“Moral behavior doesn’t need God. We need to act moral for social cohesion. Morality evolved for our survival and that’s why people act morally. It is degrading to humans, and servile, to require God for morality.”
Christopher Hitchens
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig
Biola University
1.) Hitchens insists that moral behavior doesn’t need God and yet turns around and implies that he can know it is good to have social cohesion. That is a moral judgment that has no grounding except in Hitchen’s say so.
2.) Hitchens then says that people act morally in order to survive but who says that survival is a moral good? How would we know that survival is a moral good without an objective standard for what is good? Are we to take Hitchen’s word alone that survival is a moral good? On this basis Stalin’s ongoing survival was a moral good that needed to be defended.
3.) Hitchens says it is degrading to humans and servile to require God but one must ask from where is Hitchens drawing his standard to suggest that it is a bad morality that degrades humans and makes them servile?
Hitchens, at every turn must presuppose himself as god in order to talk about his own version of morality. We must conclude that Hitchens was a theist who took himself as god.
“After all, Dr. Craig, to win this argument, has to believe and prove to a certainty. He is not just saying there might be a God because he has to say there must be one, otherwise we couldn’t be here and there couldn’t be morality. It’s not a contingency for him. I have to say that I appear as a skeptic who believes that doubt is the great engine (the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery, and all innovation), and that I doubt these things.”
Christopher Hitchens
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig
Hitchens believed that doubt is the great engine and that he doubts all that Craig, as a Christian, is certain of. Hitchens thus is praising doubt over certainty and Hitchens is damn certain that doubt is certain.
“You cannot get from deism to theism except by a series of extraordinarily generous—to yourself—assumptions.”
Christopher Hitchens
Debate w/ Wm. Lane Craig
Hitchens is exactly correct here. This is the failure of all evidentialist apologetics. Another failure is that evidentialism can only bring one to probability. It can only argue that the greatest percentage and preponderance of evidence supports the assertion that “God exists.” However, evidentialism faces the problem that it can not know if something has 90% certainty of something being true unless it first knows with 100% certainty that something like God exists is true. How can anyone know that something is 90% likely of being certain unless they first know where the 100% marker of certainty is? Evidentialism fails because it argues for a high degree of certainty of matters being true even though it has no idea of what constitutes 100% certainty. Only be presupposing 100% certainty as given in God’s revealed word can we begin to talk about other degrees of certainty when it comes to evidence but after we have 100% why do we need 90%?
As late Larry Auster pointed out, these vapid atheist protestations that “We don’t need God to be moral!” sounded somewhat more convincing back in the days when atheists, who were then still under the partial influence of traditional Western morality, had not completely accepted the Sexual Revolution yet.
But nowadays, vast majority of atheists are OK with sodomy and abortion-on-demand, and God knows what else filth. The kind of stuff that will “kill off the race” (to use Victorian parlance) if tolerated for a few generations’ time.
So, only if they firmly distance themselves from the ideal of autonomous sexual freedom can atheists even pretend that they can still be “moral” without God. How many of them are ready to do that?
But, as you say, even if they distance themselves from the ideal of autonomous sexual freedom even then they are still only pretending to be moral and they have no basis upon which not to embrace gross sexual Libertinisms.
William Lane Craig doesn’t presuppose a young earth … and that creates some real problems for him with the biblical genealogies and the book of Genesis. Notwithstanding, I think he does a good job against Ben Shapiro in defending the resurrection of Christ.
Craig is Arminian. I don’t have much use for him.