Last week two of the Western world's premier rhetoricians took on one another in debate:
Tony Blair Debates Religion With Atheist Hitchens
Famous atheist Christopher Hitchens took on famous Catholic convert Tony Blair in a debate on whether religion is a good or bad thing for the world yesterday. And while it's impossible to declare a winner on such a subjective ... oh wait, this is 2010, which means we had an audience vote: Hitchens won with 68%. Highlights include Blair insisting that religion played no role in his decision to invade Iraq and Hitchens—AP described him as "pale and drawn" amid his cancer fight—comparing the concept of God to a "divine North Korea."
Why Tony Blair would have consented to such a debate, the ground rules of which pre-determine the outcome, is a worthwhile question, but before I address Blair's a priori error, consider my friend A. Jay Adler's commentary on the debate. (For the record, neither Jay nor myself have actually watched the debate, but that makes us uniquely qualified in this day and age to comment upon it; and again, for the record, that was meant in humor):
Of the event itself, not much of lasting value was likely to come from a debate for which the stated resolution was:
be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world. Would that be always or sometimes, for some or for all, without qualification or, all things considered, on balance? I can report from his written statement that the converted Catholic Blair, for the pro side, did not attempt to argue "without qualification." He should go into politics.
Debating G-d in utilitarian terms is not impossible, but one must first recognize that using our shell of reason to debate a way of binding the irrational that has worked to help raise man up from complete unreason to our current level of occasional rationality, contains a number of contradictions that make such an argument more than usually problematic.
[As an aside, Jay apparently needs to toss in a gratuitous snark about the Tea Parties; this is typically mirrored by my need to toss in gratuitous snark about Liberals, but I will keep it to a minimum today except to say, in a paraphrase, that I don't think those words (Tea Party) mean what Jay thinks they mean; that lends itself to a blog post in the near future]
Jay does get close to the core of the utilitarian argument in favor of G-d in his comments on one of Hitchen's arguments:
A second counter argument Hitchens offers is this:
He made a small stab at another hastily-carpentered standby of the faith-based canon, about twentieth-century tyranny being atheistic, but his heart didn’t quite seem to be in it. Everyone knows or should know what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about doing the lord’s work. And nobody can find any totalitarian text that says: we can do what we like, and everything is permitted to us, because we have no god on our side. The whole concept of supreme unalterable leadership, as Orwell wrote, is intrinsically theocratic.
One has to enjoy curlicue amusements such as "small stab" and "hastily-carpentered standby," and the undermining tunnel of "his heart didn’t quite seem to be in it," especially given the sophistical land grab Hitchens himself makes at the end of that passage. Leaving aside Hitler and just taking communist totalitarianism, the first part of the passage argues that since we cannot prove (through evidentiary text) that totalitarians did believe that in the absence of God everything is permitted, then they did not believe that. But this is like arguing that the inability to prove that God exists tends to prove that He doesn’t, i.e. that the absence of proof of the affirmative supports the negative, when it is simply not dispositive. More to the point – of course, twentieth century communism was atheistic. It was, explicitly, a materialism predicated on the disbelief in an ideal metaphysical substratum from which moral imperatives are entailed; in recorded actuality, these totalitarianisms, working in that belief, did act as if everything is permitted, for everything was indeed done, because everything was materially, not morally directed. [Emphasis mine-SW]
One can argue, and many have, that it is not necessary to invoke G-d in order to have a superordinate morality; such a position may eventually be correct, though until we understand ourselves a great deal better than we do today I think a morality based on human ethics without recourse to an idealized, external force (a neutral set of rules that can be understood? a supreme being?) can be all too easily corrupted to support the belief that as Jay put it: a materialism predicated on the disbelief in an ideal metaphysical substratum from which moral imperatives are entailed ... (enables) totalitarianisms, working in that belief, (to) act as if everything is permitted ... because everything was materially, not morally directed.
Finally these kinds of debates will always predispose to the victory by the Atheists for a few relatively simple, and therefore unacknowledged, reasons. First, the believer in G-d must, of necessity, admit to himself that such a belief can never be fully grounded in reason; the connection of faith to the irrational parts of our minds are implicit when not made explicit. We use terms like ineffable to make such a connection more acceptable to our reason but ultimately our belief is fueled and preserved by our awareness that it is based upon a mystery at the heart of existence. The Atheist has no such handicap. He is able, using his reason, to convince himself that Atheism has nothing to do with his irrationality. This exhibits, more than anything else, how adept homo rationalis has become at the grand arts of self deception, rationalization and intellectualization. By doing away with G-d, the Atheist has effectively replaced Him with man, without having to countenance his own arrogance. In the end, arguing the ineffable within the limitations of language and with language as the ultimate arbiter, is an impossibility, even for those as articulate as Tony Blair.
The second problem with the debate is that rational man stands upon an edifice built over thousands of years based upon a foundational belief that the universe can be rationally understood, a belief that is inextricable from the belief in the monotheism that established it, though we have become increasingly able to hide that connection from ourselves. We have spent several thousand years trying to tame our irrational desires and the idea that we are now ready to jettison the entire edifice upon which we stand as unnecessary because we do not fully appreciate its unconscious determinants and utility, is to risk disasters greater than those already seen in the last century.
The only reasonable resolution to the debate question is that at this time, in this place, in those social structures that are built upon the Judeo-Christian morality, based on a superordinate G-d, our current ability to have this debate could not have taken place without religion. It is true that a great many religious men have behaved in amoral ways (though that risks imposing the Judeo-Christian morality on those who murder in the name of their morality; this is problematic for many who no longer have the capacity for moral distinctions) and a great many Atheists have behaved in a highly moral manner (despite many of them having a problem acknowledging the debt they owe to the G-d they disbelieve in); this does not alter a logic problem that has become difficult to manage:
Our modern Western Culture and Civilization are emergent structures that rest upon a Judeo-Christian G-d; while religion may not be necessary for any one individual to behave in a moral manner, it has not yet been shown that any society can behave morally without religion.
Recent Comments