SPEAKER_02 0:00

Picture an old village, and in the centre of this village is a well, and within that well is everything that makes us human. We're talking off our decency, our love, our compassion, our hope.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I understand that atheists will get God wrong. That kind of goes with the territory about being an atheist, but why do they have to get humanity so wrong? Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. Are you subscribed to the channel? We're gonna hit 100k very soon. Be one of the 100,000. But just the other day I had a debate with Stephen Woodford, aka Rationality Rules. The debate topic is does religion poison everything? And of course it's taken from the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great. It's a very expansive proposition that Stephen has to defend. Religion poisons everything. I was happy to take on the debate because I think it's it's really a huge burden to take on if you're going to be in the affirmative on this debate. So I was very I was very happy to be negating what Stephen was saying here. And I might make a couple of these kinds of videos responding to the 90-minute conversation that we had in front of a crowd in London. In this video, I just want to have a look at Stephen's opening statement. And I love that he began with an analogy. I love inhabiting illustrations. It really helps to clarify a person's position. And what I really appreciate about this analogy is that if I had made it, it would sound like I was caricaturing Stephen. But Stephen, in his own words, genuinely thinks that this is how humanity and morality and religion relate to one another. Get a load of this.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

We're going to discuss today the proposition that religion poisons everything, and it's from the great works, or inspired by the great works, of Christopher Hitchens. You've probably heard of him. I am going to argue the affirmative of religion poisons everything, and I'm going to give you an argument for it, and Glenn is going to argue against it, and we're going to see what he has to say. And to begin, what I want to do is to get you to picture something in your mind and to keep this in your mind for the rest of the debate. Picture an old village, and in the centre of this village is a well, and within that well is everything that makes us human. We're talking of our decency, our love, our compassion, our hope. That's all in the well, and it's all human, it's all ours. And then, once upon a time, a religious community comes along and they take over the village, and they approach the well and they tip something in. They tip in their doctrines, they tip in their dogma, they tip in their revelations, and then the water changes. Now, the water still quenches your thirst, it still sustains life, but now in every cup there is something extra. Centuries pass, and then something extraordinary happens. The religious people that tip down their substance in that well, they start claiming that the water is theirs. They say that without them there would be no water. In fact, they get so bold as to claim that it was their ancestors alone that built the well. They are the reason that the society is sustained. This is nonsense. It's a fiction, it's a lie. The well was always human, the well was always ours. As Christopher Hitchens himself put it, human decency is not derived from religion, it precedes it. But, as many of you will know, indoctrination is, shall we say, a hell of a drug. And so not only the religious in the community, but also many people that are not religious become convinced that without the contagion, we die. That if there was no faith, then there would be no hope. That if there was no church, there would be no community. If there was no God, there would be no love, no meaning, no reason to go on living.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Not all kinds of atheism are the same. John Gray has seven different kinds of atheism, but one of them is this new atheist variety, which seems to have religion derangement syndrome, and seems to conceive of religion as a separate and separable part of the human person, as though you can unbake the cake of humanity and get rid of this awful flower so that you can still have some kind of baked good. That's my illustration for how unthinkable it is to kind of try and separate this religious aspect to humanity. But I didn't really need to make that analogy because Stephen's got his own analogy. There's an old village with a well, and within the well is everything good about humanity. There's decency, love, compassion, and hope. This is the pre-lapsarian state, the pre-fall state of humanity is apparently an irreligious humanity that is nevertheless decent and loving, compassionate and hopeful. But never forget that this is how Stephen Woodford welcomes viewers to his channel. Why hello, my fellow apes? Why hello, my fellow apes? Why hello, my fellow apes? As far as I'm aware, our standards for the decency, love, compassion, and hope of apes are markedly different from our expectations for decency, love, compassion, and hope from humans. And yet Stephen seems to believe in the myth of this pre-fallen humanity that is so very good. I push back on that here. Now, when I go to an ape community, I don't necessarily marvel at the decency, love, compassion, and hope of that particular ape community.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

So it it it seems to me that you're smuggling in quite religious-sounding concepts already. But in this telling of history, we've got a pre-fallen humanity that is full of decency and love and hope. What then happens is religion comes along later on, and it brings its dogmas, and with every dogma there's just a little bit of poison, just enough. And it but it adds up, and it adds up and it adds up. And the whole thing kind of reminds me of the Enlightenment vision for the state of nature. You might know that various Enlightenment philosophers had different views on what humans are really like, and it's kind of like the pub discussion that everybody has. Do you think people are mainly good or mainly bad? And among Enlightenment thinkers, Thomas Hobbes was somebody who was very much like on the bad side of things. Humans are basically brutes. Because life is basically nasty, brutish, and short. And he then thought that you needed to have a very strong state, this Leviathan that kind of sits on top of all the worst excesses of human sin. And we need strong government to keep in check our worst impulses. Thomas Hobbes was that side of things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was very much of the opinion that humanity was basically good. He's famous for saying man is born free, but everywhere is in chains, okay? And the chains are, you know, the state coming along and shackling the noble savage and the noble spirit that is just natural to humanity. Very much like what Stephen says, you know, the natural state of humanity is decency and love and compassion and hope. And then authority and government, the state dogma for Stephen comes along and, you know, shackles us and poisons us. In between those two positions, there's John Locke, who's kind of splits the difference. But in the state of nature, to imagine that this is a pre-religious kind of human experience is quite remarkable. But to define religion like that enables you to be able to dismiss and disregard and despise and delegitimate whatever you're going to label as religious. Religion comes along later and causes all the problems. That's Stephen's telling of humanity. And I don't think you have to be a Christian. You don't even have to be a believer in God. You don't have to be religious yourself to recognize that that's not really how humans tick. But having set things up like that, Stephen gives three examples of the ways that religious people can poison things.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

And the the poison runs deeper still. Think of the gay teenager comes out to his parents, comes out to his church, his community. What happens? He gets told that he's a fag and he can get out, kicked out the house, removed from the community. And he's done so explicitly in reference to Leviticus. This is a doctrine, this is the religion, this is the poison that I'm talking about. Likewise, think of the bright young woman who is capable of leading with charisma, capable of making her community move forward. Is she brilliant? Yeah. But, you know, she should probably be silent in church, not speak over men, and she should answer to her husband. And the explicit reference for this is Timothy and Ephesians, which has been done for the better part of 2,000 years. Again, look at that. The dogma. Then you have the child who is born, and we hold them up and we think this is an innocent life, precious, incredible. Except not really. The truth is they etern they deserve eternal torment. Not because they're wicked, but because her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother took an apple from a tree. This is reference to original sin. These are not failures of religion. This is the doctrines, the dogma, and the revelations working exactly as intended. So keep that well in your head for the rest of the debate.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Now we didn't actually get time to return to any of these, so so perhaps I I should just give a sentence or two on each of these issues. The gay teen who is abused because of his pattern of sexual attractions, I think that that's terrible. But it doesn't take Christians to be ones who would marginalize or abuse people for their patterns of attraction. And it's not just members of other religions either. In fact, if you just wanted to get rid of all religion and you just wanted the survival of the species, there are still powerful forces at play. And if male-female dynamics are how the species perpetuates, then whether you've got a certain religion or a different religion, or whether you consider yourself to be utterly irreligious, you can always conceive of the male-female dominant setup, marginalizing and excluding the male-male and female-female minority. It doesn't take Leviticus to do that. Religion is not this added thing that brings a poison that would not otherwise be there. And then Stephen talks about the bright young woman who reads Timothy and she's told to be silent in church. Well, I mean, imagine this bright young woman in the prelapsarian state that Stephen imagines at the beginning. Imagine her like before the horrors of religion come along. Is she in this prelapsarian state of, you know, before the evils of religion get involved? It is she just in the natural state of things? A liberated woman who is the equal of every man? Because we don't know many societies like that, apart from the ones who have taken Timothy very seriously. And the rest of the New Testament and the rest of the Old Testament. Let's imagine going to this bright young woman who has a voice that needs to be heard in the world. And you tell her that she needs to live in one of two cultures, and she's only got this choice. She can live in a culture that has meditated on the words of Paul and the rest of the New Testament, or she can live in a culture that has not meditated on Paul and the New Testament for the last 2,000 years. Bright young woman. Choose this day. Which culture you would rather be in. I think she would choose the culture that's been shaped by the writings of Paul, absolutely. On the third issue, uh it's about do we teach hell to small children? Now there would definitely be some very inappropriate ways of bringing up that topic with small children. But the question of what we say needs to be downstream of whether the thing is true or not. And is there some kind of justice which all humanity will face? If there is, in fact, such justice, then denying knowledge of that thing to people would be a kind of neglect. So we can't sidestep the truthfulness issue of it before figuring out whether it's harmful or not. Now let me just skip on in Stephen's opening to the challenge that he wants to set for me for this debate. And I'm not sure whether this is a challenge that I should accept or whether it's a challenge that reveals Stephen's misunderstanding of how humanity and religion actually relate. Here's the challenge.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

I'm not saying that religion can't do good. I'm not saying that religious people can't do good. Of course they can. I'm not saying that everything that religion touches turns to ash. Not even close. And I'm not saying that every religious person, when they clasp their hands in prayer, that they're doing so for selfish reasons or for malice. That's not the case. That would be a silly proposition. And I'm sure we can agree that whatever Christopher Hitchens was, it wasn't silly. Hitchens was actually very clear. He said that religion cannot do something uniquely good without introducing something bad. That is, you cannot do religion cannot do something uniquely good without introducing something bad. A simple claim. Turns out that there is a very easy way to test this. It's it's a fallow i you can actually test the theory with what I would call a trinity of hurdles. And here they are. All Glenn needs to do is to name a religious action taken or a religious principle held that comes clean and is unique. And it needs to go over these hurdles. Number one, it needs to be genuinely good. Glenn will easily go over this hurdle every single time, because religion is associated with good things. Charity, community, etc. The second hurdle is that he needs to show that it requires religion. That is to say that there is no secular equivalent. You couldn't achieve it without religion. I think he's going to struggle on this front. And the third is to show that it comes clean. That is no conditions, no threats. So the charity needs to come without the implicit assumption or goal of conversion. The community needs to come without conformity, the hope needs to come without help. My prophecy for this debate is that Ben uh Glen will cover the first hurdle every single time, but no worries. I do not believe that he will cover all three even once. But notice. Even if he were able to achieve this, he needs to do it again and again and again. Because to show that just one cup from a well is clean does not mean that we would get our children to feed from that well.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

So the challenge that Stephen wants to set is whatever I raise as something that is an antidote to the poison, whatever I raise that is good and health-giving in the world, it needs to be genuinely good, it needs to require religion, it needs to come clean. Stephen is very clear that Christianity and other religions have done much good in the world. He thinks I'll have trouble with saying that these things require religion, and he seems to be very suspicious that the good things that believers do in the world, he seems to be suspicious that they are intended just as the bait in order to hook people in, uh, as some kind of uh evangelistic event, as some kind of proselytization. Which to me says that Stephen thinks of religion as something that comes along later to the human person, and the human person is to be assumed to be decent, loving, compassionate, and hopeful. And our moral communities are assumed to basically have an idea of what the good and the just, the true and the beautiful looks like. And then the religious person comes along later, and they might do a soup kitchen, but they only do a soup kitchen with the homeless so that somebody can get up and give a five-minute god spot and tell all the homeless people to come to Christ. Which is just not how humanity and religion and goodness actually relate. The decency, love, compassion, and hope are all bound up with metaphysical beliefs, sacred beliefs. The treating of one another as better than apes is a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of other people that goes way over and beyond what evolution demands of me in that moment. Evolution might demand from me a kind of in-group amity, but also some out-group enmity. And I'll cooperate with you in order to compete with the other groups. Compassion for you, killing for you. That's how apes do it. But humans don't do it like that because there's something exceptional about humans. Whether you're looking at the Bible or whether you're looking at an anthropologist's handbook, as far back as humans go, humans are religious. And sometimes religion, as I say in my opening statement, which we'll get to in in another video, sometimes religion can be an incredible poison and truly muck things up. But the kind of way that religion mucks things up is in an all-pervasive way, in a baked-in kind of a way, in a way that makes us cry out for an antidote. But specifically to answer Stephen's claim, name something that religion uniquely can do, that is genuinely good, requires religion, and comes clean. I think simply the fact of our humanity and our human exceptionalism above and beyond apes is a genuinely good thing. But where does it come from? Well, T. S. Eliot would say, as I say in the debate. As T. S. Eliot said, he said, you know, if we if we remove from the word humanity everything religion has taught us, we will be left with only a clever, mischievous, adaptable ape. It is religion that gives you your sense of the human. That vision of the human is above the natural. It is supernatural. It's genuinely good. It requires religion. And it comes clean. This is not about an evangelistic tactic to get you anywhere. So again and again in this debate, I just try and come back to the illustration that Stephen wants to set up. And he said he wanted to return to it. Keep this in your mind for the rest of the debate. Keep that well in your head for the rest of the debate. But when I tried to return to it again and again, to show what a faulty picture of humanity and religion that this is, Stephen didn't like that line of inquiry. You said that the old village has a well. Inside the well is something that is common to all of us. Decency, love, compassion, hope. You've smuggled in a whole heck of a lot of stuff. You you begin your videos by saying, Well, hello, my fellow apes. Now, when I go to an ape community, I don't necessarily uh marvel at the decency, love, compassion, and hope of that particular ape community.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

So it it it seems to me that you're smuggling in quite religious sounding concepts already.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

So with the debate being that religion poisons everything, we don't want to get muck mucked down in meta-ethics. As much as everyone's enjoying our time, I'm sure they don't want to get stuck in the city.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

I don't In this well that you are imagining is a pre-religious well. In this well, there is what? There is the the the assumption that that slavery is out and infanticide is out of the way. No, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

Like again, like there's different there's different moral views that different people have. These are interesting things that are all going into your well, aren't they? Don't you think? Are you gonna ask me to give you a meta ethical theory again?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

I'm I'm asking you to consider whether Augustine was in fact right about original sin, that what is baked into the human condition um involves all these kinds of negatives. Um and and is we we are not born into decency, love, compassion, and hope. Or at least there is uh a poison that is already in there, right? That is called vainglory and pride and violence and you know all the negative aspects of the human person. And that what is baked into humanity, but before your idea of religion coming along later and adding into it, what is baked in seems to be, whether you look at Hammurabi, whether you look at Harari, whether you look at the Old Testament, is a brutal world that we that we wish was otherwise, right? And what I want to know from you, Stephen, is with what on what basis do we object to that and say we're going to do something different from either Leviticus or Hammurabi, right? On what basis? I've I've got a New Testament, I've got a Jesus, I've I've got a decisive turning point in history. What is your decisive turning point that now says, okay, we're not going to do the Hammurabi thing? You seem to believe that decency involves gender equality. Is that something else that goes into this old village well? Is that is that is that what we are to expect morally? And if so, why? Why should we expect gender equality? I agree with gender equality. Why should we expect it? Why should we expect an equality of persons and not a kind of class-riven caste system? What is it that's that is baked into your vision for humanity?

SPEAKER_02 21:01

But again, what you're doing is asking me to give you a moral theory, and that's not the proposition tonight. The proposition is does religion poison everything? Right. All we need to do is take propositions that we agree on. People are not here for meta-ethics, they're here to understand whether or not it poisons if you agree.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

Imagine that the reason why we believe those things is because of religion. Just imagine it, okay? That is what I'm saying to you, and you need to deal with that, right?

SPEAKER_02 21:25

What makes you think that? It's just it's just your faith that it all comes from Christ, or what is it?

SPEAKER_01 21:29

What's my my my belief is that religion and violence and slavery and endemic inequality, vertiginously steep hierarchies of being, are all baked into the human person. Hello, my fellow apes, right? Okay. And what is it what is it that then makes us think decency, love, compassion, and hope is what being a human is?

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Like All all I'm doing is an anthropological task here. I'm describing what humanity is. What is what is humanity? I'm warts and all, you know, like humans are passionate, they are community. But if we've evolved to have warts, what's wrong with warts? I'm but I'm not here for a debate in meterethics, Glenn we're talking about. Because you can't debate the proposition. Going look, slavery, right? You and I agree slavery's bad. Why? Christians failed. Why? Why is slavery bad? It doesn't matter why we think it's bad. Can you not say why it's bad? All we need is to agree on the proposition. You cannot say why it's bad.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Say why it's bad without appealing to some kind of sacred ideal or transcendent reality. Meet me halfway then. Why is it bad? Because we're made in God's image, and therefore to enslave an image of God is as unthinkable as to enslave God Himself, right? And we were we were created to have dominion rather to be served. So what these were the arguments that brought about abolition in the 17th, 18th centuries. Alright, this. What doctrine tells you that? I've I've just gave you two doctrines the doctrine of the image of God and the doctrine that humanity has has dominion. Now, you tell me why is slavery wrong? No, because I'm I'm not I don't think you've done the job. Why is slavery wrong?

SPEAKER_02 23:17

But you haven't done the job, Glenn. You sa you you asked me to make sure that you're not sure. If you wanted to play this game, we could play this game. Why is it that it's good or bad? Is it because God says so? Oh, you want to go Euthyphro? Yes.

unknown 23:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

You don't have a workable moral theory here. You just have might makes right. Oh, I don't have might makes right. How do you avoid having might makes right? We I say love is ultimate. What is ultimate in your worldview? What is ultimate?

SPEAKER_02 23:44

We've put the euthyphro dilemma down because we don't want to take up too much time. And I was worried about getting into a metaphorical debate rather than, for instance, is slavery good or bad? We can argue this premise. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

What I've illustrated is Is slavery good or bad is much closer to this debate, isn't it? So is it good or bad?

SPEAKER_02 23:59

And if so, why? This is my point. I've just illustrated that you can't ground it, goodness. So I'm going to meet you halfway, and for the purpose of this debate, I'm going to say that I can't either. But you and I agree.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

You can't. You can't say why slavery is wrong. No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

I said that for the purpose of this debate, I'll meet you with what you've just done, which is to fail to ground goodness.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Um I I Well, people people can be the judge. Is equality one of the things that you're going to put into the pre-religious well? And if so, where are you going to ground it? Again, you're asking the grounding question. I totally am. So women's rights are in this well as well. No, I'm telling you, the hammer notes be around it. No, no, no, you're switching the claim.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

The claim is whether or not it's worse is what you made. You do this every time. You make a definitive claim, I show you that you're wrong, and then you want to go into moral ethics. No, okay.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

This is Stephen's analogy. This is what he said he wanted to return to again and again. And he simply wanted to assume that human decency precedes religion, that the human somehow precedes religion, that religion comes along later as this separate and separable thing that you can unbake the cake, remove the flour, and still remain with some kind of ghetto. It's just such an unlikely picture of humanity. And I think one of the reasons why the new atheism is dead is because Rousseau's vision of humanity, this Pollyanna kind of idea of a naturally good humanity, I think that that vision has taken a beating. I think a lot of progressive utopians have pitched a vision for that kind of decency, love, compassion, and hope at the very heart of what humans are really about. And I think that is massively overpromised and completely underdelivered. And a lot of people are ready to hear a much more realistic vision of the human person. And if you want to figure out what humanity is like according to Jesus, we've got just the thing for you. It's 321. You can go to 321course.com, get Jesus' vision for God, the world, and you. It would take you two hours to binge the whole thing, or you can do it over eight different sessions. There's 36,000 people doing it online right now. There's a thousand churches that you can find on that website that are running the course in person. Run, don't walk, and go to 321course.com to discover life according to Jesus. Well, you can always go and watch that debate of mine at the Pangburn channel. We'll put the links in the description. Why don't you like this video and do subscribe so that you can catch up on the next video where I will talk about my opening statement? Until then.