Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris debate Rabbis David Wolpe and Bradley Artson.
Sorry for the recent slew of video/image posts. I haven’t found time to write much lately. Hopefully that changes soon.
Update: the YouTube video has been taken down. Until I find another embeddable link, you can watch the entire debate here.
Here, in his closing remarks in a debate against leading Intelligent Design proponent William Dembski, Christopher Hitchens gave a rather stirring defense of doubt.
Watch the entire debate. Dembski made some formidable points, and Hitchens, despite his failing health, was unusually spirited.
I don’t think so. If such debates were futile, I wouldn’t bother blogging about religion. But these two videos do a great job of explaining why arguments for atheism/theism often fail to persuade.
Hat-tip to Common Sense Atheism.
Last week, I criticized what I see as intellectually lazy apologetics. So today, I want to draw your attention to a couple of thoughtful defenses of theism instead.
DasAmericanAtheist, one of my favorite atheist YouTubers, recently did a video where he defends theism against a theist arguing for atheism. Perhaps it flirts with sophistry, but I think it’s a really cool idea.
Okay, so the title is just to grab your attention. The Catholic Church is actually extending a rather ecumenical offer to atheists. From The Independent:
The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church’s relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church’s top theologians.
The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.
Via Debunking Christianity.
What Hitchens expresses in his (admittedly non-responsive) answer is essentially the problem of evil. Why would a loving and all-powerful god permit the evils that befell, say, Elisabeth Fritzl? It is (or should be) a difficult question for theists. But understand the limitations of the problem of evil.
The problem of evil is not a logical disproof of god. It could be that god is all-powerful, but malevolent. It could also be true that god is loving, but not all-powerful. Indeed it may even be the case that god is both loving and all-powerful and his reasons for permitting evil are beyond our understanding. So the problem of evil is not an argument for atheism.
This is precisely why I like Hitchens. Unlike Dawkins and Harris, Hitchens doesn’t make a case against god’s existence. He doesn’t give a damn. As Dr. Kleiner says, “The least interesting fact about god is that he exists.” The question for Hitchens isn’t whether god exists (though of course Hitchens doesn’t believe god does), but whether god is worthy of worship. In the spirit of Job, Hitchens is demanding that god account for the evil in the world. And it is not of enough for god to bark, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” That makes god sound like the “celestial dictator” Hitchens accuses him of being.
I’ve been meaning to post this video for a while, but it’s particularly instructive after the discussion of Biblical inerrantism and the Gospels’ veracity on the last post.