University of Cambridge Union Debate "This House Believes Religion Has No Place In The 21st Century"

[Applause] [Music] good evening everyone welcome to the Cambridge Union I know tonight is a debate that many of us have been waiting for it sees a star studded lineup debating one of the biggest issues of today the exact motion being debated tonight is this house believes religion has no place in the 21st century a quick point of clarification We Are Tonight debating specifically organized religion and that's what our speakers will be debating on as ever the debate is a series of alternating speeches first in proposition and then in opposition and so on but this isn't just a debate between the speakers it's very much a student debate too and we do want as many points from the floor as possible tonight to make a point of information which you may do at anytime apart from doing the first and the last minute of a speaker speech those are protected please stand up say point of information or on that point and then it is up to the speakers will they take your point if they don't do so please do respect that it is their right if they do and we hope they will please state your name of college before you start speaking and keep your speeches to a maximum of one minute another thing to remember please please we've got people all around the building tonight listening um via our feeds please wait for a microphone to reach you or no one will hear word you say um I think that's everything for me our first Speaker this evening is Andrew copson Andrew is the chief executive of the British humanist Association an organization representing atheists in the UK Andrew thank you very much I want to start by once again clarifying exactly what it is is we're speaking about this evening organized religion we're not talking about individual men and women on their personal quest for values and meaning and purpose in life uh we can all go on that journey and good luck with it we're talking about organized religion clearly defined groups that have inout memberships categories of membership hierarchies whether clergy or otherwise and an Institutional existence above and beyond their individual members we're ists and humanists on our side of the house this evening but we need not be we could be joined by religious people many Hindus and Buddhists obviously but also individual Believers in the monotheistic religions who have their beliefs but are wary as we are of organized religion and when we say it has no place we don't mean that it should be banned persecuted wiped out and eliminated but that the harm it does outweighs the good that it does and that we would be better off without it I'm going to talk this evening about about some of the harmful moral and social effects of organized religion which outweigh any potential benefits it might claim and are peculiarly harmful in the context of the 21st century World taken together with the pentious intellectual effects of organized religion which Richard will argue this evening and backed up by the empirical studies that demonstrate the truth of what we're arguing which Arif will bring to bear we on this side of the house think that our case for the proposition is indubitable we can all talk about whether or not organized religion has been a Force for good or harm in the past we can rehearse back of the envelope calculations hospices and charitable Endeavors in the balance against Crusades witch burnings the Inquisition 911 avisena weighed against AMA Bin Laden Francis of AI versus Adolf Hitler but what's relevant this evening is the 21st century and its particular challenges we'll say more about those as we go along but it's pretty clear what the context of the 21st century is a world that's more interconnected than ever it was a world that is more democratic than it ever was and a human race facing the greatest existential threats we ever have at the same time as we understand the universe and our place in it more fully than ever before in a world like this where do we best get our ethics from what's the best form of social organization what values and principles and attitudes and habits of mind will equip Us best to face the particular challenges and make the most of the opportunities offered to humanity it is not from organized religions that these will come the first argument that needs debunking is the idea that organized religion is a special spur to moral or social action in our world all things being equal most people do good most of the time and although it's sometimes claimed that organized religion is a Force for good because it is an ESP special MO motivator to social action and you may hear this from the other side of the house uh this evening there's no real evidence to support this in the UK for example the last citizenship survey showed the percentage of religious people volunteering in their Community was the same as the percentage of non-religious people and although religious Charities do good work in the UK and and abroad most Charities two-thirds of them are secular high levels of compassion kindness to neighbors social cohesion are recorded in some of the countries with the lowest levels of religious belonging in the world in Sweden for example in other nor northern European countries and in the least religious states of the United States of America many studies that claim to find that members of organized religions are more charitable more pro-social more civil engaged than their non-religious counterparts are flawed because they use almost invariably irrelevant comparators shared values of altruism and care for others are the common Heritage of all human beings and organized religion adds nothing to plain human compassion and empathy or nothing for the good anyway there is evidence that people involved in one religion or another behave more kindly to members of their own religion but here we hit one of the main problems in this century when we're becoming ever more interdependent we need fellow feeling with all people rather than just with members of Our Own in group and organized religion is certainly not a way to ensure that although they often make claims to Universal fraternity the reality and practice when organized religions are strong is very often the opposite and we can see examples of that all across the world um in our newspapers and on our television news every day so in relation to social morality organized religion is not a particular good the good done in its name is incidental to it it can be secured by other forms of organization just as well if not better and the harm it does of limiting our moral sympathies outweighs any good socially organized religion an element of tribalism to society great barriers and divisions which we do not need in our age this sort of harmfulness is obviously not limited to religions it can also be a feature of many political ideologies we can all think of examples from the recent past of that but organized religions provide a more durable system than most political ideologies and they're different from political ideologies in that they give a reason over and above and beyond human beings to sanctify uh their Commandments they can make you fight your neighbor against your better instincts they can override compassion and empathy to make you harm others in a way that basing your morality solely on human compassion never can and we can go further the very view of ethics that organized religions represent as distinct from a humanist view or a more personalized disorganized religious view is a harmful one for our time out of kilter with needs what is morality morality is something that has its foundation in our biology in the social instincts that we can see that we share with um the animals that are most closely related to us morality is an organized attempt to reinforce those social instincts it's generated from human beings ourselves in our interactions with each other both originally at its source and in an ongoing way it arises from our dealings with each other and it's an artifact of our Humanity organized religions in their accounts of morality conceal this fact they Place Reliance on Commandments issued by authorities external to humanity they prioritize adherance to rules laid down sometimes Millennia ago and in contexts quite different from today's even the more sophisticated theologies don't deny this even if they prioritize a dialogue with texts and a discussion with texts and authorities rather than just a Slave saish adherence to them genuinely believing that the source of value is located outside of humanity and not within it inevitably dehumanizes ethics and the moral scale of the person who believes it can become horribly distorted blasphemy placed in the same league of immorality as murder you need strong organized religion to make you believe something as obscene as this we see a vivid case of this in the harm done in this way um by for example the Roman Catholic Church in relation to birth control or attempts to limit access to abortions internationally by American evangelicals no one from outside an organized religion could possibly deem that sort of activity moral which brings massive human suffering on a number of fronts only an organized religion would engage in the sort of international lobbying against sexual and reproductive Health rights which the holy sea engages in on the international stage lobbying in defiance of all the tests of harm done but in obedience to religious Authority the problems inherent in that view of ethics the ethics promoted by organized religions are particularly harmful in our century when the institutional power can magnify um their tragic effects worldwide on top of all this there is in our world today a growing Democratic Spirit people are less willing to live under totalitarian governments than they were less automatically deferential to Authority than they were you see this in the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe and in the new democracies in other parts of the world we have access to knowledge instantly and we have access to social media that facilitate free exchanges of information human freedom is Advanced by these processes organized religions with their hierarchies and their natural institutional desire to persist are the antithesis of this model we see it all over the world where organized religions often in contrast to more freethinking dissident individual religious Believers line up and prop up oppressive regimes and totalitarian ideologies our chances of securing greater human Freedom are diminished by this tendency what is good in any organized religion is never unique the same good can be secured in some other way what is unique is very seldom good what we need in this world is simple human compassion feeling fellow feeling for all our fellow men and women a commitment to make our moral decisions in the Here and Now based on evidence with the goal of human welfare a determination to organize our Affairs globally in a way that will increase freedom and fulfillment in the one life we know we have that's what we need and that's the positive case Advanced by the proposition tonight drivers of sectarianism multipliers of conflict proponents of fossilized moralities fear and favor sanction driven moral authoritarianism distorting our moral scale producing harm where there need be none uniquely divisive because of their great importance and their extra human reference points organized religions are undoubtedly a force for harm rather than good in our century thank you Andrew one very quick point of order that I should have mentioned earlier please no Photography in the chamber this evening our next speaker as I'm sure everyone here is aware is the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury and the incoming new master of morling college Lord ran [Music] Williams I'm very grateful to the proponent for clarifying an issue which must be in the minds of many of us because with all due respect to the authority and influence of this house a vote for the motion this evening will not change facts on the ground and the fact on the ground is that religion organized or disorganized undoubtedly has a place in the 21st Cent century and the challenge that we face is not so much whether it should be there or not as what our attitude should be to it critical indeed receptive I trust engaged above all I'll explain why I believe engagement with organized religion is a priority for the 21st century and indeed Beyond I have of course to declare something of an interest here in believing that believing it's as a matter of fact true but let's leave that on one side just for the moment why engage with let's not call it organized but communal religion and before going further let me just Define what I mean by that it's all very well to say that we're talking about organized religion as opposed to some mysterious activity that people engage in their privacy and their Solitude the philosopher White heads remark that religion is what a man does with his Solitude what a woman does with her Solitude is still very mysterious of course but that's part of the unhappy Legacy of certain religious attitudes across the centuries I freely admit that however religion has always been a matter of community building a matter of building precisely those relations of compassion fellow feeling and I dare to use the word inclusion which would otherwise be absent from our human societies there is no such thing as a purely solitary religious attitude please h s in College um even if we accept that religion was once necessary for Community Building Etc in the world we live in today we have very we have strong communities that are are linked not only um we're not only linked to the people who live close to us and believe that things we believe but to people around the world through social networking and such like so even if we did need religion for community building in the past what why is it still necessary now when it does all the harm that was previously mentioned thank you if I may I'll come back to that in a while it's a very important point which I'd very much like to take up but at the moment the point I'm trying to underline is that the notion that religious commitment can be purely A Private Matter is one that runs against the grain of religious history because of that innate element in religious commitment religious language that is tradition building and Community Building more of that I promise Hannah later on now why should we take seriously this claim to be an agency for community building it's because the main historic religions of the world have all of them in their different ways a passionate metaphysical commitment to human equality that is to an idea that human beings as such are worthy of respect are endowed with dignity and that proposition whatever may be said by secularists is not so self-evident that we can ignore the question of where it comes from religious community is based on the notion that there is something profoundly in common between myself and my neighbor the tragedy of the history of organized religion which I don't dispute for a moment is that it is so often said solidarity ends at the borders of our commitment the reality of many centuries indeed Millennia of communal religion is that religious communities have constantly stepped beyond the boundaries of th those Comfort zones to create communities to create patterns of mutuality that do not stop with the people you happen to agree with and whether we're talking about the Islamic umah whether we're talking about the Buddhist World whether we're talking about the Christian church that has been a dynamic within religion which has contributed to the fact which some I'm afraid some religious people are often reluctant to recognize that the very concept of human rights has profound religious Roots the universal Declaration of Human Rights would not be the way it is without a certain history of philosophical and Theological debate now it made said and just has been said that that may have been necessary once have we outgrown it I don't think we have because as I said earlier it's not wholly self-evident why we should regard every human subject as endowed with the same kind of dignity every human subject is worthy of the same kind of respect religious people on the whole will say that every individual deserves that radical respect because they're made in God's image because they're the object of God's love however you want to phrase it but that is a non-negotiable element in the life of these communities so I want at least to see us arguing about where Universalist moral commitments come from where they're rooted where their Origins are and I go back here to what was said by the great and not at all theological German philosopher habas some 15 or 20 years ago that we are not so richly endowed with sources for being serious about human dignity in our contemporary culture that we can afford to ignore what religion has to contribute to that discussion but I want to say at the same time how crucial it is that religion should if it is to have a place in the 21st century be the object of exactly the kind of scrutiny exactly the kind of critique that we're talking about tonight religion that is allowed to bury itself in privacy is religion that very frequently goes extremely sour religion left to itself protected from public scrutiny and public debate of this kind is religion that is constantly liable to turn precisely into the caricature of Faith which you've already heard eloquently described this evening and that is why if I say that I thank God for Professor Dawkins you will understand what I do and I don't mean it's part of the case for defending as I would defend the involvement for example of my own church in the statutary educational system of this country that there are Faith schools in this country is not a matter of the state sanctioning the propagation of irrational views without critique it's a matter of engaging religious agents and religious communities please Harry PTO Clair College um surely Faith schools are the exact example of the kind of thing which divides people because only certain people are allowed in faith schools and you said that religion was meant to be sort of all-encompassing but the way I see it religion only sees to divide and everybody who's religious sees their way of viewing things and everybody else and that's it I would recommend you here to look at some of the statistics about admissions policies in church of England schools where there is a regular assumption that a minimum percentage of admissions will be to people who do not necessarily share religious Faith it's not a a condition laid down at the door and those who wish to have their children educated in that particular kind of framework may not share all the essentials of that framework but nonetheless are welcome in that environment I think that's an important part of how many of our church schools do actually work and I can confirm that from quite a bit of personal experience visiting Church schools over the last I suppose 20 years off and on but the point is an interesting one because of course Church schools do illustrate precisely what I was saying earlier the way in which what may appear to be tight-knit and inward-looking communities are constantly as it were driven to cross their own boundaries to create an atmosphere of welcome for those who don't belong and I recall here a statement which I've quoted more than once from an old student of mine who said that the church and I'm speaking of course here of my own commitments the church is one of those places which remains a place where you put things feelings aspirations that don't fit anywhere else and the church has to be hospitable to that variety of feeling that variety of aspiration and inquiry so the point about church schools is one well worth returning to and I dare say that there will be one or two observations on that as time goes on but let me as I move towards a conclusion pick up just one or two specifics you have of course been warned that we on this side of the chamber will tell you how nice religion makes people now I as a former Archbishop I'm in quite a good position to know the truth of that assertion and I would want to say with some firmness that that is not the case that I want to make because it doesn't entirely stand up what I would want to point to is something which is in many parts of the world unique to the Christian and other religious environment and that is what I've touched on already that particular passion for attention to those who are otherwise ignored or otherwise outside and my image here is from a visit to Congo about 18 months ago speaking one evening to a large group of young people who had all of them been abducted to be forced into militias in the congales Civil War at various points in their adolescence about 30 or 40 of these youngsters spoke shared their experience and said one after another without prompting without agenda had the church not been faithful to us in these circumstances and they were people very varied backgrounds not all of them Christian we would not be here recovering our identity as members of a community as people to whom some kind of dignity was accorded so long as that process and that pattern remains true so long as there are religious communities which make a point of ignore of attending to refusing to ignore those who are the edge of their society those who have no obvious claim because of social usefulness or whatever then I believe religion retains a place in the 21st century the 22nd and really for quite a long time after that thank you thank you Lord Williams we're going to take a very short floor around now as well as later on same J as before please wait for microphone to reach you say your name and college before you speak and please please do keep speeches to a maximum of one minute can we first have a point in proposition of the motion please Le Lea said free Queen's College um the Church of England specifically discriminates on the grounds of gender and that doesn't really have a place in the 21st century so how do you defend [Music] that a point in opposition to the motion please hi um Rob Fox Smith peace house um I'd like to just draw an analogy which might seem trivial to some um and obviously to the extent that it's valuable but um it should be considered not further um I'd like to make religion analogous to football quickly um every week millions of people turn out to watch football something we call the beautiful game and there are divisions in football we chant we fight and you know bad things happen but at the same time um that's not why it's beautiful it's beautiful because it gives people are reasoned to come together and feel like they're part of something that's bigger than themselves and now if you look at religion every week millions of people turn out to their place of worship and yeah there are fights we chant at each other but it offers people a place to feel that they're part of something bigger than themselves and you might not agree with it I don't support man united but I can understand why people do I understand that it's more than just a team that plays football so you might not agree with religion but can you not accept that it provides a platform for people to feel like there's something bigger than [Music] themselves and an initial point in exstension of the motion please Ben Jones Hilton College um saying because I I don't I'm not going to argue that religion's got no place in the 21st century however I'd like to make a specific point about religion in 21st century politics um for much of human history there's been no separ strict separation between organized religion um and politics and what I think now is you we must learn we must learn from the fact that around the world some of the most pressing problems facing us contemporarily um are are the fact that the distinction has been collapsed uh between extreme interpretations of religion and politics look at boo Haram look at the Taliban um and in fact in the past maybe that's okay nowadays it's not okay we live in the nuclear age and there are states which are potentially unstable which possess nuclear weapons what I say is in politics specifically you I don't want anything Exempted from rational judgment and it's imperative that we encourage moves towards tolerance and towards more secular ideas um we can absolutely allow for religion but specifically in politics I want a move towards tolerance and if we do that that will be a move towards a safer world thank you we would have another floor round slightly later on in the evening but to get back to our main debate we have a speaker who really does need no introduction this evening a world-renowned um evolutionary biologist and a one of the most famous critics of religion there is Professor Richard Dawkins Mr President thank you I must apologize to begin with for a sudden attack of clergyman's throat which uh I've been trying to cure by sucking cough sweets and I hope my voice doesn't give out before the end of my uh statutary 10 minutes um I'm not going to be talking about moral issues um others have and will uh I'm going to be talking as a scientist passionate about scientific truth um so I I won't say I don't really care whether religion has moral good effects or not I do but what I care about tonight at least is is it true and is it true really matters to a scientist uh and I think it's almost a moral case that truth actually is important my text is taken from the book of Psalms the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork that's the kind of God I could go for the kind of God I would have gone for if I lived before Darwin the kind of God I indeed I did go for uh as a young man when I was as St Paul said when I was a child I spake as a child child I understood as a child How does it go um but when I became a man I put away childish things I could go for a god whose primary business was to create the cosmos to set up the laws of physics to twiddle the knobs that fine-tune the physical constants in such a way as to Foster the eventual emergence of biological evolution such a god a grand God the god of the cosmos the god of the physicist God the hyper mathematician God the master architect that would be a god worth worshiping probably not worth praying to for that sort of cosmic God worthy of proper reverence and respect would have better things to do than bother himself with the trivia of human prayers and human sins and human preoccupations the sort of God I would not feel like worshiping would be one who far from fixing his thoughts on his magnificent creation was instead obsessed with sin sin sin sin sin sin the obsession of the Christian God interested in nothing but the sins including private acts which do nobody else any harm of the members of one particular species of Old World primate on one small planet orbiting one rather small star amid a 100 billion stars somewhere in the outer suburbs of one ordinary Galaxy among a 100 billion galaxies such delusions of grandeur to think that a god with a 100 billion galaxies on his mind would give a toughy damn who you sleep with or or indeed whether you believe in him yet the god of the Christians is supposed to have cared so much about the sins of this one species of oldw world African ape that he sent his own son or himself depending on your theology into Earth down whatever that means to Earth as a blood sacrifice a Divine scapegoat in order to be tortured and killed for the sins of the world or even the sins of one particular man Adam who as we now know never existed a somewhat empty gesture to die for the sins of somebody who never existed but although modern sophisticated theologians of course don't actually believe in Adam they do still seem to pay lip service to the idea more than lip service rather strong service to the idea of original sin we are are suffused with sin we're born in sin we are sinful unless we plead forgiveness that is not a very Humane not a very pleasant not a very moral Doctrine uh and I think that the idea of of the blood sacrifice is perhaps even worse I'm mentioning only Christianity because that's the only religion I know well it's part of my culture I'm a cultural Anglican Grateful by the way to be a cultural Anglican when you look at the competition if I were a cultural Muslim I probably have something to say about that Faith's appalling treatment of women appalling attitude to women as well well as various other moral points but I want to go back to the God that I said I could go for God the physicist God the mathematician God the all-wise cosmologist God The Immortal knob twiddler who knows who knows to the umth decimal place the exact value of every physical constant how it needs to be set in order to bring a lasting Universe into existence which is capable of giving rise to life and eventually perhaps to us the heavens declare the glory of well something the fact of your own existence is perhaps the most astonishing fact you'll ever be asked to confront think about it the laws of physics which just tell you how atoms interact with each other how Fields how forces interact with each other have somehow managed to give rise to trees and Kangaroos and monkeys and bush babies and us a species capable of having a brain big enough to reflect on our own existence and work out where we came from and why that's a pretty glorious thought and we're at the center of it think how a camera salesman might advertise your eyes you have two elegantly designed cameras in your head both with ball and socket mounting so they can be instantly swiveled in any direction and follow track a moving Target each can sharply Focus an image on a 5 megapixel screen with trir chromatic coding for full color vision it has continuous autofocus from Infinity to just a few inches it has an auto stopping Iris diaphragm that can handle many orders of magnitude of Luminosity change it's a dual mounted system with sophisticated computer hardware and software in the brain to bring into register the two images and form aeroscopic images I mean what an astounding fact that is and we now know how it came about we know that it came about by a purely mechanical automatic process there was no design yes Lara Kaplan Emanuel College um science has previously said that they know how things come about in the development of Science and in it's been proven wrong as well and Charles Darwin has even said himself that his theory of evolution isn't complete and I was just wondering what you would have to say about that well it would not be much of a scientific theory if in the 19th century it was complete um of course it wasn't complete and of course those of us in the early 20th century and the late 20th century and indeed the 21st century have done enormous amounts to enlarge and improve Darwin's theory but Darwin would recognize it as his own it's one of of the glories of science that it does of course Advance it does change nobody no no scientist would ever wish to claim that it's absolutely finished and I'll be coming on to that the explanation for the existence of things like eyes uh is almost laughably simple but it had to wait for the 19th century before we got a clue as to it as to how it came about before Darwin it would have taken indeed did take a great philosophical mind to spot that the argument from design the argument that says because it screams design at you therefore there must have been a designer that is a deeply facius argument it doesn't explain anything because the designer himself or herself or itself would have to have been himself a a highly complicated object a highly sophisticated object in order to achieve that level of design now as the interruptor has just pointed out we don't know everything there are gaps theologians have long good theologians at least have long pointed out that uh we should not as theologians put our trust in the god of the gaps that's a theological point and it's a very valid one because gaps shrink as science advances there are still gaps there's a gap in the origin of life there's a gap in the origin of the cosmos these gaps are now steadily being filled and no sophisticated Theologian would put his faith in these gaps the whole lesson from the theological criticism of the god of the gaps argument is that you cannot resort to a designer as an explanation for anything given that the task the designer is asked to do requires his own designer at least as complicated and sophisticated the lesson from Darwin is that because the really difficult problem of of explanation has already been solved by Darwin the remaining gaps that need to be solved are relatively easy physics May await its Darwin but it will come there are many reasons why religion has no place I'm concluding now there are many reasons why religion has no place in the 21st century and my colleagues will deal with them or have dealt with them to a scientist however what's really objectionable about religion is that it Fosters the idea that we should be satisfied with a non-explanation to a difficult question instead of working hard it's hard work working hard to provide a real explanation religious explanations are Supernatural but in no possible sense it's a supernatural explanation for anything an explanation it's a copout a betrayal of the intellect a betrayal of all that's best about what makes us human a phony substitute for an explanation which seems to answer the question until you examine it and realize that it does no such thing religion in science is not just redundant and irrelevant it's an active and pernicious charlatan that point this is my I've got to conclude now I'm already over time it pedals false explanations or at least pseudo explanations where real explanations could have been offered and will be offered SE of explanations that get in the way of the Enterprise of of discovering real explanations as the centuries go by religion has less and less room to exist and perform its obscurantist interference with the search for truth in the 21st century it's high time finally to send it packing thank you Professor continuing the case for the opposition is a renowned writer and professor of ISL Islamic stud studies at Oxford he's president of the European Muslim Network and has been known as the Muslim Martin Luther Professor T Ramadan thank you I was surprised by the fact that uh what I got as a question is that religion has no place in the 21st century in all the arguments that I got right now we're not talking about the question itself and only concluding on the fact that because we have this idea of Truth the the the way you think we are thinking about truth from a religious Viewpoint or from within the organized religion we should hope that religions will disappear in the 21st century and have no place so the argument itself for someone who is a scientist is not very scientific and much more uh driven by patience as if there is something which is behind all the scientific arguments is more passionate than rooted in arguments and it's exactly the same with what I heard in the first speech for Muslims or for Christians or for organized religions the fact that we think that morality is has a transcendental Source doesn't mean that we dehumanize morality this is not an argument this is dangerous a dangerous conclusion not a scientific one so let me come to something which I think it's so important for us today when it comes to religions in in fact religions as Faith as knowledge itself or as rituals are for organized religions means means and the means you can use them in a way or in another you can use them for the good and you can use them for the bad it's not because we have people from within an organized religions that sometimes are instrumentalizing religion that we should forget everything which is coming from within the organized religion and understand what was said the sources of morality the way we deal with human dignity the way we deal with the the way we have to deal with our own self and it's very important you cannot dismiss the point that within the organized religion there is a very deep understanding of the concept of human being what it means to be a human being it's not only coming from Socrates it's also coming from a very old uh religious tradition and a very deep understanding of what is shared uh in a universal way way which has to do with the way we deal with our heart our body and our mind and the point is that what we get from the organized religion is also something which is very important at the end of the day what is good is what you are going to do with yourself and what is bad is the way you are going to do with yourself it's a personal responsibility and in the 21st century it's something that we have to listen to and at least to respect and the point for me is this one if we look at the challenge as a head the 21st century we have lots of knowledge technology and and uh sciences and at the end of the day we have lots of means but there are critical questions about the ends what do we want to achieve and this is the time where we need philosophy and religions and humanists all together to come and to deal with this we need a pluralistic discussion on this not humanist telling us we don't need you if you are truly humanist you no please I I'm sorry I have lots of things to say so uh and I heard because I heard so many things so the only right humanistic position you would be for you to say I disagree with you from the organized religions but we need you to have these pluralistic discussions on the ends and the finalities to use philosophical discussion not to tell us in the name of our humanism disappear is this humanism this is dogmatic rationality it's as dogmatic as a new religion as the old religion yes it is so my point here is to say something which is essential which was said by Dr William it's so important yes the Contemporary World our 21st century needs religions to be involved in this discussion because at the end of the day what is is coming from the organized religions of course we will find people and we can keep on having anecdotes about 77 and uh what Inquisition we always you will always find in history something to prove your point but at the end of the day you have to look at the other side of what religions organized religions provide our Humanity with and this is something which is also important in our Century what we need is a discussion a deep discussion about the ants in order to come to uh talk about the human dignity but I would say that religions need what is happening now in the 21st century and we have to engage with religions and all what you are saying is not about sitting down and saying this religion and to essentialize religions by saying they are bad with women they are bad with this they did this that's not a discussion that's ridiculous it's not going to be the the answer to our discussion today the answer answer to our discussion is let us engage with religions and let us engage with dogmatic rationality and scientism in a way which is telling us what are the ends what do we want to achieve what I want from within an organized religion is you I need you by the way I need you because you are helping me to deal with my own fellow brothers and sisters in the religious communities to say I don't want people to instrumentalize my relig I don't want formalism I don't want dogmatism I want you to challenge me in order for me to come back to my Religious brothers and sisters in humanity as well to be able to come with a better understanding and you know what you need me you need us in order not to come to this arrogant attitude to look at people because implicitly in all you are saying there is a superiority complex the way you deal with religions is we are backward and we need each other because we don't we are not facing the world the way it is and I think that this is problematic because what I see in this it's dogmatism do I still I don't know where I am in my time so I would say that in this discussion today uh when we need each other and we have to engage with religion it's also to come in this discussion in the 21st century to question the very essence of religion and okay you have you have 15 seconds if you say we need to engage in an open discussion with both religious uh religious people and atheists then what would you say to the prolific record of all religions uh in the past and today evangelizing try convert people to their own beliefs and also uh educating children and not just their own children but also others in religious schools schools uh trying to convince them and teach them that that is the one true way to believe I think that you are you are exactly explaining my point this is what I said that you will always find people within religious organized religions trying to convince and trying to convert people but I would tell you that it's exactly the same with some ites they want to convert people to ites that is the thing and I I I think that at the end of the day what is important what I am expecting from you as I expecting from any human being is to be the witness to his philosophy in his daily life so if you are an atheist and you have principles show me your principles if you are religious show me your principles don't try to convert me show me who you are instead of trying to convince me that I'm wrong and that my truth should disappear from history anyone who wants someone to disappear from history sry religious thoughts or philosophical thought is dangerous because this is dogmatism this is dangerous behind it this is a new way of dealing with power my conclusion my my conclusion is to say if I come to what is needed to our worlds today to to our world today in the Contemporary world is very much to to to look at what religions can provide us with and when for example and you know in organized religion it's not only something which has to do with Community it has to do with community and it has to do with individuals so when it comes to something that I learned from within a tradition I'm dealing yes I'm dealing with scientific truth philosophical truth and I'm acknowledging the fact that we don't have one final answer and even uh Richard dokins cannot prove that God doesn't exist so when he doesn't prove this let us come to what is our day uh way of life in in religious tradition we find a way of educating yourself know who you are and not only what you have something which is very needed in our consumerist societies that we need something which is questioning the very end and purpose of our human life and I think that if we dis we don't take this as something which is the religious contribution to a philosophical and needed discussion on ethics for example I'm not I don't care about the source of morality I want to talk about morality meaning about ethics about the fact that we need ethics in politics ethics in economy and why do you want me to disappear from the discussion because I'm coming from an organized religion don't do that just say welcome to the discussion so my conclusion is if you are faithful to your humanistic position you should be against the motion thank you thank you very much Professor Ramadan this is the point in the debate where you get to have your say we'll take points in order of proposition opposition and then exstension uh same as before with the microphones and one minute please does anyone firstly have a point they'd like to make all lot in proposition of the motion back corner uh Joe Hazel Penbrook College um so we heard a lot about the problems with dogma and why that would be really good in terms of religious discourse but I think I speak for a lot of the house when I say I'm really happy being dogmatic about things like women's rights and abortion and being fair to homosexual and so for and I actually think on these grounds we're willing to stand for so many things that religion at least to me organized religion seems to be so dead set against that actually were willing to be dogmatic and we're willing to exclude them from a discourse that we actually think perhaps might be poisoned by them thank you a point in opposition please thanks um Matt Hitchens Emanual College um I don't believe in God but I do really like Christmas carols um and that's that's not to trivialize religious practices but that's only to say that I do think religion has a role in the 21st century Society if only as sort of an outgoing example and so we can take the ritualistic communal um positive aspects of a religious Society forward into a secular future could I have a point an exstension uh Morgan L the Christ College um I think in exstension I feel the problem here is that I have a problem with organized religion in its current form not with organized religion as a concept I think the problem at the moment is that organized religion seeks too much to give answers it's not a personal choice I mean how many people can honestly say they chose their religion that it wasn't put on them at Birth or at school or so on apart from the occasional heretic or convert I mean it should be a personal choice the answers aren't easy but you know let people have questions and let the answers be difficult but let it be a choice organized religion could provide that if it didn't push itself on people thank you [Applause] we'll go back to proposition um you said oh it's briy down in college uh you said that when you come to a debate about morality um and you don't want me to question your source as God well I hesitate in using an an obvious example but that's quite hard to do when saying you're using a book which also legitimizes uh well which also says that it's wrong to eat shellfish say we're talking about gay sex for example well I find it quite hard to use that as a as a legitimate Source thank you point in opposition please over there uh Katherine Bond Mari Edwards um I have a serious problem with the idea of treating the Bible as scientific fact rather than an example of humans exploring their own faith and showing their own faith they have a serious problem with people continuing to identify religion with Dogma rather as the gentleman over there mentioned as a personal Journey of Faith um and I feel that the idea of treating the Bible as a spiritual fact misses entirely the point of it as it spiritual and personal object can I take another point in abstention just um I'm Hannah from SE um while I have a lot of um sympathy with Professor ramadan's um point about not completely excluding someone from from the debate because you you think they're wrong I mean um I'm not religious myself but I I'm slightly afraid of completely pushing someone out because um I disagree with them because I can see that that might be be seen as dogmatic in a way that people might have accused certain members of The Proposition of being but equally I wonder if he knows I imagine he does actually because he's I'm sure had conversations with people of other religions what it feels like to talk to someone who believes not only that you're wrong and that that's just of consequence to as you having having a truth that they don't believe in but that because you're wrong you are innately damned and sinful and I know a lot of religion religious people nowadays don't want to to sound as Extreme as that but I think we have to accept that that's a position that a lot of religious people in Italy come from because um one of the key things about an awful lot of religions not all but an awful lot is saying this is my God and if you don't believe in my God or at least do some of the things prescribed by my God or a God then you're you will suffer in some way and that's a very hard thing to engage with when people are saying not just I disagree with you but I disagree with you and I think that for your disagreement with me you'll be punished and I might be very nice to you now and very polite to you now but ultimately I know that I'm going to heaven and you're going to suffer in Hell or equivalent and that's a very hard thing to engage with and I wonder why we should be asked to engage with something that says that about such a large group of other people what was that ass what was that is that abens we'll take another point in proposition of the motion [Music] please um name of college please Mike V Church of College I have to say I find it incredible that someone could go to the Congo and conclude that religion is a fantastic thing thing because of what they've seen in the Congo where my experience of that part of the world is that first of all religion was forced upon people there by Colonial slave moners and until recently religious people I mean priests have been strongly implicated in genocide it's it has it takes an extraordinary leap you know leap of mental gymnastics to go to Congo and conclude that religion is a brilliant thing which helps people would you like to respond to that Lord Williams would you like to respond yeah pleas do can we just get a microphone to sorry thank you um I understand that the background of all kinds of conflicts all kinds of suffering in the continent of Africa and elsewhere is shaped by religion as it's shaped by many other factors what I'm reporting though is not history but what is actually happening at the moment what is actually happening to make a difference to the lives of people who would otherwise be on the Refuge heap of society these are people who and Congo is not an example where genocide has been in any sense promoted or colluded with by religious groups what what has been happening in Rwanda and Burundi which I take it are the examples you're thinking of in terms of religious involvement is not religion being responsible for genocidal activity but genocide Sweeping in its Trail tribal-based genocide Sweeping in its Trail religious people along with others it happens because I have a less uh Sunny view of human nature than Professor Dawkins does it happens to religious people as it happens to others that's why I say what I see as distinctive about the religious contribution is not that religious people are drawn in to appalling cruel bigoted exclusive Behavior but that something else breaks through again and again and makes that kind of difference Professor Ramadan a very a very quick point just in response to that I believe yes quickly uh two points about what you just said about some of the religious people that can you can meet and talk to and uh they can let you think that because you don't believe in what they believe you are going to be punished or you are wrong I think that once again you can find some mindsets that are like this can you just reduce all the religious people to such an attitude I wouldn't say so so I think that in order to be and to go beyond this we need to engage and we need to have and to we need to get the very essence of religious uh uh traditions and to understand that it helps the people to be better in many ways so just to take one or two anecdotes to prove that all the religions are like this I think it's wrong and I always think that we have to engage with whoever you disagree with with and my last point is about being dogmatic we don't agree on the definition of dogmatic what you are saying is that you are very clear on the fact that you are not going to compromise on some rights for women and for human beings and I will be with you dogmatic is not this dogmatic is to be so sure that you are right that you are not able to listen to what is said that you are so sure that you want to impose your position and you are not going to change anyone in such a way dogmatic minds are dangerous clear Minds open minds are the future can I have another point in opposition to the motion please thank you razah khabib Emanuel College I'd like to take this opportunity to respond to Professor Dawkins who opened his speech tonight speaking on behalf of scientists and Professor Dawkins spoke and made a speech in which he claimed that religion does not offer answers and that scientists care about truth he said that truth in science is almost a moral question and he almost centered his entire debate around this and I'd like to speak as as a student of science as a physicist um and say that I actually I'm a scientist but I don't I don't feel the same way he does about truth because speaking as a physicist who has to deal with the fact that we say 75% of the universe is invisible and we don't know what it is um speaking as a physicist who says that actually we treat subatomic particles that are both waves and particles at the same time we don't have truth anymore physicists sacrific truth a long time ago in fact you speak to a lot of physicist they say they're anti-realists they don't believe science is true that's a standard position amongst a lot of scientists and in fact it's non-sec to the debate because at the end of the day whether we believe science is true or God is true is irrelevant to whether or not we think religion has a place in the 21st century Professor Dawkins there are of course many very mysterious things is this working uh many very mysterious things in science and physics above all physics has a long way to go as you of course know better than I physics has a long way to go and there will be Mysteries to be solved the physics of maybe 500 years time time will be perhaps more mysterious than we can possibly imagine but that is it's a huge fallacy to say that because there's something we don't yet understand therefore religion is going to be the one that fills it the very idea that because there are mysterious things we don't understand in science somehow means that we're going to find wisdom in a collection of Bronze Age books is palpably absurd Mr copson I'm not a scientist or or a technologist of any sort I want to respond very quickly to the uh accusation that's come from from the other side specifically from TK um about the idea that what's been put up on our side of the debate has been the proposition that we should dogmatically exclude or eliminate or olude um or destroy um both either the religious perspective um in the 21st century or religious people I said very specifically at the top of the remarks that I made that we were not taking the claim that organized religion should have no place in the 21st century um to be one um to to be an argument on us well listen to me for a moment and you'll know what I'm saying and then you can and then you can and if you want if you want to respond to it afterwards you'll at least be responding to something that I've said rather than something that you've said that I've said dogmatic which is a good definition of Dogma actually um in in in some people's minds um I don't want to take up too much of your extra time um so just to say that um what I was talking about was not um proposing the motion with a view to eliminating such people and excluding such people of course in reality if we want the 21st century to be a success we're going to have to reach out to each other across those divides that was a major part of the argument that I made what I'm saying that in the hypothetical World um where we could um be without organized religion the 21st century it would be a better world and I want to you know I still stand by that um but that's what I'm arguing not that it should therefore um be eliminated but that we would be um better off without it if it didn't exist and that's not to say um that religious people don't do good nor that they might find uh for them the sources of their goodness in their religions it's to say that they would do just as much good and be just as good if they were confucians or humanists um or took their morality from other uh nonorganized religious sources thanks very much can we have one last point and exstension please over there hello is it working yes Gideon Farrell King's College um I just wanted to pick up on some of the points made by Lord Williams um about the kind of inclusiveness of religion so I think there have been quite a lot of disingenuous points made on both sides um and we're kind of dodging the argument a little bit which is more about whether or not it has a place not whether we should get rid of it as was just said but anyway um that I'm going to take an example from my own tradition which is Judaism which has been Borrowed by most of the other religions here um and say that actually it's not particularly inclusive if you look in the Old Testament um a lot of it's to do with God saying kill them and kill them because they didn't believe in me um which is basically not particularly inclusive and doesn't really talk about everyone being equal it talks about those people who believe being equal and you know I'm going to be be resurrected on armageddon's plane whatever it is uh and you won't so I wouldn't say that's very inclusive I'd say it's quite the opposite it's quite divisive and um thanks thank you for all the points from the Flor we want to get back again to our main debate and closing the case for the proposition is Dr Arif Ahmed Dr Ahmed is a senior Lector in philosophy here at Cambridge and an Ardent critic of religion Dr r good evening thanks um excuse me a second let me just start by talking about uh dogmatism I took dogmatism to mean believing things in spite of the evidence and not being sensitive to the evidence and of course the view that professor Hawkins and Andrew and most secular humanists propose is on that definition the very opposite of dogmatism of course if there were evidence for the beliefs that ran Williams has or the belief that Tark Ramadan has in God or theology or Resurrection or any of these other things we might start to believe it but the fact is that despite more than 2,000 years of trying nobody has produced a shred of evidence for any of those things of course yep what would you evid maybe one of two things one of two things yes so the question was what would I take as evidence maybe they mean something else one of two things exactly the same thing as we take evidence to be everywhere else namely either a valid argument that is an argument with true premises from which the conclusions follow or something like an empirical empirical argument the sort of evidence we have for instance that drugs work or planes flies or all the other things to which we trust the most important decisions in our life on the point of evidence of course the other thing I would say is that no not no thanks uh neither of the speakers on the other side as far as I could hear produced a single piece of evidence for any of their assertions there was quite a lot of philosophical talk and gesturing and rhetoric of one sort or another and patterns of mutuality and various other things but nobody as far as I could tell cited any specific case except the one example of the Congo which which was rightly disputed um or any actual evidence at all for any of the things that they said I'll come back to some of these points later um let me now say something about the nature of the question that we're discussing uh the issue is whether organized religion has a place in the 21st century uh one point that I think needs emphasizing that hasn't so far been been emphasized is that by religion we don't just mean Christianity and we certainly don't just mean the Church of England uh we mean uh Mormonism and baptism 7th Day adventism Pentecostalism and all of the other Christian sects also Hinduism Voodoo Scientology and Islam these are all parts of religion and in fact fact it's fair to concentrate more on those than upon the Church of England because some of those are the fastest growing religions Islam is the fastest growing major religion in the west the Evangelical churches the fastest growing uh Christian religions in the United States and I believe in fact in the world the Evangelical and P Pentecostal uh churches whereas on the other hand the Church of England has declined by about 80% since 1970 or rather the number of children going I think to church has declined by 80% % and the actual number of of anglicans has declined by 50% in that period so of course well do you want to point of [Applause] information the rate of decline of um Sunday attendance in the Church of England is not 80% I can't give you the figure because I didn't come prepared for this the the rate of growth of anglicans worldwide has been I think in the order of about 30% in the period you mentioned I don't particularly want to get into arguments about these details but if you're making some uh point on the back of this I would just like the evidence to be in [Applause] focus yes that's correct the the evidence concerns rate of church church attendance and that was Data taken from 2009 but the point that I'm making of course stands which is that we should be concentrating on the religions that are fastest growing and in Europe that is Islam and in America and the rest of the world amongst Christianity that is the Evangelical churches um a claim that beat off stiff competition to be the silliest thing that was said on the other side was Professor ramadan's claimed that that somehow we're essentializing religion or essentializing Islam by saying oh you must believe this and you must believe that and if we cite 77 we're saying it's of the essence of Islam to go around blowing up buses or it's of the essence of Islam to do this that or the other it's no issue about essentializing we just need to look at the facts and the evidence the question is what are the effects of these things so when we're asking about the question whether organized religion and Islam is an organized religion it doesn't have the same organizational structure as many other religions but it does have de facto patterns of authority there are iers in Teran who can issue fats to murder people people and so on uh so it is it is an organized religion what we should be looking at is not what's essential to a religion as if that claim even makes any sense what are the actual facts about the effects that organization organized religion really does have in the world we live in today so let me turn now to those the first point was just one was one that Andrew's already touched on so I should be brief about it um and that's just a question to do with well issues about social capital and social cohesion and V vague terms like that when we ask about what are the actual effects we find that there are plenty of studies the most recent hav been in 2012 showing that as Andrew said um religious uh non-religious people uh show more kindness more uh more generosity in randoms acts of kindness compassion has more more of an effect towards altruism in those people than in religious people in addition there's evidence stating from the last five or six years showing a strong correlation uh between um higher rates of belief in religion and worship of C of Creator on the one hand and higher rates of uh homicide Juvenile and early adult mortality STD infection rates teen pregnancy and abortion in all of the uh all of the prosperous democracies on that point but sir correlation doesn't imply causation if you want to Esta if you want to establish that religion has a causal role in this you need to consider the inherent structure of religion and what it is inherent to religion that it means that is not simply an accessory to these harms but rather a causative Factor nobody denies that correlation doesn't entail causation everyone who knows anything about it knows that correlation is evidence for causation which is what I was claiming let me move on [Applause] now let me move on uh now to to two other issues there were three three points that I wanted to say about the effects of organized religion one of them was that to do with ethics the second one is to do with what you might call the price of social cohesion if you take that term uh seriously enough and this is of course the persecution of people who want to live their own lives in ways that that religions for one reason or another consider inappropriate the example I'm going to discuss I could have talked about many things the example I'm going to discuss is gay people uh so for instance I mean an anecdote just one anecdote amongst many that I could give is the fact that in 2009 when the death penalty for homosexuality was introduced in Uganda Anda I think reintroduced or introduced in Uganda people on both sides of the debate at the time agreed that the main impetus for bringing that back and it did come back um was a US evangelist pastor called Scott Lively um from a group called defend the family International um who ran a seminar there proposing exactly that um his aim being as he said to expose the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda now obviously that's just one anecdote I mean the facts are that in many Islamic countries there is the death penalty for homosexuality in Saudi Arabia for instance and Iran uh in the UK 39% of Christians don't agree that homosexuals should have the same legal rights as heterosexuals this is from a pole in 2009 uh and from another poll in the same year 0% of Muslims think that it's morally think that homosexuality is morally acceptable I could go on but um you get the point and these are actual facts this is data this is not me waving my hands in the air making some semantical hair splitting or giving some murky philosophical argument these are facts and perhaps the opposition would like to tell tell us which of these things are in fact not facts or which of these studies are flawed let me go on to the third thing which I think is is perhaps the most important uh which is freedom of speech there are various cases that I might cite um if I had the time I would have mentioned the the rushy case um but I will just talk about the case about the dissh cartoons which many of you will know about which dates back to 2009 the history of that was of course that these cartoons depicting Muhammad uh were produced they caused a great deal of offense an Islamic organization comprising a large number of Islamic countries their ambassadors wanted to speak to the Danish Prime Minister he refused and they sent imams around Islamic countries stirring up resentment at this this caused riots and other things at which about 200 people died and it has an echo even in Cambridge I'm sorry to say those of you who are at Clare College might know you probably won't remember but you might know that about four or five years ago a student at this college was nearly thrown out of the university for publishing a magazine in which those cartoons were shown it was spineless uh on the part of Cl college that they actually apologized for this perhaps what's worse than the real threat of the fact that violence is really committed against these people and other people for instance in connection with the satanic versus um you know when they produce things that are critical of Islam is the chilling effect that it has there are things people don't do and don't say and are frightened to say now because the fastest growing religion in Europe now organized religion in Europe is offered a real threat of violence against anyone who criticizes it that's an effect that's a that's an effect of organized religion demonstrable effect of it the final point I want to make I'm going to close now uh the final point that I want to make is to emphasize that of course nothing in the argument that I gave depends on the truth or falsity of uh religion I made a few remarks at the beginning but apart from that nothing in this empirical case has any dependence at all on the truth or falsity of the Christian or the Islamic or any other religion a religious person could vote for the proposition the point is not is religion true or is religion false the point is there is a difference between what Andrew and I would regard as a relatively legitimate role of religion which is having a personal ethic which perhaps means genuinely love for your fellow man and what then happened to Christianity and all of the other religions which is that they started wearing pointing hats pointy hats and telling people what to do and it's if you reject that step that you should vote for the motion thank you thank you Dr armed our final speaker tonight is associate director of the Henry Jackson Society associate editor of The Spectator magazine and a well-known commentator on issues of religion extremism and immigration Mr Douglas Moray um well uh thank you thank you very much for that it's uh well I was going to say it's a pleasure to be back in Cambridge it isn't entirely um I've been dreading this debate uh for many reasons which will I think become clear if they haven't been clear already um it's a very awkward position to be in I first of all because I am not an A in agree agement was very much said by my own side most of the time I remember being on news night some years ago calling for Williams's resignation as Archbishop when he made his catastrophic intervention into the matter of sharia in the UK um I remember actually being on prr with Tariq I remember we were shouting at each other and indeed at Jeremy Paxman who was shouting at both of us um and um I T and I Chase each other around the globe in studios in debating forums universities many places I consider him one of my very dearest and closest enemies um and I'm also in the unfortunate position because I agree with most of what the opposition say not just tonight uh but generally um I'm an atheist myself I don't believe in Revelations I don't believe that Moses Jesus or Muhammad had any Divine in instructions I think they made it up but and I'm sure you knew there was a butt coming uh I am on this side very uncomfortably because this statement this house believes religion has no place in the 21st century is to me as an atheist not just an overstatement but very wrong indeed I will on to exactly why in the coming minutes first of all one piece of cestry which has to be tidied up organized it's been put in since we had the motion agreed organized religion we're now told this isn't a serious addition uh to this debate how could you have disorganized religion if how could you have a religion which wasn't organized by any structure at all I mean somebody has to say whether Mass is at 11:00 or 11:15 for good sake um all religion all people who believe broadly in a similar thing are going to have some desire to come together and there's going to be some kind of authority whether it's in a mosque or a synagogue or a temple or a church or anything else of course all religion in some way is going to be organized but the reason I wanted to speak on this side is for this reason when this whole debate which does matter very much and will matter very much in the century ahead of us there is a great possibility of completely uh distancing views which at the very least you should listen to and I've already sentenced it this evening if we had been gathered here in Cambridge at the union a 100 years ago you would have probably listened in as respectful silence to the clergy and had no possible intervention against their thought as you do tonight with prominent spokesman for atheism it's simple simply the case that very very swiftly the tables have turned in recent years and very Swift it's become really not very difficult certainly thank goodness in this country to talk against religion and has become rather difficult particularly for non-believers to speak up for anything that religion does offer and it does offer things and I think we shouldn't ignore them the problem in this debate is that neither side and I wish it was possible to speak and advise you to go down the middle door but neither side in this debate in this whole debate not just tonight but generally ever wants to admit what they miss and what they have got wrong religion has got very many things wrong all sorts of religions have they always leap into truth claims they scienze their claims what they have that is uh is is true in part becomes dogmatic so often there are very many things that religion has got wrong which Professor Dawkins and his colleagues are very good indeed at explaining but atheism has got things wrong as well it is not a Flawless system or Flawless belief and there are things which atheists Miss and are I think very worried about admitting that they miss if if I may um are very worried about admitting that they miss the uh German philosopher who R Williams has already quite quoted tonight Jorgen haras coined the term a few years ago a beautiful term it's worth bearing in mind he said it's he wrote an essay called the awareness of what is missing it just posits the fact that in the secular State an atheist mindset there are some things you miss and the non-religious very rarely want to mention this but there are things that they miss if we were to get rid of religion entirely in the 21st century very many people not only themselves would miss it very deeply but but there would be all sorts of questions which people have in their lives which would remain if not completely unanswered then answered incredibly quietly secularism and Atheism have all sorts of truths to argue but their voice is very quiet on many things that matter to many people the voice of atheism is at least quiet in the face of death in the face of human tragedy of suffering it has very little to say to people who seek for instance some kind of reconciliation or forgiveness or repentance all sorts of things which religious Traditions have addressed you may think the religious tradition is wrong in its uh in its origin but they do address these questions they have tried to they have tried to build a philosophy on this and at the very least if you were to throw out at this very moment all religion all religion in the the 21st century having no place many people would be deprived of these things Andrew copson uh in his I thought somewhat presumptuous speech if I may say so um portrayed a future in which if we just dropped religion we would be running into the sunlit Uplands where everything would be terrific we would be reasonable creatures in a reasonable Universe with reasonable desires reasonably answered are you sure about that are you absolutely sure that if you tell a generation two generations three generations religion has and let's remember no place in the 21st century are you sure that we arrive at those sunlit up plans or is it possible that if you tell people enough that they live a meaningless life in a meaningless Universe in a meaningless existence that you may just get something like a Perpetual vers of the only way is essic believe it is true or not religion provided and I would say provides and will provide in the future an opportunity for people to ask serious questions about themselves ask serious questions about the universe and their existence the quote Lin he says in church a serious house on serious Earth this is wherein all blend where in whose blend uh all our compulsions meet it is the case I would submit whether you believe as I say in the literal truth of religion or not whether you believe or go to church or synagogue or mosc or whatever yourself it is the case that these places used to provide and provide for many people still a place to ask questions which in other places in their lives without that they simply have no such opportunity to H to ask to address you know somebody said said earlier that uh it said have we outgrown it I just wanted to raise a couple of things let say this may seem a contrarian Viewpoint it is not I can tell you there are several things that have been cited tonight about religion which need countering and I'd ask just for your forbearance as I mentioned these some it's come up several times Community Building uh Alan debot wrote a really very bad book recently uh called um called religion for atheists but there were several very good um uh points in it and one which I I I'm not sure is able to be refuted is this that among other things Church provided people who had nothing in common other than the place that they found that they found themselves in that they found themselves sitting in a Pew beside somebody with a form of common Humanity which is missing in the Modern Age Andrew said well we've got Facebook and we've got social networking many of these things are very good there's all sorts of good that can come from them it also means you are very able to agree and to meet all the time people who agree with your point of view you can found Facebook groups with people who agree with you already you can f found social networking groups with people very like you I'm sure after you leave Cambridge you will be able to have old alumni Facebook groups which put you in touch with other people very like you church and organized religion among other things and I think it's worth noting allows people to sit beside people in a place with a common a with whom otherwise they have absolutely nothing in common no so socioeconomic Bond no cultural Bond maybe except for the fact that they have found themselves in this place together one other very quick uh point before I start to wrap up um on several times tonight it's already been mentioned about the simple evil that religion does because of abortion and so on I would just make the following intervention in this many times in debates in the House of Lords and in the Commons about abortion about euthanasia and these sort of things yes religions have got very many of these things wrong but if you look at the contributions to these debates the contrib ution of the religious to abortion issues and to right to life issues and to partial birth abortions and all sorts of other things and euthanasia is not nothing it injects a sense into society and into the debate as long as it cannot harm and hamper scientific progress and I'll get on to that in a second provides a voice which reasons and I would argue sometimes holds back advances which many people such as Andrew would be lovely about rushing straight ahead to believe leaving we're going to this place which is fine now look I I'm just going to wrap up with this Richard Dawkin said at the very opening is it true that was that that was what you you said you wanted to address no and yes no it is not true it is not literally true but can religion carry truth yes schopenhauer says in his Dialogue on religion he says truth may be like water it needs a vessel to carry it we don't have very many vessels and if you believe that we can go into the 21st century not only saying we don't need a vessel ourselves but nobody else should have one I don't believe that would be a period of Greater understanding the deal and let me just say you won't often hear me those you had heard me here before we know I don't normally do reconciliation but I'm going to have a quick go the deal in the 21st century must be this religions must not have the ability to dictate the lives of people who do not follow those religions religion must have no ability to dictate law or to dictate the lives of people who do not follow those religions that I think should be the thing that religion gives up largely it has given it up the Church of England has given up most of it and I think that's a good thing it has led the way religions will have to concede that but the non-religious should make a concession to the non-religious should accept in the 21st century that it is not the case that religion has nothing whatsoever to say it does it has a voice it has a contribution to make it is thoughtful in part it has thought things over if the 21st century is to work it will involve all of these things it will involve religion knowing its place but it will also involve atheists and secularists knowing that their place is not to dismiss deride and laugh at as meaningless something which seeks for meaning if the 21st century is to work religion will have a place people can agree with Professor Dawkins and his colleagues but no rational person could agree with this motion thank you thank you Douglas and thank you to all our speakers because I please ask people to remain seated until our speakers have left the chamber tonight as ever the door by which you leave is significant eyes to the right nose to the left exstension straight down the middle and the result will be announced in the bar in about 15 minutes thank you to all for coming and I hope to see you next week

Channel: Tariq Ramadan Official

Views: 10,396

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Id: 5qENPFvEsCg

Length: 96min 50sec (5810 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 08 2014