And while wandering the Global Innertubes in relation to the last post, I came across a fragment of a debate on blasphemy, between epic brain Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens. Both men are of the atheist persuasion. Their debate covered some of the basic questions about God – and I’m assuming, because the ‘video’ doesn’t make it clear, that they’re dealing with the God of the monotheists, rather than religion in general. Even so, it interested me because those arguments that relate to the monotheists’ “one true God” are quite often directed by militant anti-religionists at religion in general, and this scattergun approach is where a lot of my problems with atheists tend to arise.
Here’s the ‘video’ (it’s not really a video; someone’s taken the edited soundtrack of a part of the debate and put ‘helpful’ illustrative stills over it). Needless to say, I offer the usual caution about linking through and reading the attached comments – it’s likely to make you lose all sense of humanity’s worth. Still, have a listen:
Stephen Fry opens with his rejection of God on the basis of the fact that evil and suffering exist in the world. ‘Theodicy’ is the attempt to reconcile the idea of God as an all-powerful and all-loving being with a world full of pain and wickedness and tragedy.
“When a child has bone cancer, how can you say there is a loving God? I know it’s a clicheic complaint about him, but I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer.”
I admit I’m always a little prone to react badly to “think of the children” arguments – an argument strong enough to have merit shouldn’t need to be bolstered by appeals to emotion. Still, putting aside the apparent consensus belief that an adult’s life is somehow worth less than that of a child (if God is a merciless mass killer, then He’s as evil for killing adults as He is for killing children), Stephen’s point is one commonly made against the idea of God as He’s described by the monotheists. If you don’t assume that God – or whatever Higher Power you might recognise – is a) all loving or b) all powerful, then the question of theodicy becomes a moot point. Again, what the arguer seems to wield as a weapon against ‘religion’ is in truth a weapon against only one variety of religion.
Hitchens comes in at this point to say that he’s an ‘anti-theist’ because if wishing for the existence of God means wishing for something that you’d be obliged to worship, then wishing for God means, in effect, wanting to be a slave, “and one can’t want that as a free person”. This is another flawed argument. The existence of God is quite clearly not a matter of ‘wishing’ or ‘wanting’: He either exists (at least as monotheists perceive Him) or He doesn’t. Wishing one way or the other can have no bearing on that. So we’re left with two possibilities: either God doesn’t exist, and we’re free to disbelieve because He doesn’t exist; or He does exist, and we’re free to disbelieve anyway. Which would imply that we are not, in fact, slaves… Unless of course, everything we say and do and think is a pre-destined part of God’s plan, in which case Hitchens’ own resistance to the idea of slavery to God is in itself submission to that slavery.
Hitchens then goes on to address the concept of ‘awe’:
“Have a look through the Hubble Telescope, if you want to see something absolutely beautiful and wondrous. Or contemplate the unravelling of the human genome; or read a page of Stephen Hawking. There’s real beauty and mystery and wonder there.”
Hitchens seems to be implying – as many anti-religionists do – that one cannot simultaneously believe in God, or gods, and appreciate the wonder and majesty and violence and, yes, awe, of the Universe. He laughingly refers to Bible stories about Lazarus and the Burning Bush, and says that these “aren’t enough to keep the mind alive”. But this is utterly and completely misguided. The question of whether there is a ‘creator’ simply cannot be answered by examination of the creation. It is as wrong for an atheist to argue that a scientific explanation precludes a deliberate creation as it is for a religionist to argue that complexity requires a deliberate creation. If there was a creator, and if everything we see around us is the product of some method of creation as yet unknown to us by a mind as yet beyond us, then the world we see around us would look precisely as it does. If there was no creator, if the universe has come into being and evolved through naturally occurring physical laws, then, again, the world would look exactly the same. There are religious arguments that can be refuted based on scientific discovery: we know, for example, that the world was not created in six days six thousand years ago. (At least, if it was, then it was created by a God who sought to deceive us by making it seem otherwise – and a deceitful God is not the one worshipped by monotheists, as a rule.) But in general, no matter how much we discover about the universe around us, we cannot use our discoveries to show the existence, or not, of a divinity.
But towards the end of this clip, Stephen makes an interesting point that (I think probably inadvertently) highlights the very fallacy employed by many atheists against religion:
“Religious people often like to say, when, for example, they are ‘dissing’, shall we say, what they perceive to be decadence, whether it’s in the forms of homosexuality and licence and so on, and indeed blasphemy; they say “look at the Roman Empire, that was all ended by all that licence”. It wasn’t, it was ended by Christianity. It was Christianity that put an end to the Roman Empire as such, as the empire we think of.”
It’s a fair point to make, and one made by several remnant polytheists in the later years of the Empire: the Roman state stood, all told, for 1,133 years prior to the adoption of Christianity as its official state religion. A mere ninety-six years later, the western empire had fallen. Some speculated that the fall of the empire in the west (and in the east, in that the ‘Roman Empire’ became the ‘Byzantine Empire’) was due to the abandonment of the Romans’ old gods. Perhaps the empire would have fallen anyway. But Stephen Fry indicates that he believes that “Christianity put an end to the Roman Empire”. So religion clearly an issue. I wonder if he imagines the Romans prior to the rise of Christianity to have been atheists? I suspect not: Mr Fry is a man of considerable education and would know this wasn’t the case. But it shows the importance of making the distinction: if you want to attack a belief, or a deity concept, or a dogma, or a religious attitude, then you can certainly do so. What you can’t logically do – especially if you’re someone who claims to treasure logic and reason – is use an objection to the beliefs of one faith to attack religion as a whole.
