you all did from many generations but I don't see a problem in thinking that the universe is not created it simply has always existed and I think the point is that they're not that I'm not arguing that the existence of the material universe is strictly incompatible with a creator so I'm simply arguing that we have no need to believe in such a creator and the there is no argument for him from the fact that the the universe needs the first cause because then the Creator also needs the first cause and if John rejects that assumption saying that well you know we define God as uncreated well then of course we can say the universe also is uncreated I want to address though the point that John made both in his opening remarks and again now that Christianity is based on a historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus the evidence for this historical fact is extremely slender that's the problem with trying to rest on that we don't have any contemporary documents that attest to this we know from biblical criticisms new scholarship that the actual so-called Gospels that we read were written considerably after this they may have an earlier source sometimes called Q but that too was written at least a generation after this so the idea of Jesus having been resurrected is something that is a something that is is I was around in the literature and that was written many years afterwards by Christians but of course we know that there are many diverse religious traditions that make all sorts of claims about historical fact and the idea of a god of a God who is resurrected who comes back to life is also not unique to Christianity we find it in in other anthropological traditions and in traditions around the time we find so I think to really to rest much on this claim as a historical claim is extremely slender and particularly since it does seem to violate all the laws of nature that we know and understand we would need to have particularly strong evidence in order to believe in it this is a point that the philosopher David Hume made that to believe in miracles you would need to have quite remarkably good evidence in fact uum thought that you could never really have such evidence I wouldn't say you could never have such evidence I wouldn't say it's inconceivable and you could have events that were so well documented and witnessed but even though they appeared to go against all the laws of nature that we understand nevertheless you would believe in them but certainly the idea that Jesus rose again from the dead is not something that we could claim to be well known in fact I would say there are pretty much no facts about the life of Jesus that you could really take as being well known and well documented but that would probably lead us too far at least this central historical claim I think is something that you really have to be already a believer with faith to say this is what I'm going to stake my belief on despite the fact that there are so many other religious traditions that claim all sorts of incredible things now I also want to deal with the idea that somehow the although science or evolution can explain the mechanisms they don't explain this idea of the agent but of course this is precisely the difference between a car which we know was designed for a purpose and the universe which was not my view designed for a purpose and doesn't need any kind of agent I don't see any problem with the idea that consciousness arises from a process of evolution we know that there are non-human animals which have consciousness of various sorts and various degrees and we can understand how consciousness can be useful as for survival how the capacity to feel pain can be useful in avoiding dangers and therefore helping you to survive and we know that for example things like being able to do rudimentary mathematics can be helpful to survive so that if you see three tigers go into a cave and only to come out you know that it's not a good idea to go into that cave so it's not surprising that we should have developed this capacity and now we develop it to a very high degree where we can write papers on these topics as john has done and I think something similar can happen with with morality that maybe we can have insights even into as John suggested possibly objective moral truths which have nothing to do with God but our objective in the sense that some of the true use of mathematics our objective and we've developed the capacity to reason which enables us to see and understand those truths so I don't think it follows from atheism that morality can only be human conventions although you know that's that would be a possibility that some philosophers believed in but I think it's perfectly compatible with it that we have rational insights that are more universal and in that connection I also want to reject the idea that John mentioned that the idea of human equality Springs specifically from Christian roots not so it's part of the universality of morality that philosophers in different traditions have accepted that idea or something very like it you find it for example in the stoic tradition which was around in Rome at the time was when Christianity was spreading so maybe it's no coincidence that Christianity picked it up in and you find it also completely separately independently I'd suggest in Chinese thought in the thought of Mencius for example among ancient Chinese philosophers before the era of Christianity so I think there are things that human minds in separate cultures differently have come to accept maybe they don't put them into practice as much as we would like but they are ideas that occur to the kinds of rational intelligent beings who have evolved on this planet thank you so gentlemen we now move to a time of questions and your responses I certainly want to invite you to engage one another to generate some conversation between you and I will invite you to to ask each other questions let's begin with you Peter John has made this statement he says do away with God and you do away with freedom would you like to respond to that suddenly the word freedom means different things of course we have in a country like Australia a considerable degree of political freedom I presume John does not mean that if you do away with God you necessarily have a authoritarian regime in place you presume he accepts that you could have political freedom as indeed we do although many Australians from our prime minister Dan are not religious believers so presumably he means in some sense free will and if that's what he means then I would say there's a sense in which that claim is true and there's a sense in which it's false obviously we have freedom to make choices I chose to take part in this debate I could have declined I was conscious of making that choice but could somebody have said well it was in some way predetermined if somebody had known the position of every atom in the universe at some earlier point and all of the laws that govern the universe they would have been able to predict that I Peter Singer would have accepted Larry tontons invitation to speak at this debate tonight yeah maybe I don't know it's a possibility so there's maybe a sense in which the kind of deep metaphysical freedom that some theists and proponents of free will want to talk about is not possible on the view of the universe that I hold but we should not be deluded into thinking that means that we don't make real choices obviously we do professor Lennox would you like to to respond to that I mean it seems that the the idea of God creating freedom is counterintuitive isn't freedom found in in the belief that there is no God well I sympathize quite a bit with what Peter has just said it seems to me you get various degrees of this what I was referring to Peter was my own frequent experience of Russia the systematic experiment imposition of a an atheistic regime which left them it wasn't my quote it was their quote that they felt that they'd been robbed of freedom and of course the classic example of it is the Berlin Wall so I was referring to it at that level what I find quite interesting is that I don't know whether you go along with this or were you hinting at it when it comes down to it Richard Dawkins for instance in his book says that the universe is just a bottom what we'd expect to find it's in the end there is no good no evil no justice DNA just is and we dance to its music because that would seem to me to be spell the end of your ethics and all morality if we have that kind of determinism in the universe but presumably you're not suggesting that no I don't I don't agree with Richard Dawkins if he thinks that there is no good or no bad in no justice in the universe and of course he can't say that as a scientist he's simply saying I would say that science or evolution doesn't show you what is good or not I'm in that's a philosophical question but I don't think we need to reject ideas that some things are good that suffering is bad for example at least the suffering of the innocent is a bad thing I don't think that and I took it that you were accepting this I don't think that we need to abandon that view just because we abandoned theism no no if I can just say one thing about because I then I did slightly misunderstand what you said about freedom look I mean I think if you only listen to Russians who suffered under the Atheist Soviet regime loss of freedom you're taking a somewhat biosample maybe you should go to Iran and ask people there whether you know they have freedom and if not they would perhaps say look it's it's theism that has prevented us from having a great deal of freedom and certainly there are many parts of the world where that is true and in historical times they've been even more parts of the world where people have been deprived of their freedom in the name of religious belief so we don't think either you know I don't think a theism has any monopoly in terms of depriving depriving people of freedom I'm sure you'd agree with that oh I would agree with it especially coming from Northern Ireland and I think it's very important there to distinguish which sometimes people do not do but I'm sure you do between different religions because one of the things have been very important to me on this particular issue is that it was Christ himself that refused to allow the use of violence to defend him or his message and it seems to me that that is immensely important that Christians who take up weapons to defend their faith are not followers of Jesus they're actually contradicting what he stood for well that may be but then we have the question of whether we all ought to be pacifist in a world in which there are some people who are not pacifist and you know while I deplore a lot of the violence in the world I'm not a pacifist I was wording myself very carefully I said the defend him or his message he did say the sword the early apostles did say the state does not bear the sword in pain I think there are two separate issues actually let's go to you professor Lennox um you have argued the science gives evidence of God and then your closing statement excuse me rather your your last remarks in your opening statement you then spoke of Jesus Christ so why does the evidence it seems like there might be a leak there well how does the evidence go from that that that science demonstrates as you argued that there is a God to the God of the Bible so it doesn't and I never intended the two that they make that very clear I was responding fact what evidence do I count as valid for the existence of God and it's a different kind that some of it comes from science and the rational intelligibility of the universe in fact we could do science that only gets us so far as in fact the new testament recognizes you can see i believe in nature that there is a god that he's powerful but you don't get much further than that then i would play and it is a step further i agree with you entirely but it's a step into history not into an agitation and i will come back a bit that you hear peter that it seems to me the evidence for the new testament historicity is very considerable indeed we have documents going back to the very early centuries indeed in fact one document of part of the Gospel of John into the first century and senior people like Oxford Sherwood White is an eminent Roman historian says that the confirmation of the historicity of say the New Testament basic history book the book of Acts is utterly overwhelming I think historians whom I have consulted in detail because I'm not a historian would be much more confident that you here to be that there is very strong evidence for the historicity of what's claimed in the New Testament am I allowed to comment Larry on the resurrection specifically here because Peter made the comment that as David Hume famously said miracles or violations of the law of nature well Davidson was a distinguished Scotsman I'm an Irishman might disagree with him I think Peter that this notion that miracles or violations of the laws of nature has been responsible for an immense amount of confusion and let me illustrate it this way and it's administration due to CS Lewis if in my hotel and Melbourne tonight I put a hundred dollars plus a hundred dollars in the drawer it's $200 now if I wake up in the morning and find fifty dollars I won't say the laws of arithmetic have been broken I may so that say the laws of Australia have been broken now the point is how do I recognize that someone has put his hand into the system I recognise it by knowing those laws of arithmetic that seems to me that with something like the resurrection we need a universe that is governed by stable laws if you do not know regularities to its nature normally works you cannot recognize something that appears to contravene those regularities if if you think dead people jump up every hour of the week you won't be surprised by resurrection they know the regularities but you see no Christian is claiming but Jesus rose from the dead by natural processes what they are claiming is that God fed by his power into the system and did something special science in his description of the regularities is completely neutral on that it can tell us that resurrections are improbable but not impossible because they don't violate any laws so I would take issue at that basic conception there yes I mean I'm not as I said I'm not exclusively defending use claims which was a strong one but I do think that the evidence you know if you're relying on historical evidence the evidence is extremely thin we know that there are many cases where people claim to have seen all sorts of things claim that all they've had all kinds of visions that people have appeared to them you know that they've been cured and generally we are skeptical about such claims we and rightly so right okay so given I mean you said there are documents from the first century okay but the first century is compatible with if we assume that the tradition is that Jesus was crucified and around 30 then we're talking about people who were writing who have perhaps the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of those who were supposed to witness it now we know that stories get twisted and new stories get invented you only have to pay Chinese whispers with fifty people and you know see what comes out at the end after you whisper something in at the beginning so that isn't true Peter really because the Apostle Paul was writing in the early 50s it's much nearer to the time than that now I'm a little bit older than you I could remember things very clearly 20-30 years back and so on so I think the gap is but I thought ball was not an eyewitness right I mean Paul was reporting what other people said yeah but he was an eyewitness of something you were saying that a lot of people many people have to be a believer in the resurrection before they do anything else Paul wasn't he was absolutely against Jesus and it was an appearance of the risen Christ that was the foundation of his conversion so he was not the believer when he met Jesus right so it was one of these kinds of visions that I was talking about that he had apparition or something like that and that's what I'm saying we know many people have these sometimes about their religious beliefs sometimes about aliens coming from Mars or somewhere and kidnapping them and we're normally very skeptical about this and and we understand that in Paul's day people maybe were not quite so skeptical but we would think that they should have been a lot of work just really skeptical and in fact in any of my studies of the psychology of the hallucinations the evidence is that people see what they're expecting to see now the one significant thing about Jesus resurrection is nobody was expecting to see it and the fact is that Paul was saying that there were 500 witnesses who saw it at once there is no record I don't think it's directly I may be wrong in that of any collective hallucination they're normally individual things and I think we can get at this historically I'm going to do a shameless bit of advertising because they've just written the book banned the evidence for the resurrection and so these things are very fresh to my mind and you're right and being skeptical Peter but I think if we bring that skeptical mind and I've tried to do it all my life to these things the evidence mounts the fact is Christianity seemed hopeless when Jesus died something caused it and I would put it this way quoting a famous historian there's a resurrection shaped hold in history that is the only thing that makes sense of what happened well I certainly wouldn't agree that with that I mean no doubt Christian Christianity answered to certain psychological needs that people had at that time in the Roman Empire and we know that many different religions grew adds and some of them also grew in remarkable ways Islam also grew for example in quite remarkable ways so I don't think the fact that a religion survives and grows is evidence that there is some truth that its foundation I also want to remind you that you made a statement just now that none of them were expecting to see the resurrection well we just don't know that I mean you know we don't have any documentary evidence from those people there you know we don't have say that one of them wrote a letter to someone else saying oh you know Jesus who I was following has been crucified I'm in despair that's the end of it you know we didn't lose her we have Luke who they all believe he's not one of these people he was a brilliant historian by all accounts who says at the very beginning of his history the Gospel of Luke that he traced everything from the beginning he consulted eyewitnesses he did everything a historian to do and he has been proved accurate and reliable on so many detailed things that we can check so there's certainly a prima facie a case to take him very seriously so I think you're going too much too far to say we don't know when the historians take this very seriously indeed I've been let's move to the neck topic here would you like to respond to that well I did let me just say that I mean there are contradictions within the Gospels themselves you know you take Luke but I don't remember which way it is but for example take something like the Sermon on the Mount and one of the Gospel says it was preached on a mat the other says it was preached on the plain there seems to be a fair amount of disagreement within the Gospels themselves or Jesus may have been like many preachers Peter he preached the same Sharman more than once well I understanding is that most that most most historical scholars think that there was no sermon preached on demand but that the Gospel writers put together a collection of his sayings and turned it into a sermon and I understand his internal evidence of that but I'm not enough of a biblical scholar to go in today but so let's let's move to a question for you Peter um do you see all religious belief as irrational that is would you would you lump together all religions or do you make some distinction among them I think at their foundation all religious belief is irrational insofar as it believes in a deity or a supernatural force or something of that sort but I put it that way because it depends a lot what you call a religion for example Buddhism is often regarded as a religion but at least in its pure forms it doesn't presuppose the existence of a deity I think what is them an interesting example where if you look at the practice of Buddhists in many countries they become superstitious and they appear to believe that you know putting prayers somewhere or lighting a candle or something or other is going to somehow affect something that they're hoping for or make things go well but I think in pure forms of Buddhism that isn't true so you could say that Buddhism is perhaps a philosophical ethical way of life rather than a religion and if you take that out of the religious teaching and other things like Buddhism then I would say that all of those religions are ultimately irrational now some may be more irrational than some may have stranger and weirder and more bizarre beliefs than others undoubtedly but I think that given and I should say also given what we know about the world now I mean I don't think it was necessarily irrational for people to have religious beliefs before we could explain things I mean if you were living in earlier times and you saw thunder and lightning it maybe it wasn't irrational to think wow there's some great big guy up there who's angry and is you know making this noise and these flashes but you know now we understand what thunder and lightning is and we have no reason to believe that that is in some way a sign of a God so I think it depends on our circumstances but given the kind of knowledge of the world we have today I think belief in a deity particularly a deity of the Bible that that sort is irrational would you like to respond well as I try to argue at the beginning I think atheism is irrational because it tries to derive rationality out of irrationality and I see it a colossal leap of blind faith to go from an explanation of the universe in terms of mindless unguided processes to all the marvelous rationality we have today and as for coherence the notion that there is an intelligent God behind our intelligence it's it makes sense in the beginning was the word and it's interesting Peter made the point earlier and I think it makes very clear what the issue between us is we're talking ladies and gentlemen when two diametrically opposed worldviews and the easy way to see that is Peter will say look he accepts the universe as I owned the studio Peter is a brute fact it's there so in that sense it's for you ultimate reality everything else is derivative including mind intelligence of the idea of God because there isn't a god I take the exact opposite view that the mind is primary not the riveted in the beginning was the word in the beginning was God and the mass-energy the universe or multiverse or whatever we think of it as is derivative that is the issue between us and as someone once put it the question is not whether there is an ultimate fact the question is which ultimate tractor we believe it and Peter believes that the universe in that sensor as as his ultimate fact and I believe in God and my argument simply is here that far from I can't speak for other religions Peter I can speak mainly from my own faith they must defend themselves but it seems to me that Christianity makes far more rational sense and I did mention it does seem to have been the foundation for modern science how long science can keep going without a preventative thing but that's another matter ah well I mean I agree with you on the statement of what the issue is between us I think you've made that fairly and well you know I I'm not I won't agree with you really about the any essential connection between Christianity and modern science I think that to considerable extent science rose in spite of Christianity rather than with it and we only have to look at the way Christianity treated scientists like Galileo to see that and even Darwin of course had huge amount of religious opposition and science that were there were certainly scientific minds in non-christian cultures there was a great deal of science in India for example in terms of astronomy understanding of the universe and in China as well it's true that the rise of modern science happened in the Christian West for a variety of reasons that I don't see any real necessary connection thank you let's let's move on to another question here and that's the question of suffering which is a primary argument as I understand it that that Professor singer has has raised against the existence of the God of the Bible how do you respond to that argument with immense sympathy it's the hardest problem Peter that I or you face I think to account for suffering and you know every time I get asked the question there's a vision comes into my mind of standing and oh ships which I've done many times and weeping and you mentioned quite rightly that there are two problems there's a problem of moral evil and then there's a problem with what we call natural evil earthquakes I was in Christchurch two days after the earthquake I met some of the victims who were distraught some people who had their friends crushed and so on and I just feel that there are no simplistic answers to this that's my first response my second response is to say that if you then deduce that there's no God in one sense you've solved the problem intellectually the universe is just as it is and so on but what you've not done is remove the suffering what you have decidedly done is removed all hope now that may be the way the universe is and I go through contortions like you do in you mentioned some of them could God not if he had not seen this and could he not and so on and we can have a lengthy discussion on this and I think you would probably outwit me very quickly on it and I respond to all this and they say look we can argue til the cows come home as they say in Ireland about what God might could etc have done or not have done but the fact is we're faced with a world with two ruined cathedrals there's one in Coventry that was ruined by moral evil if you accept that for a moment by bombing there's one in Christchurch that was ruined by a natural disaster those to my mind are symbols of our problem and my response is this yes I'm faced like you were the world with ragged ages with hurting people my niece of 22 had an inner earthquake in her brain and she's dead my brother blown up in a terrorist bomb and no doubt you have tragedies in your own background in Central Europe in years gone by and I try to say this with extreme sensitivity because they don't feel they're any easy answers I say Peter this granted that it's like that is there any evidence whatsoever that there is a loving God out there and my answer to that is well let me not say it's an answer to window into an answer you know because I said it this evening that I believe Jesus is God I know you don't accept that but let's try and look at the logic off it if Jesus actually was God the question that I'm faced with is what was God doing in a cross and I can begin to see here that if this is true then God has not remained distant from the problem of suffering and evil but has himself become part of it and all I can say that for me with all my questions that I have many I have seen myself and many other people come to some kind of peace if not necessarily closure by knowing that God will understand there's one final point if death is the end then of course there is no hope now because I believe in God I have a problem with suffering but then I do not believe death is the end and I further believe that God is a God of absolute justice and fairness and one day he will compensate to such an extent that if we could see now where the innocent victims of suffering have been we would have a lot I think of our question let's put in response ok well firstly thank you John for your honesty in meaning that you don't really have an answer to the problem that I posed which remains for me the strongest reason for not believing in the God of the Jewish and Christian tradition and I think it still does after everything that you've said because you acknowledge that you can't really answer the problem now you do say that if I say there's no God or faith you say there's no God we've solved the problem so you agree that we have an answer to that problem but you say we've not removed the suffering well of course that's true we haven't removed the suffering we can try to remove the suffering I think we ought to be trying to minimize the suffering maybe not remove it because that's just too utopian but we ought to be doing what we can to minimize it I don't think it helps you define peace to know that God will understand I would think really you know do you think God understands this just why isn't he doing something about it I mean how does that help not not everybody even not every suffering being even understands that there is a God so it's no consolation to the Kangaroos dying of lack of water out in the desert during a drought that God understands they don't understand that concept at all then you said if death is the end and there is no hope no this is the end of each one of us but death is not the end of our species there is hope in the sense that we can hope that humans will learn from mistakes of the past that we will develop better ways of living that we will be able to find ways in which people can live more peacefully and ethically together that we will eventually develop our science to the point where we can minimize the suffering that's caused from natural disasters and there is hope that the world will improve and I certainly have that hope what I don't have I guess is the idea that God is as you said a god of absolute justice and fairness who will somehow compensate for this suffering I don't even really understand how you could make sense of that I mean if suppose that you reward somebody who died a slow and agonizing death from either from human moral evil from being tortured solely to death or from a painful debilitating disease that took months to bring a person to their death even if you say well now he's in heaven and living a blissful life it doesn't seem to take away the badness of what he suffered why couldn't he be in heaven without having suffered that and again my understanding is that at least standard Christian view is that it is only human beings who have this hope of life after death so where is the compensation again for all of the suffering over millions of years of billions and billions of non-human animals maybe heretical enough to say that they too get rewarded that would be nice if you could believe that but I would still say why not just have the rewards without the pain and suffering that came before so where's the compensation Christ told a story of a man who suffered in this life terribly because he was discriminated against and he was called Nazareth so I presume he was an actual person and he got nothing to eat except what the dogs was pushed off the table for the dogs that he was covered in sores and I find it very interesting that Christ talked about what happened to him after death he clearly been a friendless man and yet we are told that in that eternal world which is of course part and parcel of the hope of Christians and I unashamedly believe in it that man found himself in the company of Abraham who is one of the few people described in Scripture as the friend of God and it seems to me that that little cameo shows us that God can compensate you say you cannot imagine it I think that okay there's a lot of things I cannot imagine but the New Testament in its descriptions of the world to come uses a lot of negatives of course there's no pain there's no crying there is no death well Peter if there is a world like that isn't that infinitely better granted that the sufferings here anyway you and I face it it's here isn't that infinitely better than simply saying well there's hope for the species but I personally have no hope whatsoever you see it seems to me that we're both faced with this problem but that there is a Christian promise that that transcends death and the fact that Christ has become part of suffering that weighs with me heavily and of course you will agree with me the not all sufferings bad suffering can develop a person's character but I know exactly what you mean there seems to be too much and I would sense that in my own heart but it still does not bright me to atheism because I see in Christ and that's why I find the evidence so important there is somewhere that I can really get some kind of peace though not all the solutions that either I or you Peter would want to have let me just say that again you said that you know I have no hope but I mean well I just know how well I'm but I do have personal hope I hope that I will continue to live for another decade or so and enjoy my life and enjoy my family and see my grandchildren get older and I also have hope that I will continue to see improvements in the world now I do think that I will die and that's that will be the end of me that's true but it's not something that causes me to despair but I mean I can see that it would be psychologically nice you know if you really believed that you were headed for some sort of immortality and some wonderful state it just seems to me you're telling yourself a fairy tale you're really kidding yourself because you know it's maybe a bit tough for some people to accept the fact that immortal and they'll be appointed which will die and that'll be the end of it but Peter you could be telling himself a fairy tale too but I would you know I would what's the fairy tale I don't have the psychological reward the idea that you know and many people were familiar with wishful thinking we're familiar I mean look at now the climate skeptics oh I think you know the Republicans they think oh if climate change is really happening it'll justify the government in taking more drastic action to regulate our lives but we don't think governments ought to interfere in our lives therefore the climate isn't changing or if it's changing it has nothing to do with greenhouse gases that humans emit all right I mean that's wishful thinking I hope you agree with me that that's Oh Peter I accept the Freudian argument but I think it works both ways there's a wonderful book written by Mumford Lutz for their clinic is shifted discretion the brief history of the great one just appeared recently by Germany's leading psychiatrist he says this he says if there is no God Freud gives us a brilliant explanation why heaven and all this kind of thing pie in the sky when you die as wishful thinking if there is no God but then he goes on to say if there is a God Freud will give you an equally brilliant explanation of why atheism is wishful thinking the desire not to meet God as just watch me wash put it the famous have a Polish poet so his bottom line is as to whether there is a God or not Freud won't help you you'll have to go somewhere else and that's why I want to go somewhere else and base it on something concrete and for me it comes back to the person of Christ and the resurrection how do you respond Peter could I tell our line is our time is running short I do want to give Peter the opportunity to respond to that a futile are you well let just me say that I didn't mention Freud tonight if you want to hear me on Freud I'm speaking tomorrow at the National Gallery of Victoria about my grandparents in Freud's Vienna my grandfather actually co-authored a paper with Freud but I'm not afraid in I think there are much better psychological views and I don't see how it could be wishful thinking to believe that you died and that's the end of it I have I have two two final questions for you let me put this one to to both of you and we'll we'll begin over here Dostoyevsky is famously quoted as saying in The Brothers Karamazov if there is no immortality there can be no virtue and all things are permissible do you accept the logic of that I do but I would want to carefully explain what he didn't mean and what he didn't mean I'm sure Peter will agree with this what he did me is that atheists cannot be moral because I often find myself shamed as a Christian by the character and integrity of my atheist friends I don't think he was talking about that I think he was talking about what I mentioned in my opening remarks that there's no rational justification for morality if there isn't a god and I think there's a lot of truth in that just as I feel there's no rational justification for rationality if there isn't a god but I think it's very important to see what he is not saying and what do you say and that's what I think he's saying well I agree with you that if he were saying that atheists can't be moral he would obviously be saying something false but I also think he's saying something false on your interpretation because I don't think you need belief in God to believe that there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong in fact one of your Oxford colleagues the philosopher Derek Moffat has just in a couple of months ago published I think one of the most significant books in moral philosophy to be published for a long time it's a two-volume total of 1,400 pages arguing for the idea of rationally based objective truths and morality and Partha is an atheist it makes no reference to God in this discussion I think it's perfectly possible to say that there are some things that is rational to do that for example causing suffering to others for know let's say for simply for amusement to yourself where the amusement to yourself is clearly my less than the suffering you're causing to others could be seen as something that is failing to take account of the idea that you are just one being in the universe as is the other person that you are causing suffering to and you're not justified in doing that now there's a lot more argument obviously as I say that needs to go into defending that but I don't accept that only theism can provide a ground for the idea that some things really matter in a perfectly straightforward and objective sense a final question for the two of you before we get to your closing statements and we'll begin here with you Peter a child asks you the age-old question Who am I and why am I here what is your response well if the child asks Who am I I think I can answer that question quite well I can say you are an animal you are an animal of the primate of a mammal you're a primate and you're of the species homo sapien and i can say we know a lot of bad beings like you and how they come into existence what's their nature there's still a lot more that we can find out and hopefully we'll find out in generations to come but we know a good deal about who you are but the question why am I here or why am I here is at least potentially a mistaken question if it seeks a purpose for your being here if it seeks an explanation then of course the explanation is essentially a Darwin's theory of evolution and let me just say because I remember I wanted to respond to something john said but didn't that is that I think we can assume that somehow in the primeval soup we got collections of molecules that became self-replicating and I don't think we need any miraculous or mysterious views about how life gets going but from that point we have evolution which leads us to be here but if we think is there a purpose to my existence the purpose is only the purposes that we give ourselves we are purposive beings so we can say I want my purpose to be whatever it might be whatever we decide it might be but is there some ultimate reason why am I here no there just isn't and it's a mistake to ask that question well not surprisingly I don't think it's a distinct choice that question you've got immense faith of the wrong kind Peter in the primeval soup but that's another matter if I'm asked that question of course we can describe various things about a child of this relationship to the world but I think one of the most thrilling things is this that child is of infinite value because it bears the image of its creator and I think one of the most well for me one of the most moving things that stated in the whole of the Bible comes near the end of it of the book of Revelation where there is a scene in heaven in which I believe where God is being praised as creator and one of the elements in that praise is this that the whole of heaven so to speak is praising God and saying about human beings because of your will they wear and wear created now that's rather ancient English so let me put it into contemporary English what are the things that makes my life meaningful and the childhood ask the question is that I do believe ladies and gentlemen but I exist because God wanted me to be and it's that that fills my life with meaning that I cannot begin to describe to have a relationship with the Creator that invented the atom that invented all the colors and though scientists can think of a new one really that thought of the human brain that is an exciting and a thrilling thing and to think that me that I with all my imperfections inadequacies and sane lives that God could want me to be that is the thing that gives me a tremendous value and I would want to explain that amongst other things to any child and indeed any person in the world your closing remarks thank you I think we've had a very interesting discussion I think that it's clarified a number of the points between religious believers and atheists like myself and obviously I still think that the existence of suffering of the kinds of sufferings that Jon and I agree this is the great barrier to belief in this kind of God of the Bible but one thing that has emerged in our discussion is the extent to which Jon wants to place weight on the scriptures he's referred very largely to the New Testament the Christian scriptures although he did of course refer to the opening lines of the Hebrew Bible and I think that you know it doesn't really stand up to the kind of critical examination I mean there are lots of things in it which clearly are not true when read in a perfectly ordinary way not just the contradiction I mentioned but the fact that it's pretty clear that both Jesus and Paul believed that the second coming or the apocalypse or whatever you might want to call it was going to happen very soon there are lines repeated a couple of times where Jesus says something like none of you shall taste death before I come again and Paul says similar things suggesting that it was clearly expected that this great event would happen quite soon in their own lifetimes or you know certainly within a century or so and we know of course the Christians have continued to think this all down through the ages we had this farcical episode just a month or two back where some Americans believed some Christian who said that the world was coming to an end on a specific time and date but you know let's leave those kinds of Raving decide but but the fact that this is clearly repeated in the New Testament surely suggests and it didn't happen obviously surely suggest that we should not believe in the kinds of things that Jesus is saying that in a sense the honesty or accuracy of the reports is is evidence that they are the reports insofar as a historically accurate of a false preacher a preacher who had false beliefs about what was going to happen in the future and so I think that we can't really place much historical weight at all even if they show that there was such a preacher around at this time in terms of him being God or the Son of God or however we reconcile those problems no and there are many other things I think if we believe these scriptures that we would want to reject morally not only factually that would lead us to todate them the attitude of Paul to women for example if he was supposed to have been enlightened and received Christ and so on we would certainly want to reject his his moral views moral views of Christians to homosexuality I think is again something that we certainly ought to reject so I don't see in my reading of the scriptures evidence either of the idea that these are a record of someone who was supremely wise and supremely knowledgeable nor the RET that they're a record of someone who was supremely morally good someone who certainly had some interesting things to say about morality but not someone who you would want to say had the greatest insights of all time into the nature of morality so I think that reason alone if I were to become a theist of some sort if I were to be persuaded and I'm not by these arguments about the difficulty of rationality emerging from a world without reason I would still not think that the Christian scriptures are evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was someone who we ought to regard as in some way a god-like or divine being thank well Peter it's been a real pleasure to be allowed to come to Melbourne to your home city and to have this utterly fascinating debate that's good to give me a lot of pause for thought in days to come let me turn to what you are saying about Christ who's after all the central evidence of my faith and you said that he was mistaken in his notions about the coming and you quoted a statement the actual quotation is this there will be some of you he said to the disciples standing here who shall not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God coming with power and the each of the texts goes on then to say that a few days later he took Peter James and John up onto a high mountain and was transfigured before them and his face began to shine of the Sun and I believe that that it was the exact fulfillment of what he said that he went up that mountain and they saw what the kingdom of God was like they saw Elijah and Moses by the power of Christ made contemporary with Christ they saw his character transfigured they saw that a low tide in this world he was treated with disrespect in that world above he was the son se UN the source of all its energy radiance and light now the interesting thing is one of the people who was there was the Apostle Peter and he writing as an old man says that the thing that convinced him par excellence of the reality of the eternal Kingdom was what happened on that mountain seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and hearing a voice come from heaven that was a preview of what will happen on a large scale now Christ taught about his coming in two ways in the New Testament and I think Peter you've got confused between the two because Christ taught parables where he expected his followers to live as if he was coming back just like that but then he also said well of course you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars but the end is not yet it's not yet and so on so there was a historical process but nevertheless he expected his followers to live as if he was coming back and it makes perfect sense because psychologically if I think well Christ will return away then then it is of no relevance to me I forgotten the fact that the moment I die I step sideways into eternity so I do not think he was mistaken I think what he was doing was giving a 2-level teaching to explain exactly what was going on but in conclusion tonight what I would like to stress is this Peter I've been very impressed by your interest in practical ethics as I think you probably were the one who pioneer done but you have noticed that Christianity is not primarily a system of ethics ethics comes at the second order it flows out of the Christian message and there's a reason for that because the problem is when people teach me ethics when they set an ethical standard in front of me that of course raises guilt within me and I don't even keep my own standards let alone God's standards I need more than ethical teaching I need forgiveness I need power to live and it seems to me that here Christianity is utterly unique it's not competing with any other religion for the simple reason that Christ offers me something that nobody else offers he offers me pardon and forgiveness and a certainty of life to come now Peter you talk a lot in your books about ethics the one thing that I see missing is this that there's no cult there's no concept of ultimate just and because I believe of the resurrection of Jesus I believe there's going to be a final judgement when justice will be done for everyone as far as I can see and perhaps I misunderstand it but under atheism the terrorist in a corner blows his brains out and in a sense he will never face justice and millions of people by definition who have not got justice in this world will never get it in the world to come because there isn't a world to come so atheism it seems to me whatever ethics can be developed in the end there is no justice but belief in God and in Christ gives that added element which makes everything make sense thank you ladies and gentlemen [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Fixed Point Foundation

Views: 110,964

Rating: 4.80057 out of 5

Keywords: John Lennox, Peter Singer, Debate, God, Faith, Atheism, Science, Ethics, Morality, Apologetics

Id: HoTILnpd3q8

Length: 106min 5sec (6365 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2017