Struggling into the Old Dinner Jacket Again

On Thursday night I struggled into my ancient dinner jacket (no, I refuse to call it a tuxedo) for a debate at the Oxford Union. It was, alas, about belief in God. I had agreed to do it because it seemed a sort of duty, but really I was redundant, because of the presence there of that giant of Christian advocacy, the mighty John Lennox.

 

Professor Lennox, a man of great breadth and depth of knowledge and experience of life, who holds the chair of Mathematics at Oxford University, can easily dispose of the silly and very common default belief of uneducated moderns that science and faith are incompatible,  which lies at the heart of much lazy modern atheism. He is also much nicer than I am, as is the other member of my side in this discussion Dr Joanna Collicutt.  

 

Against us ( and I believe this occasion was being recorded for YouTube purposes so you can eventually check up for yourselves) were Dan Barker, , Co-President of the (American) Freedom from Religion Foundation, Dr Michael Shermer, founder of the (American) Skeptics Society and Professor Peter Millican, a nice old fashioned enthusiast for David Hume and a distinguished philosopher.(He would later disappoint me by being a lot too much like his debating partners than he needed to be, though he didn’t suffer from their self-satisfied assumption of superiority, presumably knowing that John Lennox is a man worthy of respect. Richard Dawkins, who didn’t speak,  was sitting looking terribly handsome just behind the atheist advocates).  

 

It fell to me to speak fifth , last f my side, and after Mr Barker and Mr Shermer. I had been irritated by their smug, self-satisfied raillery against faith, their tedious ‘they can’t all be right’ and ‘all religions share the same myths’ non-arguments familiar to any sixth-former and unpersuasive to the maturer person. They laughed at each other’s jokes, rather loudly (a good deal more loudly, I thought,  than anyone else in the full-to-capacity hall) .

 

So I decided that I would abandon any pretence at being Mr Nice Guy. I said they reminded me of the most obnoxious, irritating, person I had ever met – namely my own adolescent self. And I treated them to a dramatic reading of the great passage from Book of Job (chapter 38)  in which God speaks from the Whirlwind:

‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding.

 

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof?’.

 

I love that bit about ‘who hath stretched the line upon it?’, so obviously written by someone who had done some actual building.

 

The answer, of course, is that they have no idea, and neither do I.  Hence what followed. The question before us was ‘This House believes in God’ ,’believes in…’, not ‘knows that there is a… ‘.  I think Mr Carter had said that he ‘knew’ there was no God. I made my usual point, familiar to readers here, that belief is a matter of choice. Why would anyone want the universe to be a pointless chaos, where our actions could be judged only by their immediate observable effects, a universe utterly without the hope of justice, where death was the end and the deaths of those we loved extinguished them irrevocably. Well, the question, once asked, rather answers itself, doesn’t it?

 

I can only say in my defence that I got the impression (pleasing to me) that the other lot didn’t much like it, as presumably they are more used to dishing out mockery and scorn in the general direction of the gentle faithful, before wildly cheering crowds.  Well, as Conan Doyle’s unjustly forgotten creation,  Brigadier Etienne Gerard,  said, ‘I’m all in favour of forgiving my enemies, but it seems only fair to give them something to forgive me for too.’