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Type of bind: Hardcover
EAN num: 9781591280538
ISBN number: 1591280532
Label: Canon Press
Manufacturer: Canon Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 72
Printing Date: September 02, 2008
Publishing house: Canon Press
Sale Popularity Level: 15943
Studio: Canon Press
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The gloves come off in this electric exchange, originally hosted by Christianity Today, as leading atheist Christopher Hitchens (author of God Is Not Great) and Christian apologist Douglas Wilson (author of Letter from a Christian Citizen) go head-to-head on this divisive question. The result is entertaining and provocative—a glimpse into the ongoing debate.
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This book reproduces an insightful and spirited recent debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson over what Dostoevsky called the Eternal Questions: What is the real nature of the universe in which we find ourselves? What are the ultimate bases of reason and ethics? Are there any ultimate sanctions governing human behavior? Though Hitchens is always worth reading for his quick wit and frequently surprising arguments, unfortunately in this debate he does not come off at his best. While graciously conceding that Hitchens has clean hands, Wilson wielding a very fine knife shows that Hitchens, sad to say, doesn't have any hands to begin with.
Hitchens is of the view that the universe is the accidental consequence of swirling particles, claiming that his reason has led him to this conclusion. Wilson, in the style of C.S.Lewis, points out that if the world outside Hitchen's head is given over wholly to such irrational chemical processes, the world inside Hitchens' head can be no differently composed, and that what Hitchens refers to as "rational argument" has been "arbitrarily dubbed" so.
Similarly, if there are no ultimate, objective standards in ethics, then despite Hitchens rhetorical maneuverings, what follows is what Dostoevsky's Ivan pointed out long ago: there is no "good" or "bad for "everything's permitted." Hitchens' "fulminations" against assorted zealots are, as a result, also merely arbitrary.
To dispute the necessity of a God behind the Big Bang, Hitchens, with unusual complacency, rests his case on the principle called Ockham's Razor, the argument that it's bad logic to multiply entities. The problem here is that Ockham's Razor is at best a rule of thumb, never a guarantee of a royal road to truth in any particular case.
On the other side, the weakest part of Wilson's case, in my view, is his failure to address the idea that the necessity for ultimate sanctions does not lead to the existence of a particular God, much less the God of Christianity. His arguments in the present debate end, in fact, at a considerable distance from either conclusion, though Wilson seems unaware of this shortcoming.
Both men agree that it's possible in behavior for a person to be a righteous, ethical atheist. What is missing in their presentation here, however, is what can be found in Shakespeare's addition to the ending of the pagan story of King Lear. It will be remembered that the character of Cordelia is so ethically fine that Elizabethans would have dubbed her a "natural Christian." She is murdered, almost gratuitously, at play's end, and her distraught father cradles her broken body in his arms, a pieta whose meaning has yet to make any sense in the world of brutal men. The play's argument, I'd claim, supports Hitchens in his view that one can be a fine person without a Redeemer God yet on the scene. It also supports Wilson in his sense that ethics are not enough to make life bearable, since very often "the virtuous miscarry and the wicked prosper." If there is no Redeemer - though ways can be found to hedge on this - ultimately there is no Justice, and in Paul's words "we are the most miserable of creatures." Human life becomes mere history, filled with bad luck but lacking any meaningful, tragic dimension. How much interest one has in the need of a Redeemer rests finally on how much poignancy one senses in existence.
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After reading this, I still find myself befuddled as to how a man of Hitchens' intellectual caliber can fail to see the glaring inconsistency of his argument. Pastor Wilson winsomely and repeatedly puts the obvious question before Mr. Hitchens: what is good, and how do you know? (Okay, that's two questions) Apparently, Mr. Hitchens doesn't know - 'evolution' is the closest thing to an answer that he offers. What he does know, however, is that he is very nearly a chimpanzee, miracles are silly (spontaneous generation being excluded), and that we'd all be better off as Atheists. He just can't tell us why. Fizzing indeed. "Is Christianity Good for The World?" is a short read and is very accessible - no prerequisite for a philosophy degree before diving in. Very helpful in the way of exposing the bankruptcy of Atheistic reasoning in light of God's truth. Don't shy away from putting this in the hands of unbelieving friends and family, either - as long as you're willing to follow up with some challenging and winsome discussion. The answer to the question behind the book, by the way, is YES. Only we Christians can ask that question without ripping the rug out from under our own feet. The moment that Mr. Hitchins agreed to the validity of this debate, however, he lost it.
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When America's most influential conservative thinker (and Catholic) William F. Buckley died early this year (2/27/08) my sense of loss centered on this one thought: When Bill Buckley's "Firing Line" disappeared from television (almost a decade ago) we lost perhaps the greatest `give-and-take' (liberal/conservative debates) ever to grace our TV screens.
Buckley's record-setting program ("longest-running TV show with just one host,") treated us to the very best in debates. (How could it not, with a guest list that ranged from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Kissinger, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson, Jimmy Carter, William Kuntsler, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Louis Auchincloss, Tom Wolfe and Allen Ginsburg (and a host of other 'bright lights').
Most of Bill's shows were `political' . . . but my all-time favorite featured a former atheistic journalist (turned Catholic) Malcolm Muggeridge -- a program that, (like this book) is at the heart of the perennial subject most worth debating . . . the "existence of God."
When I mentioned this book this morning at breakfast, my wife said: "Christopher Hitchens IS an intelligent man, isn't he?" And I thought (to myself, but didn't say out loud) that, "I've heard better, historical `apologetics for atheism' than those advanced in this book!"
What I said (out loud) though, was: "Yes, he IS (smart) and - for that reason -- you'll really enjoy the `point/counterpoint' from the "Christian apologist" here, Douglas Wilson. [I'm certain Bill Buckley would have enjoyed 'hosting' this one!]
Anyway, it would take a better mind than mine to recapitulate in fewer words, Mr. Wilson (who writes with a C.S. Lewis 'economy-of-style') in his brilliant reflections on Mr. Hitchens' best arguments. May I share a couple of favorites: See if they don't `speak' to your heart and mind (and life experience):
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"Your very first point (is) that the Christian faith cannot credit itself for all that `Love your neighbor' stuff -- not to mention the Golden Rule, and that the reason for this is that such moral precepts have been self-evident to everybody throughout history who wanted to have a stable society.
"You then move on to the second point, which contains the idea that the teachings of Christianity are `incredibly immoral.' Apparently, basic morality is NOT all that self-evident. So my very first question is: Which way do you want to argue this? Do all human societies have a grasp of basic morality, or has religion `poisoned EVERYTHING'?"
"The second thing to observe in this regard is that Christians actually do not claim that the gospel has made the world better by bringing us turbo-charged ethical information. There have been ethical advances that are due to the propagation of the faith . . . but that is not `where the action is.' Christians believe - as C. S. Lewis argued in THE ABOLITION OF MAN - that non-believers do understand the basics of morality.
"Paul the apostle refers to the Gentiles, who did not have the law but who nevertheless knew by nature some of the tenets of the law (Rom. 2:14). But the world is not made better because people can understand the ways in which they are being bad . . .
"It has to be made better by `Good News' - we must receive the gift of forgiveness, and the resultant ability to live more in conformity to a standard we already knew (but were necessarily failing to meet.
"The gospel makes the world better through (that) Good News, not through guilt trips or good advice."
[And in a final point made by Douglas Wilson to Christopher Hitchens]
"You make a great deal out of your individualism and your right to be left alone: Given your atheism, what account are you able to give that would require us to respect the individual?
"How does this individualism of yours flow from the premises of atheism?
"Why should anyone in the outside world respect the details of your thought life any more than they respect the internal churnings of any other given `chemical reaction'? If there is a distinction, could you show how the premises (starting assumptions) of your atheism might produce such a distinction?
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I'm delighted that our Canadian edition (published by our largest publishing house, McClelland & Stewart) includes a delightful forward by Jonah Goldberg --- my favorite alumnus of Billy Buckley's "National Review" magazine (too young, alas, ever to have appeared on "Firing Line").
Mark Blackburn
Winnipeg Canada
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I followed the original debate at the Christianity Today website as it was occurring. Very interesting.
If I may paraphrase or sum up a point that Wilson made in his debate with Hitchens, "If there is no God and we're just a bunch of organic chemical reactions, that's all we are doing... we're just fizzing."
Counter Point 1) Two people arguing with one another DO seem to "react" to one another's points in a reflex-like fashion based on well worn ruts (or intricately tangled tendrils) of thought formed during each person's respective life times of unique experiences, readings and ponderings. One point provokes a response which provokes a counter, ad infinitum, like ping pong reflexes on display, and neither person seems to need to think very hard to keep the game going indefinitely.
Any fresh evidence marshaled in support of each point is likewise dealt with in a summary fashion, the mind being flexible enough to invent ways to question the new evidence, or invent a special rule or corollary as an exception in which to fit the new evidence, or it can stretch one's overall views just a tad in one direction to make the new evidence fit one's overall brain-mind pattern, or it can toss up a point that it finds more "fundamental" and hence more worth focusing upon and stuff the new evidence into a "less fundamental" side compartment to examine later or forget about.
So each mind is flexible enough to be able to do all the imaginative and inventive "adjustments" I mentioned above, and most minds will chose to make such minor adjustments rather than take the immense time and effort needed to switch over completely to a whole new system of mental architecture. In that sense we are all relatively conservative once we have a well worked out system with grooves worn into our mind-brains.
(For one example of the brain-mind's conservatism one may note the case of the "soft" atheist, Antony Flew, who, though he came to question his former atheism that he had developed in books for decades, still told his Christian friend, Habermas, that he had not necessarily come to believe in a personal deity, nor in an infallible holy book, nor in the Christian religion. I also read of another similar instance in Christianity Today, in an article that stated that most Evangelicals convert in their teens, and that every year past the age of twenty that a person lives and does not convert to Evangelical Christianity, that that person has an increasingly less chance of doing so later in life.)
Counter Point 2) Another difficulty is that our brain-mind functions in a three-dimensional fashion with neurons connected to neurons in all directions and likewise with thoughts connected one with another in equally deep and wide fashion, such connections being forged over each individual's unique lifetime of experiences and learning. Yet we are restricted by nature to communicating with each other via a LINEAR process that consists of a whittling down of our three-dimensional understandings into a thin stream of words. It's little wonder that people find it difficult to fully express what's in their three-dimensional brain-minds to one another, and it's little wonder that people with differing views do not often come to agree with one another during "debates."
Counter Point 3) Trying to make the other person's view appear absurd by comparing it to something absurd is not the same as proving that your view is "more rational." It's simply a rhetorical technique, like comparing the violin works of Fritz Kreisler to the mere scrapping of cat's entrails. Or like comparing marvelous books and the stories they relate to mere ink stains on train-track-flattened tree guts. But in reality I'm quite certain that one's fellow human beings (whether theistic or atheistic) when listening to such music or reading such books, are getting more out of them than the "ad absurdum" descriptions above! The question therefore is not whether atheists and theists both can have similar feelings and interests that lay in the human realm, but whether or not the everyday human realm is connected partly or wholly with some other realm that theists claim exists.
Counter Point 4) Theists think their view is "superior" because it can explain everything in the human, animal and physical realms, all the feelings, all the books, all the knowledge, all the atoms. But notice the explanation provided by theism, i.e., "God did it." God made the brain-mind, beauty, music, atoms, everything, "God did it." But some are not as impressed as others with such an explanation. They ask, isn't saying that "God did it," like saying, "It is like it Is?" And how exactly does that differ from an atheist saying, "It is like it Is?"
And why is "God" used to "explain" the stuff we already agree we "like" in our human realm? Things like sunsets, beauty, kindness, long life, health, ... Read More
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...give me your best argument. You know, the one you just know that everyone will find meaningful. You see, any endeavor to assert that life is meaningless proves that meaning exists, whether you like it or not.
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