You say that you cannot believe that Christ's death on the Cross was salvation for the world because the idea is absurd. I have shown in various ways that absurdity has not been a disqualifier for any number of your current beliefs. You praise reason to the heights, yet will not give reasons for your strident and inflexible moral judgments, or why you have arbitrarily dubbed certain chemical processes "rational argument." That's absurd right now, and yet there you are, holding it. So for you to refuse to accept Christ because it is absurd is like a man at one end of the pool refusing to move to the other end because he might get wet. Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do. But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.
Source > "Is Christianity Good for the World?", Christianity Today debate between Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. (May, 2007) (178 reads)
When I said that Jesus is good for the world because he
is the life of the world, you just tossed this away. You said, "You
cannot possibly 'know' this. Nor can you present any evidence for it." Actually,
I believe I can present evidence for what I know. But evidence comes to
us like food, and that is why we say grace over it. And we are supposed
to eat it, not push it around on the plate—and if we don't give
thanks, it never tastes right. But here is some evidence for you, in no
particular order. The engineering that went into ankles. The taste of
beer. That Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, just like he
said. A woman's neck. Bees fooling around in the flower bed. The
ability of acorns to manufacture enormous oaks out of stuff they find
in the air and dirt. Forgiveness of sin. Storms out of the North, the
kind with lightning. Joyous laughter (diaphragm spasms to the atheistic
materialist). The ocean at night with a full moon. Delta blues. The
peacock that lives in my yard. Sunrise, in color. Baptizing babies. The
pleasure of sneezing. Eye contact. Having your feet removed from the
miry clay, and established forever on the rock. You may say none of
this tastes right to you. But suppose you were to bow your head and say
grace over all of it. Try it that way.
Source > "Is Christianity Good for the World?", Christianity Today debate between Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. (May, 2007)
(306 reads)
But it is interesting that the same thing happens to you when you have to give some warrant for trusting in "reason.". I noted your citation of LaPlace in your book and am glad you brought him up here. LaPlace believed he was not in need of the God hypothesis, just like you, but you should also know he held this position as a firm believer in celestial and terrestrial mechanics. He was a causal determinist, meaning that he believed that every element of the universe in the present was "the effect of its past and the cause of its future."
So if LaPlace is why you think belief in God is now "optional," this appeal of yours actually turns into quite a fun business. This doctrine means (although LaPlace admittedly got distracted before these implications caught up with him) that you, Christopher Hitchens, are not thinking your thoughts and writing them down because they are true, but rather because the position and velocity of all the atoms in the universe one hundred years ago necessitated it. And I am not sitting here thinking my Christian thoughts because they are the truth of God, but rather because that is what these assembled chemicals in my head always do in this condition and at this temperature. "LaPlace's demon" could have calculated and predicted your arguments (and word count) a century ago in just the same way that he could have calculated the water levels of the puddles in my driveway — and could have done so using the same formulae. This means that your arguments and my puddles are actually the same kind of thing. They are on the same level, so to speak.
If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is "winning the debate." They aren't debating; they are just fizzing. You refer to "language in which to write this argument," and you do so as though you believed in a universe where argument was a meaningful concept. Argument? Argument? I have no need for your "argument hypothesis." Just matter in motion, man.
Source > "Is Christianity Good for the World?", Christianity Today debate between Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. (May, 2007) (188 reads)
The scribes were treated with excessive deference in Jewish society because of their education and learning. Everyone honored them because of their wisdom and intelligence. The "mere children"(napioi in Greek, really meaning babes) were Jesus' image for the uneducated and ignorant. He is saying that the gospel of grace has been disclose to and grasped by the uneducated and ignorant instead of the learned and wise. For this Jesus thanks God... The babes (napioi) are in the same state as the children (paidia). God's grace falls on them because they are negligible creatures, not because of their good qualities. They may be aware of their worthlessness, but this is not the reason revelations are given to them. Jesus expressly attributes their good fortune to the Father's good pleasure, the divine eudokia. The gifts are not determined by the slightest personal quality or virtue. They were pure liberality. Once and for all, Jesus deals the death blow to any distinction between the elite and the ordinary in the Christian community. Source > The Ragamuffin Gospel, (Questar Publishers, 1993), 54. (648 reads)
I hope you'll be interested to know that I — near the start of a new millennium and at the age of 67 — am still able to believe, with no serious effort, that the entire universe was willed into being by an unsurpassed power whom most human beings call God. I believe that God remains conscious of his creation and interested in it. I believe that his interest may be described, intermittently at least, as love (and I say "his" with no strong suspicion that he shares qualities with the earthly male gender). Source > "Dear Harper", in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. (347 reads)
As a disciple, the Christian philosopher is enthralled with Jesus, he trusts Him, and wants everthing in his life to enhance Jesus' reputation among the nations. The Christian is here primarly to serve a Name, not to make a name and the disciple recognizes that in Jesus all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge reside. Source > MA Philosophy Newsletter, Talbot School of Theology (Issue V, Fall 2000) (465 reads)
In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.) Source > Warranted Christian Belief, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 63. (421 reads)
Is [Christian] belief intellectually acceptable? In particular, is it intellectually acceptable for us, now; For educated and intelligent people in the twenty-first century, with all that has happened over the last four or five hundred years? Some will concede that Christian belief was acceptable and even appropriate for our ancestors, people who knew little of other religions, who knew nothing of evolution and our animal ancestry, nothing of contemporary subatomic physics and the strange, eerie, disquieting world it postulates, nothing of those great masters of suspicion, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, nothing of the acids of modern historical biblical criticism. But for us enlightened contemporary intellectuals (so the claim continues) things are wholly different, for people who know about those things (people of our rather impressive intellectual attainments), there is something naive and foolish, or perhaps bullheaded and irresponsible, or even vaguely pathological in holding onto such belief. Source > Warranted Christian Belief, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. vii. (451 reads)
Describing the book is easy enough. It is a competent Christian philosopher-educator trying to heal the anti-intellectualism in the modern Church. To that end the book is first a description of the problem with a little historical analysis. ("How We lost the Christian Mind and Why We Must Recover It"= chapter 1) Then an explanation of the role of reason in the spiritual transformation that is the historic orthodox Christian faith. This is part 1 = "Why the Mind Matters in Christianity". The rest of the book is a two piece prescription, argued top down, from big principles to important particular and specific recommendations. ~ RM Williams
Unfortunately, I have seen too many Christian thinkers who have a certain texture or posture in life that gives the impression that they are far more concerned with assuring their academic colleagues that they are not ignorant fundamentalists than they are with pleasing God and serving His people. Such thinkers often give up too much intellectual real estate far too readily to secular or other perspectives inimical to the Christian faith. This is why many average Christian folk are suspicious of the mind today. All too often, they have seen intellectual growth in Christian academics lead to a cynical posture unfaithful to the spirit of the Christian way. Fidelity to God and His cause is the core commitment of a growing Christian mind. Source > Love God With All Your Mind (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1997), p. 111. (532 reads)
Throughout church history, theologians have expressed three different aspects of biblical faith: notitia (knowledge), fiducia (trust), and assensus (assent). Notitia refers to the data or doctrinal content of the Christian faith. Assensus denotes the assent of the intellect to the truth of the content of Christian teaching. Note that each of these aspects of faith requires a careful exercise of reason, both in understanding what the teaching of Christianity are and in judging their truthfulness. In this way, reason is indispensable for the third aspect of faith — ducia — which captures the personal application or trust involved in faith, and act that primarily involves the will but includes the affection and intellect too. Source > Love God With All Your Mind (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1997), p. 37. (404 reads)
Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable Source > Mere Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) p.125 (406 reads)
But the fact that Christianity can only be shown to be probably true need not be troubling when two things are kept in mind: first, that we attain no more than probability with respect to almost everything we infer...without detriment to the depth of our conviction and that even our non-inferred, basic beliefs may not be held with any sort of absolute certainty...; and second, that even if we can only show Christianity to be probably true, nevertheless we can on the basis of the Spirit's witness know Christianity to be true with a deep assurance that far outstrips what the evidence in our particular situation might support (think analogously of the person convinced of his innocence even though all the evidence stands against him). To demand logically demonstrative proofs as a pre-condition for making a religious commitment is therefore just being unreasonable. Source > Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994) (378 reads)
Moreover, it's not just Christian scholars and pastors who need to be intellectually engaged with the issues. Christian laymen, too, need to be intellectually engaged. Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one's faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, of the stability brought to one's life by the conviction that one's faith is objectively true. Source > Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994) (405 reads)
The Bible says all men are without excuse. Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit. Source > Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), p.37. (375 reads)
I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition. Source > "A Philosopher's Religious Faith", in A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (Macmillan, April 1994) (327 reads)
When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments, and the surprises of the Spirit. Evangelical faith is bartered for cozy, comfortable piety. A failure of nerve and an unwillingness to risk distorts God into a Bookkeeper and the gospel of grace is swapped for the security of religious bondage. (63) ... If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don't cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God's truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition. Of course, the open mind does not accept everything indiscriminately — Marxism and capitalism, Christianity and atheism, love and lust, Moet Chandon and vinegar. It does not absorb all propositions equally like a sponge, nor is it as soft. But the open mind realizes that reality, truth, and Jesus Christ are incredibly open-ended. Source > The Ragamuffin Gospel, (Questar Publishers, 1993). (389 reads)
Alvin Plantinga argues that a natural way to understand such notions as rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our cognitive equipment's functioning properly: our cognitive equipment functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he understand the notion of cognitive malfunction? >
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On the other hand, there are those who disdain the apologetic task altogether, either because they believe that Christian faith is entirely a gift of God or because they advocate religious commitment as a "leap of faith". Such thinkers would quote Pascal: "The heart has reasons that reason knows not of". What those who take this approach overlook is that it proves too much. If Christian belief is justified by faith alone, then so is every other form of belief on the commitment market, since the devotees of each are equally convinced they are right. Besides, it is important to notice that Pascal still called the reasons which are not known by reason, "reasons". Source > Faith in Dialogue: A Christian Apologetic (Word Publishing: September 1985), 12. (342 reads)
