Hitchens vs. Wilson, The King's College

Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson: Is Christianity Good For the World?

October 29, 2008, The King's College

[Moderator Dr. Marvin Olasky introduces Hitchens and Wilson]

OLASKY: Doug, let's start with you [indecipherable]. In two minutes, tell us why Christianity is good for the world.

WILSON: There are two levels where that question can be addressed. One would be the level that I would, as a Christian minister, address it: It's good for the world because it's the truth of the Gospel for the world. Now, there are many who would answer it on another level, sort of a more pragmatic approach where they would say, "Religion, generally, is good for the world as a form of social control and it gives people comfort and consolation and keeps them from doing terrible, bad things to one another." The problem with that, as Christopher will hasten to inform you is that it often is the occasion for wars and conflicts between differing religions. So I want to defend not religion as a generic good for the world as a social control, but rather that the Christian faith, because Jesus is the Christ of God, is good for the world. The Christian Gospel is nothing if not the message that Jesus Christ is the last Adam—the word "Adam" means "mankind" in Hebrew. So when we're told—when the apostle Paul tells us that Jesus is the last Adam, he's saying Jesus is the ultimate mankind, the final mankind. We have the option of growing up into—mature as human beings in Christ and there's no other option, there's no other way. Now if that truth claim, if that claim is true—objectively true, then it has to be good for the world by definition; it's the salvation of the world. Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. How would that not be good? Of course, if the claim is false, if Jesus was delusional or a charlatan, then, of course, Christianity is no more good for the world than any other widely-circulated lie.

OLASKY: Ok. Chris, why is Christianity bad for the world?

HITCHENS: First, because it's based on a fantastic illusion. Let's say that the consensus is that our species, we being the higher primates, Homo sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says it may be 100,000; Richard Dawkins thinks maybe quarter of a million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be Christian you have to believe that for 98,000 years our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25, dying of their teeth, famine, struggle, indigenous war, suffering, misery, all of that. For 98,000 heaven watches it with complete indifference and then 2,000 years ago thinks, "That's enough of that, we should—it's time to intervene. The best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Not—don't let's appear to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization, let's go the desert and have another revelation there." This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am glad this is the case? (To get to the point of—the wrongness in the other sense of Christianity) Because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, that is the one of vicarious redemption: You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay our debt if I love you; I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much, I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away because I can't abolish your responsibility and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish thinking and I don't think wish thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important of all, the word "love." By making love compulsory, by saying you must love. You must love your neighbor as yourself, something you can't actually do. We'll always fall short so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear, that is to say a supreme being, an eternal father. Someone of whom you must be afraid but who you must love him too. If you fail in this duty, you're, again, a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy and that brings me to the final objection and I'll condense it, Dr. Olasky, which is this is a totalitarian system. If there was a god who could do these things and demand these things of us and who was eternal and unchanging, we would be living under a dictatorship from which there was no appeal and one that could never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round—and I could say more—it's an excellent thing that there's absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

OLASKY: Ok Doug, are you a thinking person or are you left speechless by Chris' assault?

WILSON: I give up.

HITCHENS: [To Olasky] Christopher. Would you mind calling me Christopher? I'm sorry, it's only because it's my name.

WILSON: Alright.

HITCHENS: Thank you.

WILSON: Here, I think, is the central difficulty of Christopher's critique of the Christian faith: You notice that he is not critiquing the Christian faith by appealing to a standard that overarches all human beings and that is obligatory for all of us. When he says things like, "Substitutionary atonement is immoral," well, by what standard? Who says? What do you mean "immoral"? What world view considers it to be immoral and why is that world view in charge of the Christian world view? All ultimate truth claims are, to use post-modern jargon, "totalized": You can't talk about everything without talking about everything and what Christopher has to do, in order to critique the Christian faith, is he has to borrow ethical standards from the Christian faith and run a reductio where he says, "According to the standards that you adopt as Christians, here, let me climb into that— let me climb into the Christian car and see if I can drive it into a tree." That's what he's doing. But he doesn't have any car to drive of his own. Why—substitutionary atonement is immoral. How come? Who says?

HITCHENS: Very well.

OLASKY: Chris, yes, are you a car thief?

HITCHENS: Now, here we are. I haven't known Douglas Wilson for very long, but he does strike me as a very sweet and decent and generous and humane person and thus he obviously doesn't know how insulting, how rude he's just been. Not just to me...

WILSON: Oh, I think I do.

HITCHENS: Not just to me—not just to your humble servant the carjacker, but to you also, ladies and gentlemen. I think it's a fantastically rude thing to say that if it wasn't for Christianity, I and you wouldn't know right from wrong. It's an extraordinary thing to say. The awareness of the difference between right and wrong is innate in human beings and it can be found and noticed, being observed and enforced and upheld in societies where Christianity has never yet penetrated. To say that no one—let me give an example from the Old Testament: (The story, as you know, the wandering in the Sinai and the wandering in the desert is all made up, it's a Jewish foundational myth but) the Ten Commandments, four or five of which do actually contain moral injunctions, some of them are nonsensical, some of them are theocratic, some of them are self-contradictory, but the ones that say, on the whole, "Avoid murder, theft, and perjury," are, I would consider, sound and I would dare say every in this room would without necessarily having to be told. Are we to assume that my mother's ancestors, the ancient Jewish people, got all the way to Mount Sinai under the impression that murder, theft, and perjury were all ok? And only when told from on high, "Stop with that!" suddenly thought maybe they are such bad ideas after all. Of course not. There couldn't have been a Jewish society or enough Jewish solidarity to get them that far if they, for one thing, if they thought these things were fine until God says that they are. This is not how morality is formed at all. To the contrary, as far as I can tell, religion gets its morality from humans. It's a feedback loop and then it says—tells them to think of things that aren't sins as if they were. For example, coveting your neighbor's goods, a perfectly healthy thing to do. The ambition of jealousy and emulation is a necessary spur to innovation and to progress. Then described, quite ludicrously, as a sin and you're made to feel guilty about it when you shouldn't. That's the irrational superimposition on ordinary human solidarity and morality that is attempted by all religion, not just Christianity.

WILSON: There's two things. One: Notice that the core of what Christopher acknowledged, that the ancient Jews had a quite healthy and robust respect for certain decencies that are pervasive in all societies, particularly religious societies, means that it must be the case that religion does not poison everything, contrary to the thesis of your recent book. Now, you want to go on...

HITCHENS: To the contrary. I said they had those things without being told by God.

WILSON: Right, but then having had them, and when religion came along, religion needs to have poisoned it, if religion poisons everything. But the point is that if they already had them because they're human, not because they were religious and religion screws everything up, then why didn't it screw up "Do not murder," "Do not lie," "Do not perjure"? Why didn't it mess that up? Now here's the thing that I want to—have point something out. I'm quite willing to be direct with Christopher if I think it calls for it, but I don't want to be unintentionally rude to him. (Oscar Wilde defined a gentleman as someone who never insults someone else accidentally.) Notice that Christopher said that morality is innate but notice that that's coming from an evolutionist where everything's up for grabs. In an evolutionary world view, everything's on the table. All kinds of things are innate. These used to be innate in our makeup, back before we were human beings, when we were another kind of critter, there were innate things that disappeared. So, why can't our innate morality evolve right along with the rest of us? The other thing is, and this is very important to note, I did not say that Christopher does not know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. If you read his book—read his book on god is Not Great, or if you read virtually anything else he writes, it's very, very clear that he has an acute sense of right and wrong, up and down, righteousness, unrighteous. He would have made a very good puritan in...(You're welcome.) And to wrap it up, there's a difference between knowing the difference between good and evil and being able to give an accounting of it. My challenge is not that he doesn't know right and wrong, he does, but how can you account for it, given an evolutionary time and chance universe?

HITCHENS: Just to go back to that episode in Sinai: I say that the knowledge that murder, theft, and perjury should be avoided was already present in Jewish and every other known society before the injunctions come from heaven and these injunctions, these are the religious ones, the ones that only God could tell you: Well, you've got to circumcise your children, you have to mutilate your children's genitals; you have to avoid eating pigs; you have to be prepared—in fact you are enjoined to slay the Amalekites down to the last child and only keep a few young women alive for purposes better imagined than described, and do the same to the Mideonites and others—genocide is made a holy obligation. That's the added bit, that's what religion adds to morality. It negates it, in other words. The Golden Rule, so called, the one that any--most children don't have to be taught (in other words, don't treat other people as you wouldn't want to be treated yourself, or more positively, treat others as you would wish them to treat you) certainly appears in The Analects of Confucius, a very long time ago. Most people would not say Confucionism was really a religion. It also appears—it's been beautifully expressed by Rabbi Hillel, a Babylonian rabbi. Christianity adds absolutely nothing, in other words, to our awareness of the difference between good and evil but does shift a lot of good things into the evil side and a lot of evil things into the good side and ends up in a universe of howling moral confusion.

WILSON: Let me seize this opportunity to agree with Christopher on something, and that is if you take C. S. Lewis' book The Abolition of Man, in the appendix, or in the back of the book, he has a compilation of ethical injunctions from around the world, different religions, different periods of history, which he calls the Tao. And he's doing this to illustrate—to make Christopher's point which is that you—the Christian faith does not bring fundamentally into the world a new consciousness of right and wrong. What comes into the world is gospel, not good advice, but good news. So the problem is not that didn't know the difference between right and wrong. We did, and constantly do, we speak to others in terms of it. The problem is that we don't live up to the standards that we affirm, whatever religion it is, if it's The Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism or whatever way you have. Men and women are sinners and they fail to obtain that standard and what Christ offers and what Christianity offers is forgiveness of sin, which is what Christopher began by saying is an impossibility.

HITCHENS: Well let me rush to seize the outstretched paw there. And, while we're on the subject of Lewis—one of my least favorite authors—Lewis does make a very, very important observation, I would call it a concession as a matter of fact, where he says there's one tone of voice he can't stand hearing, and you hear it a lot, it was very much present in the work of a great hero of mine, his biographer I am, Thomas Jefferson, say Christianity may not be theologically true but Jesus was a wonderful, morally exemplary human being with extremely lovely preachments that deserve attention whether you believe in the Gospel or not. C. S. Lewis quite rightly says that's absolutely ridiculous. That's the one thing you cannot say, because if this man was not the son of God then the things that He was saying were absolutely immoral, some of them wicked or mad. They make no sense or they make sense only as injunctions to do evil. As for example: Take no thought for the morrow, care not to clothe or to eat, don't worry about your family, leave your family, who cares about your children, don't invest, don't grow, don't sew, there's no point. It's all coming to an end very soon. The kingdom of God is coming, which he thought would be in the lifetime of his disciples. Then it does make sense, of course. Who cares then? But otherwise it would be an immoral preachment. So I think we've already made quite a lot of progress in that I think in front of most audiences, this one's probably more qualified on the matter—in front of most audiences, morality is talked about as if it was what innate and what was common to us and religion is judged by whether it is moral or not where as, as Doug Wilson points out, that's not true.

OLASKY: In several minutes we'll begin taking questions from the floor so you can line up in the aisles as things occur to you—thoughts and questions occur to you. Doug?

WILSON: We're back to our disagreement because C. S. Lewis is one of my favorite writers and I believe he had a talent for going right to the nub of the matter and at least one this one, we agree: Jesus was either the son of God, the Lord of heaven and earth or He was a nutcase or He was an evil, evil man. Let's not have any nonsense about Him being a great moral prophet. He was out of His head if He—if He didn't have the authority to say the things that He said then He had no right or business saying them.

HITCHENS: That works for me. No, let's bring it on.

OLASKY: Bring it on, yes. So, questioners can begin lining up as they choose to do so. But let me ask Christopher a question here: Are there any good things that Christians have done?

HITCHENS: That Christians have done? I'm sure. Yes, I know people who I regard as nicer than myself who do what they do, it seems to me, because they are Christian. I like to think they would do it—they'd be that way if there had never been any Christianity and I think there's every possibility that that is so. I can't deny that they give me the impression and they say to themselves that this is because of their faith.

OLASKY: Doug, are there bad things that Christians have done, that Christianity is in some way responsible for?

WILSON: I don't believe that there are things you can say Christianity is responsible for except in the sense that your math class is responsible for the wrong answers that you got on the test. You wouldn't be getting those wrong answers if you had been enrolled in the class. So in that case, the math class is responsible for your failing the math class. But the math instructor, the math curriculum, the laws of mathematics are not responsible for you getting it wrong. Those are errors or deviances from the norm. But, on a practical level, as a pastor—I've been a pastor for over thirty years and I can tell you that there are all sorts of unique, interesting religious pathologies that show up in people in a religious context that don't show up elsewhere. In a secular world you're get secular pathologies and in a religious you're going to get religious pathologies and that's what pastors and people who are charged with the care of souls, have to deal with all the time. So yes, there's a unique kind of Christian screwed-up-ness that can occur but that has to do with us not obeying what the Bible says to do, not following God the way we ought to follow Him.

HITCHENS: That, I have to say I think there's a slight element of casuistry there in that, you say if an immoral thing was done by a Christian that would mean—because the person was a Christian—that would mean because it was immoral it couldn't have been Christian by definition. So, that's a little too convenient, isn't it?

WILSON: It's very convenient.

HITCHENS: For example, the injunction to spread the news of Christianity, to prosthelytize, has in the hands of, perhaps not of your church but, shall I say the Roman Catholic Church, led to appalling crimes being committed which the Church itself is said to have apologized for.

WILSON: Yes, there are many things for which...

HITCHENS: They can't say they didn't do this for Jesus or in the name of God.

WILSON: Correct. But they can say that, because they bear His name, in the baptism and by profession and they did wicked acts in His name, they have an obligation to repent, to turn away from it. So, the issue is if the question is simply can an atheist do good things and can a Christian do bad things the answer is certainly of course. That's absolutely the case. What I'm saying is that the Christian who does evil things and wants to tenaciously cling to it can't justify his rebellion and sin in terms of Scripture. He can't justify what he's doing from the foundational assumptions of his faith and vice versa. I don't believe the atheist can give an accounting of morality.

HITCHENS: Well, you see, this is the difficulty that I'll have to bring up now. You, I think, are not a member of the Roman Catholic Church, but if you were one you would believe his Holiness the Pope is the vicar of Christ on earth and is chosen by God for that job so and order given by the Pope does rather commit a Catholic to say that, "I'm doing this for Christianity." So when they say that all Jews are collectively responsible for the murder of Christ, as they did until 1964, that's in the name of God as far as anyone can tell. Now if, as I suspect, you don't believe that, what I want to know is how do you know that you're a better Christian than the Pope? The Pope, by the way, thinks you're going straight to hell because there's only one true faith and you're not part of it. So this is all part—one of the worst things about Christianity, it seems to me, is how much its adherents love each other. There's not the least of the wickedness that's imposed on the world is religious warfare between Christians about interpretations of essentially uninterpretable because nonsensical and irrational and contradictory Scriptures.

WILSON: You just climbed into the Christian car again and drove it into a tree.

HITCHENS: No, I don't think so. I found it in the ditch and decided to leave it right there where it belongs.

OLASKY: Ok, let's get out of the ditch by going to a question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I guess for Mr. Hitchens: One of the distinctives of the Abrahamic theistic faiths surely is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which is probably stated most simply by Aristotle (who's certainly no theist in the sense that the Christian would speak of it in this argument) from the impossibility of an infinite chain of causation that the chain of material causation we experience as becoming has to terminate somewhere in an immovable mover, an uncaused causing that is the fount of all being. So you don't have that option, it seems, so how do you account for being as such, what is your ontology?

HITCHENS: Well, isn't the danger of what you just proposed that of an infinite regression in that who's going to cause this cause, where does this being come from? Who created this creator? I've never known anyone who can get past the infinite regression objection to that. And in any case if you were to advance that theory successfully—if you were to say to me, or if you were to get me to say, "I can't answer that. I can't disprove it. It could be true." All you would've done was establish the possibility that deism was a reasonable position to hold. Which, I would say that until Darwin and Einstein it probably was. It was the sort of thing that an intelligent person might have to end up believing because the orders and rhythms of the nature and the cosmos don't seem very likely to be accidental. But if you've established deism you've got all your work still ahead of you to be a theist. You have to show that this god, this person who went to all this trouble with physics, cares who you sleep with or how or whether you should eat a pig or not or what day you should observe as holy. Now, I don't see how you get from your uncaused cause to that, to the idea that we are divinely created, supervised by someone who cares for us. That's something for which there can never be made any evidence. You either have to believe that or not. And as I'm sure Pastor Wilson will confirm you have to have faith in order to believe it to begin with, so...

WILSON: And it's not that you can never have...

HITCHENS: And some of us, I'm afraid, there's no help for this. As Pascal described us: We are so made, we are so constituted that we cannot believe.

WILSON: Yes...

HITCHENS: We can't. A lot of humans are created that way.

WILSON: Some can't, some...

HITCHENS: And we presume we're also in the image of God.

WILSON: Some can't and some won't. When you say that there's this infinite regress going back, either you have an endless chain of material of causality, which has struck many thinking theologians and philosophers as absurd, as something untenable because you've got each element in the contingent chain is dependent on the previous contingent thing, and so it seems reasonable and it seemed reasonable to many to postulate a necessary being that is not part of that chain. And I don't think that's a compelling argument for God's existence but having accepted God's existence on other grounds, it's not that I believe that the cosmological argument proves God's existence but I do believe that God's existence proves the cosmological argument. I think it's true.

HITCHENS: Ah.

OLASKY: Let's go to another question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: This question's for Mr. Wilson: Mr. Hitchens pointed out a interesting surface flaw of Christianity and that is that we believe that, even with the most conservative estimates there's at least 4,000 years of human history before Christ [Hitchens laughs] and if you believe that—notice I say at least, but—if you believe that Christ is the redeemer than all those people, by necessity, went to hell. How can you assert that a religion who says that that many people went to hell for seemingly no reason, even though they might have been good or bad, is good for the world?

WILSON: Here's the structure of the argument first: If you assume, or quietly assume that mankind is basically good, basically innocent, basically minding their own business, not doing anything wrong and we don't know about Jesus because God withheld that information from us and then God comes in many thousands of years later and says, "Ha ha! You didn't know about Jesus. I'm going to throw you into hell for your ignorance which I placed upon you," then yes, the objection is a very strong one. But that's not the way it works. The human race is in rebellion against God; the human race is fallen into sin. So if I develop a cure for cancer and I go and offer it to a bunch of people in a cancer ward and half of them take it and half of them don't and those who take it are cured, those who died don't die of not taking medicine, they died of cancer, alright? The cancer's the thing that killed them not not knowing about the medicine, not not taking the medicine, the thing that kills them is the cancer. The thing that kills people, the thing that caused the death and suffering before the advent of Christ was the existence of sin, rebellion, self-centeredness, me-first-ism, that's what causes the problem. Christ is the solution; Christ is not the problem. Christ is the savior; Christ is not the disease. Sin is the disease. Self-absorption is the disease.

HITCHENS: Can I have a comment? Your question has also occurred with considerable force to early Christian thinkers who don't try and explain it away as Pastor Wilson has just done (or just, rather failed to do). But you said, "No, there has to be an answer to that." Also, what about the people who live now in Borneo, say, who've never met a Christian, never heard of the Bible, don't know the Jesus story? What about them, are they condemned by their ignorance? There is indeed a term invented by, I think Ignatius of Loyola called "invincible ignorance" to cover this. (It's a form of innocence.) It means it's not your fault, you couldn't have heard the Good News. In the Apostle's Creed it is said of Jesus that after suffering under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, he descended into hell, you'll remember that. Well I've heard it argued by some Christians that He went to hell in order to retrospectively recruit all those who had been boiling there awaiting His arrival. Seems to me this is a fantastically cruel way of explaining things but at least it does square the circle that otherwise cannot be squared, believe you me.

WILSON: Just a quick item: The Greek for that word in the Apostle's Creed is "Hades" not "hell" so when people think of hell they usually think of Final Judgment, lake of fire. "Hades" is the Greek word for the Hebrew "Sheol," the place of the dead not necessarily torment, so that's just a quick...

HITCHENS: Sure, but I'm only saying that these people—it's a place of confinement I think we might add. Certainly is [indecipherable] in that—no, indeed, I mean, there is no hell; it's a detail worth pointing out. There is no hell in the Old Testament. [Audience laughter] There's no hell in the Old Testament. There's no mention of it. Once God is finished with you, once all the Amalekite children have been killed, that's the end of them. There's no punishment of the dead. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who says, "If you don't listen to my meek and mild message you can be—depart into everlasting fire. You've always got that option if you don't like my meek and mild stuff." So yes, I think it's very—it's not a matter of pedantry at all. The difference between hell, Hades, infinite, eternal punishment and not is very important. One of Christianity's specifically horrible contributions to human mythology and delusion is the idea, the terrifying idea that you could be tortured forever.

WILSON: Horrible by what standard?

HITCHENS: Horrible by—well, good question.

WILSON: Yeah, I know.

HITCHENS: No. Horrible, well—shall I say—let me ask anyone here who doesn't think it's a horrible idea to put up their hand. So it doesn't seem to require much explanation, does it, as a horrible idea?

WILSON: Well...

HITCHENS: Do you feel you need a standard to keep your hand down at the moment? Or did I just say something that was so morally self-evident?

WILSON: No, there's a difference between an emotional reaction to something—every person...

HITCHENS: Oh, I think they're using their heads, Douglas.

WILSON: No, t here's a difference between an emotional reaction, which all of us have, everybody with natural affection thinks it's a terrible idea to think of people perishing eternally. That's not the issue. The issue is: How do you give an accounting of what is good and what is bad? When you say—if the universe is, on your accounting, time and chance acting on matter, if all the universe is is matter in motion, what do you mean "horrible"? What do you mean by "horrible idea"? Who cares?

HITCHENS: Why do we care? Very good point. (Or, a very good question.) I ask myself a lot why that is. I think it is because I am one of the higher primates.

WILSON: But that's not a rallying cry.

HITCHENS: No, it appears to be—no, it's not much of a rallying cry but it has the merit of being true. It appears to be part of the equipment, intellectual and moral equivalent, of our primate species that it does have the need to help its fellow creatures as well as to torture, kill, rape, enslave, and exploit them. It does have a feeling, a quite strong one, that there's a human need to help and that you might need help yourself someday so be nice to your neighbor so why not?

WILSON: How...how does it sort out?

HITCHENS: Not everyone has this. There are quite a lot of people, also presumably made in the image of God, I think a superfluous assumption to be making, but, also made in the image of God, according to you, who were born sociopathic; they don't care about other people; they can't be made to; they just won't and don't. They're a problem for the rest of us. And then there are people who are born psychopathic who positively need to see others suffer...

WILSON: If our species...

HITCHENS: And have a bad time.

WILSON: If our species has within it these seeds of a gregarious, lend-a-helping-hand-and-we-have-a-herd instinct and we want to help out, we have that instinct and we also have the instinct to go to war and fight and do all these terrible things that we do, I've got instinct A and instinct B: What is it that tells you which one is right?

HITCHENS: Same as you, I would say.

WILSON: God?

HITCHENS: No. No, you knew all that before you'd ever read the Bible.

WILSON: Well, I knew all that but how...

HITCHENS: You knew that well before anyone ever introduced you to Christianity. Don't tell me you didn't or I'll have to be seriously alarmed about what you were like as a little boy.

WILSON: Well that would be good to do, to see us...

HITCHENS: No, come on.

WILSON: Here's the issue: Of course, I can feel a certain way before I can give an accounting of it, but what I'm asking for is, given your premises, given your assumptions, given what you say the universe is, given all that, how do you give an accounting of which way you go? Now I know—I've read enough of your stuff and seen enough to know that you and I would agree on any number of things. If we're going around New York and we see someone in trouble, we would have the same instinct, we'd would want to help; we'd want to step in and do that. I know that that's true of you. What I can't get from you is a reason for that choice, given your assumptions.

HITCHENS: Well, I just don't think that the idea that there's a creator who supervises you and watches over you and intervenes in your life is a good or sufficient explanation of any of this, that's all.

WILSON: I know that you...

HITCHENS: It's a burdensome assumption that makes—well, in that case, where are all the psychopaths and sociopaths coming from? They're all made in the image of God as well.

WILSON: Sure, I know what assumption you don't think works...

HITCHENS: Why would God want to do that—make someone innately wicked and a menace to their neighbors from the moment they were born, because of the way they are?

WILSON: I know that you don't think works. What I'm trying to get is what you think does work. What does account for this instinct A, instinct B...

HITCHENS: Well, it's observable in other species, as you know. We're not the only primates who have families and solidarity and look out for each other and so on. There are other species as well.

WILSON: And other species go to war; other species' mothers eat their young...

HITCHENS: Yes, that's right.

WILSON: Other species—how do I sort this out?

HITCHENS: Well, random mutation and natural selection produce quite a lot of discrepant results. There are no results that cannot be explained by random mutation combined with natural selection. Whereas, if you add a supernatural dimension, you explain everything and nothing. Something that explains everything doesn't explain very much. That's the notorious disadvantage of it. I like to give blood, for example. I positively enjoy doing it. When Dr. Olasky and I both used to be Marxists and one of the great things about the socialist instinct, I used to think, was people have a human need to help (there's a great book about blood donation called The Gift Relationship). The British National Health Service is not allowed to pay for blood. You can't buy it or sell it but it never runs out of it. There are always enough people to give. I positively enjoy it and also have a very rare blood group (AB negative). I might need a blood donation myself one day. It's in my interest that the blood donor habit is kept up and I don't lose a pint when I give blood; I get it back after about an hour after a nice strong cup of tea. So I've given someone a pint of blood and I haven't lost one. Very nice—it gives me pleasure. Do I have to explain why that's so? No. If I said it gives me pleasure because it puts me in well with my Lord and supreme celestial dictator, I think you might think less of me, perhaps than you—I was about to say than you already do—than you would if I had just left it where I had just left it. Now do you see?

WILSON: The problem is, Christopher gets pleasure from giving blood. Other people in the world get pleasure from taking it.

OLAKSY: My wife and I, when we give blood, do it in seats right next to each other and we have a race, so we get great pleasure out of that. So let's...

HITCHENS: And I take and place bets on that and I get great pleasure out of that too.

OLASKY: Next question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: This is for Mr. Hitchens but I'd love for Mr. Wilson to respond as well: You stated earlier that Christianity perverted the notion of love by making it compulsory. My question, I guess, is: As a Christian, my Trinitarianism instinct is to understand the Father's love for the Son and the Son's love for the Spirit, etc., etc., as the model for the world and as something that—as love as an act of transcendence. Obviously, in your account that's not there, that's absent. So what is the place for love in your account? Is it simply a biochemical reaction? Is it something we just do? Is it one of those random genetic mutations that we talked about? How do we account for love? What is it? Is it important and is it something that really defines us as humans or is it something that's accidental?

HITCHENS: No, it's central to the self-definition of the human. People who can't feel that emotion, I think, we are entitled to describe in some way less than human. There are three ways in which I think Christianity gets this wrong: One is by making an injunction that's much too strenuous. You're not just to be good to neighbor and treat them as you would wish them to treat you, you must love them as yourself. In other words, you must be self-abnegating. I think that's unhealthy. You are not, in fact, ever going to succeed in doing that. You might find one person you love as much as yourself or even more in your life and you're very lucky if you do, there's a wonderful feeling, but it can't be enforced on you. We can't be told that's what you must do, that spoils the point of it. And it has another disadvantage which is because it's too strenuous and it can't be lived up to. In fact, you're always guilty; you've always fallen short. So organized masochism, another unpleasant feature, it seems to me, of Christianity: contempt for one's own self-respect and integrity is enjoined. Then there's the compulsory love: You must love someone, the Supreme Father, who you must also fear—you're also told you ought to fear. Actually, that is many people's relationship to their fathers. But that means that the divine doesn't improve on what the human mammalian family has already discovered for itself. And then the third, perhaps the most immoral of all, is the injunction to love your enemies. That I will not do. I know who my enemies are. At the moment the most deadly ones are Islamist theocrats with a homicidal and genocidal agenda. I'm not going to love them. You go love them if you want; don't love them on my behalf. I'll get on with killing them and destroying them, erasing them and you can love them. But the idea that you ought to love them is not a moral idea at all. It's a wicked idea and I hope it doesn't take hold, especially on any of you seemingly serious, decent, young people. What a disgusting order to love those people.

WILSON: Here's the...

HITCHENS: Destroy them.

WILSON: A couple of responses here: One is on the compulsory nature of love commanded, God commanding us to love: (I saw a great t-shirt once that said, "Gravity: It's not just a good idea, it's the law." Well, gravity is just the way things are, and this was implied in the question.) God the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the Spirit and the Father and Son love one another eternally. It's simply the way God is. So when we are told—commanded to love God (the first Commandment is to Love God with all our hearts, sould, mind, and strength and the second is to love our neighbors as ourselves), what God is doing is requiring us to conform ourselves to the nature of ultimate reality. He's inviting us to cease rebelling against that reality, which is what self-centeredness does. Now, of course Christopher's quite right that we can't do this apart from God's grace, apart from His enabling and if we try on our own it's simply going to be perpetual condemnation because we're never going to be good enough. That's why we need to be forgiven. On the second point, having to do with loving our enemies, I want to say that loving your enemies is not inconsistent with fighting them and it is not inconsistent with doing what is necessary to love your own family, love your own people and protect and defend them. I will say that peace is going to come to the Middle East, I believe, sooner as a result of Christian missionaries going there, preaching the Gospel, loving people who are their enemies. God destroys his enemies two ways—you said destroy them, these people are out to do vile things you said to destroy them—I can echo that I can say, "Amen," but God destroys enemies two ways: God destroys enemies by taking them out the traditional way and God also destroys enemies by transforming them into friends. That destroys an enemy too.

HITCHENS: The Irish foreign minister was making a speech to the United Nations during the debate on the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 and urged them to settle their dispute in a Christian fashion. I'll never forget it. Now, just—that's an observation. I have a question for you: I've only known you today and I've heard you now, maybe seven or eight times just in the last ten minutes, say what God wants us to do about quite a lot of things, quite important ones. Here's my question for you: How do you know that God wants us to do them? See, I wouldn't be able to begin a sentence by saying, "I know what God wants." I wouldn't. And to you it seems to be second nature. I insist on knowing: How do you make a claim that I couldn't make? How do you know something that as far I know nobody could know: the mind of God? I need an answer to this question.

WILSON: You shall have it shortly.

HITCHENS: Very good.

WILSON: Here's the thing: You don't know what God wants us to do but you do apparently know what the blind evolutionary process wants us to do.

HITCHENS: No I don't.

WILSON: Well, you want us to love—higher primates to love one another and not do awful things and live up to our...

HITCHENS: I'm not ordering them to do so.

WILSON: So it's not bad if they don't?

HITCHENS: I didn't say that.

WILSON: Ok, so you are saying it is bad.

HITCHENS: By what standard by the way?

WILSON: Well, that was a good question that I didn't get an answer for earlier. Now the reason...

HITCHENS: That's why it's a good question because to me the answer isn't as obvious as it is to you.

WILSON: Now let me answer the question you posed to me.

HITCHENS: Yes, why not?

WILSON: I believe, as a Christian minister, I get up week after week on the Lord's day to preach and I'll read from Scripture and I'll say before I read, "These are the words of God," and give you God's word. I'll read the text and then exposit the text so I have no business or authority going, as the Apostle Paul says in Corinthians, "We're to learn how not to go beyond what is written." So God is there, as Francis Schaeffer put it in his book title, He is There and He is Not Silent. So, the Christian faith believes in a God who reveals Himself. God reveals Himself in Creation, He reveals Himself in the incarnation of the word of God, Jesus, and He reveals Himself in His inscripturated word. So, I need to stick close to what God has revealed to us in Scripture and that's how I—so if I say, "God wants us to do thus and such," and you say, "How do you know that?" what I would do is I'd give you a chapter and verse. I'd say, "Well, here's where He told us to do that."

HITCHENS: Must be very handy; you can just assume what you have to prove.

WILSON: It is very handy. And you're assuming—assuming what you need to prove on ultimate questions is inescapable. So, if you say you depend on reason as your ultimate court of appeal and I can say, "Oh? Give me a reason for that." Well, you're assuming—when you give me reason for that, you're assuming what you need to prove. If I asked for a reason for your trust in reason, you wouldn't say, "Oh, thank you, I will have a jelly doughnut." You're going to appeal to reason and that's just like me opening my Bible and pointing to a scriptural text.

HITCHENS: Not just like.

WILSON: We're finite beings and so every finite being has to have an axiomatic starting point. You have one, I have one.

HITCHENS: Right.

WILSON: As an unbeliever, your axiomatic starting point is one of unbelief; mine is one of faith.

HITCHENS: But if this scripture was the Koran, does everything you say still hold?

WILSON: No.

HITCHENS: Why not? How do you know they've got the wrong god?

WILSON: That's a great question and it's what Greg Bahnsen referred to as "the impossibility of the contrary." Basically there are about five world views available. Most variants are denominational differences between, you know, within those world views. You've got Trinitarianism and Unitarianism and Pantheism and Naturalism and Dualism. And everything that you can shake out will fit under one of those categories. So if someone said, "I belong to a Unitarian faith like Islam, and there's one God and Muhammed is his prophet," does this work? Well, among those five world views, what you have is a demolition derby, a last-man-standing approach where, ok, if each faith—if each one of these faiths has A, B, C, that's their fundamental assertion then you reason downstream, given those premises, reason downstream from those. If one column says, "I assert B," and then you get to a logical consequence of that which is not B, C, not C, D, not D, and the only one that doesn't do that is the Christian faith, which is, I'm convinced, is the case then that's the last man standing; that's the demolition derby, or as Dr. Greg Bahnson said, "the impossibility of the contrary." You can't just say, "I have my presuppositions and I can do as a Muslim what you did as a Christian, or I can do as a Naturalist what you did as a Christian," you can't really do that.

HITCHENS: If you were born in Saudi Arabia, then, would you be better off being an atheist than a Muslim?

WILSON: Say that again.

HITCHENS: If a soul, a person, is born in Saudi Arabia, would that person, in your judgment, be wiser to be an atheist than to become a Muslim?

WILSON: You know, that's a hard question to answer. But I would honestly say that it would be better for that person to be an atheist in that setting. Not because atheism is the truth, but because that means that he's at least on a pilgrimage. He's at least stepped away from that which is the dominant, controlling form of thought, which is erroneous. And if he wants his moving he might keep moving until he finds Christ.

OLASKY: Next question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Uh, yes this question is for Mr. Hitchens but also, I guess, for Mr. Wilson as well. I'm a big fan of your columns on Slate and I definitely read them every hour as my—as soon as they come out—as some of my roommates and professors can attest...

HITCHENS: Thank you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: And, we've kind of touched on this, I guess, in the periphery of this argument but (and I know I'm simplifying things), but one of the reasons that you often argue that Saddam Hussein needed to be taken out, for a lack of a better word, is the "crimes" he perpetrated against, you know, the Kurds, and against his own people. Another cause you're very passionate about is—and I'm going to mispronounce her name—Ms. Hirsaan Ali...is that...?

HITCHENS: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: Right. I guess what I'm asking is: Those crimes that were perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and towards Ms. Ali, couldn't it be argued that Saddam had, through evolutionary means, gotten to a position of power where he was stronger and is up to him to survive—I guess what I'm saying is you often refer to moral arguments for the Iraq war. Couldn't it be argued that if survival of the fittest holds true that there really wasn't a moral argument for the Iraq war, we could maybe take him out because we're a stronger entity, the US, but, I guess—this is basically what we've been talking about the last 20 minutes or so, but...

HITCHENS: Well, if I have understood you correctly, what you're really asking me is would I think it made sense to describe to the Saddam Hussein regime as evil? Well, I wrote a long essay and it's in a little book of mine called The Long Short War: A Postponed Liberation of Iraq, about that very question. How would one derive such a term as "evil"? I personally believe I've witnessed the operations of radical evil in the world, in fact in northern Iran. It's something to do with the smell that's given off by genocide but also by torture. In other words, by being crueler than you need to be to stay in power, by being cruel for its own sake. This sort of surplus value of dictatorship and torture and genocide. The exorbitant bit, the evil part, the part that isn't necessary for the job to be done. It's purely a celebration of horror for its own sake. That's the nearest—that surplus value element to it is the nearest I've been able to get and I can promise you that if you were a person of ordinary morality as we all are, you would know it too when you saw it. By what standard, I'm about to be asked? You would know that too. You'd know what standard you were using when you had that reaction, believe me. Did we only take out Saddam Hussein because we could? No, because there's no regime we couldn't take out if we wanted to. And there are many regimes we wish we could. In Burma, for example, or Zimbabwe (a Buddhist dictatorship in Burma, a Catholic dictatorship in Zimbabwe)—never mind, just teasing. But we don't because there are actually certain norms of secular international law that have to be breached—at least one of four have to be breached before a state can be said to have sacrificed its sovereignty and laid itself open to intervention.

OLASKY: We're not going to get deep into the questions of the Iraq war today, but certainly the question of evil. [To Wilson] Do you want...?

WILSON: Yes. One of the things that I would say quickly in response to it is this: I agree with Christopher that we would react in similar ways, if not identical ways, to many things that manifest themselves around the globe. When I've read Christopher, I really appreciate it, for example his review for example of Pat Buchanan's book in Newsweek some months ago, and what I appreciated was that he wasn't just blowing smoke in the general direction in these international situations. He knew something about them. And when he assess this being done to this group to that group, has the stench of death about it, it's evil and it's wrong, I'm not arguing that. We agree. When you—the stench of genocide, the stench of torture, those sorts of things—that's bad business. Here's the problem: Suppose Christopher, in one of his journalistic jaunts, goes to interview a dictator on his deathbed, alright? The dictator has got a vast trail of injustice behind him and, if Christopher is right, no justice in front of him, right? He's lived to be 85 years old, he's going to die and he's going to go into oblivion just like every other bit of protoplasm, alright? Identical. And this dictator, who did all these things that Christopher rightly disapproves of, chuckles to himself and says, "You know, I'm like Frank Sinatra: I did it my way and got away with it too, you know? I kept myself in power, the US never came and took me out, I lived to a ripe old age, I got away with it," and laughs quietly to himself. Now what can Christopher say to him that would refute him, that would answer him? Now he did get away with it. There's vast injustice behind him and no justice in front of him. And how do you maintain your own sense of personal indignation at these evils when you believe that's the way the universe is? Christopher thinks that the universe doesn't care about this stuff. Genocide is just like so much foam on the sea, that's all it is. John Lennon said, "Imagine: Above Auschwitz only sky. Imagine there's no heaven above us, no hell below." Above Buchenwald, only sky. Above every horror that Christopher's ever written about, only sky.

HITCHENS: Yes, that's sad but true. The universe doesn't care—doesn't know, as a matter or fact, this is going on. The heavens don't notice it. They're not even indifferent.

WILSON: And if the universe doesn't care, why do you?

HITCHENS: They're not even indifferent, they're unaware. I can't make them be aware. I might, like you, wished that they were aware, and that God would punish or prevent these things, but He doesn't and I can't make myself believe something because it might be nice to believe it (a big difference between us). Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange Fascist Party, very active chap in his life, was asked of by the priests who, of course, always surround dictators on their deathbeds, holding up crosses and offering them absolution, if they'll say—everything you've ever done will be forgiven if you will just now say that you'll accept Jesus as your personal savior (how about that for an immoral action, by the way?). Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was asked to forgive all of his enemies. And as he was slipping away he said, "I have no enemies; I killed them all."

OLASKY: So...

HITCHENS: That's why I'm in favor of getting rid of Saddam Hussein when he's in his prime. That's the short answer to your question.

OLASkY: So do you wish Christianity were true?

HITCHENS: No, I don't. I don't think that the problems and miseries and strugglings and sufferings of humanity can be resolved by referring them to a supernatural totalitarian, unanswerable, unchallengeable authority. I don't think there's a totalitarian solution to our many, many woes and sufferings. I just don't and I'm glad to think there is such a solution available.

WILSON: And I cannot see...

HITCHENS: No, and I do not think that stars move in their courses and can be moved to pity by the sufferings of my fellow creatures. They don't know we're here; evolution doesn't know we're here.

WILSON: And I cannot...

HITCHENS: It won't notice when we've gone.

WILSON: And I cannot see why, if ultimately reality does not and cannot know or care, why any subset of reality should know or care.

HITCHENS: Well, we've seen one of the tortures that's inflicted on us by existence is that we are, most of us, condemned to care.

WILSON: That's just...

HITCHENS: We do feel the sufferings of others...

WILSON: That's just a chemical...

HITCHENS: ...as well as our own.

WILSON: That's a chemical reaction. That's all it is is a chemical reaction.

HITCHENS: It still hurts.

WILSON: Hurts you.

HITCHENS: It does.

WILSON: Why should we care about...

HITCHENS: Then insult is added to injury: You're told that these sufferings are sent by God, that they can be ennobling to us, that they're sent as a test.

[BREAK]

WILSON: I know you denounce things, you praise things and I agree with you in many of the instances where you do. I'm just pointing out you don't have a foundation under that very nice house of yours.

HITCHENS: You talk as if—you really do talk as if I advocate for evolution, that I say I wish evolution was true, that it's not an opinion of mine or a conclusion of mine, it's a desire or a piece of propaganda on my part. Convinced as I am that all the evidence suggests that the cosmos began with a big bang, the universe is expanding very fast, and that the rate of expansion is increasing, and that the galaxy Andromeda is headed on a direct collision course with our own so that we know now—we know, we can watch it in the sky, we can watch it through a telescope, that the something we have now will very soon be nothing. I know that to be true. You say, "Well then, where does your morality come from?" and I say, "Wait a minute: First of all, is this true or is it not?" What about the evidence? Now, just about the origin of our own tiny species, never mind the cosmos, all the evidence—absolutely all of it says that we are here because of the operations of random mutation and natural selection. There is no other satisfactory explanation for our presence here. You say, "Well, that just means we're animals." Well, what if it's true? What if it's true? What if all the evidence is in its favor? Then it's not my opinion, it's not my propaganda. I can't make myself believe something that's in direct contradiction to all the known facts.

WILSON: Then you should embrace the consequences of what you affirm.

HITCHENS: Well, do I not seem to do so?

WILSON: No. No, because you can't account for morality.

HITCHENS: [Exasperated sigh]

WILSON: Given what you just described, you can't account for it and you persist in hanging on to it.

HITCHENS: The need for our species of solidarity and for survival is a perfectly good explanation.

WILSON: No, killing other races off is another way to survive.

HITCHENS: Sure, well that's often enjoined, as you know, is enjoined in the Bible. The destruction of other races is necessary for the children of Israel to get to the stolen property that they've been awarded in Sinai.

WILSON: So what problem do you have with that?

HITCHENS: I object to being told that it's a moral preachment, that's all.

WILSON: Basically...

HITCHENS: I don't like being told it's God's will. I can see why one tribe of Bronze Age bandits might want to kill and take the property and the young ladies of another tribe, I can see that. But to invent a story that says God gave them permission to do it, I think is wicked.

WILSON: So you...

HITCHENS: And stupid too, actually.

WILSON: So...

HITCHENS: And aesthetically, somehow, not pleasing. Let me add—now, where do aesthetics come from if we're just primates? I don't know, exactly. But there is—we have enough surplus in our cortexes to allow for art and music and indeed love. Just as well, I often think. But I don't regard it as a divine gift. And there's absolutely no evidence that it is.

OLASKY: This back and forth has been very instructive. We have a lot of people wanting to ask questions. So, questions now and then we'll just have one answer, one answer...

HITCHENS: Oh, sorry.

OLASKY: And then move on to the next question, but this has been very good. Emily?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: My question is similar to what Mr. Wilson was just asking. It's for you, Mr. Hitchens. Assuming, as you said, that evolution has created everything that is, and that random mutation and natural selection produce mixed results, you know, competing instincts towards generosity and love as well as toward genocide and war and domination, and if you, as you say, you don't know where aesthetics come from, you don't appear to want to be pinned down on where objective morality comes from...

HITCHENS: No, objective morality is from human solidarity, the need for survival. We couldn't be having this conversation if we were not moral animals. We wouldn't have gotten this far. We wouldn't have evolved language.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: Ok.

HITCHENS: Or civilization. So...I know I've said this before.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: Ok, competing—given the fact of competing human solidarities (definitions of morality), why should anyone listen when you say, "Such-and-such an action is wrong; a nation should follow such-and-such a course." What is your justification for persuading people to believe certain things?

HITCHENS: Only slightly better than my saying they should listen to me because I'm doing God's will. Slightly, but measurably superior to that. And less arrogant. Considerably less arrogant.

WILSON: I want to point out...

HITCHENS: And aesthetically more pleasing.

WILSON: I want to point out very quickly and hit it and run away, and that is: The evolutionary advantage is not conferred simply by human solidarity. Evolutionary advantage is also conferred by destroying your enemies, ok?

HITCHENS: Absolutely.

WILSON: Now, you can't have—just emphasize the one. So, genetic propagation (preserving your little corner of the gene pool) is a tribal thing. You can't just assume that enemies will only be martians or aliens. So, this means that evolution means conflict within the human species.

HITCHENS: Yes. Where does that come from, by the way? That's God's will as well. Evil is God's will too.

WILSON: We're sinners.

HITCHENS: Well that's—isn't that a little trite or tautologist?

WILSON: Very true.

HITCHENS: Of course it would have to be the case because we're all sinners.

WILSON: Yes.

HITCHENS: Because that's how we've been made by God. This isn't very much nutrition, I don't think. It's not very satisfying; doesn't tell you very much. I mean, I know the Devil was once in heaven as a co-ruler and there was a falling out but I've never thought that was a terrifically good explanation of the Problem of Evil either.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Anyway, my question is for Mr. Hitchens: (First of all, I'd like to thank both of you for showing up and doing this for us. I don't think anyone else has thanked you for that yet, so...I'll be the first to do so.)

HITCHENS: Oh, please it's my pleasure, but thank you.

WILSON: You're welcome.

HITCHENS: No, very decent of you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: My question is: If your view of morality is that it is innate within humans and is simply a natural process, a natural accumulation of events, then isn't your statement that genocide is wrong in the Old Testament and evil and utterly despicable and yet you just told us that you'd like to kill those who wish to kill you. You wish to, you know—radical Muslims, radical Christians, whatever. My question is: Couldn't morality—if morality is evolving, would you agree to that, morality is evolving, that it is—since humans are evolving and morality is found within humans, then by essence morality would be evolving. Would you agree with that statement?

HITCHENS: It's the slightly—it's what Macaulay called the Whig Interpretation of history, that there is an improvement over time in our compassion, that we include more and more people and award more and more rights. But yes, I find I can't say I don't believe that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: My question, then, is:

HITCHENS: There are some terrible backslidings. I mean, Fascism is worse, much worse than anything that went before it. And many, many huge improvements occurred before that colossal reaction set in. So it's unwise to just accept the Whig Interpretation, that it's a—evolution is a fairly straight line.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: Well, yes, of course. I mean, evolution you obviously have some backsliding with it, it's pretty obvious from scientific...

HITCHENS: Our brains are in fact getting bigger, but very slowly.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: But, I guess my question is then: Would you support eugenics in order to continue the good health and prosperity of the human race, a thing that is generally looked down upon in today's society but for the good of mankind, I mean, you know, there's a reason Down Syndrome babies—babies with Down Syndrome has declined precipitously and that is because people don't want to have to take care of them. So, would it be acceptable to say, "Well look, for the good of mankind, in order to survive, why don't we kill off X amount of people?"

HITCHENS: Well, fortunately, nature does most of that for us. I mean, most abortions take place spontaneously in the womb. Nature knows this one isn't going to work out. It's called miscarriage, it happens all the time. If we're adapted, as you know, our bodies are adapted to life on the African Savanna, adapted to an environment that we fled from, but if there had been humans with two or three lolling-headed, disabled babies on that Savanna, to take care of, they wouldn't have survived. Everyone would've been killed by the predators. So on the whole, nature takes care of this for us. I'm not in favor of exterminating the unfit, no. I hope I didn't say anything that would lead you to the contrary impression. And if you ask me, "Isn't that just because of some compassion that I couldn't explain the origin of?" The answer is actually "No," or "Not entirely." There would be a utilitarian explanation as well. As when we encounter a terrifying new disease like AIDS, you learn a great deal from combating it. You improve your game in medicine and in research. If you treat every human being, however disabled, mentally or physically they are, as if they're worth the full value, you gain experiences that are well worth having for the betterment of the species in general.

WILSON: If I could just tack one thing on, just a general observation: The atheistic process of evolution means that terms like "backsliding" is incoherent. Progress is incoherent, there's no such thing as progress, there's no such thing as backsliding. All you have is change. If there is no judgment, is no God, is no standard, is no righteousness, then my perennial question is, "By what standard?"

HITCHENS: Only on the fantastic assumption that you can't have morality without religion. A case you haven't even advanced one argument for yet.

WILSON: Morality is subject to evolution just like everything else is.

OLASKY: We're going to evolve to the next question.

HITCHENS: Well that's certainly true. Religion is subject to evolution as well. Most religions no longer believe half of what they used to preach. I would actually say that was progress.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: Alright, my question is for both gentlemen (and this is because I'm noting an area of ambiguity). So, Mr. Wilson first. My question is: What is sin and how are sin and God—how are they related in a metaphysical sense? And Mr. Hitchens, I'd love to hear you comment on this as well.

WILSON: Well, the Apostle John tells us that sin is lawlessness; the Westminster catechism says that sin is any lack of conformity to the law of God. The law of God, in its turn, is simply an inscripturated summary of God's character, what God is like. So ultimately, I would say that sin is being unlike God in certain character—love, holiness, those sorts of things. So sin is lawlessness or not being like God or Christ.

HITCHENS: Because I don't avoid all terms of that value judgment doesn't mean that I embrace all of them either. I think sin is probably one you can do without. Wrongdoing I can understand; evil, I've told you, I think is important because it's the surplus value, the cruelty and horror for its own sake, self-endangering, self-destructive, suicidal as well as horrible, in other words. Crime, of course, can be understood and to call something a crime is a pretty severe condemnation. The word "sin," as you've just heard, is completely incoherent because it's failing to do God's will which means you must know what God's will is which, by definition, no primate can. And, I'm afraid, Douglas has yet again failed to inform us of how he knows something that we don't. By what right—quo warranto—by what right, he says, he knows what God's mind is. I'm going to have to repeat this question and I can tell you that at the end of this session the question will still be an open one.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: I would also like to thank both of you gentlemen for coming. This has been wonderful.

HITCHENS: It's a pleasure.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: My question is for you, Mr. Hitchens. I was wondering—it's on a much less scholarly level, I guess, but—in your personal life and in the people that you've come across, and I'm sure you've debated some interesting people and just, you know, in passing we all—we meet different people and get to understand different life experiences: What would your opinion be on someone who, or on a lot of people maybe who have grown up and maybe not believed in any God or have been devout, you know, non-believers, if that makes sense, or believers in a different religion, and have come across the Bible or have, in some fashion that is not necessarily being prosthelytized, as you talked about, or not necessarily growing up in a Christian home, they have decided to convert to Christianity, and in doing so have put themselves in a position where maybe their potential wealth gain or potential influence in society would be diminished but they feel that the returns for that are greater on a higher level? I guess, how do you feel about that and what would you do if a supernatural experience occurred to you, if you had said, "You know what, God, if you would show up right now and do this and you did it," I mean, how would you react to that? Would you commit yourself to an asylum? Or would you just ask more questions?

HITCHENS: Ok. To the hypothetical person or persons you mentioned, my answer would be I wish them all the best of luck. And if it works for them I'm very happy for them. I just don't want them trying to teach that Bible in the school attended by my daughter or to try and legislate from that book in the common law of the United States or to try and have a supernatural intervention taught in science class. I won't have any of that. Aside from that, we can coexist. (I make that demand of all religions, by the way.) And incidentally you'd have to grant it to all religions of you thought that someone's life could be improved by reading a holy book, and that they'd then be less materialistic and a nicer person and so on. Well then—you know, it's said, and I believe it may well be true that Louis Farrakhan's racist, crack-pot, cult organization gets young black men off drugs and jail—maybe it does—by handing them the Wahabi Quran. Well, what have you proved there? Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. But as long as they don't try to hurt me with it, I'm fine. Now as to the likelihood that I'd have a revelation (I keep being told that that's what I'm secretly looking for, that I couldn't be like this if I wasn't some kind of a seeker. It's very irritating. That's like being told you may not believe in Jesus but He believes in you. A fantastically annoying thing to have said.)

WILSON: I can assure you that He doesn't.

[Audience gasp]

HITCHENS: David Hume—I suppose you've all read David Hume on miracles. If you haven't, you must. It's the most elegant philosophizing on the question of miraculous apparition that has yet been. He says if something appears to have happened that is not consistent with the laws of nature (the laws of nature have been suspended), there are two contingencies: Either that the laws of nature have been suspended (in your favor) or that you're under a misapprehension. Which is the likeliest? It's always likeliest that you're always under a misapprehension. And if you're hearing about this from someone who claims to have seen it and you were though getting it second hand the odds that it's a misapprehension that's being spread are exponential increased. So if I heard voices telling me to do something and that this was on behalf of a deity, I would check myself in, of course, and I hope that you would, if you saw someone in the street raving and saying—let's not say raving, that would be to prejudice it—but if someone came up to you and said, "You know, I'm on a mission from God today and I've got various things I've got to do and I hope you'll help me do them because God's will has to be done through me," why is it you edge away from people like that rather than towards them, if they're on the same bus as you? What saving instinct makes you say, "I'm going to move to another seat now," rather than say, "Ooh, I wish you'd share!" Why is that? You know very well why it is.

WILSON: I'd like to tack on...

HITCHENS: People who say they are doing God's work are to be distrusted.

WILSON: I'd like to tack on a quick agreement: I agree with Christopher that I don't believe that creationism has any place in public schools; I don't believe that prayer has any place in public schools; I don't believe that the teaching of one religion over another has any place in the public schools but, of course, that's because I don't believe that kids ought to be in public schools. I don't believe—[Audience laughter]—I don't think lockers ought to be, I don't believe that textbooks ought to be...[video cuts out]

AUDIENCE MEMBER 9: This question is for Mr. Hitchens: Again and again, throughout this debate you've said that morality is innate to mankind and Pastor Wilson, I feel you've argued on his terms on that particular point. How would you respond to the argument that this innate morality is actually evidence of God because throughout no society have we really seen a lack of morality destroy the society. Every single person throughout our history has had this morality. How would you respond to that, that this is an obvious evidence that God created this morality with an emphasis—not Christianity that has taught us these ethics, it's that when God created you, yourself, he built in this moral code, so that's how you would be?

HITCHENS: Well, to that hypothesis I would say that it was unfalsifiable and those of you should know if a proposition can be described as unfalsifiable it falls as by definition weak, or unsustainable. I couldn't possibly disprove that, in other words. There would be no way of proving that that wasn't so, which means it's a hopeless proposition. It would also leave—but suppose it to be true, then you'd have to ask, "Well, which other authority is instilling us with the temptation, in some cases the need, to rape, steal, perjure, kill, and so forth. Is that coming from the same great imprinter or another one? Is there, in fact, spiritual warfare going on between demons and angels going on all around us that we can't quite see?" That's also an unfalsifiable proposition. It could be true, there's just no evidence for it and I must say, old-fashioned, call me if you will, that when there's no evidence for a proposition, my inclination is to doubt it. There, I've said it.

OLASKY: Next.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 10: This is a question for Mr. Wilson. Allow me to read a passage from the text. This is on page 17 of your introduction. You say, "The issue of thanksgiving is really central to the whole debate about the existence of God. On the one hand, if there is no God, there is no need to thank anyone. We're here as a result of a long chain of impersonal processes grinding their way down to a brief moment in time. If there is a God, then every breath, every movement, every sight and sound is sheer, unadulterated gift. And as our mothers taught us when you give presents like this, the only appropriate response is to thank them." I am not thankful and I think that you want to be thankful and so you're inventing God as wish fulfillment (I'm taking here Mr. Hitchens' argument). Please respond to how your feeling thankful necessitates God. I think that you can very easily say that you're inventing a god because you want to feel thankful.

WILSON: Yes. The counterargument to this would be that it's simply a particular manifestation of wish fulfillment so that you would like there to be someone to thank and so you do. The difficulty with that is when you look at the vast array of cool stuff that exists around us, there seems to me to be, as one scientist put it, "It looks as though the universe is a put-up job." Everywhere you go there's something really fantastic going on and it's not as though there's just one or two things where, if I find an object, a brightly colored rock in the forest, if I'm an unbeliever and I'm walking along and I find a rock and I don't know if I should thank anyone for that one rock. But suppose it's 17 trillion beautiful things, glorious things? It begins to look like a divine conspiracy and at a certain point, a refusal to give thanks looks like willful stubbornness. So I want to argue that in Romans I, Paul says the fundamental problem that men have is they refuse to honor God as God and refuse to give Him thanks. So I believe that thanksgiving is at the heart of our difficulty in seeing.

OLASKY: Let's move—another question.

HITCHENS: Can I just say something on this question, because it goes very strongly to my point about the totalitarian character of religion: What sort of person wants His subjects, who He created, He made, to reward Him by incessantly—and remember it says everlastingly, evermore praising God and saying, "Holy, holy, holy." And then always thanking and never stopping. It seems a rather capricious and tyrannical demand, doesn't it to you? Doesn't it to me? I've actually been—I used to wonder when I was a kid, they say well—I could work out what hell might be like very easily, everyone can. Convincing accounts of heaven are harder to come by unless you look in the Quran, but the Christian one seem to offer everlasting praise and I remember thinking, "What would that be like?" I mean, after the first week of saying, "Thank you," at the top of my voice wouldn't things start to seem a little subject to diminishing returns, possibly even for the person listening to them, as well? We'd never want to hear anything from you but that? That's all that's demanded of me. I've been to North Korea, I've seen a state where that's what people have to do. They have to worship and thank all day, all the time. Everything they get is from the infinite love and generosity of the Dear Leader and the Great Leader who, by the way, are a father and son reincarnation which would make North Korea just one short of trinity, in case that detail interests you at all. You know, there is one reason I'd have in my own life to wish sometimes to say, "Thank God," and, in a sense, to wish I could mean it, and the word for it is "apotropaic." An apotropaic is the gesture you make to avoid hubris, in other words, so that if your book is a best-seller you don't just say, "Hey, I must be a better write than I thought!" You want to be able to say, "It's nice to think that not everything is done by hand." And so, the idea of thanking is a good way of indulging the apotropaic. But don't go taking it too literally, or condemning yourself to a life of groveling, an infinity of groveling because that would be caving into the sado-masochistic, totalitarian core of religious faith.

WILSON: North Korea is an atheistic state, by the way.

HITCHENS: No, it isn't, it's the most religious state on the planet.

WILSON: Yeah. That's what I said.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Mr. Hitchens, I don't mean to be rude but you seem to have this wide-eyed...

HITCHENS: I have a very thick skin.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Alright, excellent. You seem to have this wide-eyed, mystical view of human metasolidarity as moral absolute and I dare say the [indecipherable] would be proud, but why should this human metasolidarity as moral absolute, why shouldn't I believe that there are A) competing solidarities, why can't I believe that? and B) why can't I believe that what you're doing is basically just a power play upon all of us and that, really, morality is simply your preference that you are commanding of all of us?

HITCHENS: I have to say you're not—it's not rude at all as phrased, but it was rude of you not to be paying attention earlier. (And you didn't do yourself any favors, either.) I didn't say, "Look at how superbly moral we primates are." I said the morality we do have is innate in us and it's a necessary condition for survival as a species, I didn't saying how wonderful it was. Nor do I say how wonderful it is that we're also programmed to rape, steal, cheat, and lie, and I don't blame any celestial deity for that either because it's because we are animals, not sinners, animals, poorly evolved primate species that these things are innate in us. It doesn't need to look for a supernatural explanation. How could I prove this all wasn't a power play on my part? I couldn't. What was your other question? There was a closing one.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: Well the other question was on competing solidarities. You've talked about the solidarity we have with each other. Why don't we just have competing solidarities?

HITCHENS: Well, we do.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 11: I mean, there's brotherhood amongst—solidarity amongst thieves.

HITCHENS: Surely, and among Fascists, very much so. And in particular among Communists. It's what they actually call it: brotherhood. I don't see how that represents any kind of challenge to anything I've said. Our species is divided into sub-groups and tribes. I don't think we are subdivided by race; I think we're all the same race, but there are different ethnicities and tribalisms and certainly a very large number of solidarities. The attempt made by the Bible to define these is the most laughable one.

WILSON: It's a challenge to your position. It's a challenge...

HITCHENS: The Sons of Ham and the Sons of Noah and all the rest that were in there and the belief held by many Christians for a very long time, and by some of the Mormon persuasion to this very day, that black people are a special creation not quite human and condemned to be that color before they were born. None of this, as you'll see, means that religion can shed any light on this stuff at all.

WILSON: It's a challenge...

HITCHENS: All of these things can be discussed as if there was no supernatural dimension and as problems they remain exactly the way they would be if there was no supernatural dimension.

WILSON: It's a challenge to your position because if our values and our decisions and our code arises from our solidarity, if there are competing solidarities, you don't know what to do.

OLASKY: Last quick question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: Professor Hitchens...

HITCHENS: It doesn't undermine my position at all if there's no instruction to what to do there. When human interests and human rights—interpretations of right—collide, that doesn't condemn my position at all. It's what you would expect of an evolved, primate species. It's Hegel's definition of tragedy as a conflict between two rights. These things will occur. You can't resolve them by referring them upward to a celestial totalitarianism. You will get no help from that quarter.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: Professor Hitchens...

HITCHENS: Sir.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: If I can step into your car for a moment. Would not extinction be a great mercy for the human race as it would be an end to these meaningless chemical reactions that are as likely to cause pain as pleasure, that apparently aren't leading toward any great conclusion or justice or redemption? Why should I not undertake a campaign to exterminate the human race and call myself a liberator of the human race from the pain and suffering that has marked its progress through history?

HITCHENS: Well you're asking, excuse me, you're addressing your question to the wrong person. It's not I who looks forward to the end of the world and to the apocalypse and to the last days. It's not I who says that my belief can't wait for that to happen, that that'll be the happy day when the trumpet shall sound and we shall be changed. I don't look forward to that at all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: But why not?

HITCHENS: Ask someone who believes any of this.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: But I'm asking, "Why not?" since your world is without hope and without...

HITCHENS: Because with the short life that I have been given by evolution and natural selection, I'm not going to be pushed around by theocrats in the short time I do have.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 12: So are you thankful to evolution and natural selection for the short time you've been given?

HITCHENS: Yeah. I have been—here I am. There's no getting around it. I don't attribute my presence here, as some so arrogantly do, to a divine plan. I don't think I'm the object of a divine plan. Do I look to you as I'm the object of a divine plan?

WILSON: Absolutely.

HITCHENS: Thought not. Whereas—but the explanation that I'm here because of the laws of operation, the laws of biology is perfectly satisfying to me and it doesn't leave anything unexplained. It doesn't mean everything is explained, however, that would be reductionist. But I don't look forward—no, I don't look forward to the destruction of the world. I don't look forward to the end of the world at all. It's those who believe in divine creation and divine dispensation who look forward to that. You should be asking them, and perhaps yourself, why that is. I do think religion does conceal a death wish, not very carefully either.

WILSON: At the very least, the end of the world on Christopher's terms would be the cessation of all pain and there is something you could look forward to in that.

HITCHENS: Yeah, but when Buddhists and other say, you know, if only I would join their—I'd cease to suffer from pain and struggle and anxiety and so on and I say, "I don't believe you can give that to me, I don't." But if you could, I wouldn't think it was worth the having. I like conflict; I like anxiety; I like struggle; I like combat; I like all these things; they make life worth living for me. I don't want there to be permanent peace and tranquility and banality. I don't want it at all, ok?

WILSON: But that's what you're going to get.

HITCHENS: By the way, what does the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

OLASKY: What?

HITCHENS: Make me one with everything.

WILSON: What does the Buddhist say to the Christian?

HITCHENS: No, wait...

WILSON: I'm going to get in my karma and run over your dogma.

HITCHENS: Wait, sir. The other shoe has to fall. So the hot dog vendor gives him his slathered dog with everything and the Buddhist hands over 20 bucks, starts to munch, waits for a bit, ketchup on his saffron robes, and nothing happens. And he says to the hot dog vendor, "What about my change?" And the vendor says, "Change comes only from within."

OLASKY: On that enlightening note, we must cease this struggle. Please join me in thanking both of our [indecipherable].

Hitchens in Brisbane

After searching Hitchens on Hulu.com, I found a few videos unavailable on Youtube. One stood out: Hitchens' brief interview with The Brisbane Times (May 24, 2010) in which he promotes his memoir, Hitch-22. Hitch offers a few crumbs about his forthcoming book on the Ten Commandments, with its thesis: "The whole concept of having a commandment needs to be investigated ... moral reasoning and ethical debate are what's required, not orders from on high."

Hitchens insists that morality cannot be naïvely reduced to a Bronze-Aged Kindergarten lesson. How we figure right and wrong is, like Homo sapiens, a slowly evolving merry-go-round of trial and error. I'm particularly hopeful for a panel, November 4, in New York City focusing on the relevance of the Ten Commandments.

Every time a believer finishes crowing about objectively grounding morality through the precious decalogue, I can't help but roll my eyes and ask, "Perhaps, but why would a god design creatures that needed commandments in the first place?" As Hitch likes to quote Fulke Greville, we are created sick and commanded to be well.

I'll leave you with the tastiest of Hitch's revised commandments: Turn off that fucking cell phone. (You can have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.)

Hitchens vs. Roberts, Hugh Hewitt Show

Christopher Hitchens vs. Dr. Mark Roberts: The Great God Debate.

June 6, 2007, Hugh Hewitt Show

HEWITT: Morning, glory to you and grace, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. Welcome to a special edition of The Hugh Hewitt Show, "The Great God Debate," a three-hour exchange of views between Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Mark Roberts. Christopher Hitchens, a graduate of Oxford, of course, long time journalist, Vanity Fair columnist, author of many books and collections of essays, including a biography of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, and most recently, god Is Not Great, last week, the number-one-selling non-fiction book in America. Dr. Roberts, frequent guest on this program, is a graduate of Harvard College and also received his PhD from Harvard. He is a pastor, a professor, a blogger, and the author of six books. His latest is available this week, in fact, Can We Trust The Gospels? Gentlemen, welcome to you both. Christopher, good to have you back on.

HITCHENS: Very nice of you to have me back.

HEWITT: And Mark, good to have you back as well.

ROBERTS: Thank you, and Christopher, it's nice to meet you electronically.

HITCHENS: Thank you for saying so.

HEWITT: I set up this debate with the help of my Internet friends by suggesting I would be offering propositions to you both, and then having you comment on each of them as we go forth and then cross comment. In the course of fifteen segments, I hope to get through at least a dozen of these. Many are drawn from Christopher Hitchens' new book, some are drawn from my having read Mark's manuscript, although that's not available yet to Christopher, so I'm going to minimize that a little bit. I want to begin, though, by asking a question of Christopher Hitchens and Mark Roberts that comes from Christopher's brother, Peter, in The Daily Telegraph this week, where he writes, "Where is Christopher's certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from?" Christopher Hitchens, how do you respond to your brother?

HITCHENS: Well, it's the most commonly asked question of unbelievers, or perhaps I should say atheists, and I regard it, though you put it very politely, as a slightly insulting one. But the suggestion that you make is that if I don't respect a celestial dictatorship that's unalterable, nothing is going to prevent me from lying, cheating, raping, thieving, and so on. Well, I can't exactly tell you why I don't do those things, or why I enjoy, say, going to give blood, which I do. After all, I don't really lose a pint, but somebody gains one, and I have a rare blood group, and I might need some blood one day myself, so it seems an all-around very satisfying transaction. In a sense, do I need to say much more than that?

HEWITT: Dr. Roberts, does he?

ROBERTS: Well, on one hand, no. I think there are certainly moral, good people who believe all kinds of things, including atheism. In fact, I have sometimes said that I sometimes believe Christians kind of rely on God and need God here because they actually are not as good people as folk who not believers, and somehow, we need a little extra help. I think there's—the problem is not that there aren't atheists and others who are moral and live morally, I think the problem would come if somebody who disagreed on a matter of ethics, and said, "Well, I understand that you, Christopher, believe I shouldn't, you know, shoot this innocent person." But in my view, I think I should shoot this innocent person. I'm not sure how, and I'd be interested, how would you say to that person at that point, "No, you, shouldn't, and here's why you shouldn't."

HITCHENS: Well, I think I would probably be capable of giving some good reasons. I think for one thing, it would be an outrage to their conscience. Let's don't consider the interest of the other person for a moment. And after all, some people do need to be shot, but you stipulated innocence. Well, it would be an outrage to your conscience if for some reason, we do—we are aware of doing ill or doing good. The test I apply in my book, a fairly good, pragmatic, American test, is what do you do when no one's looking? The fact is someone is looking. You have an internal conversation with yourself where you don't want to look or feel bad. I don't think this comes from God. I think it comes as part of our evolution. Darwin points out, and others have noticed since, that there are animals who behave ethically to one another. They have solidarity; they have family groups; they seem able to feel sympathy; they certainly come to each other's aid, in the case of some of the higher mammals. I think our morality evolved, and I don't believe that my Jewish ancestors thought that perjury and murder and theft were okay until they got to Mount Sinai and were told no dice. But there's another insulting, if I may say this, implication to the question, which is that those who do subscribe to the idea of an all-seeing permanent surveillance from a celestial dictatorship are therefore going to behave well. Now, there's absolutely no evidence for that proposition at all. And some of the things that are enjoined by the Ten Commandments, such as not envying other people's property, which in my view, is a great spur to innovation, as well as the thought it's impossible not to have, actually don't lead to moral preachments, nor do commandments to mutilate the genitals seem to me to be moral preachments, nor does the idea of terrifying children with stories of hell appear to me to be moral. There's a great deal of wickedness that's attributable purely to religious belief. Morally normal people wouldn't do these things if they didn't think God was desiring them to do so.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts…

HITCHENS: So I return the question in that form.

ROBERTS: So then, for you, our morality is something that has come by way of evolutionary process? Did I get that correctly?

HITCHENS: Yes, it's necessary for human society to evolve, that to be certain, and it's found in all societies, whichever god they worship, or whichever cult they practice, that courage is respected, cowardice is not, murder is forbidden, theft is very much frowned upon. There are different sexual morays, not very, very widely different. The incest taboo seems to be very common, so does the one on cannibalism. I mean, the societies that don't follow those teachings, or rather follow—[inaudible] teaching, I mean, societies that violate those laws tend to die out of horrible diseases or of in-breeding.

HEWITT: But I would pose the question to you both: Child exposure, common in the ancient world, still common in some societies, practiced widely in China today, is not considered immoral in those societies, but does it offend your conscience, Christopher, given that you're concerned about, you've reference a couple of cruelties to children?

HITCHENS: Yes, it does, and I have to say it rather startles me to think of a society where that wouldn't be the case.

ROBERTS: Well, I agree with you on that. I think my point would be that you have perhaps explained why we are moral, namely that it comes from evolution. I don't know that you've provided an adequate explanation for why we should act morally if indeed we don't agree on what morality is, the case of infant exposure would be a good one.

HITCHENS: Well...

ROBERTS: But my point would be further: It's an interesting example, because in my Church, and you know, mostly, I'm a pastor. In my Church, we're very involved with a group in China of Christian people who are there quite precisely to save young children, usually girls, who have been left exposed and to die. And in this case, it isn't just a humanist impulse or conscience, but it's a very specific response to the view that they are precious in the eyes of God, and that we are called to reach out to those who are lowly. So at least in some cases, the ones that I'm most familiar with, we have a rationale for being moral, and examples of people being moral, quite specifically because of their, in this case, Christian conviction.

HITCHENS: Very well, and I wish great luck to your friends, and there are many other Christians I know who do marvelous work in North Korea, for example, where the people are trying to escape from a prison slave state there, and also for keeping the issue of Darfur in front of the public. I think the Evangelical movement deserves a great deal of credit. But here's my challenge, which you don't have to answer now, but let's say I'd love an answer by the end of our discussion. 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 haven't yet found anyone who can answer me that. There's a perfectly good secular reason for opposing especially the exposure of girl—it's often worse than exposure, by the way, in China. I mean, they bury alive all the stifling girl babies. I mean, it will in the end mean there aren't enough women. There's every reason why the Chinese are going to discover—I mean, alarming—I wrote this in Vanity Fair once, that an officially communist society will very soon have no word for brother or sister, let alone uncle or aunt. And that, as they say, will not stand. It has to change. They'll discover that they've ruined their own demography, as well as to having done, in the meantime, things that are revoltingly cruel. But when you talk about innocent children, remember, it is surely the Scripture that tells us that children are born in original sin, and are insensate.

HEWITT: A minute to the break.

ROBERTS: I've never read that insensate part in my Bible before, but maybe I missed it. No, my point would be that Christopher, you would explain the fact of human conscience in light of evolution. That may well be true. I would actually say something I know you don't believe—but you and I can differ on all kinds of things—that your innate morality is in fact quite a real remnant of your having been created by a moral god, and that one of the reasons that your arguments work, appeal to common conscience and stuff like that, is that we have in fact embedded within us something more than the accident of evolution, but something that God has in fact given, however twisted it might be. And so I think on the religious side of things, I can at least make a stronger case not only for why we should be moral, namely that there is a God who knows all things, and says this is a good way to live, but I can even explain why atheists are in fact moral, and that is they're created in God's image.

HEWITT: My first proposition, gentlemen, on what science and scientists tell us about God, that many fine scientists believe in God does not prove God exists, and that many fine scientists do not believe in God does not prove that God does not exist. Two illustrations: Dr. Francis Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project, he declared at the National Prayer Breakfast on the first of February of this year that, "I can't identify a single conflict between what I know as a rigorous scientist and what I know as a believer," and he condemned the increasingly shrill voices around us who argue that the scientific and spiritual worldviews are incompatible. "I am here this morning to tell you that these are different ways of finding truth, and are not only compatible, but they are wondrously complementary." There's also a new Walter Isaacson biography of Einstein, quotes many, many passages of the great physicist, including one that reads, "I am not an atheist," said Einstein. "The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows something must have written those books. It does not know how." Christopher Hitchens, is my first proposition correct?

HITCHENS: I actually don't think it is. I think that science has provided us with explanations for things that religion used to think it did explain. I think that has to be simply conceded, not just about the origin of the cosmos, but by the origin of species, including our own, and the commonality, as shown by the Genome Project, between ourselves and other animals, and indeed other vegetables—no, not other vegetables, I mean, plant life. Our DNA is extraordinary in demonstrating that, and it simply abolishes the need to think about a prime mover.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts…

HITCHENS: You can—in other words, it's an optional belief. Dr. Collins is absolutely welcome to say he believes in God, and even though he can't seem to argue that as well as he does elsewhere, that he's a Christian. But it's, as I say in my book, it's an optional belief now. It's been optional ever since Laplace, when demonstrating the workings of the universe, was asked, "Well, there doesn't seem to be a God in this design of yours," he said, "Well, it actually operates perfectly well without that assumption." So you can make it if you want, but it's completely superfluous. It can't be integral to it; it doesn't explain anything. Einstein did say he was not an atheist, but he went on to say that he had no belief whatever in a personal God. He was a Spinozist, which is a very exact way of saying that you do not believe that God intervenes in human affairs.

HEWITT: Yes, and that is quoted repeatedly.

HITCHENS: And if you don't believe that God intervenes in human affairs then I think you're not a Christian, because a theist may very well say, "Well, the order of the universe seems to imply some kind of authorship," but that's as far as one can go. Religion means you have to say you know what God wants, and what is in His mind. For example, I don't understand why my partner in this discussion has such a modest job, if he knows as much as to know that God gave me a conscience. I mean, if he has sources of information as extraordinary as that, he should be much better known than he is.

HEWITT: I think that Einstein goes on to say that he's almost a Calvinist. He's a determinist. He quotes at length that way. Mark Roberts, my proposition was, though, that the number of scientists agreeing or disagreeing on either side does not tell us anything, actually, given the multiplicity of views on this. Science has not proven or disproven God.

ROBERTS: Well, there would be several points to make. One is that though the majority of scientists do not have religious faith, according, actually, to a very fascinating recent study by a group of sociologists, about 40% of university scientists in this country have some kind of religious faith, about 60% don't, about half of those are atheist, half of those are agnostic, which is kind of fascinating. Part of what the study found, though, is that the correlation is very strong not between what people believe as scientists, but how they were raised. In other words, those who were raised in atheistic homes continued to be atheistic, those who were raised in religious homes continued to be religious. And that seems better to explain the nature of their faith or non-faith. But I would go back to something, and actually, it's quoted, Christopher quotes it in his book by one of my professors at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, who spoke of religion and science in terms of non-overlapping magisteria, that is to say that science offers explanations of a certain sort, religions offers explanations of a certain sort. I would agree with Christopher's assertion that when religion tries to make scientific explanation, it makes a mess of things. I would want to go further and say when science tries to go the other way, it makes a mess of things, and that what we have is different ways of explaining behavior, different ways of explaining reality. I would argue that both can have validity. For example, consider my love for my children. I think it's real to talk about my feelings of love for my children. They are quite real. A materialist might say no, that's simply a biochemical or molecular event happening in your brain. Well, I happen to believe it is a biochemical molecular event happening in my brain. But I also believe that my love for my children has a reality that that kind of scientific approach can't get at. And so we need different ways to deal with reality. Science is extraordinarily helpful, but I think there's also a place for religion to fill in the blanks that science can never fill in.

HEWITT: Christopher…

HITCHENS: Could I just add one tiny thing?

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: I obviously want everyone to go and rush out and buy my book, but there is another book by Professor Victor Stenger that's recently been published called God, the Failed Hypothesis. He's a much better scientist than I am, probably not as good, though, as Professor Stephen Jay Gould, celebrated atheist. (I very much envy you having had him as a professor.) Here's an example of what I mean, then. And since we mentioned Einstein, what Einstein says is that the miraculous thing about the universe is that there aren't any miracles in it; that the beautiful thing about science, and particularly about physics, is its extraordinary regularity, symmetry, beauty, predictability and so on. So that's the extraordinary thing, that miracles do not occur, because this natural order is never disturbed. Now there, it seems to me as a pretty flat contradiction. Who really would be a Christian if it didn't claim—if Christianity didn't claim that miracles could be worked by faith?

HEWITT: Now I am reading from Walter Isaacson's biography on page 384. Einstein said, "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that behind all the discernable laws and connection, there remains something subtle and tangible and inexplicable, a veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend, is my religion. To that extent, in fact, I am religious." I think that contradicts, Christopher Hitchens, what you just said.

HITCHENS: No, no it doesn't at all, because do the religious say that these things cannot be explained? They do not. They say there is a God, and we know what He wants.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts?

HITCHENS: They make a claim they cannot conceivably sustain, and when challenged on it, they say well, of course you can't believe it if you don't have faith. This is irritating. It's the exact negation of what Einstein just said.

ROBERTS: Well, I would have to agree with Christopher Hitchens that religious people can sometimes be irritating, having dealt with many of them and being one myself. I think what I would want to say is that we can look at the wonder of Creation, or that's perhaps begging the question, of the universe as it is, and we can get to the point of saying either that's all there is, and it is wonderful, or we can get to the point of saying there must be something beyond this, some sort of God, can't be proved, but one can't say that it doesn't matter whether there is that God or not.

HEWITT: This proposition, number two, goes to you first, Dr. Roberts: All religions have done cruel things at some times, and some religions have been all, well, cruel almost continuously. But neither fact proves that all religions are cruel, or that some religions do not reject cruelty at least in theory all the time. True or false?

ROBERTS: True. You want me to elaborate?

HEWITT: Yeah.

ROBERTS: Yeah, one of the things that is certainly true, and Christopher Hitchens is an incredible collector of things that religious people have done that are terrible. And I've got to say, having read his book now twice, carefully, that about half the time, I'm reading it, and I'm saying, "Wow, this is really bad," and I agree completely with his moral outrage. So I certainly believe that religions and religious people have done a lot of bad in the world. I don't think one can conclude from that that therefore religion necessarily poisons everything, or always poisons everything. That seems to me to be taking many steps forward in the debate without sufficient evidence. One would need to make a much stronger case. So I think I'm very happy with the view that religion, especially when mixed in with other things, can make matters much worse, and historically, religious people have done some terrible things in the guise of religion.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens?

HITCHENS: Well, no, I'm afraid I think that the crimes of religion are innate in it. And the reason why I think it's wicked ab initio is this: First, as I have said, it depends upon the worship of an absolute and unchangeable power. It's simplicity totalitarian. Second, it degrades our human self-respect by saying that we wouldn't act morally if it were not for the fear of this celestial dictatorship, and it degrades the idea that we could do the right thing for its own sake. And then third, it seems to me absolutely invariably to based on sexual repression, and out of fear and disgust, robbing the sexual act, the most important thing that we do. And the misery and the violence that comes from that seems to me inevitable, and to be laid not at the door of those who misuse religion, but at the door of those who interpret it correctly.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts?

ROBERTS: Well, I—again, there's too much to address here, but let me kind of go for the middle of that, that religion claims we wouldn't act morally without fear. This is one of the places where as I've read your book, Christopher, I sometimes wonder if you and I live in alternative universes. I've been a Christian for fifty years, I've been a pastor for twenty plus years; I've preached; I've told my congregation many things that I think they are to do morally. Never once, never once have I played the fear card, not one time ever, nor the reward in Heaven card. For me, the justifications for moral behavior have to do with the nature of God and God's love, God's call to love, a response in gratitude to what God has done for us in Christ, and so forth and so on. I realize that you don't believe that those things happen to be true, but what is certainly true is that at least in the part of the religious world in which I live and where I'm a pastor, I have never done that which you say all religions must do, so I'm mystified.

HITCHENS: Well now, well, I mean, I get this at every stop. You know, I've been debating this up and down the country with men of faith, and women, too, for some weeks. And I've realized that I'd have to write a different book for each one of them because you cannot make the assumption that people actually do subscribe to what the scriptural texts actually say. But if you're telling me that Christianity does not say that there's an eternal punishment for sinners, then I'm very happy to find that you're not, to that extent, a believer.

ROBERTS: Well, I think actually, Christianity believes that there's eternal punishment for all people, but God is gracious, and therefore, we don't have that problem. But the eternal punishment, then, isn't the motivation. We're all stuck. That's part of where original sin, if one believes in that, and that's a pretty slippery doctrine, comes in.

HITCHENS: Well of course I don't believe in original sin. It's a preposterous idea, and a wicked one, too.

ROBERTS: Well, all I'm saying is that if we believe that, then that is—it's completely irrelevant to our behavior, how we act, because we're all going to hell anyway. So…

HITCHENS: Well actually, if you think that this is only a brief veil of tears, and a preparation for a later life, what does it really matter what does happen here?

ROBERTS: Well, it matters if our being on earth is a part of God's work of restoring the brokenness of Creation. And then what we do is extraordinarily important.

HITCHENS: Well, that's incredibly cruel. As I open my book by saying that's telling people they've been created sick, and then ordering them to be well.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, proposition number 3: On page 114 of your book, you write, "The existence of Jesus is highly questionable." Can you back that up?

HITCHENS: Sure.

HEWITT: Please do.

HITCHENS: Well, there doesn't exist a shard of convincing evidence that He ever did. The Gospels were written a great deal after the events they purport to describe. And they contradict each other on every important aspect of the life story. I actually do think there must have been such a person, but it's only by a process of induction that is not flattering to the myth. In other words, the fabrication of the story of Bethlehem is designed to fulfill an ancient prophecy, and because that's where it's supposed to happen and all this, so that an invention has to be made of a tax by Caesar Augustus and a census and all this, and that explains why the Holy Family is in that place instead. Well, if the thing had been invented out of whole cloth, then they would just have had Him born there, and have done with it. But the fact that all this fabrication has to be made to make it come right suggests that there was someone born in that—roughly that area at around that time who was a preacher of some sort. But there isn't a trustworthy word—I'm probably, if I'm not trespassing on the territory of my partner here—there isn't a trustworthy word, as you know from reading Bart Ehrman and others, in any of the Gospels that you could remotely say was historical evidence.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts?

ROBERTS: Well, yeah, I guess you and I are going to have to disagree on this one, too. But let me say a couple things: First is the Gospels in the New Testament are not the earliest witness to the existence of Jesus. That would be in the letters of Paul, which are quite a bit earlier than the Gospels, and independent from them. And those letters actually refer to earlier oral traditions. So in fact, we have certainly evidence outside of the Gospel that's earlier. The other thing…

HITCHENS: It's all hearsay, though.

ROBERTS: Well, in that it is spoken of—what do you mean by hearsay?

HITCHENS: Well, I mean it's not—there's nothing attested by anyone you could reasonably describe as a reliable witness, in anything you could reasonably describe as a reliable form.

ROBERTS: Well, I don't know what you've…

HITCHENS: Except for the counterintuitive evidence that—there's so much fabrication, that it would seem needless if there hadn't been a real person to be telling these fibs about.

ROBERTS: No, it's interesting. Your argument on Bethlehem is the kind of argument, actually, that I make in my book, in that when you really look at the evidence, it's obvious that it wasn't fabricated or they would have done so much of a better job. My point is simply that the Gospels are not the earliest witness. There also are some non-Christian witnesses from around the end of the first century: the Jewish historian Josephus; the Roman historian Tacitus; Suetonius in all likelihood refers to Jesus, though calling him Crestus. So we have from a time not too far from the Gospels evidence of Jesus outside of Christianity. But the other point I would simply want to make: I think you said that the Gospels themselves contradict themselves on almost every point that matters, or something—did I get that right?

HITCHENS: Yeah, sure.

ROBERTS: Well, this is going to be a nice moment to promo my book, but I put in, I think it's a list of thirty three places in which the four Gospels agree, and I would say that many of those things are in fact the main points, and quite astounding. For example, the four Gospels agree that the earliest witnesses to the Resurrection are women. They're doing this in a culture that doesn't accept the testimony of women in a law court, that almost surely would never have been fabricated. It would have been ridiculous to do so. So the fact that all four Gospels agree on such a thing is in fact very important. The fact that the Gospels agree on the fact that Jesus recruited his disciples in a culture in which rabbis didn't recruit but had disciples come to them, et cetera, et cetera. I could go through the whole list. I won't do that.

HITCHENS: Well, I don't say at every point, but I mean I'm, annoyingly, I'm just for once in a hotel that doesn't have a Gideon Bible. But...

ROBERTS: It's an atheist hotel. That's your problem.

HITCHENS: I just invite anyone listening to this to read any—actually they'd better quickly read all four of the accounts of either the birth or the death, and see if they can make them agree.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts?

ROBERTS: Well, isn't it—the interesting thing is if they all agreed, I think the critics of the New Testament would say, "A-ha, collusion!" In fact, there was an effort in the second century among Christians to try and get them to sort of be one coherent account. Interestingly enough, the early Church rejected that in favor of what one would say was before more independent witnesses (although a couple of the Gospels are probably relying on each other). Folk who have worked this through, and I would be one of them, have found ways to see, yes, there are differences in the telling of the story, but to suggest that they're somehow wild contradictions makes me again wonder if you and I are living in parallel universes.

HITCHENS: Well, I mean, you force me to press you. I mean, do you think that at the time of the crucifixion, the graves in the greater Jerusalem area opened and many of the dead came out and walked the streets? That's one account.

ROBERTS: Yes.

HITCHENS: It's not sustained, but you do think that happened?

ROBERTS: It's in Matthew's Gospel.

HITCHENS: Yes.

ROBERTS: As a believer, I think it happens. If I put on my historian hat, I say, "This is one Gospel, one witness to this." This makes it again, now speaking as a historian, historically unlikely. As a believer, I believe it. What I'm talking about is…

HITCHENS: I find it absolutely flabbergasting, because among other things, that surely degrades the idea of resurrection by making it commonplace.

ROBERTS: It degrades the idea of resurrection…

HITCHENS: If it can happen to—if just the graves had opened and anyone can get up and walk around, what's so special about the proposed resurrection of the Nazarene?

ROBERTS: Well, you know, it's even worse than that, because Christian theology holds that every person will be resurrected, so we've thoroughly degraded it.

HITCHENS: Well, while you are making things up, why not throw that in?

HEWITT: Can I ask, though, was the account in Matthew contradicted by the other Gospels?

ROBERTS: There's no contradiction. All I'm saying is...

HEWITT: That's what I was…

ROBERTS: When there's one testimony to something that otherwise we would consider to be unlikely, if you simply look at that from a historical point of view, you'd say that's unlikely. Now I happen to believe that it happened, but I believe that it happened because as I have studied the Gospel of Matthew, I find Matthew to be a reliable historical witness to what happened in that time. So on that ground, I'd argue for it.

HITCHENS: No one, whether Tacitus nor Joesphus or any other chronicler of the period seems to think there was an earthquake.

HEWITT: I turn to Bart Ehrman. He figures prominently in Christopher Hitchens' book; he figures prominently in Mark Roberts' book. Christopher Hitchens, what do you find so appealing about Bart Ehrman?

HITCHENS: Well, I find—it's what Bertrand Russell used to call the argument of evidence against interest, or as my friend, you probably know him, John O'Sullivan says…

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: He says if the Pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job. If he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be onto something. Bart Ehrman did the best a man could do to keep up his belief, and he appears to have been—I hope I, again, don't trespass into my partner's field of expertise—but to have been quite a renowned scholar of the Gospels, in several languages, in the believing Christian community. I'm right, am I not, in saying this?

HEWITT: Mark Roberts?

ROBERTS: He is a well-regarded scholar.

HITCHENS: And he came to the conclusion that it was mythical?

ROBERTS: Well, when he was a young man.

HITCHENS: [inaudible] Most of the stories, including some of the ones that I used to most enjoy contemplating when I was being taught the Bible at school, are inserted even later than one had, so to say, feared.

ROBERTS: Mark Roberts?

ROBERTS: I think you're talking there about the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

HITCHENS: Yes.

ROBERTS: Yes, he points out that that particular story is not found in the earliest of the copies, the manuscripts of the Gospel of John that we have. The thing is that that has been well known for centuries to any and every scholar and most Christians, because if you open up your Bible, you'll find out that in most copies of the Bible, that story is in brackets anyway. That's old, old news. I don't know why in particular that's relevant.

HITCHENS: Oh, it isn't particularly relevant. It's just it was the one that struck me, because it used to be one of my favorite stories. That's all.

ROBERTS: Ah. Well…

HITCHENS: But I mean, the totality of Dr. Ehrman's work, the book is called Misquoting Jesus.

ROBERTS: Yes.

HEWITT: And your estimate of Misquoting Jesus?

HITCHENS: Well, I can't wait to read your reply to it, because I've tried and failed to find someone who will take the book on from a Christian point of view, so perhaps I've now found one.

HEWITT: Oh, you have.

ROBERTS: Well, you may not be persuaded, but in fact, the second chapter of my book looks at the textual and manuscript background for the Gospels. And in that, I try to lay out much of what Ehrman does. And by the way, I need to say, much of his scholarship is quite fine, though he has been a person who has been opposing Christianity for thirty years. So I don't know that he's necessarily objective in all things, nor am I. But he is a fine scholar.

HITCHENS: Excuse me?

ROBERTS: Huh?

HITCHENS: He's been an opponent of Christianity for thirty years?

ROBERTS: Yes. He lost his faith. He admits to have lost, losing his faith in graduate school. He's an atheist. And he has been arguing as an atheist now for over thirty years, and writing books opposing orthodox Christian faith.

HITCHENS: My understanding was very different from that. I'm going to have to check.

ROBERTS: Oh, it's quite true. There's a place in which he himself talks about losing his faith, and yet still celebrating Christmas rather sadly.

HEWITT: This hour—in the third hour of today's show we're going to go back the general question of religion and morality. This hour, though, I'm going into the tall grass of the New Testament, and I want to begin with some propositions that Christopher Hitchens puts into his book, in the discussion of the New Testament, particularly that H. L. Mencken and Thomas Paine's view of the New Testament, "a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably have respectable origin, but others palpably apocryphal, have been," and this is the key, "born out by later biblical scholarship, much of it first embarked upon to show that the texts are still relevant." Dr. Roberts, I'm going to start with you. Is Mr. Hitchens correct that much of Biblical scholarship has come to believe the New Testament to be an accumulation of more or less discordant documents, many of them apocryphal?

ROBERTS: Not most of New Testament scholarship, but a substantial segment of it. Really the segment that I spent a lot of time in when I was in grad school at Harvard has tended greatly to emphasize the discordant nature or the disagreements among New Testament writers. There is a whole other sort of world of New Testament scholarship that has continued to see that there's quite a bit of commonality. I think the truth is that it's quite a bit in the middle. There are a great diversity of perspectives on Jesus and what He means. There's a difference of opinion on a number of issues within the New Testament, and yet the New Testament is quite unified in its central message in understanding who Jesus is, and what God was doing in Jesus.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, when you write that the Gospels, "cannot agree on the mythical elements, they disagree wildly about the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas and Peter's haunting denial, most astonishingly they cannot converge on a common account of the crucifixion or the resurrection. Thus, the one interpretation that we simply have to discard is the one that claims divine warrant for all of them." Are you considering that if an account is not replicated, it is thereby undermined? Or are you just talking about direct conflicts between accounts?

HITCHENS: I suppose I'd rest my case on the statement that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If we were going to be asked to believe that the laws of nature are suspended and that virgins give birth and that dead people walk again, we want to be sure that we're getting pretty impressive testimony. And this falls short of being testimony, really, at all.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts?

ROBERTS: I don't understand that last comment. Why is it not testimony?

HITCHENS: Well, it's hearsay.

ROBERTS: Well, it...

HITCHENS: It's hearsay from a very backward, illiterate society. And usually, passed on by people with a very strong interest in getting it believed.

ROBERTS: You've just made the important point and I appreciate you're doing it. It was an illiterate society. It was an oral society. One of the things that scholars have studied at great length in the last twenty years, in fact, it's one of the live issues that academic meetings of New Testament scholars is the nature of oral communities. And what they discover is that there is actually quite a bit of discipline and order within oral communities in terms of hearing, remembering and passing on information. And in fact, you might be interested in a book recently published by Richard Bauckham, who is a professor at St. Andrews in Scotland, on the Gospels having been written by eyewitness and the eyewitness account. Because they were an illiterate society, then it wasn't hearsay in the way ours is. These were people who were disciplined in remembering and accurately passing on stories. And so the fact of it being that society is one of the things that makes it reasonable to trust that the oral traditions passed on the context of this community are in fact believable.

HEWITT: Now Christopher Hitchens, one of the arguments that Dr. Roberts makes in his book, and again, you haven't had a chance to read it, yet, is that if we use one standard to assess historical documents and accounts of history, just one standard, that the Christian standard, or the Christian evidences are far stronger than anything similar, whether Thucydides or Heroides or Josephus or Tacitus, that the distance and time between the autograph and the manuscripts that reproduce it much, much smaller, the number of copies much, much higher, and that any consistent approach to history would elevate the Christian account above almost any other account of any other ancient occurrence.

HITCHENS: I don't know that I'm really qualified enough to pronounce on that. I mean, there is a big argument, for example, about whether Homer ever existed, or whether it's the work of many hands. There's no agreement, really, about the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare, though it seems fairly certain they all were written by one person. That's much closer to us.

HEWITT: But I recall in your book…

HITCHENS: The likelihood that this—Shakespeare doesn't say you have to believe things that would otherwise be completely unbelievable on unsupported oral testimony. I say in my book, for example, it doesn't matter to me that we only have second-hand evidence for the existence of Socrates. We can't say for certain there was such a person. His teachings and his methods remain with us, and we call them Socratic. That's just—that's quite enough for me. But I'm not telling you, or anyone else, that if you don't agree with me about Socrates, you're going to go to hell, or if you do, you're going to go to Heaven, and your sins will be forgiven you.

HEWITT: But in your account of Socrates which I found compelling…

HITCHENS: [inaudble] Extraordinary claims are made that are not verifiable, but extraordinary demands are made in their name upon us, which hold that because of this, there are things we mustn't do and things we must.

HEWITT: Well, Socrates would make the demand upon…

HITCHENS: And we also have to believe—excuse me, it's—these are only the micro parts of what's unbelievable. To me, the essentially unbelievable thing is this: What should be agree on for the lifespan of Homo sapiens now? We know pretty much how long we've been on the planet. Dr. Roberts, what's your view of that?

ROBERTS: Will you say again? I missed…

HITCHENS: What's your view of how long Homo sapiens has been on the planet? Our species?

ROBERTS: Oh, a long time, much longer than 6,000 years, let's put it that way.

HITCHENS: Yes, I mean, I think it's—there isn't an absolute certainty, but let's say—except for the absolute literalists who think that's the age of the earth—well over 150,000 years.

ROBERTS: Okay.

HITCHENS: In the course of which time enormous numbers of people are born, don't live frightfully long, die, usually of their teeth, or by violence of some others, or in childbirth, or of nameless diseases that they can't identify because they don't know about the germ theater of disease, and so on. And it goes on and on like that. And only about 6,000 years ago does heaven decide to intervene in remote parts of the Middle East. Now I find that unbelievable on its face. I don't just think it isn't true, I cannot see how anybody could believe that, or wish it to be true.

HEWITT: Dr. Roberts?

ROBERTS: You know, let's—one of the things—you quote Socrates in your book, and you like Socrates. I like Socrates, too. And one of the things you say of Socrates, all he really knew, he said, was the extent of his own ignorance. And then you add to me, this is still the definition of an educated person, which comes close to being a compliment to me, though you don't know me well. I've often said—I've been quoted in saying that I knew much more when I was twenty than when I'm fifty, and by the time I'm seventy, who knows what I'll know. There is a great deal about what I believe to be God's work in the world, that eclipses my understanding, and sometimes, quite frankly, bugs me, and I will take that up with God on many an occasion and in all kinds of ways. If I were God, do I think I would do things differently? Yes, I would. But I have, myself as a Christian, come to the place of saying I am not God, that's probably a good thing for the universe, and where I find God's ways mystifying, I'm going to pursue what is true, I'm going to seek to know what is true, and at the same time, I'm going to be satisfied with my own ignorance.

HEWITT: But I want to go back to the—somehow, we got away from the idea that the accounts of Socrates are much more thinly sourced than the accounts of Christ, but you are willing to go with the teachings of Socrates, even though they recommend some frankly ill-advised decisions with regards to the city and the state, and his own survival.

HITCHENS: Oh, no, no. I'm sorry, I'm not an endorser of—I mean, I'm not, there's no such thing as a Socratist, but I admire his method of argument.

HEWITT: Okay, but as to just the simple historical fact, when it comes to the source materials that Dr. Roberts claimed, antiquity, multiplicity, trustworthy scholarly methodology and quantity and quality of textually ambiguous passages, the accounts of Christ stand up better than any other historical account, Christopher Hitchens. I don't know how you can argue with that.

HITCHENS: Well, I don't know how you can assert it, because you're not comparing like with like.

ROBERTS: Well, what Hugh is talking about there is the manuscript evidence for the Gospels. And I think on that ground, we're in pretty good shape. But something needs to be said, and I think I would agree with you, I wish there was better evidence for Christ. I do indeed. It would be convenient and helpful in a number of ways. If all we had to go on, we who are Christian, was the Gospel record, I think we could have confidence, but we would miss a lot. There is so much more for Christians that accounts for why we are Christian than that alone, and that needs to be thrown into the mix, I think.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, I was struck in your book—and by the way, I hope you realize this is one of these interviews, I've heard you a few times, both the guest and the host have actually read your book closely.

HITCHENS: Well, that's incredibly decent of you.

ROBERTS: Twice.

HEWITT: So...

ROBERTS: Every word, twice.

HITCHENS: I do very much appreciate, and I'm very sorry I can't return the compliment to Dr. Roberts, but I shall.

HEWITT: Okay, now I was struck when out of the middle of nowhere come the Gnostic Gospels into your account, because it seemed to me unnecessary to anything that you were trying to prove. Why did you bring up the Gnostic Gospels? What point do you think they play in your narrative of discrediting religion?

HITCHENS: Well, because I was going on—I was clearing the ground for what I wanted later to say about the Koran, about the way in which a text is given authority by pruning the stuff, the garbage out of it, the discrepant bits, the contradictory bits, and so forth, making certain things canonical, discarding others, and because I was very fascinated by what I'd read about the Gospel of Judas.

HEWITT: In the book you write, "For a long time, there was incandescent debate over which of the Gospels should be regarded as divinely inspired. Some argued for these and some for others, and many a life was horribly lost on those propositions. Nobody dared say they were all man ascribed, long after the supposed drama was over and the revelation of St. John seemed to have been squeezed into the canon because of its author's rather ordinary name." Mark Roberts, you're a scholar of the Gnostic Gospels, and did you find the account compelling? Or did it clear the way for the subsequent point made?

ROBERTS: Well, you know, it reminded me of things that one can read from certain scholars. It actually didn't remind me of what somebody who's actually studied the Gnostic Gospels would much think about them. For one thing, the Gnostic Gospels almost have nothing that has to do with the actual life of Jesus. They're filled with all kinds of theology which if you believe it, you would believe to be quite inspired, and if you don't, you'd believe it to be quite silly. But they have virtually nothing to say about the historical life of Jesus. And so in that regard, they're just not terribly helpful. Plus they were written at least, or on average, at any rate, a century later than the Biblical Gospels, so the Gnostic Gospels don't really help us much at all, if our desire is to know something of Jesus. They're fascinating in and of themselves, but more…

HITCHENS: The gospel of Judas has a lot about Jesus in it.

ROBERTS: Well, but you actually read that, and I appreciate that. You gave almost a page to it. But what it tells us about Jesus is, it has absolutely nothing to do with what He did. It has some sayings of Jesus, and in language that almost 100% certain is nothing Jesus Himself would have actually said, because it sounds nothing like what a first-century Jew would say.

HITCHENS: Well, it did surely—it answers a question that is raised necessarily by the accepted account of the last Passover, which is this: Why is Judas considered to be a bad person when he's only doing God's will?

ROBERTS: I agree with you there. It answers that, because for the Gnostic, the physical body is bad and evil, and in the gospel of Judas, Judas is the one who is going to get rid of the physical body of Jesus. And so for the Gnostics, Judas is the hero. He got rid of the body so that the real Christ, non-physical Christ, could sort of be set free. And that's why Judas is the hero. It does exonerate him. I'm not sure it does it in a way that has much historical persuasiveness to it.

HITCHENS: Well, you certainly have me there. I don't think it's historical at all.

HEWITT: So…

HITCHENS: I mean, I think it's another fabrication, but still, it makes a mystery a little less mysterious.

HEWITT: But was…

HITCHENS: I mean, why do you think, I'll put the question to you this way: I know you're not a Catholic, but the Church of Rome waited until 1965, twenty years after the end of the final solution in Europe, to acquit the Jewish people of the charge of deicide, not some Jews, but all Jews. Why do you think it took them so long?

ROBERTS: Well, I think there, I'd want to take a page out of your book and say that human beings are insufficiently rational.

HITCHENS: But it had been dogma preached very fervently for a long, long time in the name of someone who claims—you don't support his claim, I don't know on what basis you don't—to hold the keys of St. Peter, and who shares a lot of your beliefs. Now I think I do know why, because we—if these events, or some version of it did occur, the certainty is that there a lot of Jews around. And if they're told that they're absolved of responsibility, then it becomes extremely difficult to say to the rest of the human race you were responsible for Calvary as well. That's why they couldn't let them go. That's why this massive injustice was committed, not as an aberration of Christianity, but as part of its central teaching, for the greater part of its existence, and hasn't been sincerely, in my view, repudiated.

ROBERTS: Well then, that is lacking. All I can say is on this count, I am with you completely that the anti-Judaism of much of Christian history is extraordinarily inconsistent with what Christianity ought to be. And you'll get no defense from me. You and I are of common mind in thinking that's terrible. I'd go the step further to say that it's also terrible history, because when you look carefully at the Gospel records, you discover that the vast majority of the Jews were in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus' death, were abhorred by it. They were upset by it.

HEWITT: And is it inconsistent, Dr. Roberts, with the teachings of Jesus and the explanation of those teachings of Paul?

ROBERTS: Oh, extraordinarily so. So it's one thing—I mean, there is definitely a problem, and I will agree that this a problem for Christians, that so many Christians have both thought things we ought not to have thought, and done things we ought not to have done. And obviously that's even more disturbing to me as a Christian, because I have a certain brotherhood and sisterhood with some of these folk. It's a terrible mark on our record.

HITCHENS: Well, it ought to be said, and I add it, that Maimonides, the great Jewish sage, thought it was one of the best day's work the Jewish people had ever done, that the elders did exactly the right thing by putting to death this ghastly heretic and imposter.

ROBERTS: Well, that didn't help much, did it?

HITCHENS: But, but, but, so I mean, I've no sympathy with Judaism, either. But it is said, is it not, that the Jews called for his blood to be on their heads and on their descendents to the remotest generation, and echo of the preamble to the Ten Commandments where it is said that the sins of the fathers will be visited on their children. I do not regard this as moral preaching. Do you?

ROBERTS: Uh...

HITCHENS: Is it right to say that the sins of the father shall be visited on their children, and their children's children? Is it moral to say that, let alone truthful?

ROBERTS: Well, I think it's certainly truthful. Whether it's moral depends on what sins and the way in which it's visited. I mean, I think it's certainly truthful that my children, unfortunately, are going to carry on some of my own sins. Now I don't think that's moral. I don't break it. I think that there are situations in which it may well be moral.

HITCHENS: No, no. That's not correct. They may go on sinning; they're doomed to, apparently. But they've got to suffer for yours?

ROBERTS: Well, I think that is…

HITCHENS: And their children's children are going to be held responsible for your sins? That's what it says.

ROBERTS: I think that it is true that they will continue to suffer from my sin. I think the question of when it is moral for that to happen is not one that I could give a yes/no answer to.

HEWITT: I'm tempted to turn the page, but I don't want to, because it's the hardest part of Christopher Hitchens' book, Dr. Mark Roberts, is when he goes to the Old Testament, and he finds some awful things: the murder of innocents, the slaying of enemies, the destruction of children, every one, down to the last person in the city. And he presents this as an indictment of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Is he right to do so?

ROBERTS: Let me say that I also find that to be one of the hardest things about believing the Bible to be God's word. There are things in it that I find intuitively contrary to what seems to me to be right and wrong, and some of the things that he mentions are things I myself struggle with. My response is two-fold. First of all: I have been greatly helped by listening especially to Jewish writers and rabbis talk about some of that material because there's a lot of it that I don't get as a Christian and people who live within that tradition are able to make much more sense of it than I. That's number one. The second thing I need to say, though, is that all of that has to be seen in two contexts. Number one, in the context of the culture of that time in history, and many of the things that we see as quite, perhaps, bizarre, or irrational end up making a lot more sense when we understand that culture and the time. For me, the larger point is that what the Old Testament gives us is, you might say, the beginning and the first chapters of the larger story of God's work with us, of God's Creation, of the brokenness of the world, of God's effort to mend the world through a very unusual process, that is by entering into relationship with a people and using people to help fix the world. Now there's a part of me that thinks God wasn't—I wonder sometimes why God gave us the ability to mess it up in the first place. That seems sometimes peculiar. If I were God, I don't know that I would do that. But God, I assume, knows what's best. But secondly, the idea that He's going to use people to bring about the mending of it, and so it's the larger story of the Old Testament that is for me what's most important, in light of which, then, a lot of the things that seem curious, unexplainable, even offensive, can make sense.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, and one of the things that left me...

HITCHENS: You're not going to go on and tell me that there is historical authority for the events described in the New Testament—I mean, sorry, the Old Testament.

ROBERTS: I think there is…

HITCHENS: You're surely not going to do that.

HEWITT: Well, you did. You said there was a kingdom of David and you said that there was quite a lot of evidence for the later Israeli or Jewish kingdom.

HITCHENS: Yes, there is, but…

HEWITT: But not for Moses.

HITCHENS: But it was a very much smaller kingdom than was thought, a very much more modestly sized and no evidence whatsoever for the captivity and the exile and the wandering.

HEWITT: But that was actually one of the parts, I thought, was a little thin for you, Christopher, because the Jewish archaeological experts that you refer to have not been given access to the same places where their studies have been able to produce the evidences of David.

HITCHENS: No, but they had the strongest motive in the places where they could dig, for doing this, and the Sinai's been gone over with a fine tooth comb by now, by a lot of other very highly qualified archeologists and there just is no evidence for it at all.

HEWITT: And as those of us involved in the discussion of WMD are like to say, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

HITCHENS: Ah, no, but with WMD, you can use the argument from design because you were dealing with a regime that had possessed, and had used, and had a record of concealment of WMD, so there's a very fair induction to be made in that case. Please, sir, that wasn't very [inaudible]...

HEWITT: So Mark Roberts, what do you say to his response?

ROBERTS: Well, the further we go back into ancient history…

HITCHENS: No, look. I have a question.

ROBERTS: Yeah, sure.

HITCHENS: Sorry—why does it matter to you to want to adopt these texts—these horrible texts as your own? Why don't you just let it go? Why don't you just say it's a pity that St. Paul, in talking, I think, to the Galatians, says, you know, we adopt all these books and these prophecies as our own because we think they were vindicated? Why—how does that make human life better?

ROBERTS: Well, it...

HITCHENS: How does it help us to be ethical? Why impose this extraordinary strain on yourself? You're never going to be able to prove it, and you should be relieved.

ROBERTS: Never be able to prove the historicity…

HITCHENS: That there's any authenticity, let alone any morality in these horrible old Jewish texts. Why bother—why adopt them when you could discard them?

ROBERTS: Well, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say there's no morality in them, but I would agree with your assertion. The further you go back in history, the harder and harder it is to come up with the kind of evidence you talk about. So you know, you can find an evidence of an ancient Jericho, and some scholars think they haven't got evidence that a wall fell over there. But that still is minimal to the kind of confirmation that one could get from much more recent kinds of evidence.

HEWITT: Dr. Roberts, as we went to break, Christopher Hitchens has said, "Why not just toss it off? You know, get rid of the Old Testament, or the Jewish scriptures, and you'll be much more—Jefferson could get along with Jesus. Why not just leave it at that?"

ROBERTS: Well, I would agree it would make certain things easier. Interestingly, this was a great debate within second-century Christianity, because there was man named Marcian who had been apparently an orthodox Christian, and then pretty much decided the Old Testament was much as Christopher Hitchens believes it to be, and he just cut it off, and he went into the New Testament, and he took out all the Old Testament references. And there was a major argument within the early Church as to whether one needs, in fact, to hang onto the Old Testament or not. The reasons I would give intellectually are that the Old Testament are—it's the soil out of which the New Testament was grown. And you need the soil to grow the plant. The personal side of that, I think of a friend of mine named Gary, who grew up as an orthodox Jew. Some years ago, Gary became a Christian. And as I had been with him as his pastor, one of the things that astounded me almost initially was how much he, having his Jewish background, was able to get and to live the Christian life so much better than people who are Americans not coming out of a Jewish background. For example, Americans who become Christians tend to be incredibly individualistic. Gary intuitively got the fact that being a Christian is about being a member of a community. And so I would argue that it's his closeness to the soil that enables him to be a better believer.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, do you admire the work of Walker Percy?

HITCHENS: I've read a little, not a great deal. It didn't encourage me to go on to the end.

HEWITT: I bring him up because he was asked once why he was a believer and he said, "I'll stop believing when someone can explain to me the Jews." And now there is a similar passage in your book by a different person, and in fact, there is that extraordinary story of a people formed by that account, as horrific as it is at some points, and as you say, evidence-free in some others, but evidence-filled in others. Does it not strike you that that is an extraordinary story to have come to the full circle, back in Jerusalem, where they are, were it not for the Divine Hand upon that people?

HITCHENS: Well, I mean, as someone who has some Jewish ancestry, and a Jewish daughter, and who is indeed very impressed by the survival of the Jewish people, and very committed to it, I can't agree with you, no, because if there's been a supervising hand, it's been an extremely brutal one. It's the reason I think why so many Jews, I think probably the majority now, are non-believers, are secular in one form or another, or atheist, and why the Jewish contribution to atheism has been so extraordinary, from Spinoza to Einstein.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts, does that—go ahead.

HITCHENS: But there have been—I'll tell you something: The rabbi, after the end of the Second World War, the revelation of the Final Solution, the shoah, the rabbis went rather quiet. They hadn't got anything much to say about how this had happened, or whether God really had done it as a punishment for the exile. The rabbis who did think would've rather kept it to themselves. That's why this constitution of the state of Israel is as secular as it is. After the 1967 war, which is forty years ago, as you know, this week, a number of rabbis did start to get up and say, "A-ha, now we see the Finger of God! The Holocaust was all meant so this could happen, so that we could establish rule over Arabs." Well, I can't imagine anything more evil being said, or stupid, I have to say.

HEWITT: Well, I don't agree with it, either. I don't, in fact, attribute to God the Holocaust.

HITCHENS: Well, then don't, please, don't say that God is behind all these things.

HEWITT: No, I...

HITCHENS: Why insult your deity by making him responsible for...

HEWITT: I don't think he's responsible. I think there is free will in the universe, and that explains how come the Nazis, pagans that they were, went about their vicious ideology, and wiped out six million people, but that's not my point. My point…

HITCHENS: No, no. [inaudible] of the S.S. were confessing Catholics.

HEWITT: I agree. I know that and it's in your book, but paganism—Hitler was not a Christian. Hitler was not a believer in other than Hitler's own…

HITCHENS: He never repudiated his Church, Hitler.

HEWITT: His Church repudiated him.

HITCHENS: No, it did not because The Roman Church issued instructions that his birthday was to be celebrated from the pulpit every year until the very end, as you know.

HEWITT: I will simply stand by the point that Hitler is not a Christian and I don't believe—you make that argument in that book, even.

HITCHENS: No, I don't say he was a Christian in my book. I say that he didn't repudiate it and he certainly took great care to get the support of the churches. But he wanted to replace everything with Aryan blood myths and the worship of himself, that is certainly true.

HEWITT: But we've run into one of his central points, Mark, which is...

ROBERTS: Well, I want to make a—I just want to say that I think one of the great ways in which—now Christopher, you may not like this, but in which Christopher Hitchens is a friend, a kind of a friend to the Church and to Christians. He forces us to deal with things that are hard things about faith. And as much as I'd rather not have to think about them, I am one that is in fact committed to finding the truth, to challenging the things I believe. And I think one of the things Christians need to do is to wrestle much more faithfully and honestly than we sometimes have with some of the sorry parts of our history and the challenging parts of our theology, because I believe that that kind of wrestling leads us more to the truth. Now it may very well not lead us to the exact same truth that we began with, so be it. But I think that the questions that are being asked here, and the challenge to Christians to think, to use our brains, to be rational, to examine, to be unafraid of difficult questions, I actually see that as a service, and in that sense, I appreciate the challenge, even though I come to places where I say, "I'm not exactly sure how to meet it at this point."

HEWITT: Well, there's a magician's trick in it, though, and the magician's trick is, for example, Christopher Hitchens, when you say why would God allow Pius XI to die, and Pius XII to replace him, when the former is pro-Jew and anti-Hitler, and the latter is pro-Hitler and anti-Jew? And it's the magician's trick is that God's not involved in that, as He, as you want us—as you want your reader to believe Christians believe He is involved in that, and it's not a fair portrait of Pius XII.

HITCHENS: Oh, no it's not harsh enough. I agree. But it is, you probably don't believe...

HEWITT: No, I don't.

HITCHENS: But it is believed by Catholics that God picks his vicar of Christ on Earth.

HEWITT: Yes, yes He does, and sometimes…

HITCHENS: And it is, therefore—of course I think it's a nonsensical belief, but if it be true, then at the very eve of the Second World War, He decided to appoint a vicar of Christ who was pro-Hitler. That's a lot to swallow, isn't it? I don't hold God responsible for these things, bear in mind. I'm not insulting Him, as you do. I'm not saying that He takes responsibility in these, and I don't think there's any such person. I free myself from this incredibly strenuous, impossible belief. {inaubdible] But you saddle yourselves.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts, before we go to the third hour, one of the things I found inexplicable about Christopher's book is that he wants readers who are not familiar with Christians to believe that everything is determinism and that God is in fact a puppet master running it, and free will is the part that I found so missing from this. Your comment?

ROBERTS: Well, two things. One is yes, that gets undersold, and so it's as if God is responsible for everything and I don't know that that's fair to the Christian understanding of God. The second thing that I found missing in the book was an understanding that the world is not the way God meant it to be. I mean, if you go to the—well, the argument from design, and finding a watch on the beach. The watch we find is a broken watch. It doesn't work right. It doesn't keep time the way it was meant to. And so much of what happens in this world—Christians believe in anyway—is not what God intends, both because of human freedom, and because the world itself is broken. We also believe that God is in the business of putting the world back together, and that in fact that we're a part of that business and that's part of why we're here in the world. But minus that freedom, and minus the understanding of the brokenness of the world, God gets blamed for a lot of things like the so-called acts of God in my insurance contract that I'm not really sure are acts of God so much as acts of nature.

HEWITT: And Christopher Hitchens, I want to be fair to you. That is what you attribute to God as sort of the puppet master.

HITCHENS: No, no, no. Actually, I'm sorry to have to say, and it is—I will say for the first and only time—I think you completely misrepresented what I write, and also what I think. I say it's childish to blame God for things going wrong. It's idiotic. If there was such a person, I'd have more respect for His majesty than to say He owes me an explanation. You know, if there's a God, why have I got cancer? What a silly question. It would be, I wouldn't have any idea why He would want that. I would just have to accept it. But I mean, I don't, I do not go in for this game at all, and I don't know why anybody does.

HEWITT: I know you don't, but I believe that the picture...

HITCHENS: But I mean, I am a bit astounded to find that we don't think that God designed us and the universe after all, or that if He did, He did it with such tremendous cruel ineptitude. I mean, again, it's not my problem. I don't think this way. As for free will, I think we have it, but I think we have no choice but to have it.

HEWITT: What I was saying is not that you believe it, but that the portrait you put in of Christians is that they believe Christ is, or that God is in fact in charge of everything.

HITCHENS: Well, they invite these kind of—I mean, after all, did you not just say to me that if I contemplated the history of the Jews, I would have to see that God was planning everything for them? Well, I say that if you say that, then you've just accepted on behalf of a deity whose mind you appear to know—how, you don't say—an enormous responsibility.

HEWITT: No, you see in history an unfolding of a reconstruction effort that Mark Roberts was referring to, not one driven forward in every detail, but one in which that mystery of free will is allowed to operate.

[BREAK]

HEWITT: I want to get to one of the big questions: the impact of religion on the twentieth century. Has it been a net positive or a net negative for human civilization, Christopher Hitchens?

HITCHENS: Why just this century? I'm sorry if I'm being dense.

HEWITT: I'm just asking because now, we know more, we understand more, we have the benefit of better theology, better learning, and growth as human beings in the twentieth century. How'd we do as religious people versus non-religious?

HITCHENS: Well, when I think about the twentieth century, I suppose I think of so many of its unanticipatable horrors. I mean, we behaved worse in the last century, probably as a species, than we ever had before. And you know what examples I'm alluding to, I suppose. And the implication of religion in all of these was pretty, pretty gross. I'm thinking—I have a long chapter in my book about the role of the Church, for example, in supporting the rise of fascism.

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: I don't think they're ever going to be able to—I frankly don't think Christianity's ever going to be able to live that down.

HEWITT: Of course, we do have the neo-pagan Nazis, we have the atheist Stalin, we have the atheist Mao, we have the atheist Cuba, we have the atheist North Korea...

HITCHENS: Well, it's not—I have a long chapter on that objection, too. In fact, this ought to come up now, oughtn't it? (I mean, secular criminality.)

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: Well, I say in my book that's—if the axis of fascism, almost entirely a Catholic movement, all the way from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, concordat between the Vatican and Hitler that lasts until the very end, and continues to shelter Nazi wanted war criminals after it's over and help them to establish other dictatorships in South America; the Japanese, led by someone who actually was a god, not just a godly person, but a god himself, according to those who believed in him, who no doubt thought he was the fount of all ethics in Japan and that there would be rape and pillage if people stopped believing in him. Turning to Stalinism: Look, in 1917 in Russia, when the regime falls, millions of Russians for hundreds of years have been told that the head of their government is a person just a little below God. He's the czar, the absolute ruler and owner of a country. He's also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. That's the inculcation of servility, incredulity in the huge, uneducated population. If you're Josef Stalin—who studied as a seminary student, by the way, for most of his life—you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you can't exploit a reservoir of servility and incredulity like that. He replicates it perfectly. There's an inquisition; there are show trials to expose heretics; there are miracle (Lysenko's biology); there's the constant worship of the leader. Everything comes from the top; everyone has to say thank you all the time for the great benefits. It's a replication of the same thing. And by the way, the Russian Orthodox Church continues to support him, which it did. If you want to point out to me a society that went into famine and dictatorship and mass murder and war and torture as a result of adopting the principals of Lucretius and Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine, then we'd have a level playing field.

HEWITT: Dr. Roberts, did you find persuasive Mr. Hitchens' approach to the twentieth century where in fact he redefined all of the atheist regimes into being neo-religious regimes?

ROBERTS: Well, I must admit that did feel like that was a bit of special pleading, because it seems to be evidence contrary to his main thesis that religion poisons everything. Something poisons everything. I think we could be agreed in that. But to say that it's religion, I think, isn't getting the full nature of the poisoning, if you will. It seems to me that we can look for something else. And actually, I found within god is Not Great a quote that I rather like, actually. It said past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is biologically only partly rational. Now to me, the partly rational doesn't quite get it, but I think Christopher Hitchens himself if moving toward an explanation that sees the problems in this world as not necessarily stemming from religion. Religion, when it gets messed up with totalitarianism, when it gets messed up with partial rationality, religion can be turned to bad uses, absolutely. Irreligious people the same. There is plenty of sin to go around on all side and so then we begin to ask what is the deeper problem with human nature, and can we get at that somehow? And I think blaming religion, especially for Stalinism and Mao and stuff, seems to be twisting the definition of religion out of any kind of normal definition—dictionary mode.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, when you brought up the Rwandan horror, and frankly educated me on the Catholic connection there, which I did not know and found horrifying, I thought it was not fair, though, to leave out John Paul II's efforts to bring down, successfully, along with Thatcher and Reagan, the Soviet Union, that if you're going to indict religion, it may have poisoned many things, but it certainly didn't poison Poland. It freed Poland.

HITCHENS: Oh, well, I think you'll find, I hope you'll find, I'm sure you'll find, that I do say…

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: ...that I thought that John Paul II was an extraordinary human being.

HEWITT: Yes, but...

HITCHENS: And in that respect, and in others too, though terrible things to be laid to his charge, as well. By any standards, he was a great mammal. This might be the time to reiterate my earlier challenge, because we still have some time left. I still want to be informed of a moral preachment, or a moral action made by a believer that couldn't be made by an unbeliever.

HEWITT: I'm not sure that I know one.

HITCHENS: Because otherwise, you see, religion becomes optional. You can have a nice Pope, you can have a nasty Pope. You can have an honest priest, you can have a dishonest priest. You can have a fraudulent Church or a frugal and scrupulous one. But it's just, it could just as well be a private belief. Now that's unfortunately not really possible in religious terms, is it, because you have to believe there is a supernatural power to which you owe some duty. You make yourselves believe this. I still can't understand why you'd want to.

ROBERTS: Well, you know, let me say that there is a struggle for believers who are open-minded and seek the truth, and I don't deny it. But let me try to answer your question with an action that I consider to be one of the most moral that I do as a human being, though you and I might disagree on that, and that is the action, I did it last night. When my son was going to bed, I got next to him and I prayed for him. I doubt an atheist could do that. To me, that is one of the most moral of things I do as a human being.

HITCHENS: Gosh. Well, I mean, I think it does as much good as aerobic dancing would do, frankly. I don't mean to be rude, but I don't see, I don't see that it's a moral action. You also seem to suggest that in some way by not praying for my children, I'm not as moral as you are.

ROBERTS: Hardly.

HITCHENS: I'm not sure you meant to say that.

ROBERTS: No, let me be clear. I did not mean…

HITCHENS: It's not really an answer to my challenge, is it?

ROBERTS: No, you can do many other moral deeds. You might get with your children in the evening, and tell them how much you love them, and that would be absolutely fantastic. All I'm saying is that you asked for a moral action that I could do that an atheist could not do with integrity. And for me, praying for my children before they go to bed is one of the most important things in my life, and I believe it to be highly moral, and I doubt that an atheist could do that in good conscience. So...

HITCHENS: I don't say, please don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't dream of saying that it was an immoral action. But I must tell you what I think, which is that it is an irrelevant one. I mean, it isn't of itself a good thing, and it isn't an action, either.

HEWITT: Well, that brings us to one of my propositions: The vast majority of people listening disagree with you on that, Christopher, and atheists have always been with us, they always argue passionately, you better than most, now, with a fine book that is entertaining. But on the other hand, Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life has sold 20 million copies, the Church in China's exploding, Africa's alive with Evangelical fervor, the Catholic Church in South America is thriving. And so by any objective measure...

HITCHENS: Islam is sweeping all before it as well, so it's a great time to be faith based.

HEWITT: Atheists—ut atheists have failed again. With all of the arguments that you've always been able to martial, it just doesn't work. Why is that, do you suppose?

HITCHENS: Well, I say in the book that religious belief is ineradicable. It's innate—it's not innate in all of us. There are a certain number of people who always have been born and always will be, who now have to be taken seriously and can't be silenced and burned and imprisoned and tortured anymore, for whom it isn't possible to believe, of who I am, as you can see, one. But it is still—it's a belief I have to resist, sometimes. You know, if we were sitting together and a huge, rusting fridge fell out of the sky and hit only you and left me alone, I would sort of think that was a bit of luck, though it would be a vile thing to think, wouldn't it?

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: I couldn't stop myself. And we're afraid of death, and we seek for passions where none exist. One of the most awful things in the Bible, I used to think when I was a child, was "seek and ye shall find." Of course you will if you seek—if you look for a pattern and you hope there's a God, and you don't want to die, and you hope an exception will be made in your own case. You're very likely to become vulnerable to religion. But I mean, you have to allow me to be unimpressed.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts, we got a minute to the break.

ROBERTS: Christopher, have you read N. T. Wright's book Simply Christian?

HITCHENS: No, I've not.

ROBERTS: You know, even before you read mine...

HITCHENS: It sounds like a very sickly title, I must say.

ROBERTS: Well, it's okay.

HITCHENS: It's like Mere Christianity. I hate that sort of pseudo-modesty that Christians sometimes have.

ROBERTS: I appreciate that. You may not like the book, but it would be helpful in a couple of ways, because I think it would help you to get what Christians believe to be the larger purpose and story, and it might also help to explain whey there is this yearning in us for God because we happen to believe God put it there.

HEWITT: I want to go now to the Anthropic Principle, because a number of people asked me to bring this up in the course of preparing for this. Mark Daniels wrote, "It requires greater blind faith to believe that the universe has just happened into existence than to believe an intelligent being created it." I was written to about Robert Rood and James Trefil, astronomers who believe that when you look at the twenty unique characteristics of the globe, that it could only have been fulfilled in—actually, it should never have happened, even in the trillion universes and the 100 billion stars, and each of them so magnificent as the Creation, and so delicately balanced. And I go to the Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything, that when you're done reading brief cosmological history, Christopher Hitchens, it really does take an extraordinary amount of indifference to accident to come to the conclusion that we're just here because of an accident.

HITCHENS: Well, it doesn't involve believing just in an accident. I mean, there was an extraordinary event that brought the universe into being, which the word Big Bang, originally invented by Professor Fred Hoyle, was originally designed to scorn that idea, to make it sound silly. But in fact, it's now pretty much accepted. I just have to refer you again, I think, to Victor Stenger's book, which has a much closer engagement than mine does with the sciences. It seems to me, though, that the really unbelievable thing, the thing that cannot be believed, is that we on this very tiny speck of a planet in a solar system that has otherwise only dead planets, and the death of which we can all anticipate almost to the hour (the heat death of our known universe), that it's on the very, very edge of a whirling, unimaginable space with other galaxies, that we are the point of all this creation. It's just not possible for me, at any rate, to believe that.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts, when my correspondents point out that the Earth being fit for habitat requires the number of stars in the planetary system, the parent star birth date, the parent star age, the parent star distance, the parent star mass, surface gravity, axial tilt, all these other things, does that increase or decrease your belief?

ROBERTS: Well, to the extent that I understand it, and I need to confess that I am quite limited in my understanding of that kind of science, it certainly increases...

HITCHENS: Well, that makes two of us.

ROBERTS: Well, it increases my belief.

HEWITT: Well, I've got it down.

ROBERTS: Okay, so at least somebody here knows what it is.

HITCHENS: You can't possibly say that you derive your faith from it, can you?

HEWITT: No.

HITCHENS: Because Christianity comes from a time when people thought the sky was bowl and they had no idea that the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun instead of the sun around it. Indeed, Christianity threatened with torture and death anyone who tried to investigate the subjects you've just been presenting us with.

ROBERTS: Yes, in not one of the happy chapters in our history. I mean, let me point to another book that I found to be quite helpful. It's by Owen Gingrich. Owen Gingrich is an astrophysicist at Harvard. He actually taught there when I was a student there, though I didn't take a class from him. We would eat lunch in the same place. He wrote a book called God's Universe. It's Harvard University Press, it's a fairly small book, talking about how he as an astrophysicist is also a man of faith, a Christian, and how that makes sense. And he says a couple of things I think you can find interesting. One is that when he looks at the utter unlikelihood of human existence, that that does increase his faith that there is some sort of a god behind all of this, but also, and this is where I think it's interesting in terms of Christopher Hitchens' recent comment, he chides himself from thinking that we're the whole purpose, that it's human beings are the whole purpose of it. He says as a Christian who needs to be humbled before God and as a scientist, there may well be other life in other places. To me, it's instructive, because it shows how a great man of science, who's scientific understanding vastly, vastly exceeds my own, actually allows him to be more convinced in his religious faith no less, and to do it in a very rational and sane and open to science way, that I find very appealing. I think one of the things I would want to say myself is that the extent to which in the history of the relationship between religion and science, Christianity has often opposed scientific inquiry. Much of that I find very grievous, and would agree with Christopher Hitchens that that was a sorry thing.

HITCHENS: You see, suppose that you could infer a Creator who's interested—sorry, suppose you could infer a Creator or an intelligence from these calculations, which is a hypothesis that so far when tested has proved to be inadequate. But suppose, let me grant it to you. All your work is still ahead of you. That doesn't suggest in the smallest degree that He's interested in what happens to you or me.

HEWITT: I think that's correct, and you would have to look for evidences of His plan revealed to humankind.

HITCHENS: Yes, and I just think our cranial capacity isn't up to that.

ROBERTS: No, I would agree with you that, that gets us to a place…

HITCHENS: So why claim to know things you can't possibly know? I keep asking you, I will keep asking you: Why do you impose this extraordinary burden on yourself?

HEWITT: Because you found those evidences, I would say.

ROBERTS: Well, because...

HITCHENS: Well, you better—you should publicize them better. They haven't penetrated yet.

ROBERTS: Yes. I would say that what you're saying is, "Why hang onto these things that are hard to believe and defend?" And my answer is that I have to be intellectually honest and try to be faithful as a thinker, that I simply can't lop off of my faith those things that I find inconvenient or difficult to understand; that it's a matter of—and you say, "Well then, why hold onto the faith in the first place?" Because the faith in the first place, to me, makes ultimately the most sense of all things, and because of something that I realize that you would have a hard time agreeing with, but what I would also say is my experience of God. I realize you don't think I've had an experience of God, but I...

HITCHENS: No, no. I think you have.

ROBERTS: Really?

HITCHENS: I wouldn't dream of doubting that you think you have. But I don't think you could make it real to anybody else.

ROBERTS: Well, as a—all I can say is as a pastor, I...

HITCHENS: I don't think that people who report seeing UFO's and so on are lying. I think they did. I think they really do think they saw them. I just do not think we're being visited by such craft.

ROBERTS: My experience, and again, this gets to my particular experience as a pastor, is that it's not an easy thing at all to help somebody else to experience God as reality, but that if I am as faithful to the truth as I can be, if I seek to live it out as faithfully as I can, that actually, that can help people come to experience God in a genuine way as well. If I didn't believe that, I sure as heck wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

HEWITT: And Christopher Hitchens, you believe people are deluding themselves when they believe they have experienced God?

HITCHENS: Well actually, I was a friend of a bishop of the Church of England, a very decent and gentle man called Hugh Montefiore, who converted from Judaism to become a Christian, who became a very senior figure in the Anglican Church, because of a personal visit that he had from Jesus Christ when he was one of the few Jews at a Protestant boarding school. And he wrote a book also saying that the conditions for life on this planet seem to be so extraordinary, that the knife edge balance on which we live, that it testifies to the divine, and I don't—I can't say that old Bishop Hugh was lying when he said he'd had a personal visit from Jesus. It did change his life. He acted for the rest of his life as if it had happened.

HEWITT: On that point, we will return, because that's very interesting. Is that in the book, Christopher? It's not in the book, is it?

HITCHENS: What?

HEWITT: You didn't include that in the book, did you?

HITCHENS: No, I probably should have done.

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: It's a very interesting book that he wrote, but he's worth Googling.

HEWITT: I now bring up a point sent to me by Randy Elrod who blogs at Ethos. He wanted this proposition to be put out there: An understanding of the existence of something greater than ourselves gives us the ability, as Dostoyevsky states in The Brothers, to not only live, but to live for something definite. Without a firm notion of what he is living for, man will not accept life and will rather destroy himself rather than remain on earth. And of course, he is one of the great Christian mystics, Christopher Hitchens, but do you believe that man absolutely must have some understanding of something larger than himself, meaning God, or that it becomes meaningless and insane?

HITCHENS: Well, I think we do probably need something on the order of the transcendent in our lives and I think humanism fulfills these needs, incidentally. I mean, if you say that for you, as for me, the beauties of science, the consolations of philosophy, the study of literature as the source of ethical and moral questions—that's enough for most people's lifetimes. And to turn away from this, and to say, "Well, I'd rather go for the ancient texts that come from the childhood of our species," is first, I think, to refuse a wonderful offer, and second, it makes it impossibly arrogant for the questioner to assume that that'll make you behave better. I mean, surely, he knows that many people are absolutely convinced that there's a God greater than themselves, are convinced that that God is telling them to do evil. The example you just gave of people who have personal experiences that must be considered valid must be valid for everybody in that case. In that case, it is true that the archangel Gabriel told the prophet Mohammed what to do. It was—it seems to have been very convincing to him and to many other people. Do you accept the validity of that or not?

HEWITT: No, I don't, and that...

HITCHENS: Do you accept that Louis Farrakhan can get people off drugs by faith?

HEWITT: No, I don't. And that's why Mark Roberts, this is his biggest challenge.

HITCHENS: Are you impressed? Well, how do you accept it for one and reject it for another?

HEWITT: You have to—Mark Roberts, I'll leave that question to you, because it's a question of choosing between many competing claims as to divine guidance.

ROBERTS: Well, this is where Christopher Hitchens and I would, though, I think, end up in different places, agree that one of the things we desperately need is open-mindedness, clear thinking, the ability to ask difficult questions, to test our own hypotheses. You got to study with Karl Popper, I understand, and that would be the thing I envy of you, having studied philosophy of science in my undergraduate days, and Popper was rather a hero there, that we need to—I don't take at all every testimony at face value as true. I think we've got to examine it, look to see if it's true, test it. I believe that in my own way.

HITCHENS: Well, how, there's no standard for doing that, though, is there? It's the most subjective possible thing, and actually, you don't get terribly reassured, do you, if someone comes up to you in the street and says I'm on a mission from God and He's given me some instructions. Why does that not delight you if someone comes up and does that?

ROBERTS: Well, because I happen to believe that sometimes people are on a mission from God, and sometimes they think they are and they're not, and it's not necessarily a good thing.

HITCHENS: Yeah well, I'd love to be with you the next time someone says that—comes up to both of us and says they're hearing voices and it's God. You're going to throw your arms around him and say, "You, too? What luck!"

HEWITT: But generally...

HITCHENS: I don't think so. I don't know why I don't think so, but I just don't.

ROBERTS: I actually spend quite a bit of time with people who have claims for various kinds of religious experiences and what I do is I listen to them. I try as best I can with the tools I have and the understanding I have to discern the extent to which what they are saying is true or not, and you're right. You've said is that a difficult thing to do? Is there some absolute standard? I don't believe there is. But I do believe...

HITCHENS: No, there isn't. You couldn't believe—it wouldn't be a matter of belief, would it? It would have to have something to do with proof.

ROBERTS: Well, yeah, so...

HITCHENS: Just a tiny little bit, a smidgeon of evidence here and there wouldn't kill, would it? There isn't any, that's the thing.

ROBERTS: Well...

HITCHENS: It's just, you can't, you don't judge people by what they think of themselves. You'd be a immoral if you did.

HEWITT: You do judge them by how they live, though.

HITCHENS: You'd be failing them by not saying, "Look, I'm really sorry, man, but I think you're in trouble and you need help."

ROBERTS: Well, that is actually—I have said that to different kind of people, because of course, schizophrenics also believe that have religious experiences when in fact...

HITCHENS: Indeed they do.

ROBERTS: ...they desperately need help.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts, early in the show you said that Christopher Hitchens does not seem to inhabit the same universe you do when it comes to the religious people that you know. And the conversation we just had about people walking up and talking to—reminded me of that comment, because that's not really how religious people live in my experience. It's not—and they're not poisoned. They're out doing good things and living extraordinarily humble but service-filled lives. And I think maybe that's where the disconnect comes between the portrait we get out of god is Not Great and your portrait.

ROBERTS: Well, I think if one looks at the things that religious people have done throughout history, and even throughout the world today that are not good, one comes up with a certain view of what religion must be that's very different from the average experience. And here, I can't speak for all religions. I can speak for what I know; I can speak for myself and my congregation of people whose faith in God is a prime motivator of goodness. I think of recently some folk from our Church went down to an orphanage in Mexico and some of the folks fix bicycles and some of the folks worked on teeth, because we have a couple dentists in the Church. And they did that not just because they're good humanists, they did that because they're Christians and they feel that that is what they are to do for their faith, in their response to God. Now as I look at that, it is very hard for me to see how that poisoned anything. It seems to me that that greatly enriched something, and helped people's lives. And so I guess I'm willing to say that sometimes religion poisons things. I am looking for the side that says and sometimes it doesn't.

HITCHENS: Very well. Well, since you've both been kind enough to read my book, you—I don't expect you'll remember every bit of it—but you will grant me that I spend some time describing my encounters in Northern Uganda with people who are...

HEWITT: Yes.

HITCHENS: ...there in a selfless way, trying to repair the damage done by...

HEWITT: The Lord's Army.

HITCHENS: ...the horrible religious...

HEWITT: Yup.

HITCHENS: …Christian group called the Lord's Resistance Army. And I say, "Well, which of you is really the faithful one?" I mean, to me, it doesn't matter because there are very large numbers of people who do that kind of work all over the world and I've met them, and can introduce you to them, who do so for its own sake, for the sake of their fellow men, for their brothers and sisters. And they don't demand any divine warrant, and they're not suspected of proselytization, either.

HEWITT: Christopher, question for you...

HITCHENS: Now, so any—it's like in my original challenge. You have to name an ethical action that an atheist couldn't take.

HEWITT: But I have a question for you.

HITCHENS: There are millions of unbelievers who do charitable work. I don't say charity poisons everything. But in order to say that confronted with, say, AIDS in Africa, that that's bad, though P.S., it might be God's punishment...

HEWITT: A question for you, though.

HITCHENS: So I mean, and B) though AIDS is bad, with condoms are worse, and must be forbidden, for a really foolish, wicked thing like that, you need to be a person of faith.

HEWITT: You have read the Gospels, so you know what Jesus teaches, and you then go to Uganda and you see what the Lord's Army was taught and you see what the people trying to repair the Lord's Army is taught. Which group is acting in conformance with the actual teachings of Jesus as you read them?

HITCHENS: Well, I would say—I'd have to say both.

HEWITT: How could the Lord's Army be acting in...

HITCHENS: I'd have to say both. Well, the Lord's Resistance Army says that nothing will be okay in Uganda until everyone agrees with the Ten Commandments.

HEWITT: Jesus does not teach that. Mark Roberts, does he?

HITCHENS: No, Jesus doesn't, no.

HEWITT: That's what I asked.

HITCHENS: But Moses does.

HEWITT: I was asking in the teachings...

HITCHENS: And you adopt Moses as one of your heroes.

HEWITT: I was asking as you assess the teachings of Jesus and those two camps in Uganda, one is teaching Christ's love, and one is not. That's why I'm saying.

HITCHENS: Who comes to bring not peace but a sword?

ROBERTS: Well...

HEWITT: Touché.

ROBERTS: But in its context, one has to understand what that means, and it's not quite fair to throw that. Who's the one who said that his followers are to be known by their love? And that's the more consistent and more easily understood of...

HITCHENS: So we need divine permission for love? Excuse me?

ROBERTS: Excuse me?

HITCHENS: Who needs divine permission for love?

ROBERTS: I don't know that any of us need permission, but it certainly helps...

HITCHENS: Or to be told to love? Isn't it rather odd to be told to love? It's always seemed bizarre to me.

ROBERTS: Well, you know, from my point of view, it's extraordinarily helpful, because I...

HITCHENS: Ordered to love, I don't, it's—something is cranky there.

ROBERTS: Well, we need to understand and appreciate...

HITCHENS: And ordered to love others as much as you love yourself and your loved ones. That's, by the way, making an impossible commandment of people—making a command that can't be met. Therefore, you can always accuse people of falling short of it, you can always find them guilty.

ROBERTS: I could accuse you of recently listening to one of my sermons because I agree it's an impossible commandment. The good news for Christians is that God helps us, and that's what we believe: to live that which we on our own could not.

HITCHENS: So you think all this is directed at you?

ROBERTS: Excuse me?

HITCHENS: You think all this is directed at you? You think the universe is designed with you in mind?

ROBERTS: No, I think the universe is...

HITCHENS: Incredibly—in the guise of modesty, that seems to me an extraordinarily arrogant statement.

ROBERTS: I don't know that I've ever thought that or believed it.

HITCHENS: Well, will you promise me to think about it at least once?

ROBERTS: Yes. I believe that the universe is designed with much greater things than me in mind, and that God has enlisted me to help in His work of bringing the universe back into order. Is that a...

HITCHENS: Gosh. Well, I must say, you have a very high opinion of yourself.

ROBERTS: Well...

HITCHENS: I think you're a pretty decent chap also.

ROBERTS: If in...

HITCHENS: But I think that's a very, very extreme idea.

ROBERTS: If thirty years ago, an American man was drafted into the army, I don't know that that person would rightly think he had a high opinion of himself.

HITCHENS: Oh, so you're conscripted into this?

ROBERTS: Well, we use called, but conscripted...

HITCHENS: I mean, I just never know with which proposition I am arguing.

ROBERTS: Conscripted, if you wish; called is usually what we prefer.

HITCHENS: Uh-huh. Onward Christian soldiers. Well, that has a wonderful history.

HEWITT: We're rapidly coming to the conclusion of this. Mark Roberts, did you have any questions for Christopher Hitchens?

ROBERTS: Well, only in that the harder parts of your book for me were the places where you rather ridicule people of faith. Now sometimes, you ridicule people of faith that I also agree with you are thinking and doing things that are virtually worthy of ridicule. But I wondered why you do that when it seems like you're going to lose the opportunity to influence some of the very people you would want to influence.

HITCHENS: Ah, well, it's just the way I am. I mean, I'm a polemicist, if you like, and one has to get people's attention first of all.

ROBERTS: Well okay, that's fair.

HITCHENS: And that may sound to you, as it somewhat slightly sounds to me, as a vulgar answer, but it is the truth, right? One can't write a book saying, "God is not that brilliant."

HEWITT: I guess you couldn't.

ROBERTS: No, I appreciate that. That is a good answer. The only thing I would say is that I think some of what is good in your book will get lost because it's hard to be told that I'm stupid.

HEWITT: Thank you to Christopher Hitchens and Mark Roberts for spending so much time with us today on the "Great God Debate." Christopher Hitchens, any final thought here?

HITCHENS: Well, yes. I might have had another one, but I can't let Dr. Roberts' last observation go uncommented upon. I most certainly do not say that he's stupid and I say in my book that many people of high intelligence and fervent conscience have been devout believers. I say that I think the belief is stupid and unfounded and false and potentially, latently, always wicked, because it is both servile in one way, and arrogant in another. And that's why I dare to say that it's, ab initio, a poison. But I certainly do not say of people who have faith that they are dumb. Isaac Newton was practically a spiritualist. Alfred Russel Wallace, who did a lot of Darwin's work for him, had weird, supernatural beliefs as well. These things are compatible with high intelligence and great morality. But we would be better off if we left them behind.

HEWITT: Mark Roberts, your concluding thought?

ROBERTS: Well, perhaps I took it too personally the line that says, "Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago," given that two days ago, I stood up and spoke words that I'd hoped were intelligible, noble and inspiring.

ROBERTS: But let me say something. I think this is important to say, and I haven't said it: One of the great things I appreciate in Christopher Hitchens is he is a man of high morals, and I think any Christian or other religious person who doubts or denies that misses the point, and I share with him much of his outrage at evil in the world. I share, I admire his willingness to do things like provide a sanctuary for Salman Rushdie, or to speak out against certain features of Islam in a day when it is risky to do so. I share his outrage over many of the abuses, for example, the abuse of children within the Church, and probably even feel it more deeply because I'm a part of at least that larger Church. One of the things I appreciate about Christopher Hitchens in his writing is his moral stance. The thing that I believe is that if one has a faith basis for morality, in fact, there is even greater warrant. One can make greater arguments for saying that others must join in them. I realize that he disagrees with that, but I am grateful that he hasn't fallen into some swamp of relativism. And in fact, there's a high moral calling that I think all people, religious, non-religious, ought to take seriously and be challenged by, and I need to say that I appreciate that in him and in his book.

HEWITT: Christopher Hitchens, always a pleasure. We look forward to talking, continued good luck in your book tour. And Mark Roberts, thank you, sir, continued good luck with the launch of Can The Gospels Be Trusted? I'll be back tomorrow America on the next edition of The Hugh Hewitt Show.