Kong Fights Godzilla, and The Winner Is . . .

Well, the 6th and final installment of the web debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson has now been posted on the Christianity Today website.

Contrary to my earlier predictions, this has been a surprisingly "flat" debate. Considering that there were only one or two posts per week, I would have expected a higher level of discussion, especially out of Wilson. Is this really the best he could do? With all his acolytes, disciples, and hangers-on? I feel that half of my friends could have debated Hitchens as well - in substance, if not in style.

Most tellingly, the debate never seemed to stay on topic for long, which was supposed to be, "Is Christianity Good For The World?" Instead, it devolved (I use that word on purpose) into the standard Atheist v. Christian Theist debate. Been there, done that.

I still like Wilson's thinking on a lot of issues, but this feels like a missed opportunity.

King Kong vs. Godzilla

The big boys have come out to play. Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens are conducting a web debate/exchange over the course of this month around the question, "Is Christianity Good For The World?" The first two installments show that this has the potential to be interesting, indeed. It certainly shows promise of being a juicier engagement than my own attempts on the Evolution Blog.

(I've talked about both Wilson and Hitchens in previous posts. If you want to see where, click on the labels at the bottom of this post.)

Part 1 of the debate is here, which will provide you a link to Part 2 - and, presumably, all subsequent installments. I don't know how many "rounds" there will be when all is said and done.

People Poison Everything

Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, which has been on the NY Times bestseller list for some time. Then Sam Harris wrote Letter to a Christian Nation, which has been similarly popular. Now Christopher Hitchens weighs in with God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I predict it'll spend several weeks (or more) on the bestseller list, as well. What's up with the onslaught of anti-religion books?

Here's an excerpt from Doug Wilson's blog, in which he reviews Hitchens' new book. I suspect that if you read this excerpt, you'll know just about everything you need to know about the book.

But the second response is to point out the logical problem with how Hitchens has arranged his thought experiment. Suppose his thesis was not that religion poisons everything, but rather that trousers poison everything. Since trousers are common enough, just like religion, it would not be much work at all for a person of Hitchens' abilities to assemble one horrendous story after another of one atrocity after another, and all committed by men in trousers. See, trousers poison everything.

The problem here is immediatley seen in the availability of counterexamples. We betake ourselves to look at this society, and then that one, and all the men in those societies wear togas. And, sure enough, we find that all the same atrocities are being committed in these differently-appareled cultures. Maybe trousers don't poison everything. Maybe men are a disgrace to trousers. For if trousers poisoned verything, one would think (naturally enough) that to get into a trouser-free zone would pretty much take care of the problem. But toga-men do all the same awful stuff. And then, so do loin-cloth men. Maybe togas don't poison everything either. Maybe men are a disgrace to togas.

The subtitle of this book is "How Religion Poisons Everything." And in this chapter, "Religion Kills," Hitchens points to example after example of religious people behaving badly. And I, for one, don't think he is making this stuff up. But for someone who bases an awful lot on reason, I think he needs to pay closer attention to what he is doing in the name thereof. His conclusion does not follow from the evidence being presented, not unless wet streets cause rain.

Perhaps Hitchens should take a step farther back and argue a much more plausible point, which is that "People Poison Everything." Go back to our trouser example. If trousers were the problem, then getting rid of them should get rid of the basic problem (making all due allowance for societal inertia). In the same way, if religion is the toxic waste in the system, then purging it should deal with the problem. So, then, what did almost a century of religion-free societies (Soviet Union, Red China, and so on) teach us about all this? We had quite a few trips around the sun enjoying life to its fullest, now that religion (that which poisons everything) was banished and gone. But son of a gun, the atrocities sort of picked up speed. The "poison" was purged from the system but the patient was still flat on his back on the hospital bed with his tongue hanging out.

When you look at abominable theistic societies and abominable atheistic societies, the variables are probably not the thing you want to appeal to in order to account for the constant, horrific result. We need to look for the constant. What might that be? People. People poison everything.

Douglas Wilson On: Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion," and Creation-Evolution

Douglas Wilson is, among other things, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho. Although I don't consider myself a "Wilsonite," I find this recent entry from his blog to be an excellent response to some statements in Richard Dawkins' book, "The God Delusion."

Not surprisingly, Richard Dawkins places the evolutionary process at the center of his argument.

"This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution" (p. 31, emphasis in the original).

This might be hard for scientific laymen to grasp, so I will try to provide a couple illustrations. This factory, for example, full of fantastically complex machinery and robots for the manufacturing of various ingenious devices of intricate design, is something that cannot itself be designed. For when confronted with a world full of designed things, it is not unscientific to allow that many of them were in fact designed, so long as you insist that the most intricate and complicated one, the one making all the others, happened all by itself. This Swiss watch exhibits design, to be sure, and we can allow that it was made, on purpose, in the factory. But the factory for making Swiss watches, far more complicated than any of the watches made in said factory, had to have been the result of a huge explosion in a nearby auto salvage yard. If you don't follow this argument, you probably didn't take enough science courses in high school.

If you need to hang some really heavy things from your sky hook, make sure to fasten the socket for that sky hook at least fifteen feet higher in the air than you otherwise would. The bolts work better a little bit higher like that.

Before I get some comments from scientists who think that I am not being sufficiently Respectful, let me defend myself by quoting Dawkins, quoting Thomas Jefferson.

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus" (p. 34).

I am glad that Dawkins taught me this principle, for I have long failed to comprehend any distinct notion of something that travels like a wave and arrives like a particle. Or maybe it is the other way around, traveling like a particle and arriving like a wave. See? A positively indistinct concept. I don't think it could be me.

The backdrop for many of Dawkins' worries is his idea that the United States has turned into this huge Theocracy. And, by European standards, maybe we have, but that is not saying much.

"The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least" (p. 40).

Dawkins swallows the standard propaganda about the deism of the Founders, and laments how far our fair republic has fallen.

"The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified" (p. 41).

Horrified, aye. The preachers at the time of the American Founding were the kind of men who spit on their hands before they started to preach, and taking one thing with another, they made the average Religious Right evangelical today look like the Rev. Caspar Milquetoast. At Yorktown, all George Washington's colonels (with one exception) were elders in Presbyterian churches. Horace Walpole said "cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson," referring to Witherspoon. Over half the Continental Army were Presbyterians, and the rest were Congregationalists and Baptists, fellow Calvinists all. The black robed Presbyterian preachers were called "the black regiment" because of their importance to the war effort. One of the names for the war in England was "the Presbyterian Revolt." I could go on, but Richard Dawkins seriously needs to strike up a friendship with Gary Demar and try to sneevel some free books out of him.

All that may be, but luckily it doesn't matter.

"Whether Jefferson and his colleagues were theists, deists, agnostics or atheists, they were also passionate secularists who believed that the religious opinions of a President, or lack of them, were entirely his own business" (p. 43).

Here is Jefferson's famous wall of separation, the wall that separates, as every intelligent school child knows, the right side of the brain from the left side of the brain. This wall, so important in modern secular politics, prevents us from thinking straight, for, as we all know, thinking straight would lead us into Difficulties.

I am fond of the following thought experiment. A man is running for high office, and in the course of the campaign he says this, in response to a question: "You know, my faith is very precious to me -- too precious in fact to mix with the secular duties that are connected with this office. If elected, I pledge to the American people that I will not allow my private religious convictions to affect in any way how I discharge my duties." Two years later when he is found with two hundred thousand dollars in his freezer, a mistress in the Bahamas, Jack Abramoff in his closet, and dry rot in his soul, certain penetrating questions are asked at a press conference. But the best defense is a good offense, and I would love to see Sen. Snoutworst stick to his guns. "There is nothing to apologize for in this. I openly promised the American people in the campaign that my personal relgious convictions, which are very precious to Cathy and me (not to mention Kimberly), would not be allowed to intrude into how I conducted myself in office." Secularism defined this way is not just wrong, it is incoherent.

But this is a book about atheism, and so we get back to the God-issue. Dawkins brings forth Bertrand Russell's argument concerning the burden of proof. If someone were to assert that between Earth and Mars a china teapot was orbiting the sun eliptically (p. 52), and that it was too small to be detected by our most powerful telescopes, it would be impossible to prove the theory wrong. But Russell argued that the burden of proof remains on the teapot enthusiast. And okay, I can go for that. So why is this a bad example on the God question? Why are the outer space teapot and the God who created all things not comparables? The reason they don't compare is that God does things, and He says things. If the teapot were out there and sending messages, we would know how to decode those messages. Dawkins actually acknowledges this in his discussion (in this same chapter) of the search for extraterrestial intelligence. While talking about our attempts to understand messages coming toward us, he asks, "A good approach is to turn the question around. What should we intelligently do in order to advertise our presence to extraterrestial listeners?" (p. 71).

Very good. And if someone in this cosmic teapot were sending SOS messages because the cosmic tea cozy got stuck and he could not get away in the standard teapot escape pod (as the apostle Paul would put it, I am out of my mind to talk like this), we would know how to decode his distress messages because we have the ability to distinguish information from background noise. We know what information looks like. Now, what if the universe we live in has information embedded in it throughout? What if the triune God who spoke it all into existence has left notes everywhere? What if every living cell contains a library that makes the Library of Congress look like my grandkids' coloring books collection?

Dawkins gets one thing right.

"As I shall argue in a moment, a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?" (p. 55).

"I return to the point: a universe in which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence" (p. 61).

He is quite right. A universe spoken into existence by God is a very different place than a chaotic multiverse that has just staggered onto the cosmic stage and is looking around bewildered. "What is this?" it whispers frantically. "Waiting for Godot" the prompter hisses back.

"Like nothing else, evolution really does provide anexplanation for the existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical purposes, rule them out" (p. 61).

Right. Libraries write themselves, factories build themselves, and bridges design themselves. This doesn't usually happen, to be sure, and if it weren't for evolution, it would be reasonable for us to rule such things out. In fact, I think the only person who wouldn't rule them out would be the guy in the teapot.