"Does A Good God Exist?" Debate - Christopher Hitchens' Parts

There are, I suppose, three forms of the divine, and if you eliminate polytheism, which I think we may as well all do for today's purposes, there are two ways of approaching it.

One is the deistic and one is the theistic.

I hope I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but if you don't know it, it's useful and it's a very important opening distinction.

There are those, there have been those, among them were many of the founders of our great republic, in particular Mr. Thomas Jefferson, who were not Christians, but who were deists.

They believed that the evidence of the universe and of nature showed a designer, seemed to imply it by its patterns and repetitions.

A very, very common usage in those days was that of the watch, which later turns up in Mr. Paley's Natural Theology, which for many, many years was the central Christian text in the argument for design.

He says very simply, if you're an Aborigine and you're walking along a beach and you find a pocket watch ticking away, You don't know what it's for.

You have no education that would enable you to judge its purpose, but you can tell it's not a rock, and you can tell it's not a vegetable, and you can tell it's been made by someone for some purpose.

That much you must know, even if you know nothing else.

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 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 very difficult and impossible actually to disprove.

One can only say the evidence for it isn't quite strong enough to be persuasive.

To be a theist, in other words, to occupy the position that many people here currently do, and my opponent does, 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 us individually, as well as as a species, and that it shows, is a very, very much more difficult undertaking.

I'm going to show why I think it's more or less impossible.

There are usually three ways in which people try and demonstrate it.

One is looking at the cosmos, the vault of heaven, the world beyond what we can quite see or apprehend.

The second is human history and its development, and the third is ourselves, our own bodies, our makeup.

Again, I'll have to condense, I hope you'll forgive me, but I'll sketch in what I think the objections are.