Extract, Transcript – “God from the Fringes: The Great Debate”
University of Notre Dame, April 1995, televised, 2 hours 52 minutes
Fredericks:
“…absurd, just absurd-”
Hitchens:
“[Laughing] My opponent seems shaken by the assertion. [Pause for crowd laughter].”
Fredericks:
“It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever- and if you think I’m going to stand here and-”
Hitchens:
“Well you can stand wherever you want dear Pastor, but that will not change the simple fact of the matter, which is that you are trying to stack absurdities on their head. Layer after layer after layer. Oh well, we have something we do not yet understand, therefore it must have been a supernatural being, surely, and it must be my supernatural being, specifically, a God who cares about us, even knows we exist, who takes part in our little tribal wars, cares who we sleep with, in what position, cares what we eat and on what day of the week. It is an absurdity. We are confronted with something the theists says is impossible, which I dispute but regardless, which they say is impossible and so their solution therefore is to layer more impossibilities on top. Impossibility solved by more impossibilities. Stacking turtles. And eventually if we just throw in enough nonsense, eventually, they hope, we’ll forget to question this underlying assumption and let them sneak this prehistoric god of theirs in through the back door.”
Fredericks:
“You cannot stand there, while men are able to fly and-”
Hitchens:
“Men could fly before the Aurora Nirvanas my friend. [Pause for crowd noise]. Oh yes they could. They flew in aeroplanes, they flew in helicopters, quite a few of them actually. Even had wars, would you believe. I think even some Americans were involved [Pause for crowd laughter]. Think about it though, explain an aeroplane in its most fundamental terms. We have taken rocks, and we have put them in fire until they liquified, and we have taken that liquid and cooled it into shapes harder than stone. Then we have taken those shapes and stuck them together, with more magic rocks which talk to each other using lightning, and filled the whole thing with a black substance from the bowels of the Earth. And this allows us to fly. Also while you’re up there an attractive woman in a short skirt serves you a bag of peanuts [Pause for crowd laughter].”
Fredericks:
“You can hardly compare-”
Hitchens:
“But I can, absolutely I can, because were I to go back in time, as the good Pastor suggested earlier – if I was to return, say, to eighth century France, maybe a nice little Bordeaux vineyard [Pause for crowd laughter] and present myself to an eighth century peasant and fly, yes my friend is absolutely right, they would condemn me as a witch, they would burn me at the stake – if they could catch me of course [Pause for crowd laughter]. But the exact same would have been true had I returned in an aeroplane. Or carrying a mobile phone. Modern medicine. Forget witchcraft, forget witchcraft. If I had arrived back in 810AD in a Boeing 747, Charlemagne himself would have declared me Satan [Pause for crowd laughter]. But to us, see it’s perfectly ordinary. Because we understand it. And were we to leave the Boeing 747 with the eighth century French peasant, or the mobile phone, or the jar of antibiotics, they would eventually, hopefully, if they were clever enough, given enough time, come to understand it too. And replicate it. And it would no longer be magic. Why should our abilities be any different?”
Fredericks:
“Because a phone is a machine. We are the ones who have created it. We know it. We know how it works.”
Hitchens:
“Do you? Can you explain to me how a mobile telephone works? Because if you can Pastor Fredericks I must concede you are much more technologically savvy than I am. I barely know how to turn this thing on [Pause for crowd laughter]. And this is the heart of it then [Pause to raise cellphone]. I don’t know how this works. But I know there is an answer. I know it is not some antinatural creation, some product of the divine, I do not have to resort to believing it somehow exists outside of the rules of our universe, simply because I do not understand it.”
Fredericks:
“Yes but the obvious difference is, there are people out there right now who do know how a cellphone works, and they could explain it to you. But with superhuman abilities there is no explanation, science has not-”
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Hitchens:
“Science has not found an answer yet. This does not make superpowers remarkable, it does not even make them a minority amongst observable phenomena. The universe is full, Mister Fredericks, absolutely teeming with things which we do not have an adequate explanation for. Go back a hundred years and those unknowns multiply. Go back a thousand and they multiply even further. And slowly, slowly, through hard work and constant effort, science has chipped away at these mysteries, so that with every passing era we know more and more. This will be no different [Pause for crowd applause]. I have absolutely no doubt. Because there is yet to be anything which has entirely defeated our methods. There is yet to be a question to which science has provided an answer which has then been supplanted by a later, better answer provided by faith. And that’s just fact. [Pause for crowd applause].”
Fredericks:
“Superpowers are unnatural. They are clearly magic, and the existence of magic-”
Hitchens:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As applicable here as it is to any machine. Why should biological processes be any different? Why should stellar phenomenon? Ten thousand years ago my ancestors looked up at lightning in the sky and believed it was angry gods. Now we know better. Why should we, now, see someone shooting lightning from their hands and automatically revert to ‘oh that person is clearly supernatural’? Or it is an act of God, clearly. Rubbish. Absolute rubbish.”
Fredericks:
“We can talk around this all we want. And we can blur our eyes, and turn our hearts from the truth, and try our hardest to make what has happened fit into our selfish worldview. But the facts remain the facts. This is not some natural phenomenon. This is not something which has existed for thousands of years which we are only just now beginning to understand. This is something which has happened quickly, which has happened spectacularly, and which defies the ‘laws’ which we have established for this world [Pause for crowd applause]. For years, atheists have been saying ‘if God is real, let Him show Himself’. Now he does, he has, and as usual they’ve returned to more excuses. As usual they’ve attempted to explain away what we all instinctually know.”
Hitchens:
“Except, no, sorry, except he hasn’t shown himself, sorry, that didn’t actually happen. What has happened, what we have observed, is that a wave of stellar force, of light, impacted the Earth, caused colours to appear in the atmosphere, and following that there was mass unconsciousness. And then we awoke with abilities previously beyond our keen. Nowhere, in this admittedly – and I don’t deny it is – historic, unprecedented, so far unexplained but again I believe not unexplainable, event; nowhere did we see the presence of the Christian God. Or the presence of any God, for that matter. Nowhere did we see any signs, any written messages, the clouds did not part and rearrange to say ‘from Jesus Christ your saviour, you’re welcome’ [Pause for crowd laughter]. God did not come down and talk to us, he did not leave a note. We simply had an experience that we do not understand.
Now were my friend on the stage here arguing for the existence of aliens, I would have a much harder time. Much harder. God-like, but not godly, beings, unthinkably advanced, travelling through space, finding a species at a lower stage of development and going ‘we’re going to help them’; that is utterly believable. Completely baseless, of course, in terms of evidence, there’s nothing to support it, but as a logical man, as a man who when entertaining hypothetical ideas looks for plausibility and reason, the idea of intervention by benevolent extra‑terrestrials gains a lot more ground. But gods, and the idea of gods, and this assumption of this omnipotent magical creator, run into the same problem they’ve always had, the same problem they’ve had for thousands of years, which is, quite simply, where did they come from? If God made the universe, who made God?”
Fredericks:
“God is outside-”
Hitchens:
“I’m sorry, Pastor Fredericks, I keep interrupting you, I feel like I’m being terribly rude, but I also feel like you were about to say something along the lines of ‘God is outside creation’. ‘God has always existed.’ Am I wrong?”
Fredericks:
“No, but-”
Hitchens:
“So why. Can’t. The Aurora [Pause for crowd applause]. This is the question, this is what I keep coming back to. If you are going to explain away God’s existence with ‘oh well he’s outside the rules’, why can’t that same explanation be applied to the universe? Why is God, who is presumably more powerful and complex than his creations, because in theist theology something less complex can only come from something more, why is God, this infinitely complex being, simply existing and then creating the universe plausible, but the universe simply existing on its own is not? [Pause for crowd applause] What’s good enough for you, Pastor Fredericks, should be good enough for me, and I can do it with less illogical leaps [Pause for crowd applause].”
Gale:
“Pastor Fredericks, your response.”
Fredericks:
“I… I… um…”
Hitchens:
“Look, and again I don’t want to belabour this, but we cannot, in the face of strangeness simply abandon scientific principles. There is no evidence – no incontestable, factual evidence – that there is a god. There is not, either, and I admit this absolutely without hesitation, perfect scientific answers for the origins of the universe, although – and I hurry to note that I am not a physicist – there is some evidence, as I understand it, some mathematics which hypothesises that matter and antimatter may be able to spring spontaneously into being as a kind of ‘equation equals zero’. But we do not know. We do not know. And that is okay. It is okay not to know, it is better to admit our shortcomings rather than attempt to fill the void with superstitious tripe. Because who knows? Maybe one day we will understand the Aurora Nirvanas. But the fact that we don’t, ladies and gentlemen, is not an excuse for theists, for anyone, to simply scratch their heads and go ‘well I don’t understand, therefore God’. There is no evidence of a grand creator, let alone that he sent the Aurora, let alone that he knows or cares at all about our insignificant lives. And what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And an unknown should not be put forward as evidence of the impossible simply because it is, as yet, unknown [Pause for crowd applause].”