The third and final part (Part I / Part II) of manicstreetpreacher’s reassessment of Christopher Hitchens’ debate against William Lane Craig will examine the “emotional blackmail factor” that pervades Dr Craig’s case for the Almighty.
When Craig is not appealing to flawed logic, he appeals to common sense and inner feelings to guilt trip his audiences into accepting his arguments as this last post will demonstrate.
Argument from objective morality
After name-dropping atheist philosophers like Michael Ruse who contend that morality is just a by-product of evolution and universal norms such as the wrongness of rape and torturing children have no deeper meaning than assisting our survival, Craig argued that human morality is objective and therefore must come from God with nothing more than “the problem is that objective moral values do exist and deep down we all know it” to back it up. As he phrases it:
If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
Objective moral values do exist.
Therefore God exists.
Both of Craig’s premises are flawed, so his conclusion is invalid. Firstly, objective morals could well exist without God. They could be hardwired into our genes as an evolutionary survival mechanism. So clearly, Craig’s first premise is incorrect.
However, objective moral values de facto do not exist. Not everyone has the same moral standards. Our perception of what is right and wrong have changed over the centuries with Richard Dawkins has termed “the shifting moral Zeitgeist”. Indeed, practices in other parts of the World today which are considered the height of piety seem barbaric to Westerners. You only have to look inside the books of our religions and see what these pronouncements mandate to see that this is the case.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that the moral argument for God is just rank wishful thinking, (how this differs from all other arguments from God, I am not entirely certain). Perhaps it would be wonderful if there was a list of rules set in stone somewhere in the metaphysical universe, but I simply don’t see any evidence for it. We just have to feel our around, sometimes getting it right, sometimes making mistakes, always striving for a state of moral perfection regardless of whether that will ever be achieved in reality.
I really wish that Hitchens had raised Craig’s appalling views on the morality of the God of the Old Testament. I had been very suspicious of Craig declaring the atrocities of the Israelites’ slaughter of the Canaanites to be off-limits in debates, since it was a question of biblical inerrancy, not whether God existed. I found my answer in an appalling radio interview and then with an article on Craig’s website which I commented on a few months after the Biola debate in which Craig argued that since God sets down moral values, he can arbitrarily overrule them with the result being that murder, torture and ethical cleansing are suddenly all fine and dandy. Therefore, the Israelites were acting entirely in accordance with the will of God in exterminating the Canaanites and the Bible’s inerrancy is unaffected.
I won’t repeat my piece here; I suggest that it is read in full, but it is a stunning indictment of the theological mind which totally undermines Craig’s argument from objective morality, since he knows that murder, torture and genocide are wrong independent of God’s commands. It is also a graphic illustration of Plato’s “Euthyphro Dilemma”: if God tells you to torture a baby, it becomes morally right and indeed obligatory to torture a baby.
Resurrection of Jesus
A key component in Craig’s argument for the resurrection of Jesus is that his followers would not have believed in a dying and rising Jewish messiah, much less have died for that belief. For his second rebuttal after cross-examination, a clearly weary Hitchens invoked Tertullian’s maxim credo quia absurdum: “I believe it because it is absurd”. He recounted his research on Mother Teresa and the circumstances surrounding her thoroughly discredited post-death miracle that will see her canonised by the Vatican and will in fact contribute to the misery and suffering of millions in the Third World by promoting shamanism and devaluing modern medicine.
A fair point, but I have seen Hitchens do much better on the historical Jesus. Check out these two clips from his debate against D’Souza at Freedom Fest 2008 in Las Vegas.
On the historical Jesus and the criterion of embarrassment:
On the virgin birth and potency of the story:
Craig is basing his argument on discredited sources that are self-contradictory, written decades after the events that they purport to describe, copied and re-copied over centuries by fallible scribes with their own theological axes to grind. And as we shall see in the next section, this is not even the reason why he believes in the resurrection at all.
Argument from personal experience
In his opening speech, Hitchens quoted from two editions of Craig’s book, Reasonable Faith, where Craig argues that a person knows that Christianity is true because the “Inner Witness of the Holy Spirit” assures him that it is true. Whereas reason and evidence can be used to support this proposition they cannot be used to overthrow it. A person has enough assurances from God with regard to his existence and the consequences that will be metered out for rejecting belief in God are entirely on the shoulders of the non-believer.
Although Craig’s response to this in his first rebuttal was somewhat convoluted, I cannot see how he refuted Hitchens’ interpretation, or even amended it significantly. According to Craig, all belief in God entails is a warm fuzzy feeling inside that there has to be something more than this veil of tears and all arguments and evidence in support are wholly ancillary. Atheist theologian Robert Price summed up Craig’s stance perfectly in their 1999 debate on the resurrection:
Dr Craig then freely admits that his conviction arises from purely subjective factors. To me it sounds no different in principle from the teenage Mormon door-knocker: he tells you that the Book of Mormon was written by ancient Americans because he has a warm swelling feeling inside when he asks God if it’s true.
Craig said that Hitchens had to show that he is delusional; otherwise his belief in God through personal experience is still valid. Again, this is a prime example of Craig placing the burden of proof on his opponent. Without access to Craig’s medical records (I’ll avoid making the cheap shot that they would make for interesting reading!), this is an impossible task.
Nevertheless, people have all sorts of personal experiences that seem real to them: out of body, alien abduction, near death. Without any corroborating evidence, the sceptic is perfectly justified in writing them off as deluded, not matter how sincere they are. Indeed, virtually all of these experiences can be reproduced on subjects in the lab under control conditions.
So what sort of evidence would corroborate personal religious experience? As Victor Stenger points out in God, The Failed Hypothesis and The New Atheism, perhaps if someone returned from such an experience with some new knowledge in their heads that they could not have otherwise obtained except through the agency of an all-powerful, all-knowing supernatural being. If Craig really does have a hotline to the Big Guy in the Sky, then I don’t know why he hasn’t found a better way to spend his evenings than arguing with miserable heretics like Hitchens who are all fire-bound anyway.
Perhaps personal experience of God is something I will address in a future post, but for now I’ll direct Craig to Sam Harris’ take on the argument from meaning and purpose with his “Diamond The Size of a Refrigerator Buried in Your Back Yard” Gambit for him to realise what a risible non sequitur his reasoning is.
The last “Hussar!”
The debate moderator, Hugh Hewitt, posed the final question of the evening to Hitchens and asked why there was such a high public demand for debates on the God question at present. Hitchens’ reply was that he is part of a small group of people who want to take a stand against theocratic bullying from Islamist regimes in the Middle East who are soon to obtain nuclear weaponry, terror attacks against civilian non-combatants by Al-Qaeda, fanatical Jewish settlers stealing land from Palestinians to bring on the Messiah and fundamentalist American Christians who want junk taught in school science classes. For the first time that evening, Craig had to wait politely as the audience’s applause died down before he could retort.
Hitchens may well have wanted to debate the wrong topic that night. The New Atheism may well be a form of “village atheism”; hostile to the social effects of religion rather than appreciative of the subtle nuances of theological “scholarship”. But I’ll conclude these posts with a thought from my original piece after first watching the debate that I definitely stand by:
I could accept every one of Craig’s five arguments; you still have all your work ahead of you convincing me that the Pope, the holder of the keys of St Peter, Christ’s vicar on Earth is objectively moral to go to Africa and say, “AIDS might be bad, but condoms might be worse”. This is a sinister and immoral aspect to religion that interests me more than the mere existence of God and the truthfulness of the scriptures; one which Hitchens tackles head on, but Craig wilfully evades.
Craig may have won the battle. But the outcome of the war might not be so rosy for him.
manicstreetpreacher’s second out of three posts (Part I / Part III) reassessing Christopher Hitchens’ debate against William Lane Craig discusses the “Rubik’s Cube factor” of Craig’s continually evolving God in the face of objections to design.
As always, Craig started off the debate by presenting his bog-standard five “arguments” that make it seem rational that God exists: origins of the universe, fine-tuning of the universe, existence of objective moral values, resurrection of Jesus Christ and personal experience of God. In CraigWorld these are so amazingly irrefutable that he has used them in just about every debate for the past 15 years, despite their obvious weaknesses and being corrected ad infinitum by opponents and critics.
However, Craig will still say he has won the debate unless and until his arguments have been “torn down” and “a new set of arguments” put in their place. Has it ever occurred to Craig that his “arguments” are not worth expending the effort? After all, you can make a plausible case that the Earth is flat or that the Holocaust never happened if you limit the debate to a narrow set of facts and arguments.
Consider the case of Thomas Aikenhead, a teenage medical student who was the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh, 1697 for scorning the Holy Trinity as “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense” and “not worthy of man’s refutation”. Can’t Craig learn anything from this?
Why resort to “arguments” at all?
Atheists hardly ever raise the argument from hiddenness in a debate, but let’s face it: there is no empirical data whatsoever in support of the existence of God. The fact that debates have to be held on this question at all has to say a great deal. If God does exist, why does he choose to remain hidden? Wouldn’t it just be great if we could see God creating new planets and species in front of eyes rather than just having to makes “inferences to the best explanation”?
Anselm’s Ontological Argument declares by fiat that existence is both a necessary and great-making property and therefore a maximally great being by its very definition must exist in reality. Fine. I could engage in the same smart-Alec sophistry by declaring that evidence, proof and certainty beyond reasonable doubt in the minds of all living creatures in the universe are great making properties and therefore by definition such a being does not exist.
Before turning to Craig’s “arguments”, I have previously posted a series of highly amusing and irreverent YouTube videos refuting Craig’s arguments. Victor Stenger, American atheist physicist, presented plausible rational alternatives to Craig’s supernatural “God of the Gaps” reasoning during their 2003 debate the University of Hawaii.
Cosmological argument
Craig is being flagrantly dishonest by continuing to assert that the universe began to exist with the Big Bang singularity. Although not on this occasion, Craig has quoted Stephen Hawking as writing, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at Big Bang.” However, Hawking and his partner in physics, Roger Penrose, have recanted an earlier thesis when they said that the universe began with the Big Bang singularity. But hacks like Craig and conservative Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza mine extracts from Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and The Nature of Space and Time to make it appear that Hawking still believes that the universe began with the Big Bang singularity.
Hawking acknowledges in Brief History, “So in the end our [Hawking and Penrose] work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a Big Bang singularity.” However, the very next sentence Hawking writes, “It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account (p. 50).”
In his latest book, The New Atheism,Victor Stenger clarifies:
D’Souza has glanced at A Brief History of Time, mining quotations that seem to confirm his preconceived ideas. He quotes Hawking as saying, “There must have been a Big Bang singularity.” D’Souza has lifted it out of context and given it precisely the opposite meaning of what Hawking intended… Hawking was referring to the calculation he published with Penrose in 1970, and D’Souza cut off the quotation. This act of editorship makes it look like Hawking is confirming that the Big Bang actually happened when in fact the full quote reveals just the opposite.
Craig’s assertion “out of nothing, nothing comes” is sheer folk wisdom. We see apparently uncaused events all the time in radioactive decay. Firstly, Craig ought to have looked at the smoke detectors in the Biola gym and considered when a particular Americium atom decays inside it, what caused one to decay rather than some other one. The answer is nothing that we know. Secondly, even in a vacuum, virtual particles come into existence all the time and are measurable. Appealing to “common sense” reasoning when it is at odds with modern physics contradicts is not intellectually honest.
“Is atheism true?”
Craig responds to Hitchens’ speech by saying that he has no positive arguments to show that “atheism is true”. This is a misrepresentation of the atheist position and part of Craig’s debating trick to shift the burden of proof onto his opponent when he is the one advancing the positive claim. Atheism is a term devised by the religious to label people who do not share their views. It is the opinion that theism is untrue since there are no good reasons to believe that God exists. There is no evidence for God and saying “God did it” in order to explain away the existence of the natural world is no explanation at all. Craig is asking the impossible by demanding arguments or evidence that God does not exist.
Having loaded the burden of proof onto his opponent’s shoulders, Craig excused himself from having to provide anything like the extraordinary evidence that his extraordinary claims warrant. He said that he was arguing for the “best explanation of the data”. But even if the debate were only about inference to the best explanation, Craig has still not provided anything like the level of proof required to discharge his claims.
Craig closed his first rebuttal by saying that all the evidence has been on his side. He certainly presented reasons to believe, but that does not mean that they were any better than those for Russell’s teapot or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Subsequently, Craig showed that providing evidence against God is pointless, since far from “Christians being able to follow the evidence wherever it leads”, believers can move the characteristics of their God around like a Rubik’s Cube so that God confirms with the empirical data post hoc. Craig’s responses to Hitchens’ objections to arguments from design proved this in spades.
Teleological argument
In his first rebuttal, Craig quotes Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga and portrays Hitchens’ belief in the scientific truth of evolution by natural selection as a faith-based commitment: atheists are ideologically committed to evolution since as an alternative to God it is the only game in town. This is a gross misrepresentation. Believing in evolution is not a faith claim at all, but accepting a coherent scientific hypothesis supported by masses of evidence and one that has survived sustained assaults by creationists. Even if evolution had not been discovered, or indeed was untrue, this would still not provide one shred of evidence either for design or a designer.
After Hitchens in his opening speech rather beautifully recounted how he had the mitochondria trail of his African Homo sapiens ancestry traced with a DNA swab from his cheek by the National Geographic Genographic Project, Craig employed a ridiculous sound bite about the sheer “improbability” of evolution by natural selection. This next clip is from a different event, but it is virtually identical to what he said at Biola.
There are two objections to a priori improbability of which Craig has no doubt been informed repeatedly. Firstly, Craig’s obsession with low probability is irrelevant since improbable events happen every day. If you crunch the numbers in relation to your own existence (i.e. the probability that a particular sperm united with a particular egg multiplied by the probability that your parents met, repeating the calculation back until the beginning of time), invariably you will get a fantastically low probability.
Secondly, what is the probability of the supernatural alternative? What’s the probability that the universe is the product of a divine design? What’s the probability that the laws of nature are violated? It could be even lower. And what empirical data do we have to make the calculation at all? I have never heard an apologist answer these questions and Craig disappointed me yet again at Biola.
Then Craig moved onto Hitchens’ “98,000 Year Wait” Gambit claiming that God’s timing in bringing the Christian revelation to the largest number of people possible was perfect since only 2 percent of humans who have ever lived were born before the year 1AD. The claim sounded highly dubious. Sure enough, the report by the Population Reference Bureau to which Craig referred (download PDF) actually shows that at least 47 billion out of the estimated 106 billion people that have ever lived were born before 1AD. That’s about 43 percent, not 2 percent. Craig may well have based his argument on this article by D’Souza:
I’m indebted to Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. An adept numbers guy, Kreps notes that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.
“So in a sense,” Kreps notes, “God’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If He’d come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world’s population, so even though 98 percent of humanity’s timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption.”
Kreps/ D’Souza/ Craig either misread the chart thinking the number of 1,137,789,769 at “Births Between Benchmarks” for 8000BC represented the people born before 1AD or just divided 106 billion by 47 billion and thought the 2.25 meant 2.25 percent. I just wonder how Craig’s God will be reinvented in the light of this correction.
Argument from fine tuning
This idea that the universe is fine-tuned for human life is an utter distortion of physics by apologists who have leaped on part of a scientific concept as supposed evidence for their God.
One look at the universe shows that it is anything but congenial for our kind of life. The Earth is the one speck of dust that we know is capable of supporting life in a vast abyss of virtual nothingness. Our observations of the nearest solar systems and planets do not bode well for the prospect of having intelligent carbon-based neighbours. Is that a universe that is friendly towards life?
The planetary version of the Anthropic Fine Tuning Principle makes even less sense. Theists are basically saying, “Look how hostile the solar system is life. If it wasn’t for the gravity of Jupiter sucking up all the space debris, we’d have a cataclysm of the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs every five minutes. God must have placed Jupiter in the path of the asteroids when he was finally bothered to create beings who could worship him!” What nonsense!
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle is like Darwinism. It is an alternative to the design explanation, not a feature of it. An all-powerful God would be capable of designing life to exist irrespective of the heat, cold, sunlight and asteroid conditions. Indeed, he could design us to survive in a hard vacuum!
However, the inhabitants of CraigWorld see the vast emptiness of space and the sheer improbability of life and say, “Oh, it points to a designer God who created the universe with humans in mind!” But theologians keep their children fed by constantly reinventing their God to conform to the empirical data.
Suppose we reverse the data and imagine a Star Trek-like universe where intelligent life is overwhelmingly probable and our extra-terrestrial neighbours visit us regularly (and not just long enough for a single frame blurry photo to be taken by someone driving a potato truck in Iowa). The theologians would still say, “Oh, it points to a designer God who created the universe with humans in mind!” The words, “cake”, “eat” and “have” spring to mind.
Hitchens argues that the failed galaxies and certain destruction of the Earth by the explosion of its own sun do not imply a benevolent designer. Craig’s reply is that this does not disprove that they were designed, since manmade objects such as cars and houses are not built to last forever. True, but this was never part of Hitchens’ argument. However, you would be hard pressed to argue that this was all the result of an all-wise and all-loving designer who cared for his creations.
Finally, Craig says that this objection has no purchase on Christian theism, since for Christians; the end of life on Earth is the beginning of eternal life. This is a ludicrous assertion that has no more substance than a child’s fairytale. Craig offers no evidence for a soul separate from the physical body or the prospect of life after death, aside from ancient scriptures, which of course predicted the end would come 2,000 years ago (Matthew 16).
We are still waiting. Perhaps it’s time to give up and move on, Doctor? No, evidence is an occasional convenience in CraigWorld. What matters is good ol’ fashioned faith, as my third and final post tomorrow will demonstrate to degree of probability beyond mere inference to the best explanation.
With his 100th post 😮 manicstreetpreacher begins his reassessment of a notorious debate as he tries to figure out where his hero went wrong.
Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child.
So went the verdict of the web’s most fawning atheist Craigophile, Lukeprog, over at Common Sense Atheism a year ago today in respect of Christopher Hitchens’ debate against Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, at Biola University on the motion “Does God Exist?”.
Luke subsequently commented that his piece was linked all over the web. Craig himself quoted it in his post-debate newsletter to his flock. Lee Strobel quoted it in his foreword to Craig’s latest apologetic, On Guard. I linked to it in my original comment piece back in June last year when the Biola DVD hit the torrents sites. I’m certainly not giving Luke the satisfaction of linking to it again here.
I have mixed feeling about my original piece. After the damning verdict against Hitchens on the blogs was clearly exaggerated, I wanted to stick up for the guy. At the same time, my blood was very much up that he had let Craig get away with so much and smugly declare that his five pathetic “arguments” for God’s existence were unassailable and that his opponent had provided no evidence or argument that God did not exist, that it turned into an ad hominem rant against Craig.
I originally titled it “We should all feel very sorry for this man”, which irritatingly still appears when the post is automatically generated by WordPress as a “possibly related” post. I even made some very unkind remarks about Craig’s spindly hands that since he is obviously close to punching his last ticket, he is dreaming of eternal life next to the Father’s right hand more than usual but will be sorely disappointed. “What a great analysis,” I thought when I hit “Publish”. Until one of the post’s first commenters pointed out that Craig suffers from a neuromuscular disorder that affects the appearance and movement of his hands. Damn. It has been my most reviewed and re-edited post.
So one year after the actual debate, I have taken a step back and watched the tape again with the benefit of having seen and heard a lot more lectures and debates by Craig. The remainder of this post and my second and third posts will present what I now think.
Hitchens and Craig meet at the Christian Book Expo
The full audio of the discussion can be downloaded here; the full tape video is uploaded to YouTube below.
Hitchens dominated the discussion and received most of the airtime and audience questions. However, in his closing remarks, Craig baited him by saying that his arguments amounted to “I don’t like it”, as opposed to “I don’t believe it’s true” and condescendingly asked him to engage more with him and his cohorts’ wonderful arguments in their upcoming debate at Biola. In an Apologia podcast immediately afterwards, Craig sounded incredibly pleased with himself, saying that Hitchens did not have the “intellectual capacity” to answer his arguments. The clip with Craig and Hitchens interviewed can be listened to here. Following the encounter, the blogs predicted a beat down for Hitchens at Craig’s hands, including former student of Craig and evangelical preacher turned atheist author and blogger, John W Loftus.
Letters from Biola
I’ll come right out and say that Hitchens lost the debate. No two ways about it. While he didn’t come off as badly as Lukeprog’s infamous sound bite implied, he simply didn’t prepare enough in advance to answer Craig’s arguments. Hitchens is more concerned with the social effects of religion. Craig wanted to argue over its truth and after all, that was the debate’s motion. Craig boasts a great delivery at the lectern. He compresses his points very well and splits his arguments up piecemeal. Hitchens sears, flows and mixes it all up into one. He also has a habit of making “throat-clearing” precursors before answering points.
Even so, I had severely underestimated Craig. A very few others aside, I had only seen his debates against Bart Ehrman and Victor Stenger which were the two occasions when he had been convincingly beaten. Having now seen and heard many more of his debates, I can see that Craig does not debate his opponents has such, but executes premeditated hit-jobs on them. Craig makes a point of not debating anyone without a doctorate. He made an exception with Hitchens, who has been a visiting professor at several universities, but as far as I know does not hold an actual PhD and during the debate, Craig referred to him as “Mister” rather than “Doctor” or “Professor”. Was this an attempt on Craig’s part to discredit the leading debater of the Four Horsemen? Very possibly.
Craig employed every single one of his dirty tricks at Biola: scientific distortion, quote-mining of authorities, dropping in as many points as possible, patronising and intimidating erudition, demagogically pandering to the audience… the lot. It can take ten times as long to answer a question than to ask it. Craig fires out arguments in quick succession and then chides his opponent for failing to answer all of this arguments and objections. He also presented straw man versions of Hitchens’ own arguments, which took up a great deal of Hitchens’ time in his rebuttals, only for Craig of course go on and then say that Hitchens had not properly refuted his original arguments!
Craig also constantly appeals to authorities. During the Hitchens debate he quoted external sources no fewer than 19 times! However, he is extremely selective in the way that he uses quotes. In their debates against Craig on the resurrection, Bart Ehrman and Bishop John Shelby Spong exposed Craig’s use of authorities on New Testament scholarship who in reality are deeply opposed.
Richard Dawkins was quite right to refuse publically a debate against Craig on the grounds that the man is simply a “professional debater” rather than a proper academic worth taking seriously. Hitchens was too respectful and had clearly been taken in by the Craig hype, as his slightly nervous demeanour at the pre-debate press conference showed.
So with the dust well and truly settled, let’s take a look at Craig’s arguments now he is unable to hide behind his debating tricks. My next post tomorrow will begin the deconstruction of Craig’s arguments and tactics piece by piece.
manicstreetpreacher witnesses first-hand a rhetorical massacre of Vatican hench(wo)men by the cream of British intellectualism.
On Monday, 19 October 2009 I attended a debate at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, London featuring “New Atheist” and author of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens and actor, writer and broadcaster, Stephen Fry, to argue against the motion “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world” with Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Conservative MP, Ann Widdecombe proposing.
The debate was filmed by BBC TV cameras and the debate moderator, Zeinab Badawi, told us that it would be broadcast to 70 million people throughout the world on 7 and 8 November 2009. The full video of the debate can be viewed below:
Each of the four speakers were allowed 15 minutes for an opening statement, then there was about 30 minutes of the audience’s questions and comments and then the panel were given a final five minutes to sum up. The whole event lasted a shade under two hours from 7:00 – 9:00pm. The only disappointment is that Hitchens wasn’t signing books afterwards, but apart from that it was very well put together by the organisers, Intelligence Squared.
Exactly as I predicted before the event, this was an utterly one-sided affair. Hitch and Fry wiped the floor with their papist opponents. It was an embarrassment for the parties of God. The two men had everything on their side. They had the arguments, they had the historical facts, they had the present day facts, they had the rhetoric, they had the wit and most importantly they had the audience, although it has to be said that most of them were dead against the motion from the start.
Blow-by-blow: Archbishop John Onaiyekan
Archbishop John Onaiyekan opened the motion for the proposition. He seemed an amiable enough fellow; I’m sure you’d like to have him round for dinner. Unfortunately he was encumbered with a thick Nigerian accent, which made it difficult to understand what he was saying. Not that it would have made too much difference. From what I could pick up, his opening statement was a wishy-washy apologia that cited few factual examples and even less ideology.
The Archbishop said that from his Catholic upbringing to the present day as a 65 year old adult, he had no regrets and devoutly believed in the motion, otherwise he would not be a member of the Catholic Church in the first place. The Church has stood the test of time over the last two thousand years ranging from the good ordinary folk of the world to the leaders of the world. He cited the 2008 papal encyclical, Caritas In Veritate, “Charity in Truth”, as a good example of what the Church stood for.
Noises were made about the Church’s syllabus of errors, but the Archbishop stressed the need to keep perspective and be careful when judging others. After all, the late pontiff, John Paul II apologised for many of the Church’s “misjudgements” throughout history.
The Archbishop argued that true good of the Catholic Church can be attested by its 1.2 billion members and we really ought to go and speak to some of them to realise that the world needs more people linking arms and striving for a future of justice. The Archbishop also stated that the Church has a hand in setting up many schools and hospitals and contrary to the public perception of its stance on condom use, had worked closely with the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS.
It was a well-meaning and consolatory opening. The Archbishop finished with plenty of his allotted time to spare and asked with a dash of irony whether there now could be anyone in the audience who didn’t think that the Catholic Church was a force for good. Bless him, he must have hoped that his two opponents would be willing to search for common ground.
What planet has he been living on?
The Hitch
OK, let’s face it. This is why the majority of the audience paid their admissions fee. To witness arguably the world’s most outspoken atheist and opponent of religion take aim at the easiest target he could have wished for. We were not disappointed.
After the usual warm-up quips about the moderator admiring his shirt, Hitch went at the Holy See like a rabid dog.
WHAM! The statement delivered by Pope John Paul II’s spokesmen on 12 March 2000 apologising for everything from the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the oppression of women (who after all comprise half the human race), to the forced conversion of the indigenous peoples of South America by theConquistadors.
BLAM! The 94 public recognitions of the Church’s crimes against humanity from apologising for the African slave trade in 1995 to the admission in 1992 that Galileo was actually right when he said that the sun was the centre of our solar system and the earth and the other planets were in orbit around it.
KA-ZAAM!!! Hitchens’ demanded that apologies were long overdue for the crimes of the Croatian Utashe lead by Ante Pavelić in the Second World War which received the full blessing of the clergy, to the rape and torture and cover-up of children in Catholic schools and care homes from “Ireland to Australia”, to the hideous preaching of Augustine’s doctrine of limbo which had countless parents in agony over the destination of the souls of their un-baptised children.
BIFF! There were a few more sins for the Holy See to atone for: the 1933 Reich Concordat with Nazi Germany which dissolved the Catholic Centre Party and removed all opposition to the rise of Hitler while ensuring that the Church maintained control of state education. Come to think of it, wasn’t the first treaty that Mussolini put his name to the 1929 Lateran Treaty with the Vatican. Wasn’t Jozef Tiso, the despot who governed Slovakia an ordained priest? Wasn’t every other fascist dictator from Franco to Salazar raised as a Catholic with the public blessing of St Peter’s Basilica? Wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s birthday celebrated from the pulpits every year right up until his death?
NO MORE, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!!!!
Well alright, then perhaps a little bit more. This is getting kinda fun.
THWACK!!! Hitch declared that none of this could be laughed off with gestures to the charitable. After all, didn’t Pope Ratzinger qualify the apology to the South American Indians by saying while on a visit to Brazil in 2007 that they were “silently longing” for the arrival of Christianity? The sex abuse scandal culminating in the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, Massachusetts, only for the same Cardinal to show up at the 2005 conclave to elect the new pontiff doesn’t exactly enhance the Vatican’s claim to moral superiority either. Neither does the doctrine of anti-Semitism for the Jews’ complicity for the death of Christ preached until 1964, nearly 20 years after the judgment of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
POW!!! Hitch then proceeded to tear the moral relativism that has engulfed the Church in recent years (and would certainly engulf the arguments of its apologists this night) a new one. He stated that the rape and torture of children is something that cannot be relativised. It cannot be shrugged off as something that would not happen if “queers had not been allowed into the Church.” If any “normal” person were accused of child rape, they would want to die. If they were found guilty, they would commit suicide.
ZAP!!! More suggested topics to apologise for? How about the re-inauguration of Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, who effectively said, “Genocide? No. Deicide? Yes!”? Ratzinger invited Williamson back into the fold because Church unity was more important than moral integrity. And how about the genocide in Rwanda, the most Catholic country in Africa where priests and nuns were guilty of inciting the massacres and indeed, many are now standing trial for taking part in it themselves. No proper apology has ever been issued.
Hitch then stood up for his friend, Stephen Fry, who is “not like other girls” and cannot be a member of the Church for being a “fag”. The Church’s condescending stance to “hate the sin, love the sinner” means that a substantial portion of the world’s population is excluded from the sacraments.
Hitch ended by saying that he did not wish harm on anybody, but he looked forward to the death of Ratzinger for one reason and one reason only. In the intervening weeks and months between one pope dying and another being elected by the College of Cardinals, there is a period when no one on earth claims to be infallible. Our species must be rid of its faith the certainty from above if it is to progress.
The crowd loved every minute of it. Hitch’s address was punctuated by applause and cheers several times. The biggest cheer came when he faced the Archbishop and asked him for a public apology for the Church’s policy of delivering false information about the effectiveness of condom use, effectively saying that “AIDS is bad, but condoms are worse”.
In case you couldn’t tell, Hitchens is a personal hero of mine. I’m well on the way to having read all of his books. I’ve seen him lecture and debate as many times as I’ve been able to find on YouTube. I’ve referenced him more times than I care to remember on this blog and in my appearances on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? and I have come in for some stick from commenters and listeners for being a mouthpiece for the Four Horsemen in general and Hitchens in particular. This was the first time that I have seen him speak live and it was worth 10 times the admission price.
It was orgasmic!
Widdecombe
The Conservative MP and Catholic convert was announced to have left the Church of England in 1992 when it decided to ordain women priests. In answer to a question from the audience, she explained that a woman can be an MP because it is a profession, but there is no theological basis for a woman to be a priest because they cannot lead the confession before Christ. Apparently a woman can no more stand in for JC than a man for the Virgin Mary. Right.
Out of the two papists, it has to be said that Widdecombe put up by far the better fight. She raised rapturous applause from the Catholic supporters in the audience (all five of them) by starting off demanding that Hitchens give an apology for the caricature he had presented of the Church’s history, saying that members of the Waffen SS had to renounce their Christianity before entering the organisation, and Ratzinger made Bishop Richard Williamson renounce his views on the Holocaust before once again granting him the sacraments. She also tried to deflect his remarks saying that he had to delve into history and go back to the Crusades and the Inquisition for the core of his arguments.
I was in dire need of a sick bucket at one point when Widdecombe indulged in the worst kind of relativism in defending the Church’s stance on slavery since it was simply in line with the opinions of the rest of the world! Hitchens later pointed out that if slavery had to be considered in context, what could be more relative than that? What happened; did God change his mind?
As if slavery wasn’t bad enough, Widdecombe went on to say that it has only been in recent years that the courts and the Samaritans have tackled the problem of child sex abuse and there has been a Sex Offenders Register.
Special pleading and calls for clemency do not convincing arguments make, Miss Widdecombe.
The worst offence Widdecombe committed was recommending the work of historian Michael Burleigh who, along with Martin Gilbert, has praised the efforts of the wartime pope, Pius XII, in rescuing many thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by giving them refuge in Castel Gandolfo. I wonder how many people realised that in fact Burleigh re-prints a bogus statement purporting to be from Albert Einstein praising the Church’s response to Hitler in his 2006 book Sacred Causes, the questionable authenticity of which Hitchens debunks in God Is Not Great.
While Hitch didn’t nail her for that point in his closing remarks, he did stand by his views on the Church preaching the doctrine of deicide against the Jewish people as likely to have provided a well of anti-Semitism throughout Europe which facilitated the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
It wasn’t all bad, however. Widdecombe at least pointed out that the Church does much in the way of charitable giving and as a politician, she relied on them as much local government.
The address finished off with a call for the Church’s offer of hope and salvation, which the two nasty heretics at the other side of the table simply could not offer. Hitch’s retort in the closing section was to agree whole heartedly that absolution was not forthcoming from him and Fry, but Catholics still had to live with their conscience and good luck to them.
Fry
As good as Hitchens was, the revelation of the evening was Stephen Fry. Here was a man who I previously did not think capable of saying boo to a goose coming out (if you’ll excuse the pun) in full force against the forces of theocratic sexual repression.
Fry started off quoting Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest, saying that speaking one’s mind was quite often not just a moral duty, but a pleasure! This was a subject he felt strongly about, not because he objected to people being religious, but because he felt passionately about the Enlightenment, which the Church has never tired of attacking. Straightaway, Fry sarcastically rubbished Widdecombe’s dismissal of history, saying that history “quivers down all of us”.
Fry then went on to attack the appalling doctrine of purgatory and the hideous idea that a soul needs to be prayed for by us mortals here on earth in order to “take the first left when getting on the plane and getting a first class seat to heaven.” He lambasted the tradition of people giving money to ensure the safe delivery of the soul and questioned why it should be a privilege that only men could enjoy.
The next target was the Church’s exploitation of poor people, citing Thomas More who burned people at the stake for reading English translations of the Bible during the Reformation yet was made the patron saint of politicians by Pope John Paul II! Then there was the disgraceful joint statement on contraception with Saudi Arabia (!) in 2003 that began, “On behalf of the revealed religions of the world…”
However, the real meat came with Fry’s attacks on the Church’s stance on homosexuality. As a gay man, Fry could not possibly be a member of an institution that thought him evil. On the contrary, Fry announced that he was a man who was full of love and certainly had no need of the pope’s permission to tell him to practise it. Fry compared sex to food. It’s jolly and it’s fun. But frankly, the Catholic Church is anorexic.
Fry has made a series of TV documentaries about HIV in Africa, HIV and Me, and attacked the Church’s stance on preaching misinformation about contraception. “Yes, abstinence and being faithful help prevent the spread of AIDS, BUT SO DO CONDOMS!!!” It was not the last time the mild-mannered British comic would raise his voice.
This wonderful opening speech was topped off by speculation as to what Jesus would think. Fry is clearly one of those atheists who at least think that Christ was a great moral teacher (unlike Hitchens who questions both the man’s existence as well as his morality), and asked what the Nazarene would think of the opulence of St Peters and the male-dominated hierarchy. Of course he would be horrified and would be the last person to become a member of his own church!
In his closing statement, Fry answered Widdecombe’s protests that he just had to bring up condoms and sexuality was rather like a criminal in the dock saying to the judge, “Do you have to bring up that burglary?”! The second time he raised his voice was in reply again to Widdecombe’s relativist defence of the Church not condemning slavery because it was a socially acceptable normal with, “WELL, WHAT ARE YOU FOR?!” Magic.
Democracy in action
After the main speeches, the debate moved to comments and questions from the house. The atheists were in full force in both numbers and words. The moderator eventually had to ask for Catholic supporters to ask questions to balance things out!
Several gay men and women took the mikes and made their feelings known on the Church’s interference with what they do behind their bedroom doors. One man asked the Archbishop what current policy of the Church he was most ashamed of!
Hitchens answered supporters’ objections to the Church’s charitable work and fundraising with his stock reply that Hamas do much of the same in Gaza, but is anyone going to say a word in defence of them for that reason? He also showed his feminist colours by attacking the Ten Commandments as suppressing women and that the one proven way of bringing a society off its knees was to bring about the emancipation and the empowerment of women as opposed to having them as field hands, pack horses and baby producers.
Hitch also quite happily admitted to being sexually obsessed after Widdecombe accused Fry in her closing remarks of saying the evening’s only piece of “unpleasantness” by mocking the Archbishop’s vow of celibacy. Hitch’s retort to this piece of prudishness was that from the day he first discovered that his God-given male member would give him no peace, he decided to give it no rest in return. He also pronounced that homosexuality was not just a form of sex, it was a form of love. Stephen Fry was a good friend of his and he would allow him to baby-sit his children any day of the week. If, on the other hand, a clergyman showed up to look after his children, he would first call a taxi and then call the police!
The audience polls before and after the debate said it all:
Before the debate:
For the motion: 678
Against: 1102
Don’t know: 346
After the debate:
For: 268
Against: 1876
Don’t know: 34
Therefore, the number of people in the audience who opposed the motion increased by 774.
Ouch!
Andrew M Brown, on his Daily Telegraphblog, summed up the problem for the parties of God rather well:
The problem (from the Catholic point of view) was that the speakers arguing for the Church as a force for good were hopelessly outclassed by two hugely popular, professional performers. The archbishop had obviously decided that it would work best if he stuck to facts and figures and presented the Church as a sort of vast charitable or “social welfare” organisation. He emphasised how many Catholics there were in the world, and that even included “heads of state”, he said, as if that was a clincher. But he said virtually nothing of a religious or spiritual nature as far as I could tell, and non-Catholics would have been none the wiser about what you might call the transcendent aspects of the Church. Then later when challenged he became painfully hesitant. In the end he mumbled and spluttered and retreated into embarrassing excuses and evasions. He repeatedly got Ann Widdecombe’s name wrong. The hostility of both the audience and his opponents seemed to have discomfited him…
Even if you didn’t agree with him you’d have to concede Hitchens especially was spectacular and hyper-articulate… Hitchens drank bottled water mostly, and plenty of it, though from time to time when he was sitting down he raised a glass of amber fluid from out of sight, down on the floor somewhere, and took a slug from that. I don’t know why he kept a drink under the table like that, perhaps because the debate was filmed for broadcast. He sweated profusely and dabbed his shiny forehead, eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. But his diction was clear and he was in control, like a revivalist tent preacher, building the volume to a crescendo at the end, to applause and roars from the audience.
Amen to that, brother.
In conclusion – more and more are wearing their scarlet letter with pride
Aside from the superb showing by Stephen Fry and the utter annihilation of the apologists at the hands of the heretics, the evening was notable for one other reason: the number of people willing to announce their atheist colours with pride and make their feelings known about what they really feel about the most oppressive, hypocritical institution that our mammalian primate species has ever concocted.
The books by the “New Atheists”: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and of course, Christopher Hitchens have instilled the non-believers around the world with the motivation and the confidence to speak out. This is no mere flash in the pan. As Winston Churchill had it, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Sorry to all the bishops, priests, nuns and mullahs, but we are not going away in a hurry. All we need now is the confidence not to pick on such a soft target next time and debate whether Islam is a force for good in the world…
manicstreetpreacher 