Reflections from
The first question Hugh Hewitt asked Christopher Hitchens was how he derives moral values from a purely material world. Hitchens did what atheists often do, he changed the question. He described how he could and did behave morally; he didn't answer how moral value derives from a material world that has no resources to explain it. It's a feature of the world that is so natural to us, it seems obvious it exists. Hitchens draws from this extensively in his moral tirade against religion in his book. But that something is obvious doesn't mean that it's explained. The question is not why does an atheist behave well? The question is how does morality exist in a material world?
Hitchens also brought up a point he made in the book - that the moral law was created, instituted at Sinai. Of course, that isn't the case. It's the the Biblical teaching. The moral law predates Sinai. It was simply codified for, a government for the people of Israel as a nation.
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Listening to Hugh Hewitt's program today, here are some comments.
Hitchens makes the claim in his book and in the debate that the graves opened and the dead walking around at the time of the crucifixion reduces the extraordinariness of Jesus' resurrection. First, I'm not sure that's true, but there's a fundamental difference in Jesus' resurrection that he misses: The Scripture says that Jesus raised Himself. No matter how many of us will be raised, none of us will have raised ourselves. We are all dependent on the Lord for that.
I'm not sure why Roberts didn't respond to the dating of the Gospels that Hitchens asserted is quite late, long after the eyewitnesses were gone. That is a contested claim. Just as Hitchens relies on a very narrow slice of New Testament scholarship for his assessments, he has done so here. I think that was a major issue to contest.
Hitchens relies heavily on Bart Ehrman's scholarship and said that he didn't know of any responses to him by conservative scholarship. I don't know why he's not aware of the responses since they can be found quite easily with a Google search. (To find links to some of these, use our search on this blog.) The response might not be as numerous as Hitchens would expect if Ehrman's claims are controversial, but that is likely because most of the evidence Ehrman musters for his thesis is old news, as Roberts identified with one example. What is new is the importance of what he cites and the implications Ehrman draws from the evidence.
I didn't know that Ehrman is an atheist now, as Roberts said. I didn't know he'd completely lost his faith.
Hitchens said that the Gospel of Judas is valuable in that it offered a rationale for Judas' betrayal of Jesus, how we reconcile Judas being held responsible for what he was needed to do for God's plan. I don't know why Roberts seemed to agree, though he did take issue with the historicity of the Gospel of Judas. God worked out His plan for Jesus' crucifixion through Judas' own free actions, so he's responsible for what he did.
Hitchens claimed unchallenged that the canon of the New Testament was debate and decided quite late. That's just not true. The canon was set in practice in the second century. The church used a criteria for determining the books considered authoritative for teaching very early. It wasn't debated at the later council that formalized the canon; they simply recognzied what had been so in practice. F. F. Bruce's book Canon is an excellent resource.
Hitchens pointed to the difficult "immoral" things that are cited in the Old Testament. I agree that many things in the Old Testament are difficult. But an important point Roberts didn't point out that makes the Old Testament coherent is that the nation of Israel, the tribes they fought were guilty and God used the temporal events to issue His just judgment. That may be rejected, but as internal coherence issue that is vital to understanding the difficult things. It may not be our place to judge as the judgment are exacted, but it is God's perogative.
Hitchens, fairly asked, if God does exist then how to we evaluate competing religious claims. As I mentioned in my review of his book, we agree that if there is truth value to religious claims they are objective claims, not subjective. All religious claims can't be true because they contradict and represent very different views of reality.
Hitchens, however, believes there isn't the kind of evidence that would help us do this. First, if he was willing, even for the sake of argument in the debate, to consider that God exists, then that's a major concession on his part that should have been pursued. Second, this is where the historicity and the dating of the Gospels is critical. Very few religions make historical claims. Among those that do, the Bible is unique in the kind of manuscript evidence that makes it a historical document that should be taken seriously. I would contend that there is evidence to adjudicate among all the religious claims and Christianity offers it. No other does. And more so, Christianity, the Bible properly understood, offers a view of reality that can also explain morality and value, is compatible with scientific inquiry, all of which Hitchens values.
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