Clip 5: Does science make belief in God obsolete? (Templeton Foundation)

To read the short essays that accompany this video, with contributions by Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, Kenneth Miller, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, Jerome Groopman, and others, visit http://www.templeton.org/belief This is the third in a series of conversations among leading scientists, scholars, and public figures about the "Big Questions." For previous Big Questions conversations sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, visit http://www.templeton.org/bigquestions

At a lunch event in New York City on September 22, 2008, Christopher Hitchens and the Catholic theologian Lorenzo Albacete squared off over the Big Question: "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" The event was jointly sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and On Faith, the online religion forum of the Washington Post and Newsweek. The discussion was moderated by Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, and Sally Quinn of the Washington Post.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• templeton
• templeton foundation
• christopher hitchens
• big questions
• God
• science
• jon meacham
• sally quinn
• washington post

[ilikezappa]

The monsignor is refreshingly incisive. I liked him to bits , even tho I am an atheist

[jlzkcarlos]

Gotta love the Hitch

[jaggy723]

Love the monsignor..

[niinja2]

"if you dont love one another the world is justified not to believe in any of my claims"

so fuking true

i have always thought that the main reason people are atheists is because there are no Christians acting this way.

[megavolt67]

@megavolt67 If organized religion didn't spring up out of it, and there weren't beliefs that threatened the livelihood of others, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, there always seems to be the need of believers to spread that belief and use it to gain dominion over people. The fact that belief has no need of logic or reason beyond some sense of personal wish-fulfillment just makes it all the scarier. We must be ever vigilant when it comes to theocratic encroachment (as Hitch puts it).

[megavolt67]

Sounds like what monsignor is saying is that unless science can provide an explanation for everything, he has no reason to abandon his own faith-based ideas. But science will never be able to explain EVERY mystery. It will only ever disprove SOME faith-based notions. The burden of proof should be on the more fantastical claim, but when one shifts that burden and reduces its relevance via the concept of faith, there's just not much to say except that faith should be a purely personal thing.

[kram83au]

monsignor, was saying anything to avoid hitchens big punchs,which hitchens couldnt get off, cause the old guy just totaly sucked up to science. is this one of religions champion debaters. hitchens would have been better picking a fight with a drunk jehovahs wittness.

[hopkins4545]

I am Catholic and recognize evolution as fact and theory. Not all Christians are without scholarship or erudition. The South hath bred some bad apples.

[fifty50matt]

i agree

[mhopwood1]

Check out GMDInformation, another YouTuber who offers a non-fundamentalist view of Christianity and reason. There are these little rays of hope and sanity out there.

[mhopwood1]

Even Christ was in some sense an "atheist" - there is that classic quotation from Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" where he comments that on the Cross, "God was forsaken of God".

Plus, Jews and Christians were originally accused of "atheism" because we had no images of our God in the temples. It was seen as madness and worse than madness by the pagan majority.

So I think actually the rational Christians and the fervent atheists are more or less on the same side really.

[mhopwood1]

I can assure you there's no-one less "set in his ways" than Albacete... I converted to Catholicisim in my early twenties when I was much younger and studying my Masters in Physics!

Like everyone, including me many times, in your post you confuse the religious sense or "instinct" with faith in a historical person which one has actually met directly; this is the crucial difference Albecete highlights in another of these videos.