Blind Faith On Trial In ‘Divinity of Doubt’

An Exclusive Interview With Vincent Bugliosi, Author Of  ‘Divinity of Doubt — The God Question.’

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Bestselling author and renowned prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, in his new book, Divinity of Doubt — The God Question, presents evidence for and against the existence of God in his indictment of religion, theism, and atheism.
Bugliosi, known for his career at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office where he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 cases, including his most famous trial, the Charles Manson case, was recently interviewed by Iconoclast publisher W. Leon Smith.

The prosecutor who penned Helter Skelter (based on the Manson case), the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history, and more recently And The Sea Will Tell, Outrage, Reclaiming History: The “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, has been called “the quintessential prosecutor.” According to Alan Dershowitz, “If you created a prosecutorial Hall of Fame, Vince would be in the entranceway.”

Vincent Bugliosi, Author of "Divinity of Doubt — The God Question"

His latest book has been placed on the bestseller list at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and sells for $26.99 hardcover, ISBN: 978-59315-629-9.

In Divinity of Doubt, Bugliosi dissects the bible, drawing attention to inconsistencies and contradictions based on years of examination and fine attention to detail. He also examines Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and its improbabilities, plus strikes out against atheism.

“When I hear theists and atheists pontificating on how they know God does or does not exist, I can only smile at the irrationality, and yes, vanity of the notion,” writes Bugliosi. “Since the depth of a belief should be in proportion to the evidence, no sensible person should be dogmatic about whether there is or is not a God,” he declares.

In making his case for agnosticism – which he defines as believing that the existence versus nonexistence of God is “unknowable” – Bugliosi takes a fresh and provocative look at the evidence for and against God.  With his trademark irrefutable logic and wit, Bugliosi exposes the intellectual poverty of atheism and embarrasses its leading proponents.

He takes on and eviscerates theism – its bible, religious beliefs, and prayer, as well as examining in highly stimulating and fascinating discourse such topics as evolution, intelligent design, the identity of Jesus, heaven, hell, morality, and death.
“Because the issue of whether there is a God is an impenetrable mystery, agnosticism is the only intelligent, strong position one can take on the question of God’s existence,” Bugliosi states.  “Doubt is divine in that it impels a search for the truth.  It opens the door to knowledge.  Faith puts a lock on the door,” he adds.

Here is the Iconoclast interview:

ICONOCLAST:  Divinity of Doubt has to be one of the best books ever written on the subject of religion and life. What inspired you to address the God question?

BUGLIOSI: Well, if you know anything about me, Leon, I like challenges, and I don’t think there is any bigger challenge than taking on the issue of God. It’s viewed by many people as being an eternal mystery, and I don’t report to know the answer to it. I’m an agnostic. For your audience, most of them will know what I’m about to say but some might not. Theists believe in God, as you know, atheists do not. Agnostics say, and I’m an agnostic, “I don’t know.”

I like to tell people, Leon, that I’ve got a rather bright — I’m being a little cute here — a rather bright person on my side. At least some people think he’s kind of bright. His name is Einstein. Einstein was an agnostic. Arguably, you know, the greatest mind of the 20th century. Interestingly enough, Charles Darwin was also an agnostic. Now I say interestingly enough, Leon, because most evolutionists, not all, but most evolutionists tend to be atheists, and here we have the founder of evolution, Charles Darwin, being a very strong agnostic.

I feel that the question of whether or not there is a God to be, like I said, an impenetrable mystery beyond human comprehension. The way Einstein put it, he said, “The problem is too vast  for our limited minds,” and that’s why I feel the most sensible position to take on this question, the most responsible position to take, is that of agnosticism.

I like Gertrude Stein’s take on agnosticism. Back in the 1930s, she said, “There ain’t no answer, there ain’t going to be any answer, there never has been any answer: that’s the answer.”

Also back in the 1930s, the great criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow perceptively said, “I don’t report to know what ignorant men are sure of.”

One little tag to this, Leon, is that more than one person has told me that after reading Divinity of Doubt, The God Question they found out who they were. What they meant when they explained it is that they had thought that they were either, let’s say, a theist or an atheist and they found out that they were neither, but they actually were an agnostic and they didn’t even realize it until they had read the book. They found that learning about their true religious identity was of some value to them.
In the book, I very heavily take on atheism also, and the atheists are not too happy with me. I view atheism as being an intellectually barren philosophy whose chief provocateurs, I’m talking about people like, oh, Christopher Higgins, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins — if you read their books, Leon, I don’t know if you have, but if you do, these people cannot find a non sequitur that they do not like.

I do not know whether or not there is a God, and the atheists may very well be correct when they say they don’t believe in God and some go as far as say there definitely is no God. But I do not believe that atheistic dogma leads one rationally to that conclusion because, as I say, if you examine what they say, and I give several examples in the book, they go from one non sequitur to another. I have yet to see an atheistic argument that leads irresistibly to the non-existence of God.

I’ve already spoken to one group that had quite a few atheists in it, and I’m going to be speaking to a group later this month heavily populated with atheists. I asked the last group to give me something that’s not a non sequitur and they couldn’t do it. At least theism has one argument that at least has common sense on its part, or not uncommon sense. I think a better word would be logic, and that’s the argument of first cause.

First cause arguably leads back to an uncaused cause and that uncaused cause being a God. So, a long answer to your question, and then I went off atheism and theism.

It’s a tremendous challenge; I’ve always been interested in the whole issue of God as so many people have been. I wrote myself many, many notes throughout the years and put them in a folder, never attempted to do a book. But I finally decided to do one, and I took about two years out of my life, worked seven days a week, got heavily, heavily into it. And I have to say that I’m more excited about Divinity of Doubt than any other book in my entire career and I’ve had seven New York Times bestsellers, three getting up to number one.

Helter Skelter, you know, on the Manson case, was my biggest book, and it’s not just because there’s no more important subject that God, but at the expense of sounding presumptuous, Leon, there are two things that make Divinity of Doubt, I think, different and one is that in the book I discuss virtually every single important issue in the entire area of God and religion, and if you’ve read books on God and religion, you will know that this is not common, not common at all.

But secondly, and I think most important by far, I offer fresh and, this is going to sound presumptuous but it just happens to be factual, I offer fresh and controversial insights on almost all of these issues. This sounds a little hard to believe since we’re talking here about a 2000-year-old conversation, at least with Christianity, in which it is well known that nothing significant has been brought to the table in a great number of years, but Divinity of Doubt has that.

I can give you a very short but a very perfect testament to what I just said. Have you ever heard the name Frank Shaeffer before, Leon?

ICONOCLAST: Um, sounds familiar.

BUGLIOSI: Okay, Frank Shaeffer and his father, Francis Shaeffer, were founders of the religious right in America. Shaeffer is no longer a member of the religious right. He saw the light of day, but he is still a practicing Christian and goes to church on Sundays. His father was a prominent theologian, and also a preacher. His mother was a missionary and also a preacher. Frank himself was a preacher for years. He’s written several books on God. His most prominent book, which is a New York Times bestseller, was Crazy for God. Frank, who is close to 60 years old, talks about the fact that as early as five years of age he can remember at the dinner table that all the talk was about God and religion. That’s over half a century that he’s been immersed in God and religion. We gave him a copy of Divinity of Doubt to read for a review, and I’ll just give you a part of the review.
He said “I found myself following my wife around the house reading passages of the book to her.”

Obviously, Leon, would Frank have said this if what he read in the book was familiar to him? There’s all types of very fresh insights into this book, and at the heart of the book I take on many age-old religious beliefs that people have unthinkingly accepted as true, such as free will, immortality of the soul, the virgin birth, the so-called power of prayer, that the Christian God is all powerful and all good, and I proved beyond a reasonable doubt that actually they are not true.

And I do this, Leon, in the same identical way I did as a prosecutor. I just let the evidence be my only master and then I draw powerful inferences from that evidence. Some of the things I say in Divinity of Doubt are so much against what people have heard a thousand times in the past that some people are very uncomfortable with them. It takes them out of their comfort zone, but everything I say is supported by the evidence.

ICONOCLAST: The veracity of Noah has always bothered me. How did he round up all those live animals, care for them, feed them, get more animals for years, and provide physical homes for them? Also, I always thought the rainbow deal was incorrect because of science. But the thing that really got me was what you  referred to in your book, that God was saying he was about to commit premeditated mass murder…and, of course, we are supposedly made in his image. In a way that sounds more like something Satan might say or do, if he exists. Do you think the bible was written for the purpose of creating wars?

BUGLIOSI: Yeah, well you know he created man in his image, he’s supposedly happy with it, and then as you well know in Genesis he becomes very disappointed with the human race. What does he do? Well, he destroys, murders, the entire human race and in a very nice way — I’m being sarcastic, probably one of the worst ways of dying — he drowns virtually everyone except Noah, as you say, and his family.

The first question is, if in fact humanity turned out to be so bad, if he is all knowing, he is supposed to be omniscient. I’m talking about God. Why did he create human beings in the first place if he already knew that they were going to end up disappointing him?

But this gets into another issue: the issue of the monstrous God of the Old Testament as distinguished from the Jesus of the New Testament.

The God of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New Testament, according to, not Judaism because they believe that Jesus was just a prophet, but according to Christianity, they are one in the same. They talk about the trinity, but they don’t distinguish between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, and yet if you talk to these people they have absolutely no difficulty overlooking the fact that God would really put the monsters and the tyrants of history to shame.
The thousands upon thousands of murders that he commanded his followers to commit doesn’t seem to bother people at all. They feel that everything that God did in the Old Testament was justified.

I’ve got a little quote here. Let’s see if I can find it. It’s by Thomas Paine, one of the people who inspired the American Revolution, a very brilliant man. Here’s what Paine said in the Age of Reason, one of his books, about the horrors of the Old Testament. For instance, in the book of Joshua, God commands Joshua to kill, as he did, all the people, 31 kingdoms, hostile of Israelites — a type of ethnic cleansing that included the slaughter of all men, women, and children. In Samuel, the Lord told Saul, the first king of Israel, “I have decided to settle accounts with the nation of Amalek for opposing Israel when they came from Egypt. Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalek Nation – men, women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys, which Saul did. There are many more instances like this, in addition to the fact that, of course, like I said, he murdered the entire human race by drowning with the exception of Noah.

Here’s what Thomas Paine says in his Age of Reason. He says, “The bible tells us that all the murders in the Old Testament were done by the express command of God. To believe, therefore, the bible to be true, we must un-believe all our belief in the moral justice of God, for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend?”

How do you get around that, you see? The Jews who believe in the Old Testament, in Christianity they believe in the Old Testament and New Testament, they have no trouble, they do not condemn God for doing any of these things, because whatever he did, there were justifications for it.

But like Thomas Paine says, “How could a smiling infant offend?”

What could an infant have possibly done to justify God murdering these infants? There really are no explanations for a great number of things that I talk about here in Divinity of Doubt, but I do get into some things, like free will and immortality of the soul, that really, if you can find them in other books out there developed in the way I have, I’d like to know what those books are.

ICONOCLAST:  I have often wondered if the Book of Matthew in the New Testament was perhaps written, or co-written, by a guy named Mathias, Judas’ replacement. Are you familiar with that at all?

BUGLIOSI:  No, I’ve heard of it, but no I did not get into that. It’s normally assumed that Matthew did not write the Book of Matthew, but most biblical scholars do not seem to know who in fact did. Mark, of course, was never even an apostle. He was close to Peter. Peter was an apostle. The Book of John, as you probably know, the Gospel of John, John they say wrote it when he was close to 100 years of age, which would have been 70 years after all of the incidences that were taking place that he writes about, and no one suggests that he was taking notes when he was with Jesus.

ICONOCLAST:  Apparently Mathias was the note taker, you know, during Jesus’ reign. He was the one that took all of the notes and kind of kept records of everything. I was thinking, he might come closer to being a person that would actually write something like this than would a tax collector?

BUGLIOSI:  Now there’s an allegation, obviously, that Mathias took notes, but where would that have come from, because, really, the only thing we have to go on is that it’s extremely unlikely that many of these things took place. What document, what historical record would say that Mathias was taking notes?

ICONOCLAST: I’m not sure there is one.

BUGLIOSI:  It’s part of the mythology. And it may be true, you know, it may be true, but it’s hard to talk with too much authority about the New Testament because you’re kind of limited to the four gospels. And then, as you say, you were talking about Matthew. We don’t even know who the authors were. Although biblical scholars seem to concede that the four gospels were written, finally, at least the last one, by the end of the 1st century AD. It’s interesting also that the first writing in the New Testament was not quite that long after Jesus supposedly died on the cross in 33 AD. It’s normally believed by biblical scholars that Paul was not an apostle. Well, he was an apostle, but he never did see God and Jesus in life. He saw the apparition on the way to Damascus. It’s generally believed that his 1 Thessalonians was written somewhere around 51, 52 AD, which is only about 17, 18, 19 years after Jesus supposedly died on the cross. We’re getting into trivia or detail that really, really does not go to the heart of the book Divinity of Doubt.

ICONOCLAST: I’ve always wondered, why did it take them so long to write that stuff. You’d think they would get on it pretty quick instead of waiting so many years.

BUGLIOSI: Well, the one, and again we’re straying away from the essence of Divinity of Doubt, but one thing, there is an argument against that, and it ends up being a false prophesy of Jesus.

Jesus at one point in the gospels told his followers that he would return before some of the people he was talking to had died. In other words, some of the people he was talking to would still be alive when he returned. Now, we know that’s not the case. They called it parousia. I don’t know off the top of my head how to spell it, I think it was p-a-r-o-u-s-i-a. This was the belief of early Christianity that Jesus would be returning very, very soon, and that would be one possible justification for waiting as long as they did, thinking that “well, he’s going come back very shortly anyway.”

ICONOCLAST : Near the end of Divinity of Doubt in the notes section you refer to the “attainment of zero” whereby people strive to reach zero but keep getting knocked down. I have a philosophy that things are always happening in balance. If something good happens to you, you can count on something bad to happen to balance it out. And for me, I was contemplating your zero thing, and just trying to figure out if it fits into my theory?

BUGLIOSI: That’s just a philosophy of mind that has nothing to do with the book. It sounds very similar, but I just made a parenthetical observation of mine that I had as a youngster, that there really was nothing called happy. You can call it happiness, but there’s no condition of happiness. When we think we’re happy we’re just rising up to zero. When we are at below zero we’re unhappy for whatever reason, maybe we’re hungry, maybe we’re thirsty, but once we satisfy that need of thirst or hunger or whatever, all we’re doing is going back up to zero. And zero I guess would be a point at birth, or what have you.

ICONOCLAST: I’m not sure that this has anything to do with it either, but I’m going to ask you anyway; it’s kind of a stupid question.

BUGLIOSI: *Laughs*

ICONOCLAST:  What goes through your head when in court a witness recites that he or she will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God?

BUGLIOSI:  I don’t even hear those words because if you talk to any trial lawyer they will tell you that perjury exists in virtually every trial, it’s almost taken for granted. To give an example, if a defendant is charged with robbery, and he takes the witness stand and denies committing the robbery, and the jury comes back with a verdict of guilty, that is a concomitant finding that he must have lied, or they believed he lied, when he took the witness stand.

He denied it, and they said no, you’re guilty. And yet, I don’t know of any case ever in America where after the trial the prosecutor says “well not only have I convicted you of robbery now, but I’m also going to convict you of perjury.” It’s not done. Why isn’t it done? Because it’s taken for granted that he’s going to deny it.

Prosecutors expect defendants to deny guilt. Look, if they hadn’t denied guilt, then there wouldn’t have been a trial, they would have pled guilty, you follow? So, I mean I hear those words up there but I do know that perjury is extremely common at a trial, and it’s unfortunate, you know, but it’s a reality of life.

ICONOCLAST: I’ve read several of your reviews, like on Amazon, and they tend to be hot or cold.

BUGLIOSI: Well, the ones that are cold, almost invariably, are the atheists or the evolutionists. They don’t even bother reading the book. They simply say, “Don’t read the book. It’s no good” and all that stuff. But no, the book has gotten tremendous reviews from actual reviewers.

It’s like my book on the Kennedy assassination, which is the equivalent of 13 volumes of 400 page books that weigh 7½ pounds, a monstrous book. It has over 10,000 citations and it takes people an entire year to read it.

In fact, Tom Hanks and his people are going to be doing a multi-hour mini-series for HBO for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2013. My book is called Reclaiming History. The book came out, and the very next day there were these conspiracy theorists saying, “Don’t read the book, it’s a terrible book.” Well, they hadn’t even read the book. And it’s the same thing with Divinity of Doubt. These are the atheists that are attacking me or the theists, you know. But it’s an incredible book.

ICONOCLAST: Yes, it is an incredible book.

BUGLIOSI:  Well I appreciate that. It’s the type of book that makes you think. People say  you read one paragraph, and you have to stop and think about it, then you go on to the next paragraph, and then you have to think again, and people also talk about the fact that they find things, so many things, in the book kind of funny. I don’t know, did you find it that way? Did you get any humor out of the book?

ICONOCLAST:  Maybe a little bit, but not really that much.  I just thought it made me think and it took me a while to read it. I would read a few pages or a chapter and then leave it open a little while and, you know, kind of go from there.

BUGLIOSI:  Let me just quickly talk about a couple of the things, that if true literally could spell the end of Christianity.
Free will. You hear everyone talk about free will. God gives all of us free will, they say. If you challenge them on it they’ll say, “Well, it’s in the bible.” But it turns out that contrary to popular belief, the bible does not say there’s free will. In fact, it says the precise opposite that there is no free will.

And, I don’t have to tell you, Leon, the enormous ratifications of this. How do you explain or justify God’s, assuming there’s a God, punishment of evildoers? If what they did was preordained by God, they had no choice. Now mind you, I’m not saying there’s no free will. If you were to ask me if I believe there is free will, I would say, “Well, why are you asking me?  I don’t know anymore about it than my next door neighbor.” We’re talking about the bible here, and the bible isn’t something to be ignored. To just give an indication of the power of the bible, you take away the bible and overnight, overnight, Christianity and Judaism literally cease to exist. There is no way in the world they could even begin to exist without the bible.

Now, just a little support for what I just told you about the bible not saying there’s free will: Isaiah 63:17 says, “Lord, why do you cause us some free will; why do you cause us to stray from thy ways.” Romans 11:32 goes so far as to say that God “confines all men to disobedience.”

Talmudic scholars, Leon, for centuries have been struggling trying to get around, desperately trying to get around, because Judaism believes so much in free will, as Christianity does, trying to get around Exodus 4:21 where God tells Moses, “I will harden the heart of the Pharaoh, causing him to be stubborn, so that he will not set the people free” referring to the Israelites who were in bondage at that time in Egypt, thereby apparently justifying his imposition.

Another example of God being such a nice guy is his imposition of the 10 plagues on the poor people of Egypt until the Pharaoh finally capitulated. This is the type of support that I give for these positions that are just completely against what people have heard a thousand times in the past, that the bible actually says there’s no free will.

It turns out that the immortality of the soul, and I traced this all the way back, was a pure invention of Plato in the 4th century BC, pure invention, that Christianity was forced to embrace because without it, there’s no life after death. I mean, everybody knows that the body doesn’t rise from the dead, so if the soul’s not immortal, there’s no life after death, and if there’s no life after death, the problem there is that there is no what? There’s no heaven and hell. And I would ask the rhetorical question, Leon, how does Christianity exist? How does it continue to be in existence? How does it stay alive without heaven and hell? Isn’t this what it offers or threatens its followers with? But this is the type of stuff that you’re not going to find, and this is not a boast, it’s just an absolute fact, that you’re not going to find in books.

If they were out there — these observations — I would never have written Divinity of Doubt.

I also found, but we’re not going to be able to get into all the detail on it, but I found evidence in the New Testament, referring to Matthew which we talked about earlier, Matthew 1:18 and 1:22 which read in conjunction with the Old Testament, specifically Isaiah 7:14 proves, not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt, that Jesus was not born of a virgin. That’s if you look at Isaiah 7:14,  that Matthew 1:18 and 1:22 rely on for that proposition. If Jesus was not born of a virgin, then he was not the son of God, and if he was not the son of God, then the Christian belief that God had his son die on the cross for our sins goes out the window, too, which in effect ravages much of Christianity.

This is why so many people have read this book and, several of the reviews said it, but there is no way that anyone can read Divinity of Doubt without being affected. You read Divinity of Doubt and you’re never going to feel quite the same way about God and religion again. Now again, I’m not saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin. I’d sound silly if I said that. I’m talking about the bible.

Leon,  I really, really enjoyed talking to you and I wish you the very best in all of your endeavors down there. You’re aware of my book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder so you and I are on the same side there, right?

ICONOCLAST: Yeah, I think so.

BUGLIOSI:  We’re making a documentary on it. It’s about 99 percent completed. It’s got to go through post production. In fact, tomorrow I’m going to be working all day on it. So we should have The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder on the big screen probably within a half a year or so, and maybe I can come back and talk to you again.