Hitchens - D'Souza Debate

As I posted yesterday, last night I had the chance to see Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza debate (ostensibly) the question "Is Religion the Problem?" at the University of Notre Dame. Now that I've had a day to gather my thoughts and talk with a few friends who also attended the debate, I feel prepared to give some of thoughts on what transpired. The video is supposed to be posted on YouTube soon and also on the Notre Dame Center for the Philosophy of Religion's website, and once it is I will post a link to it for anyone who might be interested.

As a preliminary word, let me comment on the whole idea of debating these sort of topics. As many others have (rightly in my opinion) pointed out, debating has more to do with the rhetorical skills of the participants rather than the truth or strength of their arguments. I wasn't expecting to have my faith shaken to its core or substantially boosted from the exchange, and I doubt many if any in the audience experienced such a feeling in either direction. What debates are valuable for, however, is providing a starting place for further discussion on important topics. The students organizing the debate stressed this point, portraying the debate as a starting point for conversations to come. Debates don't prove the truth of atheism or theism, but they can help facilitate public discussion of important issues about God, religion, and science and help bring together people from different perspectives who share a like-minded interest in a topic. With that in mind, I'll try to summarize the main points and arguments of both participants, while tossing in a bit of my own reflection and analysis along the way.

Hitchens was the first to present his opening statement. Much of his opening statement was a call for epistemic humility. He stressed in various ways the point that in light of how little we know (and how the more we know seems to only make us aware of newer realms of which we know even less) that doubt and skepticism are the only respectable and responsible options. Religion is wrong because it claims to know the answers to our questions, but religion is simply a human-made construction that reflects humanity's primitive, primate origins, a lowly background marked by fear, tribalism, and aggression. Religion was the first faltering attempt of primitive humans to answer questions about cosmology, medicine, psychology, and the need for human solidarity. However, we have now found much better answers to these problems through science and ought to set aside the trappings of religion which so strongly testify to our primitive origins. Religion, asserted Hitchens severely warps our "moral sense of proportion" by making us think that we are somehow the center of the cosmos and the pinnacle of the world. In the light of the great age of the cosmos, to think that God revealing Himself to Middle Eastern farmers three thousand years ago is the purpose of the universe is exceedingly arrogant and presumptuous.

Dinesh D'Souza followed with his statement in which he stressed he would use reason alone to show the truth of religion. He stated that his approach would be that of a presuppositional argument (by which he seemed to mean an inference to the best explanation). He then proceeded to list a number of features of the world and our experience that he claimed science (particularly evolution) could not adequately account for. I should note that D'Souza does not appear to reject the theory of evolution, but instead believes that it has certain explanatory limitations. Evolution cannot account for the origin of the cell, and no good account of how the first life arose has been offered, he claimed. The depth of human evil also seems to go far beyond what evolution calls for, which merely offers "cruelty tempered by necessity" while human evil seems to often go well beyond any sense of necessity. Altruistic acts for strangers and rationality itself were also points that D'Souza claimed could not be accounted for satisfactorily from an evolutionary perspective.

I take issue with a number of Dinesh's points and his overall approach. I was a bit disappointed that he seemed to present only traditional Christian apologist fare, but much more seriously (as was also pointed out in the question and answer portion), Dinesh's argument seems to be only about the explanatory gaps of science, not the strength of theistic explanations. This is simply nothing more than the God of the gaps arguments. Dinesh seemed to admit as much himself when he claimed that if a better account could be given he would change his mind, implying that his only attachment to a belief in God is based upon naturalistic evidence. I find this a little difficult to believe to say the least. Also, Dinesh seems to ignore an important distinction within biology, namely the distinction between evolutionary biology and origins of life biology. This is not a major point, because even within the realms of origin of life biology there is no strong case for how the first life arose on earth, but to imply that evolution should be able to answer this question is misguided. Evolution only tells the story of how life on earth developed and changed over time, not how it first came to be.

In the rebuttal portion, Hitchens claimed that Dinesh's arguments were unfalsifiable and that religion provided an "infinitely elastic airbag" that could be made to assimilate any possible data point. He also claimed that even if there is no God, our moral problems would be identical. Thus, we should not presume that we can only be good with God. At several points throughout the debate, Hitchens took umbrage at the notion that he is somehow unable to behave morally simply because he doesn't believe in God, arguing that he had no need of a cosmic parent in the sky in order to behave morally and for the benefit of others.

I take issue with this last point of Hitchens'. While I do not doubt that Christopher Hitchens is able to behave morally, I disagree that the question of God has no bearing on the issue of morality. While I applaud Hitchens for desiring to do things like give blood and promote freedom and liberty around the world, what if someone else seeks fulfillment in doing things that Hitchens' would consider to be evil? There are profound disagreements in our world about what the good is and what the good society should look like, but all Hitchens' does is draw implicitly upon Western assumptions about what the good society should look like and our distate for societies that do not look that way.

Wouldn't it be better if Iran were a secular democracy and not a theocracy, asks Hitchens. But why is a secular democracy better? To certain strands of Islam, the good society is one that operates in accordance with Islamic law and seeks to behave rightly before God. A society that allows people to choose to disobey God as an act of free consequence is terrible and invites the judgment of God on such a view. All Hitchens has shown is that those of us who share a common cultural heritage and intellectual legacy prefer things to be a certain way and are suspicious and fearful of others who do not value the same things that we do. That says nothing about whether or not they are good. Hitchens' obviously has a strong sense of morality, but seems to assume that his moral principles are self-evident. This is simply cultural arrogance unless he can give an account as to how his moral views should hold any sway over someone else. The theistic explanation at least has that in its favor. This is a huge blind-spot in much of contemporary atheism and one that is quite simply mind-staggering to me. There are many different views of what the good and the moral is in our world, but Hitchens' fails to provide any clues as to how or why these different views can be adjudicated.

In D'Souza's rebuttal, he stressed that science is not only based on verification in response to Hitchens' charge of unfalsifiability. He also claimed that divine revelation has been corroborated by science, claiming that modern cosmology seems to have vindicated the ancient Hebrew view of a creation out of nothing. He also stressed that explanations function at multiple levels. Thus, a scientific explanation is only part of the story. He used the example of making a cup of tea. There is a scientific story that can be told about why a cup of tea came to be based on the boiling of water, the chemical interaction that take places when that water hits the tea leaves, etc. But just as correctly, a story can be told about why the tea came to be that simply states "Dinesh wanted to have a cup of tea." Thus, science cannot give an exhaustive explanation of things because it cannot begin to grapple with purpose and intentionality.

It needs to be pointed out that to the best of my knowledge, the ancient Hebrews did not in fact believe in creation ex nihilo, but instead believed that God had brought order to primeval chaos. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo still vastly predates big bang cosmology so the core of Dinesh's argument in this particular case is still defensible, but I believe that he has gotten his details wrong.

The question and answer session was entertaining as both participants are gifted speakers and very funny in their own unique ways. Hitchens' jokingly talking about leaving the Anglican Church was hilarious (and made me think of Eddie Izzard's "cake or death" comedy sketch). Also, this was the only point in the debate where the two interlocutors traded atrocities, something I feared the entire debate would dissolve into given the topic. Happily, the topic seemed to have been discarded with the very first opening statement in favor of broader arguments for and against belief and religion, so there was only limited exchange about whether believers or atheists have committed worse atrocities. After dealing with the question of atrocities committed in the name of secular utopianism, Hitchens' declared that the problem is the belief that humanity can be perfected by force, whether this belief be religiously or secularly motivated. This is a telling revelation in my mind considering that the topic of the debate ostensibly was "Is religion the problem?" Based on this view, it would seem that Hitchens' ought to say "no."

Hitchens' also claimed that the question of creation ex nihilo has been answered scientifically and pointed the audience to Lawrence Krauss' presentation on a universe from nothing. Having already watched Professor Krauss' presentation several months before the debate, I happen to agree with D'Souza's retort that Krauss merely uses some verbal sleight of hand to get around the question of how something can come from nothing. Krauss' answer is basically that in a quantum universe, nothing gives rise to something, which only begs the question since it naturally only leads to why we should have a quantum universe at all (incidentally, something that Krauss seems to admit in passing in his brief article "The Free Lunch that Made our Universe").

There was also a brief exchange on the nature of evolution debating Stephen Jay Gould's famous videotape analogy about evolution, with Hitchens' speaking in favor of Gould's contention that if the story of evolution were to replayed things would look completely different while D'Souza countered with Simon Conway Morris' work on evolutionary convergence to claim that things would look strinkingly similar as they do now if evolution could be played out again. Having recently read a collection of essays edited by Conway Morris, I admit that I drawn to his views on evolutionary convergence.

In the end, it made for an entertaining evening with two engaging speakers, even though I did take significant issue with points raised by each side. While both speakers were very engaging, I can't help but thinking that these debates are a bit canned. Afterall, Hitchens and D'Souza have debated each other several times before and will do so yet again later this year. There is obviously very good money to be made on the debate circuit, but the result is that the same anecdotes get retold each debate along with the same clever quips designed to get a warm reception from the audience (as anyone who has ever viewed any of the other numerous debates by either Hitchens or D'Souza available on YouTube can attest to). While there is nothing wrong with presenting the same ideas and anecdotes to different audiences, the cynic in me wonders about the sincerity behind them sometimes. If you keep debating the same guy again and again, at what point is this just a mutual agreement to make a lot of money by engaging with another entertaining person who disagrees with you? Perhaps that's a bit too cynical, but its the same way that I feel about itinerant preachers.

With that being said, I would encourage anyone with any interest in atheist-theist debates to see either of these two speakers live if the chance arises. Again, I do not think that either one made a knock-down case for their position, but they are both very good orators and these debates do help stimulate discussion. I wouldn't be writing a blog if I didn't think matters of faith were worth talking about, so anything that helps encourage dialog along those lines has its place:-)