For a variety of reasons I ended up watching a “debate” between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza one night on C-SPAN2 on the subject of the relative merits of religion, particularly Christianity vs. atheism. You can figure out who was on what side. I use the term “debate” for lack of a better one, but really, I can’t think of two worse representatives of the respective positions. Hitchens was soused, and D’Souza made his typical nuanced-on-the-surface-but-blindingly-simplistic-beneath arguments. The audience showed about the same level of sophistication as that of the Jerry Springer Show—slightly less as some in Springer’s crowd watch with a good dose of irony, and at this little circus all seemed committed.
This is too bad, as a genuine debate about the roles of religion and science in how we view the world is still a compelling one. Instead of tackling the issues with the kind of reflection they deserve, both Hitchens and D’Souza fell back on the same moribund arguments that have sullied these waters for as long as anyone can recall: Hitchens contended there was no scientific proof of the existence of God, so there isn’t one; D’Souza countered that science is too internally conflicted and has too little evidence to prove its own theories, and that therefore there is only one alternative, that being a traditionalist view of creation. D’Souza’s explanation is a leap of faith that he posits as pure science, and Hitchens’s is just bad science since the lack of something does not obviate its existence. If Hitchens were being honest, he would have to say that science is agnostic on the matter of God, but that the lack of positive proof would tend to indicate there isn’t one. If D’Souza were being honest, he would have to say that the limitations inherent in science force him to appeal to faith and that his traditionalist view makes the most sense for him.
If we were all being honest about this, we would say that the complexity of things like DNA might seem miraculous to us in comparison to everyday experience, but, given the nature of our physical laws, they are not beyond the realm of possibility. If we were all being honest, we’d say that these same laws that give rise to DNA, in some sense, create us, though obviously not in the same way that insists on a Big, White, Bearded Man in the Sky.
D’Souza, naturally, clung to the idea of God as a font for morality enforced by the promise of eternal salvation or damnation. Hitchens contended that the moral sense is innate, a product of evolution, corrupted by our flawed societies and the religions they espouse. D’Souza pointed out the mass murders of Stalin, Hilter, and Mao as being “secular” and “atheistic” in origin; Hitchens countered with the Crusades and feudalism, and that there never would have been a Stalin or a Hitler without the bad behavior of the religiously backed reigns of the kings and the czars.
This back-and-forth does not seem to make sense when you consider that the justification for mass murder always comes from what is most readily at hand—faith, tradition, racial purity, ideological uniformity—but that it always comes down to power, taking it and keeping it. And while our capacity for morality may very well be innate, individual expressions of it are certainly not, and that furthermore, they vary from culture to culture and era to era. Morality is more like language: by our natures we can always acquire it, but which form of it we do acquire is determined neither by God nor by genetics.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Moral relativism makes morality no more real; it merely acknowledges the complexity, ambiguity, and instability of the human condition. Likewise, it’s just fine to say that certain positions on the existence or lack of a divine being is not, maybe even cannot be, a scientific one. Science must be limited in its scope to pursue its methodology, and the more comfortable we are with that, the better off we’ll be when it inevitably reverses itself. Faith will always require a certain amount of unprovability, and the more comfortable we are with that, the more rested out spirits will be.
What really bothers me about the positions of both D’Souza and Hitchens is that they are both fundamentalist: both require a level of certainty entirely unjustified by our limited epistemology.