The All-Time Best Arguments Against Religion

[Applause] I just ask our audience a question first of all if you'd raise your hands how many of you believe in God okay a Forest of Hands So Richard Dawkins these people are deluded all every single one of them well I fear that's right yes um I would say it's rather like the phenomenon of the imaginary friend that children have and that Comfort them and console them but there's actually not the slightest shred of evidence that any kind of Supernatural being exists so I'm sorry to say deluded yes deluded um how can so many people

be wrong well there was a time when everybody believed that the world was flat there was a time when everybody believed that uh the um Sun whiz round the Earth people are very very frequently deluded and by the way uh of course there was a time when people believed in Zeus and Apollo and in other parts of the world they believed in Thor and Wan people who believed in fairies and lepre horns uh everybody in this room I would guess knows what it's like not to believe in the god of some other religion um you

know that if if you happen to be born in the Middle East you'll probably be Muslim and people who are born in the Middle East um believe equally fervently in their God they can't both be right there are so many different gods that people have believed in throughout history so what people believe is really an accident of geography exactly right yes um Fredick ner famously said that God was dead and Sigman Freud can be rendered as having said that God was Dad um and I think both of them are probably right the the concept of

God is 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 um in which case it' 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 that 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 partially expressed wish for a protector a

parent someone who will never desert you someone who will do in a way or thinking for you especially questions of moral philosophy at its best it's that it's a it's a wish to be loved more than you probably deserve and at its worst it's it's the underdeveloped part of the human psyche that needs to totalitarianism that 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 um it used to be

believed I mean the number of gods now is 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 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 unity 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 I I actually why shouldn't there be something as you say if if there wasn't then we wouldn't be here but the question why is there something rather than nothing the the origin of the something the origin of the co of the cosmos was I suspect an extremely simple event and simple events are very simple to understand and explain once upon a time not that long ago a couple of centuries ago the question would not have been why is there something rather than nothing the

question would have been why is there all this magnificent life why are there trees why is there grass why are there birds why are there humans Darwin answered that question and blew out of the water the theistic answer to that question theists and are driven back to this much much more simple question why is there something rather than nothing everything else is either explained or well on the way to being explained we're left with just one little tiny smidgeon of a gap in which God is alleged to be to be hiding but even if you

invoke a supernatural Creator to explain why is there something rather than nothing you still explained absolutely nothing because you're left without an explanation for that God himself every second that we're speaking a a star the size of our son 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 um 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 bit more impressive uh gives you more to think about mutually exclusive are they mutually exclusive God make you a stust one one has the virtue of being true and provable and studi which the other doesn't and I I do think that the verifiability of something is is a virtue

of are we simply material then yes we we don't have bodies we are bodies until 50,000 years ago there were four other kinds of of biped humanoid not unlike us still living on the planet died leaving no descendants we're the only survivors of those people um that family were the last they we don't know if they had gods or not so you think inexplicable no no religion ever invented it appears to have known that these creatures even existed because the the the religious are forced to believe that they really significant event that happened in the

human story happened about 3,000 years ago you think there could be one sentence that could convince um let's say a creationist to seriously doubt their Theory ideally if you could convince a believer in God to really doubt their belief but that's too hard not sure about a about a sentence I think perhaps the single most convincing fact observation that you could point to would be the um the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the genes using modern DNA techniques actually looking at the the letterto letter correspondences between genes compare the genes of

any pair of animals you like uh pair of animals pair of plants and then plot out the resemblances and they fall in a perfect hierarchy a perfect family tree and the only alternative to it being a family tree is that the intelligent designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhand and devious manner um more moreover the same thing works with with every Gene you do separately and even pseudo genes that don't do anything but are vestigial relics of genes that once that once did something I find it extremely hard to imagine how

any creationist who actually bothered to listen to that could possibly doubt the fact of evolution but they don't listen I mean there your your question is a is a perfectly good question but it's not it's not really relevant because what they do is simply stick their fingers in their ear and say la la la they know what's true because it's in the holy book and that that even I mean the most extreme case is the geologist Kurt wise who has a PHD in geology from Harvard and said if all the evidence in the universe pointed

toward an old Earth I would be the first to admit it but I would still be a young Earth creationist because that is what Holy Scripture teaches me you cannot argue with with with a with a with a mind like that a mind like that it seems to me is well a disgrace to the human species you're right that science has made many things more comprehensible to us and that it's explained things that religion used to take credit for in other other words now we know there's a germ theory of disease diseases are not curses

or revenges from Heaven same with earthquakes and so on the stuff they used to teach us and many of them still do 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 yes than people who lived before Galileo we just because we have now an increasingly large idea of the Fantastic expanse of the UN the unknown um that precisely the moment at which to say that skepticism is what's necessary inquiry uh 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 would insult me if they say Socrates your your great hero didn't exist try it on a Muslim try it on a Christian their prophets didn't exist or show people that Moses is a myth they start hurling themselves about making menacing noises very often socres 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 and the mentality of faith and second on on on metaphysics which you I noce take refug in several times already this evening like what is love um is something poet or is it praic 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 a god of religion are saying that Redemption is is on offer to human beings that salvation

is on offer to them and that if they reject the offer they can be in really big trouble now don't don't start talking on to an audience like this or if you don't mind to a debat 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 on on pain of death sometimes in some forms but available to you if you'll only have enough

Faith where we' just found out that faith is probably the most overrated of the virtues and the one most least useful to us in the real dilemmas that we actually have to [Music]