Hitchens vs. Wilson

There is a mildly interesting letter debate going on within the online pages of Christianity Today between theologian Douglas Wilson and atheist writer Christopher Hitchens about whether or not Christianity is 'good for the world.' Part 1 is here with links to the other three parts. Hitchens is of the persuasion that all religion is a bad thing and that humanity should collectively drop it while of course Wilson, self-appointed defender of the faith against Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens and others, takes the defensive.

Unfortunately, the two quickly fall into habits much older than they are with Hitchens taking Biblical narrative out of context and attributing all vile acts committed by those calling themselves Christians to the nature of the religion itself, and Wilson arguing that atheists have no basis for moral judgments and must accept monsters like Stalin to be just as moral as anyone else.

Finally in part four of their exchange, Hitchens responds to this charge in an inarticulate, but satisfactory way: morality, he wants to say, needn't come from any supernatural source, but can be taken to be an innate part of the basic make-up of our species, evolved for specific, chiefly beneficial reasons. A similar view has been argued recently by the biologist Marc Hauser, and it certain is a plausible argument. As I've often argued on this blog, more and more of human behavior (including mental behavior) is being attributed to innate properties and it is time to give up our tendency to deny that much of who we are, like all other species on the planet, is the products of millions of years of evolutionary tweaking.

Having perhaps finally understood Hitchens' position, Wilson reply is equally awkward and inexact, but at its core, I think, also equally correct: that whatever our innate moral compass might tell us, Christ told us that the standard is much greater; that whatever mixture of selfishness and reciprocative altruism might be mandated by evolved social structures in our species, they are irrelevant for living the way God wants us to live. Hitchens claims that the order to love thy neighbor as thyself is an impossible command, not understanding that this makes the Christian point nicely: it is impossible, but that doesn't negate our obligation to it. It does, however, makes forgiveness necessary.

In many ways, I wish Wilson would take his argument further, since I think the only way to fully answer the claims of secularists like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris is to articulate a new understanding of Christianity (well, new in a technical sense) whereby Christianity is understood as a mandate from Jesus to become more than what biology and evolution have created us to be. Within this understanding, Christians can freely embrace scientific discoveries that shed light on our biological and mental makeup, using these to shed theological light on the kinds of human behaviors that might derive from supernatural "Kingdom of God" principles rather than from mere biological, psychological, or sociological necessity.