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.

What’s tragic is that the author blames the Creationists for creating a climate in which people are afraid to openly discuss problems with evolution.

[Link: two or three . net: Evolutionary scientists argue about making their doubts public]

I would add “terribly ironic” to that description, along with “tragic.”

God is the Issue: Recapturing the Cultural Initiative, a  book by Brad Bright just recently revised and set for re-release next week (and being mailed to thousands of pastors across America), is available in advance for bloggers, for review on your blogs. (See the end of this blog post for information on how to obtain your copy.)

The book has two crucial messages, especially during election season here in the U.S. It’s not just for here and now, though, but for any time of cultural questioning or confrontation. First, no matter what questions may arise at the surface, God is always at the root of the issue. Second, followers of Christ can (and must) be far more effective in managing the “playing field” of cultural issues, not yielding to the “rules” set by those who have opposing agendas—thereby keeping the focus where it belongs. From the book’s introduction:

Since the nation’s founding, many churches across America have preached consistently about the person of Jesus Christ. That history has been punctuated by several periods of preaching on various and sundry social ills. During the decades since the moral upheaval of the 1960s, we have seen an increase in that kind of preaching again. And yet, despite our preaching, as we begin the new millennium we are confronted with a society that is shamelessly attempting to shake off all remaining vestiges of decency and morality. Society has removed God from His place at the center of everything and given Him a seat on the sidelines. And we as the church have acquiesced to their agenda, and have joined the debate over symptomatic issues instead of clarifying that God is the logical and necessary starting point for all cultural debates.

The church in America today generally communicates with the culture in one of two ways. Either we preach the straight gospel without regard to the cultural and personal context, or we simply react defensively to the symptomatic cultural ills— such as homosexual behavior, abortion, racism, or pornography. Unlike Jesus, we have a difficult time using the cultural context as a relevant platform for making the God of the Bible the issue. Therefore, God comes across as largely irrelevant to the everyday life of the average American. Consequently, the culture ends up regarding us (along with the God of the Bible) as out of touch or, worse, dangerous.

The book not only analyzes culture in terms of its relationship to God, but also offers fresh new ways to think about engaging fruitfully with our culture, with multiple examples to illustrate.

Brad Bright is the president of Bright Media Foundation, and a colleague and friend of mine. Because I believe in the message of this book so strongly, I’m helping him get the word out about it. Bloggers who wish to review this book may use the form below to request an advance copy. You’ll receive an email with a PDF link within 24 hours (probably sooner).

The book will be available for general sale in mid-October. Come back here then for more information on where you can order it.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

In Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, edited by Ravi Zacharias, Danielle DuRant writes of an all-too-familiar experience for Christians (p. 285):

We want to trust that God is good and will never leave us or forsake us, yet sometimes we dare not bank our lives on this for fear of disappointment.

I recognize this in myself, in my unwillingness to follow God wherever he leads, or to pray courageous prayers, the kind that won’t come to pass unless God truly makes them come to pass. This is not the whole story of my Christian life, certainly, and I have seen God answer significant prayers. But sometimes I hold back. What if God fails to show up, after all?

But what am I protecting here? Am I guarding God from the possibility that he might fail to come through? God doesn’t need that kind of help from me. A deeper, fuller trust in God would fling itself upon the possibility of failure, knowing that God will make the catch every time.

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.

I’ve been spiritually dry lately. This morning I decided to let God’s word remind me of Jesus Christ’s position at the center of everything,  for which I turned to Ephesians 1:3-14. It begins, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. . . ” It continues by listing some of those blessings: forgiveness, sharing in God’s holiness, being adopted into the family of God, knowing the mystery of his will, experiencing the promise and presence of the Holy Spirit, and more. One phrase sums it up: “the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us.”

Read through this at the link above, and you may get the same sense I do: that Paul (the author) was fairly tripping over his words, trying to express the inexpressible. Translators have trouble telling where one sentence ends and another begins (the original Greek had no punctuation). The passage is packed with meaning. Paul uses some rather technical language to accomplish this, so some readers will prefer to read Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message instead of a more literal rendering. Even there, though, Paul’s sense of praise and glory overflows; the computer screen (if that’s where you are reading it) is fairly dripping with the deluge of Paul’s gratefulness for God’s blessing.

It is all centered in one place: six times in this passage it says “in Christ” or the equivalent, “in him.” All of this goodness we receive, we receive in Jesus Christ. Jesus had said (John 10:10), “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly,” or to the maximum.

Somehow, incomprehensibly, some people have gotten a picture that following Christ is dull, rule-bound, and restricted. Nothing could be further from the truth. My dryness of late has come from being distant from him as the source, not from following him! It’s like life without music, without trees and grass and flowers. But the closer I’m connected to him, the more alive I am!

Contemplating Christ is uplifting just because of who he is. No person in history has taught such a high standard of love and giving; and no person has so clearly lived out that standard. There is something energizing in thinking thoughts of greatness. There is more than that going on here, though. It’s not just Christ’s example, it’s his actual gift of life to us. He is not just an uplifter of life, he is the source of all true life. Fullness of life comes only in him, for he is Creator, Redeemer, the only true Son of God.

We have passages like this in God’s word to remind us of this. We grow dull (as I have) by forgetting (or rejecting) his gift of lavish love and grace, thinking that we have what it takes apart from him. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who attest to the huge, qualitative change when they have committed their lives to Christ, as if the scales fell off their eyes and they saw and felt what’s real for the first time. I experienced the same. I continue to experience it, and I can (once again) attest to the difference it makes when I draw close to Jesus Christ as my source of life.

The truth, explained by God in his word, and demonstrated in the experience of millions of Christ-followers, is that real life is in Christ alone. And what a great life it is!

Interesting article, beginning,

At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship.

[Link: Artist Builds Temple of Science | Wired Science from Wired.com]

A commenter going by “Blamm” noted pithily,

In order to compete with religion surely science needs to stop looking at the how and start answering the why. Why am I here?

And then down the page a bit there’s another comment by “Blake,” Sept 29, 12:26:42 am, that’s a masterpiece of self-parody, though unfortunately not publishable here.

Book Review

Richard Abanes takes a thorough and critical look at Eckhart Tolle’s latest book, in his 2008 Bethany House book, A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller. It’s a study primarily aimed (through most of its length) toward Christian believers, drawing on Christians’ shared trust in the Bible as a trustworthy revelation from God. As such it could well be an invaluable resource for Christians who may find Tolle attractive, like Kelly at the 2:41 point in this YouTube video. Abanes draws 80 discrete statements out of Tolle’s A New Earth and painstakingly shows how they all fall short of truth.

The first chapter differs from the rest in comparing Tolle with Tolle, rather than Tolle with Scripture, providing a point of contact with those who do not adhere to biblical authority. For example, Tolle says, “every belief is an obstacle.” Abanes asks rather sensibly whether that itself is a belief. Later he quotes Tolle,

To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad. . . . The Master responds to falsehood and truth, good news and bad news, in exactly the same way: [By merely saying,] “is that so?”

As spiritual as that may sound, Abanes shows that Tolle’s

[B]ooks and lectures are filled with judgments about what is good, bad, right, wrong, true, and false (for example, wars, exclusive religious claims, the witch hunts of Europe, materialism, sickness, addiction).

It is indeed an old deception, wrapped up in soothing spiritual language and propelled by Oprah’s powerful marketing. If you have questions about Tolle, or if you know of someone who thinks it may be a nice addition to Christianity, this short book may provide your best, most accessible set of trustworthy answers.

A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2008. 173 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$9.59.

Holopupenko has uncovered a gem! It’s John Cleese on what Holopupenko has titled, Scientism - Refuge of Atheism and Other Foolish Ideas

See it at Reasoning Repaired

There’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.

So says Daniel Pinchbeck, in a NY Times Magazine article entitled “The Final Days” by Benjamin Anastas. Pinchbeck wrote an “alternative-culture bestselle4,” 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He is part of a movement that looks to the Mayan calendar as an indicator that the world will come to an end—or some kind of major spiritual revolution—on December 21, 2012. Anastas also quotes Chet Snow, who “tracks the impending consciousness shift on his Mass Dreams Newsletter, organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site tours, and gathers [people] for conferences devoted to ancient mysteries and the paranormal.” Snow says,

The pillars of our expectations about the future in the West have started to crumble. Religion, politics, economics–none of it is working any more. So when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover in 2012 involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say, ‘Huh, maybe I need to connect with that.’

We certainly need to connect with something. The Mayan calendar is hardly likely to be it, but Pinchbeck is right about one thing: materialist philosophy isn’t it either.

I’m about to crack open the book A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. I already know Tolle has run afoul of the most basic reality of our relationship with God, which is that there is one God and we are not him. There is deadly spiritual danger in that error. Yet there’s also something below the surface there that I can appreciate. It’s his rejection of cold stone materialism; his refusal to accept that physical reality is all there is. In that much, at least Tolle is on the right track.

The Renaissance/Rock band Blackmore’s Night sings of what materialism has cost is, in “World of Stone:”

“Once a world of glittering hope
This world is not the world we knew
The only light left to shine
Is between me and you

“On our own In a World of Stone
We are not alone

“I had once believed in angels
They were everywhere I looked
A gentle hand guiding me
To give more than I took

“But I have died a thousand times
Watching all these angels fall
Their lonely eyes haunt me still
We will avenge them all

“On our own In a World of Stone
We are not alone”

To believe that secular materialists (represented by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Lewontin, Provine, and the like) is to consider our world has become one of stone. The angels have fallen, not as Lucifer fell but as snowflakes fall and die in a lake. They’re gone. Scientistic naturalism has driven out the spiritual, and for this we have died a thousand times. I think this is indeed where the roots of Western New Age religion lie. With the angels’ lonely eyes haunting us, many are willing to avenge their deaths by slaying materialism and even rationality, choosing to rely on Mayan calendars instead.

This is not a necessary war. There is a better way than Tolle’s out of a soulless universe, though I can understand his appeal to those who do not know that.

Part of the beauty of Christianity is that it offers the best of both worlds. Spirituality and rationality coexist, for there really is a God and a spiritual world, and God, the Logos (the Word, John 1:1), is also the author of rationality. There is a most interesting ambiguity in Romans 12:1: our devotion to God can be translated either as a spiritual or as a reasonable act of worship. Both meanings exist in the original Greek word, and both apply.

New Age philosophy is a search on the wrong path, fatally aimed toward considering humans equal with God; yet it is also partly based in a search for the right thing: for a sense of spirituality, of connection to the Source. The author of this spiritual yearning is God himself, who created us in his image for relationship with him. This is, in Blackmore’s Night’s words, “the world we knew,” or at least the one we deeply sense is right for us.

This post is adapted from one originally published July 4, 2007.