Thinking Christian

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.

I’m hoping it won’t be long before we can see this on video: last night’s debate between Jay Richards and Christopher HItchens on Intelligent Design. Stanford Daily Online reported on it, including this:

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.”

Earlier Richards had pointed out the obvious: “a sneer is not an argument.” He could have said it again here. (As a debater, Hitchens is definitely quick with the smug sneer of superiority.)

Hitchens’s point seems to be that belief in miracles precludes science being a contributor to one’s worldview, and vice versa. What would have to be true in order for that to be the case? First, it would mean that Isaac Newton’s and Francis Collins’s worldviews have had nothing to do with science, to say nothing of hundreds of other eminent Christian scientists. Is that not just a bit unlikely?

Second, it would have to mean that the virgin birth of Christ is so contradictory to science that no person could accept both at the same time. But this distorts the Christian position regarding miracles in general, and the virgin birth and resurrection in particular. Christians believe the universe behaves regularly, according to natural law, reflecting the rational mind of God; but that God as a personal Being interrupts this regularity from time to time, for the sake of relationship with the people He created. Interventions of the clearly miraculous sort are rare, rare enough that science can successfully discover the regularities that do exist. There is no contradiction there.

Hitchens might argue that science has proved miracles are impossible; but this is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific conclusion. Science studies regularities, that which usually happens. It does not know whether the usual always happens. If science says the usual must always happen, it is speaking outside its field. It can only study what is normal, regular, usual. How could it prove God never intervenes?

So Hitchens’s sneer is empty. We do not know how Jay Richards responded. According to the report, moderator Ben Stein got there first:

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

I wonder where he got the impression that Hitchens feels that way.