I'm sure you have heard it said that God is love. You've heard it said God is life. You've heard it said sometimes God is dead, challenging propositions all. But what about this one? God is necessary, necessary in the sense that he is demanded by human nature itself. If we are fully to make sense of the world we live in, to know good from bad, to touch on the meaning of our own existence. Whether for you, it's God of the Bible or

God that is a more abstract spirituality or shared consciousness. In ages past before there was science, this necessity of God was in this regard unassailable. But what about today with all we know and how far we have come? Well, we think this has the makings of a debate. So let's have it. Yes or no to this statement. The more we evolve, the less we need God. I'm John Don Van. I am onstage with four superbly qualified debaters who will argue for and against

that resolution. We are at the K playhouse at Hunter College in New York, where our live audience will choose the winner. As always our debate goes in three rounds and if all goes well and I'm sure it will, civil discourse will win as well. Our motion is this. The more we evolve, the less we need God, let's meet our debater. And I want to start with an introduction pairing two of the opponents actually, Michael Schirmer and Deepak Chopra because they have something of a history of friendly,

rivalry, Michael Schirmer, you're arguing for the motion, you're a New York Times bestselling author, the publisher of skeptic magazine, you teach skepticism 101 at Chapman University, your second time on our stage welcome back. And Deepak Chopra, you are arguing against the motion, you are an advocate for integrative medicine. You have been described as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century by Time Magazine. You have written more than 85 books translated into 43 languages, many, many, many of them bestsellers. And deep

deepak, you too, when you have faced off before on stage, the very first time that you were physically on a stage, you said that this was not your first meeting. What did you say to Michael all the time? We have met in many incarnations. When I first met Michael, I was an atheist, but then I realized I was gone. So it worked out for me. And Michael, going back to you on the other side, we heard that the two of you actually got together and meditated together. So where did you go on that conversation? Yeah, well, this was a

little bit of the urge in my wife to give Deepak's worldview a try. And I have to say I did feel much better after the weekend of meditating. Of course, it doesn't hurt to be in Carl's Bad California at the beach at a five-star resort, getting massages and drinking tea and doing yoga every day. If you're not feeling better, you're doing something wrong. All right. So the two of you are not here by any means alone. You each have very strong partners on your side. Michael, please tell us who is your teammate on the four side? Well, Dr. Heather Berlan is the perfect debate partner for me tonight because she studies consciousness from a neural

science perspective. And of course, Deepak's interest is in consciousness and they have very radically different views. Not only studies this professionally from a neuroscience perspective, but also does some clinical work. Heather Berlan. Heather, Michael just covered that you're a cognitive neuroscientist. You're also a assistant professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai. Your interest in neuroscience began when you were really little. Yeah, no, that's true. I was five years old when I first came to the realization that I was going to die, which kind of freaked me out a bit.

So I asked my dad, Dad, where do my thoughts come from and can I keep them when I die? And he said they come from your brain. And I said, okay, how? And he said, actually, we don't know. And I said, well, what can I be when I grow up to figure that out? And he said, I guess it's like, hiatris. From that moment on, it became my mission to try to understand where my thoughts come from, how my brain produces my consciousness. Perhaps I can keep my thoughts when I die. I still haven't found the answer for that, but it's been a quest. Maybe it'll happen tonight. Maybe tonight. All right. And Deepak Chopra on the other side.

Opposing side, please tell us who your partner is in this debate. I'm still trying to figure out who I am. So I think exactly. Don't know who he is. Okay. So he is, is Anup Kumar. Anup, thank you so much for joining us in Intelligent Squared. You are a board certified emergency physician. You are author of the book, Michelangelo's Medicine, how redefining the human body will transform health and health care. Anup, curious about this. As an ER doctor and your title almost refers to this, you get an opportunity, more opportunity,

more opportunity for us to see the human body in a unique way. You get to see its functioning and its form and its fragility. What do you take away? What insight do you take away from that experience? I take away that what we call life really doesn't have an opposite. The opposite of birth is death and the opposite of death is birth, but life doesn't have an opposite. Wow, fantastic. The room is held silent by that. But I want to invite one more round of applause for you and for all of our debaters.

So to the debate, we move on to round one, round one, our opening statements by each debater in turn. Speaking first for the motion, the more we evolve, the less we need. God here is cognitive neuroscientist Heather Berlin.

Scientific progress over the past several hundred years has completely transformed our knowledge of how the world works. And each major scientific breakthrough has had to overturn some religious dogma.

So we've gone from believing in special creation to an understanding of how all living things descend from a single common ancestor by blind trial and error process, natural selection.

We've gone from believing that diseases were curses caused by evil spirits and bad karma to an understanding of the deep mechanisms of disease at the cellular and molecular level.

But we still live in a world where people reject life-saving medicine on religious grounds. Just the other day there was a news story about a two year old boy who died because his parents chose prayer over medical treatment.

So the more our understanding evolves, the less we need God.

Now using God to explain natural phenomena is an argument known as God of the gaps. Throughout history, with there was a gap in our understanding, God must explain it.

So when you hear from our opponents, be vigilant. They might tell you that the materialistic science can only explain so much, but we still need God beyond the limits of our understanding. That's a God of the gaps argument.

Now in my own field, neuroscience, 350 years ago, Rene Daycart had argued that our perceptions had to be accurate because God would never deceive us.

And our brains were made of physical mechanisms, but our conscious minds are an immaterial essence, a spirit that interacts with the physical brain through the pineal gland.

But today, neuroscience is revealing that daycart was wrong. Our perceptions are biased and inaccurate. And consciousness doesn't interact with the brain.

Consciousness is what the brain does, and there's no reason to believe that consciousness existed before brains existed.

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