PLANO—The God of Christianity either is a capricious tyrant who threatens those who reject him with the penalty of everlasting torture, or he is a loving Creator who came to suffer with beings made in his image and provide them eternal life, according to the competing views of two scholars who debated at a suburban Dallas megachurch.
Christopher Hitchens, author of God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and William Dembski, research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, squared off at Prestonwood Baptist Church to debate the existence of a benevolent God. Prestonwood Christian Academy’s Biblical Worldview Institute sponsored the public event.
Hitchens insisted neither the nature of the cosmos, human history nor the complexity of the human body offer any proof of a designer who loves his creation.
“It’s not exactly accidental that 99.8 percent of all species ever to appear on earth are extinct. That does not give evidence of design or allow us to trace the finger of any god, let alone one who wishes us well,” he said.
Hitchens described human beings as “poorly evolved mammals on a short-lived planet” and as “half a chromosome away from being chimpanzees, and I’m afraid it shows.”
On the contrary, Dembski insisted, the presence of specified complexity and patterns in nature infer creation by a designing intelligence—not random chance. Proponents of Intelligent Design have a strategic advantage over atheistic material evolutionists, he asserted.
“Atheism demands evolution” and puts the materialist in an intellectual straitjacket, Dembski said. Theists, on the other hand, may believe God used evolution—at least on some small scale—as an instrument in creation, but they are not hamstrung by belief in a blindly purposeless from of evolution, as are atheists, he said.
“Secularism can be just as ideologically driven as religion,” he said.
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Intelligent Design is “friendly toward theism,” but it does not offer proof of a loving God, Dembski added. “It doesn’t get you the gospel, the tomb or the resurrection.”
However, once God is accepted as the source of all being and purpose, that proposition leads to belief in God’s goodness and a moral universe.
Materialism, in contrast, cannot provide an objective standard for morality.
“The atheist is cheating when he makes a moral judgment, acting as if it has an objective standard,” he said.
Hitchens rejected the notion of morality dictated to humanity by a deity as being tyrannical.
“I don’t like the idea of a father who never goes away … a king who cannot be deposed … a judge who does not allow a lawyer, jury or appeal,” he said.
“For centuries, the struggle for freedom was against the worst type of dictatorship—the theocracy of the divine right of kings. The totalitarian temptation has to be resisted, and I believe this is one of its core origin points.”
Furthermore, he asserted, belief in the biblical view of God means “you are created incurably sick and then ordered under pain of death and eternal punishment to be well.”
On the contrary, Dembski countered, “We are not incurably sick. The cure is Jesus Christ.”
He pointed to a loving picture of God in the New Testament account of the Incarnation—God entering into human suffering in the person of Jesus Christ.
“God established solidarity with the human condition,” he said.
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