This weekend I am in Vegas sampling some great shows, food and shopping. I took math in college, and so I know exactly why I shouldn't play the casinos. (It's not a question of morality; it's a question of knowing when you're being shafted.) Besides, I'm saving my brain for a bruising man-to-man debate against Christopher Hitchens. Every survey taken following one of my debates with leading atheists has me the winner, and I'd like to keep it that way.
In this blog I want to return to one of Hitchens's favorite arguments, one that he used in our New York debate last October and also in an Orange County debate last spring. In fact, in the Orange County synagogue event that also featured Jewish radio host Dennis Prager, Hitchens came out swinging with precisely this argument. Essentially Hitchens noted that Homo sapiens has been on the planet for approximately 100,000 years but for most of that time God seems to have been indifferent and inactive, choosing only to intervene in human history a few thousand years ago. What kind of a God, Hitchens contemptuously asked, behaves in this way?
When Hitchens first sprung this on me last year, I was surprised. But since then I've given some thought to it. When Hitchens brought it up a second time I was ready for him. Here I want to show how Hitchens' argument completely backfires on atheism. Let's apply an entirely secular analysis and go with Hitchens' premise that there is no God and man is an evolved primate. Well, biology tells us that man's basic frame and brain size haven't substantially changed throughout his terrestrial existence.
So here is the problem. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for more than 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. No real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization. How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise physically and mentally undistinguishable from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn't figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?
Then, a few thousand years ago, everything changes. Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.
So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man's trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!
Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.
So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by the Book of Genesis.
Reader Comments ( Page 2 of 35)
16. An interesting article.And some interesting comments,especially from Somber and JeffFlyingv.Makes me wanna run back to school again.
However,it is agreed that agriculture and science,according to evolutionary theory,developed around 15000bce,that means that for 85000 years,homosapiens was still a hunter-gatherer.Forgive me if i am wrong,but that sounds too long for man to move from ape-like to agriculture-like.I kinda like what the religionist thinks,cause it has man designed different from other animals.Man can think.Animals can'tMan has advanced further than food-gatherer.Animals are still there.
Anyways,good blog today.Am looking foward to the discussion here.
Question;Why did it take us so long to discover agriculture.The Iceage explanation advanced here is good,but not sufficient enough.After all,the ice age was not global.(note,this is a serious question,not a joke.)
mad african christian at 8:00AM on Jul 11th 2008
17. So, again, your umpteenth argument that god exists is some inferential "miracle" to explain the detail we haven't yet uncovered about human evolution. God is proven, as usual, as a default explanation for a cavity in our knowledge which are growing fewer almost weekly. There isn't even any attempt any more to affirmatively prove that god or gods exist. The new paradigm is that if science hasn't explained this or that it must be god. So god is being crowded out in our ever expanding knowledge of how things work and has been marginalized to accounting for less and less of our understanding of the universe and history. Seems as if god will be unemployed soon and there aren't many career opportunities for an unemployed god. Ask Zeus or Thor.
eric at 8:34AM on Jul 11th 2008
18. The first 98% of man's time on this planet was occupied with survival. Scattered clans and small communities (think Amazon Indian tribes in modern times) had not the leisure time to develop art, math etc. until the advent of large, immobile populations that NEEDED agriculture to provide enough food (again, a survival issue) to feed themselves. However, since 1 man can produce vastly more food than he himself needs, this freed up other segments of the population for more contemplative pursuits, such as >GASP< religion.
GearHedEd at 8:26AM on Jul 11th 2008
19. Hunter-gatherers spent all their time trying to hunt and gather. Any real hunter can tell you that when you have no choice but to hunt for all your food and clothing, you dont get much time to paint pictures. This was survival.
Add on to that the fact that most pre-historic man was probably nomadic, you have no recording of their history. Now what about cave drawings? How do any of us know that some ancient man decided to draw a picture of a hunt or something of the sort, and he looked upon it as "art".
DD's arguement is just substitution. If you dont understand why something did or didnt happen, then God was involved.
CaptainCack at 8:30AM on Jul 11th 2008
20. It's also noteworthy that some of the oldest Sumerian clay tablets found have been translated and are KNOWN to be receipts for grain transactions. This implies that written languages were developed to facilitate equity and justice in bartering foodstuffs and other services in early agricultural societies.
GearHedEd at 8:31AM on Jul 11th 2008
21. You know, thinking about it, the most important inventions of mankind have been in the last hundred or so years. The internet, gasoline, toilet paper, cell phones, skyscrapers, all of which we consider the basics of life. What made us so much more intelligent than the previous generations of over a hundred years ago?
a born atheist at 8:36AM on Jul 11th 2008
22. knowledge increases exponentially.
CaptainCack at 8:44AM on Jul 11th 2008
23. I think DD should give up those brain bruising debates of his. His brain seems to have been bruised nearly as bad as Ali's already.
You have to love his reasoning; Things were really bad before about 2,000 BC, they started getting a lot better around 1,300 AD, it must be because JC was crucified around 30 AD. That makes about as much sense as saying the allies won WW II because of the works of Shakespeare, none at all.
Ed W. at 8:48AM on Jul 11th 2008
24. It's always exciting to watch you devise a new argumentative failure, but using this one is simply suicide. The most important invention that got the ball rolling for all future progress was language. The gift of speech was not given to us from birth, but probably from a few ingenious gogs who learned that they could share verbal cues to help them coordinate greater feats. It was no longer about genetic evolution. The tools to reason were already there. Why did it take us so long? Why WOULDN'T it take so long. You make it sound like the moment we became human we had to have been able to build catapults and intuitively grasp calculus. Plus archaeoanthropology shows us some tribes that had already begun to form cultures went extinct for various reasons.
Mokele Mbembe at 8:54AM on Jul 11th 2008
25. MAC: "but that sounds too long for man to move from ape-like to agriculture-like"
Pre-agricultural man was not "ape-like". In fact, it's my feeling that we are not any "smarter" today than we were 100,000 years ago, we've just been working our way forward on very small gains. And now, after 100,000 years, we simply have a much vaster repository of knowledge to work from.
I don't know how to make or use an atl-atl, knap flint, track, kill or butcher an Elk, read the weather, start a fire without a match. Before written language, these folks had to keep all 352 pages of the "Field Guide to Edible Plants" in their heads, amongst countless other "books".
Dinesh shows a shocking lack of understanding of pre-modern man. But, his view fits his purpose, so...
Ryan Anderson at 8:55AM on Jul 11th 2008
26. 21. You know, thinking about it, the most important inventions of mankind have been in the last hundred or so years. The internet, gasoline, toilet paper, cell phones, skyscrapers, all of which we consider the basics of life. What made us so much more intelligent than the previous generations of over a hundred years ago?
a born atheist at 8:36AM on Jul 11th 2008
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Interesting that you should ask such a question.
According to the bible ther is to be a n increase of knowledge at the of end times.
Dan:12-4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
Observant at 8:57AM on Jul 11th 2008
27. Mokele; "Plus archaeoanthropology shows us some tribes that had already begun to form cultures went extinct for various reasons"
Clearly because they were descended from Cain.
Ryan Anderson at 8:59AM on Jul 11th 2008
28. "So paradoxically Hitchens' argument becomes a boomerang."
Anything seems paradoxical when you twist it to look like it contradicts itself. There really is no contradiction here, you're just preaching to your corner. A true faith doesn't need to be affirmed by misrepresentations of other faiths.
I have accomplished virtually nothing for the first 9X% of my life. Then some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit into me and I magically graduated college and got jobs.
Mokele Mbembe at 9:06AM on Jul 11th 2008
29. Observant; "According to the bible ther is to be a n increase of knowledge at the of end times"
Wouldn't knowledge (the accumulation and storage of data) be at it's highest level right before the "end time".
Ryan Anderson at 9:08AM on Jul 11th 2008
30. Ryan, goddess 1,
Were are the books or bible if you will of the Gods You assert the Hebrews plagiarized their God from.
Dont you find it strange that out of all the gods that you say man invented, that the God of the Hebrews is the only one who was able to have a book called the bible endure the test of time.
Observant at 9:10AM on Jul 11th 2008