The Daily Hatch

Scene from ‘Collision’ – Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson
http://www.collisionmovie.com/

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PART 6

6/01/2007 03:01 PM

Christopher Hitchens

To: Douglas Wilson

Re: Is Christianity Good for the World?

Quo warranto

is a very ancient question, meaning “by what right?” You ask me for my “warrant”

for a code of right conduct and persist in mistaking my answer for an evasion. I in turn ask you

by what right you assume that a celestial autocracy is a guarantee of morals, let alone by what

right you choose your own (Christian) version of it as the only correct one. All deities have been

hailed by their subjects as the fount of good behavior, just as they have been used as the excuse

for inexcusable behavior.

My answer is the same as it was all along: Our morality evolved. Just as we have. Natural selection

and trial-and-error have given us the vague yet grand conception of human rights and some but

not yet all of the means of making these rights coherent and consistent. There is simply no need

for the introduction of the extraneous or the supernatural. LaPlace was only one of those who

concluded that religion is essentially irrelevant to important questions: an option if you choose it,

but only one among many. (I have to say that your account of him makes him sound dangerously

like the repulsive Calvin, but even the great Isaac Newton and the even greater Alfred Russell

Wallace were prey to all kinds of superstitious delusions as they made their marvelous

humanistic discoveries.)

There seems to be no easy way to discuss this other than in personal or individual terms. You and

I have no idea what it is like to be a sociopath—someone who does not care about other people

except inasmuch as they serve his turn—or a psychopath—someone who derives actual delight

from inflicting misery on others. But we know that such people exist, and that they must be

guarded against. I regard their existence as part of our haphazard evolution and our kinship with

a nature that often favors the predator. You do not. Indeed, you apparently adopt the immoral

and suicidal doctrine that advocates forgiveness for those who would destroy us. Please take care

not to forgive my enemies, or the enemies of society. If I have to call such people “evil” (and I

find I have no alternative), I do not deduce peaceful coexistence from that observation and do

not want you being tender to them when it is my or my family’s life that is at stake.

Turning from this to the surprising amount of virtue that can be found in humans, I again

choose not to confect a mystery where none exists. Leaving ordinary sins to one side—I do not

steal other people’s property, for example, and hope for a reciprocal restraint on their part, and

do not pardon such offenses when they occur—I could mention something that is particular to

our discussion. Every now and then, in argument, I find myself glib enough to make a cheap

point or a point that might evoke instant applause from an audience. But I am always aware of

doing so, or if you like of the temptation to do so, and I strive (not always with success) to resist

the tactic, and rather dislike myself when I give in to it. Why do I do this? Socrates called this

restraint the

daemon: an inner voice that helps us toward self-criticism. Many later thinkers have

defined it in discrepant ways, but a definition is something short of an understanding.

I am content to regard it as indefinable, which is where we part company. My own inclination is

to regard it as a human faculty without which we could not have—I shan’t say “evolved” yet

again—made the smallest progress as

homo sapiens. You believe that I owe this inner prompting

to the divine, and you further assert that a heavenly intervention made in the last two thousand

years of human history (a microsecond of evolutionary time) is the seal on the deal. You will

have to excuse me when I say that I think such a belief is, as well as incredible, immoral. It makes

right action dependent on a highly improbable wager on the supernatural. To state the case in

another way, it suggests that without celestial sanction, you yourself would be unrestrained in

your appetites and careless of other people. Awful though many of your opinions are to me, I

decline to believe that you would, if you lost your faith, become base and self-centered. It is,

rather, religion that has made many morally normal people assent to appalling cruelties,

including the mutilation of children’s genitalia, the institution of slavery, the revulsion from

female sexuality, and many other crimes from which an average infidel would, without any

heavenly prompting, turn away. Ask yourself this question. Can you name one moral action, or

moral utterance, performed or spoken by a believer that could not have been performed or

spoken by an atheist? My email is available to any reader who is willing to accept this challenge.

I like your joke about the reduction of mirth to a spasm (there was a solemn critic of P.G.

Wodehouse who defined the smile in terms of “naso-labial” contractions), but I think you let

yourself down a bit with your Hallmark conclusion. I dare say that I could add to the list of joys

and even include one or two subjects which Christianity and other religions have made difficult

to discuss in public. However, I shall select my own recent investigation of my DNA, which can

now be sequenced and analyzed. I was perfectly happy with the “revelation” of my own kinship

with other species and quite overwhelmed by the skill and precision of those who allowed me to

do it. A lot of wit and beauty and intelligence had to go into the confirmation of my status as an

evolved animal, just as a great deal of dullness and stupidity is required for the continuing denial

of it.

I think we shall do better if we do not resist evidence that may at first sight appear unwelcome or

unsettling, just as we shall do better if we refuse conclusions for which there is no evidence at all.

CH

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