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Near Death, Christopher Hitchens Was Asked About God — His Answer Shocked Everyone — Transcript

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0:00There is a smell in hospital rooms that
0:02I suspect no one who has spent time in
0:04them ever fully forgets. It is not the
0:06smell of illness exactly. It is the
0:08smell of management of the industrial
0:11project of keeping a body going past the
0:13point at which it wishes to continue.
0:15Antiseptic plastic tubing. The faint
0:18metallic undertone of oxygen being fed
0:20into lungs that have decided to be
0:21difficult. I know this smell well now. I
0:24have been living inside it for the
0:26better part of a year. It is December
0:282011. I am 62 years old. I have is
0:31esophasial cancer, the kind that gives
0:33you very little argument about its
0:34intentions. The doctors have been
0:36admirably honest. I have always
0:38preferred honest doctors to kind
0:41so publicly enough times that they
0:42apparently feel licensed to be direct
0:44with me. The cancer is not retreating.
0:46The treatments are doing what treatments
0:48do to a person, which is to say they are
0:50doing almost as much damage as the
0:52disease. I am in Houston at the MD
0:54Anderson Cancer Center which is one of
0:56the finest institutions of its kind in
0:58the world and which cannot save me. I am
1:01thinking about a conversation that
1:02happened two weeks ago. A priest came to
1:04my room. He came quietly respectfully
1:07with none of the aggression I might have
1:08expected from someone who had read my
1:10books. He sat down. He looked at me with
1:13genuine human warmth which I want to
1:15acknowledge because I think warmth is
1:17real even when its metaphysical
1:19underpinning is not. And then he asked
1:21me with great gentleness whether I had
1:23considered making my peace with Jesus
1:25Christ before the end came. I want to
1:27tell you what I said to him not because
1:29it was clever. I have said clever things
1:31my whole life and cleverness is in the
1:32end one of the minor virtues. I want to
1:35tell you because what I said was true
1:37and the truth in this particular
1:38territory is the thing that has cost me
1:40the most and the thing I am least
1:41willing to surrender. Now here of all
1:44places with the antiseptic smell in the
1:46air and the oxygen hissing and the wall
1:49between me and the darkness growing
1:50daily measurably thinner. I want to tell
1:52you everything I have ever thought about
1:54God, about Jesus, about the afterlife,
1:56about the priests and the imams and the
1:58rabbis who have spent their careers
2:00telling human beings what they must
2:01believe in order to avoid damnation. I
2:04want to do this not as a provocation. I
2:06have provoked enough in my life. I want
2:08to do it as a reckoning, a final honest
2:11unflinching reckoning with the claims
2:12that religion has made about the
2:14universe, about human beings, and about
2:17what waits for us on the other side of
2:18the last breath. And I want to begin
2:20with a specific memory because all
2:22honest reckonings begin with a specific
2:23memory. And because the specific detail
2:26has a way of keeping you honest that
2:27abstraction never quite manages. When I
2:29was a boy in England, this would have
2:31been the late 1950s, early 1960s, my
2:34mother used to take me to church on
2:35Sundays. She was not a deeply devout
2:38woman, but she was a product of her time
2:39and her class. And in England in those
2:41years, churchgoing was what one did. It
2:44was social infrastructure. It was
2:46respectability made visible on a weekly
2:48basis. And I went because children go
2:50where their mothers take them and
2:51because the alternative was to sit at
2:53home being bored in a different way. But
2:55I remember one Sunday specifically. I
2:57would have been perhaps 9 or 10. The
2:59vicar was delivering a sermon on the
3:01nature of hell. And he was not being
3:03metaphorical. He was describing with
3:06what I can only call relish the specific
3:08sensory experience of eternal damnation.
3:11The fire, the darkness, the worms that
3:13do not die, the weeping and the nashing
3:15of teeth. He was taking his material
3:17directly from the gospels, which I would
3:19later learn are considerably more
3:21explicit about the geography of eternal
3:22punishment than they are about most
3:24other things. And I remember sitting
3:26there in the pew, a 9-year-old boy, and
3:28thinking something that I did not have
3:30the vocabulary to articulate then, but
3:32that I have spent the rest of my life
3:33articulating. This is a man describing
3:36the most horrific outcome imaginable for
3:38a human being. Presenting it as both
3:40inevitable for most of us and as somehow
3:42compatible with the goodness of the god
3:44who designed the system. He was
3:46describing a universe in which the
3:48overwhelming majority of the human
3:49beings who had ever lived would spend
3:52eternity in conditions that would
3:53constitute torture by any definition
3:55that word has ever been given. And he
3:57was inviting us to worship the
3:59intelligence that had constructed this
4:00arrangement. I did not yet have the word
4:03for what I felt. The word I would
4:04discover years later is moral. What I
4:07felt was a moral objection, not an
4:09intellectual objection, a moral one. the
4:12kind that originates not in the brain
4:13but somewhere below it in whatever part
4:15of the body is responsible for the
4:17recognition that something is wrong. I
4:19am going to come back to that boy in the
4:21pew. I am going to come back to what he
4:23decided in that moment and what that
4:25decision cost him and what it gave him
4:27in return. But first I need to tell you
4:29about the hospital room and the question
4:31that was waiting for me there. The one I
4:33had never been able to stop asking. The
4:35one that every version of religion I
4:36have ever encountered has tried to
4:38answer and never quite managed to do so
4:40without. Somewhere in the architecture
4:42of the answer, something coming apart. I
4:44want to make you a promise at the outset
4:46that I intend to keep to the letter.
4:48What I am about to tell you is not
4:50brave. Courage has been attributed to me
4:52by people who misunderstand what courage
4:54is. A man who simply cannot bring
4:56himself to lie is not brave. He is
4:58constitutionally incapable of the
5:00alternative. That is not the same thing.
5:02What I am going to tell you is something
5:04more fundamental than bravery. It is a
5:07description arrived at over a lifetime
5:09of argument over decades of reading the
5:11sacred texts with the same critical
5:13attention I would apply to any other
5:14document over years of debate with the
5:16finest theological minds I was able to
5:18locate of what the God claim actually
5:20requires you to believe not emotionally
5:22not poetically physically logically and
5:25with reference to what we actually know
5:26about the world. And here is the
5:28promise. The God hypothesis examined
5:30with the same rigor that we apply to any
5:32other hypothesis about the physical
5:33world does not merely fail to meet the
5:36standard of evidence. It fails in a
5:37specific traceable reproducible way. The
5:40failure is not the result of my
5:42hostility. It is the result of the
5:44internal logic of the claim itself. I am
5:46not telling you that God does not exist
5:48in some diffuse metaphorical sense in
5:50the sense that love exists or justice
5:53exists or the feeling you get standing
5:55at the edge of the Grand Canyon at dusk
5:56exists. If by God you mean that feeling,
5:59then God exists and has no need of
6:01defense because feelings are real and do
6:04not require supernatural explanation. I
6:06am telling you something much more
6:08specific. I am telling you
6:09mathematically according to the same
6:11principles of reasoning that have
6:13produced every genuine advance in human
6:15understanding from Galileo to Darwin to
6:17Einstein that the specific God proposed
6:20by the Abrahamic traditions omnisient
6:22omnipotent omnipresent personally
6:24invested in human behavior responsive to
6:26prayer capable of performing miracles
6:28the author of moral law the judge of the
6:31dead that God when you trace the
6:32implications of those properties with
6:34the care they deserve is not merely
6:36unproven that God is incoherent
6:39The concept examined carefully does not
6:41hold together, not approximately, not
6:44with minor revisions. The concept
6:46contains contradictions so fundamental
6:47that no amount of theological
6:49sophistication has ever resolved them.
6:51And I have read enough of the theology
6:52to say this without the slightest
6:54hesitation. This is not an argument
6:56against the beauty of religious art. It
6:58is not an argument against the comfort
7:00that religious community can provide. It
7:02is not an argument against the moral
7:03insights that religious traditions have
7:05sometimes, despite themselves managed to
7:07produce. It is an argument about the
7:09specific concrete physical and logical
7:11claims, the ones that can be examined,
7:13the ones that must be examined because
7:15two billion people are organizing their
7:17lives and their politics and their
7:18treatment of other human beings around
7:20the assumption that those claims are
7:21true. That examination is what I have
7:23been doing my entire life. And in
7:26December 2011, with the oxygen hissing
7:29and the antiseptic in the air, I find
7:31myself positioned to give you the
7:33results. Before I begin, I want to say
7:35something I mean with complete
7:36sincerity. And I want to say it not as a
7:38rhetorical maneuver because I am aware
7:41that this kind of prefetary generosity
7:43can function as a rhetorical maneuver,
7:44but because it happens to be true, and
7:46truth is what we are here for. I am not
7:49unaware of what religion has meant to
7:50people. I have sat with people in grief
7:53who found in their faith something that
7:54I could not offer them and that mattered
7:56enormously to them. I have watched
7:58people approach death with a serenity
8:00that I found genuinely moving. A
8:03serenity that their belief clearly
8:04provided and that I had no wish to
8:06dismantle. I have read the mystics. I
8:09have read Augustine and Aquinus and
8:10Pascal and Kagard and Simone Wild. I do
8:13not approach this as an ignoramus who
8:15has never considered the best case for
8:17the other side. My own mother had a
8:19faith that was quiet and I believe
8:21sustaining. She found in her tradition
8:23something that I never found there. And
8:25I never once tried to argue her out of
8:27it because it was hers and not mine to
8:29adjudicate. She was not a stupid woman.
8:31She was in many respects more
8:33emotionally intelligent than I have ever
8:34managed to be. And she found in the
8:36Christian story something that helped
8:38her bear things that otherwise might
8:39have been unbearable. I name her here
8:41because I think it is important to
8:42establish that the arguments I am about
8:45to make are not made from the position
8:47of someone who has never loved a
8:48religious person or never seen what
8:51religious faith at its best can do for a
8:54human being. What I'm about to do is
8:57distinguish between what religion
8:58provides, the comfort, the community,
9:01the moral framework, the narrative of
9:03meaning, and what religion claims, the
9:05specific, physical, historical, logical
9:08propositions that underlly all the rest
9:10of it. Those propositions are what I
9:12intend to examine. And I intend to
9:14examine them the way I have examined
9:16every other proposition I have ever
9:17encountered by asking what evidence
9:19supports them and whether that evidence
9:21is sufficient. And what happens when you
9:23follow the internal logic of the claims
9:25wherever it actually leads? I am told
9:28this makes me cold. I am told this makes
9:30me incapable of understanding what
9:31religion is really about. I have been
9:33told this many times by many people. And
9:36I want to be honest about how I receive
9:38that criticism. I receive it as a
9:40compliment. Not because coldness is
9:42admirable, but because what is being
9:44described as coldness is actually
9:45precision. And precision in the service
9:47of truth is the only form of respect I
9:50know that lasts. I am going to take you
9:52through four arguments, not four
9:54expressions of personal distaste for
9:56organized religion, though I have those
9:58in abundance and will not pretend
10:00otherwise. Four structural problems,
10:02four places where the God claim examined
10:05with the care it deserves does not hold
10:07together. Each one is a problem I
10:09encountered in the course of my reading
10:10and thinking over many decades. Each one
10:13is a problem I spent significant time
10:15trying to resolve because I understand
10:17what it would mean if a resolution
10:18existed. Each one is a problem I was
10:20unable to resolve. Not because I stopped
10:23looking, but because the problems are
10:24real. The first is what I call the
10:26problem of design without a designer.
10:28The argument from complexity, the claim
10:30that the universe's intricacy proves the
10:32existence of an intelligent creator,
10:34fails not because it is emotionally
10:36unsatisfying, but because it is
10:38logically self-defeating. I will show
10:40you exactly how. The second is the
10:42problem of the moral monster. The god
10:45described in the Abrahamic texts. when
10:46you read those texts carefully and
10:48honestly rather than selectively and
10:49reverently is not a figure who inspires
10:52worship. He is a figure who inspires the
10:54most serious moral interrogation
10:55available to us and the attempts to
10:57rescue him through sophisticated
10:59theology consistently require abandoning
11:01the plain meaning of the texts that are
11:03supposed to establish his authority. The
11:05third is the problem of omniscience and
11:06free will. The problem that has
11:08generated more theological evasion, more
11:10philosophical fog, more late night
11:12arguments between believers and skeptics
11:14than almost any other. I intend to cut
11:16through that fog and show you what is
11:18actually there underneath it. The fourth
11:20is what I call the problem of the
11:21deathbed. The argument about what the
11:23specific offer of Christianity requires
11:25you to believe about justice, about
11:26moral conduct, and about the kind of God
11:28who would arrange the universe so that
11:30the criterion for salvation is not how
11:33you lived, but whether you accepted a
11:34specific proposition about a specific
11:36historical figure before your heart
11:37stopped beating. I will go through all
11:39four of these arguments with the care
11:41they deserve. I will not rush and I will
11:43not pretend at any point that the
11:45problems are smaller than they are. Let
11:47us begin with the argument from design.
11:49It is the oldest argument for God's
11:51existence and in some ways the most
11:53intuitive and I want to give it the
11:55respect it deserves before I show you
11:56precisely why it fails. The argument
11:59goes like this. When you look at the
12:01complexity of living things, at the
12:03extraordinary, improbable, intricately
12:05organized structure of a protein, a
12:06cell, an ecosystem, a human brain, your
12:09first instinct is to recognize design.
12:11Designed things have designers. The
12:13universe is extraordinary complex.
12:15Therefore, the universe has a designer.
12:17Therefore, God, I understand why this
12:19argument has been compelling for
12:20thousands of years. When you understand
12:22how a single enzyme works, how it folds
12:25into exactly the right three-dimensional
12:26shape to catalyze exactly the right
12:29chemical reaction, how the precision
12:31required is so extraordinary that even
12:33the slightest deviation in the amino
12:35acid sequence renders the molecule
12:37inert. It genuinely does look for a
12:39moment like something planned, something
12:41intended, something that could not have
12:44arrived at its present configuration by
12:46any process that lacks foresight.
12:48William Paley, the 18th century
12:50theologian, gave this argument its most
12:52famous form. He said that if you were
12:54walking across a heath and you found a
12:56watch lying on the ground, you would
12:57immediately infer from the precision and
13:00the intricacy and the evident
13:01purposefulness of its parts that it had
13:03been made by a watchmaker. And if the
13:05watch is designed, said Paley, then by
13:08analogy, the far more complex mechanisms
13:10of living things must also be designed
13:12and the designer must be God. Now, here
13:14is what Charles Darwin did to that
13:16argument in 1859. He did not merely
13:18punch a hole in it. He inverted it
13:20entirely. He showed that the appearance
13:22of design in living things is not
13:24evidence of a designer. It is evidence
13:26of a process that over sufficient time
13:29produces the appearance of design
13:30without requiring a designer. Natural
13:33selection working on random variation
13:35over hundreds of millions of years
13:37produces organisms of extraordinary
13:39complexity and apparent purposefulness
13:41without anyone doing the purposing. The
13:43watchmaker, as Richard Dawkins later put
13:45it, with characteristic precision, is
13:47blind. I am not going to spend time
13:50defending Darwin because Darwin requires
13:52no defense from me. The theory of
13:54evolution by natural selection is the
13:56most robustly tested and empirically
13:58confirmed theory in the history of
13:59biology. It has been confirmed by
14:02genetics, by the fossil record, by
14:04comparative anatomy, by the direct
14:06observation of evolution in real time in
14:08populations of bacteria and insects and
14:10fish. It is as well established as the
14:12germ theory of disease or the atomic
14:14theory of matter. And anyone who tells
14:16you otherwise is either ignorant of the
14:18evidence or has decided in advance that
14:20the evidence does not matter. But here
14:22is the thing I want to say about the
14:24design argument that goes beyond Darwin
14:26because Darwin answers the biological
14:28version of the argument but not the
14:30deeper version. The deeper version says
14:32all right we can explain the complexity
14:33of living things by natural selection
14:35but what about the laws of physics
14:37themselves? What about the initial
14:39conditions of the universe? What about
14:41the specific values of the fundamental
14:43constants, the gravitational constant,
14:45the fine structure constant, the mass of
14:47the electron that turn out to be
14:49calibrated with what looks like
14:50extraordinary precision for the
14:52production of a universe capable of
14:53supporting complexity at all? If those
14:55constants had been even slightly
14:57different, if the gravitational constant
14:59were a fraction larger or smaller, if
15:01the cosmological constant were anywhere
15:03other than its observed value, there
15:05would be no stars, no planets, no
15:07chemistry, no biology, no us. Does this
15:09not suggest a designer? This is the
15:11fine-tuning argument, and it is the form
15:13the design argument takes among
15:14sophisticated contemporary theists. And
15:17I want to examine it carefully because
15:18unlike the naive paleon version, it
15:20cannot simply be dismissed. The first
15:22thing to notice about the fine-tuning
15:24argument is that it assumes we know what
15:25the space of possible universes looks
15:27like. We don't. We have one universe and
15:30we observe that it has the constants it
15:32has. The claim that those constants are
15:34improbably precise for the production of
15:36life requires knowing what the
15:38probability distribution over possible
15:39constants looks like requires knowing in
15:42other words whether there is a large or
15:43a small range of constants that would
15:45produce a universe capable of supporting
15:47complexity. We do not know this. the
15:49calculation cannot be done with the
15:51information we currently possess. The
15:52second thing to notice is that the
15:54argument proves too much. If the precise
15:56calibration of the constants indicates a
15:58designer, then the designer must be more
16:00complex than anything the designer
16:02created. Must be in fact a being of
16:04infinite precision, infinite knowledge,
16:06infinite power. And a being of infinite
16:08precision, infinite knowledge, and
16:10infinite power would itself seem to
16:12require explanation. You cannot explain
16:15the complexity of the universe by
16:17positing something still more complex as
16:18its cause unless you're prepared to
16:20explain that and then explain what
16:23explains that in a regress that by
16:25definition never terminates. The
16:26theologian's response to this objection
16:28is always the same. God does not require
16:30an explanation because God is the
16:32uncaused first cause, the necessary
16:34being, the ground of all contingent
16:36existence. And here I want to say
16:38something very precise because this
16:39response deserves a precise reply. The
16:41claim that God is a necessary being, a
16:43being who could not not exist, is a
16:45claim that requires a proof. The
16:48onlogical argument, which Ansom of
16:49Canterbury advanced in the 11th century,
16:51and which every major philosopher since
16:53Kant has regarded as fatally flawed, was
16:55supposed to provide that proof. It
16:57doesn't. The concept of a necessary
16:59being is not self-evidently coherent.
17:01The question, why is there something
17:03rather than nothing applies to God just
17:06as it applies to everything else? Unless
17:08you have a genuine argument, not a
17:10stipulation, not a definitional move,
17:11but a genuine argument for why God is
17:14exempt from it. The theologian who says
17:16God doesn't need an explanation because
17:17God is God, is not providing an answer.
17:20He is providing a description of where
17:21the explanation stops. He is telling you
17:23that at a certain point he decided to
17:25stop asking questions. That is a
17:27personal decision and he is welcome to
17:29make it. It is not a solution to the
17:31problem of design. And here is the thing
17:32I tried very hard to avoid concluding
17:34but eventually had to accept. The design
17:36argument in every form I have
17:38encountered it either produces an
17:40infinite regress or terminates in a
17:42special pleading. Either the designer
17:44requires a designer and we never get out
17:46of the regress or we grant the designer
17:48special exemption from the very
17:49explanatory demand that motivated the
17:51argument in the first place. Neither
17:53option is satisfying. And in the full
17:55landscape of my reading, which is, I
17:58will say, without false modesty,
17:59extensive, I have never encountered a
18:02formulation of the design argument that
18:04escapes this dilemma. Darwin destroyed
18:06the biological version. Physics has
18:08given us several candidate explanations
18:10for the cosmological version, including
18:12the multiverse hypothesis, which
18:14proposes that the constants are not
18:15fine-tuned, but simply sample the
18:17available range. Our universe is one of
18:19an enormously large number of universes
18:20with varying constants. And we
18:22necessarily find ourselves in one where
18:24the constants permit our existence
18:26because we could not exist in any other.
18:28This is not a proven theory, but it is a
18:30scientific hypothesis which is more than
18:32the design argument manages to be. The
18:34intellectual confession I want to make
18:35here is genuine. I spent years being
18:38somewhat sympathetic to the fine-tuning
18:39argument. Not because I found the
18:41theological conclusion compelling, but
18:43because the phenomenon it points to, the
18:45fact that the constants have the values
18:47they have, seemed genuinely in need of
18:49explanation. I thought for a time that
18:51there might be something there, that
18:53perhaps the multiverse explanation was
18:54too easy, too convenient, the kind of
18:57thing you reach for when you want to
18:58avoid an uncomfortable conclusion. But I
19:00kept being brought back to the same
19:02point. Even if the fine-tuning argument
19:04established that the universe had been
19:06designed, which it does not, it would
19:08not thereby establish that the designer
19:10was omnipotent or omnisient or morally
19:12good or interested in human beings. It
19:14would establish only that the constants
19:16were chosen by something. The specific
19:18God of Christianity or Islam or Judaism
19:21with his specific attributes and his
19:24specific moral demands and his specific
19:26intervention in human history is not
19:28even in the neighborhood of what the
19:29fine-tuning argument at its strongest
19:31can establish. We are left then with
19:33this. The most powerful argument for
19:35God's existence examined carefully
19:37cannot establish either that a designer
19:39exists or if it could that the designer
19:42is anything like the God that people
19:44actually pray to. Let me move to the
19:46second argument. The one that I think is
19:48in some ways more fundamental and
19:50certainly more emotionally loaded. And
19:52because it is emotionally loaded, I want
19:54to approach it with particular care. The
19:57God of the Abrahamic religions, and I am
19:59speaking here primarily of the God
20:00described in the Hebrew Bible, the New
20:02Testament, and the Quran, is presented
20:04to us as the author of morality, the
20:07standard of goodness, the being in
20:09comparison to whom all human ethical
20:11achievement is, as the theology puts it,
20:14as filthy rags. We are told to worship
20:16this God not merely because he is
20:18powerful, the universe would make him
20:20powerful by definition, but because he
20:22is good. His goodness is the foundation
20:24on which the entire moral architecture
20:26of Western civilization has been
20:28constructed. I want to read these texts,
20:30not selectively, not in the way that
20:32theologians read them with a
20:34sophisticated hermeneutic that
20:36conveniently allows the uncomfortable
20:37passages to be reinterpreted as metaphor
20:40while the comfortable ones are taken as
20:42literal divine instruction. I want to
20:44read them the way a historian reads
20:45them, which is to say, I want to take
20:47them seriously. The God of Genesis
20:49creates human beings in his image,
20:51places them in a garden, gives them a
20:53prohibition they cannot understand the
20:55meaning of because they do not yet have
20:57the knowledge of good and evil, and then
20:59condemns them and all their descendants
21:01to suffering, labor, and death when they
21:03violate the prohibition. Let me say that
21:06again with the precision it requires.
21:08God creates beings who lack moral
21:10knowledge, gives them a moral command,
21:12and punishes them when they fail to
21:13comply. The entire apparatus of original
21:16sin, of the fallen state of humanity, of
21:19the need for redemption, rests on this
21:21foundation. And the foundation is a
21:23description of behavior that in any
21:25human context we would recognize
21:26immediately as enttrapment. The God of
21:28Genesis then watches as Cain murders
21:30Abel, the first homicide in human
21:32history. And his response is to protect
21:34Cain from vengeance by marking him.
21:36Which is to say, God's response to the
21:38first murder is to ensure that the
21:40murderer is not killed. But then a few
21:42chapters later when humanity has become
21:44generally wicked, God's response is to
21:46drown all of them. Every man, every
21:48woman, every child, every infant, every
21:50animal, except for the eight people on
21:52Noah's boat and the animals he has
21:54managed to select. This is presented to
21:56us as the action of a just and loving
21:58God. The children of the world,
22:00including presumably the children too
22:02young to have committed any of the
22:03wickedness that so offended the
22:04Almighty, are drowned. Every one of
22:06them. And this is the flood. The story
22:09that is painted on nursery walls and
22:11illustrated in children's books because
22:12we have decided as a civilization that
22:15the industrial scale drowning of
22:16children is an appropriate subject for
22:18nursery decoration provided that God is
22:20the one doing the drowning. I move on.
22:23The God of Exodus hardens Pharaoh's
22:24heart. This is not my reading of the
22:26text. It is the text. In chapter 4,
22:29before Moses has said anything to
22:31Pharaoh, God tells Moses that he will
22:33harden Pharaoh's heart so that Pharaoh
22:36will refuse to let the Israelites go.
22:38Then when Pharaoh refuses, because God
22:40has arranged for him to refuse, God
22:42punishes Egypt with 10 plagues, the last
22:44of which is the murder of every
22:46firstborn child in Egypt. Every
22:48firstborn, the child of the slave, the
22:50text specifically says, as well as the
22:52firstborn of Pharaoh, innocent children
22:54killed by an omnipotent god who could
22:56have simply with no effort. whatsoever
22:59inspired Pharaoh to release the
23:00Israelites without the preliminary
23:02maneuvering with hardened hearts and
23:03murdered infants. Why the detour through
23:06the slaughter of Egyptian children? The
23:08text is explicit about this as well. God
23:10tells Moses in chapter 10 that he has
23:12hardened the hearts of Pharaoh and his
23:14servants so that I may show these signs
23:16of mine among them and so that you may
23:18tell in the ears of your son and your
23:20son's son what I have done in Egypt and
23:22my signs which I have done among them
23:24that you may know how that I am the
23:25Lord. God murdered the children of Egypt
23:28in order to generate a story worth
23:29telling. He murdered them by his own
23:31account for the sake of his reputation.
23:34I do not require you to be an atheist to
23:35find this morally disturbing. I merely
23:37require you to apply to this story the
23:39same moral standards you would apply to
23:40any other story about a powerful entity
23:42killing children to enhance its
23:43prestige. I anticipate the theological
23:46response. I have heard it many times.
23:48The response is that God's ways are not
23:50our ways. That what looks to us like
23:52injustice is from the perspective of
23:54omniscience something we cannot
23:55comprehend. that we are not in a
23:57position to judge God by human standards
23:59because God transcends human standards.
24:01I want to say very precisely what is
24:03wrong with this response. What is wrong
24:05with it is that it evacuates the word
24:07good of all content. If God's goodness
24:09is so different from what we mean by
24:11goodness that it is compatible with the
24:12drowning of every child on earth and the
24:14murder of Egyptian infants for
24:16reputational purposes, then we no longer
24:18know what we mean when we say God is
24:20good. The word has been drained of its
24:21meaning. And a God who is beyond good
24:23and evil in the sense of transcending
24:25any standard that applies to moral
24:26beings is not a God who can serve as the
24:29foundation of morality. He is a God who
24:31has rendered morality arbitrary. The New
24:33Testament, I'm told, is different. Jesus
24:35represents a new dispensation. The God
24:37of love, not the God of wrath. The
24:39sermon on the mount, not the drowning of
24:41the world. And there is something to
24:43this. The ethical teachings attributed
24:45to Jesus, love your enemies, care for
24:47the poor, treat others as you wish to be
24:48treated, contain real moral insight. I
24:51have never denied this. Some of those
24:53teachings are beautiful and some of them
24:55are more radical than anything their
24:56cultural predecessors managed to
24:57produce. But the New Testament does not
24:59rescend the God of the Old Testament.
25:01Jesus says explicitly in Matthew 5 that
25:04he has come not to abolish the law and
25:05the prophets but to fulfill them. And
25:07the New Testament introduces a feature
25:09that the Old Testament for all its
25:10savageries does not fully contain. The
25:12doctrine of eternal damnation. The Old
25:14Testament kills you. The New Testament
25:16threatens you with something
25:17considerably worse than death, with
25:19eternal conscious torment in a place of
25:21fire and darkness for the crime of
25:23having held the wrong belief. I know
25:25that many sophisticated modern
25:26Christians do not believe in hell. I
25:28know that there are theologians who
25:30argue for universal salvation and others
25:32who argue for annihilationism, the view
25:34that the damned simply cease to exist
25:36rather than suffering eternally. I find
25:38these revisionary readings of the
25:39tradition considerably more humane than
25:41the original. I also find them
25:43considerably less honest about what the
25:44texts actually say. Jesus in the Gospels
25:47speaks of hell more than any other
25:48figure in the New Testament. He
25:50describes it as a place of outer
25:51darkness where there will be weeping and
25:52nashing of teeth. He describes it as a
25:54place where the worm does not die and
25:56the fire is not quenched. He describes
25:58the separation of the sheep from the
25:59goats at the final judgment and the
26:01goats are dispatched to eternal fire
26:03prepared for the devil and his angels.
26:05These are not metaphors that anyone in
26:07Jesus's audience would have understood
26:09as metaphors. They are descriptions of a
26:11real place with real fire where real
26:13people will suffer for real eternity. A
26:16God who creates human beings with the
26:17capacity for sin in full fornowledge
26:19that most of them will sin and who then
26:21arranges for those who sin and do not
26:23accept the correct remedy to suffer for
26:25eternity. That God is not a God who is
26:27difficult to comprehend. That God is
26:29morally speaking perfectly
26:30comprehensible and what he is
26:32comprehensible as is a being who has
26:34constructed a universe that functions as
26:36an enormously elaborate trap. I said
26:39earlier that I had a moral objection,
26:41not merely an intellectual one, to the
26:43theology I heard as a 9-year-old boy. I
26:45want to be precise about what that
26:46objection is because I think it is the
26:48most important thing I have to say
26:50today. The objection is not that hell is
26:52unpleasant. The objection is that the
26:54system that produces it, the system in
26:56which omnisient God creates beings he
26:57knows will damn themselves, watches them
26:59do so, and then sentences them to
27:01eternal torment, is a system that no
27:03decent human institution would tolerate.
27:05If a human judge sentenced every
27:07criminal in his courtroom to death,
27:09regardless of the severity of their
27:10crime on the grounds that the law
27:12requires it, we would remove that judge.
27:15If a human parent designed a situation
27:17in which he knew in advance his child
27:19would fail and then punished the child
27:21severely for failing, we would call that
27:23abuse. The same actions performed by an
27:25omnipotent God are presented to us as
27:28justice and love. I want to be clear
27:30that I am not making this argument
27:31because I enjoy making it. I take no
27:33pleasure in the conclusion, but I have
27:35spent decades reading the best
27:36theological defenses of the God of the
27:38Abrahamic traditions. And what I find
27:41consistently is that the defense
27:43requires either ignoring large portions
27:45of the sacred texts or redefining the
27:47word good until it no longer means
27:49anything recognizable or both. What I am
27:52about to show you in the next argument
27:54is the one I find most logically
27:55elegant. And by elegant I mean the kind
27:58of clean that a perfect proof has where
28:00the result seems almost too neat and
28:02then you check it three more times and
28:03it is still correct. The problem of
28:05omniscience and free will has been
28:07discussed for centuries but I don't
28:09think it has been discussed with the
28:10precision it deserves. Subscribe if you
28:12want to follow the logic wherever it
28:14leads. I will be back in 30 seconds. Let
28:16me now take up the third argument. The
28:18one about omniscience and free will
28:20which I consider the most
28:21philosophically precise of the four
28:23problems I am presenting and which I
28:25find most theologians are most eager to
28:26avoid. The claim is as follows. God is
28:29omnisient. God knows everything. This is
28:32not a peripheral attribute of the divine
28:33nature. It is central to it. An
28:36omnisient God knows the past, the
28:38present, and the future. He knows every
28:40thought you have ever had and every
28:42thought you will ever have. He knows
28:44every decision you will make from the
28:45moment of your conception to the moment
28:47of your death, including the decision if
28:49you are of the relevant religious
28:50tradition of whether you will accept or
28:52reject the saving grace that is on
28:54offer. Now consider what this means for
28:56free will. Free will is the doctrine
28:58that human beings have genuine agency.
29:00That when you make a decision, you are
29:02genuinely choosing between real
29:03alternatives and that the choice is
29:05yours in a meaningful sense, not merely
29:07the unfolding of a predetermined causal
29:09sequence. Free will is morally essential
29:11to the Abrahamic religions because
29:13without it, moral judgment is
29:14incoherent. You cannot be held
29:16responsible for actions you had no
29:18genuine alternative but to perform. The
29:20entire apparatus of sin, guilt,
29:22redemption, and salvation depends on the
29:23proposition that human beings are
29:25genuinely free to choose. But if God is
29:27omnisient, then before you were born,
29:29indeed before the universe existed, God
29:32knew what every decision you would make
29:33would be. He knew whether you would
29:35accept or reject the gospel. He knew
29:37whether you would commit murder or
29:38refrain from it. He knew the precise
29:40content of every thought you would ever
29:42have. And he created you anyway with
29:44full and complete fornowledge of
29:46everything you would do and everything
29:48that would happen to you in consequence.
29:49Now I want you to sit with the logical
29:51structure of what that means. It means
29:53that the decisions you make are not in
29:55any meaningful sense yours to make
29:57differently. Not because you lack the
29:59subjective experience of deliberation.
30:01You may have that experience quite
30:02vividly. But because the outcome of that
30:04deliberation was known with certainty
30:06before you existed, the future is from
30:09the perspective of omniscience fixed.
30:11And a fixed future is by definition a
30:13determined future. And a determined
30:15future is one in which your choices are
30:16not genuinely open. The theologian's
30:19response to this is typically one of two
30:20things. The first response is to invoke
30:22a distinction between fornowledge and
30:24predetermination. God knows what you
30:26will choose, says the theologian, but
30:28his knowing it does not cause you to
30:30choose it. You are still free. He merely
30:32knows in advance what you will freely
30:34do. I want to examine this response with
30:37the precision it requires. The claim is
30:39that God's fornowledge of your choice is
30:41compatible with that choice being
30:42genuinely free. Let us think carefully
30:45about what this requires. For your
30:46choice to be genuinely free, there must
30:48be a possible world in which you choose
30:50differently. But if God's fornowledge is
30:52infallible, as it must be by definition,
30:54then there is no possible world in which
30:56you choose differently. Because in every
30:58possible world, God's fornowledge would
31:00be correct. And God's fornowledge is
31:01that you make the choice you make. The
31:03possible world in which you choose
31:05differently is a world in which God's
31:06fornowledge was wrong. And God's
31:08fornowledge cannot be wrong. Therefore,
31:10there is no possible world in which you
31:11choose differently. Therefore, your
31:13choice is not free in any sense that
31:15allows for genuine alternatives. I have
31:17read the theological literature on this
31:19problem extensively. The most
31:20sophisticated responses invoke concepts
31:22like middle knowledge. The Jesuit
31:25theologian Luis Deolina's proposal that
31:27God knows not just what you will do but
31:29what you would have done in every
31:30possible counterfactual situation. This
31:33is a genuinely interesting philosophical
31:35idea. It does not solve the problem. It
31:37deepens it. Because if God knows what
31:39you would do in every possible
31:40situation, then the range of what you
31:42can do is fixed by God's knowledge. And
31:44the appearance of genuine freedom is
31:46even more illusory than it first
31:47appeared. The second theological
31:49response is to accept that God's
31:50fornowledge and human free will cannot
31:53both be fully real and to emphasize one
31:55at the expense of the other. Open
31:57theism, the position held by some
31:59contemporary evangelical theologians,
32:01proposes that God has chosen to limit
32:03his fornowledge in order to preserve
32:04genuine human freedom. God does not know
32:07what you will freely do because genuine
32:09freedom is incompatible with being known
32:11in advance. This is at least a
32:12consistent position. It is also a
32:14position that once you trace its
32:16implications destroys the omniscience
32:18that is supposed to be God's defining
32:20attribute. An omnisient being who has
32:22chosen not to know the future is not
32:24omnisient. The word has been redefined
32:26to mean something other than what it
32:27means. But here is the implication that
32:29I find most devastating and which I want
32:32to state as precisely as I can. If God
32:34is omnisient in the full unqualified
32:36sense, then when he created the
32:38universe, he knew who would be saved and
32:40who would be damned. He knew before he
32:42created you whether you were going to
32:44heaven or hell. He created the damned
32:46anyway. He created them knowing they
32:48were going to hell. And he created the
32:50system that would send them there. This
32:51is the doctrine of predestination. And
32:54Calvin had the intellectual honesty to
32:55embrace it fully. If God is omnisient
32:58and omnipotent, then the saved are saved
33:00because God chose them and the damned
33:01are damned because God made them
33:03damnable. The alternative that God
33:05created human beings in full forn
33:07knowowledge of their damnation and is
33:09nevertheless morally innocent of their
33:10fate requires a conception of moral
33:12responsibility that has no equivalent in
33:15any human ethical system I am aware of.
33:17I spent a long time looking for the
33:19error in this argument. I read planting
33:21on free will and the problem of evil. I
33:23read Molina on middle knowledge. I read
33:25the open theists. I read bath on the
33:28universal salvific will. And what I kept
33:30finding was the same thing. Every
33:32sophisticated response to the
33:34omniscience free will problem either
33:36sacrifices omniscience or sacrifices the
33:38genuine reality of human freedom or
33:40sacrifices the coherence of divine
33:42justice. You can have two of the three.
33:44The tradition claims all three. The
33:47tradition examined carefully cannot have
33:48all three. This brings me to the fourth
33:51argument. the one that the priest's
33:52visit made most vivid and which I think
33:55is the most revealing thing about the
33:56structure of the God hypothesis when you
33:58examine it in the particular light that
34:00a terminal diagnosis provides. The offer
34:02that was being extended to me in that
34:04hospital room is a specific offer with
34:06specific terms. It is not merely an
34:09invitation to reflect on one's life or
34:11to find peace or to cultivate a sense of
34:13gratitude for existence. It is the offer
34:15of a transaction. Accept Jesus Christ as
34:18your Lord and Savior and your sins will
34:20be forgiven and you will be granted
34:22eternal life. Reject the offer or simply
34:24fail to accept it before death and you
34:26will not. That is the transaction. I am
34:28not caricaturing it. That is what the
34:30tradition teaches. That is what the
34:32priest was offering. Now I want to
34:33examine the moral logic of that system
34:35very carefully because I think when you
34:37look at it without the emotional framing
34:39of comfort and salvation what you find
34:41is a structure of justice that would be
34:42regarded as deeply problematic if it
34:44appeared in any human legal or moral
34:46institution.
34:48Consider what the deathbed conversion
34:50implies about the relationship between
34:51conduct and consequence. A person who
34:53has lived a life of significant harm to
34:55others, who has spent decades, let us
34:57say, exploiting and deceiving those
34:59around them, causing suffering in the
35:01most concrete and personal ways, can in
35:03the final moments of consciousness make
35:05a sincere declaration of faith and
35:08receive full absolution. The entire
35:10record is expuned. Every harm they
35:12caused, every person they damaged, every
35:15lie they told is simply removed from the
35:17moral ledger by the act of belief.
35:19Meanwhile, a person who has spent the
35:20same decades in service to others, in
35:23genuine ethical commitment, in love and
35:25honesty and the repair of what has been
35:26broken, but who has not made the
35:28required declaration, perhaps because
35:30the evidence available to them did not
35:32warrant belief. Perhaps because they
35:34died suddenly without the opportunity.
35:36Perhaps because the particular version
35:38of Christianity they encountered seemed
35:39to them not credible. That person does
35:42not receive the same absolution. The
35:44criterion for the ultimate moral
35:45judgment is not the life. It is the
35:47confession. It is not what you did but
35:50what you believed in the final moment. I
35:52want to be as precise as possible about
35:54why I find this morally not merely
35:56inadequate but actually repugnant. What
35:59it means is that the Abrahamic God's
36:01system of justice grades not on conduct
36:03but on the acceptance of a specific
36:05metaphysical proposition. The person who
36:07lived a good life but died unconvinced
36:09is damned. The person who lived a
36:11terrible life but converted at the last
36:12moment is saved. The logical implication
36:15of this system is that how you treat
36:16other human beings matters less to God
36:19than whether you profess the correct
36:20belief about God's nature. I have never
36:22been able to accept this, not in any
36:24version of it I have encountered. And I
36:26want to be clear about what I mean by
36:27not accepting it. I am not saying that I
36:30find the system personally inconvenient.
36:32I am saying that I find it morally
36:33primitive. I am saying that it
36:35represents a conception of justice that
36:37has been superseded in the course of
36:39human moral development by considerably
36:41more defensible alternatives. We do not
36:44in our better legal and ethical systems
36:46sentence people based on their beliefs
36:47about the judge. We sentence them based
36:49on what they did in the world to other
36:52people. The proposition that God is the
36:54author of morality becomes very strange
36:56indeed when the moral system he authors
36:58appears to be less just than what
37:00thoughtful human beings have managed to
37:02construct without divine assistance. But
37:04here is the thing I want to add because
37:05I think it is important and because I do
37:07not want to leave the argument at the
37:09level of unfairness. What the deathbed
37:11transaction also reveals is something
37:13about the kind of God who designed the
37:15system. A god who can be satisfied by a
37:17deathbed profession of faith. A god who
37:19is willing to cancel the moral ledger in
37:21exchange for a lastminute declaration of
37:23feelalty is not a god whose standard of
37:25justice is high. He is a god who values
37:27compliance over character. He is, if we
37:30are honest about it, a god who looks
37:32rather more like the kings of the
37:33ancient world who offered amnesty to
37:35rebels who submitted before the battle
37:36than he looks like the author of the
37:38moral law. I raised this point in a
37:40debate once with a theologian who
37:41responded that God's forgiveness is not
37:43a reduction of his standards but an
37:45expression of his mercy. Mercy said the
37:47theologian is the supreme divine
37:49attribute. I replied then and I maintain
37:52now that mercy which erases the
37:54consequences of genuine harm done to
37:56real people is not obviously a virtue.
37:58The person who was harmed by the
38:00repentant sinner does not receive their
38:02compensation when the sinner is
38:03forgiven. They simply have to accept
38:05that the person who wronged them has
38:06been let off the hook by a divine
38:08authority who cares more about the
38:10disposition of the wrongdoer's soul than
38:12about the material reality of the
38:13wrongdoers's victims. Where is the
38:15justice for the victims in this system?
38:18Where in the entire architecture of
38:19divine mercy and grace and deathbed
38:21redemption is the account taken of the
38:23people who were actually harmed? I do
38:25not have an answer to that question
38:27because the tradition does not have a
38:28compelling one. The tradition offers
38:30heaven to the victims as compensation.
38:32But heaven for the victims does not undo
38:34the harm. It reframes it. And the
38:36reframing is accomplished by an
38:38authority who is also responsible for
38:40designing the system in which the harm
38:41was possible. I want to stop here and
38:43say something about where these four
38:44arguments leave us because I think the
38:46synthesis is important and I do not want
38:48it to be misread as a nihilistic
38:50conclusion because it is not one. The
38:52four arguments I have made, the failure
38:54of the design argument, the moral
38:56problems with the God of the texts, the
38:58incoherence of omniscience and free
38:59will, and the moral primitiveness of the
39:01deathbed transactions. These arguments
39:04taken together do not merely establish
39:06that a particular conception of God is
39:07implausible. They establish something
39:09more specific. They establish that the
39:11God of the Abrahamic traditions
39:13described with the specific attributes
39:14that tradition has assigned to him
39:16cannot be coherently conceived. that the
39:19concept examined with the care that any
39:21important concept deserves does not hold
39:23together. But here is what I want to say
39:25about what is left after the concept
39:26falls apart because I think this is
39:28where the argument most often goes wrong
39:30and where I am most often misunderstood.
39:32The questions that generated the God
39:34hypothesis are not answered by the
39:35failure of the God hypothesis. The
39:37question of why there is something
39:39rather than nothing is not answered. The
39:41question of what the laws of physics are
39:43grounded in, why the universe follows
39:44law-ike regularities at all is not
39:47answered. The question of what
39:48consciousness is and what its
39:50relationship to matter might be is not
39:52answered. The question of what if
39:54anything survives death in any form is
39:56not answered. These questions are real.
39:59They are not trivially answered by
40:00saying physics. Physics describes what
40:03happens. It does not and does not claim
40:05to explain why there is anything for
40:08physics to describe. And here is what I
40:10find. When I look at the universe
40:11without the God hypothesis, when I look
40:13at it with the tools of science and
40:14philosophy, without the prior commitment
40:16to a supernatural explanation, what I
40:19find is not comfort. I never promised
40:20you comfort. What I find is something
40:22vertigenous, the specific intellectual
40:24vertigo of genuinely not knowing, of
40:27standing at the edge of a cliff and
40:28being unable to see the bottom, of
40:30holding a question that is enormous
40:31enough to have occupied the finest minds
40:33in human history without resolution. I
40:35find that the universe is by any honest
40:37measure staggering. I find that the
40:40process by which matter organized itself
40:42over 13.8 billion years into entities
40:44capable of asking why it did so is
40:46stranger and more improbable and more
40:48worthy of sustained attention than
40:50anything the religious traditions have
40:51managed to describe. I find that the
40:53fact of consciousness, the fact that
40:55there is something it is like to be me
40:57lying in this hospital bed with the
40:59oxygen hissing and the light coming
41:00through the blinds at a particular
41:02December angle is genuinely mysterious.
41:04Not mystery in the sense of something we
41:06should stop inquiring into. mystery in
41:08the sense of something we have not yet
41:10adequately explained. The reframe I want
41:12to offer is this. The God hypothesis is
41:14not the only way to honor the genuine
41:16stranges of existence. In fact, the God
41:18hypothesis may be the least adequate way
41:20to honor it because the God hypothesis
41:22provides an explanation that turns out
41:24on inspection to explain nothing. It
41:26replaces the mystery of the universe
41:28with the mystery of God and does not
41:30tell us anything about either that we
41:32did not already know. What I have found
41:35over a lifetime of looking is that the
41:37honest I don't know held not as defeat
41:40but as the accurate description of where
41:41I actually am is considerably more
41:44honest and considerably more interesting
41:46than any available answer. Every closed
41:48answer, God did it or it's just physics
41:50or the question is meaningless is an
41:52attempt to shut the inquiry down. The
41:55inquiry shut down produces no further
41:57understanding. The open inquiry, the one
41:59that says we do not know why there is
42:01something rather than nothing. And that
42:03this not knowing is not a failure but a
42:04frontier has produced in the centuries
42:06in which it has been practiced every
42:08genuine advance in human understanding.
42:10I am not offering you peace. I am
42:13offering you something better than
42:14peace. I am offering you the correct
42:16description of the situation which is
42:18that we do not know and that not knowing
42:20correctly is the only place from which
42:22genuine understanding can grow. I want
42:24to go back to that boy in the pew. The
42:279-year-old sitting in the English church
42:29listening to the vicar describe the
42:30geography of hell with what I
42:32characterized as relish. I want to tell
42:34you what he decided in that moment
42:36because I think it was one of the few
42:37genuinely important decisions I have
42:39ever made. He decided not to pretend. It
42:41was not an intellectual decision
42:43exactly. He did not have the vocabulary
42:45for an intellectual decision of that
42:46kind. It was something more primitive
42:48and in some ways more reliable than
42:50intellect. It was a moral decision. The
42:52decision that there is something
42:53dishonest, something fundamentally
42:55irretrievably dishonest, about accepting
42:57a description of the universe because
42:59you are frightened of the alternative.
43:01About professing belief because the
43:02social cost of disbelief is higher than
43:04you want to pay. About saying I believe
43:07when what you mean is I am afraid not to
43:09believe. That decision has cost me over
43:11the course of my life things I am not
43:13going to enumerate here because this is
43:15not the moment for a catalog of personal
43:17grievances. But it has also given me
43:19something that I find in December 2011
43:22with the oxygen hissing and the cancer
43:24doing what the cancer does, I would not
43:26trade for any alternative. It has given
43:28me the specific and particular
43:29satisfaction of having spent my life in
43:31the company of arguments that I actually
43:33believe. Of having written what I
43:35actually think with the force I actually
43:37feel it, of having when asked what I
43:39believe, said what I actually believe
43:41rather than what would be most
43:42comfortable or most socially acceptable
43:44or most likely to get me invited to the
43:46right dinner parties. I am told that
43:48this is arrogance. I am told that the
43:49certainty with which I hold my positions
43:51is incompatible with genuine
43:52intellectual humility. I want to address
43:54this charge directly because I think it
43:56is based on a misunderstanding of what
43:58intellectual humility actually requires.
44:01Intellectual humility does not require
44:03that you hold all positions with equal
44:05tentiveness. It requires that you hold
44:07your positions with a grip proportional
44:08to the quality of the evidence that
44:10supports them. The position that the
44:12earth orbits the sun is held with great
44:14confidence not because we are arrogant
44:16about it but because the evidence for it
44:17is overwhelming and the evidence against
44:19it is non-existent. The position that
44:21the god of the Abrahamic traditions as
44:23described is a coherent concept capable
44:25of doing the theological work the
44:26traditions assigned to him is a position
44:28I hold with very little confidence
44:30because the arguments I have presented
44:31suggest that the concept fails under
44:34examination in specific traceable ways.
44:36What intellectual humility requires is
44:38not uncertainty about everything. It
44:40requires the specific willingness to
44:41update your views when the evidence
44:43changes. I am entirely willing to update
44:45my views about God if the evidence
44:47changes. I have been willing my entire
44:48life. The evidence has not changed. What
44:51I want to say in the time remaining to
44:53me and I am realistic about how much
44:55time that is. Is that the alternative to
44:57faith is not despair. The alternative to
44:59faith is not the cold empty universe of
45:01the Hollywood atheist. A universe of
45:03meaningless matter grinding
45:04indifferently through meaningless time.
45:06That is a bad description of the
45:08universe. And it is a description that
45:10serves the interests of the religious by
45:11making the alternative look worse than
45:13it is. The actual alternative to faith
45:15is attention. It is the specific
45:17sustained disciplined attention to what
45:19is actually there. To the extraordinary
45:21improbability that anything exists at
45:23all. To the specific local miracle that
45:25chemistry became biology and biology
45:27became consciousness and consciousness
45:28became curiosity. to the fact that in a
45:31universe of almost incomprehensible age
45:32and scale, somewhere on a small planet
45:35around a very ordinary star, something
45:37happened that has never been adequately
45:38explained and may never be fully
45:40explained. And what happened is the
45:42universe began to look at itself and
45:43wonder what it was. I find that more
45:45moving than any sermon. I find it more
45:47worthy of sustained attention than any
45:49catechism. I find it, if I'm being
45:51honest, more frightening than anything
45:52the vicar described in terms of eternal
45:54punishment. Because the genuine mystery
45:55of consciousness, the real question of
45:57what it means that there is something it
45:58is like to be here is a harder question
46:01than anything theology has formulated
46:03and has no easy answer. But I would
46:05rather have the hard question honestly
46:06than the easy answer falsely. I have
46:08always preferred the hard honest
46:09question. I prefer it now. The priest
46:12left my room with the same grace with
46:14which he arrived. I found myself moved
46:16by his decency. Decency is real wherever
46:19it appears. And this is the thing I want
46:21to be careful about. Decency in the
46:23service of a false proposition does not
46:25become false. It remains decency. The
46:27comfort that faith provides to people
46:29who are suffering is real comfort. Even
46:31if the metaphysical basis for it cannot
46:33survive examination. The community that
46:36religious practice builds is genuine
46:38community. The moral instruction that
46:40religious traditions have conveyed
46:41imperfectly and selectively has done
46:43genuine good. I do not want to leave you
46:45with the impression that I am
46:46indifferent to any of this. I am not
46:48indifferent to any of it. What I am
46:50indifferent to is the proposal that I
46:51accept as literally true claims that I
46:54have examined carefully and found to be
46:55literally false in order to have access
46:57to the comfort those claims provide.
46:59That is the bargain I was offered in
47:01December 2011. And I will tell you what
47:03I told the priest which is the same
47:05thing I have told everyone who has
47:07offered me that bargain in the decades
47:09before. I am grateful for the offer. I
47:11understand what it is and I cannot take
47:13it. Not because I am brave, because I am
47:16constitutionally incapable of the
47:17alternative. The oxygen is still
47:19hissing. The December light is still
47:21coming through the window at that
47:23particular cold angle. That is the light
47:25of this day and no other. And I find
47:27reaching the end of this argument, as I
47:29have found reaching the end of every
47:30argument worth having, that the honest
47:32account held clearly without flinching,
47:35without the self-comfort of pretended
47:37certainty in either direction is not
47:39empty. It is the most solid thing
47:41available. I don't know what happens
47:43next, but I know that I have spent my
47:45life asking the right questions, and
47:47that I think is enough. I want to spend
47:49some time on a question that I have not
47:50yet addressed directly because I think
47:52it is the question that underlies
47:53everything I have said so far, and
47:55because it is the question that
47:56defenders of religion most often resort
47:58to when the arguments about God's
48:00existence begin to go badly for them.
48:02The question is, without God, how do you
48:04ground morality? I have heard this
48:06question asked hundreds of times in
48:08dozens of countries across more than 30
48:10years of public argument about religion.
48:12It is always asked as though it settles
48:13the matter, as though the mere posing of
48:15the question is sufficient to
48:17demonstrate that the secular position is
48:18untenable, that without a divine
48:20lawgiver, there can be no genuine moral
48:23obligations, and that the choice is
48:24therefore between God and moral chaos. I
48:27want to examine this claim with the care
48:28it deserves, because I think it is in a
48:31specific and demonstrable sense
48:33backwards. Let me begin with a
48:34historical observation. The societies
48:36that have most fully incorporated
48:38religious authority into their
48:39governance that have come closest to the
48:41theocratic model that the question
48:43implies is necessary for morality have
48:46not been notable for their moral
48:47achievements. The Inquisition was not a
48:49notable moral achievement. The Crusades
48:51were not notable moral achievements. The
48:53religious wars of the 16th and 17th
48:55centuries in Europe, which killed a
48:57larger proportion of the European
48:59population than the First World War,
49:00were not notable moral achievements. the
49:03systematic persecution of heretics, of
49:05Jews, of Muslims, of homosexuals, of
49:08women who did not conform to the
49:09prescribed role. None of these were
49:11notable moral achievements. I am not,
49:13before someone raises the objection
49:15saying that religion caused all of these
49:17things in some simple direct sense.
49:19History is more complicated than that.
49:21But I am saying that the claim that
49:22morality requires religion as its
49:24foundation is not well supported by the
49:27empirical record of what religiously
49:29organized societies have actually done.
49:31Now let me engage with the philosophical
49:33argument because the philosophical
49:34argument is more interesting than the
49:36historical one. The philosophical
49:37argument against secular morality goes
49:39back to DSTVKI's formulation. If God
49:42does not exist, everything is permitted.
49:44The idea is that moral obligations
49:46require a legislator, someone who can
49:48genuinely command, who has the authority
49:50to make rules binding, and who can
49:52enforce those rules with consequences
49:54that matter. Without God, moral rules
49:57are merely human conventions and human
49:59conventions can be changed or ignored
50:01without ultimate consequence. I want to
50:03make three points about this argument in
50:05increasing order of seriousness. The
50:07first point is empirical. The claim is
50:09that without God, everything is
50:11permitted. But we observe empirically
50:13that human beings without religious
50:15belief are not more likely to behave in
50:17ways we would call morally monstrous
50:19than human beings with religious belief.
50:21The prison population of the United
50:23States is not disproportionately
50:24composed of atheists. The countries with
50:26the highest levels of atheism, the
50:28Scandinavian countries, Japan, the Czech
50:30Republic, do not show higher rates of
50:32murder, rape, theft, or fraud than
50:34heavily religious countries. If the
50:36absence of God caused moral chaos, we
50:38would expect to see evidence of this in
50:39the comparative behavior of populations
50:41with varying levels of religious belief.
50:43We do not see this evidence. The second
50:45point is logical. The dsttoeskin
50:47argument assumes that without God, human
50:49beings have no reason to behave morally.
50:52But this is a claim that requires
50:53examination. Human beings are social
50:55animals. We evolved in social groups.
50:58The capacity for empathy, the ability to
51:00take account of the suffering of others.
51:02To recognize in others a form of
51:04experience similar to our own is not a
51:06theological concept. It is an
51:08evolutionary one. Natural selection has
51:10produced social animals with strong
51:12pro-social instincts because social
51:13cooperation vastly improved the fitness
51:16of our ancestors. The capacity to feel
51:18pain at the suffering of others. The
51:20capacity we call compassion is not a
51:22gift from God. It is an inheritance from
51:24our evolutionary history. This does not
51:26make morality merely conventional or
51:28merely subjective. It means that
51:30morality is grounded in something real,
51:32in the actual facts about the kinds of
51:34experiences that human beings can have
51:36and in the actual capacity of human
51:37beings to take account of those
51:39experiences in their decisions. A
51:40morality based on the recognition that
51:42suffering is bad, that it is better to
51:44reduce suffering than to increase it,
51:46that human beings have the capacity to
51:48affect each other's suffering through
51:49their actions, is not a morality that
51:51requires divine sanction. It is a
51:53morality that requires only the
51:55recognition of facts that are as solid
51:56as any other facts about the world. The
51:59third point is, I think, the most
52:00important. The theistic objection to
52:02secular morality assumes that the God
52:04hypothesis actually solves the problem
52:06of moral grounding. But does it?
52:08Consider the following. If something is
52:10morally right because God commands it,
52:12then morality is arbitrary. It depends
52:14entirely on God's will, which could in
52:16principle have been otherwise. God could
52:18have commanded us to murder the
52:20innocent, and it would have been right
52:21to do so because God commanded it. This
52:24is the ethifera dilemma posed by Plato
52:26in the fifth century before the common
52:27era. and it has never been adequately
52:29answered by any theist I have read or
52:31debated. The dilemma is is something
52:33right because God commands it or does
52:35God command it because it is right. If
52:37the former morality is arbitrary if the
52:39latter morality exists independently of
52:41God's will and God is not the foundation
52:43of morality but merely its reporter.
52:45Most sophisticated theists try to escape
52:47the dilemma by saying that God commands
52:49what he does because it is his nature to
52:51command what is good and his nature is
52:53necessarily good. But this moves the
52:55question back one step. If God's nature
52:58is necessarily good, then goodness
53:00exists as a standard prior to and
53:02independent of God by which God's nature
53:04can be evaluated. The standard of
53:05goodness is not created by God. It is
53:07what God conforms to. And if that is the
53:10case, then we are back in the territory
53:12of an objective moral standard that
53:13exists independently of any divine will,
53:16which is precisely what the secular
53:17moralist has been claiming all along. I
53:19am not saying that secular morality has
53:21solved all the hard problems. I am
53:23saying that the hard problems are not
53:25solved by the theistic alternative. The
53:28theist faces exactly the same
53:29metaethical difficulties as the
53:31secularist with the additional problem
53:33of an entity whose existence is
53:35unestablished and whose moral record as
53:38described in the sacred texts is deeply
53:40troubling. Before I conclude, I want to
53:42address something that I have perhaps
53:43been too quick to dismiss in some of my
53:45past arguments. the phenomenon of
53:47religious experience not as evidence for
53:50God but as a genuine human phenomenon
53:52that deserves honest attention. The
53:54argument from religious experience is in
53:56its most basic form this billions of
53:59human beings have reported experiences
54:00that they describe as encounters with
54:02the divine. These experiences are
54:04reported across cultures across
54:06centuries across wildly different
54:08religious traditions. They share certain
54:10characteristic features a sense of
54:12presence a feeling of unity or
54:14dissolution of the boundaries of the
54:15self. a sense of overwhelming
54:17significance, a quality of certainty
54:19that the experience was not merely
54:20subjective. These experiences are for
54:23the people who have them among the most
54:25significant of their lives. Is not this
54:27vast body of human testimony evidence
54:29that there is something real being
54:31encountered? I want to be honest about
54:33this argument. I find it more
54:35interesting than most defenses of
54:36religious belief. And I want to be
54:38precise about why. The first thing to
54:40say is that religious experiences are
54:42real. The people who have them are
54:43having a real experience. I do not for a
54:45moment suggest that they are
54:46confabulating or performing or
54:49deliberately deceiving anyone. The
54:51subjective reality of the experience is
54:52not in question. What is in question is
54:54what the experience is evidence of. And
54:56here I want to invoke a distinction that
54:58I think is crucial. The distinction
55:00between the experience and the
55:01interpretation of the experience. The
55:03experience, the sense of presence, the
55:05feeling of unity, the overwhelming
55:07significance is real. The interpretation
55:10that the presence is the God of Abraham,
55:12that the unity is union with Christ,
55:14that the significance is the
55:15significance of salvation is a separate
55:17matter and one that the experience
55:19itself does not establish. We know from
55:21neuroscience that experiences with the
55:23phenomenological characteristics of
55:24religious experience can be produced by
55:26specific interventions in the brain.
55:28temporal lobe stimulation, the
55:30application of a magnetic field to a
55:32specific region of the skull in Michael
55:34Persinger's experiments, the use of
55:35psilocybin and other psychedelic
55:37compounds. All of these can produce
55:39experiences that the subjects describe
55:40in terms indistinguishable from the
55:42language of mystical religious
55:44experience. This does not by itself
55:46prove that all religious experience is
55:47simply brain activity. But it does
55:49demonstrate that the brain is capable of
55:51producing these experiences under
55:53conditions that have nothing to do with
55:54divine intervention. The experiences are
55:57real. What they are evidence of is not
55:59the specific theological propositions
56:01that any given tradition has constructed
56:03to explain them. They are evidence that
56:05the human brain is capable of states in
56:07which the ordinary boundaries of self
56:09and world are not experienced as they
56:11normally are. That is an interesting and
56:13important fact about the human brain. It
56:15is not evidence of the existence of the
56:17God of Abraham. There is a deeper point
56:19I want to make here and it is one that I
56:21find genuinely difficult to articulate
56:23without sounding dismissive which I do
56:25not intend to be. The experiences that
56:27people call religious are, I think,
56:30encounters with something real. But what
56:32they are encountering is not a
56:34supernatural being. They are
56:35encountering the actual nature of
56:37consciousness, the actual structure of
56:39their own minds, the actual fact of
56:41their embeddedness in a universe they
56:42have not constructed and cannot fully
56:44comprehend. The sense of something
56:46larger than oneself, the sense of
56:48dissolution into something greater.
56:50These are not illusions. They are
56:51accurate perceptions of the actual
56:53situation that we are small, temporary,
56:56improbably complex arrangements of
56:58matter in an enormous ancient
56:59indifferent universe. The religious
57:02traditions have tried to make that
57:03perception manageable by giving it a
57:05name, a story, a ritual, a community.
57:08That is understandable. But it is not
57:10the same as having accurately described
57:11what the perception is. A perception of
57:13the name is not the thing. The story is
57:16not the thing. The ritual is not the
57:17thing. the thing itself, the actual
57:19mystery of existence, the actual
57:20strangeness of consciousness, the actual
57:22improbability that anything is here at
57:24all, that thing has not been adequately
57:26named by anyone. And this is where I
57:29find myself in the final analysis in
57:31agreement with the religious impulse,
57:32even while being in disagreement with
57:34every specific religious claim I have
57:36ever encountered. The impulse, the sense
57:38that there is something here that
57:39demands more than casual attention, that
57:41the universe is not simply a brute fact
57:43to be taken for granted, that
57:45consciousness is a genuine mystery worth
57:46sustained inquiry. That impulse is
57:49correct. It is the most reasonable
57:50response to the human situation. What is
57:53not correct is the specific conceptual
57:55apparatus that the traditions have built
57:57to house the impulse, the omnisient,
58:00omnipotent, personal God who monitors
58:01behavior, answers prayers, and sends the
58:04unrepentant to eternal fire. That
58:06apparatus when examined with the care we
58:08have applied this evening falls apart.
58:10Not because the people who built it was
58:12stupid or dishonest because the problem
58:14they were trying to solve, the problem
58:16of how to live in the face of the
58:17mystery of existence is harder than any
58:19apparatus yet constructed has managed to
58:22adequately address. There is one more
58:24argument I want to make because I have
58:25been circling around it throughout
58:26everything I have said and I think it
58:28deserves to be made directly and given
58:30its full weight. The argument from
58:32suffering, what philosophers call the
58:34problem of evil, is the oldest and most
58:36powerful argument against the existence
58:38of God. I do not need to spend a long
58:40time on it because it has been stated
58:42more powerfully by others than I am able
58:43to state it. But I want to make one
58:45point about it that I do not think is
58:47made often enough. The argument
58:48typically focuses on the quantity and
58:50distribution of suffering in the world.
58:52Why would a good God permit the
58:54suffering of innocent children, the
58:55Holocaust, the Lisbon earthquake, the
58:57Black Death? The theodysies, the
58:59attempts to answer this question invoke
59:01the free will defense, the soulmaking
59:03argument, the appeal to divine mystery
59:05and various other constructions. What I
59:07want to focus on is a slightly different
59:09point. It is not just that there is
59:11suffering. It is the specific gratuitous
59:14purposeless quality of so much
59:16suffering. The child born with chases
59:18disease who will suffer for several
59:20years as her nervous system
59:21progressively deteriorates and then die
59:23has not sinned. Her suffering does not
59:25build her character. It does not teach
59:27her or anyone else a lesson. It is
59:29suffering in its most pure and
59:31purposeless form. There is no
59:33theological account of it that does not
59:34eventually come down to God's ways and
59:37not our ways. Which is to say there is
59:39no account of it. The soulmaking
59:41theodysy associated with the theologian
59:43John Hick argues that suffering is
59:45necessary for the development of morally
59:47mature souls. That a world without
59:49challenges would not produce beings
59:51capable of genuine virtue. I find this
59:53argument insulting to the memory of
59:55every child who has died of a
59:56preventable disease, every victim of
59:58random violence, every person whose
1:00:01suffering exceeded anything required for
1:00:02the development of moral character by
1:00:04several orders of magnitude. An
1:00:06omnipotent God who chose this particular
1:00:08curriculum for moral education when he
1:00:10could have chosen any other, including
1:00:12one that did not involve the systematic
1:00:14suffering of children, is not a God
1:00:16whose pedagogy I admire. But here is the
1:00:19point I want to make that goes beyond
1:00:20the traditional statement of the
1:00:22problem. The existence of gratuitous
1:00:24suffering does not merely make it
1:00:26unlikely that a good god exists. It
1:00:28makes specific claims about the kind of
1:00:30god that the suffering implies if there
1:00:32is a god. A god who could prevent the
1:00:35suffering of a child with chesak's
1:00:36disease and does not is a god who either
1:00:39cannot prevent it in which case he is
1:00:41not omnipotent or will not prevent it in
1:00:43which case he is not good in any sense
1:00:45the word has ever meant. The theological
1:00:47move at this point is to deny that we
1:00:48are in a position to evaluate God's
1:00:50goodness by our own standards. I have
1:00:53addressed this move already and I want
1:00:54only to add if we cannot evaluate God's
1:00:57goodness by our own standards, we cannot
1:00:59know that God is good. We can only know
1:01:01that God is powerful. Worshiping a being
1:01:04of great power whose goodness cannot be
1:01:05evaluated is not the worship of a good
1:01:08God. It is the worship of power itself.
1:01:10And I am unable to find anything morally
1:01:12admirable in the worship of power for
1:01:14its own sake. I want to say something
1:01:16about the sacred texts themselves
1:01:18because I think my critique of religious
1:01:20belief is sometimes understood as a
1:01:22philosophical critique only as though I
1:01:24am objecting to the concept of God
1:01:26without having read what the traditions
1:01:28say about God. I want to make clear that
1:01:30this is not the case. I have read the
1:01:32Bible, both testaments, multiple
1:01:34translations, plus the Hebrew original
1:01:36in enough detail to have opinions about
1:01:38the translation choices. I have read the
1:01:40Quran in Durwood's translation in
1:01:41arburies and in the pithl and I have
1:01:43spent time with people whose Arabic is
1:01:45sufficient to read it in the original. I
1:01:47have read the hadith. I have read the
1:01:48Talmud selectively. I have read the book
1:01:51of Mormon. I have read the works of Mary
1:01:53Baker Eddie. I have read the sacred
1:01:55texts of Hinduism of Buddhism of Janism
1:01:58and I have opinions about all of them.
1:02:00What I find in the Abrahamic texts,
1:02:02specifically in the texts that underly
1:02:04the three major monotheistic religions,
1:02:06and through them a very large proportion
1:02:09of the world's current populations, is
1:02:11the following. The texts were written by
1:02:13human beings, human beings of their
1:02:15time, with the understanding of their
1:02:16time, with the moral assumptions of
1:02:18their time, with the political needs of
1:02:20their time. The marks of human
1:02:22authorship are visible on every page.
1:02:24The contradictions between the gospel
1:02:25accounts of the resurrections where the
1:02:27women go, what they find, what they are
1:02:29told, whether Jesus appears in Galilee
1:02:31or Jerusalem, are not the contradictions
1:02:33of perfect divine authorship. They are
1:02:35the contradictions of multiple human
1:02:37authors working decades after the events
1:02:39they describe from different sources
1:02:41with different communities and different
1:02:42theological purposes. The scientific
1:02:44errors in the texts, the firmament in
1:02:46Genesis, the hairs chewing their cut in
1:02:48Leviticus, the mustard seed as the
1:02:50smallest of all seeds in Mark, are not
1:02:52the errors of an omnisient author. They
1:02:55are the errors of a pre-scientific
1:02:56culture doing its best to describe a
1:02:58world it did not have the instruments to
1:03:00fully understand. The moral limitations
1:03:02of the texts, the approval of slavery,
1:03:04the subordination of women, the
1:03:06prescribed killing of homosexuals and
1:03:08adulterers and apostates are not the
1:03:10instructions of a being whose morality
1:03:11transcends time and culture. They are
1:03:13the moral conventions of specific
1:03:15ancient cultures filtered through the
1:03:17specific political and social needs of
1:03:19specific communities. I am not saying
1:03:21the texts contain nothing of value. I
1:03:23have already said the opposite. The
1:03:25Psalms contain passages of genuine
1:03:26literary beauty. The prophets contain
1:03:28passages of genuine moral insight. The
1:03:31sermon on the mount contains ethical
1:03:32teaching that has not been surpassed.
1:03:34But the claim that these texts are the
1:03:36inherent word of God, that every word
1:03:38was divinely dictated and that every
1:03:40instruction must be obeyed, is a claim
1:03:42that cannot survive honest reading. And
1:03:44the moderate position, the position that
1:03:46says the texts are inspired but not
1:03:48inherent, that we must interpret them in
1:03:50light of our current understanding, that
1:03:51the passages that seem morally
1:03:53problematic are to be reinterpreted
1:03:55rather than taken literally. The
1:03:57moderate position has a problem that I
1:03:58think it needs to grapple with more
1:04:00honestly than it typically does. The
1:04:02problem is this. If you have the
1:04:03authority to decide which passages are
1:04:05to be taken literally and which are to
1:04:06be reinterpreted, then you are
1:04:08exercising a moral judgment that is
1:04:10prior to and independent of the text.
1:04:12You are saying this passage commands the
1:04:15killing of homosexuals, but I know that
1:04:17killing homosexuals is wrong. Therefore,
1:04:19this passage must be interpreted
1:04:20allegorically. But if you already know
1:04:23independently of the text that killing
1:04:25homosexuals is wrong, then you do not
1:04:27need the text to tell you what is
1:04:29morally right and wrong, you have a
1:04:31moral standard that you are applying to
1:04:33the text rather than deriving from it.
1:04:35This is a position I respect
1:04:36considerably more than the literalist
1:04:38one. But it conceds the central point.
1:04:41Moral knowledge is prior to and
1:04:42independent of divine authority. We know
1:04:45what is good and what is bad by a
1:04:47process that does not require divine
1:04:48revelation. And if that is true, then
1:04:51the claim that we need God for morality
1:04:53is false. I want to tell you as
1:04:55precisely as I can what I actually
1:04:57believe, not what I disbelieve. I have
1:04:59been clear enough about that. What I
1:05:01believe. I believe that the universe is
1:05:03real, that it exists independently of
1:05:05any mind's observation of it. And that
1:05:07it has the character it has regardless
1:05:09of our wishes about what that character
1:05:10might be. I believe this because the
1:05:12alternative that the universe is somehow
1:05:14a construction of consciousness, a dream
1:05:17dreamt by no dreamer, is considerably
1:05:19less well supported by the evidence than
1:05:21the alternative. I believe that
1:05:22consciousness is real. That when I say
1:05:24there is something it is like to be me
1:05:27lying in this hospital bed in December
1:05:282011, I am saying something true about
1:05:31the universe. That the first person
1:05:33perspective is a genuine feature of
1:05:34reality and not an illusion. I believe
1:05:36this while acknowledging that I have no
1:05:38adequate account of what consciousness
1:05:39is or how it relates to the physical
1:05:42processes in my brain. The hard problem
1:05:44of consciousness is genuinely hard and I
1:05:46am not going to pretend otherwise. I
1:05:48believe that suffering matters. That the
1:05:50suffering of a sentient being is
1:05:51genuinely bad. Not merely instrumentally
1:05:53bad, not merely conventionally bad, but
1:05:55genuinely objectively bad in the way
1:05:57that a cancer is bad for a body. This is
1:06:00not a belief I can derive from physics.
1:06:02But it is a belief I hold with as much
1:06:04confidence as I hold any other belief
1:06:06because its denial is not merely
1:06:08philosophical. Its denial is what every
1:06:10moral monster in history has effectively
1:06:12acted upon and the results of that
1:06:14denial are as close to a moral proof as
1:06:16we are ever going to get. I believe that
1:06:18intellectual honesty is a virtue that
1:06:20there is something genuinely admirable
1:06:21about the person who says I don't know
1:06:23when they don't know and something
1:06:25genuinely contemptable not merely
1:06:27mistaken but contemptable about the
1:06:29person who claims certainty they do not
1:06:31possess in order to secure comfort or
1:06:33status or the approval of their
1:06:34community. I have tried to practice this
1:06:37virtue. I have not always succeeded but
1:06:39I have always tried. And I believe this
1:06:42is the one that surprises people the
1:06:43most. I believe that existence is
1:06:45astonishing. Not in a warm, comforting
1:06:47way, in a cold, precise, almost
1:06:50frightening way. The fact that there is
1:06:51something rather than nothing. The fact
1:06:53that the something that exists has the
1:06:55specific character it has with the
1:06:57specific laws it has producing the
1:06:59specific outcomes it produces. The fact
1:07:01that among those outcomes, somewhere on
1:07:03a small planet around an ordinary star
1:07:05in an unremarkable galaxy, matter
1:07:07organized itself into something capable
1:07:09of asking why it did so. I find this
1:07:12genuinely, enduringly, irreducibly
1:07:14astonishing. I do not have a name for
1:07:16this astonishment. The religious
1:07:17traditions have a name for it. They call
1:07:19it the sense of the holy, the experience
1:07:21of the sacred, the encounter with the
1:07:23divine. I have no quarrel with the
1:07:25experience. I have a quarrel with the
1:07:27specific conceptual apparatus that the
1:07:28traditions have built to house the
1:07:30experience. The experience is real. The
1:07:32apparatus examined with the care we have
1:07:34applied tonight falls apart. What
1:07:37remains when the apparatus falls apart
1:07:39is the experience itself. the raw,
1:07:41unmediated, nameless astonishment of
1:07:43existing at all, of being for a brief
1:07:45and improbable time this specific
1:07:47arrangement of matter capable of asking
1:07:49this specific question. I don't know
1:07:52what happens next. I have said this
1:07:54before, and I mean it in the most
1:07:55literal possible sense. I do not know
1:07:58what happens to consciousness when the
1:07:59physical substrate that generates it
1:08:01ceases to function. I have views. I find
1:08:03the materialist view considerably better
1:08:06supported than the alternatives. But I
1:08:08hold those views with a grip appropriate
1:08:09to the quality of the evidence, which is
1:08:11to say firmly but not absolutely. The
1:08:13question is still open and I find
1:08:15reaching the end of my argument in this
1:08:17particular light that I can live with
1:08:19that for as long as living with it is
1:08:20available to me. The priest left, the
1:08:23oxygen is hissing. The December light
1:08:25has the particular quality of December
1:08:27light in Houston, which is not very much
1:08:28like December light in England. And I
1:08:30have been in enough places to know that
1:08:32the light of each place is specific and
1:08:34unre repeatable. And that this light,
1:08:36this particular afternoon light through
1:08:37a hospital window in December 2011 is
1:08:40the light of this day and no other. I am
1:08:42not comforted by that. I am not made
1:08:44more comfortable by having thought
1:08:45carefully about all of this, by having
1:08:47followed the logic wherever it led, by
1:08:49having refused the available
1:08:50consolations in favor of the accurate
1:08:52description. But I am not frightened by
1:08:54it either. And I want to say why because
1:08:56I think this is where the argument ends
1:08:58and where I want to leave you. I am not
1:09:00frightened because the fear of death
1:09:02when it is examined honestly turns out
1:09:04to be largely the fear of not knowing.
1:09:06We are afraid of what we cannot see,
1:09:08cannot predict, cannot prepare for. The
1:09:10religious traditions have addressed this
1:09:12fear by telling us what is on the other
1:09:14side, heaven or hell or reincarnation or
1:09:18resurrection. The consolation is real,
1:09:21but the consolation requires believing a
1:09:22claim that, as I hope I have shown,
1:09:24cannot be honestly sustained. What I
1:09:26find when I refuse that consolation is
1:09:28something unexpected. I find that the
1:09:30unknown held honestly rather than
1:09:32papered over with an inadequate
1:09:33hypothesis is not terrifying. It is
1:09:36interesting. It is the most interesting
1:09:38question I have ever held. And I have
1:09:40spent my life in the company of
1:09:41interesting questions. The universe does
1:09:43not owe me an answer to this question.
1:09:45It has not answered most of the
1:09:46questions I have asked it. It has
1:09:48occasionally and imperfectly and with
1:09:50enormous effort on my part permitted me
1:09:52to see some small portion of its
1:09:53structure. For that I am in my way
1:09:55grateful. Not to anyone, just grateful.
1:09:58I want to end with the 9-year-old in the
1:10:00pew because I promise to come back to
1:10:02him and I keep my promises. He decided
1:10:04not to pretend. Not because he was
1:10:06brave, because he could not make himself
1:10:08do otherwise because the alternative,
1:10:10nodding along, mouthing the responses,
1:10:12accepting the story because the story
1:10:14was being offered with such evident
1:10:16conviction and such evident good
1:10:17intentions. The alternative felt to him
1:10:20like a betrayal of something he could
1:10:21not yet name. What he could not yet name
1:10:23was his own intellect, his own judgment,
1:10:26the specific and particular capacity he
1:10:28had that we all have, though not
1:10:30everyone chooses to exercise it, to look
1:10:32at a claim and evaluate it, not on the
1:10:34basis of who is making it or how
1:10:36sincerely they believe it, but on the
1:10:38basis of whether it is true. He grew up
1:10:40to make a career of exercising that
1:10:42capacity. He made enemies. He made fewer
1:10:45friends than he might have made if he
1:10:46had been less insistent. He said things
1:10:48that hurt people, not because he was
1:10:50indifferent to their pain, but because
1:10:52he could not find a way to say what he
1:10:54actually thought that did not involve
1:10:55saying what he actually thought. And now
1:10:57he is in a hospital bed in Houston, 62
1:11:00years old, with a cancer that has made
1:11:02up its mind. And he finds that he does
1:11:04not regret the career he chose. He does
1:11:06not regret the arguments. He does not
1:11:08regret the enemies. He would not trade
1:11:10the life of honest inquiry for any
1:11:12version of the alternative. The priest
1:11:14offered him peace. He was grateful for
1:11:15the offer. He chose the question
1:11:17instead. That I think is enough.
1:11:20Subscribe. Stay in the inquiry.

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