Christopher Hitchens Debate

Transcript Christopher Hitchens Debate

Christopher Hitchens: They all make the same mistake which is to praise the idea of faith, elevate it over reason and evidence, and to say on the most important thing of all (which is: why are we here? what are we to do? what is the meaning of our life?), on the most important questions, they say it is very important to decide it without evidence, that you must make an unprovable assertion, and then demand respect for it. Well, I think the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, we have yet to do a podcast on the Hitchens debate [1]. Boy, we just really need to. There has been a lot of information at ReasonableFaith.org on this debate with Christopher Hitchens out in Los Angeles at Biola. A lot on YouTube about it. Pretty good coverage as well on this debate. Being that he is a journalist, he is very popular, and he is one of the four horsemen of the so-called New Atheism. So this was a strategic debate as well to confront one of the four horsemen in a very influential movement who has a best-seller.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think it was strategic in that sense, Kevin. 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 argument. So I have had some less than pleasant debates with graduate students or lawyers in the past where they just weren’t very good debates. 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 is a prominent spokesman 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 that the debate went well.

Kevin Harris: The Frank Zindler debate that you did in Chicago [2] is similar to this because Frank Zindler was considered to be unbeatable when it came to debating, and that if you just really wanted to put the Christian in his place bring in Zindler from the American Atheist because he would just mop the floor with you. In fact, Ravi Zacharias was told that. I’ll tell you what we’ll do – you think you can debate? We’ll put Zindler up against you.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, I remember when they were looking for the atheist opponent for that debate and they picked Zindler. Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelburg said, “Well, can’t you get a bona fide scholar? Someone who is more credentialed?” And Rob Sherman, the American Atheist fellow said, “Oh, no, this is our man. This is the guy that we want to do this.” As I watched videos in preparation for that debate it turned out that Zindler could be a formidable opponent. I saw him debate some Christians, and he really took them to pieces. So that was a kind of similar confrontation in that this was a popularizer sort of fellow who could be rhetorically effective. It was also similar in another sense, Kevin. I think these were the two most widely disseminated, or broadcast, debates that I’ve been in. Both of them had huge audiences live of several thousand people. Both of them were also being simultaneously broadcast – either through radio or internet – all around the country and even in foreign nations. So they were very similar in that sense as well.

Kevin Harris: Let me just say you were extremely successful in that debate. That, again, was strategic because it put to rest this idea that no one could beat this American Atheist spokesperson and who did not make a good showing in this debate. I think that that launched a lot of things for Reasonable Faith in that Zondervan published that and a lot of people picked that up in bookstores and things like that and have watched that debate.

Dr. Craig: That’s the great thing about these recordings – they have a life of their own, long after the event is gone and forgotten. People in Australia have been watching the Zindler debate as you say. And now this Hitchens debate as well being professionally recorded by Illustra Media should go out just all over.

Kevin Harris: Some comments on the debate then.

Dr. Craig: Well, I had a little bit of fun with the debate because two weeks before the debate I was on a panel discussion with Christopher Hitchens in Dallas at this Christian book exposition. [3] On the panel were Doug Wilson, and Lee Strobel as well, and some other folks. 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. [4] 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. He was seated right to my left, immediately at my left elbow, so I turned to him and said, “Now, in two weeks we are going to be debating these issues at Biola University, and I hope that you will use that time to do a little homework so that we can have a little more substantive discussion when we meet.” I was just needling him a little bit, kind of teasing him. Unfortunately, he didn’t use those two weeks to do much homework, I’m afraid, because the discussion wasn’t any better.

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

Dr. Craig: Oh, and that is hard for many people to do. You hear that British accent, and it sounds so urbane and so intelligent. And then, as you say, the rhetoric with the comparisons of God to a North Korean dictator – things of this sort. They are very visual images and makes him for an engaging speaker as you say. And it is 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 are 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. 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 would think he would have heard of Lewis or other great British scholars. But evidently he had not. On the one hand, that is discouraging to think that we 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.

Kevin Harris: Yeah. Maybe God could use it – this is our hope with Reasonable Faith ministries – to begin to work on a person.

Dr. Craig: Absolutely, Kevin. I saw in the open forum the other day an email from a fellow who had lost his faith, something like twenty years ago. And when someone asked him why he said, “It was because in talking with people I can see that the most insightful people were non-Christians, and that my reasons for believing in Christianity were all fear-based and were utterly untenable, and I just began to see I had no reasons to believe what I believe at all.” So this person walked away. I think we can prevent that from happening if we can show Christian kids – high schoolers and others – that some of the most reflective and deep people are Christians. And the fact is, that’s the truth! They really are! And moreover Christianity isn’t fear-based or just a leap of faith into the dark. There are really good arguments and evidence for what we believe, and these hold up in one-on-one, face-to-face confrontations with the best that secular atheism and agnosticism can offer.

Kevin Harris: Now, at the same time, Hitchens indicates that what he sees falsely as a new trend in Christianity – he thinks that it is a capitulation to science and that the advance of science is causing Christianity to change. And if it continues in this way, then Christianity will go away and be taken over by science because the evidence is against God. So, in another way, he is not very congratulatory. He is also saying, “Well, you are adjusting your belief to new data that is coming in, and that is going to erode your faith.”

Dr. Craig: That is just, again, historically naïve. If you look at, for example, the history of apologetics, you can see from Isaac Newton on prominent scientists appealing to scientific evidence, especially the Bridgewater Treatises on the argument for design or the teleological argument; the Gifford Lectures founded in Britain to defend natural theology. [5] The fact is that all along the line, Christians and scientists have been in dialogue with one another and not at all seeing science as opposed to the Christian faith. So this is not any kind of new movement or capitulation; not at all. This is a historical process, and we simply stand at the current edge of it.

Kevin Harris: His second contention in the debate – what he tended to want to argue – was that “Where was God throughout human history?” He really brought up the problem of evil a lot and why, in human history, is God so late to the game? What about all the horrible things people have been through prior to Christ.? So he had kind of an argument from outrage on what he saw as God being absent.

Dr. Craig: It is not clear exactly what this argument is, Kevin. I’m not sure that Hitchens himself understands it.

Kevin Harris: I call it an argument from outrage though I’m not even sure that that would completely characterize it.

Dr. Craig: For example, when I asked him in Dallas, I said, “You say that God has delayed 98,000 years before sending Christ to humanity and that this is very, very late in the game. That seems to me that what counts as late is relative. If humanity endures for another 100,000 years, then it would turn out that Christ came right in the middle of human history, wouldn’t it? So it wouldn’t be late in the game.” And he said, “Well, yeah, I guess that’s right.” It was as though he virtually conceded the point. So the argument can’t be that it is late or too late for Christ to come. It must be: what happened to all those people that died before Christ came? But, gosh, Christians believe that God has always been active in human history, and we have a record of salvation history in the nation of Israel and how God has been preparing Israel for the advent of the Messiah. We believe that Christ’s atoning death is efficacious for everyone who came before Christ and will be salvific, or will save persons, who respond in an appropriate way to God’s revelation to them. So there is just not really a problem there that I can see.

Kevin Harris: Notice that it is an internal question (internal to Christianity; internal to God’s existence). I thought he was supposed to be a big atheist. I mean, he is arguing why is God, who apparently exists, so late? Now the implications are that that means God doesn’t exist. But he is not really arguing for atheism. He is arguing an internal problem of God’s timing.

Dr. Craig: That’s very interesting, Kevin, because on this panel discussion when Doug Wilson pointed out that Christ’s death was efficacious for those who came before Christ (it is not as though these people were neglected or overlooked), Hitchens admitted, “Well, yes, that solves the problem but I don’t see any reason to believe in Christianity.” Well, as you say, that just evacuates the argument of any significance then. The issue will be then do we have good reasons to believe Christianity is true? It will not be an objection to Christianity to say that God overlooked all those folks because he admits that on Christianity they are not overlooked. So where is the argument? Where is the objection? I don’t see it.

Kevin Harris: When you watch the debate, Christopher Hitchens at the end just kind of forgoes his final statement in saying, “Well, look, I’m not going to get anywhere with this William Lane Craig guy, he is going to answer everything I say.” So he wanted to get right to the Q&A – question and answer. Why do you think that is?

Dr. Craig: That was a real shock to me, too. I gave my closing statement and then Hugh Hewitt got up to have Hitchens give his closing statement, and Hitchens just waved the closing statement and said he didn’t want to give one. So Hewitt then went to the audience directly for questions. It seemed as though Hitchens just had an attitude of resignation and almost passivity by that point.

Kevin Harris: Well, he feels like he can handle the layman a little easier, I’m afraid. He does want to get that interaction so that he can be more comfortable dealing with people who have less complex questions. Now, I’m not going to accuse him of purposefully punting to that, but again it is a dependence on his rhetorical skill and his persuasiveness that he’s going to at this point.

Dr. Craig: Yes. He was unusually subdued in that debate. I don’t know if it was because of the venue or what. But he didn’t really get into his rhetoric until his rebuttal speech. Then he began to appeal to the North Korean dictator and these other examples of his purple prose, but by then it was really too late. So I think by the time of the final speech he was just ready to be done with it. [6]

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, as we conclude, there was something encouraging that Christopher Hitchens said and that is he wanted to come to the states and interact with all these Christians who have been emailing him and flaming him and everything in the world, and he was willing to come and be among us and come to our venues and say, “OK, let’s talk about this.” But he made a comment at the panel that he has been treated so well by the Christian community.

Dr. Craig: Yes.

Kevin Harris: So he was very appreciative of how well he was treated. He was certainly given a lot of time to talk on that panel.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t bullied or outnumbered in that sense. He is taking more and more speaking engagements for Christian audiences, which I thought was intriguing. The cynic in me thinks that, well, he has just discovered another source of big fat honoraria in that the Christian community is willing to pay big dollars to get him to come. But on the other hand, there may be a genuine desire here for real dialogue with Christians – to hear what they have to say and share his perspective. I hope that that is his motive.

Kevin Harris: Any comments on his book? Did you go through it? God is Not Great?

Dr. Craig: I did not go through the book myself, Kevin, because I have to shepherd my reading time very carefully or I can become distracted from the focus of my scholarly research which is on a quite different topic. What I did do was I asked my teaching assistant, Joe Gorra, to go through Hitchens works and to find any passages in the books that would address any of the five arguments for God’s existence that I typically use in my debates. So Joe got back to me with whatever Hitchens might have said about the cosmological or the fine-tuning argument or the moral argument. There just really wasn’t very much there, frankly. He didn’t address these in his book anymore than he did in the debate. So I didn’t read the book through myself, no. I just asked my research assistant to look for the important and relevant parts of it.

Kevin Harris: It seems to be a rant against the religious right. I find this quite often. People don’t have a problem with God, or Christianity, or Christ. But they are afraid of the religious right and the theocracy and that they are all going to come in our business and bedrooms and we aren’t going to have any freedoms. If that is your beef, fine. But what does that have to do with whether God exists and whether Christianity is true.

Dr. Craig: Boy, that is right. There are plenty of Christians who have a beef with the religious right, as well. And they don’t think that that disproves the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus. So we mustn’t think that these political issues are at all essential to the truth of the Christian worldview.

Kevin Harris: Absolutely. One final comment from you, Bill. Why are these atheist books such best sellers? I guess because they would have an audience. I guess Christians and religious people would be curious about them. But Hitchens book, along with the other so-called New Atheists, have of late been very good on the best seller list.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, they have obviously scratched an itch in our culture, haven’t they? I think they have raised the consciousness of atheism in our culture in a way that Richard Dawkins, for example, said was his goal. I am not sure what to attribute this to except for a kind of increasing secularism in American Western society that you already see in Europe and in Canada for example and now is becoming very vociferous in the United States. This really struck a cord. Probably the attacks of 9/11, I think, poisoned many peoples’ minds against fundamentalist religion, and Christianity got tarred with the same brush. Certainly these New Atheists are guilty of lumping all religious believers together and condemning them all for the atrocities of these extremists.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, will there be a Dawkins debate?

Dr. Craig: No. He has resolutely refused to debate. He has been approached by very high level folks who have set up previous events that he has done with John Lennox. He is just adamant. It is not going to happen. [7]