Wilson Handles Hitchens
Great stuff. Tall order to handle Christopher Hitchens, but Douglas Wilson does it:
You write like a witty but acerbic tenth-century archbishop with a bad case of the gout. But this is truly an odd thing to do if "morality" is a simple derivative of evolution. Are you filled with fierce indignation that the koala bear hasn't evolved ears that stick flat to the side of his head like they are supposed to? Are you wroth over the fact that clams don't have legs yet? When you notice that the bears at the zoo continue to suck on their paws, do you stop to remonstrate with them?
Your notion of morality, and the evolution it rode in on, can only concern itself with what is. But morality as Christians understand it, and the kind you surreptitiously draw upon, is concerned with ought. David Hume showed us that we cannot successfully derive ought from is. Have you discovered the error in his reasoning? It is clear from how you defend your ideas of "morality" that you have not done so. You are a gifted writer, and you have a flair for polemical voltage. But strip it all away, and what do you have underneath? You believe yourself to live in a universe where there is no such thing as any fixed ought or ought not. But God has gifted you with a remarkable ability to denounce what ought not to be. And so, because you reject him, you have great sermons but no way of ever coming up with a text. When people start to notice the absence of texts, the absence of warrant, the absence of reasons, you adjust and compensate with rhetorical embellishment and empurpled prose. You are like the minister in the story who wrote in the margin of his notes, "Argument weak. Shout here."
Good thing we'll be using Wilson's logic text in homeschooling our kids.
related articles
- Constantly Directing? (June 23rd, 2007)
- The Clash of Civilizations (June 9th, 2007)
June 13th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Nice. Hitchens is about as articulate as they come, so I’ve been waiting for someone to take him to the rhetorical woodshed.
I made a similar point regarding him during a recent discussion on my blog:
“Christopher Hitchens wants it both ways.
He wants to trash anything related to God whenever and wherever he can, but he also wants to live and thrive off the residuals of an Enlightenment and Western Civilization which have as their foundation the creation and preservation of knowledge made possible by the Christian church.”
It baffles me how someone as smart as Hitchens came be so oblivious to paradox. Yes, religion is poison (point granted). But, at its best (and I believe that Christianity, warts and all, is just that), it is also the antidote.
June 13th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Wow — that is brilliant! Thanks for sharing it.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Hitchens has a history of wanting it both ways. Several years ago he used to describe himself as a socialist who lived in the U.S. because we have better stuff.