Christopher Hitchens, near the close of his debate with Frank Turek, offered this brief, masterful moment of apparently oblivious self-rebuttal:

Religion works for most people because people in a sense horribly do want it to be true, that they are supervised, that God looks out for them, that they might be rewarded, or they might be punished. It has this terrible servile advantage. That’s why I consider it to be morally superior to be an atheist, to say I would rather live without that ghastly master-slave mentality…. I can only say that I am very relieved to find, having studied the best evidence … very relieved to find there’s no evidence for it at all. If I thought it was true, I would consider myself condemned to live under a tyranny.

(You can find this at at the 1:52:50 point in the debate.) Religion thrives, he says, because people want it. Then he goes on to explain why he wants atheism.

Attempts to explain religion away as some kind of psychological aberration have been with us since Freud and even earlier. Schopenhauer and Feuerbach called it wish fulfillment. The fallacy there has been pointed out repeatedly: wish fulfillment can work both ways, for there are many who do not wish for there to be a God.

This is not a new issue, but rarely has it been caught in such a convenient little package. If Hitchens thinks he can explain religion away by its fulfilling some person’s desires, I can as easily explain his atheism away by how obviously it fulfills his own desire, his wish to be free of accountability before his creator.

Frank Turek’s final comment is most appropriate in light of Hitchens’s desires:

Christopher Hitchens thinks there is no God, and he hates him. God thinks there is a Christopher Hitchens, and he loves him.

(Regarding “no evidence for it at all,” see here, among the comments following my earlier post on this debate),

I’ve listened through most of the Frank Turek-Christopher Hitchens debate (I’ll catch the end of it on my commute home). I wish I had time to watch it on video, because I’m sure the facial expressions tell a lot. Even without that, I find Hitchens’s approach to be quite remarkable, in several ways.

1. Hitchens argues through adjectives. His speech is peppered with terms like “vile, totalitarian, sniveling, weak,” applied to theism, and “courageous, moral, bracing, mature,” applied to atheism. His appeal is overwhelmingly of the emotional sort, replete with derision and sarcasm toward his opponent. He ranks high on verbal facility, which he uses as a blunt weapon in argumentation. Had Turek responded in kind, (he didn’t) it would have been little more than a test of who could deliver the better insult.

2. He appeals to a morality whose foundations are mysterious. Since (he says) theism is “vile, totalitarian, sniveling, and weak,” then theism is morally wrong. Turek responded to this but Hitchens didn’t hear what he was saying (for whatever reason). The question (in my terms, not Turek’s) is this: apart from God, what does “wrong” mean? From where does the concept come? How can we explain it? Do we know enough about “wrong” to be able to use it, as Hitchens does, as a premise in an argument? Apart from a transcendent moral lawgiver, it’s hard to see how “wrong” has any standing greater than Hitchens’s emotional reaction to it. To have any force, it must borrow from a theistic worldview. Turek said it was as if Hitchens was “climbing up on God’s lap to slap him in the face.”

3a. Hitchens finds two general sorts of things immoral in theism. The first is of this sort: “God created us in original sin, then demands that we rescue ourselves and earn our way back to being right.” Well, I don’t know where he got that theology from, but it wasn’t from Christian sources. That’s not Christianity. He rejects a distortion of Christianity, not the real thing at all. He was in fact positively surprised, during the first question/answer exchange between himself and Turek, to learn that Christianity believes God will intervene and prevent the ultimate heat death of the cosmos. He had no idea; he sounded stunned to hear it. But that’s basic Christian theology. He argues against Christianity without knowing what it is.

3b. Hitchens also finds various theists’ actions to be reprehensible. Turek rightly pointed out that a complaint against religious persons is not an argument against God. I would add this: this argument applies only if there is some necessary connection between claiming belief in God and acting better. There isn’t. There is, in Christianity, an expected connection between following Jesus Christ and becoming a better person than one was at first; but not all religions follow Christ, not all who claim to be Christians do either, and among those who follow Christ, some of us have a long way to go to catch up. Anyway, the discussion was not about Christianity, it was about God’s existence in general, and the behavior of those who claim to be religious is for the most part irrelevant to the arguments for God. (Response 2 above also applies here.)

4. Hitchens continues to misconstrue the moral argument. He really ought to listen better. (I’ve presented the moral argument a number of times here; this is one of them.)

5. On the origin of the cosmos, Hitchens does not seem to understand what the theory says. He said that before the Big Bang, it was as if all matter in the universe was packed into a suitcase (he was borrowing from an illustration he had earlier employed with one of his children). What was outside the suitcase? “Nobody knows,” he said. A far better answer would be, there was nothing outside the suitcase—nothing, as in zero with the rim kicked off. Not even space. All existence was in the suitcase, materially speaking.

6. He pulled a neat switch on the questions of the origin of life and evolution. Turek asked him if he had any idea how life could have come from non-life. Hitchens said he didn’t know, and that it is the essence of science to say “we don’t know” to many questions, and that the best definition of education is to know what one does not know. He made quite a virtue out of not knowing that answer! But, he said, there is nothing in the world of the cosmos or of life that cannot be explained by material processes. He knows that much for sure!

7. Finally, he kept insisting that he doesn’t have to know; that it’s the theists who claim to have it all figured out and have to prove their position. That is hardly correct, however. In the face of at least two widely acknowledged scientific conundrums—the finely tuned origin of the universe from no knowable precursor, and the origin of life—Hitchens asks us to exercise an awful lot of faith when he says everything is explainable in material terms.

Turek, for his part, presented a set of standard arguments for the existence of God. It was very compressed: seven basic arguments in his opening 20 minutes. Whether he succeeded in making them fully clear and persuasive, I’m not one to judge, because I’m familiar with them in their extended forms and I was mentally filling in gaps as he spoke. I can confidently say this, however: he understood his own position, he understood his opponent’s position, and he used rational argumentation to compare the two. Hitchens did not understand his opponent’s position, he argued through adjectives, and there is reason to wonder how well he even understands his own position.

There’s a good question at WorldMagBlog today, which I’ll repeat here,

… This group of atheists and agnostics claim that proclaiming an annual National Day of Prayer creates a “hostile environment for nonbelievers, who are made to feel as if they are political outsiders.” Let me ask the nonbelievers who frequent this blog: Do you … feel threatened by our president calling Christians to gather together once a year to pray for God’s blessing on our nation?

[Link: WORLD Magazine | Community | Blog Archive | Litigious atheists and agnostics]

So here’s a poll question specifically for atheists, agnostics, skeptics, etc.:

 Loading ...

Comments are open, especially in case I didn’t get all the relevant options listed here.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

[Link: Look Who's Irrational Now - WSJ.com]

Further:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.

and…

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t.

There are a lot of irrational, unsupported beliefs out there even among educated persons. A long time ago I started saying that certain skeptics’ claims could and should be tested sociologically. For example, it’s been said that belief in religion or Intelligent Design will interfere with scientific curiosity. That’s a theoretical claim of the sort that can be tested sociologically. I don’t know if it ever has. Richard Dawkins’s belief that teaching religion is child abuse can also be checked with the empirical data, and we already know the answer. HIs position on that is thoroughly unscientific. Irrational, even, one might fairly say.

Atheists like Dawkins and Harris have been saying that Christians are less rational than non-believers. I had not thought to call for an empirical study on that, but here it is.

See also Baylor University’s information from the press conference on release of this study, including this:

“We are confident in saying we have a national random sample not skewed in any way and that represents a good cross section of the country,” said Dr. Carson Mencken, professor of sociology and research director for the institute.

I can’t wait to see what certain self-proclaimed bastions of scientific objectivity (Skeptic magazine, for example) will do with this information. My copy of the 200-page report is on the way here; in the meantime I invite your comments. (Please read at least one of the linked articles on the current Baylor report first.)

Hat Tip to Stand to Reason

Last week I started a new series, “What Is Christianity?” I have another shorter series to run parallel with it: “What Is Atheism?”

The emphasis this time is on the question mark. The question I most want to address is whether atheism is a belief system. I have been taken to task for thinking that it is (also here), so I think it’s worth exploring. The author of The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath, certainly considers to be one. Writing in Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, he asks,

So how an we engage in a productive dialogue with the belief system of atheism?

That seems like a good question—productive dialogue is always welcome—unless the premise of atheism’s being a belief system is wrongheaded. We could still find some kind of productive dialogue, I’m sure, but if not with a belief system, then with what?

Atheism is not an ism, we are told. Specifically, from About.com,

Atheism Is Not a Belief System

A belief system is a “faith based on a series of beliefs but not formalized into a religion; also, a fixed coherent set of beliefs prevalent in a community or society.” This is simpler than an ideology or philosophy because it’s just a group of beliefs; they don’t have to be interconnected and they don’t have to provide guidance. This still doesn’t describe atheism; even if we narrowed atheism to denying the existence of gods, that’s still just one belief and a single belief is not a set of beliefs. Theism is also a single belief that is not a belief system. Both theism and atheism are part of belief systems, though.

Now in my naivetë I had thought it was a belief system; for a thought a belief system was some kind of system of some kind of beliefs. So I have begun to explore what atheists mean when they say it is not a belief system. I have come across at least three answers:

1. Atheism is not a belief system because it is not a system of belief. As About.com tells us, atheists’ views of life and reality are too varied and diverse to subsume under one system.

2. Atheism is not a belief system because atheism is not a belief. This answer divides further into two:

a. Atheism is not a belief but a lack of belief, in God of course. (That seems to have been the tack Marco was taking here., and it’s explicitly the approach taken here.)

b. Atheism is not a belief because “belief” means something like religious faith; or (to borrow terminology McGrath used just before the above-quoted question) atheism is not “a set of ideas that cannot actually be proved.”

I’ll leave it at that for now and come back to this later.

Daniel Dennett, one of the four most prominent “New Atheists,” is no proponent of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The hallucination theory to explain Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances is no longer held by many scholars. Nevertheless there are exceptions to this, including Gerd Lüdemann (detailed further here). In Consciousness Explained, however, Dennett says on page 7,

Another conclusion it seems we can draw from this is that strong hallucinations are simply impossible! By a strong hallucination I mean a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional object in the real world—as contrasted to flashes, geometric distortions, auras, afterimages, fleeting phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous sensations. A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looked like.

(See the full argument here; go to page one if it doesn’t open directly there) Based on Dennett’s analysis, then, hallucinations cannot explain the events in Matthew 28:9-10, Luke 24:13-48, John 20:24-28, or John 21:4-19.

See Gary Habermas for more on hallucination theories.

Could it be that the New Atheism is a new manifestation of old-fashioned intolerance toward those who are different?

BK at Cadre Comments has quoted at length from a provocative column in First Post by Andrew Brown, titled “The Horror of a New Atheist World.” Brown noted that the New Atheists’ contentions are often quite unbelievable, even ridiculous, such as that Hitler was a believer in the Roman Catholic* religion and that Martin Luther King Jr. was not a Christian. Brown could have listed other outlandish examples, like Dawkins’s belief that raising children to believe in Christ is child abuse.

What is going on in these books? Brown has an intriguing suggestion:

But the New Atheist books which really sell are those which mirror the abusive certainty they ascribe to all their enemies.

And what could be behind that?

Why is this view suddenly so popular? Many Americans clearly feel oppressed by Christian pieties, and practically everyone in Europe is afraid of being oppressed by Islamic piety. The belief in human progress with which we all grew up looks less and less like fact and more like yet another fallible ‘faith’.

In this climate of uncertainty, the New Atheism spreads exactly like any other sort of fundamentalism. It offers a clear, compelling certainty at a time of economic and social confusion. It offers enemies (the religious) and wise, benevolent leaders (Dawkins, for example, whose name today appears on the front page of his website a mere 35 times).

Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, England, presents a provocative question in his article The Darwinian Delusion:

The next time you want to stop a conversation among the soi-disant enlightened, ask what has atheism ever done for science. It’s one thing to admit that religious dogmatism has periodically halted the march of scientific progress but quite another to argue that atheism has actually advanced science.

His own answer, in summary:

More generally, atheism has not figured as a force in the history of science not because it has been suppressed but because whenever it has been expressed, it has not encouraged the pursuit of science. The general metaphysical idea underlying Darwinism – that a morally indifferent nature selects from among a variety of organic possibilities – has many secular and religious precedents across the world. In each case, it has led to an ethic of equanimity and even resignation, certainly not a drive to remake the planet, if not the universe, to our own purposes. Yet, so far we have got pretty far on that drive. The longer we continue successfully, the stronger the evidence that at least human life cannot be fully explained in Darwinian terms.

Hat Tip: Post-Darwinist

Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.

(Note added 9/3/08: Comments are closed here, but the discussion remains open. See the final comment on this thread for explanation.)

The real question Christopher Hitchens was trying to get readers focused on here (as opposed to the one he said he was answering), was something like this:

“Why should we think people who believe in God behave better than those who do not?”

He goes on to tell about Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses whose behaviors are less than exemplary, and he insists (quite rightly) that atheists most certainly do good things. I have several brief responses from a Christian perspective.

1. Christians are by no means committed to believing that belief in God or gods taken generally is good, or that it leads to ethical actions. The Bible is full of people who believed in a God or gods, and yet sacrificed children to their gods, practiced temple prostitution, and committed other abominable acts. Christians believe there is but one God, revealed in Jesus Christ, that contradictory beliefs are in error, and that there is no reason to expect extraordinary good to come from believing in any other religions.

2. This may come as a surprise to some readers, but Christianity is not committed to the belief that Christians are more ethical than others. The explanation for this comes in three parts.*

a. Following Jesus Christ with one’s whole heart, in a supportive context and practicing the normal disciplines of the Christian life, will certainly lead to growth in one’s character, with outwardly visible effects. Christianity is quite committed to this belief. If followers of Christ came from a representative portion of any population, the difference in our lives ought to be apparent for all to see.

b. But Christianity is not committed to the belief that followers of Christ come from a random, representative sample of any population. We’re a bunch of sinners. That means me, and it means any other Christian reading this. It includes Billy Graham and the Pope, and it includes anybody who does not yet believe in Christ, but knows they are not perfect. We do not come to Jesus Christ, and we do not (or should not) present ourselves to the world, as any better than anyone else.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Consider what Jesus said about the Pharisee, who was a model of ideal behavior, and the tax collector, who represented greed, thievery, and betrayal of his people. It was the tax collector who “went home justified.” Jesus was considerably more comfortable with those who misbehaved than he was with the Pharisees, who were outwardly the party of the perfect. He came to call not the righteous, but sinners, to follow him.

c. Therefore even if Christians grow in character through following Christ, we may very well just be catching up with the rest of the world in our outward behavior.

3. Nevertheless, there is good sociological evidence that followers of Christ are, on average, are doing okay with respect to character and ethics, in comparison with social peers.

*Credit goes to Timothy Keller for bringing this to light.

Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.

Christopher Hitchens says that since he published God is Not Great,

[t]he case that keeps coming up against me is this: If the heavens are empty (as I maintain in my little book God Is Not Great), then why should anyone behave ethically?

[Link: Search Magazine - Finding Morals Under Empty Heavens]

The question has seemed absurd to him, he says. Now, though, he has heard it so often he feels he has to respond. Watch what happens when he starts to answer:

Yet, I keep being asked, by good and anxious people, how we would teach morality in the absence of God. This question has two minor implications. It first shows a lack of confidence among believers, as if they half know that faith is weak, and suspect that morality might also be so. Second, it insults unbelievers, as if we infidels might at any moment give ourselves over to slaughter and rapine. Beyond this, it suggests a sort of arid pragmatism. So, faith has given people strength?

He took an interesting turn at right about that point, which invalidates his ensuing answer to the question he opened with. I’m not talking about his dismissiveness toward “good and anxious people.” That’s just his typical smugness. The problem is not (just) in his attitude but in his reasoning.

Rather than telling you what I’m seeing, I’m going to let you puzzle it out. Here’s a hint: you might not even need to read the article to see it—it shows up in just these quotes. I would still encourage you to read the article anyway. It’s not long, and none of us would want to misrepresent Mr. Hitchens by taking quotes out of context.