Introduction and Context

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming. Thank you, Dr. Turek, for that very spirited opening to the evening. I should say first it’s a great honor to be in the capital of the great state of Virginia. I’m in a small way a biographer of Thomas Jefferson, and his memorial, as you know, omitted the mention of his presidencies and vice presidencies and preferred to focus on his work at the university and his authorship of the Virgi nia Statute on Religious Freedom, which is the embryo and basis of the First Amendment to our Constitution, which makes this the only country in the world that has ever decided that God and constitutional matters should be separated.

The Existence of God

And it’s in defense partly of that civilizational impulse that I rise this evening to satirize the idea that we’re here by somebody else’s permission and owe that person an explanation, which is what it is to be a theist, if not a deist at any rate. I almost never watch television, and I’m usually glad that I don’t, but now I’m glad that sometimes I’m forced by my daughter to watch Family Guy, because you may possibly have seen the moment when the chubby father comes down in the morning and looks at his cereal in the bowl, accepting one of your more sophisticated challenges, and says, “Look at this.” It says, “Woo woo woo woo woo.” And his daughter says, “Those are Cheerios, dad.”

But I accept the ontological challenge, and I accept it in this way. The answer to the question with which we confront ourselves tonight, or are confronted if you prefer, “Does God exist?” is to me, yes, it does. It must do. It must do because it is so real to those who do believe in it. There are people of whom it may be said that for them, God does exist. I’ve become perfectly persuaded of this by now. There is no form of persuasion that would make me assent to this proposition.

Some of us are born. We are born, too, in answer to Blaise Pascal’s own problem, the one that made him write his pensee and address them to those who are so made that they cannot believe. Those of us to whom almost everything that Dr. Turek just said would be the mere equivalent of white noise. I suppose it’s my job this evening to explain ontologically how that is the case.

Limbo and Belief

Perhaps I’ll do it by force of example. Recently, very recently, in fact as little ago in time as last year, the Vatican announced that Limbo, the destination of the unbaptized child soul, no longer exists. There is no such place. St. Augustine was in error, it appears, in sending so many children, at least the souls of so many unbaptized children, to this destination for so long. Among the comments that I heard about this, among the mildest actually, was that of a woman raised in the Catholic faith whose child had died before baptism could take place, who had for many years believed that that’s where her unbaptized child had gone, and she said, “They can’t tell me that place doesn’t exist.

It’s been as real to me as anything possibly could be for so long. They’ve no right to tell me now that this no longer exists.” Ontologically, Limbo exists for those who believe in it just as God does. I’m not here to deny that.

It’s only a few decades now since the rival church, the Church of Rome, the Church of England, announced that really no one actually goes to hell. It could be that after you die you’re forbidden God’s grace, but there’s no real place of eternal, unending, infinite torture and torment to those who claim the grace of God and the redemption of Jesus made a living for so many years, and how do they make their living? By lying to children.

Think of it. Hundreds and hundreds of years of people proudly earning their keep by lying to children and terrifying them, and saying that because they could do that, they were morally superior to us. Reason, common sense, decency, ordinary decency, rebels against this kind of mind-forged manacle, however charmingly or humorously it’s expressed, but hell exists in the minds of several people I’ve spoken to just today on this campus and in the intervals of other conversations. For them it’s real, and I don’t say that it’s not.

Challenging Beliefs

What I want to show is that it can, if it does exist, nonetheless be abolished. Like many other mind-forged manacles and man-made tyrannies that confront us. And in fact, that this belief in a supreme and unalterable tyranny is the oldest enemy of our species, the oldest enemy of our intellectual freedom and our moral autonomy, and must be met, and must be challenged, and must be overthrown. I want to argue for nothing less than that.

It’s actually rather wonderful, isn’t it, that religious authorities who used to say they were infallible say, “Just take the last pope.” Just the last. I know I’m not talking with a Catholic apologist this evening, but nonetheless, the Church, when people say “the Church,” they know which one they mean. They mean the one in Rome. The one where when Stephen Hawking was invited and was asked at the conference on the Church and Science, “Is there anything he’d like to see in Rome?” while he was there, he said he’d like to see the records of the trial of Galileo. Don’t please be invoking Mr. Hawking, by the way, as if he was a deist.

Papal Apologies

The last pope, just in the last decade of his tenure, apologized. He said, “We were wrong about the Jewish question. We probably shouldn’t have said for so long the Jews were responsible for the murder of Christ. We were probably wrong in forced conversion of the peoples of the Indies,” as they were thought of, the Isthmus and the southern cone of our hemisphere.

“We were certainly wrong. We owe an apology to the Muslims for the atrocities of the Crusades. We owe an apology to the Eastern Orthodox churches for the incredible butchery to which they, our fellow Christians, were subjected by us, the Roman Catholic Church. And we probably owe an apology to the Protestants for saying so many awful things about them and torturing and burning and killing them too. So having now said we were completely wrong and completely cruel and completely sadistic and completely violent and retarded human civilization for that many centuries, in that many countries and continents, we quit. And now we can go back to being infallible all over again.”

There are people who on faith will accept being spoken to in that tone of voice and in that way. But I, ladies and gentlemen, am not one of them, and I don’t think there’s any form of persuasion that should allow you to be spoken to as if you were serfs or slaves either.

Aquinas and Atheism

Proceeding with the ontology with which I began, the Aquinas point, that if you can conceive of something, whether it’s a ghost, a phantasm, or a deity, if you can conceive of something, it is in some sense real if it’s real in your mind, and showing with the obvious fallacy that has always attended that, is it nonetheless possible for an atheist to say, a proclaimed atheist to say as I do, proclaim myself to be, that God positively can be said not to exist?

No. It’s a very common misunderstanding about my fraternity sorority. I’ll just take a moment to clear it up. The atheist says, no persuasive argument for the existence of God has ever been advanced or adduced without convincing rebuttal. No argument in favor stands or has been found to stand the test of argument and evidence. We cannot say that we know that there could be no such entity. Among other things, we are too reverent of the extraordinary time of discovery, innovation, pushing back of the frontiers of knowledge and understanding that’s taken place just in our own time to make any such remark.

But by saying this, we say, I think, quite a lot. There is no valid or coherent or consistent argument that would not work if it comes to that for the existence of any god. Now I notice it was by a slight work of illusion, a bit of tap dancing there, that Dr. Turek went from being a deist to a theist and then from being a theist to a Christian.

Now I know he does not believe in the existence of the sun god Ra. I’m practically certain he doesn’t believe in the existence of Zeus. If you’ll pick up a copy of my portable atheist, a selection of the finest writings by non-believers, down the years and just turn to the three pages where Mencken, H.L. Mencken, lists the easiest to name 3,000 gods that used to be worshipped and that no longer are held to exist by anybody, you’ll spare me the trouble of reading them out.

Personal Gods and Belief Systems

No, he thinks he doesn’t just know, Dr. Turek, that there is a god, he knows which one is the right one from a potentially infinite list, actually from a list that’s as long as the number of people there are or have ever been in the human species, because if you ever argue with a theist or a deist, as I do every day, you’ll find they all believe in a god of their very own. Indeed, they often say a personal god. Indeed, they often say a personal savior. So out of what are we reifying a concept that applies to all of us? Out of nothing but wish thinking and nonsense and fear and ignorance and above all, and I’m not quitting on this point, servility. Everyone in this room is an atheist.

Everyone can name a god in which they do not believe. Let them advance the case that the one in which they believe is the superior one. Let Dr. Turek be the first person I’ve ever met to do that convincingly this evening, and I will show him due respect. I don’t think the task can actually be undertaken.

Deism vs. Theism

Now, the same tap dancing hopes you will not notice that deism and theism are two quite different things. The deist argument says that there is so much order apparent in nature and in the cosmos and in the universe that it might be unwise to assume that such order has no one interested in ordering or designing it. That assumption might be an unsafe one. The philosopher Paley in his Natural Theology said design implies a designer. He came up with the very famous image of the watch.

If you come across the watch, if you’re a primitive tribesperson in the Sahara, you may not know what it’s for, but you know that it’s not a rock or a vegetable. You know it has a purpose, and someone made it that way. Until quite recently, that was the default position of most intelligent people, including Mr. Jefferson, who despite his intermittent atheism, in my judgment, was a deist.

I’m so sorry, was a deist, was a deist. He would debate with, among the many skills he had, was a very advanced level of paleontology. He would debate with the greatest paleontologist of his time, the Count de Buffon. How comes it, how can it be that we find seashells so high on the mountains of Virginia? How can this be? Not even the most intelligent people of that day, and it’s very recent, it’s an instant in historical time, had any idea how that could be.

There isn’t anyone in this room who wasn’t educated and brought up knowing exactly how that is. It’s just a shame that Jefferson and many other intelligent and humane and well-educated, illiterate people just couldn’t see that far. He wasn’t to know, though Darwin was born in his day, on the same day, actually, in 1809, as Abraham Lincoln, the very same day, the two great emancipators, Darwin being, in my judgment, the greater of the two.

Scientific Understanding and Religion

Now we know, we know this proposition to be true, the proposition that was ridiculed so pathetically, I have to say, I thought, by Dr. Turek, there is no explanation for the origins of our species, for the origins of our cosmos, for the origins of our globe itself, there is not one explanation left which requires the existence of a deus ex machina. In every case, we have a better or sufficient explanation. I think that assertion of mine will stand any challenge this evening. I’m looking forward to hearing some more of them.

Of course, Darwin used creationist images. He actually set out to vindicate Paley’s theology. He thought he could do it by his study, taxonomical study of nature. Einstein used God images when he spoke of the extraordinary majesty of the cosmos. It’s in us, it’s in our vocabulary, it’s hard-wired in us, you might almost say, to use images of awe-inspiring, godly, Mozartian, you might say, or even Shakespearean images when talking about these things. But when we come down to the actual analysis of them, we find that we don’t need the prime mover at all, and that most of the prime mover explanations, if not all of them, have been positively misleading, so that the deus may propose a designer.

The Burden of Proof

And I may not be able to show you, convincing you, that there could be no such person, but the theist has all their work still ahead of them. From this designer, how do we get to the designer who answers prayers? Did you hear a thing, I mean, just a phrase, even an implication, even a suggestion, from anything my opponent said, that you could, by an argument from design, prove answered prayers, or prove that someone born of a virgin was therefore the son of a god, or could prove that resurrections occur, and that by people being tortured to death thousands of years ago, we are now redeemed, that we are vicariously forgiven our own offenses by human sacrifice? How does deism help you to that? It doesn’t. It quite simply doesn’t, and can not. And the attempt to build from one to the other is a conjuring trick, of a very vulgar, I think, kind.

Human Morality and Religion

We live in the childhood of our species, so when Stephen Hawking says that if we could understand the event horizon that surrounds the black hole, we would in some sense know the mind of God, he proves that our vocabulary is still that of our infancy. He makes no concession to the idea of a theist or theocratic dispensation. I’d better ask now how I’m doing for time. Good. I’m not sure I’m going to need all that. But I’d like to try and reply and fight on my feet when I can, and I made some notes about what Dr. Turek had said, and I feel that they were challenges to me, that I would be ignoble if I didn’t respond to.

The first, and I thought frankly the most egregious, was this. I find it extraordinary that it can be said on a university campus in this year of grace that without God, humans are capable of doing anything. That there is no moral restraint upon us if we don’t concur in the idea that we are the property and creation of a supreme being. I’m making the assumption that all of you check in every now and then with some kind of news outlet and have a view of what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Isn’t it as plain as could be that those who commit the most callous, the most cruel, the most brutal, the most indiscriminate atrocities of all, do so precisely because they believe they have divine permission? Shall I answer my own question? Shall I insult you by adding more? Who can’t think of an example of this kind?

Moral Actions and Believers

Let me put the question in another form that I’ve put in now. Every forum from YouTube to C-SPAN to the wireless to the print to the radio to the television and innumerable forums to those who say that without God there can be no morality. You are to ask yourself two questions.

You are to name a moral action undertaken or a moral and ethical statement made by a believer. I daresay you can do it. You are then to say that you cannot imagine a non-believer making this moral statement or undertaking this moral action.

Can you think, can you now think, can any of you think, you don’t have to answer now, it’s a little night and you have my email and I’ve done this with everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to even lower people. You name me the ethical and moral actional statement that a believer can make and an unbeliever cannot and there’s a prize and I’ll tell you about that later.

Now there’s a second question.

Think of something wicked that only a believer would be likely to do or something wicked that only a believer would be likely to say. You’ve already thought of it.

The suicide bombing community is entirely religious. The genital mutilation community is entirely religious. I wouldn’t say that the child abuse community is entirely religious. I wouldn’t, but it’s bidding to be entirely religious. It operates on the old Latin slogan, no child’s behind left. How dare anybody, how dare anyone who speaks for religion say of us, the secular and the non-believers that we are the immoral ones. It is itself a wicked thing to say, itself an absolutely indefensible thing to say.

Violence and Divine Permission

No, the decapitation on the bus is going to be done by someone who thinks God is telling him to do it. Smurdiakov is actually the stupidest character in Dostoevsky’s novel. He’s the one who makes this proposition. Everyone has to understand, everyone has to understand that it is those who feel that the divine is prompting them, who feel they are permitted anything and everything. And it is those who are the leading, most salient, most violent, most vicious opponents of the values and civilization that Thomas Jefferson stood for and promulgated.

Fine-Tuning and the Universe

Just on the question of fine-tuning, I have a number of responses. We have to postpone some of the naturalistic questions for later, when I know they’ll come up again. You mentioned Edwin Hubble and the way that he saw the red light shift and saw that the universe was not just expanding but expanding very fast, away from itself, that the big bang had not stopped. Lawrence Krauss, great physicist, probably the next Nobel Prize winner, has noticed that most of people’s assumption was wrong, that though this expansion was taking place, it was thought, the rate of speed of the expansion must surely be declining. People still think in Newtonian terms in this way. No, says Krauss, he’s pointed it out and now it’s agreed by all.

No, the Hubble rate of red light shift is increasing. The universe is dissipating itself at high speed and the speed is getting greater. What does this mean? Well, it answers the question of why is there something instead of nothing, because now we have something. We’re all here because there’s something and nothing is coming right for us. Very soon, a physicist wouldn’t be able to tell the big bang had ever taken place. So far sprung apart will the whole system be.

And meanwhile, look in the sky at night and you can see the Andromeda Galaxy headed straight for us on a direct collision course. Who designed that? Who made it certain that every other planet in our solar system is either too hot or too cold to support life, as is most of our own planet, and that in just one tiny, irrelevant solar system already condemned to heat death and implosion? Some design, wouldn’t you say?

Conclusion: The Nature of Religion

But these are just the poultering minor objections that I have to the theistic worldview. The main one is the one with which I began. Religion, theism, not deism, theism I underline, theism says that all our manifold problems, what is the good, how shall we live it, how shall we know it, how to explain suffering, how to confront the possibility of our own, perhaps molecular, irrelevance, all these questions that must disturb and detain us all, can be solved by referring them upward to a totalitarian judgment, to an absolutist monarch. The other thing that the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was supposed to rebut, repudiate, disown, yes, I promise you, 30 seconds.

There is no totalitarian solution to these problems. There is no big brother in the sky. It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us, waking and sleeping, who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, who can do thought crime just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are, and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again.

To demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave.

It is a wonderful thing. It is a wonderful thing, in my submission, that we now have enough information, enough intelligence, and I hope, enough intellectual and moral courage to say that this ghastly proposition is founded on a lie, and to celebrate that fact. And I invite you to join me in doing so. Thank you.