The Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens Debate at WTS

For Numbers 31, the Midianites had committed crimes against God and God decided to exact his justice on them by the hand of Moses. Furthermore, the Jews have a history of idolotry, especially when coexisting with pagan nations. You may have a very humanistic view of morality, but God is a lover of people, and considers his glory supreme.

God is worthy of worship because he is God. His actions are not what merit him, but his character. His actions are demonstrations of his character. You do not seem to think that God's justice is good character for God. It is. The truth is that we all deserve the kind of justice that the Midianites got. The follow up is that we will all be destroyed like the Midianites for our evil deeds. This is justice. Our only hope is that God might find mercy in his heart to forgive us.

God does not forgive for free. He forgives at the price of his Son, Jesus Christ, who died a death on the cross, taking on the sins of all who trust in him, so that we may be treated as heirs of God, not as the Midianites. Jesus proved he was God, proved his love for humanity, and proved his ability to forgive sins by rising from physical death, and has proven his resurrection by showing his scarred body to hundreds of eyewitnesses. We have eyewitness accounts to this day of Jesus' resurrection by their correspondences and testimonies, including that which we call Christian scripture.

In the wake of Numbers 31, we ought all repent and receive the gift of forgiveness from God, that we may see all aspects of his great character, not just his severity in judging severely evil people. For God truely is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. His mercies are new every morning and each breath we take is yet another undeserved gift from God to sinners.

Grace to you Charles, and to all others.

Do a poll before a debate on where people stand on religion, have a debate on religion, then ask people who won. I think you will find both sides claiming victory. I would disagree that Christopher Hitchens himmed and hawed on an answer - I would be more likely to say he didn't give an answer you agreed with. Whether you agree or disagree with his message, Christopher Hitchens is obviously an intelligent person. Hitchens has said many times that morality comes from man - he is born with it. Man knew before Moses not to kill or steal because that disrupts society.

We are all born atheists - religion is taught. The definition of atheist is "No belief in a God or Gods" - Most religious people use the definition of the anti-theist who believe without a doubt their is no God.

Pastor Wilson makes the most idiotic, meaningless argument imaginable here and calls it a masterpiece. It is quite a nice rhetorical game he seems to be playing, but ultimately it is an act of misdirection. He points us to his unassailable (sarcasm) logic in the hope that we will not notice the absurdity of his premise. His discussion regards what he sees as "the failure of atheists to be atheists" and is essentially an argument based on a literal and absolute definition of the term. I am first reminded of the Dawkins Scale of religious belief, described as follows: On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there." Hitchens may well consider himself a 7, but that is fundamentally irrelevant. He then begins a metaphor about origins and outcomes comparing god to a cook and assailing materialist reductionism. He fails to consider quantum uncertainty, and he is missing the point entirely. His next paragraph amounts to nothing more than a comment on the unpopularity of a random universe in the minds of believers. Just to take stock, that is three paragraphs of rhetorical obfuscation with no meaningful content whatsoever. His argument thus far is all bun and no meat, to use a metaphor like Wilson does.
So Wilson's first three paragraph involve setting the stage for a pro-religion argument, essentially providing no meaningful insight. It is in his fourth paragraph that he goes for it, and goes off the rails. "So if the universe is what the atheist maintains it is, then this determines what sort of account we must give for the nature of everything -- and this includes the atheist's thought processes, ethical convictions, and aesthetic appreciations." He continues with another consumption based metaphor, as convoluted and meaningless as the last. He compares people to bottles of soda pop, disregarding the concept of sentience and the evolutionary basis for it. It really is pathetic. When I first read this paragraph I wondered if there was something missing from my analysis, before I realized that it was his argument that was fundamentally insufficient. If we assume that life can arise, and that sentience can arise from basic life given the proper conditions to allow for selection, then this question is moot. And if we wonder whether that there is indeed no fundamental cognitive difference between a rock and a plant, or a plant and an amoeba then the question is completely invalidated, because there is a very obvious difference, living versus non living, but in practice the average layman could detect no difference in intelligence between them. It comes down to a fundamental definition of life as either an accident or divine providence, and ultimately either is possible, but one is much more likely, because the divinity itself must have arisen at some point, even if it was before the universe as we know it, leaving open the question of the origin of the deity, which is an even more difficult leap to make than the origin of the first microorganisms. Wilson then imagines that aesthetic appreciation and other senses of the arts can only come from god, which is essentially to assume that either man is nothing more than a biological machine or man is a product of a god. Neither is entirely correct, because of sentience, what the religious call free will.
The argument really falls apart with this assertion, "And if you were to shake it really hard by means of art school, and place it in front of Michelangelo's David, or the Rose Window of Charles Cathedral, the results would not really be aesthetic appreciation, but more fizzing still." which essentially posits that the only possible difference between life or non-life is intelligence, which Wilson supposes must come from God. Most absurdly, he posits that knowledge is irrelevant, that if anything with intelligence must come from god, then anything that does not come from god cannot have intelligence. We know we have intelligence, and therefore by Wilson's logic we must be products of an intelligence, or we are equivalent to inanimate fizzing. It is almost insulting to have to consider such logic, but when I read Wilson's argument I was simply so dumbfounded that I had to go back over it, line by line, sentence by sentence, to make sure I was really reading what it seemed that I was reading. It cost me much of my faith in humanity. Just read this excerpt: "If you were to shake up one bottle of pop, and show it film footage of some genocidal atrocity, the reaction you would get is not moral outrage, but rather more fizzing. And if you were to shake it really hard by means of art school, and place it in front of Michelangelo's David, or the Rose Window of Chartres Cathedral, the results would not really be aesthetic appreciation, but more fizzing still." In other words, moral outrage and aesthetic appreciation MUST come from god. It is simply ridiculous. He effectively posits that the arrangement of chemicals that gave rise to him determine both his beliefs and his choices. This is a valid question, but not a particularly insightful one. We have seen how giving certain drugs to people can cause psychosis, the abandonment of morality or even personality. the arrangement or organic chemicals is a complicated thing, complex enough to give rise to sentience, which is itself complex enough to be unpredictable, if only because the brain may function as a quantum computer, and thus to a certain extent out cognition is subject to quantum uncertainty, which explains variation under seemingly identical conditions.
This is where his argument really begins to piss me off: "But no account of things can be tenable unless it provides us with the preconditions that make it possible for our "accounting" to represent genuine insight. Atheism fails to do this, and the failure is a spectacular one. Nor does atheism allow us to have any fixed ethical standard, or the possibility of beauty." This is absurd, in that it posits that the lack of preconditions invalidates any argument. What are the preconditions for God? And what exactly is genuine insight? The capacity to think about something in a way that it has never been considered before? To take an idea further than it has been taken in the past? Both of these can easily be explained as products of gradual evolution over millions of years. It still seems that Wilson's fundamental assertion is that there can be no sentience in a universe without a god, and this is patently absurd. All previous atheistic arguments apply, especially the one that says that if all intelligence must rise from god then how did god's intelligence arise? and if it has always been, then what kind of universe is this. How is it different from the matrix or a giant simulation run on a Matrioshka brain?
Another bad metaphor, another failed paragraph. I am losing my patience with this guy. "It does no good to appeal to the discoveries made by science and reason, for one of the things that reason has apparently brought us is atheism. Right? And not content to let sleeping dogs lie, reason also brings us the inexorable consequences of atheism, which includes the unpalatable but necessary conclusion that random neuron firings do not amount to any "truth" that corresponds to anything outside our heads. This, ironically enough, includes atheism, and so we find ourselves falling out of the tree, saw in one hand and branch in the other." Sure, it is of course true that random neuron firings (and they are NOT random, once the neurons have been formed and shaped by experience) cannot represent any truth outside of the mind. But can anything? Must any truth outside of perception come from God. Must god, therefore, be the one ultimate truth, from which all other truth is derived? Why, then, is this not reflected in the shape of the universe or the history of man? Truth had always been malleable, because it can only exist in the mind. There is nothing that says this cannot be so, and indeed nothing to contradict it. If there is immutable truth it is not knowable by man, and probably not able to be interpreted by man. Consider, for example, if religion is actually the word of god, immutable truth from the divine ultimate creator. Then man has taken that truth and used it to kill his fellows or exploit them to the greatest extent possible. It is as unfair to ask atheism to account for all creative thought as it is to ask religion to account for evil. Creative thought is a random accident, and evil is the product of man's creativity combined with his inherent, evolutionarily prescribed selfishness.
Finally Wilson takes it where it was always going. After five paragraphs of obfuscation and rhetorical wanderings intended only to confuse the reader into thinking that Wilson is insightful, he brings out the Jesus, and loses everyone who doesnt belive in his christian god. it is almost sad to have it come to this, just like it would be sad for me to use the arguments on atheistic terms to refute Wilson rather than attacking him on his own terms. Read it and weep for the fate of humanity: "Contrast this with the Christian gospel -- God the Father is the Maker of heaven and earth. He sent His Son to be born one of us; this Son died on gibbet for our sins, as the ultimate and final human sacrifice, and He rose from the dead on the third day following. Having ascended into Heaven and taken His place at the right hand of His Father, He sent His Holy Spirit into the world in order to transform it, a process that is still ongoing. Now obviously, this is a message that can be believed or disbelieved. But the reason for mentioning it here includes the important point that such a set of convictions makes it possible for us to believe that reason can be trusted, that goodness does not change with the evolutionary times, and that beauty is grounded in the very heart of God. Someone who believes these things doesn't believe that we are just fizzing."
The good news here is that he does acknowledge that this argument need not be believed to be on his side. But he then suggests that only a story with a similar level of completeness allows for consistency in reason and the idea of a static morality. The great ironic absurdity here is twofold: First, it assumes that morality has been consisten throughout history, which is patently untrue, contradicted not only by history, archaelogy and anthropology but also by the bible itself. Consider as an example the differences in morality between the old and new testaments. They are positively incompatible. Then there is beauty: Is is grounded in the heart of god, or a reflection of the qualities of self that an individual appreciates. There is a simple answer to this: aesthetic sensibilities are almost entirely subjective. Something that is stunningly beautiful to one person might be horrifingly ugly to another. How can the concept of beauty, or humanity's inherent sense of beauty, come from an immutable god and still differ so completely? And what the fuck is with all the food metaphors?
So we come finally, painfully, to Wilson's conclusion. GOD IS NOT LIKE A COOK!!!!
"You can deny that this God exists, of course, and you can throw the whole cosmos into that pan of reduction sauce. And you can keep the heat on by publishing one atheist missive after another. But what you should not be allowed to do is cook the whole thing bone dry and call the crust on the bottom an example of the numinous or transcendent. Calling it that provides us with no reason to believe it -- and numerous reasons not to."
Forget for a moment that reducing the known universe, which extends more than 46.5 billion light years in every direction, to the result of causality, is by no means a reduction of its power, beauty or mystery. Indeed, what is more beautiful: that in an ever expanding cosmos of absolutely inconceivable size, 100 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars each, a single being controls it all; or that this incredible infinite universe is infinite in more ways than one and therefore not only is everything possible but everything has happened somewhere. There are infinite universes that have no life, and infinite universes with more life than ours. But a single lifeform controlling them all... it is almost depressing. Wilson's food metaphors show that he appreciates the beauty of variation, but he fails to see that infinite variation is only possible in a universe in which there are no absolutes: no absolute god, with an abolsute sense of morality and a universal aesthetic sensibility. It is frightening to even consider that this might be the case, much less to consider that some people are uneducated enough to believe it. Pastor Wilson scares me, not because he is a moron or a liar but because he believes he is neither. He sees his observations and food metaphors as insightful. He considers his sense of beauty to be universal. The level of small mindedness exhibited in these beliefs is simply staggering, and horrifying to the atheist, who thus can see the level of delusion with which he must contend in much more concrete terms.