If you want to be awe inspired, ladies and gentlemen, and let me say, let me just tell you that those of us who do not believe we are divinely created, let alone divinely supervised, are not immune to the idea of awe and beauty and the transcendent. Let me invite you to look for a moment at the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. Some of you may have done it. If you haven’t done it now, or yet, do it soon. The extraordinary revelations of swirling yet somehow beautiful, new galaxies in color and depth and majesty, like nothing, I think, the human eye has ever seen. Turn away from that if you wish, and gaze at a burning bush, in an illiterate desert part of the middle east, and say that that’s where revelation comes from. I don’t believe you’d be able to do it. Or read a page of Stephen Hawking on the absolute magnificence and consistency and underlying beauty, as Einstein says the great miracle of physics is there are no miracles, it all carries on holding together all the time. There are no interruptions in its order. There are no suspensions of it just to please Joshua, or just to please some sect or tribal group. No. It’s much, much, much more impressive than that. Hawking has a colleague who looked at the event horizon of the black hole. If you could travel towards a black hole, not yet possible to do, if you could, in theory, the event horizon is the point at which the black hole is pulling everything into itself. So, over into the black hole goes light, itself. It’s so strong it can pull light back into itself. It’s really awe inspiring. A lot more, say, than a crowd of pigs, infested by devils, running down a hill, into the sea, which is a piece of sorcery, and cheap magic of the sort that shouldn’t impress any thinking person. Think about a black hole instead, pulling the light into itself, the event horizon just reorganizing nature, so that if you could get to that lip, the lip of the event horizon and fall in, and go in, you could in theory see the past and the future stretching before and in front of you. You would see time, except you wouldn’t have the time to do it, of course, if you were a mere primate as we are, but Hawking has a colleague who says if he knew he was dying of a terminal illness, that’s how he’d want to go out, is over the lip of the event horizon. That would be majesty, that would be magnificence, that would be awe inspiring, that would be apocalyptic. So it’s in the natural world, it’s in the world of science and the world of innovation, and discovery, and doubt. We wouldn’t have discovered any of these things if we’d taken the religious story for granted to begin with. We would have said we already know enough. We know. God made this. God wants it this way. What’s the need for inquiry? We already have all the information we need. The big difference between this side of the house, mine, and the other, is this, I am absolutely certain that I do not know, but that it might be possible to find out and that doubt and skepticism and innovation and inquiry are the only means by which wonder and beauty and awe and symmetry will be discovered, and beyond those peaks we can yet see new, more wonderful peaks will arise. Whereas, on the Wilson side of the house it is said we already have the certainty, we know that God created us, and we even claim to know his mind and what he wants of us. And I just invite you to open your minds to the possibility that the skeptical and the inquiring and the doubtful will be better than anything that calls itself faith, because anything that calls itself faith calls itself certainty and for certainty I think there is no place in an institute of intellectual mentation and higher education, and I’m very grateful to you all for giving me the chance to say so. Christopher Hitchens in debate vs Pastor Douglas Wilson
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:49:46 +0000
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