“Divinity of Doubt” – Vincent Bugliosi

Humanist Society of Santa Barbara – 17 September 2011

By Robert Bernstein

Famed lawyer Vincent Bugliosi set the bar high by saying his book “Divinity of Doubt” discusses virtually every important issue on God and religion. And that he had fresh, provocative insights on all of them. He admitted this sounds presumptuous after 2000 years of discussion, but he thinks it is true.

Those in the audience may have disagreed with his self-assessment. Personally, I worried at the start when he made a confused reference to research that showed the human brain seems to have an area devoted to awareness of God. What worried me was his wondering about the word “neuron” as if it was exotic to him.

There was a repeated pattern: Every time talk got into the world of any science, he fumbled. And yet some of the substance of his arguments is scientific at its core. Many in the audience gasped when he said he was “not overly sold on evolution” and thought “the evidence for evolution is flimsy”.

Likewise when he was asked about cosmological issues and he sneered at the idea that quantum mechanics allowed for something to appear out of a vacuum.

The good news: He did indeed have some new insights. Starting with his take on free will in the Bible.

God is often taken to be omniscient, omnipotent and all-good. This combination raises the “problem of evil”. If God knows all and has the power to change what is wrong, how can there be evil in the world? The usual answer offered is that God gave people free will and that the evil is a result of the free choices of individual people.

Bugliosi says he looked at literally hundreds of books of Bible scholarship. He claims that less than one percent had free will in their index. And that these references were negative. That is, the Bible actually affirmed no free will!

Only the obscure Book of Sirach in the Old Testament affirms free will. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is 803 pages and has no mention of free will.

He references Isaiah 63:17 where God is asked, “Why have you allowed us to turn from your path?” And Exodus 4:21 where God hardens the heart of the Pharaoh so that he will not let the Jews go free.

Martin Luther wrote a book called “The Bondage of the Will” that is clear on this point: Man has free will only to the extent of doing God’s will.

Bugliosi says that even if God did give us free will it does not absolve him of evil. He asks us to imagine a 17 year old named Eddie who is robbing and raping and so far not caught. But his parents know of his behavior. We would not let his parents say, “Eddie has free will” as an excuse for their inaction.

Bugliosi next discusses the immortality of the soul as crucial to Christianity. Without it there is no heaven or hell. Yet, in 1 Timothy 6:16 it says only God is immortal. Bugliosi says the idea of an immortal soul comes from Plato who just made it up with no evidence.

Bugliosi challenges the idea of Jesus being born to a virgin. He went back to the original Hebrew and found the prophesy in the Old Testament (Isaiah 7:14) was that he be born to a “young woman”. He consulted with a rabbi Dershowitz who affirmed that the Bible uses a different word for “virgin”. Isaiah 7:14 also says the child would be named Immanuel (meaning God is with us) not Jesus. And that the kings of Syria and Israel would die in his time. But that happened in 730BC.

But Bugliosi saved some severe barbs for atheists, in particular the New Atheists Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris.

He says atheists cannot prove there is no God. And he thinks the cosmological problem of the origin of the universe is a real problem for atheists. As noted, he even thinks the evolution of life is a problem for atheists. He claims that Darwin himself was an agnostic, not an atheist. And he puts Einstein on the agnostic team as well.

He quotes Clarence Darrow, “I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure.”

And Gertrude Stein, “There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.”

Bugliosi says that Sam Harris and John Loftus wrote books that correctly challenge religion. But they fall flat in claiming to support atheism. He says a Pew poll showed that 30 percent of Americans who are not associated with a religion still believe in God.

Until he sees a refutation his legal mind finds complete, Bugliosi will remain an agnostic.