He recently debated William Lane Craig at Biola University. Here's a blog report of the debate.
Evangelical Outpost also reported:
William Lane Craig is really excellent - has written many useful apologetics books.My conclusion on the debate was that Hitchens adequately represented the ingrained doubt that we all feel regarding God's existence. I rarely, if ever, 'feel' God's existence or have religious experiences, and Hitchens voiced that he does not/cannot relate to those experiences either. In order to cope with this situation, though, he has resorted to creating what I consider to be illusory experience of hubristic liberty. Does he 'feel' any more as an atheist than he might as a deist?
Ironic, too, that the question would come down to that: the arguments are not capable of resolving the debate, and thus, 'faith in God' or 'faith in personal experience' becomes the determinate. I have chosen faith in something--Someone--that transcends myself, for not only do the logical arguments indicate the existence of God, but also, Christianity gives (among other things) life a meaningful syntax that my personal, narrow experience of life does not. Hitchens wants me to live for some thing called "society," but why should I? Hitchens wants to seek some thing called "liberty," but what right has he to say what it is or why it is valuable?
Hitchens wants to default onto an assumption of 'no God', but I can't help but think that to do so very well may be the most terrifying, unreasonable prospect possible, and a cynical delving into the depths of our own human psyches that offers little hope of re-surfacing. If one must assume--and it seems they must if they wish to make sense of life--then I will assume that there is 'something rather than nothing' for a reason beyond the perpetuation of the 'something' itself.
And in case you didn't know, Christopher Hitchens' brother Peter is a Christian - here he reviews God is Not Great.
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Your Name, your catch seems a bit merciless "... only those who have been ego deflated by hitting their bottom will ever try it and then only when there is no hope that anything else will work" for I do not see this in real life. Many good people get along just fine and yet a nagging doubt eats away at their ability to fully enjoy life. Its not as much of a slamdunk as you say - indeed Hitchens mother committed suicide I believe, that's a whammy worthy of saving graces, no? Could Mr. Hitchens pain be not a gift for his benefit, but for ours...? What about current Christian witness to the culture is so unattractive that the impression our neighbors take away is so facile, glib and indeed negative? Could it be our 'triumphalism' aka we're right you must be wrong. No one is 100% immaculate, could our sin contaminate God's love? Is the grace we attempt to share polluted by pride?
Parsifal for me captures that torment Mr. Hitchens suffers from, as a latter-day Amfortas self-absorbedly withholding forgiveness over some prior injury (which could be as simple as the imperfect satisfaction of the wealth he's accumulated by denying God!)
I think the question whether religion makes people good misses the point in a way that plays into his argument. As does the long-distance psychoanalysis.
Hitchens loves the story about someone who asked Waugh how he could be such a sinful person if he believed in God, the response apparently having been, "Imagine what I'd be like if I didn't!" He likes the story because it encapsulates what he sees as the fundamental flaw in religious thinking, ie., it's not falsifiable, just is Your Name's experience is not falsifiable and, therefore, not (sorry) science.
But for me, the core meaning of religion, the thing that actually makes it valuable to me, is exactly this: I cannot prove that religion makes people better than atheism, anymore than I can give an easy, mechanical answer to the problem of suffering. I have to let go of that.
The letting go is, I think, the point.
So, maybe, the answer to Hitchens is:
"Fine. I don't necessarily agree that religion makes people more bad than they would otherwise be, but you have demonstrated ad absurdum that it does not always make them better. Let's assume at least this for the sake of argument - that religion in no way makes people nicer, less selfish, or any other positive utilitarian function one might want to ascribe to religion. Or, at the very least, it's unprovable that it does, and very likely in some instances that it makes things worse.
So what?"
Mr. C. Hitchens' metaphysical view is a good example of the final stage of the near-terminal relavitism that has our culture by the throat. Not to be too harsh toward a man who can be both harsh toward Christianity himself and at times generous at the personal level, but most of what he says - promotes, actually in his books and articles - is irrelevant. That's right, irrelevant. He brings up the subject of God. And then he talks about many things that are not that subject as if they were. in other words, he does not know what he is talking about much of the time, and he talks a lot.
For Christians, and most especially Catholics, what matters is the objective truth, or Truth, of the matter. Jesus told us (and it wasn't a catchy jingle) "Ego sum via, veritas, et vita." "I am the way, the life, and the truth." God's private name is "I AM." That is reality. Whatever flows from that reality is a consequence, not the other way around.
We go farther than Hitchens does. If our faith is not true, we are the most pityable of creatures, not harmless dupes or a particularly silly part of the human landscape as he sometimes says. He has been getting more honest lately, and following his logic to its conclusion. Increasingly, in his view God is not good, or the idea of god is not good. He's working toward promoting the idea that God is evil, which is a real trick since good and evil loose their actual reference point in a godless metaphysic. But relativism, with its stranglehold on our modern minds, will plug the hole in the logic so that hardly anybody will notice.
Paying him the respect of taking what he says seriously is not "psychologizing at a distance." He means it. And there is no middle ground, as our relativistic culture desires. Either God exists or He does not. Either Christ was God in the form of a 1st century Palestinian Jew, or he was not. Etc. Those facts do not close the mind, they safeguard it, and open it to all that is. They are what permits us to have a society with a polite evening with a Hitchens-type laying out his worldview, while a Christian lays out his. It never happened otherwise, except as a decaying legacy of having once happened.
Glenn,
When I said "psychologizing at a distance," I wasn't speaking to your point, actually. I had in mind more the tendency to speculate about what in his personal life has left him with such a strong desire to disprove God. I wasn't suggesting we take him at anything less than his word.
In fact, I was suggesting (I think) exactly the same thing you are suggesting; the things he argues are mostly irrelevant to the truth of religion, at least as I understand it. And I don't think I've succumb to relativism by saying that God is not subject to the *type* of proof he demands, have I?
[BTW, I think this is helpful: http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2009/04/some-personal-thoughts-on-proofs-of-god-1.html#more]
Dear Paul,
Your comment is clear and well stated. I agree.
Glenn
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