I can’t tell you what a nice feeling it is to have an Award named after you. And an award sponsored not by just any old organization but by the Atheist Alliance International. You may feel beleaguered in your own country. But let me tell you I honour you for that as well as many other things. And so I feel honoured that you have decided to give this award in my name.

But of course I feel even more honoured that this year’s recipients of the award are Penn and Teller. Among the most famour conjurors in the world. And surely the most eloquently and intelligently presented conjurors in the world. Penn eloquent with words, Teller eloquent with silence, both highly intelligent leaders of what I prophesy is going to become the twenty first century revival of the Enlightenment at the end of the present mini Dark Age.

There is a verse of the Bible – actually I think it is in the Apocrypha – which always puzzled me. “Let us now praise famous men.” I always thought it was rather a dopey verse, but I can see one circumstance in which it makes sense. When you feel beleaguered, as what appears to be a tiny minority, but you are in fact rather a large minority most of whom are still lurking in the closet, what you need is to persuade a large number of people to come out of the closet, giving encouragement to each other by that act. We need a gathering memetic snowball. A positive feedback loop, gaining momentum until the courage needed to come out dwindles away to nothing. And in order to kick start the snowball and give it initial momentum, you need just a few highly admired role models with courage and articulate intelligence. You need Penn and Teller and a few others like them. Let us now praise famous men, precisely because they are admired and can start an avalanche.

The second reason I would single out Penn and Teller for praise is not just that they are giving a wonderful example to others to come out of the closet, but that they have the courage to give offence. I don’t mean that giving offence is in itself a virtue. But I do deplore a tendency, in the nice liberal circles in which most of us move, to feel that people have a right not to be offended, even if what they say is highy offensive.

In Britain in the past month there have been two rather contemptible little episodes that both stemmed from religious people assuming that they have a God-given right not to be offended, and society at large conniving in that delusion. One was a play in a Birmingham theatre, written by a member of the Sikh community, which took the lid off the oppression of women in that community. The theatre was compelled to take the show off when mobs of Sikhs physically attacked the theatre, endangering life. Decent liberals, people like us, felt torn between our love of free speech, and a feeling that people have a right not to be offended.

The second incident was ‘Jerry Springer, the Opera’, which has provoked riots by Christians, and again has been hounded out of theatres in Britain. The worst incident was a Cancer charity which decided not to accept a donation from the theatre company because Christian activits threatened to stop other people donating to that cancer charity. Moreover, when the BBC televised the opera, the Christian Coalition published the private addresses and telephone numbers of senior BBC executives and encouraged a hate campaign against these individuals, who had to have police protection.

By the way, I happened to meet the leader of that same Christian Coalition, in the rival TV station to the BBC in Manchester. I was about to do the normal polite thing, smile and shake his hand. But I had just been thinking about my speech for Penn and Teller, and it suddenly flashed across my mind: “I don’t have to shake this man’s hand.” Before I had time to think better of it, I called him, to his face, an irrational bigot. He said, “Well you didn’t waste much time in getting down to the name-calling.” I replied that there are just a few issues where we have to stop pussyfooting around, and free speech was one of them.

I think we have been running scared of giving offence for too long. There are times when offence is precisely the right thing to give. I remember a wonderful occasion when my scientific colleague Lewis Wolpert and I were on a TV panel with some theologians. At one point, a theologian sand something like, “I must say I find Professor Wolpert’s remarks about religion very offensive.” Wolpert immortally shot back (read it in a South African accent), “They were supposed to be offensive!”

Penn and Teller are not afraid of giving offence, where the target deserves it, in particular where the target is any kind of hypocrisy or charlatanry.

Which brings me to the third reason I am so pleased you have decided to honour Penn and Teller. They are illusionists but, unlike certain other professional conjurors – charlatans who pretend to be something more than conjurors – Penn and Teller make no supernatural claims for tricks which, to my innocent eye, look 100 times more supernatural than any biblical miracle. On the contrary, they could be described not only as among the world’s greatest illusionists. They are also among the world’s greatest disillusionists. They disillusion people who might otherwise be susceptible to the supernatural temptation. I have not, to my regret, seen their TV show Bullshit, but my understanding is that this is what it is all about. I wish that show was shown in Britain.

This brings me to a final observation on the importance of top class illusionists like Penn and Teller. It is a point about miracles.

Miracle stories are the oxygen of popular religion. Without miracle stories, ordinary people would not be susceptible to the blandishments of priests and ayatollahs. Without the natural gullibility of people, together with a natural desire to spread good memes, miracle stories would not spread, and religion might be a lot closer to its long deserved exinction. And the natural gullibility of people is abetted by a compelling tendency to believe what appears to be the evidence of our own eyes. Psychologists are increasingly finding that eye-witness evidence is extraordinarily unreliable. The bizarre phenomena of false memory syndrome ram home that conclusion. Visual and other illusions, from the classic Muller Leyer illusion, through the Penrose Impossible Triangle and the Hollow Face Illusion to the Devil’s Tuning Fork do not go away even when you know they are illusions and have had them explained to you. The human brain runs software that constructs its own reality from the sense data fed to it, and this can be badly misled by certain kinds of sense data. Given this, it is no wonder gullible people are so susceptible to Virgin Marys, angels and other hallucinations inspired by childhood indoctrination in a variety of religions.

World class illusionists like Penn and Teller carry the demonstration to extremes that can only be described as uncanny, and which would undoubtedly be classed as supernatural miracles were it not for the integrity of the performers themselves. In the whole of the Bible, the Koran or any other scripture, there is no miracle more miraculous than Penn and Teller’s “bullet caught in the teeth” act. Yet we know that is not a miracle because they tell us it is not a miracle. Isn’t this the most spectacular demonstration that apparent miracles are not what they seem? And doesn’t this apply a fortiori to piffling little miracles like changing water into wine?

I have talked enough. I am deeply honoured that the Atheist Alliance are linking my name to those of Penn and Teller in this delightful way. I hope that they will treasure the tangible token of the award that Margaret Downey has chosen, just as I shall treasure the memory of presenting it to them.