Last night I spoke at the Durham University Debating Society. The motion before the house was \u201cThis house believes Jesus Christ is the way the truth and the life.\u201d Proposing were philosopher Prof. Richard Swinburne, the Bishop of Edinburgh Brian Smith, and a Seventh Day Adventist Minister called Don.<\/p>\n
What I found especially interesting about the debate was the Bishop\u2019s approach. He deliberately eschewed argument and appealed instead to personal experience \u2013 an experience relating to what he called \u201cthe meaning of life\u201d.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen this done before, but the Bishop was particularly good at it. He started with jokes, but then gradually began to speak more softly and with feeling. In our quietest moments, he said, each one of us \u2013 yes, even a cynical atheist \u2013 is aware, deep down, of a light. It\u2019s an awareness of something fundamentally good, of a yearning to be something better than we are. This something is… Jesus. Sombre nodding from the Christian Union contingent. When the Bishop sat down, there was moment of quiet, reflective calm before the applause broke out.<\/p>\n
How do you respond to that? Get all logical and sceptical on him, and you come across as a coarse bully, someone insensitive to one of the deepest insights available to humanity, an insight that, yes, even a cynic like me has, though I might try to deny it.<\/p>\n
Well, here\u2019s what I said. How could I have done better?<\/p>\n
I started by pointing out something surely undeniable \u2013 that religion has a quite extraordinary ability to get even very smart, well-educated people to believe ridiculous things. Sixty years ago, the view that the entire universe is just six thousand years old was the view of a tiny band of religious crackpots. It\u2019s now held by some 100 million Americans. Some of these people, I pointed out, are much smarter than anyone in this room. Many are college educated. Yet religion has the power to convince them not just the universe is six thousand years old, but also that this is good science. Wow!<\/p>\n