I admit that I am at a loss as to what the qualifications to any answer proposed to Christopher Hitchens’ challenges might entail.
We have all been in such situations have we not? When someone asks you a question and they are so eager to give you a certain response that they are not even listening to your answer but just waiting for you to pause for three nanoseconds so that they can take the lid off of their canned response. It happened to me recently, some asked me a series of questions and regardless of my answers they were dead set on coming to a preconceived conclusion. Yet, upon considering their conclusion, I noted that they disregarded my statements and simply pushed their desired conclusion right through my statements as if they were irrelevant-pragmatism is not a virtue.
What I am going on and on about? During the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath which was entitled “Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World” (reviewed here) Christopher Hitchens proposed a series of challenges. The problem is that the challenges are stated in a generic manner. That is, in a generic enough manner that I am afraid that any answer will be discredited due to a preconceived conclusion, which is that the challenges cannot be answered viably. The challenges presuppose that they are unanswerable and thus, appear to be crafted in a generic enough manner so as to make them very small and difficult target to hit.
I thought to parse the challenges into three parts and so deal with them in three posts. Let us consider the first part:
“I have a challenge which I have now put in print on the Christianity Today Website and in many other places. It’s this: if it’s to be argued that our morality or ethics can be derived from the supernatural, then name me an action, a moral action taken by a believer or a moral statement uttered by one, that could not have been made or uttered by an infidel, a non-believer.”
My first observation is that these challenges are based upon presuppositions. They are obviously based on Christopher Hitchens’ worldview and also upon his misunderstanding of alternate worldviews-namely the Judeo-Christian worldview. Thus, I will attempt to respond by elucidating those portions of his challenges which are premised upon miscomprehensions of the Judeo-Christian worldview. While other theists, deists, etc. can respond according to their own, my responses will be based a Judeo-Christian presupposition.
From a Judeo-Christian perspective this portion of the challenge is a non-issue for various reasons. Please note that by non-issue I do not mean unimportant or invalid as a logical question but I mean that this portion is premised upon a misunderstanding and is evidence of lack of knowledge.
Moral actions and statements are prompted by God, whether they proceed forth from the sayings and doings of a prophet or from a non-believing infidel. It is a category mistake to take a claim such as, “God is the author of the moral law” and assume that it means that no one can access that law without a direct and conscious relationship with God.
In crafting this portion of the challenges Christopher Hitchens is responding to an argument that no one has made. Rather, he is arguing against his own misunderstandings and with direct violations of that which the Bible does state and thus he is setting up a straw man.
A biblical texts aught suffice as a response:
“…for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them” (Romans 2:14-15)