Christopher Hitchens has issued an open invitation to pastors to debate him on the merits of his latest book God Is Not Great. A few have taken him up, but not many. Most pastors are probably reluctant to debate Hitchens, and I can see why. The man is a mongrel! I do not say this as an insult but as a tribute to how tough this guy is.

I know Hitchens and have always liked him. We have debated twice in the past, once on socialism a very long time ago, when Hitchens used to be a socialist. Fortunately Hitchens has seen the error of his ways, although it would have been nice for the epiphany to have come to him during our debate. It would have been nice to have Hitchens turn to me in his closing statement to say, “You know, you have completely convinced me. You are right and I am wrong.” Still, Hitchens did eventually repent of his position on socialism.

Our second debate, a few years ago, was on political correctness. I found it amusing to see Hitchens defend political correctness, because he is not politically correct. Today that’s obvious, as Hitchens is an outspoken defender of Bush’s war in Iraq. But it was becoming clear even then, as Hitchens was challenging his colleagues on the far left on issues like abortion. Remarkably Hitchens is pro-life. This may seem odd, given his atheist convictions, but Hitchens’ view is that since we have only one life to live, we have to place a very high value on it and protect it. In any case, this debate was not so much a gladiatorial contest as a lively discussion on a range of issues from affirmative action to multiculturalism to campus speech codes.

I’m surprised at the vehemence and nastiness of Hitchens’ atheism. I didn’t know he harbored these deep resentments. Yes, I know that atheists present their ideas as the pure result of reason and evolution and so on, but I cannot believe that Hitchens regards the idea that we are descended from the apes with anything other than bemused irony. I suspect that Hitchens likes Darwin mainly because Darwin gives him a cudgel with which to beat pastors.

As he admitted in a recent interview, Hitchens calls himself an “anti-theist” rather than an “atheist.” Most atheists say that based on the evidence, they believe God does not exist. Hitchens’ position is somewhat different: he doesn’t want God to exist. He hates the idea of God’s existence because he thinks of God as a tyrant who supervises his moral life. Even the tyranny of Stalin or Kim Jong Il, Hitchens says, ends when you die. But this God, he wants obedience and praise and worship even in the afterlife! To Hitchens that’s a form of unceasing subservience and slavery.

In a way I can understand why pastors would be reluctant to get into the combat zone with Hitchens. Pastors are supposed to be models of Christian charity. This means that Hitchens can call them names but they cannot call him names. Pastors are required to turn the other cheek, while Hitchens gets ready to kick them in the rear end. Moreover, pastors are not used to fending off attacks from people who deny the validity of the gospels and, in Hitchens’ case, even cast doubt on the historical existence of Jesus Christ. How can you quote Scripture to a man who denies the authority of Scripture to adjudicate anything?

So Hitchens has a good game going, because he gets to make outrageous claims and they are going mostly unchallenged. Consider Hitchens’ discussion of one of the classic Christian proofs for the existence of God. Hitchens takes up Anselm’s so-called ontological argument, and he makes short work of it. Basically Anselm argues that God is, by definition, a being than which no greater can be conceived. But if God is such a being, he must exist. Why? Because if it didn’t, then he would be a being than which a greater could be conceived.

Anselm’s argument seems like a theological rabbit pulled from a rhetorical top hat. Yet when you ponder the logic. it is surprisingly strong. Philosophers of the caliber of Descartes and Leibniz have accepted the validity of Anselm’s ontological argument and given their own versions of it. Others, such as Aquinas and Kant, have considered the argument defective. But not one of them takes Hitchens’ line, which is to accuse Anselm of arguing that everything that can be conceived must exist.

This is emphatically not what Anselm is saying. He is not so foolish as to claim that if you can imagine a unicorn, therefore a unicorn must exist. Anselm’s argument only applies to one special case. God is defined, even by atheists, as a being of the highest conceivable perfection. Now such a being can exist only in the mind, or in the mind and in reality as well. Anselm argues that it is greater or more perfect to exist both in the mind and in reality, than to exist in the mind alone. Therefore God must exist, because otherwise he would not be a being of the highest conceivable perfection.

As centuries of commentary on Anselm confirms, this is an argument that seems hard to accept, and yet it is not very easy to refute. Hitchens certainly doesn’t do it. I have a mixed view of Hitchens’ arguments, but his real strength is in launching witty and pungent barbs at Christianity. Having shared the podium with him in the past, I know he’s an agile debater. I’d like to step into the arena and cross swords with him again in the fall, when my book What’s So Great About Christianity comes out. Perhaps one good thing that can come out of all these atheist books is that they bring God back into the mainstream of American cultural debate. It’s long overdue.

Militant Atheists Topping Best-Seller Lists

"There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist," Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. "There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying."

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books' success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.

"I don't believe in conspiracy theories," Mouw said, "but it's almost like they all had a meeting and said, 'Let's counterattack.'"

Christian Post

This week Hugh Hewitt devoted an entire show to"The Great God Debate" between Christopher Hitchens, author most recently of god Is Not Great, and Dr. Mark Roberts, theologian, professor, pastor, New Testament scholar and author of many books including the just published Can We Trust The Gospels?

Hitchens Debates Professor Marvin Olasky While on PR Tour in Texas

Last month University of Texas Professor and devout Christian, Marvin Olasky, stepped into the ring to debate Christopher Hitchens. The American Statesman reports that Olasky may lack debating experience but he gave a persistent defense of the faith while calling Hitchens on his rhetorical style and his sweeping assertion that "religion poisons everything".

"Olasky offered a different label for religion's negative impact: sin.

As Hitchens railed against the evils of religious fundamentalism in the debate, Olasky accused him of using 'totalitarian, fundamentalist rhetoric' to make his point.

'He's really not saying, Come, let us reason together,' Olasky said before the debate. 'He's saying, You're stupid, and I don't think that's the best tactic to produce a dialogue.'"

Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn't know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about "Negroes" -- with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty -- that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times).

Stephen Prothero
Boston University

After 8 years in prison, Jack Kevorkian emerged with the same views on the issue of assisted suicide that landed him there in the first place

Jack Kevorkian, Compassionate Eccentric? The Evidence Paints A Darker Portrait

"In actuality, most of Kevorkian's "patients" were not terminally ill, but disabled and depressed. Several weren't even sick, according to their autopsies. Moreover, Kevorkian never attempted to treat any of the 130 or so persons who traveled to Michigan to be hooked up to his suicide machines to die either by drug overdose or carbon monoxide poisoning.

And as for compassion — forget about it. Kevorkian was never in the killing business to alleviate unbearable suffering. Indeed, over the course of decades he repeatedly explained his ultimate goals in professional journals and in his 1991 book, Prescription Medicide. As Jack Kevorkian articulately expresses it himself, compassion had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Wesley J. Smith

Hitchens vs Hitchens - Peter Hitchens reviews his brother's book

"Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: 'The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural....I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.'"

"I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done. I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort. At the heart of this book are two extraordinary, bold statements. One is a declaration of absolute faith, faith that religion has got it wrong, a mental thunderbolt of unbelief. Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. 'I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong.'"

"At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection. It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he 'simply knew' who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind. It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and 'innate' knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as 'awesome' – in awe of whom or what?"

"Or 'mysterious'. What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to 'conscience' and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions. Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from? How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion? If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct."

By Peter Hitchens
The Mail on Sunday

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