The fourth installment of the debate is online here. This debate is getting rather frustrating. In my opinion [I am a Christian and a presuppositionalist-so take the opinion with that in mind], Hitchens has not taken the time to move past his own approach to “religion” or Christianity to even consider what Wilson is doing or how he is arguing. Setting aside whether Wilson is actually giving too much ground [which I have read from some analytical philosophers], Wilson is dealing with the issue of presuppositions, or to use an analytical term, “warrant.” I am beginning to wonder if Hitchens will give any warrant for his belief.
Look in this current installment. At one point Hitchens comes close to answering Wilson’s question about mortality by saying, “When you say that men have never known nor yet understood the essential principle, however, you speak absurdly. Ordinary morality is innate in my view.” Hitchens completely missed the point. First, Wilson didn’t say that mankind doesn’t know how to live. Instead, he said that mankind cannot provide a basis for morality given their own worldview [an unbelieving worldview]. Second, Hitchens actually says that “Ordinary morality is innate in my view.” This is what Wilson goes back to deal with, and this is at the heart of the issue.
First, Wilson reminds him that he [Hitchens] has been something of a moralistic prophet against religion:
Your book and your installments in this debate thus far are filled with fierce denunciations of various manifestations of immorality…Why should anyone listen to your jeremiads against weirdbeards in the Middle East or fundamentalist Baptists from Virginia like Falwell? On your terms, you are just a random collection of protoplasm, noisier than most, but no more authoritative than any—which is to say, not at all.
So the problem is that Hitchens wants to denounce certain types of immorality and religious commitment. Why should I listen to him? What is his basis for telling me to stop behaving this way?
Wilson outlines Hitchens three problems.
- Innate does not equal authoritative; Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within?
- Millions of humans have a different innate and conflicting morality than that of Hitchens. Why does Hitchens speak of his convictions and tell us how we must behave?
- The issue of change within creatures as connected to Hitchens own view of evolution.
Here is Wilson’s quote for the third issue:
You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?
This is an important point. If morality is innate, and if we believe in evolution [which Hitchens does], then what about when that innate sense changes. Is it ok for a mother to eat her young if our innate sense changes again?
Wilson then closes the exchange with a reminder of the purpose of this debate and the hope found in the gospel. Is Christianity good for the world? Wilson’s point has been to show that an atheist cannot speak to whether something is good or not. Here is the statement:
If Christianity is bad for the world, atheists can’t consistently point this out, having no fixed way of defining “bad.” If Christianity is good for the world, atheists should not be asked about it either because they have no way of defining “good.”
This however is not the case for Christians. We believe in goodness because God has revealed it to us, and “goodness” is bound up in God’s nature. God reveals this to us through Jesus Christ. In Wilson’s words, Jesus Christ is good for the world because he came as the life of the world.
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