Introduction and Personal Background

I have no local boy roots. I am a Navy brat, however. Commander Hitchens of Portsmouth. I’d like to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, that that isn’t the best that Frank can do. He ended with that pious hope. He must indeed hope it isn’t. I’ve seen him do better in his 20 minutes. He barely got his trousers off, as a matter of fact, before he had to sit down because he didn’t get beyond deism.

On Deism and Atheism

I don’t think he even intended much to get beyond deism. If there was a word a-deist, it would describe me probably rather better than the vulgar word atheist does. I don’t have a special word for saying why I don’t believe in Santa Claus, for example, or why I don’t believe in the tooth fairy, or why I don’t believe in astrology. I don’t need a special word for that. I assume, with me, you assume, that these are fairy tales, man-made fables, either for the frightening or the amusement of, depending on need, children.

I don’t believe there is a supernatural dimension, and I don’t believe there have ever been any miracles, so I don’t believe that prayers are answered. I don’t believe any of this. None of this comes up so far in this argument. I’m not arguing with a religious person yet at all. I’m arguing with someone who claims to know more than I do about physics and biology. It’s possible that he does. Many, many people do. But bear in mind that we cannot say that we know that there was not a prime mover. It’s not within our compass.

The Nature of Knowledge and Prime Movers

Pitifully ignorant as we are, only scrabbling on the lower slopes of the study of physics, as all of us are, even the best, we may not say that we know there was no prime mover. We may not say that. We can say that all the laws appear to operate without that assumption. It’s very, very, very rare indeed to meet a physicist of any standing from Einstein onwards who is not at the most a spinosist, in other words, someone who might say there could be a pantheism somewhere, there could be a force, but there is no way you can take a step from the laws of physics, the observable creation of the cosmos, that leads you to the belief that there is an intervening personal God who does answer prayers, who does watch over you, who does notice what you’re up to, who does mind what you do, who you sleep with, and in what position, what you eat, what you eat and on what days of the week, what propitiations and sacrifices you will make, what commandments you will follow.

There is no possible way. No one’s even tried it, of getting from the laws of physics or biology to any such idea. So from the person who says, “I’m a deist. I don’t think all of this can be an accident. There must be some cosmic force,” I say, “I can’t disprove it, though I think the cosmos functions without it, but you have all your work, sir or ma’am, still ahead of you before you can say that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person, let alone that he was the son of God, let alone that his mother was a virgin, let alone that he was resurrected.”

None of these things, by the way, would prove he was the son of God if they did happen, nor would they prove that his doctrines were not erroneous. A resurrected person who was the son of a virgin could still be talking nonsense. There’s no logic that says he must be right. If I’m having an argument with you, sir, and you say, “You lose, boy chick,” I say, “How come?” “Because my mother never went to bed with another man.” Your logic is faulty. I think my case could remain just as strong as ever it was.

The Origins of Religion

In default of that, I must say, rather bizarre intervention. Now, why do we have religion in the first place? Why are we having this discussion? Why does Frank feel the need to talk in this way? Because we are pattern-seeking mammals. It’s part of our evolution. We look for patterns. We’re designed to look for them. And if we can’t find a good explanation, we’ll come up with a bad one rather than none at all. Most people would rather have a conspiracy theory than no theory. It’s very observable that.

There’s a lot of junk science around before good science arrives. Before we have astronomy, we have astrology. Before we have chemistry, we have alchemy. All of these things are derivatives of religion because in a very sinister verse of the Bible that used to upset me when I was being forced to listen to it as a little boy, it says, “Seek and ye shall find.” Yes, that’s exactly right. Seek and you will find. Seek for an explanation of volcanic eruptions when you’re living in a primitive society and you will think they’re probably a visitation from an angry deity.

And if you’re told you can postpone the next eruption by throwing a few live babies into the lava down the crater, that’s what you’ll do. Religion has just started. Religion has just begun. Why do some people get the plague and others not? Because they’re sinful. Why? Where’s the plague coming from in the first place? It’s a punishment from God and/or in early Christian society, the Jews have poisoned the wells. So we’ll go and get them. Again, because we already hate them because they killed our Redeemer. They committed deicide. All of them did. All of them. No one’s exempt.

Indeed, if you want to be–if you have to be a Christian, it’s an article of their faith that we were all present at Calvary. We all drove in the nails, the Jews particularly so. And we all have to expiate this guilt for a crime that may or may not have been committed, but if it was, was committed before we were born. What is this? It’s not physics. Okay? It’s not biology. It’s not science. It’s faith. Why don’t you fly under your true flag, sir? Why don’t you say, “These things must be believed as articles of faith. Don’t try and derive it from science.”

David Hume and the Supernatural

Now I’ve–I can’t improve on the argument that David Hume comes up with–came up with against the idea of the supernatural, against the idea that the laws of nature are occasionally suspended in order to make people’s faith a little more secure. Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary, you may remember, says under prayer–under P for prayer–prayer, a request that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner himself admittedly unworthy.

David Hume puts it a little more acidly than that. He says, “If you see the laws of nature apparently suspended, perhaps a virgin’s given birth, perhaps a leper has suddenly stopped being a leper, who knows what it might be? You know the sort of thing. You have to ask yourself one of two things. Well, actually, you have to ask yourself both. Which is the more probable, that the laws of nature have just been suspended or that I am under a misapprehension?” That’s if you are an eyewitness yourself to the–if you’re hearing about it second, third, fourth, and fifth hand, you have to ask this question with redoubled and trebled and quadrupled force.

And the likelihood is which, that the laws of nature were suspended or that somebody maybe garbled, maybe a rumor got around. If you make this assumption, then nothing is mysterious about reality. Nothing is mysterious at all. It would explain why everyone seems to die and no one comes back. No longer a mystery about that. It would explain why some people are cured of leprosy and other even worse diseases if they go to the doctor and if that doctor has access to certain kinds of drugs, but not if they don’t.

Theological Reflections on the Plague

The great theologian, Lancelot Andrews, the bishop of–archbishop of Canterbury, during the Black Death, wondered. He said, “It seems odd to me. There are people who go to church and pray and they give their tithes and they do everything that they’re supposed to do and they lead godly lives and yet they seem to die of the plague just as much as the sinners do.” He went to his grave, the archbishop, not realizing that he’d very nearly stumbled on a very good point.

After all, the discussion before us this evening is what explains reality better? Well, I think my explanation is probably, so far, not the inferior one. I’ve actually watched, I’ve seen myself the fabrication of a religion or of a religious figure. I’ve seen it done before my very eyes in the case of the fraudulent woman calling herself Mother Teresa, though she certainly was a virgin and never had any children, and actually named Agnes Bourjachou, an Albanian crook who worked in Calcutta who was considered by those who read only the newspapers as a friend of the poor, but was in fact a friend of an advocate for poverty.

She believed poverty was a gift from God, that suffering ennobled people. She didn’t believe in this for herself, for poverty, because she took several million dollars from, among other people, the Duvalier family in Haiti, probably the most cruel deceivers and oppressors of the poor in the late 20th century, from the Charles Keating savings and loan racket in California, the so-called savings and loan scandal, from many, many other depraved rich persons, and used the money to build not a teaching hospital in Calcutta or a clinic or for the relief of poverty or hunger or disease or anything of the sort, but to build over 150 convents in her own name to found an order that would glorify and magnify herself. And that’s where the money went.

Miracles and Canonization

Since then, we are asked to believe by His Holiness the Pope, the lately named, formerly named Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, that because of an intercession by her posthumously that a woman in Bengal named Monica was cured of a tumor just by praying and putting a picture of Mother Teresa on the swelling in her stomach. I can assure you that’s not how tumors go away. Ladies and gentlemen, I can also assure you the last thing India needs is to be told that its people, when they’re ill, should go to faith healers and shamans and the enormous number of witch doctors, crooks and charlatans who there are in the subcontinent.

Many people will die if they follow this kind of advice. And the doctors in the case have already testified before anyone else could be heard from that they understand perfectly what medicine they gave her, how she responded to treatment, how normal the disorder was, how predictable was the recovery. But you’re going to be told quite soon from St. Peter’s Square in Rome that this was a miracle and it fulfills the conditions for this terrible woman to be made into a saint.

I watched every stage of this. I saw it happen. I went to Calcutta. I’ve talked to and interviewed people who were concerned in the miracle case. I was asked myself by the Vatican to come and testify against the ridiculous canonization and beatification of this woman. I know how religion gets started, and it gets started because we like our illusions and because the world, the realm of illusion, is very, very precious to us.

The Question of Existence and Design

But again, the matter for this evening is does deism, theism, or atheism best explain reality? And once again, I don’t think my explanation fails. How am I doing for time? Eight minutes. Bloody good. This question of the beginning of things is, of course, very important. And if you think that it must have had a beginner as well as a beginning, that it’s not just a design or an apparent design, but it must have had a designer, you are only asking for another question to be asked, which is who created this creator? Who designed this designer? Who fixed up this prime mover? Who was the prime mover for that prime mover?

The common word for this in logic and some philosophy causes is it’s an infinite regression. It doesn’t really get you anywhere. But as I say, it wouldn’t get you to religion, even if you could prove that there must have been a prime mover. It wouldn’t get you to the worship of other human beings as if they were prophets or saviors or redeemers. It can’t help you get there. You have to believe that as a matter of faith or not. You can’t do it from physics.

The Limits of Human Understanding

There’s furthermore, I think, an almost insuperable ontological problem involved here. Suppose it to be true. Suppose that I concede it. Suppose there must be such a designer or an individual, an intelligence, something like a person that does this. How could I know it? Which person is smarter, sufficiently smarter, perhaps I should say? Smart enough, smarter than me, smarter than anyone here, smarter, I dare say, even than Frank, to know this person and what’s in his mind?

I submit that it’s not possible for another human being to tell you he knows this to be true, any more than it’s possible for me to tell you, which I don’t try and do, because I’m not unreasonable in this way, that I know it isn’t true. But don’t you see that there’s all the difference in the world between my saying I can’t know it and Frank saying, “Well, I can’t prove it,” because he wants you to believe it’s necessary so that you will then become Christian.

And I say that that’s a leap that you simply cannot make, and you certainly can’t make on the basis of evidence. I think the religious would be much better to leave evidence alone where they don’t excel and to concentrate on faith, where at least they can claim some kind of monopoly.

Reverse Engineering of Religious Beliefs

I’m not terribly impressed either by the argument that’s advanced so often these days. Remember, all the Christian propositions were complete and absolutely in place. The resurrection, the healing of – excuse me, not the healing – the forgiveness of sin, all of these, the virgin birth, the fatherhood of God, the sonhood of Jesus, the Adam and Eve story, all of these things were completely believed and promulgated by the Christian church long before there was any knowledge of the Big Bang or of evolution.

So what they’re doing is essentially a reverse engineering job. Okay, now we do know these things, most of them established, discovered, published in the teeth of religious opposition. Now we know them. Ah, that proves we were right all along. God was even cleverer than we thought. This is just plagiarism. It’s just borrowing from other disciplines to make it all come right.

The End of the Universe

And if we’re going to talk about beginnings, we’d better have a bit of a word about ends, had we not. About the end we know a great deal. We know, as Edwin Hubble discovered some time ago, that the universe is expanding at a very, very rapid rate. This is known as the red light shift effect. It was thought of – it was thought by most physicists that that wouldn’t go on at the same rate for very long, that the rate at which everything was racing away from itself would diminish. The sort of Newtonian logic would suggest that.

In fact, it’s been shown very recently by a brilliant physicist named Lawrence Krauss that the Hubble rate is actually increasing. Things are flying apart much, much faster than we thought. Very soon, in fact, it won’t be possible probably to see the red light shift or the other traces of the original Big Bang anymore. The end is really coming on us at an increasing rate of speed.

So out of our something – to reverse the question that keeps being asked with such a suggestiveness – out of our something, a great deal of nothing is coming. So who’s the creator and designer of that, may I inquire? And meantime, as any astronomer can tell you, if you look in the sky at night, you can almost without a telescope see the Andromeda Galaxy heading towards us. It’s not very far off in astronomical time. The Andromeda Galaxy is headed direct collision course with our own. We know that’s going to happen.

The Chaos of Existence

There’s a lot of nothingness headed our way. And that’s if we have time. That’s if our sun does not swell up, burn out, our oceans boil, everything come to an end. In the meantime, which is a certainty to happen at some point whether the other things happen before or after or not. So whose design exactly is that? How does it come that just in the tiny suburb of our bit of the cosmos, the little solar system that we inhabit, all of the other planets are either much too hot or much too cold to support anything like a life, as is true of great parts of our own planet?

How is that? Some design. Some designer. How is it that 99.9% of all the species that have ever been on Earth, ever, recorded have gone extinct, as we very nearly did ourselves as a species in the very early dawning years of our existence in Africa, which has now been mapped? Very nearly, we’re not a business altogether. Who designed that contingency? Whose plan and caprice is this?

In other words, if you are to rephrase all these arguments of science and natural law and so forth, to assume that they work better with a god, you’re just as badly off as you would be otherwise, because the same laws and the same processes still apply. You just say that they’re set in motion by a designer. In that case, he’s responsible for the extinctions. He’s responsible for the diseases. He’s responsible for the chaos, for the dead planets, for the swirling chaos of the other galaxies, for the expanding rate at which nothingness is headed towards us.

Conclusion on Divine Responsibility

So this god, if he exists, must be one or some or all of the following: tinkering and incompetent, very capricious, very wasteful, and very cruel. Now, that is what you get, sir, if you make some deity responsible for the natural order as we observe it, which was the topic we were asked to address this evening. And I think I’d be trespassing on Frank’s time if I wedge any further. So I’ll reserve my remaining points for rebuttal. And I’m very grateful for your attention. Thank you.