Not so much a battle as a slaughter
I watched a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach recently. The subject was 'Is there a God?', Rabbi Boteach unfortunately had neglected to prepare an argument so instead he just attacked the scholarship of one of Hitchens' books and even the Rabbi who was moderating the debate was forced to step in from time to time to focus Boteach on the actual question at hand.
Hitchens First: The burden of proof is on my opponent. Religion does stand in our credit; religion is a ingenious result of pattern seeking that we as mammals have come up with. It's the first and worst explanation we came up with.
Boteach First: That was depressing. Atheism is a non-prophet religion (geddit?). Hitchens wrote a book and it contains errors: Hitchens is a secular fundamentalist fanatic. Hitler was bad, the US used to sterilise the mentally ill. Evolution leads to terrible things. The reason Jews have never engaged in terrorism is because of the agreement with God. He slags of MLK, the Dalai Llama and Mother Theresa, Hanukkah (a celebration of defiance of religious tyranny!) etc etc
Hitchens rebuttal: When I come across people who think that Adam and Eve were real people and lived quite recently, there is nothing to do with these points but to underline them. To be a fundamentalist is to insist that something can be advanced on faith alone and without evidence. Christianity teaches us to love our enemies: I don't do that, I'll get on with the business of destroying, isolating and combatting the enemies of civilization. MLK was fine, but his 'sainthood' has dwarfed the efforts of those that organized the famous march. Indeed - he was attacked for having communist and secular friends. I don't believe the Dalai Llama's claim and there hasn't even been the pretense of an election in the exile community which he has been leading for about half a century. Mutilating the genitalia of people who have not consented is a brutal act, that people like the Rabbi could only justify because of their belief. Hanukkah was in defiance of secularists like Epicurus and Lucretius - not religious tyranny but opponents thereof.
Boteach rebuttal: Hitchens is closed minded. *Lists another error in one of his books this time debating that Einstein turned down the premiership of Israel not because of his misgivings of Zionism but because of his unftness for the position* (Boteach actually seems to be right on this, I'll give him a point for this --Mod). I have debated evolutionists eg Richard Dawkins 4 times (Dawkins repudiates this and says that Boteach only chaired four debates with guest debators at Oxford -- Mod), beneficial mutations don't exist (some quote mines from various evolutionists as support). Evolutionists believe in Time, I believe in God. The world used to be said to 4 billion years old, now we're up to 16 billion (The world is about 4.5 billion years old, the universe is 13.7 billion years old -- Mod). Stephen J Gould didn't believe in Evolution, he believed in punctuated equilibrium. He said the fossil record does not support evolution (actually he said, " In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record-geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)-reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record." -- Mod). The brain is so complex - God must be involved.
Hitchens: On the claim that SJG did not believe in evolution I really do not know where to begin. I think the best thing to do would be to read any chapter of any of his books. The famous dispute with Richard Dawkins was about how it happened. (More accurately the disagreement was over the where natural selection takes place, a rather esoteric argument, Gould believed that punctuation implies that selection occurs at the group (survival of the fittest species) level and Dawkins believes that it takes place at the gene level --Mod). It was argued until recently that the fossil record used to be thought of as a test of faith, and only recently has it been accepted that they really reflect some kind of natural history. This kind of thing is an example of the unfalsifiable nature of the religious anti-evolution argument.
Boteach: *Gets quite excited about another perceived error in the same book by Hitchens (God is not Great). This time it is about whether a jewish court would condone a medic who refused to treat non-Jews, laying a challenge to Hitchens with the loser having to buy 100 books of his opponents*. The probability of the eye evolved has been compared to monkeys typing shakespeare by randomly hitting a typewriter (And yet, computer models using conservative figures show that the evolution of the eye is almost inevitable, and can happen rather quickly -- Mod). SJG doesn't believe in evolution, he believes in punctuated equilibrium, evolution means to slowly evolve (he seems to be equating phyletic gradualism with evolution and talking as if punctuated equlibrium were not evolution, which is just incredibally wrong. Not even Darwin was a phyletic gradualist. -- Mod). Evolution implies racism, evolutionists aren't racist because he accepts religious morality.
Neil Gillman: I have to stop you.
After that was 'question time' and it got quite heated at that point not making it easy to summarise. Hitchens responded immediately to Boteach's challenge though, and provided a cite for the court that condoned the medic's actions (or lack thereof).
Anyway, Boteach made a big point about how you shouldn't just make stuff up. If he chooses to debate God in the future, he might want to steer clear of evolution. He just made stuff up about it. He should probably avoid reasoning that morality is innate as evidence of God too, since that dies on its arse too. Unfortunately that was basically all the evidence he put forward. The rest was about how great the God he believes exists is (though of course, he has no way of knowing these kinds of things even if his evidence of God's existence is to be accepted), and how Hitchens' book contained errors (nothing to do with the existence of God). One amusing moment had the moderator stepping in and pointedly asking Boteach to answer the question. Some more ranting ensued at which point Hitchens leant over to the moderator and said, to paraphrase "You asked for this white noise", the moderator laughed agreed that he had asked for it and now he was interrupting it.
The only downside (amusing as it was, the moderator had a wonderful sense of humour) was that the debate got so heated that despite Gillman trying to stop it it carried on. So while the two were still bickering over some point or another unrelated to the existence of God, Gillman turned to the audience thanked them for coming and wished them all a good night.
Hitchens First: The burden of proof is on my opponent. Religion does stand in our credit; religion is a ingenious result of pattern seeking that we as mammals have come up with. It's the first and worst explanation we came up with.
Boteach First: That was depressing. Atheism is a non-prophet religion (geddit?). Hitchens wrote a book and it contains errors: Hitchens is a secular fundamentalist fanatic. Hitler was bad, the US used to sterilise the mentally ill. Evolution leads to terrible things. The reason Jews have never engaged in terrorism is because of the agreement with God. He slags of MLK, the Dalai Llama and Mother Theresa, Hanukkah (a celebration of defiance of religious tyranny!) etc etc
Hitchens rebuttal: When I come across people who think that Adam and Eve were real people and lived quite recently, there is nothing to do with these points but to underline them. To be a fundamentalist is to insist that something can be advanced on faith alone and without evidence. Christianity teaches us to love our enemies: I don't do that, I'll get on with the business of destroying, isolating and combatting the enemies of civilization. MLK was fine, but his 'sainthood' has dwarfed the efforts of those that organized the famous march. Indeed - he was attacked for having communist and secular friends. I don't believe the Dalai Llama's claim and there hasn't even been the pretense of an election in the exile community which he has been leading for about half a century. Mutilating the genitalia of people who have not consented is a brutal act, that people like the Rabbi could only justify because of their belief. Hanukkah was in defiance of secularists like Epicurus and Lucretius - not religious tyranny but opponents thereof.
Boteach rebuttal: Hitchens is closed minded. *Lists another error in one of his books this time debating that Einstein turned down the premiership of Israel not because of his misgivings of Zionism but because of his unftness for the position* (Boteach actually seems to be right on this, I'll give him a point for this --Mod). I have debated evolutionists eg Richard Dawkins 4 times (Dawkins repudiates this and says that Boteach only chaired four debates with guest debators at Oxford -- Mod), beneficial mutations don't exist (some quote mines from various evolutionists as support). Evolutionists believe in Time, I believe in God. The world used to be said to 4 billion years old, now we're up to 16 billion (The world is about 4.5 billion years old, the universe is 13.7 billion years old -- Mod). Stephen J Gould didn't believe in Evolution, he believed in punctuated equilibrium. He said the fossil record does not support evolution (actually he said, " In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record-geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)-reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record." -- Mod). The brain is so complex - God must be involved.
Hitchens: On the claim that SJG did not believe in evolution I really do not know where to begin. I think the best thing to do would be to read any chapter of any of his books. The famous dispute with Richard Dawkins was about how it happened. (More accurately the disagreement was over the where natural selection takes place, a rather esoteric argument, Gould believed that punctuation implies that selection occurs at the group (survival of the fittest species) level and Dawkins believes that it takes place at the gene level --Mod). It was argued until recently that the fossil record used to be thought of as a test of faith, and only recently has it been accepted that they really reflect some kind of natural history. This kind of thing is an example of the unfalsifiable nature of the religious anti-evolution argument.
Boteach: *Gets quite excited about another perceived error in the same book by Hitchens (God is not Great). This time it is about whether a jewish court would condone a medic who refused to treat non-Jews, laying a challenge to Hitchens with the loser having to buy 100 books of his opponents*. The probability of the eye evolved has been compared to monkeys typing shakespeare by randomly hitting a typewriter (And yet, computer models using conservative figures show that the evolution of the eye is almost inevitable, and can happen rather quickly -- Mod). SJG doesn't believe in evolution, he believes in punctuated equilibrium, evolution means to slowly evolve (he seems to be equating phyletic gradualism with evolution and talking as if punctuated equlibrium were not evolution, which is just incredibally wrong. Not even Darwin was a phyletic gradualist. -- Mod). Evolution implies racism, evolutionists aren't racist because he accepts religious morality.
Neil Gillman: I have to stop you.
After that was 'question time' and it got quite heated at that point not making it easy to summarise. Hitchens responded immediately to Boteach's challenge though, and provided a cite for the court that condoned the medic's actions (or lack thereof).
Anyway, Boteach made a big point about how you shouldn't just make stuff up. If he chooses to debate God in the future, he might want to steer clear of evolution. He just made stuff up about it. He should probably avoid reasoning that morality is innate as evidence of God too, since that dies on its arse too. Unfortunately that was basically all the evidence he put forward. The rest was about how great the God he believes exists is (though of course, he has no way of knowing these kinds of things even if his evidence of God's existence is to be accepted), and how Hitchens' book contained errors (nothing to do with the existence of God). One amusing moment had the moderator stepping in and pointedly asking Boteach to answer the question. Some more ranting ensued at which point Hitchens leant over to the moderator and said, to paraphrase "You asked for this white noise", the moderator laughed agreed that he had asked for it and now he was interrupting it.
The only downside (amusing as it was, the moderator had a wonderful sense of humour) was that the debate got so heated that despite Gillman trying to stop it it carried on. So while the two were still bickering over some point or another unrelated to the existence of God, Gillman turned to the audience thanked them for coming and wished them all a good night.