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 5 of 35)
61. Pretervision: Once more you are, like Dinesh, refusing to answer the question. I can think of at least two answers to that, and I'm the atheist! But you refuse to answer, either because you are stubbornly unwilling to conceed it is impossible to know the will of something that doesn't exist or is utterly fictional, or that your imagination doesn't allow you to seek nuance outside the bible.
You ask who cares? I do, because Dinesh has proposed that some time in history God finally decided to intervene in man's natural state. Ignoring the blatant lack of archeological evidence for such a claim, in order for it to be true you would have to find some immediate and overwhelming change in human behavior in a society in question. What archeology shows is that there is no magical date when humans developed laws. All primitive people have laws, rules, and taboos. Anthopologists have argued that they stem from survivalist roots; rules that help behavior that keeps the group alive are promoted first. The point is that Dinesh makes this bold proclaimation that mankind was nothing and then God came and flicked a switch and suddenly we had some trait that allowed us to make the world we exist in today, yet he and yourself are unable to provide any concrete evidence of when this change took place or what it was. Caves occupied by homo erectus had crude unfired clay statuary of a bear, the earliest example of art. Was that when this magic change happened? Or was it more than three HUNDRED thousand years later when people were learning the principles of agriculture.
Observant: time does not equate to validity. Otherwise you will have to conceed that the Iliad, Oddessy, and Epic of Gilgamesh are equally as true as the bible.
Somber at 11:01AM on Jul 11th 2008
62. It's not just you.
Somehow my answer was silly, but a sky-guy suddenly breathing life into people is not.
Allrightythen...
Perhaps god also came down and imprinted the earth in Nazca with lines...looney tunes....looney tunes....th th th th th-that's all folks.
America's Most Gangsta at 11:04AM on Jul 11th 2008
63. I have reached the point where I really cant take this blog seriously. That includes myself, and all of you who post your comments. Most of us probably should be working, nothing said here will ever change anyones behavior as it seems just like venting, and I tend to post over-exaggerated comments just to solicit reactions from people.
Most people in here revert the comments to the basest human emotions. Very few commenters backup their ideas with any factual or logical arguements. As I will still comment here due to my Stockholm Syndrome for all of you, I will still try to make you wonder if I am serious or not.
mostly I am not.
CaptainCack at 11:05AM on Jul 11th 2008
64. 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
Hi mad African,
It all stems from human knowledge. From proto-historic literature we find that the primitives believed in self fertilization. They were unaware that seeds were the cause of fruits. But even after they did discover the seed they then had to learn about water. In the most ancient hunter gathering sites archeologist have found small pre-farming sites were small crops were grown. It seems as though they were at first failures. Farming was no small task and it often brought diseases of the crops and unwanted pests. The question was how were men who lived rather fulfilling lives forced into agricultural work? The answer, religion, the patriarchal kind. According to the oldest sources for organized religion man was created to do gods work on earth.
goddess1prevail at 11:07AM on Jul 11th 2008
65. Incidently, Pretervision, you made one statement that I think bears a special note: that religion is hardwired. I think that superstition is genetic. Allow me to paraphrase Gil Grissom, a man I admire:
You live on the savannah. The wind rustles some grass. You think its a hyena. You run away and are alive. You go to check the grass. It is a hyena. You are eaten. We are decended from the ones who ran away.
Let me put it a step further. Just as human technology has allowed certain less than survivable genetic traits to flourish, like near sightedness, human society too has allowed those genes that promote skepticism and inquery to flourish. As more and more people are able to openly question religion and pass on their genes, more and more people find that the great lie to be as it is: no more than an imaginary hyena in our minds.
Somber at 11:08AM on Jul 11th 2008
66. whereas we do speak of law and writing and music and as such. And those things are young indeed.
xx
music is as old as vocal cords and sticks beating on the ground and diadic harmony is as old as men and women wailing or chanting together.
Triadic and tetradic harmony is as old as children and adolescents joining in, and instrumental music may have been the properties of the neanderthal.
They had the birds and insects for reference as well as the calls of all their food products.
There is a cylindrical bone fragment accurately dated to 80,000 years that has two and a broken third hole that are round and the appropriate distance from one another and the end of the bone to create divisions of the harmonic overtone series - to the layman, part of a musical scale.
This is a neanderthal artifact and looks and measures much more like a flute than a gnawed bone.
Neanderthal statuary is also known, and there may have been cross culturation between them and H. sapiens.
Remains of flowers have been found at neanderthal burial digs, gravesites.
Evaluation of this information requires a gain control, not an on off switch, but this is very interesting information regarding prehistoric society and culture.
Agriculture also requires a stable climate in case you all forgot. During the ice ages and migration, you weren't going to get much of that.
The earliest precursors of writing are trade talismans from all over the chaldean lands - they seem to have been in use for about five thousand years before the first cuneiform.
Tallies on bones over twenty thousand years old are known - they are not for any sort of flensing or butchery - they are counting marks.
There is tantalizing evidence of open trade in the middle of the jungles of africa as well. There is a date seed that dates back about 8 thousand years that literally litters stream beds in the congo.
These dates were believed to be a staple of trade at that time, and are not native to the area and cannot survive there.
The implication is that the climate was much different and there may have been a flourishing civilization in what is now the jungles of central africa.
As to civilizations, there is another physical phenomenon known as Emergence that may have been at work. Basically, when a system is complex enough, some unexpected and coordinated complexity can arise in a sort of quantum manner, meaning that it appears as a fully fledged discrete phenomenon, not as a gradually acquired trait.
All of this is light years away from any reinforcement of scripture that would be more accurate than a horoscope or scrying.
Clif Kuplen at 11:11AM on Jul 11th 2008
67. 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
Observant,
No not at all observant. In order to understand history you have to understand how the history of writing evolved.
First of all the ancient never wrote on books. They wrote on clay tablets since paper was not invented yet. (clay books would have been extremely heavy) These clay tablets were unearthed by the hundreds of thousands in such places like Nineveh, Alexandria, and many others. Sadly war has destroyed many of them and others wait in museums waiting to be deciphered.
Abraham took his Sumerian knowledge with him when he entered Canaan. There his god EA(Hebrew EAYH) was merged with the Canaanite god EL (created of all mankind and the known universe) and they became one deity. This is clearly found in the torah.
Thanks to the war the Iraqi museum was ransacked and over 100,000 tablets lost, stolen and destroyed.
But luckily many of the plagiarized stories like Allilum, the flood, creation and the confusion of the languages survive almost intact at the British Museum (and others). These huge tablets date since before the Akkadian (the proto-Hebraic branch of language) which were the Hebrews ancestors.
The only reason the gods of the Hebrews survived is due to Christianity attaching themselves to their covenant. Other wise if Marcoion would have had it his way the Hebrew religion would have also gone extinct. But the religion of the ancients, belief and practice is alive and well in our society today under the guise of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Also the reason the bible stands the test of time is because the huge censorship campaign the early church took against other religions. Many manuscripts were burned and scribes discouraged from writing heresy. Also thank the printing press that allowed for large distribution of the bible.
goddess1prevail at 11:19AM on Jul 11th 2008
68.
Not only is Denish wrong about the ancients and their gods but he is wrong about their accomplishments. Just because the male god wasn't invented yet does not mean these primitives were theists of some sort. Their goddess was around for 40,000 years before the tyranny of the male god took over.
Not only did these men invent language, made clothing out of animals skin, conquered fire, cave paintings, hunting tools, music, worked as teams for hunting, and had a general understanding of the seasons, respect for live but they also lived in peace without war under the goddess. And most of this stuff dates back to almost 100,000 years ago!
It wasn't until the male god came to mankind that ruined 95,000 years of peace and tranquility. This is when we see war and human sacrifice at its best! This is when the order of the social classes was invented and slavery became the norm.
This is the Fall of man according to Genesis.
goddess1prevail at 11:26AM on Jul 11th 2008
69. Goddess1: The only reason the gods of the Hebrews survived is due to Christianity attaching themselves to their covenant.
PV: Christianity created a new international covenant of Judaism in prophetic anticipation that the old Judaism was about to vanish...and was vindicated by history.
Somber: I do, because Dinesh has proposed that some time in history God finally decided to intervene in man's natural state.
PV: But Hitchens' whole argument amounts to this: "Well, I would have done it differently." It's a non-argument. There's no real objection to be found in that. There's nothing to respond to.
Somber: The point is that Dinesh makes this bold proclaimation that mankind was nothing and then God came and flicked a switch and suddenly we had some trait that allowed us to make the world we exist in today
PV: Even if that was an accurate depiction of the point Dinesh is making (which it is not), so what? What's the objection? Who cares when humans went to the next level?
preteristvision at 11:34AM on Jul 11th 2008
70. I have never listened to a debate between dimwit and an atheist, nor would I want to. I seriously doubt that someone quoting from a book of fairy tales could win an argument against someone using proven scientific facts.
Geoff Barker at 11:39AM on Jul 11th 2008
71. D'Souza, you're kidding, right?
emelpe at 11:47AM on Jul 11th 2008
72. So god created his toys and then sat there and watched primitive man die in agony from incurable wounds and diseases, which he must have created. Just as now he sits there and watches as little children die in agony from burns or are raped and sodomised by adults. He sure is a caring god.
Geoff Barker at 11:49AM on Jul 11th 2008
73. Pretervision: Stop being obtuse. Hitchen's argument is that there is no God at all. One example of rhetorical evidence towards that argument is God's apparent absenteeism. Dinesh's counter is one that humanity underwent a fundamental mental change that allowed 'the naked ape to get his act together'. Fair enough. Dinesh regards himself as a scholar so if he wants to make that play then so be it.
If he does, however, then he should be able to conclusively prove what was changed, and when. If God truly is a universal being then it is a change that should been seen in all primitive societies. Or, if God is truly selective, it should be observable in the archeological records of the ancient hebrews and the prehistoric people who became the hebrews.
If Dinesh can not deliniate exactly what this 'magic change' was, or when it occured, then it is impossible to back it up with any real substance. Instead, Dinesh appeals to a stereotypical view of cave men being nigh bestial in their behavior and then suddenly making cities and starting modern civilized behavior. There is no evidence of humanity ever taking a "next step", because human societal development has, until recently, been a gradual evolution for millenia. There is no one time that humans developed language, we've always had it from the time we were beasts to now. Our language has changed and evolved with us. There is no magical moment of intervention, and if there is, then it is up to you to provide when it happened and what it was.
Even religion is not a universal trait, from shamanistic traditions of Africa to the personified Gods of Europe to the celestial bureaucracy of Asia to transcendant beliefs of india. No where is there a singluar revolutionary change in humanity that you can attribute to God.
Somber at 11:49AM on Jul 11th 2008
74. Dear fellow creationists,
Don't be fooled by more neo-Darwinist dogma. There are still evolutionists debating Neanderthal's humanity. And there is absolutely NO difference between Cro-magnon man and Homo Sapiens, or Homo Sapiens Sapiens. None, zero, zilch, it doesn't exist.
oneblood at 11:53AM on Jul 11th 2008
75. PV: Christianity created a new international covenant of Judaism in prophetic anticipation that the old Judaism was about to vanish...and was vindicated by history.
But Judaism didn't vanish and their original unchanged covenant which they believe to be intact and true is still alive with the Hebrews today. This would have also disappeared if the Christians didn't attach themselves to their history and god.
goddess1prevail at 11:57AM on Jul 11th 2008