Transcription
Atheists have nothing to die for and everything to live for. In this rare debate, Cliff goes toe-to-toe with the former president of the Atheist Community of Austin in this incredible intellectual debate. Cliff Kenley and Matt Dillahunty respond to their evidence for some of the most debated topics for religion. Make sure to comment down below which argument was your favorite. Now, let's get to the debate.
One is this, is this continued objection to, "Without God, there's no ultimate meaning. There's no real purpose." Well, I don't know what you mean by "real purpose." That seems kind of cheaty. But as far as ultimate meaning, yes, I agree. No ultimate meaning in the existential sense that you're talking about it, and it doesn't matter one bit. The car that I've got out there, parked in the parking lot, I've had for a couple years. One of these days, it's going to rot away. Does that mean it's not valuable now? Does that mean it doesn't have any value to me now? Does that mean there's no purpose? Should I just go ahead and chuck it now? Let's get rid of it. Eventually, it's going to be useless. That's absurd. We all recognize that things have meaning and purpose right now because they are valuable to us. These are things, these are properties that we imbue things with, and we imbue people with. Do I matter as much to you as your spouse? Bet you I don't. Unless it's you.
This idea that without the ultimate meaning, or if something is ultimately meaningless, doesn't mean it is always meaningless, or it doesn't mean it's meaningless in every way. This idea about morality, um, that it's all relative. Um, actually, I'm a staunch defender of absolute morality. And despite Cliff's strawman, uh, I'm not saying that slavery is immoral because I said so. It might surprise some people to know that while I don't think there's intrinsic value, I think that there is a value in people, and that's the value that we imbue them with. This idea that "because I said so" is the, is the basis for secular morality is flatly absurd. It's the exact opposite of what I just finished talking about about how you go through and you build up this system. We are physical beings in a physical universe that follows physical laws. There are truths to be discovered about how our actions benefit us and how our actions harm us. This is simply true. We don't need another mind. This is about the interaction of minds, but we don't need some transcendent mind to dictate what is true. We discover what is true about the reality that we inhabit. God or not, soul or not, we can choose everything on the list that Cliff just talked about about being good to each other and building a productive society and caring and loving and trying to end poverty, trying to end oppression, and trying to build a better society. We can do all of that just because it's the right thing to do.
There's no evidence for a soul. In fact, there's good evidence against it. There's no evidence, or not enough evidence, um, of the various God claims that are out there, or not any particularly good evidence, at least that I've been made aware of. But I could be wrong, and tomorrow I could find out that there is a God and that I do have a soul, and it wouldn't change very much for me as far as how I end up living my life, because I've already come to good, good reasons to do things. I'm open to being corrected on them, but what's going to correct me is reason and evidence, not appealing to a God. And if people ask me, "Well, what are you going to do if you die and you end up standing before God?" Hey, I tried. I used my brain. I followed the evidence where it was. And by the way, if your character is actually accurately depicted in the Bible or the Quran, I don't want nothing to do with you. I'm already morally superior to you. I already care more about people than you do. I know I've never sanctioned slavery. Never sanctioned genocide. Gods have.
Do all religions lead to the same God? I don't know. I think, I think it's unlikely. Um, I think they clearly all define God differently. I think you could go right down into the same church, on the same pew, and get two different people, and they're going to define God differently, and they're going to have different views of God. I think there's as many different religions as there are people trying to practice them. And my concern isn't whether or not they all lead to the same God. It's what kind of world do they end up creating? Because why should I care about an afterlife that I don't know whether or not exists when I've got a life that I know that I have, and I'd like to make it better? And if your religion is impeding on the ability of people who don't practice your religion, or those who do, from living the best life they can right now, then your religion is a problem. That goes for Islam, and Christianity, and Scientology, and Hinduism, and everything. If you're advocating something that is detracting from the good of this world, you're part of the problem.
Thank you, gentlemen. Matt, the next question will start with you. Does being an atheist require the same faith that believing in God does? No. I, I'm seriously, it doesn't require any faith to not believe something. It doesn't. Now, if atheism was this assertion that there are no Gods, oh, I'm pissing people off. If atheism was this assertion that there are no Gods, well, then yes, you might be able to make a case that that was based on faith, or maybe it's not. It would depend on what the basis, what the foundation for that particular belief was. But atheism in the weak atheism sense of "I do not believe," this doesn't require faith. I don't believe there's a Bigfoot. That's not a faith. It's not a faith-based position. Uh, I'm not asserting certainty that there isn't a Bigfoot. I'm just not yet convinced the Bigfoot claim hasn't met its burden of proof. Neither of alien abductions. Which, by the way, I'll point out, you can actually go talk to real, living people right now who will tell you their alien abduction story. Living, breathing people. You can talk to them. They will have stories that are similar in detail. In some cases, there are multiple people who have supposedly experienced this together. In some cases, the vis, the things that people have seen have been entire small towns, and you can interview these people. How many people think that they're actually being abducted by aliens? Not me. That's people you can talk to right now. Somebody writes a couple books, and in a couple thousand years, somebody could stand up and say, "Hey, look, I wouldn't believe it, but look at all of these accounts. These are firsthand people. They were interviewed by the news." We have a much better record of what was happening at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century than we do about what happened back when Jesus was supposedly alive, or back around the time that Hinduism was being formed. This is a real record. We even have video footage of people talking about how they came down. And then they'll start tying it together in an intricate little web, the same way conspiracy theorists do right now. "Oh, there were lizard people in the government," or "crop circles." Out there, we don't believe any of that. I hope I am at Texas State. I kind of respect you guys, 'cause I don't care about colleges. So we're not in any rivalry. You know, UT. But we don't believe that. Why should we? And yet, we're expected to believe what is potentially a more extraordinary claim with weaker evidence. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about a universe that's billions, 13.7 billion years old, that there might be some other life somewhere. I don't know. Probably unlikely they made it this far. No reason for them to pick Earth because we're not special, despite what many creationists would have you believe. They've got this Wile E. Coyote God who straps on a hat and balances on a wire and goes through all this stuff to catch a coyote. He builds this entire massive universe all for one species on this little bitty insignificant dot. Did the aliens get here? I don't know. I don't think so. I don't have any good reason to believe that they did. Doesn't mean I believe that they didn't. And yet, we're expected to believe the more extraordinary claims of religion, unless sound evidence. We're expected to believe miracles, things that suspend or violate the laws of nature. There's nothing about alien abductions that necessarily violates laws of nature, is there? I mean, it's at least slightly more reasonable. And yet, we don't believe it. With people you can talk to, yet we're going to point to anonymous books that are hearsay accounts, copies of copies of translations of copies by unknown and anonymous authors, wherein which we know there are forgeries. Anybody seen "Snake Salvation" on TV? It's on National Geographic. It's about the snake-handling Pentecostals, and they rely on Mark 16, somewhere in the 9 through 20 section, I think it's around verse 18, where they shall take up serpents. Mark 16:9-20 is almost certainly a forgery. It doesn't exist in the oldest and best manuscripts. Yet they believe it. Maybe it should be there. Maybe there are the ones that are right. I like snakes. I've got pet snakes. I'm not going to handle them, and I'm certainly, you know, I'm going to handle mine. I'm not going to handle venomous snakes for fun, and certainly not as an exercise of faith, because there's not really good evidence that it's actually something that we should encourage, because those guys get bit and die all the time. And my pastor friends who don't adhere to that particular doctrine look at them and say, "Hey, dummy, God gave you a brain and doctors." You know, go. There's not agreement on these issues about Gods. We don't have good evidence for these things. We have fallacies and tired old arguments that have been rebutted over and over again. If there is a God, he knows exactly what it would take to convince me. He hasn't done it. Meaning, see, the other either doesn't exist, or he doesn't want me to know he exists.
Does being an atheist require the same faith that believing in God does? No. An atheist has a type of faith that says, "I'm going to live for someone or something other than God." And the fascinating question that I love to ask my atheist friends is, "What do you live for? And what is the evidence that whatever it is you live for is true?" Now, the majority of my atheist friends living in the United States live for money. And it makes sense. Money can benefit you a great deal. Nothing wrong with money. But is the ultimate purpose of life to live for money? So, my secular materialist friends are very talented. Majority of them work on Wall Street, and majority of my secular materialist friends live for the American dollar. I think we live in a culture that puts a premium on that. I'm not saying that Matt does. I'm just saying the majority of my atheist friends, who are very wonderful people, live for money. Others of them live for pleasure. They've reduced the purpose of life to stimulating my nerve endings. I understand that. I enjoy pleasure. I'm convinced that pleasure is a gift from God. The central nervous system that I have that gives me pleasure is good. The taste buds on my tongue that enable me to enjoy food is good. But to reduce the purpose of life to stimulating my nerve endings, I mean, come on now. What I find interesting is Matt consistently says, "Well, there's not enough evidence." Fine. What I would love to hear from Matt is, "What am I living for? And what's the evidence of what I am living for is true?" See, friends, all of us are going to put our heads on our pillows tonight. None of us can prove that what we're living for is true. The question, though, is, what's the evidence that whatever it is you're living for is reliable and true? And there are a lot of different options out there. Now, Matt likes to talk a lot about the Bible. So let's talk about the Bible. The Gospels that we have in English today are based on over 5,200 Greek manuscripts or pieces of manuscript dated from the 2nd through the 10th Century AD, all agreeing to an infinitesimal degree. There is no document from antiquity that can even approach the New Testament Gospels in manuscript evidence. Secondly, you have four different Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They're not carbon copies, obviously. They use notes. There are similarities in language between, especially the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But there's a tremendous internal consistency between Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are no major contradictions. There are different perspectives, the same way that if you and I were standing on a street corner and we saw two cars coming down the street, and we heard a woman scream, there was a screech of brakes, and then there was a collision. If you and I went to the police department, and you said, "Officer, I saw the two cars coming down the street. I heard a woman screaming, then there was a collision." And if I were to say, "Officer, I saw the two cars coming down the street. I heard a screech of brakes, and then there was a collision." We're not contradicting each other. We're offering two equally valid perspectives on what really happened. And that's what you've got in the Gospels. I'm real glad they're not Xerox copies. They're not photocopies. They're unique perspectives on Jesus of Nazareth.
Now, what I find astonishing is that Matt says he went to seminary. No, I didn't. All right, you were going to the ministry. I was going to. I didn't go. Yeah, you want to go into the ministry. Okay. Which means you probably read the Bible. And then when you wheel off a statement that the Bible doesn't say anything against slavery, that's embarrassing. Let me tell you why it's embarrassing. The main point of the book of Philemon in the New Testament is Paul is writing to a slave owner, Philemon, and he is saying, "I met your runaway slave, Onesimus." Now, in the Roman Empire, the rule, the law is that you are permitted to execute the guy. He's a runaway slave. But I, Paul, am asking you, Philemon, to take Onesimus back, no longer as a slave, but as a brother in Christ. Who do you think fought and finally won for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire? A man named William Wilberforce, who served in the British Parliament. And it was due to his faith in Christ that he struggled against slavery in the entire British Empire until he won, just before he died. Why did William Wilberforce fight for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire? Because he was a devoted follower of Christ, and he understood that all human beings are created in the image of God. Therefore, to stand against slavery and to stand for the value and dignity of all of human life is not an option. So I can promise you folks, you've got to read the text for yourself. Because if a man as intelligent as he can say the Bible never says anything against slavery, you've got to read it for yourself. Read Philemon in the New Testament.
What do you both think or believe will happen after you die? I imagine my wife will get married to somebody else. And actually, she's going to run off with a friend of hers and have a whole bunch of kids. Oh, you may. What's going to happen to me? I don't know. I don't see any reason to think that anything is going to happen to me. Everything that makes me, me, everything that we have historically and religiously attributed to a soul that can be identified with a place, has a place in the brain. My personality is in my brain. We know from experiments on people who have suffered all sorts of brain damage that you can reset people's personality, their preferences, their memories, their ability to make new memories. I'm going to get the name wrong. Damasio, somebody will know. Anyway, did a talk at one of the religion summits about a split-brain patient, hemispherectomy. They can communicate with both halves, and each half has its separate personality and a separate identity and communicates independently. One half Christian, the other half atheist. Now, I guess you could argue that when we split that brain in half, there was only enough soul for one side, and the other side just got shafted. But everything we know about what makes us us, our likes, our preferences, our desires, they're all a product of the brain. A lot of theists would say that there's a soul behind it all, a puppet master, the ghost in the machine. And yet, there's no evidence to support this, and it doesn't make sense in the model. If I suffer severe brain damage, and all of a sudden I don't remember the past, I don't remember that I love my wife, I don't like the same foods, I don't want to interact with the same people, and now all of a sudden I believe in God, am I the same person? I don't think so. Haven't we really kind of ended up with a whole new person?
I have an argument that I use partially as a joke. It's an argument that demonstrates, according to some traditions, nobody's in heaven. And it's really easy. In heaven, there's no suffering and no sadness. According to some traditions, my mom is convinced she's going to heaven. She's convinced I'm going to hell. I don't know who's going to end up in heaven, but it won't be my mom. There's no way my mom could be up in heaven not suffering and not sad that her son is in hell. And if God does some kind of magic to take that out of her, it's not my mom anymore. It's a facsimile of my mom, some kind of robotic, worshiping thing that's not my mom. My mom and I disagree vastly on religious stuff, so much so we don't talk about it anymore because we love each other. We'd like to have a civil Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever religious holiday drives me up there to visit and hang out. By the way, we celebrate Christmas, have a big white tree with peppermints and stuff on it. It's awesome. Entirely secular stuff. We're stealing it back because Christianity stole most of those things from other religions, and Easter too. But I'm not that big on eggs and candy because I'm diabetic. But everything that we know about us takes place in our brain. Your brain gets damaged, are you the same person? I don't know. The math on souls is confusing. Sam Harris has talked about the math on souls for people who believe that zygotes get a soul because the embryo will sometimes split and then re-get together. So when it splits, does it have two souls? And when it comes back together, does it just have one? Or now do we have a body with two souls? Or do we not put a soul in until afterwards? Or does it happen when he breathes his first breath, as the Jews believed? Doesn't it make any sense? The math on souls doesn't make sense. The science on souls doesn't make sense. There's no reason to think that there's some kind of ghost dictating what goes on in my brain. We haven't even gotten into free will. Cliff keeps asserting that we have it. I'm not convinced we do, at least not in the sense that he's talking about. I don't know what's going to happen to me when I'm dead. I'm pretty sure my body's going to rot, my brain's going to stop working, and I will cease to exist. And it didn't bother me before I was alive, so I don't see what bothers me afterwards.
Guys, we've got to be honest with each other. If there is no God, we know exactly what happens when we die. If there is no God, there's no life after death. If there is no God, you are matter and energy, and when you die, the matter and energy fall apart. So let's not act like maybe there's life after death. No, that's illogical. If there is no God, when you die, when I die, we become fertilizer. Very logical, very reasonable. But you know what the problem is? The problem is that I've got to do funerals for families that are atheist or agnostic. Inevitably, what happens to me is I'm standing there, and they're coming up to me saying, "Well, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe the great spirit." Excuse me, great spirit? What are you talking about? If there is no God, there's no spirit. There's matter and energy, and when we die, the matter and energy fall apart. Now, don't get scared. Just face reality. Be objective. And don't allow your fears to get you knocking your knees, saying, "Oh, well, maybe. Oh, well, possibly." No, be rational. Use your good mind. If there is no God, when you die, you rot. When I die, I rot. End of story. Just think about it. Now, there's an alternative to that, and the alternative is that if there's a supernatural God, then possibly there is life after death. And I can promise you, I would never believe there's life after death because I'm scared to die. That's being a wimp. That's being a coward. Instead, you'd better use your brain, and you better start thinking, and you better figure out, does the evidence point to there being something more to reality than matter and energy, there being some type of God, or does there not? And then secondly, you better use your brain, and you better think real clearly, does the historical evidence point to Jesus having died and risen from the dead, or not? And I can promise you, if you believe there's life after death because you're scared to die, you're an intellectual wimp. And I would never believe there's life after death because I find it attractive. And Matt is wrong. I don't believe there's life after death because I've got this deep longing for life after death. But I'll tell you exactly what I do. If I find that I have a deep longing for something, I look at the evidence to find out is there any truth to it or not. And if there's no truth to it, I drop it. But if there is evidence to support it, I would be very wise to follow that evidence. Now, why do I believe there's life after death? First of all, because the evidence is there is a supernatural God. And second of all, because the historical evidence is that Jesus was dead, and three days later he rose from the dead. And the people who saw him risen from the dead died for, not for belief, they died for what they claim to have seen. The dead Christ risen from the dead. If you claim to have seen something like Matthew, Mark, John, Thomas, Philip, Andrew, Peter, if you claim to have seen the dead Christ risen from the dead, and then you stand before Roman soldiers, and the Roman soldiers say, "Caesar is Lord," and live, or else maintain that Jesus has risen from the dead, and we will execute you for it. And if you stand there and say, "I'm sorry, I've seen Jesus risen from the dead," that gives your claim tremendous credibility. So the evidence is Jesus rose from the dead. That's why I'm convinced when he promises you eternal life if you trust in him, he ain't blowing smoke. He's speaking the truth.
How do you both explain love? Is it a real thing? If there is no God, you have reduced reality to matter and energy. Which means the student at Duke University was absolutely right when he said to me, "Cliff, there is no God." And I asked, "Fine, then what motivates Mother Teresa to do what she's doing among the dying in Kolkata, India?" And he was spot on when he said, "The drive to preserve the genetic pool." That's what motivates Mother Teresa. And I said, "I'm sorry, I don't agree. I don't think that Mother Teresa has to work among the dying in Kolkata, India. I think that she freely chooses to. I think that she freely chooses to love people who are dying ghastly deaths. And that ability to choose to love is part of what it means to be a human being. And every atheist, every agnostic, every human being has the ability to love. All of my atheist friends love very deeply. They love. But what is love? Love is not simply a biochemical reaction, a sex drive, or a drive to preserve the genetic pool. Love is a decision of the will to care for someone else." Now, I think Matt's definition of love, it's something that just comes to you, is straight out of Hollywood. In other words, love in America, for too many of us, is something you fall into and fall out of. It's a feeling that just sort of overwhelms you. Jesus said, "Love your enemy." I never have good feelings for my enemy. So is Jesus being unrealistic when he commands us to love our enemies? No, because when you read the New Testament and the Old Testament, what you begin to realize is love is not a feeling that you either fall into or out of. Rather, love is a decision of the will to pray for and to work for the well-being and the success of another human being, even if that person is your enemy. So you and I are created to love. We all have a free will, and we all choose whether to love or to seek revenge. We all choose whether to love or to be apathetic. We all choose whether we love or hate. And I can promise you, if you put your faith in Christ, all that he wants to do is help you to love others better. And that has been my experience. I went to Davidson College down in North Carolina to play basketball. The only problem was I wasn't good enough to play D1 basketball, so I barely made the team. And I had good seats for every game. And there was an assistant coach who would stand on the sidelines during basketball practice, and he would mock me. And my teammates would come up to me and say, "Hey, man, what have you done against this guy? Did he treat you like a piece of dirt?" And I'd say, "I don't know." But inside me, I felt a hatred and resentment towards this man because he stood between me and what I wanted to do most in life at that time: play against NC State and Notre Dame and St. John's, Chapel Hill, and UCLA. And I resented the guy's presence on planet Earth, to put it honestly. But I reached the point in my life where I said, "God, I've tried to love the man, and I can't stand him. Would you please help me?" And I experienced a power outside of myself to love a basketball coach who I, on my own, hated. That's what Jesus wants to do in our lives. He wants to give us the power from within to change and to love even our enemy, even the person who cuts us off at the knee. He wants to give us the power to forgive. And to forgive is difficult, because when someone hurts me badly enough, what's going off in my head is, "Rocky, Rocky, Rocky, blast him into the next generation." And Jesus says, "No, forgive. Absorb the hit. Forgive." And I find that to be really living.
So on a couple of occasions, we heard, "If there is no God, then there's only matter and energy." Which I'll just point out is not actually true. Um, whether or not there's a God is one question, and whether or not there's something else is another. And Cliff wants to say, "If there's no God, then there's just matter and energy." I think Buddhists would disagree with him. They don't believe in God, and yet they believe in all sorts of, some of them, supernatural things like karma and reincarnation and things like that. Cliff models his head as the only one he can see. When it comes to love, brought up the example of Mother Teresa. If you're Catholic, I'm probably going to piss you off, but if you haven't read Christopher Hitchens' "The Missionary Position," you probably should. His Mother Teresa was not an agent of love. She was in love with suffering, and she felt that suffering brought people closer to God. So she brought in millions in donations and left people laying on squalid floors, suffering and dying, because it was God's will. She was not some agent of change. She did not provide the medical treatments, in many cases, that would have been necessary. That would have been a real demonstration of loving someone, caring about them. She loved her idea of God, which included suffering as a primary demonstration of what God wanted out of these people's lives. Now, I'm not advocating really a Hollywood love. I was just, when I said, you know, love's kind of something that happens, I was talking about how you fall in love or meet somebody. I don't remember making any sort of conscious choice. Maybe I did. The demonstration of will was what I do with love. What is love? How do I explain love? Well, yeah, it's something that happens in the brain, electro-chemical signals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can distill that down until it seems to some to be just really kind of sterile and clinical. How is it any less wonderful if you discover that the experience that you've had of being in love does not actually come from an external source? It's you still had that feeling. It's the same. It's true. The experience isn't diminished. And I would argue that this constant appeal to God as external sources for things like love diminishes them. People look at flowers. Flowers are beautiful. I love flowers, not as much as some people, but I love flowers. Is a flower more beautiful because God made it? Of course not. The fact that there is some all-powerful God means that he could have created a flower that when you looked at it, sent you over the edge into euphoric bliss and immediately into orgasm that surpassed everything everywhere. But the flower's still beautiful, even though it doesn't do that. And love, whether you think it comes from God or whether you think that it's just what happens in your brain, still the same. There's no demonstration that there's a God required for this, just like when I eat certain things and enjoy them, or when I hear certain music. One of the things that helped me figure out all those times in the past where I was convinced, like everybody around me, that I had experienced the Holy Spirit right then and there, was coming to the understanding that I could have that same similar euphoric experience from secular music, from beauty, from art, from Mount Rushmore. Which, by the way, the reason we recognize Mount Rushmore is not design, is designed, is because we have mountains of evidence for it and no mechanism by which mountains spontaneously generate faces, which is not the same as life. We recognize design not by complexity, but by contrasting it with that which is naturally occurring. And life is naturally occurring. There's a mechanism for replication there. And saying, "Walking along and finding the one thing that looks different is absurd." If you believe in a God, because with Paley's watchmaker thing, if you walk along and find a watch, and it was clearly designed. Wrong, because in God, in the God-believing universe, you're walking around on a universe full of watches, through a pasture of watches, and picking up one watch and saying, "This one's special." That's the same thing he's doing with love. It's good.