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TechnoratiA best-selling atheist author claims that Christianity not only falsely takes credit for good in the world, but actually promotes immorality.
In a recent debate against a Christian scholar and pastor, Christopher Hitchens argued against the idea that Christianity is accountable for the spreading of moral principles such as how it is wrong to murder and steal.
The author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything also said there was a moral code similar to the “Golden Rule” in place even before Moses received the Ten Commandments.
“It appears that these values (murder, theft, perjury are wrong and courage and self-sacrifice are admirable) are universal and innate,” said Hitchens in a video posted on the Christian Broadcasting Network news web site on Friday. “And they also predate – well I wouldn’t say they predate all religion because there has always been some kind of religion – but they certainly predate monotheism and they certainly predate Christianity.”
Hitchens believes the basis for goodness and morality is “human solidarity” or the “brotherhood of man.”
Debate opponent and Christian representative Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, however, challenged Hitchens’ human solidarity claim as the basis of goodness by using Hitchens’ own acknowledgment that bad emotions are also innately in humans.
“The problem with grounding it (morality) in innate instincts, like human solidarity, is that we have competing, jostling instincts,” Wilson argued.
What is stopping people from engaging in evil if there is no absolute truth about what is good and what is bad, asked the senior fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and the author of Letter from a Christian Citizen.
The Christian debater argued that people have a side that wants to engage in what is bad, for instance exterminate neighbors, but they also have a good side that wants to help their neighbor. Without an absolute truth found in the Scripture, people will all be left with – at best – an “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” strategy on whether to act good or bad.
“How do you choose between them,” Wilson asked. “If the authoritative nature of morality comes from this innate status, what about our innate predisposition to go to war or commit genocide?”
Atheist Hitchens in an earlier segment said he firmly does not believe there is an absolute truth but only relative truth. Yet he acknowledges there are some objective truths held by all men such as murder is bad and honesty is good.
To strengthen his argument, Hitchens highlighted how Christians in the past have claimed an absolute truth but later embarrassingly had to revise the truth because science proved them wrong.
For instance, the church said that the universe revolved around the earth, but later it was discovered that the planets orbit the sun. All Christians also believed that the Genesis account was the literal events of creation until science introduced evolution and believers had to revisit or revise what they believed was the truth.
“An objection I have to religion, in other words, is it’s our first and worst attempt to making sense of things,” Hitchens declared. “First and worst – it happened when we were very afraid, very ignorant, and when we were terrified by natural order of events like earthquakes and floods that are susceptible to a much more easier explanation.” Continue »
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