Creation vs. Evolution: The 1986 Oxford Union Debate Revisited

WARNING; THE AI TRANSCRIPT CONTAINS MANY ERRORS BUT MAY BE HELPFUL IN PLACES. THIS IS DUE TO THE LOW QUALITY OF THE ORIGINAL TAPE RECORDED AUDIO

Hello. This podcast is published every week with fresh material, but today I am making an exception to that and reproducing a speech I gave nearly 40 years ago. My name is Edgar Andrews. I am an emeritus professor of the University of London, England, and I have two doctorates in the subject of physics.

Back in 1986, I debated head-to-head with the well-known atheist Richard Dawkins. We were both speaking in the Oxford Union debate of that year, and the subject of that debate was the motion that the doctrine of creation was more valid than the theory of evolution. Dawkins and myself were both seconders. I was speaking for creation, and Dawkins was speaking for evolution. As the practice that the Oxford Union Debating Society needed, he and I began the debate. I spoke first, and he followed.

The podcast that you are going to hear now is audio only because the debate was recorded in audio only. And it was recorded on an old-fashioned tape recorder. So there's a lot of background noise and the audio quality is not very good. But I think it will be clear enough for you to understand and to follow, and I hope enjoy. You might also like to know that the entire debate is available on YouTube under the title Huxley Memorial Debate. And each speaker is given his own episode. So if you want to hear what other speakers had to say, you can go to the YouTube channel and discover that. Search for the Huxley Memorial Debate, 1986. But here in this episode, you will hear simply the speech that I made, and which, in effect, began the entire debate.