Transcription
[Music] Madame President, it's good to see you again. D and I met about a month or so ago on a boat, uh, by sheer coincidence, on the River Thames somewhere. And I was told that there was an upcoming debate at this Union that Michael Shermer had pulled out of, that was on essentially the existence of God or whether it was a delusion, and that they were in need of a replacement speaker.
Now, I won't go as far, especially given the circumstances, to call this Providence. However, it does leave you with a slight sense that there might have been more than chance at play in bringing me to this chamber tonight. But it is exactly that kind of thinking, the seeking of agency and design where there is in fact none, that I've traveled here in an attempt to dispel.
We've heard a lot about arguments, but as a psychological phenomenon, I wonder how relevant these really are to God belief. That is, when you hear somebody recounting a conversion story, how often does it really begin with premise one? You're more likely to hear a narrative or a story, some kind of an account of an experience. Indeed, the most high-profile conversion perhaps of this Millennium happened just a few weeks ago when the fifth horoman of New Atheism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, announced in a long and celebrated essay that she had embraced Christianity.
I was far from the first reviewer to notice something rather peculiar about this publication. That is, its somewhat conspicuous lack of arguments for the existence of God or for the truth of Christianity. Instead, she devoted the entire thing to talking about culture. She talked about the looming threats of Russia and China, of global Islamism, of wokeism. I think that an essay which mentions Osama Bin Laden, Vladimir Putin, and indeed Professor Richard Dawkins, exactly as many times as it mentions Jesus Christ, might tell us that we're looking at a conversion that is, at best, insensitive to the truth claims of religious belief, and instead an attempt to escape, or or a result, I should say, of a desire to escape certain unfortunate social realities. That is, where God appeared in a dream to Joseph or to Zachariah, it seems that the President of Russia appeared in a nightmare to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and also endowed her with a skill that I'm incapable of, which is to adopt a belief simply because of its political or existential convenience. Again, perhaps my desire for my philosophical convictions to be, you know, true, is just too high, uh, a margin to demand.
What I really want to ask is, whether this should be any kind of surprise, this approach. I mean, there is some recognition, even amongst the religious, that this is at least in part what religion does, what religion is. It provides some kind of unifying ethic to suppress the more depraved elements of our human nature. Evelyn Waugh was once, uh, asked how he reconciled his private hedonism and gluttony. He was accused of being rude and and self-indulgent. How he reconciled this with his professed Christianity. He accepted the charge and simply said, "Can you imagine how much worse I would be if I wasn't a Catholic?" Fair enough.
Um, I think that I'm far from the first to suggest that religion is in essence nothing more than a memetic entity that serves some kind of social purpose like this. That's what it's for, but isn't actually true. And I'm glad to hear that at least one member of the opposition this evening seems to agree with me. I'm not sure if you'll see it that way too, ladies and gentlemen. But I won't say that I know this is the case, of course. I I can't do so. I will simply ask a question of you. What would you expect to see if God existed and all of this was being supervised? What would you expect the world to look like? How would you expect life to have evolved?
And if we assume the alternative hypothesis, that is atheism, materialism, that is that the world we find ourselves in is just an amoral arena of accidentally existing organisms competing in an endless struggle for survival, what would we expect to find? And what do we find? A system of natural selection which explains the Origin of Species on planet Earth that does not just cause or bring about, but relies upon suffering and death. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the death and destruction of the unfit. 99% plus of all of the species, species, let alone animals, that have ever inhabited this planet have been brutally wiped from existence. And for what? For our development? It seems that unimaginable, indescribable, and seemingly inexplicable suffering is embedded into the very mechanism by which I'm told God decided to create human beings.
I'm not saying this can't be explained on theism. I I of course I can't say that. You could say that this is all part of some grand plan of Jovian proportion in its unintelligibility. Maybe there's some kind of compensation in the afterlife. Maybe dogs do go to heaven after all. Sure. I'm just asking you what you would actually expect to be the case. I think that we wouldn't expect to see anything like what I've just described if we assume that there is a benevolent invigilator overseeing the process. However, if we assume atheism, not only do we come to explain this phenomenon, but in my view, we also come to expect it.
If I'm wrong, however, if the truth of theism is indeed as plain and graspable as many on the opposition would doubtless like to suggest this evening, then I must ask, why has religious belief traditionally, if not essentially, delusional in essence, relied so heavily on, if you like, non-rational modes of convincing? A sign as sure as they come of delusional belief is an inability to muster and a resistance against rational defense of that belief, especially in the face of challenge, and most evidence when the threat or enforcement, indeed, of suppression or physical violence, uh, violence is substituted in its place. That is the place of rational argument.
And this hardly needs explication. Just 600 feet from the door of this chamber, there's an easily missable cross on the floor of Broad Street which marks the spot where three Bishops of the Church of England were burned at the stake. Not even for being the wrong religion, but so close, the wrong denomination, the wrong interpretation of the words. Doctrinal disputes like this have a long and violent history within the religious tradition. And I think it's worth asking why that's the case. "Oh, you think that the Sun, you think that the sun proceeds from the Father alone, not the Father and the Holy Spirit? You're about to find out as you meet your maker."
Wherever religious authorities have had the political power to do so, I would say, and found the threat of otherworldly Hellfire to have somewhat lost its efficacy on certain people, then it provides, or they provide, shall we say, a corporeal simulacrum of this, bringing the flames into our own veil of tears, providing a very worldly inferno to ready the heretic for the inferno that's to come in Hades, reducing heretics to literal ashes in the full view of anybody else who might have the temerity to question or to challenge the authority and compassion of the church.
Why might a religious tradition, which I'm told is balanced upon reason and provability, evolve such a knee-jerk mortal resistance to freedom of thought? Of course, in our modern age, where the state is no longer the principal auxiliary of religious violence, I of course understand that that's the case. This is something that happened hundreds of years ago now. This ignoble mantle is taken up instead by individual religious fanatics who cannot and will not be deterred by the morality of their fellow creatures, or indeed by the laws of their country, because there is no legislation written by any person of any time that could even count one iota against the dictates of the supernatural creator of the universe, access to, to whose precise and exacting will is, of course, only a delusion when it's somebody else's God, when it's the wrong God.
If that's not the case, then not only is this belief in God and access to his will not delusionary, but now I'm told is actually a prerequisite for reason, for science, for morality, all of the noble pursuits that humanity entertains. This, despite the fact that most of the important developments historically in all of these areas have regularly been made by dissidents who subverted the clerical authoritarianism of the very religious traditions that now wish to claim these developments as their own. Touch scandalous, I think you'll agree. I hope you'll agree.
Again, I can simply ask you, what best explains this psychological condition? Might this suppressive and sensorial historical attitude, which seems essentially tied to the history of religious thought, be compatible with the truth of religious claims? Of course, absolutely. Is it best better explained by an inability to provide serious and conclusive rational defenses of those beliefs? Maybe. Might this also explain the characteristic taboo on the criticism of people's religious belief that survives with us in many ways to this day? Perhaps also. I'm not sure. Might this also explain why faith, as we've already heard, that is belief without evidence, just reflect on that for a moment, might also explain why this is proposed as a virtue and indeed the foundation of belief in God? Blessed are, after all, those who believe without seeing, without seeing.
I don't know. It's not really for someone like myself, who strictly speaking is is an agnostic, it's not really for me to say. But I can only leave it with you, and I suppose the remainder of the opposition. Thank you. [Applause]