"Does A Good God Exist?" Debate - (1) Hitchen's Opening Speech

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski
Title: Does A Good God Exist?
Date: November 18th, 2010
Place: Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas
Audience: Students of Prestonwood Christian Academy
Full Debate:    • Christopher Hitchens VS. William Demb...  

Content:

Deism vs. Theism

The watchmaker analogy/argument;

"The metaphor of the watch was very much used by the deists. And of course, watches run down, and break down, and it was believed by many of them that if an intelligence had begun the universe, begun the process, he'd took no further interest in it - didn't intervene in human affairs, didn't mind who won the war, didn't mind which country was the leading one, watched with relative—well, or didn't watch—with indifference, plague, famine, war and so forth. That's a very hard position to oppose, by the way. It's impossible, actually, to disprove - one can only the evidence for it isn't quite strong enough to be persuasive. To be a theist, to be a member of a monotheistic religion, that believes that truth has been revealed, that god has intervened in human affairs, that he has a plan for us - each of as individually and as a species, and that it shows - is a very much more difficult undertaking. I'm gonna show why I think it's more or less impossible...";

3 frequent demonstrations of god: Looking at the cosmos; Human history and development; Our bodies/makeup;

"What preoccupies most scientists now is not how much they know compared to 50 years ago, though that is enormous as a difference, but how little they know compared to what they're finding out..." "...For a few milliseconds really of cosmic time our species has lived on one very very small rock, in a very small solar system that's a part of a fantastically unimportant suburb, in one of an uncountable number of galaxies..." "...Every single second since the big bang a star the size of our sun has blown up, gone to nothing..." "...And indeed physicists now exist who can tell you the date on which our sun will follow suit..." "...We know when it's [the world] coming to an end and we know how it will be, but we know something even more extraordinary which is the rate of expansion of this explosion we're looming through is actually speeding up. Our universe is flying apart further and faster than we thought it was..." "...Everyone who studies it professionally finds it impossible to reconcile this extraordinarily destructive, chaotic, self-destructive process, to find in it the finger of god, to find in that the idea of a design. And it's not just because we know so little about it, it's because what we know about it that's essential doesn't seem as if it's the intended result brought about by a divine-benign creator who loves every single one of us living as we do on this tiny rock in this negligible suburb of the cosmos."

"It's a big mistake to think that your own cause, or your own country, or your own side has god in its corner. For one thing, it commits the sin of pride".

The Jewish covenant with god; The Holocaust; "Many people wondered how god could permit this to a people who he had made a special relationship with, and many people left the synagog as a result..."; The rabbis' instant explanation for this human disaster and human crime; "...And then the Israelis won a war in 1967 which got them back control of the holy places in Jerusalem and then the rabbis blew the ram's horn again and said 'No no, we should have waited, now we see the finger of god - it was all to drive us back to Palestine where we should always have been and to make us the owners of Jerusalem, now we see what the design was'..." "...There isn't a single Israeli now who isn't wondering whether the victory in that war and the conquest of those holy places wasn't a disaster, hasn't led them into a terrible trap of endless war and confrontation in the middle east..."

Evolution, humans, primates, kinship with other species, near extinction of the human species; 99.8% of all the forms of life ever to appear on earth have gone extinct.

"I don't think it's healthy for people to want there to be a permanent unalterable irremovable authority over them."

"What I'm inviting you to do is to consider emancipating yourselves from the idea that you, selfishly, are the sole object of all the wonders of the cosmos and of nature, because that's not a humble idea at all, it's a very arrogant one and there's no evidence for it..." "...And then, again, the second emancipation - to think of yourselves as free citizens who are not enthralled [enslaved] to any supernatural-eternal authority, which you will always find is interpreted for you by other mammals who claim to have access to this authority - that gives them special power over you. Don't allow yourselves to have your lives run like that."