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.
posted by Lame and Blind @ 9:18 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Oddly enough, over the years one who has repeatedly made exactly the point you make in your last paragraph is John Spong.
If we frame moral philosophy in terms of the questions, What is good?, and, How do we know what is good?, then I'm not sure that what I will call the "descriptivist" approach to morality fully answers the question. If Wilson has said (to paraphrase), we can only know what is good through God's revelation, and this is that revelation, then Hitchens' response, as regards an innate moral faculty, addresses only the question of how we know what is good: it does not address the principal question, what is good, anyway. The medium is made clear, but the content remains muddled.
Bringing up Stalin as an example of a monster is interesting in this context, because while he can, in his own person, be held up as an example of an (im,a)moral person, the Stalinist system which empowered him was built and sustained on top of the moral behavior of millions of people.
While Western moral philosophy has often dismissed the concept of authority as a source of moral information, with arguments usually typical of, if something is good because the authority commands it, then goodness is arbitrary, and cannot be accessed by reason, so we should just stop talking about it, but if the authority commands it because it is good, then its goodness lies outside the authority, and whatever Reason the authority has used to determine its goodness is accessible to me, too, because I partake of the same Reason, and I can determine its goodness without recourse to the authority, in actual observation of human behavior, we can see that deference to authority is a widely-employed category of human moral behavior. Monstrosities such as the Stalinist system (or any other of the dozens of authoritarian disasters that the 20th century provides) can occur when it becomes the only form of moral behavior.
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