Transcription
[Music] I used to believe in God, like our very articulate and eloquent speaker before us. I used to believe firmly in God. I was an ordained minister. I preached the gospel for 19 years. I felt this presence in my mind as I prayed. I got goosebumps as I was in communion with what I thought was the holy spirit of God. As I read the Holy Bible and read about the resurrection of Jesus, I dedicated my life to preaching that gospel that I thought was so real, that gave so much meaning, so much hope, so much beauty to the world.
But I've changed my mind. I now know I was deluded. I was having a very real, very powerful, but mental experience that happens in most religions. I won't tell you my whole story, uh, but I went through a process of deconversion that took four or five years, starting as a firm believer, Evangelical Street Preacher. In, in the forward to my book, Godless, that tells that story, Richard Dawkins writes, "Dan Barkin was not just a preacher, he's the kind of preacher you would not want to sit next to on a bus." That was me. I was so convinced, I was so in love with Jesus, my Savior and my Lord.
But I went through a process, Evangelical fundamentalist, where I migrated into more of a moderate, where I preach less hell and more love, into more of a more liberal stage in my life, until eventually I dumped out all the bath water and I found out there's no baby there. It's just words. It's just arguments. But from the very articulate words we heard tonight, we didn't see any dots connected. We heard a lot of argument. But when it comes to evidence, only two pieces were offered, which we will probably get to: personal experience and the resurrection of Jesus.
If nothing comes from nothing, then God cannot exist, because God is not nothing. If that premise is true, that nothing comes from nothing, and if God is something, then you've just shot yourself in the foot. Today is Thursday. What does that mean, Mr. President? Thursday? What does it mean? It's the, it's the day that millions of people believed in the god Thor. There was a gap in understanding. There was a mystery. What is that noise in the sky? What are those lights? What is all this? What is that? It must be an agency. It must be some de-, it must be some being or something. And they named it Thor. And today we have a day of the week. We don't have a Jesus day, but we do have a Thor's day that we're, that millions of people believed in, maybe some still do. But that deity has found itself on the scrap heap of history.
Just like when I looked at the deity I used to believe in, the God of the Bible. It started for me with the simple idea that Jesus told a parable about the prodigal son. A parable is what? It's a fiction. It doesn't matter if the Prodigal Son actually existed in history. It was the moral tale that mattered. The ancient Israelites made up a parable or a metaphor about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and a talking snake. Look up in the dictionary the word fable. You will find it as a moral tale involving talking animals. We know that Adam and Eve could not have existed because of evolution. I, I assume everyone in this room accepts the solid fact of the evol-, evolution of the human species. So Adam and Eve could not have been real people. It was a metaphor. And many Christians accept that fact. They know there's metaphor, figures of speech in the Bible. But in my process, if the prodical son is a fabrication, if Adam and Eve are a metaphor, then what about this other character, this Yahweh, this Jehovah, this Elohim character? Where do you draw the line? When we know that humans are very good in inventing myths, like the turtle in my native Native American ancestry, the turtle that swam across the waters, brought up the mud from the bottom, created the continents. A beautiful story, a wonderful metaphor, but that didn't really happen. The God character himself is also one of those fictions. I came to realize, maybe a useful fiction, maybe it gave meaning, maybe it gave hope, maybe it gave purpose. None the a fiction nonetheless.
The reason I am a non-believer today is because of the lack of evidence and argument for a deity. If there were any real evidence for a God, then by now, someone should have won the Nobel Prize for pointing that out. Any scientist in the world would jump at the chance to say, "Here we go." I mean, if there is a hitherto unknown force of the cosmos that we haven't yet been able to determine, what scientist in the world would not love to make that point? That hasn't been done yet. All we have are what we would call, and I think many believers call, God of the Gap. The thunder and lightning was a gap that is now closed. The perhaps fine-tuning of the initial constants, perhaps the origin of the Big Bang. We do have some gaps in science. In fact, it is those gaps that drive science. Without those gaps, we wouldn't have scientific inquiry.
What we are offered with is faith and belief. And you were very eloquent in saying that you have a belief in a God, that what you believe is God. But belief is not knowledge. Belief is simply an assertion. According to the Bible, that you believers believe, belief is the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for. Belief is not evidence. Anytime you have to accept an assertion by faith, you're admitting that that assertion cannot be accepted on its own merits. It doesn't have the strength to be accepted as any other, perhaps scientific hypothesis would be taken. Do scientists gather together every Sunday morning in their scientific sanctuaries and bow their heads and sing, "Yes, the Higgs Boson is real! I know in my heart the Higgs Boson is real! I will have faith! I will be strong to this secular world who challenges my belief that the God particle is real. Amen." If, if they did such a thing, you would think they were pretty insecure on the concept, wouldn't you? You, that's what we find with faith, a constant puffing yourself up, be strong, resist the world, believe in these absurdities in spite of the doubts.
The, uh, resurrection of Jesus Christ, the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the absolute worst example anyone could possibly give for the reliability of the Bible. And I'm not exaggerating. Let me tell you why I'm not exaggerating. Many stories in the Bible are given once or twice. The resurrection story is given five times. You can compare them. Scholars have never been able to reconcile those contradictory accounts of the resur-, resurrection of Jesus. And besides that, and there are many of them, was the tomb open or closed when the women arrived? What message did the angels give? How many angels were at the tomb? And so on. Uh, besides that, we see through the development in the first century of the Christian myth that the earliest stories were simple. There were no angels. There were, there were very few remarkable events. But as you go 10, 20, 30 years later, you find more and more until you get to the Book of John, where you find these outlandish stories. What you see in the development of the resurrection story in the New Testament is the development of a legend, starting simple, growing over time, getting more and more fantastic. It's a mistake to treat those accounts as if they were flat, as if they all happened at one time. We can see before our eyes the development from a simple, unvarnished, perhaps some element of truth in some story about someone who may have spiritually ascended, like we say, "Grandma died and went to heaven." Maybe the early apostles said, "Jesus died and went to heaven." But that exaggerated. So the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not evidence for a God. And even then, it would just be evidence that a man rose from the dead. How do you connect the dots?
We suffer also from a coherent definition of a God. We have a proposition: "This house believes in God." What is that word? What does that word God mean? There are many. I don't have time to go into much detail, but there are many incompatible properties that many theists assign to this deity, much like saying, uh, this deity is a married bachelor. Can a married bachelor exist logically? It cannot. And there are mutually incompatible prop-, characteristics of this deity that many theists have put forward that make it a married bachelor. For example, God is supposedly an omniscient being who has free will. But if you know the future, you can't have free will. I'm not talking about human free will, and that's a big debate whether we have it or not. Even atheists agree among them, disagree among themselves. But God, presumably this being, is a personal being with free will who knows his own future decisions. In order to have free will, whatever that means, there has to be a period of indeterminacy during which you truly do have options. I could choose coffee or tea. I could choose this or that. But if you know your future options, you have no choice. You have no freedom. You are not a free, uh, personal agency. So if your definition of God is that God is omniscient and free, he cannot exist. He's a married bachelor. I know theologians try to tinker with definitions. By the way, if God cannot change what he knows he's going to do tomorrow at 12:00 noon, that also puts some limits on his omnipotence, doesn't it?
A lot of these arguments from, uh, design and theology, for example, suffer from begging the question. It's rather like the man who is amazed, "Look at how all these rivers were made to flow right along the state [Laughter] boundaries. Nice. How do you explain that? Nice. It must have been a massive feat of engineering, a huge economic development. How did they get those rivers to do that? Isn't that incredible?" And yet, that's how a lot of this theol-, theological thinking is. "How did the human eye evolve? How do you explain that? There must have been design behind it." It does look like design, doesn't it? Those rivers look like they were designed to flow right along those boundaries. It's an upside-down kind of thinking and in, in a sense, begs the question. The, the whole idea that in some of these theological arguments, that complexity requires a designer. And, uh, Richard somewhere here pointed out in his book, The Blind Watchmaker, "Anything that is complex enough to design functional complexity, any, any deity who could, could design, has to have a mind that is at least as functionally complex as the thing that it designed, right?" If your premise is that functional complexity requires a designer, if that's your premise, then the mind of that deity also must, by that premise, require a designer. And you get into this infinite regress of, "Well, then God needed a bigger God and a bigger God." I think most scientists prefer to just stop with what we do know rather than speculate endlessly about a, a mountain of turtles.
Another, another lack that, uh, takes against the evidence for existence of a God is the lack of agreement among believers. If there is a deity that you love and care about, why do no two believers agree on any social or moral issue? You name it: gay marriage, doctor-assisted suicide, stem cell research, death, um, the war. You name these social issues we're struggling with. You find devout, praying, Bible-believing Christians on both sides of those issues. Paul wrote in the Bible, "God is not the author of confusion." But can you think of a single book that's caused more confusion than that Bible? They don't agree. Why? Why not? Why shouldn't it be clear? Why shouldn't this all-loving, all-caring deity make it clear to us? It is not. They have fought over each, fought with each other over these issues. The 30 Years' War, which was based to some degree on the confessional differences over infant baptism and transubstantiation. People were killed. John Calvin had his friend Servetus killed over a simple misplacement of a preposition. The lack of agreement among believers is a serious problem towards the existence of an all-loving, all-caring God.
And then, of course, the problem of evil. And, um, our previous speaker, uh, pointed out that that is probably the Achilles' heel in theology. All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and you know there's no God. At least no good God. Maybe there's an evil God. Those children are dying at the same random rate, even though their parents are desperately praying, desperately loving those kids, wanting some kind of divine intervention. And yet, as Ann Gayer says, who's the Pres-, the former president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, "Nothing fails like prayer." That would be evidence if you could give some scientific evidence that prayer actually makes an organic difference, not just makes you feel better, but an actual difference in the real world. That would be something to put on the table. The fact that that's not put on the table shows that prayer is pretty much talking to yourself.
Finally, there's no need for a belief in God. Millions, tens of millions of people on this planet live happy lives, productive lives, moral lives, purposeful lives, lives of hope and meaning without deluding ourselves that there are these invisible personalities populating some supernatural realm. We are quite happy, thank you, without that belief. Based on all of that, it is more likely to reject the proposition than to accept it. Thank [Applause] [Music]