Christopher Hitchens’ Challenge (renamed)
In a recent debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Mark D. Roberts on the Hugh Hewitt show (which can be heard here for a limited time), Hitchens makes what he apparently thinks to be an unanswerable challenge to Mark D. Roberts. Here’s what he said:
Really? How about this one: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind". (Luke 10:27a) I have yet to meet a non-believer who has, in fact, loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, nor have I met an atheist that would take or utter that as an action that he would consider moral.
Next challenge?
Note: the name of this post has been changed (6/11) due to an error in identifying Christopher Hitchens' brother, Peter, as the one making the challenge. My fault.
Here’s my challenge * * * : You have to name a moral action taken or a moral statement uttered by a person of faith that could not be taken or uttered by a non-believer. I have yet to find anyone who can answer me that.
Really? How about this one: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind". (Luke 10:27a) I have yet to meet a non-believer who has, in fact, loved God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, nor have I met an atheist that would take or utter that as an action that he would consider moral.
Next challenge?
Note: the name of this post has been changed (6/11) due to an error in identifying Christopher Hitchens' brother, Peter, as the one making the challenge. My fault.
Comments
The point is not who can make a moral statement. A parrot can make a moral statement.
The point is whether atheists' current moral statements and actions, heavily influenced by a long Christianized culture, would be the same in a culture that has outgrown all of its Christian influence and relies solely on secular ethics.
The two examples history provides us to date, the communists and the French Revolutionists during the reign of terror, are not encouraging.
There is a transcendent source of morality that supersedes my own opinions, desires, inclinations, or even societal conditioning.
That's really all it takes to make the point I'd make about morality.
I mean, I have no problem at all seeing, from a Darwinist viewpoint, justifications for Hitler. From a "selfish gene" viewpoint, what's so different between that and one ant-hill exterminating another that gets into its territory?
(As an educated guess, I expect Paul would reply that this is all a 'religious' person is doing, too. Which admittedly some or even many theistic morality theories would give him good grounds for thinking. {sigh} More on this eventually in my Ethics&t3rdPers series. Paul was a good discussant; I hope he shows up again sometime. {bowing in his direction!})
One of the First Things editors (not Neuhaus, maybe Novak; it's at the house) had an extended article this month on much the same topic. One of several related articles in fact, but this one made several good points in favor of the necessity of secular critiques, too; most interestingly these were admissions by the pope from a debate with Jurgen Habremas, an atheistic apologist who has serious concerns himself about secularism's lack of moral capital.
Mark added: {{the issue is whether or not an atheistic system can really provide an objective rational for morals. Problem is, more people seem to be willing to just say, ok morals aren't objective, no bigee.}}
The second problem is certainly a problem, too; but it stems from a concession to a denial of the first problem. Which is why Paul's example is famiiliar in my experience: start off protesting that atheists can too come up with an objective rationale for morals; and then after awhile concede that the basis, even if objectively real, isn't _itself_ moral in quality which kinda reductively nixes the objective morality claim. After which the 'no biggee' is heard. {g}
And, as I pointed out in my second entry (and the third one, to some extent), it isn't that such systems are necessarily inconsistent. They just aren't actually _ethical_. But a practical question then comes up: what are we to _teach_ concerning this (ostensible) truth? As I noted, for the ethical pragmatist to function with power in his society, he has to take advantage of the misunderstanding of other people about an effective appeal to an intrinsically ethical objective standard (whether the characteristics of that standard are coherently spelled out or not.) If the people aren't taught misleading things, the pragmatist's powerbase is zorched. When the people find out the pragmatist is willing to mislead the people in order to have power over them, his credibility will be shot. (Or the remnants of his credibility. Which we had a sad example of recently, too, hm? {coughJoftushack})
This problem is not to be confused, however, with attempts by secularists to locate an objectively real and objectively _ethical_ standard in the interpersonal relationships of multiple persons. This attempt may run into a few similar problems, but it's a different kettle of fish than sourcing to a merely (though rationally) _invented_ ethic.
JRP
JRP
How embarrassing . . . .
So look at it that way; by _that_ (consequentialistic?) standard, you're galactically far ahead. {beam!}
JRP
I never thought of it that way, but why not? LARRY!
As for times of human upheavals like the French Revolution, or the communist revolution, what about the fact that Christians were killing each other and killing pagans, and killing Muslims and killing Jews and witches for centuries before that, and holding public executions and burning books. (Quite an object lesson in an age without radio or TV, everybody goes to the execution.) Study the Thirty Years War for example, the Hundred Years War, The English Civil War, the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre, and many others.
Early American Puritan preachers taught that if the Indians would not convert, they deserved to be exterminated like the Canaanites.
America's own revolution against the British in the 1700s pitted Christian against Christian, in other words people believing in the God, Christ, and creationism, still fought and killed one another. It wasn't atheism bringing them to blows but simply some other matter. (America's revolutionaries rejected any system of divine kingship such as Great Britain practiced, and instead opted for "all men being created equal," and governments "of the people and by the people").
America's Civil War in the 1800s only happened after a tremendous increase in church attendance, after Sunday Schools were invented and tracts were being handed out en masse for the first time, and that war against pitted Christians against Christians. Ten years prior to the Civil War, three nationwide Christian denominations split in two over the issue of whether or not ministers ought to own slaves, and even the northern ministers didn't disagree that the laity could own slaves. Thus was formed the Southern Baptist, Southern Methodist, and Southern Presbyterian denominations, whose members also cried out loudly for political secession of the Southern states from the Northern states ten years later, which led to the Civil War, a war in which more American soldiers died than in all wars afterwards, including both World Wars, right up to the Gulf War. Read "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis" by a Wheaton Professor, who also admitted in an interview that he broke down and cried while researchging his book after he realized the kinds of intractible theological differences that existed between Christians that helped lead up to the Civil War, that deepened resentments and devilish enthusiasms and that helped sustain the war longer than it ought to have continued.
WW1 also pitted Christians against Christians and was a source of great disillusionment throughout Europe. (More soldiers died of influenza during that war than from guns, shells and poison gas.)
All that being said, I'm not forgiving communism by any means. But the story there is also more complicated than most people realize. Communism appealled to poor downtrodden peoples such as the Russian people who were extremely poor and taken advantage of horribly by both state and church which were both merged tightly in pre-communist Russia.
The communist revolution itself took place during a time of upheavel in Europe, during the last year of Europe's own World War 1. So the Russian people fell for promises of a "worker's paradise," and fell for the truth of Marx's all-knowing "dialectical materialism" and divisions of history, which involved unquestionable inevitabilities, or so Marx believed.
After WW1 Germany sunk into a great depression and grasped at judgmental politicians and judgmental religious views, promising unquestionable answers, putting the Nazis in power, who reacted extra strongly against the rise of "Jewish Bolshevism" in nearby Russia. So the mutual fears and hatreds between Germany and Russia helped sparked an escalating growth of fanatical denunciations in both nations.
Germany by the way was one of the most Christian nations in Europe when a dictator took power there. And most Protestants were taken with Hitler, even Christians and politicians in Europe and the U.S. praised Hitler's early trimphs in getting Germany's economy back up (before even the U.S. was able to do so), getting Germany's enthusiasm and pride back, and for clearing Germany's streets of criminals (unfortunately whomever Hitler imagined to be a criminal was next on his list, Jews, gays, gypsies, political dissidents).
The fact remains, Germans were not irreligious. They had Christian beliefs. But nations can go overboard after they suffer a great depression and start admiring firmly responding judgmental leaders and ideologies.
(Neither is a Christian nation immune to diseases run amock as the medieval Black death proved. As the countless cases of dysentery proved during America's Civil War, which killed more soldiers than bullets did.)
Now a quotation from Aldoux Huxley's book, "Ends and Means":
The desire to justify a particular form of political organization and, in some cases, of a personal will to power has played an equally large part in the formulation of philosophies postulating the existence of meaning in the world. Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalistic system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press, and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of [Calvin's] Geneva and [Puritan] New England. In all cases they have shown that the meaning of the world was such as to be compatibel with, or actually most completely expressed by, the iniquities I have mentioned above -- iniquities which happened, of course, to serve the personal or sectarian interests of the philosophiers concerned. In due course, these arose philosophers who denied not only the right of Christian special pleaders to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world, but even their right to find any such meaning whatsoever. In the circumstances, the fact was not surprising. One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers eclipse. [p. 314-316]
With all due respect, you are assuming so much in your comment as to verge on the silliness that you decry. It isn't "Bronze Age Mythology" -- it isn't myth at all (at least, not in the sense that you seem to mean). I do have evidence that God exists -- you simply reject it. Believing in aliens obviously would not have the same moral implication as believing in a being who is the source of all righteousness, goodness, mercy and justice.
Here is another way of putting it:
Describe an act which a non-believer would call moral/virtuous but would not perform, while a believer would perform it.
Don't all rush at once.