***Correction: In this article, The Daily inaccurately reported that Jay Richards is a program director for the intelligent design think tank Discovery Institute. In fact, Richards has not worked at the Discovery Institute for more than a year; he is currently the media director of the Acton Institute.***

During an animated debate yesterday in a packed Dinkelspiel Auditorium, atheist Christopher Hitchens and intelligent design advocate Jay Richards clashed over the evidence for God’s existence.

“There are no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty in universities,” said host Ben Stein, famous for his role as the dull economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, during “Atheism vs. Theism and the Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design.”

“We are lucky — blessed, I would say — to have two extremely smart people here today,” Stein said, giving both participants 14 minutes for their opening remarks.

“I can’t imagine it’ll take me 14 minutes to demolish intelligent design, as I refuse to call it,” began Hitchens, the author of the 2007 bestseller “God is Not Great.”

He cited the existence of evil as evidence against a benevolent designer.

“If everything was designed,” Hitchens asked, “what are we to make of the designer who has subjected so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?”

He added that any person who looked to nature as evidence for design must contend with the fact that 98 percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct.

“Whose design?” asked Hitchens, to applause from many audience members, including a dozen wearing “Atheists of Silicon Valley” T-shirts. “What kind of design? What kind of caprice, what kind of incompetence, what kind of cruelty?’

Richards congratulated Hitchens on his rhetoric, but dismissed the atheist’s perspective.

“A sneer is not an argument,” said Richards, a program director for the intelligent design think tank Discovery Institute.

Richards encouraged the audience to see atheism and theism as two competing hypotheses, saying he would lay out “a laundry list of facts,” and ask whether they fit better in an atheistic or theistic worldview.

For theists, “there is a personal being, a transcendent, eternal, personal being,” Richards said. “This being is by definition goodness and love.”

As his first evidence for theism, Richards argued that all people feel “simple moral truths.”

“We all know that it’s wrong to torture little children just for the fun of it,” he said.

The fact that nature seems to be organized rationally and mathematically suggests evidence for theism, Richards said, as does the “fine-tuning principle” — the idea that the laws of the universe are set up just right to allow for life. He added that the universe’s inception at the Big Bang is also evidence for a creator.

“Anything that begins to exist must have a cause for its beginning,” Richards said.

The intelligent design advocate next appealed to “irreducible complexity,” one of intelligent design’s central tenets. He cited the bacterial flagellum and the cascade of blood-clotting factors, saying that they must be designed because they need all of their parts at once to work and could not evolve little-by-little.

“Processes that require foresight are inaccessible to natural selection,” Richards said.

Hitchens then requested the chance to ask Richards a question.

“Do you believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin?” he asked when Richards assented. “Do you believe he was resurrected from the dead?”

Richards said that he did.

“I rest my case,” said Hitchens. “This is an honest guy, who has just made it very clear [that] science has nothing to do with his world view.”

Stein interrupted with a question for Hitchens.

“Many people are deeply religious,” he said. “Are they just stupider than you?”

“I think I am smarter than most people,” Hitchens said, but he added that religion plays an important part in human history.

“Religion was our first try at philosophy, it was our first try at epistemology. It’s what we came up with when we didn’t know we lived on a round planet circling the sun.”

The event was broadcast by the Church Communication Network to churches around the country. Listeners could send questions via fax or email, and audience members at Stanford could turn in written questions to be answered by the debaters.

Richards stated that just as the designers of Mt. Rushmore made the monument very different from the hills around it, “intelligent agents leave markers for their design.”

“The existence of a creator God is something we can discern from the world around us,” he concluded.

Hitchens disagreed.

“The world as we know it works as the world might be expected to work if it did not have a designer,” he concluded. “We can finally grow up if we resign ourselves to this increasingly inescapable truth.”

The event was sponsored by The Stanford Review, the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness club and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford.