Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray | Peter Robinson | Hoover Institution

And then in part two, you'll explain to me what it means. Tom Holland, from Dominion, I was once more than ready to accept Edward Gibbon's interpretation of the triumph of Christianity, Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's interpretation that Christianity had ushered in an age, quoting Gibbon, an age of superstition and incredulity. But the more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien I found it, explain that.

>> Tom Holland: Well, when I was a child, I was raised Christian. I loved the Bible stories, but the truth was that I actually preferred the figures of the great empires. So I was on the side of Pharaoh, rather than the children of Israel. I was on the side of Nebuchadnezzar, rather than the Judeans. I was on the side of Pontius Pilate, I'm ashamed to say, rather than Jesus. So I identified very strongly with particularly the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.

And so, when I grew up and left behind childish things, I nevertheless maintained my fascination with Greece, and particularly with Rome. And those were the subjects of the first books that I wrote. But as I said in the passage that you just read, any sense I had that I was the heir of Greece or of Rome came under enormous strain. Because while, say, the Romans were a very moral people, it became increasingly clear to me that that morality was something very, very unsettling.

And the more I reflected on this, the more I kind of started thinking, well, what changed? Where do my instincts, where do my assumptions come from? And rather like someone, you've got an itch on your back and you're kind of trying to scratch it. And then finally I found it. I realized that, essentially, I, my friends, the country, the civilization I live in is actually not really the heir of Greece or Rome at all.

It's been profoundly and utterly shaped by Christianity, to the degree that I would say, I say in the book, that we, all of us in the West, whether we are believers or non-believers. Whether we are Jews, Muslims, Hindus living in the West, we are all of us, in a sense, goldfish swimming in Christian waters. Because Christianity has so radically affected our assumptions, not just about ethics or morality, but about the most basic way we contemplate society.

The idea of the secular, the idea of there being something called religion. All of this is so shaped by Christianity that I think we remain, in very, very fundamental ways, deeply Christian. >> Peter Robinson: Personal believers are not, it's still the water in which we swim. >> Tom Holland: I think there's a case for saying that a logical endpoint of Christianity is a kind of atheism that has been very evangelical over the past few decades in the West.

>> Peter Robinson: We'll come to that, Douglass, The War on the West, in considering the great cathedrals of Europe, you write, you could wonder whether the money used to build these structures was honestly acquired or whether some portion was taken illegitimately. Rather a knavish thought, really, but still, you could do all these things and more.

Or you could stand back and admire the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Capella Sansevero in Naples, the Duomo in Florence, just down the hill from where we're sitting now. Why should we not simply stand back and credit our good fortune to have inherited these things? These are a gift to all humankind, close quote. So the war on the West is in, at least in part, a war on what, do you want to say Christian inheritance, how?

>> Douglas Murray: Well, obviously, the Christian inheritance is a huge part of it. I mean, as Tom Holland already said, what I regard as, Tom's a historian of the ancient world. And if I was to give myself a self-appointed title, I'd say I was a historian of the present. I mean, I'm trying to work out always in my books what's going on in our era.

And one of the things that seems to me undeniable of the last 20 years, for instance, has been actually an attempt to deny what Tom shows, proves in his book. We have wanted to show that we didn't need the Christian inheritance, even to say that it wasn't there, that we could get there through other ways. That the ancients were enough, or that the Enlightenment was enough. There was a sort of willed effort to not need Christianity. And I think there's an interesting question there of why.

And there is an answer to that, which is something that's been posed. It's known as Bockenforde's dilemma, which is, can a culture continue to exist if it has cut itself off from the thing which gave it birth? Now, the answer to that question may well be no, could be yes. And the analogy I tend to use is maybe it's like sawing off the roots of a tree that you're sitting in. However, it means that there is a desire on the part of some people to say, actually, that's not the tree that we're on.

I think Tom's work proves, of course it is, of course, we are. We dream Christian dreams. We swim in Christian waters. We're Christian, whether we like it or not. But, nevertheless, this poses a big challenge, because we now are the moderns, we have this dilemma of our own, does that mean in that case we have to go back to faith? For many people that's simply not possible, myself included, what happened in the 19th century happened.

What happened in the 20th century happened, we are not where we were 300 years ago in terms of learning, philosophy, or anything else. And what's more, there is this fear, and I'm sure it'll come up at some point, there is a fear that whenever you credit this gap that exists today, people will say, well, in that case, believe.

And yet, and that's what, by the way, one of the assumptions that many people take away from Matthew Arnold's poem which you started with, is the assumption, because, of course, Arnold talks about the long, withdrawing roar. But many people have said since Arnold wrote that, but of course, the sea goes out and it can come back in again. Now, of course, Christian believers hope that's going to happen. And my stance is, we don't know. We don't know what it is we're going towards.

Maybe we are in the position that people in the ancient world were when, in the end, people lost faith in the old gods. The temples were no longer visited. Something else took over. If you visit many churches in Europe, you can't help thinking that something like that must be underway at the moment. What do you do with these buildings in the center of all of our villages when nobody goes into them, other than as items of archaeological interest?

>> Peter Robinson: So give me the name of the dilemma again. >> Douglas Murray: Bockenforde's dilemma, he's a distinguished German jurist of the late 20th century. >> Peter Robinson: Which is, I'm having trouble catching the name because there's [SOUND] in the middle. All right, so what do you make of that dilemma? This notion that, Douglas, the emptiness of the churches, we're shooting today, I should say in Fiesole, Italy.

I mispronounced that name every single time I said it when we recorded here three years ago. And it turns out we have Italian speaking listeners. I've been corrected. >> Stephen Meyer: [LAUGH] You got corrected. >> Peter Robinson: Fiesole, here's what I discovered walking around Florence, the place down the hill. The place is small, but the churches are beautiful and they're cool and they're empty. Lovely place to go for a walk. What do you make of that?

>> Tom Holland: Well, I see the repudiation or the decline of institutional Christianity. The paradox is, my paradox, for what it's worth. >> Peter Robinson: The Harlem paradox. >> Tom Holland: That in itself is an expression of the distinctive character of, let's call it Western Christianity, Latin Christianity. At the molten core of Christianity is the idea that you can be born again, that you can be washed in the baptismal waters and emerge a new being.

And what happens very distinctively in the Latin West in the 11th century through the 12th century is that this paradigm is applied to the whole fabric of society. It becomes the ambition of radicals who seize control of the Bishopric of Rome, the greatest see in the Latin world, that they will cleanse the whole of Christendom. That they will purge the radiant white robes of the church from the grubby poring hands of kings and emperors who also claim a stake in the dimension of the supernatural.

And over the course of the Middle Ages, we see twin dimensions emerge. One of these dimensions is what, since the time of Augustine, has been described as the saeculum, which literally means the flux of time. People born on the flux of time heading towards oblivion. That is the fate of fallen mankind. How can mankind be redeemed from that? Well, it can be redeemed by the religio, the bond that can bejoin us to the eternity of heaven. And that is what the church provides.

So for the reformers, there are these twin dimensions of the saeculum and religio. And over the course of the Middle Ages, and then into the Reformation and into the modern period, this emerges to become idea of the secular, and then of there being something called religion. But what happens in the Middle Ages is that the kind of the lava of that initial rebellion, that initial process of reformatio, of reformation, calcifies, and the rebels of one age become the elites of another.

And this generates the revulsion, Luther's revulsion, Calvin's revulsion, that generates the Reformation. And in the Reformation, you see what early Christians had done towards the Roman world, the tearing down of idolatry, the banishing of superstition. Only now it is the Roman Church that is seen as something to be torn down. That is a kind of abiding Christian impulse, moving into the Enlightenment, into the French revolution, the Russian revolution, you see exactly these same instincts.

Only now it's not just the Roman Church that is the target of this repudiation, it's the whole fabric of Christianity. But the instinct, the paradox, say, of the French Revolution, is that when the revolutionaries are tearing down the privileges and the fabric of the churches. >> Peter Robinson: Renaming Notre Dame, what was it, a temple of justice? >> Tom Holland: Temple of Reason. >> Peter Robinson: Temple of Reason, right.

>> Tom Holland: Yeah, they're doing it for deeply, deeply Christian reasons. And that's why I said at the beginning of this that there is, I think, a kind of inherent trend within Christianity that moves towards atheism. Because even before Christianity, the impulse of the Hebrew prophets is to condemn the gods of the Egyptians or the Babylonians as so much stock of stone and tell people that there is no divine manifest in springs or on the top of hills.

The reformers are doing that in the Reformation, materialist scientists now are doing that. The process of banishing the super, of desacralizing the world is an incredibly Christian one. >> Peter Robinson: Surely we have, I think, I say surely as if I'm sure of this, I'm not. Rene Girard would draw the distinction between Christianity proper and hyper Christianity, which seizes upon, and this was Girard's.

The point you just made, as far as I understand, it was extremely close to, if not exactly the same point that Rene Girard was making, which is that hyper Christianity is actually quite dangerous. There's a notion of egalitarianism in Christianity. The communists take that and take that value and blow it up and lose the sense of proportion, lose the larger context of value. >> Stephen Meyer: It's becomes secularized form of religion that has no constraints.

>> Peter Robinson: So Douglas writes in The War on the West, as Christianity has withdrawn, so one new religion in particular has found its way into the cultural mainstream. It is the new religion of antiracism. With other grand narratives collapsed, the religion of antiracism fills people with purpose and a sense of meaning. To eliminate Christian belief, how to put this? We cannot go back to a pre-Christian world. That at a minimum, is Tom's point, is that at a very minimum.

>> Tom Holland: We ca,n though, and we've tried it, certainly, in Europe with fascism. Fascism was on one level, deeply, it was fascinated by the future. It was fascinated by tanks and airplanes and shiny new equipment. But it was also deeply back looking. There was a conscious effort to go back to the pre-Christian world. So Mussolini is identifying with Augustus. And Hitler, actually, unlike Himmler, Hitler was very much identified with both the classical Greeks and the Romans.

He saw them as Aryans. >> Peter Robinson: And Freud, Freud written in that statement that the Nazis were some kind of harkening back to the Volk, the pagan past, yes?

>> Douglas Murray: And by the way, I'd just add one other thing to that, which is a point that David Berlinsky's made in a book that actually, if you look back at the 20th century, what is the one thing that the murderers, gangs of Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin, and every other despot of the 20th century, what's the one thing they all had in common? None of them thought that God was watching. >> Tom Holland: But, Douglas, I would distinguish the Nazis from those inspired by communist ideology.

Communist ideology bears the DNA of Christianity. >> Peter Robinson: That was kind of the millennarian idea. >> Tom Holland: Because it's all about the last will be first, the first will be last, Dives and Lazarus, it's all that. >> Stephen Meyer: It's a secularized form of Christianity that denies that God is watching, and therefore, all things are unlawful. >> Tom Holland: With a deep strain of the apocalyptic. This idea that the world can be born again, that new Jerusalem can be born.

The thing about the Nazis is that, unlike the French or the Russian revolutionaries, or the Chinese, well, the French and the Russian revolutionaries who were bred of the matrix of a Christian society. Unlike them, the Nazis consciously repudiate not just institutional Christianity, but the fundamental values of Christianity. And Paul says there is no Jew or Greek. The idea of a kind of universal human dignity is fundamental to Christian ideology. They reject that.

>> Peter Robinson: As to Marx, but not to the Nazis. >> Tom Holland: And also, the other core one, of course, that they reject is, I said that the image of the cross symbolizes the idea that the tortured triumphs over the torturer. That is not what the Nazis believe. The Nazis believe that the strong should crush down the weak. And they do it, for the Nazis do it not because they want to be wicked or evil. They do it because they think that is what is morally justified.

>> Douglas Murray: If I make a couple of points quickly, one thing is noticeable that we've devolved onto discussion of the Nazis, but there's a reason, which is that we also live still in the shadow of that. >> Peter Robinson: We certainly do. >> Douglas Murray: And Europe, where we're currently sitting, lives under a previous shadow as well. When Pope Benedict visited England, my friend Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave an address to Pope Benedict in which he said something very important.

He said, the peoples of Europe didn't lose faith in God just simply because they lost faith in God. They lost faith in the idea of the peoples of God being able to get on with each other. Europe, as people know, in the 16th century was a hellish demonstration of the fact that religion brought war, brought turmoil to societies, in the 20th century. We have to work out how we have God after this, and we're still working that out. We're nowhere near a conclusion, if we could ever get to one.

But it's interesting that everything must always be polluted by it, because it's another one of the reasons why the peoples of Europe and the peoples of the Christian world moved away from God. >> Stephen Meyer: That's such an interesting observation, Douglas, because, in essence, he's saying that we've lost faith in God because we've become disillusioned with ourselves.

And I think there was an interesting piece in the New York Times a couple summers ago by Ross Douthat, the very thoughtful columnist there, who is also, I think, a Catholic believer. And he was raising the question, and it's the same question I'd like to raise, which is, given all that's happened in the past and given the human failures and the wars of the last century, is it yet still possible to rethink the God question?

Because we didn't reject God because of a lack of evidence for the reality of God in creation or in our world. There's an intellectual antecedent. There's the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th century. There's the 19th century scientific materialism. But then there's also this background of the human nature problem expressed in the religious wars. But if we look at the evidence itself- >> Peter Robinson: Historical or scientific? >> Stephen Meyer: I mean scientific evidence.

>> Peter Robinson: Sure. >> Stephen Meyer: And I also think there's been a great shift in philosophy away from these very facile disproofs of the possibility of the miraculous by people like David Hume in the Enlightenment. I think those are, most philosophers regard those as very weak arguments indeed. But I think the scientific evidence to me, I had a long myself tortuous religious conversion. It took about seven years. It was anything but a Damascus Road experience.

I overthought everything, but finally settled. And it was soon after that that I began to encounter these scientists at major meetings who were themselves having intellectual conversions to some form of theism and later even to Christianity. Allen Sandage, a notable figure, a great long time Jewish agnostic cosmologist, whom I heard speak early in my scientific career.

And he shocked the audience by explaining how he had come to a belief in God, not in spite of the scientific work that he did, but in large part because of it. He was one of the scientists who was documenting the expansion of the universe. And Douthat, in this piece in the New York Times two summers ago, said, look, in light of some of these developments, the one he cited was the fine tuning argument that the physicists are talking about.

That the universe not only had a beginning, but it's been finely tuned against all odds and for no underlying physical reason to allow for the possibility of life. And some of these developments, intellectually, I think, ought to cause us perhaps to rethink that default materialism or atheism that we all inherited out of the 19th century. >> Peter Robinson: Now we have two modes of thought taking place here, as far as I can tell. You're talking about the evidence, the scientific evidence.

I don't know how you respond to that, but I'm a layman. That striking is very compelling. That has to be taken into account, that new evidence can no more be unknown or undiscovered than can, mode of thought number two, just a moment. Remember the trenches in the First World War? Those were Christian nations. That was pre-Nazi. Those were all Christian nations engaging in slaughter of each other on an astonishing, massive scale.

>> Stephen Meyer: It's a huge question, where were the statesmen to stop that? >> Peter Robinson: Where was God? Where was God? These are things that also the history cannot be unexperienced or unlearned. >> Douglas Murray: It wasn't just the Second World War, Christian faith for many people died in the psalm. But I think that something has to be observed here of what Stephen says, which is that if you're a person of faith, let alone a person of the Christian faith.

Whenever a new discovery comes up, you will want it to bolster the argument you have. Now, the problem, I can say, is that many atheists will take the same line, albeit the opposite way, which was that they will hope that it will bolster their case. >> Peter Robinson: Of course. >> Douglas Murray: My own view, of course, remains we just don't know. And it seems to me that Christians will want the answers to be Christianity. Atheists will want it to be atheism.

But the mode that our own age should try to be in should be to simply be open to these questions. >> Peter Robinson: [CROSSTALK] Hold on, hold on. I'm going to reassert control and give the first question. >> Stephen Meyer: But it's just getting interesting right now. >> Peter Robinson: No, no, no, it'll get more interesting. So to take this, here's what I'd like to know. What I'd like to pursue next is, what do we need, A, and B, what is intellectually tenable at this stage?

The scientific discoveries cannot be unknown, and the horrifying experiences of the 20th century cannot be unlived and should not be forgotten. Okay, two quotations. George Washington, and this is coming to you, George Washington farewell address, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. National morality, he's talking about an old fashioned idea, virtue.

Tom Holland in Dominion, in the ancient world, quote, even skeptics who scorned the possibility that a fellow mortal might truly become a god were happy to concede its civic value, close quote. Whether you believe in Christianity or not, all three of you grant that those are the moral waters we swim in, do we need to behave as if it were true? How do you sustain the kind of civic virtue that everybody senses a decent society needs?

>> Tom Holland: Well, so this is the question that Nietzsche, whose writings were given by the German government to soldiers marching to the Western Front, that he has posed most kind of challengingly, I think. And essentially, he is saying, can you have Christian values, Christian ethics, Christian morality, without Christian belief?

And his take, which has been very, very influential on me, is that communists, socialists, liberals, Nietzsche was particularly contemptuous of the English-speaking brand of liberalism, are essentially Christians. They think that they have cast off Christianity but they haven't really. And Nietzsche's great parable is that God is dead, that his corpse lies in a great cave.

But that the corpse is so enormous that it continues to cast shadows and these flicker and change and we continue to see them. But that in the long run, this will generate convulsive process of change. And to be honest, that prophecy came true in the Third Reich. It came through much faster than he thought, and I think the shock of that was so great for us that, in a way, Nazism served to create a new mythology.

So if you like, the shadow that is flickering on our current cave, the shadow of God that's flickering on the cave, is a Nazi one. And rather than the devil, now we have Hitler, rather than hell, we have Auschwitz. And that is why we are so haunted by the Nazis, that's why Douglas said, I can't believe we've got haunted Nazis already.

But I mean, we're bound to because I think before the Third Reich, people, even if they weren't Christian, they would accept Christ as the kind of the moral exemplar, and they would say, what would Jesus do? I think, by and large, people now say, what would Hitler do, and do the opposite. And the joke, you go on social media, within three seconds, people will accuse you of being a Nazi.

This is the kind of the great joke, but it's similar to the readiness that people in earlier ages might have said to accuse people of being in hawk with the devil or whatever. But we fear and dread and loathe the Nazis for deeply, deeply Christian reasons, because the question that none of us ever really pause to think is, well, what was so wrong with what the Nazis said? What's so wrong with being racist, what's so wrong with trampling down the weak?

>> Peter Robinson: By the way, our friend David Berlinsky says the Holocaust was like the crucifixion, it was an event that changed everything. >> Douglas Murray: Yes. >> Peter Robinson: Which is fair. >> Douglas Murray: Of course, I mean, it's Celan's most famous poem, is that terrible line of it, Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland. Death is a master from Germany. >> Peter Robinson: All right, so back to you, while I've got these two Englishmen, while we're on this side.

So Charles, now King Charles, gives his speech- >> Stephen Meyer: Douglas is now an American. >> Douglas Murray: I am not an American, I reside. >> Stephen Meyer: You reside in America. >> Peter Robinson: You reside in America. >> Douglas Murray: I pass. >> Tom Holland: Englishman, in New York. >> Stephen Meyer: [LAUGH] >> Peter Robinson: You don't pass for one second. You don't pass for one second.

Charles, King Charles, it is the year 2022, and the evening his mother dies, the evening of the day on which he has become king. He gives an address to the nation in which he speaks about the special relationship of the Crown to the Church of England in which his own faith resides.

>> King Charles III: The role and the duties of monarchy also remain, as does the sovereign's particular relationship and responsibility towards the Church of England, the church in which my own faith is so deeply rooted. >> Peter Robinson: This is what, a hopeless anachronism, useful to the nation to continue some sense of continuity with the Christian. With the English Christian inheritance, what do you do with this?

>> Douglas Murray: If I could try to tie that up with what you said earlier about Thomas Jefferson took the view that the civic virtues of Christianity were such that you could pretend to do it effectively even if you didn't do the believing. And there's an interesting, I mean, there are people who believe in belief. I might be one of them, is it something that people can do? It's a good thing. >> Peter Robinson: Not a crazy position.

>> Douglas Murray: All the data shows that you're going to be happier if you're a believer and much more. In Britain, the established church has a very distinctive function, which is to effectively own reigning, how would you put it? Yes, temper the enthusiasm of religion, contain it within the state.

It was a very important statement that he made, King Charles had, in the 1990s, toyed with this idea that he would, rather than take the title Defender of the Faith, would somehow be Defender of Faith. And this is interesting, because, of course, our own age has got a lot of sort of syncretic religion running through it, hybrids of bits of Christianity, a bit of Buddhism, usually a quite a large bit of Buddhism.

And there was a sort of idea maybe he's going to do that, in which case several things, including the established church, would have actually been in serious trouble. He resisted that, he did a thing, I think, which is correct, is to say, no, this is one of the titles I've inherited, and I'm the Defender of the Faith, and that's just what we've inherited in England, in Britain. >> Tom Holland: I mean, just specifically on the mystery of royalty and Christianity.

I think that one of the problems for institutional Christianity, for the churches, is that, in a way, they've been too successful, that their teachings have, in a sense, been nationalized. So particularly in European countries, perhaps more than the United States, but still in the United States, education, health, all these kind of things that previously were the responsibility of churches, they've been secularized. And in a sense, the church itself has been secularized.

It's the instinct, I think, certainly, in a national church like the Church of England, of many of the priests is to identify with the kind of the preponderant ideology of the age, which is a secular one. My own personal feeling is that that's a terrible mistake, and that Christianity is nothing if it's not spectacularly odd, if the strangeness, the weirdness, the mystery is not given space to breathe. >> Stephen Meyer: And that comes across so beautifully in your writing, Tom.

>> Tom Holland: But so, it struck me- >> Stephen Meyer: The preface of your book really is jarring, because you swim in Christian waters and you forget just how. >> Tom Holland: How odd it is. >> Stephen Meyer: How odd it is. >> Tom Holland: But it struck me very powerfully with the funeral of the Queen. That people were being touched by the strangeness of it, by the sense that the Queen was anointed.

This is a ritual that goes back 1000 years in England, but ultimately goes back to ancient Israel, to David and to Solomon. And people felt themselves touched and moved by something strange that they didn't understand. And it was a rare moment where a sense of the weird was allowed to enter into the very heart of the state, and people were stirred by it.

And I think that it would be a terrible mistake for the new king if he, presuming he wants the monarchy to survive, and indeed the Church of England to survive, if he was the stint on the element of the strangeness within the coronation, I think he should absolutely [CROSSTALK]. >> Douglas Murray: I've got a very quick observation as well, if I may. I completely agree with what Tom just said. There's a specific difficulty for Christians, which in certain other religions doesn't exist.

And let me give an example, it's Judaism. Some years ago I said to a rabbi friend, an Orthodox rabbi friend, a rather rude question. I said, would you agree that many people who come to your synagogue do not believe in God? And he said, most, I'd have thought. And I said, well, what lesson do you draw from that? And he said, this year in the UK, 98% of British Jews will be celebrating the holy days.

Now, I say that because in Christian terms, there are reasons why Jews can be practicing without being believing. And there was a debate about believing and belonging. Well, yes, but what does it mean to be a Christian who wants Christian tradition to continue, but cannot go to the church, or thinks other people can go for them?

>> Stephen Meyer: All right, well, this is what I appreciate about these two gentlemen so much, is that they both have this deep appreciation of the importance of Christianity and genuine belief in God. And at least in Doug's case, Douglas's case, sorry, can't quite get themselves over the line to belief. I don't quite know where Tom stands on that, but I'm used to engaging these very angry atheists who hate Christianity and hate belief in God.

But in a piece I did for the Jerusalem Post last summer, [COUGH] eulogizing the great physicist Stephen Weinberg. I talked about this, that there was the old new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Weinberg was one of them, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. But there's a kind of new new atheist, people who authentically lament the loss of Christian belief, or of a theistic foundation, a Judeo-Christian foundation for our culture, but authentically also can't themselves come to belief.

And I have hoped that my own work might open up that discussion in a new way. Because we've inherited all this baggage from the Enlightenment, the rise of scientific materialism, figures like Darwin, Marx, and Freud from the late 19th century, who so shaped the worldview of the 20th century. And yet I think there is a very legitimate and genuine intellectual opportunity to reassess these deep questions apart from the baggage of the religious wars.

And within Christianity, I think there is a framework for explaining even how Christians can end up resorting to violence against each other, because there is this deep teaching about the fallenness of man that affects us all. The human nature problem is not eliminated simply because you believe in Christianity.

But on the other hand, I think the materialists lack the intellectual framework to account for the extraordinary evidence that we have of design in the universe and for the creation of the universe. And these fundamental questions that we have assumed science has already adjudicated are, I think, being reopened by discoveries that have, frankly, shocked us. And even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged this.

Last summer, he talked about, he was knocked sideways with wonder at the discovery of the digital processing of information inside cells. It was not anything he expected from his blind, pitiless processes. >> Peter Robinson: Stephen, let me hit you. >> Stephen Meyer: Yeah. >> Peter Robinson: I do mean to hurl it at you. >> Stephen Meyer: Excellent. >> Peter Robinson: With a passage from St Paul, this is 1st Corinthians 15.

Speaking of odd, I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. That he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve. After that, he was seen of five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, close quote. So St Paul is right there ruling out the easy ethical option.

Christ is the great teacher, we can take certain messages, follow his example. What would Jesus, no, that's not all. He is insisting that Christians believe in the resurrection. >> Stephen Meyer: He's appealing to the testimony of eyewitnesses. >> Peter Robinson: And he is appealing to the testament, he is saying, in effect, if you don't believe me, there's still several hundred people still alive.

He's appealing to the testimony that had the greatest weight in Roman law and still has the greatest weight in our law, which is eyewitness testimony. >> Stephen Meyer: He's appealing to what we would call today an empirical basis for faith. And we have ruled that possibility out largely because of developments in Enlightenment philosophy, the secular enlightenment philosophy, people like Hume, who said that miracles were impossible.

And because of developments in the 19th century in science which suggested that God did not exist, the rise of materialism. The miraculous accounts in the Bible are a great offense to the intellect of people who have been trained in schools like we've all been to, because we've inherited a worldview that says miracles are impossible.

And that worldview is materialism, that probability of a miracle, given scientific materialism or scientific naturalism or scientific atheism is your worldview, is zero, because a miracle is an act of God. If God does not exist, there is no possibility of a miracle. And then when you read those, the documents of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament.

You necessarily have to simply deduce that the events that are recorded could not possibly have happened, because miracles are impossible, there is no God to exist. But if there is now a case, and I don't think there's ever not been a case for the reality of God, but I think the case has gotten so strong, and scientific atheism has become itself so weird in opposing it. We now have the multiverse hypothesis as an alternative to the evidence of design we have in the fine tuning.

My main work has been about the evidence of design at the foundation of life in biology, the digital code that's in the DNA. And to explain that, the chemical evolutionary theorists and secular evolutionary biologists have not come up with an evolutionary account of the origin of information. Some of them are now talking about the information coming from a space alien, the so-called panspermia hypothesis.

And so you're getting this very strange way in which it's now scientific atheism that is engaging in the formulation of epicycles of strange hypotheses. >> Peter Robinson: So your point is? >> Stephen Meyer: My point is the belief in theism is, again, credible. >> Peter Robinson: Let me frame it up.

Your point is that Big Bang, the discovery of fine tuning, the discovery of unbelievably complex code, even in the simplest forms of life, that makes a belief in resurrection, Orthodox Christianity, intellectually respectable. >> Stephen Meyer: It makes a belief in theism very credible. And that changes the prior probability, as the philosophers would say, of a miracle. And that means you have to reassess those Biblical texts on straight up historical grounds.

Without having a presupposition that precludes the possibility that there is historical support for the events recorded therein. >> Peter Robinson: Do you buy any of this? >> Tom Holland: Well, what I would say, to slightly spin what Stephen is saying in a different way- >> Peter Robinson: All right. >> Tom Holland: Is that it's not as though secular liberals, whether they're atheist, agnostic, or whatever, aren't equally capable of believing weird, mad things.

[CROSSTALK] And talking about alien seedings, I mean, that's quite odd. But I would say that also very odd is, say, a belief that human beings have rights, the idea that human rights exist. Most people in the West believe in human rights, but human rights don't exist objectively. I mean, they're as fantastical as believing in angels. And their origins are very specifically rooted in Christian theology.

It's formulated by the lawyers who, in the wake of the great revolution of the 11th and 12th century, are trying to construct a fabric of framework of law for the Christian people. And they look to the scriptures and they see that Christ teaches that those who are rich should give shelter and food and water and clothing to the poor. And they deduce from that the instinct that the poor therefore have rights to these things.

And this sets in train this incredibly fertile notion that human beings have rights. Now, people today are very reluctant to face up to the idea that this is a very culturally contingent idea rooted in Christian theology, medieval Catholic theology. And so they say, well, you'll find human rights, that's in China, or Greece, or Rome, or whatever, but it isn't.

And I think that what I have found meditating and reflecting on the incredible inheritance of Christian theology and practice and liturgy and all kinds of things. Is that I want to believe in the things that I believe in as a secular humanist, I want to believe in human rights. And if I can believe in that, there are times where I think, well, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. If I can believe in human rights, then why can't I believe in angels?

>> Douglas Murray: Can Stephen and I push you, then, on your belief? >> Tom Holland: Well, so, as a historian in the West, you are the heir to two different traditions. You are the heir to the Greek tradition of history, in which, to be honest, the gods don't play much role. Certainly, they're present in Herodotus, they're virtually invisible in Thucydides. But you also have the tradition of history that you get in the Bible, where events are shaped by the hand of God.

And those are traditions that feed through into the Western inheritance of history. I would absolutely identify myself as a historian with the Greek tradition. I don't think that it's my role to identify the hand of God. I try to explain Christian history in human terms. But having said that, I have found the experience of immersing myself in the history of Christianity and the examples of Christian history often to be unsettling, it often is.

But I think, even when I'm unsettled by Christian history, I realize that it's for Christian reasons. If I'm unsettled by the Inquisition, it's because it's powerful people killing an innocent person. And why am I revolted by that? >> Stephen Meyer: The cruelty of the ancient world, the Greco-Romans would not have worried about those same types of events in the way we do. >> Tom Holland: Well, as Dostoevsky, great, great story about the inquisitor.

If you as an atheist are enshrined the Inquisition as a model of something horrific, it's for Christian reasons. It's because you are shaped by a culture that has had an innocent person put to death by a state apparatus at the heart- >> Peter Robinson: Okay, can I- >> Tom Holland: So- >> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes, yes. >> Tom Holland: And so therefore, I feel that the kind of the bundle of my instincts, my beliefs, my presumptions are generated by this incredibly mysterious Christian inheritance.

And I'm very open to accepting that there is a strangeness there that I don't want to deny. >> Peter Robinson: All right, you know what? Thank you. >> Stephen Meyer: May I talk about two types of strangeness at some point? But Douglas- [CROSSTALK] >> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes, you get dibs on two points of strangeness. >> Douglas Murray: By the way, when you quoted St Paul and you were talking about that, am I right? Tom, who's the ancient who sees St Paul and recorded it?

Somebody, there's a physical description of St Paul. >> Tom Holland: I don't think so, there are medieval letters in which Seneca and St Paul are supposed to have communicated. But I don't think- >> Douglas Murray: It's interesting- >> Peter Robinson: Douglas- >> Douglas Murray: Anyhow. >> Peter Robinson: So you would not, A, it is possible, but you do not yourself. It is possible for a witted intellectual of the year 2022 to believe in a resurrection.

B, it's not possible, C, it's none of my business. And I shouldn't even be asking that question because somehow or other that violates- >> Douglas Murray: I think, all things are possible, I mean- >> Peter Robinson: But you see what I'm saying? This is a very raw claim. >> Douglas Murray: Being a philosopher and practicing, believing Christian has been a tension for many years now.

I mean, it's not as though they don't overlap or can't overlap, but it definitely suffers a tension that it wouldn't have done, say, 400 years ago. My main problem is that nobody wants to admit what they don't know. And there's a tendency towards dogmatism on all sides in our age. And one of those, the consequences of that is, for instance, I mean, Christianity is, if you use it as a basis and an explanation for life.

You also have to explain why the religion's central tenet is the complete inverting of the thing we know most of all, which is death. This is in itself a massive claim, but it's fueled 2,000 years of faith, now that claiming that the whole cosmos can rip, as it were, is what has fueled the Christian faith. That it is an unbelievable thing that has happened, which millions and millions of people still on Earth, of course, believe.

But if I can say, this is why I favor the argument that Habermas made some years ago, what he described as the awareness of what's missing. Because it's the other flip side of that, the unwillingness of the modern West to admit that there is this god-shaped hole in the culture. We have songs where people talk about angels, people talk about being reunited after death and would say, in what metaphysical system are you doing this? What's the game you're playing here?

I would just like people to at least concede that they need, to use Rilke. They need to live in the questions in the hope that at some point they live their way into the answer. >> Peter Robinson: You still have dibs, I'm coming next to you, Stephen. >> Stephen Meyer: No worries. >> Peter Robinson: Here's Roger Scruton, Douglas. And the question, of course, is going to be, do you subscribe to this?

Anybody who goes through life with an open mind and heart will encounter moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur, it is as though, on the winding, ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window through which we catch sight of another and brighter world. A world to which we belong but which we cannot enter. There are many who would dismiss this world as an unscientific fiction.

I am not alone in thinking that it is real and important. You could sign your name to that, couldn't you? >> Douglas Murray: I actually have the volume of essays that appears in as a preface, introduction by me. >> Peter Robinson: And you know perfectly well that's exactly what it is. >> Douglas Murray: I think it's a beautiful expression of something that Roger intuited, and so do I. >> Peter Robinson: And that's deeply Christian, isn't it?

>> Tom Holland: Well, I think it's somebody feeling that there is a nymph in a stream in Greece in the fifth century would probably say something. >> Peter Robinson: I said, Holland corralled at last, and now he's off on nymphs, go ahead.

>> Douglas Murray: Here's what I'd say about it, is that there, Roger is referring to a very important instinct, which is the thing that should always jolt a true atheist, which is that everybody in their lives will experience moments of awesome feeling of some kind, transcendence. It might happen with a person, it might feel in eros, it might be in human love, it might be in a place, in a building, it might just be waking up in the morning.

Everybody at some point in their life has to contend with this question of, what is this thing that I feel to be true and cannot reach? Christians would obviously say, it's the Christian God, I think the rest of us have to say, we'll live in the question. >> Peter Robinson: Stephen, speaking of questions.

>> Stephen Meyer: Well, a couple things, the arguments that first persuaded me of theism were actually philosophical arguments, and there has been in the last 30 or 40 years a tremendous renaissance in philosophy towards belief. You have major figures like Richard Swinburne at Oxford or Alvin Plantiga in Notre Dame and this whole Midwest school. So there are plenty of philosophers who now are very convinced theists, whether they be Christians or Jews or something else.

And I think the one of the huge questions that we've inherited from the Enlightenment is the question of knowledge, how is that we know the world around us at all? And it turns out that secular materialist thought has been unable to provide a justification for belief in the reliability of the human mind. And that has led to this radical relativism that has expressed itself both philosophically and in the culture, and one of the best reasons to believe in the reliability of the mind.

Which was one of the reasons that led to the scientific revolution was that our minds are made in the image of God, who is a rational creator, who has endowed the physical world with a kind of order and rationality that we can perceive. Because there's a principle of correspondence between the way he made our minds and our ability to perceive the reason and the order and the design that he put into nature.

This was the key idea of intelligibility that inspired much of the scientific revolution, and so the problem of knowledge, I think, is solved elegantly by the presupposition of theism. So there's an argument, the argument that persuaded me was sometimes called the argument from epistemological necessity. St Augustine put it this way, we believe in order to know, if you believe first in the existence of a creator, who made our minds as a reliable instrument to know the world that he made.

We also then can have confidence in our ability to know things and this was the basis of the scientific revolution. So I think philosophically, just as there is scientifically, I think moving back towards a theistic position, I think that same thing is happening in science. >> Peter Robinson: In philosophy?

>> Stephen Meyer: In philosophy, yes, now, I take very seriously what Douglas said earlier about the problem of confirmation bias, that we all want to believe the thing that confirms the beliefs that we already have. There is a way, I think one of the benefits of philosophical training is that it allows the assessment of arguments, irrespective of the motives of the arguer. And I accept that there is a motive on behalf of believers, of Christian and other theistic believers.

To believe in God because it helps answer some of those existential questions, and it gives us a hope for the afterlife, we all want that. On the other hand, there's also a motive that's been often pointed out for people who don't believe, because not believing in God also releases us from a sense of moral accountability to higher authority. And we'd all like to be autonomous at some points in our lives, at least, now, I think ultimately those two things are awash and should be treated as awash.

We should set those motives aside and try to assess the case for or against a transcendent deity based on the evidence and based on some very fundamental philosophical arguments. That's what I attempt to do in the book Return of the God Hypothesis, I think there are a lot of people who are in the field of philosophy, philosophy of science, epistemology, who are really wrestling with these deep questions at that level.

And trying to extricate them from both the cultural baggage and the intellectual baggage of the last few centuries and to reassess the God question afresh in light of evidence and apart from some of these things that are not, strictly speaking, evidential matters or matters of reason, but rather of cultural baggage.

>> Douglas Murray: If I was a militant atheist, I would want to push back against Stephen and his colleagues by saying, even if you find what you think you're looking for, it doesn't necessarily mean the Christian God, and this would seem to me to quite. But if I was in Stephen's position and leaning on the secular atheists, I think the thing I would be asking them is, there is a modern understanding of yourself that doesn't ring true with your feeling of yourself.

So for instance, we don't like our sense of ourselves, and now Tom might argue this is because we've just inherited this from Christianity. >> Tom Holland: But if l were Douglas, l would. >> Douglas Murray: You would. >> Peter Robinson: [LAUGH] >> Stephen Meyer: He's made that rather clear. >> Douglas Murray: But I would suggest that many of the modern materialist understandings of ourselves, the sense that there's no particular purpose and so on.

Doesn't ring true with the sense people have of themselves, which is that there must be something in ourselves that is extraordinary and it must have meaning and purpose. And either we're meaning seeking beings and there is no meaning or there is meaning, but it doesn't sit well with us. When we're told you're just, for instance, a consumer, you would go, I'm what, we feel ourselves to be something else. And I would lean on, well, what is that?

>> Stephen Meyer: Well, and this is why it's so much more interesting to talk to you than it is to talk to Richard Dawkins. Because the ardent scientific atheists, the new atheism, which was just a repackaging of late 19th century scientific materialism. Has written off all of these things, it's blind and deaf to the things that are truly human about us.

We all sense that there's something more than blind, pitiless indifference at work, and I think wrestling with that is the thing we all should be doing. >> Tom Holland: I think also, a case can be made for the significance of Christianity that enthusiasts for evolution would accept. >> Peter Robinson: That who would accept? >> Tom Holland: Enthusiasts for theories of evolution would accept that materialists who were in favor, who believe in theories of evolution.

>> Stephen Meyer: Tread carefully, he knows this ground, but go ahead. >> Tom Holland: Okay, so what I would say is that, objectively speaking, whether measured in terms of adherence now or the influence that it's had on the course of global history. Christianity is the most successful explanation for what human beings are doing, what life is for, why we were created, why there is suffering, all these things.

Christianity has offered human beings the most successful explanation for that, and at the very least- >> Peter Robinson: I want to hear you say yes and I think it may be true, but you won't do that. >> Tom Holland: Well, I mean, on the materialist level you might say, well, it's an adaptive strategy. And therefore, based on terms of how successful it's been, it's certainly worth considering. >> Stephen Meyer: You could frame it that way Tom, you could frame it that way.

>> Peter Robinson: It's certainly worth considering. >> Stephen Meyer: But there's a philosophical way. >> Peter Robinson: I consider that a triumph to get you there. >> Stephen Meyer: That was well said and you could frame it as a successful adaptive strategy. Or if you look at it philosophically, you could say that the Christian world and life view has a comprehensive explanatory power.

Both about human failing and about the evidence for the reality of God that is unique and I think that's a reason to believe it. >> Peter Robinson: You get a word, and then I want to close us by going back to Matthew Arnold, if I may. Is that fair? >> Douglas Murray: Just a very quick observation which I think we need to acknowledge, which is we are talking, of course, about the West and Western faith.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes. >> Douglas Murray: And Tom certainly, I know, has traveled, has seen the experience of the beleaguered churches in the Middle East as I have. And I have seen in our own day Christian faith of a kind that our predecessors would have recognized and we don't remember is going on. And if you travel to, as I have, north Nigeria and you see people praying the Lord's Prayer.

And saying, deliver us from evil, and they were chased across the fields, and they lost their brother the day before in a machete attack. These people are burning with a faith that our predecessors would have recognized. >> Tom Holland: Well, absolutely, but I would say on top of that, that what's been happening in Africa is a process of conversion akin to the conversion of Western Europe and Northern Europe. >> Stephen Meyer: In the first century.

>> Tom Holland: In the early Middle Ages, we are living in one of the great ages of Christian evangelism and I would say also that we're living through. So there are two great, I think, in future, historians of religion will look back at this age and say there were two great kinda convulsive currents, one of which is radical Islam. Which is in everybody's faces, it's part of the headlines.

The other is Pentecostalism, which is below the surface but is blazing, it's a great spirit rush, I mean that's what it is, it's the blaze of the spirit. And that is transforming, it's not only converting people to Christianity, but it's also, say, transforming the balance between Catholicism and Protestantism in Latin America. So this is an age of very vital Christian faith.

>> Peter Robinson: For purposes of reining in this program to something we can deal with here, back to Western Europe, at least, and the United States. Matthew Arnold, 1867, on Dover Beach, Arnold feels the appeal of Christianity, but isn't a believer. He writes later in life, after writing this poem, he writes, never let us deny the story of Jesus its power and pathos, but it never really happened, close quote. Okay, so here we are, let's just take a moment and go through the poem a bit.

1867 is the poem, he writes of the sea at night, the sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair. He can see the white cliffs of England, he can see the lights glimmering on the French coast, he can hear the roar of the waves. The Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, but now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, faith ebbing away. Now listen to this closing passage, I think it speaks to a great deal that we've discussed here.

Love, let us be true to one another, so there's some hope of dignity and nobility and human love, even in this world from which faith is withdrawn. But then he continues, for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and here we are as on a darkling plain swept and with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

Have you ever heard a better description of social media? Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. Okay, so what do you make of this? Is that a fair description of where we stand now? Where you think we stand now that we're forced to look, no? >> Tom Holland: No, not at all, I mean, we remain the heirs of the Christian way of understanding social fabric, our social responsibilities.

They may be without the frameworks of overt Christian belief, without the familiarity with the scriptures, without church practice that had structured to these patterns of belief in earlier ages. They may be going off in, slaloming off in all kinds of strange directions and ways and mutating, but the West remains a civilization with deeply held moral principles. And so we, I would not categorize us as ignorant armies clashing by night.

>> Peter Robinson: The tide of faith is coming back in, or he was wrong and it never really went out? >> Tom Holland: We still have faith, I think we have faith that human beings have an inherent dignity. We have faith that the rich have responsibility to the poor, we have faith in an ideal of universal brotherhood. They come under strain, but the animating principles that govern liberal society in both Western Europe and North America seem to me profoundly Christians still.

That doesn't necessarily depend on believing that Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead, but they remain deeply held beliefs, I think. >> Peter Robinson: I come to you last. >> Stephen Meyer: I wonder if I, so that Douglas could go last, but I agree with Tom about the inheritance of Christian principles and sensibilities. But I think there's something inherently unstable and even dangerous about merely affirming the ethical endowments of Christianity without underlying belief.

Because what we have, as you mentioned, is a secularized hyper form of Christianity which we now call wokeness. >> Peter Robinson: Mm-hm. >> Stephen Meyer: That I think is eating our culture from the inside out, and it does not have within it the kind of inherent moral constraints that Christianity. >> Peter Robinson: Also no capacity for forgiveness. >> Stephen Meyer: No capacity for forgiveness, a very different doctrine of original sin, it's selective. >> Peter Robinson: And no mercy.

>> Stephen Meyer: It assigns original sin by group, rather than forcing us all to acknowledge that we're fallen and come short. And it has a revolutionary impulse which cannot be fully satisfied, much as in the French Revolution. So I think these hyper Christian, these secularized, hyper Christian forms of expression actually can be a bit dangerous to culture. And that it's much better to ground Christian belief in an affirmation of the real.

That it really happened, in other words, with real belief comes some of the constraints upon the expression of this revolutionary impulse. We are all fallen, there is no utopian future possible, we have to adopt limited forms of government and more modest aims in this world. And I think that that form of religious belief, whether it be Christian or Jewish, is entirely possible intellectually.

It's possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Christian or theist today in a way that maybe it didn't seem possible at the end of the 19th century. >> Peter Robinson: Last word on the tide of faith, Douglas. >> Douglas Murray: A couple of things, the first is this, I agree with almost everything that Tom said, but I would change one word, Tom kept on saying, we have faith in these things.

I would say we have hope in these things, the metaphysical underpinnings of our society, that sort of unites everything I've written in recent years, are much shakier than people realize, we are on exceptionally shaky ground. The whole structure that has fallen out from underneath us has not yet been realized by the people standing on top of it, but I think that what Tom described is we have faith in these things.

I say we have hope in these things, the British novelist Julian Barnes wrote a slightly saccharine, but touching, in a way, phrase some years ago, he said, I don't believe in God, but I miss him. And I think that certainly the West, we miss God, and there is this remaining, not faith, but hope. It might not be that the Christian faith is true, but a hope that there is some meaning, some purpose.

That we're not just here to eke out a living and have some fun, but that there is something beyond ourselves, something we see, we want to reach. And that's the hope in our age. >> Stephen Meyer: Or that the consequences of Christian belief, that Tom- >> Douglas Murray: Or that they are. >> Stephen Meyer: Can persist without the metaphysical foundation. >> Douglas Murray: Exactly.

>> Stephen Meyer: And the question is whether that's a real hope, a false hope, or one that is like- >> Douglas Murray: Exactly, currently we are sitting on the tree, it has been very nearly succesfully- >> Peter Robinson: Douglas Murray. >> Douglas Murray: It has very nearly successfully been sawn off, and we will see if we can remain sitting.

>> Peter Robinson: Douglas Murray, author of War on the West, Tom Holland, author of Dominion, and Steve Meyer, author of the Return of the God Hypothesis, thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, The Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson, shooting today from Fiesole, I think I pronounced it correctly, Fiesole, Italy.