If you want to be awe-inspired ladies and gentlemen, and let me say, let me just tell you that those of us that do not believe we are divinely created, let alone divinely supervised, are not immune to the idea of awe and beauty and the transcendent. Let me invite you to look for a moment at the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. Some of you may have done it. If you haven’t done it now, or yet, do it soon. The extraordinary revelations of swirling, yet somehow beautiful new galaxies in colour and depth in majesty like nothing I think the human eye has ever seen.

Turn away from that if you wish and gaze at a burning bush in an illiterate desert part in the Middle East and say that’s where revelation comes from. I don’t believe you’d be able to do it! Or read a page of Stephen Hawking on the absolute magnificence and consistency and underlying beauty. As Einstein says, the great miracle of physics is there are not miracles. It all carries on, holding together all the time. There are not interruptions in this order. There are not suspensions of it just to please Joshua or just to please some sect or tribal group. No, it is much, much, much more impressive than that.

Hawking has a colleague who looks at the Event Horizon of a black hole. If you could travel towards a black hole – it’s not yet possible to do – but if you could – in theory, the Event Horizon is the point at which the black hole is pulling everything into itself. So, over into the black hole goes light itself. It’s so strong it can pull light back into itself. It’s really awe-inspiring; a lot more, say, than a crowd of pigs, infested by devils running down a hill into the sea, which is a piece of sorcery and cheap magic of the sort that shouldn’t impress any thinking person. Be sure the black hole is there, pulling the light into itself – the event horizon just reorganising nature so that if you could get to that lip, the lip of that Event Horizon, and fall in, go in, you could, in theory, see the past and the future stretching before and in front of you. You would see time, except you wouldn’t have the time to do it, of course, if you were a mere primate, as we are.

Hawking has a colleague who says that if he knew he was dying with a terminal illness, that’s how he would want to go out, over the lip of the event horizon. That would be majesty; that would be magnificence; that would be awe-inspiring. So, it’s in the natural world, it’s in the world of science and the world of innovation and discovery and doubt, we wouldn’t have discovered any of these things if we’d taken the religious story for granted to begin with. We would have said we already know enough. We know. God made this. God wants it this way, what’s the need for inquiry? We already have all the information we need.

The big difference between this side of the house (mine) and the other is this: I am absolutely certain that I do not know, but that it might be possible to find out and that doubt and scepticism and innovation and inquiry are the only means by which wonder and beauty and awe and symmetry will be discovered, and beyond those peaks we can yet see new, more wonderful peaks will arise."

The late CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS in an unscripted debate response with a Christian apologist.