The God Debate: Hitchens vs. D'Souza

good evening and welcome to the Gaad debate my name is daniel odary and this is my good friend and colleague together we have organized the debate that you were about to enjoy we'd like to take a moment however to explain the purpose of this event and to recognize those who made it possible good evening thank you for coming thank you for waiting to finish that paper missing that bookstore basketball game rescheduling that Club meeting and passing up that door movie here in Notre Dame we sometimes make the mistake of compartmentalizing our lives a little too much everything has a set time class during the day homework at night party on Friday recover on Saturday and go to Mass on Sunday often in the pursuit of double majors and extracurriculars we forget to take the time to just talk the value of time spent discussing debating and learning with fellow students cannot be seen in numbers or grades it is our responsibility of students to ensure that intellectual life extends beyond the classroom it is our responsibility to constantly question and explore by breaking down our familiar routines and shaking things up a little and shaking things up a little is exactly what we're going to do here tonight it's not enough to surround ourselves with like-minded people we must shine at we must sharpen I am against iron the goal of this debate is to promote discussion not just tomorrow the next day and not just in concert halls the questions being discussed here tonight should be asked in dorm rooms in dining halls and at 4:00 a.m. and records these questions are vitally important whether we are theist or atheist or somewhere in between the answers to these questions may never be fully resolved but the speaker's here today will atleast shed some light on those questions they'll shake our preconceptions and in settlers just enough for us to search for our own answers we should never stop looking and that ideal the pursuit of truth is what has inspired this event but this event would not have happened at all without help from many different people first and foremost foremost we must thank Dean Joseph Stanfield for steering the project since its inception we promised we wouldn't make him stand up but why not Dean Joseph Stanfield second our thanks go to the Center for a philosophy of religion especially Joyce in our moderator Mike Ray for contributing their time effort and funds to towards the project without these three people this event would remain nothing more than an interesting idea thank you also to the staff of the DeBartolo Center for Performing Arts for hosting us in this incredible concert hall our gratitude also goes out to the Henckels family and their lecture series as well as the Institute for scholarship in the liberal arts directed by Augustin Fuentes for contributing enormous link to this debate for their support we'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Letters the Center for undergraduate scholarly engagement the comm be learning belong the classroom grant father Theodore Hesburgh the Glenn family honors program the department of philosophy the program in Liberal Studies and the Center for the study religion society a long list and a special mention to komak and Nick finally it brings me great pleasure to introduce tonight's moderator professor Mike ray as well as helping set up the debate professor ray runs the Notre Dame Center for philosophy of religion a graduate with honors from UCLA and more importantly a double domer professor ray is an instrumental figure in fostering intellectual discussion on campus there's no better person to moderate a debate on these topics please welcome professor migraine thanks Malcolm and Daniel and thanks to all of you for being here since it was founded in the late 1970s the Center for philosophy of religion has primarily been a think-tank for research and philosophy of religion and specifically Christian philosophy more recently though we've started to look for ways to promote more serious philosophical reflection and dialogue about religion and the Christian faith within the undergraduate community on campus remarkably just as we were beginning to think about how we might do that Daniel o Duffy walked into my office dropping not only the idea for tonight's event entire laps but also over two-thirds of the funding and more than half of the organizational work already completed over the past several months we've launched really in awe as Malcolm and Daniel have worked their magic they've taught us how to put together an amazing show that will sell out to a crowd of students in 90 minutes flat without even a hint of football in the title I'm excited to be here tonight and I'm also excited about the prospect of putting on more events like this one in the years to come the topic to be discussed tonight is the question is religion the problem Hitchens says religion poisons everything is he right even if it doesn't poison everything does that at least poison our minds is religion belief in God just a virus of the mind as Richard Dawkins thinks or is it the case as D'Souza thinks that maybe belief in God is perfectly rational and even a good thing these are the sorts of questions that we're here to talk about tonight on that note then were delighted to welcome our two speakers Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza named one of America's most influential conservative thinkers by the New York Times Dinesh D'Souza has spent decades at the forefront of politics from serving as a policy analyst in the Reagan White House to teaching at Stanford University since the arrival of the so called New Atheists however D'Souza's focus has turned to defending religion having written the New York Times bestselling books what's so great about Christianity and life after death the evidence D'Souza has fast become one of the world's foremost apologists championing Christianity and Catholicism in particular in print on television and in debates around the globe Christopher Hitchens as self-described Marxist and anti theist is one might say the polar opposite of D'Souza he was ranked as one of America's most influential liberals by Forbes magazine and has been hailed by the London observer as one of the most brilliant journalists of our time as with many of us his life and thought have been significantly impacted by the religiously motivated violence and cruelty he is witnessed firsthand and from afar but unlike many of us he has identified religion itself as the problem and has taken on the mission of opposing it he's the author of numerous books including the bestseller God is not great how religion poisons everything and he is now commonly characterized as one of the Four Horsemen of atheism teaming up with the other Horseman Miller Crowley Laden outlined against a blue-gray October sky sorry wrong horsemen teaming up with the other horsemen Sam Harris Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett Christopher Hitchens has traveled the world challenging religion and its defenders wherever they may be found the structure of tonight's debate will be as follows Hitchens will start taking 15 minutes for his opening remarks defending the motion that religion is the problem followed by D'Souza with a 15-minute opposition to the motion each will then get five minutes for a rebuttal after that we'll have about 40 minutes for questions from the audience there are two microphones on the ground floor on either side of the stage if you have a question for either debater tonight please line up in an orderly fashion behind the mics no pushing once I open the floor to questions each will be given a couple of minutes at the end for some closing remarks please remember that flash photography freelance videotaping and active cell phones are prohibited please also do not use laptops the debate is being videotaped it will show up on YouTube and on the center for philosophy of religion website just sit back and enjoy it please also bear in mind that although this debate is on a contentious topic our goal tonight is to have an intellectually serious discussion with that in mind do feel free to applaud the speakers but please refrain from booing interrupting throwing fruit or otherwise disrupting the event finally please remember that Notre Dame is the world's number one institution in the philosophy of religion and also has one of the world's best theology departments any questions that don't get answered tonight you can ask if your local faculty in the weeks to come when you show up in their offices tell them I sent you now don't do that now on with the show I give to you Christopher Hitchens Thank You professor very generous introduction thank you ladies and gentlemen my first duty which is also a pleasure is to thank the University of Notre Dame for inviting me onto its terrain and mr. Duffy in particular in an institution that's also identified I believe with the great history people of Ireland for taking the Revenge of arranging for English whether to greet me now I could I've been given 15 minutes which isn't that much but I could do it in a way and to like this as a proposition when Gertrude Stein was dying some of you will know this story she asked as her last hour approached well what is the answer and when no one around her bed spoke she rephrase and said well in that case what is the question and I'm speaking tonight we are speaking tonight we're met tonight a institution of higher learning and the greatest obligation that you have is to keep an open mind and to realize that in our present state human society we're more more overborne by how little we know and how little we know about more and more or if you like how much more we know but how much less we know as we find out how much more and more there is to know in these circumstances which I believe to be undeniable the only respectable intellectual position is one of doubt skepticism reservation and free and I'd stress free and unfettered inquiry in that lies as it has always lain our only hope so you should beware always of those who say that these questions have already been decided in particular to those who tell you that they've been decided by reservation excuse me by revelation that there are handed down Commandments and precepts that predate in a sense ourselves and that the answers are already available if only we could see them and that the obligation upon ourselves to debate ethical and moral and historical and other questions is thereby dissolved it seems to me that that is the one position is what I call the faith position that has to be discarded first so thank you for your attention and I'm done except that it seems that I have a reputation for demagogy to live up to when I come to a place like this I read the local paper the campus observer in this case and I was sorry to see that Jeannette and I are not considered up to the standards of father Richard McBryan whose exacting standards I I dare say at far reach and I was also sorry to see myself and others represented in other papers and in particular by distinguished cleric in st. Peter's on Good Friday who made a speech through which is occurring as the Pope sat in silence Father Canton and Messer saying that people like myself are part of a program the persecution comparable only to that of the Jews with the church in mind this is the first time they've ever been accused of being part of a program or a persecution but as long as it's going on I'll also add that it's the only program I've ever heard of that's led by small deaf and dumb children whose cries for justice have been ignored and well that is the definition of the program I'll continue to support it because I think it demonstrates very clearly the moral superiority of the secular concept of justice and law over canon law and religious law with its sickly emphasis on self exculpation in the guise of forgiveness and redemption that's not the only reason why religion is a problem it's a problem principally because it is man-made because to an extent it is true as the church used to preacher it had more confidence that we are in some sense originally sinful and guilty if you want to prove that you only have to look at the many religions that people have structured to see that they are indeed the product of an imperfectly evolved primate species about half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee with a prefrontal lobe that's too small an adrenaline gland that's too big and various other evolutionary deformities about which we're finding out evermore a species that is predatory a man is a wolf to man homo homini lupus' as well being said those species that's very fearful of itself and others and of the natural order and above all very very willing despite its protestations of religious modesty to be convinced that the operations of the cosmos and the universe are all operating with us in mind make up your mind whether you want to be modest or not but don't say that you are made out of just or if you're a woman out of a bit of rib or if you're Muslim out of a clot of blood and you're an abject sinner born into guilt but add nonetheless let's cheer up the whole universe is still designed with you in mind this is not modesty or humility it's a man-made force conservation in my judgment and it does great moral damage it walks it begins by warping what we might call our moral sense of proportion I wish that was all that could be said I think that's the most important thing I ought to say why I think it ought to be credited and I want to add that my colleagues Richard Dawkins and Daniel Jenner's have been very generous in this respect this debate would be uninteresting if religion was one-dimensional religion was our first attempt to make sense of our surroundings was our first attempt of cosmology for example to make sense of what goes on in the heavens it was our first attempt at what I care about the most the study of literature and literary criticism it gave us text to deliberate and even to debate about even if some of those texts were held to be the Word of God and beyond review and beyond criticism nonetheless the idea is introduced and it had never been introduced before it's our first attempt at health care in one way if you if you go to the shame and all the witchdoctor when you make the right propitiation as the right sacrifices and you really believe in it you you have a better chance of recovery everybody knows it's a medical fact morale is an ingredient in health and it was our first attempt at that too it was a first very bad attempt at human solidarity because it was tribe based but nonetheless it taught that there were virtues in sticking together and it was our first attempt I would say also this is not an exhaustive list at psychiatric care at dealing with terrible loneliness of the human condition what happens when the individual spirit looks out shivering into the enormous void of the cosmos and contemplates its own extinction and deals with the awful fear of death this was the first attempt to apply any balm to that awful question but as Charles Darwin says of our own evident kinship with lower mammals and lower forms of life we bear as he puts it in the Origin of Species we we bear always the ineffaceable stamp of our lowly origin our repeated the ineffaceable stamp of our lowly origin religion does the same thing it quite clearly shows that it's the first the most primitive the most crude and the most deluded attempt to make sense it is the worst attempt but partly because it was the first so the credit can be divided in that way and the worst thing it did was to offer us certainty to say these are truths that are unalterable they're handed down from on high we only have to learn God's will and how to obey it in order to free ourselves from these dilemmas that's probably the worst advice of all Heinrich Heine says that if you're in a dark wood on a dark night and you don't know where you are never been through this territory before you may be well advised to hire as a guide the local mad blind old man who can feel his way through the forest because he can do something you can't but when the dawn breaks and the light comes you would be silly if you continue to operate with this guide this blind mad old man who was doing his best with the first attempt to give you just two very contemporary examples to have a germ theory of disease relieves you of the idea that plagues are punishments that the church used to preach the plagues come because the Jews have poisoned the wells as the church very often preached or that the Jews even exists and are themselves a plague as the church used to preach when it felt strong enough and also was morally weak enough and had such little evidence you can free yourself from the idea that diseases or punishments or visitations if you study plate tectonics you won't do what the Archbishop of Cady did the other day speaking to his sorrowing people after his predecessor had been buried in the ruins of the Cathedral of port-au-prince along with a quarter of a million other unfortunate patients whose lives were miserable enough as it was and to say with the Cardinal Archbishop of New York standing next to him that God had something to say to Haiti and this is the way he chose to say it if you study if you study plate tectonics and a few other things you will free yourself of this appalling burden from our superstitious fearful primate past and I suggest again to an institution of higher learning that's a responsibility we all have to take on if we reflect some people say the great Stephen Jay Gould who I admired very much when we all learned a great deal about evolutionary biology used to say rather leniently I think that well these are non-overlapping magisteria the material world a scientific world in the faith will I think non-overlapping is too soft I think it's more question really increasingly of it being a matter of incompatibility or perhaps better to say irreconcilability just if you reflect on a few things I'll have time I hope to mention my timer by the way isn't running so I'm under your discipline professor and you'll give me very good when we reflect that the rate of expansion of our universe is increasing it was thought until Hubble that we knew it was expanding but that surely Newton would teach us that the rate would diminish no the rate is increasing the Big Bang is speeding up we can see the the end of it coming increasingly clearly and while we wait for that we can see the galaxy of Andromeda moving nearer towards the collision that's coming with us you can see it now in the night sky this is the object of a design you think what kind of designer in that case to say that the this must have an origin and now we know how it's going to end Why ask why there's something rather than nothing when you can see the nothingness coming only replaces the question faith is of no use in deciding it and that's on the macro level from the macro to the micro 99.8% of all species ever created if you insist on the face of this planet have already become extinct leaving no descendants I might add that of that number three or four branches of our own family Homo sapiens branches of it the cro-magnons the Neanderthals who were living with us until about fifty thousand years ago who had tools who made art who decorated graves who clearly had a religion who must have had a God who must have abandoned them who must have let them go they are no longer with us we don't know what their last cries were like and our own species was down to about ten thousand in Africa before we finally got out of their unforced a condition to move from the macro in other words to the micro our own solar system is only halfway through it's a lot it's bound before it blows up and as Sir Martin royal the great astronomer royal and professor of cosmology at Cambridge and incidentally believing Anglican says by the time there are creatures on the earth who look as the Sun expires they will not be human would not be humans you see this happen if our planet lives that long the creatures that watch it happen will be as far different from us as we are from amoeba and bacteria faced with these amazing overarching Titanic I would say all inspiring facts like the fact that ever since the Big Bang every single second a star the size of ours has blown up while I've been talking once every second a star the size of our Sun has gone out faced with these amazing indisputable facts can you be brought to believe that the main events in human history the crucial ones happened 3,000 to 2,000 years ago in illiterate desert Arabia and Palestine and that it was at that moment only that the heavens decided it was time to intervene and that by those interventions we can ask for salvation can you be brought to believe this I stand before you as someone who quite simply cannot and who refuses furthermore to be told that if I don't believe it I wouldn't have any source for ethics or morality please don't pile the insulting on to the irrational and tell me that if I don't accept these sacrifices in the desert I have no reason to tell right from wrong one minute one minute good then I'll have to prune and you'll be the losers but I'll have a there's a rebuttal coming all right look at the contemporary religious scene a return to religion as well as faith and belief Israeli settlers are stealing other people's land in the hope of bringing on the Messiah and a terrible war on the alternative side as it thinks of itself the Islamic jihadists are preparing a war without end a faith-based war based on the repulsive tactic of suicide murder and all of these people believe that they have a divine warrant a holy book and the direct Word of God on their side we used to worry when I was young what will happen when a maniac gets hold of a nuclear weapon we're about to discover what happens when that happens the Islamic Republic of Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon and by illegal means that flow'd every possible international law and treaty meanwhile in Russia the authoritarian chauvinistic expansionist regime of Vladimir Putin is increasingly decked in clerical garb by the Russian Orthodox Church with its traditional allegiance to sorry Serfdom and the rest of it and Dinesh would have to argue I'll close on this Jeanne she would have to argue that surely that's better then it'd be a mass outbreak of secularism in Russia and Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia and I would call that a reductio ad absurdum and I'll leave you with it and I'll be back thanks and now dinesh d'souza do you want to use this one be great just face it my way yes thank you very much I'm delighted to be here it's wow this is a beautiful auditorium quite an event I understand the tickets were very I almost didn't get in myself I been listening with some interest to Christopher Hitchens listening to him I feel a little bit like Winston Churchill during the Boer War he said it is always exhilarating to be shot at without result and and I say this I say this because even if everything that Christopher Hitchens says is true he has hardly demonstrated religion to be a very serious problem at all he seems to say that religion is built into human nature it's an evolutionary development that man has been searching for explanations since he set foot on the planet religion supplied functional explanations now perhaps we have better ones even if all this were true I'm going to dispute it and show it's not true but even if it were true this would hardly be a damning indictment of religion science itself has developed in the same way it's been an explanation it's gotten better over time but what I want to do is meet Christopher on his own ground he says we should be doubters and I'm going to be a doubter he says we should be skeptics and I endorse that completely in this debate at no time will I make any arguments that appeal to Revelation scripture or authority I'll make arguments based on reason alone and I want to engage the argument on Hitchens's own ground by not by making the easy argument for the utility of religion it's good for us it makes practical sense it's consoling that's all true I'm going to actually make an argument for the truth of religion and the argument I'm going to make well I call it the presuppositional argument but it's an argument that requires a little bit of explanation imagine if you are a detective and you're going on your approach a crime scene and all the evidence points to a suspect but it turns out he couldn't have done it why because the body was dumped in one location and he was in a completely different location and then it hits you as a detective wait a minute perhaps the guy had an accomplice now you don't know that he did but the assumption that he did suddenly make sense of all the other facts that were previously mysterious suddenly you see how the crime was committed to it's very detail if this seems like a little bit of an unusual way to argue I want to emphasize that this is wisely the way in which scientists argue when faced with new phenomena for example scientists looking at galaxies out there have noticed of the galaxies hang together and yet when you measure the amount of matter in them there's not enough gravity to hold the galaxies together they should be flying apart and so scientists presuppose that there is some other form of matter they call it dark matter that must be there exercising a gravitational force so even though we can't see the dark matter it's detectable by no instrument it explains what we do see the presupposition of dark matter clarifies the matter that is in front of us now what I'm going to do is try to adduce some puzzling facts about life and then asked whether the presupposition of God explains those facts explains those facts better than any rival explanation Christopher Hitchens who spent a lot of time telling us about evolution and evolution as a as an effort to explain the presence of life on the planet but of course evolution does not explain the presence of life on the planet Darwin knew that evolution merely explains the transition between one life form and another that's very different from accounting for life itself consider for example the primordial cell if you read Franklin Harold's book the way of the cell this is a biologist at University of Colorado in Boulder he describes the cell as a kind of supercomputer it is of a level of complexity even Richard Dawkins in his work describes the cell as a kind of digital computer now the cell can't have evolved because evolution presupposes the cell evolution requires a cell that already has the built-in capacity to reproduce itself so how did we get a cell the very idea that random molecules in a warm pond through a bolt of lightning assembled a cell would be akin to saying that a bolt of lightning in a warm pond could assemble an automobile or a skyscraper it's preposterous Richard Dawkins knows it's preposterous and therefore when asked how did we get life originally he said well maybe aliens brought it from another planet it's ridiculous but it's in a way the best explanation he could come up with other than intelligent design so there we go we have the mystery of the cell but evolution raises further puzzles because evolution depends upon a universe structured in a certain way evolution depends on a Sun that's eight light minutes away evolution depends upon the constants of nature if I were to pick up a pen and drop it it will fall at a known acceleration to the ground gravity the universe has a whole bunch of these constants hundreds of them scientists have asked what if these constants on which evolution depends what if these constants were changed a little bit what if the speed of light were a little slower or a little faster this question is addressed by Stephen Hawking in his book of Reif history of time he says that if you change these constants of nature at all and in he's talking about the rate of expansion of the universe he says if you change that not 10 percent or 1 percent but one part in a hundred thousand millionth million we would have no universe we would have no life not just Homo sapiens no complex life would have evolved anywhere in other words our very existence here is dependent upon the fine-tuning of a set of constants in nature we're not talking about just on earth the entire universe this argument that is sometimes called the anthropic principle of the fine-tuned universe this has put modern atheism completely on the defensive why should the universe be structured in precisely this way and no other way what is the best explanation is there an atheist explanation I'd like to hear it let's move on in thinking about evolution because evolution cannot explain the depth of human evil what I mean by this is simply this evolution presumes cruelty evolution presumes harshness but it is a harshness tempered by necessity think of a lion it wants to eat the Antelope because it's hungry but have you ever heard of a line that wants to wipe every antelope off the face of the earth No so how do you explain this human evil that far out runs necessity and reaches depths that seem almost unfathomable evolution cannot account for rationality because evolution says we are programmed in the world to survive and reproduce our minds our organs of survival they are not organs of truth so if we believe in rationality we require something outside of evolution to account for that evolution can't even account for morality and this requires a little bit of explanation so think of a couple of moral facts and I'm not talking about heroic deeds of greatness think of simple things getting up to give your seat to an old lady in a bus donating blood there's a famine in Haiti you volunteer your time or you write a check now if we are evolved primates who are programmed to survive and reproduce why would we do these things there's a whole literature on this and basically it comes down to this the advocates of evolution say well evolution is a form of extended selfishness if a mother jumps into a burning car to say for two children that's because she and her children have the same genes so what seems like an altruistic and noble deed is actually a merely a cunning strategy on the part of the mom to make sure her genes make it into the next generation we're not talking about her Levi's we're talking about her genetic inheritance or evolution appeals to what can be called reciprocal advantage you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours a businessman may be nice to a customer not because he thinks he's a great guy but because he wants him to come back into the store again but these two common evolutionary strategies to explain morality don't explain the three examples I gave at all I'm in a bus the old lady hobbles in she's not a relative she isn't grandma so genetic kinship doesn't come into it and neither does reciprocal advantage I don't say well you know I think I'll give her my seat because next week I want horsey no you give up your seat cos you're a nice guy you give up blood because you want to do a good thing you donate your time to help strangers who are genetically unrelated to you and can't reciprocate your favors these are the simple facts of morality in the world and what is the evolutionary explanation for them there is none or if there is one I would like to hear it so in debating these issues very often it's very easy to knock the burden of proof on to the theists and say you explain everything but no in the world we're not in the position where there's only one explanation contending their arrival explanations there is a theists explanation the God explanation and there is a non theist or atheist explanation we have to weigh the two against each other my contention is that the Atheist explanation flounders when confronted with all these facts the complexity of the cell the fine-tuning of the universe the fact of morality the depth of human evil the reality of morality in the world what about the God explanation seems obvious to me it does one heck of a lot better why do we have a cell that shows the structure of complexity because the cell has been intelligently designed perhaps by an intelligent designer why does the universe show complexity and rationality well those are the characteristics of the Creator who made it that way why are there depths of human evil because our lives are a cosmic drama in which good and evil are in constant struggle the Christian story why is there morality in the world why do we all feel even when it works against our advantage a moral law within us well that's because there is a moral lawgiver who gave it to us so when we put it all together the presupposition of God God is invisible I can see that we can't see him but if we posit him all these mysterious facts suddenly the lights come on it provides an explanation now again with any presupposition argument there may be a better alternative explanation and so I put the ball into Christopher Hitchens court to say if you can explain these facts better then I can I will happily as a skeptic concede to your point of view give me a better explanation for these facts I leave you with this thought ultimately we know that belief is good for us if it was a primitive explanation of three thousand years ago why would it be the case that religion hasn't disappeared three thousand years ago why is it the case that were actually seeing religious revivals around the world why is the fact of religious experience it's almost as if you go to a village and 95% of those people in the village say we know this guy named Bill why as we interact with him we relate to him we have experience of him five guys that we've never met bill and three of them say there is no bill the other 95% are making them up now which is more likely is it likely that the 3% are right and the 95% are lying or hallucinating or is it more likely that 95% are right and the other 3% just don't know the guy when you look at the fact of religious experience in the world today to simply write it off as a primitive explanation of why the why ancient man couldn't explain the Thunder seems idiotically unrelated to the fact that religion serves current needs and current wants so religion is not the problem God is not the problem God is in fact the answer to the problem thank I never heard Dinesh doing that without thinking what a wonderful Muslim he would make you try telling a you try telling a hundred people in Saudi Arabia that you don't think the Prophet Mohammed really heard those voices you can be really outvoted and yes Dinesh I have noticed there are religious revivals going on pay a lot of attention to them I don't find them as welcome perhaps as you do and on your detective hypothesis don't you think there's something to be said for considering on falsifiability when constructing a protheses for example Albert Einstein staked his reputation he said if I'm wrong about this then there will not be an eclipse at a certain time of day and month and year off the west coast of Africa and I will look a fool but if I'm right there will be one and people four gathered thinking he can't be that smart and he was professor JBS Haldane used to be asked well what would what would shake your faith in evolution this was when it was much more controversial than it is now and I'm impressed to find that dinesh believes in intelligent design which really does require I would think a leap of faith but there it is halt dein said well show me rabbits burns in the Jurassic lair and I'll give up now can you think of any religious spokesman you've ever heard who would tell you in advance what would disprove their hypothesis of course you can't because it's unfalsifiable and we were all taught weren't we by professor Karl Popper that unfalsifiable 'ti in a theory is a test not a bit strength but of its weakness so you can't beat it the church used to say no God didn't allow evolution Indy instead he hid the bones in the rocks to test our faith I didn't work out too well so now they say our now we know about it it proves how incredibly clever he was all along it's an infinitely elastic airbag and there's no there's no argument that I can bring or anyone else can bring against it and that's what should make you suspicious then a question for dinner sure I know I'm supposed to be answering them as well as asking them but it does intrigue me when I debate with religious people he announces the heaviest words he was going to talk with reference to revelation scripture or scriptural authority now why ask yourselves then not ask you why is that why do I never come up against someone who says I'll tell you why I'm religious because I think that Jesus of Nazareth Nazareth is the way the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except by him and if you'll believe on this you will be given eternal life I'd be impressed if people would sometimes say that why do the religious people so often feel they must say no we don't what that's all sort of metaphorical in what sense are they then religious you'll notice that dinesh talked about the operations of the divine and the Creator only in the observable natural order that's what used to be called the Diaz position was the position held by skeptics like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson by the end of the 18th century was as far as anyone could see before Darwin and before Einstein there appeared to be evidence of design in the universe but there was no evidence of divine intervention in it very important point the deist may say and I would have to say it cannot be disproved that there was a first cause and that it was godly that cannot be disproved it can only be argued there's no evidence for it but the deists having established that position if they have has all their works to the head of them to show that there is a God who cares about us even knows we exist take sides in our little tribal wars cares who we sleep with and in what position cares what we eat and on what day of the week arbitrates matters of this kind that's the conceited that's the endless human wish to believe that we have parents who want to look out for us and and help us not to grow up or get out of the way and so it surprises me that there are no professions of real religious faith ever made on these occasions now I suppose I should then say what my own method in this is since I was challenged on that point take the two figures of Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates I believe Jesus of Nazareth operates on me the fringe of mythology and prehistory I don't think it's absolutely certainly established there was such a person or that he made those pronouncements or that he was the son of God or the son of a virgin or any of these things and I would likewise have to concede that we only know the work of Socrates through secondhand sources in the same way second or third hand quite impressive ones in some cases from Plato's apology but he can't be demonstrated to me the Socrates ever walk the streets of Athens if I couldn't it's coming that's that's fine very well just quickly that if it could be shown to a believing Christian the the grave of Jesus opened and the body of him found and the resurrection disproved if that could be archaeologically done for the sake of argument it would presumably be a disaster for you you'd have to think then we're alone then how we're going to know right from wrong what can we do I maintain with Socrates that on the contrary the moral problems and ethical problems and other dilemmas that we have would be exactly the same as they are what are our duties to each other what how could we build the just city how should we think how can we face the possibility of our loneliness how can we do right and do these questions would remain exactly as they are and as they do and so all that is necessary is to transcend the superstitious transcend the mythical and accept the responsibility take it on ourselves that no one can do this for us and I would hope that in a great university that thought might carry the day thank you somewhat like the mosquito in the nudist colony I'm trying to decide where to begin I I might begin by noting that in my opening statement I offered a kind of a challenge to Christopher Hitchens I mentioned anomalous features of the world as it is and of the evolutionary explanation and offered to him the chance to offer rival theories that might do better than the God explanation I just want to note that he has offered none instead what he has offered is the idea that science is based on verifiability but religion not this I think is in fact not true and I'm he said no one's ever given an example of it and I'm about to give him to the ancient Hebrews assorted uniquely by the way of all religions that God made the universe out of nothing now incidentally the idea that God or God's made the universe is a very old idea but in every other religion god or gods fashioned the universe out of some other stuff God is a kind of carpenter he took the stuff of the universe and he made life and he made man but the Hebrew said no there was nothing and then there was a universe and I want to suggest that modern science has proved this to be 100% cracked if you go to an introductory physics class at Notre Dame you will learn that as a direct consequence of the Big Bang not only did the universe have a beginning not only did all the matter have a beginning but space and time also had a beginning in other words first there was nothing no space no time and then there was a universe with space and time suddenly the Christian concept of eternity of a God being outside of space and time which for centuries were scientifically unintelligible is now not only coherent but riding alongside the most edge discoveries in modern physics and modern astronomy the ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament predicts that the people of Israel after being dispersed would return there would be if you will a reuniting of the State of Israel until the 1940s this was a possibility historically so preposterous but if someone had actually suggested it they would meet with derisive laughter and yet it has in fact happened just as the Bible said it would now these are not scientific theories if you talk to the ancient Hebrews and said how do you know that there was nothing and there was a universe they didn't do any scientific experiments they basically said God told me but I'm saying that if you look at that as a prophecy or as a factual claim about the world we now know 2,000 years later that it is it is in its essence correct the reason that I can't go on like this is because religion addresses different types of questions and scientific questions here are three here we are flung into the world one question we have is what's the purpose of our life or why are we here or where are we going what happens to us after we die here are the scientific answers to those three questions don't have a clue don't have a clue and don't have a clue we are no closer to answering those questions scientifically than we were since the time of the Babylonians so what is wrong in looking to religion to supply explanations in a domain where science is utterly inert inarticulate and in fact mute you can't just say that if you understand the ballistics of plate tectonics you understand purpose it would be as if my dad took me on his on his knee and gave me a spanking and Christopher Hitchens goes don't think he's angry with you if you only understood the ballistics of the Caine you would have a full explanation of what's going on or on the other hand if I put a pot of tea on the kettle and began to boil it Hitchens can't say well if I tell you about the who said what's going on here well the scientific explanation is that water when heated the molecules expand the temperature rises but there's another explanation dinesh wants to have a cup of tea so explanations work at more than one level and finally Christopher asks why argue this way well we know about presenting the case the other way in fact you get it in church or you get it in synagogue or you get it every Sunday the argument from the Bible the argument from Authority I know it's a useless argument to use in a secular setting especially when debating with an atheist if I say I believe in Jesus because the book of Matthew says this or the Gospel of Luke says that he's going to say well who cares what the Gospel of Luke says I don't accept the authority of the Bible to adjudicate the matter so we are at a stage culture in which we have to use rational arguments if we are trying to communicate in secular venues so here we are at a university what could be more appropriate than to address these arguments in the vocabulary of reason christopher wants me to fling the Bible at him so he can then claim the high ground of science and reason what flummox ism is when I use science and reason itself to torpedo his arguments that's when you get him going down in his knees and praying for still more quotations from Scripture thank you very much we now have time for questions we have two microphones down in front if you have a question for either of our speakers please come forward and line up it has been suggested that I start the question period with a question for each of our two speakers that's an opportunity I gladly accept after I'm done asking questions all field questions from the audience please what you're you're free to indicate to whom your question is directed but we'll give both speakers the opportunity to weigh in please limit yourself to one brief question I'm the only one that gets to if your question runs long I will interrupt and ask you to focus it if it continues to run long I will ask you to sit down if it continues to run long you don't want that to happen there will be no follow-up questioning once you've asked your question please step aside from the mic and those are the ground rules so now I'll start with questions as I understand it the basic argument that Christopher Hitchens is giving I haven't seen the text but as I understand it the argument can be summed up roughly like this religion gives explanations science gives better explanations our job is to go with the best explanations so we ought to go in for science all the time and set religion aside as superstition D'Souza wants to address this on Hitchens's turf so I'm going to start by asking a question of D'Souza it looked like your goal was to show that theistic explanations are in fact better than scientific explanations as I saw what you in fact said showed that scientific explanations are often problematic incomplete and gapi but I don't think you showed that theistic explanations are better and just to pick a couple of examples so for example you talk about the fine-tuning argument so here's a case where maybe belief in God explains certain features of the universe better than atheistic theories would but of course one wonders if the world is superintended by a perfectly good god once the Holocaust right whence manner of horrendous evil and suffering and so all of a sudden it looks like the appeal to God to explain features of the universe it's not clear that theism is winning take morality - right on the one hand sure we maybe can understand where moral laws come from if there's a divine lawgiver on the other hand Christianity has a doctrine of original sin Christianity has other things that confound our moral intuitions right so again it's not clear that theism wins well that's a lot to chew on look the standards that I'm appealing to are in a way very intuitive we have a currently a major scientific project to look for life on other planets now truth of it is if we were to get information that on let's say the moon Europa we found hieroglyphics some interesting architectural structures some apparent roving vehicles this would settle the argument right away we would conclude as long as we didn't put him there that there must be some other forms of life that have done that if someone came along and said molecules of sand assembled themselves into all this this would be an explanation but a stupid one compared to the inference to intelligent design so the in fact the scientists say that even if we get radio signals in Morse code they would be adequate to demonstrate the existence of intelligent life elsewhere so my point is let's apply the reasonable standard if we see a fine-tuned universe what's more likely someone fine-tuned it or it fine-tuned itself could the universe have created itself out of nothing is there some alternative explanation for the data at hand No so I'm simply saying let's go with the best explanation by the way my argument is an eternal if twenty years from now you had a scientific argument that was better that said hey we figured it all out I would go with that I would have to drop this argument I'm saying that in the current mode of knowledge and thinking this is a successful explanation you can't change the subject and say well now explain the whole cost that requires a different set of rebuttals I would say the Holocaust is a product of freewill God didn't do the Holocaust Hitler did the Nazis did to try to deflect explain to God for human action voluntarily undertaken is to minimize the human capacity for evil but whether or not that argument works it has nothing to do with the design argument and finally morality very briefly again if evolution could adequately account for morality let's remember that the Atheist premise is that we are evolved creatures in the world and that's it so evolution has to do a lot of work it has to explain the human desire to give blood to strangers if it can't do that then it fails as an adequate explanation for a very important form of human behavior morality that is seen in every culture known to man it requires explanation I have an alternative explanation that in human beings there are two parts there we are evolutionary creatures in the world that explains why we desire sex and we desire food to survive to reproduce but then I have this other thing inside of me what Adam Smith calls the impartial spectator and that's another voice and it's in me but it's not of me in fact it's often stopping me from doing what I want to do it's blocking my self interest where does that come from how does evolution account for that so I'm saying that the god hypothesis casts more light on that subject the hypothesis of a moral lawgiver in fact even the hypothesis of a life to come you may say a final court in which our moral deeds will be adjudicated explains why we act the way we do now otherwise our own behavior is incomprehensible to us that's the strength of the presupposition argument do you want to comment on this or just take my question for you I'll stand up for your question and I'll see if I can do both but I know people are impatient to get to the next segment bring it on my question for you is very quick your argument seems to rest on the idea that religious religion is an explanatory enterprise and that the warrant for believing the doctrines of a particular religion comes from their explanatory value why would you think that well because of religions own right very large claims and because something I didn't have time to go into because not all these religions can be simultaneously true I mean there are enormous numbers of competing religions it's another reason that it's obvious to me that they're man-made it's what you would expect if it was man-made there be lots of religions with incompatible claims and theologies and that this would lead to further quarreling either one of them is completely true as the Roman Church used to say it was the one true church some of its members still do or all of them are false or all of them are true which of course can't be true now to Dinesh and the matter of anomalies and the question of ex nihilo half the time when I debate it's people saying nothing can come from nothing you can't get something from nothing so since there is something someone must have wanted there to be something not I think a very impressive syllogism I can't do it all this evening but it's very easy for anyone to go and see professor Lawrence Krauss deliver his brilliant lecture online call the whole universe from nothing which explains to you how indeed you can get very not large numbers of things from nothing with the proper understanding of quantum theory and then tonight Jeannette says really there was nothing and the Hebrews were so clever that they knew that and therefore they must have been right about God as well this is ridiculous the ancient Hebrews also thought that God made man and women out of nothing or out of dust and clay whereas we have an exact knowledge or increasing the exact knowledge of precisely the genetic materials in common with other creatures from which we were assembled and then not content with that he says Biblical prophecy is true in respect of Palestine this is an extraordinary thing and you were right to mention the whole course if it's true that God wanted the Jews to get back to Palestine then it must have been true that he wanted their exile to be ended the galoot as it's known designers and the Exile the wandering and we know how that wandering was ended by Christian Europe throwing living Jewish babies into furnaces well that must be part of the plan there mustn't it and some rabbis used to claim that by the way they used to claim that the Holocaust was a punishment for exile and then people sergeant desert the synagogue so they shut up about it until the 67 war and then when the Israeli army got the Wailing Wall back they said ah we shouldn't have spoken so quickly actually this was what God always had in mind although the conquest by Jews of the Palestinians where you see how brilliantly that's worked out I don't think it's wise or moral or decent to try and detect the finger of God in human quarrels I think the enterprise is futile and it incidentally shows the absurdity of all arguments from design thank you thank you both for coming tonight I'm wondering if either or both of you can acknowledge or rather I'd like to hear your feelings on the possibility of your thoughts and your theories on religion or or lack of a God being simply a product of your environment or to phrase another way if you were born to a different family in a different place perhaps with a different skin color Christopher would you still be an atheist and dinesh would you would you still be I'm assuming Christian a believer in religion or could the role to be completely reversed and all your theories and your thoughts strictly based on your upbringing well was it to be first well I can that case I can start with a compliment to Dinesh because in one of his books he tells the story of asking his father in India daddy everyone out here seems to be Hindu with quite a few Muslims why are we Christians and his father said because Dinesh the Portuguese Inquisition got to this part of India first which is in fact the full and complete explanation for that actually you can tell Dinesh was very well brought up in this respect he's made the most of it obviously in my case this does not apply because I mean obviously if you asked someone in Buffalo why'd you go to the Roman Catholic Church you'll say because my parents were from posner it's the overwhelmingly probable explanation why'd you go to a Greek Orthodox Church my parents were born in Thessaloniki of course this is true but there are a lot of people who convert God quite a large number of Muslims on their way out of Islam embrace Christianity which is a very risky thing to do it must be something they care a lot about and I think one should take seriously and there is relatively easy for me being born in England and emigrating to America to leave the Church of England behind that believe me is no sweat there are great our greatest religious perk our great Christian poet George Herbert refers to the sweet mediocrity of our native Church what do you get if you cross an Anglican with the Jehovah's Witness someone who comes to your door and bothers you for no particular reason so enough for me well I think we have an environmental explanation for Christopher's skepticism he was raised in a religion that was based on the family values of Henry the eighth enough said now with regard to with regard to the Indian explanation his explanation is true but incomplete and here's the point my grandfather did say that to me and I began to read Indian history and I realized that a handful of Portuguese missionaries in Quizlet oriole or not would have a pretty hard time converting hundreds of thousands of people and Indian historians look at it have a better explanation it's called the caste system see if you were born into the Hindu caste system and you were one of the guys on the lower rungs of the ladder to put it somewhat bluntly you were screwed I didn't matter what merit you had you couldn't rise up and neither could your children so along come these greedy missionaries and maybe they had swords but the truth of it is a lot of Indians were very eager to get out of the caste system they didn't need the swords they rushed into the arms of the missionaries because they promised something that the Hindus couldn't universal brotherhood it wasn't always practiced but even the idea of it the principle of it was hugely appealing and that's why there were mass conversions not only to Christianity but also to Islam which makes a similar promise so this is the historical landscape a final point about this is that we're committing here what could be called a genetic fallacy we we do it with religion we always can see the fallacy if we apply to any other area for example it is very probable that there are more people who believe in Darwin's theory of evolution who come from Oxford England then who come from Oxford Mississippi it's probably equally true that there are more people who believe in Einstein's theory of relativity who come from New York than who come from New Guinea what does this say about whether Einstein's theory is correct or no nothing the origins of your ideas have no bearing on whether they're true or not so wherever Christopher and I got our ideologies or our religious convictions you should weigh our arguments on the merits thank you mr. D'Souza you mentioned that you would you would only speak basically in secular terms in terms of defending your faith without appealing to Revelation or anything of that sort do you feel that there is an advantage for the world population at large for religious people to be required to defend their faith in such a venue or do you feel that we would be better off if you had the luxury of only defending your faith within congregations of the faithful and without counterpart skeptics to demand that sort of intellectual line I have argued that I think the Christians need to learn to be bilingual and by that I mean to speak perhaps two languages a Christian language at home or in church and a more secular language in the public square not because we want to wear two faces but because we want to make our arguments accessible to people who may not share our assumptions and so a lot of times if someone says you know what do you think about gay marriage the Christian opens to the Book of Leviticus not recognizing that the person he is talking you does not recognize the authority of Leviticus to decide the matter so it becomes a futile enterprise two ships in the night the only way to have debate is to meet on some common ground and in that sense I think in a Democratic Society the common ground of reason is a perfectly appropriate language for democratic discourse so what we're doing here is a secular intellectual enterprise if I was speaking as I sometimes do in a megachurch or or the Catholic event I might speak in a little different language but that's because I'm speaking to an audience with different assumptions I'm sorry you know it was for dinner am I Ian from the Michigan a skeptics my question is for dinesh you Chris very kind of addressed this already it's on the issue of spontaneous generation dinesh you use the analogy with the jet being spontaneously put together by a thunderstorm you know in a junkyards of sorts I was wondering how do you defend the argument that it's more likely that a creator did this when even though it's unlikely that say you know something would have randomly created a cell or a molecule over time there's still in the infinite spans of things in the vast amount of time that the universe has existed some miniscule probability that this could have come about versus this blatant argument that it must have been this because it's improbable when there is no really backing for the reverse argument how do you you know how do you counteract this and also if you have anything to add to this Christopher it is true that one can always by re rigging the assumptions create new probabilities so for example there are many physicists who have computed that if you look at all the particles of matter in the entire universe the chance of them randomly assembling to produce a cell is essentially zero however you can increase that probability by adding universes and there are many cosmologists who say well what if there are a thousand universes or an infinity of universes then in the infinity of time and that's problematic statement in itself but with an infinity of universes an infinity of transactions even improbable events to occur the problem with that is you can call it not only a scandalous violation of Occam's razor it's essentially rhetorical gistic promiscuity because what is the evidence that there is even one other universe other than our own empirically none you're essentially making up universes to account for the anomalies of the universe we have so which is more likely it's almost as if the Atheist to try to abolish one invisible God has to fabricate an infinity of invisible universes I mean I'd like to believe that but frankly I don't have that much faith um the person violating the principle of William of Occam here I think though Dinesh is you I mean everyone remembers what Laplace said to Napoleon when he produced his he was the greatest scientist of his day his orrery the solar system as viewed from the outside never been done before in model form and the emperor said well there doesn't seem to be any God in this operators and Laplace said well your majesty it happens to operate perfectly well without that assumption so it does janeshia asked earlier and i should have taken him up on it isn't it the case that two the three questions where are we coming where are we from where are we going and why are we here there are three notes from our side that's not true at all it was incredible that he alleged it to the question of where are we from the map both in the macro and the micro term where did we come from the cosmological the big bang and the micro the unraveling of the human string of DNA and our kinship with other animals and indeed other forms of non animal life we are enormous ly greater - we are enormously greater extend well informed about our origins and what we don't know we don't claim to know very important the my submitting that I don't know exactly how it began is not at all the same as generis admission that he doesn't know either because he feels he has to know because if it's not a matter of faith in it's not a matter of god he can't say he believes in it a little bit it must be a real belief to be genuine and it must have some explanatory value and he doesn't hold it very strongly and it doesn't explain anything which we have better explanations likewise about where we are going we have a very good idea now of the time and place if you like the time anyway when our universe and our Sun and indeed the because will will come to an end Jean ash might say well then if you look at the Bible it proves right all those who said the end of the world is at hand there's biblical authority if I just proves we were right all along yes except that they said that by repenting you could prevent this outcome which you can not okay as to why are we here good question to which there so far no perfect answer and I suggest you keep the argument about that open and sharpen the questions and consider the infinite possible variety of answers and train your mind that way don't say you already know why you're here that someone wants you to be here that your father that you're protected that it's all part of a divine plan you can't know that and you shouldn't say it there I want to get back to the the basics of this debate and professor D'Souza you touched on this a little bit using the freewill argument I want to know how you can reconcile your statement that belief is a good thing when so many lives been lost due to the differing opinions of religious views that is a that is true although historically greatly overstated the Inquisition when I was a student at Dartmouth if you had asked me how many people were killed in the Inquisition I would have said hundreds of thousands maybe millions horrible blot and Western history truth of it is these things and I'll carefully studied Henry came in as a multi-volume study of the Inquisition Spanish Inquisition was the worst and over three hundred and fifty years the number of people killed in the Inquisition was fewer than 2,000 now to 2,000 people 250 years it works out to about five guys a year not normally considered a world historical crime now is that 2002 many yes but my point is that while the atheists are often crying crocodile tears over the crimes of religion crime said by the way often occurred five hundred or thousand years ago what about the vastly greater crimes of atheist regimes committed in our own lifetime in the last century and they are still going on if you take Hitler Stalin and Mao alone the three of them collectively in the space of a few decades killed close to a hundred million people and that's the tip of the iceberg what about Ceausescu Kim jong-il Fidel Castro Pol Pot Pol Pot he's a Junior League atheist you normally you don't even name the guy but his Khmer Rouge regime in Indochina following the Vietnam War kills about two million in about three years two million even bin Laden is in his wildest dreams doesn't even come close so I'm all for looking at the historical record but let's look at it fairly and not blame religion for crimes when there are vastly greater and more recent crimes committed by atheist regimes let's look at all sides of the ledger there's a factual and a theoretical comment to be made on that first I think you're flat-out wrong on the Inquisition not that the numbers game is crucial but the Inquisition in the Americas cause further Bartolome odd luck to las casas to convene a great meeting at the university of salamanca to consider whether the christian world should ever have gone as conquistadors because the the genocidal price paid by the the people of old colombia pre-columbian was so high slavery torture burning no one knows what the numbers are but they're horrifying the second the thirty years war has to be considered a war of religion and we don't know how many people were killed there either but the retarding of civilization was absolutely gigantic as well as the they were pouring harvest of innocent population third at the beginning of the first world war a clash of Empires all of the Imperial leaders were in a sense theocrats the Ottoman Empire was a theocracy by definition kaiser wilhelm ii was the head of the protestant church in Germany the Tsar of Russia was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia the King Emperor of Britain Georgia v was the head of the Church of England as you say rightly founded on the family values of Henry the eighth civilization has not recovered from the rich Harding process of that war i they fact we never will get over will happen in that war and that's a there's a Wars of Religion just to stay with the point of fatten on the secular the allegation that the other killers a secular of the first one you mentioned Adolphe Hitler it has to be said that I can always give you the page reference of Mein Kampf where he says that his desire to slaughter the Jews is because his fealty to the work of the Lord he regards it as a holy course that's in my time maybe he doesn't have the authority to say that but you can't call him secular on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it read Gott mit uns every single one of them got on our side just as the Confederacy had day of ended che as its official motto in the Civil War for slavery the it's been calculated by the Catholic historian Paul Johnson that up to one-third of the SS were confessing Catholics if you change the word fascism if you take it out of the history of the 1930s just remove it pretend it doesn't exist it's called a propaganda word insert instead extreme Christian right-wing you have not taught read out alter a thing about the spread of fascism from Portugal through Spain across to Croatia to Slovakia where the head of the Nazi puppet regime was a priest in heavy orders college he said Vichy Austria you know the story or if you don't you should or anyone here who considers himself the Catholics should know that this is not I'm sorry to say ladies and gentlemen secularism of the others I would say actually say Pol Pot had a very extreme idea of a restoration of the old Buddhist authority known as the Anka but let me not quarrel too much what was wrong with these heroic mass murderers that they all thought that they could bring about an alternate history they all thought that with them history would be consummated history would in fact come to an end they were mess I am the whole problem to begin with is the idea that human beings can be perfected by force or by faith or by conquest over Inquisition that can take it explicitly religious form or just another Messiah form but it reinforces the point I began with take nothing for certain don't believe in any absolutism don't believe in any totalitarianism Jones asked for any supreme leader in the sky or on earth for that way lies madness and torture and murder and always will may I answer briefly just given the nature of the topic let me say very briefly first of all las casas was not protesting the work of the inquisition he was protesting the work of the conquistadors there's a big difference between the Spaniards who came for greed and gold and to take slaves and the church which sent missionaries the missionaries were on the side of the Indians and convened the debate at Salamanca at which the Pope decided that the Indians have souls and that the Spanish conquest should be stopped never in human history by the way has a ruler ordered a conquest stopped for moral reasons and it was the missionaries who made that argument so factually it is not true that the deaths of the Indians most of which by the way were through malaria and other diseases to which they had no immunities but it had nothing to do with the missionaries it was driven by the greed of the conquistadors the thirty years war look at the history of the 30 Years War and you'll see look at the alliances if they broke down neatly in the Catholic versus Protestant you could say perhaps as a religious war but they didn't Catholic France began to ally with the Protestants the moment that the Protestants began to lose right away you see that territorial wars over power and land are now being presented as Wars of Religion was world war one a religious war that would make every war a religious war world war two was a religious war in other words just because Frances Catholic and England is Protestant doesn't make it a religious war if they're fighting over territory Hitler now here we have to be a little careful because in mine coms Hitler has a long section on propaganda in which he says do not be afraid you lie to make your case there is a book edited by the distinguished historian Hugh trevor-roper called Hitler's Table Talk it gives detailed accounts assembled by Martin boring himself of Hitler's views on a wide range of subjects Hitler hated Christianity he was not a religious believer he might have been some sort of a Teutonic pagan he might have believed a weird form of ancient polytheism but no recognizable form of monotheism and he detested Christianity knows I'm doing the Lord's work was tactical he wanted the support of the Bavarian Catholics and the Lutheran Protestants and so he invented what he called the Aryan Christ the Christ who comes back to avenge himself on the Jews the churches didn't go for it so this is a complex history I've written about it myself the bottom line of it is my point isn't that Hitler was an atheist but that the 20th century saw secular regimes which try to get rid of traditional religion and morality and establish a new man and a new utopia the secular paradise and look what it brought us an ocean of blood a mountain of bodies so but for this reason I'm concluding that it is this effort to enforce secular utopia and not religion that is responsible for the mass murders of history you can you can reply quickly if you like and then we'll go up it's great I'm going to let the questions go about eight minutes over time because we started late and then we'll wrap us know I should be quick in that case you know you gracefully withdraw the allegation that national socialism and fascism were secular or atheistic and I'm grateful for your generosity second that people change sides in religious wars for opportunist reasons doesn't particularly surprise me you can spend a lot of time telling a Protestant in Northern Ireland who has a picture of King William on it page it on the side of his house the when King William fought the Battle of the Boyne his Ally was the Pope the Protestant sort of knows this they also Forrest them he doesn't really believe it's true happens to be true of course it's opportunistic why is it opportunistic because religion is man-made as I began by saying it's what you would expect if religion was the creation of aggressive fearful primates it's exactly what you would expect and the same would be true of its non-religious attempts to create paradise because it's asking too much of people and it leads to fanaticism and torture and murder and war so you all you succeed in doing is replacing the question no there's no teleology no there's no eschatology no there's no ultimate history no there's no redemption no there are no Supreme Leader's here or anywhere else thank you thank you both for the thought-provoking ideas you've presented I have questions about the scientific things that you mentioned one was sort of raised earlier you mentioned the cell as this complex thing as if it is theorized that it arose spontaneously and I may be out of date but I remember reading theories at some points about more chemical molecules that began reproducing much before any actual cells and wouldn't that be an explanation of earlier life and the second one has to do with the perfectly tuned universe and whether the logic of saying that life exists that fits us perfectly tuned universe is an indication of that somehow divinely created fits with the idea that there's the universe is tuned in a certain way that the only possibility of life with that tuning is life as it exists now and perhaps it would be presumptuous of us to say that if it were tuned differently there wouldn't be some other way that different forms of life would have arisen let me address those points in sequence with regard to the cell Darwin speculated that it might have come about in a warm pond in the 1950s there were some experiments that generated some amino acids and there was a lot of excitement thinking that there might be a way to recreate in the laboratory the ingredients of life those experiments haven't gone anywhere but more importantly that in the real world wasn't a laboratory even if you could recreate the ingredients in a laboratory using all the laboratory apparatus it doesn't mean it happen that you have to show that it could have happened that way in nature so the point I'm simply saying is based on current knowledge and all arguments have to be based on what we know now we're all open to new ideas in the future there is currently no good explanation and all I'm saying is that in any other sphere of life if I was walking down and look at an alley and I see a head rolling around I conclude that somebody committed suicide or somebody killed someone it's a reasonable inference from the data you could say well that's a rather presumptuous conclusion there might have been natural ways in which the head detached itself from the there could be but what's the most plausible under the circumstances normally when we see intelligent activity what is science but an effort to excavate intelligence out of nature the reason we need Newton and Einstein is because intelligence is hidden in nature equals mc-squared doesn't jump out at you you've got a you got a test' nature and pull it out so if nature is an embodiment and network of intelligent systems isn't the most reasonable explanation that intelligence put it there if we are need intelligence to get it out how to get there in the first place this seems to me to be nothing more than a direct inference from the facts now I want two men say a word about Larry Krauss who was mentioned earlier the physicist the universe coming out of nothing there's a lot of Herbal jugglery that's going into all this imagine if I were to try to show the following money comes out of nothing proof all assets will be counted as plus all liabilities will be counted as minus the pluses and minus cancel out we have money but there's a zero on the balance sheet money comes out of nothing you would say this is a little bit sleight of hand basically what's going on today is what physicists like Krause do is they identify all energy as positive but all gravitational energy is negative they presume that the total amount of positive and negative energy cancels out and therefore the universe came out of nothing it didn't really come out of nothing there's a whole lot of energy there but by defining one kind of energy as plus and another kind of energy is minus presto they cancel out and you've got so what I'm getting at here is I want to show the acrobatics to which modern atheism has to go this by the way is not science Krauss is trying to make an atheist argument in an atheist venue drawing on science but I'm saying look at the lengths to which the guy has to go to try to defy the normal operations of reason to tell us that not only a molecule but an entire universe Wow popped out of absolutely nothing you can believe it if you want to but it sure does take a lot of credulity a try be terse but first earnestly entreat you ladies and gentlemen to watch professor Krauss his lecture for yourself and not accept that product version of it on the nothing question is is it charges on ourselves as it happens it's rather more marvelous than almost anything in any holy book if all the elements from which we in our surroundings are made are from exploded stars from the stars that blow up and die at the rate of one every second and have been doing that since the Big Bang isn't it rather magical to think that we're all made out of Stardust never mind as professor Krauss says never mind the martyrs stars had to die so that we could live this is a very essential reflection to be having and it Dwarfs it dwarfs the religious explanations you didn't noticed initially the gentleman asked at the end couldn't it have turned out another way which I think was the possibly the crux of his question I'd recommend another study to you sorry excuse me professor Stephen Jay Gould who I mentioned flatteringly earlier it's part of my disagreement with him about the non-overlapping magisteria did a marvelous paleontological book called the Burgess Shale this is a half of a mountain that's fallen away in the Canadian Rockies revealing the whole interior core of a great mountain so you can read off as if on a screen the it's more like a bush actually than a tree all the little tendrils of evolution of reptiles birds plants and so on as they sprout up branch offers and many of them stopped nothing happened to them they were quite promising but they went nowhere and it doesn't go up like a tree it goes all over the place like a bush well says professor Gould is one of the most unsettling but in genus thoughts I've ever heard from a paleontologist suppose that we could which in a way we can rewind this as if as if onto a tape get the burgess shale get the the outlines of the rewind rewind it play it again there's absolutely no certainty it would come out the same way that all those branches would go off and diverge and die out or flourish in the way that they do as they did it's completely governed by uncertainty kristan any number of conceivable outcomes up with up with which evolution could have come it's another version of our selfishness our self regard I might say our solipsism that we cannot easily unconvince ourselves that all of this happened so that the Pope could condemn masturbation a brief oh if I can offer a very very brief rebuttal we're now plumbing into the depths here a little bit I do want to point out that Gould thesis rewind the tape of life and it would come out differently which is by now a few decades old is challenged by the world's leading expert in the burgess shale Simon Conway Morris a paleontologist in England and also by Christian de Duve a Nobel laureate in chemistry and their argument is no that essentially Google had it wrong Gould was guessing that every evolutionary pathway would cut very differently but the latest evidence is that that's not so consider the evolution of the eye for a long time in a sense 6,000 year creationists would say how could the eye evolve turns out that the eye has evolved multiple times and it's evolved in similar ways that is telling us that evolution is not this random thicket it tends to converge to solutions that are similar even when faced with different kind of organisms and different kind of problems so I recommend to you not only Conway Morris I'm to do but also a book called rare earth by the paleontologist Brownlee which basically looks at why we haven't found life on other planets rare earth and their conclusion is that the conditions for life to exist are so particular that it's actually reasonable to expect that life exists only here only on this planet it seems almost incredible but when you think about it it actually makes sense consider this our life is completely dependent on the Sun the Sun is aces more than brief oh you're right I'm being carried away so I'll stop here and we'll go to the next question do you have a very brief reply it's so nice that and how much we progress no one now argues against the evolution of the eye now a argument of the evolution the eye is completely conceded and then it's used against Stephen Jay Gould the thing to read there is Richard Richard Dawkins is chapter on the multiple evolutions of the eye including the fish that have four is to be found in climbing Mount improbable to which I also recommend you as for I agree with you that I very overwhelmingly likely to our planet is only one that supports life certainly we know in our own little suburb of the solar system that all the other planets don't support life there either much too hot or much too cold as our large tracts of our planet and we have every reason to know now that we live on a climatic knife edge and in the meantime our Sun is preparing to blow up and become a red dwarf I ask you whose design is that we will take one more question I'm going to ask each of our speakers to let their reply to this question also double as their closing remarks it better be will man tread softly for you tread on our dreams my question is for mr. Dinesh you talked before about well the improbability of a lot of things and given the improbability the necessary meaning of certain things so because it's so because of the improbability of life in some circumstances because of the uniqueness of life here that this implies something how would you respond to the thought that maybe there doesn't have to be any meaning that say as existentialist would say there's no inherent meaning but we can create our own meaning so I guess my question is why must there be some inherent purpose or some trajectory why can't things have just happened I'll be it may be very improbably I think that you misunderstand my argument if it is an inference to meaning I'm not saying we have improbable events we've got to figure out some kind of meaning no I'm making inference to a cause David Hume the great skeptic said there is no event that occurs without a cause now true in the weird world of the quantum we can find exceptions to that rule but quantum effects cancel out when you come to macroscopic objects and whenever you hear someone say consciousness I really don't know what that is but perhaps it's a quantum thing he's basically saying he doesn't know the quantum is invoked to explain things that are unexplained here's my point here's the argument tightened up everything that has a beginning all material objects that have a beginning have a cause the universe is a material object that has a beginning the universe has a cause the cause could be natural or supernatural the cause cannot be natural because Nature can't cause itself unless professor Krauss is right since the cause can't be natural it's more believable that a supernatural being and moreover a supernatural being with a lot of and a lot of knowledge and a lot of concern for us because life is the outcome of this process these are reasonable inferences to a cause I mentioned earlier the three big questions Christopher said science has provided answers and he restated all my three questions so none of them were my original questions so for example when I said where are we going my point was what happens after we die is there life after death we don't know the Atheist doesn't know the believer doesn't know the Atheist who says there isn't just like the believer who says there is is making a leap of faith Christopher avoided the question by changing it to will the universe come to an end will the Sun blow up that wasn't my point my point is what comes what happens to us after we die that is unknown science has no insight on that question and here's a final thought very often we use evolution as a catch-all explanation but we don't subject evolution to the critical scrutiny that we would see subject religion for example Christopher invoked earlier and it's been repeatedly invoked Freud's idea that we invent the afterlife because we want to live forever we were upset with life we have suffering we have depth we imagine another world that's better no suffering no death heaven now the only problem with this first of all is that religions not only pause at heaven they also posit hell and if you're going to make up another world to compensate for the difficulties in this one it's very odd that you would make up hell hell's a lot worse than diabetes or even death because death is just turning off the computer but there's an evolutionary argument against this that has now discredited the flow Freudian explanation and what is that evolution says that we are creatures programmed to survive and reproduce it is very costly for us to invent schemes that are not true and to invest costly resources especially for primitive man to give money to priests to build cathedrals and pyramids to invest in the next life evolution ruthlessly punishes that kind of extravagance and that's why this Freudian theory which was very fashionable 60 years ago has fallen into disrepute among scholars it makes no evolutionary a sense so the bottom line I'm getting at here is in a debate like this I've been very pleased with this debate I think it has been actually at a higher level than a lot of debates on this kind of a topic and even some of our debates we I think we've been able to raise it to another level ultimately I think I want to show that the believers position no less and the atheists is an attempt to grapple with the facts to make sense of the data to illuminate rationally the world that we live in faith is not a substitute for reason faith only kicks in when reason comes to an end when there are explanations and they stop I date my wife for three years I then want to decide if I should propose I put in reason I try to see where it goes but then I say what is life what are going to be like for the next 50 years and there's no way to know I can say well I'm gonna be an agnostic I'm gonna wait for the data to come in well if I do that she'll marry someone else so we'll both be dead the data will never be in at some point rational knowledge has to give way to practical action and faith is the bridge between limited always limited human knowledge and the inevitability and necessity of human action that ultimately is something that knowledge can teach us thank you very much well if I'm not mistaken that was a meaning of life question there wasn't it worth well wherefore whence forth meaning good a good way of winding up if you like I missed something there it went past my bat and slightly put me off my stroke as well just a second where was it yes meaning but before I give that just to things on on dinesh in his last remarks I don't think it can fairly be said in front of an audience like this that the refusal to take a faith-based position that has no evidence in other words a belief that there is an afterlife or a belief that there is a Supreme Being if I say I don't believe it because there's no evidence for it it isn't even casuistry to say that that is on my part a faith-based statement it's instead a refusal of faith and refusal to use it as a method of reasoning so it's not comparing like with like at all second not just completely to defend Sigmund Freud dinesh is right in criticizing Freud's future of an illusion to the extent that when people are subject to wish thinking we might expect them to be purely hedonistic only to want the best to say let's imagine a comforting future while we are about it that's something that will cheer us all up as a matter of fact we're not as nice as all that we don't want everyone going to hell like since we don't want everyone going to heaven as the older English sect used to say we are the pure and chosen few and all the rest are damned there's room enough in hell for you we don't want heaven crowned and the great existentialist jean-paul Sartre said that hell is other people but actually what many what many what many people mean is hell is for other people and they have just as strong a wish thought that other people suffer eternally as they have the thought and the wish for themselves that they should be in paradise you can see it very explicitly when you see other versions of the Paradise myth like the Muslim one or early Christian versions were part of the pleasure of being in heaven was knowing that other people were burning forever and that's what you'd expect of a predatory fearful partly evolved primate species that was making up a religious story about itself it sounds exactly as you would expect it to do all right well believing in none of that thinking it's an evil and futile belief people have the nerve to ask me what if you don't believe in heaven and hell what gives your life meaning do you not detect a slight insult as well as a slight irrationality to that question you mean I'd have much more meaning in my life if I thought that I would die and I'd be given one chance what would have been given while I was alive one chance if I'd made a mistake I'd be condemned eternally that that was the kind of judge I'd be facing and in the meantime he'll be advisable to live my life in propitiation of this supernatural dictator that would lend more meaning to my life than my view counter to Pascal contra Pascal if there's any such judge I'll be able to say at least I never faked belief in you in order to win your approbation sir or ma'am as the case might be and if you are as reported you have detected that those were my thoughts and at least I wasn't a hypocrite Pascal says no at least pretend you believe how it's win-win this is corrupt reasoning it's the it's the reasoning of a huckster and it lends no meaning to life at all still why do I care for example why do I care why do I care about Rwanda why do I care about my Iranian friends fighting theocracy why do I give up my own time to them well I'll tell you why and I hope and I've said I suppose at the risk of embarrassment it gives me great pleasure to do so I like to feel that I'm since we only have one life to live that I can help people make it free as best I can and assist them in the real struggle for liberty which in the in its most essential form is the struggle against the Aquos tea which is the original form the dictatorship and violation of human rights actually takes I enjoyed doing it and I enjoy the sort of people it makes me come in contact with and I like giving blood passively I mean I don't like spilling it but I don't mind having it run off me in a pint because it's strange enough it's a pleasurable sensation and you know that someone else is getting a pint of blood and you aren't losing one because with a strong cup of tea or Bloody Mary you'll get it back right or both get it you'll get it back so it used to appeal to me in my old socialist days it's the perfect model for human solidarity it's in your interest to do it someone else benefits you don't lose and if like me you have a rare blood group you hope that other people do the same thing so there's enough blood when your own turn comes and it's an all-round agreeable experience and it's not like being fearful of judgement it's much more meaningful than that I think it's often believed of people like myself that there's something joyless in our view where is the role in in the Atheist world the unbelieving world for the numinous all the ecstatic or the transcendent well come on those of us who can appreciate poetry and music and love and friendship and solidarity are not to be treated as if we have no imagination of exhilaration allows as if we don't feel things at nightfall when music plays and friends are around as if we don't get great pleasure when we meet we don't meet to repeat incantations we've had Dindin to us since childhood we don't feel so insecure that we must in count and recite and go through routine and ritual we meet to discuss our differences and to discuss the latest challenges to our world coming to a close from from people that Dinesh we try and use the method of the Socratic dialogue even when its conclusions are unwelcome to ourselves and though therefore I can't recommend atheism as morally superior I can say that at least it faces the consequences of its belief with a certain stoicism we might wish for eternal life but we're not going to award to ourselves as a prize for work we haven't yet done so my closing recommendation is why not try the stoical and Socratic life for yourself why not examine more closely the tradition the great tradition that we have from Lucretius and Democritus that goes that goes through Galileo Spinoza Voltaire Einstein Russel and many others a tradition I think much greater than than the fearful and the propitiatory and the ritualistic I've been enormous ly grateful for your kindness and having me here I want to thank you again good night thank you all for coming you

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,202,679

Rating: 4.670886 out of 5

Keywords: Christopher, Hitchens, Dinesh, D'Souza, HD, high, definition, debate, Hitch, atheism, god, theism, christianity, catholic, catholicism, church, jesus, religion, speech, university, of, notre, dame, souza

Id: 9V85OykSDT8

Length: 108min 4sec (6484 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/TheNachoKid]

Dinesh so far out of his league with Hitchens. Kind of not fair, to be honest. This reminds me how much I miss Hitch.