In my debate with Christopher Hitchens in New York last October he raised a point that I did not know how to answer. So I employed an old debating strategy: I ignored it and answered other issues. But Hitchens' argument bothered me.

Here's what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let's say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man's plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn't really care.

Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, "It's time to get involved." Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn't bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere.

Here is the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?

I'm going to answer this argument in two ways. First, I'm going to show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted. Second, I'll reveal how Hitchens' argument backfires completely on atheism. For my first argument I'm indebted to Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

An adept numbers guy, Kreps notes that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.

"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."

I have to agree with Kreps's conclusion: "Sorry Hitchens."  But actually Hitchens’ plight is worse than this.  As I pointed out in a recent three-way debate with Hitchens and radio host Dennis Prager, Hitchens’ argument poses a far bigger problem for atheism than it does for theism.

To see why this is so, let’s apply an entirely secular analysis and go with Hitchens' premise that there is no God and man is an evolved primate. Well, man's basic frame and brain size haven't changed throughout his terrestrial existence.  So here is the problem. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. Besides some cave paintings, no real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization.  Both the wheel and Egyptian hieroglyphics are only 5000 years old.

How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise physically and mentally undistinguishable from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn't figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?

Then, a few thousand years ago, everything changes. Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels, agriculture, art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.

So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this, but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man's trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!

Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.

So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by biblical account of creation.

Atheist Richard Dawkins Hits a New Low

Atheist Richard Dawkins recently announced in his blog that he sees Hitler’s style in Dinesh D’Souza’s speaking. This is so unfair! Hitler competed with Churchill for the most effective orator of the 20th century. D’Souza is simply not in this league. Hitler’s speaking skills were as good as he was evil. And who was more evil than Hitler?

From Dawkins' blog:

“It occurs to me that people like Boteach and D’Souza may be honestly unaware that they shriek and yell in such an unbecoming way. Maybe this is just what preachers of a certain kind do. So people whose profession is to preach, or who live their lives surrounded by preachers, just don’t hear their ugly yells and shrieks as we do. They have become inured to the preaching style of yelling that the resemblance to Hitler passes them by.”

Dinesh Responds:

The philosopher Leo Strauss once spoke of the reductio ad Hitlerum. By this he meant the promiscuous tendency of people to try to score a debating point by comparing their opponents to Hitler. The form of the argument is something like this: "My opponent doesn't like strawberry ice cream. Hitler didn't like strawberry ice cream. My opponent is just like Hitler." Strauss's point was that the reductio ad Hitlerum is the mark of the lazy and illogical mind.

Sure enough, here is Richard Dawkins employing the reductio against me in a recent comment on his website richarddawkins.net. Referring to me and a conservative rabbi named Boteach, Dawkins writes:

"...I'm not suggesting that Boteach and D'Souza have literally damaged their ears. But at a higher cortical level they may have become desensitized through years of preaching, and exposure to preachers, so they don't hear, and literally and honestly don't understand, the strong resemblance to the hideous vocal style of Hitler. Once again, I need to emphasize that the comparison with Hitler is limited to vocal style. Of course nobody is suggesting that either Boteach or D'Souza have similar opinions to Hitler, or resemble him in any other way at all.

"But imagine listening to a Boteach speech or a D'Souza speech or a Hitler speech with no knowledge of English or German. I suspect that you'd hardly notice the difference. Contrast it with a speech by Christopher Hitchens. The voice is strong, even a little thrilling. But there's no hysteria there. The words match the content: measured, thoughtful, strong and powerful but never hysterical."

Had this not appeared on Dawkins' website, I would have thought it parody. But who can bring himself to laugh? Does Dawkins have any idea of how gross it is to compare a rabbi to Hitler on the sole ground that both men had a tendency to raise their voices? If this isn't anti-Semitism at the very least it shows a shocking disregard for what the Holocaust means to Jews. Perhaps the kindest explanation is that Dawkins has a pathological hatred for the clergy, and Boteach is a rabbi.

I, on the other hand, am a scholar and author. Dawkins, who knows this, weirdly insinuates that I am a preacher or spend most of my time with preachers. This couldn't be further from the truth. I have been a secular writer for 20 years and mostly I speak to university audiences and business groups. Moreover, the atheists I debate, like Michael Shermer and Peter Singer and Christopher Hitchens, routinely tell me how effectively I use wit and repartee and rhetorical understatement and learned analogies to make my points. Far from using "yells" and "shrieks," the only time I can recall even raising my voice was during my debate with Daniel Dennett, and this was not because I was upset but only because the microphone was not working properly.

I suspect that Dawkins has come up with this pathetic reductio ad Hitlerum in order to justify his cowardice in not debating me. "I can't debate Dinesh because he will use his Hitler voice to shout me down." Isn't the real problem that Dawkins has used his zoologist's credentials in order to wander into fields (physics, astronomy, history, philosophy, anthropology, theology) where his knowledge is embarrassingly limited? I suspect he's worried that in a debate I will exposure his ignorance and make him an international object of ridicule.

Why not prove me wrong, Richard? Come out from under your desk and take me up on my invitation to debate. I promise to speak in whispers!

http://www.richarddawkins.net

A New Day for Apologetics -- People young and old are flocking to hear — and be changed by — winsome arguments for the Christian faith.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Despite all the recent attacks on faith or, perhaps, because of them these are definitely the best of times for Christian apologists such as Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig, Ben Witherington III, Darrell Bock, and J. P. Moreland. They are making documentaries, writing books, giving media interviews, attending debates and conferences, and presenting the public with what they say is a growing mountain of scientific and archaeological evidence documenting the truth of Christianity.

"There has been a resurgence in Christian apologetics as a direct result of the challenges Christianity has faced in the form of militant atheism in college classrooms, on the Internet, and in TV documentaries and best-selling books," says Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and most recently the author of The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ.

Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote What's So Great About Christianity? (CT, March 2008), says the New Atheists are raising new types of questions requiring "21st-century apologetics."

"The apologetics of the 1970s and '80s are useful if you are teaching in a church camp, but it's not that relevant to the claims the New Atheists are making, which are very different," D'Souza says. "The New Atheists are really surfing the waves of 9/11, equating Islamic radicalism with Christianity. These are not questions addressed by C. S. Lewis or Josh McDowell."

This spate of attacks has also kindled an unexpected surge of interest in apologetics among youth.

"It wasn't too many years ago that scholars were writing off apologetics because we live in a postmodern world where young people are not supposed to be interested in things like the historical Jesus," Strobel says. "The biggest shock is that among people who communicated to me that they had found faith in Christ through apologetics, the single biggest group was 16- to 24-year-olds."

Last summer, hundreds had to be turned away from a Focus on the Family- sponsored apologetics conference for teenagers that drew an overflow crowd of 1,500. Meanwhile, the hotbeds of apologetics education Biola University and its Talbot School of Theology (CT, June 2003), Southern Evangelical Seminary, and Liberty University are crammed with students pursuing graduate degrees in philosophy and apologetics.

As this fascination with the evidence for Christianity has piqued the popular mind, Craig, D'Souza, and others are debating some of the principal atheist philosophers and liberal Bible scholars at universities and other forums in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. These debates often draw thousands of college students. Young people are curious whether Christianity can be rationally defended. Last year more than 2,000 students packed Central Hall in London to hear Craig debate biologist Louis Wolpert on the topic, "Is God a Delusion?" The moderator was BBC commentator John Humphrys, whom Craig calls the "Mike Wallace of Great Britain."

"He was stunned," Craig says. "He said, 'As I look out at this sea of young faces before me, whether or not you believe in God, something is going on here. I have never seen this kind of interest before in religious things in Britain.' Everywhere we go the reaction has been that people want to hear both sides presented. And when [they are], they will come out in droves to hear a discussion of the existence of God or the evidence for Christianity."

John Bloom, a physics professor at Biola, moderated what was billed as a "wild head-to-head debate" on Intelligent Design and Darwinism. Bloom says the recent challenges to Christianity coincide with celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

Reclaiming Jesus

Then there are the attacks on the New Testament's picture of Jesus as the Son of God. Witherington, a New Testament professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, says the claims made by the Jesus Seminar and others have set off alarms among orthodox Bible scholars. Darrell Bock is a research professor in New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of Dethroning Jesus. Bock speaks at forums nationwide about the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas, which are used to argue that the Christ of Christianity is contrived and the real Jesus is a less divine figure.

"A cottage industry has developed to debunk the Bible," Bock says. "Their goal has been to take this more skeptical reading of the Bible out of the ivory tower and into the public square."

Christian apologists are beginning to make headway in telling the other side of the story. D'Souza, a former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, has received international media exposure debating atheist pundit Christopher Hitchens, Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer, and others.

And although Strobel and others are appealing primarily to the intellect, people are responding with their hearts. Strobel says the recent aggression against the faith has provided a great opportunity to present Christ to non-Christians. Strobel is convinced apologetics helps bring people to God. He notes that more than 700 made professions of faith during his last book and speaking tour. Many people have a spiritual sticking point a tough question about the faith. And once they find an answer, Strobel says, it often turns out to be the last barrier between them and God.

One of those people was Evel Knievel, the motorcycle daredevil who died in November 2007. Earlier that spring, Knievel called Strobel after a friend gave him a copy of The Case for Christ. Knievel said the book was instrumental in his conversion from atheism to Christianity. Strobel, a motorcycle fanatic since childhood, and Knievel became friends, speaking weekly over the telephone.

"He just transformed in amazing ways," Strobel says. "I know his last interview was with a macho men's magazine, and he broke down crying, talking about his newfound relationship with Christ. He was so grateful. He knew he had lived a very immoral life and regretted that. He told me many times how he wished he could live his life over for God, and yet God reached down in his last days and dragged him into the kingdom. He was so overwhelmed by God's grace. Here was this macho daredevil who became this humble, loving, and sincere follower of Jesus. It was an amazing thing to behold."

Troy Anderson is a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/july/14.29.html

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