D'Souza - Don't Try This At Home

I was recently watching one of the many atheist/theist debates available on YouTube. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has spent many a lazy afternoon this way. One of the more unusual formats I’ve stumbled across was to be found in a debate, of Spanish origin, between three of the four horsemen; Hitchens, Harris and Dennett on the one hand, and D’Souza, Taleb and Boteach on the other. There were many potential topics for discussion hidden away over the two or so hours the debate went on for, but I want to focus on one small segment courtesy of Dinesh D’Souza.

I am yet to find an opponent of ‘new atheism’ as thought-provoking as D’Souza. There are certain questions that he asks which every freethinking atheist must ask themselves. There are moments where he seems to be speaking real sense – he asks the right questions, but draws erroneous conclusions. The majority of what he says is white noise. But, as you may have guessed, there are moments when he really gets it wrong – quite astoundingly wrong. I (or even better; a reader) will discuss D’Souza’s more credible claims at some point in the future. But for now, I couldn’t let what I heard go without addressing it. Here is the video I urge you to watch before reading any further.



“The atheist” exclaims D’Souza “is posing as the champion of reason, science and evidence”. Since this is what Young Freethought is all about, it only seems fair to address his points.

D’Souza’s argument tumbles fantastically with his statement that the atheist and the theist are “both are making a truth claim and [that] both are totally ignorant” – It is only the theist who is making a truth claim. D’Souza seems to concede at this point, for the sake of debate, that there is no evidence for life after death. The reasonable person will not claim that there is life after death, nor will they claim that on the basis of the lack of evidence, there is no life after death. All that can be done is to say ‘since there is no evidence of life after death, I have no reason to believe it’. An analogy that is perhaps clichéd, but nonetheless apt: there is no evidence for the existence of fairies, nor is there any evidence against their existence. Is it more reasonable to believe that fairies exist or that they do not? Of course, it is to say that they do not. Strictly speaking, it must be conceded that it is indeed possible that they do exist, but what reason is there to believe it? Simply none. An incredibly watered-down agnosticism is the position held. The same can be said about pink unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster and the yeti. No reasonable mind would entertain the possibility that these creations do in fact exist – they would only remain open to the possibility of their truth. The concept of life after death is specifically designed to be immune to falsifiability.

Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but a lack of evidence where some might be expected can indeed suggest that a proposition is false. Luckily we have a world which we can observe; providing us with the raw material for decision making. We might expect that a Christian God who created a world where we continue living after our bodily death would have left some hallmarks on his creation; we might expect, that since we are special in our ability to survive death, that humans are granted some special place in the universe, we might even expect to have some encounter with the deceased – we find none of these things.

The reason, however, I take such issue with this speech is the complete pseudo-scientific conclusions D’Souza draws from the frontiers of scientific inquiry. What D’Souza spouts is worse than the God of the Gaps. He relegates himself to a league shared by scientologists who measure your ‘thetan levels’, mystics who take away your ‘negative energy’ with the power of crystals and T.V hosts who communicate with ghosts with the aid of their ‘spirit guides’. I’m pretty certain D’Souza treats these people’s arguments in the same way freethinkers do; so why does he use them? I sincerely cannot think how or why.

D’Souza, like the charlatans, uses the mystery of quantum mechanics to justify his position. The many-words interpretation of quantum mechanics is slowly gaining popularity and overthrowing the long-held ‘orthodox’ Copenhagen interpretation. I am certainly no quantum physicist, so I’ll keep my science brief. The idea of ‘many-worlds’ states that what was previously considered to be the collapse of a wavefunction (a kind of quantum probability spread) does not exist. Every possible outcome does occur and we only witness one. The others occur in an ever growing number of parallel universes. More QM literate readers can correct me, but I think I’m right in stating that a large number of possibilities all occur and do so in parallel universes. D’Souza asserts that better known ideas, such as the Big Bang and Dark Matter, also all point towards a ‘material resurrection’.

Not only is this simply the God of the Gaps at its most blatant – it is a complete farce. The illogic involved is stupendous: we don’t know what the majority of matter is, therefore the likelihood is that a mass material resurrection will occur when Jesus Christ returns. It is frustrating to see an apologist so able to stop rational people becoming complacent by challenging them on important issues reduced to such piffle.

Please Dinesh – don‘t repeat this.