The God Debate: Hitchens vs. D'Souza

Good evening and welcome to the

debate

about God. My name is Daniel O Doing and this is my good friend and colleague M Fi. Together we have organized the

debate

you were about to enjoy. However, we would like to take a moment to explain the purpose of this event and recognize those who made it possible good evening thank you for coming thank you for waiting to finish that newspaper missing that basketball game at the bookstore rescheduling that club meeting and passing up that movie in the dorm here at Notre Dame we sometimes make the mistake of compartmentalizing Our lives too much everything has a fixed schedule class during the day homework at night party on Friday recover on Saturday and go to mass on Sunday often in the search for double majors and extracurricular activities we forget to take the time to simply talk about the value Time spent discussing, debating, and learning with fellow students cannot be seen in numbers or grades.

It is our responsibility as students to ensure that intellectual life extends beyond the classroom. It is our responsibility to constantly question and explore by breaking our familiar routines and shaking things up. shaking things up a little and changing things a little is exactly what we are going to do here tonight it is not enough to surround ourselves with like-minded people we must fight we must sharpen iron against iron the goal of this debate is to promote discussion not just tomorrow at next day and not just in the usual halls, the questions that are being discussed here tonight should be asked in the dining rooms and at 4:00 a.m. m., for the record, these questions are vitally important, whether we are a theist, atheist, or somewhere in between.

The answers to these questions may never be fully resolved, but the speakers here today will at least shed some light on those questions. They will shake our preconceptions and disturb us enough to make us seek our own answers. We must never stop searching for that ideal. The search for truth is what has inspired this event, but this event would not have happened without the help of many different people. First, we must thank Dean Joseph Stanfield for leading the project from its inception. We promised we wouldn't force him. stand up, but why not Dean Joseph Stanfield? Our thanks to the Center for Philosophy of Religion, especially Joyce and our moderator Mike Ray, for contributing their time, effort, and funds to the project.

Without these three people, this event would have been nothing more than nothing. an interesting idea, thanks also to the staff of the dbo Performing Arts Center for hosting us in this incredible concert hall. Our thanks also to the hles family and their lecture series, as well as to the liberal arts scholarship institute led by Augustine Pentes for contributing greatly to this debate for their support. We would also like to thank the Faculty of Arts and Letters. The Center for Undergraduate Academic Engagement. The um the learning Bel on Castro Grant. Father Theodore hburg. The Glen Family Honors Program. the liberal studies program and the center for the study of religious society a long list and a special mention to comac and nick finally, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to tonight's moderator, professor mike ray, as well as help prepare the debate.

Professor Ray directs the Center for the Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame, a UCLA honors graduate and, more importantly, a double Domer. Professor Ray is a key figure in fostering intellectual debate on campus. There is no better person to moderate a debate on these topics. Please welcome Professor Mike Ray. Thank you Malcolm and Daniel, and thank you all for being here since its founding in the late 1970s, the center for philosophy of religion has been primarily a think tank for religious research and philosophy of religion and specifically Christian philosophy, more recently, although we have begun to search. looking for ways to promote more serious philosophical reflection and dialogue about religion and the Christian faith within the university community on campus, notably just as we began to think about how we might do this, Daniel OD Duffy walked into my office leaving not only the idea of ​​tonight's event is not due to our lapse, but also to more than two-thirds of the funding and more than half of the organizational work already completed over the past few months.

We have truly watched in awe as Malcolm and Daniel have worked their magic and shown us how. put on an incredible show that will sell out a crowd of students in 90 minutes 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 hosting more events. like this in the next few years the topic that will be discussed tonight is the question is religion the problem Hitchens says that religion poisons everything he is right even if it doesn't poison everything at least it poisons our minds is it religion to simply believe in God? a virus of the Mind as Richard Dawkins thinks or is it the case as Duza thinks that perhaps believing in God is perfectly rational and even a good thing these are the kind of questions we are here to talk about tonight in that note, so we are delighted to welcome our two speakers, Christopher Hitchens and Denes Duza, named one of America's most influential conservative thinkers by the New York Times.

Denes Duza 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 Atheist, yet Duza's focus has been on advocating religion after writing New York Times best-selling books. What is good about Christianity and life after death? The evidence is that Duza has quickly become one of the most prominent in the world. apologists defending Christianity and Catholicism in particular in print publications, television and debates around the world Christopher Hitchens, who describes himself as a Marxist and anti-theist, is one might say the polar opposite of duza;

He was ranked as one of the most influential liberals in America by Forbes magazine and has been hailed by the London Observer as one of the most brilliant journalists of our time, as for many of us his life and thought have been seen. significantly affected by the religiously motivated violence and cruelty he has witnessed firsthand and from afar, but unlike many of us. he has identified religion itself as the problem and has made it his mission to oppose it. He is the author of numerous books, including the bestseller God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything, and is now commonly characterized as one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism. with the other ER Crowley Laden riders silhouetted against a blue-gray October sky, sorry, I was wrong.

Horsemen, uh, teaming up with the other horsemen, uh, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens has traveled the world challenging religion and its defenders wherever the structure is found. Tonight's debate will be as follows: Hitchens will begin taking 15 minutes for his opening remarks defending the motion that religion is the problem, followed by Duza with a 15-minute opposition to the motion, each will have five minutes to a rebuttal, after that we will have Approximately 40 minutes for questions from the audience. There are two microphones downstairs on either side of the stage. If you have a question for any of the debaters tonight, please line up in an orderly fashion behind the microphones.

Don't press. Once you open the room for each question you will be given a couple of minutes at the end for some final comments. Please remember that videos with flash photography and active cell phones are prohibited. Also do not use laptops. The debate is being recorded on video. It will appear on YouTube and the philosophy of religion center website just sit back and enjoy it, please also note that although this debate is about a controversial topic, our goal tonight is to have an intellectually serious discussion with that in mind, Feel free to applaud the speakers, but please refrain from heckling, heckling, throwing fruit, or disrupting the event.

Finally, remember that Notre Dame is the number one institution in the world for philosophy of religion and also has one of the best theology departments in the world. Any questions you don't get answered tonight, feel free to ask. from your local college in the next few weeks, when you show up at their offices, tell them that I sent you, no, don't do that now, continue with the program that I present to you, Christopher Hitchens, thank you professor, very generous introduction, thank you ladies and gentlemen, um. My first duty, which is also a pleasure, is to thank the University of Notre Dame for inviting me to its grounds and Mr.

Uffy in particular at an institution that also identifies, I believe, with the great history and the people of Ireland for take the revenge of arranging for the English weather to greet me now, they could have given me 15 minutes, which isn't much, but I could do it one way and two, um, like this as a proposal when Gerud Stein was dying, Some of you will know this story. she asked as she approached for the last time, well what's the answer and when no one around her bed spoke she rephrased and said, well in that case what's the question and I'll talk tonight, we'll talk tonight, we'll meet tonight night, um in a high learning institution and the greatest obligation that you have is to keep an open mind and realize that in our current state of human society we are increasingly overwhelmed 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 discover how much more and more there is to know in these circumstances that I believe are undeniable the only respectable intellectual position is that of Doubt reserved and free skepticism and I would emphasize free and unfettered inquiry lies, as it has always been, our only hope, so you must always be wary of those who say that these questions have already been decided, particularly those who tell you that they have been decided by a reservation excuse.

I am told by Revelation that there are Commandments and precepts handed down that in some sense predate ourselves and that the answers are already available if only we could see them and that the obligation upon ourselves to debate ethical, moral, historical and other questions is therefore dissolved, it seems to me that that is the only position, it is what I call the position of faith that must be discarded first, so thank you for your attention and I am done, except that it seems that I have a reputation for demagoguery to be on the height. When I get to a place like this I read the local newspaper, the campus observer in this case, and was sorry to see that Denes and I are not considered up to the standards of Father Rich Mcbrian, whose exacting standards, I dare say. are beyond our reach and I was also sorry to see myself and others represented in other newspapers, and in particular by a distinguished clergyman in St Peter's on Good Friday who gave a speech during which His Holiness the Pope remained silent, Father Celan MSA. to say that people like me are part of a program, a persecution comparable only to that of the Jews, with the church in mind, this is the first time I have been accused of being part of a program or persecution, but as long as it is In the In the future, I will also add that it is the only show I have ever heard of that is run by little deaf and mute children whose cries for justice have been ignored, and even though that is the definition of the show, I will continue to support it. because I think it very clearly demonstrates the moral superiority of the secular concept of justice and law over canon law and religious law with its clear emphasis on self-exculpation disguised as forgiveness and redemption.

That's not the only reason religion is a problem, it's a problem primarily because it is man-made because to some extent it is true, as the church used to preach when it was more confident, that in some sense we are originally sinners and guilty if you want to prove that you just have to look at the many religions. that people have constructed to see that they are actually the product of an imperfectly evolved primate species, about half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee with a prefrontal lobe that is too small, an adrenaline gland that is too large, and various other evolutionary deformities on the that we are discovering more and more a predatory species, man is a wolf for man homo homon lupus, as has been said, a species very fearful of itself and of others and of the natural order and above all very very willing despite its protests of religious modesty to Convince yourself that all the operations of the cosmos and the universe operate with us in mind.

He decides if you want to be modest or not, but don't say that you are made of dust or that you are a woman. for a bit of rib or if you are a Muslim for a blood clot and you are an abject sinner born ofblame, but add, anyway, let's cheer up, the entire universe is still designed with you in mind, this is not modesty. or humility is a false constellation created by man in my opinion and it causes great moral damage if it is deformed it begins by deforming what we could call our moral sense of proportion um I wish that was all that could be said, although I think that The important thing is that I must say why I think he should be given credit, and I must add that my colleagues Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet have been very generous in this regard.

This debate wouldn't be interesting if religion were one-dimensional. Religion was ours. first attempt to make sense of our environment was our first attempt at cosmology, for example, making sense of what happens in the heavens was our first attempt at what matters most to me the study of literature and literary criticism gave us texts to deliberate and even debate even if some of those texts were considered the word of God and Beyond Review and Beyond Criticism, however, the idea is introduced and it had never been introducedBefore um, it is our first attempt at healthcare In a way, if you go to the Sham or the witch doctor and do the right propitiation, the right sacrifices and you really believe in it, you have a better chance of recovery.

Everyone knows that it is a medical fact, morality is an ingredient of health and it was our first attempt to achieve that too. It was a very bad first attempt at human solidarity because it was tribe based, but it still taught that there are virtues in sticking together and it was our first attempt, I would also say that this is not an exhaustive list of psychiatric care to deal with terrible loneliness of the human condition and what happens when the individual Spirit looks tremblingly into the enormous emptiness of the cosmos and contemplates its own extinction. and deals with the terrible fear of death, this was the first attempt to apply a balm to that terrible issue, but as Charles Darwin says about our evident kinship with the lower mammals and the lower life forms that we have, as expressed in The origin of the species.

We, we, always carry the indelible seal of our humble origin, I repeat, the indelible seal of our humble origin, religion does the same, it clearly shows that it is the first, the most primitive, the crudest and the most deceptive attempt to give it meaning. It is the worst attempt but partly because it was the first so the credit can be divided that way and the worst thing it did was offer us certainty to say these are truths that are unalterable they are transmitted from above only we have to learn the Will of God and how to obey it in order to free ourselves from these dilemmas, that is probably the worst advice of all.

Hinrich Hiner says that if you are in a dark forest on a dark night and you don't know where you are and if you have never passed through this territory before, we recommend that you hire the local blind and crazy old man as a guide who can feel his way through the forest because it can do something that you can't do except when the sun rises. breaks and the light comes, you would be foolish to continue operating with this guide, this blind, crazy old man who was doing the best he could on the first try, to give you just two very contemporary examples, having a germ theory of disease It frees you from the idea that the plagues are punishments that the church used to preach, that the plagues come because the Jews have poisoned the wells as the church often preached, or that the Jews even exist and are themselves a plague as the church used to preach. when he felt strong enough and was also quite morally weak and had so little evidence.

You can free yourself from the idea that illnesses are punishments or visits. If you study plate tectonics, you will not do what the Archbishop of Haiti did the other day speaking to his grieving people after his His predecessor had been buried in the ruins of the Porto Prance cathedral along with a quarter of a million other Haans unfortunate people whose lives were already miserable enough and to say with the Cardinal Archbishop of New York at his side that God had something to say to Haiti and this is the way he chose to say it if you study tectonics from PL Tech and a few other things you will be freed from this burden atrocious of our superstitious and fearful primate past and I again suggest an institution of Higher learning is a responsibility that we all have to assume if we reflect.

Some people say that the great Steven J. Gul, whom I greatly admired, from whom we all learned a lot about evolutionary biology, used to say quite indulgently. I think well these are not the overlap of magic the material world the scientific world and the world of faith I think not overlapping is too soft I think it's more a matter of it's becoming more a matter of incompatibility or maybe better say irreconcilability only if you reflect on some things I will have time. I hope to mention that, by the way, my stopwatch is not working, so I am under your discipline president. um, you'll give me great, um, when we reflect that the expansion rate of our universe is increasing, it was thought. until Hubble, which we knew was expanding but surely Newton would teach us that the speed would decrease, no, the speed is increasing, the Big Bang is accelerating, we can see its end more and more clearly and while we wait for that we can see the Andromeda galaxy approaching towards the collision that is 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 this must have an origin and now we know how it is going to end why ask why there is something instead of nothing when you can see that nothing comes only replaces the question faith is useless to decide it and that is on the macro level from the macro to the micro 99.8 The percentage of all species ever created, if you insist on the face of this planet, have already become extinct without leaving descendants.

I could add that of that number three or four branches of our own family, Homo sapiens, branches of it, the Crom-Magnons and the Neanderthals, who lived with us until about 50,000 years ago who had tools who made art who decorated tombs uh 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 are not I don't know what their last cries were like and our own species had dwindled to about 10,000 in Africa before we finally left there without being abandoned this time or until now to move from the macro to the micro;

In other words, our own solar system is only halfway there. through its long span before it explodes and as Sir Martin uh Royal, the great Astronomer Royal and professor of cosmology at Cambridge and, by the way, an Anglican believer says that by the time there are creatures on earth that appear when the sun expires, they will not be Humans will not be the ones to see this happen if our planet lives this long, the creatures that see it will be as different from us as we are from amiii and bacteria compared to these incredible Titanic. I would say they are all inspiring facts like the fact that since the Big Bang every second a star the size of ours has exploded while I have been talking once every second a star the size of our son has risen in front of these amazing Indisputable facts, can you make yourself believe? that the main events in human history, the crucial ones, happened 3,000 or 2,000 years ago in the illiterate deserts of Arabia and Palestine and that it was only at that moment that the heavens decided that it was time to intervene and that through those interventions we can ask for salvation.

Make me believe this. I present myself to you as someone who simply cannot and who also refuses to be told that if I did not believe it I would have no source of ethics or morality. Please don't pile on the insults. the irrational and tell me that if I don't accept these sacrifices in the desert I don't have to distinguish good from evil evil a minute a minute well um then I will have to prune and you will be the losers but I'll have a rebuttal coming. Well, look at the contemporary religious scene. Return to religion, as well as faith and beliefs.

Israeli settlers are stealing other people's land in hopes of bringing the Messiah and a terrible war on the alternative side. As they themselves think, the Islamic jihadists are preparing an endless war, a war based on faith based on the repulsive tactic of suicide murder and all these people believe that they have a divine order, a holy book and the direct word of God in your hands. side we used to worry when I was young what will happen when a maniac gets his hands on a nuclear weapon we are about to find out what will happen when that happens the Islamic Republic of Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon and by illegal means that disobey all laws and possible international treaties, meanwhile, in Russia, Vladimir Putin's expansionist chauvinist authoritarian regime is increasingly adorned in clerical garb by the Russian Orthodox Church with its traditional loyalty to zaris surom and the rest, and this would have to be argued .

I will close On this topic, I would have to argue that surely that is better than there being a massive outbreak of secularism in Russia, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and I would call that a reduction of absurdity and I will leave you with that and I will return thanks I don't I know and now denes tza Do you want to use this one? Be cool, have it my way. Yes go. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. It's incredible, this is a beautiful auditorium, quite an event. um I understand that the tickets were very I almost didn't get them um I've been listening with some interest to Christopher Hitchens um listening to him I feel a bit like Winston Churchill during the war boore said it's always exhilarating to be attacked without result and I say this, I say this because even if everything Christopher Hitchon says is true, he has barely shown that religion is a very serious problem, he seems to say that religion is integrated into human nature, it is an evolutionary issue. development that man has been looking for explanations since he set foot on the planet religion provided functional explanations now maybe we have better ones even if all this were true I'm going to argue it and prove that it's not true but even if it were true this Hardly It would be a damning indictment of religion.

Science itself has developed in the same way. It was an explanation. It has improved over time. But what I wanted to do is meet Christopher on his own turf. He says we should be skeptical and I'm going to do it. He is a skeptic, he says we should be skeptics and I fully support him in this debate, at no time will I make any argument that appeals to Scripture or the authority of Revelation. I will make arguments based solely on reason and I want to address the argument in Hitchens stands his own ground by not making an easy argument for the usefulness of religion, it is good for us, it makes practical sense, it is comforting, eh, everything that's true.

I am GNA, in fact, I present an argument for the truth of religion and the argument I am going to use. To clarify, I call it a presuppositional argument, but it is an argument that requires a bit of explanation. Imagine if you're a detective and you approach a crime scene, uh, and all the evidence points to a suspect, but it turns out. I realized he couldn't have done it because the body was dumped in one place and he was in a completely different place and then you realize as a detective, wait a minute, maybe the guy had an accomplice, now you don't know. he did it, but the assumption that he did it suddenly makes sense of all the other facts that were previously mysterious, suddenly you see how the crime was committed down to the smallest detail.

If this seems like a slightly unusual way to argue, I want to emphasize that this is precisely the way scientists argue when faced with new phenomena. For example, scientists who observe galaxies have noticed that galaxies are bound together, and yet when the amount of matter in them is measured, there is not enough gravity to hold them together. They should be flying to pieces and that is why scientists assume that there is some other form of matter, they call it dark matter, which must be there exerting a gravitational force, so although we cannot see dark matter, it is not detectable by any instrument, that explains what we do.

Look, the dark matter presupposition clarifies the issue before us and what I'm going to do is try to adduce some puzzling facts about life and then ask whether God's presupposition explains those facts better than any other. rival explanation Christopher Hitchens will spend a lot of time telling us about evolution and evolution 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 simply explains. the transition between one form of life and another is very different from accounting for life itself, consider, for example, the primordial cell, if you read Franklin Herald's book The Way of the cell, this is a biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, describes the cell as a kind of supercomputer isa level of complexity even Richard Dawkins his work describes the cell as a kind of digital computer now the cell cannot have evolved because evolution presupposes the cell.

Evolution requires a cell that already has the built-in ability to reproduce. itself, so how did we get a cell? The very idea that random molecules in a warm pond via lightning assembled a cell would be like saying that lightning and a warm pond could assemble a car or a skyscraper. It's absurd Richard. Dawkins knows it's absurd, and so when asked how we originally got life, he said, well, maybe aliens brought it from another planet. It's ridiculous, but in some ways it's 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 poses more puzzles because evolution depends on a universe structured in a certain way. manner.

Evolution depends on a sun that is eight light minutes away. Evolution depends on the constants of nature. If I picked up a pen and dropped it, I would. They fall to the ground with a known acceleration Gravity the universe has a lot of these constants hundreds of them Scientists have asked what would happen if these constants on which evolution depends? What would happen if these constants changed a little? What if the speed of light was a little? Slower or a little faster, this question is addressed by Step Hawking in the Reef Time History book, he says that if you change these constants of nature at all, and when he talks about the expansion rate of the universe, he says If you change that, no. 10% or 1% but one part in 100,000 millionths of a million we would not have Universe we would not have life not only Homo sapiens would not have complex life evolved anywhere, in other words, our existence here depends on the fine tuning of a set of constants in nature , we are not just talking about the Earth, the entire universe, this argument that is sometimes called the anthropic principle or adjusted universe.

This has put modern atheism completely on the defensive, why should the universe be structured precisely this way and not any other way? What is the best explanation? Is there an atheistic explanation? I would like to hear it let's continue thinking about evolution because evolution cannot explain the depth of human evil what I mean by this is simply this Evolution supposes cruelty Evolution supposes harshness but it is a harshness tempered by necessity think of a lion that wants to eat the antelope because it is hungry, but have you ever heard of a phrase that wants to erase all the antelopes from the face of the Earth, no, then how do you explain this human evil that far exceeds the need and reaches depths that seem almost unfathomable?

Evolution cannot explain rationality because it says that we are programmed in the world to survive and reproduce our minds are organs of survival, they are not organs of Truth, so if we believe in rationality, we need something outside of evolution to explain that. Evolution can't even explain morality and this requires a bit of explaining, so think of a couple more. moral facts and I'm not talking about heroic feats of greatness think about simple things get up to give your seat to an old lady on a bus donate blood there is famine in Haiti volunteer your time or write a check now yes we are evolved primates who are programmed to survive and reproduce why would we do these things?

There is a whole literature on this and it basically comes down to this. Proponents of evolution say that well, evolution is a form of widespread selfishness if a mother jumps into a burning car to save her two children it is because she and her children have the same genes, so what It seems like an altruistic and noble act, it is actually just a cunning strategy on the part of the mother to ensure that her genes reach the next generation. We are not talking about her Levis, we are talking about her genetic inheritance or Revolution 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 is a great guy, but because he wants him to come back to the store, but these two common evolutionary strategies for explaining morality do not explain the three examples at all. he said. I'm on a bus, the old lady limps in, she's not a relative, she's not. She is a grandmother, so genetic kinship does not come into play 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 her seat.

No, you give up your seat because you are a good guy you give blood because you want to do something good you donate your time to help strangers who are not genetically related to you and cannot reciprocate your favors these are the simple facts of morality in the world and what it is The evolutionary explanation for them there is none or if there is one I would like to hear it, so when debating these topics very often it is very easy to put the burden of proof on the theist and say that you explain everything, but not in the world in which that we are.

I am not in a position where there is only one damning explanation there are rival explanations there is a theistic explanation the god explanation and there is an atheist or non-theistic explanation we have to weigh the two against each other my argument is that the atheist explanation fails when faced with all of 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 God's explanation? It seems obvious to me, it is much 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 complexity? human evil because our lives are a cosmic drama in which good and evil are in constant struggle the Christian story why there is morality in the world why we all feel even when it goes against our advantage a moral law within us good , that's because there is a moral legislator 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 it, but if we present all these mysterious facts, suddenly the lights come on, it provides an explanation.

Now again, with any presuppositional argument there may be a better alternative explanation, so I put the ball in Christopher Hitchen Court to say that if you can explain these facts better than I can, I will happily, as a skeptic, accept your view and 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 were a primitive explanation from 3000 years ago why would it be true that religion has not disappeared 3000 years ago why is it so that in We are actually seeing religious revivals all over the world.

Why is the fact of religious experience almost like you go to a village and 95% of the people in the village say we know this guy named Bill? Why do we interact with it? We relate to him, we have experience with him, five guys say we've never met Bill and three of them say there's no bill, the other 95% are making them up now, which is more likely, they're probably 3% are right and the 95% are lying or hallucinating or it is more likely that 95% are right and the other 3% just don't know the man when you look at the fact of religious experience in the world today to simply dismiss it. like something primitive.

The explanation for why Ancient Man couldn't explain Thunder seems stupidly unrelated to the fact that religion satisfies current needs and desires, so religion isn't the problem. God is not the problem. God is, in fact, the answer to the problem. Thank you. He never defines having done that without thinking about what a wonderful Muslim he would be. If you try to tell 100 people in Saudi Arabia that you don't believe the Prophet Muhammad really heard those voices, you're really going to get defeated and yes. Jes, I have noticed religious revivals taking place, pay close attention to them. I don't find them so welcome, maybe you'll say yes, and based on your detective hypothesis, don't you think there's something to be said for considering unforgeability when constructing? a hypothesis, for example, Albert Einstein St. his reputation said that if I am wrong about this, then there will not be an eclipse at a certain time of day, month and year off the west coast of Africa and I will look like a fool, but if I'm right, there will be one and people will gather thinking he can't be that smart and he was.

Professor JBS Holdan was asked what would shake his faith in evolution. This was when it was much more controversial than it is now and I'm impressed to find that Gesh believes in intelligent design, which he really requires. I would think it was a leap of faith, but there it is. Holdan said, "Well, show me rabbits. Burns in the Jurassic and I'll give up now." Can you think of any religious spokesperson you have ever heard who told you in advance what would disprove his hypothesis? Of course, you can't because it is unfalsifiable and we were all taught that unfalsifiability by Professor Carl Poer in a theory.

It is a test not of his strength but of his weakness, so he cannot be defeated. The church used to say no. God did not allow evolution, in fact, he hid the bones in the rocks to test our faith which did not work. it turned out too well so now they say oh now that we know, it shows how incredibly smart it was all along, it's an infinitely elastic airbag and there's no argument I can make or anyone else can make against it and that's which should make you suspicious, then a question for GES. I know I'm supposed to answer them as well as ask them, but I get intrigued when debating with religious people.

He announced that I have the words from him. I was going to speak without reference to the Scriptures of Revelation or. Scriptural Authority now why are you wondering then I will ask you why that is why I never meet someone who says I will tell you why I am religious because I think that Jesus of Nazareth Nazareth is the way to truth and life and no one comes to the father except for him and if you believe in this you will be given eternal life. I would be shocked if people sometimes said that, why do religious people so often feel like they have to say no, we don't?

No, that is somewhat metaphorical, in what sense are they religious? You will notice that Dees spoke of the operations of the Divine and the Creator only in the observable natural order, that is what used to be called the dest position, it was the position held by Skeptics such as Thomas Payne and Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century, as far as Anyone could see, before Darwin and before Einstein there seemed to be evidence of design in the universe, but there was no evidence of divine intervention in it. Very important point the holiest can say and I would have to say that it cannot be refuted that there was a first cause and that it was Divine which cannot be refuted, you can only argue that there is no evidence for it, um, but the deists They have established that position if they have all their works still ahead of them to show that there is a God who cares about us, even knows we exist, takes sides in our little tribal wars, cares who we sleep with and in what position, cares what we eat and on what day. the week uh arbitrates matters of this type that is the conceited that is the endless human desire to believe that we have parents who want to take care of us and and help us not to grow up or get off the path um and so it is surprising I think that professions have never been made of real religious faith on these occasions.

I guess I should say what my own method is on this, since I was challenged on that point. Let's take the two figures of Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates. I believe that Jesús J. of Nazareth operates outside of mythology and prehistory. I don't think it's absolutely established that such a person existed 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. um and I would also have to admit that we only know Socrates' work through second-hand sources in the same way, second-hand or third-hand, quite impressive sources in some cases from Plato's apology, but it can't be proven to me. that Socrates once walked the streets. of Athens five minutes how many is five minutes that is five very quickly so if it could be shown to a believing Christian that the tomb of Jesus was opened and his body was found and the resurrection was disproved if that could be done archaeologically for the sake of argument would probably be a disaster for you you would have to think then we are alone so how are we going to distinguish good from evil what can we do?

I maintain with Socrates that, on the contrary, the moral problems and the ethical problems and other dilemmas that we have would be exactly the same. What are our mutual duties? How could we build a just city? How should we think? How can we face the possibility of our loneliness? How can we do itcorrect and do it? these questions would remain exactly as they are and as they are, so all that is necessary is to transcend the superstitious, transcend the mythical and accept responsibility, assume that no one can do this for us and I hope that to a large extent University, uh, that thought could triumph, thank you, something like the mosquito in the most naked colony.

I'm trying to decide where to start. I might start by pointing out that in my opening speech I offered a kind of challenge to Christopher Hitchens that I mentioned. anomalous features of the world as it is and of The Evolutionary Explanation and offered him the opportunity to offer rival theories that might work better than the God explanation. I just want to point out that he hasn't offered any. Instead, what he has offered is the idea. that science is based on verifiability but religion is not. This I believe is actually not true and he said that no one has given him an example of it and I am about to give you two of the ancient Hebrews uniquely affirmed by the way of all religions. that God made the universe out of nothing now, by the way, the idea that God or the gods made the universe is a very old idea, but in all other religions, God or the gods created the universe from some another matter.

God is a kind of carpenter, he took the things from the universe and he created life and he created man, but the Hebrews said no, there was nothing and then there was a universe, and I want to suggest that modern science has shown that this It's 100% correct if you're going to an introductory physics class. In Notame you will learn that as a direct consequence of the Big Bang, not only did the universe have a beginning, not only did all matter have a beginning, but space and time also had a beginning. In other words, first there was nothing, neither space nor time, and then there was a universe with space and time, suddenly the Christian concept of the Eternity of a god outside of space and time, which for centuries was scientifically unintelligible, is now not only coherent but written alongside the most advanced discoveries in physics and modern astronomy, the ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament predict that the people of Israel after being dispersed would return, there would be, so to speak, a reunification of the state of Israel until the 1940s.

This was such a historically absurd possibility. that if someone had really suggested it, they would meet. with mocking laughter and yet in fact it has happened just as the Bible said it would happen now these are not scientific theories if you talk to the ancient Hebrews and tell them how you know there was nothing and there was a universe they did not do any scientific experiments , they basically said that God told me, but what I'm saying is that if you look at that as a prophecy or as a factual statement about the world that we now know 2000 years later, I mean, it is essentially correct.

The reason I can't continue like this is because religion addresses different types of questions and the scientific questions here are three. here we are thrown into the world one question we have is what is 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 I have no idea we have no idea and We have no idea that we are no closer to answering those questions scientifically than we have been since the time of the Babylonians, so what is wrong with turning to religion to provide explanations in a domain where science is completely inert, inarticulate and, in fact, mute, you can't just say that if you understand the ballistics of plate tectonics you understand the purpose, it would be like if my father sat me on his knee and beat me and Christopher Hitchens said: "I don't you do".

I think he is mad at you, if you only understood the ballistics of the cane you would have a full explanation of what is going on or on the other hand if he put a cup of tea in the kettle and started boiling it Hitchens can't. Well, if I tell you what is happening here, you say, the scientific explanation is that when water is heated, the molecules expand, the temperature increases, but there is another explanation: Denesh wants to have a cup of tea, so the Explanations work on more than one level. finally Christopher asks why argue this way.

Well, we know how to present the case another way. In fact, you get it at church or synagogue or you get it every Sunday. The argument from the Bible the argument from Authority. I know it's 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 he's going to say well, who cares what he says? the Gospel of Luke? We do not accept the authority of the Bible to judge the matter, so we are in a state in our culture where we have to use rational arguments if we try to communicate in secular places, so here we are in a university, what could be more Appropriate that To address these arguments in the vocabulary of reason, Christopher wants me to throw the Bible at him so that he can then claim the high ground of science and reason.

What is phloism when I use science and reason itself to torpedo his arguments. That's when you put it into action. on my knees and praying for more scripture quotes. Thank you so much. Now we have time for questions. We have two microphones in front. If you have any questions for any of our speakers, please come and line up. It has been suggested. I begin the question period with a question for each of our two speakers, uh, that's an opportunity I'm happy to accept, once I'm done asking questions, all field questions from the audience, please, uh, what you are, you are free to indicate who.

Your question is directed, but we will give both speakers a chance to weigh in. Stick to one short question. I'm the only one who gets two. If your question is long, I will interrupt you and ask you to concentrate if you continue. run for too long i will ask you to sit down if it continues for too long you don't want that to happen there will be no follow up questions once you have asked your question please step away from the microphone and those are the ground rules so now i will start with questions, such as I understand it, the basic argument that Christopher Hitches is making.

I haven't seen the text, but as I understand it, the argument can be roughly summarized as religion gives explanations, science gives better explanations, our job. is to go with the best explanations, so we should dedicate ourselves to science all the time and leave religion aside since superstition uh duza wants to address this on Hitchens Turf, so I'm going to start by asking a question to uh duza, it seemed like his The point was to show that theistic explanations are, in fact, better than scientific explanations, as I saw it, what he actually said showed that scientific explanations are often problematic, incomplete and with gaps, but I don't think he demonstrated that theistic explanations are better and fair.

Pick a couple of examples, for example, talk about the fine-tuning argument, so here's a case where perhaps belief in God explains certain features of the universe better than atheistic theories, but of course one gets confused. asks if the world is supervised by one person perfectly. Good Lord, when the Holocaust, just when, uh, all kinds of horrendous evil and suffering, suddenly it seems that God is being appealed to to explain the features of the universe, it's not clear that theism is winning, it takes morality too well, On the one hand, uh, sure. maybe we can understand where moral laws come from if there is a divine lawgiver, on the other hand Christianity has a doctrine of original sin.

Christianity has other things that confuse our moral intuitions, so again it's not clear that theism wins, that's a lot for um. Che one um look at the standards that I'm appealing to uh they are in a very intuitive way, currently we have an important scientific project to search for life on other planets, now the truth is that if we obtained information about, say, the moon Europa we find hieroglyphs some interesting architectural structures some apparently wandering vehicles this would settle the argument immediately we would conclude, as long as we didn't put it there, that there must be other life forms that have done it if someone came and said sand molecules assemble into all of this, This would be an explanation, but a stupid one compared to the inference of intelligent design, so in fact scientists say that even if we received radio signals in Morse code, they would be adequate to demonstrate. the existence of intelligent life elsewhere, so my point is that we apply the reasonable standard if we see a fine-tuned Universe.

Which is more likely that someone tuned it or that they tuned it themselves? Could the universe have been created from nothing? Is there any alternative? explanation for the available data no, so I'm just saying let's go with the best explanation, by the way, my argument is not Eternal if in 20 years you had a scientific argument that was better and said, hey, we figured it all out. I would accept that. I would have to abandon this argument. I am saying that in the current mode of knowing and thinking that this is a successful explanation, you cannot change the subject and say "well, now explain the Holocaust, that requires a different set of refutation.

I would say that the Holocaust is a product of free agency God didn't make the Holocaust Hitler did it the Nazis to try to deflect blame onto God for human action undertaken voluntarily is to minimize the human capacity for evil, huh, but whether or not that argument works has nothing to do with the argument from design and finally morality, very briefly again, if evolution could adequately explain morality, let's remember that the atheist premise is that we are evolved creatures in the world and that's all, so evolution is all about much work has to explain the human desire to donate blood to strangers if it cannot do so then it fails as an adequate explanation for a very important form of moral human behavior seen in every culture known to man requires explanation I have an explanation alternative that in human beings there are two parts, we are evolutionary creatures in the world, which explains why we desire sex and we desire food to survive and reproduce, but then I have this other thing inside me that Adam Smith calls impartial spectator and that It's another voice and it's in me, but it's not mine, in fact it often stops me from doing what I want to do, it's blocking my own interest, where does that come from?

How does that explain evolution? So I say that the hypothesis of God sheds more light on that topic the hypothesis of a moral legislator in fact even the hypothesis of a life to come eh, it can be said that a final court in which our moral acts will be judged explains why we act as we do now otherwise our own behavior is incomprehensible to us, that is the force of the presuppositional argument. Do you want to comment on this or just accept my question for you two? I'll defend your question and see if I can do both, but I know people are eager to get to the next segment.

Answer my question. For you, it's very fast. Your argument seems to be based on the idea that religion is an explanatory enterprise and that the warrant for believing in the doctrines of a particular religion comes from its explanatory value - why would you think that? Well, because religions have very important statements and because I didn't have time to delve into something, because not all of these religions can be simultaneously true. I mean, there are an enormous number of competing religions. It is another reason why it is obvious to me that they are man made, it is what would be expected if it were man made, there are many religions with incompatible claims and theologies and this would lead to further questioning whether any of them are completely true as the Roman Church used to say it was the only true church, some of its members still do or they are all false or they are all true, which of course cannot be true, now to gesh um and the matter of anomalies and the EX nio thing half the time when I debate are people saying that 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, no I think it is a very impressive syllogism, I can do it.

I won't do it all this afternoon, but it's very easy for anyone to go see Professor Lawren House give his brilliant online lecture called "The Entire Universe from Nothing", which explains how you can get huge amounts of stuff from out of nowhere with proper understanding. of quantum theory and then tonight Jesus says there really was nothing and the Hebrews were so smart they knew it and therefore they must have been right about God also this is ridiculous the ancient Hebrews also thought that God made man and the woman of nothing or of dust and clay, while we have exact knowledge or increasingly precise knowledge of precisely the genetic materials in common with other creatures ofthose of us who were assembled and then not happy with it, says that biblical prophecy is true regarding Palestine, this is an extraordinary thing and you were right to mention the Holocaust, if it is true that God wanted the Jews to return to Palestine, then It must have been true that he wanted his exile to end, the galute, as Zionism, the exile, the wanderer and us know it.

Do you know how that wandering ended when Christian Europe threw live Jewish babies into ovens? Well, that must be part of the plan, then, right? And some rabbis used to claim that because of the way they used to claim that the Holocaust was a punishment for exile. and then people started leaving the synagogue, so they kept quiet until the war of '67 and then when the Israeli army took back the Western Wall, they said ah, we shouldn't have spoken so quickly, actually this is what God always had in mind. throughout the conquest of the Palestinians by the Jews, where you see how brilliantly it worked.

I do not think it is wise, moral or decent to try to detect the Finger of God in human disputes. I think the Enterprise is useless and, by the way, it shows the absurdity. Of all the design arguments, thank you, thank you both for coming tonight. I'm wondering if either or both of you can recognize or rather I would like to hear your feelings about the possibility of your thoughts and your theories about religion or or uh. the lack of a god is simply a product of your environment or, to put it another way, if you were born into a different family in a different place, perhaps with a different skin color, Christopher, would you still be an atheist and denes, would you still being uh?

I assume Christian is a believer in religion or the situation could be completely reversed and his theories and thoughts are based strictly on his upbringing. Well, was it for me first? Well, in that case I can start with a compliment to things because in one. from his books he tells the story of asking his father in India, dad, everyone around here seems to be Hindu, with quite a few Muslims, why we are Christians and his father said, because, my God, the Portuguese Inquisition came to this part first of India, which is in fact, the complete and complete explanation of that, abely, you can say that gesh is very well put in this regard, she made the most of it.

Obviously, in my case, this doesn't apply because obviously, if you ask someone in Buffalo, why? if you go to the Roman Catholic Church, you'll say because my parents were NPA is the overwhelmingly likely explanation for why 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. which in fact convert a large number of Muslims on their way out of Islam They 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 it seriously and although it is relatively easy for I was born in England and immigrated to America to leave the Church of England behind, that, believe me, is not a problem.

Our great, our great religious poet, 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 a Jehovah's Witness, someone who comes to your door and bothers you for no particular reason, so, well, I think we have an environmental explanation for Christopher's skepticism being raised in a religion that it was based on the family values ​​of Henry VII uh and he's upset um that's now regarding the Indian explanation uh his explanation is true but incomplete uh and this is the point my grandfather said that to me and I started reading history of the India, uh, and I realized that a handful of Portuguese missionaries, inquisitorial or not, would find it quite difficult to convert hundreds of thousands of people and the Indian historians who look at it have a better explanation: it's called the allotment system look If you were born in the Indian pay-as-you-go system and were one of the guys on the lowest rungs of the ladder to put it bluntly, you were screwed, uh, no matter how much merit you had, you couldn't move up. and their children couldn't either, so these greedy missionaries came and maybe they had swords, but the truth is that many Indians were very eager to get out of the plaster system, they didn't need the swords and they threw themselves into the arms of the missionaries because They promised something that the Hindus could not.

The Universal Brotherhood was not always practiced, but even the idea of ​​its principle was enormously attractive and that is why there were mass conversions not only to Christianity but also to Islam, which makes a similar promise so this is the historical panorama a point The final point about this is that we are committing here what could be called a genetic fallacy. We do it with religion. We can always see the fallacy if we apply it to any other area, for example. It is very likely that there are more people who believe in Darwin's theory of evolution who come from Oxford England than from Oxford Mississippi.

It's probably equally true that more people who believe in Einstein's theory of relativity come from New York than from New Guinea, so what does this say about whether Einstein's theory is correct or not? Nothing, the origins of his ideas have no bearing on whether they are true or not. Wherever Christopher and I got our ideologies or our religious convictions, you have to weigh our arguments on merit, thank you Mr. DOA, you mentioned that you would just basically speak in secular terms in terms of defending your faith, not appealing to the Apocalypse or anything for that matter. style, do you feel there is an advantage for the world population in general? that religious people be required to defend their faith in such a place or do you think we would be better off if you had the luxury of defending your faith only within congregations of the faithful and without skeptical counterparts demanding that kind of intellectual support?

I have argued that I think Christians need to learn to be bilingual and by that I mean speaking perhaps two languages, a Christian language at home or in church, uh, and a more secular language in the public square, not because we want to use two expensive, but because we want to make our arguments accessible to people who may not share our assumptions, and many times, if someone says: do you know what you think about gay marriage?, the Christian opens the Book of Leviticus without recognizing that the The person he is speaking to 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 debate is to meet on some common ground and, in that sense I think that in a democratic society the common ground of reason is perfectly appropriate language for democratic discourse, so what we are doing here is a secular intellectual enterprise.

If I were speaking like I sometimes do at a megachurch or Catholic event, I might speak in a slightly different language. but that's because I'm speaking to an audience with different assumptions name Ian was a virgin I'm Ian from the Mich Skeptics my question is for Desh Christopher, you already addressed this, it's about the issue of spontaneous generation. J, you used the analogy with the jet that is formed spontaneously by a storm, you know, at a Swords junction. I was wondering how you make the argument that it's more likely that a Creator did this when, even though it's unlikely, you say you know something would have done it. randomly created a cell or a molecule over time, there is still in the infinite spans of things in the vast amount of time that the Universe has existed some minuscule probability that this could have happened versus this blatant argument that it must have been like this because because it can be improved when there is really no support for the converse argument, how do you know how to counter this and also do you have anything to add to this Christopher?

It is true that new probabilities can always be created, by interpreting assumptions, so, for example, there are many physicists who have calculated that if you look at all the particles of matter in the entire universe, the chance that they will come together randomly 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 is a problematic statement in itself? But with an Infinity of universes, an Infinity of transactions, even in probable events, occur, the problem with that is that you can call It's not just an outrageous violation of the Razor of Aram, it's essentially syllogistic rhetorical promiscuity because what is the evidence that there is even another universe besides our own?

Empirically, none, you are essentially inventing universes to account for the anomalies of the universe we have. What is more likely is almost as if the atheist, to try to abolish an invisible God, had to fabricate an infinity of invisible universes. I mean, I'd like to believe that, but frankly, I don't have that much faith in the person. violating William Ofum's principle here, I think, although Jes is you, Ian, everyone remembers what they said to Napoleon when he produced his. He was the greatest scientist of his time. His oratory about the solar system seen from the outside had never been done before on a model. form and the emperor said well um there doesn't seem to be any God in this device and laas said well your majesty it works perfectly well without that assumption so yes uh Janesh asked before and I should have accepted it um isn't it so to the three questions from where we come from where we come from where we go and why we are here uh there are three notes on our side that are not entirely true it was incredible that he alleged it so the The question of where we come from in the term ma, both in the macro term and at the micro, where do we come from in the cosmological, the Big Bang and the micro, the unraveling of the human DNA chain and our kinship with other animals and, indeed, with other forms of non-humanity? animal life we ​​are enormously larger we are to an extent enormously better well informed about our origins and what we don't know we don't pretend to know very important um I admit I don't know exactly how it started. is not at all the same as Ganesh's admission that he doesn't know it either because he feels he has to know it because if it's not a matter of faith and it's not a matter of God, he can't say that he believes in it. not a 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 for which we have better explanations. Also, about where we are going, we now have a very good idea. of time uh and place if you like the moment anyway when the universe and our son and indeed the will C come to an end, gesh might say well, then if you look at the Bible, all those who said the end of the world. is at hand there is a fact of biblical authority that simply proves that we were right all along Yes, except they said that by repenting you could avoid this outcome, which is not possible, ladies and gentlemen, why are we here?

Good question for which so far there is no perfection. Answer and I suggest you keep the argument open about it and sharpen the questions and consider the infinite possible variety of answers and train your mind that way. Don't say that you already know why you are here, that someone wants you to be here. You're a parent, you're protected, uh, it's all part of a divine plan, you can't know that and you shouldn't say it there. I want to go back to the basics of this debate and, Professor Dua, you mentioned. this using a bit of the free will argument.

I want to know how you can reconcile your claim that belief is a good thing when so many lives have been lost due to differing religious opinions. That's true. Although historically uh, very exaggerated, the Inquisition, uh, when I was a student at Dartman, if you had asked me, uh, how many people died in the Inquisition, I would have said hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, a horrible stain on Western history, The truth is that these things are. Henry, now carefully studied, appeared as a multi-volume study of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was the worst and for 350 years the number of people killed in the Inquisition was less than 2,000 now two 2,000 people 350 years, equals about five guys a year, not normally considered a world historic crime, um, now they are 2000 too many, yes, but my point is that while atheists often cry crocodile tears over religious crimes which, by the way, often occurred 500 or a thousand years ago, what about much greater crimes?

Crimes of atheist regimes committed within our lifetime in the last century and still continuing if you take Hitler, Stalin and Mao alone, the three of them together, in the space of a few decades, killed close to 100 million people and that is tip. from the iceberg what's up with chesu Kim Jong sick Fidel Castro Paul pot Paul pot is a Junior League atheist uh, normally you don't even mention the guy's name, but his Kar Rouge regime in Indochina after the Vietnam war kills about two million in about three years? two million, even Bin Laden in his wildest dreams doesn't even come close, so I'm all for looking at the historical record, butlet's look at it fairly and not blame religion for crimes when there are much bigger and more recent crimes committed by atheist regimes, let's look at all sides of The Ledger um, there's a factual and theoretical comment to make on that first.

I think you are completely wrong about the Inquisition, not that the numbers game is crucial, but the Inquisition in the Americas, uh. It caused more fees to call a large meeting at the University of Salaman to consider whether the Christian world should ever have been conquerors because the genocidal price paid by the people of ancient pre-Columbian Colombia was so high, slavery, torture, burning anyone. He knows what the numbers are, but they are scary. The second 30 years war must be considered a war of religion and we also do not know how many people died there, but the delay of civilization was absolutely gigantic, as was the poor harvest of innocent population third um at the beginning of the first world war a clash of empires all imperial leaders were, in a sense, theocrats the Ottoman Empire was a theocracy by definition Kaiser vham thei 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 Great Britain George F. was the head of the Church of England as you say correctly founded in the family valleys of Henry VII um civilization has not recovered from the delay the process of that war or in fact we will never overcome what happened in that war and those are wars of religion just to stay with the point of fact and in the secular the accusation that the other murderers are secular from the first one that you mentioned Adolf Hitler um, it must be said that uh, I can almost give you the reference on my camp page where he says that his desire to massacre the Jews is due to his fidelity to the work of the Lord, he considers it a holy cause. in my C I may not have the authority to say that, but you can't call it secular on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it reads got mitun, each of them God on our side just as the Confederacy had it Deo vinde as an official motto in the Civil War for slavery.

Catholic historian Paul Johnson estimated that up to a 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 delete it, pretend it doesn't exist, agree a propaganda word, insert it in its place, Christian far-right, you don't have to alter, you don't have to alter anything about the spread of fascism. from Portugal through Spain to Croatia uh to Slovakia where the head of the Nazi puppet regime is was a priest of the holy orders father tiso vichi Austria do you know the history or if you don't know it you should or anyone here who considers themselves Catholic should know that this is not.

I'm sorry to say, ladies and gentlemen. secularism of others, I would actually say that the pulpit had a very extreme idea of ​​a restoration of the ancient Buddhist authority known as Anar, but don't let me discuss too much what was happening to these heroic mass murderers who everyone thought could achieve a definitive history everyone thought that with them history would be consummated history would in fact come to an end they were messianic the whole problem, to begin with, is the idea that human beings can be perfected by force or by faith or by conquest or by the Inquisition which may take it as an explicitly religious form or simply as another messianic form, but it reinforces the point I started with, don't take anything for granted, don't believe in any absolutism, don't believe in any totalitarianism, don't ask for any Supreme leader. in heaven or on Earth because that way lies madness, torture and murder, and I always will.

Can I respond briefly, given the nature of the topic let me tell you very briefly first of all Lascassas was not protesting the work of the Inquisition, he was protesting the work of the conquistadors. There is a big difference between the Spanish who came for greed and gold and to take slaves and the church. who sent missionaries the missionaries were on the side of the Indians and called the debate in Salamanca in which the pope decided that the Indians have a soul and that the Spanish conquest must never be stopped in the history of humanity by the way a ruler has ordered to stop a conquest for moral reasons and it was the missionaries who presented that argument so objectively, it is not true that the deaths of the Indians, most of which, by the way, were due to malaria and other diseases that they did not have immunity, but it had nothing to do with the missionaries it was driven by the greed of the conqueror the 30 Years' War look at the history of the 30 Years' War and you will see the alliances if they were clearly divided into Catholics versus Protestants, you could say which maybe it's a religious war but they didn't, Catholic France started allying with the Protestants at the time the Protestants started losing, you see that the territorial wars for power and land are now presented as wars of religion, was World War I a religious war that would make everyone war a religious war World War II was a religious war in other words, just because France is Catholic and England is Protestant doesn't make it a religious war if they are fighting for Hitler territory now here we have to be a little careful because in mind comp Hitler has a long section on propaganda in which he says not to be afraid to lie to defend your case.

There is a book edited by the distinguished historian Hugh Trevor Roper called Hitler's table talk that offers detailed accounts compiled by Martin, bored with Hitler. views on a wide range of topics Hitler hated Christianity he was not a religious believer he might have been some kind of tonic pagan he might have believed in a strange form of ancient polytheism but no recognizable form of monotheism and he detested Christianity so I'm doing The work of the Lord was tactical, he wanted the support of the Bavarian Catholics and the Lutheran Protestants and that is why he invented what he called the Aryan Christ, the Christ who returns to take revenge on the Jews, the churches did not accept him, so this is a complex story that I myself have written about this, the conclusion is that my point is not that Hitler was an atheist but that the 20th century saw secular regimes that attempted to get rid of traditional religion and morality and establish a new man and a new utopia, secular paradise and look what an ocean of blood, a mountain of bodies brought us, but for this reason I come to the conclusion that it is this effort to impose secular utopia and not religion that is responsible for the mass murders of History , you can, you can respond quickly if you want and then we'll come back.

I will be very I'm going to let the questions last about eight minutes because we started late and then we'll finish. Should not. be quick in that case. You elegantly withdraw the accusation that National Socialism and Fascism were secular or atheistic, and I thank you for your generosity. Second, that people change sides in religious wars for opportunistic reasons does not particularly surprise me. You can spend a lot. time telling a Protestant in Northern Ireland who has a picture of King William painted on the side of his house that when King William fought in the Battle of Bo his ally was the Pope, the Protestant more or less knows it, the Major Protestant, but I don't really think it's true, it turns out it's true, of course, it's opportunistic, why is it opportunistic?

Because religion is man-made, as I began by saying, it is what you would expect if religion were the creation of fearful and aggressive primates, it is exactly what you would expect and the same could be said of their non-religious attempts to create the Paradise because it demands too much of people and leads to fanaticism, torture, murder and war, so all you achieve is to replace the question, no, there is no noology, no, there is no eschatology, no. there is no definitive story no, there is no redemption not in those supreme leaders here or anywhere else thank you, thank you both for the stimulating ideas you presented.

I have questions about the scientific things you mentioned. One of them came up before you mentioned. the cell as this complex thing as theorized to have arisen spontaneously and may be outdated but I remember reading theories at some points about more chemical molecules that started reproducing long before actual cells and wouldn't that be an explanation of the The previous life and the second have to do with the perfectly tuned universe and if the logic of saying that there is life that fits this perfectly tuned universe is an indication that in some divinely created way it fits with the idea that there is Evolution and if 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 would be no other way in which different forms of the life would have arisen Let me address those points in sequence with respect to the cell uh Darwin speculated that it might have arisen in a warm pond in the 1950s there were some experiments that generated some amino acids and there was a lot of excitement in thinking that there might be a way to recreate in the laboratory the ingredients of life.

Those experiments haven't gone anywhere, but the most important thing is that in the real world it wasn't a laboratory, even if you could recreate the ingredients in a laboratory using all of them. "The laboratory apparatus does not mean that it happened, but it has to show that it could have happened that way in nature, so what I say is simply based on current knowledge and all arguments must be based on what we know now". We are all open to new ideas in the future, currently there is no good explanation and all I am saying is that in any other sphere of life, if I were walking and looked down an alley and saw a head spinning around, I would conclude that someone was committed suicide or someone killed someone, it's a reasonable inference from the data, you could say, well, that's a pretty presumptuous conclusion, there could have been natural ways for the head to detach from the head and there could be, but what's the matter? more plausible under normal circumstances when we see intelligent activity what is science but an effort to extract intelligence from nature the reason we need Newton and Einstein is because intelligence is hidden in nature E equals mc² does not jump to the view you have to taste nature and pull so if nature is an incarnation, a network of intelligent systems is not the most reasonable explanation of why intelligence put it there, if we need intelligence to get it out, how it got there in the first place, This seems to me to be nothing. rather than a direct inference from the facts now I want men to say a few words about Larry Krauss, who was mentioned earlier, the physicist, the universe came out of nowhere, there is a lot of verbal juggling involved in all of this, imagine if he tried to show The following money comes out of nowhere, proof that all assets will be counted as plus all liabilities will be counted as minus pluses and minuses cancel we have money but there is a zero on the balance sheet money comes out of nowhere, you would say this is a a little hand basically what is happening today is what physicists like Krauss do is identify all energy as positive but all gravitational energy is negative, they assume that the total amount of positive and negative energy cancels out and therefore , the universe emerged from nothing.

It didn't really come out of nowhere, there's a lot of energy there, but by defining one type of energy as more and another type of energy as less, they cancel each other out and you have, so what I'm talking about here is I want to show the stunts to the that modern atheism has to come. By the way, it's not science. Krauss is trying to make an atheist argument in an atheist place based on science, but what I'm saying is look how far the guy has to go. It attempts to defy the normal operations of reason to tell us that not just one molecule but an entire universe arose from absolutely nothing.

You can believe it if you want, but it sure takes a lot of credulity. I'll try. Be fair, but first I sincerely plead with you, ladies and gentlemen, to watch Professor Krauss's lecture for yourselves and not to accept this periodical version of the question of nothingness. holy book all the elements we are made of in our environment come from stars that exploded from Stars that explode and die at a rate of one per second and have been doing so since the Big Bang, isn't it pretty magical to think that they all We are made of stardust, uh, it doesn't matter, as Professor K says, it doesn't matter about the martyrs.

The stars had to die so we could live. This is a very essential reflection and overshadows the religious explanations that you did not notice. D that the gentleman asked at the end, couldn't it have turned out differently? I think that was possibly the crux of his question. I would recommend another study to you, sorry, excuse me, Professor Steven JG, whom I mentioned flatteringly before despite My disagreement with him about non-overlapping magisteria made awonderful paleontological book called The Burgess Shale. This is half of a mountain that fell in the Canadian Rockies and reveals the entire inner core of a large mountain for you and you to read. as if on a screen it looks more like a bush than a tree, all the little tendrils of the evolution of reptiles, birds, plants, etc., as they sprout, the branches offer and many of them become They stopped, nothing happened to them, they were quite promising, but they continued. nowhere and it doesn't go up like a tree, it goes everywhere like a bush, well, says professor ghoul, it's one of the most disturbing dizzying thoughts I've ever heard from a paleontologist, suppose we could, that somehow we can. rewind this like it's on tape get Burgess Shale get the outlines of the book rewind rewind it play it again there is absolutely no certainty that it would come out the same way all those branches would separate and diverge and die or flower the way they They do it is completely governed by uncertainty there are any number of conceivable outcomes that evolution could have come up with it is another version of our selfishness our self esteem could say our solipsism that we cannot help but easily convince ourselves that all this happened so that the Pope could briefly condemn masturbation.

If I can offer a very, very brief rebuttal, we are now plumbing the depths a little bit. I want to point out that the demon thesis rewinds the tape of life. and it would come out another way, which is already a few decades old, is questioned by the world's leading expert on shale stocks, Simon Conway Morris, a paleontologist from England, and also by Christian duv, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and his argument is not Basically, G was wrong. G was assuming that each evolutionary pathway would cut very differently, but the most recent evidence is that that is not the case.

Consider the evolution of the eye over a long time in one direction. 6,000 year old creationists would say how the eye could evolve. It turns out that the eye has evolved several times and has evolved in similar ways, which tells us that evolution is not a random thicket; tends to converge towards solutions that are similar even when faced with different types of organisms and different types of problems, so I think I recommend not only Conway Morris and DV, but also a book called Rare Earth by paleontologist Brownley that basically analyzes why we have not found life on other planets Rare Earth and its conclusion is that the conditions for life to exist are so particular. that it is actually reasonable to expect life to exist only here only on this planet seems almost unbelievable but when you think about it it actually makes sense consider this our life depends completely on the sun the sun has eight this is more than brief oh you You are right, I I'm getting carried away, so I'll stop here and we'll move on to the next question.

Do you have a very short answer? um that's so nice and how much progress we've made, now no one argues against the evolution of the eye now the eye evolution argument is completely conceded and then it's used against Stephen J Gold what to read There's Richard Richard Dawkins is a chapter on the many evolutions of the eye, including the fish that has four um. Probably climbing a mountain, which I also recommend because I agree with you that it is overwhelmingly likely that our planet is the only one that supports life. We certainly know in our little suburb of the solar system that all the other planets don't.

To support life, they are either too hot or too cold, as are large swathes of our planet, and we have every reason to know now that we live on the edge of the climate knife and, meanwhile, our son is preparing to explode and become a red dwarf I ask you whose design is that we will answer one more question. I'm going to ask each of our speakers to let their answer to this question also serve as their closing remarks. Now I feel bad, although it would be better to choose. Well man, okay, tread lightly because you tread on our dreams, um, my question is for Mr.

Denish, you talked earlier about the improbability of many things and, given the improbability, the necessary meaning of certain things, so because it is so due to 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? As existentialists would say, there is no inherent meaning, but we can create our own meaning, so I guess my question is why should there be? be it some inherent purpose or some trajectory why things can't just have happened even though it may be very unlikely.

I think you misunderstand my argument if it is an inference to meaning. I'm not saying that we have improbable events that we have to solve. some kind of meaning no, I am making inferences about a cause David Hume, the great skeptic, said that no event occurs without a cause, now it is true in the strange world of the quantum, we can find exceptions to that rule, but the effects Quantums cancel out when you get to macroscopic objects and every time you hear someone say Consciousness, I don't really know what that is but maybe it's something quantum, they're basically saying they don't know that quantum is invoked to explain things that aren't explained. , this is my point, this is the the argument was made stricter 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 cannot cause itself unless Professor Kuss is right since the cause cannot be natural is more credible than a supernatural being and also a supernatural being with a lot of power and a lot knowledge and a lot of concern for us because life is the result of this process these are reasonable inferences to a cause that I mentioned earlier the three big questions Christopher said that science has provided answers and he reiterated my three questions so that none of them were my question original so for example when I said where are we going my point was what happens after we die there is life after death we don't know the atheist doesn't know the believer doesn't know the atheist who says it doesn't exist just like the believer who says yes is taking a leap of faith Christopher I avoided the question by changing it to: Will the universe come to an end?

Will the sun explode? That wasn't my point. My point is what comes, what happens to us after we die, that is unknown. Science is clueless on that question and here's the Final Thought: Too often we use evolution as a general explanation, but we don't subject evolution to the critical scrutiny that we would subject religion to, for example, Christopher invoked before and it has been invoked repeatedly Freud's idea that we invent FA after life because we want to live forever we are upset with life we ​​have suffering we have death we imagine another world that is better without suffering without death heaven now the only problem with this first of all is that Religions not only postulate heaven but they also postulate hell and yes.

Let's invent another world to compensate for the difficulties of this one. It's very strange that you invent hell. Hell is much worse than diabetes or even death, because death is simply turning off the computer, but there is an evolutionary argument against this. Now he has discredited FL's Freudian explanation and Evolution says that we are creatures programmed to survive and reproduce. It is very expensive for us to invent schemes that are not true and invest expensive resources, especially for primitive man, to give money to priests to build cathedrals and pyramids to invest in a next life. Evolution mercilessly punishes that type of extravagance and that is why this Freudian theory that was very fashionable 60 years ago has fallen into discredit among academics.

It doesn't make evolutionary sense, so that's what I'm talking about. In a debate like this, I have been very satisfied with this debate. I think it's actually been at a higher level than many debates on this type of topic and even some of our debates I think we've been able to raise it to another level, ultimately I think I want to show that the position of the believer, no less than that of the e aist, it is an attempt to grapple with the facts to make sense of the data to rationally illuminate the world in which we live in faith. a substitute for reason Faith only comes into action when reason comes to an end when there are explanations and they stop I date my wife for three years then I want to decide if I should propose to her I put reason in I try to see where it goes but then I I say what life will be like with her for the next 50 years and there's no way to know I can say well I'm going to be agnostic I'm going to wait for the data to come in well if you do that she'll marry someone else that way we'll both be dead the data will never will be available at some point rational knowledge has to give way to practical action and faith is the bridge between always limited human knowledge and the inevitability and necessity of human action, which is ultimately something that knowledge can teach us, thank you very much, if I'm not mistaken, that was a question about the meaning of life, there was no where, why, when, go ahead, means well, a good way to end if. you like the ERS, I went to the Galaxy.

I missed something there, he passed my bat um and it kind of took me off my swing too just a second, where was I? Yeah, it means um, but before we go on with that, just two things in Des um in his last few comments I don't think it can be fairly said in front of an audience like this that the refusal to take a faith-based position that doesn't have evidence, in other words, a belief that there is an afterlife or a belief that there is a Supreme Being. If I say that I don't believe it because there is no evidence for it, it is not even casuistry to say that that is, on my part, a statement based on faith, it is rather a rejection of faith and a refusal to use it as a method of reasoning, so it is not at all comparing a second, not just fully defending Sigman Freud.

Dees is right to criticize Freud's future as an illusion insofar as when people are subject to wishful thoughts, we might expect them to be purely hedonistic only to want the best to say let's imagine a comforting future while we are there something that will cheer everyone up in fact we are not as nice as everyone that we don't want everyone to go to Hell, excuse me, we don't want everyone to go to heaven, as the old English sect used to say, we are the pure and chosen and few and everyone else is damned, there's enough room in hell for you, we don't want heaven to be crowded, um and the great existentialist Juan Pablo Satra said that hell is other people, but really what a lot of people mean is that hell is for other people and have a desire as strong as the thought that other people suffer eternally as they have the thought and desire. 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 or the early Christian versions where part of the pleasure of being in heaven was knowing that other people burned forever and that is what you would expect from a predatory, fearful, partially evolved primate species that was making up a religious story about itself.

It sounds exactly like you'd expect it to. Well, he doesn't believe in any of that, in fact, he thinks it's evil and useless. People with beliefs have the nerve to ask me well, if you don't believe in heaven and hell, what gives meaning to your life? Don't you detect a slight insult and a slight irrationality in that question? You mean I would have a lot more meaning in my life if I thought I would die and I would be given a chance uh I would have been given a chance while I was alive if the ID made a mistake I would be damned eternally that was the kind of judge I would be in the meantime It would be advisable to live my life in favor of this supernatural dictator who would give more meaning to my life than my opinion contrary to Pascal Contra Pascal that if there is such a judge I will be able to say at least I never pretend to believe in you to win your approval, sir or madam. , as the case may be, and if it is as reported, you will have detected that those were my thoughts and at least I was not a hypocrite, um Pascal. say no, at least pretend that you think it is beneficial for everyone, this is corrupt reasoning, it is the reasoning of a Huer and it gives no meaning to life, still, why do I care, for example, for What do I care, why do I care?

Rwanda, why am I worried about my Iranian friends fighting against theocracy? Why do I give them my own time? Well, I'll tell you why, um, and I wait and say it. I guess at the risk of embarrassing myself, it gives me great pleasure to do it, I like to feel that since we only have one life to live, I can help people make it free as best I can and help them in their true fight for freedom, that in its formMore essential is the fight against theocracy, which is the original form that dictatorship and the violation of human rights really take.

I enjoy doing it and I enjoy the type of people it puts me in contact with and I like to passively donate blood, I mean I don't like to spill. but I don't mind it draining into a pint because, strange as it may seem, it's a pleasant feeling and you know that someone else is drinking a pint of blood and you're not wasting one because with a strong cup of tea or Bloody Mary it you'll get it back or both you'll 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 best interest to do it someone else benefits you don't lose and if, like me, you have a rare blood group you hope other people do the same so that there is enough blood when your turn comes and it is a pleasant experience in all aspects and it is not like being afraid of judgment, it is much more significant than that, I think it is often believed in people like me that there is something Without joy in our vision, where is the role in the atheistic world, the unbelieving world, for the numinous or the ecstatic, or the transcendent, come on, those of us who can appreciate poetry and music and love and friendship and solidarity should not be treated as if we have no imagination as if we have no moral or emotional pulse as if we do not feel things uh at nightfall when the music plays and there are friends around like If we do not feel great pleasure when we meet, We do not gather to repeat incantations that have been instilled in us since childhood, we do not feel so insecure that we have to incant, recite and follow routines and rituals. discuss our differences and discuss the latest challenges to our worldview from people like gesh, we try to use the method of Socratic dialogue even when its conclusions are not welcome to us and therefore I cannot recommend atheism as morally Superior I can say that at least he faces the consequences of his belief with a certain stoicism.

We could wish for eternal life but we are not going to give it as a reward for work that we have not yet done, so my final recommendation is why not try the stoic life and Socratic for yourself why don't you examine the tradition more closely the great tradition we have of Lucretius and Democrat that passes for Galileo spin voler Einstein uh Russell and many others a tradition I think much greater than the fearers and the propitiators and the ritualists them I have been enormously grateful for your kindness in having me here and I want to thank you again, good evening, thank you all for coming.