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Let me turn briefly to the purpose of the universe, which some aver exists and which, they assert, gives credence to an almighty God. It’s so important to distinguish real questions that when answered illuminate the deep structure of the world from invented questions that elucidate only the psychology of the individual or the society that poses them. Many religious questions are of the second kind. They are windows onto the psyche of the soul, not windows onto the heart of matter. Purpose is an excellent example of the latter, ranking alongside the prospect of an afterlife, the nature of the soul, the significance of the resurrection, and so on.
Bertrand Russell put it well when he considered the prospect of there being a teapot in orbit around Mars. If enough people start convincing themselves that there is a teapot in orbit around Mars, then it soon becomes an object of scholarly debate and extraordinary difficult to disprove by logic, or more reliably, by experiment. Cosmic purpose is a cosmic teapot. There is not one jot of evidence for cosmic purpose. It’s a reverse-engineering of the quest for God. There is a god, the argument runs, therefore there must be a purpose in his creation of the world. How much simpler it is to accept, in line with all the evidence, that there is no cosmic purpose, that it has been invented by humans to match their vision of God, and now turned round to justify the existence of God. God is not necessary for the inception of, or actions of, the world. There is no purpose.
Is there any cranny where a nearly-defunct God can lurk? I hear you say, “Morality.” The concept of goodness has emerged as we have evolved. Goodness is not God-given. There is an innate genetic foundation of goodness, modulated by the intellect that we’ve developed. We have emerged from a past where the pressures of the hostile environment led to the operation of group activities that established unconsciously a social contract that secured us from our enemies. We fragile beings, on the whole discovered that killing one another led to the collapse of the tribe. [26] With the evolution of our massive brains, we could stand above the prospect of private and public carnage, and at least discuss it rationally even though we continue to make misjudgments about its efficacy. There is no need to see the hand of God in this evolving pattern of behavior. Unless you can show explicitly that evolution, allied with intellect, is an inadequate foundation for morality, you have no right to import the concept of God in the third of his disguises.
I’ve spoken long enough this evening. But let me summarize my position. I cannot prove that there is not a god. The perception of god overwhelms any rational argument for an omnipotent entity is the ultimate chameleon. However, I have tried to argue that the common purportedly rational reasons for believing in God are vacuous. For all the actions that God has been thought necessary for can be achieved without any intrusion into natural order.
I asked you to discard your prejudices. Civilization and science have led you on a journey from bewilderment to maturity. It’s time to respect the nobility of the human spirit, the awesome power of human comprehension as expressed in that apotheosis of the Renaissance, science. It’s time to stand full-square in front of this awesomely wonderful world and to accept that we are gloriously, gloriously alone. Thank you.
Rebuttal - Dr. Craig
Dr. Craig: You remember I said in my first speech that Dr. Atkins needed to give us some evidence against the existence of God, and I noticed a discernible lack of such evidence in that opening speech. He gave us refutations of my arguments, but he provided no argumentation whatsoever that God does not exist, and he’s got to do that if he’s going to convince us of atheism. Kai Nielsen, who is an atheist philosopher, recognizes this point. Nielsen says, “To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false . . . All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it may still be the case that God exists. In short, to show that the proofs do not work is not enough by itself. It may still be the case that God exists.” [27] So at best Dr. Atkins has simply left us with agnosticism tonight. He hasn’t given us any good reason in that opening speech to think that God does not exist.
Now he did make a couple of general comments about the nature of explanation. He said that we should prefer simpler explanations to more elaborate ones and I would agree, all things being equal, that’s true. I would say that theism is a simple explanation in that it provides a unifying view of the world that explains a vast range of data, scientific, historical, ethical and personal. He says, “But it’s just intellectual laziness to conclude to the existence of God; to say that God is the reason or the explanation for something.” But notice that many of the arguments that I gave tonight were deductive arguments. That is to say that if the premises are true, then the conclusion logically follows; whether you like it or not, whether you regard it as explanatory or not is irrelevant. In a deductive argument, as long as the premises are true and the logic is valid, the conclusion is inescapable. And therefore he’s simply got to dispute my premises. It’s not enough to simply say that God is not a good explanation.
So let’s look then specifically at the case that I laid out for the existence of God. First my argument from the origin of the universe. Notice that he actually agrees with my two premises, that whatever begins to exist has a cause, and secondly that the universe began to exist. Why then does he conclude that the universe does not have a cause? Well did you catch how radical his view is? Because he doesn't really believe the universe exists. On Dr. Atkins’ view, nothing exists. So it’s not that something came out of nothing. He literally believes nothing exists. As he writes in his article, "We, like mathematics are elegant, self-sonsistent reorganizations of nothing.” Now, let me make three responses to this.
First of all, it’s a total misunderstanding to say that because the negative energy balances out the positive energy, that therefore there is nothing. [28] That’s as illogical as saying that because I have a certain amount of debts and a certain amount of money, that therefore I have zero money. It’s just illogical. Even if on balance it balances out to nothing, there’s still negative energy and positive energy. It doesn’t mean that nothing exists!
Secondly, I would point out that you still need a productive cause for the universe even if it’s the case that you don’t need a material cause for the universe. Christopher Isham, who is the leading quantum cosmologist of Great Britain, points out in his article Cosmos in Creation, there is still “a need for ontic seeding” to produce the energy even if on balance it is naught. [29] So you still need to have an ontic seed, a beginning, a cause, to bring the positive and negative energy into being, even if on balance it’s naught.
But finally, as I say, his solution I think is simply absurd. His solution is that nothing exists, and that’s simply absurd. I at least exist, as Descartes said. Even when I doubt that I exist, who is there to do the doubting? I doubt, therefore I am. There must be something that exists. So I hope you understand how radical this alternative is. If honestly the alternative to belief in the existence of God is to say that nothing is real, nothing exists, then I say let those who decry the irrationality of belief in God be henceforth forever silent, because nothing could be more irrational or implausible than that.
Now what about my second argument from the complex order in the universe? Here he raised three questions. First he says there are problems of probability here. In a lottery, any person’s winning is improbable but somebody has to win. The analogy is a bad one. It’s not the improbability of just any universe existing. That’s right, any universe is equally improbable. It is the specified improbability of a life-permitting universe existing. The analogy would be a lottery in which there’s a billion billion billion black balls and one white ball, and you have to reach in and pick out a ball. Now any single ball you pick is equally improbable, but it is overwhelmingly more probable that whichever ball you pick it will be black rather than white. In the same way, given the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe it is vastly more probable that the universe should be life-prohibiting.
What is his explanation for the life-permitting universe that exists? Well, he gives two speculations. First he says, maybe there is only one physically possible universe, it has to be this way. I think that sort of a theory of everything is simply not a credible alternative. P. C. W. Davies says, “There is absolutely no evidence in favor of it, even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn’t follow that the physical universe itself is unique . . . The laws . . . must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions . . . it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is; it could have been otherwise.” [30] So we have to have an explanation for why we are balanced on this knife’s edge that permits our own existence.
Secondly, though, he says you could have many parallel universes. Let me just make three points about this. First, this is a metaphysical hypothesis – not a scientific one, and as such it’s no better than a divine designer. In fact, Occam’s Razor would say that a divine designer is simpler, because instead of positing an infinite number of randomly ordered parallel worlds, you posit one single designer, and that is a simpler hypothesis and therefore to be preferred. Secondly, there is no known way for such a collection of parallel universes to be formed. We’ve already seen that Dr. Atkins’ scenario of universes tumbling into being from prior mathematical points is self-contradictory. Third, the mechanisms that have been suggested for forming parallel universes still require fine-tuning in order to get the mechanism generated for making these parallel worlds, so that fine-tuning isn’t escaped. Finally, there is no independent evidence for parallel universes, but there is for God, such as the moral argument. So let’s turn to that moral argument then.
Notice that he admits that without God there are no objective moral values. He writes in one of his works, “Science . . . shows us that there can be no moral distinction between an administered poison and one that the body itself has slowly generated.” [31] Do you understand what he’s saying? There’s no moral distinction between poisoning someone deliberately and that person dying of natural causes. Now I hope that Dr. Atkins and his wife are happily married, because if she believes that then if I were he, I’d start eating in restaurants!
I think that on a serious note it’s evident that there is a moral distinction between deliberate murder and just dying a natural death. [32] As John Healey, the executive director of Amnesty International recently wrote in a fundraising letter, “I am writing you today because I think you share my profound belief that there are indeed some moral absolutes. When it comes to torture, to government-sanctioned murder, to 'disappearances,' there are no lesser evils. These are outrages against all of us.” [33] So if you agree with me that there are objective moral values, then I think you also should agree that God exists as their foundation.
Dr. Atkins did not address the historical evidences from the empty tomb, the appearances of Jesus, and the origin of the disciples’ faith, or the resurrection of Christ, which provides miraculous evidence for God’s existence, nor did he address the immediate experience of God.
It seems to me that in the absence of any positive arguments for atheism tonight, I’m rational in believing in God on the basis of my own immediate experience of God. Why should I deny that real experience in my life for no good reason at all? So in the absence of positive arguments for atheism, I think I’m perfectly rational and within my rights to stick with my belief in the existence of God.
Dr. Atkins: It seems to me that the challenge is for those who propose the more complicated explanation have to present their arguments unless they accept the simpler one. I can propose that science can account for everything there is in the world without the invocation of the complexity of a creator, and a god. What a believer has to do is to demonstrate explicitly that my view about the simplicity, the innate inherent simplicity of the world, is inadequate. It’s only by showing that it is an inadequate understanding of the world that I am prepared to accept that there may be room for a god. No arguments that we’ve heard this evening go that far. None of them say that this explicitly shows that the universe cannot come in by chance alone.
No argument we’ve heard this evening explicitly excludes the possibility that the values of the fundamental constants are the ones that are necessary for life. That is what the opposition has to do. They have to show that simplicity is inadequate.
Atheism is the more primitive, of course you would agree with that, atheism is the more primitive view of the world, which has to be displaced. It’s only through historical accident that belief in gods, which was engendered by the bewilderment of our ancestors as they dropped down from the trees and were surrounded by forces that they needed to cajole. It’s only that historical accident that has brought religion into its powerful, prime position, with believers pretending that it is our duty to displace it. That is not the case. We, from the viewpoint of modern twentieth century science, can see our way to accounting for everything that religion purports to explain but in fact fails to explain even though it’s been trying to explain it for 5,000 years. I’m invited . . . Dr. Craig says that his arguments will fail if his deductive mode can be argued against. Are his premises false?
The origin of the universe. I argued that there was nothing to be made. I did not argue that there was nothing here now. I think it quite right that we should regard the current universe as an elaborate and engaging rearrangement of nothing. There was nothing for God to do, that’s a simplification. Science, of course, cannot account for it in detail, but at least give it a chance to try. And what science will do is what religion cannot do, that is, it will provide an explanation this side of the grave. If you want to believe in God, and the arguments that Dr. Craig has presented this evening, you can only be confident about them after you are dead. That seems to me to be a grave intrusion into human logic. [34]
Complex order: I have argued there. My argument was greatly maligned in Dr. Craig’s response. I will not go into that; I don’t have further time this evening. Let me talk about the things I didn’t have time to think about in my original talk.
The historicity of Jesus: I mean I know I’m on dangerous ground here because it’s not my subject, but I don’t believe that the Gospels written as they were decades after the event are a true record of what actually happened. Anyone who bases their belief on the Gospels is in fact showing that they are credible to a stage beyond belief. Okay, I’ll accept that Jesus did exist, but I will not accept that there were any miracles. David Hume said that there is always more reason to disbelieve the messenger than to believe the message. With miracles that is exactly the case. People wanted to make a case. People wanted to make a case that they had a Savior. People wanted to make a case that here was the Messiah. There were committees 80 years after the events sitting downand thinking about what should have gone on and then writing it down as though it did go on.
As for immediate experience of God, I’m afraid that is just self-delusion. We all want to be immortal, at least I want to be immortal. I know the only way of being immortal is to encourage investment in science and medicine. I don’t believe that one can be immortal through belief in the Bible. It’s people who simply wish to believe, who feel alone in this world, who want comfort, who are lost, who don’t know their position in the world, who want to avoid the sense, the prospect of their own annihilation, who believe in things that Dr. Craig was terming the immediate experience of God. Self-delusion; nothing other than self-delusion.
So in summary, I would say give science a chance. Give science this simple understanding of the world. This simple explanation of all there is can come from science. If science fails to deliver this side of the grave, then by all means turn to religion.
Moderator: I think it would be worth our while to spend a little while on the question of agnosticism. That was raised by Dr. Craig. The question was rather graphically put when he said, the magician does not require that the existence of something depend on any proffered reasons as to why it ought to exist. That is to say, if something can exist, even when all of the known etymological reasons why it is asserted to exist are proved invalid.
So let’s begin by asking Dr. Atkins why there is that sense of certitude in his arguments. One could understand why the Christian engages in certitude. You believe or you do not believe. But if you believe that God does not figure in the creation of the universe, why must you assert that when it seems to be so much more persuasive to say, “There is no reason to believe in God. I, under the circumstances, decline to clutch in with the believer. However, I acknowledge that the question is not closed whether one such exists.” So tell me, Dr. Atkins, why do you need to affirm atheism rather than to admit the possibility of agnosticism?
Dr. Atkins: Well, you have to give intellect its opportunity. [35] So you have to see whether science, in all its glory, can account for whatever religion has been trying to account for, and has so manifestly failed. Science has really emerged over the last 300 years, and has made extraordinary progress in the last 100 years.
Moderator: But you say, ‘manifestly failed’ on . . . Manifestly is . . .
Dr. Atkins: Well, yes, of course it’s manifestly failed. It says that there is an incomprehensible creator who made the world for reasons that we will never fathom, did it in a way that we will never know. That is nothing like an explanation. An explanation should be something that we humans, with our extraordinarily powerful minds, can comprehend. To say that you will never comprehend this explanation annihilates the fact that it is an explanation.
Moderator: No, because as I understand - though I’ll let Dr. Craig speak for himself - the fact that we will never know does not mean that that which is not known can’t in fact exist.
Dr. Craig: Exactly! It just leaves you with agnosticism. That’s no proof that there is no such being.
Dr. Atkins: Okay, but I think you can prove that there is no god.
Dr. Craig: Well what are your arguments for that?
Dr. Atkins: It’s not a mathematical proof; you cannot possibly give a mathematical proof.
Dr. Craig: Give any kind of argument.
Dr. Atkins: Okay, here’s an ‘any kind of argument.’ Everything that religion claims a god can do can be accounted for by science. So, that’s, if you like, the one branch of the argument. So that there is no need, there is no necessity, for a god because science can account for everything. On the other side of the argument is the reasons why people do believe in God. One can understand why people believe in God. It’s a sense of being aloneI. It’s a sense of bewildermentI. It’s a sense of wishing for power over other people, which is the worst of the reasons. It’s simply a sense of bewilderment. It’s the sense of being alone. You know these feelings far better than I because you obviously believe in them. But taken together with a reason why people believe, desperate to believe, together with the fact that you don’t need, actually, a god, in a sense amounts to an argument against the existence of God.
Dr. Craig: Well I guess I don’t see that. I mean, why doesn’t that commit the genetic fallacy of trying to say that by explaining how a belief originates, you thereby show the belief to be false? Even if it were true that belief in the existence of God were the product of fear and anxiety and so forth, which I don’t for a minute admit, but even if it were, that’s simply a genetic fallacy to say that because that’s the way the belief originates, that therefore the belief is false.
Dr. Atkins: But that’s only one half of the argument. I’m not saying that that alone is adequate, and I’m not saying that the fact that science can account for everything alone is also adequate, but taken together, the fact that science is omnipotent and the fact that I can understand why people like you desperately want to believe in God, that is an argument against the existence of God.
Dr. Craig: But two fallacious arguments put together don’t make a sound argument, right?
Dr. Atkins: But two legs are support.
Dr. Craig: Yes, but the legs have to be sound.
Dr. Atkins: But these are sound. I’m arguing both the sufficiency and the necessity.
Dr. Craig: The first argument only - if granted, which I don’t grant, I don’t grant the premises - but the first argument will only prove that it’s not necessary to believe in God in order to explain certain things. That doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist. The second argument commits a genetic fallacy of saying that because you can explain how people come to believe in God, therefore God doesn’t exist. Neither of those warrant the conclusion, Therefore God does not exist.
Dr. Atkins: No, I did not say it was going to be a mathematical proof.
Dr. Craig: No, no, but it has to be valid.
Dr. Atkins:But it is valid in the sense that there is no need for a god. Everything in the world can be understood without needing to invoke a god. You have to accept that that is one possible view to take about the world.
Dr. Craig: Sure, that’s possible, but . . .
Dr. Atkins: Do you deny that science cannot account for everything? [36]
Dr. Craig: Yes I do deny that science can account for everything.
Dr. Atkins: So, what can’t it account for?
Dr. Craig: Well, had you brought that up in the debate I had a number of examples that I was going to give. I think there are a good number of things that cannot be scientifically proven, but that we’re all rational to accept.
Dr. Atkins: Such as?
Dr. Craig: Let me list five.
Logical and mathematical truths cannot be proven by science. Science presupposes logic and math, so that to try to prove them by science would be arguing in a circle.
Metaphysical truths, like there are other minds other than my own or that the external world is real or that the past was not created five minutes ago with an appearance of age are rational beliefs that cannot be scientifically proven.
Ethical beliefs about statements of value are not accessible by the scientific method. You can’t show by science whether the Nazi scientists in the camps did anything evil as opposed to the scientists in western democracies.
Aesthetic judgments, number four, cannot be accessed by the scientific method because the beautiful, like the good, cannot be scientifically proven.
And finally, most remarkably, would be science itself. Science cannot be justified by the scientific method. Science is permeated with unprovable assumptions. For example, in the special theory of relativity, the whole theory hinges on the assumption that the speed of light is constant in a one-way direction between any two points A and B. But that strictly cannot be proven. We simply have to assume that in order to hold to the theory.
Dr. Atkins: But you’re missing the whole point.
Moderator: So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dr. Atkins.
Dr. Atkins: Okay, yes. Okay.
Dr. Craig: So none of these beliefs can be scientifically proven and yet they are accepted by all of us, and we’re rational in doing so.
Dr. Atkins: But what you have to accept is that science is a network, a reticulation of ideas, that there’s an interaction of ideas that come from a wide variety of sources, that in order to understand the very large, one has to in fact understand the very small. It’s a network of ideas which where they flow together do not annihilate each other but support each other. Science is, in a sense, a self-consistent way of looking at the world, and in that sense it gets its authority.
I’d also disagree with, let me think of the point you made, with the possibility that it can elucidate aesthetics. I see no reason why it can’t at least begin to show why we regard some sounds and chords, if you like, as attractive, whereas dissonances are unattractive. I think it’s quite possible for us to anatomize a picture. We can see why, say, the Golden Section is attractive, in a sense. We might not be able to look at this stage in our understanding of aesthetics and say that the Mona Lisa is the most beautiful thing on earth, but at least we can begin to analyze our perception of beauty. And you will only get a full appreciation of aesthetics and religious belief and all that other stuff when one has a full understanding of consciousness, which is the most important, outstanding problem in current science.
Dr. Craig: Those are not, however, themselves, aesthetic judgments that you’re talking about. Those are judgments about why we perceive something to be beautiful and ugly. But that is not itself an aesthetic judgment. It’s like the ethical . . .
Dr. Atkins: I think it’s quite possible to build a machine that decides whether a particular chord is pleasant or unpleasant.
Dr. Craig: But you’d have to instruct the machine.
Dr. Atkins: No you wouldn’t, you’d have to train it just as we are trained. Just as we live up in a world full of Western music and a Japanese grows up in a world full of Eastern music, so you actually change by a kind of neuronal network.
Moderator: We are instructed by conventional arrangements.
Dr. Atkins: Yes, but aesthetics is largely convention.
Dr. Craig: Well, now wait . . .
Dr. Atkins:Just as ethics is largely convention.
Dr. Craig: Those are statements which are not scientific statements. Those are philosophical statements about these subjects which cannot be justified scientifically.
Dr. Atkins: But you can explore the origins of ethics. You can explore the evolutionary origins of ethics and see that they are conventions that have emerged under genetic control in part but also by the application of our massive brains.
Dr. Craig: At best that would show how moral values are discovered, but it would not show that therefore moral values are invented, or are mere conventions.
Dr. Atkins: Of course it would!
Dr. Craig:That is a statement that is a philosophical statement that goes beyond the realm of science.
Moderator: Now, I want to hardly even change the subject but I don’t want the entire half hour to go without having some recognition of Christ. [37] Now, David Hume as we all know said that it is easier to believe that human testimony has erred than that the laws of nature were suspended. Now he said that athwart x amount of evidence, that the laws of nature had been suspended. You cited some incidences. Let me ask Dr. Atkins this. Does your rooted position require that under no circumstances should the laws be suspended, so that for instance the recorded testimony of 100 scientists at Lourdes, that certain inexplicable cures actually happened, inexplicable by the laws of nature, do you simply take the David Hume position that there has got to be an error in human testimony, because you are pro priori committed to its impossibility?
Dr. Atkins: Yes, I think if you think of miracles at Lourdes, there are two possible explanations. One is that the reporters are liars, which is the Hume position, and that of course is quite likely to be the case, but is not the only possibility. The other possibility is that some kind of cure did take place which the doctors who are reporting that they didn’t understand what went on simply didn’t understand. I believe that anything that has been reported reliably, anything, can be interpreted scientifically within the framework of modern science.
Moderator: Now, Dr. Craig, you believe that the testimony to the resurrection of Christ is something which is historically impossible or simply difficult to contradict?
Dr. Craig: I wouldn’t say impossible. In matters of history we don’t talk in terms of absolutes. But I would say that there are those three established facts, which . . .
Dr. Atkins: They’re not established facts. I’m sorry, they are repetitions of what is written in the Bible.
Dr. Craig: Well, insofar as you say that, Dr. Atkins, you disagree with the majority of New Testament historians, who say that these facts do belong to the portrait of the historical Jesus.
Dr. Atkins: But most of the historians of the New Testament are believers themselves and are desperate for it to be true, and they make it true by assertion.
Dr. Craig: I think that’s a very naive view of New Testament criticism today.
Dr. Atkins: They certainly cannot prove that it is true.
Dr. Craig: Not in the sense of a mathematical proof, but in the sense of a historical proof.
Moderator: Can we prove that Caesar was killed?
Dr. Craig: Well, exactly, it’s the same sort of . . .
Dr. Atkins: There were real witnesses to Caesar’s death and on the day that it happened; there were no witnesses on the day that Jesus purported to die.
Dr. Craig: Now, you’re not denying that the crucifixion of Jesus was therefore a historical fact are you?
Dr. Atkins: It’s quite likely he was crucified; at least, someone was.
Dr. Craig: Yes, okay, and now was he then buried by Joseph of Arimathea, as the Gospels report?
Dr. Atkins: That’s what they wrote 80 years later . . .