Is There Anybody Out There?

Gerson starts off on what seems to be a practical note.

British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

By the evidence of the New York Times bestseller list, God has recently been bathed in such tributes. An irreverent trinity -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- has sold a lot of books accusing theism of fostering hatred, repressing sexuality and mutilating children (Hitchens doesn't approve of male circumcision). Every miracle is a fraud. Every mystic is a madman. And this atheism is presented as a war of liberation against centuries of spiritual tyranny.

I like this line of reasoning because it shows that what we believe about God matters. Christians see even attacking God as a way of validating his importance. Atheists see the belief in a "big angry man in the sky" also as an important, but really bad, thing.

Gerson continues on with his discussion of the effects of belief. Sure, you can be good without a belief in God, but an organizing religion gives you some sense of morality beyond your own ability to reason. To Gerson, it seems, the existence of something larger gives us all a foundation from which to guide ourselves. If you eliminate all ability to compare yourself to better angles, what's left?

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."
...
The death of God has greater consequences than expanded golf time on Sunday mornings. And it is not simply religious fundamentalists who have recognized it. America's Founders embraced public neutrality on matters of religion, but they were not indifferent to the existence of religious faith. George Washington warned against the "supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." The Founders generally believed that the virtues necessary for self-government -- self-sacrifice, honesty, public spirit -- were strengthened by religious beliefs and institutions.

The problem with this line of argument, as I think Gerson understands, is that it's not really about God -- it's about a certain kind of effect that believing in God can have on a person, and a population.

Hitchens follows Gerson down this rabbit hole, probably because neither of them realize that they're not talking about God at all: they're both talking about whatever they think believing in God means. Different subject guys!

Hitch takes a couple of rhetorical swings at Gerson. Nicely done, but he's been on his game better in other articles. He then goes right for the jugular.

However, it is his own supposedly kindly religion that prevents him from seeing how insulting is the latent suggestion of his position: the appalling insinuation that I would not know right from wrong if I was not supernaturally guided by a celestial dictatorship, which could read and condemn my thoughts and which could also consign me to eternal worshipful bliss (a somewhat hellish idea) or to an actual hell.

Wowser. Somehow we went from George Washington warning about trying to have morality without religion to some sort of celestial tyranny of humanity. Is using an external measuring stick the same as giving up your ability to reason? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. In Hitch's defense, seems like all sorts of folks have done bad things in the name of religion. Hitch dishes out a sampling.

Of course Gerson will -- and must -- cherry-pick this list (which is by no means exhaustive) and patter on about how one mustn't be too literal. But in doing this, he makes a huge concession to the ethical humanism to which he so loftily condescends. The game is given away by his own use of G.K. Chesterton's invocation of Thor. We laugh at this dead god, but were not Norse children told that without Valhalla there would be no courage and no moral example? Isn't it true that Louis Farrakhan's crackpot racist group gets young people off drugs? Doesn't Hamas claim to provide social services to the downtrodden? If you credit any one religion with motivating good deeds, how (without declaring yourself to be sectarian) can you avoid crediting them all? And is not endless warfare between the faiths to be added to the list of horrors I just mentioned? Just look at how the "faith-based" are behaving in today's Iraq.

Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first -- I have been asking it for some time -- awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.
...
"In a world without God," he writes, "this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution but designed for disappointment." Again, he substitutes the wish for the thought. We very probably are, as he admits, not the designed objects of the Big Bang or of the process of natural selection. But this sober conclusion, objective as it is, is surely preferable to the delusion that we have been created diseased, by a capricious despot, and then abruptly commanded to be whole and well, on pain of terror and torture. That sick joke is one that we can cease to find impressive, that belongs in the infancy of our species, and gives a false picture of reality that we would do well to outgrow.

Was Michelangelo trying to convey an emotion or a literal scene?
Were most people a couple hundred years ago superstitious morons compared with some of us today?

Both sides put up a great fight, and there were no knock-outs. So like every other argument about God, from time immemorial, this one has to be scored on the basis of a point system.

Hitchens makes a case long made: religious people do really bad stuff in the name of their religion. Since different people with different religions have all done horrible things, it can't be just one person or just one religion. Any religion has a caustic effect on reasoning ability and leads groups of people to oppress other groups. In addition, Hitch uses a wonderful writing style which I emulate at times, jabbing at his opponent and trying to slice directly into the heart of his argument without remorse. Hey -- if the other guy has a bad foundation, let him have it. No point in beating around the bush.

Gerson, on the other hand, flatters Hitch a bit and makes a case revolving around the "well, what else is there?" question. "Is this it? Is this all there is?" Hitch seems to be content with a resounding yes, whereas Gerson isn't buying it. Believing that the search for morality and greater meaning in life is evolutionary is like saying we on some sort of cruel pointless quest for nothingness. Evolution has designed us to chase something that doesn't exist? What's the point in chasing morality at all, then? That's stupider than the angry-man-in-the-sky-stuff.

Flip Wilson, whose tag line was 'The Devil Made Me Do It!'

Hitchens wants to use induction to end up in similar but opposite spot. People have always believed in God(s). People have always done really bad things. People have used their religion as an excuse for their actions. Therefore, religion does not prevent us from doing bad things and may actually encourage really awful things in the name of God. This is all fine and dandy if you want to believe all of the generalizations involved in his argument. Inductive argument can be productive, and it can be total bullshit. Chill out for a minute and take a look at the circular nature of what he's saying.

From our experience, let's assume that people consider themselves rational. Even serial killers have reasons for what they do. That means that any atrocity in recorded history was done by someone who had what they thought to be a rational reason to do it. Except for Flip Wilson, who famously said "The Devil Made Me Do It", people usually have some sort of reason for their actions. When a person does something of great moral import, they usually give religious reasons -- after all, religion is the moral version of rationality. Use your brain: people do what they want to do and use logic later on to justify it. So it follows that whatever was EVER done evil in the world was done for some religious reason. Now consider correlation and causality: were these things done because of a religion, or were these things done just because humans do bad stuff, and use whatever tools of morality they have handy to justify it? Saying religion causes evil because religious people have done evil things is like saying having a nose causes genocide because all genocidal maniacs have had noses.

So I'm calling it a tie, but with a word of caution for both contenders. Both need to understand that arguing some Christian view of God versus atheism is a false choice: there are all kinds of beliefs in God. For Gerson to generalize is crippling his own argument. And for Hitchens to follow him on this wild goose chase is simply stupid on Hitchenson's part. Hitch knows better. Giving out laundry lists of past evils, just like the laundry lists of the question of evil in the world (Why would God allow children to die? Cancer? Floods and pestilence? American Idol to thrive?, etc) is a pathetic and non-serious attempt at discussing the existence of a God and/or creator. For Hitchens to say there is no God is to say that there is nothing outside the grasp of his reasoning ability, which I find very doubtful. For Gerson to say that his understanding of God is superior to others (a case he did not make) is rather self-serving and short-sighted.

Gerson gives up defending the existence of God. The only God Hitchens seems capable of arguing the non-existence for is the product of his own stereotypes. Rather ironic, eh?

You guys shake hands and go back to your corners. While whatever God "is" or "is not" remained the same. People continue to struggle with the topic. Color me unimpressed. Check back in 500 years and see if anything has changed.

UPDATE: Great debate on the comments section of the Post. Here's one comment I made I thought was cogent.

As an extreme example of the problems with both of these postures, perhaps God stepped off a spaceship or something a million years ago and flicked a butterfly. Who's to say any of these arguments are any more or less valid? Maybe flicking the butterfly amounted to a personal involvement in each and every life over the next million years. Maybe it was nothing. Seems to me it all depends on your perspective.

UPDATE2: Peter Berkowitz, law professor, does a great job in continuing the "pro-God" debate. I hate to offend any of my atheist friends, but Berkowitz makes a great point: for all the talk of us having evolved so much as to not need God around anymore, the arguments are pretty much the same as they were hundreds of years ago. That doesn't mean anybody won or lost the argument. It just means that the argument has changed little in recent history; which is in direct opposition to the premise that somehow now we're so much more cognizant. If anything, as I continue to consider and reconsider the arguments put forth, I'm beginning to think Hitchens is off his game entirely and is basically pandering to some anti-Christian audience with a lot of reworked tripe. Perhaps he needs to buy a new summer cottage, or has an especially large gambling debt. In either case, if I cannot admire his unique viewpoint, I can certainly admire his spunk as a businessperson. Perhaps once Hitch gets to be 70 or 80, he can turn around and write a book with the opposite viewpoint, thereby picking up both his old audience and a new one.