Does a Good God Exist? – A Debate with Christopher Hitchens
William A. Dembski
The Existence of God
Good morning and thanks for this opportunity to debate the existence and goodness of God. I’ll start by addressing God’s existence and then turn to God’s goodness. God’s existence is the weightier question – once that’s settled, God’s goodness follows straightforwardly.
Not necessarily. Just because you can prove He exists, doesn't mean you can prove he is not a douche.
Although I could rehearse standard arguments for God’s existence, I want in this debate to take a different tack. Christopher Hitchens disbelieves in God’s existence. Why? Lack of evidence and evils perpetrated in the name of religion, he says. Yet his book God Is Not Great reveals a more basic reason. Hitchens, as a scientific reductionist, believes science has given us new knowledge that destroys religious faith. What is this new knowledge? According to Hitchens, it is Darwinian evolution.
Actually, Darwinian evolution died out a while ago. He had no idea what DNA, genes, or even CELLS were when he wrote his theory. We use a modern theory of evolution, because we now understand the mechanisms by which traits are passed on. Even so, it does destroy religious faith, because the Bible clearly says God CREATED the animals and man within a few days.
You may ask what a chapter on evolution is doing in a book defending atheism. (Not really, no.) At the end of that chapter, Hitchens explains: “We no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious.” Let this sink in. Religion, according to Hitchens, renders biological origins mysterious. But now that Darwin has come and shown how natural selection explains biological origins, all is clear. Fellow atheist Richard Dawkins puts it more memorably: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
No, religion does not render biological origins mysterious, the religious story was created by more primitive men to explain how there is such diversity in the world. It does not "render" origins mysterious, its reason for existence was BECAUSE biological origins were mysterious.
It’s no coincidence that Richard Dawkins, the world’s best known atheist, is also an evolutionary biologist. Atheists, like everyone else, need a creation story. Without God in the picture, something like Darwinian evolution has to be true. And so Hitchens, though a humanities guy, lectures his readers on proofs of evolution. Let’s look at a few of these proofs as he gives them.
See, now here, you are committing academic dishonesty. "Atheists... need a CREATION story." No, we need an explanation as to how we got here, without resorting to myths or supernatural intervention. We are here. There has to be a mechanism, duh. But we weren't created. Hence, it is not a creation story.
(1) “Junk DNA.” If Darwin got it right, then our genes are cobbled together over a long evolutionary history, accumulating lots of useless DNA (junk) because it’s easier for natural selection to keep copying such junk rather than edit it out. This sounds plausible, but it is subject to experimental test. In fact, recent findings show that much of this so-called junk DNA regulates gene expression. This is true even of repetitive DNA, the quintessential DNA junk. A forthcoming book titled The Myth of Junk DNA details these findings.
*BUZZER* Wrong. It is not "easier" to copy it then to edit it out, if there is no pressure to remove it, it won't be removed. Notice his use of the word "much." Not all. Hence, the hypothesis (not sure whether or not it's a theory) is still very plausible. Oh boy, there's a book coming out that explains it all?! Are its findings peer-reviewed and published in any scientific journal?!!! Oh, no? Huh. Not worth my time then.
(2) “The Cambrian explosion.” This refers to a narrow slice of the fossil record in which all the main animal body plans appear suddenly without precursors. The Cambrian explosion was a mystery in Darwin’s day and remains a mystery to this day. Paleontologist Peter Ward writes about the Cambrian explosion:
“The seemingly sudden appearance of skeletonized life has been one of the most perplexing puzzles of the fossil record. How is it that animals as complex as trilobites and brachiopods could spring forth so suddenly, completely formed, without a trace of their ancestors in the underlying strata? If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.”
Ward, like Hitchens, is an atheist, so he tries to soften this statement later. But the mystery remains. For more on the Cambrian explosion, see my book The Design of Life.
Ok, you got me, it's a mystery. Also, look, more intellectual dishonesty, by quote mining. *Yawn* Can we get a new tactic, please? Be original. And also, again, are your findings peer-reviewed? No? Not worth my time.
(3) “The inverted retina.” Vertebrate eyes have nerve cells in front of the light-sensitive retinal cells. This means that light first has to pass through a barrier before being detected. This seems counterintuitive, but there are good functional reasons for it. A visual system needs three things: speed, resolution, and above all sensitivity – if the eye isn’t sensing light, it’s useless. Now, it turns out that light-sensitive cells are the most oxygen-greedy cells, and they get their oxygen from blood. The sensitivity here is truly astounding – some frog eyes can sense the smallest unit of light (the photon). Positioning the nerves in front of the light-sensitive retinal cells ensures maximal blood supply to the retina and thus maximal sensitivity.
Can't argue with you there, but you bring up an interesting point. We are God's favorite creatures, right? I mean, we are in His image, after all. Why can't WE sense the photon? That would sure as hell be pretty useful. Why is a frog better then us?
But the story gets better. In 2007 it was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Müller glial cells act as optical fibers conveying light to the retina. As the abstract to this article notes,
“Their parallel array in the retina is reminiscent of fiberoptic plates used for low-distortion image transfer. Thus, Müller cells seem to mediate the image transfer through the vertebrate retina with minimal distortion and low loss. This finding elucidates a fundamental feature of the inverted retina as an optical system and ascribes a new function to glial cells.”
So the vertebrate eye is much more sophisticated than Darwinists, on their low view of design, suspected. And thanks to these Müller glial cells, the eye’s resolution is magnificent.
I don't see what you are getting at here. This is how the eye works, GOD DID IT EVOLUTION SUCKS! What the hell, man?
The problems with Hitchens’ proofs of evolution don’t end here. All his proofs are easily deconstructed (I’m happy to do so during the Q&A – I have his book with me). Hitchens is obsessed with the human eye (the same eye that has allowed him to read and educate himself as an atheist). Observing different types of eyes in nature, he repeats the chestnut that natural selection gradually turned a light-sensitive spot into a full-fledged camera eye. No mention that eyes have to be built in embryological development or that eyes are only as good as their associated neural processing. No details about the genetic changes that would be needed to effect such a transformation.
Do you know why he used human eyes to educate himself? BECAUSE HE WAS BORN WITH THEM. Hell, if he or I had the choice of better eyes, I'm PRETTY sure we would both take it. And as for his "no mentions," he was trying to be brief. There are scientific books three times as long as his book, and they kind of scratch the surface of how the rest of it works. Go read one of them, I'm sure HE has.
To really make the case, Hitchens cites Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger’s mathematical model of eye evolution, which he claims shows that eyes could evolve in a geological instant. Let me tell you a secret about mathematical models and computer simulations – unless you tether them to real observable processes, you can use them to prove anything, in which case they prove nothing. The model of Nilsson and Pelger, which Hitchens praises loudly, is of this sort. I can write a computer simulation that evolves Richard Nixon into Christopher Hitchens (that’s a scary thought). Such simulations prove nothing.
I need to turn off my INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY ALERT alarm, it's going crazier with every new paragraph. Ok, show us how putting pairs of people together, and the resulting genetic modifications, could someday produce someone who looks EXACTLY like Hitchens. I anticipate it greatly.
I know what you’re all thinking. Since the evidence for evolution is so underwhelming and since Hitchens has hitched his wagon to evolution, shouldn’t he now be ready to abandon evolution and reconsider theism? Yet this is precisely what he will not do. His atheism demands a materialistic form of evolution, and there’s only one going theory of it, namely Darwinism. The alternative, which places us here as the result of design, is for him unthinkable.
No, the evidence for evolution is OVERWHELMING, and the evidence for YOUR position is NON-EXISTENT. Atheism demands a NATURAL, PROVABLE theory, and the only thing that has any basis in fact is EVOLUTION. Quit calling it Darwinism, I shot that down a while ago. And no, it isn't unthinkable, you just haven't given us ANY real evidence for your position, therefore we stay intellectually honest to ourselves and refuse to entertain it until you provide such evidence.
In regarding design as unthinkable, Hitchens puts himself in an atheist straitjacket. For the atheist, we must be here as the result of a blind, purposeless evolutionary process – there are no other options. Atheism demands evolution. For the theist, on the other hand, it’s possible that God used an evolutionary process to deposit us here; but it’s also possible that God deposited us here in ways that make his design evident. Either of these are live options for the theist, and the theist can consider them fairly. Atheism, however, cannot live without Darwin.
Guess what, that is EXACTLY what happened. Sorry to make you think you're not special in some grand, Godly plan, but you aren't. Also, Atheism could live without Darwin, we would just have to work harder at INTELLECTUALLY disproving God, instead of scientifically. Also, you don't consider both options fairly, because you are basically saying either "God loves us and made us exactly like him," (which feels better) or "God put a bacteria on the Earth and over BILLIONS of years, it became us (Which is actually supported by some evidence, but makes you MUCH less special.) We all know which one YOU'RE choosing.
Hitchens needs evolution to be true. His treatment of it is therefore calm and deferential (albeit mistaken). By contrast, his treatment of theology and biblical studies is boorish and obtuse. For instance, Hitchens dismisses Israel’s time in Egypt and Sinai as myths lacking all archeological evidence. Yet that evidence is readily available. Take, for instance, James Hoffmeier’s books on the topic, published by that flaming fundamentalist publisher … Oxford University Press. Or consider Hitchens’ view of Jesus. There is, according to him, “little or no evidence for the life of Jesus.” Come again? It’s one thing to deny the miracles attributed to Jesus. But to say, as Hitchens does, that Jesus is “not a historical figure” is contrarian silliness.
Oh, so a guy published a book, oops, we were wrong, sorry. And also, I will say what countless Atheists have said before, "THE ONLY EVIDENCE THAT JESUS ACTUALLY EXISTED IS IN THE BIBLE AND THE BIBLE CANNOT BE USED AS EVIDENCE SINCE IT HAS BEEN PROVEN TO BE WRONG MULTIPLE TIMES ON A MULTITUDE OF SUBJECTS."
For all his talk about freedom of inquiry and Enlightenment rationality, Hitchens exhibits a very selective concern for truth. What seems to matter most to him is not whether a claim is true but whether it makes a good stick to beat religion. Deny that Jesus was real? If it helps advance the atheist agenda, go for it, especially since it’s easy to get away with in an age of theological illiteracy.
No, he follows the evidence, which is what any logical person would do. Also, say Jesus exists? If it helps advance the Christian agenda, go for it, especially since it's easy to get away with when the majority of people were indoctrinated with it when they were young.
Whenever Hitchens invokes science against religion, one gets the impression that a juggernaut is rushing forward, crushing everything in its path. Science advances, religion retreats. This is wishful thinking. The fact is, as any historian of science understands, science is not a cumulative enterprise, so reversals, retractions, and revolutions play as much a role in science as insights, illuminations, and intellectual breakthroughs. Thus, new scientific advances, far from undercutting religion, can in fact overturn antitheistic conclusions derived from prior scientific mistakes.
We all understand that, bud. And yes, they could, in fact, overturn antitheistic conclusions, but guess what? They haven't yet.
Chemical evolution is a case in point. Chemical evolution attempts to describe how non-living chemicals arranged themselves into first life. Atheism requires that chemicals have this ability. Darwin attempted to strengthen the atheists’ hand by arguing that first life was so simple that it required no designer. Darwin’s argument (made in a letter to Joseph Hooker) has since shown itself to be a failed argument from ignorance. Precisely because of what Darwin didn’t know about the complexity of the cell, microscopy being quite limited in the mid 1800s, he thought the cell was so simple that it could easily self-assemble from ordinary non-living matter.
Wrong. That's abiogenesis, not any sort of evolution. Quit beating on Darwin, he's dead, and yes, he was ignorant, but guess what? He gave us the idea, and we use a lot of his points, but we don't use Darwin anymore.
The revolution in molecular biology of the last fifty years has given the lie to this misconception. We now know that every cell (and all life is composed of cells) is a vastly complicated assembly of interconnected technologies that argue for intelligent design. We need to be engineers to understand what’s inside the cell, and the level of engineering we find there far exceeds anything humans have invented. If you want to see what I’m talking about, call up YouTube on your PDA and punch in “inner life of the cell.”
So now he's saying that just because something is complicated, it argues for intelligent design? Oh, okay. We know how the eye evolved, hat shot you down a while back, so no, we could easily argue the evolution of the cell.
I just mentioned what for Hitchens is a dirty word – “intelligent design.” For Hitchens, intelligent design, or ID, is just rebranded creationism. It is religion and not science. But in fact, intelligent design covers a broad range of special sciences, including forensic science, archeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI). Intelligent design, by definition, is the study of patterns in nature best explained as the product of intelligence. It is a basic feature of human rationality to identify the products of intelligence and distinguish them from the products of natural forces. Many special sciences capitalize on this distinction.
It IS just rebranded creationism. Exactly, Humans tend to think that because something is complicated, it is the result of intelligence. Humans also used to think that demons caused fevers. Can you REALLY trust human instincts?
In 1998, I published a statistical monograph with Cambridge University Press titled The Design Inference. In it I laid out a probabilistic method for drawing this distinction between design and accident. Essentially, this method triangulates on design by identifying independently given patterns, known as specifications, that are complex in the sense of being hard to reproduce by chance. Accordingly, the method identifies what has come to be called specified complexity. In The Design Inference I showed how this method applies outside biology. In subsequent work, when my colleagues and I started applying this method of design detection specifically to biology, we found that Darwinian evolution came up short and that ample evidence supported design. For a nice summary, see Stephen Meyer’sSignature in the Cell.
Is it peer-reviewed? Is it published in a scientific journal?
Just as getting from Darwinian evolution to atheism is not a big stretch, so getting from design in biology to theism is not a big stretch. Are we therefore ready to agree that God exists now that we’ve seen Hitchens’ proofs of evolution fail, the intelligent design alternative succeeds, that his critiques of theology are self-serving? By itself, my argument establishes a designer behind the universe (a Kantian architect, if you will). For the purposes of this debate, however, I think we’re ready to close escrow.
No, I'm not, because all of those statements are false. And please, do close, I'm tired of your intellectual dishonesty, strawmans, logical fallacies, and all-around ignorance.
Note that the full positive case for God’s existence can and should be fleshed out. Typically, such a case flows from critical reflection on the big questions of life: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why should we take morality seriously? Why is the world comprehensible to our minds? Why does mathematics, presumably a human invention, have such a precise purchase on physical reality? Each of these questions can, in my view, be answered better within a theistic than atheistic worldview. Thank you.
No, it can't. No, it doesn't. No one cares about your opinions, we have already seen how bullshit they are. I can't believe you would think you had won anything with how badly I have pwned you.
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