Professor Peter Millican | God does NOT exist

thank you very much the motion for debate tonight is this house believes in god so only those who believe in god should be voting in favor if you're undecided or agnostic you should be joining the convinced atheists in voting no and the onus of proof is on the proposes of the motion not on those of us who are skeptical now peter peter hitchens has suggested that it's a matter of choice i beg to differ most of us wish to form our beliefs on the basis of the evidence for our beliefs to be true i once struggled enormously with this question desperately hoping that i would find good reasons to believe in god sadly in the end i had to give it up not because i wanted to but because that's where the evidence pointed the motion concerns god with a capital g the supposed all-powerful all-knowing morally perfect creator of the universe we're not discussing any of the many thousands of other gods that people have believed in over the centuries but just the one omniperfect deity of the abrahamic religions so if you believe in isis and osiris zeus and aphrodite odin and thor dagdar and bridget shiva and vishnu or any of the host of deities in the innumerable other polytheistic religions then again you should be joining us in voting no belief in god can be understood in at least two ways either as the factual belief that there exists an omnipotent omniscient morally perfect creator or as faith in and commitment to a supposed personal being here we don't need to distinguish these in fact because if there's a morally perfect god then he's presumably worthy of our trust and commitment those of us who lack such commitment do so because we don't believe there's any such being now the setup of the debate isn't the only reason why the onus of proof is on the believers here there's also the fact that the claim they're making is stupendously ambitious that there exists a being of a type which is massively beyond our personal everyday experience infinitely powerful infinitely knowledgeable perfectly good an immaterial mind which can act instantaneously and without needing any causal intermediaries to do so on the entire universe now one obvious point here is that the universe we see gives very little evidence of being governed by a perfectly good being the well-known problem of evil that's very familiar i'll leave leave it aside for here here and turn to a second point the claim of supernatural agency so there's not a shred of solid scientific evidence for such disembodied intelligence all well attested examples of intelligent behavior rely on a complex physical structure a brain or perhaps in the future a computer moreover all well attested examples of perception and mental causation rely on physical intermediaries light rays signals traveling down nerves that sort of thing there's no solid evidence whatever for clairvoyance telepathy or telekinesis none now you might not want to take my word on that but it's surely obvious from everyday experience that the quality of our thinking clearly depends on the physical properties of our brain when we're sick or tired or senile or under the influence of drugs or deprived of oxygen our thought is correspondingly affected and i can remember numerous tutorials of which some of these would have been true not not on my side i hasten to now this is absolutely familiar yet most religions including christianity would have us believe that our thought can exist quite independently of the brain unimpaired even enhanced after the brain and the whole body have been completely destroyed now if this were true that our mental capacities could exist quite independently of the physical brain then one has to wonder what on earth has been going on during evolutionary history the human brain has been growing larger and larger demanding huge quantities of calories and nutrients to be developed and maintained and expanding even to the extent of making childbirth seriously dangerous for human mothers yet if our thought takes place in an immaterial soul which can function perfectly well independently of our physical brain then it's utterly mysterious why this expensive and dangerous evolutionary progression should have taken place at all in short all solid experimental evidence and all plausible scientific theory points to the brain as the basis of thought and shows the brain acting only through causal intermediaries sending signals through the nerves and so forth yet the theistic hypothesis the claim that there's this immaterial god claims not only that our thinking self can continue without our physical brains in the supposed afterlife but also that this supposed immaterial self is made in the image of an infinite immaterial self which not only is independent of matter but somehow capable of acting on matter instantaneously anywhere doing anything it wishes and just by the power of thought this is an extraordinary claim and surely requires extraordinary evidence to make it remotely plausible now i don't think we've heard any such evidence tonight and i don't think any of the arguments put by the proposals of the motion stands up now dan barker has already mentioned some of the problems with appealing to the biblical resurrection stories there are more as well i mean if you believe those stories then uh when jesus was crucified tombs opened bodies of dead uh believers rose from the dead and walked around jerusalem how many people really believed that now one point that john lennox made uh appealing to the resurrection was to say that if the resurrection is true there's a god that doesn't follow at all all it for all that follows at most is that there is some supernatural being capable of performing a physical resurrection on a human being why should that be omnipotent why should that be omniscient why should that be perfectly good it could be a being who's doing it in order to dupe loads of us into having belief in a false religion what about why is there something i'm a bit baffled by this you appear to be arguing against emotion this house knows there to be a god that's not the motion the emotion is has believes in god a belief is actually something that you almost certainly cannot prove that's not the question at issue i'm puzzled by your line of argument because he made the argument that sorry we're so eager to answer this um i take it that the way to answer this motion is not simply to have a show of hands as to how many people believe in god what i'm trying to do is bring it about that by the end of this debate uh many of you who may now believe in god who are unsure do not right why is there something rather than nothing well everything we know about modern physics suggests that at very small and very large scales our intuitive notions of what makes sense are very unreliable guides to truth so if we try to apply everyday common sense principles about everything must have a cause that sort of thing to the beginning of the universe when time gives out and our theories end up positing infinite singularities this sort of thing strikes me as completely unpersuasive likewise when it's argued that if the physical universe had a cause this must be an immaterial mind recall we've got no evidence at all that a mind can exist in the absence of material things let alone the entire universe the idea that a mind might exist in that way is just complete speculation it's surely far more plausible to say that if despite everything i've said the physical universe had some non-physical cause maybe it did it's probably going to be something completely beyond our conception big jumps in science have generally involved having to think of things that we couldn't have thought before think of quantum mechanics think of the bending of space in relativity theory how likely is it that the first thing that comes to the primitive mind namely an agent who did it is going to be the answer to our most difficult scientific questions there's no reason at all to suppose that our faculties will be competent to answer that question maybe they will maybe they won't and i want here as well to answer something that john lennox suggested which is that we have to believe in god in order to believe in the comprehensibility of the universe well i don't think scientists start out believing that they're going to find the evidence for the answers to everything they hope they will they try but you can do that without believing uh that the universe is going to be ultimately comprehensible to you let alone having to have some theory of why it's comprehensible we happen to have found that our animal faculties which have evolved for medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds amazingly have managed to lead us to lots of theories well beyond those boundaries aren't we lucky why i don't know nor do you now the uh the moral argument was mentioned by more than one of the speakers in the proposition so i better say a little bit more about this uh john lennox for example gave quotations attributing justice and democracy to christianity well every religion that there's ever been has had a moral code well there may be odd exceptions but all the major religions have some version of the golden rule many of these moral codes go way back before the bible and justice and democracy well ancient greece had a lot to say about that and that was pre-new testament so every society has codes of behavior of course they do there's no way that humans could survive without them we're a weak species we can't run fast we don't have sharp claws the only way we're going to survive is by cooperation in society and that of course requires morality it's not at all surprising to find that we are universally moral beings we don't need religion to base that and actually if you look at moral codes that are based on religion the religion typically perverts it the first four of the ten commandments are prohibitions on worshiping other gods making graven images taken that taking the name of the god of god in vain and observing the sabbath that's what the god of the bible really cares about you go and read about the sin of jeroboam the son of nebat which structures a huge proportion of the old testament explaining why all these dreadful things happened why because jeroboam had the temerity to build golden calves in bethel and dan for his people to worship instead of going to jerusalem they were told to go to jerusalem by deuteronomy do you know why go and give your offerings in jerusalem and nobody is to come empty-handed very nice way of collecting taxes with regard to religious morality another point that richard dawkins has made frequently one of the tragedies of life is how religious belief can make good people do evil things if you have false beliefs about the universe if you believe that we have immortal souls that are going to either burn in hell for eternity or else bask in eternal bliss then actually you're doing other people a favor if you torture them to make them believe so religious morality so far from you know so far from being the foundational kind of morality no morality does perfectly well without it thank you very much i mean just one other little statistical point a survey of 900 philosophers not long ago 14.6 of them were theists 56.3 of them were moral realists plenty of philosophers think you can be an objectivist about morality without believing in god god does not help ultimate accountability and justice that's something that's been appealed to by two of the speakers on the other side and peter hitchen says why would you want this why would you want a world in which you don't have ultimate accountability and justice well i'd love that to be but i'm sorry there isn't going to be and i don't think it's possible suppose you have a baby that dies in agony only a few months after its birth some from some disease that we can do nothing about tell me can anything that happens in some afterlife remedy that or make it right no it can't and the idea that god is calculating things in such a way that this baby's suffering is weighed on the balance as something that can be compensated is pretty disgusting but even if it's possible it's wishful thinking suppose you go to a restaurant and you you're going to have a four course dinner and you you you have the starter and it's absolutely disgusting what is the rational view to take about what the rest of the courses are going to be like well probably they're going to be disgusting too right you don't say oh well that was really awful but the next course must be fantastic to make up for it well thank you very much um i'm just going to end by saying something very briefly about another argument which was touched on by john lennox the claim of fine tuning which i think is a very intriguing argument it's the only uh significant development i think on the theist side in natural theology probably for a century or two probably since hume wrote actually the idea is that the laws of nature have been carefully uh designed in such a way that complex life can arise were the universe just slightly different were any of these constants of nature just a small percentage in either direction from where they are we could never have come about because for example if gravity had been stronger the universe would have collapsed before galaxies could form if gravity had been weaker that wouldn't have been enough gravity to form the galaxies well it's a tempting kind of argument it's quite an it's certainly very philosophically interesting and there are all sorts of standard objections to it we're judging on a sample size of one we've only got one universe to go on uh so how can we judge what's probable and improbable we might find a deeper explanation the theories we're talking about are very recent uh only about 30 years ago dark matter was corroborated by physicists only 14 years ago dark energy was postulated and certain physicists now think that these together constitute more than 95 percent of the mass of the universe so we're talking about a rapidly changing field with theories that could look hugely different in the future so we mustn't put too much weight on these things but i'm sorry i'm running out of time so um so um there my many theories that physicists are coming out with also postulate many many different universes if there are uncountably many other universes all slightly different it's not at all surprising that we've arisen in the universes that are in a universe that is favorable to life but very quickly some other points about it those who believe in a good god have to face the problem of evil and the fine-tuning argument does nothing to help you there i'm afraid because all sorts of gods not only good ones might like the idea of a a universe with life in it for entertainment or maybe because there's an anti-god who wants us all to be tortured if such a such a vindictive god would want there to be evolution of intelligent creatures because only by that means can he fulfill his evil desires but another point god god is able to make up the rules on the theist hypothesis he doesn't have to work within the constraints of a pre-existing theory he can design the universe however he likes why would a god who can do that who can create life just like that as genesis says he did why would such a god go through 13.7 billion years to create one species capable of relationship with him or the milky way's got 200 billion stars and it's one of 125 billion galaxies but even if there were an earth-like star an inhabit sorry an earth-like planet an inhabitable inhabitable planet for every single star the vast majority of the universe would still be totally inhospitable to life a comparison has been drawn between a volume of six million olympic swimming pools capable of containing one molecule of water and then claiming that that is finely tuned for the storage of water now to come to my final point the typical answer that the theist will give here is god is eternal he's infinite 13.7 billion years that's nothing to him that's absolutely fine for his own reasons god does not want to just create life like that he wants it to evolve naturally within a universe which has been designed to produce it by a natural process but hang on a minute on the theist principles we all have immaterial souls that are completely distinct from our physical bodies so how on earth are you going to square that with a universe that's fine-tuned to produce intelligent beings by evolution within the material universe so overall i strongly recommend you to you to reject the motion thank you happy you

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Keywords: Professor Peter Millican, The God Debate, Oxford Union, Professor, Peter, Millican, God, Debate, Oxford Union Society, Philosophy, Tutor, Proposition, Opposition, For, Against, Atheism, Atheist, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, Belief, Believe, Choice, Religion, Existence, Universe, Question, Answer, Q&A, Oxford University, University, Debates, Debating, Interview, sfn:Peter, sln:Millican, top:Religion, evn:God Debate

Id: rcHRRjsttOc

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2012