Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate

thank you cheers here in Birmingham thank you I'm Larry Taunton executive director of fixed Point foundation and I want to tell you a little something about the debate you're about to see featuring Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr John Lennox both men of the University of Oxford the question has been asked of us many times why sponsor a debate on this issue that is the new atheism and religion or in this case more specifically Christianity fixed Point Foundation is a Christian organization that seeks to draw public attention to hot button cultural issues and since September 11th

of 2001 the new atheism and its charges against religion has been one of those issues interestingly many Christians and atheists feel that their views are frequently mischaracterized in the larger cultural discussion to address this we wanted to find individuals who represented the beliefs of their respective camps we think we have two of the very best in Richard Dawkins and John Lennox we're grateful of both men for their cooperation John and Richard were delightful to work with and enthusiastic about the project from beginning to end we think you will find what follows informative challenging and thought-provoking

thank you good evening I'm Larry Taunton executive director of fixed Point Foundation the sponsor of this event we welcome you to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Alice Stevens Center and we also welcome those who are listening around the world tonight's debate features two of the great minds currently writing and speaking on this issue Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr John Lennox I will not waste time now I'm giving you their biographies as you will find them in your program but it has been my pleasure to get to know both of these men we have brought

you here this evening under rather false pretenses there's actually not a debate this evening Richard Dawkins wanted to come to the Bible Belt to to announce his conversion um to the Christian faith perhaps I'm mistaken incidentally Richard is representing the atheistic position in this debate if you didn't know that and uh Dr John Lennox the uh the Christian one there's something that I would like to say about the debate itself um we have thought that much of the discussion on this issue hasn't been particularly helpful as it's frequently framed a science versus religion um what

we are seeking to do this evening is to narrow the discussion just a bit um and hence the the name of this debate The God Delusion debate um so this debate will feature and will focus on um the the book The God Delusion and uh Richard's assertions therein over and against the Christian faith a word about fixed Point Foundation we are a Christian organization an unshamedly so but we also seek thoughtful civil discussion on meaningful issues and questions regarding eternity we think are meaningful indeed we ask that you extend every courtesy to these men whether

you agree with them or not undoubtedly there will be much said this evening that you will take issue with nonetheless we hope you will extend to them a southern welcome we're also pleased to have with us tonight serving as our moderator judge Bill Pryor many of you will recall that he was the attorney general for the state of Alabama and is now a federal judge Bill thank you very much we ask also that you turn off your cell phones and join me in greeting these men and turning it over to Bill Pryor foreign thank you

Larry good evening welcome to the debate you all know the thing and Larry has introduced it The God Delusion versus Christianity there will be a structure to our debate this evening we will begin with opening autobiographical statements from each of our debaters beginning with Professor Dawkins and then turning to Dr Lennox when I ask that each of them provide those statements I will ask them to tell tell us something about their cell each of them and uh something about the book The God Delusion we will then turn to the six major theses a professor Dawkins

book The God Delusion now obviously it's a long book we can't cover everything in it but we have selected what we think are the six major themes and to introduce each of those themes I will read some excerpts from Professor Dawkins book and then give him an opportunity to elaborate and then Dr Lennox an opportunity to respond each of those exchanges should be about five minutes uh per side and then what is not reflected in your program is that each of our Debaters will finish the program with final statements with concluding remarks we will start

that with Dr Lennox and then we will turn to Professor Dawkins so Professor Dawkins tonight you will have both the first and the last word I suppose in the interest of a Christian charity Professor Dawkins could you begin our discussion with an autobiographical statement tell us something about yourself and about the book I was born in Africa I'm a child of what was in those days the British Empire descended from a long line of khaki shorts wearing hairy need brown chewed Colonial officers I had every opportunity to become a naturalist because Africa as you know

is a wonderful place to be a naturalist unfortunately that's not the way it was I never was much of a naturalist much to my father's disappointment I suspect he was a very good now he's a very good naturalist um I suppose that's a preamble to saying that my interest in the science of biology which is what I specialize in came more from an interest in fundamental questions than from a love of watching birds or insects or pressing flowers I wanted to know why we're all here what is the meaning of life why does the universe

exist why does life exist that's what drew me to science my parents left Africa when I was about eight and I came with them I was sent to boarding school in England uh I suppose part of the point of this autobiographical note is to give a kind of religious background since we are talking about religion tonight I had a harmless Anglican upbringing I could never claim that I had religion thrust down my throat in the way it might have been had I been brought up in a more militant faith uh anglicanism as you know is

a very civilized version of Christianity no bells and smells and no creationist lunacy I was confirmed into the church of England and at the time I sincerely believed it I had a brief period of Doubt at the age of about nine before about three years before my confirmation this doubt was caused by the realization that there are lots of different religions in the world and I recognized that it was an accident of my birth that I happened to have been born into the Christian faith and I recognized instantly that had I been born into born

in say Afghanistan or born in India I would have believed very different things and that quite rightly shook my faith in the particular religion that I'd been brought up in weirdly and I now don't understand why I seem to have lost those doubts when I was about 13 and I was confirmed into the church of England I went to Oxford after having lost my faith for good at the age of about 15 or 16. that was because I discovered Darwinism I recognized that there was no good reason to believe in any kind of Supernatural creator

and my final Vestige Last Vestige of religious Faith disappeared when I finally understood the darwinian explanation for life I went to Oxford I got a doctorate at Oxford eventually I went to the University of California at Berkeley as a very young assistant professor teaching in those days animal behavior I then went back to Oxford after about two years at Berkeley and continued my career as a student of animal behavior about 1975 to 72 there was a general strike in Britain and there was no electric power I couldn't do my research and so I thought I

would write a book and I started to write a book which eventually became my first book The Selfish Gene However unfortunately the electric power came on again and so I shelved the first two chapters of the book that I'd already written put them in and drawn forgot about them until about three years later in 1975 when I got a sabbatical leave and resumed writing the selfish Gene since then I've written about eight more books uh extended phenotype the blind watchmaker River out of Eden climbing Mountain probable unweaving the rainbow a devil's chaplain the ancestors tale

and most recently The God Delusion which is the subject of tonight's debate I regard it as an enormous privilege to be alive and I regard it as a privilege to be alive especially at the end of the 20th century beginning of the 21st century a privilege to be a scientist and therefore to be in a position to understand something of the mystery of existence why we exist I think that religious explanations although they may have been satisfying for many centuries are now superseded and outdated I think moreover that they're Petty and parochial and that the

understanding that we can get from science of all those deep questions that religion once aspired to ex to explain are now better more grandly more in in a more beautiful and elegant fashion explained by science talking Dr Lennox well ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for inviting me I'm delighted to be here each one of us has a biography and a world view our set of answers to the big questions that life throws at us and so a little about my biography I'm married to Sally we have three children and four grandchildren I work

now in the University of Oxford as a mathematician and as a philosopher of science I was born in the middle of the last century in a country with a tragic reputation for sectarian violence Northern Ireland my parents were Christian but they were not sectarian in the book The God delusioned Richard you say that religion teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding well whatever other religion this may apply to it certainly did not apply to the Christianity my parents taught me from the Bible they encouraged me to be intellectually inquisitive

because they were like that themselves not in spite of their Christian faith but because of it and I owe them an immense debt for setting me free to read everything from Marx and Russell to C.S Lewis and developed in those days an interest in the big questions of life I was very fortunate to get the chance to leave Ireland and go to Cambridge where I could indulge my passion for mathematics and for science in general and Cambridge not only gave me the opportunity to develop those intellectual Pursuits but it gave me the opportunity to meet

many people of other World Views who did not share my background and my convictions as a result I developed a considerable interest in atheism an interest which led me subsequently as an Alexander Von humbled fellow to study in Germany and then travel very frequently to Eastern Europe during the period of the Cold War after the fall of Communism I went very often to the academies of science at universities in Russia to discuss and reason about these things and to see it firsthand the effect of systematic exposure to atheist indoctrination over the preceding 70 years and

so I too am very privileged to live at this time and to be involved in the public discussion of these issues now reading Richard's book I found absolutely fascinating because it strikes me as an impassioned Crusade to warn his fellow human beings of the slavery the oppression and the mental and possibly physical tortures imposed on them by religion and I actually feel a lot of sympathy for you on this particular point because I myself am totally opposed to any religion that seeks to impose Itself by force or that takes advantage of or abuses people in

any way you cannot impose Truth by force and both of us I think whole that religion should be debated in a rational way as anything else I share his Passion For Truth neither of us mercifully as a postmodern relativist but as a passionate atheist Richard has committed to the idea that God is a delusion for him Ultimate Reality I take it consists of the impression man matter and energy of the universe I believe the exact opposite God far from being a delusion is real Ultimate Reality is a personal Eternal and Supernatural God who has revealed

himself in the universe it is worth the Bible and supremely in Jesus Christ his son who is Lord and God incarnate I'm very aware that this puts me according to Richard's book firmly in the category of those who sit fluttering among the dovecoats of the deluded sucking my religious dummy or pacifier as you call it an Alabama you suggest that religion builds a firewall in the mind against scientific truth well that might be tragically the case with some religions but it's not so with Biblical Christianity indeed the reason ladies and gentlemen that I'm passionate about

truth is that God is the God of all truth one of the most famous statements that Jesus ever made was I am the truth an astonishing assertion that as C.S Lewis pointed out long ago is either megalomaniac pathologically mistaken or valid since he is claiming not merely to say true things although that is so but claiming to be ultimate truth itself the ultimate truth behind everything from the Andromeda nebula to human life conscience and mind please note that what divides us is not science we're both committed to it what divides us is our World Views

his atheistic mind theistic and Christian now his book presents to us a grim world it is a no holds barred attempt to deliver people from the dragon of religion so that they could lead a life for now of uninhibited self-fulfillment unencumbered with the background threat of an imaginary God and he says it looks bleak and cold especially from the security blanket of religious ignorance but ladies and gentlemen we need to take it seriously if that's the way it is then that's the way it is and we need to face it but we need to discuss

it seriously and look at the evidence neither of us wishes to base his life in a delusion but which is the delusion atheism or Christianity that is for each of us to decide on the basis of the evidence of course thank you the first thesis of Professor Dawkins book and each of these that's reflected in your program is a summary it's not a direct quotation but the summary is faith is blind science is evidence-based I have one excerpt at the top of a page 126 to illustrate your argument Professor Dawkins one of the truly bad

effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding could you please elaborate science uses evidence to discover the truth about the universe it's been getting better at it over the centuries in the teeth of opposition from religion although it has to be admitted that of course science grew out of a religious tradition religion as the quotation that judge prayer read out teaches us to be satisfied with was it lack of evidence or lack of um with not understanding with not with not understanding I think that

when you consider beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe a feeling of admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something I feel this I recognize that other scientists such as Carl Sagan feel this Einstein felt it we all of us share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe for the complexity of life for the sheer magnitude of the cosmos the sheer magnitude of geological time and it's tempting to translate that feeling of awe

and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing a person an agent you want to attribute it to a maker to a creator what science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a Creator and it's a major emancipation because humans have an almost overwhelming desire to ex to think that they've explained something by attributing it to a maker we're so used to explaining things in our own world like these television cameras like the lights like everything that we make the clothes we wear the chairs we sit on

everything we see around us is a manufactured object and so it's so tempting to believe that that has been made that that living that living things or that the stars or mountains or or Rivers have all been made by something it was a supreme achievement of the human intellect to realize that there is a better explanation for these things that these things can come about by purely natural causes when science began the the aim to achieve it was there but we didn't know enough nowadays at the end of the 20th century beginning of the 21st

century we still don't know everything but we've achieved an enormous amount in the way of understanding We Now understand essentially how life came into being we know that we are all cousins of all animals and plants we know that we're descended from a common ancestor which might have been something like bacteria we know the process by which that came about we don't know the details but we understand essentially how it came about there are still gaps in our understanding we don't understand how the cosmos came into existence in the first place but we're working on

that the scientific Enterprise is an active seeking an active seeking out of gaps in our knowledge seeking out of ignorance so that we can work to plug that ignorance but religion teaches us to be satisfied with not really understanding every one of these difficult questions that comes up science says right let's roll up our sleeves and work on it religion says oh God did it we don't need to work on it God did it it's as simple as that we have no thrusting Force pushing us on to try to understand religion statifies the impulse to

understand because religion provides a facile easy apparent explanation or as we'll see later in the evening it isn't really an explanation and it prevents the further work on the problem thank you Dr Linux there are two issues here faith is blind science is evidence-based I do not agree with the first one but I very much agree with the second one some faith is blind and Blind Faith can be very dangerous especially if it's coupled with a blind obedience to an evil Authority and that ladies and gentlemen I would like to emphasize is true whether the

Blind Faith is that of religious or secular people but not all faith is by Blind Faith because Faith itself carries with it the ideas of belief trust commitment and is therefore only as robust as the evidence for it faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster much beloved of Richard Dawkins a delightful idea is blind because there's no evidence for the Flying Spaghetti Monster but faith in relativity theory is not blind because there is evidence supporting it I can't speak authoritatively for other religions but faith in the Christian sense is not blind and indeed I do not

know a serious Christian who thinks it is indeed as I read it Blind Faith in idols and figments of the human imagination in other words delusional Gods is roundly condemned in the Bible my faith in God and Christ as the Son of God is no delusion it is rational and evidence-based part of the evidence is objective some of it comes from science some comes from history and some is subjective coming from experience now of course we do not speak of proof you only get proof of the strict sense in my own field of mathematics but

in every other field including science we can't speak of proof we can speak of evidence of pointers of being convinced Beyond Reasonable Doubt I think it's important in this context to emphasize that science is limited because it seems to me a creeping danger of equating science with rationality but what is beyond science is not necessarily irrational science cannot tell us for instance whether a poem a work of literature or a work of art or music is good or beautiful science can tell us that if you put strychnine into your grandmother's tea it will kill her

but science cannot tell you whether it's morally right to do so and the Nobel Prize winner sir Peter medowar who's quite a hero I think for both of us has pointed out that you can easily see the limits of science because it cannot answer the elementary questions of a child who am I what is the purpose of my existence where am I going now Richard has just contrasted science and religion religion being content with not understanding whereas science is unraveling the understanding of the universe and I understand and feel the force of that objection very

strongly because sometimes Christians I admit have been guilty of a lazy god of the gaps kind of solution I can't understand it therefore God did it and of course God disappears as the gaps close but I'd like to point out that there are two kind of kinds of gapped ladies and gentlemen there are gaps that science closes and I call those the bad gaps but there are also gaps that science opens and we may come to some of those later but as for the idea itself Richard referred to the very important fact that science and

modern science as we know it exploded in the 16th and 17th centuries and it arose out of a theistic background and many philosophers of science have studied this and come to the conclusion that's now called Whitehead's thesis that human beings became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a law Giver I think that is profoundly important because it means far from religion hindering science it was the driving force behind the rise of Science in the first place and when Isaac Newton for example discovered his law

of gravity and wrote down the equations of of motion he didn't say marvelous I Now understand it I've got a mechanism therefore I don't need God in fact it was the exact opposite it was because he understood the complexity and sophistication of the mathematical description of the universe that he his praise for God was increased and I would like to suggest Richard that somewhere down in this you're making a category mistake because you're confusing mechanism with agency we have a mechanism it does X Y and Z therefore there's no need for an agent I would

suggest that the sophistication of the mechanism and science rejoices in finding such mechanisms is evidence for the sheer wonder of the creative genius of God our next thesis is that science supports atheism not Christianity and on this thesis Professor Dawkins I would like to read two excerpts from your book the first is on page 67. you are quoting your colleague the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne with approval and he writes to scientists like Dawkins and EO Wilson the celebrated Harvard biologist the real war is between rationalism and superstition science is but one form of rationalism while

religion is the most common form of superstition several Pages earlier on page 59 you write Noma which is the idea that religion and science do not overlap non-overlapping magisteria is popular only because there is no evidence to favor the god hypothesis would you care to elaborate yes first I'd like to respond a little bit to what John said in the on the previous occasion I feel happier if we could have a bit more of a dialogue rather than this this um when you say faith is rational and evidence-based I mean if that were true it

wouldn't need to be Faith would it I mean if there were evidence for it uh why would you need to call it Faith you would say just evidence and when you said that we that that faith in relativity in in Einstein's theory of relativity is is evidence-based that of course it is but um the but the evidence is is all important I mean Einstein's predictions fit in with um with uh observed fact and they and with the whole body of theory whereas we only need to use the word faith when there isn't any evidence you've

got faith in your wife is there any evidence for that or would you face it yes plenty of evidence um I advise it never mind about my wife let's learn it's the same with by and Richard it's the same with Bible let's say let's say that in general how do we know that somebody loves us okay yes um you can use a word faith for that if you like but it's not it's not the right use of the word because it is because you you know why you know your wife loves you because of all

sorts of little signs little catches in the voice little little looks in the eye um that's the evidence that it is evidence that's perfectly good evidence that's not Faith yes it is well okay then then we're coming down to pure to pure semantics um I think you've been influenced too much by count you see um okay let's let's go on um which of these which is what are we now on it didn't seem to have much connection with the with the quotes from the The God Delusion that actually works well with the first okay it

does um you read a quote from from Jerry Coyne about the real war being between supernaturalism and naturalism the context of that quote was the turf wars in a sense in American Education between creationism and uh Evolution and uh within that context I have been accused of letting the side down because as you know there's a there's a problem with American Education that some nut cases are trying to introduce creationism into American schools which is obviously very bad for Science and my scientific colleagues are deeply worried by this and are trying to fight it and

all power to them they complain that I am not helping matters that I'm in a sense Rocking the Boat uh by uh saying quite openly that it is my understanding of evolution this has led me to atheism and they point out again quite rightly that if I would were called up to a in a court of law testifying in favor of evolution and against the teaching of creationism and the lawyer said Mr Dawkins is it true that Evolution has led you to atheism I should have to say yes whereupon he would turn to the jury

and say my case rests it doesn't do the cause of science any good to unite Evolution with atheism that was the context of Jerry coyne's remark Coyne was saying okay if you're concerned only with the with the narrow political Battle of saving American Science in the schools then you should bite you should button your lip and stop talking about atheism if on the other hand you think has coin does that the real war is between supernaturalism and naturalism then you would say well the battle over Evolution and creationism is only a skirmish the real war

is over something rather more profound that was the context of that Noma was the second quotation that you read That's non-overlapping magisteria the late Stephen Gould argued that there was no real battle between science and religion in because they were about non-overlapping magisteria different things ships that pass in the night no contact between them they're about totally different things I don't think that for a moment I think that religion really is in a sense about science I think that religious claims about the universe are scientific claims I suspect that John may agree with me about

this claims about the universe are scientific claims a universe with a god would be a very different kind of Universe from a universe without a god scientific methods are the appropriate methods or at least the scientific way of thinking is an appropriate way of thinking for deciding whether we live in this kind of universe with a God or that kind of universe without a god it becomes even more glaring where you talk about miracles which I mean however however much sophisticated theologians May profess their non-belief in Miracles the plain fact is that the ordinary person

in the Pew the ordinary unsophisticated churchgoer believes deeply in Miracles and it's largely Miracles that persuade that person into the church in the first place if there are Miracles they are to be judged as by scientific means if there was a virgin birth if somebody was raised from the dead these are strictly scientific claims they may be difficult to um to verify but as I've said in the book The God Delusion if you could imagine hypothetically that DNA evidence could be discovered showing that Jesus never had a father Jesus was born of a virgin then

can you imagine any Theologian saying oh no not relevant uh separate magisteria science has no bearing on this case of course they wouldn't science has every bearing on this case that's what I have to say about Noma and I think I probably run out of my five minutes thank you Professor Dawkins well I agree with you very much on the normal issue Richard um that science and religion keeping them separate actually if you read the small print on Noma it's a rather disconcert you because it says that science deals with reality and religion with everything

else and of course I'm not very happy with that I certainly agree with you that the modes of logical analysis that science has introduced to you are the right ones to deal with many of the central claims of Christianity I would widen it a bit it's historical science of course we're dealing with events in the past but Christianity is falsifiable in that technical sense I would very much support that now the thesis here is that science supports atheism not Christianity I think Atheism under undermine science very seriously because if you think of the basic assumption

that all of us who are scientists have that is we believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe and it's interesting to me that scientists of the Eminence of Eugene vigner and Albert Einstein use the word faith they cannot imagine a scientist without this Faith because of course they point out that you've got to believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe before you can do any science at all science doesn't give you that now the interesting thing is this suppose we now look at that issue against the background of the two World Views we're

discussing tonight atheism and theism atheism tells you at least Richard tells us in his book that since human life has been cobbled together by unguided Evolution it's unlikely that our view of the world is accurate quite so and if you are a reductionist as you must be as a materialist reducing beliefs to the physics and chemistry of neurological structures then it raises a very big question ladies and gentlemen if in the end my beliefs my theories my scientific theories are the results ultimately of the Motions of atoms in my brain produced by an unguided random

mindless process why should I believe them in other words it's like someone sitting on the branch of a tree cutting off the branch on which they're sitting and it seems to me that therefore atheism actually undercuts the scientific Endeavor very seriously that from my mind is a fleet of fatal flaw an argument that purports to derive rationality from irrationality doesn't even rise in my opinion to the Dignity of being an intelligible delusion it is logically incoherent but theism tells us that the reason science is possible the reason that I can access the universe at least

in part through my human intelligence is because the same God who created the universe is ultimately responsible for the human mind in here so that's the base level but when we come up a level now and look at science itself we have the fine-tuning of the universe the fact that the basic constants of nature have got to be very accurate in order to have a universe just like this one now I know that some people prefer and that's the word that sir Martin Reese uses an explanation in terms of a Multiverse which actually doesn't in

my opinion solve The Logical problems but I'm very interested in the verdict of Arno penzius who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the microwave background and he says astronomy leads us to a unique event a universe which was created out of nothing one with a very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life and one which has an underlying one might say Supernatural plan so that physics itself looking at the constants and the the very very specified uh numbers they had to have comes that kind of conclusion and incidentally um

the Bible gets very easily dismissed I'm afraid also in The God Delusion penzius added the best data we have concerning the Big Bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses the Psalms and the Bible as a whole it's interesting ladies and gentlemen isn't it that we only got the idea that the Universe had a beginning evidence for it in the 1960s it was very exciting I remembered well because for centuries Europe was dominated by the thinking of Aristotle which put the Earth fixed at

the center of the universe everything rotating about it and everything existing eternally the fascinating thing is this that when evidence began to arrive that there was a finite beginning to space-time some leading people in the journal Nature of the editor Maddox said this is dangerous we don't like this because it'll give too much leverage to those who believe and create them now what I find very interesting is this the Bible is frequently dismissed as being anti-scientific because it makes no predictions oh no that's incorrect it makes a brilliant prediction for centuries it's been saying there

was a beginning and if scientists had taken that a bit more seriously they might have discovered evidence for the beginning a lot earlier than they did Professor Dawkins I understand your desire uh in some ways to respond to Dr Linux but I think that this next Topic in the excerpt I'm going to read will allow you to do to both Advance the discussion of the next thesis which is that design is dead otherwise otherwise one must explain who designed the designer I think it'll allow you to advance that well the quote that I'm going to

read the excerpt is on page 109. and what you wrote is this the whole argument turns on the familiar question who made God which most thinking people discover for themselves a designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of Designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape this argument As I Shall show in the next chapter demonstrates that God do not technically disprovable is very very improbable indeed

first I find it deeply unimpressive that the Bible it can be said to predict the Big Bang there are only two possibilities either the universe began or it's been here forever just two possibilities to get one of to get one of them is really not that impressive um now sorry at least it got it right toss a penny you've got a chance of getting it right 150 of the time um right um design is dead otherwise one must explain who designed the designer well we skate over a lot when we say design is dead um

I think probably uh John and I would agree that um life is explained um Darwin explains life and no serious scientist doubts that so we go back to the previous a rather more difficult stage in the understanding of where we come from which is the origin of the universe itself and that really is genuinely difficult we don't know we understand essentially biology we don't understand cosmology in a sense we could say cosmology is waiting for its Darwin John mentioned in the answer to the previous question the idea of the physical constants being finely tuned and

it's quite true that many scientists many physicists maintain that the physical constants the the path dozen or so numbers that physicists have to Simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding I just have to be assumed you can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there and physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different the universe as we know it wouldn't exist we wouldn't be here the universe but perhaps have fizzled out in the first the Octo second and so we wouldn't be here or other

things would have gone wrong it's tempting once again to in to import the easy facile idea of a designer and to say that the designer twiddled the knobs of the Universe At The Big Bang and got them exactly right got the gravitational constant right got the strong force right the weak Force right and so on but it seems to me to be manifestly obvious that that is a futile kind of explanation because as the quotation says who designed the designer you have explained precisely nothing because instead of just saying oh well the knobs were tuned

to the right values anyway you say oh there was a God who knew how to tune the knobs to the right values and if you're going to postulate that then you've in a sense sold the pass some physicists solve that problem by not involved not invoking God of course but by invoking the anthropic principle saying well here we are we exist we have to be in the kind of universe in which uh which is capable of giving rise to us that in itself I think is unsatisfying and as John Lennox rightly says some physicists solve

that by the Multiverse idea the idea that that the our universe is just one of many universes there's a sort of foaming bubble a bubbling foam of universes and the one in which the bubble in which we are is only one of billions of universes and each of these universes has different fundamental constants most of them have fundamental constants which are unsuited to give rise to the sort of permanence and the sort of chemistry the sort of conditions that gives biological evolution darwinian Evolution the chance to get going a tiny minority of those universes has

what it takes to give rise to darwinian Evolution ultimately chemistry and then Evolution and that tiny minority has to include the universe in which we sit because here we are the anthropic principle the principle that we have to be in a universe capable of giving rise to us plus the principle of the Multiverse provides at least an interim satisfying explanation in a way that a Creator couldn't possibly be a satisfying explanation for the reason that I've given then having got ourselves into a universe which is capable of generating Stars capable of generating chemistry and ultimately

capable of generating the origin of life then biological evolution takes over and now we're on a clear run now we understand what happened once biological evolution gets going then it's easy to understand most of what's difficult most of the most of the difficulty of understanding the universe lies in lies in the in the vast complexity of life that's what really truly impresses people that's why people who believe in God mostly do believe in God because they look around the living world and they see how impressive it is so that level of impressedness is completely destroyed

by Darwin and Darwin of course doesn't explain the origin of the universe for that I invoke the anthropic principle and the Multiverse less satisfying admittedly but science makes progress the one thing you can be absolutely sure is that a creative designer cannot be a satisfying explanation Dr Linux the anthropic principle as you stated Richard I think is a complete truism of course we have to be in such and such a kind of planet of the kind that we could appear on that does not answer the question how we came to exist on it and I

fear I have to disagree with your Darwinism Darwinism does not explain life it may explain certain things about what happens when you've got life but evolution uh assuming assumes the existence of a mutating replicator it does not explain how that replicator came to exist in the first place so that's a major discussion I want to address the who designed the designer question because it's the old school boy question who created God I am actually very surprised to find it as a central argument in your book because it assumes that God is created and I'm not

surprised therefore that you call the book The God Delusion because created gods are by definition a delusion now I know and I ought to explain that Richard doesn't like people who say to him that they don't believe in the God he doesn't believe in but I think that this is possibly touching a sore spot because you leave yourself wide open to the charge after all you are arguing that God is a delusion and in order to weigh your argument I I said that it is you who's arguing that God is a delusion oh sorry and

in order to weigh that argument I need to know what you mean by God and if you say if there is a God you have to ask who created God that means that you're reduced to thinking about created Gods well none of us believe in created gods Jews Muslims or Christians and I think that argument then is entirely beside the point and you perhaps you ought to put it on your shelf marked Celestial teapots where it belongs The God Who created the universe ladies and gentlemen was not created he is eternal this is the fundamental

distinction between God and the universe it came to exist he did not and this is precisely the point the Christian Apostle John makes at the beginning of his gospel in the beginning was the word the word already was all things came to be by him God is uncreated the universe was created by Him now I don't know whether Richard has difficulty with the concept of the uncreated I don't know and I'd love to know whether he believes as a materialist that matter and energy and the laws of nature were always there because if they were

he does believe in something Eternal so perhaps the difficulty lies in believing in an eternal person but I want to probe deeper into this because he suggested that introducing God would mean an end of science God is no explanation Since By definition God is more complex than the thing you are explaining now this he States as a central argument of his book I would not have expected an argument like this from a scientist because explanations in science themselves are usually in terms of increasing complexity and apple falling is a simple event the explanation of terms

of Newton's law of gravitation is already stretching the minds of many people but its explanation in terms of a warp in space-time is stretching the minds of of the cleverest Simplicity isn't the only Criterion of Truth let me give you an example suppose you're an archaeologist and I'm exploring a cave with you and you're a Chinese expert and on this cave you see two scratches and you say human intelligence and I say pardon they're just two scratches and you say but those are the Chinese character run which means a human being but I say look

Richard that's no explanation at all you're postulating something as complex as a human brain to explain two scratches that means that your explanation is more complex than the thing you're explaining that's no explanation at all now it seems to me that's exactly what you're saying in your book The reason we can deduce something as sophisticated as human intelligence from two scratches on a cave wall is because they have a semiotic Dimension they carry meaning now that fascinates me as a mathematician because the reductionist is committed to deducing things that carry meaning and I would include

the DNA molecule among them is sophistic is is committed to explaining those in terms of the basic materials but as was pointed out a long time ago by a Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry the meaning of the message is not going to be found in the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink and it fascinated me too to see that you approved in your book of the physicist looking for a toe a theory of everything but that's a theory where the buck stops incidentally there is no hope for a toe as Stephen Hawking has

said in 2004 on the basis of girdles mathematics and its application to physicists so I'm interested that you were prepared as I understand it to agree that a TOA was a good thing in physics it's perhaps you like a TOA a toe provided there's no God attached to it I think finally if I might just say that you seem to be a oh my time's up okay I'll stop Mr Dawkins my next egg sir we're going to change gears to some extent to the fourth thesis which is that Christianity is dangerous I think you'll like

this quote it comes from the very first page of the book from the from the preface you write and I have a few excerpts to read you write imagine with John Lennon a world with no religion imagine no suicide bombers no 911 no 7-7 no Crusades no witch hunts no Gunpowder Plot no Indian partition no israeli-palestinian Wars no Serb croat Muslim massacres no persecution of Jews as Christ killers no Northern Ireland troubles no honor killings no shiny suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money God wants you to give till it hurts imagine no

Taliban to blow up ancient statues no public beheadings of blasphemers no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it you then write on page 303 that even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes and finally you write on pages 307 and 308 more generally and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that Faith itself is a virtue faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and Brooks no argument

this is supposed to be a debate and I feel intensely frustrated I'm going to reply to to what who created God I mean the word created was smuggled in by somebody else I didn't or maybe I did say who created God that's not the point the the point is not whether God is a created thing or not the point is this issue of Simplicity which you rightly went on to to uh talk about in order to understand the existence of complexity we can't just postulate complexity we have to go back to Simplicity now John used

the illustration of an archaeologist wasn't it who found some scratches on it cave and and uh it was supposed to be a powerful argument that said well these scratches are very simple but the person who did the scratching was complex that's nothing to do with the argument I'm putting the argument I'm putting is that if we're trying to explain complexity we need some kind of an ultimate explanation for the existence of a of a complex object an improbable object certainly the scratches on the cave are simple and certainly the human that made those scratches is

complex if you found if you went to another planet and you found some scratches which indicated the existence of life you would of course we would both postulate the existence of a complex living being but we would both need an explanation for where that complex living being came from and I put it to you that just to say it was always there or it just happened is precisely the kind of non-explanation which creationists accuse evolutionists of erecting they say How could an eye come about by sheer chance well of course an eye couldn't come about

by sheer chance it has to come about by a gradual incremental process from simple Beginnings exactly the same is true of anything complex and a god you can't just deduct the issue you can't just evade the issue by saying God was always there you still need an explanation so it's it tells you nothing to say that the scratches on the wall are simple and by the way the idea that um that that physics is is complex because it's difficult that's a confusion of the two words of the two meanings of the word simple simple meaning

easy to understand and certainly modern physics isn't to be easy to understand but there is a sense in which it's simple in the way that biology isn't now I haven't got much time to deal with the I'll give you a couple of extra minutes well no sorry I I didn't mean to steal that I I am um let me come on to the thing about um Christianity being dangerous the the reading from the preface with the quote from John Lennon Imagine no Taliban and all that that I think is self-explanatory and and I won't go

into that I think what I will do is is zero in on the particular point of the third quotation I think it was which was about children and the evils of teaching children that certain things are true without evidence teaching them that faith is a virtue um I Would Not For a Moment say that all religion is bad all religion is dangerous or Christianity is dangerous certainly only a minority of religious people are bad or do bad things the point about teaching children that faith is a virtue is that you're teaching them that you don't

have to justify what you do you can simply shelter behind the statement that's my faith and you're not to question that what I'm objecting to is the convention that we have all of us bought into whether we are religious or not that religious faith is something to be respected something not to be questioned and if somebody says that's my faith then you simply have to respect it tiptoe gently away and say nothing more in most cases that's quite harmless but if you are the kind of person who takes your faith really literally and who believes

that Allah has ordered you what would be the will of Allah that you go and blow somebody up then it is the fact that you were educated as a child in a madrasa to believe implicitly in the faith that you were taught and not to question it which if you happen to be of an unstable Turn of Mind or if you happen to be of of a violent Turn of Mind leads to the sorts of terrible acts which are done in the name of religion I must stress again I'm not saying that the majority of

of religious people do terrible acts I am saying that faith is a terrible weapon because it justifies the performance of terrible ads which do not have to be justified by reason or or or or evidence the one gift I would wish to give to any child is skepticism don't believe something just because you're told it don't believe something because it's your tradition don't believe something because it's in a holy holy book look for the evidence and question skeptically and if everybody did that we wouldn't be suffering the some of the terrible things that are going

on in the world at the moment Dr Linux I dearly love to come back on the first one Richard I I think there's a slight obsession with the simple to complex if you're building a factory safer manufacturing computers they'll dig a hole in the ground first that's very simple and it gets more complex as it goes up but everything comes from the mind of the planners and what I'm talking about is inference to the best explanation and the inference when we look at the semiotic say of DNA and the fact that it carries a biological

message so to speak to an intelligent designer seems to me to be much more sensible than the inference to Mindless processes that we do not know can do any such thing but that's a big debate and we've both written about it and you'll have to be referred to the literature because I want to come to this topic about Christianity been dangerous and I want to agree very largely with a lot of what you you say the danger of fanatical religion that fans the Flames of violence and quite frankly I'm ashamed as a Christian of the

reputation particularly in the Middle Ages the Crusades and so on that they're associated with Christianity but I'd like to point out that the perpetrators of that kind of atrocity were not following Christ but they were actually disobeying his explicit command because he prohibited very famously as you know his followers from using physical weapons my kingdom is not of this world he told them he told pilate and it's very interesting to my mind that Christ was actually put on trial for being a fanatical terrorist that's very easy to forget and he was publicly exonerated from the

charge by the Roman procurator truth cannot be imposed by violence particularly the truth that Christ had come into the world to bring a message of God's love and forgiveness so I would agree with you and the danger of training children to be Fanatics by not allowing them to question is a very serious one and I'm so glad that I had parents who encouraged me to think and pardon parcel of the Christian faith was that thinking now you ask us to imagine with John Lennon a world without religion well I'd like to you to imagine with

John Lennox a world without atheism with no Stalin with no Mao with no pull pot to name the heads of the three officially atheistic States a world with no Gulag no cultural revolution no Killing Fields I think that would be a world worth imagining too and I must say I I am very disturbed in your book by what seems to me to be an attempt to airbrush out the atrocities of the Communist world I've spent a lot of time visiting that part of the world and I don't recognize anything that you say atheism was not

peripheral to Marxism for Marx the criticism of religion was the foundation of all criticism and so it concerns me that a scientist who's very interested in historical science in the sense of evolutionary biology unraveling history is content with a very superficial analysis of the period of the Cold War and even more Disturbed to read things like this even if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism they both also had mustaches as do Saddam Hussein so what well yes all three of them had noses in common with the rest of us but what kind of

reasoning is this we're not talking about shared characteristics in general but the motivating ideology that drove these men to murder millions in their attempt to get rid of religion whether Jewish Christian or anything else so I'm very disturbed at your historical analysis you write that you don't believe there's an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca or shot or York minister or the Cathedral of Notre Dame but what about the thousands of churches that were demolished in Stalin's Russia and the forced transformation of them into museums now I can understand why one would want

to rewrite the history of the 20th century to airbrush out the role of atheism because one could very easily draw a parallel between the anti-religious agenda of the new atheists and the attempt of Communism to obliterate religion that's not going the right way I think and I'm sure that you would be rightly insulted and I wouldn't suggest it for a moment if I were to say that because you and Stalin were atheists that you would have approved of the ruthless elimination of millions you rightly expect me to differentiate between atheists I would like you to

write another book in which you differentiate between religions because they are not all the same some support fanaticism others don't and then finally um you contend that the teachings of moderate religion are an open invitation to extremism well that is not true of the teachings of Christ I can't speak for other religions but what about the moderate teaching of atheism I've sat beside a young girl of 13 in the gdr who's just been told as the brightest child in the school that she cannot of any more education since she's not prepared to swear public allegiance

to the atheistic State I would call that intellectual murder and it was committed many times in the name of atheism but according to you it's far worse than bulldozing buildings but you say there's not the smallest evidence that atheists do such things but there is but perhaps I've misunderstood you very happy to give up on the next one and um which would you prefer I'm very happy I'd Like Richard to choose what he wants to do because I've made some strong statements in The God Delusion I very deliberately uh made very little of all the

individual evils of religion I mentioned them occasionally but I didn't go on about the Crusades The Conquistadors anything like that I am not trying to say that religion that that religious people do bad things I agree fully that Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao did terribly bad things it may even be that atheism was an integral part of the Marxism which led them to do terrible bad things if indeed it was their Marxism that led them to do bad things what interests me is that I think that there is a logical path from

religion to doing terrible things and I kind of touched on it in the last in the last answer when I was talking about um Faith leading you to do to do things there's a logical path that says if you really really really believe that your God Allah whoever it is wants you to do something you'll go to heaven you'll go to paradise if you do it then it's possible for an entirely logical rational person to do hideous things I cannot conceive of a logical path that would lead one to say because I am an atheist

therefore it is rational for me to kill or murder or be cruel or do some some horrible thing I can easily see that there are plenty of individuals who happen to be atheists maybe even individuals who have some other philosophy which incidentally happen to be uh happen to be associated with with atheism but there is no logical path those those young men who who bombed in the London subway and uh and and the buses those 19 men who who flew planes into various targets of the United States in September of 2001. they were not Psychopaths

they were not downtrodden um ignorant people they were well educated rational people who passionately believed they were right they thought they were righteous they thought they were good their religion by the likes of their religion they were good the same thing could be said of the Hideous things done by the Taliban the oppression of women these people believed deeply in what they are doing and it follows logically once you grant them the premise of their faith then the terrible things that they do follow logically the Terrible Things That Stalin did not follow from his atheism

they followed from something horrible within him Christopher Hitchens has made the point that Stalin was in effect a new tsar of a country which for centuries had been brought up to believe that there was a semi-divine King Bazaar who and they would have been Madness for Stalin not to have exploited this cringing loyalty in the uh peasantry that had been for centuries subjugated to the tsars it would have been Madness for Stalin not to have done that it would have been Madness for Hitler whether or not Hitler himself was religious and there's some dispute about

that there's a good case to be made that Hitler was religious but I don't care whether he was or not the fact is that Hitler Hitler's terrible Deeds were done by Christians who were who were I think I leave that I mean I think even that's not relevant um the point I would return to yet again is that you will not do terrible Deeds because you are an atheist you may not not not for rational reasons you may well for very rational reasons do terrible things because you are religious that's what faith is about that's

what faith means I suppose you could say that there was a kind of faith that motivated Hitler's followers and Stalin's followers as well if that's a separate Point let's have a brief response we do want to get through all of the topics tonight but Dr Linux well I would want to argue that there's a logical path from any ideology that from any ideology that's fanatical and oppressive to the kind of behavior you say whether it's religion or atheistic because atheism is a faith of course as well it's not of course it is well don't you

believe it I I don't know you're an atheist with respect to Thor and wotan and and yes that's abuse I don't believe them but you believe atheism no it is your faith I'm in exactly the same position with respect to your Yahweh your Jehovah whatever you call him I mean exactly the same position with respect to him as you are with respect to Zeus and I cannot imagine not believing in Zeus leaving leading one to do terrible disease it's exactly the same with not believing in God I mean it now this time Dr Lennox if

we're going to get to the rest of the debates let's go on all right let's go on I think the issue has nothing to do with Zeus and so on they're non-existent deities the issue is to do with two alternative okay to do with two alternative explanations of the universe and each of us have our faith I believe there is a God behind this universe you believe the universe is all there is the cosmos is all there is those are both statements of faith okay you have evidence you believe for them the fifth thesis How

Could You Believe in the cosmos no no no we have a time limit professor and doctor the fifth thesis is that no one needs God to be moral I only have one quote it's from 226 it's short we do not need God in order to be good or evil if you think about why you might need God in order to be moral I can only think of two reasons how that might come about you might say you need a book to tell you what's moral well as for that I sincerely hope that nobody in this

room bases their morals on the Christian Bible or the Quran because if they do then their morals are likely to be hideous needless to say you can find some decent verses you can find some decent verses in both the Bible and the Quran and if you pick and choose those verses then you can say with hindsight uh this verse fits in with my view of what's moral that verse doesn't so I'm going to ignore that verse and choose this verse but you didn't need the Bible in order to do that picking and choosing you did

the picking and choosing on the basis of something else something which we all have in common whether we are religious or not we're all to a greater or lesser extent moral some of us more so than others whether we're moral or not has nothing to do with whether we read the Bible some people are kind some people are sympathetic some people care about suffering other people don't it has nothing to do with the Bible the other reason why you might need religion in order to be moral is that you are either afraid of God you're

afraid if you are not moral you'll get punished or you're trying to suck up to God and be good so that you'll get a reward neither of those two is a very Noble reason to be good to say the least now uh you you might say that that forces me into a challenge um how do I know what's moral well I don't on the whole but the point I want to make is that there does seem to be a kind of universal human acceptance that certain things are right and other things are not uh if

you look cross-culturally look at different um look at anthropological findings on different cultures you'll find there's a kind of agreement that certain things are wrong and other things are right there there's there's disagreement in detail the Golden Rule do as he would be done by do unto others what you would expect them to do to you this is a very very widespread principle and it almost amounts to Common Sense in in a way you certainly don't need a holy book in order to tell you to do that now as an evolutionist I think that it

comes partly from our evolutionary past I think that there was a time in our history when we lived in small kin groups and we lived in small groups where Good Deeds could be expected to be reciprocated and under those conditions we developed a kind of lust to be good which was parallel to the last for sex which has obvious darwinian advantages now we no longer live in small villages in small Clans and so the darwinian pressure to be good is no longer so strong nor is the darwinian pressure for lust as strong as it once

was because nowadays we often use contraceptives and therefore sexual behavior does not lead to the reproductive consequence which is of course the um the darwinian reason for it but that doesn't matter the point is that our our evolutionary past built into us a lust for sex and by the same token it built into us a lust to be good a lust to be to be friendly a lust to cooperate a lust to be sympathetic towards suffering so I think it partly comes from that but it also comes from something less easy to Define but which

which is clearly there because I call it the shifting moral Zeitgeist it's something that changes from decade to decade uh living as we do in 2007 there will be a broad consensus of what's right and wrong racism is wrong sexual discrimination is wrong uh cruelty is wrong which characterize we who live in the early 21st century which would not necessarily have characterized uh ancestors in this place uh 200 years ago uh that the consensus has moved on and I find this a very interesting fascinating fact which suggests that there really is a kind of something

in the air about what is regarded as moral and it clearly has nothing to do with religion because it doesn't come from scripture scripture hasn't doesn't change over the decades in the way that our attitudes to slavery attitudes to women Etc do there really does seem to be a powerful shifting Zeitgeist effect which is doesn't tell you anything in itself but which it which indicates that there is something in the air some some other Force something which we can understand with sufficient sociological psychological sophistication whatever else it is it's not religion the question is do

we need God to be moral if we formulate it as can an atheist be good of course because as I see it the very fact that human beings all around the world show Common Core of morality is evidence for the truth of the biblical claim that we are moral beings made in the image of God so what I would want to say is this of course we can be good without God in the sense of our personal Behavior but I'm not sure whether we can find foundations for the concept of being good without God you

admit that you cannot get ethics from science in your book a devil's chaplain science has no methods for deciding what is ethical and I find it very interesting reading one of your other books River out of Eden to find what I understand is your analysis of what the universe is like at bottom in a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt other people are going to get lucky and you won't find any Rhyme or Reason in it nor any justice the universe we observe has precisely the properties

we should expect if there is at the bottom no design no purpose no evil and no good Nothing But Blind pitiless indifference DNA neither knows nor cares DNA just is and we dance to its music now that seems to me to be saying that good and evil don't exist so I don't even know where you get the moral criteria to discuss it if a rock falls off a mountain onto your head and kills you it makes no sense calling the rock evil it just exists if Paul pop chooses to eliminate a million intellectuals or the

911 terrorists choose to fly hundreds of people to their deaths into the Twin Towers how can you call them evil if they were simply dancing to their DNA now that strikes me as a hideous world you're delivering us into that is no morality at all and so therefore just pushing this a little bit further if good and evil don't exist there is no evil and no good Nothing But Blind pitiless indifference how can it possibly make sense uh to talk of the evils of religion or of the good of atheism now I know that you

suggest elsewhere that we have to rebel against our genes but that creates to my mind an immense problem with what you say because if we are nothing but a genes and dancing to the tune of our DNA what part of us can rebel against them so I want to suggest this that far from atheism delivering an adequate explanation for Morality it dissolves it and it's a problem that's been around for centuries how can something mindless and impersonal like the universe impose a sense of morality upon us and David Hume a philosopher whom you quote pointed

this out very clearly he said you just cannot get an ought from an is you cannot derive morality and ethics from matter and energy you cannot go from Facts to values and what concerns me greatly is that although you don't say it in your book is that this kind of philosophy that has no base for morals in a Transcendent God has got to find morality either in raw nature or a combination of Nature and Society and often leads to a kind of utilitarianism and we are in serious ethical confusion I think in our contemporary world

of the legal sphere in the ethical in the medical sphere and in the business sphere because the foundations are crumbling and I want to suggest I know it's provocative but I want to suggest the Dostoyevsky was very perceptive and I've had many Russians agreeing with me when he said if God does not exist everything is permissible he's not saying that people can't be good he's saying that the foundations of morality are removed and nature predicted exactly the same thing so I find that trying to get morality elsewhere is is something that is doomed to destruction

I would love to spend time discussing the Bible I think your view of the Bible is a bit one-sided there are things there to be discussed okay fine the last thesis Christian claims about the person of Jesus are not true his alleged Miracles violate the laws of nature I'm going to read two excerpts Professor Dawkins the first comes from page 92 of your book the historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal the next comes from page 257 Jesus was a devotee of the same in-group morality coupled without group hostility that

was taken for granted in the Old Testament Jesus was a loyal Jew it was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish god to the Gentiles Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs once again I can't let past what um that that rhetoric of mine about blind physical forces and indifference and nature neither care DNA neither cares nor knows um maybe you're right that that portrays a hideous world well maybe the world

is a hideous World it doesn't make it not true that's the the fundamental point that I would wish to to leave with you that you can talk till you're blue in the face about how it would be nice if such and such were true it would be nice if if the world were friendly to us it would be nice if uh the world was not such a hideous one but I see it as first it it tells you nothing about whether whether it's true or not we have to decide whether it's true or not separately

it gives us if it is a hideous World it gives us something to rise above and we clearly do rise above it you raise the question how do we Rebel and you seem to think there was some kind of contradiction there is no contradiction with Rising above darwinian dictates we do it every time we use a contraceptive it's easy every time you use a contraceptive you are defying the darwinian imperative to reproduce you're enjoying sex using the darwinian the pleasure that was built into you into your brains by Darwinism because normally sex leads to reproduction

you're cutting off that link and you're using each sex for Pure enjoyment without reproduction that's defying that's rebelling against uh the selfish genes and we can do a grand job of rebelling against the Hideous blind physical forces that put us here we understand what what put us here we understand that we are here as a result of a truly hideous process never mind about the effects on Humanity natural selection the the process which guides Evolution the process whereby to cut you off sorry I'm gonna have to cut you off okay natural selection is is a

is an ugly process that has beautiful consequences we humans can rise above it that's only two and a half minutes then okay well our time has been used a lot about I am free Exchange if you would like to take 30 seconds to wrap up well what about the final wrap-up that we're going to do we will do that and that's our best opportunity if it's still left Dr Lennox which question do you want me to refer well it's your choice I guess well I I think I'd like to make a comment on what Richard

just said because I I think you are talking about two different things my point was this that if you believe that the universe is a bottom there's no good and evil you remove from yourself the categories you're using to discuss morality that's my point you're assuming it's true I'm arguing on the basis of its truth that you're removing those categories and therefore you leave yourself powerless to comment you you make a good point that that I've removed any absolute standard of morality the empirical fact however is that we all very largely share what we regard

as as morality and that's a very interesting much further than that if that's what you meant you should have written well there's no good or evil is a very strong absolute statement I would have thought how about what I want to refer to this how about the topic let me say something about this thesis about the person of Jesus and so on uh again I have concerns about The God Delusion in its uh treatment of the authority and reliability of scripture because those who've studied it and detailed I see reference to very few scholars in

his book have come to the conclusion that say for example the historian Luke is one of the most authoritative historians of all ancient history and Sherwin white of Oxford a Roman historian says that it would be absurd to suggest that um that Luke's basic historicity was false even in matters of detail and I'm concerned too not only about your attitude to History Richard but your description of Jesus as belonging to a person who practiced an in-group morality and out group hostility and your interpretation of love your neighbor which I note doesn't come from a theologian

but from an anesthesiologist and I think he just might have put you to sleep a little bit as you read it because in Leviticus which quotes love your neighbors yourself just a bit further down it says when a stranger sojourns you with you in your land you shall not do them wrong you shall treat the stranger who lives with you as the native among you and you shall love him as yourself because you were strangers in Egypt so and point of historicity you are totally wrong about the attitude of Jesus in fact I would have

thought you'd have been very familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan and in that Parable it was a Samaritan one of the strangers that showed mercy and that was precisely the parable that Jesus taught to illustrate they love your neighbor as yourself of Leviticus now as a mistake like that seems to me to be very serious indeed I mean I react to it a bit like this what would you think if I got all my views on Darwin from an engineer and never bothered to read the Origin of Species I think you would be

distressed by that that but finally a word about miracles this is a massive subject you claim what David Hume that Miracles violate the laws of nature well David Humes a very curious person to quote on this topic because David Hume didn't believe really in the laws of cause and effect on which laws of nature are founded he didn't believe in causality and he didn't appear to believe in the principle of induction and so that he's not a very good authority to quote secondly I do not think that Miracles are violations of the laws of nature

because the laws of nature describe what normally happens God who is the God of this universe and created it with its regularities is perfectly at Liberty to feed a new event into the universe just as C.S Lewis makes a point if I put two dollars plus two dollars in my desk tonight for four dollars if I find in the morning there are is one dollar I don't say that the laws of arithmetic have been broken I say the laws of Alabama have been broken and I call for a federal judge um well the federal judge

the federal judge is going to ask that you continue your remarks with the understanding that you really are needing to conclude them within the next couple of minutes to give Professor Dawkins in the last word there is a broadcast audience that is part of the reason for our time limits were those meant to be my concluding remarks no I'm giving you an extra minute or so to make your concluding remarks my final conclusion for the night before giving the last word to Professor Dawkins okay well ladies and gentlemen it's been an interesting discussion I'll have

to make my remarks very briefly I do not think the answer is atheism though I agree with much of the criticism that Richard makes of religion I think the book The God Delusion gives the game away in the dedication at the front of the book to Douglas Adams where where he says isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too now you do a brilliant job of getting rid of the fairies though it must be said that most of them didn't

believe in them anyway but when you see the beauty of a garden say a new College in Oxford do you believe there's no Gardener or no owner that it's Sublime Beauty has come about from raw Nature by pure chance of course not for Gardens are to be distinguished from raw Nature by the operation of intelligence and what you're doing in your book I think is presenting us with an obviously full set of Alternatives either we take Gardens on their own or the garden plus fairies but they don't appear on their own they have gardeners and

owners so does the universe you say there's no evidence of God and yet your very description of the universe as a garden Bears witness that the evidence is all around you atheism ladies and gentlemen is not only false it contains no message that deals with the central problem of human Rebellion against God history is littered with attempts to build a Godless Utopia each one of them based as the Book of Genesis suggests that they would be on a denial that God has ever spoken or even that he exists and I would remind you that the

world that Richard Dawkins wishes to bring us to is no Paradise except for the few it denies the existence of Good and Evil it even denies Justice but ladies and gentlemen our hearts cry out for justice and centuries ago the Apostle Paul spoke to the philosophers of Athens and pointed out that there would be a day in which God would judge the World by the man that he had appointed Jesus Christ and that he'd given Assurance to all people by raising him from the dead and the resurrection of Jesus Christ a miracle something Supernatural for

me constitutes the central evidence upon which I base my faith not only the atheism is a delusion but that Justice is real and our sense of morality does not mock us because if there is no Resurrection if there is nothing after death in the end the terrorists and the Fanatics have got away with it okay thank you hey Professor Dawkins yes well that concluding bit rather gives the game away doesn't it all that stuff about science and physics and the complications of physics and things it all what it really comes down to is the resurrection

of Jesus I mean there's a fundamental incompatibility between the sort of sophisticated scientists which we hear part of the time from John Lennox and it's impressive and we and we're we're interested in the in the argument about multiverses and things and then having produced some sort of a case for a kind of deistic God perhaps some God would the great physicist who who adjusted the laws and constants of the universe that's all very Grand and wonderful and then suddenly we come down to the resurrection of Jesus it's so petty it's so trivial it's so local

it's so Earthbound It's So Unworthy of the universe when we go into a garden and we see how beautiful it is and we see colored flowers and we see the butterflies and the bees of course it's natural to think there must be a gardener any fool is likely to think there must be a gardener the huge achievement of Darwin was to show that that didn't have to be true of course it's difficult of course it had to wait until the mid-19th century before anybody thought of it it seems so obvious that if you've got a

garden there must be a gardener who created it and all that goes with that what Darwin did was to show these staggeringly counter-intuitive fact that this not only can be explained by a undirected process it's not Chance by the way entirely wrong to say it's chance it's not chance natural selection is the very opposite of chance and that's the essence of it that was what Darwin discovered he showed not only a garden but everything in the living world and in principle not just on this Earth but on any other planet wherever you see the organized

complexity that we understand that we call life that it has an explanation which can derive it from simple Beginnings by comprehensible rational means that is possibly the greatest achievement that any human mind has ever accomplished not only did he show that it could be done I believe that we can argue that any that the alternative is so unparsimonious and so counter to the laws of common sense that reluctant as we might be because it might be unpleasant for us to admit it although we can't disprove that there's a God it is very very unlikely indeed

we are told that in the earlier part of the last century that GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw engaged in a lively but friendly debate it may be said that perhaps we haven't seen anything quite like that until tonight ladies and Gentlemen please join me in thanking them thank you John thank you thank you thank you very much together well um yeah very powerful influence and we get nowhere by simply ascribing our beliefs to background because I can say exactly the same thing of atheism Dr Linux thanks for what you did and I really appreciate

it all right they actually are really running over time rather substantially so you do it again oh to be sure yes foreign