DEBATE: Existence of God | Asrar Rashid vs Guy Otten | Manchester University | Part-1

[00:00:01]Good evening. U on behalf of the Medina Society at the University of Manchester, I'd like to welcome you all uh to this debate on atheism. Uh I'm not a student nor a lecturer here at the university.

[00:00:14]Um but my name is Osman and I've been asked to to moderate uh this evening's uh debate. Um before we get into any introductions or house rules uh if you wouldn't mind those sat in the middle if you could just come uh towards the middle a little bit uh because there are people coming and it would just save uh people walking over you and during the course of the debate. So if you wouldn't mind just shuffling a bit closer together um particularly those in the middle. So it just easier for those um who are joining us uh as um our couple of hours or so uh progress.

[00:00:51]Our debaters this evening um are two people um who I guess are recognized for their debating skills. So we have Guy Uton who's the chairman of the Greater Manchester Humanist uh and also has recently qualified as a humanist uh chaplain and he may want to share more about that. And on my left uh is Shehikh Assar Rashid who I'm sure is no stranger to many of you um and has been to the University of Manchester many times, a renowned Muslim theologian um hailing from from Birmingham.

[00:01:26]The topic of this evening's debate is the existence of God. And both our debaters will be presenting their points of view for the existence of God and for the non-existence um of God. Just in terms of the format for this evening, both our debaters will have opening statements lasting 20 minutes. Uh they have timers in front of them. uh and I will try my best to keep them uh to time. The remainder of the event after the 20 minutes uh will be open to the floor for questions and the answers from the debaters. But please bear in mind that that word questions from the floor. We don't want speeches.

[00:02:08]We want questions to our debaters. Uh just in terms of uh the house rules and I may have to remind you of them uh after the uh opening statements. Um I would request uh that audience members do not interrupt or interject at any point during the speaker opening presentations. Um if we find people don't want to comply with this then unfortunately we'll have to take action.

[00:02:38]Uh any questions uh that you may have please note them uh and wait until the end of both presentations to ask those questions. uh for those who want to I guess ask their questions um on paper rather than um verbally can write them down, give them to one of the volunteers who will pass them forward. During the question and answer session, audience members are only allowed to ask questions. No further contributions or comments will be uh allowed. Uh and again uh we ask that you respect uh this house rule. Audience members may ask a maximum of one question per speaker. So potentially you have two questions, one per speaker.

[00:03:23]Um if you want to take up anything with them beyond that you may have opportunity after the end of the event.

[00:03:32]Um and I would request that questions must relate to points mentioned in the presentation or around the topic of this evening's debate i.e. the existence of God. And we want to undertake this debate as I'm sure all of you as well want to in a good um natured environment. So any derogatory remarks towards any person or their speak or the speakers will not be tolerated and we will unfortunately have to ask the removal um of that person.

[00:04:03]Um just also to add Yes sir.

[00:04:06]>> Um so I just ask one question. Would we be able to ask a uh uh question of uh both speakers? So, you know, if I had a question, I could I address that to both speakers.

[00:04:18]>> So, if you had one question, you could ask it to both both speakers. Yes, that's fine. All right. Yeah, that that's okay. Yeah.

[00:04:23]>> So, you can ask one question to both speakers or you can ask each speaker a question. Um, just also to to add that we have um two two colleagues of ours who are undertaking security duties this evening. Uh, we're hoping we won't have to call on their services, but they're here to keep uh all of us uh safe.

[00:04:45]Now, that's the house rules out out the way. Uh, and now we'll be progressing to hearing um from the speakers for this evening. But just before we do that, reading around the topic of living in a godless society or the rise of of atheism, last year's British Attitude Survey found that more than half of the people in this country say they now have no religion. [clears throat] 3/4 of 18 to 24 year olds, many of that age group perhaps sat in this hall say they have no religion. Richard Dawkins talks about the God delusion. His book he claims has been downloaded over three million times. The unofficial Arabic version over three million times in Saudi Arabia.

[00:05:31]Now the number of ex-Muslims in America has increased in the last few years by 50%. So that sets the context for this debate in which we're talking about the existence of God and people's connection to that. So firstly I'm going to ask uh Mr. Autton the chairman of the Greater Manchester humanist uh to make his uh opening statement and I believe he has a presentation. Just as he walks over there just another uh just one final point in terms of the house rules >> the microphones for the questions. We have two microphones when we get to the questions. There'll be volunteers from the Medina Society >> uh in either aisle. We'd ask you to come to the the end of the aisle to ask uh your questions. Is that is that okay Hamza? So, we'll have volunteers in either aisle and uh who will be holding the microphones. Please come to the end of the aisle um for your for your mic.

[00:06:22]I'm going to undertake a bit of a David type role and pick people um and we'll probably call you out by the color of your shirt or your top. All right. Uh Mr. Austin, I don't think this is working. I don't think any of them are working. You're just going to have to shut.

[00:06:37]>> All right. Can you all hear me?

[00:06:39]>> Yeah.

[00:06:40]>> Good. Okay. If anybody can't hear me, uh could they indicate when when my voice starts going? Well, thank you first um for inviting me to share this platform uh this evening with the learned shake.

[00:06:55]Uh and I see this as a good way uh actually of understanding and getting to know each other. I'm actually not that interested in debating sort of dryly and intellectually. It's it's about dialogue. It's about understanding.

[00:07:10]So, first a present for you believers.

[00:07:15]Yep. I thought you know you you might appreciate that one.

[00:07:21]So, I was struck by the title I was given reasons and proof for why there is no God for reasons that I will give you uh as I go along. Uh so, I prefer instead to talk about naturalism, origins, and probabilities. and you'll see why those are relevant um issues. As I say, I'll leave proofs and that kind of stuff to the Q&A and instead I'll set out first the philosophical underpinnings of atheism and then I'll touch on the human culture in including religion and how it um emerged and changed and then say a few words about the origins of religion's interest in morality and I'll finish off by discussing or offering some probabilities to help you uh through this this minefield uh which is so important. So atheism itself is not a world view. Um atheism is not a worldview. Would you like me to say change slide or something? Yeah. Okay. Atheism is not a worldview. It is just a position on the god claim. whether uh the question of whether or not there is a god is actually not the central concern for naturalists. The underlying philosophy for me and for many of us is called philosophical naturalism.

[00:08:46]So change what is philosophical naturalism?

[00:08:51]Essentially it is that the world uh that we live in and are part of is what there is that is reality.

[00:09:01]uh there is essentially no other reality that we know about and it follows for this from this that we know of no supernatural reality and there's no duality between the material world and the spiritual world that if we actually had evidence of a super nature uh then it would immediately be part of the natural world and that is why the word proof struck me as odd because there can be no good proof that is not rooted in reality and evidence.

[00:09:36]So change what is the natural world?

[00:09:39]Well, this is not just the material world that we can sense. It's also the microscopic, quantum, and cosmological world that we need scientific instruments to detect or infer. It's also not just the material world of particles and energy. It's also the mental world humans have created, namely language, culture, information stored in our brains, music, science, technology, mathematics, art, and the realm of ideas, whether political, religious, or philosophical.

[00:10:12]And so you see there religion in its rightful place. It's just one amongst many sets of ideas that humans have generated. And for naturalists, we rely first on the findings of science and the scientific method to find out about the world. And science uses evidence that can be interpreted. And the evidence is our facts uh that are gathered by senses, our senses and by our instruments. And there's also a process of getting better and better evidence.

[00:10:45]And this approach is sometimes called methological methodological naturalism which is obviously related to philosophical naturalism.

[00:10:55]Slide please. Science then uh does not say that no non-natural realms exist only that they haven't been observed or discovered yet. And the burden of proving supernaturalism is always upon those who claim it exists, which means producing evidence, not just logical arguments to demonstrate it. The existence of a god lacks evidential support. We say along with gins, fairies, angels, and shan. And we say that these ideas that exist that these are ideas that exist only in our minds and not in physical reality.

[00:11:38]And I've yet to see any proof, let alone absolute proof that a god exists or indeed that no god exists. But there are some strong probabilities that you can think about and I'll suggest some later.

[00:11:52]The science has proved itself enormously successful and reliable and the understanding of how the brain in particular works has progressed enormously. And we now understand for instance that the brain is busy with a myriad of unconscious actions every moment just a fraction of which our conscious self later notices. We are really what our brain is doing.

[00:12:18]Slide please. Now this is our imam. Imam Darwin. [laughter] He's I think he's got he's got the beard, doesn't he?

[00:12:29]Evolutionary and other scientists have gathered the evidence and developed the probable account of the prehistory of our species.

[00:12:38]Humans, just as other animals, have emerged from millions of years of natural selection. Under under eva environmental pressures, each species of animal tends to find a niche in the ecosystem where it can survive and reproduce.

[00:12:55]Speciation and modification of bodies enables animals to handle their eco niches better.

[00:13:03]For instance, giraffes that have evolved long necks are able to reach more uh higher leaves and food. And fish, interestingly enough, that uh have found caves a good place, dark lightless caves, a place to thrive, lose the sight of their eyes because actually eyes are expensive things to maintain and they don't need them. Another slide, please.

[00:13:29]So, our ancestors found a different niche. They developed larger brains to outwit their predators and over time developed larger brains still and out of these large brains emerged language, culture and consciousness.

[00:13:47]So the story is that about 50,000 years ago a remarkable change occurred in homo sapiens.

[00:13:54]They began to make figurines. They started drawing pictures in caves and they began to bury their dead with grave goods.

[00:14:04]These have all been found by archaeologists. Another cave painting was found just la last week in Borneo.

[00:14:11]That's not the one that was found in Borneo, but it's similar. Um these are 30 40,000 years old.

[00:14:20]What changed?

[00:14:22]Scientists infer that what has from what has been found that humans must have developed an intelligence and a language by then that enable them to reflect on their surroundings to ask questions and tell each other stories. [clears throat] And neurologists tell us that this culture, language and consciousness which we alone in the animal kingdom appear to have are emergent properties.

[00:14:49]They emerge from the neuronal activity of our brains. There's no evidence of a soul separate from our physical being.

[00:14:58]And there's especially no evidence of any detached soul or transcendental reality or entity telling the brain what to do.

[00:15:08]Another five. Thank you. Uh that I should have put on before, but those wh no no go back. Yeah, that's it. Those are figurines. um they're are they're 25 30 40,000 years ago old and they um they they demonstrate the thinking this this spiritual thinking going on if I can say so what has changed I' I've I've just said that haven't I there's no evidence of any detached soul another uh slide please so the origins of religion is here I think I say that picture the hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago huddled around a campfire perhaps in the mouth of a cave at night using their newly acquired language and mental skills what are they going to talk about remember there's no TV they will have told each other stories they would have talked about hunting why things happen their ancestors what causes natural phenomena etc There are many things they would have talked about but they would have speculated. One of our basic ideas inherited from our evolutionary past is that of agency. We think somebody must have done it whatever it is that happens to us when actually sometimes it's the impersonal forces of nature that are responsible for things that happen.

[00:16:37]And from there it's a short step to thinking that spirits might be responsible.

[00:16:43][clears throat] And that theor origin we say and naturalists say of religious thinking. Anthropologists think that some of the present day animists a sort of religion I don't know if you're familiar with it in Africa, Siberia and places like the Amazon and elsewhere may have preserved something of this old hunter gatherer religious thinking. Next slide please.

[00:17:08]So who said that?

[00:17:11]any offers.

[00:17:14]It was the great and late Christopher Hitchens. It's true. That's that's our view. Tribes that have been visited by anthropologists have religion, culture, music, dance, art, and stories to tell, which we call myths.

[00:17:30]And the members of these tribes live together and must have had rules of conduct for the successful cooperation of their members, just as present day hunter gatherer tribes do. Again, selection pressures going back into the midst of our evolutionary history ensure that groups of animals who live together have had standards of contact of conduct should I say uh like empathy and concern for the good of their fellow tribes people. Our ancestors were not actually the first to evolve it. Their predecessor homminids, their predecessor and their predecessor mammals also had it. This is what scientists conclude who have observed other species like bonobos.

[00:18:12]Bonobos. Next one. Bonobos appear not to have changed so much as humans since the time our ancestors and their ancestors diverged in evolutionary history about 6 million years ago. They may be amongst our closest cousins. And not just because they spend a lot of time kissing. And there they are kissing.

[00:18:34]Fast forward 40,000 years or so and we no longer have small groups of hunter gatherers but larger subtle societies with kings and pharaohs. And from what we uh from what historians and archaeologists have discovered, the old polytheistic religions were concerned, not with interpersonal morality so much, but actually with propitiating the gods by sacrifice, ritual, and libation to try to head off things like natural disasters and defeat in war. And these kings and pharaohs assumed a priestly role to lead the efforts of the people.

[00:19:12]Slide please. directed towards pleasing the gods. And there's a picture of Zeus.

[00:19:15]Now, Zeus was around for pretty much as long as Islam's been around, uh maybe longer, uh but we no longer believe in him. Well, any here believe in Zeus? No.

[00:19:27]No. Okay. About 5,000 years ago, there was another religious development. The Pharaoh declared himself to be God and therefore entitled to have a glorious afterlife like the other gods.

[00:19:42]Hence the mummified bodies and the tombs full of things needed in the afterlife.

[00:19:48]And the idea seemed to spread rapidly because soon everyone wanted a piece of the action. And from there how you lived your life in this world began to be associated with religious ideas of what you could expect when you die.

[00:20:05][clears throat] Ideas about the afterlife were thus entirely the creation of humans. In Persia among the Zoroastrians, the idea about paradise and hell developed as a reward or punishment for how you led your life. These ideas were later taken over by Christians and Muslims and this is then how moral rules entered religion. Before that time, humans behaved morally for natural and social reasons just as atheists do now. There was and is no need for religious moral rules.

[00:20:40]So we see pre precepts in the Bible and the and in the Quran which combine rules about how you should behave to God with a selection of moral rules appropriate to a primitive society.

[00:20:52]This this is why atheism is not the central tenant of our philosophy. It's actually a footnote simply the recognition based in scientific and e academic expertise that all religion has roots in the mythmaking of our remote ancestors which has been handed down reformed and embellished to form the religions we still see today including notably Christianity and Islam but also other religions and there have always been actually religious reformers like Jesus and if he existed and Muhammad who have changed religions or started new ones. Think of Mormonism, Buddhism, Bahigh, Janism, the cargo cults and since 1950, my particular favorite, the cult of in Vanuatu of Prince Phillip as a god. I kid you not. There is one of his devotees with two pictures.

[00:21:51]Uh, a religious reform, you might say.

[00:21:56]Okay. So, let's move on in the few minutes I've got left to probabilities.

[00:22:01]Now, probabilities is the way I offer you to find your way through the uh the net and the mesh of arguments for and against. So, I ask the question how you can assess the competing arguments and I suggest one way is by assessing the probabilities. There's every reason to take the view that the existence of of a god at least of the Abrahamic variety is improbable.

[00:22:28]Um so the Abrahamic God is generally seen as infinite, perfect, all powerful, allseeing and knowing, allloving and compassionate. Now I ask you to compare the world we would could expect from such a perfect, all powerful, all knowing and seeing and all loving and compassionate God with the actual world.

[00:22:47]We would expect such a go a good and perfect God to create a perfect world. A world without unhappiness, poverty, injustice, sectarianism, war, starvation, climatic degradation, murder, rape, and imperialism. But [clears throat] actually, if there was no such God, the world would simply proceed on natural laws and we would expect it more probable that all these those problems could arise naturally.

[00:23:13]And that is exactly what we find. a world with unhappiness, poverty, starvation, etc. And we have to struggle for any justice we manage to get. Such a world is more consistent with a naturally developed world. And we have again if a god actually wanted to create humans as his special creation, we would expect him to do so by creating just a beautiful place perhaps like the garden of Eden where we had everything we needed and no more. But actually we see a cosmos full of billions of stars and billions of galaxies. This is more consistent, isn't it, with natural processes in which the earth and humans play a significant part, which is what cosmologists tell us actually is the case.

[00:24:01]And if there was a God that at all was at all concerned with humans, we would expect him to demonstrate his existence clearly to to all of us and communicate his love for us clearly in one unified message. Communicate it unambiguously to all mankind at all times through all media in our own languages. So there was no possible mistake. [clears throat] But if there was no such god, we would expect instead humans to invent their own gods and that these would be different gods in different places around the world backed up by different stories with no agreement about his message or who God is or what precepts he and she or she promulgates. We would see sectarianism, religious wars, inquisitions and diesh.

[00:24:46]Guess what? That's what we see. If there was a God, we would expect him to communicate timeless moral laws to the highest standard right from the start, outlawing slavery, war, persecution, and discrimination against minorities, gays, women, and apostates.

[00:25:02]If there was no God, we would expect to see a range of moral laws influenced by the background and culture in which they arose, which actually do change over time. And we have seen slavery, for instance, approved in some religions.

[00:25:16]It would have been very easy for God to give his creation a clear scientific textbook with all the scientific laws and some useful medical facts like the germ theory of disease. Why didn't he do that? He's not bothered with us. If he exists, and he doesn't exist, we say.

[00:25:32]Finally, if humans were designed by a perfect or knowing powerful God, we would expect him to design a perfect human body. Not just one, not one with design flaws or with traces of our evolutionary past or both. For instance, in the case of the appendix, it serves no human purpose and can explode causing major a major emergency or death. However, it's it in in rabbits it uh it's quite Is that one minute?

[00:26:06]>> One minute.

[00:26:06]>> Yeah. Thank you. In rabbits, it serves a useful purpose.

[00:26:11]Or as shown on the the fly slide. Thank you. Uh whack. Yeah. Um the narrow pelvic bone which makes child birth so difficult. A problem other animals don't have. So what we actually have is an imperfect body with traces of our evolutionary past. Not evidence of design by a perfect engineer God. So I ask you to treat these probabilities.

[00:26:36]Think of them. Think of them cumulatively. And remember, it's God we're talking about. He has and had, if he existed, the power to get it right.

[00:26:47]Thank you very much for listening.

[00:26:49]>> Thank you. [applause]