Debate: Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind?

Editor’s note: Christian intellectual Dinesh D’Souza and Objectivist philosopher Andrew Bernstein met at the University of Texas–Austin on February 8, 2013, to debate the question, “Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind?” Mr. D’Souza argued that Christianity is good; Dr. Bernstein, the alternative.

The debate, cohosted by The Objective Standard and University of Texas Objectivism Society, and paid for by TOS, was Livestreamed across the globe. The video is now available on TOS’s YouTube channel, where, as of this writing, it has been viewed by more than eight thousand people.

We present here the complete, unedited transcript of the debate, not only in the interest of sharing the debaters’ arguments, but also in the interest of generating further debate on the subject. The future will be determined largely by the outcome of the conflict between religion—primarily Christianity, which is by far the most influential religion in America and the world—and Objectivism, the only philosophy that recognizes and upholds the requirements of man’s life on earth as the standard of moral value. It is high time for this debate to be in the open and in full swing. In this regard, we see the debate between Mr. D’Souza and Dr. Bernstein as the intellectual shot heard ’round the world.

Because this debate entails almost two hours of extemporaneous dialogue, the speakers’ words and formulations are, of course, not as polished or grammatical as their written and edited text would be. Please bear this in mind while reading the transcript. And please share the transcript and the video with friends and family. The more people who hear clearly articulated arguments comparing and contrasting religion and Objectivism, the more will come to understand and embrace Ayn Rand’s “philosophy for living on earth.” —Craig Biddle

Grant Baker: Good evening. My name is Grant Baker. I’m the president of the UT [University of Texas] Objectivism Society, and on behalf of UTOS welcome to the debate: “Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind?” . . .

I’d like to give special thanks to The Objective Standard, which made this event tonight possible. I’d also like to thank the paying members of UTOS, the volunteers who worked tirelessly to promote this event, and especially Brittney Rivera, who has worked months bringing this debate together. Great job, Miss Rivera. [Audience applause]

Moderating tonight is professor Drew Thornley. A native of Jasper, Alabama, Drew Thornley is a graduate of the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School. A licensed attorney, Drew has spent time in private practice in the nonprofit and public policy arenas, and is now a full-time lecturer in the department of business, government, and society of the McCombs School of Business at UT-Austin. Please join me in welcoming Professor Drew Thornley. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Good evening and welcome. It’s nice to see all of you even though I can’t actually see any of you right now [given the lighting on stage]. We appreciate that you joined us tonight.

Tonight, two scholars, one a conservative Christian, the other an Objectivist atheist, will square off on the question, “Christianity: good or bad for mankind?”

Taking the position that Christianity is good for mankind is Dinesh D’Souza. Mr. D’Souza has had a twenty-five-year career as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. A former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, Mr. D’Souza also served as the John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and president of The King’s College in New York City. Mr. D’Souza is the executive producer and codirector of the film 2016: Obama’s America; and the author of many books, including the New York Times best-selling books Illiberal Education, What’s So Great About Christianity, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream.

Taking the position that Christianity is bad is Andrew Bernstein. With a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York, Dr. Bernstein teaches philosophy at CUNY Purchase, was named outstanding teacher of the year in 2004, he is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard, and the author of several books as well—including Objectivism in One Lesson: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Ayn Rand and Capitalist Solutions: A Philosophy of American Moral Dilemmas. Dr. Bernstein’s book in progress is titled Religion Versus Man.

The format of tonight’s debate is as follows: As agreed to beforehand by the debaters, Andy will present first. He will speak for fifteen minutes and then Dinesh will speak for fifteen minutes. These are the opening statements. Next, each will be given fifteen minutes for response, and then finally there will be a five-minute reply to that response.

Following the presentations by our two debaters, we will open things up to a Q&A with you, our audience members. This period will last for twenty minutes. I’ll speak more on this later when the time comes. Finally, once the Q&A period has concluded, each of the presenters will spend two minutes in closing remarks.

We ask that you please give each debater your attention and utmost respect as they speak. Please now join me in welcoming each presenter to the University of Texas at Austin. [Audience applause]

Dr. Bernstein, your first fifteen minutes.

Andrew Bernstein: Thank you. Can everybody hear me? All right. Now the criticisms I’m going to make are applicable to any religion—to Judaism, Islam, any of them. [They are] applicable to religion as such. But since Dinesh is concerned to defend Christianity, I’ll confine my criticisms to Christianity.

The crimes of Christianity against mankind are too lengthy to go into in a debate. So, just a few.

We can say in the modern Western world, Christianity has been defanged by the rational principles of the Enlightenment. But for twelve hundred years, from the 4th century AD, when Constantine first made Christianity the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, right through the 16th century Reformation, for twelve hundred years Christianity was the dominant philosophy of the Western world.

What was that like? Well, just to take a few examples, the Arians who disagreed with the Orthodox Catholics on the nature of Jesus, there was bloody disagreement; thousands of Arians were killed by the church. The suppression of the Manichean heresy was even worse. The Church suppressed it in the 5th century; it reemerges in the 13th. The pope’s army of heretic hunters burst into the city of Bergere, in modern-day France, slaughtered twenty thousand of the heretics—men, women, children, babies, the elderly—and the papal emissary writes to the Pope, “God’s justice is a wonderful thing.”

Even into the 16th century, even after the Renaissance has begun to bring back reason into the Western world, the Christians are still at it, still slaughtering each other in the Protestant-Catholic wars—for instance, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre [where] thousands of Protestants were murdered. I could go on. There’s no need. Why?

I mean, after all, Jesus preaches peace and love. There are even some Christians who practice it. I know a few. But the violence, the brutality, come from the philosophical essence of Christianity. And the philosophical essence of any religion, including Christianity, is that there’s an all-powerful God in a supernatural world that we know by faith and we must obey.

Supernaturalism and faith: These are the essence of Christianity. There’s a world higher than this one, it takes precedence over this world, and how do we gain knowledge? Primarily by reading the Bible and taking its beliefs without challenge.

Now on these premises you can believe anything. You can believe that the graves open and the dead rise and walk the streets of Jerusalem. You can believe bushes speak, men live inside whales, virgins give birth, God wills that the infidels be slaughtered, etcetera.

If you object by saying, “Well, Jesus says peace and love,” he also says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me”—which means unbelievers burn in hell for all eternity.

But the main point is this: On faith-based premises, if the clergy—whether it is the Pope, Luther, Calvin, the Puritan elders—if the clergy says that the unbelievers are the enemies of Jesus, they will destroy God’s Church, they will spread spiritual sedition, they must be annihilated, they must be burnt—on faith-based premises, how do we know that belief is false?

There’s no way to know it’s false. You can’t prove it, one way or the other. There’s no evidence, there’s no facts, there’s no rational analysis, it’s just one denomination’s faith-based beliefs against another—fervently, passionately held faith-based beliefs with no possibility of rational persuasion, no facts to point to, to establish one is wrong and the other one is right. Consequently, the inevitable brutality and violence that fills the history of Christianity for twelve hundred years when it was the dominant religion, the dominant philosophy of the Western world.

There [are] only two ways to deal with human beings: You deal with them by reason or you deal with them by force. There’s no other possibility. And with reason subordinated to faith, rational persuasion is subordinated to force. With rational proof abrogated, physical violence is necessitated. This is why the history of Christianity is the bloody spectacle that it is.

Related, politically, Christianity necessitates theocratic dictatorship. The reason for that is that for man’s law to be virtuous it must put into practice God’s law. Who best knows God’s law? The clergy or theologians who devote their lives to it. Therefore, in order for man’s law to put into practice God’s law, the clergy must be invested with full political authority. Then they force you to obey the Christian version of morality.

I could give you any number of examples: The Church during the Dark Ages, Calvin’s theocratic dictatorship in Geneva in the 16th century, the Puritan elders in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Whenever Christianity is the dominant philosophy of a culture, theocratic dictatorship is the inevitable political result.

What does it look like to force you to obey the Christian version of morality? Well, to take one example out of many, in Calvin’s Geneva, if the reformed church found a single woman pregnant, they drowned her; if they found who the father was, they killed him too. Adultery was a capital offense; they executed people for adultery.

This is what Christianity looks like in practice when it is not diluted and defanged by the rational principles of the Enlightenment. Let’s put it this way: In the modern Western world, Christianity ain’t what it used to be. It has been eviscerated, thank God, as I said, by the rational principles of the Enlightenment.

Now, if somebody says, if the unbelievers reject God, maybe it’s right to kill them, maybe it’s good, we should kill them. This raises the question of moral philosophy, “What is the good?” What is right and what is wrong? What is the standard by which we judge good and evil?

Christianity says it’s God’s will. If God says x is good, it’s good because he says so. If God says non-x is evil, it’s evil because he says so. But the question is, “Is there a fact-based, objective, rational standard of moral value—one that’s based in facts, not in faith?” The answer to that is, “Yes.”

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand defines just such a fact-based, rational standard of moral value. Good and evil arise only because living beings must achieve specific goals in order to sustain their lives.

Plants, for example, must dig their roots into the soil to gain the chemical nutrients their lives require. They must grow their leaves toward the sun to get sunlight. This is what their lives require. Animals must hunt to gain food; otherwise they starve. They must find shelter from the storm; otherwise they die. These are the values nature stipulates for their survival and for [their] flourishing life.

Human beings must grow food, build houses, learn how to cure diseases; otherwise our life will be very short. Nature requires us to gain certain values in order to sustain our lives on Earth. The good, then, for a species, is that which given its nature, given the factual requirements of its survival on Earth, is that which promotes its life.

For man, then, for a rational being, the good for man is that which factually, objectively promotes his life. For example: nutritious food, an education, living in a free society. And the evil is that which factually undermines or harms human life. For example: poison, ignorance, the imposition of dictatorship, religion.

Christianity rejects this rational standard of moral value, this fact-based standard of moral value. God’s will, not the requirements of human life, is what determines good and evil.

Now this is one critical reason for the countless innocent lives killed by Christianity in the name of Christianity. If God wills that the sinners or the unbelievers be killed, then his faithful servants carry that out. It has often been observed how much brutality is perpetrated in the name of God, including by Christians. This is the reason. If God’s will is primary, then human life is secondary. And in the Old Testament, of course, God kills . . . God knows how many.

The fundamental principle is, when man’s life is subordinated to any consideration, an alleged God’s will or another, then human lives will be sacrificed to the ruling concern and men will then die. Lots of them. In fact, prior to the 20th century rise of Communism and National Socialism, if we asked the question, what denomination or group is responsible historically for murdering more innocent Christians than any other, the answer to that would have to be other Christians.

If the good is to promote human life, the question is, “By what means?” As Ayn Rand establishes in Atlas Shrugged, reason is man’s instrument of survival. Every value of human life depends on and requires the rational mind.

We must learn how to grow food, we must learn agricultural science, agricultural technology—which requires reason. We must build houses, which requires knowledge of architecture, engineering, mathematics—which requires the rational mind. We must learn how to cure diseases, which requires knowledge of biological science—the rational mind. I could go on.

All values that human life depends on are the product of the reasoning mind. Reason is mankind’s instrument of survival, the same way that a bird’s wings is the bird’s instrument of survival.

Now Christianity subordinates reason to faith. When it is undiluted, when it is the dominant intellectual influence in a society, Christianity subordinates reason to faith. In the Middle Ages, for like a thousand years, when it was the dominant cultural influence, unrestrained by the rational principles of the Enlightenment, it warred relentlessly against the mind.

Just to give you a few examples: Justinian I, Christian Emperor, closes the Greek schools of philosophy in 529 AD because they’re inherently pernicious to Christian faith. He forbids any pagans to teach. Will Durant, the great American historian, points out that after eleven hundred years, often of glorious achievement, this effectively ended Greek philosophy.

In the East, in Alexandria, a Christian mob murders Hypatia; in fact, tears her body apart. A Christian mob, including monks, led by a member of Cyril Bishop’s staff, murders the Greek mathematician Hypatia. The historian of science Morris Kline points out that the murder of Hypatia symbolizes the end of Greek mathematics. The Christians suppressed the Greek intellectual tradition. Read Charles Freeman’s book, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. The Christians suppressed the glorious achievements of the Greek intellectual tradition; they suppressed Greek philosophy, they suppressed Greek science, they suppressed Greek mathematics, and brought on a dark age that lasted for centuries.

Let me close with this. I could go on with historical examples—they’re endless—of Christian brutality when Christianity was undiluted, before it was eviscerated.

There [are] two philosophical reasons why the philosophy is much more important than the history. There are two philosophic reasons why Christianity perpetrates endless crimes against mankind:

One, Christianity rejects man’s life as the standard of moral value, so human life means less to the Christians than the enforcement of faith-based orthodoxy. Compliance to a faith-based religious orthodoxy, not human life, is the Christian’s standard of what is good or bad.

And secondly, Christianity subordinates reason to faith. When mankind’s instrument of survival is secondary, then human survival is secondary, and many human beings will not survive, have not survived, and cannot survive under Christianity. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Mr. D’Souza, your fifteen minutes.

Dinesh D’Souza: I’m very pleased and honored to be here and am looking forward to a debate, not just against an atheist, but a particular kind of an atheist—an atheist who is an Objectivist and a sort of subscriber to the tenets of Ayn Rand, a woman for whom I have great respect.

The question before us is whether Christianity has been good or bad for the world. In my rebuttal, to come later, I am going to address a number of the specific points raised by Andrew Bernstein.

Here, I actually want to make a positive case. I want to show what Christianity has done for the world. One way to do that is to ask what the world would look like if Christianity had never existed. What would our world be like?

I’m going to take a little bit of a different path, and I’m actually going to begin by laying out some of the key tenets of Objectivism itself. In other words, I want to lay out some of the key tenets that Andrew Bernstein believes in. And you’ll see these are not tenets that are believed by only the followers of Rand; they’re actually tenets that many of us believe in as well.

For example, one of the key tenets of Objectivism is the idea of the individual, that the individual matters, that the individual can’t just be subordinated to the collective or to society. Second, the idea of freedom, the idea that freedom is important in a society, and freedom means to some degree choice—we have the right to shape our own lives, we have the right to economic freedom, to political freedom, to freedom of thought and expression and conscience. So the idea of freedom is critical. The idea of equality of rights, not equality of results or outcomes, but the idea that we have equal rights under the law. And the idea of equal rights comes out of the sense that no man has the right to rule another man, if you will, by nature. That these rights are in nature itself—Jefferson called them “natural rights,” and the Greeks did as well. So these are some of the key ideas of Objectivism. The idea of science, of rational inquiry, about investigating the world using the faculties of reason.

Now you get the impression listening to Andrew Bernstein that all of these ideas are sort of products of the Enlightenment. It never seems to have occurred to him to ask, “Where did the Enlightenment come from?”

Why did we have an enlightenment in the West? Why wasn’t there a Hindu enlightenment? Where’s the African enlightenment? The enlightenment among the Aztecs? Why did the Enlightenment occur in Western civilization? In other words, is the Enlightenment the enemy of Christianity or was it to some degree also the product of Christianity?

Let’s look, for example, at where Western civilization comes from, a civilization that included the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Enlightenment—not to mention the scientific revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

First of all, most historians will agree that the two founding pillars of Western civilization are Athens and Jerusalem. By Athens, of course, we mean the legacy of classical Greece and Rome. And by Jerusalem, we meant Judaism and also Christianity. These are the two sort of anchors on which Western civilization was built.

The ideas of Western civilization come out of one or other tributary of the West. Some people think they come out of a hybrid of Athens and Jerusalem. But we can actually reasonably trace particular ideas in the West to one or the other.

So, first of all, we can ask about the idea of the individual, was that a powerful idea in ancient Greece and Rome before Christianity? No. True, you have powerful individuals. For example, on the Greek stage we have Oedipus, who is an individual in his own right. But individualism is essentially scarce in ancient Greece and Rome.

What about the idea of freedom—of liberty, of property, of contracts, of free trade? None of this can be found anywhere really in ancient Greece and Rome, certainly not in any systematic sense in those civilizations, which are actually defined by imperialism, conquest, force, mass-scale slavery in the case of Rome. The Spartans would deposit the sick child on the hillside, happy to find him dead in the morning. Infanticide, euthanasia, pederasty: these were extremely common in, you may say, Athens.

So, if these libertarian or Objectivist ideas cannot easily be traced to Athens, where do they come from? The answer, in fact the only answer, is that they have their roots in Jerusalem.

At first glance this may seem incredible, the idea of reason, of the individual, of property being somehow a Christian legacy, but when you begin to look a little more closely at history, you see that it is actually quite true.

Take, for example, that we’re having this debate right now—where?—in a university. Who started the university system? Was it founded in the Enlightenment? Nonsense. The first universities were started in medieval Europe. They grew out of a system of monasteries that dotted the continent before universities got started.

And the first universities—the University of Paris, the University of Bologna, and, of course, later in America, Harvard, Yale, Princeton—have you noticed that of the eight Ivy League colleges, seven of them were explicitly started as Christian institutions? It’s not an accident. They might have been started by this denomination or that, but my point is, these were universities explicitly started not just by Christians but with a Christian mission, which gives you some sense that this idea of reason, far from being hostile to Christianity, was seen as completely consistent with it.

Consider the idea of science. We might wonder, why did science develop in Western civilization? Human curiosity, presumably, is universal, and we know, of course, that the Mayans would develop a calendar and the Chinese would record the eclipses, but what we call science—which includes criticism, laboratories, checking, verification, the whole ensemble of practices that leads to what Whitehead calls the invention of invention—this is a Western idea.

Again, I ask you: What was the Greek contribution to science? It’s virtually nil. What did the Romans invent? Almost nothing. The fact is, technological ingenuity began in a major way in the Middle Ages. It began small. Improving the stirrup, improving forms of weaponry, but ultimately building the Gothic cathedrals—think of those as an architectural and scientific accomplishment. And later, of course, if you think of all the great scientists: Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Pascal, Marcen, Gassendi, and on and on—and if you make a full list, you will be stunned to realize that the vast majority of them were Christians. Not only did they happen to be Christian, but, as in the case of Galileo and Kepler and Newton, they saw their work as revealing, if you will, God’s handiwork in the universe.

Now why is this important? It’s important because in Christianity, God is seen as omniscient, as knowing everything. By the way, this is not common to other religions. In other religions, God may be seen as all-powerful, but God is not really a knower. The idea that God knows everything is something specific to Christianity. And it’s important because Christians have figured that since God is omniscient he designed the world in a particular way that reflects, if you will, his omniscience. And since we are made in God’s image, it’s sort of our particular talent or vocation to be able to go and figure out the world, and through it discover, if you will, the fingerprints of God. This is a powerful motivating force even for science, and, I would argue, even today.

Now, Andrew Bernstein has spoken consistently of faith as though it were a bad word. I would argue that all of modern science is based on a certain kind of faith, and I’m going to come back in my rebuttal to what faith actually means. He seems to think it’s just stating nonsense in contradiction with reason; I will give a completely different definition of faith which applies both to religion and to science.

The kind of scientific faith I’m talking about is the faith that we live in a rational cosmos. By the way, that is not a finding of modern science; that is an assumption of modern science. We assume that if we can measure light going at a particular speed here and now, that light has always traveled at that speed in the past. We have no way of going into the past and actually measuring light then, but we assume that, and we assume that on a star ten light-years away, or a hundred light-years away, light still goes at that speed. Do we know that? Have we been there? Have we measured it? No. But we assume that light everywhere and always travels at the same speed, c. That is called faith. Faith here is not in contradiction to evidence; faith is actually going where evidence can’t reach. I’m going to come back to that a little bit later.

I do want to address the idea head on that Christianity suppressed the legacy of Greek philosophy, of Roman learning, and I actually want to look at what actually happened historically.

So, the Roman Empire, which was the wonder of the Western world, was besieged by barbarians from northern Europe—the Huns, the Lombards, the Vandals, and so on. These barbarians, who were by no means Christian, they were pagan, came into Rome; and the Roman Empire had become overstretched, decadent, and essentially was unable to defend itself. This Roman edifice was leveled, the Roman legions were no more; they were smashed by the barbarians.

Who destroyed Rome? It was a combination of barbarian force and Roman wimpery; the Christians had nothing to do with it. Roman learning was smashed because the Romans couldn’t defend it any longer, and Europe was reduced in a sense to rubble. Out of that rubble, Christianity began to rebuild the continent and began to rebuild it slowly, but without a lot of the corrupt practices that had defined Roman civilization.

For example, Rome was based on mass-scale slavery. Slavery was very common in Western civilization. Andrew Bernstein may very well say, “Well, it took the Enlightenment to abolish . . .” Nonsense. Slavery was ended in Europe between the 4th century and the 10th century. By the 10th century, which was the medieval era—no Renaissance, no Reformation—it was all Christian, just as he says; slavery disappeared from Europe.

Slavery later had a big revival, and there was a second wave of abolition in the modern era, which I’ll be happy to come to later, but my point is, the Christians didn’t level Roman civilization. Out of the rubble of Europe, created by the decadence, corruption, irresponsibility, and weakness of Rome, the Christians reconstituted Western civilization, rediscovered Roman and Greek learning—that was the whole point of Thomas Aquinas, that Aristotle had been rediscovered; and Aquinas, in a sense, created a synthesis between Aristotelian learning and Christianity.

So the bottom line of it is that even the core ideas of Objectivism, if you trace their intellectual roots far back enough, not just stopping clumsily at the Enlightenment and pretending like history was invented anew because reason was discovered and everyone before was a fool—no, if you trace the historical lineage of the Enlightenment itself, you find that it is standing, if you will, on the unrecognized pillar of Athens and Jerusalem. It is standing on the unrecognized pillar of Christianity itself.

Thank you very much. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Dr. Bernstein, your fifteen minute response-rebuttal.

Andrew Bernstein: Dinesh raises a number of points that I want to get to in my next rebuttal, but right now—you know, I came here to make the case against Christianity and, by God, I’m going to do it.

The essence of the case is philosophical. Let me look at the philosophical essence of religion. The religious belief, or the Christian belief, is that God exists independently of the world, antecedently to the world—he exists before the world—and he creates the world and he governs the world.

This cosmic consciousness, God, is independent, whereas existence is dependent on consciousness. That’s the Christian belief.

Now, what’s the philosophic truth about this? As Ayn Rand puts it, I think brilliantly, existence exists. By existence she means the sum total of everything that exists, the universe. To prove that, all we have to do is open our eyes and look out at reality. Right now I can’t see a damn thing [given the lighting], but I can hear people out there, I can see this [the podium], I know the world exists. All we have to do is look out at it.

That’s the first philosophic principle I want to establish. Existence exists. It is. It is. Sometimes I think we ought to just stop and realize what that means. The universe is. Undeniable truth.

Secondly—the things that exist—a thing is what it is and nothing else. This is the law of identity: A is A. A thing is what it is. Steel is steel; it’s not papier-mâché. Penicillin is penicillin; it’s not sulfuric acid. This is the law of identity: a thing is what it is, symbolized by A is A.

Third, because a thing is what it is, it acts in accordance with what it is. Go back to my two examples. We can use steel to build a skyscraper; we can’t build one out of papier-mâché.. We could use penicillin to cure certain diseases; we can’t do that with sulfuric acid. Because a thing is what it is, it acts in accordance with what it is. This is the law of causality. What a thing is determines what it can and cannot do.

Now, a further point—basic philosophy here—the apprehension or understanding that something exists, or anything exists, involves another key philosophic principle: consciousness, the faculty that perceives existence. Our mind, our consciousness, is real; it is the means by which we know the world.

Here’s the key philosophic question: What is the relationship between existence and consciousness—the world out here and our minds? Is one fundamental and the other derivative?

Existence, logically, necessarily, precedes consciousness, because consciousness is consciousness of an object. To be conscious is to be conscious of something, whether it’s the podium, the room, the people in it. Awareness is awareness of an object. To be conscious is to be conscious of something.

If there is no existence, there is nothing to be aware of, and there can be no consciousness. The whole idea that consciousness is aware of nothing but itself is an impossibility. Consciousness of consciousness of what?

Related, we perceive that which exists. We can see or touch this table over here, for example, but we cannot, by a sheer act of will or thinking, alter it. So I can see or touch the table, but I cannot will it to fly, to transmute into a refrigerator, or to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

Existence exists independent of consciousness—of any consciousness. That’s a key philosophical principle. Existence exists independent of consciousness—of any consciousness. Consciousness, on the other hand, is dependent on existence. Ayn Rand calls this the primacy of existence principle. Consciousness is a dependent; it depends on existence.

Now religion, including Christianity, violates this basic principle of a rational philosophy. Christianity starts not with existence but with an all-knowing mind or consciousness. Conscious of what? Of nothing, for prior to creation there is nothing. Logical impossibility number one.

Related, every fact we know about consciousness, without exception, shows us that it requires bodily means—a brain, a nervous system, a living body. In Dinesh’s book, What’s So Great About Christianity, he says, “Our best bet is to go with what we know so far and draw conclusions based on that.” Let me repeat that: “Our best bet is to go with what we know so far and draw conclusions based on that.” Page 154 of What’s So Great About Christianity. Now that’s exactly right. I agree with Dinesh 100 percent on that. Consciousness without bodily means? Given everything we know, this is logical impossibility number two.

Further, by an act of will God’s mind creates the universe. But consciousness is a faculty of perception; it cannot by a sheer act of thinking or willing create anything—create an object from nothing. What does God create the universe from? From himself, a spiritual being which cannot even exist prior to existence? How do you create a material universe from a spiritual being? No. No. If you start with nothing, you end with nothing. Creation in a religious sense is logical impossibility number three.

Now I can go on, but we have enough data to draw the conclusion. There is no God. There is no creation of the universe. The universe is eternal, always was, always will be. Existence exists. We have to accept that. I mean, we don’t have to accept it; it’s a free country. But if we’re going to hold a rational and accurate view of the universe, logically we need to accept it.

I want to get to “intelligent design,” which a lot of Christians and a lot of religious people generally [believe]—I think including Dinesh; certainly he talks about it in his book. Let me point something out: The establishment of “intelligent design”—if it could be proven (which it cannot, and I’m going to disprove it)—the establishment of “intelligent design” would not validate Christianity.

In fact, it would refute Christianity in a different form—because on these premises God then designed the world in order to create a rational being, one whose mind is his instrument of survival. Such a God would necessarily celebrate reason and those who developed it—the Greeks, especially Aristotle; the Enlightenment philosophs; such great scientists such as Charles Darwin and others; I would add Ayn Rand; those who use their rational minds to promote human life on Earth. They are the ones who would be celebrated by such a God.

What of the enemies of reason? What of the Catholic Church, which suppressed . . . Dinesh didn’t mention in the Middle Ages the suppression of the philosophers by the Church. For five hundred years, between Boethius and Abelard, there was one original philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena. And, naturally, he was condemned by the Church; and one of his books was so thoroughly burned by the Church that not a single copy survives.

Peter Abelard, the greatest European mind since Aristotle for fifteen hundred years, was hounded constantly by the Church, had his books burned, and was finally condemned by the Pope to a decree of silence—he was forbidden to ever speak. I could go on and on. This is the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.

What would happen to these enemies of reason if there was such a god? These religious creatures who suppressed the rational mind in the name of faith, what would happen to them? They will burn in hell. All these faith-based Christian monsters who suppressed the rational mind for twelve hundred years, they’re going to burn.

This is Bernstein’s wager, a long overdue answer to Pascal’s wager. If God designed human life, he designed reason and expects us to use it. Reason shows that atheism is true. (Primacy of existence principle.) Therefore, rational atheists go to heaven. [Laughter and applause from the audience.]

This is not funny. Thank you; I appreciate the support. It’s not funny. I’m serious. Those who use faith or anything else—the Nazis, with their visceral gut feelings; the Communists, with philosophical materialism and brute force—any of these creatures who use faith or whatever it is to suppress reason, mankind’s survival instrument, are therefore terrible sinners and they will burn in hell.

Therefore, wager always on reason and rational atheism, knowing that if there is a designer, he will reward those true to the reasoning mind that he designed and will punish all those who suppress the reasoning mind, mankind’s survival instrument. This is Bernstein’s wager. But “intelligent design” is false.

Now, Mr. D’Souza and plenty of other religious people today quote various scientists to the effect that if the laws of nature were different, such as gravitation, then life would be impossible. The laws of nature on this view, on the intelligent design view, are fine-tuned or designed to make human life possible.

I have already shown that design of the universe is impossible. Aside from raising the unanswerable question of “Who designed the designer?” and then, “Who designed the designer of the designer?” and so on, in an infinite regress, which is logically impossible. Aside from that, intelligent design requires that consciousness exist independently of and antecedently to existence; then consciousness creates and governs existence—a logical impossibility.

So creation design is out, on strictly logical grounds, but the claim that life is the result of chance is equally false. There [are] a lot of scientists and people who come to this conclusion. It’s just philosophically mistaken. The concept of chance does not apply to metaphysical reality, to reality as such. Instead of chance, there are causal laws based on identity.

What can philosophy say about the development of life? Here are two philosophic certainties:

One: To be is to be something. A thing is what it is. The law of identity.

Two: Because a thing is what it is, it acts in accordance with its nature. The law of causality.

Consequently, the universe is lawful and orderly. The universe, Dinesh, is not rational. Human beings are rational. The universe is lawful and orderly. Indeed, the concept of an unlawful or disorderly universe is a logical impossibility, for it would require things to act in violation to their nature—not in accordance with what they are, but in accordance with what they are not.

Some people, I think Dinesh argues, it’s possible that the laws of nature could be otherwise—for instance, gravity. No. “Possible” means that, given the laws of nature, something could occur even if it has not yet—for example, a cure for cancer. The concept of “possible” arises and has rational meaning only within the laws of nature. It is not applicable to those laws. Given existence and the specific identity of that which exists, the law of gravity is necessitated and could not be otherwise.

Therefore, events unfold in metaphysical reality apart from human choices with a majestic and awesome necessity. They are inexorable. For example, given the specific identities of components of our solar system, the sun’s emission of a specific amount of radiation, the Earth’s distance from the sun, the Earth’s gravitational pull and ability to hold an atmosphere, etcetera, because of these things, of what they are, the development of life on Earth is necessitated by the laws of nature. There is no chance here. There is no conscious design. There is the inexorable unfolding in specific forms of the law of identity.

Notice that physically a living being is formed matter. When the specific chemical elements of life—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etcetera—are formed into a certain structure or arrangement, then life results.

Nature is dynamic. Process is ubiquitous. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed this long ago. The chemical elements of life exist. Change is a constant. Matter is endlessly reformed. Over billions of years it is inevitable that the specific arrangements of the specific elements that constitute simple life forms occur and then give rise to the evolutionary process.

Given sufficient time, and probably very little, such events are inescapable. The origin of life is neither in accord with the law of chance nor the law of God, but with the law of identity.

Now, let me finish. What does Christianity say on the origin of life? From Genesis, “And God said let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let fowl fly above the Earth to the open firmament of heaven. And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that creepeth. Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.”

Do I need to comment on this? The contrast between a rational analysis of the origins of life and Christian belief I think is too stark for me to have to comment on. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Mr. D’Souza, your fifteen minute response-rebuttal.

Dinesh D’Souza: When I was a kid growing up in Bombay, I would be taken by my parents to Catholic church, where I would often hear in the sermon a priest or a pastor harangue about “This is the way it is. This is why God exists and the Bible says this and the Bible says that.” And I remember as I grew a little bit older becoming a little disgusted with this mode of argument because it was not a mode of argument at all. It was just an appeal to the Bible.

Quite oddly, sitting here tonight and listening to Andrew Bernstein, I got the same creepy feeling. I got the same creepy feeling that I was listening to a certain kind of an atheist pastor. The only difference is that he didn’t appeal to the Bible, he appeals to a word with a capital letter called Reason.

He doesn’t give any reasons. But he just says reason dictates this and reason dictates that. And he expects us all to nod sheepishly and go along. He even, in fact, concludes triumphantly that reason dictates that atheism is true.

Now, we’re in a university setting, so we can stop talking nonsense and ask a simple question: “Do we know for a fact that God exists or doesn’t exist on the basis of reason?” I would concede, we do not know.

In that sense, we are all agnostics—the believer and the unbeliever alike. Why are we agnostics? Why am I an agnostic? Because I don’t know. I call myself a believer because I am not a knower.

There’s a great difference between belief and knowledge. Knowledge means you know. Belief means you don’t know but you still believe. For example, I believe there’s a place called Papua New Guinea. I’ve never been [there], but I believe it’s there. But I wouldn’t say I believe in my brother, because I know the guy. The point here is that true belief is not a denial of doubt; it is the acknowledgment of it.

But we see in Andrew Bernstein today no shred of a doubt. Here we are flung into the world as human beings, and if we’re curious and we look around, there is a whole heck of a lot of stuff we don’t know. Where did we come from? Why does all of this even exist—this whole universe—why does it exist? What’s going to come after we die, if anything? I think we’d have to admit if we were honest that we have no answers to the most fundamental questions of existence.

In other words, we don’t, on the basis of reason, but he does on the basis of capital-r Reason. And now we begin to see what’s really going on. The big-r Reason is simply a restatement of his own prejudices, of his own faith-based conclusions. He doesn’t know what came before the world. In fact, the arguments for God can be made on the basis of reason alone.

Now, you can’t settle the question of God’s existence or nonexistence by purely appealing to philosophical nostrums—things like “existence exists.” I agree. “Things are what they are.” I agree. “Existence is prior to consciousness.” I agree, and so what?

It is one of the most startling discoveries of modern science in recent decades that this universe of ours has a beginning—the big bang—and that means that first there was nothing and then there was a universe. By the way, it is the meaning of the big bang that not only did the universe have a beginning, but space and time also have a beginning.

Space and time are actually properties of our universe, which means that “before” our universe—you have to put the word before in quote marks—no space, no time. Who or what is responsible for this? It is not unreasonable to ask, if the universe encompasses all of nature, and all of nature had a beginning, then did nature create itself out of nothing, or did some supernatural force, and that’s all we mean here by God, bring nature into existence? I would submit that these are questions that can be discussed, but not in abstraction from the actual findings of modern science.

Now if we say that the universe had a beginning and this beginning points to a creator, then we would be vindicating the first book of Genesis. The key point about the first book of Genesis is that the ancient Hebrews, who, by the way, were not scientists and did no experiments, they said first there was nothing and then there was a universe.

By the way, a leading atheist, Lawrence Krauss, whom I debated recently, has written a book called A Universe Out of Nothing—and he acts as though he has refuted Christianity. I told him: That is the Christian position. The universe actually came out of nothing.

In fact, that is not the position of other religions, which maintain that some god or gods fashioned the universe, kind of carpenter style, out of preexisting stuff. But the ancient Hebrews broke with that and said, no, there was nothing at all—no space, no time. By the way, that’s the meaning of eternity. The Christian meaning of eternity is not forever and ever and ever; it is a God who exists outside of space and time.

By the way, before the 20th century, in the Newtonian universe, that concept of being outside space and time made no sense. Time seemed to stretch indefinitely in both directions. Space seems to go everywhere. How can you get outside of space? But now we know that space and time are local properties of our universe. Suddenly the concept of eternity becomes coherent in a way that it wasn’t before.

So, yes, I agree with Andrew Bernstein that we should go with the best knowledge we have. I’m simply saying he doesn’t have the best knowledge we have. He’s not actually implementing modern knowledge. He’s simply relying on nostrums, as if in a few philosophical precepts he can settle questions that are factual questions about the world and about where it comes from.

Let me say a little bit of a word here about consciousness and a little bit of a word about faith. Faith actually has nothing to do with the empirical world of reason. Faith is relevant where reason can’t go. So, let’s say, for example, is there life after death? I would say, yes, there is. Andrew Bernstein would say, no, there isn’t. The fact of the matter is, [although] he may deny this, neither of us really knows. I’ll tell you a secret: He doesn’t know either. Why? Because we are products of our consciousness, our brains. What happens to us afterward none of us has a clue.

What’s the difference between him and me? Is it that my position for life after death is based on faith and that his position against it is based on reason? No. His position is also based on faith. The only difference is that I as a believer will admit it. I will admit that I am taking a position based on faith. He, poor fellow, will keep insisting that he’s taking a position based on reason. What reason? Has he interviewed any dead guys? Has he been to the other side of the curtain? Shakespeare says death is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler has yet returned.

The point being that what we are seeing here in this debate, and I think it’s a really interesting historical switch—there was a time when the Christians were arrogant, they proclaimed this to be true, they hounded their opponents—and now we see something of the opposite. We see a certain kind of atheist arrogance masquerading as reason itself—again, appealing to reason while giving few actual reasons.

I would actually invite Andrew Bernstein to give me real reasons, empirical reasons, about why life after death is impossible, or why life after death does not exist, about why God does not exist.

The other part of his opening statement that I want to address in the time I have left is the issue of the crimes of Christianity. You notice that, speaking in rapid-fire fashion, he went through a number of them, and if you listened to them and didn’t know what any of them are really about, it sounded like there was an awful lot of bad stuff going on. “There was this massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day and there was Calvin in Geneva, and then there was this and there was that.”

The really interesting thing is that if you step back, go into slow motion a little bit, and start looking at these things . . . and then the crucial move. If he’s right that the Enlightenment defanged Christianity, and things were so barbaric before, we would expect that things after the Enlightenment in Western civilization would be much more peaceful. We would expect that a defanged Christianity would give way to secular societies that are just so much more humane and less murderous and less genocidal than the ones that came before.

The French Revolution was almost a revolution dedicated to reason. In fact, they changed the names of cathedrals, and essentially they dedicated them to reason itself. And the French Revolution culminates in tens of thousands of people being guillotined and hanged and having their heads chopped off and rivers of blood flowing.

By the way, these are twenty to fifty times the number of people killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which was essentially an argument between two rival noble families in France—the Guises and the Huguenots. This had been going on since time immemorial. So even the “crimes of religion” so called, the Thirty Years’ War, and so on—half of those crimes have nothing to do with religion. They are dynastic struggles; they are struggles over land and power. In the Thirty Years’ War, France, a Catholic country, ends up fighting on the Protestant side. It’s clearly not a simple war of religion; there are rival powers trying to maintain their balance in Europe.

Let’s look at the 20th century, a century shaped by science and technology and, you might say, the Enlightenment. What is the record, in terms of peace, of the 20th century—a century freed of religious violence? It turns out to be the most violent century in all of human history.

To give you a slight basis of comparison, we heard a lot about people being persecuted and hounded and so on. The Inquisition—which was the worst crime of Christianity in terms of persecuting heretics—over four hundred years, the Spanish Inquisition, which was the worst, killed, according to modern scholarship, which now has very reliable information on the subject, fewer than two thousand people. Fewer than two thousand people killed over four hundred years—that’s five guys a year. And Andrew Bernstein is inconsolable about this “historical crime” and the “horrible Christians.”

Very well, in the 20th century, I pick an atheist. I’m going to weaken my own case; and I’m not even going to talk about Stalin or Mao. I’m just going to pick a junior, little-league atheist; let’s take Pol Pot. I mean, think of him. I could talk about Lenin, I could talk about Brezhnev, or Chernenko. I could talk about Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, Ceausescu, Enver Hoxha. I could go on and on. But I’ll just pick one guy: Pol Pot. By the way, educated in France, a major-league atheist, a champion of reason itself, and what does Pol Pot do in the aftermath of the Vietnam War? He massacres in the space of three years two million people. Two million. Even bin Laden in his wildest dreams doesn’t even come close.

So here’s the point: These are crimes that are committed in the name of atheism, and they are done according to atheist doctrine. Why? Because Marx in The Communist Manifesto and his other writings, his discussions of Hegel and so on, says that the belief in the afterlife is the enemy of this life. Religion is a drug. We have to get rid of it to create the new man and the new utopia.

Now, sure enough, Andrew Bernstein will say, “But that’s not really reason.” And it is true that through history people have always sought to avoid responsibility for their own crimes, or the crimes committed by their movements, by pretending it’s not “really” my team.

But wait a minute; let’s be fair. If the Christians should take responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of Christianity, as I think they should—we should. But if I have to feel bad because of the Inquisition, he should feel bad for the crimes committed in the name of atheism. He doesn’t then get to just duck out and say, “Well, no”—just as after the fall of the Soviet Union a lot of Marxists were like, “Well, that wasn’t real Marxism, these people weren’t really following Marxists principles.” Well, OK, but the Christians weren’t really following Christian principles, either.

So if you’re going to hold the Christians responsible for what they did—fact—let’s hold the atheists responsible for what they did—fact—and let’s compare. I would submit that our sad conclusion is that much of this brutality, much of this violence, is not from Christianity; it is actually rooted in what Immanuel Kant called “the warped timber of human nature.” Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

My conclusion is this: Ultimately we have to judge systems by what they have built, what they have done in the world. We can’t hold them responsible for the crimes of human nature, because those crimes are actually universal. Christianity actually is one of the key pivots for building this civilization that we, even secular people, live in. And I think if we recognize that and were subject a little less to the arrogance of Reason, capital r, we might be able to step back and even grudgingly say, “Thank God for Christianity.” Thank you very much. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Dr. Bernstein, your second and final response. You have five minutes.

Andrew Bernstein: A lot of stuff. I almost don’t know where to begin. Let me do this quickly.

Big bang theory, if it’s true, is an example of an eternal universe theory, not of creation. It’s a philosophical misinterpretation to interpret it as a creation theory. And the reason is simple: If there’s an explosion, something antecedently existed that exploded. From nothing comes no explosions. I mean, if what you’re going to say is, let’s take this bottle of gasoline and dump it on nothing and see if we get an explosion, it’s not going to happen. So I guess we have to amend Genesis now. “In the beginning there was an energy phenomenon.”

The point, of course, is that matter exists whether it’s in the form of matter or energy. It changes its forms: It’s not created, it’s not destroyed. I’m not a scientist; I don’t even know if the big bang theory is true or not. But as a philosopher I know this: With certainty, despite Mr. D’Souza’s claims here about “big-r Reason” or whatever, I know this with logical certainty, if there’s an explosion something existed before the explosion that exploded. Existence exists.

Regarding the crimes, I’m confused. I have to scratch my head here. Are we here to debate Communism or National Socialism? I don’t think so. I think we’re here to debate Christianity. So if Mr. D’Souza’s argument is, “Well, the Communists and the Nazis murdered more people than the Christians,” what conclusion do we come to from that—Christianity is only the second worst evil in Western history? I agree. I absolutely agree. And I win the debate. Because the debate is, is Christianity good or bad for mankind; and Mr. D’Souza and I have established, Christianity is the second worst evil in human history.

Regarding National Socialism and Communism as examples of the Enlightenment, that’s clearly false. A little bit of history here. The first society of reason was ancient Greece. Mr. D’Souza’s and other Christians’ denigration of the enormity of the Greeks’ achievement is insulting; it’s mistaken. Philosophy is born in ancient Greece. What did you say before, Dinesh—that the Greeks contributed almost nothing to science? That is false. It is false. It is flat out false. Today, Aristotle is recognized along with Charles Darwin as one of the two greatest biologists in human history. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Archimedes, Hippocrates, Euclid. The advances the Greeks made in science and mathematics were astounding—suppressed by the Church during the Middle and Dark Ages.

I’m just doing a hit-or-miss attack here. The Enlightenment brings back the Greek approach of rationality. You can read the leading scholar on the Enlightenment, Peter Gay. What’s Volume One of his work on the Enlightenment? The Rise of Modern Paganism—meaning the Greeks, the commitment to reason.

It’s not the French Revolution that’s based in reason. The French Revolution was influenced largely by Rousseau, who is an overt emotionalist. It’s the American Revolution that was based in reason. The leading minds of the American Enlightenment were responsible for the American Revolution: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison. Many of these men were deists; they were scornful of faith. The leading minds of the 18th-century Enlightenment, including Voltaire, were a mixture of Greek rationalism and Christian faith, with Greek rationalism and a commitment to reason—“big r” or “little r,” it doesn’t make any difference. Thomas Paine, in his book The Age of Reason, said, “My own mind is my own church.” There’s the Enlightenment attitude. These were the men who created the American Revolution. The French Revolution was created by followers of Rousseau. Read Will Durant on this. Robespierre was an enormous admirer of Rousseau, the emotionalist.

And the Nazis are overt emotionalists. There’s nobody who could be a better example of rejecting the Enlightenment and a commitment to reason than the National Socialists. How did they know their morally superiority based on racial inheritance? Did they get that from the science of biology? I don’t think so. Biology shows us moral characteristics are not inherited. Nazis answered it themselves. “We just feel it in our blood and our bowels.” That’s a quote. “We feel it in our blood and our bowels.” They were overt emotionalists. They reject reason and logic as a Jewish tool. It’s sensationalism, bodily, visceral sensations and emotions that animate the National Socialists—not reason and the Enlightenment commitment to reason.

The communists are almost as good an example, maybe better. They are philosophical materialists. They don’t only deny the mind’s effectuality; they deny its existence. Man is body. Everything is matter. Man is body; the mind—mankind’s survival instrument—doesn’t exist. How do we create the products that human life depends on? Manual labor: the work of the body. What about Aristotle’s logic, Newton’s laws of motion, the inventions of James Watt or Edison that promote production? Glorified manual labor. Human beings are bodies; we’re animals. How do you get animals to work? You whip them, and you kill them if they don’t work.

This is the overt rejection of reason in the modern world. It’s a product of modern German philosophy: Kant, Hegel, Marx, the unholy triumvirate with their rejection of reason. Kant says the mind can’t know reality at all; we just create a subjective reality. Hegel subordinates the individual to the State. The mind can’t know reality; the individual is helpless—he’s subordinate to the State. The group is all-powerful; the State is all-powerful. Which group is all-powerful? Hegel’s followers disagree. The Nazis say the race; the communists say the economic class. They all agree: The individual is nothing; the individual’s mind can’t know reality; he’s helpless; he’s subordinate to the State—his life and mind belong to the State. This is the modern world.

There are three philosophic traditions at work here: The Greeks’ commitment to reason, Christianity’s commitment to faith, and the post-Kantian modernists’ commitment to the idea that the mind is helpless, the State is all-powerful, and the individual must be subordinated to the State.

I’m going to just conclude with this point. What they call modern irrationalism—which is true, it’s accurate, in modern culture, in art and politics and education—modern irrationalism, [is] the product of German philosophy. Who set the template in Western society for irrationality? Christianity did. If you can believe that a super-consciousness of the universe exists without bodily means and creates the universe from nothing, you can believe anything. You can certainly believe you’re morally superior based on racial inheritance.

Here is Christianity’s cultural legacy: It made irrationality respectable. That’s its legacy. After Christianity, anything goes. You can make any irrational claim; you don’t need any facts to support it.

Now, I gave an argument; I gave you facts to show that there’s no God. The primacy of existence is factual. There’s no evidence whatever to indicate that consciousness can exist independently of existence or that it can mold or create existence at will. No evidence whatsoever. That is a faith-based belief. All the evidence is on my side. I gave the argument. Mr. D’Souza did not respond to it; he just made some insulting reference to “big-r reason” and “little-r reason”—that’s not going to cut it here, man.

There is no God; accept it. Existence exists; there’s no life after death—and how do I know that with complete certainty? Because according to the claims that there is life after death, some spirit, some ghost, survives without bodily means. And everything we know about consciousness without exception shows us that without bodily means there is no consciousness, which means after death, we die.

The conclusion we should take from that is not like the existentialists and be [in] despair, despair because death is the end. The conclusion is we should live with a certain sense of urgency.

Life is not a dress rehearsal. It’s not preparation for a beyond. This is it. We need to fulfill ourselves here and now. So I urge all of you: Think about what you want out of life. Do you want an education in a given field, do you want romantic love, do you want children, do you want a career in a certain field? And then work your hardest and best, using your mind, to create those values in your life and then live a happy, fulfilled life.

Values, Ayn Rand points out, are the meaning of life. That is what she means by selfishness. Values are the meaning of life. Fill your life with rational, healthy, life-promoting values—education, a productive career, friendship, romantic love, family. This is the meaning of life. We have to achieve it here—we’re not going to get a second chance, and I know that with complete certainty for the reasons I gave. Thank you. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Mr. D’Souza, we’ll give you a little extra time to be equitable, to issue your final reply.

Dinesh D’Souza: What do we know with complete certainty? If we lived in the 5th century BC we would “know” with complete certainty that there was a sun and a handful of stars and that’s it. There was no knowledge of any other planets, let alone galaxies, and there was no way to find out about them.

So, by the Bernsteinian principle, in the 5th century BC we would “know” that it’s impossible for there to be other galaxies because knowledge just simply didn’t reach that far. And since we should go with the principle that what we know is all there is, and there’s nothing to be known apparently, we can proclaim definitively that what we don’t know does not even exist.

We have a project, by the way, as you know, to search for life on other planets. Is there life on other planets? I don’t know. Andrew Bernstein doesn’t know either, by the way. Now, let’s assume that we adopt his principle, that if there’s no proof of something, that is proof that it doesn’t exist. So then we would declare in advance, there’s no life on other planets, there’s not a shred of evidence for life on other planets, ergo, there’s no life on other planets—what’s the point of even searching? We know that there isn’t.

By the way, how would we know if there was life on other planets? Let’s say we went to the moons of Jupiter or some faraway galaxy. Let’s say we went to that surface and we noticed that there were some hieroglyphics there, and we noticed that there were some skyscrapers and some moving vehicles. We would know definitively, from the design, that somebody did that. There are aliens here.

Now along would come Andrew Bernstein, “Well, we can’t prove the existence of aliens because who created the aliens?” Who the hell knows? But the fact of the matter is that when you see signs of intelligence that we didn’t do, we know that someone did them. It would be considered definitive proof of intelligent life outside our galaxy if we could get the Morse code, or if we could get the eye chart—except it didn’t say A, B, P, Q, R, but it said, “To thine own self be true.” We’d recognize that immediately.

So what’s going on here is that the same standard of open-mindedness, investigation, and ability to infer from design to a designer that we would manifestly do in any other area is suddenly closed off when it comes to God. Suddenly you can’t ask, “How did the universe get here?” He has to proclaim dogmatically and, in fact, even embarrass himself by saying things like, “The Greeks said out of nothing you can get nothing, and therefore the big bang can’t be true.” Or: “If the big bang is true, it can’t possibly mean that something came out of nothing.”

That is actually what it does mean; and, in fact, the philosophical implications were so troubling that when Einstein realized that was what it does mean, he actually began to alter his own equations and insert a cosmological constant to make it not true. Because he realized that if it is true, then you can’t just think of an eternal universe, eternally governed by laws, but you have to consider that maybe some kind of a super mind, which is what Einstein ultimately came to believe—and not the biblical God to be sure—but a sort of grand intelligence that’s responsible for the laws of nature themselves.

I mean, think about this: The laws of nature are written in code. They are a mathematical code. Galileo said the language of the universe is written in mathematics. And it’s taken the most brilliant scientists, from Kepler to Newton to Einstein, to excavate those laws out of nature. Is it unreasonable for us to ask who wrote the code? How did we get these mathematical formulas that explain the operations of matter, that explain not only what is going on inside this pen, but the same laws are responsible for explaining how galaxies move hundreds of light-years away? Who did that? Or does it do itself?

In a way, you could say that either explanation is possible, but it is the height of dogmatism to insist on matters of such magnitude that human beings from time immemorial have wondered about, to proclaim definitively at our moment in history that we know the answer. That is the kind of anti-intellectual attitude that has forever been the enemy of learning and science and open-mindedness and curiosity and modern knowledge.

Finally, with regard to the crimes of Christianity, let’s put aside communism and compare, for example, the Salem witch trials, which are by the way mythological—in college I read Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, [about] “the Salem witch trials”—against, say, the French Revolution.

Now, the French Revolution grew out of the French Enlightenment. You can say Rousseau was a romantic; Rousseau was fully a creature of the Enlightenment. A correspondent and colleague of Rousseau, d’Alembert, d’Holbach—all of these guys were in it together; they were the Enlightenment.

So once again you don’t get to duck out from the Enlightenment by essentially expelling its key members. The French Revolution killed tens of thousands of people in a very short time. The Salem witch trials? Well, I was in Salem a few years ago. You know the number of people killed in the Salem witch trials? Nineteen.

Is that nineteen too many? Sure, I’ll grant that. But it is simply ridiculous to go on and on about the “less than twenty” crime of Christianity while ignoring the far greater crimes that are committed in the name of your own ideology. Again, not by the communists in faraway Russia or China, but really right in the heart of Western civilization.

And the Nazis were the same thing. Hitler was not inspired by Christianity. He hated Christianity—persecuted the churches and so on. But Hitler wasn’t just a product of the Volk. He was also a product of an interpretation of Darwinism that saw the survival of the fittest as not simply a fact about nature but a norm for nature.

That’s kind of what I take Andrew Bernstein to be doing. He says out of facts, our desire to survive, come values. Survival becomes not only something we do, but something we ought to do. And since in nature the fittest survive, they conquer and eat and destroy the less fit, why not, it doesn’t seem like such a stretch, for the Nazis to have done, made the conclusion that from the fact of survival of the fittest in nature comes the value that the fittest ought to and must, and it is glorious for them to survive. And in that was sown the seeds of the Third Reich.

Thank you very much. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: We now turn to tonight’s Q&A session with the audience. If you have a question, and I would like to emphasize a question, for the speakers, and not one that you want to answer on your own, please approach one of the microphones to your left or right.

We will take one question at a time, alternating from one side to the other. We have twenty minutes for this portion, so, please, respectfully, in the interests of time, if you could limit your questions to a couple of sentences we would all appreciate it, and it would give others behind you a chance.

How about the lady first [gesturing to the left side].

First Questioner: This is for both of you. What is your definition of “faith” and what is your definition of “reason,” and in a few words how are they commensurate or contradictory?

Dinesh D’Souza: “Reason” is using our intelligence in the world and trying to draw conclusions based upon what we know.

“Faith” is making a decision . . . In life we have to make decisions where full information is not available. If I were courting a woman, deciding whether to marry her, I could use all the reason I can, I plug it all in, and yet if I were to ask what would life be like over the next twenty years, be like with her, I don’t know.

So, I can say I’m going to be an agnostic and wait for all the data to come in. But the data will never be in. She’ll marry someone else, or we’ll both be dead. And, therefore, at some point, I’ve got to take what I know and I’ve got to go for it. That is the leap of faith.

Faith is not in contradiction to reason; faith comes in where reason can’t go.

Andrew Bernstein: By “reason” I mean logical—that is noncontradictory—thinking applied to facts. Reason is logical— that is, noncontradictory—thinking about facts. Not about faith-based beliefs, but about facts.

“Faith” is belief in the supernatural. It’s belief in that which cannot be observed, which goes against all the evidence, which has no evidence to support it, or goes against the evidence.

I gave a good example before, from [the book of] Matthew. You know, the graves open and the dead rise and walk the streets of Jerusalem. Good example of faith-based beliefs. It’s like Mark Twain once said, “Faith is when you believe something you know ain’t so.”

But the emphasis here is on reason. Reason, again, is logical, noncontradictory thinking about facts. There is no place in the universe where reason, in principle, cannot go. There is no supernatural realm. There is no evidence to support it; it goes against all the evidence. I gave the argument that consciousness depends on existence, and that requires faith.

Drew Thornley: [To the next questioner] Sir.

Second Questioner: Speaking of the evolution of Christianity over time, I think Mr. Bernstein pointed out, it is the very principles underlying the evolution which make it unjust, but D’Souza, I think you pointed out that the crimes perpetrated by Christianity were not characteristic of what Christ taught.

I’m just wondering how much authority you put in a religion which develops its morality over time, and if you’re willing to accept a religion which is extremely different from the Christianity of today in the future.

Dinesh D’Souza: It’s not a matter that the religion evolves over time. It is that any new system of ideas engrafts itself on an existing social system.

For example, just as Muhammad arrives in the society of the Bedouins. Now, in the society of the Bedouins, it was concubinage, rape, pillage—normal practice. What does Muhammad do? He says, listen: you can have polygamy, but limit the wives to four. Right? The point being here—what is Muhammad doing? He’s taking the society as it is and offering moral remedies in that context.

So what does Christianity do? It comes into a society that’s hierarchical, monarchical, extremely violent, infanticide and those sorts of things quite common, and Christianity articulates principles that run counter to that society.

Those principles are not immediately implemented. It’s not like people immediately say, “All right, let’s stop doing this.” But the principle endures. Lincoln made a very good point on the eve of the Civil War. He said the Founders declared the right so that the enforcement could follow when the circumstances permitted.

In other words, it takes a certain amount of moral enlightenment in order to see a principle that’s in Christianity but is so radical that it takes time to implement it. So you look at the antislavery guys: they were motivated by Christianity; they were motivated by the biblical idea that we are created equal in the eyes of God.

But for many, many centuries that idea was interpreted purely for the next world; and what was revolutionary was not that the Enlightenment crept in: what was revolutionary was that Christians began to take that otherworldly teaching and apply it to this world.

The antislavery movement was not driven by science or the Enlightenment. It was driven by Quakers and evangelicals—Wilberforce in England, here in America the abolition movements, motivated by the doctrine of equality, which was in Christianity from the beginning.

Drew Thornley: [To Bernstein] Would you like to reply?

Andrew Bernstein: Yes, first I’d like to respond to Mr. D’Souza and then quickly to the questioner.

The abolitionist movement is 100 percent generated by the Enlightenment. Which century and where does it begin after Christians promote slavery for centuries? Christians happily owned slaves. When and where does the abolitionist movement begin? Oh, just by coincidence it’s the 18th century. It’s during the Enlightenment.

Almost all of the philosophs were abolitionists—Franklin, Voltaire, almost all of them were abolitionists. The reason, of course, is that man is a reasoning being. He’s self-governing—he can be self-governing—it’s wrong to hold him in bondage to the State, the Church, or the slaveowners.

Wilberforce . . . give a lot of the Christians credit; they picked this up from the Enlightenment. It’s a historical fact that Wilberforce was well aware of Enlightenment thinking on this—on what the philosophs had to say.

In regard to the question, briefly, I just want to reiterate what I said in my talk. Faith-based beliefs are impossible to rationally adjudicate. So if one denomination says, well, Jesus is God; and the other one says, no, no, no, Jesus was created by God but he is not himself God, where are the facts? What’s the evidence? There isn’t any. This is the Aryan heresy, by the way. There’s no way to use rational persuasion to adjudicate this—you simply have passionately held, faith-based beliefs with no way to rationally work out the dispute; and, hence, the endless violence between the Christian denominations—including during the Reformation. Mr. D’Souza, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre was not an aristocratic squabble; it was the Catholics versus the Protestants.

Drew Thornley: [Gesturing to an audience member on his right side] Sir.

Third Questioner: Thank you both for a wonderful debate. My question is for Mr. Bernstein. If you take any unit of time, let’s say we use days, and all of the stuff in this universe existed before the big bang, if there was one, in time an eternity passed. The problem with that is you can’t mathematically have an infinite series of days before tonight, or else we never get to tonight, so how can you rationally deny that the universe had a beginning?

Andrew Bernstein: I don’t have the slightest idea what he just asked me. I gave the reasons for why creation is impossible. I gave the reasons already. Do you want me to reiterate?

Consciousness is a metaphysical dependent; existence is metaphysically independent. It logically precedes consciousness. Consciousness requires something to be conscious of. Consciousness also requires bodily means. All the evidence supports this.

Now I agree with Mr. D’Souza about one thing—about being open to new evidence. You come to conclusions within our context of knowledge that are provisionally certain; you’re always open to new evidence.

But there’s no evidence whatsoever to indicate that consciousness can exist independently of existence, and that by an act of will can mold or create or shape or [whatever]. All the evidence is on the other side of the argument. Given all the knowledge we have today, creation is a logical impossibility.

Dinesh D’Souza: Can I respond briefly? The two leading atheist scientists in the world are probably Stephen Hawking, physicist, and then the physicist Steven Weinberg, who is right here at the University of Texas in Austin.

Stephen Hawking, in his book The First Three Minutes, says very clearly that the discovery of the big bang came as a nasty shock to the scientific community. Most scientists believed in a steady-state universe; and Weinberg admits that this gave, and I’m quoting him, “some comfort to those who believe in a Creator.”

Now, what is the atheist answer to this? Stephen Hawking and Weinberg have a similar answer, and it is an entirely faith-based answer. The answer is, there might be an infinity of multiple universes out there, none of which for which there is the slightest bit of empirical evidence whatsoever. They are merely posited. Posited why? To explain the peculiarities of our universe.

In fact, by Andrew Bernstein’s own reasoning, the entire of physics and astronomical communities’ speculation about multiple universes should be dismissed prima facie as irrational nonsense because there’s no empirical evidence for it at all.

But the truth of it is that these issues are in the mainstream of modern physics and astronomy, because to deny one invisible God you have to make up an infinity of invisible universes.

So, there are two choices, I agree: God or an infinity of universes, none of which we’ve ever seen except our own. It’s a faith-based choice. I’d like to believe in multiple universes; I don’t think I have that much faith.

Drew Thornley: [Gesturing to an audience member on his left side] Sir.

Fourth Questioner: My question is for both of you, but primarily Dinesh. Given that the prompt asks is Christianity good for the world, I think we can ignore the past for a second—it’s done some good and some bad, and we’ve secularized a lot of the good things—but right now, moving forward, given a lot of the barriers Christianity is posing to education in our schools, to civil rights in the gay rights movement, how can you defend that Christianity is good right now?

Dinesh D’Souza: That’s a very good question. I would answer it this way: I think very often in these issues we sort of miss the forest for the trees. And so when we think of Christianity today, most people will associate it with, like, abortion, school prayer, gay marriage. If I were to ask myself, “Why am I a Christian?” I would say this:

I can think of myself as a material object in the universe, a product of quarks and random forces. I could think that I have no free will because my decisions are the product of neurons in my brain over which I have no direct control. I could think that life has no purpose and when I die I’ll become nothing.

I could think that way, and reason allows me to do that. But reason also allows me to think that my life is part of a larger cosmic drama; that, in other words, there is a creator of the universe, and that the universe actually has a story, it has a point; that life itself has a purpose; that ultimately the sad injustice of our world in which many times bad guys end up on top and good guys come to grief will actually be compensated in another life—in other words, that there is cosmic justice.

Christianity gives me an experience of the sublime. In secular life, we almost get no experience of the sublime. Occasionally with art, sometimes quite honestly in sexual intercourse, but it is brief and evanescent. With Christianity, the sublime is embedded in everyday life. You get the sense that life has depth, complexity, purpose, meaning.

And there’s consolation for life after death. Fact of the matter is, you and I, we don’t think about it now, you’re too young, but the gravedigger waits for us all, and death is a terrifying experience. We have to face it no matter what. We can either face it believing that there’s something coming after, which will actually make that experience more bearable, or we can just face it grimly, saying nothing’s going to come after.

My point is, maybe nothing is going to come after, but we don’t know. He is choosing to believe that nothing comes after, and it defines his morality. I’m choosing to believe that something does come after, and it defines my outlook. And I’m simply saying that if I just look at it as a practical matter, Christianity is delivering the practical goods that enrich my life in the world, and that ultimately is why I’m a Christian.

Drew Thornley: [To Bernstein] Would you like to reply?

Andrew Bernstein: Hell, yeah. Hopefully, Dinesh, we can debate this topic again, and maybe one day you’ll actually answer my arguments.

What I want to say is this: Reason is mankind’s survival instrument. I established that; you should read Atlas Shrugged for this. This life is the one chance we get. Consequently, we need to make life on Earth amenable to human beings.

We need, and I think Dinesh and I agree on this, to institute the principle of individual rights—your life belongs to you, your mind belongs to you, you’re free to choose rational values, healthy, life-promoting values, like I said before: an education, career, friendship, romantic love, family, travel, etcetera. And you can fill your life with meaning. Values are the meaning of life, so we have to live with a certain sense of urgency because death is the end.

And we need to establish a free society. . . . The United States of America is the greatest country of history, the nation of the Enlightenment, in fact. We need to establish a free society [where] women have a right to their own bodies, homosexuals have the right to marry, etcetera. That human individuals can then achieve flourishing life on earth in a free society, established on the principle of individual rights.

That is the meaning of life. The achievement of values that make your life fulfilled—not faith-based fantasy that there’s some God directing this or that I might have some life in the end. There’s no evidence to support that; all the evidence is on the other side.

Drew Thornley: [To a member of the audience] Sir.

Fifth Questioner: One of the key arguments, I think, from Mr. Bernstein is that Christians, those who follow the teachings of Jesus, have become subservient to that belief system, and some of them have done bad things. Couldn’t that be applied to any belief system, including Objectivism or the teachings of Ayn Rand?

Dinesh D’Souza: Why don’t you answer since it’s directly to you?

Andrew Bernstein: Yes. I think some people who call themselves Objectivists are words that I can’t even say in public; and they do things that I find bizarre, irrational, destructive, harmful, hurtful.

But I’ll just say this: To the extent that somebody’s an Objectivist, and he recognizes reason, not only as the means of dealing with nature, the means of growing food and building houses and everything, but reason as the means for dealing with human beings, so the initiation of force is out, and we deal with each other by rational persuasion.

Notice that if somebody is following Objectivism and they disagree passionately on some philosophical principle, what do they do? Do they recommend burning each other at the stake? No. They stop talking to each other, they shun each other, they go their separate ways, and they simply agree to disagree.

There’s no point in insulting individual Christians or any religion, Judaism, Islam. It’s a faith-based philosophy, and there’s no way to rationally adjudicate it. And consequently you get, in religion, the burnings at the stake, the beheadings, the endless religious wars.

Europe, a thousand years ago in the Dark Ages under the Catholic Church, was almost identical to the Islamic world today. There’s a Christian Dark Age, and since 1200 AD, since the Muslims rejected Greek rationalism and imposed faith on Islamic society, they burned the books of Averroes, Avicenna, and the Islamic world has been in a dark age for eight hundred years. It’s almost identical to the dark age of Europe caused by Christianity.

Religion is hazardous to your health. That’s the conclusion here. It suppresses reason, mankind’s survival instrument, for faith.

Drew Thornley: Mr. D’Souza.

Dinesh D’Souza: If you think about Christianity and ask a simple question: What new value did Christianity bring into the world?, I think I would answer it brought into the world a new value of forgiveness.

In ancient Judaism, there is the idea of an eye for an eye. Justice. I think we would have to admit that that actually comports with strict justice. If somebody comes to your tribe and kills ten people, you have every right to go to their tribe and kill ten people.

But the insight of Christianity is that leaves twenty people dead. Forgiveness is actually a very interesting idea because it involves no denial of the horror of the crime. It fully takes it on board, and yet it agrees to, through a tremendous moral exertion, overlook it—act as if it didn’t happen while knowing full well that it did.

There is no such principle in any other religion that I know of; there’s no such principle in secular philosophy in and of itself, unless adopted from Christianity. And yet it’s the most radical principle the world has ever seen. It is the only way in a sad world, in which there have been so many terrible things inflicted on so many people, to actually move forward, the way that Mandela was able to move forward in South Africa. The whites had been oppressing the blacks for decades. Should the blacks now turn around and kill as many whites or more as the whites had killed blacks? Think of where that would end.

The whole principle of reconciliation that went on in South Africa was entirely based on the Christian principle that the guys who did the crime must acknowledge it, but having acknowledged it, the very people that they did it to must forgive them. That is the radical message of Jesus still alive in the world today.

So, to just go around talking about reason and superstition and why faith is bad and so on fails to acknowledge the Christian organizations all over the world that are actually inventing things, dispensing foods, St. Jude’s hospital, the Red Cross. In other words, Christians are acting in the world, and Andrew Bernstein is making philosophical arguments about why the whole thing shouldn’t exist.

If you actually remove Christianity from the world today, the religious-based schools would close down, the hospitals would close down, Doctors without Borders would shut its doors, the Red Cross would have to close down.

In other words, innumerable goods that are going on in the world now—and these are not acts of government coercion, they’re private charity, so they’re completely consistent with a free society—and Christianity is doing, and when Christianity stops doing, the state steps in. So you would think there’d be some measure of gratitude for what in the private sphere is being done to alleviate human suffering so the power of the government doesn’t have to be increased.

Drew Thornley: Fewer than two minutes remain in our allotted time. Don’t kill the messenger; I have to keep time here. So we must end with a concise question from this gentleman [in the audience], allow both to respond, and then we’ll move to the final closing statements.

Sixth Questioner: Dr. Bernstein, in my lifetime, it’s been reported to me various events that have taken place that fall outside the context of what we know to be natural law. These events are called miracles. They are events that have been studied by people who are knowledgeable and experts in natural law, and they fall outside of this law. As a matter of fact, these events fall contrary to these natural laws. In order for me to accept the fact that these miracles are taking place, I must have faith in a deity, a higher power, a supernatural power, a power that has created these laws that we all live by and therefore that miracle is a transposition . . .

Drew Thornley: The question?

Sixth Questioner: Explain why my faith is ill-founded when I can look at a miracle and say it has actually taken place.

Andrew Bernstein: Notice the questioner conspicuously failed to give a single example of what the hell he’s talking about. I mean, what miracles are we talking about?

I referenced [the book of] Matthew several times: The graves opened, the dead rise and walk the streets of Jerusalem. You believe that? Men live inside whales, virgins give birth, burning bushes speak?

The reason this stuff is nonsense is because it violates the law of identity. Bushes can’t speak. You know why? They got nothing to say. That’s why. They have no brain by which to formulate any thoughts. They’re incapable of thinking or speaking, and to believe it takes faith.

It’s a free country, and I will absolutely support your right to believe in miracles, but your right to believe in them or somebody else’s right to believe in them is not in itself evidence that such events ever took place.

Dinesh D’Souza: If I was standing in front of a bush and I heard a voice, I wouldn’t obtusely conclude that the bush is speaking. I would conclude that there was someone behind the bush that was speaking.

The Christian view is not that the bush spoke; it’s that God spoke behind the bush. Now, you [Bernstein] haven’t refuted that in the slightest. The point about miracles is this: If, in thirty years, modern technology enabled a dead man to be restored to life, we would simply call it a scientific advance, that a guy who’s clinically dead can be restored on the hospital table. But if that is possible, then it follows that dead people can, in fact, be restored to life—there’s nothing in modern science that declares this impossible.

The fact of the matter is we cannot pretend that the natural laws we know here and now are all the natural laws that exist. Our knowledge of what is possible is very limited. So if a man can be restored to life thirty years from now, then the dead can be restored to life; and the biblical description of dead men being restored to life may be true or may be false but is most certainly not impossible.

Drew Thornley: This concludes our Q&A portion. To put a bow on this thing we will allow each debater two minutes to wrap up, to offer some final, concluding words. Dr. Bernstein, you’re first; your two minutes begin now.

Andrew Bernstein: I just want to begin by commenting on Dinesh’s last comment. He’s saying that if medical science thirty years from now can restore people from clinical death to life, therefore miracles might exist.

First of all, notice it’s a complete hypothetical with no examples to support it, but beyond that if that were to happen, that’s not a miracle. That means it’s within the laws of nature that dead guys can be brought back to life by medical means, by scientific means. There’s no divine intervention there to raise the dead; Dinesh is talking about scientific advance.

So we’re talking about events that can occur within the laws of nature. ‘Miracle” means something that violates the laws of nature and that is caused by God.

Now, in my final wrap-up I just want to stress the positive here. Again, what I said all through tonight, reason is man’s instrument of survival; reason is the source of all human values on this earth. We need to fall in love with reason; this is the way to promote human life on earth.

Anything that suppresses the rational mind, whether it’s faith, whether it’s the emotionalism of the Nazis, whether it’s the philosophical materialism of the communists, whether it’s dictatorship of any kind—secular or theocratic—it suppresses man’s mind, and you see the collapse of civilization.

The real struggle in human history is not religion versus secularism; that’s only one example of it. The real struggle in human history is reason versus unreason, or rationalism versus irrationalism—those who support the mind and those who oppose it.

The Greeks generally supported the mind and made tremendous advances. The Muslims in the Middle Ages embraced Greek science and to some extent Greek philosophy: They made tremendous advances. Ultimately, Islam suppressed that; faith-based belief suppressed it. They’re in a dark age for eight hundred years. In the West, Christianity suppressed the Greek approach.

Notice there’s no advances in the Western world until the Christians rediscover the Greeks in Spain, and you see great minds like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus embracing Aristotle. They are Christian Aristotelians, and it’s the Aristotelian part, that commitment to fact-based, observation-based rationality, that leads to the medieval Renaissance and then to the Italian Renaissance.

You see, when men embrace reason—the Greeks, the Muslims at one time, the Christians to some degree during the medieval Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the creation of America—when men embrace reason, they create civilizations. The men of unreason tear civilizations down. And that battle simply goes on and on and on.

Like I said, Christianity set the template in the West for irrationality. On Christian beliefs, you can believe anything. And Christianity inevitably is suppressive of the independent, rational mind and consequently caused a dark age that lasted over a thousand years—that was real Christianity.

What Dinesh is talking about today are Westernized, Americanized, secular Christians who do good things in this lifetime. You don’t need Christianity for that; you need good will. In fact, what you need is the principle of individual rights to liberate the human mind.

Let me close with one example. You know, Mother Theresa or these so-called saints of charity, these faith-based saints of charity, maybe they do some good—not much. At best, what do they do? They hold the hands of the leper and console him while he dies. The men of reason cure leprosy. They cure the diseases. You depend on reason, not faith, for this.

So fall in love with reason, with rational values, and go out and live a life in a free country—let’s get the Democrats out of office. I agree with Mr. D’Souza on that. I liked Dinesh’s movie 2016. Not that I’m a Republican, but the Democrats are statists, they’re socialists. Let’s reestablish a free society in this country, and individuals can then achieve rational values and flourish. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: Well, I’m glad that we could find some common ground, and perhaps this will lead to another debate in the future and you can be on the same side of the table. Mr. D’Souza, your closing remarks.

Dinesh D’Souza: This has been a lot of fun, and very challenging and very enlightening. Notice that in the debate, we had a debate conducted in the vocabulary of reason alone. Not once in this debate have I appealed to authority, to revelation. I don’t, to my knowledge, remember ever quoting the Bible. I have used the same language of reason, the language of the university, to engage this topic.

The point I want to make is that whoever you agree with, I think you can see that reason is not a monopoly of either side. Reason is not something that atheists own; both sides can invoke reason to their cause. And therefore we have to give reasons for what we believe.

Andrew Bernstein said that if there is suffering, people of good will . . . Actually, no. If there was an earthquake tomorrow in Rwanda, you would notice that many of the countries in the world would pretend as if it never happened. There’s a lot of wealth in China. The Chinese would basically shrug. There’s a lot of oil money in the Middle East. The Muslims would look over their shoulder and go, “Well . . .” The Indians wouldn’t care.

But somehow in Western civilization, in Europe and America, all kinds of activity would occur. Church groups are sending bags of food, and there’s this and there’s that, and it’s a humanitarian crisis, and the U.S. government should do something, and so on.

Here’s my point: Europe and America are, whether we like to admit it or not, the products of a Christian culture. Lots of people may not go to church, but that Christianity has been drilled into them over the centuries. Even when the Christianity is subtracted, its humanitarian impulses remain. These are not universal impulses. These are impulses that are driven by a specific ideology that took root in the West.

Now, is it all the product of the Enlightenment? I don’t think so. I think if we want to look at the complexity of this, look at a guy like Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment. And yet when this man of the Enlightenment was dispatched by the Founders to tell us where our rights come from, did he answer, “The social contract?” “They come from reason itself.” No. He said these rights come from our creator, period. The creator is the only stated source of rights given by the man of the Enlightenment himself.

This man of the Enlightenment, who, by the way, was not an orthodox Christian, would sit with the Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out the miracles that he didn’t like; this same man, whenever he talked about something truly profound—and in this case I’m thinking here of slavery. Once again, Jefferson had few qualms about slavery itself. In fact, while Washington freed his slaves upon his death, Jefferson never did. Jefferson had two hundred slaves and didn’t free, except for Sally Hemings’s family, he basically did not free them. And yet this same slaveowner and southern planter and man of the Enlightenment, when he began to talk about slavery, you’ll notice his language becomes very religious. “Can the almighty take sides with us in such a contest?” “I tremble for my country when I recall that God is just.” And so on and so on.

In other words, even this man of Athens was imbued, if you will, by the ethics of Jerusalem. And no amount of scientific advances—of curing leprosy and so on—can cure death, can cure suffering, can wipe a tear off every face. In Gandhi’s phrase, there’s always going to be a need for that human touch motivated not by evolutionary selfishness, kin altruism, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back, but rather by this doctrine of universal brotherhood that, I think, cannot be fully assimilated into evolutionary selfishness.

It rather reaches to the stranger, the guy who has nothing in common with me, who can do nothing for me and yet, by me doing something for him—not through the state but in the private sphere—it calls upon the highest impulses of humanity. Those highest impulses are in humanity. Even the atheist has them. But what Christianity did was develop them, encourage them, create systems that foster them; those systems are still with us today, and that’s why, ultimately, Christianity has been, on the balance, a great force for good in the world. Thank you very much. [Audience applause]

Drew Thornley: These closing remarks from each speaker conclude our program. I would like to ask all of us to join in thanking the University of Texas at Austin Objectivism Society for their tireless effort in putting this event on. My personal thanks for inviting me to moderate. And last but not least, our two speakers today who traveled from a long way away to come here and put on a show for us. So our sincere thanks. [Audience applause]

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), and, most recently, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020).

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