Hitchens – God Is Not Great XXXII
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In my extended review of Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great,” I have finally reached the last chapter, “In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment.” Hitchens opens the chapter with a discussion of a quote by Lessing, where he says that given the opportunity to know all truth, he would reject the offer in favor of pursuing the truth, even knowing he would remain thereby in error. Of course this raises the question of why pursue something if obtaining it is not the goal.
But for Hitchens this is not a question of a choice between “All truth” and the pursuit of truth. Hitchens equates knowing “all truth” with faith, and for him the question becomes a choice between faith and reason, faith and modernity, faith and technology, and even a choice between faith and civilization itself.
Of course this is a false choice. I am religious and I certainly do not claim to know all truth. Far from it and I spend much of my time pursuing it. But this error goes to the heart of the atheist’s argument, and so in an odd sort of way it is fitting that Hitchens end his book with this error.
In reality it is not that those who are religious claim to know the truth, are dogmatic, blindly accepting certain truths, lack skepticism, or do not have a passion for inquiry. There are certainly some who are religious who would fit this description, just as there are some who don’t believe in god for whom this would also be an accurate description. Frankly some of the most closed minded and dogmatic people I have run into have been militant atheists. Not all to be sure, but the simple fact is that these traits can be found amongst all groups, atheist and theist alike.
Those who believe in God can seek the truth and can learn and grow just like atheists. As many have pointed out, including a few atheists, science had its roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview and many of the earlier greats minds of science, like Kepler, Newton, and even Galileo were Christians. The real problem is not that we don’t search for truth or look at the evidence, but rather that theists reach different conclusions and consider other possibilities, possibilities that are prohibited in the atheist’s materialistic worldview.
And that is the real problem. Christians make no bones about it, we have a worldview, a framework in which we evaluate the evidence and apply reason as we strive to learn the truth. Atheists claim that this shapes how we look at things and the conclusions that we reach; which is quite true, for that is exactly what frameworks do.
Where the atheists go wrong is that they also have a framework, a framework in which the only thing that exists is the material universe governed by natural law. The atheist worldview shapes how they look at things and the conclusions they reach, just as much as the Christian worldview does for Christians. Frankly, it probably affects them more. While most Christians realize that they have a worldview, most atheists not only don’t, they frequently deny it. For them, they don’t have a worldview that shapes their thinking, they just have reality, and see everything else as wrong, all the while claiming confidently not to be dogmatic, but open minded.
For the atheist, the existence of God, the supernatural, that we have a soul, etc., does not fit into their worldview and so for them, these things not only do not exist, they cannot exist. While they are adept at pointing out problems in the theist worldview, any problem, lack of evidence, or evidence to the contrary for the atheist worldview, is simply ignored with the claim that “we will figure it out someday.” When it is demonstrated that the odds against the things they believe must have happened are unimaginably large, they just cling tightly to the minuscule possibility at they happened, however small. Their worldview permits nothing else. In fact they sometimes reply, as some have with the origin of life, that however small the odds, it must have happened because we are here.
While they are quick to attack religions for their irrational beliefs, often going to the point of casting this as a battle between faith and reason, their attacks are often themselves irrational, which I have repeated pointed out, is the case with Hitchens. The real problem in seeing this as a battle between faith and reason, is that atheists have a distorted definition of faith, which is in reality for them, simply a belief in something that is false. But that is not faith. Faith is trusting something to the point of acting on it. In the Christian worldview, you have faith in God by following his teachings, the first step being accepting Jesus as your savior.
Atheists have faith in their worldview just as much as Christians do in theirs. Which worldview is right? Well I have written two books, Christianity and Secularism and Evidence for the Bible laying out my view of the evidence. On the other hand, as I have show many times here, Hitchens arguments are based on sloppy thinking, errors and irrationalities, and thus hardly provide a firm foundation for his claims.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
Dishonest – But it does not Matter
President Obama signed the stimulus bill today. The bill is essentially a huge lie passed with a number of already broken promises. It will not stimulate the economy. How could it? Most of the money will not be spent for years. But it will vastly expand the federal government, and as I explain in my forthcoming book Preserving Democracy, as government grows, liberty by definition must decrease. It will also place a huge and quite possibly impossible burden on our children and grand children.
While the bill weighs in at $787 billion, even that is deceptive. There will of course be the interest on this that also has to be paid. But then there are a whole range of hidden costs. To give just one example, Senate Majority Leader Reid got his pet project of a high speed train to run between Disneyland and Las Vegas. Obama told us that the bill would be “timely, targeted and temporary.” Ok, the train is certainly targeted to please Senator Reid.
As for timely and temporary, the train will need to cross some of the most environmentally sensitive land in the nation and thus it going to have to go through years of environmental studies and lawsuits before the “shove ready” project could even start. Given the state of environmental laws, it is very possible that the process could take decades before it could start, if it ever can. But perhaps Obama is thinking ahead, and this is actually a stimulus plan not for the current recession, but for two or three recessions from now.
Then there is the actual cost. Given the government’s track record, is there anyone who seriously believes that in the end the train, even if it is built, will only cost $8 billion? Given the government’s track record at estimating costs and the environmental hurdles the project must get over, the cost is likely to be several times that.
The train is just one of the numerous items in this bill, which is so large, written so quickly, and changed so frequently that people are still going through it trying to find out what it actually says. Even when they read it, there is so much money spent so quickly that often, it is not at all clear what it is being spent for. Example: “BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS OPERATION OF INDIAN PROGRAMS For an additional amount for ‘Operation of Indian Programs’, for workforce training programs and the housing improvement program, $40,000,000.” Twenty-seven words and $40 million is spent.
For the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General, $20 million is given away with: “For an additional amount for ‘Office of Inspector General’, $20,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2012.” Now just how is giving $20 million to the EPA’s Inspector General’s office supposed to stimulate the economy, particularly if, like most government agencies they tend to horde the money until close to the time it expires, which will be over 3 ½ years from now.
There are over a thousand pages of such giveaways. Obama said that there were no earmarks in the bill, but if that is even technically true, in reality the bill is nothing but earmarks. It is basically a huge list of every pet project, pork, and bit of spending that democratic senators and congressmen have been wanting. Most will have little simulative effect other than to stimulate government and to the select few whom the democrats wished to reward.
The bill is not timely, targeted, nor temporary. It is not free from earmarks. Lobbyists were not excluded from the process, and in fact received the bill before congressional staff. It was not posted on line for 48 hours so people could review it, but was rushed to a vote. And it is not a stimulus bill.
But, at least in the short term, none of this matters. It’s Obama, and that is all that really matters. And after all it is not as if this is real money. This is government money, the money that just magically appears whenever it is needed, so that politicians can give it away.
There is, however, a real sense of irony here. For most of Bush’s term and especially in the last year or so as the surge worked and Iraq ceased to be a major issue, the democrats have complained about how Bush increased the debt, and spent too much money. I agreed with them, though admittedly for different reasons. Yet now, in the euphoria of their victory, (after all, as both Obama and Pelosi have reminded us they won), they are going on a spending spree the likes of which we have never seen.
Unfortunately, they are not spending magic money, but real dollars – dollars that must come from somewhere, either in higher taxes, or in increased inflation, or a mixture of the two. The sobering fact is that the party will end, and the bill will come due. Somebody is going to have to pay it. And as bad as things are now, when that happens, things are likely to get a lot worse.
A Major Milestone?
The Stimulus bill passed and it is being called “a major milestone” for President Obama. But I do not see this as any significant effort. The simple fact was that a stimulus bill was going to pass as Republicans could not have stopped it. The best they could have done was influence it, but the Democrat’s response to any Republican input was “we won the election.” Sure they wanted Republican support, but not if it meant Republicans had any real input on the end result.
Nor did they need Republican support. The Democrats have a lock on the Congress, something Republicans have not had in a 100 years. Neither did Clinton have this. In fact you have to go back to Carter to find the last President who had the luxury of being able to effectively ignore the other party.
Yet with such a majority, and the opportunity it gives to a president to enact their programs and policies, Obama seems to have voluntarily stepped to the sidelines and let Pelosi and Reid handle the stimulus bill. He didn’t seem to care what was in the bill, as long as it was called a stimulus bill, and it was about $800 billion. Obama’s leadership was essentially little more than asking politicians to spend a huge amount of money. Getting politicians to spend money is not a significant accomplishment.
This is a far cry from the leadership of previous presidents of both parties as very few had been in the position of Obama. To get their policies enacted into law took a lot of skill and work to craft a bill that met their goals and yet still had enough support to pass both the house and the senate. Obama’s leadership on the stimulus bill was akin to taking some children to a candy store, handing them a lot of money, and they taking credit when they were able to spend it. I am afraid that the end result will be not be that much different than for kids who have gorged themselves on candy.
Hitchens – God Is Not Great XXXI
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In my extended review of Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great,” I have come to chapter 18, A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational. The chapter struck me as a very strange chapter, for it left me with the feeling that Hitchens lives in somewhat of a fantasy world, where atheists are a small but noble underground valiantly fighting in the face of great odds against some dark and evil empire.
Hitchens view of history is a very black and white one, where everything bad is in some way connected to religion and anything good must be the result of something other than religion. Thus Hitchens writes, “When we read of the glories of ‘Christian” devotional painting and architecture, or ‘Islamic’ astronomy and medicine, we are talking about advances of civilization and culture.” (p. 254)
As much as he likes, Hitchens cannot have it both ways. He cannot have religion “at all times and in all places” subjecting non-believers to “ruthless suppression” (p. 254) on the one hand, but a completely absent force when it comes to the “advances of civilization and culture” on the other. People are much too complex to allow for such a nice, neat compartmentalization of their various and diverse aspects of their lives.
A good example of this is Galileo, whom Hitchens mentions as one who “might have been unmolested in his telescopic work if he had not been so unwise as to admit that it had cosmological implications.” (p. 255) Hitchens contrasts this with those did kept “their innermost thoughts from the scrutiny of the godly.” (p. 255) Yet the story of Galileo is not so straight forward and simple as atheists like Hitchens seem to believe.
As Dava Sobel has written in her excellent book “Galileo’s Daughter,” Galileo “remained a good Catholic who believed in the power of prayer and endeavored always to conform his duty as a scientist with the destiny of his soul.” (p. 11-12) As I point out in Evidence for the Bible “Rather than a conflict between science and religion, or even between science and Christianity, the conflict was at best a conflict with the Catholic Church” as his works “were published and studied by protestants without conflict.” (p. 85)
Rather than the titanic struggle between faith and reason that atheists like to claim, this was more an issue of a bureaucracy attempting to maintain its hold on power, as this occurred during the Protestant Reformation. Even within the Catholic church Galileo had many supporters. His primary opponents were the Aristotelian professors who were driven more by conflicts between Galileo’s discoveries and the teachings of Aristotle than any conflict with the Bible.
Similar problems plague many of Hitchens’ other examples. Hitchens sees “the original collision between our reasoning faculties and any form of organized faith” in the trial and death of Socrates. For Hitchens the matter is simple he was “indicted for godlessness and knew is life forfeit.” (p. 255) But like Galileo, things are not quite so simple.
In the decade leading up to his trial, the democracy of Athens was twice over thrown for short periods by pupils of Socrates. When the democracy was restored for the second time in order to resort peace a general amnesty was issued; an amnesty that many must have been unhappy with given the numbers that had been killed.
Rather than religion as the driving force, the trial of Socrates was driven more by a mixture of an attempt to prosecute Socrates despite the amnesty that had been granted and fear that his continuing to gather young students around him without any change in his teachings would spawn yet more attempts to overthrow the democracy of Athens.
Much of Hitchens’ accounts are so vague as to be hard to judge. For example, writing about Gibbons, and his monumental work “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” he simply says that Hume “warned him that there would be trouble , which there was.” (p. 267) Exactly what he means by “trouble” and what kind of trouble Gibbons faced is not stated.
One source of the problems was the fact that Gibbons argued that Christianity was a cause of the downfall of Rome, a view that other historians have since questioned. Frankly it is much more likely that the growth of Christianity was a result, rather than a cause of the downfall of Rome. Yet it would seem that in Hitchens’ world, while atheists are completely free to attack, criticize, and ridicule the views of theists, theists must not respond less they be seen as part of some “ruthless suppression.”
Again this is not to argue the opposite, that the history of Christianity is all good. But Hitchens’ black and white approach to these questions hardly supports his claim to be on the side of the rational.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
Does a Tree That Fall In the Forest…
There is the old question that asks does a tree that falls in the forest make a sound if no one is there. However fascinating that question may be, there is a similar, and much more relevant version: Is a problem that goes unreported really a problem?
President Obama’s inexperience is already showing as he has pretty much lost control of his first major effort in less than two weeks. As a result there currently seems to be two, perhaps three leaders of the country. In addition to President Obama, Speaker Pelosi is exercising total control over the House, completely locking Republicans out of any say the process. As a result the bi-partisan position on the stimulus bill was the opposition, as all Republicans and 11 Democrats voted against it. As details of the stimulus package became known, public support dropped. And it is left to the Senate and Harry Reid to try and regain some control over Obama’s first signature issue.
What is clear from this episode is that the country can expect a large lurch to the left. The so-called stimulus bill crafted by Pelosi was really little more that a mixture of old-fashioned political payoffs, standard issue political pork, and an attempt to expand government into even more areas. Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said about this crisis, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” It seems Speaker Pelosi took those words to heart, as she seems to see the crisis not as a problem to be solved, but as an opportunity to reward political allies and massively redefine government.
I would not be as concerned about the move to the left if those pushing it had some concept of what they were doing. Instead they seem to be blindly following their ideology. It is not as if their policies have never been tried. They have been tried repeatedly and have failed every time. But this brings me back to the question I asked at the start: Is a problem that goes unreported really a problem? It would seem that for Pelosi and others pushing the country to the left, the answer is clearly that problems that are not reported are problems that can be ignored.
For example, while California was once the land of Reagan, it is now solidly in control of the left, whose policies drove the state into a fiscal crisis that resulted in the recall of their governor. They replaced the liberal Democrat with a liberal Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they left the liberals in control of the state legislature. The result: California is facing a $41 billion budget deficit, what Time magazine called : The Great California Fiscal Earthquake.
Nor is this just an exception. Michigan is another example of a state solidly in liberal hands for years, and has the financial problems to prove it. Likewise, one could look at the cities, dominated by liberal policies. Or just consider the following two facts: 1) The Northeast is solidly liberal. 2) People have been fleeing the Northeast. The correlation between liberal policies and these problems is clear. But it is a correlation that liberals, including those who dominate the major news media, refuse to see, and thus it goes unreported.
Instead they focus on Republicans as the cause. A perfect example of this being the current financial crisis. It is clear that at the root of current problems was bad housing loans and the housing bubble that resulted. At the center of the bad housing loans were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which were pushing them. It is also clear that the reason that Fannie and Freddie were pushing these loans is because of government policies passed initially under Carter and then expanded under Clinton. In fact Fannie and Freddie were lead by former Clinton administration officials. Finally, the Bush administration, while they may not have seen the size of the problem, did see that there was a problem with these loans and attempted to regulate Fannie and Freddie many times, but each time they were blocked by the Democrats. So it was liberal policies that forced the banks to make the loans that were at the core of the problem, while the Bush administration tried to avoid it.
But liberals do not see this, Bush was president, Bush gets the blame, end of story. And normally there is always some Republican somewhere who can be blamed. The last time the Democrats were in complete control of the Government such that there was no Republican to blame, was following the 1992 election. They messed things up so badly in two years that Republicans won control of the Congress for the first time since the early fifties. The time previous to that was in the late 1970s under Carter, which gave us the combination of high unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates, and gas lines. The time before that was under Johnson, who did not even attempt reelection.
It would seem that since the problems of liberalism are not reported, they are forgotten, and so every 10-15 years we must suffer through at least two years of democratic rule. The massive spending that is now almost certain to come will have an economic impact whether it is clearly reported or not. With the help of a willing press, Democrats will be able to effectively blame the current problems on Bush, but as time goes on and things get worse, this will become less effective as people will understandably be more focused on fixing the problem than affixing blame.
