Man I love Christopher Hitchens. From the debate, paraphrased:
“we have been homo-sapiens in our current form for 100,000 years. To believe in the Abrahamic religions is to believe that God chose to watch us, arms crossed, not intervening for 96,000 years. Then about 4000 years ago, thought the best course of action would be to intervene in the bronze-age middle east making appearances to stupefied illiterate peasants.”
Fantastic.
It’s even better when you read it as ‘peasants’ instead of ‘pheasants’.
Food TV has a show on it that features “Iron ‘Chef’” Bobby Flay going around the country and competing in cooking competitions with essentially average Americans. Sure, these average Americans usually have some specialty, or some special dish that they have become renown for, but these are not culinary school graduates, these are not world famous “chefs,” nor do any of these people have their own nationally televised cooking shows, and certainly none of them would ever be on “Iron Chef” – even as the challenger. And yet Flava’ Flay still goes out and competes with these people. And it is sad really. It’s sort of like watching Ken, from accounting, trying to play a little 1-on-1 with Michael Jordan, even when Ken gets spotted 50 points he still gets his ass handed to him. It’s like beating up on girl-scouts, or being smarter than a 5th grader; it is pathetic for the “victor” to even get in the ring, and it is embarrassing to watch. Of course Bobby Flay wins. Of course Michael Jordan wins. Of course you can take the cookies from the girl-scouts and not pay for them, of course an adult is smarter than a 5th grader. Congratulations on your huge win, douche. ‘Cause that is what you are when you even compete against people like that, and ESPECIALLY when you win, and ESPECIALLY when you loose; which of course you never do, because you are beating up on GIRL-SCOUTS.
The same is true when a scientist, of almost any stripe, (or caustic pundit trying to leverage sensational headlines for book sales) tries to pin down a “creationist” in order to make himself look / feel better. Oooooooh. You made someone who thinks the Genesis story is a science text look silly. Congratulations, they pretty well do that on their own you know.
The thing is – that when these people get down and have these little pissing contests with creationists, besides getting headlines and making a pile of money doing it, they also lower themselves to the level of the creationist. They make a living at the freak show by becoming a part of the freak show. They make science, and evolution in particular, a religion unto itself, they do nothing to forward scientific thought, and they add nothing but anger and hostility to the world. If they were to investigate the evolutionary underpinnings of religious thought, or examine why religion has been selected by evolution (as they must assume it has been) then they might be forgiven. If they were to use their knowledge and influence to do something positive, like try to bring science and religion together, they would have nothing to be forgiven of. But they don’t – instead they just pound on their pulpits and shout as loudly as creationists do – and they look just as stupid doing it. Creationists are like advertising, and abolitionists… just ignore them and they go away.
For what it’s worth, this was a debate on the existence of God, and Schmuley turned it into a debate on creationism, on Hitchens’ book and a whole lot of other things.
I think the real issue in this particular debate is that Hitchens’ is actually well trained in debate, is very quick on his feet, and is well versed in these kinds of debates. Shmuley isn’t.
There are a couple of books that actually address the religious impulse as a evolutionary tactic, including this one by the incredibly hard-core Daniel Dennett. But I’m not really sure how that would play in a debate. Might be interesting.
I think part of the idea though is that all the current “Atheist debaters” are trying to show that a belief in God is based on flawed reasoning, and that that belief is destructive. They aren’t becoming part of the freak show. They recognize how bad ideas are flooding and controlling the commons, and want to inject some reason and sense into it. There’s a lot of just crazy thinking out there, and during the long reign of the Bush administration, there has been a concerted effort to destroy scientific credibility and advance magical thinking.
Personally I think smart people including scientists who have held themselves “above the fray” have hurt the cause of reason by not being willing to confront bad ideas in public. This isn’t because they thought they were better than everyone else, it’s because they thought the wrongness of these ideas was self-evident. It appears they aren’t. The bad news is that the freak show is informing the way people live their lives, raise their children, who they vote for and etc.
The freak show is unfortunately the mainstream these days, and smart people have to be willing to say, “okay if you believe these things, I’m going to challenge you to tell me why you believe them”. For a society to grow, there has to be an active public discussion where ideas are challenged and evidence is demanded for assertions. By abstaining from that discussion because you feel it’s beneath you, you allow the crazies, and the manipulative snakes to control the conversation.
Unfortunately when you ignore creationists, they get elected to school boards and try to subvert education. They get appointed as judges which then try to adjudicate the 10 commandments.
As of 2005: 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.
As of late 2006: Those numbers are 55%, 27% and 13%
They are not going away.
Almost every systematized part of our way of life is devoted to creating and maintaining infantilized individuals who depend on authority figures to tell them how to think and feel. Part of the point of these debates isn’t to convince anyone of anything, but to encourage people to look critically at the things they think and believe.