Responses to Dinesh D'Souza's arguments

The rebuttals below are aimed at Dinesh D'Souza's case as presented in a debate with Christopher Hitchens. Click here for the mp3 of the original debate.

Dinesh D’Souza’s Arguments with italicized responses

1. The militancy of atheism and the importance of reason

We are living in an unusual time in which atheism has emerged as a kind of militant phenomenon. This is a little odd. If you are an unbeliever, why be militant? I don’t believe in unicorns but I haven’t written any books on the subject. I don’t denounce unicorns; I live my life as if unicorns do not exist. But what we have from the atheist side is a belligerent attack on theism and specifically on Christianity. I want to answer this attack by using the same tools of reason, of scepticism, of science and of evidence that is the banner under which the atheists march. I shall not rely on scripture or any other kind of theology to make my points. I am going to focus entirely on reason and evidence.

A short distance from the window to my right stand two turreted buildings. Six times each day, often at unsociable hours, they blast out a tinny, invasive, penetrating, powerful, electronically over-amplified wailing, proclaiming to the faithful (and to everyone else, interested or not) that it is time for prayer. One of the mosques is frequented by Shia Muslims; the other by their Sunni counterparts, and it is an article of their faith that each group must one day overpower and destroy the other. Insofar as they can agree on some common ground, they share the objective of complete eventual extermination of people like me, as well as those of other religions, should we refuse to convert to Islam. They believe themselves in possession of the inerrant, unalterable and final words of god. No further inquiry or other work is needed as far as they are concerned. Everything mankind could possibly need is written in the Holy Qur’an.

If all of this is not a belligerent attack on reason, on freedom, on common sense and ultimately on life itself, then what is it? Mr D’Souza, as an atheist I would like nothing better than to forget about the obscene and dictatorial figure of god once and for all. I would love to live in ignorance of the vile fiction of his history and the equally disagreeable fantasy of his petty despotic intentions. But I cannot, for they are forced down my throat daily, if not hourly, by the constant haranguing tirade of the faithful. Never mind a belligerent attack on theism. Atheists are amateur beginners when it comes to belligerence. If you want to find examples of communities that can really show us how to do belligerent with a capital B, look to the world’s major religions.

Islam is of course not the only offender. Bible bashers and Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on doors to interrupt family life and to spread their filthy message far and wide. I and others are constantly patronized by theists who consider themselves on a holier plane than we. Not long ago a Christian theist invited himself to my apartment and stayed for much of the day, during which time he tried to persuade me of the merits of ‘intelligent design’ and the historical accuracy of the Bible. When I offered counter-arguments, mainly to suppress the urge to chew off my own leg through sheer boredom, he told me quite bluntly that I should take Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice and remain silent on matters for which I have no evidence. The irony of his statement is almost as delicious as the irony of his failure to see that there was any irony at all.

I think, Mr D’Souza, that you would get on well with my garrulous theist friend. You too have opined that atheists should just shut up because we don’t believe in god, and there is no sense in being militant about unbelief. You have likened atheism to a lack of belief in unicorns. But I have yet to see a unicorn-led theocracy assemble a secret uranium enrichment plant for some sinister single-horned purpose at which we can only guess, and neither have I seen a stable of nineteen unicorns force a series of human-packed airliners to crash into densely populated buildings. Quietly enjoy living your a-unicornist life, but please remember that you and your kind routinely deny me the similar luxury of a quiet life of atheism.

2. Christianity as the source of values

In reading atheist books, I see that the values the atheists cherish the most are individual dissent; personal dignity; equality of men and women; antipathy toward oppression and slavery, and compassion as a social virtue. These values came into the world because of Christianity. We know this partly by looking outside western civilization where we see that these things we take for granted – a tsunami devastates part of the world; all the western, i.e. Christian, nations rush to help and no-one else seems to – something unique is going on that’s internal to our civilization. You might respond that western civilization isn’t built only on Christianity; it’s built on Athens, i.e. classical reason, and also on Jerusalem, which is Judaism and Christianity. If you look at the world of Athens, i.e. Greece and pre-Christian Rome, you discover that those civilizations were based on slavery. Women were treated very badly and human life didn’t count for much. The Spartans would leave feeble children on the hillside to see if they were still alive in the morning. The great philosophers of Greece and Rome viewed these incidents with equanimity. It is only from Christianity that these things which had been uncontroversial for a long time become controversial for the first time. Sam Harris tries to blame slavery on Christianity but slavery was a universal institution practised in every known culture. The Greeks, Romans and Chinese had it. There was slavery in ancient India. The American Indians had slavery long before Columbus. Christianity was the first movement in the world to oppose slavery. First the Quakers and then the evangelical Christians took a theological idea – that we are all equal in the eyes of god – an idea that for some centuries was seen as a mere spiritual truth – and they gave it a political application. If we are all created equal in the eyes of god, no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This idea became the moral engine of the anti-slavery movement in Europe and America. It is also the basis of democracy.

The cherished values are good ones. I would add, though, that a free and inquiring mind is a highly valuable and respectable virtue. I do not believe that any of the listed values came into being because of Christianity, for all of them can be dated to pre-Christian times. Confucius knew all about reciprocity as a social virtue, and compassion derives itself from such empathy. Some non-human primates display social behaviour and altruism. Did they learn this from Christianity? I’ll go on doubting it because I’d like to think our apish cousins too intelligent to become distracted by religion in the way that much of humankind has.

Perhaps your failure to complete a single clear sentence while asserting that only Christianity can explain tsunami aid is indicative of your hesitancy to be too direct in such a blatant falsehood. Aid for the tsunami victims came from around the world, from Buddhist, Muslim and secular communities, united in the horror of what had happened, and imagining the desolation of those who had lost their loved ones and homes. Such feelings are basic human qualities shared by all, regardless of the religion into which they may have had the misfortune to be born. May you quickly come see the wicked arrogance of your unwarranted elevation of Christendom to a supreme moral pedestal, in order that you may publish a full retraction with all dispatch.

Good for the Christians, eventually realizing that slavery was a bad idea after they themselves had supported it for generations. Good for the Christians for realizing women are intelligent enough to vote, after reserving that pleasure for men only throughout centuries. Mr D’Souza, Christianity claims to be twenty centuries old. Slavery was abolished within the last couple of centuries or so. What were Christians doing in the centuries before abolition? Did it take the world that long to read Christ’s divine message? God would have done better to use pigeon post.

The idea that all people are equal is most emphatically not a theological concept. Moreover, religion does an extremely good job of rendering people very unequal indeed. You have undertaken not to refer to scripture in this debate but theists often cite scripture in support of their supernatural claims, and it is scripture that speaks of god’s chosen people and of separating sheep from goats. The scriptures endorse slavery and genocide. Please do not mention religion in the same breath as equality.

3. Incompatibility of Christianity and science

This is one of the rallying cries of modern atheism. That is puzzling because the leading western scientists of the past 500 years were mostly not only theists but specifically and devoutly Christian. Hitchens and Harris posit a conflict that was not apparent to the great scientists of the west from Kepler to Newton. Modern science is based on three Christian assumptions that are, at root, metaphysical.

(i) The universe as a whole is rational. The universe embodies rationality. That is odd. It’s easy to say that my friend Bill is rational, but it’s another thing to say that matter and objects and planets follow rational principles.

(ii) The universe obeys laws that are comprehensible in the language of mathematics. That is very strange. Drivers can follow laws, for example stopping at a stop sign, but how does matter obey laws? How does the electron know what to do? Matter is unbelievably well behaved. It follows Newton’s inverse square law and Einstein’s laws. This is a metaphysical proposition.

(iii) The laws of nature are mirrored in our minds. We can apprehend and understand the laws. This is very odd. Why should the goings-on within our head match the goings-on of the universe? Believers know why. God is believed to be omniscient, i.e. super-rational. He built the universe to embody rationality. God is a lawgiver and the universe reflects his laws. We are made in god’s image; we have a spark of the divine. The atheist cannot take any of that for granted. This is faith-based science.

Up until the 19th century practically every thinking person was a theist, which in the western world meant being a Christian. Children were born and forcibly baptised into it. There was no choice. Before Darwin it seemed quite reasonable to believe in a supernatural creator so it’s not really surprising that most scientists did. However, Christianity by its very nature comes into direct conflict with science. As Richard Dawkins has said, a universe with an all-powerful god in it would be a very different kind of universe from one with no god. (Theists often misunderstand this, believing that Dawkins means ‘the universe would look different than it does now if god were real,’ but what he’s actually saying is that god, whether he exists or not, is a scientific hypothesis.) Science is all about understanding the way the world works from the bottom up. As Daniel Dennett puts it, science deals in cranes, not skyhooks, because skyhooks have no explanatory power and science is all about explaining. Virgin births, resurrections, water turning into wine, little fishes feeding thousands of people… all of these things conflict directly with what science tells us about how the world behaves.

Now for the three points.

(i) The universe as a whole is rational.

No, Mr D’Souza. The universe is pretty irrational on the whole. Read a book on quantum physics and tell me how rational you find that. As for the macroworld in which we live, our minds have evolved to be rational, because being rational was highly advantageous back in the Pleistocene when lots of clever critters were trying to eat our ancestors while they themselves were trying to avoid starvation. More of this in point (iii).

(ii) The universe obeys laws that are comprehensible in the language of mathematics.

Not really. It’s more meaningful to say that the universe behaves in a way that can be described and predicted, to a close degree of approximation, using a mathematical language that has been developed to fit the way the observable universe behaves. Mathematics is only an approximation, though. It is not a perfect description of reality, as Bertrand Russell and others proved when they showed the contradictory nature of set theory by considering the ‘set of all sets that are not members of themselves’.

(iii) The laws of nature are mirrored in our minds. We can apprehend and understand the laws. This is very odd.

It is not odd at all. We would not have got far on the African plains had we evolved capricious minds that did their own thing rather than running a virtual reality simulation through which we could make reasonable predictions of the immediate future and act accordingly. Our minds are shaped by the world in which we are evolving. You, sir, seem to assume that the world was shaped in order to fit the mind of god, which happens to be similar to our minds. You have your cart before your horse. The so-called physical ‘laws’ are not like laws set down by Parliament, which set out a standard of behaviour to which we must aspire. Judicial laws need police and judges to enforce them. Physical laws are generalized descriptions of how matter behaves. They are arrived at by observation. The behaviour of matter comes first, and ‘laws’ are written down by scientists to describe what they observe repeatedly happening. If we liken that to judicial law, governments would have to observe the behaviour of the population and write down laws that fit what they see happening. What a fascinating book of statutes might be thus produced.

4. Evil done by Christianity

We hear how Christianity has been terrible for the world. In truth, the casualties of Christianity – the Inquisition; the Crusades; the Salem witch trials (at which only 18 people, not thousands, were executed) inflicted quite light damage. Over 300 years the Spanish Inquisition killed two thousand people. Compare that with the crimes inflicted by atheist regimes not 500 or 1000 years ago but within our lifetimes. Stalin, Mao and Hitler caused over 100 million casualties in just five decades. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history. Christianity has done a lot for the world. We would be a lot worse off without it. Thank god for Christianity.

The Inquisition, the Crusades and the Salem witch trials were all direct results of scripture as interpreted by the religious authorities of the day. Stalin’s regime may have been secular but it had all the hallmarks of a theocracy, capitalizing as Stalin did upon his people’s prior orthodox conditioning. Stalin certainly did not carry out his wicked deeds citing atheism as his motive in the way that the inquisitors and crusaders chanted scripture as theirs. Hitler never renounced his Roman Catholicism, and his discrimination against the victims of the holocaust was based on theological differences. Mao’s totalitarian state had many of the attributes of religion: reverence toward a single god-like leader, and severe penalties for doing, saying or thinking the wrong things.

If you had been present at the Salem witch trials, Mr D’Souza, knowing what you know today, perhaps you would have said, “Sorry, ladies, as there are only eighteen of you to be hanged, it’s not really a problem.” No doubt each one of the condemned would have congratulated you heartily on your exemplary Christian values as they were led to the scaffold. I am sure none of them would have felt moved to condemn you for your apparent callousness toward innocent victims of idiotic, theologically inspired mass hysteria. You do of course realise that none of the eighteen can possibly have been guilty as charged, since their alleged misdemeanours could not have been carried out at all, by anyone. As for the two thousand who were brutally tortured to death by the inquisitors, if they could have heard your case I am sure they would have been only too happy to suffer and die in furtherance of the Christian values of their murderers, soothed by the knowledge that Christianity would go on to do all the good in the world that you have described.

And what of the great good that Christianity is doing in the world of today? The continent of Africa, birthplace of humanity, is subject right now to a massacre of Biblical proportions as a result of HIV/AIDS. It is absolutely vital that men and women be educated properly in limiting the spread of the virus, and that condoms be made available to all, if we are to avoid an extinction event. The response of the Catholic church? To speak forcibly against the use of condoms, filling people’s minds with corrosive theistic garbage and ensuring that millions more children will be orphaned before this terrible disease has run its course. I would have his Holiness the Pope held personally responsible for this holocaust, and would have him manually carve the name on the headstone of every AIDS victim who became infected as a result of his noble Christian values. And I would have you follow him round, sir, with a second hammer and chisel, adding your closing words to each stone: Thank God for Christianity.