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January 3, 2008
by Dinesh D'Souza

side bar side bar side bar side bar side bar side bar side bar I watched the movie The Great Debaters last night, and it helped me to understand why atheists are such bad debaters. The movie portrays four students from a little black college in Texas, and shows how, under the tutelage of their pugnacious coach, they went on to defeat Almighty Harvard. Denzel Washington, who plays the coach, says early in the movie that debate is a kind of bloodsport. It's great virtue is that it puts rival ideas up against each other, as argued by people who passionately espouse those ideas, and then it lets the truth emerge through a kind of gladiatorial elimination.

For about three years, it appeared as though the leading atheists were formidable debaters. But the reason was that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens were selecting weak opponents and then generally giving them a public whipping. In one staged encounter, hardly a debate, Richard Dawkins ambushed televangelist Ted Haggard for a film Dawkins was making. Not only did Dawkins control the format, he also controlled what was shown on film. No wonder Dawkins got the better of that encounter. Harris took on pastor Rick Warren in Newsweek, where Harris made outrageous allegations and Warren basically said that Christians are nice people because they help AIDS victims in Africa. Hitchens promoted his book God Is Not Great by traipsing through the South taking on local pastors. Now your typical pastor is not used to debating a versatile and suave character like Hitchens. A few months ago Hitchens embarrassed theologian Alister McGrath in Washington D.C.  McGrath couldn't handle Hitchens' vitriolic accusations and came off looking conciliatory and weak.

Unlike the characters in The Great Debaters, I was never part of a debate team. I got my debate practice through confronting critics of my various books. Mostly I learned by taking on such seasoned debaters as presidential candidate Walter Mondale, the literary scholar Stanley Fish, and a whole series of civil rights activists from Cornel West to Jesse Jackson. Prior to my debate with Hitchens, he described me as "one of the most formidable debaters on any topic." Richard Dawkins seems to agree: the great Haggard-slayer has somehow gotten cold feet when it comes to debating me. I guess he's afraid that I'll make him look as ridiculous as Haggard.

Then there's Sam Harris, who tells me that debate is not a very useful medium to arrive at the truth. He didn't seem to think that previously. Harris wants to engage in a written debate, and I've agreed, but it should be noted that written debates allow each side to consult experts and therefore they don't reflect the true spirit of debate, which is the clash of ideas embodied in the most articulate representatives of those ideas. I've suggested to Harris a couple of weeks ago that we do both a written and an oral debate, and I'm waiting to hear his response.

Why are the atheists faring so badly in these debates?  Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens really think that their position reflects pure reason and that my position reflects "blind faith." If this were really true they should win every single debate, for the same reason that a round-earth advocate should never lose to a flat-earth advocate. In reality there are good arguments on both sides, and I as a believer know this. I know it's hard to make the case for an invisible God and for an afterlife. In short, I know the strength of the argument on the other side. Leading atheists, however, simply do not expect to hear good counterarguments to their position. When they do, they have no idea how to answer them. So they either erupt into jejune name-calling (all too familiar to readers of my aol blog) or they slowly fall apart (witness what happened to Daniel Dennett).

In reality, I don't have to win debates against atheists; I merely have to draw. Just by coming out even, I defeat the atheist premise that atheism is the position based on reason and religion is the position based on unreason. Even a tie shows that both positions are reasonable. By defeating atheists in debate, however, I have totally exploded the atheist self-pretense. I have shown atheists to be the unreasonable ones, and this is why leading atheists like Dawkins and Harris are now going into hiding. But if these guys are scared to debate me, even in secular university settings where the audience is largely on their side, what does this say about them and about the soundness of their positions? Perhaps Dawkins and company should go and see The Great Debaters. They might get some useful tips, and they might also get their nerve back.

 

Responses to Missing the Point:

Dear Dr. D'Souza: To define a miracle as "a violation of the known laws of nature" misses the point of miracles. The purpose of a miracle, rather, is to demonstrate the real, but otherwise unknown, laws of nature - to correct our too-limited notions of how the world works. Let's take the resurrection of Christ, for example. If it was just a one-off event to allow Jesus to show off his uniqueness, then neither the resurrection nor Christ himself would be particularly relevant to us. But if Christ's resurrection demonstrates an otherwise hidden reality of human nature - that we are all meant for resurrection, as suggested by the line from the Apostles' Creed, "I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body" - then we are forced to realign our whole worldview with the reality shown by this miracle. - Bruce Lawrence Beltsville, MD

Dear Dinesh, It is quite clear from what many - including John Earman - have written about Hume's ban on miracles, that Hume was wrong and inconsistent. He had no ontology, and a very flawed epistemology. It has become increasingly clear that one cannot have any proper epistemology without an underlying ontology. All Christians are - or should be - committed to at least one miracle: the resurrection. And there seems no good reason to reject most - or perhaps even any - of the Gospel miracles performed by Our Lord. The miracles associated with the nativity are rather different. Whereas the resurrection and most of the miracles performed by Jesus were witnessed by one or - more often - several or many of his followers, those associated with the Nativity were not. It is in no way to deny the reality of miracles to ask how we should understand those associated with the nativity stories. Were they meant by their authors (and their sources) to convey sober, empirical historic events: or were they stories intended to highlight the status of Jesus as the Word made Flesh? We form our view about the divinity of Christ on the basis of his teaching, his miracles, his selfless love in embracing the Cross, and in his resurrection, ascension and the bestowing of the Holy Spirit. How then should we view the nativity stories? As history, or as 'myths' (in one or more of the word's many senses) underlining the nature of Christ? One may say both: that the nativity stories could be telling of us of real events (in that it is not beyond the power of God to work such prodigies), or they could be legends, intended to highlight what the first Christians had come to know about Jesus by other means. To adopt the second position is not to deny miracles! - Dan O'Hara

Although D'Souza is technically correct on the inductive fallacy inherent in science, I think a quicker and better argument would be that the laws of nature are in fact routinely "suspended" by the intervention of human minds-e.g., it happens every time a motorist decides to stop at a traffic light instead of rolling through it. And if the human mind can do that, how much more the Divine Mind? Don't get me wrong. D'Souza is great and I like his work. Thanks for tothesource too! - Bill Brewer

Good article. But one more point. Consider the child who sees a ball bounce for the first time. What if the wise uncle has never seen a ball bounce before and the child (and the uncle) never see a ball bounce again. Does the singularity of the experience validate or invalidate the incident? The answer is, of course, both and neither! The same is true for what might be described as miracles . . . singular events that have been experienced by many people throughout all history . . . singular and unexplainable by common knowledge. As one “wise man” put it, “A person cannot have a mis-experience. But they can have a mis-interpretation of that experience.” Hmmm. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. - Jim Tweedie, Mililani, Hawaii
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We live complex lives. We strive to sort out priorities that sometimes conflict or seem incompatible. A moral framework is needed to help us understand the reality around us. Our Judeo-Christian heritage provides a framework to help us comprehend the choices we make and the conflicts that arise over them. It is not only the main source of our spiritual values, but also many of the secular values we depend on.

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Dinesh D'Souza, the Rishwain Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, served as senior domestic policy analyst in the White House in 1987-1988. He is the best-selling author of Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, Ronald Reagan, The Virtue of Prosperity, What's So Great About America, and The Enemy at Home. His new book What's So Great About Christianity was released in October of 2007.
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