Hitchens Debates Transcripts

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-16T07:28:00.002-05:00

We at HDT mourn the loss of the great wit and wonder, Christopher Hitchens. In a pungent irony to which he would no doubt raise a glass, Hitchens, who decried hero worship, became an idol to countless muckrakers and misanthropes.

A classic Hitchslap from a recent debate:

Hitchens' address to the American Atheists National Convention 2011

2011-06-28T22:21:00.012-04:00

Christopher Hitchens' address to the American Atheists National Convention

April 22, 2011, [Venue unknown], Des Moines, Iowa

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr. Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.

Sincerely,
Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens, Authors @ Google

2011-06-28T22:18:00.018-04:00

Christopher Hitchens discusses his book god is Not Great

August 16, 2007, Google headquarters, Mountain View, California

[Introduction by Google staffer]

Thank you, darling. Sweet. Well, thank you so much for that suspiciously grudging introduction. And thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming. I understand we’ve only got the balance or so of an hour together so I’ll try and break the rule of a lifetime and be terse. And, I think I’ll put it like this: it’s true that publishers sometimes want to put a catchy or suggestive or challenging title—subtitle on a book. And so, when we hit upon, or rather they hit upon, well, how religion poisons and why religion poisons everything, I knew what would happen: people would come up to me, they'd say, you mean absolutely everything, you mean the whole thing? They’d take me literally. I thought, well, all right, one of the things you have to do in life as an author is live up to your damn subtitle. So I thought today I'd defend the subtitle because I think the title probably, when it came to me in the shower, I realized, it pretty much does speak for itself. Unlike that sign outside Little Rock airport—huge yellow and black sign black sign that you see from the airport that says, just "Jesus," a word I have used myself, and a name I know but put like that seems to say both too much and too little, you know what I mean? Well, here’s how religion has this effect, in my opinion: it is derived from the childhood of our species, from the bawling, fearful period of infancy. It comes from the time when we did not know that we lived on an orb; we thought we lived on a disc. And we did not know that we went around the sun or that the sky was not a dome; when we didn’t know that there was a germ theory to explain disease, and innumerable theories for the explanation of things like famine. It comes from a time when we had no good answers, but because we are pattern-seeking animals (a good thing about us), and because we will prefer even a conspiracy theory or a junk theory to no theory at all (a bad thing about us). This is and was our first attempt of philosophy, just as in some ways, it was our first attempt at science, and it was all founded on and remains founded on a complete misapprehension about the origins, first of the universe, and second, about human nature. We now know a great deal about the origins of the universe, and a great deal about our own nature. I've just had my DNA sequenced by National Geographic. You should all, by the way, get this done. It’s incredibly important to find out how racism and creationism have been abolished by this extraordinary scientific breakthrough, how you can find out your kinship with all your fellow creatures originating in Africa; but also, your kinship with other forms of life including not just animal but plant, and you get an idea of how you are part of nature, and how that’s wonderful enough. And we know from Stephen Hawking and from many others, Steven Weinberg and many other great physicists, an enormous amount now about what Professor Weinberg's brilliant book calls the "first three minutes," the concept of the Big Bang. And we can be as sure as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us in a great rate, nor this amazingly complex billion dollar—billion year period of evolution, we can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and I could be meeting in this room. We are not the objects of either of these plans. These plans don’t know we’re here. I’m sorry to say, wouldn’t know or care if we stopped being here. We have to face this alone with the equipment, intellectual and moral, that we’ve been given, or that we've acquired, or that is innate to us. And here’s another way in which religion poisons matters: it begins by saying, well, why don't we lie to ourselves instead, why don’t we pretend that we’re not going to die, or that an exception can be made at least in our own case if we make the right propitiations or the right moves. Why do we not pretend that the things like modern diseases which we can sequence now, sequence the genes of, like AIDS, are the punishment for wickedness and fornication? Why don't we keep fooling ourselves that there is a divine superintendent of all this because it would abolish the feeling of loneliness and possibly even of irrelevance that we might otherwise have. In other words, why don’t we surrender to wish thinking? That poisons everything, in my opinion. Right away, it attacks the very basic integrity that we need to conduct the scrupulous inquiries, investigations, experiments, interrogations of evidence that we need to survive and to prosper and to grow. And it's no coincidence, no accident that almost every scientific advance has been made in the teeth of religious opposition of one form or another that says we shouldn’t be tampering with God’s design. I suppose the most recent and most dangerous one of these is the attempt to limit stem cell research. But everyone could probably think of other forms of scientific research and inquiry, especially medical that had led to religious persecution, in reprisal. Thirdly, it’s an attack, I think, on what’s also very important to us, our innate morality. If there’s one point that I get made more than another to me when I go and debate religious people, it's this, the say, "Where would your morals come from if there was no God?" It’s actually—it’s a question that’s posed in Dostoyevsky's wonderful novel The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers says—Smerdyakov, actually, the wicked one, says it: "If God is dead, isn’t everything permitted, isn’t everything permissible? Where would our ethics be if there was no superintending duty?" This, again, seems to me a very profound insult to us in our very deepest nature and character. It is not the case, I submit to you, that we do not set about butchering and raping and thieving from each other right now only because we’re afraid of a divine punishment or because we’re looking for a divine reward. It's an extraordinarily base and insulting thing to say to people. On my mother’s side, some of my ancestry is Jewish. I don’t happen to believe the story of Moses in Egypt or the exile or the wandering in the Sinai, and, in fact, now even Israeli archaeology has shown that there isn’t a word of truth to that story or really any of the others, but take it to be true. Am I expected to believe that my mother’s ancestors got all the way to Mount Sinai, quite a trek, under the impression until they got there that rape, murder, perjury, and theft were okay, only to be told when they got to the foot of Mount Sinai, bad news, none of these things is kosher at all? They’re all forbidden. I don’t think so. I think, I think we can, actually have a better explanation ever since—superior as well as better—that no one would have been able to get as far as Mount Sinai or in any other mountain or in any other direction unless they had known that human solidarity demands that we look upon each other as brothers and sisters, and that we forbid activities such as murder, rape, perjury, and theft, that this is innate in us. If those activities are not innate, the sociopaths who don't understand the needs of anyone but themselves and the psychopaths who positively take pleasure in breaking these rules, well, all we can say is, according to one theory, they're also made in the image of God which makes the image of God question rather problematic, does it not? Or whether they can be explained by a further and better research and have to be restrained and disciplined meanwhile, but in no sense here is religion a help where it claims to help most which is to our morality, to our ethics. Finally, I would say—not finally because I’m finished here, I’m not quite done. Don't relax. I hope everyone has got to drink, something to eat, but on the poison question, I think there’s the real temptation of something very poisonous to human society and human relations which is the fear of freedom, the wish to be slaves, the wish to be told what to do. Now, just as we all like to think and we live under written documents and proclamations that encourage us to think that it is our birth right and our most precious need to be free, to be liberated, to be untrammeled, so we also knew that unfortunately the innate in people is the servile, is the wish to be told what to do, is the adoration for strong and brutal and cruel leaders, that this other baser element of the human makeup has to be accounted for and it gives us a great deal of trouble around the world as we speak. Religion, in my view, is a reification, a distillation of this wish to be a serf, to be a slave. Ask yourself if you really wish it was true that there was a celestial dictatorship that watched over you from the moment you were born, actually the moment you were conceived, all through life, night and day, knew your thoughts, waking and sleeping, could in fact convict you of thought crime, the absolute definition of a dictatorship, can convict you for what you think and what you privately want, what you’re talking about to yourself, that admonishes you like this under permanent surveillance, control and supervision and doesn’t even let go of you when you’re dead because that’s when the real fun begins. Now, my question to you is this, who wishes that that were true? Who wants to lead the life of a serf in a celestial North Korea? I’ve been to North Korea. I’m one of the very few writers who has. I am indeed the only writer who’s been to all three axis of evil countries, Iran, Iraq and North Korea. And I can tell you North Korea is the most religious state I’ve ever been to. I used to wonder when I was a kid, what would it be like praising God and thanking him all day and all night? Well, now I know because North Korea is a completely worshipful state. It's set up only to do that, for adoration and it’s only one short of a trinity. They have a father and the son, as you know, the Dear Leader and the Great Leader. The father is still the president of the country. He’s been dead for fifteen years, but Kim Jong-il, the little one, is only the head of the party and the Army. His father is still the president, head of the state. So you have in North Korea what you might call a necrocracy or what I also called them mausolocracy, thanatocracy. One—just one short of a trinity: father, son, maybe no holy ghost, but they do say that when the birth of the younger one took place, the birds of Korea sang in Korean to mark the occasion. This I’ve checked. It did not happen. Take my word for it. It didn't occur and I suppose I should add they don’t threaten to follow you after you're dead. You can leave North Korea. You can get out of their hell and their paradise by dying. Out of the Christian and Muslim one, you cannot. This is the wish to be a slave. And in my view, it’s poisonous of human relations. Now, I’ve already babbled for nearly twenty minutes. I’ll be quick. It is argued, well, some religious people have done great things and have been motivated to do so by their faith. The most cited case in point I have found is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, who I know I don’t need to explain to you about. Two quick things on that: first, he was it’s true a minister. He did preach the Book of Exodus, the exile of an enslaved and oppressed people as his metaphor. But if he really meant it, he would have said that the oppressed people, as the Book of Exodus finds them doing, were entitled to kill anyone who stood on their way and take their land, their property, enslave their women, kill their children, and commit genocide, rape, ethnic cleansing and forcible theft of land. That’s what the Book of Exodus described happening, the full destruction of the tribes. It's very fortunate that Dr. King only meant the Bible at the most to be used as a metaphor and after all he was using the only book that he could be sure all of his audience had ever really read. That’s the first thing. The second is, during his lifetime, he was attacked all the time for having too many secular and leftist and non-believing friends, the people like famous black secularists like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and others, the men that actually did organize the march on Washington;,which leads me to my third observation which is this: It’s a challenge I've made now in debates with rabbis, with priests of all Christian stripes, with imams. Once with a—I know this sounds like an opening of a joke about some bar, but once also with a Buddhist nun in Miami. I asked them all. Here is my challenge: you have to name me an ethical statement that was made or a moral action that was performed by a religious person in the name of faith that could not have been made as an action or uttered as a statement by a person not of faith, a person of no faith. You have to do that. Not so far and I’ve done it at quite a high level with the religious, no takers. No one's been able to find me that. That being the case, we're entitled to say, I think, that religious faith serve as the requirements whereas if I was to ask anyone in this room, "Think of a wicked thing said or an evil thing done by a person of faith in the name of faith," no one would have a second of hesitation in thinking of one, would they? Interesting to realize how true that is and how much truerit's getting. Does anyone ever listen to Dennis Prager’s Show? He’s a slightly loopy Christian broadcaster—religious broadcaster, I should say, he’s more Jewish than Christian—Judeo-Christian broadcaster who quite often rather generously has me on his show. And he asked me a question the other day, he had a challenge of his own. He said, “You are to imagine that you’re in a town late at night where you've never been before, and you have no friends and it’s getting dark. And through the darkness, you see coming towards you a group of men, let’s say ten. Do you feel better or worse if you know that they’re just coming from a prayer meeting?” This is Mr. Prager’s question to me. I said, “Well, Mr. Prager, without leaving you, from just without quitting the letter B, I can tell you I’ve had that experience in Belfast, in Beirut, in Baghdad, in Bombay, in Bosnia, and in Bethlehem. And if you see anyone coming from a religious gathering in any of those places, you know exactly how fast you need to run. And no one has to explain to you why and I haven’t had to waste any time telling you, have I, ladies and gentlemen? So I submit to you that it is those who are people of faith who have the explaining to do, who have the justifying to do if this is indeed the case. If they can't account for anything about the origin of our cosmos or our species, if they say that without them, we’d be without morals and make us seem as if we are merely animals without faith, if further, everybody can name an instance where religion has made people actually behave worse to one another and act as a retardant upon the advances of knowledge and science and information, I submit that the case to be made is theirs rather than mine. And we have a better tradition. We’re not just arid secularists and materialists, we on the atheist side. We can point, through the Hubble telescope, the fantastic, awe-inspiring majestic pictures that are being taken now of the outer limits of our universe, and who’s going to turn away from those pictures and start gaping again at the burning bush? We have smaller microscopes that can examine for us the miracles of the interior of the double helix and the sheer beauty of that. The natural world is wonderful enough, more wonderful than anything conjured by the fools who believe in astrology or the supernatural. And we have a better tradition politically against the popes and the imams and the witch doctors and the divine right of kings and the whole long tradition of civic repression combined with religion that's known as theocracy. We have created in the United States, the only country in the history of the world written on founding documents testable, organized, works in progress based on the theory of human liberation and the only constitution in the history of world that says that there shall be a separation between the church and the state. God is never mentioned in the United States Constitution except in order to limit religion and keep it out of politics and put it under legal control. This achievement was described by President Jefferson, whose biographer I am in a small way, to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut in a letter after they'd written to him for fear of persecution. By the way, who do you think the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut were afraid of being persecuted by? Anyone knows?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: The Methodists?

HITCHENS: No, the Congregationalists of Danbury, Connecticut. People forget what it used to be like, see how the Christians loved each other, how they've tried to repeat the European pattern of one religious sect repressing and torturing another one. And as you probably know, the president wrote back and said, “No, you may be assured that there will ever be in this country a wall of separation between the church and the state.” So I have a new slogan and I’m taking it on tour and I invite you to join me in it and it goes like this, “Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall.” Okay, thank you very much for coming. And I’m all yours. And that was 25 minutes, I hope that’s fair. And I’ll point out the questioners if you like because I don't think anyone thinks that I’ve planted my immediate family in this hole, but, Carol, stay out of it. Bring it on.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Thank you for coming to Google.

HITCHENS: It’s my honor.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: So you make it sound really, really simple. I mean you have explanations for everything.

HITCHENS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: And I agree with a lot of your arguments and, you know, I lived in, you know like, a socialist country. I mean, I come from Croatia so I, you know, I empathize with a little bit of when you say like the axis of evil and especially North Korea being a perfect theocracy, I can relate to that. But I don't understand why do you say that these people really want to be enslaved, if you could explain this to me. I mean, I think there’s really a system, you know, like set up by a minority which is really a brutal system and I don't understand about that part, like, you know, like this is something that these people want so...

HITCHENS: Did you say you were Croatska, Croatian?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Yes, yes.

HITCHENS: Yeah. Well, then I would be upset if you thought I meant that these man-made regimes were there because people wanted them to be, no. That’s not what I meant at all about North Korea. Particularly, these have been riveted onto...

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Yes.

HITCHENS: ...people. I mean, North Korea is a hermetic place unfortunately in that it has ocean on either side of it; the Demilitarized Zone which is several miles wide on the south and Russia and China are on the north. So, you have a place where you can horribly conduct an experiment on human beings, essentially. You can isolate them totally. The North Korean State was set up in the same year that Orwell published 1984. And you almost think that somebody gave Kim Il-sung a copy of 1984 in Korean and said, “Do you think we could make this fly?” And he said, “Well, I can’t be sure. We sure can give it the old college try.” Because that’s how it feels there. I went there, I thought, I've had his experience—I’ll just digress for a second. I’ve had this experience twice in my life. Journalists hate cliché. I know it doesn’t always seem like that when you read the papers, but we try and avoid them. I went to Prague once under the old days of the communist regime. I thought whatever happens to me here, I’m not going to mention Franz Kafka in my essay. I’m going to be the first journalist not to do it. I went to a meeting of the opposition underground, somebody betrayed us because the secret police came in and, suddenly, wham like this just broke down the door, dogs, torches, rubber truncheons, the lot. They slammed me against the wall, "You’re under arrest." "Well, I demand to see the British ambassador." "Blah, blah, you’re under arrest." "What’s the charge?" "We don't have to tell you that." I thought, fuck, I’ve got to mention Kafka after all. They make you do it. Well, I—that’s actually what a cliché is. Communism is a cliché in itself. The same in North Korea: I thought I don’t want to mention Orwell, I don't want to mention Orwell, now I have to mention him. There’s no other standard of comparison. No, what I meant about the fear of freedom was this: many, many people don't of course want to live under a hellish starvation regime of gulag type, like that. But they quite like being told what to do. They don't want to be told that life doesn’t—the world doesn’t owe them a living and that they’re on their own and they quite like it and repeatedly vote for parties and sometimes leaders who promise to provide everything as long as they'll give up just a little bit of freedom, just a little bit. In the tradeoff, you’ll get more security and more welfare. It’s a temptation. In some cases, it takes an extreme form, and I'm very impressed by how often when I debate with the religious people, they will tell me that they gravitate towards faith because they want someone to, if you like, look after them. The whole idea of a heavenly father, for example, is built up on this. The old joke says, "Some say God is dead, some say God is dad." You figure. Then there are people who—well, Islam for example, the word means—the word "Islam" means surrender, prostration. You give everything to God. Everything's in his hands. This is implicitly totalitarian. That’s what I mean. But I think it's innate in most people is the feeling that they quite like someone to take care of them all of the time so it can be hard to argue with them that there is no such person.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: I understand better now but it's not...

HITCHENS: Okay.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: ...just to follow up a little bit. So is there a possibility there to say that then some people are more freedom-loving than others and is this some sort of, you know, like—I wouldn’t call it racism or anything but, you know, like, differentiating people by their love towards freedom and I'll end with that?

HITCHENS: No, I’m certain that the same feelings are innate in all people. And that one day there will be a North Korean edition of 1984, and it will be a huge bestseller there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Uh-huh.

HITCHENS: I am as sure of that as I can be of anything. Though, at the moment, it’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone in North Korea who's even allowed to consider the concept of political liberty. It will come because it is innate. I have no doubt about that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: To follow up to on this fear of freedom and there is an innate idea, sorry to beat that horse, but what do you think would possibly replace this? I also think that there are some—I mean it’s obviously much easier to say my life is out of my control and these events are out of my control so, you know, I’m going to thank God for the good things and, you know, hate the devil for the bad things, whatever. So, like, you know, from Plato to Nietzsche to Sartre have said it’s difficult to choose the life where you're actually deciding and making choices for yourself and taking responsibility and appreciating the fact that the world doesn’t care about your existence and then doing what you need to do with that. It is difficult. How do we, you know, well—how could we possibly imagine a world where everybody buys into that idea and how do we—where would we go like—where would that structure that some people feel they can’t do without, where would they get that from? I guess what would religion be replaced by so to fulfill this natural need?

HITCHENS: Yeah. Well, I would say that emancipating oneself from religion and from the combined sort of solipsism and masochism, this is what I was trying to say to the comrade here a moment ago. Religion says to you, remember, the monotheistic ones, you're a miserable sinner, your sin is original, you can't escape it, you’re born as a wretch, you’re made out of dust or according to the Qur'an, a clot of blood, you’re a worm, you’re nothing, you know, but a piece of gunk basically. But—and you got to work really hard to get away from the terrible punishment that awaits you for that. So total abnegation, but there’s also good news: the universe is designed with you in mind, and God has a plan for you personally. So just when the person thinks they can't take anymore abuse—it’s like being inducted into a cult—just when the person thinks they can't take anymore humiliation, they're told, ah, but father loves you and he wants you to join our group. That’s not good for people. You’d be better off without it. So would everyone you know, so it’s not a matter of what we would put in its place; we wouldn’t. We’d be emancipated from that kind of sadomasochism. That’s a good thing to start off with. Second, we have the wonders and beauties of science to study. We have instead of ancient texts that are full of lies and myths, we have increasingly a wonderful world literature that’s available to anybody who can read even a little. Most recently, I would cite you, because yesterday was the birthday of India, happy birthday by the way to all Indians here. And Pakistanis, if you insist, though I think the partition was a huge mistake. There’s a—and religious partition is the worst kind, and it’s going to lead one day to a thermonuclear war so—I didn’t have time to go into that but maybe someone will ask me. There's incredible literature in English written by Indians. It’s sort of a sub-branch, but I shouldn’t even say sub, I mean a branch, a new branch of English writing by Indians in English. It's becoming a great part of world literature. There’s all this extraordinary excitement. And people say no, no, no, you should, as Thomas Aquinas said, "I'm only a man of one book," you know, you should be reading a bible, you don't really need anything else, they’re destroying libraries in the Muslim world that could have any books that contradict the Qur'an. This is no way to live. But having said all that, and said what the—and the consolations of philosophy too which aren’t that hard to study are very rewarding. And ethical and moral dilemmas that you get out of the study of literature, George Eliot, Dostoyevsky, people of that kind, James Joyce. Still, it’s only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. There are no guarantees and an atheist can be a nihilist, or a sadist, or a Stalinist, or a fascist—actually it’d be unlikely the last one but that’s possible. Okay, but there are no guarantees and in part that it’s the recognition of that, that’s the beginning of wisdom as well as I think the beginning of liberty.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: One short and one longer one. I just want to be sure, I assume that you have read the Captain Stormfield's Journey To Heaven by Mark Twain?

HITCHENS: Sorry. Yes, I've read a lot of Mr. Clemens on religion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Yes. That seemed a sort of a definitive work on the hierarchy structure of a more standard religion.

HITCHENS: Yes. By the way, you can't read too much Twain, ladies and gentlemen, on the subject. And now all of his stuff is available. There are websites on Mark Twain and religion. It used to be really hard to get his writings on religion even 10 years ago. Sorry.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: And my longer question which hopefully won't choke you up. I actually have several friends who are very well-educated, in some cases in the sciences, who became religious late in life. They had been atheist or agnostic, and then just decided they were feeling something and became religious. Do you have anything to say on that sort of grounds or why that might be occurring?

HITCHENS: Yes, I suppose I could speculate, but that’s all I would be doing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Of course.

HITCHENS: I think for some people, the Hubble View, say, does have the opposite effect from the one it has on me. It makes people feel, well, then, whoever designed this must be even more amazing than I thought. And that’s—there are attempts made by creationists now to say that. Instead of saying, "No, Darwin was wrong. God made all this stuff." They now say, "Well, okay, there was evolution, but God did that, too." So as you may know arguments that explain everything, explain nothing. That’s a definite principle I think of underlying poor cognition. If they can bend their argument so it can comprehend everything, comprise everything then it isn't an argument. But I think that we are certainly made in such a way as to be worshipfully inclined, shall we say. That tendency is certainly within us. And when people think that there's something awe inspiring, what they feel is awe. And then what they feel is well, maybe there's some majesty I should be acknowledging here, though that isn't at all a logical step. By the way, do you know about "awe?"

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: In what sense?

HITCHENS: John Wayne played the Roman centurion in one of the films about the crucifixion?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I don’t believe I've seen that one.

HITCHENS: And there's a certain point the rain has to come down hard, and there's thunder and lightning and the veil of the temple splits and so on. And John Wayne, standing as a centurion, is supposed to say, "Truly, this was the son of God." So he does this. I forget who the director was, I think it’s Houston. And cue rain, thunder and lightning, so Wayne stands there stoically, under the waters, "Truly, this was the son of God." And the director's, "John, that was great. That was terrific. I just wonder if we could have it with a little more awe." So they cue again the rain, thunder, the veil of the temple splits in twain, earthquakes, you know, it's all happening and Wayne says, "Aw, truly, this was the son of God."

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: So this is a kind of a follow-up on Tom's question. I have a buddy who styles himself as a kind of an allegorical pagan. And he's had a lot of angry criticisms of religion, many of which echo yours. But at the same time he feels in himself a kind of a biological need to be part of a circle of believers in a community which he feels helps his rather fragile emotional demeanor. He goes through, you know, depression and things like that, and he finds that belief—so what he'd done is try to find what he feels as the least obnoxious religion he could find and then not take it too seriously. What would you say to such a person?

HITCHENS: Well, that used to be called the Church of England, or the Unitarians, about whom Bertrand Russell said, "The great thing about them is they believe in one god maximum." Peter DeVries is very good on this. He says, "People used to be pagans and polytheists and believe in multiple gods, and then they started believing in one god and they're going nearer the true figure all the time." This is progress.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: On an article, I believe it was in Slate I read, you seemed reluctant to endorse if not critical of Richard Dawkins's attempt to sort of organize the atheists under the title of "Brights."

HITCHENS: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: And I believe that your comment was that we infidels need no such machinery of reinforcement. My question is, if like-minded people do not organize, especially if those whose ideals we oppose are more organized, how can we attempt to kind of steer our society the way that we would like it to go?

HITCHENS: Well, I was thinking of saying this to the previous question. I mean, I’m in some ways the wrong person to ask these questions. I’m no longer a joiner up of groups. I don’t feel the belonging need anymore. I used to when I was younger and more left than I am now feel that the need to be involved in an organized way. Now I don’t, and I think I probably have more influence as an individual than I ever did as a cogwheel in a so-called party. (A point for anyone to ponder actually who was asked have they ever considered registering independent, for example. People may fight harder for your vote if you don’t give it away in advance.) Separate question, and it’s very important to me that I don’t belong to a church. People who believe as I believe don’t need to get together all the time and remind ourselves what we believe, reinforce it, ram it home in case we forget the incredible propositions that, you know, we're singing and all of this kind of thing. You just recognize a fellow free-thinker when you meet one. That should be enough. And in any country or any language as well. There will be in Washington in October a big gathering where Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and myself and many others are going to be—Victor Stinger. Because there has been an extraordinary vogue of successful books on this subject now, and I think there's a change in the zeitgeist going on about religion. And let me just say this, if that zeitgeist has been brought about—the change has been brought about in that zeitgeist, it hasn’t been by any organization. It's been by a group of like-minded people writing their hearts out and refusing to be intimidated by religious bullying. Or, to allow religious nonsense to be taught in the schools, for example, in place of science. Or to allow euphemisms to be spread about the behavior of the parties of god in Iraq or elsewhere. That’s what created it, not an organization but what you might call an intellectual tendency. I think that’s fine. I think it's encouraging.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: Hi. A few of the things that you said don’t really seem consistent with our experience in the United States. Two things in particular: one is that you said, you know, once people, you know, have Hubble telescopes and microscopes, the burning bush is not as interesting. And the other thing you said is that, you know, religion kind of feeds into, you know, innate human nature for, you know, being told what to do or not having as much freedom. Well, in the United States, you have the most advanced, wealthy, most powerful nation in probably the history of the world, and you have probably the most freedom-loving, you know, almost inventing—not inventing but really espousing the philosophy of freedom and individuality and trying to, you know, propagate that throughout the world. Yet, you also have the most religious nation. Well, it's true. I mean, you can argue with the methods but I mean, there's no question that, like, we are trying to promote democracy. And yet you have, yeah, the most religious nation. You have like people going to church is probably an all-time high. Religious people affect who are leaders are, you know, to a great degree. So how do you explain, like, that contradiction?

HITCHENS: Well, I don’t think it’s a contradiction because religious, the section of the constitution means you can have religious pluralism. Now for example where I come from, originally (you can probably tell I was born in England), the head of the church is the head of the state and the head of the armed forces. It's an official church and you have to pay for it and whether you want to or not. And on the moment that Her Majesty the Queen expires, the head of the Church of England will become a bat-eared half-Muslim with no taste in women as far as I can see, the lugubrious Prince Charles, who goes to classes on Islam and talks to plants and is a loon. That’s what you get for founding a church on the family values of Henry VIII. In the United States, you can't have any of that. That'd be completely unconstitutional. You can belong to any church you want, the government has nothing to do with that. And people I think take a Toquevillian view, if you like, of the church. They go, many of them, to church for social reasons. Some of them for ethnic ones, some of them for charitable, some of them for community reasons as you might say. If you ask someone now—I've been doing this a lot recently. I have debated at every stop of my book tour. "Okay, so you said you are a Baptist minister?" "Yes." "Well, do you believe in John Calvin's teaching on predestination and hell fire?" "Why do you want to know?" "Well, only because you said you were a Baptist." "Yeah, but I mean I’m a Southern Baptist, you know that kind." Well, come one. They don’t love the question. They—ask Catholics if they really believe what their church teaches or what the Pope tells them. Of course they don’t for the most part. The fastest growing group of people in the country has been measured as being those of who have no belief or who are atheists. By far the fastest growing, it’s doubled in the last ten years. People are evidently lying to the opinion polls, that there are not enough churches in the country—there are plenty of them. They’re not enough to take all the people who say that they go to them, just couldn’t be done, couldn’t fit them in. I don’t think people who have doubts about religion are going to tell them to opinion pollsters who call them up at dinner time. They will say, "Yes, I am a Methodist." or whatever it is, they’re not going say "I sometimes wonder if John Wesley was really the man." Not when the multiple choice boxes are being gone through. So, but unfortunately, I mean, there are people who think that that’s the way to go politically. The president, for example, thinks that to say someone is person of faith is axiomatically to confer a compliment on them. And if you remember, he did it to Vladimir Putin, KGB goon and hood, and increasingly evidently a very dangerous man to have in charge in Russia. President meets and says right away, “Right away, well, I could tell by looking into his eyes and seeing that he was wearing his grandmother’s crucifix, that he was just the chap for me.” Now, in a strong field, I think that’s the stupidest thing the president has yet said. And he must, I think, occasionally regret it. And I got—tried to get a research grant to this one to find out just, I just need to know something: has Vladimir Putin ever worn his grandmother’s crucifix since? Had he ever been seen wearing it before? Or did he just think this should be enough for the president of the United States? Because if so, it would show that religion was not just metaphysically incorrect, but as I have I believe said, a danger and a poison to all of us. If our republic can be—and its president can be pushed over, like that, like someone offering garlic to a vampire, then we really are in trouble.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: Just a follow-up, though: it just sounds like you would have almost no religion in the U.S. if you—if it’s true that you were saying, that once you became an advanced scientific society, you know, you’d lose interest in religion which is not the case.

HITCHENS: Alright. I'll say a bit more: I mean, take the case of the so-called “intelligent design school.” They want at least equal time, they used to want to ban evolution, now they want equal time in schools. So, they brought with their Discovery Institute friends from Washington, moves on school boards and courts in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and the most conservative county of Pennsylvania around the town of Dover. And they have been humiliated in each case. And this is in Kansas, in Texas, in Oklahoma and in the most reactionary part of Pennsylvania, thrown off the school board by the electorate and thrown out of court as flat out unconstitutional by the judges, in all cases, Reagan Republican appointees. And I don’t know what they’re going to do next, these rednecks, I don’t know what they’re going to do. But, I know why it doesn’t work, and why it’s not going to work, because there may be many parents in Kansas who say, “Well, I personally think that God made the rocks and so on and only made them 6,000 years ago," but they don’t want their children taught that in school. They don’t want to come from a state where they get laughed when they say where they’re from. "Oh you’re from Kansas, that’s the place where…" they don’t like that. It was the same with the confederate flag issue, quite apart from the racism. A lot of people didn’t want to come from a state that had a confederate battle flag on its [indecipherable]. Among other things people won’t have their conventions in your state and you’ll suffer for that too. You’ll get laughed at when you travel. They don’t want this. And nor should they have to put up with it because of a handful of crackpots. So, no, I don’t say there aren’t a lot of devout people in this country and I don’t say that science just negates religion. But I say that the influence of religion as opposed to scientific rationalism is hugely overestimated, yeah. Shouldn’t impress people to the point where they feel it must—can’t be opposed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: Thank you for coming.

HITCHENS: Thanks for having me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: I think you already answered one of my questions regarding organizing a larger effort. So separate from that, I wanted to get just some comments and thoughts based upon the idea of if there is going to be an independent movement whether at the Atheist or Anti-theist movement, whether you’re part of it or not, if you have any suggestions for the average person not may not have say a publishing company or a production company, but does have the Internet, you know, does have their own thoughts...

HITCHENS: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: ...and a keyboard in front of them, what they can do to either give resources to other people or to actually express their thoughts in ways that you find to actually be, you know, exceptional...

HITCHENS: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: ...to further some sort of movement, if there may be one.

HITCHEN: Yeah. My friend, Rich Dawkins actually at the end of his book, The God Delusion, does have a list which you can look up, and his is an excellent book, I should say, of websites where, so to say, help is available. Well, there’s one for example—there is a very important one of called, “Leaving Islam,” is about people want to get out and are afraid or are being intimidated, ways of actually doing it and finding contact with people who feel the same way. Very serious because there are quite a lot of our fellow citizens now who don’t feel that they do have religious freedom because they are imprisoned in a religion that can kill them for even considering changing their minds about it, this is not a small matter. But I tell you what I would do: I would become a subscriber to a magazine called Free Inquiry which is published out of Amherst, New York. It’s every month I think, a very, very good rationalist and skeptical magazine which has itself a lot of local activities that you can look up. And then, there’s another magazine called Skeptical Inquiry, published from nearer here, maybe more appeal to people of a scientific or technical bent which does things likes they expose frauds that are on TV claiming to be able to put you in touch with your relatives, or divine water or all these kinds of nutbags that are often featured on primetime shows. And puts you also in touch with the work the great magicians Penn and Teller and James Randi, who again show that miracles are easy. And they can also show the fraudulence of anyone who tries to exploit them. A world of wonder awaits you. And these magazines will also show you, point out to you the areas where resistance is needed, say to the continued attempt to teach nonsense in American schools. “Yes, children that concludes the biology period, and now get ready for your creation studies hour and after the astronomy class we will have the astrology class for equal time, and then the chemistry/alchemy period.” It’s enough to make a cat laugh, isn’t it? There are people think this is what should be done to stultify American children. So, you can meet up with other people could think that that’s a bad idea.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: Yeah, two things, an observation and a concern: my first observation is that I think you share something in common with Jesus in that both of you have seems to be attacking aspects of religion, but in his case, he attacked specific religious leaders whereas you attack religion itself. And, I just find that interesting…

HITCHENS: No, our resemblances are often pointed out.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: I’m sad to hear, I thought for sure I’d be the first. And secondly, the bit of concern, if we start going more and more toward atheism—you mentioned some of the horrible things that happened in the name of religion, but I look at one of the greatest genocides or at least mass murders ever, was by the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin when in the name of among another things atheism, they killed an enormously large number of their own people. And what do you think would prevent that from happening if indeed you were successful?

HITCHENS: I have a chapter on this in my book because it is a very frequently asked question, I think it’s also a very serious one. I have to condense the chapter if I may, but here’s the situation: until 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, millions of Russians, millions and millions of them had for hundreds and hundreds of years been told that the head of the state, the Czar, was also the head of the church and was a little more than human, he was the little father of the people. He wasn’t quite divine. He was more like a saint than a human. And he owned everything in the country and everything was due to him. That’s how a gigantic layer Russian society was inculcated with servile, fatalistic ideas. If you are Josef Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business in the first place if you can’t realize this is a huge opportunity for you, you’ve inherited a population that’s servile and credulous and superstitious. Well, what does Stalin do? He sets up an inquisition; he has heresy hunts, trials of heretics, the Moscow trials; he proclaims miracles, Lysenko’s agriculture that was supposed to produce three harvests a year or whatever it was, the pseudo-biology that would feed everyone in a week; he says all thanks are due at all times to the leader and you must praise him at all times for his goodness and kindness. And incidentally, he always kept the Russian Orthodox Church on his side. It split. It split the church and some of them moved to New York and set up a rival. But the Russian Orthodox Church remained part of the regime, he was not so stupid as not to know he had to do that, just as Hitler and Mussolini made an even more aggressive deal with the Roman Catholic Church and with some of the Protestants. And remember the other great axis of evil person of that time, the Emperor of Japan, was not just a religious person but actually a god. So Fascism, Communism and Stalinism and Nazism are actually nothing like as secular as some people think, and much more religious than most people know. But here's what a fair test would be: find a society that's adopted the teachings of Spinoza, and Voltaire, Galileo, Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and gone down the pits as result of doing that into famine and war and dictatorship and torture and repression. That would be a fair test. That's the experiment I'd like to run. I don’t think that's going to end up with a gulag.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: Hi. Thank you for coming.

HITCHENS: Thank you for having me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: More ladies asking questions would be awesome and please. I implore you to be really hilarious so we can prove Mr. Hitchens is wrong about why women cannot be funny.

HITCHENS: I was wondering what you'd done with your chicks here I must say.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: We're a technology company. So, I'm not religious but just to play a little devil's advocate, what do you say to studies that show that people who consistently go to church, who pray, who believe in God have, like, lower blood pressure and live longer lives, et cetera?

HITCHENS: Well, I’d say it wouldn't prove much. I mean, the—it'd be hard to prove. I'm not sure I would be able to trust the methodology but suppose it was true, the same could be said of being a Moonie for example. I mean, it is said that Louis Farrakhan's racist crackpot Nation of Islam, sectarian gang gets young men of drugs. For all I know it does, it may but that doesn’t recommend it to me. Nor does it prove a thing about its theology, if you see what I mean. Whereas I can absolutely tell you that of the suicide bombing population, 100% are faith based.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: This is true.

HITCHENS: And I don’t think that that in itself disproves faith but I think it should make you skeptical of that kind of random sampling.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: Sure. There seemed to be...

HITCHENS: Of the genital mutilation community the same can be said.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: I've a lot of progressive religious friends who—I used to be pretty condescending towards religion but I feel like I've learned a lot from them and learned about their religious practice and what it means to them and as you stated earlier a lot of religious people don’t really believe all the tenets of what their faith says anyway. So, I feel like those friends of mine are looking for community and looking for a feeling of oneness with other people and with the universe and ultimately on a scientific level that bears out anyway because on, like, a quantum level everything is one and is the same. So, I feel like churches at least in this country provide the sense of community that I don’t think exists any other way in our culture. I don’t feel like I had that growing up and I feel like my friends that went to church, they can go back to their church now and there are all of these adults that aside from their parents that were there to nurture them as they were growing up and then ask how they're doing and I never had that. So, I'm jealous of that in a sense.

HITCHENS: It takes a lot to make me cry but you...See me afterwards, I mean...Look actually it’s what I said about if there's any who read, who read de Toqueville, On Democracy in America should—that's what he said about communitarianism and religion. It's very—it's the reason why America is so religious but it's a different form of religion. Ask yourself a related question: it's amazing to me how many Americans change religion when they get married. You hear it all the time, you've heard it. I used to be Seventh Day Adventist but my wife was Congregationalist, now I go to the Congregationalists. It doesn’t matter the Seventh Day Adventist used to say, "If you don’t stay with us you're going straight to hell." Changed very easily. Go to another church instead. Wouldn't consider perhaps not going to one but it shows the depth of the strength of religious allegiance. I also think that, well, it's notorious about, say, Polish Catholics in Chicago or Greek Orthodox or many Jews, the church has been a means of transmitting, preserving an ethnic tradition as well. The solidarity in the face of often quiet bleak kinds of life, and now there's even a phenomenon known as Churchianity and expressed by the megachurches, the people who lead half transient lives don’t have very stable employment or residence who often are moving around the country. On a Sunday they want to know where they can go take the old jalopy and be among friends, and these characters are waiting for them believe you me to remove what few savings they do have left from them. Because that's another indissoluble fact about American religion just as community and blood pressure may be involved. It has to be mentioned in the same breath as open fraud to an absolutely astonishing extent. I mean, the shake down community, the genital mutilation community, the suicide bombing community, the child abuse—I would prefer to say child rape communities, all these are communities of faith, believe you me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Oh, it's my turn?

HITCHENS: Sir.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Try to diverge a little from the immediate subjects. You've expressed your regrets for this perverse impulse in the human spirit which seems to desire to be dominated, to prostrate itself before the mysterious altar of power. It occurs to me that the current government of this nation has, in a calculated fashion, exploited this perverse desire and exploited the language which seems to inspire it or appeal to it. Now, I'm strongly opposed to a particular policy of this government which is the indefinite detention of so-called terrorist suspects in Cuba and in particular I dislike the way the government tries to justify this policy by using these very discourses of power and secrecy which come of a particular religious stamp. So I would like to ask, not to be impertinent, how you can square what you've said today with other comments you've made apparently in support of this very policy.

HITCHENS: Well, there's no danger of you being impertinent so don’t worry about that. I've just returned from Guantanamo&mdashwell, I say "just", I was there last month. It took me a long time to get down and haven't yet written anything about it so you won't know my views as I'm not sure that I know them in full myself, but about your question: I know what my views are about indefinite detention in principle. I didn't see or must have missed any allusion that all made to religion, in the decision to declare them enemy combatants.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Um...

HITCHENS: You're suggesting there was a religious justification for the detention policy?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Not a religious justification per se but in my opinion the Bush administration in its public deliveries often uses a language of power very much akin to that used by religious tyrants and demagogues down the centuries and this language comes up particularly strongly when justifying controversial actions such as Guantanamo Bay.

HITCHENS: Well, again I think we have a disagreement. I mean the language they seem to use to me is the language of the secular language of emergency powers and special circumstances requiring extraordinary measures. That’s a very old argument especially in the United States, it goes back to President Lincoln’s attempt to suspend habeas corpus in the Civil War. It reminds me of that and not of any argument about or with theocracy.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: "Emergency powers" and "extraordinary rendition" and other terms like this, to me, rather smack of secrecy jargon...

HITCHENS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: ...at the same time used by preachers.

HITCHENS: Or by secular despots. I mean, I just don’t think you’re quite carrying your point about the theological. If by all means if you want to discuss the question of civil liberties, let’s do so, but I mean it’s a departure from the rubric. The Bush administration is not conducting a holy war in this respect. It is confronting a holy war, however. I mean one thing you can’t miss about the inhabitants of Guantanamo is how faith based they are, and that’s part of the reason why we are presented with this problem. The difficulty seems to me to be the following: if you treat them as criminals, as some argue, then you can’t say really that you are fighting a war, then it’s only a law and order question. If you say you’re fighting a war, then in what sense are these not enemy soldiers? If they are enemy soldiers, how can you try them as criminals? Why are you holding people as criminals and building a military tribunal? I visited the room where they’re going to have them tried, where they'll be able to say, “Well, thanks for having me here and admitting that I am a soldier," when the whole point is that the Geneva Convention says that they’re not. So that’s bad enough to begin with and it’s a territory no government has yet had to step onto. But in addition, we’re apparently not allowed to do any of those things, nor are we allowed extraordinary rendition nor can we return them to their countries of origin in case they get maltreated there by their own governments. Well, this leaves the—apparently only two alternatives. One is not to take any prisoners and the other is to let everybody go and say we’ve got no right to hold you. Neither of these seems to be very attractive. This is as far as I’ve got now with my reasoning about it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Do you not dislike the way that’s all of these actions might not be unconstitutional? They’re not justified in constitutional terms but in language such as "extraordinary rendition," "emergency powers"...

HITCHENS: Yeah, I do dislike that very much, yes. I mean, no one’s ever been able to point out to me that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus helped to defeat the confederacy, for example. And I certainly don’t think that the president has the right under the Constitution to suspend habeas corpus. Only the Congress can do that. It doesn’t mean it can’t be suspended. The Congress has to do it, the president cannot. I'm rather a stickler for that kind of thing. Call me old fashioned if you will.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Well, I feel I’ve taken up a little too much time now.

HITCHENS: A very welcome question, believe me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: I would posit that the Bush administration has restrained itself or needs to be restrained from using genuine religious language in the way it’s approached its so-called war and terror and I believe the word crusade was used earlier in the campaign by President Bush, it’s not been used since. And we remember that the original name of the campaign was "Infinite Justice," another rejected piece of unfortunate language, obviously picked out by some careful PR person.

HITCHENS: Fair enough.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: Hi. Thank you very much for coming. I was—just had a question about something that many people have probably find to be a less serious issue but I'm curious about your thoughts on art, music and creativity and how those fit in with your other ideas. These are—those were three things that formed communities that maybe could be argued on faith, you know. The greatest composers throughout history always dedicating their work to God and things of that nature and I'm just curious how you view these things and beauty of these things to be similar to the beauty that you suggested you can find in nature or how you think that they might be more suited, more fitting in with religion. I'm just curious if you think that any would be devalued in this new system or any—with your ideas.

HITCHENS: Yeah, we don’t know—of the extraordinary buildings, the great Gothic cathedrals for example or the, even the Great mosques of Andalusia, we don’t know if the architects who built them that they were themselves convinced that it was for the greater glory of God. We just know that at the time you couldn't get a job as an architect if you didn't affirm that. And if—certainly we know what would have happened to you if you said, “What God?” That would not just be the end of your career as an architect, so we don’t know about that. We don’t know the same about, even the devotional painters, we don’t know that they were believers, or the composers. Of the devotional poets, and I'm on stronger ground here as a literary critic, I know a bit more about it. People like John Donne or George Herbert, it would be very, very hard to fake writing that if you weren’t a believer. It would be extremely hard. Where would you get your inspiration from? And my feeling is that it’s real devotional poetry and I personally couldn't be without it. We’d be much poorer. To stay with the literature if you don’t mind. The King James version of the Bible, the King James translation, referred to in the New York Times recently as the St. James translation, is itself a great work of literature and one couldn't be without it. If you don’t understand the beauty of that liturgy, there’s a lot of Shakespeare and of Milton and Blake you wouldn’t get, you wouldn’t know what was going on. So it’s part of literacy to know it. I once wrote a book about the Parthenon, very important building for western civilization, great deal to be learned from it and from—by its beauty and by its symmetry and by its extraordinary architecture and sculpture. But I no longer care about the cult of Pallas Athena. I no longer care about the mystical ceremonies, some of them involving animal sacrifice and possibly human, that were conducted on the road from Eleusis. And I don’t have to care about Athenian imperialism and what it did to the Greek colonies in the rest of the Mediterranean. I can just appreciate the building and some—and know about the philosophical context and the plays of Sophocles and all the other things that were going on at the same time without any reference to their gods. So I propose that what culture largely means to us now is how to deal with civilizational art and great creativity in a post-supernatural era. In other words, how to keep all of that that’s of value without having to care about the culture of Pallas Athena, for example, or to be forced to bear in mind that say, St. Peter’s in Rome, actually not I think that impressive a building, was built by special sale of indulgences, I mean that’s how the money for it was raised. We can consider that independently now. We can value this building without knowing that. Though I always find it’s somewhat hard to forget.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: Right. Okay. I was just curious, I mean I wanted to seek more towards how all these things in art and music and creativity are often relayed between individuals as being spiritual or something along that nature whether or not the actual topic.

HITCHENS: Well, no, then let me add—I wanted to say a bit more of this when I was speaking first. I think that the human need for the transcendent or the spiritual is undeniable but that’s not the supernatural. It’s very important to understand. The feeling that people get out of landscape and music, or landscape and music in combination or the feeling of war and love at the same time has had extraordinary consequences for many people, say, or one or other on their own. These are the things we can’t do without but there’s no reason to attribute them to the supernatural.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: Yes.

HITCHENS: You’re not glimpsing anything but nature from that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: Thank you. Thank you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 13: Hi. So it turns out if you follow the money trail back for a lot of these things, this whole creationism, teaching creationism idea, you’ll eventually find political organizations that are trying to energize a base, right? And these bases...

HITCHENS: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 13: ...what they’d like to do is to get these people to feel like they’re being attacked. And in a lot of the discussions we have in your presentation, there’s a fine line between attacking people versus attacking ideas, right? What do you do to kind of ensure that you’re not going after people and not making people feel like you’re telling them that they’re idiots for example, right? How do you make that separation?

HITCHENS: Well, I think my answer’s been anticipated perhaps.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 13: Right.

HITCHENS: If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 13: Right.

HITCHENS: I'm very depressed however in this country you can be told "That’s offensive!" as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment, not to me they don’t, and I'm not running for anything so I didn't have to pretend to like people when I don’t.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 13: Right. Thanks.

MODERATOR: Hello. Oh, thank you so much for speaking. I think we’re going to have a book signing right outside over here. So, if everyone got their copy of the book, thank you very much for coming.

HITCHENS: How very nice of you to do that.

Hitchens vs. Blair, Roy Thomson Hall

2010-11-27T09:10:00.026-05:00

Cristopher Hitchens vs. Tony Blair: Be it Resolved, Religion is a Force for Good in the World

November 26, 2010, Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

[Introductions by Peter Munk and moderator Rudyard Griffiths]

HITCHENS: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much to the Munk family, great philanthropists for making this possible. Seven minutes, ladies and gentlemen, for the foundational argument between religion and philosophy leaves me hardly time to praise my distinguished opponent. In fact, I might have to seize a later chance of doing that. I think three and a half minutes for metaphysics and three and a half for the material world won't be excessive. And I have a text—and I have a text and it is from, because I won't take a religious text from a known extremist or fanatic, it's from Cardinal Newman, recently, by Mr. Blair's urging, beatified and on his way to canonization, a man whose Apologia made many Anglicans reconsider their fealty and made many people join the Roman Catholic church and is considered, I think, rightly a great Christian thinker. My text from the Apologia: "The Catholic church," said Newman, "holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail and for all the many millions on it to die in extremist agony than that one soul, I will not say will be lost, but should commit one venial sin, should tell one willful untruth or should steal one farthing without excuse." You'll have to say it's beautifully phrased, ladies and gentlemen, but to me, and here's my proposition, what we have here, and picked from no mean source, is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality. Its essential fanaticism, its consideration of the human being as raw material and its fantasy of purity. Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that: created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent—exigent, I would say more than exigent—greedy for uncritical praise from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. However, let no one say there's no cure: salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said—it must be said, would have to admit, makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims. Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I'm asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but of their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed, not man-made code. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, "Beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord"? No, it is—as the great physicist Steven Weinberg has very aptly put it, "In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things you'll need religion." Now, I've got now 1 minute and 57 seconds to say why I think this is very self-evident in our material world. Let me ask Tony again, because he's here, and because the place where he is seeking peace is the birthplace of monotheism, so you might think it was unusually filled with refulgence and love and peace. Everyone in the civilized world has roughly agreed, including the majority of Arabs and Jews and the international community, that there should be enough room for two states for two peoples in the same land, I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can't we get it? The UN can't get it, the US can't get it, the Quartet can't get it, the PLO can't get it, the Israeli parliament can't get it, why can't they get it? Because the parties of God have a veto on it, and everybody knows that this is true. Because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peacem there will never be compromise. There will instead be misery, shame and tyranny and people will kill each others' children for ancient books and caves and relics, and who is going to say this is good for the world? And that's just the example nearest to hand. Have you looked lately at the possibility that we used to discuss as children in fear, what will happen when Messianic fanatics get hold of an apocalyptic weapon? Well, we're about to find that out as we watch the Islamic republic of Iran and its party-of-God allies make a dress rehearsal for precisely this. Have you looked lately at the revival of czarism in Putin's Russia, where the black-cowled, black-coated leadership of Russian Orthodoxy is draped over an increasingly xenophobic, tyrannical, expansionist, and aggressive regime? Have you looked lately at the teaching in Africa and the consequences of it of a church that says, "AIDS may be wicked but not as wicked as condoms." That's exactly no seconds left, ladies and gentlemen. I have done my best. Believe me, I have more.

GRIFFITHS: Christopher, thank you for starting our debate. Mr. Blair, your opening remarks, please.

BLAIR: Thank you. First of all, let me say it is a real pleasure to be with you all this evening, to be back in Toronto. It's a particular privilege and honor to be with Christopher in this debate. Let me first of all say that I do not regard the leader of North Korea as a religious icon, you will be delighted to know. I'm going to make—it's a biblical number, seven—seven points in my seven minutes. The first is this: it is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion. It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary common good inspired by religion. Almost half of health care in Africa is delivered by faith-based organizations, saving millions of lives. A quarter of worldwide HIV/AIDS care is provided by Catholic organizations. There is the fantastic work of Muslim and Jewish relief organizations. There are in Canada thousands of religious organizations that care for the mentally ill or disabled or disadvantaged or destitute. And here in Toronto, barely one and a half miles from here, is a shelter run by covenant house, a Christian charity for homeless youth in Canada. So the proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable. It can be destructive; it can also create a deep well of compassion, and frequently does. And the second is that people are inspired to do such good by what I would say is the true essence of faith, which is, along with doctrine and ritual particular to each faith, a basic belief common to all faiths in serving and loving God through serving and loving your fellow human beings. As witnessed by the life and teaching of Jesus, one of love, selflessness and sacrifice, the meaning of the Torah. It was Rabbi Hillel who was once famously challenged by someone who said they would convert to religion if he could recite the whole of the Torah standing on one leg. He stood on one leg and said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the Torah, the rest is commentary, now go and do it." The teaching of prophet Mohammed, saving one life is as if you're saving the whole of humanity; the Hindu searching after selflessness; the Buddhist concepts of karuna, mudita, and metta which all subjugate selfish desires to care for others seek insistence on respect for others of another faith. That, in my view, is the true face of faith. And the values derived from this essence offer to many people a benign, positive, and progressive framework by which to live our daily lives, stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad. And faith, defined in this way, is not simply faith as solace in times of need, though it can be, nor a relic of unthinking tradition, still less a piece of superstition or an explanation of biology. Instead, it answers a profound spiritual yearning, something we feel and sense instinctively. This is a spiritual presence, bigger, more important, more meaningful than just us alone, that has its own power separate from our power, and that even as the world's marvels multiply, makes us kneel in humility, not swagger in pride. And that if faith is seen in this way, science and religion are not incompatible, destined to fight each other, until eventually the cool reason of science extinguishes the fanatical flames of religion, rather, science educates us as to how the physical world is and how it functions and faiths educates us as to the purpose to which such knowledge is put, the values that should guide its use, and the limits of what science and technology can do not to make our lives materially richer but rather richer in spirit. And so imagine indeed a world without religious faith, not just no place of worship, no prayer, no scripture, but no men or women who, because of their faith, dedicating their lives to others, showing forgiveness where otherwise they wouldn't, believing through their faith that even the weakest and most powerless have rights, and they have a duty to defend them. And yes, I agree, in a world without religion, the religious fanatics may be gone, but I ask you, would fanaticism be gone? And then realize that such an imagined vision of a world without religion is not in fact new. The twentieth century was a century scarred by visions that had precisely that imagining in their vision, and at their heart and gave us Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. In this vision, obedience to the will of God was for the weak, it was the will of man that should dominate. So I do not deny for a moment that religion can be a force for evil, but I claim that where it is, it is based essentially on a perversion of faith and I assert that at least religion can also be a force for good, and where it is, that it's true to what I believe is the essence of faith. And I say that a world without religious faith would be spiritually, morally, and emotionally diminished. So I know very well that you can point, and quite rightly Christopher does, to examples of where people have used religion to do things that are terrible. And that have made the world a worse place. But I ask you not to judge all people of religious faith by those people, any more than we would judge politics by bad politicians, or indeed journalists by bad journalists. The question is, along with all the things that are wrong with religion, is there also something within it that helps the world to be better and people to do good? And I would submit there is. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Well Tony, your training in parliament, I can see, had you perfectly landing that right on the seven minute market. Ladies and gentlemen, we're moving into our rebuttal rounds and I'd like the audience to get engaged, to applaud when they hear something that the debaters say that they like, also to help me enforce our time limit. So when you see that clock ticking down, start applauding and that will move us through this in an orderly fashion. So Christopher, it's now your opportunity, in our first of two rebuttal rounds, to respond to Mr. Blair.

HITCHENS: Do I have four, is that right?

GRIFFITHS: Two rounds of rebuttals. Each of you has the opportunity to go back and forth, and yes, you have four minutes for each speaker within each of those rounds, if that's not too confusing.

HITCHENS: That sounds alright. I've got four minutes?

GRIFFITHS: Yes.

HITCHENS: Yeah, good. Then hold your applause, for heaven's sake. Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world, and all I'm arguing is that it would be better if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism. Logically, if Tony is right, I would be slightly better off, not much, but slightly better off, being a Wahabi Muslim or a "Twelver" Shia Muslim or a Jehovah's witness than I am, wallowing as I do, in mere secularism. All I'm arguing, and really seriously, is what we need is a great deal more of one and a great deal less of the second. And I knew it would come up that we'd be told about charity, and I take this very seriously, because we know, ladies and gentlemen, as it happens, we're the first generation of people who do really, what the cure for poverty really is. It eluded people for a long, long time. The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. But it won't bring—I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won't bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of their teaching. That still goes on. I'd like to hear a word of apology from the religious about that, if it was on offer, after all, otherwise I'd be accused of judging them by the worst of them, and this isn't done, as Tony says so wrongly, in the name of religion, it's a direct precept, practice, and enforceable discipline of religion, is it not, sir, in this case? I think you'll find that it is. But if you're going to say, all right, the Mormons will tell you the same, "You may think it's a bit cracked to think Joseph Smith found another bible buried in upstate New York, but you should see our missionaries in action." I'm not impressed. I'd rather have no Mormons, no missionaries quite honestly, and no Joseph Smith. Do we grant to Hamas and to Hezbollah, both of whom will tell you, and incessantly do, "Look at our charitable work. Without us defending the poor of Gaza, the poor of Lebanon, where would they be? And they're right, they do a great deal of charitable work. It's nothing compared to the harm that they do, but it's a great deal of work all the same. I'm also familiar with the teachings of the great Rabbi Hillel. I even know where he plagiarized the story from (if he had access to the stuff). The injunction not to do to another what would be repulsive done to yourself is found in the Analects of Confucius, if you want to date it, but actually it's found in the heart of every person in this room. Everybody knows that much. We don't require divine permission to know right from wrong. We don't need tablets administered to us ten at a time in tablet form on pain of death to be able to have a moral argument. No, we have the reasoning and the moral suasion of Socrates and our own abilities. We don't need dictatorship to give us right from wrong, and that's my lot, thank you.

GRIFFITHS: In the name of fairness and equity, Mr. Blair, I'm going to give you an additional 25 seconds for your first rebuttal.

BLAIR: First of all, I don't think we should think that because you can point to examples of prejudice in the name of religion, that bigotry and prejudice and wrongdoing are wholly owned subsidiaries of religion. There are plenty of examples of prejudice against women, against gay people, against others that come from outside the world of religion. And the claim that I make is not that everything the church has done in Africa is right but let me tell you one thing it did do, and it did it whilst I was Prime Minister of the UK: the churches together formed a campaign for the cancellation of debt, they came together, they succeeded, and the first beneficiaries of the cancellation of debt were young girls going to school in Africa, because for the first time they had free primary education. So I agree that not everything the church or the religious communities have done around the world is right, but I do say at least accept that there are people doing great work, day in, day out, who genuinely are not prejudiced or bigoted, but are working with people who are afflicted by famine and disease and poverty and they are doing it inspired by their faith. And of course it's the case that not everybody—of course it's the case that you do not have to be a person of faith in order to do good work, I've never claimed that, I would never claim that. I know lots of people, many, many people, who are people not of faith at all, but who do fantastic and decent work for their communities and for the world. My claim is just very simple: there are nonetheless people who are inspired by their faith to do good. I mean, I think of people I met some time ago in South Africa, nuns who were looking after children that were born with HIV/AIDS. These are people who are working and living alongside and caring for people inspired by their faith. Is it possible for them to have done that without their religious faith? Of course, it's possible for them to have done it. But the fact is, that's what motivated them. So what I say to you is at least—look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, "Right, we've got six hospices here and one suicide bomber there, and how does it all equalize out?" That's not a very productive way of arguing this. And actually, I thought one of the most interesting things that Christopher said is that we're not going to drive religion out of the world, and that's true, we're not. And actually, I think for people of faith to have debates with those who are secularists is actually good and right and healthy and it's what we should be doing. I'm not claiming that everyone should congregate on Myspace, I'm simply claiming one very simple thing: that if we can't drive religion out of the world because many people of faith believe it and believe it very deeply, let's at least see how we do make religion a force for good, how we do encourage those people of faith who are trying to do good, and how we unite those against those who want to pervert religion and turn it into a badge of identity used in opposition to others. So I would simply finish by saying this: there are many situations where faith has done wrong, but there are many situations in which wrong has been done without religion playing any part in it at all. So let us not condemn all people of religious faith because of the bigotry or prejudice shown by some, and let us at least acknowledge that some good has come out of religion, and that we should celebrate.

GRIFFITHS: Christopher, your second rebuttal, please.

HITCHENS: Oh I have a second one?

GRIFFITHS: You have a second one.

HITCHENS: Oh my God—an amazing test of audience tolerance. Well alright, well how splendidly you notice we progress, ladies and gentlemen. Now it's okay, some religious people are sort of all right. I think I seem to be bargaining one of the greater statesmen of the recent past down a bit. Not necessarily opposed to that. Just to finish on the charity point, I once did a lot of work with a man called Sebasti&atild;o Salgado, some of you will know him, great man, great photographer. He was the UNICEF ambassador on polio questions. I went to Calcutta with him, elsewhere. Nearly got rid of polio, nearly got rid of polio, nearly made it join smallpox as a disease, a thing of the past, a filthy memory, except for so many religious groups in Bengal and elsewhere, Afghanistan, West Africa and so on, telling their children, "Don't go and take the drops, it's a conspiracy. It's against God. It's against God's design." (By the way, that argument isn't terribly new, when smallpox was a scourge, Timothy Dwight, the great divine who was the head of Yale, said taking Dr. Jenner's injection was an interference with God's design as well.) That's sort of, by the way—you need something like UNICEF to get major work done if you want to alleviate poverty and misery and disease, and for me, my money will always go to organizations like Medecins Sans Frontiers, like Oxfam, and many others, who, strangely enough, go out into the world, do good for their fellow creatures for its own sake. They don't take the Bible along, as people do to Haiti all the time, we keep catching them doing it. Their money is being spent flat out on proselytization. It's a function of the old thing that was hand in hand with imperialism. It's the missionary tradition. They can call it charity if they will, but it doesn't stand a second look. So much on the business of doing good, except perhaps to add, since I have you for some extra minutes, Mr. Blair and I at different times gave quite a lot of our years to the Labour Party and to the Labour movement, and if the promise of religion was true—had been true, right up until the late nineteenth century in, say, Britain, or North America or Canada, that good works are what's required and should be enough, and those who give charity should be honored, those who receive it should be grateful, two rather revolting ideas in one, I have to say, there would be no need for human and social and political action, we could rely on being innately good, which we know we can't rely upon, and which I never suggested that we could or should. So, now what would—and I'm intrigued now, so religion could be a good thing after all, sometimes, we think, is now the proposition. What would a religion have to do to get that far? Well, I think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. It would have to say no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. No, we can't offer you miracles. Find me the church that will say, "Forget all that. Faith healing, no." It would have to give that up. It would have to give up the idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who is judge, jury, and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn't finished with you even when you died. That's quite a lot for religion to give up, don't you think? But who would not say we would be better off without it if it was, or what Tony Blair would like it to be like it to be, an aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realizations of human solidarity, the knowledge we are all in fact bound up with one another, that we have responsibilities one to another, and as I do when I give blood, partly because I don't lose the pint forever, I can always get it back, but that there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Tony, it must feel like the House of Commons all over again.

BLAIR: I don't know, so far they're a little politer actually.

GRIFFITHS: Your final rebuttal, please.

BLAIR: Yeah. It all depends, I guess, what your experience of religious people is. I mean, my experience of the people I was with last week in Africa, that include deeply religious people is not actually that they're doing what they're doing because of heaven and hell. They're doing it for love of their fellow human beings, and that's, I think, something very fine. What's more, that they believe that this love of their fellow human beings is bound up with their faith. So it's not something, you know—yes, of course, it is absolutely true, they might decide to do this, irrespective of the fact that they have religious faith, but their faith, they feel, is an impulse to do that good. And you know, I don't recognize the description of the work that they do in what Christopher said. In Sierra Leone, where I was, you have Christians and Muslims working together to deliver health care in that country. That's religion playing a positive role. They're working across the faith divide and doing it, because they again believe that their faith impels them to do that. When we look back in history, yes of course you can see plenty of examples of where religion has played a negative role. You can see great examples, for example in the abolition of slavery, where religious reformers joined with secular reformers in order to bring about the abolition of slavery. Let's get away from this idea that religion created poverty. You know, there are bad things that have happened in the world outside of religion. And when you look at the twentieth century and you see the great scars of political ideology, around views that had absolutely dramatically at their heart—fascism, the communism of Stalin—absolutely at their heart was the eradication of religion, and what I would say to you is, get rid of religion, but you're not going to get rid of fanaticism and you're not going to get rid of the wrong in the world. So the question is, how then do we make sense of religion having this vital part in the world today, since it is growing and not diminishing, how do we make sense of this? And this is where yes, there is an obligation on the people of faith to try and join across the faith divide with those of other faiths. That's reason for my foundation. We have people of different religious faiths, we've actually got a program where young people team up with each other of different faiths and work together in Africa on malaria, back in their own faith communities, and here in Canada. We have a schools program that allows schools to link up using the technology so that kids of different faiths can talk to each other across the world. And here's the thing, when they start to talk about their faith they don't actually talk in terms of heaven and hell and a God that's an executioner of those that do wrong, they talk in terms of their basic feeling that love of God can be expressed best through love of neighbor and actions in furtherance of the compassion and help needed by others. And this is—in 2007, you know, religious organizations in the US gave one and a half times the amount of aid that USAID did, not insignificant. So my point is very, very simple: you can list all the faults of religion, just as you can list the faults of the politicians, the journalists, and any other profession, but for people of faith, the reason why they try to do good, and when they do it, is because their faiths motivates them to do so and that is genuinely the proper face of faith.

GRIFFITHS: Well gentlemen, thank you for a terrific start to this debate. The time has now come to involve you, the audience, here at Roy Thomson hall, those written questions have been coming in and some have been passed on to me and our folks in the control room. Also, we're going to bring on our online audience through questions that have been debated on our discussion boards and I'm going to take some live questions from some younger audience members here on the stage. And in that regard, Christopher, we're going to start with a question from you. There's a young woman right here who would like to address you personally. Tell the audience your name and your question, please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Hi my name is Meg [indecipherable].

GRIFFITHS: Just hold on one second. We're going to get this microphone working. Is this microphone working? Try again.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Hello?

GRIFFITHS: You go it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Ok. My name is Meg [indecipherable]. I'm a recent graduate from the University of Toronto and my question's in regards to globalization. This century, globalization will bring together as never before nations and peoples divided by wealth, geography, politics and race. So my question is: instead of fearing faith, why not embrace the shared values of the world's major religions as a way of uniting humankind?

GRIFFITHS: Great question. Christopher? Unity out of faith or disunity?

HITCHENS: Perfectly good question, but sounded—seemed to be phrased as a call for common humanism. I mean there's no—I didn't hear anyone say, "Wouldn't it be better if everyone at least joined some church or other?" Not a bit of it. Common humanism is, I think, not made particularly easier by the practice of religion and I'll tell you why: there's something about religion that is very often, at any rate, in its original monotheistic and Judaistic form, actually is, ab initio an expression of exclusivism. This is our God. This is the God who's made a covenant with our tribe. You find it all over the place. It isn't always as sectarian as foundational fundamentalist Judaism was and sometimes still is, but it's not unknown. I mean, it's always struck me as slightly absurd there'd be a special church for English people, although I can sort of see the point. It strikes me as positively sinister that Pope Benedict should want to restore the Catholic church to the claim it used to make, which is it is the one true church, and that all other forms of Christianity are, as he still puts it, defective and inadequate. How this helps to build your future world of co-operation and understanding is not known to me. If you tell me in the Balkans what your religion is, I can tell you what your nationality is. You're not a Catholic, you know less about Loyola than I do. But I know you're a Croat, and I know you're a Croat nationalist. Religion and, in fact any form of faith, because it is a surrender of reason, it's a surrender of reason in favor of faith, is a fantastic force multiplier, a tremendous intensifier—I was trying to say—of all things that are in fact divisive rather than inclusive and that's why its history is so stained with blood, not just of crimes against humanity, crimes against womanhood, crimes against reason and science, attacks upon medicine and enlightenment, all these appalling things that Tony kept defending himself from that I didn't even have time to bring up. No, but if you would just look at the way the Christians love each other in the wars of religion in Lebanon, or in former Yugoslavia, you will see that there is no conceivable way that by calling on the supernatural, you will achieve anything like your objective of a common humanism which is, I think you're quite right to say, our only chance of, I won't call it, salvation. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Tony, what I'd like you to do—there's another question on the stage, someone in a sense has the inverse question for you and it'd be a great opportunity for to respond to Hitchens at the same time. So let me go to Emily [Padden], a Trudeau scholar at Oxford University, who has a question for you, Mr. Blair.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Thank you very much. My research is in armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa and so the question I'd like to ask you Mr. Blair, if I may is: how do you argue that religion is a force for good in the world when the same faiths that bind peoples and groups also deepen divisions and exacerbate conflict?

GRIFFITHS: Great question.

BLAIR: To which my answer is they can do, and there are very many examples of that, but there are also examples, let me give you one from the Northern Ireland peace process, where in the end people from Protestant and Catholic churches got together and actually the religious leaders of those two churches tried to bring about a situation where people reached out across the faith divide. And so, what I would say to you is this exclusivism is not—you know, this type of excluding other people because they're different—let's just nail the myth that this is solely the prerogative of religion. I'm afraid this happens in many, many different walks of life. It's not what true religion is about. True religion is not about excluding somebody because they're different, true religion is actually about embracing someone who is different. That is why, you know, in every major religion, this concept of love of neighbor, and Christopher is absolutely right, Confucius did indeed say exactly something similar to Rabbi Hillel, of course Jesus said love your neighbour as yourself. If you look at Hinduism, Buddhism, the religion of Islam, after the death of the prophet Mohammed, Islam was actually at the forefront of science, was at the forefront of introducing proper rights for women, for the first time, in that part of the world. So the point is this, and this is really where the debate comes to, Christopher says, "Well, humanism is enough," and what I say to that is: but for some people of faith, it isn't enough. They actually believe that there is indeed a different and higher power simply than humanity, and that is not about them thinking of heaven and hell in some sort of old-fashioned sense of trying to terrorize people into submission to religion, they actually think of it as about how you fulfill your purpose as a human being in the service of others. And so, you know, when we say, "Well, that could be done by humanism," yes, it could, but the fact is for many people, it's driven by faith, and so yes, it's true, you can find examples of where religion has deepened the divide in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. You can also find examples of where religion has tried to overcome those divides by preaching what is the true message of religion, which is one of human compassion and love.

GRIFFITHS: Hitchens, let's have you come back on that because, not just Northern Ireland but Iraq, a war that you supported, religion played an important role arguably in the success of putting together post-invasion Iraq.

HITCHENS: I only think we should do this because the two questions were in effect the same and both very well phrased, and because I never like to miss out a chance to congratulate someone on being humorous, if only unintentionally. It's very touching for Tony to say that he recently went to a meeting that bridged a religious divide in Northern Ireland. Well, where does the religious divide come from? 400 years and more, in my own country of birth, of people killing each others' children, depending on what kind of Christian they were, and sending each others' children in rhetoric to hell, and making Northern Ireland the place, the most remarkable in northern Europe for unemployment, for ignorance, for poverty and for, I would say, stupidity too. And for them now to say, "Maybe we might consider breaching this gap." Well, I should bloody well think so. But I don't see how. If they had listened to the atheist community in Northern Ireland, which is a real thing, and if they had listened to the secular movement in Northern Ireland, which is a real thing and I know many people who have suffered dreadfully from membership in it, not excluding being pulled out of a car by a man in a balaclava and being asked, "Are you Catholic or Protestant?" He said, "I'm Jewish atheist, actually." "Well are you a Protestant Jewish atheist or a Catholic Jewish atheist?" You laugh, but it's not so funny when the party of God has a gun in your ear at the same time. And that was in Britain, and still is, to some extent, until recently. Rwanda: do I say that there would be no quarrel between Hutu and Tutsi, people in Rwanda? Belgian colonialism made it worse, but there are no doubt innate ethnic differences, or there are felt to be in Rwanda. But the fact of the matter is Rwanda is the most Christian country in Africa. In fact, by one account—that's to say, numbers of people in relation to numbers of churches—it's the most Christian country in the world, and the Hutu power genocide, at any rate, was preached from the pulpits, actually the pulpits of the Catholic church, as many of the people we are still looking for wanted in that genocide are hiding in the Vatican along with a number of other people who should be given up to international justice, by the way, quite a number of people. So since Tony seems to like religious people best when they are largely non-practicing, but just basically faithful, I will grant him that much. I say it's not entirely the fault of religion that this happened in Rwanda, but when it's preached from the pulpit as it was in Northern Ireland and in Rwanda, it does tend to make it very, very much worse. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Tony, just briefly come back on that, because you were intimately involved in the search for peace in Northern Ireland and I presume you had a very different perspective of the role faith played in the resolution of that conflict.

BLAIR: Yeah, and I now do work in Rwanda. First of all, I think it really would be bizarre to say that the conflict in Rwanda was a result of the Catholic church. I mean, Rwanda is a perfect indicator of what I'm saying, which is you can put aside religion, and still have the most terrible things happen. I mean, this was the worst genocide since the holocaust, it was committed on a tribal basis. Yes it's true there were members of the Catholic church who behaved badly in that context of Rwanda. There were also, by the way, members of the Catholic church and others of religious denomination who stood up and protected and died alongside people in Rwanda. So you know, you—and as for Northern Ireland, yes, of course, Protestant and Catholic, absolutely right, but you couldn't ignore the politics of the situation in Northern Ireland. It was to do with the relationship between Britain and Ireland going back over many, many centuries. So my point is very simple: of course religion has played a role and sometimes a very bad role in these situations, but not only religion. And what is at the heart of this is we wouldn't dream of condemning all of politics because politics had led to Hitler or Stalin or indeed what has happened in Rwanda. So let us not condemn the whole of religion or say that religion, when you look at it as a whole, is a force for bad because there are examples of where religion has had that impact. And so my—I think actually Rwanda and Northern Ireland are classic examples, even the Middle East peace process, I mean yes, I agree, you can look at all the religious issues there but let's not ignore the political issues either, and frankly at the moment the reason, and I can tell you this from first hand—well, but I can tell you from first hand experience, the reason we don't have an agreement at the moment between Palestinians and Israelis is not to do with the religious leaders on either side, it's a lot more to do with the political leaders, so it's my branch that has to take the blame for that. And therefore, what I would say is I actually think that yes, of course a lot of these conflicts have religious roots, I actually think it's possible for religious leaders to play a positive part in trying to resolve those, but in the end, it's for politics and religion to try and work out a way in which religion, in a world of globalization that is pushing people together, can play a positive rather than negative role, and if we concentrated on that, rather than trying to drive religion out, which is futile, to concentrate instead on how we actually get people of different faiths working together, learning from each other and living with each other, I think it would be a more productive mission. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Okay, let's—we like the applauding, so please continue that throughout the debate. Let's take a written question. My producers are telling me that we have a written question, we'll get that on the screen and Christopher this is for you to start with, interesting one: America is both one of the most religious countries in the world and also one of the most democratic and pluralistic, both now and arguably through much of its history. How do you explain that seeming paradox?

HITCHENS: Relatively simply, the United States has uniquely a constitution that forbids the government to take sides in any religious matter, or to sponsor a church, or to adopt any form of faith itself. As a result of which, anyone who wants to practice their religion in America has to do it as a volunteer. It's what de Tocqueville wrote about so well in his Democracy in America. Ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut during his tenure as president, saying—you'll be familiar with the phrase I'm sure: "Rest assured," because they had written to them out of their fear of persecution in Connecticut, "Rest assured that there will ever be a wall of separation between the church and the state in this country," and the maintenance of that wall, which people like me have to defend every day against those who want garbage taught in schools and pseudo science in the name of Christ and other atrocities. The maintenance of that wall is the guarantee of the democracy. By the way, for a bonus, can anyone tell me who the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut thought was persecuting them?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: The Congregationalists.

HITCHENS: The Congregationalists of Danbury, Connecticut, well done. (Also, that argues, by the way, for the existence of a very small but real fan base of mine somewhere in this room.) Yes, now, it doesn't seem to matter very much now but it mattered then. Give those Congregationalists enough power, as they did have in Connecticut, and just you see just how unfurry they look compared to how dare so they behave now that we've disciplined them. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Tony, let me come to you with that same question. Is it just a case of American exceptionalism, or is this balance between pluralism and faith that's been achieved in America something that you're either seeing in other parts of the world or a model that can be exported globally?

BLAIR: Well I think what most people want to see is a situation where people of faith are able to speak in the public sphere but are not able to dictate, and that is a reasonable balance, and I think that most—you know, most people would accept.
But I think, you know, again what I would say about examples of where you get religious people that are fanatical in the views that they want to press on others, you know, fanaticism is not, as I say, it's not a wholly owned subsidiary of religion, I'm afraid. It can happen outside of religion too. So the question is, how do people of, if you like, good faith, who believe in pluralist democracy, how do we ensure that people who hold faith deeply are able to participate in society, and have the same ability to do that as everyone else without being kind of denigrated, but at the same time have to respect the fact that ultimately, democracy is about the will of the people and the will of the people as a whole. So I think that most people can get that balance right, and we are very lucky actually in our countries because we are in a situation where people of different faiths are free to practice their faith as they like and that is in my view an absolutely fundamental part of democracy, and it's something that people of religious faith have to be very clear about and stand up and do. And one of the reasons why for me I think it's—it's actually important for people of religious faith to have people like Christopher challenge us and say, "Ok, this is how we see religion, now you get out there and tell us how it's different and where it isn't different how you're going to make it so," and I think that's a positive and good thing. All I ask for is that where people of faith are speaking in the public sphere, then people accept that we have a right to do that, and that sometimes we do that actually because we believe in the things that we're saying, and we're not trying to subvert or change democracy. On the contrary, we simply want to be part of it, and our voice is a voice that has a right to be heard alongside the voice of others.

GRIFFITHS: I see Christopher writing furiously so I'm going to ask him to come back on that point.

HITCHENS: Well, I hadn't anything specially to add there, I think I would rather give another person a chance for a question.

GRIFFITHS: Well, it's a question that was debated for you, Christopher, on munkdebates.com in a lead-up to this evening, on our discussion board, many people saying that religion provides a sense of community in modern societies where immersed in a consumer culture, more often than not, living alongside fellow citizens who are more maybe self-directed than other-directed. What do you say about the pure community function of religion? Isn't that a public good—a valid public good of religious belief?

HITCHENS: Absolutely, I say good luck to it. The way I phrase it in my book, available at fine bookstores everywhere, is that I propose a pact with the faith, the faithful. I say—I'll take it again, I'll quote from the great Thomas Jefferson, I don't mind if my neighbor believes in 15 gods or in none, he neither by that breaks my leg nor picks my pocket. I would echo that and say that as long as you don't want your religion taught to my children in school, given a government subsidy, imposed on me by violence, any of these things, you are fine by me. I would prefer not even to know what it is that you do in that church of yours. In fact, if you force it on my attention, I will consider it a breach of that pact. Have your own bloody Christmas, and so on. Do your slaughtering, if possible, in an abattoir. And don't mutilate the genitals of your children. Because then I'm afraid it gets within the ambit of law. All right, don't you think that's reasonably pluralistic and humanitarian of me? I think it is. Why is it a vain hope on my part? Why is that? Has this pact ever been honored by the other side? Of course not. And it's a mystery to me, and I'll share it with you. If I believed that there was a savior who had been appointed or sent by—or a prophet—appointed or sent by a God who bore me in mind, and loved me, and wanted the best for me, if I believed that and that I possessed the means of grace and the hope of glory, to phrase it like that, I think, I don't know, I think I might be happy. They say it's the way to happiness. Why doesn't it make them happy? Don't you think it's a perfectly decent question? Why doesn't it? Because they won't be happy until you believe it too. And why is that? Because that's what their holy books tell them. Now, I'm sorry, it's enough with saying in the name of religion. Do these texts say that until every knee bows in the name of Jesus and so on, there will be no happiness? Of course it is what they say. It isn't just a private belief. It is rather, and I think always has been, and it's why I'm here, actually a threat to the idea of a peaceable community, and very often, as now, and frequently, a very palpable one. So I think that's the underlying energy that powers the friendly disagreement between Tony and myself.

GRIFFITHS: Tony, would you like to come back on that topic of religion and community or move on to another question? Let's move on? Also on our website, big discussion around the topic of religion and its role in the invasion of Iraq and Mr. Blair, the question is for you, and it's about something that many people posted about something you said once about the interplay of religion and politics, and to quote you directly, you said, "What faith can do is not tell you what is right, but give you the strength to do it." The question being: what role did faith play in your most important decision as Prime Minister, the invasion of Iraq?

BLAIR: We can nail this one pretty easily. It was not about religious faith. And, you know, one of the things that I sometimes say to people is, look, the thing about religion and religious faith is if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I'm afraid. Ok? So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, "Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7?" Unfortunately, He doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, that they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right.

GRIFFITHS: So Christopher, the natural follow-on question to you is how did you square the circle, or maybe you didn't, between your support for the Iraq war and let's say the current then president, George W. Bush, in his very public evocation of faith in terms of his rhetoric around the invasion?

HITCHENS: Well, I don't remember, in fact I don't think you can point out to me any moment where George Bush said he was under divine order or had any divine warrant for the intervention in Iraq. In fact, I'm perfectly certain that...

GRIFFITHS: Well, he...

HITCHENS: ...he might not have minded at some points giving that impression. But he wanted to give that impression about everything that he did. George Bush is someone who, as with his immediate predecessor, after various experiments in faith, ended up in his wife's church, most comfortable place for him to be. She's, after all, is the one who said to him, "If you take another drink, you scumbag, I'm leaving and taking the kids," which is his way of saying he found Jesus and gave up the bottle. We know this to be true. Now, and like a good Methodist—I was in Methodist school for many years myself—like a good Methodist, George Bush says the following: "I've done all I can with this argument and with this conflict. From now on, all is in God's hands." That's quite different, I think. It would have made him a perfectly good Muslim, as a matter of fact. A combination of fatalism with a slightly sinister feeling of being chosen. Anyway. No, what was—surely what's striking most to the eye of those who observe the debate on what Tony Blair and I agree to call teh liberation of Iraq is the unanimous opposition of the leadership of every single Christian church to it, including the president's own and the other Prime Minister's own. The Methodist church of the United States adamantly opposed, the Vatican adamantly opposed, as it had been to the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. Not the first time in the world that a sort of sickly Christian passivity has been preached in the face of fascist dictatorship, and of course I was very surprised by the number of liberal Jews who took the same about a regime that harbored genocidal thoughts towards them, and if it comes to that—but I'm not the arbiter of what's rational in the mind of the religious thinker given the number of Muslims put to the sword by Saddam Hussein's regime, quite extraordinary to see the extent to which Muslim fundamentalists flocked to his defense. But I don't expect integrity or consistency from those quarters. But those of us who worked with the people, with Iraqi intellectuals like Kanan Makiya, with the Kurdish leadership, the secular left opposition of the popular—excuse me, the patriotic union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi Communist Party, you have to give it credit for this, many feminists and other secularists who worked for many years to bring down Saddam Hussein are very proud of our solidarity with those comrades, those brothers and sisters. We are still in touch with them, we have nothing to apologize for. It's those who would have kept a cannibal and a Caligula and a professional sadist in power who have the explaining to do. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: I want to be conscious of our time and go to our two final onstage questions and I believe the first one is for Mr. Blair, a student at the Munk School of Global Affairs. Introduce yourself and ask your question of Mr. Blair.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Yes. Good evening, my name is Jonah [Cantor] and my question pertains to something that has come up earlier this evening. Religion on both sides is often seen as an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, and I was wondering what role you believe faith can play in a positive manner in helping to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

BLAIR: Well, I remember a few months back I was in Jericho and when you go out from Jericho, they took me up to—we went to visit the Mount of Temptation, which is where I think they take all the politicians, and the guide that was showing us around—the Palestinian guide, suddenly stopped at one point, and he said, "This part of the world," he said, "Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, why did they all have to come here?" And I sort of said, "Well, supposing they hadn't, would everyone be fine?" He said, "Ah, probably not." But you know, the religious leadership can play a part in this, for example, I don't think you will get a resolution of the issue of Jerusalem unless—which is a sacred and holy city to all three Abrahamic faiths—unless people of faith are prepared to try and find common ground, so they are entitled to worship in the way that they wish. And it's correct that in both Israel and Palestine, you see examples of religious fundamentalism and people espousing and doing extreme things as a result of their religion, but I can also tell you that there are rabbis and people of the Muslim faith on the Palestinian side who are desperately trying to find common ground and ways of working together. And I think part of the issue and the reason indeed for me starting my faith foundation is that we can argue forever the degree to which what is happening in the Middle East is a result of religion or the result of politics, but one thing is absolutely clear, that without those of religious faith playing a positive and constructive role, it's going to be very difficult to reach peace. So my view again, and I think this is in a sense one of the debates that underlies everything we've been saying this evening, is if it is correct that you're not going to simply eliminate religion, you know, you're not going to drive religion out of the world, then let's work on how we make those people of different faiths, even though they believe that their own faith is the path, so they believe, to salvation, how they can work across the faith divide in order to produce respect and understanding and tolerance, because believe it or not, amongst all the examples of prejudice and bigotry that Christopher quite rightly draws attention to, there are also examples of people of deep religious faith, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, who are desperately trying to search for peace and with the right political will supporting that who would play a major part in achieving peace. So I agree that religion has to one degree created these problems, but actually people of different religious faiths working together can also be an important part of resolving these problems, and that's what we should do, and it's what we can do, and in respect of Jerusalem, it is absolutely imperative that we do do.

HITCHENS: A visitor goes to the Western wall—anything he can do. A visitor goes to the Western wall, sees a man tearing at his beard, banging his head on the wall, shoving messages into it at a rate of knots, wailing and flailing, watches with fascination. When the guy finally breaks he says, "Excuse me, I couldn't help noticing you were being unusually devout in your addresses to the wall, to the divine. Do you mind if I ask you what you're praying for?" He said, "I was praying that there should be peace, that there should be mutual love and respect between all the peoples in this area." And he said, "What do you think?" says the visitor. He says, "Well, it's like talking to the wall." But there are people who think talking to walls is actually a form of divine worship, in this part [indecipherable] and it's another instance, not that I didn't bring it up laboriously myself, but I don't mind it again, of the difference between Tony and myself. When he says—when he uses his giveaway phrase "in the name of religion," rather than "as a direct consequence of scriptural authority," which is what I mean when I talk about this. No one's going to deny, are they, that there are awards of real estate made in the Bible by none other than Jehovah himself, that land is promised to human primates over other human primates, in response to a divine covenant. [Coughing] (Do excuse me. Sorry, this sometimes happens.) No, that can't be denied. When David Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of what he still called a secular state he called in Yigael Yadin and Finkelstein and the other Israeli archaeologists, professional guys, and said, "Go out into the desert and dig up the title deeds to our state. You'll find our legitimate"—that was instruction to the department of archaeology. They went, after they conquered Sinai and West Bank. They went even further afield looking for some evidence Moses had ever been there. They didn't find any because there never has been and there never will be any. But you cannot say that the foundational cause, casus belli in this region, the idea that God intervenes in real estate and territorial disputes, isn't inscribed in the text itself. And not only in the Jewish text but thanks to a foolish decision taken in the early Christian centuries where it was decided not to dump the New Testament and to start again just with the Nazarene story—great Christian theologians like Marcian were in favor of that. Why do we want to bring the darkness and tyranny and terror and death and blood and cultism of the first books along with us? Surely we should start again? No, we're saddling ourselves with all that. So this is a responsibility for the Christian world too. And need I add that there is no good Muslim who does not say that Allah tells us we can never give up an inch of Muslim land and that once our mosques are built there can be no retreat. It would be a betrayal, it would lead you straight to hell. In other words, yes, yes, they gibber and jabber, all of them, the three religions. Yeah, yeah, you're quite right, God awards land, it's just you've got the wrong title. No. This is what I mean when I say religion is a real danger to the survival of civilization, and that it makes this banal regional and national dispute which, if reduced to its real proportions, is a nothingness, if it makes that, not just lethally insoluble, but is drawing in other contending parties who really wish, openly wish, for an apocalyptic conclusion to it, as also bodied forth in the same scriptural texts, in other words that it will be the death of us all, the end of humanity, the end of the world, the end of the whole suffering veil of tears, which is what they secretly want. This is a failure of the parties of God and it's not something that happens because people misinterpret the texts, it's because they believe in them, that's the problem. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Tony, would you like a quick rejoinder or can I move on to our final question for this session?

BLAIR: If you like.

GRIFFITHS: Well great, we have, I think, the perfect final question and it's from another student at the Munk School for Global Affairs, Dana Wagner. Where are you Dana? Here you are.

WAGNER: A big part of this issue is our inability to stand in another's shoes with an open mind to understand a different world view. In this regard, can each of you tell us which of your opponent's arguments is the most convincing? Thank you.

BLAIR: Right. Now this definitely never happened in the House of Commons. I think that the most convincing argument is, and the argument that people of faith have got to deal with, is actually the argument that Christopher's just made, which is that the bad that is done in the name of religion is intrinsically grounded in the scripture of religion. That is the single most difficult argument. And since I've said it's a really difficult argument, I suppose I better give an answer to it. My answer to it is this: that there is, of course, that debate that goes on within religion, which is the degree to which, as it were, you look at scripture abstracted from its time, you pick out individual parts of it, you use those in order to justify whatever view you like, or whether, as I tried to do in my opening, you actually say well what is the essence of that faith and what is the essence of scripture? And of course, then what you realize is that yes, of course, if you believe, as a Muslim that we should live our lives according to the seventh century, then you will end up with some very extreme positions, but actually there are masses of Muslims who completely reject that as a view of Islam, and instead say no, of course, the prophet back then was somebody who brought order and stability and actually, for example, even though we today would want equality for women and many again, despite what people say, many Muslims would agree with that as well, and many Muslim women obviously, back then, actually what He did was extraordinary for that time. And also when you look at Christianity, yes of course you can point to issues that of that time now seem very strange and outdated, but on the other hand, when you take Christianity as a whole and ask what it means, and they say, "Well what draws people to it?" You know, what is it that made me as a student come to Christianity? It wasn't to do with some of the things that Christopher has just been describing, and you know, I understand that's—there are those traditions within religion, I understand that, I accept that, I see how people look at certain parts of scripture and draw those conclusions from it, but it's not what it means to me, it's not the essence of it. The essence of it is through the life of Jesus Christ, is a life of love and selflessness and sacrifice and that's what it means to me. And so I think the most difficult thing for people of faith is to be able to explain scripture in a way that makes sense to people in the modern world, and one of the things that we have actually begun recently is a dialogue called the common word, which is about Muslims and Christians trying to come together and through scripture find a common basis of co-operation and mutual respect. So, you know, yes, it is a difficult argument, that is the most difficult argument, I agree, but I also think there is an answer to it, and I think one of the values actually of having a debate like this, and in a sense, having someone making that point as powerfully as Christopher has made it, is that it does force people of faith to recognize that we have to deal with this argument, to take it on, and to make sure that not just in what we are trying to do, but in how we interpret our faith, we are making sure that what I describe as the essence of faith, which is serving God through the love of others, is indeed reflected not just in what we do but in the doctrines and the practice of our religion.

HITCHENS: Admirable question, thank you for it. The remark Tony made that I most agreed with this evening, I'll just hope that doesn't sound too minimal, was when he said that if religion was to disappear, things would by no means, as it were, automatically be okay. I mean, he phrased it better than that. But it would be what I regard as a necessary condition would certainly not be a sufficient one, at any rate religion won't disappear, but the hold it has on people's minds can be substantially broken and domesticated. He's quite right about that, of course. I hope I didn't seem at any point to have argued to the contrary. I come before you after all as a materialist. If we give up religion, we discover what actually we know already, whether we're religious or not, which is that we are somewhat imperfectly evolved primates on a very small planet in a very unimportant suburb of a solar system that is itself a negligible part of a very rapidly expanding and blowing apart cosmic phenomenon. These conclusions to me are a great deal more awe inspiring than what's contained in any burning bush or horse that flies overnight to Jerusalem or any other of that—a great deal more awe inspiring, as is any look through the Hubble telescope at what our real nature and future really is. So he was quite right to say that, and I would have been entirely wrong if I implied otherwise. I think I could say a couple of things for religion myself—would, in fact. First is what I call the apotropaic. We all have it: the desire not to be found to be claiming all the credit, a certain kind of modesty, you could almost say humility. People will therefore say they'll thank God when something happens that they are grateful for, or—there's no need to make this a religious thing. The Greeks had the concept of hubris as something to be avoided and criticized. But what the Greeks would also call the apotropaic, the view that not all the glory can be claimed by a load of primates like ourselves is a healthy reminder too. Second, the sense that there's something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates. I think it's very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and in architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion. And I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I'll mention it briefly. I couldn't live without the Parthenon. I don't believe any civilized person could. If it was to be destroyed, you'd feel something much worse than the destruction of the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. But—and we would have lost an enormous amount of besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry and grace and harmony. But I don't care about the cult of Pallas Athena, it's gone. And as far as I know it's not to be missed. The Eleusinian mysteries have been demystified. The sacrifices, some of them human, that were made to those gods, are regrettable but have been blotted out and forgotten. And Athenian imperialism is also a thing of the past. What remains is the fantastic beauty and the faith that built it. The question is how to keep what is of value of this sort in art and in our own emotions and in our finer feelings the numinous, the transcendent, I will go as far as the ecstatic, and to distinguish it precisely from superstition and the supernatural which are designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile and which sometimes succeed only too well. Thank you.

GRIFFITHS: Well it's time now for the final act in our debate, closing statements. We'll do that in the reverse order of our opening remarks. So Christopher, I'm going to call on you, again, to speak your closing remarks, please.

HITCHENS: I'm not ready.

GRIFFITHS: Ok.

HITCHENS: I didn't know it was coming. And, Tony, what do you say, would you rather have another question? There are so many people who've got them.

BLAIR: I'm...

HITCHENS: [indecipherable] answer another question.

GRIFFITHS: Let's take another question? Ok.

HITCHENS: In other words, don't run away with the idea I've run out of stuff, ok? Yes, I'd rather be provoked if someone could do that.

BLAIR: Sure.

GRIFFITHS: Well let's do that. And I guess we'll give Christopher a pause here, a chance to drink and catch his breath and Tony, go to you on this—the whole question of, which has been at the center of this debate, on the rigidity or flexibility of religious doctrine. Your church, the Catholic Church, has just made a reversal of sorts on its policy around the use of condoms, allowed explicitly and only for the prevention of HIV/AIDS infection. Is that a positive? Is that an expression of flexibility or a critique of the decades of rigidity before this reversal?

BLAIR: Well, I welcome it. But you know—I mean, I'm one of the billion, I think, lay Catholics, so I don't—and I think many, many Catholics have different views on the whole range of issues upon which there is teaching by the Church. I just wanted to pick up something, if I might, that Christopher said, because I thought his discussion of the transcendent was very interesting, actually. I mean, for those of us of religious faith we acknowledge and believe that there is a power higher and separate from human power and in a way what Christopher is saying is, "Well, I don't—I can't accept that but I do accept there is something transcendent in the human experience and something numinous, something even ecstatic." You see, for me the belief in a higher power and the fact that we should be obedient to the will of that power and not simply our own will, I don't regard that as putting me in a position of "servility," is not the word I would use. I would use the word "obligation" and, you know, when I—it is of course absolutely true that when I can point to any of the acts that I say are inspired by religious faith, you can say, "Well, they could have easily been inspired by humanism." But I think that for those of us that are of faith and do believe that there is something actually more than simply human power this does give you, I think, a humility. It's not all that can give you a humility but it does. I think, and I have witnessed this myself, I remember—actually again, to refer to Northern Ireland—when I met some of the people who were the relatives of those that dies in the Omagh bombing, which came actually after the Good Friday Agreement and was the worst terrorist attack in the history of Northern Ireland, and I went to visit the relatives of the victims and I remember a man saying to me and—that—who had lost his loved one in the bombing—saying to me, "You know, I have prayed about this and I want you to know that this terrible act should make you all the more determined to reach peace and to not stop your quest for peace." And it is completely true that of course he could have come to such an extraordinary and, I would say, transcendent view of forgiveness and compassion without religious faith but it was what led him to that. And so, I think you can't ignore the fact that for many of us, actually religious faith is what shapes us in this direction and not because we are servile or base our religious faith on superstition or contrary to reason, indeed, which is why I've never seen a contradiction between Darwin and being someone of religious faith. But we do genuinely believe that it impels us in a way that is different and more imperative in a sense than anything else in our lives and, you know, in a way we wouldn't be being true to ourselves unless we admitted that. So that doesn't mean to say that someone who has no religious faith couldn't be just as good a person and that is—I do not claim for an instant that anybody who is religious—of religious faith is in some way a superior or better person than someone who isn't, but I do say that religion can and does, in the lives of millions, actually hundreds of millions, in fact, billions of people, does give them an impulse to be better people than otherwise they would be.

GRIFFITHS: We'd ask for your closing statement, five minutes. Your closing statement.

HITCHENS Five minutes each?

GRIFFITHS: Yep. So now onto our closing statements. Christopher, you will begin. You have five minutes on the clock.

HITCHENS: I think a way I might do it actually is by commenting on what Tony just said because he succeeded in doing what I had hoped I might get him to do earlier which is to allow me to drive him back onto the territory of metaphysics with which I began because we did need to transcend that and thus to get beyond questions like, "Well, are religious people good?" "Are they bad?" and other things that are very important. "Does religion make them behave better or worse?" and so forth. I'll give you and I'll challenge Tony on an example: I mentioned earlier our attachment to the Labour and socialist movement in our lifetimes. For a very long time we had in that movement a challenger, apparently from the left, the communist movement, which has only been dead a very short time now and actually hasn't died everywhere yet and which said it had a much more comprehensive and courageous and thoroughgoing answer than we did to the problems created by capitalism and imperialism and other things and really proposed a fighting solution. And if I was to point to you the number of heroic people who believed in that and the number of wonderful works of especially fiction, novels and essays written by people who believed in it—you could probably, all of you mention one of your own. If you were a Canadian—I hope they still teach about him in school, the great example of Norman Bethune, heroic doctor who went to volunteer in China during the civil war on the communist side, did amazing work, invented a form of battlefield blood transfusion, just one among many examples. It was the communists in many parts of Europe who barred the road to fascism in Spain and kept Madrid, for many years, from falling to Franco and Hitler and Mussolini. Ghandi may take credit for the Indian independence movement (too much in my view) but no one would deny the tremendous role played by the Indian communists in doing this, in helping to break the challenge—excuse me, break the hold of Great Britain on their country. As a matter of fact, some people find it embarrassing to concede this, but I don't, as a supporter of it myself, the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela's party, at least half of its members of the central committee and executives were members of the communist party until quite recently, very probably including Mandela himself. There's no doubt about it, there was real heroism and dignity and humanism to those people but we opposed it. We said it wouldn't work. Why won't it work? It's not worth the sacrifice of freedom that it implies. It implies that these things only can be done if you'll place yourself under an infallible leadership, one that, once it's made the decision has made that decision and you are bound by it—you might conceivably notice where I'm going here. It's why many of the people, the brilliant intellectuals who did leave it, left it very often for as high reasons of principle as they joined it in the first place and the names of their books are legion and legendary. The best known is called The God That Failed, precisely because it was an attempt at a bogus form, a surrogate of, religion. But let no one say, and when the history of it comes to be written, no one will be able to say that it didn't represent some high points in human history. But I repeat, it wasn't worth it that the sacrifice of mental and intellectual and moral freedom and that was the purpose of my original set of questions on the metaphysical side. Are you—consider yourselves and consider this carefully, ladies and gentlemen, brothers, sisters, comrades, friends—are you yourselves willing for the sake of certain elements of the numinous, perhaps for a great record of good works, as it's proposed by Tony, are you willing to say that you give your allegiance to an ultimate redeemer, because you're not really religious if you don't believe that there is a divine supervision involved. You don't have to believe it intervenes all the time. If you don't believe that, you're already half way out the door, you don't need me. But are you willing to pay the price for a permanent supervisor? Are you willing to pay the price of believing in things that are supernatural, miracles, afterlives, angels? Are you willing to admit, perhaps this most of all, are you willing to admit that human beings can be the interpreter of this divine figure? Because a religion means that you will have to follow someone who is your religious leader. You can't, try as you may, follow Jesus of Nazareth. It can't be done. You can try and do it, it can't be done. You'll have to follow his vicar on earth, Pope Benedict XXVI as presently, the—his own claim, not mine—the apostolic succession, the vicar of Christ on earth. You have to say that this person has divine authority. I maintain that that, and what goes with it, is too much of a sacrifice of the mental and intellectual freedom that is essential to us, to be tolerated, and you gain everything by repudiating that and standing up to your own full height and you gain much more than you will by pretending that you're a member of a flock or in any other way any kind of sheep. Thank you.

BLAIR: I've just—when Christopher was talking there about our times in the Labour Party together I was just recalling after we suffered our fourth election defeat in a row in the Labour Party, meeting a party member after the fourth defeat who said to me, "The people have now voted against us four times. What is wrong with them?" And you know, I would say that actually the example of communism shows that those that want to suppress freedom and that those that have a fanatical view of the way the world should work, those are not confined to the sphere of religious faith, I'm afraid. It is there in many, many different walks of life. So the question is, for me, this is not about how I, with a belief for me as a Christian, with the belief in Jesus Christ not how that makes me subject to oppression and servitude but, on the contrary, how that helps me find the best way of expressing the best of the human spirit. And it was actually Einstein who was not an atheist in fact, he believed in a supreme being, although he did not necessarily subscribe to organized religion, who said religion without science is blind, but he also went on to say science without religion is lame and I would say that, for me, faith is not about certainty. It is, in part, a reflection indeed of my own awareness of my own ignorance and, that though life's processes can be explained by science, nonetheless the meaning and purpose of life cannot be. And in that space, for me at least, lies not certainty in the scientific sense but a belief that is clear and insistent and I would say rational which is there is a higher power than human power and that higher power causes to lead better lives in accordance with a will more important than our own, not in order that we should be imprisoned by that superior will but, on the contrary, so that we can discipline and use our own will in furtherance of the things that represent the best in human beings and the best in humanity. So, I think this debate this evening has been a fascinating and I think deeply important debate about probably the single most important issue of the twenty-first century. I actually don't think the twenty-first century will be about fundamentalist political ideology. I accept it could be about fundamentalist, religious, or cultural ideology and the way that we avoid that is for those people of faith actually to be prepared to stand up and to debate those people who are of none and for those people who believe in a world of peaceful coexistence where people do cooperate together recognize that there are people with deeply held religious convictions and that those convictions impel them to be a part of that peaceful coexistence even though it is true, there are those who in the name of religion, and indeed as a consequence of religion, will sometimes do things that are horrific bad, evil, and, in my view, totally contrary to the true meaning of faith. So, I don't stand before you tonight and say that those of us of religious faith have always done right since that is plainly wrong, but I do say that throughout human history there have been examples of people inspired by faith that have actually, rather than contributed to the suppression of humanity, contributed to its liberation, spiritually, emotionally, and even materially and it is those people that I stand up for here with you tonight. Thank you.

Read Hitchens' response

Read Christopher's brother Peter's response

Hitchens vs. Sharpton, New York Public Library

2010-11-26T11:47:00.018-05:00

Christopher Hitchens vs. Al Sharpton: Is God Great?

May 7, 2007, The New York Public Library

[Introductions by Paul Holdengräber and moderator Jacob Weisberg]

WEISBERG: Christopher, I would like to start with you: what have you got against God?

HITCHENS: [To Sharpton] Good grief, so it hadn’t really sunk in on me that as you were being ordained when I was nine, I was just getting out there completely. I was nine when I thought I saw through it when my biology teacher told me that God was so good as to have made vegetation green because it was the color most restful to our eyes. And I thought, “Mrs. Watts, this is nonsense.” I knew nothing about chlorophyll or photosynthesis, nothing about the theory of evolution, nothing about adaptation, nothing of the sort. I just knew she’d got everything all wrong. And, of course, the argument against faith, against religion, falls into two essential halves, not necessarily congruent, but I believe congruent: the first is it’s not true. Religion comes from the infancy of our species—I won’t say race because I don’t think our species is subdivided by races—infancy of our species when we didn’t know that the earth went around the sun, we didn’t know that germs caused disease, we didn’t know when we were told in Genesis you’re given dominion over all creatures that this did not include microorganisms, because we didn’t know they were there, so we didn’t know they had dominion over us. When diseases broke out it was blamed on wickedness, or sometimes on the Jews, or if it was by Jews on the Amalekites, or as you will. We didn’t know anything about the nature of the earth’s crust, how it was cooling, earthquakes, storms, all of this were a mystery. Well, we are, at least to that extent, a reasoning species. Even a conspiracy theory is often better than no theory at all. The mind searches for form, we’re now stuck with the forms that we found in our infancy, in our primitive, barbaric past. Well, that could be fine, still. No nation can be without mythology or myth or legend. And there are people who say, “Well, it’s not exactly true. Virgins don’t conceive, ok, bushes don’t burn forever,”—although why that would be so impressive, I’ve never understood—“Dead men don’t walk, and so on and so forth. Ok, alright, it’s not really true. It does come from a rather fearful period of the Dark Ages. But, at least it’s nice to believe it. It teaches good precepts.” This, I think, is very radically untrue. I give in my book the example, which I’ll give you now, of a person very much influential on my youth, and I know on the Reverend’s too, Dr. Martin Luther King. My friend Taylor Branch’s book about Dr. King—I would rather call him doctor than reverend because, I’m sorry to say, I think it’s a higher title of honor—Taylor Branch’s trilogy about him is called Parting the Waters, The Pillar of Fire, and At Jordan’s Edge. And everybody literate here knows the story of Exodus and understands what Dr. King meant when he demanded that his people be free of bondage. But, if you think about it for a second, it’s a very good thing that the good doctor was only using this metaphorically. If he’d really been invoking the lessons of Genesis and Exodus, he would have been saying that his people had the right to kill anyone who stood in their way, to exterminate all other tribes, to mutilate their children’s genitalia, to make slaves of those they captured, to take the land and property of others, to engage in rather long and hideous and elaborate arguments about ox goring, and finally, which is the sentence that ends that—or the verse that ends that section of the book, should not suffer a witch to live (the warrant for witch burning). In other words, in these books there are the warrants for genocide, for slavery, for the torture of children for disobedience, for genital mutilation, for annexation, for rape and all the rest of it. It’s a very good thing that this is man-made. There are those who say that they wish they could believe and I suppose a decent atheist could say that, if only for a lack of evidence, he wishes he or she could. I can’t be among their number. I’m very glad it is not true that there is a permanent, unshakeable, unchallengeable celestial supervision, a divine North Korea in which no privacy, no liberty is possible from the moment of conception, not just until the moment of death but well after. I’ve been to North Korea and now I know what a prayerful state would look like. I know what it would be like to praise God from dawn until dusk. I’ve seen it happen. And it’s the most disgusting and depressing and and pointless soulless thing you can picture. But at least with North Korea you can die and you can leave. Christianity won’t let you do that because—I’ll mention another thing about the Old Testament: the Old Testament may have—and any Jews and Christians who like it may like this too—they may have genocide, rape, racism, and all the rest of the things I’ve mentioned, but it never mentions punishment of the dead. When you’re done, when you’re in the mass grave into which you’ve been thrown as an Amalekite, it’s over. Not until gentle Jesus, meek and mild is the concept of hell introduced. Eternal torture, eternal punishment for you and all your family for the smallest transgression. I have no hesitation in saying this is a wicked belief. I've also no hesitation in saying—and I musn't trespass on the Reverend’s time—that we don’t need it in two senses. One, it’s wicked and two, we have and always have had, a much superior tradition. We know that Democritus and Epicurus worked out in ancient Athens the world was made of atoms, that the gods did not exist and certainly took no interest in human affairs and would be foolish to do so and would be wicked if they did. We have the tradition that brings us through Galileo and Spinoza and Thomas Paine and Voltaire and Thomas Jeffesron and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, men of great wisdom and insight by all means struck by the awe-inspiring character of our universe, by all means open to devotional music and architecture and poetry, by all means aware of the transcendent. But look through the Hubble telescope if you want to see something that is awe inspiring and don’t look to blood-stained old myths. Now, “Why now? Why am I doing this now?” people ask. Well, I’ll tell you why now: because in the last few years it’s become impossible to turn a page of a newspaper without being, as the religious would say, "offended." In other words I don’t think I sound self-pitying if I say I’m offended that a cartoonist in a tiny democratic country in Scandinavia (Denmark) can’t do his job without a death threat and that no American magazine or newspaper would reprint those cartoons either to elucidate the question or in solidarity. I’m offended that civil society in Iraq is being destroyed, leveled by the parties of God. I’m offended that people in this country believe that they have the right to advocate the teaching of garbage to children under the fatuous name of Intelligent Design. I believe that we're—[After audience applause] Oh, I thought you’d never clap. Just as I believe that where religion ends philosophy begins, where alchemy ends chemistry begins, where astrology ends astronomy begins and now the people would say, “Well let’s give equal time to astrology in the schools.” It’s nonsense—dangerous and sinister nonsense. The Pope says, “AIDS may be bad, but condoms are much worse.” What kind of moral teaching is this? And how many people are going to die for such dogma? You see what I mean. So, I just—I’ll be very brief: and end to this, an end particularly to the cultural fringe that says that if someone can claim to be religious spokesman they are entitled to respect. [To Sharpton] I have to say it in your presence, sir: I think that the title Reverend is something people should be more concerned to live down than to live up to. Thank you.

WEISBERG: We will get back to some of that. But Reverend Sharpton, in your rebuttal, would you take a moment to correct Christopher on his misconception that religion was somehow incidental to the Civil Rights movement?

SHARPTON: That’s all you want me to rebut?

WEISBERG: No.

HITCHENS: Feel free.

WEISBERG: Cover that please.

SHARPTON: Well, first of all, let me thank you for inviting me and—to have this debate. It is the first time in my long career that I was not assumed to be the devil in a debate. It’s an unusual place for me on this stage. So I couldn’t turn down representing God and the divine in a public encounter. But I think that several things in rebutting what brother Hitchens says—you don’t have a problem with living up or down to being brother, do you?

HITCHENS: Damn right.

SHARPTON: I think that…

HITCHENS: I take it kindly.

SHARPTON: …you made a very interesting analysis of how people use or misuse God but you made no argument about God himself. And by attacking the “wicked” use of God does not at all address the existence of God or non-existence of God. We are sitting in a room that, because of lights, we assume that there is electricity in the building. Electricity can light up a room or burn it down. It does not mean electricity does not exist because it burns the building down or that it is inherently wicked. It is how people use it. So clearly people have misused God as they have misused other things that are possibly positive, but its existence is not in any way proven or disproven by you giving a long diatribe on those that have mishandled and misused God because there are many that you can cite that have acted in a way that shows the goodness of God. Your book God is Not Great could be refuted by many that feel He is great or She is great, whatever way you relate to God. Science, to me, does not wipe away the existence of God because science had to start somewhere. So to pick up mankind in its evolving state does not tell me where mankind began, how it became a long story of ordered steps. Well who ordered them? Why do things follow such a natural progression? Who set the progress? And, in fact, even in the term “wicked,” if there is no God, and if there is no supreme mechanism that governs the world, what makes right right and what makes wrong wrong? Why don’t we just go by whoever’s the strongest at any given period in history? Because nothing is wicked, because whoever’s in power at the time would determine what is wicked and what is not wicked because there’s no real moral code because there’s nobody to judge that. So at one hand we’re going to argue God doesn’t exist, on the hand we’re going to call people wicked. Wicked according to who and according to what? It would be based on whoever has the power at that time. So I think that the real thing that I’m interested in, Mr. Hitchens, is to really discuss the idea of God and the idea of a supreme being and how creatures and creation have just by some great coincidence, an unexplained scheme follows some order that just happened by itself. Something, some force, some overruling force had to set all of that pattern in and it continues thousands of years later. Can you give a million examples of where people have misused that, where they’ve distorted that, where in the name of God or North Korea or other tragedies have happened? Yes. In terms of the Civil Rights movement, it was absolutely fueled by a belief in God and a belief in right or wrong and had not there been this belief that there was a right and a wrong, the Civil Rights movement that you alluded to, or that you referred to, would not have existed because what made it wrong for people to be slaves? What made it wrong for humans to be treated unequally? Because there was nobody to say that they were all equal, it was whoever had the strength. But at the end what is refreshing is that you are a man of faith because any man that at this date still has faith that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has more faith than any religious person I know.

HITCHENS: Very well, that's a very generous response. Do you mind if I take it in reverse order? The belief that there are weapons of mass destruction, or rather the conviction that Saddam Hussein was interested in weapons of mass destruction, you could, I suppose, describe as an argument from design. In other words, he had them before, he’d known how to conceal them, he’d used them several times, he seems to be prepared to risk his entire political career on the idea of reacquiring them. I would say that was not a belief that had no evidence and I would say that anyone who treated him as if he was innocent on the subject would be a sap, actually (would be my short word for it). Second, on the Civil Rights movement, you—I expected you to be more assertive. I don't know what Dr. King's private convictions about religion were. I know that he studied Hegel, I know that he studied Marx. I know that among his very close entourage were a large number of secular socialists and communists, you know their names too. Samuel Levinson is probably the best known but—among the black civil rights leadership, Bayard Rustin, secular socialist, Philip Randolph, secular socialist, trade union leader, these were the building blocks for the march on Washington, as was Victor Reuther and many others. The belief that it is illegal as well as evil to keep black Americans in subjection does not require any supernatural endorsement. It had been proved repeatedly in law and in morality and in ethics and demonstrated in practice. The only thing that has always been consistently justified by the churches was initially slavery, the right to hold someone as a slave, biblically warranted, and the right to keep the races separate which is endorsed by a church that, just to give a contemporary example, one of the current candidates for the Republican nomination is a member of a church (the so-called "Mormon" Church of Latter-Day Saints) that until 1965 had it as an article of faith that the Bible separates the Sons of Ham and makes them lesser. Well, I don't have to discredit a text like that because I don't think it has any authority. So, in a sense, I return the question to you. Now, I didn't say that God was misused. I hope I didn't—I wasn't so poorly understood by everybody. I said that the idea of God is a dictatorial one to being with. The belief in a supreme, eternal, invigilating creator who knows what you think and what you do and cares about it and will reward or punish you and watches you while you sleep is, I think, a horrific belief, a man-made one fortunately. I'm very glad there's no evidence for it. Let me—in case I was misunderstood let me assert again: I think it's innately an awful belief. However, the cleverest theologian, and there have been some, has never been able to demonstrate that such a person exists. It's impossible to do so. It's not possible either for me to demonstrate conclusively that no such person exists. That cannot be done either. But one thing can be done: a person who claims not to know only that this person exists, a task beyond our brain, but to claim to know His or Her (I'll accept your correction, Reverend) mind, to say, "I know because I'm in holy orders what this entity wants you to do, what He wants you to eat, who He wants you to go to bed with and how He wants you to go to bed with them, what you may read, what associations in private you may form, what thoughts you may have," that person is out of the argument now, it seems to me. We know that no one knows that. So the claim made by the religious that they know God, they know His mind, that they can tell us what to do in His name is, I think, exploded. Further, it is not argued by my side at any rate nor by no one I know on it that the—our presence here on the planet is something that is susceptible to a smooth, logical, reasonable explanation. To the contrary, we are still very much in doubt as to precisely how we came to be human and to separate ourselves from some of our common ancestors. We also know that of the species that have been on this small planet on this tiny solar system since the beginning of measurable time of the number that have—were ever in existence, more than 98.9% have become extinct. A certain solipsism I think is required to believe that we, as the resulting species, are somehow the center of the created cosmos. This is not modesty, as the Christians call it. It's not humility. It's an unbelievably arrogant claim to make. But at least it makes up for the other claim we're supposed to put up with which is, "Well, yes, but we're also miserable sinners, conceived in filth and doomed to abject ourselves." Both of these positions are too extreme, too strenuous, too fanatical, and both of them reinforce each other in unpleasant ways and both should be outgrown by us. Voila.

SHARPTON: Well I think you probably had a bad Sunday School teacher because a lot of what you're saying is based on dogma and has nothing to do with one's belief in a supreme being. You're discussing, again, religions, dogmas, denominations, not the existence or non-existence of God. I'm glad to hear you concede you can't prove He or She doesn't exist any more than you claim that those that believe—[Microphone buzz]

WEISBERG: There He is now.

SHARPTON: Are you going to claim that's God speaking on my behalf?

HITCHENS: I hate it when that happens.

SHARPTON: Or the devil, which you choose. But I think that, again, the basic core question of God goes way beyond any example, no matter how witty or humorous, of those that come in God's name because it is the dictates of denominations or organized religious groups that tell you what to eat and what to wear and who to sleep with and all of that. That has nothing to do with the existence of an order to the universe that is clear and evident, that science, I think, confirms that it evolved from somewhere. That's how I relate to God. To your point, however, since I wasn't assertive enough in the first going forward and I think—one guy said that the other night in Vegas and Mayweather got more assertive, he won the fight so watch out on that. I'll get a little more assertive. Dr. King's organization's, brother Hitchens, name was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, so there's no question that he himself saw that the basis of the movement was God-based. Did he have some socialists that did not believe in God that associated with the movement? Absolutely. But they joined SCLC's endeavors after SCLC was formed. In fact, SCLC was formed in 1957 in New Orleans before many of them that organized the march on Washington. When Bayard Rustin, who I knew, went down south, his problem was he debated a lot with the ministers there who was the core of that group, so to try and secularize the Civil Rights Movement is just totally inaccurate. It was a church-based, faith-based movement, there is no question about that. And Dr. King, way before he studied Hegel and the rest he grew up in Ebenezer Baptist Church, was an ordained minister, first went to Morehouse, then Crozer Theological Seminary, then went to Boston to study those that you have referred to so let's not reinvent Dr. King any more that we try to reduce God to some denominational convention. And as for the one Mormon running for office, those that really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don't worry about that. That's a temporary situation. But I think the core challenge that I would have is that I would say to you that if your argument is that there are those that have used religion, as in slavery, or as even today, to oppress people use religion to be unfair to people or have misinterpreted scriptures, you would get no debate from me. I think that is a fact of history and one that many of us have had to fight against. That still does not disqualify God any more than using anything in nature that is wrong—to say that one eats food that is poisoned does not mean one should therefore starve because food is inherently bad. That—I think you're confusing the misuse of religion with the existence of God. There are those that have no religious affiliations at all that believe in God. There are people that don't deal with organized church at all that still believe in God. So when you say God is not great let's not then debate organized religion is not great or some that have exploited organized religion is not great. You, in the title of your book—and I've had a chance to go through your book—attack God not those that express that they are therefore standing in God's place or representing God and your whole oratory about weapons of mass destruction and he thought he had it and all of that, when we found him he was in a rat trap with a 22 pistol. He knew he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction because no one, as one that comes out of the hood, no one that has atom bombs would just retreat with a 22 and wait under calvary.

WEISBERG: Any order you like.

HITCHENS: I think I better stick to the reverse order. No, well that's why I—very good time to attack him was before he would get back what he lost by way of WMD. He didn't have any then and he wasn't going to get them back, either any more than he was going to improve his relations with Al Qaeda. They were as good as they were ever going to get and that was fine by me. Maybe an argument for another time but, believe me, I'm not reluctant to have it. Then we are of one mind, essentially, I mean, after all, I did not deny what's common knowledge that Dr. Martin Luther King was the Reverend Martin Luther King and was indeed at the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

SHARPTON: I thought you said you don't know his [indecipherable].

HITCHENS: No, no, I said I cannot say to you that I know that he was a believing Christian, no I cannot. I mean neither can you say that to me any more than, we seem to be of one mind on this too, that none of us can prove or disprove the existence of God. The differences between us—I don't say that I'm an ordained minister because I don't think I could push it that far. On the—since you're evidently an agnostic, it's a confession that I'm very welcome to have, not extracted from you, but heard you make. Now here's the question: you say these texts are misused, I say that they are not. The Old Testament says or does not say that Abraham was doing a noble thing by offering to sacrifice his son to prove himself loyal to God or to the voices he was hearing in his head? It says that was a noble thing for him to do, he was rewarded for it by a great posterity and a great long life. Offering to murder his son because of hearing voices in his head. This is not moral teaching to me. Is it not the case that the Old Testament says that the Amalekites must all be destrored down to the last child, every one among them, leave not one? Yes, it does say that. Bishop of Landaff in a debate with Thomas Paine said, "Well, when it says keep the women," as Paine had pointed out, he said, "I'm sure God din't mean just to keep them for immoral purposes." Well what does the Bishop of Landaff know about this? Kill all the men, kill all the children, and keep the virgins. I think I know what they had in mind. I don't think it's moral teaching. To this day there are nutbag settlers, some Israeli citizens, some of them American, some of them Israeli-Americans, trying to settle the West Bank in the name of this prophecy, throw other people off their land and establish a theocracy that will bring on the Messiah and, they hope, Armageddon and the end of the world. Well I think the United States Supreme Court should hear argument that not one American dime can be used constitutionally for that project, ok? It's high time, cut it off. These people mean to— these people mean us real harm and I'm not going to dilate about whether their Muslim brothers say about us when the—the Koran does not say that you may be killed for changing your religion but the Hadith, the so-called sayings of the prophet, which are taken just as seriously, do say that. So when someone says, "I'm a Muslim and I'm telling you, Mr. Rushdie, if you apostatize from this faith, you're dead," he's not misquoting the texts, sir, he's not. He's quoting them accurately. I think I'll phrase it as understatedly as I can: I think we can do without a lot of this.

WEISBERG: Christopher.

SHARPTON: Now, let me respond to this. I think again...

HITCHENS: I think enough already would cover a lot of this stuff.

SHARPTON: Again, you are debating points I didn't make. I said—you keep confusing the existence of God, again, with religious denominational beliefs. I'm not debating...

HITCHENS: They're not—are they separable?

SHARPTON: Yes.

HITCHENS: Well fine.

SHARPTON: Very much so. I think that you're quoting the Bible—if you said everything in the Bible you rejected you still have not established why a belief in God—maybe a belief in God through that vehicle may be your debate but you're not addressing God. You're talking Koran, Bibles, people's interpretation of God. That is not my debate. My debate with your book is that you're saying therefore since they did this to—well, since Abraham was going to murder his son, there is no God. That's like one plus two equals seven. I mean, we're not—so Abraham may have been incorrect, if that's your point, or what they did with the Amalcolmites or what's going on in the Middle East, what does that have to do with the existence of a universe that is set on a order that I believe was set by a supreme being that continues to evolve today that I think science has done a credible job in analyzing. Now you can debate which one of the Bibles, Korans, religious books may have had it right or interpreted it right but that does not address the central question. You, sir, did not attack the Christian church or the Muslim religion or the Pope, you attacked God and to attack God is a whole lot—you hit here and you debate here. Let's talk about God, let's not talk about those that came in His name and you have some maybe credible arguments against whether or not you felt that they were correct or incorrect and, again, I raise as I did in my opening statement: who decides what is wicked, what is right, what is ethical? If there's nothing there that governs humanity whatever is ethical is whatever we decide is ethical because we're in charge. It's all up to us.

HITCHENS: Ok, once again in reverse order if I may: religion gets its morality from us. I think it's very easy to demonstrate that. I'll do it from one of each of the two testaments.

SHARPTON: You back on testaments. Why don't you right a book Testaments are Not Great?

HITCHENS: I've spent a lot of time with my Bible, ok? My Bible, I do.

SHARPTON: I told you you had a bad sunday school teacher.

HITCHENS: Or the "Babel" as they call it in Dixie. I do. In the—there's a very famous parable in the New Testament where the alleged Jesus of Nazareth tells a story about a man from Samaria (we call it the good Samaritan) who, finding a fellow creature in enormous distress and pain, goes well out of His way to alleviate his suffering and to follow up to make sure that His sympathy hasn't been a waste of time, to do the aftercare if you like. We know one thing about this person from Samaria: he cannot have been a Christian. Jesus is telling this story about someone He's heard of who acted, as far as we know, from no other prompting other than elementary human solidarity. What other prompting do we need? Our species would not have survived, we wouldn't be met here if we didn't have, as well as many selfish instincts, the need, and often for our own sake, to be of use to others, to combine with them, to take an interest in them, to care for them, and to worry when they're in pain. No supernatural authority, as with the Civil Rights Movement, is required for this. Morality comes from us, religion claims to have invented it on our behalf. Then, ok, another example from the older testament: is it really to be believed that, until they got to the foot of Mt. Sinai, the followers of Moses believed that, up until then, adultery, murder, theft, and perjury were ok? They're suddenly told, "Oh hey, we got some new ideas for you." I don't think so. It's a bit of an insult to the ancient Jewish faith, of which Jacob and I are both rather disgraceful ornaments in our different ways. I think our ancestors were smarter than that and even if they weren't smarter, they wouldn't have got that far if they were under the contrary impression. The Golden Rule is something you don't have to teach a child. There's no need to say, "And if you don't follow this rule, you'll burn in hell forever." That's immoral teaching. Now I hope I've made myself clear. On the—but I'm wondering if I have because you face me, Reverend, with two very unwelcome thoughts: either I have been completely inarticulate in everything I've said this evening or you have misunderstood me.

SHARPTON: Or both.

HITCHENS: I prefer myself—or, these are not mutually exclusive. And I should've seen that coming.

SHARPTON: Have faith, son, you can do better.

HITCHENS: I thought I said with storm ground we cannot know if there was a creator whether of ourselves or of our cosmos. You may wish to assume one but that's the best you can do. The evidence is all that the cosmos evolved and the evidence that there was a single mind purposeful creator of it is nil. There's no evidence for that at all. By all means believe it as long as you don't try to make me believe it or teach it to my children.

SHARPTON: Well, let me say that we've got...

HITCHENS: On that I have to insist. That's not a difference of opinion.

SHARPTON: I will meet you on common ground there, but I will say that many people, I among them, in our own lives have had experiences that make me believe that there is a God and make me believe that my seeking God and seeking the guidance of a supreme being is real to me. I'm not going by Moses, I'm not going by Peter, I'm not going by the man that you said was "allegedly" Jesus of Nazareth, I'm talking about in people's personal experiences with their interaction through their own faith with God can say that you or no one else can tell me that did not exist. If I was only sitting up here arguing with you over Scriptures, then you would have points that I would consider valid to this discussion, but I'm not here to defend Scriptures. I didn't write those Scriptures. I lived my life and in my life the existence of God has been confirmed to me in my own personal dealings and my own faith being vindicated and validated that had absolutely nothing to do with Scriptures or whether they were right or wrong and, again, I pose the question: when you raise the issue of morality, if there is no supervisory being, then what do we base morality on? Is it based on who has the might at any given time? Who's in power? What is morality based on if there is no order to the universe and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right and wrong, what is moral and immoral? You use very religious terms interchangeably while you attack the idea of a God. There is nothing immoral if there is nothing in charge because everything becomes moral if, in fact, the species as we are is all there is. We'll determine—let's decide every four years what's moral. (Most Republicans do, but, I mean...) Let's do it in the sense of let's just say forget about that, we'll decide morality based on every period of time because there is nothing up there governing in any way. And you don't have to burn in hell to understand that life has certain guiding posts that has been set there well beyond your own being and I think to think that the whole world was waiting on one's birth, your birth or mine, or death, to set the framework of morality, I think that is very arrogant. It's also delusional, but it is very arrogant at best.

HITCHENS: Again, in reverse order:...

SHARPTON: Don't look for help from the referee, I'm over here.

HITCHENS: I incline in your direction, sir. Said it before—very suggestive thing that you just said: if there was no one in charge, how would we know how to act morally? This is indeed, this is a very profound observation. It's argued by Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, he said, "Without God anything is permissible." Some people believe that. Some people believe that without the fear of divine total surveillance and supervision everyone would do exactly as they wished and we would all be wolves to each other. I think there's an enormous amount of evidence that that's not the case, that morality is innate in us, that solidarity is part of our self-interest in society as well as our own interest and very much to argue the contrary that when you see something otherwise surprising to you, such as a good person acting in a wicked manner, it's very often because they believe they're under divine orders to do so. Steven Weinberg puts it very well, he says, "Left to themselves, evil people will do evil things and good people will try and do good things. If you want a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion." For example—I simply do not believe—I do not believe that my Palestinian friends I've known now for years, think that to blow yourself up outside an orphanage is a moral act—or inside one is a moral act, or an old person's home in Netanya is a moral action, that anything in their nature makes them think this, but their Mullahs tell them that there is, that a person doing this is a hero. I do not think that any person looking at a newborn baby would think, "How wonderful, what a gift and now let's just start sawing away at its genitalia with a sharp stone." Who would give them that idea were it not the godly? And what kind of argument from design is this? Babies are not born beautiful, they're born ugly, they need to be sawn a bit because the handywork of God is such garbage. Well honestly, this is what I mean when I say that those who think there's any connection between ethics and religion have all their work still ahead of them and after thousands of years, still have it all ahead of them more and more. There.

SHARPTON: So you do not believe, in your long and thorough research of history, that atheists ever did anything evil, it's only religious people that were driven by somebody representing God that made them do that and people that came in satanic ways, all of that is rubbish? Only religious people reading scriptures of some sort have done wicked things in the history of the world?

HITCHENS: I should have raised that question myself and I realize also...

SHARPTON: But you didn't, so I did, so let's...

HITCHENS: But I've never yet been in one of these meetings where it didn't come up and—but I still owe you yet another answer. When you say you've had this confirming emotion in your own life, of course, I would not be so presumptuous as to challenge you. Indeed, I believe people when they say that they have experienced miracles. I believe that they think that they have. I think I'm obliged to credit them if it comes to that as long as they keep it to, if you like, if I can put it like this, modestly as I dare, to themselves. If I believed that I was saved because once a baby boy was born and, before mutilated, made the extraordinary discovery that he escaped the female birth canal, mother was a virgin (or at least that her birth canal was only one way) and that thus I was—a sorry thing, by the way, religions' distastes for these regions, don't you find? And something to put you on your guard: suppose I thought, ok, now I know that, that must prove his teachings are true, which it doesn't seem to me that they do, but suppose I did, and I'm going to be saved by it, I'd think that was a wonderful secret. It would make me happy. It should make me happy. It doesn't make people happy. They can't be happy until I believe it too. My children must be taught this stuff. So sir, no ma'am, no day, no way, no shape, no form. You keep your illusion private. And I hope it does make you happy and there's perhaps some reason why it would but then—no, we're told the Pope's authority to say you can't have a condom comes from his ability to certify a miracle, a disturbance in the natural order. I think it was David Hume who put it slightly vulgarly, this was again about the virgin birth I think: which is more likely, that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie? There has to be an answer to this kind of question. As to the secular bad behavior, well, I used to be a believing Marxist and I've had this argument about Communism in different forms all my life and I really—there's a very—you confront me with an intensely serious question, though, actually, secular criminality on the political level wasn't really possible until pretty much the late eighteenth century because the religious monopoly on violence and cruelty and torture and slavery and so on was so intense. It has to be said that some of my non-believing forebearers seized the opportunity to behave in the same way, sure. There's no question about it. And I'll put it like this, to take the best known case: up until 1917 the czar of Russia was not just the ruler and owner of Russia and all the Russian people and everything in it, but he was also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was considered by church and the people to be something a little more than divine—excuse me, a little more than human. Not as high as Hirohito, but a bit higher than the Pope in secular and temporal power. If you were Stalin you'd be crazy if you don't take advantage of a people who'd had centuries of indoctrination of that kind. Of course you would want to see if you couldn't replicate that and to see about reproducing it, emulating it, trading on it, taking advantage of it. You'd be nuts if you didn't do it. So the answer, I think, which is a very long process, will be a long, cultural process, is to try and move people up to a cultural and intellectual level where they above that kind of appeal, where they're not credulous, where they don't take things on faith, where they don't make gods or idols or images out of anybody including fellow human beings and that they learn the pleasures of thinking for themselves. How about that for a modest proposal?

WEISBERG: I'd like to use my referee's power to ask you each a question before we open it to the audience for questions and Christopher, my question for you, taking up the cudgels a little bit for Reverend Sharpton: you keep coming back to various forms of biblical literalism. Reverend, somewhat to my surprise, has not defended anything in the Bible and asks, quite reasonably, what is your problem with deism? You've written about Paine, Jefferson, you write in your book about Einstein and Darwin, who are arguably deists in a way. What is, since you say yourself you can't prove God doesn't exist, what is your problem with faith divorced from religious text or literalism?

HITCHENS: Well religion is not the belief that there is a god, after all. Religion is the belief that God tells you what to do. So, if we have to talk about religion, we are not talking—theism believes in the existence of a creating being but it has no prescriptions for morality. You can't as—a theist cannot say, "I think that this universe is so well-designed that it implies a creator, therefore don't be going to bed with another member of the same sex." Theism—deism, excuse, did I say theism that time? Deism, excuse me, is therefore not a religion. This is a first for me, I've never yet met someone in holy orders who has said that the words of the holy books have nothing to do with God. I know there's a lot of laxity in the churches these days, and I've been trying to encourage it, but, I mean, it seems to me—I could have been pushing at a slightly more well-defended door. Jefferson, who could have been a great paleontologist, a great botanist—well was, in fact, all of these things, couldn't shake the feeling that the sheer order and beauty of it implied something. But he had these great discussions with his French counterparts: "How come the shells—the sea shells you find them so high up on the mountain tops? What is that?" He had no idea. He died after 1819. The great day in 1819 is the day that Mr. Lincoln is born and Mr. Darwin is born, same day. I know which one of them was the greater emancipator, too. Jefferson couldn't see as far, we just didn't have the horizon. Now can you hold to the deist belief if you choose, if you like, but the overwhelming evidence is that we do have an explanation for the origins of the species, ours and all others and that each new discovery made, in however remote a part of the earth's surface, in paleontology will confirm, or not confute, or not contradict, the body of knowledge that we have so painstakingly erected. So everything else added to that is a work of what the Church of England used to call supererogation. It's needless, it's unnecessary. Ockham's razor disposes painlessly of it.

WEISBERG: Let me turn...

HITCHENS: It's gone. It's history.

WEISBERG: To turn it to you, Reverend Sharpton, for a moment, I was expecting you to—I think you've very eloquently made a version of the argument from design, you have argued of an idea of spirituality, but you haven't defended the Bible at all. I mean, isn't that what you do from the pulpit?

SHARPTON: Well maybe I read the wrong book.

HITCHENS: Could be.

SHARPTON: I did not get the book that Hitchens wrote, The Bible is Not Great. I didn't get a copy of the book that Religion is Not Great. He said God is not great and I have yet to, after several inquiries here tonight, get him to address that. And when I read his book and hear him talk he makes a case against everything other than God. Maybe the name of the book should've been God is Not Great, I Don't Think or You Have the Right to Think He's Great if You Just Don't Tell Me. That might have been a more appropriate title. But I'm waiting for him to establish that God, not King James, not Mohammed, not Jerry Falwell, God is not great. So to ask me to defend who I have no personal relationship with, no belief in, is—I'm in the wrong debate. I think that we can then agree that as long as I don't bother the sedate, scholarly world of Mr. Hitchens, then I can believe in my god and he's fine and I'm fine with that because I'm certainly not trying to convert Mr. Hitchens, I'm just trying to have him understand that he cannot impose upon me how I relate to God by quoting things that I may or may not believe anyway.

WEISBERG: I'm afraid we're not going to have any conversions tonight and I wasn't expecting any, although, you never know if Christopher is going to start speaking in tongues before we're done. Let's take some questions from the audience. There is...

[Holdengräber instructs those who are lining up where to find the microphones]

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Is it working? Thank you very much. Gentlemen thank you very much for the discussion. This question is for Mr. Hitchens. Based on your prior writings, based on, most recently, a Time Out interview with you in which you claim that the only time you ever prayed to God was for an erection, I'm going to ask you this question:...

SHARPTON: Was that a miracle?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: The question, Mr. Hitchens, is should...

HITCHENS: What people usually want to know is was the prayer answered?

WEISBERG: And?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Not me, baby. Should we normal, sane Americans continue to be so bedazzled by a bespokes, off-cam superficialist who just wants the US to pick up the many disastrous pieces of the British Empire and whose understanding of God is much shorter than his penis?

HITCHENS: I don't mind.

WEISBERG: Assuming that that was not a question, let's try another one.

HITCHENS: Well, I thought is was. It sounded interrogative. I mean, I don't want anyone to think I'm dodging anything is all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: It might be difficult for me to follow that one, but, correct me if I'm wrong in the beginning of the talk you...

HITCHENS: Oh we will, we will.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: ...you expressed antipathy towards deism in principle...

HITCHENS: Slow down, I can't hear a word you're saying.

SHARPTON: I can't either.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: I'm sorry. In the beginning of the talk you expressed antipathy towards deism in principle predicated upon this particular interpretation of God as a supreme dictator and judge, is that correct?

HITCHENS: That would be correct, yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Now, if I could play devil's advocate for God for a moment, could you appreciate a god who watches us and our actions eagerly and with great interest because he created a world where everything is permitted?

HITCHENS: Yes, I can picture it but not without horror.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Hi Christopher, my name is Lynn [indecipherable]. I came from Toronto for this.

HITCHENS: This isn't about my penis, is it?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: No. I wanted to ask you in light of the number of intellectuals and well-educated people and Templeton prize-winners that invoke the names of Richard Dawkins, you, and others who are speaking out and liberating us right now, are they deluded, dishonest, or emotionally dysfunctional? And may I also ask with regards to your book you mentioned that at age nine that you realized that you might have been an atheist but yet had two religious weddings, one Greek Orthodox and then Jewish, why did you do that? When my second wedding came along I went for the justice of the peace in a real estate office under a stuffed trout.

SHARPTON: Now I got the problem: two failed marriages and one failed erection, you gave up on God.

HITCHENS: You still don't know how that prayer was answered, Reverend. That's what you might call a premature ejaculation on your part.

SHARPTON: Not if I had Mary to give me witness.

HITCHENS: And I'm sorry, but I only have on ex-wife and not even she, in her most adamant moments, would describe our marriage as failed. I will say this, by the way, I hope I encourage anyone here who might be over in any difficulty, if you have a child with someone you really can never be divorced from them and she and I are very proud of our children and they are rather happy with us. It's a pity we couldn't get along better, but...Anyway, don't let me get too husky about this. On with the show, skipping lightly over the genitalia. Isaac Newton was a spiritualist, as far as we know. He seems to have believed in a number of weird and crackpotted theories. Joseph Priestley, the great Unitarian and rationalist and defender of the American Revolution, forced to flee from England to Philadelphia after the monarchists and Tories burned his laboratory, discoverer of oxygen, believed in the phlogiston theory, the most exploded theory that we know of. You'll find the coincidence or coexistence of superstition and mania of all kinds with great scientific achievements all over the place... [VIDEO EDIT] The [indecipherable] people who are real physicists, Fred Hoyle was actually one of them—the late Fred Hoyle, the man who believed in steady state and disbelieved what he contemptuously called the Big Bang, was also a man of odd, intermittent faith. It doesn't matter. What you could not do is say that your evidence as a physicist or a biologist supported your private religious beliefs. It would be a coincidence. Whereas if you're Richard Dawkins, the coherence between what you have found and what you have contributed to science and the extreme unlikelihood of the existence of any god is pretty striking. Hope that's clear.

WEISBERG: [To the next audience member] Please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: First of all, I have no interest in anyone's sex life, sorry. My question builds upon your response. Why do so many people seem to feel such a deep need to believe things which are obviously untrue: homeopathy, angels, UFOs, you name it, all the claptrap which fills endless magazines, television shows, etc.?

WEISBERG: As I understood the question it was essentially why is there such a persistent need for faith?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: What's the appeal...

WEISBERG: Why do so many people continue to believe if Christopher argues that the species has evolved beyond the need for it? Is that your question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Well, not quite. What is the fundamental attraction of the illogical?

SHARPTON: Is what?

WEISBERG: Say it again?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: What is the fundamental attraction of the illogical?

WEISBERG: Oh. Is it...

HITCHENS: Of the illogical. Yeah, I understand.

WEISBERG: Is it—are people drawn to religion because they're drawn to superstition and things that aren't logical?

HITCHENS: [To Sharpton] Well, you first.

SHARPTON: Let's go in reverse.

HITCHENS: Alright then. There's a poem by Philip Larkin called Church going which I hope anyone here who has not read—that sentence is going nowhere—I hope anyone who hasn't read that poem will let me do them a favor and look it up for themselves before next—this time tomorrow, which would perfectly express my point of view. A wonderful statement by the greatest English poem of this period about the experience of visiting a church. Not wanting to be able to believe but not being able to dismiss the seriousness, the history, the tradition, the beauty of it. I couldn't do without the poems of George Herbert or John Dunne either, which have strictly devotional poems. I think you could fake being a devotional painter. You could be a painter who didn't believe in God and pretend you did for patronage. You couldn't fake being John Dunne or George Herbert. I couldn't do without their work. I couldn't do without gothic architecture or devotional music either. I wouldn't trust anyone who did, who had no feeling for this and people who don't know what the numinous and the transcendent feel like, who don't experience anything when combinations of landscape and music and poetry and also the melancholy of one's own life, the realization that we're going to die and that our children actually need us to do so, other melancholy reflections of this kind are, to that extent, not poetic, not human, not literary, not civilized. But the supernatural adds to this absolutely zero, it seems to me, and in some ways subtracts from its grandeur and its seriousness. So I'm one of those who Pascal is actually thinking about, or was thinking about, when we wrote. He wrote to the person who is so made that he cannot believe. There are millions of us, there always have been, there are now, there are going to be many more of us in the future. We're just a little bit fed up with being treated like freaks in American culture.

SHARPTON: I, for my belief, do not believe that everyone believes in things that are illogical. I think that—and there are different theologians who approach it differently, I guess the closest—well not exactly where I am but Paul Tillich who talks about personal god would be going in the direction that I believe—I believe in my own experiences and my own relationship with God and that is not based on any illogical, unbelievable act. I do not believe things that are necessarily part of dogma and I think that [To Hitchens] Richard, if you or whoever has the right to disbelieve it without being a freak but I don't think that I am a freak that believes in illogical things because I believe that the reason the world operates in a certain order is because there is a supreme force that ordered it and I don't think that—I happen to agree with Richard that I think religion has been one of the most misused things in history but I don't think that has anything to do with the existence or the non-existence of God. I think that has something to do with man's misuse or use of what is absolutely there and that is a supreme being.

WEISBERG: Thank you. We have a lot of questions. Let's get through as many as we can. Sir.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: I wonder if you both might comment on this. In an age when there is so much, as Mr. Hitchens would put it, wonderful secular knowledge that should disprove or replace the value or the importance of religion, all the modern knowledge that we have, why is it that in so much of the world religion is growing rapidly, in the global south particularly evangelical Christianity is growing at a tremendous rate and there are plenty of statistics to back that up. And even when people experience the most horrendous evil, they seem to turn in some strong ways towards religious belief. My broth-in-law is a US Air Force chaplain. He served two tours in Iraq. He's presently in Afghanistan. He ministers to men and women who have seen horrendous evil and experienced it firsthand and yet his services are overflowing, he's done many baptisms. Please help us understand at a time when the human race should have grown out of all of this, why is it growing so dramatically? Thank you.

WEISBERG: [To Hitchens] Do you want the first go-about?

HITCHENS: I am happy to yield to the...well, at the risk of being callous...

SHARPTON: You?

HITCHENS: (Can we assume that I've gone inaudible?) I don't think that we should be paying for chaplains. I don't think the US government should be employing any. James Madison's a coauthor of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom and of the First Amendment and therefore was very adamant on the point and very clear. There shouldn't be—it's flat out unconstitutional to pay or employ a chaplain to open the proceedings of Congress or to be in the armed forces. We can't have chaplains on our payroll. That's that. People who want to pray can't be stopped but they can do it—of all the solitary activities, apart for the search for—never mind—surely that's one that doesn't need a paid state mediator. It's a negation of the American Revolution. So, that first. Second, yes, modernity, involving as it does, a huge exchange of technology and population and innovation, in a very churning and vertiginous manner, of course means that a lot of lives have to be lived in a very insecure and risky way and it's not at all unlike our nature as a species to try and cling to stability, certainty, and consolation in those cases. It explains itself, it seems to me. What is notable, though, is it hasn't come up in thousands of years with any superior explanation to the old ones. It still is going back to myths that were discredited and exploded many years ago. And these, of course, turn out to be false consolations whereas the consolations of philosophy and of the aesthetic and of the beauty of science and of reason and so on, available to us all the time and really able to explain why things happen, why terrible wounds are inflicted in Afghanistan, and so forth. No, no, that won't do. Let's, like some absolute loser, find the person who Paley means who says—finds a watch on the beach and thinks, "I don't know what this is for but it seems to tick. It must be for something," but doesn't understand it. We find this wonderful truffle and open it and look at the chocolate and throw it away and then munch on the wrapper. I don't understand it but I'm one of those who are not made this way.

SHARPTON: I think the core of your question—I think that the more mankind learns, the more mankind understands that it does not have all the answers and that's why people continue to reach and seek answers that is beyond what, even in this age, we've been able to discover. I think that is why. And I think that there's also the innate emptiness in mankind to always go back to the core of what made mankind in the first place and that, to me, is a supreme being. I think that answers the question of why I think the—and then—[Noticing Hitchens was choking]

HITCHENS: Sorry.

SHARPTON: I thought you got the Holy Ghost or something.

HITCHENS: Just throwing myself around.

SHARPTON: But I think that's why we see the rise of Evangelism. Whether or not I agree with the rise or not is another question. But I think the quest is inspired because of the increased knowledge has not answered the question of where it begins and what governs all of the things that, obviously, operate in some order and with some precision and I must say, at the risk of my sounding callous, it amazes me that it doesn't bother you that we spend two trillion dollars in a war we should've never been in, you just worry about paying the chaplains to pray over it?

HITCHENS: Yeah well, you see, I don't love our enemies and I don't love people who do love them. I hate our enemies and think they should be killed and I think that they want to kill me. And I think we can do it with half the budget or maybe twice but I'm absolutely sure that there should be no country that has a budget that can threaten ours and I'm not sentimental about the point. I wanted to have another whack at that very question...

SHARPTON: So people that preach God and love should shut up and remain private but killers ought to just go and just kill people that they call their enemies. That's very ethical and [indecipherable].

HITCHENS: The people who preach "Allahu akbar" had better find out that there's a stronger force than them and one that also has unalterable convictions and principles and that can also be offended and that they offend it at their peril. That's what I think. Now, to the last question, I just want to have one more run at it.

SHARPTON: You already answered it.

HITCHENS: I know, but if you don't mind.

SHARPTON: You trying it twice?

HITCHENS: When I started hurling myself around like a shout-and-holler person, it was because I suddenly though of [indecipherable].

SHARPTON: Ok, I understand. Well there is no right or wrong with you so go ahead, answer it three times.

HITCHENS: The questions that they come and ask these chaplains are, "Why, why, why? Why does it happen that the nicest guy in my unit just took a round through the throat," you know, and, "I've just been to this village where all the children are being killed and where"—you can fill this in for yourself—"Why, why, why, why?" That's the question, isn't it? Well, have you ever heard of any spokesman of any religion give an answer to that question? They've had thousands of years to think about it. No, they haven't come up with a question at all, unless to say, as they used to, when it was a plague or a war or a tsunami, "Well it's probably a sign of sin. You're being punished." The Archbishop of Canterbury in England two years ago says he really worries how God could be so mean as to unleash a tidal wave towards Christmas time in Asia. You can't believe you're listening to this stuff. Now if you ask me, ok, I'll say—"Why did this happen? Why did the best guy I know get cancer of the throat or get mugged or slaughtered, or whatever it was?" I'll say, "Because we belong to an imperfectly evolved species where the adrenaline glands are too big, the prefrontal lobes are too small and we bear every sign of the stamp of our lowly origin and only by realizing the fact that we are mammals are we likely to be able to talk any sense about it." And if you say, "Well, why did that city fall down or be overcome by waves or that volcano kill all those children?" I'll say, "Well, hate to break it to you, but we live on a cooling planet whose crust hasn't quite settled yet. These are to be expected and there is no other explanation for them and don't believe anyone who says there is." Well, this is not perhaps perfect ethical instruction, but it does conform to the hippocratic injunction, primum non nocere, at least I'm not lying to these people. At least what I say can do them no harm and at least it cannot increase the illusions they already have and usually when you go to that village and ask, "Why are the children being killed?" it's because someone who believed in God thought that they had it coming.

WEISBERG: Next.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Hi. Thank you. I'll be brief. The question of where to find morality, with or without God, which, I think, is certainly too large for either side of this debate to settle or resolve within the space of a few hours—you can't hear me? However, I think Mr. Hitchens has made a start and at least has offered a possibility of where we might find morality....

WEISBERG: Could you, I'm sorry, just get to your question because we have lots of people waiting.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Ok, I'm sorry. Reverend Sharpton has resisted Mr. Hitchens' attacks on the institutions that were later claimed to relay God's will but expresses doubt as to how we can have morality without God so I'm wondering if criteria such as personal experience are all we have without the legislature of shared religious texts, how are we to move on from moral solipsism and actually find morality?

SHARPTON: I think that the—well, it is Mr. Hitchens that says that we found morality in ourselves, that we know morality. I would argue that the reason you can find it within yourselves is because of a sense of God and a pattern in human character that was there. There's no scientific evidence offered by non-believers as why this morality would be there other than—what, what, it just evolved somewhere? That we would have this sense of morality? I don't that it has to be governed by organized religion, that's all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: Hi. First of all I just want to say I'm writing a book and it's called An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Religion Succeeds and Atheism Fails, so I am an atheist but I defend religion. And my...

WEISBERG: You're really splitting the difference here, huh?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: [After being told by an usher to ask his question] I know, I just lost it, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

HITCHENS: Sounds like dialectical interference.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: My question is—to Christopher is how you can justify wanting to take something away from people that gives meaning to 95% of the American people replace it with something that gives meaning to just 5% of the American people?

HITCHENS: Ha, well, what an incredibly stupid question. First, I've said repeatedly that this stuff cannot be taken away from people. It is their favorite toy and it will remain so as long—as Freud said in The Future of an Illusion it will remain that way as long as we're afraid of death and have that problem which is I think likely to be quite a long time. Second, I hope I've made it clear that I'm perfectly happy for people to have these toys and to play with them at home and hug them to themselves and so on and share them with other people who come around and play with the toys, so that's absolutely fine. They are not to make me play with these toys. I will not play with the toys. Don't bring the toys to my house. Don't say my children must play with these toys. Don't say—my toys might be a condom, here we go again—are not allowed by their toys. I'm not going to have any of that. Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation. Is that finally clear? Have I got that across? Thank you.

WEISBERG: Next. Quick question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: Yes. Mr. Sharpton, if morality comes from whatever God tells people to do or whatever God says is right and wrong...

SHARPTON: I never said—I never said that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: ...rather than the objective requirements of human life, then how is God any different than Stalin?

SHARPTON: But I never said that. I think that—I think Mr. Hitchens said that God tells people this. I said that God—if there is no supreme being that sets a framework for the world that has a framework of right and wrong then what do we base it on? Do I think God calls the leaders of the church every morning and tells them what's right and wrong after they read The New York Times? No. I think that there is a framework based on what is right and wrong in humanity by the force that created humanity and that is not God sending you an email every day or revelation on a mountain. I did not say that. I think that was his concept of what had happened to some that had professed that, so I can't defend what I didn't say.

HITCHENS: I am of one mind with the Reverend in saying that there has been no divine revelation. There could not be such a thing. But I'm a little disappointed in you.

SHARPTON: I know you are.

HITCHENS: Just a fraction disappointed.

SHARPTON: I know you are.

HITCHENS: But you can live with it. I can see that you can.

SHARPTON: I'll try.

HITCHENS: You're man enough, you're man enough to [indecipherable].

SHARPTON: I'll try.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: If—this is a follow up I guess to the last question—but if you need God or religion or spirituality, whatever, to have morality then how do you explain the high crime rate in the US, which is the most religious industrial country in the world versus Japan and Sweden and other countries that are almost entirely secular?

SHARPTON: Well, I think you confuse two things in your question. That there, first of all, is a distinct difference between spiritual and religious. You kind of intermingled the two. And I think that those that commit crimes, and I hate to disagree with Mr. Hitchens, are not all believers in God. I mean to say that that question is logical is to say that every criminal is a God-fearing person that commits crime. I have a feeling—I certainly don't have the data at my disposal as my good friend brother Hitchens—but I would suspect atheists commit crimes too.

HITCHENS: I can absolutely vouch for that.

SHARPTON: We're of one mind. We're coming together.

HITCHENS: I mean, look, I dare say the question was supposed to helpful to my side but I don't it so for two reasons. One, it's too approximate. I mean, just as you hear people say—something I think is really fatuous—there are no atheists in foxholes. You've heard it. There are very few atheists on death row, either, but I wouldn't make that a case for my side. It's just not the way I argue. I do notice that Christians, or other believers, tend to say if a baby falls 25 floors and lands with a bounce on the lawn and is unharmed they attribute it to a divine intervention and if it falls two feet off a table and cracks its skull and dies they just say that's bad luck. I have noticed that tendency and this is, I think, a version of that. The burden of proof, in any case, is not on our team, if you will. We don't say disbelief in God will make you a better person or make you more moral. We are arguing against those who say that a belief in an unprovable supernatural will make you more moral. Now that we know is not true. That we know is not true because there's not just a lot of ordinary crime committed by the faithful but there's a lot of extraordinary crime such as suicide bombing and genital mutilation and many other things that's committed because of and only because of faith. I rest my case.

SHARPTON: So the way to get the crime rate down would be to increase atheism and disbelief?

HITCHENS: No, there is no corollary, as I was careful, I think scrupulous in saying, there's no corollary of the atheists side to that.

SHARPTON: Oh, ok.

HITCHENS: Those who argue that religion is a source of morality have, as always, and as so far this evening, all their explaining still ahead of them and that's with 2,000 years of failure to chalk up. Pretty wet performance, isn't it?

SHARPTON: I must say this—and I know some more questions—atheism has been here for thousands of years, too and I think that just as there is a lot going forward to look for answers from those of us that believe, those that have made thousands of years of careers and books in disbelief haven't answered much either.

SHARPTON: Well if you think that Spinoza, say, or Democritus is just the equivalent of—I don't know who, did you say Paul Tillich?—I just think you're not comparing like with like. I think our tradition beats yours every time intellectually.

SHARPTON: Of course you do.

HITCHENS: And our tradition has no—we've never had to take anything back. We've never had to say, "Look, we were teaching the children that the world was flat for too long. We'll have to change this for now." Or we've never said you'll go to limbo if your child dies unbaptized. We've had nothing of this sort on our conscience and every discovery made by independent, corroborative, disinterested research tends to support what we suspected in the first place.

SHARPTON: But I would argue that those of us that believe in our own relationships with God and believe prayers are answered does disbelief, that it's hard to lose something if you put nothing there but just argue against whatever's there is not there. So you start with a undue advantage.

HITCHENS: That went straight past my bat.

SHARPTON: I know.

WEISBERG: Let's take—I want to take just two more questions. Sir, please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: Mr. Hitchens, does man have an innate need for ceremony and ritual and if so, how does he satisfy it without religion?

HITCHENS: I believe we do, for the most part, have an innate need for ceremony and ritual, yes. I think that that seems to be a finding of all anthropologists in all societies at all times. This doesn't mean that they have to take the form of, say, human sacrifice, thought some of the better and more elaborate ones have taken that form, or say the investiture of a monarch where one would be better off with a republic, and so forth. I mean, the knowledge of this needs or innatenesses is also an awareness that these impulses must be, so to say, domesticated, civilized. Actually, the best argument I know for religion, which is—perhaps I owe an apology to the gentleman I was rude to a few moments ago—which is, in a way, an atheist argument, is religion, though it's based on complete falsity and fantasy does at least give a form and a shape to people's atavistic and superstitious and barbaric and other worshiping tendencies. It domesticates and organizes them. That's what many people believe the Roman Catholic Church has been doing for a while and I would be prepared to concede that is it wasn't for the teachings on virginity, the denial of the right of contraception, and many other horror shows. They can put on a good ritual, I'll give you that but don't go believing that if you put a wafer on your tongue you're going to change the cosmos because you know, there's no truth to that at all.

WEISBERG: We're honored to have Ayaan Hirsi Ali here this evening.

HITCHENS: Ah!

WEISBERG: And I'm going to give here the honor of the last question.

ALI: Yes, thank you, and I've become an atheist and if brother Sharpton answers my question I might go back to faith.

SHARPTON: I got it here.

WEISBERG: Glad there's at least one persuadable person here.

ALI: Mr. Sharpton, you repeated many times tonight that you did not want to talk about religion, you wanted to talk about God. It is unfair, then, to ask you to give us the evidence if His existence. Is it, for instance, unreasonable for you to tell us if He or She or It created this world order, who created Him then?

SHARPTON: Who created...

ALI: God. I mean, what was before Him?

SHARPTON: Well...

ALI: Let me finish all of my question.

SHARPTON: Oh, I though you only had one. This is a...

ALI: Well, it's important.

SHARPTON: Ok. It's a long conversion. Go ahead.

ALI: And finally, isn't it odd that you carry a Christian title and that you refuse, even for once tonight, to defend the charge and the content of the Bible.

SHARPTON: Because we are here to discuss Mr. Hitchens' book and Mr. Hitchens' book attacks God and I wanted him to defend his book. His book, unfortunately for your question, did not attack the Bible or Christianity and I would not want—well you have to read the book, it does when you get inside but I think that what you must—what I wanted to convey is that there are all kinds of people that relate to God other than the ways Mr. Hitchens may address a certain religion that I respect. You don't have to be a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist to believe in God or worship God. So that is not to defend against those that say that God does not exist because that would have reduced the debate to just part of the framework of the book. So that is why I wanted him to discuss with us his whole attack, not just his dogmatic attack, though he clearly does—and I do encourage people to buy the book, it's well-written. I don't believe what it says, but it's well-written.

HITCHENS: [To Weisberg] Oh, that's a very nice [indecipherable].

SHARPTON: He's a very eloquent and well-versed person.

HITCHENS: Well that's extremely handsome of you.

SHARPTON: Oh, I know that. But in answer to your first question, I think that, again, to say that one does not exist because I cannot say for sure how it was brought into being—I'm sitting on this stage, you don't know how I was born. Answering God's not there because we don't know who God's father was or how God came into being I don't think deals with the existence that there is clearly confirmed by some of the scientific data in Mr. Hitchens' book that I, again, encourage you to get and get an autograph. Is that a ritual, when you sign an autograph?

HITCHENS: Yes, it is. It is.

SHARPTON: I think that the existence of God...

HITCHENS: It's more like a sacrament, actually.

SHARPTON: It's a sacrilege?

HITCHENS: It's more like a sacrament.

SHARPTON: It's a sacrament.

HITCHENS: This is America, baby...

SHARPTON: Don't put a wafer on your tongue when you get an autograph.

HITCHENS: ...I'm only going to be nice to people with receipts from now on. That's how moral I am.

WEISBERG: I'm afraid we're ending the evening with no conversions but with a lot of eloquence and I want to—please join me in thanking both of our debaters.

Hitchens and Geiger, The Globe and Mail

2010-11-26T10:24:00.010-05:00

Christopher Hitchens interviewed by John Geiger (transcribed by Aleysha Haniff)

November 26, 2010, The Globe and Mail

GEIGER: Thank you very much for speaking with The Globe and Mail. It’s a pleasure to meet you. When did you know you were a non-believer? Was there a moment you decided, "this is nonsense" and I’m thinking here of Mrs. [Jean] Watts.

HITCHENS: Yes. Well to answer your first question the first bit of your question is the better half of it because it is more I think a matter of realizing that one isn't, for many of us at any rate, rather than as for some I know, having had beliefs or thought one had them and having them fall away or indeed, suddenly, find them not any longer tenable. I think [indecipherable] I must have been 10, I suppose. When I was a little boy, at a little boy’s boarding school in Devonshire, my country of birth. Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know. And it’s not just taught as a subject but Christianity is taught as true, as well as in scripture lessons. And our scripture teacher, Mrs. Watts, was also our nature teacher. So in a very beautiful way taught about birds, trees. I used to know a lot more about all that than I do now. And one day, Mrs. Watts, who was a modest old woman, I think overreached herself and tried to combine role of scripture and nature teaching. And said, "You notice boys, that God has made the vegetation and the trees and the grass very green, a lovely kind of green, which is the most restful color to our eyes. And imagine instead if they were orange, or puce, or magenta or something. So that shows that God is good." And I remember thinking, "I know nothing about chlorophyll, photosynthesis, let alone natural selection." But I remember thinking, "That's nonsense." That must be untrue. If either thing adapted to the other, it would have been our eyes to the vegetation, surely. And it’s one of those little proofs of a large thing ... Once you have a thought like that you essentially can’t unthink it. And I started to notice if I hadn't already, other things about the scriptures too that didn’t appeal. So, you couldn’t call that a conversion, exactly, or a revelation or a counter-revelation. It was more, as you implied with your first point, discovering this was meaningless to me as a way of thinking.

GEIGER: Was that solidified at some point? Were you at university or was there some moment where you felt really an accumulation of these sorts of observations and you felt this is...

HITCHENS: Well, I noticed as I grew up, I noticed other things about it. Also, I think in my schools days, I noticed it was a very powerful reinforcement tool for authority. They had the masters of the schools, also the man who conducted the service. Just as Her Majesty the Queen as well as being head of the state, was head of the Church of England. And so, I thought it was extremely convenient for certain kinds of traditional authority to be able to claim some sort of religious justification. And that also put me on my guard against it. I read Bertrand Russell’s famous book, Why I am Not a Christian, at around that time I would think, and found it fairly persuasive. But of course, for a good bit of time, I’m talking about I was born in 1949, I was in university in the 60s and so forth. It was a very political time, but religion wasn’t a huge subject. I mean, most people were, if religious, fairly mildly so as is the Anglican communion. What Shelley, in his famous essay, called the necessity of atheism, wasn’t something that troubled me very much. I just thought it was the more intelligent way to think. And I distrusted those who claimed divine authority. There may or may not be a creator, but there’s no human being who can speak in his or her name. So it’s more in the last few years, it seemed to be a matter of urgency to say the gains made by the Enlightenment, the permission to think about things without religious intimidation really need to be defended and need to be reasserted. That plus the enormous developments in the natural sciences, the amazing discoveries we’ve recently made about our own nature, through the human genome project, and about, we’re only grazing on the outer fringes of it, the nature and origins of the cosmos all seem to me to make the argument a lot clearer and more interesting and more pressing than it used to be. Hence the misleading term "new atheist" which is applied to people like myself. There’s nothing new about it except with the enormous new discoveries and the way that they’ve been opposed by some people of faith to say the least, and then the challenge of theocratic barbarism, being felt very immediately. I think that’s the one thing that combines me with my co-thinkers on this matter, those we disagree on quite a range of other things.

GEIGER: Does a moral hierarchy exist on religions today? Are some a greater force for good in the world than others or are they essentially moral equivalents? As your book subtitle read, "God poisons everything."

HITCHENS: Well, should I start with the "poisons everything?" Perhaps I should. Ok, I’ll ask for trouble if I put on a provocative subtitle, but I mean by it, not of course it poisons Chinese food or tantric sex or Niagara falls or something but it does attack us in our deepest integrity. It says we wouldn’t know right from wrong if it wasn’t for divine permission. It immediately makes us, essentially, slaves. And it has to be opposed for that reason. And such a radical frontal attack on human dignity, it seems to me, that it does leach into everything. And it has the effect of making good people say and do wicked things. For example, a morally normal person when presented with a new baby would not set about its genitals with a sharp stone or a knife. He would have to think God needed that. No, it wouldn’t occur to him otherwise. It make intelligent people say stupid things, commits them to saying stupid things such as they are objects of a divine design. As well as being stupid, very conceited by the way. They claim believers to be so modest. That’s what I mean by the poison. And because of that, I do tend to think it applies in general. My younger daughter goes to a Quaker school in Washington, the same one as the president’s children. ... There was a time when the Quakers ran the most sadistic prisons in North America and were fond of excommunicating people for the smallest things such as supporting the American Revolution, for example. If they’d been more powerful, they might have been worse. ... any surrender of reason in favor of faith contains the same danger it seems to me. Fluctuates over time. Before, I’ve been asked in the 1930s what I thought was the most dangerous religion I almost certainly would have said Roman Catholicism because of its then pretty much undisguised alliance with the Fascist parties in Europe, for which it has not yet succeeded in apologizing enough, in my opinion. But has, least admitted it was true. It was very dangerous then. I now think obviously, or rather self-evidently, Wahabi fundamentalist Islam and its equivalents in messianic Shiism, the Shia equivalent of that Sunni theory, practice, are as dangerous especially because they could get a hold of weapons, or a weapon of mass destruction. So we would find out, with a little speculation, we used to have after lights out when we were young, what would really happen if a really wicked person got a hold of a nuclear bomb and now we’re going to find out. When the messianic meets the apocalyptic, watch out.

GEIGER: So, in a highly globalized world, religious systems are very much in the mix. Can religion at least provide common values and ethical foundation. Obviously, there’s differences but is there some sort of root?

HITCHENS: Religion can’t provide that. Moral values come from innate human solidarity. They’re the values we need, have needed to survive as a species. Knowing we have responsibilities to other people, for example, knowing that certain types of behavior are worse than antisocial. Religion, to an extent believes that, but it doesn’t always. It takes it from us. No, it couldn't provide it. All it could do is lay claim to it, a claim that I would deny. And because it’s not in the nature of faith to be really universal—it’s quite extraordinary the number of claims that are made by people of faith to be the holders of the only faith, It’s not enough for them to say they believe in God, or get values from it, they have to say God revealed to us. And the wars of religion alone would be enough to negate this claim. .... also to show what we already know, that religion is man-made. So it’s one of our artifacts, along with, fortunately with, genuine humanistic morality. And I think it’s essential to choose between the two.

GEIGER: You write that your own particular atheism is very much a protestant atheism, that you, I guess it comes out of your own experience when you were young. But is there something peculiar to the King James Bible or to the Church of England practice of faith that you think inspired your journey.

HITCHENS: No. All I mean by that is the kind of atheist I originally was, was someone who felt very taken by, or stricken by love for what some have called the authorized or the King James version of the Bible. ... I found that it didn’t answer, it didn’t answer morally, it didn’t answer philosophically. It was that that I cut my teeth on. Friends of mine who are a former Shia twelfth imam, believers for example, have had a totally different experience coming through to the other side. But I must say I recognize their dilemma. They were told to do it. Twelve imams, one of whom has gone missing, who is only waiting to return. I think that reminds me of something, almost certainly plagiarized from an original, not very persuasive script. But I think people have all to find their own way. What I do find is what the experience of unbelief in formal belief is remarkably similar. Very, very similar. So I deduce from that, that the original beliefs are probably very similar too. For all the outward discrepancy, the willingness on their part to make a cause of war. If you look at the number of Shia muslims who’ve been killed by Sunni Muslims in the last year, it vastly exceeds the number of casualties inflicted in the Iran, excuse me, the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts by the other side.

GEIGER: Many people, I think, derive a pleasure value from religion in part because of the ceremony. Does ritual play a part in your own life? Is there some aspect of that that’s missing?

HITCHENS: I say in the opening of god is Not Great, that one of the huge advantages or being a non-believer is that you don’t have to keep on reinforcing your non-belief by going to ceremonies. And in the keeping of company, sort of try to make it seem more true because it’s being affirmed in a crowd. Or by ritual, or by incantation of any sort. We don’t need that. And I can run into a non-believer who I haven’t known before and in a very short time discover roughly what we have in common. But we don’t have to keep reminding ourselves, hey, remember, keep the faith on this point. It’s absolutely what we don’t need. I don’t even belong to any atheist or secular group for example. I’m a little suspicious of people who do. Though I can understand how many of them feel isolated, especially in some parts of the United States. But I think the need for that reaffirmation is kind of a pathetic thing, even when it can have beautiful outcomes, as in certain celebrations ...

If some people, nonetheless do find it comforting or consoling, I say I wish them joy with it. I just don’t want to have to hear about it. In other words, I don’t want at Christmas time, to know anything the government says or does, such as displays of Christmas trees or indeed, Santa Claus, or nativity scenes, or anything of this sort. ... I don’t want them teaching it in school. I don’t want them asking for government subsidies for it. I don’t want them saying it’s illegal to ridicule it. All of these things they do, all the time. I’d prefer not to have to know what these people think. Isn’t it enough for them that they have a God who loves them and will give them salvation? I mean, if I believed that, I’d be happy. They’re not happy. They won’t be happy until everyone else believes it too. And that’s surely a very bad sign and it’s a sign of intellectual and moral weakness.

GEIGER: You don’t have a Christmas tree, I take it.

HITCHENS: Sure, I do. As long as I’ve been a father, I’ve always had one. And I have Passover as well, in homage to another tradition of which I have a partial claim.

GEIGER: Your mother was Jewish.

HITCHENS: So is my wife. So was my grandmother. So is my daughter. Anyone who didn’t like or wanted to defame or threaten the Jewish people would be insulting my wife, my mother, my mother my late and much beloved mother in law, my granny. I don’t need to say anything for myself, surely.

GEIGER: Can you name a theological work, a religious text or philosophical work that has had a profound influence on you? I guess, either way.

HITCHENS: Well, Newman's Apologia is a very interesting, very absorbing book, I’d have to say. As is Augustine’s City of God. And there’s something else I thinking of what I can’t quite reach at the moment. Of course, in order to appreciate them one has to get through an enormous amount of self-obsession, self-importance. So much in fact, it gets in the way because you think what kind of humility is this? That they feel that every episode in their own lives is somehow a world-historical moment. Not to say cosmic. So I’ve tried, and it may as well be a failure of imagination on my part. Oh, of course, I should have mentioned Pensées, thoughts of Pascal, which are very ingenious. Written by a man of science, a great mathematician. A theorist .... And interestingly enough addressed, as he puts it, to the man who is so made that he cannot believe. Pascal knew that it’s not really true, that all people are naturally believers. It may be true of a large group of people in a lot of times and places but it’s equally true to say what some of us are constituted the other way. We can’t take this seriously, it’s gibberish to us. Or, worse. And Pascal understands this and is trying to speak directly and, well, that’s a nice change.

GEIGER: Is there contemporary work?

HITCHENS: Not that I know of. I’ve read because my little, our little, movement the "new atheists" are called, have generated a whole shelf of rebuttals and I feel obliged to read those.

GEIGER: Including your brother.

HITCHENS: Including, indeed, my baby brother. And I feel under some sense of obligation anyone nice enough to [indecipherable]. And look, how could it be otherwise. Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments. If you know the old ones, you know them. And I would presume to say I know them reasonably well. You don’t come up with anything... how could you? The most you could get now is what I would call a sort of parasitism. Those who used to be very dubious about the theory of evolution, if not hostile, now say, alright, alright! In fact, now we think about it, it is true. It’s so true and it’s so beautiful and it’s so intricate, so fascinating, it must have taken God to do it. Well, that’s not thinking at all. That’s just saying include us in. Same with the Big Man. Didn’t like it, now they love because they say it’s so awe-inspiring, it must be divine. Well, that’s not a new argument because it isn’t an argument.

GEIGER: The concept of redemption is at the essence of Christianity. And even as an atheist, is there anything in that? Is there anything that you would seek redemption?

HITCHENS: The desire for a second chance let’s say, or the desire perhaps to undo or make up for one’s shortcomings or let’s say sentence or crimes is or should be so strong. It is for that reason that, you see, that I think religion is so dangerous because it offers a full solution to a real problem. And it comes out in Christianity in the most deplorable way, which is the idea of vicarious atonement, You can indeed be redeemed as long as you’re willing to have someone else take responsibility for your own sins. That’s not responsible, that’s actually scapegoating. It’s loading the guilt of the tribe onto a sacrificial figure. I think that’s actually immoral. But it certainly answers a deeply-filled need.

From The Globe and Mail

Hitchens vs. Wolpe, New Center for Arts and Culture

2010-11-22T21:00:00.032-05:00

Christopher Hitchens vs. Rabbi David Wolpe: The Great God Debate

March 23, 2010, New Center for Arts and Culture, Boston, MA

[Introduction by NPR's Tom Ashbrook]

ASHBROOK: I made a mistake with my third child: I waited until she could speak to have her baptized and when—baptism, you know, water on head—and when the preacher, you know, got the water with the droplets and began to put it on her head and he said it was in the name of God and she said, “What is God?” Let’s just do it, let’s just start with the simplicity of a child. What is God, Rabbi?

WOLPE: Well, it depends who you’re answering. If you’re answering a two-year-old, you answer one way, but if you answer—discussing it with an adult, you begin with a recognition, which actually the entire debate should be framed with, of human limitation. In the following sense, when you were two years old, could you imagine what it’s like to be an adult? Of course not. A two-year-old has no idea what an adult is like. And yet we make definitive statements about God all the time when in every religion that I know of the distance between God and human beings is infinitely greater than the distance between an adult and a two-year-old. So, when I say, as I’m going to in a second—I’m not going to avoid your question—but understand that I say it against the background of a religious recognition of our own inability to understand that which is infinitely greater than ourselves. My thumbnail definition of what God is is that God is the source of everything that exists and God is someone, something with whom a human being can have a relationship and that you can lead your life in alignment with a godly purpose. But any definition that is greater than that is, in some ways, to introduce God, which is, by the way, the title of Christopher’s book is exactly right. God is not great, because to say God is great or God is something is to put a definition on God, which we know from classical Jewish philosophy you ought not to do. So, in fact, Christopher is exactly right and we can wrap it up right now.

ASHBROOK: Thank you very much for coming, it’s been a wonderful evening. Apologies perhaps to Muslims in the audience who say, “God is great” all the time. We’ll circle back.

WOLPE: Ok.

ASHBROOK: Chris Hedges, to you...

HITCHENS: If you don’t mind…

ASHBROOK: …answer my daughter's question, maybe you’ll warn her off.

HITCHENS: If you don’t mind, it would be Christopher, and Hitchens.

ASHBROOK: Yes, sir.

HITCHENS: Chris Hedges is a horrible…

ASHBROOK: Hedges, did I say Hedges?

HITCHENS: Yes you did.

ASHBROOK: Forgive me.

HITCHENS: Chris Hedges is a horrible apologist for liberation theology.

ASHBROOK: Christopher Hitchens.

HITCHENS: That’s better.

ASHBROOK: Too many guests, too little time.

HITCHENS: Sorry, I exist too, if you see what I mean.

ASHBROOK: Yes.

HITCHENS: May as well start by establishing that ontological claim.

ASHBROOK: Yes.

HITCHENS: Well, Friederich Nietzsche famously said that God was dead and Sigmund Freud can be rendered as having said that God was dad. And I think both of them were probably right. The concept of God is, like everything else in our vocabulary, man-made. It’s an invention of human beings. Unless you take the view that God made us, in which case there’d be a lot to explain: how many—why did we, in that case, make so many gods? It does seem to be much, very much more probable that men and women made many gods than any one god made all men and women and the rest of creation. And, as well as being man-made, it’s fear-made. It is the unexpressed, or partial expressed, wish for a protector, a parent, someone who will never desert you, someone who will do, in a way, your thinking for you, especially on questions of moral philosophy. At its best it’s that, it’s a wish to be loved more than you probably deserve. And at its worst it’s the underdeveloped part of the human psyche that leads to totalitarianism, that wants to worship and that wants a boss, that wants a celestial dictatorship and that’s the bit that’s now threatening to destroy our secular civilization. And so you’re quite right to start where you do. It used to be believed—I mean, the number of gods now is infinite and a new god is created almost every day by some cult or other—but it used to be that there was a belief that gods were in the trees, in the woods, in the springs, in the sea, in the clouds and so forth (polytheism of a kind). Then, something a bit more polytheistic like Olympus where there was at least a location for the divine, but it was multi-faceted. And then monotheism, getting it down to one. So I regard this as progress of a sort because they’re getting nearer the true figure all the time.

WOLPE: I actually…

ASHBROOK: Rabbi, yes. Progess, maybe.

HITCHENS: Which, by the way, is why the Vatican, in it’s old days, was very upset by the concept of zero, didn’t like zero at all, the most important number of all, the number without which you can’t do anything, which wasn’t there in Roman numerals.

WOLPE: No, it was invented in Islamic civilization, actually.

HITCHENS: And unfortunately also struck them as a sinister import from—impartimus infidelium, from pagan lands, but also the trouble—the concept of zero was very troubling for theism and must be and does indeed remain so. It’s one of the many, many ways in which theism is not compatible with the scientific world view.

ASHBROOK: Rabbi Wolpe, may I ask you…

WOLPE: I just want to point out, without even taking issue with the incorrect statements that he made, I want you to…

HITCHENS: Why would you…

WOLPE: I want you to understand—wait, wait, wait, I want you to understand the progress of the argument that you just heard because it’s important that people do this all the time and at least you should be aware of it whether you accept it or not. Very often when people argue with you, especially when they argue about religion, they attribute their own beliefs to logic and your belief to psychology. So religious people believe in something because they need to be loved, or they need a crutch or they’re weak. But I believe what I believe because it’s true and scientific. And I just want you to be aware that you cannot actually disprove someone’s belief by impugning an unworthy motive to it. You actually have to disprove the belief. So don’t let Christopher pull the psychological wool over your eyes. You can actually be just as worthy or unworthy of love, just as tough-minded, just as thoughtful, just as deep, and still believe in God as most human beings have throughout all of human history as if you are Christopher Hitchens.

ASHBROOK: Christopher, are you a trickster?

HITCHENS: Well, I don’t think that—you couldn’t accuse that of being an incorrect statement, he would accuse it of being an incomplete one. I didn’t give all the reasons why people believe in God. After all, you did write a whole book that argues that the belief in God can be very useful to people in times of crisis, did you not? I mean that’s…

WOLPE: Yes, but I never said that was why you shouldn’t believe in God.

HITCHENS: No, and I don’t think it is the reason why many people do.

WOLPE: Ok.

HITCHENS: But remember there are two questions—I better now say, lest I be accused of not having exhausting the entire subject in my first response—I’d better say there are at least two questions. One is this: is there a god, a creator, a prime mover, an uncaused cause, whatever you like to call it? And this was the question answered at a certain point not very long ago in our history by the deists—people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and many others who said that the order of the universe seemed to suggest that it couldn’t just have been random, that there may have been a designer but that the designer didn’t take any part in human affairs. And that, in the late seventeenth, early eighteenth centuries—sorry, late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries—was probably a very intelligent position to hold. It was pre-Einstein, pre-Darwin. It was probably as far as you were likely to get with philosophical speculation. But believing that there might be a cause or a mover or a creator is one thing but believing that there is a supervising, intervening entity who cares who wins the war, who cares who you sleep with and in what way, who cares what you eat and on what day, and—in other words, who makes you the center of the whole cosmos, is another thing altogether. So people who say, “I believe in God, I’m a deist,” have all their work in front of them before they can say that they are really religious.

ASHBROOK: Are you prepared to be a deist?

HITCHENS: No.

ASHBROOK: No divine mover, even at the whatever, the origin?

HITCHENS: There’s nothing in the natural, cosmic order, or—that’s the macro level—or the mirco level, that’s to say the constituent of our own DNA and the things that we have in common with the other animals and indeed other forms of life, like plants, but isn’t susceptible to a much better explanation.

WOLPE: Well, here's—I'm…

HITCHENS: In other words, as the great physicist Laplace said when he demonstrated his working model (his orrery, as it’s called) of the solar system to the emperor and Napoleon said, “Well I see there’s no God in this system,” and Laplace said, “Well, Your Majesty, it works without that assumption.”

ASHBROOK: Rabbi, I don’t want to play God…

WOLPE: Ok.

ASHBROOK: …but to give form to this…

WOLPE: Sure.

ASHBROOK: It’s 2010. You said you think of God as the source of all. In the year BCE 2010 why it should be the source of all to divinity, what about science? And you’ve just said…

WOLPE: Sorry, that’s exactly what I was going to address is the—first of all, there are two separate ways of thinking about this, both—and I’ll offer them both briefly and you can decide if both or neither is congenial to you. One is that of course you can’t equate God and proof for God and discussion of God with a demonstration in a laboratory. That’s never been the case. The idea is different, to shift it differently which is this: I would ask you this question instead: deep down, do you believe that the universe is constituted only by stuff, by material? Or is there a mystery at the heart of things? Do you believe that you are purely synapses or is there something immaterial and eternal about you and those you love? Do you believe that things like love are just an epiphenomena of the way evolution has put us all together or do you think there is something that in the fact that immaterial things like ideas and love and consciousness have such a profound influence on our lives that lead you to believe that the intangible can be at least as real or more real than the tangible. If that way of looking at the world appeals to you or speaks to you, then you understand that Laplace, in order to explain how the heavens go, may not need the hypothesis of God, but that in order to explain why there is something rather than nothing, why there is a deeper meaning to life than stuff alone that that’s something that speaks to you and lets you understand that God is real. That’s part one. Wait, wait, wait. Part two is there are in fact things that are suggestive of something greater in even the scientific world, which is why, by the way, in the American Academy of Science more than half consistently, and this has been true over the last 100 years, 51, 52% of scientists say that they believe in God and that is the fact that everything exists rather than nothing, that consciousness, which is still inexplicable to human beings is real, that I make sounds, which is immaterial, and it touches you in some way that it makes you want to change things. The way of looking at the world even from what we can see and touch and feel suggests that there's something greater than know and now, go right ahead.

HITCHENS: I can’t paraphrase him properly, but you really ought to get a hold of—it’s easy to find on Google—a lecture given by Lawrence Krauss, who I regard as the greatest living physicist, and it’s about the quantum and it’s about a whole universe from nothing. It’s exactly how you get from nothing to something, in fact quite a lot of things. One means by which this happens is the following: every second that we’re speaking a star the size of our sun or bigger goes out, blows up or goes out. That’s been the case every single second since the first moment of the Big Bang. It’s a lot. That’ll be a lot of suns going out as we speak. And there’s a lot of annihilation, isn’t it? It’s a lot of destruction. It’s on a—it’s rather what you might call almost a wasteful scale. It does have the positive outcome though that we are all constituted of those materials. We are made of star dust. Now I find that a rather more majestic and wonderful and even beautiful idea than, say, the idea of the burning bush. A bit more impressive, gives you more to think about.

WOLPE: Are they mutually exclusive? Are they mutually exclusive? Did God make you of star dust?

HITCHENS: One has the virtue of being true and provable and studyable, which the other doesn’t. And I do think that the verifiability of something is a virtue.

ASHBROOK: Are we simply material?

HITCHENS: Yes. We don’t have bodies, we are bodies. Until 50,000 years ago there were four other kinds of biped, humanoid, not unlike us, still living on the planet, died leaving no descendents. We’re the only survivors of those people, that family. We're the last—we don’t know if they had gods or not.

ASHBROOK: So you think you’re inexplicable?

HITCHENS: No religion invented appears to have known that these creatures even existed because the religious are forced to believe that the only really significant event that happened in the human story happened about 3,000 years ago.

ASHBROOK: Are the mysteries inexplicable? Are we just waiting to understand them?

WOLPE: That’s not true. That’s factually not true.

HITCHENS: Now, all of this massive Big Bang cosmological churning and destruction and annihiliation—which is paralleled, by the way on our own earth where 99% of all species that have already been on the planet have ever gone extinct, leaving no descendants. All of this could be part of a plan. There’s no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn’t it, with mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time and all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination in order that the Pope can tell people not to jerk off. This is stupid.

ASHBROOK: Rabbi?

WOLPE: Yeah, right. No, I think here…

HITCHENS: This is—it’s childish to be [indecipherable].

WOLPE: I can care—we've reached actually—we’ve reached an area of agreement. I, too, repudiate that statement, by the Pope, and I’m happy to do it publically.

HITCHENS: I’m—we’ll leave it right there.

WOLPE: No, no, no, no, no, wait just a second, hold on. The—first of all it’s just not true that religions don’t actually acknowledge very important things that happened before their own founding. Just read the beginning of the Bible, which goes back far beyond the founding of the Bible. But, more important than that, there are actually things that if you are material you can’t give an accounting of. For example, you might not believe that you have free will. You might think that everything you do was predetermined from the beginning of the Big Bang and (just the fact, by the way, that all the universe, physics tells us, came from something tinier than the head of a pin, is, to me, there is no other word than miraculous for it, but nonetheless) you might believe that all—that everything you did, the words tonight, the fact that those flowers would be orange on the table, that was all predetermined from the beginning of time. But if you believe that you actually make a choice, that human beings have free will, then I ask you how you account for that? You didn’t pick your birth, your genetics, you didn’t pick your environment. So from the very beginning all of that was predetermined for you and unless there is something immaterial about you that allows you to choose, then everything human beings do is already set from the beginning of time. I don’t understand how you get free will if you don’t have God.

ASHBROOK: Christopher.

HITCHENS: It’s pathetic, I’m sorry to say, to say of the cosmological and the genetic that these are deterministic processes. They’re not at all. They’re full of extraordinary randomness and in the genetic case of mutation—Stephen Jay Gould, the great paleontologist, wrote a book which I recommend to you called The Burgess Shale, which is—it’s the side of a mountain in Canada, in the Canadian Rockies, that sheared off so you can read—you can see the inside of a mountain. You can see it as if you were looking at a blackboard and you can see the growth and development of the species. And you realize it’s not a tree, it’s more like a bush. There are various branches that go off and go nowhere and there are others that succeed and different kinds of failure and different kinds of mutation. His most exciting thought, most revolutionary thought is this: if you could, so to speak, put all of that onto a tape and rewind it and then press play again, there’s no certainty it would come out the same way. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that it would not. So there’s nothing predetermined. There’s nothing deterministic about this at all. Thanks to our understanding of our genetics, which are also not predetermined because they’re the result of random mutation and natural selection as everyone now knows. That’s why we can have, sad to say for the kosher, but we can have skin transplants and organ transplants from pigs, who are much closer to us than we used to think. We can also sequence the DNA of viruses and learn how to immunize ourselves from it. It works, in other words. But yes, it can be tampered with, it can be engineered for good as well as for ill. There’s nothing deterministic about it at all. It’s much more exciting, it’s much more interesting, it’s much more rewarding, it’s verifiable. And yes, there are elements, I was trying to say, the miraculous, the awe-inspiring, the tragic, the majestic in this that there simply are not in the incantations of Genesis where the supposed authors claim to know the divinity, the creator, on personal terms. This is nonsense. It’s for children.

WOLPE: First of all, it is interesting—I mean, Stephen Gould who was, by the way, very sympathetic to religion, and wrote a book called Rocks of Ages which I also recommend to you where he said that religion and science don’t overlap.

HITCHENS: They sure don’t.

WOLPE: One second. If you read his book on the Burgess Shale he does say if you rewind then you assume if you push play again you would get a different result and that’s certainly true unless the result was intended. But, more important than that: yes, there’s randomness in the system. Nobody would argue that there isn’t randomness in the system, but randomness isn’t free will. Randomness is getting a result you don’t expect. The question is how do you get a directed choice, which isn’t random? I choose right now to pick this glass up. Now how did I make that choice if I’m purely a product of my DNA and my environment? Then it’s not a choice, then it was programmed in, then it’s instinct. And the whole point that religion’s always made about instinct would that human beings can rise above it. Unlike animals, which are the same at age two as they are at age ten as they are at age fifteen, a human being grows and changes and chooses. That’s the basis of religious [indecipherable].

ASHBROOK: I have to say to me it doesn’t seem a matter of religion that I can choose to pick up this glass. That seems to me to be well within what could develop on a purely scientific basis.

WOLPE: How? How?

ASHBROOK: I’m not a scientist but it doesn’t seem like a mystery of God to me personally.

WOLPE: Oh sure it is. Well no—but seriously, where does the element of free choice come from?

ASHBROOK: I could be purely instinctual and put my head in a stream and drink and choose to do that.

WOLPE: But that—now, wait, wait, when you say “choose,” where does the choice come from any more than my—[picking up a glass of water] than the choice of this glass to fall down? Where do you get a choice as opposed to a complex interaction of DNA and environment, neither of which you chose?

HITCHENS: Again, piling on completely unnecessary assumptions, and also inviting a question that will make you uncomfortable.

WOLPE: Go ahead.

HITCHENS: If you say that, “No, it’s because God has given you free will,” I have to ask you how do you know that?

WOLPE: Well, are you assuming that we have free will?

HITCHENS: One who…

WOLPE: Are you assuming that we have free will?

HITCHENS: If you answer my question…

WOLPE: Then give me another source.

HITCHENS: If you answer my question with another question…

WOLPE: Give me another source.

HITCHENS: …I’ll still answer it…

WOLPE: Ok.

HITCHENS: I will still answer it…

WOLPE: Thank you.

HITCHENS: …even though your question is an answer to mine—not an answer, a response to mine.

WOLPE: Yes.

HITCHENS: The view I take about free will is that of course we have free will, because we have no choice but to have it.

WOLPE: No, that’s a quip, not an answer.

HITCHENS: I was and still am, to some extent, a dialectical materialist and I also think there are some ironies in the universe as well as in history. But to say, “Of course we have free will, the boss says we’ve got it,” is to make a mockery of the whole concept and it’s also to invite the question what kind of tyranny is this that you want? You want an all-supervising, all-deciding person. I asked you first, what sources of information so you have about this person’s existence that I don’t have, that are denied to me? I’d like to know. And second, why do you want it? Why do you want to arrive at a terminus of unfreedom where there is a celestial authority upon whom all things depend and from which all things flow? Why do you want that and how on earth do you know that there’s any case to be made for its existence?

ASHBROOK: Yes, please, that’s a good question.

WOLPE: I don’t think it’s a terminus of unfreedom.

HITCHENS: I think you’re only free when you’ve declared against it, frankly. That’s the beginning of freedom is the emancipation...

WOLPE: Is that the coda to the question?

HITCHENS: ...from the tyranny of theocracy, yes.

WOLPE: I actually think that the whole point that I was making was that a belief in a god who creates you is what gives you free will and that without it you have to fall into a determinism. And, by the way, you may think that science gives it to you, but every scientist I’ve asked on this question, including David Barash, who’s an evolutionary biologist says that it is—Steven Pinker had the same reaction—is that it is more or less a commonplace of modern science that determinism is the only world view that’s consistent with an understanding of the way science works. So, you may be able to find it in science, but I haven’t met a scientist yet who’s been able to account for it. Now, putting that aside...

ASHBROOK: But not every scientist is a believer.

WOLPE: No, of course not. I’m saying that…

HITCHENS: Almost no scientist is.

WOLPE: … those who don’t use determinism as their philosophical assumption. But let me answer his question, too, which is therefore, I assume that as a religious person you’re granted freedom. That’s the whole point, is you do make choices.

HITCHENS: Once you’ve said “granted”…

WOLPE: Better choices, better…

HITCHENS: Once you’ve said “granted,” you’ve made my point.

ASHBROOK: And he’s English, he knows about [indecipherable].

WOLPE: Well, you’re granted—you’re granted…

HITCHENS: “Thank you for making me free,” what’s that?

WOLPE: No, you’re granted freedom—so you’re granted freedom by the evolutionary process, I’m granted freedom by a creator. Either way, what you—either way you have to be…

HITCHENS: I’m not granted all sorts of freedom. I mean…

WOLPE: Right.

HITCHENS: Of course scientists are right to that—to this extent. There are—Einstein says, “The miraculous things about the laws of nature is they’re never suspended.” That’s what so amazing about them, is they’re immutable. Religion claims that, on occasions, the laws of nature are suspended in order to prove what they wouldn’t otherwise prove.

WOLPE: It depends who you ask. Not Maimonides. It depends who you ask in religion.

ASHBROOK: Is there a fundamental contradiction in your mind, Rabbi, between Jewish teaching and evolution?

WOLPE: No.

ASHBROOK: None at all?

WOLPE: Certainly not. Nope. None.

ASHBROOK: But evolution, as we learn it, doesn’t require a deity.

WOLPE: No. Well, it depends what you mean by “require a deity.” It’s just like saying that building this stage doesn’t require a deity. The question isn’t whether the discovery of the mechanism by which God made the world requires God, it just requires the discovery of the mechanism by which God made the world. But it also doesn’t outlaw God or make God impossible or make it, in fact, less plausible.

ASHBROOK: What’s the difference to your mind between mystery and incomprehension?

WOLPE: Incomprehension?

ASHBROOK: In other words, will we solve…

WOLPE: Incomprehension describes my reaction to the question.

ASHBROOK: Oh, great. America’s Rabbi thinks my questions incomprehensible.

WOLPE: I’m not sure I understand, tell me again.

ASHBROOK: Well…

WOLPE: In other words…

ASHBROOK: Science progressively made a lot of things comprehensible.

WOLPE: Yes. Mystery means those things that by the very nature of the world are unfigureoutable no matter how bright we are, no matter how hard we work at it.

ASHBROOK: How do you know that they’re unfigureoutable?

WOLPE: Well, you’re asking…

ASHBROOK: I prefer that over incomprehensible.

WOLPE: You’re asking me to know in a way that I’m not willing to concede is the proper way to describe religious conviction. It’s like saying to me, “How do you know that love exists?” or “How do you know that another human being is beautiful?” or “How do you know that”—I don’t know—“that these lights are a pageant of gorgeous colors?” The answer is you don’t know it. Some things you have as the deepest conviction of your soul and there are things that make sense of the world in ways that nothing else makes sense of the world but if you ask me do I know that God exists the way I know that that glass is on the table then I say you’re putting in an empirical, scientific framework which is exactly the framework that religious people want to keep religion out of because [indecipherable].

ASHBROOK: But I want to [indecipherable]—how do you know the mystery won’t be solved one day?

WOLPE: Because it’s not a mystery of a question that’s solvable. It’s like saying, “How do you know the mystery won’t be solved that you have an ineradicable sense that the world is wondrous?” I don’t know how you would even think about solving such a mystery.

ASHBROOK: If I could understand it and still find it wondrous, Christopher, what about you, if it’s not God…

WOLPE: Oh, I…

ASHBROOK: …is it all soluble?

HITCHENS: Well first…

ASHBROOK: One day?

HITCHENS: …you’re right that science has made many things more comprehensible to us and it’s explained things that religion used to take credit for. In other words, now we know there’s a germ theory of disease. Diseases are not curses or revenge from heaven. Same with earthquakes and so on. The stuff they used to teach us, and many of them still do is nonsense—evil nonsense as well as ignorant nonsense. But, it’s also taught us, just in my lifetime, an enormous amount more about how little we know. We’re much, much more ignorant…

WOLPE: Yes.

HITCHENS: …than people who lived before Galileo. Because we have now an increasingly large idea...

WOLPE: Of how ignorant...

HITCHENS: ...of the fantastic expanse of the unknown. That’s precisely the moment at which to say that skepticism is what’s necessary, inquiry, debate, doubt. Where’s faith in this? Where’s the usefulness of faith there? There’s no use to it at all. Socrates, who, as far as I know, existed, but may well not have done, it doesn’t matter to me. No one will insult me if they say, “Socrates, your great hero, didn’t exist.” Try it on a Muslim, try it on a Christian that their prophets didn’t exist, or tell people that Moses is a myth. They start hurling themselves about making menacing noises very often. Socrates said you’re only educated when you’ve understood how ignorant you are. And you’re only going to even find that out by doubting everything all the time. There’s all the difference in the world between that outlook and that mentality…

WOLPE: Now…

HITCHENS: …and the mentality of faith. And second, on metaphysics, which you, I noticed, take refuge in several times already this evening like, “What is love,” “Is something poetic or is it prosaic?” Very good questions, but metaphysical ones. Those who say, “God exists and intervenes in the world,” in other words, those who say there is a religious god, the god of religion, are saying that redemption is unoffered to human beings, that salvation is unoffered to them, and that if they reject the offer they can be in really big trouble. Now don’t start talking on [indecipherable] like this or, if you don’t mind, to a debate partner like me as if religion was a private matter because everybody knows that if it was there wouldn’t be anything to argue about. It's precisely because it claims to be a total solution, a complete solution to all problems, available on pain of death, sometimes, in some forms, but available to you if you’ll only have enough faith. Well we just found out that faith is probably the most overrated of the virtues and the one most—least useful to use in the real dilemmas that we actually have to face.

WOLPE: There are so many things to unpack in that statement that I’ll just pick on two or three. First, being interestingly that Socrates, whether he existed or not, according to Plato, at least, believed in the gods and even in an afterlife so he didn’t doubt everything, but…

HITCHENS: Gods, maybe.

WOLPE: Wait, no, wait, wait, wait, didn’t interrupt you. But, I want you to know, and you should know this in particular…

HITCHENS: Couldn’t think of anything to say.

WOLPE: I didn’t interrupt you twice.

HITCHENS: Sorry.

WOLPE: But I want you to know…

HITCHENS: You weren’t quick enough.

WOLPE: It may be true that part of it was speed but I also think it's because civility is a very religious virtue. So the…

HITCHENS: I could’ve said that.

WOLPE: The Jewish tradition actually doesn’t tell you that everyone must do this in the world. Rather, it prescribes goodness and that’s what it is that religion is supposed to bring into the world. Now can you point to examples of religious wickedness? Of course you can. But that’s clearly what Judaism asks of people. The first obligation that you have is goodness and that’s why when you talk about religion as though it is inherently totalitarian, it tells you you must act this way it makes two mistakes. First of all, it doesn’t see religion as evolving as anything else does, when in fact the Judaism of thousands of years ago ought to be, must be, should be, is expected to be different than the Judaism of today.

ASHBROOK: Still has ten commandments.

HITCHENS: None of which mention goodness.

WOLPE: Alright, guys, guys, guys, you have to let me finish my statement, ok?

HITCHENS: Ok.

ASHBROOK: Please.

WOLPE: Thank you.

HITCHENS: You’re welcome.

WOLPE: I feel a little bit between a sandwich here, but—and the second part of it is, if you say that faith does nothing for you, as Christopher repeats over and over again, it’s very hard to explain why it is that millions and millions of people all over the world and throughout history have felt that faith deepens their life, gives them meaning, increases their goodness, and why it is, for example, in America that people of faith give more to charity, vote more in elections, volunteer more, help more. Do you know what the largest aid organization is—aid and development organization is in the United States? It’s not CARE, it’s not Save the Children, it’s One World, which is a Christian organization out of Seattle, which not only gives millions and millions and millions of dollars across the world but sends people all over the world to the most beleaguered, helpless places and they do it because they believe they’re called to do it by God. It’s just not true that having faith makes no difference in this world. It makes a tremendous difference and the vast majority of that difference, not all of it, but the vast majority of that difference is for goodness.

ASHBROOK: [To Hitchens] Let me put a question in if you'd be so good. The Rabbi feels in a sandwich and I don’t mean for you to feel in a sandwich. Let me put this to you.

HITCHENS: [indecipherable]

WOLPE: Oh, that’s ok.

ASHBROOK: Christopher, what about the solace of faith? Some of the most religious people I know ended up there…

WOLPE: Oh this is a softball. I want a hard question.

ASHBROOK: No, I mean I…

WOLPE: I know what he’s going to say to this…

ASHBROOK: Well, maybe, but he’s been called…

WOLPE: …you hard-minded, hard-hearted, non-needer of solace.

ASHBROOK: Yes. Worse, you’re a misanthrope because you’re not sympathetic to peoples’ need for religion.

HITCHENS: I say in my book, available in fine bookstores everywhere, that as long as I don’t have to hear about it, I don’t mind what people believe. If they say, “Well, thanks to Joseph Smith and his gold plates I have real faith now and I've got a family and I have friends and I have a real system and so on,” and I say, fine, fine, just don’t come to my front door with it. Don’t ask for a tax break for it. Don’t ask my children to be taught it in the schools.

WOLPE: Did you sign up tonight thinking you wouldn’t hear about it?

HITCHENS: And I ask them a question—I ask the question in the book, people think they have a personal relationship with a creator and they’re the possessors of a wonderful secret and it must feel—I’ve never felt it, I presume it feels great. Why doesn’t it make them happy? They’re not happy. They can’t be happy until everyone else believes it too. They go out and proselytize, very often—and here's—I can’t let your last answer go—very often in the guise of charity. You notice how often religion, rather than ask the questions that I put like how do you know there’s a god, what evidence do you have for it? Which you say, “Well, lots of good people do good things because they’re religious.” Well let’s take the most recent impressing case. Richard Dawkins and I and a few others, in response to the Haiti earthquake, set up an emergency charity for people of non-belief to give to because so many charitable organization are, in fact, proselytizing groups. So, we raised about two million in a weekend and all that money goes straight—and, by the way—thank you. If you go to Richard’s website you can find out more about how to donate to this because it’s permanent, it’s going to stay into being. All that money went straight to Doctors Without Borders, of course, and the International Red Cross which, though it has a cross isn’t a religious organization. Both of these organizations are already in Haiti, they’re proven. None of the money goes to support any missionary activity. None. And the Scientologists and all the others who turned up in Haiti, and the other that turned up in Haiti to kidnap babies to convert them to their faith and there are Catholics who turned up and said, standing in the ruins of their own cathedral with a quarter-of-a-million Haitians buried under the rubble, “God spoke here today and you should listen to his message.” Don’t tell me that’s good. Don’t tell me that’s good. That’s wicked. It’s proselytizing. It’s proselytizing with the helpless, using them as objects of charity and conversion. It’s lying to people.

ASHBROOK: But there’s also a lot of [indecipherable]…

HITCHENS: It’s wrong to lie.

WOLPE: But…

HITCHENS: It’s wrong to lie to people. And it’s giving them false hopes and false explanations for their plight. Now, we’re not guilty of any of that. And now I’ll ask you another question: where in the Decalogue does the word “goodness” appear? Where? It’s a good swathe of Exodus for you. Where in Exodus does the word “goodness” appear? Where, in this commandment-rich territory does the word “goodness” or the enjoinment to be good occur? [To Wolpe] This should be a softball for you.

WOLPE: Ok. First of all, it tells you what you ought not to do. It says love your neighbor as yourself. In the book of Leviticus—I mean, I’m allowed to move to Leviticus from Exodus, right?

HITCHENS: Yes. Yes, that’s fair.

WOLPE: Yes, ok. Thank you, I appreciate that. It says you should pursue justice. Justice you shall pursue. It says over and over and over again—and also, by the way, I, you know, no tradition, at least certainly not the Jewish tradition and I’m not aware of any other tradition, is only the Bible. Judaism is a long exegetical tradition and it says several times in the Talmud that the one purpose of the mitzvot is letzharef et habriyot, which means "to refine human character." It’s clear that Judaism is directed around goodness. It’s repeated over and over again. The whole system and framework of mitzvot is to get people to treat each other decently and if you say, which you do, that people use authority (governmental authority, religious authority, military authority, poltical authority) to do bad things, my answer is of course they do. Any time you set up a structure of authority, people will do bad things—churches, other things.

HITCHENS: That isn’t what I said.

WOLPE: But that—yes, of course it is. So what you say is—what you heard is: when religion does good things it doesn’t count because sometimes they want people to believe what they believe, when it does bad things it’s because of religion. When you make everything good that religion does invalid and everything bad that religion does representative that’s called arguing in bad faith which is ironic for someone who has none.

ASHBROOK: It seems a fair question.

HITCHENS: Yes, it’s not—I mean, as I know you know, that isn’t at all what I said. I don’t say bad things are done in the name of religion or by authorities, I say it’s religion itself that is the problem. I go out of my way to make clear that I don’t take refuge in any other position. Now, in Leviticus and in Exodus if you're a neighbor, you better not—and you—this person, you’re supposed to love him—this person had better not be an Amalekite, a Midianite, a Moabite, better not be a…

WOLPE: Yes.

HITCHENS: Better not be a witch…

WOLPE: Yep.

HITCHENS: …the desctruction of whom is enjoined.

WOLPE: Right.

HITCHENS: Better not be a homosexual, the stoning of whom is enjoined. Better not be a slave, the terms of enslavement of which are all laid out. Now, these are primitive, tribal, agricultural—(most of the commandments, by the way in the Decalogue, are addressed to the property-owning classes. "Here’s what you can’t do with your servants." "Here your servants must also obey this commandment." Why are the commandments addressed only to people who have staff? Why are the women—rather a large objection I would have thought—why are women counted as part of the animal and chattel that’s disposable by these holders of property?) It’s—couldn’t it be any more obvious that this is a man-made phenomenon and at a time when people were not at their best and full of fear and ignorance and greed and covetousness of other people’s property?

ASHBROOK: Can we be faithful and not be trapped by history, not all of its elements are attractive?

WOLPE: Well, it’s not only that but as Christopher knows very well I assume that the Bible was put together by human beings and that the Jewish tradition is a long, evolving tradition as are other traditions in which the dross of history is gradually refined in the same way that you would not expect someone 3,000 years ago to be able to understand the sort of arguments that you’re making tonight. People change, there’s an evolutionary process also, not only to biology, but to sociology, to ideology, all of those things and that’s why the question is very much does religion make people better and can these systems refine themselves and can they get rid of the stuff that’s bad in religion? I think that to assume that you can cherry-pick the things and the statements in religion that are negative and those things are necessarily enduring contradicts the history of every tradition I know.

HITCHENS: Well “cherry-picking” is an odd word to use for something that’s thrust upon you. I’ve got no choice but to study the Decalogue.

WOLPE: No, actually, it’s not…

HITCHENS: I point out it says it suggests to property owners and enjoins them to keep women as property…

WOLPE: So are you…

HITCHENS: …and they say, “Oh, you’re cherry-picking, you’re nitpicking.” I’m not.

WOLPE: So are you in favor of theft, murder, and adultery? Do you think those are good things?

HITCHENS: There’s now—here’s exactly the nub of my question:

WOLPE: Ok.

HITCHENS: If what you say is true…

WOLPE: Yes.

HITCHENS: …not that I—and I’ve never said, I wouldn’t—I couldn’t be interpreted as having said no religious person can do a good thing.

WOLPE: No, I didn’t say that. Right.

HITCHENS: If what you say is true, this should be true and you should find it easy to point it out:

WOLPE: Ok.

HITCHENS: There must be something, not that they can do or do but that I cannot do that’s a good thing. Either a moral statement made or a moral or ethical statement performed that a person of faith could perform that I cannot.

WOLPE: That...

HITCHENS: You must be able to identify that…

WOLPE: No actually…

HITCHENS: …if your point is to have any force at all.

WOLPE: How could you—how, how can one human being do something that another human being can’t do physically? Physically, of course, you could do anything that I could do but I can say lots of things you don’t do.

HITCHENS: No, I said a moral or ethical.

WOLPE: I can say lots of things you don’t do, not that you can’t do. You probably don’t do, as I do, bless your child on a Friday night. You probably don’t create great works of art based on religion. You probably don’t go half way across the world feeling that you’re motivated and called by a god who tells you to help other human beings. I mean, all those things are things that religion motivates people to do, not that you can’t do them, but that people generally don’t do them if they’re not motivated by religion.

HITCHENS: Oh come on, get real. I mean, pronouncing an incantation…

WOLPE: Yes.

HITCHENS: Isn’t a moral action.

WOLPE: Of course it is.

HITCHENS: No, it isn’t.

WOLPE: It’s only not a moral action if you don’t feel the enormous...

HICHENS: It can subjectively be [indecipherable]—it's not a moral...

WOLPE: If you don’t—it's only not a moral—hey, hey…

HITCHENS: And anyway, it is something I could do.

WOLPE: It's not—of course you can and I encourage you to do it. It’s only not a moral action...

ASHBROOK: Maybe one day.

WOLPE: ...if you don’t feel the unique expression of love when it takes place in an atmosphere of sanctity that is not the same as saying to a child, “I love you.” I have to tell you, some of you knew my father who passed away in May who was a rabbi. When I think of the most powerful and intimate moments that I had with my father it was when he put his hands on my head and blessed me on a Friday night. Now, he would not have done that were he not religious and it wasn’t the same as when he kissed me goodnight and said, “I love you,” because there is an element in which religious people dwell, it’s called a world of sanctity that you can’t invoke and can’t dwell in if you don’t believe that that realm exists.

ASHBROOK: Christopher…

HITCHENS: Do you—well, wait. [To Wolpe] First, I’m sorry for your loss…

WOLPE: Oh, thank you.

HITCHENS: …as the Irish say, sorry for your trouble. Second, I’m still going to have to insist, I don’t think anyone in the audience can consider that’s an answer to my challenge.

WOLPE: Of course it is.

HITCHENS: One has to say a moral or ethical statement or action that an unbeliever could not perform…

WOLPE: But “could not” means that you’re physically incapable of it.

HITCHENS: No.

WOLPE: And I'm willing to concede...

HITCHENS: No, if it’s goodness it would be morally capable…

WOLPE: ...right here you can do everything I can do.

HITCHENS: Well, let’s not go that far.

WOLPE: Of course you can. Of course you can.

HITCHENS: Well then, ok, alright.

WOLPE: You have to say “wouldn’t do,” you can’t say “can’t do.”

HITCHENS: Since you won’t answer it I’ll just leave the question to the audience.

WOLPE: I did.

HITCHENS: If anyone can come up to me and say, “Here’s a moral thing you couldn’t do”—not don’t do but could not do—“that only a religious person could do,” I’d be very interested to hear of it. No one’s been able to come up with any point.

ASHBROOK: Let me ask a second…

HITCHENS: Second, there’s a brief corollary: think of a wicked thing done or an evil thing said that is done precisely because of faith. You’ve already thought of one.

WOLPE: But any that someone who doesn't have faith couldn't do? Wait, tell me something that someone who doesn't have faith could not do.

HITCHENS: I didn’t say that.

WOLPE: Ok. But that’s exactly the point.

HITCHENS: No it’s not.

WOLPE: A human being can do certain things whether they’re believers or not. They have the physical ability. Believing something doesn’t give you a new physical ability.

HITCHENS: It still doesn’t—so to you it’s not a problem that the suicide murder community, the genital mutilation community, these are all faith-based communities?

WOLPE: Do you want me to answer that?

HITCHENS: And while we’re on the subject of charity, who doesn’t hear Hamas saying, “The reason we’re loved by our people is because we provide social services. We help the needy. We’re the only people who come out and do that.” Which is, by the way, I’m horrified to have to say, is true. But do you excuse them for that because they are charitable?

WOLPE: Of course not.

HITCHENS: Do you not think that they bless they’re children a whole lot?

WOLPE: Yes, and I think that’s a beautiful thing that they do.

HITCHENS: I bet you can—I’ve heard them do it.

WOLPE: Right. I don’t think there’s…

HITCHENS: You try being a Muslim child and not be blessed the entire time. That’s part of the authority that they claim. They claim to own these people.

ASHBROOK: But Christopher, I want to ask…

HITCHENS: This is all faith-based.

ASHBROOK: Who steps up to—you don’t like any of the language but life has a lot of despair. People fall into despair. Who steps up to save them? I don’t mean in Christian terms necessarily at all, but who steps up to reach out to those people? And for society as a whole, if you don’t have the teaching of religion, what will offer a kind of moral construct? I don’t see it in schools. I don’t—union halls are gone. Who’s going to give people a structure of meaning?

WOLPE: I live in such a world, it’s called Hollywood.

ASHBROOK: Hollywood, exactly. I mean, what—it may have blemishes, it may be deeply flawed, it may be fatally flawed you would say, but I mean, what’s the substitute? What’s the structure for moral teaching and save the despairing?

HITCHENS: I think despair is quite a good starting point myself. I mean I think it’s very good to know that we’re born into a losing struggle. I think that the stoicism that comes from that and the reflection that comes from that is very useful. I’m not very impressed by people who say, “Well, I wish it wasn’t true so I’ll try and act as if it isn’t.” It is true. Everything is governed by entropy and decline and annihilation and disaster and you’re born into a losing struggle and because you’re a mammal primate, a primate mammal, you know you are and you know you’re going to die and there’ll be a lot of struggle and pain along the way. I don’t want a world without anxiety and grief and pain and struggle. I can’t get it.

ASHBROOK: No one’s saying you can’t have that.

HITCHENS: But those who offer it to me, I spurn the gift. I don’t want what you want. I don’t want the feeling of an eternal love and peace. Love and peace, very, very overrated in my view. One reason—one of the many reasons—I should despise all religions equally, and I do in a way—

WOLPE: [To Ashbrook] I want to say something.

HITCHENS: ...but one way in which I prefer Judaism to its rivals is that the emphasis is more on justice than on love.

WOLPE: I want to go [indecipherable]. [To Hitchens] Why is that not misanthropic of you, that attitude?

HITCHENS: Misanthropic? It doesn’t mean I have to hate people.

ASHBROOK: Well, it’s tough [indecipherable]. It’s hard [indecipherable].

HITCHENS: It means I respect them enough not to offer them false consolation.

WOLPE: I do think it’s important…

HITCHENS: The realm of illusion will not help you to cure this condition.

WOLPE: I do think it’s important to say that part of this—part of this is based in temperament, part of it is based in life experience. I spend a lot of my time at the bedside of people who are dying, with parents who lost children, with husbands who lost wives, and wives who lost husbands. The sense of community that is created by religion, the sense that life is meaningful even if it’s short, all of that, it’s not trivial, it’s not cheap consolation, it’s not illusion, it goes to the depths of questions that human beings ask themselves and I know that you can make a clever remark about the cheap selling of religious consolation but, you know what, the remark is melted by the heat of human anguish when you’re standing by the grave of a child who died and the mother is saying a prayer and that brings her some measure of comfort because she really does believe that this world, in some sense, is meaningful and is not nihilistic and is not empty and is not foolish and, although I can’t prove to you in an empirical sense that in fact the world is meaningful, at that moment, even as I question it, it seems to me the deepest instinct of my soul.

HITCHENS: Gosh. Well, if you’ll pardon me, I won’t share any of my griefs with you. But I’ve never had one or had any—know anyone who’s had the faintest consolation from religion and indeed being told, as the Christians tell them, that they’re off to a better place and so on, I think is positively wicked thing to do. I think lying to the dying for a living—what self-respecting person can do that? And once you've faced...

WOLPE: And you know it’s a lie because—I just—just tell me how you know it’s a lie since you assert it again and again.

HITCHENS: Because the person saying it cannot possibly know it to be true.

WOLPE: And therefore it’s a lie?

HITCHENS: They don’t have access to information that was denied to me.

WOLPE: Even if they believe it it’s a lie?

HITCHENS: Yes, yes, it’s a lie.

WOLPE: Ok.

ASHBROOK: But how do we create, for those who aren’t able or don’t desire to walk around in despair or to walk around in irony, in a world that brings [indecipherable]…

HITCHENS: Try it, try it.

ASHBROOK: Try it, fine. But I think it’s manifestly clear lots of people don’t choose that. So, what does atheism offer?

HITCHENS: Well, it offers the chance of living without illusion, which I think—it says philosophy and literature will do a great deal more for you. They're much more—there’s a lot more morality in them. There’s a lot more ethical discussion in Dostoyevsky, say, than in any of the holy books. Or George Eliot…

ASHBROOK: But who will present them in our society—real society, who will present them in a way…

WOLPE: There is. There is.

HITCHENS: For now I’m presenting. For now I’m presenting. I can’t do…

ASHBROOK: You’re going to be very busy.

HITCHENS: I can only appear in my own person here. I'd even say, to some extent, this works for me. Irony, I think, is tremendously useful, as is philosophy, especially the philosophy of Spinoza, especially in times of anguish. And the realization that there’s no false consolation can actually cheer you up. Once you face the fact that you’re born into a losing struggle things immediately appear a great deal more manageable in some ways. And of the remarks against this made, not one of these remarks couldn’t have been made by a devout member of the Muslim brotherhood. And what I want to ask him is this: if anything of what he says is true, is he really saying that he would prefer me not to be myself, not to be an unbeliever and someone who believes in irony and the unillusioned world, but I’d be morally better off if I was a Wahabi Muslim, for example, or a Roman Catholic.

WOLPE: Is me asking—is “he” me? Ok.

HITCHENS: I mean, according to you, I would be a better person if I was a person of faith.

WOLPE: No, no, no, don’t answer the question. You asked me the question...

HITCHENS: Alright.

WOLPE: ...you’re not allowed to answer it for me.

HITCHENS: You imply. I want to know if you really mean that.

WOLPE: Actually, I never said that you were automatically better off if you believe than if you didn’t believe. I think Christopher is very useful in the world because he forces religious people—I mean, he’s useful for many, many reasons, obviously, to the world but he also forces religious people to think seriously about their faith and and as I understand the god that I believe in and the god that Judaism presents, the first and primary demand is not belief, the first and primary demand is goodness. That’s exactly what characterizes Judaism and therefore if you say to me, “I’m a good person but I don’t believe. Is it better that I would be a miserable person who believed?” All I have to do is look at the sources and say, "Obviously not." Obviously it’s better for you to be who you are and to promote goodness in the world. That’s exactly—[HEBREW] is what the Jewish tradition teaches (to make the world better under the sovereignty of God) But notice the first clause in that is to make the world better. So if you do that, that’s the primary demand of any faith I think is worth its salt.

ASHBROOK: May we turn, on that point, to what Barry [indecipherable] as an acute concern, that is, violence. And the question of whether violence is integral to religion or exceptional and an offense to religion, or both, or all three? [To Wolpe] Violence and religion.

WOLPE: Ok, so, I’m going to try to abbreviate this. There are two things to remember. First of all, most religious conflicts are not about religion. What you find is religions will fight when there’s land, when there’s power, when there’s resources, where there’s water, when there’s money. It’s very rare for a religious group—not inconceivable—very rare for a religious group to say, “Hey guess what? There’s someone half way across the world who believes differently, let’s go get them, alright? It’s the people who live next door to us who are other than us. We should get them and by the way, along the way we’re going to take their land and we’re going to take their riches and we’re going to take this." And that’s because—and if you look in the Encyclopedia of War, which is probably not something that you peruse in your leisure hours, but if you do, you will see that it identified 1763 wars since the beginning of time. 123 of them are identified as religious wars. When you take religion out of a society, you don’t get a more peaceful society. We look at the twentieth century, it was a like a laboratory for that: Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism, Cambodia, North Korea versus South Korea, on and on and on and on. The fact is the record of extracting religion is very poor. And the final point is this, which is: if you ask why religious people fight, the answer is clear: It’s because they’re people. I have a colleague, not a rabbi, but a psychologist in Los Angeles who studies bullying. Do you know at what age bullying is most prominent? Think to yourself what age and then I’ll tell you the answer. By far, the answer is preschool. Because we’re not born all sweetness and light. It’s why it’s so much hard work to get a kid to be good, alright? Parents don’t have to say to their child, “Why don’t you share a little bit less, you know? Because you’re—really—you're too selfless. You’re too kind.” Instead it’s very hard work to get people to do well. What religions are known for is their attempts to make something straight of the crooked nature of human beings and they fail again and again and again exactly as you would expect if you know human nature. But that doesn’t mean that the attempt to do it makes people worse. Quite the opposite, at least according to the evidence of history.

HITCHENS: Well, violence—there’s no mystery about violence. Violence arises because we are primates, imperfectly evolved. Our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenaline glands are too big. There are various other deformities of this kind, sexual organs designed by committee, all the rest of it. And we’re greedy…

WOLPE: We’re back to politics, I guess.

HITCHENS: …and fearful and—but—and covetous of other people’s property. And also, surprisingly, it’s probably our biggest defect given that the reason we’re so successful is there’s almost no genetic difference between us. If we were dogs we’d all be the same breed, fantastically little variation. But we’re incredibly prone to tribalism and ethnic and racial—what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences. So of course if a tribe, let’s say, that's calling itself the children of Israel, for the sake of argument, decides they should kill all the other tribes that get in its way, take their women as slaves, butcher their men, take their land, take their cattle and so battle this way across to Caanan and take every elses land and burn down their—that’s going to happen whether there’s a god or not or whether there’s religion or not but it'll happen very much more intensely if they believe they have the mandate from heaven to do so. It’s a terrific force multiplier. I think there would have been a quarrel between the Hutu and the Tutsi of Rwanda, say, once Belgian colonialism had established that there were these two different character groups (types, tribes)—but a terrific force multiplier that the Catholic church was as strong as it was in Rwanda, the most Christian country in Africa, made it infinitely worse. What makes the Isreal-Palestine two-state solution ungettable? Because there’s a chunk of people on both sides who say they have God in their corner and God gave only their group the land and they can negate the votes of everybody else including the whole of the international community, by the way, just because of their faith. Northern Ireland is the same. There wouldn't have been a Republican nationalist dispute. It’s infinitely worse because of religion. So I think that the possible—the corollary I’d like to hope would be that the less religion there was the less violence there would be but I can’t in good Darwinian conscience say that. But I think the more that people refuse orders that were divine, as for example, to take the preposterous allegation that the Rabbi makes that the wars of the twentieth century were secular wars: the belt buckle worn by every soldier in the Nazi army that says, “Gott mit uns” (God on our side) I don’t think that was a help, do you? Things were bad enough as they were. On page 70, I think it is, of Mein Kampf Hitler says that "in taking on the filthy virus of Judaism I know I’m doing the work of the Lord and I’m called, I’m summoned by the Lord to do this work," a book—one of the very few books that the Vatican didn't ban in that period, by the way. And I don’t think that was a help, either. So I’d say, on the whole, we’d be better off without the belief either in a supreme dictator, because that leads to violence, or the idea that God takes sides in our pathetic, mammalian disputes. Thank you.

WOLPE: I want to just add as a coda to this: when you say that we shouldn’t take orders, I just want to remind you of a long history, for example, the abolition of slavery was almost entirely the work of people who believed they were taking orders from something higher than societal orders. Wilberforce in England, here, you know Beecher and John Brown and so on, they believed they were doing God’s work...

HITCHENS: So did the slave owners.

WOLPE: ...by abolishing slavery and it’s interesting that the opposition to slavery was a Christian movement but the idea is it’s not an issue of who you take orders from, it’s an issue of the orders you take. That’s the issue and it comes down, in part, to the kind of religion you practice, not whether you practice religion.

HITCHENS: Comrades, I just—I’m sorry…

WOLPE: Comrades? What kind of orders you take, when it comes down to it.

HITCHENS: Brothers and sisters.

WOLPE: That’s better.

HITCHENS: Comrades, friends: I suppose it is somewhat to the credit of some Christians that in the waning decades of thousands of years of slavery that were biblically mandated, some of them belated joined things like the American Anti-Slavery Society, stars of which were Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, non-believers, right? Whereas to the last day of the confederacy, the flag of the confederacy said “Deo vindice” (God on our side) and every justification for that slavery came from the Bible where indeed it’s not hard to find it.

ASHBROOK: We’re going to take questions from the audience…

HITCHENS: Not hard to find it at all.

ASHBROOK: …in about one minute. There are microphones. If you have questions make your way and we will take them very shortly. As we begin to do that, may I ask, Christopher Hitchens, you’ve debated Rabbi David Wolpe on this subject, you’ve debated the Reverend Al Sharpton.

HITCHENS: Yes.

ASHBROOK: What’s the difference between these debates?

HITCHENS: Well the Reverend Al Sharpton is another case of the damage done to society by religion because once it was agreed by the rest of America that black people are best led by preachers and once it was agreed to write out of the Civil Rights record the heroic black secularists like Bayard Rustin and the great black union leader Philip Randolph (who actually organized, with the help of the United Automobile Workers, the march on Washington), once all that had been forgotten and we decide, “Yeah, black people, they really love their preachers,” then once Dr. King is gone then it’s one succession of junk demagogues after another, all of them given the mantle because they’re in holy orders. There’s no fraudulance you can’t get away with in this country if you can get the word reverend put in front of your name.

ASHBROOK: Questions from the audience.

HITCHENS: Sharpton’s a very conspicuous example of that.

ASHBROOK: We’ll begin right here. Madame, your question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Sir.

ASHBROOK: Sir. I can’t see, I'm sorry, the light—Hedges, Hitchens, madame, sir.

HITCHENS: Mr. Hedges.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I’m going to come up there and beat you up, man.

ASHBROOK: Later.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Ok. It seems to me that, you know, most religions deal with operational aspects of life such as human capital development, that is the accumulation of literacy and technology, economic development, mental and physical well-being, and public service, which deals with charity and those kinds of things.

ASHBROOK: These are the work of religion, you’re saying?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Yes, that they profess this, yes. And that all faiths profess these things and since they do, it seems to me that it’s not so much their profession that causes the negative externalities between people who profess these things but it's the labels that they take hold such as—I think Mr. Hitchens alluded to the fact that people say things about their faith that they actually don't practice or believe and so I’m saying that should we just abandon these labels and stop calling ourselves Jews, Christians or Muslisms or whatever and deal with the operational facts of life which deal with, again, human capital, you know, literacy, economic development, mental and physical well-being, and public service and charity, helping others without the labels?

ASHBROOK: Rabbi?

WOLPE: If I understand your question correctly, I would say this: the largest organized groups of charities in the world over and over and over again all around the world organize themselves around religious groups. I don’t think that that’s a mistake and I don’t think that that’s a coincidence so that in fact if you disband the idea that we’re doing this as a religious group you will, in one stroke, undo a great deal of the good that happens in the world. So no, I think that communities which, by the way, without religions I don’t know where you get communities, where young and old sit together in common purpose. It’s very rare, especially in our atomized society, if you disband that I think you get trouble.

ASHBROOK: Christopher, without community, without the labels?

HITCHENS: Implied in what David says is that a person exists who would say, “Now that I don’t believe in God I’ll stop giving money to charity. I don’t care any more.” I don’t know—I don't think there is such a person and if that were so it would be a very strange religion that they’d been professing, wouldn't it?

ASHBROOK: Who will organize good works in the absence of religion?

WOLPE: Why is it—not only that but why is it that in survey after survey religious people do give more...

HITCHENS: I'll tell you.

WOLPE: ...and religious people watch less television and have—use drugs less and use alcohol less. It has social utility.

HITCHENS: This is what religion is down to. It’s very impressive to me.

WOLPE: Ok, good.

HITCHENS: It’s very often the first thing, when debating with Catholics, they always change the subject to charity right away. With Jews it’s usually a little later.

WOLPE: You just said that they…

HITCHENS: And with Muslims it’s…

WOLPE: It’s at the very end.

HITCHENS: …it’s all the time because what else can they—they don’t want to defend their faith…

WOLPE: But you just said the opposite. You just said that if you didn’t believe you wouldn't do it.

HITCHENS: They don’t want to defend their faith, they don’t want to say—they feel uneasy talking about redemption, salvation, all these kinds of things, but look at the good work we’ve—if you talked to the Mormons they’ll say, “You may not think much of Joseph Smith,” and I say you got that right, “but, boy you should see our missionaries in Peru.”

ASHBROOK: The government will do the work if religion does not?

HITCHENS: Excuse me what has this got to do with the existence of God or the validity of religious claims? It has nothing to do with it. It’s always introduced as a time-wasting tactic. Nothing to do with it.

WOLPE: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, don’t applaud that. But, all of you who applauded I just want to ask you this: if Christopher says to me, “God doesn’t exist,” and I say, “But we do good things,” he’s got a point. But his previous comment was people who don’t believe in religion do good things. In response I say—in response to the question people who believe in religion do good things to a greater extent and then he says, ‘Well why aren’t you talking about whether God exists?” You made an argument against the social utility of religion, I then made an argument for the social utility of religion and you turned theological on me.

HITCHENS: Excuse me, I have not conceded that it is to a greater extent. Let me give you an example: with the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, whose wonderful work on the primary producers of the third world you ought to be familiar, the great—one of the great photographers, he’s the ambassador as the UNICEF cause of the United Nations Children’s Fund for the eradication of polio. I went with him all over Bengal. We got it down to the point where except for a few bits of Afghanistan and El Salvador, polio was almost gone from the world, it could go with small pox. Not a small thing, done by UNICEF, a secular organization and we nearly got—a date was announced where we were pretty sure it would be gone and it spread back because largely Muslim groups in Nigeria and also in parts of Bengal and Afghanistan told people, “Don’t go get your children inoculated. It’s a plot by scientists and Jews and others to sterilize Mulisms.” And that, plus the Hajj, plus the wonderful devotional habit of going to Mecca all the time and taking all your own diseases with you has meant that polio is back all the way across Africa now. So I’m not going to have it said that in order to do good you’ve got to be more religious than someone who…

ASHBROOK: It’s going to be complicated but I want to get another question if I may, sir.

HITCHENS: All the practical evidence is the other way and it's nothing to do with the claims of faith. Nothing.

ASHBROOK: Sir.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Thank you, thank you. First, comment to Mr. Hitchens: thank you for a very well-argued book.

HITCHENS: Oh…

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: You and I are in violent agreement.

HITCHENS: Appreciate it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Second, it seems to me—not to talk about religion and faith for the moment but the question as to whether God exists, let’s not duck that one. It seems to me that to discuss that subject, one needs to have some scientific knowledge. [Video edit] My question is very simply to Rabbi Wolpe—and please take a second to think about it—my question is—and I’ve asked this of priests, reverends, and rabbis many times…

ASHBROOK: We’re ready.

HITCHENS: We’re braced.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: My question is: if no one ever explained God to you, not in writing, not aurally, would you have figured it out? Thank you.

WOLPE: So first of all, I think that it’s important to understand that the idea that there’s an inbuilt opposition between scientific knowledge and belief is contradicted by some very prominent scientists, including Francis Collins, who’s the head of the Human Genome Project who wrote a book in favor of God, Owen Gingerich, who’s an astrophysicist at Harvard who wrote a book talking about his belief in God. I always find it interesting that people assume that the expertise that they have is necessary in order to make the assertion that someone else makes and if they don’t have it then they can’t speak about it. I grew up in a home where one of my brothers is a PhD in bioethics and the other one is a PhD in developmental biology. They talk science all the time. I think for a lay person I have a reasonably good grasp of some sciences and I would say absolutely I can make the assertion that God exists precisely because the criteria that is used for a scientific assertion is not used for a religious assertion. Nobody asks a—in the same way that you make philosophical statements that are not subject to scientific criteria. If you ask yourself what does the world look like to something that’s not human, to a bat, to an ant, the answer is we can’t possibly know that because we can’t unknow what we know and we can’t look at the world through different eyes. So if you ask me would I have come to this belief if it wasn’t explained to me, my only evidence to answer that is yes, human beings did and either it was explained to them by God, which is what I assume, or you would come to it naturally. So yeah, I think that I would come to it naturally but can I prove that to you? No. It’s precisely one of the many examples of unprovable questions that we nonetheless we can feel deeply about.

AUDIENCE MEMBER X: My point though is that early on…

WOLPE: Is this a debate or is this a conversation?

ASHBROOK: Let me put it to Christopher, do you assume that everything one day will be solved scientifically? Does it matter to you?

HITCHENS: No, all that science is going to do is keep on teaching us how little we know and multiplying the distance between our own attainments and our desire to master these matters. Many of these questions will remain undecidable which is the way I like them. Religion and science can coexist in the same person, that’s true and I know Francis Collins. He writes brilliantly on the genome but if you’ve read C. S. Lewis you don’t need to read him on religion, it’s unbelievably naïve. Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist, a very strong if rather superstitious Christian, thought the Pope was the antichrist (might have been on to something there), but a very weird—full of very weird beliefs and thought if you knew the measurements of the old temple you’d know more than if you understood gravity. Alfred Russel Wallace, who did most of Darwin’s work for him, was a spiritualist who would go to table rapping sessions listening to burblings from the beyond. Joseph Priestley was a Unitarian and believed in the phlogiston theory.

WOLPE: Shouldn’t that be a [indecipherable]?

HITCHENS: But it’s really only until—I would say it’s only until Albert Einstein—not until I mean—Albert Einstein, I mean, that you get a scientist who’s also essentially a philosopher of pure mind. That’s the great breakthrough and now you can have private beliefs and be a scientific person but no one says my science helps to vindicate my religion, no one says that anymore. That’s not doable.

ASHBROOK: I want to get to more questions please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Yes, I have a question for both of you regarding the existence of universal morality. My question for Mr. Hitchens, is there one and if so where does it come from? And my question for the rabbi is if there is one and it's, for example, in the 613 mitzvot how do you personally pick and choose which ones to follow because I noticed, you know, you’re not wearing tzitzit and so many other prescriptions so if it's universally…

WOLPE: I might be. It might be under my shirt.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Well, there are—I won’t go there. But, generally speaking can you be a good Jew and not follow the 613 if that is the prescription for universal morality?

HITCHENS: Well, the most commonly taken universal absolute moral statement is what’s sometimes called the Golden Rule which, well, Rabbi Hillel says, “Don’t do to another person what would be repulsive to you.” Others say, “Do as you would be done by,” just putting it another way. It’s in the Analects of Confucius, it’s—very few societies don’t have it, so I think that’s what we’d have to take as the nearest to an absolute. It’s obviously subject to various relativities, alas. For one thing, it’s only really as good as the person saying it. Should I not do to Charles Manson what I don’t want him to do to me? Well, if you see what I mean. I mean, should we say, “Don’t lets do to Charles Manson what we wouldn’t want done to ourselves”? Obviously not. It’s just like the contradiction between the Old and the New Testaments. The Old Testament says an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth which would lead to a very eyeless and toothless world. And then the Nazarene says you can’t condemn anyone unless you can cast the first stone. (Actually that bit was knitted into the Bible quite late and it was most certainly a fabrication. But it’s believed in by many Christians who, you know, as you know will believe practically anything, but...) If you can’t condemn anyone without being yourself without sin then we can’t even arrest Charles Manson unless we were sinless ourselves. So these moral absolutes are actually more full of moral relativism than you might think and they certainly—the reason people want there to be absolutes is this: they want there to be an absolute authority who can give them to you because wouldn’t that save you from all the trouble of thinking out ethics for yourself, which is where I started. Why not take that chance? More enjoyable, less subject to appalling commandments to stone witches and murder homosexuals…

ASHBROOK: And all the rest. Rabbi, universal morality? And if there is, which…

WOLPE: The—I’m not sure that Christopher said whether he believes in a universal morality, but yes, someone who believes in God assumes that there is a universal morality but also assumes that it’s very hard—and it’s not that the 613 mitzvot instantiate universal morality and moral reasoning, as far as I know, certainly in other traditions, but obviously in Judaism, is an essential part of the Jewish tradition. It’s not that you get out of thinking by being part of the Jewish tradition. In fact, questioning, reasoning, wondering, thinking, objecting, is an essential part of Judaism and anyone who studies Talmud knows that it’s filled with objections and questions but the assumption is that there actually is a right and a wrong in any given case. If all human beings are evolved primates, there’s not a right and a wrong, there’s a better and a worse, there’s a more powerful and less powerful. Nietzsche was exactly right: if God is dead then power is all that matters because ultimately there isn’t a right and a wrong, there’s something that promotes your interest and something that negates your interest but I don’t believe that.

HITCHENS: Excuse me, do you or do you not believe that human beings are evolved primates.

WOLPE: Yes.

HITCHENS: But you say [indecipherable]…

WOLPE: But I also believe—I said if all they are is evolved primates as opposed to evolved primates who have a spark of the eternal in them, which I believe we do.

ASHBROOK: Question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Two questions for Mr. Hitchens. The first one is I was taught by a physics professor that if you go back to the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, in the first one-to-the-sixty-first to the first second the entire universe is in a tiny amount of space and at that size space and time can cross. And his point was that the whole universe came into existence out of a hiccup in the space-time warp and therefore it’s just kind of a big accident that we were here. And so my question is the same one that I posed to him that day: why is there a space-time warp? Which leads me to the second question which is wouldn’t it make more sense that there would be nothing? There is—should be no universe, there should be no space-time warp, there should be none of us and unless we’re hooked into The Matrix right now we seem to be here and so…

ASHBROOK: Should we take that as an argument for God, is that what your saying?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: For something. There’s a great mystery at the core of the universe. Then why are we here is the second question to argue those in.

ASHBROOK: Ok, thank you very much.

HITCHENS: Well again, I’d commend to you someone who’s much more expert on this subject, I started by mentioning Lawrence Krauss’ lecture on a whole universe from nothing but where’s the grandeur, where’ the divinity in the hiccup? And who produces the hiccupper? All you get from this is an infinite regression. Who creates this creator? Who—it gets you nowhere. And again, if you do make the assumption which I can’t dispute or certainly cannot refute that there is a first cause or an uncaused cause, it still doesn’t mean that there’s a god who takes sides, answers prayers, enjoins moral [indecipherable]…

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: I didn’t ask about that, no.

HITCHENS: No, but I mean—so I’m afraid you only—you compel me to somewhat to repeat myself.

WOLPE: Can I ask a quick question about what you just said?

HITCHENS: Yes.

WOLPE: If it’s an assumption that you can’t refute, which I understand—I think everybody here would say you can’t prove that there’s not a god, that doesn’t mean that there is one—but if it’s an assumption that you can’t refute, why is it that when someone says, “I believe that it is true,” do you say that they are lying?

HITCHENS: I didn’t say that they’re lying.

WOLPE: You said to me when someone stands—when you lie…

HITCHENS: I say someone who goes to tell a child that if they don’t behave well they’ll go to hell is lying.

WOLPE: That’s wasn’t the example that we used.

HITCHENS: Someone who goes to the deathbed of a dying person…

WOLPE: …and says that I believe that there’s another world other than this one…

HITCHENS: …and says, “You’re going to a better place,” is, I think, a charlatan, a neauseating charlatan.

WOLPE: I’ll let it…

[Video edit]

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: ...and the question is whether religious people at the highest level have a better understanding of themselves than people who claim to be atheists and in particular we can ask the question is Mr. Hitchens himself really as great an atheist as he claims?

WOLPE: He’s pretty good. Yeah, he’s pretty good.

ASHBROOK: Mr. Hitchens are you a closet believer?

HITCHENS: No, a point of agreement between the rabbi and myself is that the human species—mammalian, primate, so on, that it undoubtedly is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns—does have a need for, I would say, the transcendent, would be one word, the numinous, even the ecstatic, wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t felt this and it has obviously to do with landscape, light, music, love, and I think also a permanent awareness of the transience of all things and the melancholy that invests all this so that it isn’t just gaping happily at a sunset while listening to music. You’re doing that knowing that it can’t last for very long, very important part of the awareness. People who didn’t have this would, I think, be beyond autistic. But there’s no need for the supernatural in this at all. There’s no supernatural dimension of which this gives you a share. And yes, of course, for poetry and literature we are rather stuck with the pathetic fallacy, if you know what I mean, the pathetic fallacy is giving human attributes to material things, so we’re tempted to do that too.

ASHBROOK: Rabbi, can religions be saved?

HITCHENS: Just on the word “evil” though: I personally find it’s a word you absolutely have to have. I decided this in Iraq, as a matter of fact, after I’d seen the—Saddam Hussein’s attempt with chemicals weapons to destroy the Kurdish people of northern [indecipherable] and seen the, as it were, the stench of evil and I thought there’s something else you can say about Saddam Hussein: psychopathic dictator, mass murderer, genocidalist, “bad guy” as some people used to call him, things of this kind, wasn’t up to it. There was a surplus value to totalitarianism, a sort of a numinous bit, a shimmer around it that meant that “evil” is a word we could not do without.

ASHBROOK: [To Wolpe] Do you see in he who speaks up for the numinous the possibility of belief? Do you smell a potential person of faith in Hitchens or no way [indecipherable]?

WOLPE: I think, no, I mean—to be perfectly honest and not to make a cheap joke about it, I think that Christopher is a person of tremendous, impressive faith. Not the faith that I have at all but faith in justice, faith in goodness, I mean what he’s done with much of his life is, I think, really awe-inspiring. That doesn’t mean for a minute that I think he’s being dishonest about his lack of faith in the things that I believe, but does he have faith in a different sense, absolutely.

ASHBROOK: [To audience] Can we do more? Yes?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Mr. Hitchens, you are likely the world’s most charming, roguish, and enlightened atheist and I love you for that but as a Sufi Muslim I’m very ruffled by the title of your book. Of all the titles you likely had at your disposal did you have to settle for the literal negation of “Allahu akbar”?

HITCHENS: Yes.

ASHBROOK: Thank you for that question. Thank you. It’s a very good question and I’m glad. I wanted to go back to it. Why?

HITCHENS: The—as I said, I think that all religions are wrong in the same way in that they privilege faith over reason but they’re not all equally bad in the same way all the time. I mean if I had been writing in the 1930s I would certainly have said that the Roman Catholic Church was the most dangerous religion in the world because of its open alliance with fascism and anti-Semitism, which—the damage from that our culture has never recovered from and never will but at the moment it’s very clear to me that most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form, the horrible idea of wanting to end up with Sharia, with a religion-governed state (a state of religious law) and that the best means of getting there is jihad (holy war) and that Muslims have a special right to feel aggrieved enough to demand this, I think is absolute obscene wickedness and I think their religion is nonsense and…

ASHBROOK: But the entirety? In its entirety?

HITCHENS: In its entirety. The idea that God speaks to some illiterate merchant warlord in Arabia and he’s able to write this down perfectly and it contains the answers to all human—don’t waste my time, it’s bullshit.

ASHBROOK: But you’re saying the same thing…

HITCHENS: Also that God speaks—the archangel Gabriel speaks only Arabic, it seems, is crap.

WOLPE: [To audience member] I just want to say in retrospect you were very civil, actually. I don’t know what I was thinking.

ASHBROOK: Is this the same characterization of all religions, you think?

HITCHENS: And this is—wait—actually no because remember, Islam makes one very important claim for itself. All religions claim to be revealed truth, that they are all founded by divine revelation, but Islam rather dangerously says, “Ours is the last and final one. There can’t be any more after this. This is God’s last word.” Now that’s straight away a temptation to violence and intolerance and if you note, it’s a temptation they seem quite willing to fall for.

ASHBROOK: Rabbi, do you have any…

HITCHENS: Second, I had another motive, which is this: if you remember Dick Gregory, the older comrades here will, great black comedian and civil rights activist, when he came to write his memoir he called it Nigger.

WOLPE: Right.

HITCHENS: It upset a lot of people, including his old mum who called him and said, “Why are you doing this?” and he says, “Momma, every time you hear that word again, they’re selling my book.” So every “Allahu akbar” reminds people that we’re in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion and that there are…

ASHBROOK: With our—even for our Sufi friend you give no quota?

HITCHENS: Look, he believes in the prophecy of Mohammed, I'm sorry to say I think he’s being at best conned. Yeah.

ASHBROOK: Our time is ticking down. With respect, if I may be the protocol guy, sorry.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: I want to go back to your answer to the question just before this because I think—and particularly I want to interrogate you, Rabbi because you—in your earlier discussion and your answer to a couple of the questions you seem to suggest that if there is something beyond the material that’s evidence for God or it—and then on the question of whether there can be moral behavior, one can have a reason to act morally you say that only, you know, that requires the existence of God, if God doesn’t exist you don’t believe in God, you don’t have reasons to behave morally but then I think in your answer—so I think that’s where it was until your answer to the question before last and at that point you seem to grant that the gentlemen sitting to your left actually did have reasons to act morally even though he does not believe in God…

ASHBROOK: Yes, that’s right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: …and I’m trying to figure out…

WOLPE: I’ll explain. The difference is not whether people in their own minds have compelling reasons to act morally. The question is if you don’t believe in God and you say, “You know what, I’m going to”—why would you do good in secret, as Balzac put it, perhaps only believers in God do good in secret. Now, obviously that’s not true but you understand the ideology behind it which is if you don’t believe that there’s a universal moral code that comes from beyond us and that human beings make up what’s right and what’s wrong why is it that I as a human being can’t decide this is right for me even though I know it’s going to be wrong for anyone else? In other words, the standard that arises only from human beings is easily broken by human beings whereas if you think that goodness is woven into the fabric of the universe, which is what a believer says, then it’s always wrong at all times in all places whether someone’s watching or their not watching, whether you’re a believer or not a believer, that’s always true and that’s the distinction I was trying to get at.

HITCHENS: I was very struck—because this is the core question, so we might as well revisit it. I was very struck this week reading—I’m sure you saw it—the Pope’s brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, who runs the choir school in Regensburg. He’s discovered recently there’s been some unpleasantness at the school of which he was the steward for about twenty or thirty years. He said he didn’t know about any of that and surely claims not to have taken any part in it but he did say he used to smack the boys around quite a lot, he said, until Bavarian law changed and made it illegal for teachers to hit children. Well I don’t want to be told any more that without religious people we wouldn’t know what morality was. He didn’t know this until the secular law intervened and taught him how to behave. Now, wait, wait, wait, what is the whole racket of The Church in this protecting itself from it saying they were all ordered don’t go near the courts, don’t go near the police, we’ll sort this out among ourselves and they say they’re the people who prevent us from succumbing to moral relativism? I’m not hearing it from them. I’m sorry, it’s insulting to be talked to in that way. The great recent governer of this state, Mr. Romney, wants to be president. Ok, there’s a constitutional issue here: Mormons are supposed to say that their prophet, as they call their leader, his word is sovereign over any one else’s, including the Constitution of the United States. So Romney has to say, and finally people did force him to answer the question, “Well, do you think that about your prophet?” He said, “No, the Constitution takes precedence in all cases.” Fine, so to the extent that he’s an acceptable person is to the extent he’s not a Mormon. The discipline of secularism is necessary to civilize these superstitions. I hope very few of you begin your day by thanking God that you’re not a female or a goy, for example.

ASHBROOK: Our time is short, we’re going to swing it around for just a little bit. Yes, back here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: This is for Mr. Wolpe. At the start of your talk you said that this was scientific but you spent the rest of the talk backpedaling from that. But my real question is about free will: you say that you cannot get free will from a deterministic system. I can create the pseudo-random number generatorthat you cannot distinguish from randomness no matter how long you look at it.

WOLPE: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: It’ll take longer than the life of the universe.

WOLPE: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: So where did you get...

WOLPE: That gives you randomness, that doesn’t give give you intentional free will and I never said…

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: But if you use that…

WOLPE: I didn’t say at the beginning, by the way, that my belief was scientific. I said that the system is scientific.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: But if you use that as an output it’s deterministic but it gives you a random result that you can use for free will.

WOLPE: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: Now, where did your deity get free will, if it has it? If it doesn’t have it, it’s not much of a deity. If it does have free will, either it got it itself, why can’t we do it? Or some other deity gave your deity free will, which gives you an infinite regress.

ASHBROOK: This is your last question, I’m afraid.

WOLPE: The answer is that there is no analogy between this deity and between human beings. Just like when someone says, “Who gave birth to God?” that’s a misconceiving of the religious concept of God which is that God has always existed and God isn’t a biological creature, therefore God doesn’t get free will the way human beings get free will. The objection and the problem with human beings getting free will is that if we’re purely biological how does that [indecipherable] chemical free will get into us? And a random generator doesn’t give you free will, even if it gave you random numbers. That’s quite different from actually choosing to do something or to do something else.

ASHBROOK: Who do you think in our society is winning this debate? The atheists, the New Atheists? The religious? Where’s the center of gravity going? And this will be the last question, I’m afraid.

HITCHENS: I think a very large number of people don’t—and I say this based on experience debating in a large number of churches and synagogues—go there for some of the reasons the Rabbi gives: community, Tocquevillian reasons, you might say, American communties, self-help, often they run a school, this kind of thing. They don’t really believe the holy books. They don’t think they have been specially noticed by God or can expect any special favors from Him. But they see, as it were, no harm in it. And there’s a great deal of schism among those who do believe, an enormous amount of schism, so when people say in opinion polls that—or when you read that 90% of American believe in the virgin birth and in Satan and so forth I don’t believe it at all. I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe that people have doubts about it would tell someone who rang them up in their kitchen on the telephone either. I think that underneath this there’s a huge crust of doubt and a great resentment against American theocrats. They—if you want to know how to piss of an American Protestant in the south say, “Are you one of those Jerry Falwell people?” They hate that, rightly.

ASHBROOK: You think you’re winning, then?

HITCHENS: Well no, I think that the supposed religious monolithic nature of America is grossly overstated. It doesn’t describe reality. And it is certainly true, as one of the questioners mentioned, that the number of those who say, not that they’re atheists, we’re still a very small minority, but those who say they have no faith and no allegiance to any church has doubled in the last few years and that’s according to a decent opinion survey, the Pew one, not a random poll.

WOLPE: Right.

ASHBROOK: Rabbi, where do you see the center of gravity?

HITCHENS: And it’ll double again.

ASHBROOK: Toward you? Toward Christopher? Somewhere else?

WOLPE: I’m not—I mean, I don’t have a sociological expertise. I can’t tell you in terms of statistics where it’s going. This is what I would say: I think that there are lots of reasons why organized religion has trouble, many of them have been enumerated by Christopher and there are various other reasons as well but I actually think that the impulse to piety and the sense of something greater than ourselves is deeply implanted in human beings and will never go away and in that sense, although people will find different expressions for their religious belief, I feel quite confident that actually most people will continue to be religious in the sense of believing that in fact life isn’t an empty, howling wilderness the way that Christopher describes it but that there is something deep, lasting, eternal, meaningful about you, about those you love and about the world that we live in.

ASHBROOK: Rabbi David Wolpe, Christopher Hitchens, you’re a great audience, thank you very much.

Hitchens vs. Turek, Virginia Commonwealth University

2010-11-09T17:16:00.028-05:00

Christopher Hitchens vs. Frank Turek: Does God Exist?

September 8, 2008, Virginia Commonwealth University

[Introduction by Dean Timothy Hulsey]

TUREK: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

AUDIENCE: Good evening.

TUREK: My name is Frank Turek. Before I get started let me ask you this: how many of you have heard me before or this is your first time? How many of you are here tonight? How many do not respond to surveys? [To Hulsey] 3 out of 10 don’t respond to surveys, Dean. This is my first formal debate so give me a little grace if I can’t cram everything I want to say into 20 minutes. I will say, however, I’ve had many informal debates, most of them with my wife and I have not fared very well there. I will say, however, that she is probably the perfect sparring partner for Christopher Hitchens because her nickname at our house is Nails and Nails is the type of woman that if she ain’t happy, ain’t nobody in the house happy so hopefully I’m prepared for a very formidable opponent in Christopher Hitchens and I do want to say that I very much like Christopher Hitchens. I’ve been following him for many years. I’m kind of a political junkie so I’ve seen him around quite a bit and I appreciate his charm and his wit and I agree with him on a lot of things, obviously not the issue of God, that would make a very boring debate. But I will say that I went up to Christopher just about a half hour ago and I shook his hand and I said, "Christopher, I’m actually a fan,” and he smiled and he said, “The night is young.” I want to thank The United Secular Alliance. I want to thank Daniel Pendergrast. Where’s Daniel, are you here Daniel? He was my contact here. I also want to thank Dean Timothy Hulsey and I also want to thank, of course, Christopher for doing this debate. I think it’s impossible not to like Christopher and as I mentioned I do. He’s carrying the cross for atheism and he carries it very well. Tonight I’m going to carry the cross for theism and I want to point out that I think we’re both trying to explain the world around us. We both have the burden of proof to explain why reality is the way it is. I have to show how reality is best explained by theism and Christopher has to explain why reality is best explained by atheism and I think we should follow the evidence where it leads. I think that the evidence we see all around us and within us leads to a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, personal, powerful, intelligent, moral creator (i.e. what we would call a theistic god). And this creator created this universe and the life within us—or the life within it I should say. Now I’m going to try and summarize my 450-page book, at least the first 200 pages of it, in the next 20 minutes (or next 18 minutes at this point now) and that is an impossible task. That would be about 20 pages a minute. Actually, probably I can do it because I’m originally from New Jersey. See, I speak at 150 words a minute with gusts to 350, so if I go a little quick and you want to see more of the evidence please get the book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and I want to point out that all the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to feed needy children; mine, ok? See, I’ve got three sons. The oldest two are in college right now so I need a little help and one of them is sitting right over here. Alright, Christopher, on page 282 of god is Not Great, available at fine bookstores everywhere, says this: “Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.” I think that is exactly wrong. I think due to the telescope and the microscope, we are seeing evidence that leads directly to God. I’m going to give you three major arguments for this and then I’m going to give you four more that are a result, I think, of a theistic world view. I’m going to spend most of my time on the three and then I’ll just mention the last four. The three are: the cosmological argument from the beginning of the universe, the next one is the teleological argument from the design of the universe and the design of life and the third is the moral argument. Let’s start with the cosmological argument, and this is basically the argument from the Big Bang, that the universe had a beginning. If it had a beginning, it must have had a beginner. Now, for some reasons Christians are afraid of the Big Bang. I’m not afraid of the Big Bang, I believe in the Big Bang. I just think I know who banged it. Now, the evidence for the Big Bang is good. I’m going to give you evidence in an acronym: SURGE. S, U, R, G, E. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it because even Christopher, in his book on page 65, says, “The Big Bang is the accepted origin of the universe.” S stands for the second law of thermodynamics, that the universe is running down. As that sun is up there, it is burning out. Ultimately we will go to heat death, as Christopher has said in his book, “Well, if the universe is eternal, that sun would’ve burned out a long time ago but since the sun is still up there and we still have energy here, the universe must have had a beginning.” The second law of thermodynamics also says that ordered things go towards disorder. It affects this school. We have to paint the walls. We have to put gas in our car. The second law of thermodynamics also affects us as human beings. When you get older, the second law of thermodynamics is seen by the fact that we all get dresser disease (that’s when our chest falls into our drawers, see?). That’s the second law of thermodynamics. The U in SURGE is the fact that the universe is expanding, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. Hubble deduced that if the universe is expanding, if you watched everything in reverse, you would see it collapse back to a point mathematically and logically to nothing. So the universe exploded into being out of nothing. The G stands for the great galaxy—I'm sorry, the R stands for the radiation echo, discovered by accident by Penzias and Wilson, two scientists working at Bell labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. They discovered basically the radiation afterglow or the remnant heat from the initial Big Bang explosion. The heat is still out there, it’s just a couple of degree above absolute zero. Now good theories predict future discoveries and they said if the radiation afterglow was out there and the Big Bang really did occur, we ought to find very fine temperature variations among the radiation afterglow so they sent up a satellite in 1989 to circle the earth, it’s called the COBE space satellite to measure this radiation afterglow and for three years they found nothing until they tuned their instruments just a little bit more precisely and found that there were temperature variations in the radiation afterglow and they were down to one part in 100,000. George Smoot, the leader of the expedition said, “If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.” Stephen Hawking said this is the greatest discovery of cosmology, perhaps the greatest discovery of all time. Those temperature variations allowed galaxies to ultimately form so we could ultimately be here. The E in SURGE stands for Einstein’s theory of general relativity which says time, space, and matter are co-relative. You can’t have space without time, you can’t have time without space and matter and in effect it says that the universe came into existence with space and time together. In other words, once there was no time, once there was no space, once there was no matter and then bang, out of nothing the universe exploded into being. What is nothing? Aristotle had a good definition of nothing. He said, “Nothing is what rocks dream about.” Nothing. There was no thing. There was not positive and negative energy, as Isaac Asimov has said. There was not a vacuum. There was not swirling mathematical points at Dr. Atkins has said from Oxford. There was nothing, what rocks dream about. Which means that the universe exploded into being, all space, all matter, all time out of nothing and several scientists have pointed this out. Stephen Hawking said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang. Agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow, the man who sits in Edwin Hubble’s chair (or who did until February when he died) he was an agnostic. He sat at Mount Wilson and looked through Hubble’s telescope. He wrote a book in 1978 called God and the Astronomers and here’s what Jastrow wrote, or here’s what he said, actually, in an interview. He said, “Astronomers now have found they’ve painted themselves into a corner because they have proven by their own methods that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth and they have found that all this has happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I and anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact. Why is an agnostic astronomer saying supernatural forces at work? Why couldn’t nature have created the universe? Because there was no nature, there was nothing, what rocks dream about and then the entire space-time continuum leapt into existence. If it’s not a natural cause, by definition it must be a supernatural cause, something beyond the natural. In fact, Arthur Eddington, the contemporary of Einstein who was an expert in general relativity, said, “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.” So the cosmological argument leaves us with one question: either no one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing. The atheistic view is no one created something out of nothing. The theistic view is someone created something out of nothing. Which view is more reasonable? I think Julie Andrews had it right: nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could. That’s the cosmological argument. The teleological argument: the design argument actually had two arguments contained within it. It is the argument from design and there are dozens of factors about the universe that are precisely designed for the existence of the universe and life. So not only did the universe explode into being out of nothing, it did so with incredible precision. Stephen Hawking has noted that the universe would not exist if there was a decrease in the expansion rate one second after the Big Bang by only one part in one hundred thousand million million.” This lead Hawking to conclude, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as an act of God who intended to create beings like us. Not only is it designed in terms of its expansion but the gravitational force is so precise if you change the gravitational force by one part in ten to the forty, nothing would exist. What's one part in ten to the forty? Stretch a tape measure across the entire known universe. Set gravity at one inch anywhere on that tape measure. If you move gravity—the force of gravity one inch in either direction, we don’t exist. There’s also factors about our universe and particularly our solar system that cannot be explained unless there is a designer behind it. For example, the earth rotation, 24 hours just right. If it was a little bit more or a little bit less we wouldn’t be here. The axial tilt, 23 and ½ degrees, just right. Change that and we’re not here. The—Jupiter being in its current orbit. If Jupiter wasn’t there, we’d be bombarded with space material. Why? Because Jupiter acts as a cosmic vacuum cleaner, it attracts all of the cosmic space junk to it rather than us. There are a number of factors I don’t have time to get into, but Arno Penzias, the man who codiscovered the R in SURGE (the radiation afterglow) said this: “Astronomy leads us to a unique event: a universe which was created out of nothing one with the 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.” A friend of Christopher, atheist Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist, put it this way: “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values. So not only is the universe precisely tweaked—and by the way, there would be no life unless the universe was precisely finely tuned, as I just mentioned, but life itself is designed. Let me take you to your breakfast table for just a second. Suppose you wanted to have a bowl of alphabet cereal. You’re a teenager and you come downstairs and have a bowl of alphabet cereal and you see the alphabet cereal’s knocked over and the letters from the alphabet cereal are spelled out on the placemat and it spells, “Take out the garbage, mom.” What are you going to assume, cat knocked the box over? Earthquake shook the house? Or are you going to say, “No, that’s intelligent design from an intelligent being.” Or let’s say you’re laying out on the beach and you see in the clouds, “Drink Coke.” What are you going to assume, unusual cloud formation? No, you’re going to say there has to be a sky writer up there, even if you didn’t see him. Why? Because messages only come from minds. Well it turns out there’s a message in all life called DNA, we all know about it. All life has a message. I have DNA, you have DNA, a banana has DNA. In Darwin’s day it was not known how incredibly complex simple—so called simple life is. And they thought that maybe simple life could come together without intelligent intervention and ultimately natural selection could take over. It’s the theory of macroevolution, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, from the goo to you, via the zoo. From the infantile to the reptile to the crocodile to the gentile, that’s the theory of macroevolution. The problem is is that now we know that this intelligent life couldn’t have come together by natural laws because we now know that the simplest life has the amount of specified complexity or information in it, in terms of DNA, of a thousand complete sets of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Now, who’s that according to? Not a Christian, not a theist, that’s according to Richard Dawkins, from his book Blind Watchmaker, I think it’s page 116. Now to believe that that resulted by natural law is like believing that the Library of Congress resulted from an explosion in a printing shop. See, I don’t have enough faith to believe that. So life appears to be designed. In fact, Antony Flew, who was a atheist, a very prominent atheist, but recently became a theist, or at least a deist as a result of this evidence said, “It is impossible for evolution to account for the fact that one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica put together. It now seems to me that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument from design." How am I doing on time, Dean? Five minutes, ok thank you. Design is so prevalent that even people like Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA, Sir Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “Big Bang” in a derisive way, are now, or were, proponents of panspermia, seeds everywhere, in other words, that life got deposited here by aliens, which is just kind of a backhanded way of saying that there’s no way we know how life came by natural causes here. There must be aliens out there that brought it here, which, of course, just puts the question off one more step: where did the aliens come from, right? There’s a lot more on the design argument but I’m running out of time here. Let me just give you one quote from Chandra Wickramasinghe who is a student of Sir Fred Hoyle. He said, “The emergence of life from a primordial soup on earth is merely an article of faith.” Sir Fred Hoyle said, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggest that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” So cosmological argument, teleological argument, now let’s move on to the moral argument. If there is no God you can’t say that decapitating a man on a bus is objectively morally wrong. That’s just your opinion. As Dostoyevsky said, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Now I want to be very clear here: I’m not saying that atheists can’t know morality, they do. I’m not saying that atheists can’t be moral, they can. I’m not saying that believing in God makes you more moral. As Christopher has pointed out and, as I say, I agree with much of what he writes here, I’m not saying that religious people are necessarily better than atheists. That’s not the argument. The argument is is that there’s no way to say that a given act is moral or immoral unless there’s a standard beyond humanity. It’s not just my opinion, it’s not just Christopher’s opinion or Mother Teresa’s or Hitler’s, there is a standard beyond everybody that defines what is right. That standard is God’s very nature. Since objective moral laws exist, there must be an objective moral law giver. You say, “No, there doesn’t need to be any moral law giver.” If there’s a prescription there must be a prescriber. If you go to the pharmacist and you say, “Here, I’d like you to fill this prescription,” and the pharmacist says, “Who prescribed it?” and you go, “Nobody,” are you going to get your prescription? No. Now, again, there’s a lot more on the moral argument, maybe we can talk about it a little bit during the Q & A, but what can learn from these three arguments for God? We can learn from the cosmological argument that this being must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. Why? Because it created space, time, and material. It must also be powerful. Why? Because it created out of nothing. Must be personal, why? Because you can’t go from a state of non-existence to a state of existence without making a choice and only personal beings make choices. Impersonal forces do not. It must be intelligent. Why? Because it created in such a highly-designed, razor’s edge way. It must be moral. Why? Due to the moral argument. And of course, it must be a creator. These attributes are the attributes of what the Bible would call “God.” Let me sum up what agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow said after going through evidence like this. He said, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason,” and remember, he’s the agnostic, “the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mounts of ignorance, he’s about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he’s greeted by a band of theologians who’ve been sitting there for centuries.” [To Hulsey] Two more minutes? Take three, thank you sir. Those are the three main arguments. Now I’d like to say there’s four additional truths about the universe that are better explained by theism than by atheism. First of all, reason and the laws of logic. Christopher’s a self-described materialist but if atheism is true we have no grounds to know it because reason and thoughts are just chemical reactions in the brain. How can you have—even Einstein believed this. Einstein was a determinist. How can you trust what Christopher says if it’s just chemical reactions going on in his brain and chemical reactions in our brain? See, chemical don’t reason, they react. Now, I’m not saying there’s no connection between our thinking and chemicals, there is, but if it’s nothing but chemicals, how can we trust them? Even Darwin recognized this, it’s called Darwin’s doubt. He said, “If we are just the product materially of primates, why should I even trust anything, much less my theory of natural selection?” The next major reason is the laws of mathematics. Science depends on the notion that the universe is rational and mathematical at all levels. But how does rationality and mathematics arise from randomness? How do they come from matter? Rationality and mathematics are the product of mind, not matter. So you’ve got reason and the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, and, number seven (or, seven in my list here, three in the addition) human freedom and the ability to make choices. Christopher is somebody who is very concerned about human freedom as I am, but again, if we are just molecules in motion, how do we have human freedom? William Provine from Cornell, he’s a materialist, a Darwinist, he points out that we don’t have any human freedom if all we are is molecules in motion. Now, Christopher ought not scold anybody for being a snake-handling, Bible-thumping, funny mentalist preacher because according to his own world view, that person is that way because these are just chemicals going on in his brain. Neither could you say that Hitler had done anything wrong if it’s just chemicals going on in his brain. I mean, what is the murder molecule? How much does justice weigh? These are questions that have no answer in a materialistic world view, but that is Christopher’s world view. It seems to me that it makes much more sense to say that reason and laws of logic and mathematics and human freedom come from a great mind that granted us these immaterial realities. The final argument is consciousness. Do you know that a heap of sand and a human brain have the same elements? Why are some carbon-based molecules conscious and some are not? Materialists have no answer for this. Daniel Dennett, another person who would agree with Christopher on many things, he’s a materialist, says that consciousness is an illusion because he’s a materialist. You’re not really witnessing this right now, it's just an illusion. Now one wonders if he was conscious when he wrote this. But again, there is no explanation for this in an atheistic world view. Now I have a couple other arguments on the bench but I don’t have time to get to them. Let me sum up in one minute. We need to take all of this data into context, not just one argument but all of them. What is the best explanation? Christopher has to explain these eight truths about the universe from an atheistic perspective. He must explain how the universe arose from nothing, how extreme fine-tuning and design arose from chaos, how life arose from non-life, how morality arose from materials, how reason and the laws of logic arose from matter, how mind arose from mud, how mathematics arose from molecules, how human freedom arose from blind repetitive forces and how consciousness arose from chemicals. If he can’t give evidence to explain these truths about reality from an atheistic perspective, if he’s just going to state unsupported speculative possibilities that rely on faith, then I think theism is a more reasonable world view. Thank you for your attention, I appreciate it.

HULSEY: Thank you, Dr. Turek. We’ll now have 20 minutes from Mr. Hitchens in his opening statement.

HITCHENS: 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 Virginia 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 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 I—sometimes I’m forced by my daughter to watch Family Guy because you may have possibly 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 he says, "Look at this, it say oo-oo-oo-oo-oo," 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 believe in it. There are people of whom it may be said that for them God does exist, I’ve become perfectly persuaded to this by now. There is no form of persuasion that would make me ascent to this proposition. Some of us are born—we’re born, too—in an answer to Blaise Pascal’s own problem, the one that made him write his Pens&eecute;es 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. 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, one of 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 of Rome, the Church of England, announced 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 with which 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’re morally superior to us. Reason, common sense, decency, ordinary decency rebels against this kind of mind-forged manacle, how ever charmingly or humorously it’s expressed. But hell exists in the minds of several people I’ve spoken to just today on this campus in the intervals of other conversations. For them it’s real, and I don’t say that it’s not. 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 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 used to say they were infallible. Say—just take the last the 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 if there’s 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.) 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 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 that 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. 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’re 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 noticed it was by a slight work of elision, 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 Menken—H.L. Menken lists the easiest-to-name 3,000 gods that used to be worshiped and are no longer accepted to exist by anybody. You’ll spare me the trouble of reading them out. 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 no 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. Now, the same tap dancing hopes you will not notice deism and theism are 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 and his natural theology said design implies a designer. He came up with that very famous image of the watch. If you come across a 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 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 theist—I’m so sorry, was a deist, was a deist. He would debate—among the many skills he had was a very advanced level of paleontology. He would debate with the greatest paleontologists of his time, the Compte de Buffon. How comes it—how can it be that we find sea shells so high on the mountains in 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 and literate people just couldn’t see that far. He wasn’t to know that 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, in my judgment, the greater of the two.) 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’s 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, 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 say to use images of awe-inspiring, godly, Mozartean, you might say or even Shakespearean images when talking about these things but when we come to the actually 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 deist may propose a designer and I may not be able to show you convincingly that there may not be such a 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 cannot and the attempt to build from one to the other is a conjuring trick of a very vulgar, I think, kind. 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 better ask now how I’m doing for time. Good, 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 now and then with some sort kind 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? Let me put the question in another form than I’ve put it in now. Every forum from Youtube to C-Span to the wireless to the print to the radio to the television and in 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 dare say 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, you have all 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 or moral statement that a believe can make and a non-believer 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 and absolutely indefensible thing to say. No, the decapitation on the bus is going to be done by someone who thinks God is telling him to do it. Smerdyakov is actually the stupidest character in Dostoyevksy’s novel and 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 though those who are the leading, the most salient, most violent and vicious opponents that the values and civilization that Thomas Jefferson stood for and promulgated. 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 for—has noticed that most peoples’ assumption was wrong, that though this expansion was taking place, it was thought, the rate of speed of expansion must surely be declining. People still think in Newtonian terms in this way. No, says Krauss. He’s pointed out and now it’s agreed by all. No, the Hubble rate of the 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? But these are just the paltering, minor objections that I have to the theistic world view. 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 molecular irrelevance, all these question that must disturb and detain us all) can be solves by referring them upward to a totalitarian judgment, to an absolutist monarch (the other thing that the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom was supposed to rebut, repudiate, disown).

HULSEY: Yes.

HITCHENS: [To Hulsey] 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—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 it 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.

HULSEY: Thank you Mr. Hitchens. We now have five minutes of rebuttal from Dr. Turek.

TUREK: In fairness to Christopher, that statement—obviously was his opening statement—was not meant to rebut my statement but now my statement is to rebut his and I want to point out that most of what Christopher just said there is pretty much complaints about religion and religious people and has no impact on whether or not God exists. Religious people can be the worst people that ever lived. That says nothing about whether or not God exists. People can do evil, that doesn’t mean the parents don’t exist. Children can do evil, it doesn’t mean the parents don’t exist. My kids do evil but I’m still here. I do evil, my dad’s still here [gesturing towards the audience] in fact, he’s sitting right there. What does that prove whether or not God exists? Let me try and go down some of the things Christopher said. Yes, I am an atheist when it comes to Zeus but Zeus is not spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, moral, personal, intelligent creator that I hopefully, at least I thought I gave evidence for and maybe Christopher will come back to my statements on that later. I don’t believe in Zeus because I don’t think there’s any evidence for Zeus but I think there’s evidence for the theistic God. Deism—I didn’t make the direct shift to theism, I probably should’ve been more explicit. I think it’s obvious there’s a theistic God because life came several billion years after the creation. That is not a deistic concept, that is a theistic concept. I didn’t say anything about Christianity. Even though I am a Christian, I don’t have time to defend Christianity here. I’d love to debate Christopher on the issue of Christianity in the future and I’ll publicly offer that right now. If he wants to debate whether or not the New Testament documents are reliable and tell us really what happened, what Jesus came and said and did, I’d be happy to do it. But when I mentioned before I have a couple arguments on the bench—I’ve got almost a full baseball team of arguments here. I’ve got a couple arguments on the bench—it’s the resurrection is one of them and I don’t have time to get to that here, so I’m not backing up the Christian God here, I’m backing up a theistic God even though personally I do believe in a Christian god. He claimed Darwin was the great emancipator and that—he went on to talk about atrocities and I think he, again, missed my point. As I said before I’m not saying atheists can’t be moral. Christopher, what he says in his book, again, much of it is true. Religious people have done awful things. In fact, Christianity predicts we’ll be hypocrites. That’s what The Church is, it’s full of hypocrites. Whenever anybody says, “I don’t want to go to church, there are too many hypocrites down there,” I always say, “Come on down pal, we got room for one more.” That’s what The Church is, we’re all fallen, we’re all sinners, that’s why we need a savior because we can’t do and Christopher said, “Well, how can you command somebody to be well when they have no capacity to be well?” Well, we were well in the beginning and—I’m going into Christian theology here, I understand, I’ll just try and answer the point—we were well in the beginning but then we messed up so God, the great physician, came back to save us. That’s Christian theology. Again, I don’t have time to support it, I’m just pointing out that is the theology. Now Christopher talked about atrocities, but again, on the atheistic world view—here’s the main point—how do you define what an atrocity is? Who defines it? Who has the authority to define what an atrocity is? The carbon atom? The benzene molecule? I’m not saying you have to believe in God to be moral. I’m not saying that only religious people are moral. I’m not saying atheists can’t be moral. I’m not saying atheists don’t know morality. I’m saying there’s no way to justify what is right and what is wrong unless there's some authority that provides it. What is the authority? In a materialistic world view there is no authority. The carbon atom has no moral authority over you. And it seems that Christopher goes on and on about how he does not want to be under any some kind of divine totalitarianism. That is a moral rejection of God. Where does he come up with this immoral totalitarianism? His world view does not afford immorality because his world view does not afford morality. He has to borrow from the Christian world view in order to argue against it. In fact, he has to sit in God’s lap to slap His face. Where does he get morality from? Where does he get reason from? Where does he get mathematics from? Where does he get consciousness from? Where does the universe—he said there are explanations for where the universe came from, atheistic. I’d love to hear them. I haven’t heard one yet. How does something come from nothing with extreme fine tuning? What is the explanation for that? He said there are arguments for the beginning of life that are naturalistic. Not according to the people who are studying the matter. How about Francis Crick? If I could find his quote here...Francis Crick said, “Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one because there’s too much speculation running after too few facts. Marc Kirschner of Harvard and John C Gerhart of Berkeley said, “Everything about evolution before the bacteria-like life forms is sheer conjecture.” Biochemist Klaus Dose admits that after almost 30 years of research into the origin of life has led to “a better perception of immensity of the problem of the origin of life on earth rather than its solution. At present, all the discussions on the principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.” Now I’m not saying that this is a default position, that it must be God. I’m not saying that I just lack a natural explanation for the origin of life. I’m saying that specified complexity, information, the DNA structure that we all have is evidence for an intelligent being. Because information only comes from minds. The laws of ink and paper did not create god is Not Great. There was a mind behind it that brought it into existence. And there’s a mind behind DNA. What is the atheistic explanation for DNA? What is the atheistic explanation for information? What is the atheistic explanation for all of these nine things I mentioned? [To Hulsey] How much time to I have? I have none. Survey said, “Sit down.” [To Hitchens] Yes, sir.

HITCHENS: Well I think I’ll just invite Dr. Turek to do the following: make available to us on a sheet of paper, which I’m sure he has, the thesaurus of quotations that he’s found from this and that, scientists and physicists and natural scientists and so forth, and you’ll find when you read them, when you look at them—I was writing them down as he went through them—all of these are statements of uncertainty. All of them. They’re statements of all we know is how little we know. That’s been, for many years, my definition of an educated person, someone who knows enough to know how ignorant they are. It’s actually is the only—it’s not my own original definition, it comes from the Greek, but it’s the only definition that works and no one working and toiling in the field of science could possibly say anything less or more of themselves, especially at a time like this, but, there you have it right away. The theistic and deistic explanation has to be based on a certainty that there is a supervising and, if you want to be a theist, a caring and intervening creator who manages these matters and there hasn’t been a single sentence so far from Dr. Turek in support of that proposition. Let me give you an example. If you—do you—the event horizon of Stephen Hawking that I just mentioned—I’ll take the cosmological one, just to begin with—the event horizon is the lip of the black hole. It’s where the—suppose you could travel towards a black hole and see it and see the lip of it and notice it before you went in and over and down, that’s what’s known as the event horizon if it exists. Hawking had a gravely ill colleague in Cambridge who said if he knew he was definitely going to die, that’s the way he’d like to go, falling into the event horizon lip of the black hole because in theory you’d be able to see the past and the future and time, except you wouldn’t have quite enough “time” to do so. But, that would be a grand way to check out if you were a physicist. “Turn away from this,” says the—”turn away from that—these incredible, majestic, awe-inspiring thoughts,” say the theists. “Think about the burning bush instead. Think about the trivial miracles witnessed by sheep herding peasants in Bronze Age Palestine and think about the death that they feel that we should incur for their sins.” It was stated by Dr. Turek that the sins of these people, the transgressions of these people and the debt they owe their creator bind all of us as sinners. What a shame we’re not perfect. What a shame there’s nothing we can do about it. What a shame we’re created already in prison and have to earn our emancipation. I tell you again, this is servility to the ultimate power. Now, there are people in this audience much better equipped than I to say that there is so far nothing in our natural world—to move away from the cosmological—there is nothing in our natural world, the globe we live on, that cannot be explained by random mutation combined with evolution by natural selection. Nothing works without that assumption. Everything works with it. There are lots of things that remain to be decided. But it’s not a theory, or not just one. It does work, it is operational. It does not require a prime mover. Ockham’s razor says we should dispose of unnecessary, needless assumptions and that’s what I propose we do in this case. I’ll put it another way: how long would you say Homo sapiens has been on the planet? Francis—not Crick, excuse me, the author of the—[To Hulsey and Turek] the supervisor of the human genome project…

TUREK: Collins.

HITCHENS: …Collins, my new best friend and occasional debating enemy, thinks not more than half a million years. Richard Dawkins thinks it could be as much as three quarters of a million. I can sink the number actually, if you like. We know that we left—the species left Africa about 75,000 years ago, having probably shrunk down to about two or three thousand people as a result of a terrible climactic disturbance, probably from Indonesia, probably from a predecessor of Krakatoa, which meant that we were this close to joining the 99.8% of all species every living on the surface of this planet who became extinct. Some design, by the way. Profuse creation of millions and millions and millions of life forms all to be wiped out with not even anyone to testify to their previous existence. We nearly joined that lot, managed to get out of it just in time. Let’s call it—I don't want Francis’ million or half a million or Richard Dawkins’ 75,000, whichever way—just give me that amount of time. Suppose we’ve only been around for 75,000 years. Monotheism (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) shows up, what, four or five thousand years ago at the most. So if you give me my most microscopically small assumption of human existence, for at least 70,000 years heaven watches as the human species is born, dies, usually of its teeth, usually at about 20, usually its infants having about a 9, 10, 2% chance of living. You can—I don’t have to draw you a picture—watches this with indifference. Thousands and thousands of generations, miserable, illiterate, starving, hungry. To say nothing of the wars they’ll fight with each other, to say nothing of the cruelties they will inflict as well as the ones they will suffer just from existence and only three or four, perhaps five thousand years ago heaven decides it's enough of that, it’s time for an intervention, and the best way to do it would be in the most primitive part of the Middle East. Not in China where people can read and have looked at telescopes. No, in the most primitive part of the Middle East basically by offering human sacrifice to them. This is a doctrine that cannot be believed by anyone who studied anything scientific, anything historical, anything archaeological, anything paleological, anything biological. No, can’t be believed by anyone. It can be only be believed by someone who wants to be a play thing and a slave of a pitiless, totalitarian power. How glad we should be that the evidence for this ghastly entity is nil. Good. Thanks.

HULSEY: I’m going to stay out of the way and let them ask questions of each other and the way that we’ve scheduled is a minute to ask and five to answer. We’ll try to stay to that.

HITCHENS: That’s very generous.

HULSEY: If you, Dr. Turek, would like to go first since you had already posed some questions to Mr. Hitchens. We will start there.

HITCHENS: How many times do we do that?

HULSEY: Three times, so you get three a piece.

HITCHENS: Wouldn’t—could I just propose, unless you really have three that you’re dying to—I don’t have three I’m trying to duck, but that seems a long time for the audience to have to wait, it seems to me. Could we do two, maybe, and get to their questions?

TUREK: I have six.

HITCHENS: You have six? I’m your witness then.

HULSEY: So three was right. Dr. Turek?

HITCHENS: Ok.

TUREK: Christopher, what is your explanation for the beginning of time, space, and matter out of nothing?

HITCHENS: Well, we don’t know—I remember being asked by one of my children once when they said, “Well, what was there at the Big Bang?” and I said, “Well you have to imagine,”—this shows how poverty-stricken our own vocabulary is and I suspect how poverty-stricken our own capacity is. In other words, I think there are some things not that we don’t understand or know but that we cannot so we’re reduced to sort of primitive images—but I said, “Suppose you picture all of matter, the whole matter, condensed into”—I got this from Hawking, I think, or one of his colleagues—”condensed into something like a very small, dense, black suitcase of the kind you see people carrying money in crime films and it’s about to fly open. That’s what you’d have to be able to—and everything that’s ever going to be is inside that.” That was the best I could do and I don’t think many people could do, if I do say so myself, that much better. But I was completely unhorsed because the kid said, “Well, what was outside the suitcase?” and I thought well, I can’t—I can’t do that and I don’t know anyone who can. And that, in a way, would be my whole point. I don’t have to know, you do. You’re the one who says you know, not me.

TUREK: Is it…

HITCHENS: The theist or the deist say, “Oh, come one, we know this is only possible with an author. It’s only possible with a creator. It’s only possible with a master and commander. It’s only possibly with a dictator.” You’re welcome, I don’t need five minutes.

TUREK: Is it fair to say, though, that if the creation was out of nothing, and that’s the common view today, that the being that brought it into existence—the cause, whatever it was…

HITCHENS: Don’t say being. What ground do you have to say being?

TUREK: Because to go from a state of non-existence to a state of existence you need to make a choice.

HITCHENS: No you don’t.

TUREK: You don’t?

HITCHENS: No you do not.

TUREK: How does something…

HITCHENS: Where are you getting this choice from?

TUREK: The choice—how does a—first of all, there was no nature, there was nothing. So if there was nothing, how do you get something from nothing without a cause?

HITCHENS: How do you get—I can answer the same question in the way I did before—how do you get so much nothing from something? You look into the night sky if you’re in, say, the Carmel peninsula—you can’t do it from many parts of Virginia now, but you are in certain parts of California, as I was just recently—you can look into the night sky and see the universe is blowing up and bursting into flames every night of the week, several times. They had something and it’s all nothing now. Who’s the author of that? Who mandated that? Who’s the creator of that? Who’s the dictator who demands that sacrifice?

TUREK: The fact that things…

HITCHENS: You’re making a rod for your own back here.

TUREK: No, the facts that things go out of existence, Christopher, doesn’t mean that they’re not designed. The typewriter is out of existence right now, thankfully. But the typewriter's designed. So the fact that the universe is going to heat death doesn’t mean that it didn’t have a designer at the beginning and, of course, religious people believe that somebody’s going to intervene to stop it before it does go. And even if…

HITCHENS: Oh, they do?

TUREK: Even if it doesn’t…

HITCHENS: Wait, wait, wait, wait…

TUREK: Even if no—hold on…

HITCHENS: Sorry…

TUREK: Even if nobody intervenes, it [inaudible] goes to heat death.

HITCHENS: Do the religious among you—excuse me—did the religious among you, ladies and gentlemen, to understand, I did not, that there will be an intervention to make an exception in our case, that this will not happen to our cosmos, that God will prevent the heat death of...?

TUREK: That’s the Christian view, and it's [inaudible]...

HITCHENS: I had no idea. I had no idea. It’s...

TUREK: A new heaven and a new earth will be created. Genesis is paradise lost, Revelation is paradise restored.

HITCHENS: Have it your way. It sounds fatuous to me, I’ve got to say.

TUREK: Again, how do you get something from nothing?

HITCHENS: You—I’m not the one who has to answer the question. Excuse me, you’re the one who has to answer it. You’re the one who claims to know. You say there was a creation moment and a creator. I want to know why you’re changing the subject...

TUREK: I'm not changing the subject...

HITCHENS: ...and saying to me how do I not know this when you’re the one who has all the information.

TUREK: Information...

HITCHENS: I also want to know—no, I also want to know this: I want to know what sources you have that are not available to me. How do you know that an intervention will occur to prevent the entropy and implosion and destruction of our solar system?

TUREK: If you want to go to our second debate I’ll provide that.

HITCHENS: Well it’s...

TUREK: But what I’m saying...

HITCHENS: Is this an artificial separation?

TUREK: Let’s say there’s no intervention, we go to heat death. Does that mean the universe was not created and not designed?

HITCHENS: It doesn’t entail that belief, no. But it makes it...

TUREK: Ok, so what’s your point?

HITCHENS: It makes it seem a very capricious designer. Shall we say—rather, as I said, it’s an old verse of Fulke Greville's: "Created sick, commanded to be well." Why would people be told, “Ok, I can create you but I’m going to create you with original sin, misery, shame, death of children, disease and so on, just to see if you can pass a test that would mean I might not send you to hell. I don’t say that that didn’t happen. I say that I’m very glad that the evidence for it is very scanty. And I accuse those of who do believe it, and I can’t have been surely misunderstood on this point, of having—harboring a very sinister desire to live in a totalitarian system.

TUREK: How do you define sinister?

HULSEY: Let get—let’s—Mr. Hitchens...

HITCHENS: The desire to be a slave.

TUREK: Is that...

HITCHENS: Masochism.

TUREK: Is that chemicals in your brain...

HITCHENS: I regard masochism...

TUREK: ...or is there something beyond you that...

HITCHENS: I’ll say that I think masochism is a sinister and creepy impulse, yes.

HULSEY: Mr. Hitchens...

[Interlude where Hulsey sees to it that Dr. Turek’s microphone is turned up]

HULSEY: Mr. Hitchens, a question for Dr. Turek.

HITCHENS: Alright. I won’t take a minute to ask. In the—I don’t just support and try and help out those who dissent from the ridiculous belief of Christianity, the horrible idea of vicarious redemption. In other words, the idea that by watching another person suffer, an innocent person suffer, that you could be freed, not just from your debts or your sins, but your responsibilities. You could cast your sins on a scapegoat. I don’t just oppose that disgusting belief, I oppose it for the Judaism from which it’s plagiarized and the Islam that plagiarizes from it and I give publicity and exposure whenever I can to those who were brave enough in old times to oppose this nightmarish belief. And one of the great opponents of the Islamic totalitarianism in ancient Persia was the great Omar Khayyam, perhaps the greatest poet of all Persia, whose Rubaiyat is known at least to some of you and my favorite verse of this comes from the Robert [Bagalian] translation and it takes the form of a question—the quatrain is in the form of a question. It says, “And do you think that onto such as you, a maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew, God gave a secret and denied it me? Well, well, what matters it? Believe that too.” This magnificent astronomer and scientist and physician and humanist of Persia who opposed the cruel, sadistic, verminous, ignorant Mullahs of his day, I borrow the question: what is your authority for saying that you know something that I don’t?

TUREK: Christopher, I’m giving a probability argument. As you said before, you can’t disprove the existence of God. And you can’t prove beyond any doubt that there's a God. I’m giving probability. I’m giving cosmological, teleological, moral, consciousness, reason, mathematics, all of those things I listed before. It’s open, the evidence is open to everybody and this is related to your 70,000 years point that you just made there. From a Christian perspective, God has always had a revelation, even before Christ. It talks about the fact that God has always had a witness. There's three witnesses. There is creation; everyone has creation. There’s conscience; everyone has conscience and there’s Christ. Now Christ, it’s true, only came 2,000 years ago but His...

HITCHENS: And has to come again.

TUREK: ...sacrifice of aontement—excuse me—His sacrifice of atonement is retroactive to everybody who lived before Him. So He’s always had a witness.

HITCHENS: How convenient.

TUREK: It is quite convenient and that is the very nature of God, you’re absolutely correct.

HITCHENS: Well, I got him to say it. You see, if we were only discussing ontological questions that would be all very well and it could be quite amusing. I could say that you require a higher degree of standard of proof for your proposition than I perhaps do for mine and you'd probably accept that, and so forth, and we could go back and forth. We’d be paltering again with the essence of the matter which is this: that the difference between the theist and the deist is as follows: the deist says it make not make some kind of sense without a designer. The theist says, “When I tell you what to do, Christopher, I have God on my side.” The deist says he can tell what God wants of me, what length I should shave off the end of my penis, if I’m a boy or have a male child, or off the clitoris if it’s a female child. He knows to the exactitude what the proportions of that should be, what the diet should be, what the dietary laws ought to be, who I should sleep with and in what position and various other—you can—and since God doesn’t ever directly appear and say, “Do it this way,” it’s done for Him, and this is really convenient, by human representatives who claim to act in His name. So that’s why I think your standard of proof should be a great deal higher because if you—the reason this point is important to you is because it would mean real power in the only world that actually exists, which is the material world, of you over me. And you wonder why I’m not keen.

TUREK: Ok. The material world is all that exists. That thought that you just mentioned, Christopher—the material world that all that exists—is that thought material, and if it is, why is it true?

HITCHENS: That sounds like casuistry to me but I certainly think that everything that I am capable of thinking, saying, feeling, and so forth, does depend on my continued existence as a, what should we say, a mass of molecules, or...Yeah I—shoot me in the head and I can’t go on like this. And I won’t be coming back to bother you, either.

TUREK: [To Hulsey] Question?

HITCHENS: Nor am I going anywhere after that’s happened.

TUREK: Christopher...

HITCHENS: And I don’t wish it otherwise, by the way. I don’t wish otherwise. Sir.

TUREK: God gives you what you desire.

HITCHENS: Would that that were the case.

TUREK: I have a, bear with me, a relatively long question here. After admitting that an unborn child is a human being, you write on page 221—and thankfully you say in the book that it’s nonsense that an unborn child is not a human being, you admit that the unborn child is—you say this, and I quote, “There may be circumstances in which it is not desirable to carry a fetus to full term.” You then go on to advocate termination of pregnancy if birth control fails. Here’s my question: why is it that according to you when God plays God by taking a life prematurely, in the Old Testament for example, it is a moral outrage but when you play God by taking a life prematurely through abortion it is a moral right?

HITCHENS: Well, it’s a false distinction. I mean, I don’t—that’s not what I say. I mean, I say that the great abortive agent is, I’d say, nature. I don’t say God. Of course, God does not decide that so many pregnancies are not carried to full term. Nature knows, in the case of our species, as with every other mammal and primate, that some fetuses are not going to make it and flushes them out. That’s just a brute fact. We wouldn’t be here if that wasn’t the case because we are, as you know, adapted biologically to an environment which we’ve abandoned, The Savana. That’s why we have appendices that are designed for grass eaters. You know all this, it’s all very well-knowable. You can’t be having of sickly, half-baked childre nand get away from the predators. So nature is the great abortive agent. I certainly don’t blame God for it. I do, as a humanist, believe that the concept “unborn child" is a real one and I think the concept is underlined by all the recent findings of embryology about the early viability of a well-conceived human baby, one that isn’t going to be critically deformed, or even some that are will be able to survive outside the womb earlier and earlier and earlier and I see that date only being pushed back and I feel the responsibility to consider the occupant of the womb as a candidate member of society in the future and thus to say that it cannot be only the responsibility of the woman to decide upon it, that it’s a social question and an ethical and a moral one and I say this as someone who has no supernatural belief. So, your question ought to have been this: how do I have any ethical opinions since I don’t believe that I’m created and I don’t believe I’m going to heaven?

TUREK: I prefer the first question, if you don’t mind.

HITCHENS: Right, but ok, but I mean—isn’t it entailed by it? Have I—well I appeal to the audience, have I not answered the question about the termination of pregnancy?

[Several audience members raise doubt]

HITCHENS: Which bit have I not answered? You’d better prompt me, then.

TUREK: I’ll read it again: why is it that, according to you, when God plays God by taking a life prematurely...

HITCHENS: Well I didn’t—it isn’t according to me. I don’t say God does that.

TUREK: You...

HITCHENS: Nature does that.

TUREK: In your book, which is right over here, you have an entire chapter about the atrocities in the Old Testament.

HITCHENS: Yes.

TUREK: And the atrocities have to do with God commanding genocide and those things. And you obviously have a problem with that, as many people should. So my question again is why, according to you, when God plays God by taking a life prematurely in the Old Testament is it a moral outrage but when you play God by taking a life prematurely through an abortion it is a moral right?

HITCHENS: Well once again, I’m sorry if my work so obscure. I don’t say that I have a moral right to terminate a pregnancy. I have given all the reasons that I think hedge that question ethically and morally very sternly, very stringently. And in any case it’s not like saying that every living child of the Amalekites should be destroyed and an injunction by God to Moses to say he’s been too merciful and he spared too many children and enslaved too few women and didn’t make the genocide complete. I’m sorry I’ve never been accused of and I expect not to be, if I’m lucky enough in my life, of any such thing. And the idea there’s a moral equivalence between the two or handling the really difficult question of an unviable fetus and what should be done about it isn’t a moral equivalence at all.

TUREK: So do you want to say that all unborn life is, like you say in the book, is a human being and therefore you should not kill it? Is that what you want to say to get out of this dilemma? Or what is it you want to say?

HITCHENS: No, but I think—no, but I think the presumption—I’ve long said that the presumption is that the unborn entity has a right on its side and that every effort should be made to see if it can be preserved and I think that’s an ethical imperative. What I do say in the book is I think The Roman Catholic Church makes this argument immoral when it could be a moral one by saying that contraception is not going to be allowed, by saying that contraception is the moral equivalent of abortion. In other words to say that contraception is also murder, which is a nonsensical and disproportionate position. I quote some serious Catholics in my book—William F. Buckley the late is one, [indecipherable] is another one—by saying if The Church says that contraception and abortion are morally the same, it degrades the opposition to abortion. And by making absurd arguments, as it has in the past, Aquinas believed every single sperm contained a micro embryo inside it and thus that, if you like, I hope I don’t offend anyone, handjobs are genocide. As for blow jobs, don’t start. That an ectopic pregnancy, in others words, a direct threat to the life of the mother, a Fallopian tube pregnancy is, instead of a direct threat to the life of the mother and an obvious no-starter for a human embryo, because that’s going anyway, is someone who should be allowed to vote. This is nonsense. It’s casuistry. It’s immoral. It’s superstition and it prevents people from thinking seriously about matters that humanism can decide for itself, for heaven’s sake, without any supernatural intervention.

TUREK: Your question, sir.

HITCHENS: Oh, well, since I apparently I answered your last question with a question of my own I’ll make it my question to you. I’m very keen to know how it is that you, in a sense, that you dare to say that without a belief in religion I would have no source for ethical or moral [indecipherable].

TUREK: That’s not what I’m saying.

HITCHENS: You seem to hint at it.

TUREK: No.

HITCHENS: [To the audience] Did he not?

TUREK: Oh, I’m not saying you don’t know morality, Christopher, I’m saying you can’t justify morality without a being beyond yourself.

HITCHENS: So that—just if I—ok, good. So that if I say that for me it’s enough to be willing to love my fellow man and perhaps hope that my fellow man or woman will give me some of the same consideration in return and that, after all, the Samaritan, of whom we’ve all heard, was the only one to help after the priests and Levites had passed by and the Samaritan also, though he’s talked of by Jesus, can’t have been a Christian because he appears in a story told by Jesus so there can’t be any Christianity before that. Somehow he knew the moral thing to do was to help his fellow person without religious instruction.

TUREK: Yes, that’s right.

HITCHENS: And that that’s actually the whole point of the parable, though it’s not the way it’s usually told.

TUREK: And that’s what Christianity teaches: you know morality, it’s written on your heart. You don’t need the Scripture to know right from wrong.

HITCHENS: And this was only available to us 2,000 year ago?

TUREK: No, you’ve known it from the beginning of time. Conscience has been on humanity forever. That’s the point.

HITCHENS: You’ll have to let me press you a little bit on that. I mean, William Hewitt Gladstone spent a huge amount of his life—and he was a great scholar of Latin and Greek—showing that every one of the Greek Socratic and other moral precepts, all they were were just prefigurations of Christianity. This was the best the Greeks could do before Jesus arrived.

TUREK: No, no, no, no. I don't mean that.

HITCHENS: They couldn’t face the idea that these solidarities and moralities and understandings are innate in people and don’t require divine permission. I just have to ask you, if you can do it plainly, which side do you come down on, do you think we need divine permission to act humanly to each other?

TUREK: No, it has nothing to do with permission, it has to do with the ontological category known as morality. Where does morality come from? Does it come from the benzene molecule? The carbon molecule? The oxygen molecule? In your world view where does it come from?

HITCHENS: Suppose that we were having this discussion before the existence of molecules was understood.

TUREK: That’s irrelevant.

HITCHENS: No, it’s not because the discussion about where does the good come from was being conducted before Lucretius developed the atomic theory, before Democritus and Epicurus, I should better say, understood that the whole world was made up of atoms and molecules. Before that was known, people were arguing why do we behave one way to our fellows and we call it good and another way and we call it wicked?

TUREK: Because it’s written on..

HITCHENS: The molecular—I don’t think you can build in a molecular distraction to that.

TUREK: That’s—it’s—?I don’t have the molecular problem, you do. You’re a materialist. I’m trying to ask you where does morality come from in a materialistic world view?

HITCHENS: Well, did I not just acquit myself of that charge and say that the argument preceeds the knowledge of the atomic and molecular structure.

TUREK: No, it doesn’t.

HITCHENS: Not that I think, by the way, that the atomic and molecular structure is irrelevant and it could be that we might find out that there are, who knows, pheremones or this or other phenomena that do have an influence on our moral conditioning. There still wouldn’t, to a morally normal person, relieve them of the responsibility of saying that I feel I know what's right. I feel some things my children don’t need to be told, they already know.

TUREK: Let me interject here and just ask the question in another way.

HITCHENS: Whereas to tell a child, “You go to this church which means you’ll go to heaven but your little playmates don’t go to that church and therefore will go to hell,” seems to me to be an unpleasant thing to be saying.

TUREK: Yes, that is.

HITCHENS: Maybe I’m in a minority.

TUREK: That could be an unpleasant thing but how do you...

HITCHENS: Actually, an evil thing to be saying...

TUREK: Let’s call it evil, Christopher...

HITCHENS: That’s something only a religious person would dream of saying.

TUREK: Let’s call it evil. Where does evil come from...

HITCHENS: Religion. And morality—to answer your next question, morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

TUREK: Humanism according to who, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, who?

HITCHENS: You’re saying that Hitler was a humanist?

TUREK: Just—Hitchens.

HITCHENS: I’ve lived to hear it said.

TUREK: Hitchens.

HITCHENS: And in Virginia. Hitler was a Catholic.

TUREK: A human. A human. A human.

HITCHENS: Hitler was a Catholic, so was Mussolini.

TUREK: Give me a—how does morality exist if it’s just my opinion against your opinion and there’s no standard beyond?

HITCHENS: Both of them had an official political concordat with the Catholic churches. Both of them wanted the worship of themselves as well as of God.

TUREK: So I suppose no evil comes from atheism?

HITCHENS: And their third main ally, Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, not content just to be theocratic, was himself a god. So anyone who says that fascism and Nazism were secular is an ignoramus...

TUREK: Why is it wrong...

HITCHENS: ...on a gigantic scale.

TUREK: Alright, ok. I’m asking an ontological question, I’m not asking...

HITCHENS: I’m not going to be called a Hitlerite because I’m a humanist...

TUREK: I’m not asking a sociological question.

HITCHENS: ...let’s get that clear.

TUREK: Alright. Let me ask the question another way. This is my last question. If God does not exist why do all people have a fixed moral obligation to love and not murder? How do molecules in motion have any authority to tell you how to behave? When you do something wrong, whose standard are you breaking, who are you displeasing? The carbon atom? The benzene molecule? Who?

HITCHENS: This question’s been asked—Socrates answered it like this, when he was on trial for his life (accused of blasphemy, by the way): he said that he had an inner daimon, was the way he put it, not a demon, but a daimon, an inner spirit, an inner critic, a conscience would be one way of putting it, and that he knew enough to know, even when he was making the best speech of his life, that if he was making a point that was somehow dishonest or incomplete or shady, the daimon would tell him, “Yeah that was clever, but you shouldn’t have tried it.” He knew. Any person of average moral equipment has the same knowledge. I hope you’ll—if you don’t I’m very sorry for you. Adam Smith called it the internal witness who we all have to have a conversation with all the time. It’s been—C. S. Lewis decided to call it conscience and to attribute it to the divine but he didn’t improve on what Adam Smith said in The Theory of Moral Sentiments or what Adam Smith said when standing trial for his own life. It’s been sometimes colloquially defined as why do people behave well when nobody’s looking? I don’t believe there’s anyone in this hall who doesn’t know what I mean by that. Why, when it won’t do you any good when you decide, “I could’ve kept that wallet I found in the back of the cab seat, but I’m not, I’m going to turn it in and see—find its real possessor.” There are those people to whom those thoughts do not occur, who are deaf to that idea, who only think of themselves, who wouldn’t worry about the internal daimon or censor or companion and there are, of course, people who only get pleasure from being unpleasant to other people and inflicting cruelty on them. The first group we call the sociopathic and the second group we call the psychopathic. My only—they occur in nature and in society. My only problem is with those who think we’re all made in the image of God, the one explanation that absolutely doesn’t work at all, that gets you no where, that explains nothing.

TUREK: Christopher, it’s your turn to ask.

HITCHENS: Oh really?

TUREK: Yes, sir.

HITCHENS: Well my question is this: would anyone in the audience like to join this conversation?

HULSEY: We actually have question if you’re ready to move along.

HITCHENS: Yeah, I am.

HULSEY: There are a couple of questions—a lot—several similar questions that boil down to a couple of questions for each of you and one that I’ll end with that I think is an important one to address to both of you. Since you gave your turn away, Mr. Hitchens, I’ll ask you first. "If," the questioner asks, “If God does not exist then what is the purpose of life?”

HITCHENS: Well, I can only answer for myself. What cheers me up? I suppose mainly gloating over the misfortunes of other people. I guess that...

TUREK: And you say evil comes from religion, huh?

HITCHENS: I guess that has to be—yeah, mainly crowing over the miseries of others. It doesn’t always work but it never completely fails. And then there’s irony. There’s irony and—which is the gin in the Campari, you know, the cream in the coffee. Sex can have diminishing returns but it’s amazing. No, that’s pretty much it, then it’s clear onto the grave.

HULSEY: Dr. Turek?

TUREK: Yes. [To Hulsey] You want me to answer that or not? Somebody else, ok.

HULSEY: If Christianity is true, then why aren’t the differences that Jesus makes in the lives of Christians more powerful or evident than the impact other religions make on their adherents?

TUREK: I don’t know if I accept the premise of the question.

HULSEY: Well, the questioner adds, Ghandi was every bit as influential as any Christian.

TUREK: Yeah, that’s true and that’s one of the problems with Christianity. The biggest problem with Christianity is Christians. I admit it.

HULSEY: But the questioner’s asking a more central question which is if this is the truth...

TUREK: Yes.

HULSEY: ...why doesn’t that truth, by the weight of its infinite being cause its adherents to behave in a way that we can all notice?

TUREK: Well, I think you can notice it in several Christians. I think Christians for years have been the ones that have built hospitals and cared for the poor and cared for the weak and the sick. So I think it does make a difference. My problem, which is part of the problem that the questioner is asking, is why doesn’t it have this effect on everyone? And I’ll throw a little Christian theology in here: the problem isn’t that we don’t have all the Holy Spirit we do, we just don’t allow all the Holy Spirit to do what it should do. It’s our problem, we are fallen human beings and that’s why Christ had to come because we are fallen human beings.

HITCHENS: And has to come again because He didn’t get it right the first time. I agree with you that the grammar of the question is wrong but for a different reason. I don’t see what’s moral about Christian preaching. For example, apart from the horrible idea of vicarious redemption—I’ll say it again in case I missed you the first time what I mean by that—I could pay your debt, even if I didn’t know you. If I was a friend I could say, “You’re in debt? I’ll pay.” In extreme cases people have been known to say, “I’ll serve your sentence in prison. I’ll do that for you.” What I cannot do is relieve you of your responsibility. I can’t say, “Throw your sins on me, they’ll melt away.” Immoral. People are not allowed to be, you're not entitled to be relieved of your responsibilities. And vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is a very primitive and horrible scapegoating idea that belongs to the barbaric period of human history.

TUREK: So all pardons are immoral?

HITCHENS: Completely it's own—no, not all pardons, I didn’t say that. I said vicarious redemption is an immoral doctrine. It’s also immoral of the Nazarene to say, “Take no thought for the morrow. Not to clothe, not to eat, not to invest, leave your family, leave your children, leave everything, give up the world, no investment, no thrift, no thought for the future, just follow me.” That’s only moral if you are a sure believer in the idea that the world is about to come to an end, which was the case with this apocalyptic [indecipherable].

TUREK: I guess you never read the parable of the talents, huh?

HITCHENS: He said the prophecy is that the world is coming to an end real soon. There’s no point in caring about it or anything else. That’s not a moral preachment to me at all. There are many other ways in which I fail to see any bad behavior can ever be described as unchristian. And of course it’s completely laughable to say Christians build hospitals. Just as many Christians have bombed hospitals that have built them and as many Muslims have built hospitals as Christians have and as many Babylonians have built great buildings as Christians have. If that’s the best you can do, that’s the best you can do.

HULSEY: One of the questioners repeats a point from Dr. Turek’s opening statement that apparently he or she feels you did not address Mr. Hitchens...

HITCHENS: Ah.

HULSEY: ...about the irreducible complexity of DNA and is it possible for such structures to have formed by chance?

HITCHENS: Well, there are two—I have two responses to that. One is what would she have said before she knew about DNA?

TUREK: What does that have to do with anything? It existed prior to anyone knowing about them.

HITCHENS: Yes, that’s right.

TUREK: Gravity existed before we knew about it, Christopher.

HITCHENS: That’s correct.

TUREK: You need an explanation for it.

HITCHENS: That’s correct, and Christianity thought it could explain everything and then it found out more things...

TUREK: No, not everything.

HITCHENS: Wait, it’s a very simple—same as your point about molecules that I said that these arguments predate Epicurus, Lucretius and the atomic theory. Christianity used to say it can explain everything. All you need to know is that there’s an all-powerful, all-loving, all-intervening, all-knowing, omniscient god. Ok, well then wait, wouldn’t DNA explain more? Ah, well that only shows that God's even cleverer than we thought. So it’s an infinitely expanding tautology. There are many—there are some Christians who accept, in fact it was actually a Catholic physicist at The Univerity of Louvain in Belgium, who first came up with the idea of what we now call the Big Bang. And most popes, not all, most popes have accepted it. Some thought of it as a challenge to Christianity. The Pope Leo, who he went to—I can’t think of the scientist's name for a second, maybe someone here can help me—he went to the pope and said, “Looks like this is how things started,” and the pope said, “If you like, I'll make it dogma that every Catholic has to believe it,” and he said, “That would slightly be missing the point Your Holiness.”

TUREK: Christopher, what does this have to do with the origin of DNA.

HITCHENS: Well, because it is true to say that religion, as Stephen Jay Gould said, that religion and science belong to non-overlapping magisteria. I think these magistria are, in many ways, incompatible and in many ways irreconcilable but it is no more true to say that the existence of the complexity of DNA shows that God was more ingenious than we thought than it is to say that it necessarily shows by its self-revealing ingenuity that we don’t need the hypothesis of God. Both of these positions would be, in my opinion, somewhat reductionist, though I would have to say that I think the second one is more persuasive and more elegant.

TUREK: No, Gould is wrong...

HITCHENS: Will that do?

TUREK: Christians, or religious people—religion is trying to find out what—how the universe began and so is science. They’re not...

HITCHENS: No, religion says it does know, excuse me.

TUREK: It’s trying—it tries to find it...

HITCHENS: Religion is not a process of scientific inquiry. Religion is an affirmation of faith. It says it already knows.

TUREK: I am a religious person, Christopher...

HITCHENS: It says it already knows.

TUREK: ...and I will use the evidence to try and point out that the universe exploded into being out of nothing.

HITCHENS: And you have scientific evidence for the view that an intervention will occur to prevent the implosion and [indecipherable]...

TUREK: No, forget that. Let’s start at the beginning.

HITCHENS: I can’t forget it.

TUREK: Let’s start at the beginning. That’s for debate two.

HITCHENS: It’s the only thing you’ve said all evening that I’m going to remember.

HULSEY: Gentlemen.

TUREK: That’s for debate two.

HITCHENS: No, no. I mean, don’t say...

TUREK: You—what—here—ok.

HITCHENS: Look, do yourself and your faith the honor of saying it’s faith.

TUREK: No, no, no. The argument would be...

HITCHENS: Don’t say it’s science based. You won’t get away with it.

TUREK: The argument would be, Christopher, is that if the universe exploded into being out of nothing then miracles are possible because the greatest miracle of all has already occurred. The question is...

HITCHENS: No.

TUREK: ...have miracles occurred in the first century?

HITCHENS: No, because a miracle—a miracle is a...

TUREK: That requires another debate whereby we have to look at the hictorical evidence and see. And if it is true that Jesus really did come and say and do the things that the New Testament writer said He did then whatever He teaches is true because if He rose from the dead He was God. If He taught that there will be an intervention then there will be. That’s the argument, I don’t have time to support it.

HITCHENS: Very good. Now, gosh—a sentence or two from David Hume on miracles would clear all of this up.

AUDIENCE: [Informing Hitchens his mircophone has fallen off]

HITCHENS: A sentence of two from David Hume would correct what you said. A miracle is defined not as part of the natural order but as a suspension of the natural order.

TUREK: No, an intervention, not a suspension.

HITCHENS: You can’t say of the Big Bang, which is the foundation of the natural order, that it’s a suspension of what it starts. You may not do that. However, if you meet someone in the street who you yesterday saw executed, you can say either that an extraordinary miracle has occurred or that you are under a very grave misapprehension and David Hume’s logic on this, I think, is quite irrefutable. He says, “What is more likely, that the laws of nature have been suspended in your favor, and in a way that you approve, or that you’ve made a mistake?” And in each case you must—and especially if you didn’t see it yourself and you’re hearing it from someone who says that they did. I would go further and say the following: I’ll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who’s mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say—I don’t say that’s impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn’t prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The daughter of Jairus was raised, didn’t say a thing about what she’d been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I’ll give you all the miracles and you’ll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.

TUREK: No, Christopher, you have to look at each miracle in light of the evidence and the context. Hume was wrong because his premise, that was wrong, was the one that said the evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare. It’s not—from Hume’s own world view—if Hume was here to today he wouldn’t even believe in the Big Bang because it only happened once. It’s not a regular event, it happened once. He wouldn’t believe in the spontaneous generation of life, which is what a materialist must believe because it only happened once. He wouldn’t believe in his own birth because it happened only once. He would be able to believe in the whole history of our solar system because it only happened once. You don’t need regular events to know whether or not something happened. Singular events happen all the time. This debate will never happen again [to the audience] yet you’re here to witness it.

HITCHENS: There’s a—I mean, I’m just going to put my—repose my trust in the audience here. There’s an obvious difference between a singularity and a miracle. And I—I mean, I think it would be embarrassing to try and explain it. It would be patronizing to...

HULSEY: Dr. Turek, a member of the audience takes issue with your claim that objective morality necessarily relies in an absolute deity, asking instead what about empathy, for which there are apparently significant biological bases?

TUREK: I didn’t hear that, what?

HULSEY: What about empathy...

TUREK: Empathy.

HULSEY: ...for which there are fairly well established biological bases, a very human emotion, cannot empathy lead to morality?

TUREK: Is it right to be empathetic, that’s the question. I’m not saying there’s no chemical connection between morality and—or, for morality I should say. Certainly they’re going to be linked, there are chemicals going on. The question is, what is the standard that makes empathy or love right? What is the chemical composition of love? What is the—how much does justice weigh?

HULSEY: Well...

TUREK: These are all things that make no sense in a materialistic world view.

HULSEY: Well, but that’s not entirely true. Let’s say for example that cognitive neuroscientists are able to determine with scientific levels of precision that in fact certain neurochemical and cognitive events always—essentially always co-occur with the experience of empathy.

TUREK: But that wouldn’t mean that empathy’s right. See, there may be chemical compositions that cause that guy to chop that guy’s head off on the Canadian bus. That wouldn’t make it right. The question is what makes something right? In a materialist world view there’s nothing that can make something right or wrong. As David Hume has said, “You cannot get an ought from an is.”

HITCHENS: Well, I’m happy to agree with that. I think that’s true. But I have to add only that there are—we've all—some of us have been lucky enough to see it or meet people who’ve done it and all of us have read about it—there are people who will, when a grenade is lobbed through the window throw themselves onto it before it can blow up. It does happen. There are people who die under torture without giving away the whereabouts of their comrades. There are people who go do bomb disposal work and sit diffusing a huge device. They know that at any minute—it does happen. It’s always happened. It’s common to every known human society, it’s a part of every heroic narrative of every known society that's ever been. Those who do it are honored. They are “sung” as we say (in the times when there was no literate—no literal record) and it doesn’t require divine sanction or permission. It is, we’re proud to say, if not innate in us (we’d be too humble to say that), it’s innate in our species. It’s something we can all aspire to.

TUREK: Yes, you know it.

HITCHENS: We do not get it from Big Brother. If we did that would degrade it. It would mean it wasn’t heroic, it wasn’t brave, it wasn’t individual, it wasn’t exemplary—didn't deserve anything.

TUREK: Why are these things good?

HITCHENS: Well, because it would be in the hope either of a reward from Big Brother or for fear of punishment from it. It would abolish morality.

TUREK: Christopher...

HITCHENS: It destroys ethics. It means the individual example is dust. How many more times do I have to say this?

TUREK: Christopher, you’ve already abolished morality by your materialistic world view. There’s no such thing as morality if you’re just a bunch of chemicals.

HITCHENS: Wait a second, I—[responding to audience applause] It’s ok, I already know some people will clap at anything. Are you—do you mean to say that the human—that the body of a mammal or primate is not a chemical composition?

TUREK: No, it is.

HITCHENS: Oh good.

TUREK: I’m questioning where you...

HITCHENS: Why do act as if this has only just been discovered and as if it’s a theological point?

TUREK: Because you apparently haven’t discovered that morality...

HITCHENS: I say that in spite of—No, I would rather say that in spite of the fact that I am a primate—or, notwithstanding, perhaps I’d better say, that I am a primate, nonetheless I’m capable of thinking about heroism, self-sacrifice, example and so forth.

TUREK: Why are all those things good? Why are they good?

HITCHENS: Don’t turn to me and say, “How can you say that and be a primate?”

TUREK: Why are they good?

HITCHENS: I’m a primate. I can’t alter the fact that I’m a primate. I can conceal it better than some people can.

TUREK: Why are they good?

HITCHENS: That’s the best I can do.

TUREK: Why is bravery, heroism...

HITCHENS: You’re a primate as well and you’ll agree, both of us, that it shows, ok?

HULSEY: Let’s finish with this, which is the fundamental question and I think deserves a serious answer. The writer says, “Gentlemen, I venture to say that no one"—“no one” is two words, by the way—"no one came into this room without already deciding who he or she agrees with and no one with leave with a different mind set. What would it take for each of you, what evidence would you need, upon what basis would you make a decision to change your mind fundamentally about the question that we gathered here to discuss this evening?

TUREK: Great question. Well, Christianity would be refuted by somehow discovering the body of Christ. Theism might be—I don’t know how you could refute theism, if all the scientific evidence somehow changed. If—I don’t know how you deal with the morality issue, if the fine tuning didn’t occur, if we could find—if the universe it eternal it wouldn’t need a cause but all the scientific evidence seems to suggest the universe is eternal so it needs a cause and the cause must be immaterial, spaceless, timeless but if all that changed that might be—at least get me to doubt theism. Sir?

HITCHENS: In most of the debates—I wish I had though of this this evening, actually—[Interrupted by audience reminding him to keep his microphone closer] In most of the debates I’ve taken part in, and I wish I had thought of it this evening too, we took a vote before the debate, including registering the undecided and then had one and the end, just to see—basically to see where the undecided had gone and I was always surprised by how many people had come or at least were willing to consider themselves as having come with an open mind. I—my view is this: very few people have that much difficulty thinking of themselves as objects of a divine plan. The great advantage religion has is our own solipsism. It’s the same as people who don’t really believe in astrology but they’ll take a quick peek to see what’s happening to Taurus today and if it says, “Well, might be a good time for a flutter on the stock exchange,” not to think, “Hang on, the planets don’t really move to determine my investments, but maybe, you know...It’s not impossible it could all be about me.” I think about it quite a lot actually because I have the same birthday as Thomas Jefferson, April the thirteenth, except that I don’t because he was born under the old calendar and I think though it says on his tomb he was born on the thirteenth of April, he was actually born on something like the twenty-fifth of April, under the old calendar. I’ve often wondered how the horoscope people manage the transition, the time when everyone had to change which star sign they were. I dare say it got done easily enough. Religion works for most people because to have—people, in a sense, horribly do want it to be true, that they are supervised, that God looks out for them, that they might be rewarded or that they might be punished. It has this terrible, servile advantage. That’s why I consider it to be morally superior to be an atheist, to say I would rather live without that ghastly master-slave mentality.

HULSEY: And there’s no evidence or event that can change your commitment to that belief?

HITCHENS: I could only say that if there was—I’m very relieved to find, having studied what I think of as the best evidence and arguments from physicists, biologists, paleontologists, students of mythology, history, archaeology and so on, very relieved to find that there’s no evidence for it at all. If I thought it was true, I would consider myself condemned to live under a tyranny and I’ve spent my entire life repudiating that idea and helping, I hope, others to think the same. But, there is not a chance, of course, there isn’t a single chance that anyone will find that, hey, after all, we can definitely know that a virgin conceived or that a condemned felon walked again and it’s quite absurd for anyone to argue in scientific terms as if any of that is even thinkable. What I don’t understand—I suppose I should close by—is why anybody should be so contemptuous, I suppose is the word, or insecure about their own faith as not to call it that. Did you hear him say at any point this evening, “This is my faith. I believe it inspite of the evidence to the contrary. I lay my life on it. I believe I’m redeemed by it. I think I will live eternally because"—no, he has no confidence to say anything like that. Instead he tried to mix it up in an area in scientific inquiry where he’s no more competent than, hey, even I am. And that is where he made his big mistake. Thanks.

HULSEY: Gentlemen, what did we decide, five minutes to close?

TUREK: Five to ten? Seven maybe?

HULSEY: [To Hitchens] Since Dr. Turek went first in the opening, would you mind going first now?

HITCHENS: Well, I thought I just wrapped.

HULSEY: You can call it a wrap unless you’d like five more minutes.

HITCHENS: Gosh. When asked what I think the most erotic words in the language I sometimes think—[realizing he’s off microphone] when asked what I think are the most erotic words in the language, I sometimes think slowly, “captive audience.” No, you know what? If I hadn’t made my case by now, brothers and sisters, I don’t think I will make it in the next five. I ask you to excuse me. If anyone thinks that there’s a question, having—who’s heard me, that thinks there’s a question that I answered poorly or inadequately, or badly or failed to answer at all and would like to challenge me I'd happily give them five minutes but I have, so to say, shot my bolt otherwise. Is there anyone who would like to challenge me? Yes? [To audience member] Please.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If there is no God, why do you spend your whole life trying to convince people that there isn't? Why don't you just stay home?

TUREK: [To Hulsey] Can you repeat that?

HULSEY: Yes, the question is if there is no God, why spend your life and career trying to refute that? Why don’t you just leave it alone and stay home? Fair enough?

HITCHENS: Well it’s not my—it isn’t my whole career, for one thing. It’s become a major preoccupation of my life though in the last eight or nine years, especially since September 11, 2001 to try and help generate an opposition to theocracy and its depredations. That is now probably my main political preoccupation, to help people in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Israel resist those who sincerely want to encompass the destruction of civilization and sincerely believe they have God on their side in wanting to do so. A thing—maybe I will take a few minutes just to say something that I find repulsive about, especially monotheistic, Messianic religion. With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over. Whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real, authentic spokemen, not the sort of pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it, those who talk—there was a famous spokesmen for this in Virginia until recently, about the rapture say that those of us who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind. If we’re in a car, it’s your lookout, that car won’t have a driver anymore. If you’re a pilot, that’s your lookout, that plane will crash. We will be with Jesus and the rest of you can go straight to hell. The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity—if you don’t believe that there is to be an apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnatioan, a final one, then you’re not really a believer, and their contempt for things of this world shows through all of them. It’s well put in an old rhyme from an English exclusive bretheren sect. It says that, “We are the pure and chosen few and all the rest are damned. There’s room enough in hell for you, we don’t want heaven crammed.” You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk. They cannot wait, they cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the world. They can’t wait for, what I would call without ambiguity, a final solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers, paid for often by American tax dollars, deciding that if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land and all the non-Jews out of it then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of the Messiah and there are Christians in this country who consider it their job to help this happen so that Armageddon can occur so that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilization and trying to acquire learning and knowledge and health and medicine and to push back—can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over. That, to me, is a hideous thing in eschatological terms and end time terms on its own, hateful idea, hateful practice and a hateful theory but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it, who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes, ethnicities, who say—who openly say they love death more than we love life and who are betting that with God on their side, they’re right about that. So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another, it means we can't think without this. We must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of sado-masochism and the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil. And though I do, some nights, stay at home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity. Thank you.

HULSEY: Dr. Turek, your close.

TUREK: First of all I want to thank everyone, I know it’s been a long night and I enjoy listening to Christopher even if I don’t agree with him and I want to thank Christopher for being here and putting so much effort into this debate. Let me just clean up a few things that I wasn’t able to respond to before and that is this issue of design where Christopher seems to say because things are going to oblivion, it wasn’t designed. Well, first of all, design in a world constrained by physical constraints can only be optimal if you know the purpose of the designer. Stephen Jay Gould had a book years ago called Panda’s Thumb where he complained that the panda’s thumbs was not as good as our thumb. It only seemed to enable the panda to strip bamboo. Well maybe that’s all the panda was supposed to do is strip bamboo. You can’t say it’s a sub-optimal design unless you know what the purpose of the designer was. My car is not designed perfectly but it’s still designed. So, just because you find faults in design doesn’t mean there is no design and you wouldn’t be able to find a fault unless you knew what the purpose of the designer was. Let me now summarize Christopher’s book and as I read Christopher’s book it seems to me he’s making two statements. The first statement is there is no God and I hate Him. After all, Christopher defines himself as an anti-theist, not an atheist, but an anti-theist. And that’s why he couldn’t even respond to the question, “What might change your mind?” Nothing is going to change Christopher’s mind. His mind is made up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: He’s narrow-minded.

TUREK: The second—he’s narrow-minded, yes. The second major point he makes is since religious people do evil things, God doesn’t exist. That is a non sequitor in logic. We all do evil things, that doesn’t mean our parents don’t exist. Just because people do evil things doesn’t mean that all religion is false. And Christopher bunches all religions together and makes no distinctions that need to be made. I am with you, Christopher, on your opposition of radical Islam. I am with you. I am with you politically on more things than you will know because I think many religions are false and there are many false beliefs. In fact, may religious people—here’s the points Christopher makes, and he’s right about many of these things: many religious people have behaved terribly. Many religious beliefs are false and can’t be justified. You don’t need to believe in God to know right from wrong. You don’t need the Bible or any other religious book to know basic right and wrong; morality predates scripture. I agree with all that and that in fact is the Christian view as well. And unless someone outside of the universe intervenes or laws of nature change this incredibly fine-tuned universe will go to oblivion. I agree with all that. But none of these things are arguments against the existence God. God could still exist even if all of Christopher’s assertions and complaints are true. Let me also point out that religion does not poison everything. Everything poisons religion. I poison religion. Regrettably, I poison religion because I don’t live up to the pure words of Christ. And that’s why Christ had to come because none of us live up to it but we know what the standards are because there’s a standard beyond ourselves. Christopher has identified how religious people poison religion, how they act immorally. You know, that’s what Jesus and the prophets did and why Jesus came. Christopher is so charming and he is so persuasive, he is like an Old Testament prophet. He is, and he is calling the church to morality. He can’t define what that is, but he’s calling them to it. He’s not calling them to the Christian morality necessarily, he’s calling them to his own morality but what he points out are some of the very things Jesus points out. Many people in the church are following tradition rather than the words of Christ. Many people in the church are doing evil things. Jesus condemned the people who were the most religious because they were the furthest away from God and Christopher is to be commended for that because many of them are. But unlike Jesus, who appealed to God’s standard of morality, Christopher’s atheism affords him no objective moral standard by which to judge anything wrong including all the sins of religious people: circumcision, sexual restrictions, suicide bombing, etc. He has to borrow objective morality from the theistic world view in order to argue against it. He has to assume God in order to deny Him. He has to sit in God’s lap in order to slap His face. He also has to borrow aspects of a theistic world view in order to even get his world view off the ground. He has to borrow the universe (which is a pretty big issue) he has to borrow fine-tuning, life, reason, math, human freedom, and consciousness. Notice he never addressed any of those things. Where do those come from in an atheistic world view? Christopher, in the last chapter of his book, talks about we need to get away from all this religious stuff and we need to go to Enlightenment values. What are Enlightenment values? Well, here are—is what Christopher says on the last page of his book: “Very importantly the divorce between the sexual life and fear, the sexual life and disease and the sexual life and tyranny can now at last be tempted on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse.” It appears that Christopher is rebelling against the church lady here. He doesn’t like the restrictions on sexuality. Is it true that if Jesus said sleep with anybody you want, Christopher would be a Christian? I don’t know. But that is what he’s rebelling against. Now he talks about the divine dictatorship. He says that he rebels, as he just pointed out, against the divine dictatorship because he’s an anti-theist. But let me ask this question: why must everyone submit to his dictatorship, the dictatorship of Christopher Hitchens? He’s telling everyone to live up—or to give up their sacred text and to live according to renewed Enlightenment values—values that apparently he gets to choose. Christopher, in effect, wants to replace God. He wants his values—he wants you to adopt Enlightenment values. Christopher never answered the questions and the evidence that I brought up. I think this is a theistic universe because all time, all space, and all matter exploded out of nothing; number two, it did so with incredible precision and extreme fine-tuning; we saw that life seems to be the result of intelligence; four, we saw that there are objective, immaterial moral values out there (and Christopher’s big on immorality, I’m with him on that); number five, we saw that immaterial realities such as reason and the laws of logic exist and have no way to be explained (there’s no way to explain those by materialism); that the laws of mathematics, number six, exist and they help us investigate and measure this orderly universe; number seven, that people are not mere chemicals but are free to make choices; and number eight, and finally that we are conscious beings and we cannot explain ourselves by mere chemicals. We’re something beyond chemicals but atheism only has a world view that says all that exists are chemicals. Because Christopher and his atheist friends have not been able to explain any of these realities from an atheistic perspective, they have instead relied on speculation and faith. I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. Now there’s one more other point: Christopher may think that there is no God and He hates him, but God thinks there is a Christopher Hitchens and God loves him.