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A Final Review of Christopher Hitchens

February 02, 2012     Time: 00:14:28
A Final Review of Christopher Hitchens

Summary

Upon the recent death of Christopher Hitchens, here are excerpts from past podcasts of Dr. Craig's interactions with him. www.reasonablefaith.org

Transcript A Final Review of Christopher Hitchens

 

Kevin Harris: Thanks for joining us. This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I'm Kevin Harris. And the recent death of journalist and outspoken anti-theist Christopher Hitchens was of particular importance to Reasonable Faith in that Dr. Craig had a debate with him as well as a panel discussion, and I also had a brief meeting with him. Now, we've done several podcasts on Hitchens and today we'll play some brief highlights from those podcasts. Now, Chris Hitchens called himself an anti-theist because the very idea of God repelled him. He thought that it would entail God's being some totalitarian dictator, and he didn't want to live in a universe like that. We think you'll appreciate these excerpts. They really synopsize Dr. Craig's thoughts.

Dr. Craig: Well, I didn't have much personal interaction with him, Kevin. It was mainly on the dais itself. But I must say that I've been struck by how many Christians have a genuine affection for this man. Despite his vitriolic attacks upon Christianity, he has a sort of lovable, curmudgeonly quality about him, that everybody I meet who has seen him loves Christopher Hitchens for this.

Kevin Harris: And he says that he feels that, too. He says that he sensed it when he was doing this tour that included a debate with you and a dialogue on a panel. He says that he genuinely feels that affection for him and that love for him.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, and that's gratifying – isn't it? – he was well treated at Biola and I think he sensed that Christians really liked him. . . .

Initially I was reluctant to do this debate because I have had pretty negative experiences in the past debating with people who are not themselves scholars. You can't argue with someone who doesn't understand logic, who doesn't understand that they have just made an incoherent statement, or that their conclusions don't follow from their premises. Argumentation is almost futile with someone who doesn’t understand arguments. So I've had some less than pleasant debates with graduate students or lawyers in the past where they just weren't very good debates. And so I didn't really want to do this thing with Hitchens. But the folks at Biola just pressed me very hard and said, “He's a prominent spokesmen for the New Atheism, and it would be very important for someone to debate him and just to really expose the superficiality and the emptiness of his rhetoric.” So for that reason I did take it on, and I'm glad that I did. I thought the debate went well. . . .

You know, Kevin, in my debates and dialogues with him I didn't see that he had any good grounds for his unbelief. It wasn't as though this is a rationally based skepticism on his part. It's just an emotional anger and resistance against God. And so although he likes to portray himself as this sort of noble skeptic, I saw no reasons whatsoever to suggest that he had any kind of substantive grounds for his atheism. He's resisting God and God's efforts to save him right up until the end. . . .

Two weeks before the debate, I was on a panel discussion with Christopher Hitchens in Dallas at this Christian book exposition. And on the panel were Doug Wilson and Lee Strobel as well, and some other folks. And I had the last word in this panel discussion and was able to summarize, I think, ten arguments that the theists on the panel had presented for Christian theism, and opposed to that was just one argument that Christopher Hitchens had offered, and even that, he admitted, was answered, if you take a Christian theological perspective. So he really had nothing to stand on. So he was seated right to my left, immediately at my left elbow, so I turned to him and I said, now, in two weeks we're going to be debating these issues at Biola University and I hope that you'll use that time to do a little homework so that we can have a more substantive discussion when we meet. And I was just needling him a little bit, you know, kind of teasing him. [laughter] And unfortunately he didn't use those two weeks to do much homework, I'm afraid, because the discussion wasn't any better.

Kevin Harris: Well, he depends on his rhetorical skill. He is a wordsmith. And he's awesome to listen too. You want to let him talk because he's so interesting and he has such a way with words. What we have to do, however, is look beyond that and see if there's any substance to what is coming out.

Dr. Craig: Oh, and that's hard for many people to do, Kevin – you know? – you hear that British accent and it sounds so urbane and so intelligent, and then, as you say, the rhetoric, the comparisons of God to a North Korean dictator, things of this sort. They're very visual images and makes him for an engaging speaker, [1] as you say. And it's hard for people to actually look beyond that and assess the substance of the argument.

Kevin Harris: He came over to a table where I was sitting after the panel discussion that you're referring to and he remarked along the lines of, “I'm rather surprised at this new trend in Christianity of actually having facts and evidence to back up what you believe.” He says, “I thought it was just about faith.”

Dr. Craig: Yes, he mentioned that in one of the events that I was involved in, either the panel discussion or perhaps the debate. He thought apologetics was something new, some radical turn somehow, and I thought, 'my goodness, had he never heard of C.S. Lewis?' As a British person you think he would have heard of Lewis or of other great British scholars, but evidently he had not. And on the one hand that's discouraging to think that we've had so little impact in that area, on the other hand it is encouraging that here is a New Atheist who is suddenly being confronted for the first time with argument and evidence for the Christian faith, and finds this to be something new and challenging that needs to be dealt with. . . .

I think he can rightly say that he has helped with others to spearhead at least an advance in the secularization of Western society, if not a revolution. And I'm doing everything I can with my colleagues who are Christian philosophers and New Testament scholars and scientists to work a revolution of the opposite sort, a renaissance of Christian intellectual engagement and activity, which will overwhelm any sort of secular revolution that Hitchens and others have tried to foment on a popular level.

Kevin Harris: Here's a statement from Christopher Hitchens that he was known for:

Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let’s say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man’s plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn’t really care.

Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, “It’s time to get involved.” Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn’t bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.

Here's the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98% of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2%. What kind of a bizarre God acts like this? [2]

Dr. Craig: It seems to me that Hitchens' – as you would expect – has a really deficit view of divine providence and sovereignty over the whole of human history. I think that as Christians we want to say that God is providentially directing a world of free creatures in such a way so as to maximize the number of persons to come to know him freely and to bring them into his kingdom. And from the very creation of man God was known by man at first. Adam and Eve and their children knew God, the Scripture says that God's existence and nature is evident in the creation around us, that his moral law is written on our hearts, so that from time immemorial people have known of the existence of God and of his moral demands on us. So it's not as though God was unknown to primitive man. Quite the contrary, God was clearly revealed in nature and in conscience.

Moreover, God is so directing the development of the human race so that in the fullness of time, as Paul says in Galatians, he would send forth his son to redeem humanity. And this required the preparation of the nation of Israel, which required the calling of Abraham out of modern day Iraq and into the land of Israel. So all of this time is preparatory, it's preparing the ground for the calling forth of Jesus, his Son.

And Paul, in the book of Acts in chapter 17 in his address on Mars Hill, says something very interesting that connects with this question. He says there that,

From one man [namely, Adam] God made every nation of men to populate the earth. And that he determined the exact times and places that they should live. He did this so that they might feel after him and seek for him and perhaps find him because he is not far from everyone of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. [3]

According to Paul the whole development of the human race is under the providence of God with a goal toward achieving the maximal knowledge of God. And I think we see the marvelous plan of God unfolded in human history.

Kevin Harris: Can we make a case that Christ's arrival and the work of the prophets and so forth, even prior to Christ was at a crossroads, perhaps, of history and the world?

Dr. Craig: Yes, when you think about the geographical location, for example, of Israel, at the crossroads of the three great continents of Africa, Asia and Europe. It was ideally situated for the Gospel eventually to go out from there and to fill every corner of the globe. And it's wonderful to study the history of the expansion of Christianity.

And here's another thought for reflection, Kevin, that I think is very sobering. When you look at the exponential growth in the population of the world, what you discover is that this initial segment of the human race that existed over these tens of thousands of years, in time this becomes an utter triviality compared to the total population of the world which has heard the Gospel and will have the opportunity to respond fully to Christ. Do you see my point? That initial segment on the curve compared to the whole as the curve exponentially rises in world population, it'll turn out that really the percentages are quite reversed. Rather than the 2% getting the revelation after the 98% has gone by, it'll be the 2% that went by compared to the 98% which has the opportunity to hear and believe in Christ.

Kevin Harris: That about the toothaches kind of got me, there [laughter]—there's nothing worse than a toothache.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, that's for sure. But you know that's just part of the problem of evil. That really doesn't have anything to do with God's inactivity in these pre-historic times because people in the third world today who still don't have access to dental care suffer miserably with toothaches. That's just part of the natural evil that we deal with in a universe that's run by natural law. There's nothing peculiar about that that’s different from, say, cancer or leukemia or automobile accidents or things of that sort that we in civilized society still suffer from. So that's a quite separate problem.

Kevin Harris: Actually, I think that ancient dentistry was probably a lot worse than the ancient toothaches. [laughter]

Dr. Craig: Yeah, that's right. Let me fix it for you – bam! – with a rock. Kenneth Scott Latourette was a church historian at Yale University and he wrote a five volume work called The History of The Expansion of Christianity, and reading this is just an awe-inspiring story of how Christianity grew from seemingly absurd beginnings to fill the entire globe today. And what Latourette says is that the growth of Christianity in the world is literally without precedent. It is the largest, most successful movement in the history of mankind that the world has ever seen. And this is, as you say, because of the preparation that went into it. The Roman peace, the Pax Romana, the system of Roman roads, the Greek language which was prevalent throughout the area, all of this was prepared for the fullness of time, as Paul says, for Christ to be brought into the world. And now we're seeing the fruit of it as twenty centuries later this is the largest religion in the world today, some one third of the population of the world at least claims adherence to the claims of Christianity.

Kevin Harris: Well, thank you for being here. Be sure to listen to the entire podcast on Christopher Hitchens for more details. [4] They're found at ReasonableFaith.org, and we'll see you next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. [5]