I wholly enjoyed the debate this last Saturday between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens on the topic: Does God Exist? I’ve been anxiously awaiting this for some time as I’m quite a fan or Dr. Craig and am very familiar with Mr. Hitchens.
Craig is a smart, articulate and careful thinker who is very, very experienced and talented regarding public debates. The combination of content and manner make him, likely, the strongest public debater in the Christian community in regarding the existence of God, the resurrection and other topics.
Hitchens is also a sharp and articulate speaker with a masterful grasp of the use of rhetoric which makes him especially potent and effective in public debates. (While the charge of ‘rhetorician’ can be a negative, I mean it here in the positive — that Hitchens is a very effective speaker.) He’s flashy, engaging, funny, and often abrasive.
I didn’t doubt Craig’s content, but I was very interested to see 1) How he would present his case and 2) How he would deal with Hitchens’ often overwhelming personality. In this area, I wasn’t challenged a whole lot. On the former Craig presented a very full, but familiar (to me) case for Christian theism. On the later, he really didn’t have much to do.
Hitchens, who is (charitably) often very rude in debates (interrupting, oft insulting, and appealing more to audience sentiments and humor than engaging the arguments) was in large measure a gentleman. He didn’t interrupt, and he didn’t carry charades to any large degree, though he did tell a few jokes that I thought were very funny. (He’s a really gifted writer. I’ve enjoyed the writings of his I’ve read that pertain to areas other than religion, where I think he’s so obsessively angry that he loses the magic that makes him great.)
That night, he was calm and reasonable… and not much else. Without rhetorical posturing (I do mean this one in a negative) he was literally left with nothing to stand on. This we saw in his rebuttals, especially in his cross-examinations by Craig and in his ceding of his closing comments.
(Some of this is from memory. Hopefully when I get the audio I can pick up what escapes me now, but as I remember it…)
Craig presented five lines of arguments for theism.
1. The Cosmological Argument: simply “The big bang needs a big banger.”Thanks, Greg Koukl
2. The Teleological Argument: The fine-tuning of the universe argument.
3. The Moral Argument: Simply, for morals to be grounded (and thus be accounted for) there needs to be a giver of that moral law.
4. The Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus
5. Argument for Personal Experience of God / Proper Basic Beliefs
Here we saw Hitchens utterly fail in responding to these challenges.
1. The Cosmological Argument. Hitchens’ response to the cosmological argument was three-fold. One: Christian cosmology has been riddled with errors over hundreds of years and Two: we do not know very much about the universe. Three: Who made the designer?
Notice here that neither of these objections challenge Craig’s presentation or lines of reasoning. Even if you grant both of them, Craig’s argument still holds. Look at the basic form of the cosmological argument.
- Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
- The universe began to exist.
- the universe has a cause.
- (further) That cause must be a free-acting, personal agent with limitless power, or God.
Add Hitchens’ challenges and see if they follow what follows:
- Christians have made mistakes in cosmology therefore the universe does not have a cause? Fail.
- We do not know a lot, therefore the universe has no cause? Fail.
(Notice too that in that last objection Hitchens is doing exactly what many Christians either do, or are accused of doing: Appealing to a ‘God of the gaps,’ or in his case, a ‘Science of the gaps.’ “We can’t explain that now, but maybe later!” Also note that Craig cited numerous secular cosmologists in line with modern day cosmological science, not ‘Christians.’)
Third he asks, “Who made God?” This demonstrates that Hitchens does not understand the argument. The first premise clearly stats that what begins to exist has a cause, not that everything has a cause. Christianity teaches that God is the uncaused cause, the first mover. Sure, he can challenge that, but simply asking “Who made God?” is not a refutation, and it demonstrates his lack of comprehension of the argument.
2. The Teleological Argument. Hitchens does not address Craig’s argument. Hitchens attempts to challenge the design argument, not the teleological argument that Craig presented. In any case, let’s look at that.
He cites the rate of extinction over the age of the planet, and that universe is slowly expanding out into a lifeless mass of emptiness as evidence that the universe is not designed. Note here that he doesn’t address Craig’s argument. Again, we can grant his points, in this case facts, yet they fail to prove his point. We no longer see Ford Pintos being produced, and we see older ones being worn down until they cease to function (for Ford’s that might be pretty quick!) yet clearly the Pinto is designed. Fail.
3. The Moral Argument. Here Hitchens again completely misunderstands the argument. This is quite common, Hitchens’ type of mistake, but one would assume a man publicly debating the issue would have done some basic homework. The man force of the moral argument is the ‘grounding issue.’ That is, there must be a giver of a moral law for there to be a moral law. The debate is not whether or not a non-theist can be moral. Christians especially should understand that non-Christians can be moral… often times more moral than Christians. The point is that non-theists cannot account for the existence of morality. Of course they can perceive existing morality, but they cannot give is a foundation to stand on. Hitchens failed to grasp this.
I don’t recall any serious challenged to either point 4 or 5. (Though point 5 was not pushed as were the others, though Craig said Hitchens needs to demonstrate why Craig cannot trust in his personal experience (especially light of solid evidence as seen in 1-4). Either he needs to show why he is either a liar, madman or mistaken; he did none.
Hitchens spent a large part of his time railing against abstract ‘religion’ not the existence of God, the debate’s topic. What Craig was right to point out is that those, like Hitchens’ use of the ‘problem of evil’ are secondary issues. The behavior of religious adherents says nothing about the accuracy of their theology (Hey, it’s logically possible that Allah wants us all to fly planes into buildings. Because some Muslims (radical or not) follow suit doesn’t prove their beliefs are false.) In turn, the existence of evil doesn’t challenge the existence of God. (In fact, I think it counts for it. You must have God to have anything be truly evil and demand moral accountability as such. After all, a falling coconut doesn’t murder when it lands on someone’s head. We obviously have a different standard.)
Without his interruptions or dramatics, Hitchens was largely left to his arguments, and we had a preview of this even before the debate started. The debate handout featured an insert outlining the speakers’ main points. Craig, defending “Does God exist? Yes,” outlined all of his five points. Hitchens’ side, “Does God Exist? No,” was boldly left blank. However, it turned out not to be boldness, but an accurate description.
He, Hitchens, did pull out some of his tricks to distract from the topic: attempting to pit Craig against other denominations of Christianity, or asking him to affirm the ‘shocking’ non-evidential claims of Christianity like the virgin birth (to the shock of some atheists in the crowd, Craig unashamedly owned them) as if they proved any point other than to attempt embarrassment of one’s opponent in front of people that have not thought through the reasoning.
This works only if someone already assumes that miracles are possible, i.e. that God does not exist. However, if God does exist, especially a God that can make the universe from nothing, a virgin birth seems trivial. The claim in not that a virgin naturally became pregnant.
I left the event more certain, not less, that God exists and that Christianity accurately described Him. There certainly are reasonable defenses of atheism, as some of Craig’s past debaters have done. This was not one of them.
Debate info.
The late Bertrand Russell said that, “No one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God.” This is a very powerful repackaging of the ever-persistent problem of evil. Another way to state it would be to ask, “How can you say there is a good God when there is so much evil in the world?” And that’s not an easy question, is it? There is force there, because we know what death is like and we know what it’s like when we see suffering of the most innocent and helpless and know that it’s not right. And yet Russell’s statement is demonstrably false, as our local church can bear witness.
