WorldNutDaily hack takes Hitchens’ challenge

1 December 2007 · 2 Comments

Do you remember the challenge that Christopher Hitchens apparently mentions in his new book Portable Atheist (which I haven’t yet read) and put to theists everywhere while touring with God Is Not Great? I’ll remind you:

Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.

It turns out that someone called Tom Flannery of that inimitable organ, WorldNetDaily, has taken it upon himself to take up the gauntlet and try to answer it.

And Flannery’s answer is (drumroll, please)…

In the case of Christianity, if its claims are true, then the greatest moral law of all is to love the Lord God with all of one’s heart, mind and strength. That’s something an unbeliever, by self-definition, could never do.

Emphasis as original, for whatever that’s worth, although it seems to me, from the general tone of the whole piece, that this emphasis has a pronounced sneering tone.

With mind-bending sophistry, Flannery argues that Hitchens, to then refute this answer, has to prove that christianity is not true. If he doesn’t, then he’s not engaging in the proper rules of philosophical debate and, I expect by default, must have failed to refute it.

He knows that in a philosophical debate of any kind, the skeptic (in this case Hitchens) must give the presumption of truth to his adversary. He must presume that the philosophy or worldview he is opposing (in this case the Christian faith) is in fact true, and then debunk it on that basis (on the basis of its own claims) if he is to cast any doubts upon its veracity.

…

The Bible tells us that it is impossible for a person to even say “Jesus is Lord” in spirit and in truth unless the Holy Spirit is the motivating force behind it, in which case the person has already accepted God and received the Spirit.

In arguing this, he makes note of The War Against Terror (TWAT™) and then claims that islam is not a true religion, and therefore doesn’t count.

Hitchens would point to the homicidal use of those hijacked airliners and say: “That’s religion for you.” To which true believers like myself would respond: “No, Christopher, that’s false religion for you.” He doesn’t seem to understand there’s a difference

Somehow I doubt that Flannery has subjected himself to the same standard that he puts on Hitchens: to prove that islam is wrong before dismissing it. Of course, with the theist logic at work, an assumption on his part that his belief is true automagically makes every other religious belief necessarily false. But to do this, he would have to prove christianity true which, of course, he doesn’t.

And, there’s the obligatory dig at his (obviously idiotic) idea of evolution, or — as the fundies like to call it — “Darwinism”:

Everything from child rape to murder to genocide would be justifiable as “survival of the fittest” or a modified version of it (say, “desire of the strongest”).

I’m sure I don’t need to point out the multiple levels of stupid in this single statement.

The funniest (and I use the term ironically) thing about this piece of “journalism”, though, is the anecdote at the end of the piece:

Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias tells of a time he spoke at a university in defense of truth and was accosted afterward by a group of angry students who insisted there is no such thing as absolute truth. Zacharias challenged the leader of the group by asking him, “If instead of giving a speech today, I came out and cut a newborn baby into pieces on the stage, would that have been wrong for me to do?”

The young man thought for a moment, realizing that if he said it was wrong he would be acknowledging the existence of truth. Then he tellingly replied: “I may not have liked watching you do it, but at the same time I can’t say that it would have been wrong.”

I’ll answer that: yes, it would have been wrong. At the same time, it should be noted that his bible shows his god happily duplicating this scenario on a scale that can only boggle the mind (Exodus 12:29-30, Psalms 137:9) and therefore, by Flannery’s own argument (God by nature … is perfectly holy and therefore perfectly just.) it’s not wrong, is it?

Tags: <bad arguments/logical fallacies, bible, books, christianity, Christopher Hitchens, evidence, God Is Not Great, islam, Portable Atheist, The Stupid It Burns, WorldNutDaily>