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 6 of 35)
76.
oneblood, what is your bible spin on neanderthals, cro-magnons and homo sapiens sapiens?
JefFlyingV at 12:00PM on Jul 11th 2008
77. "Even religion is not a universal trait,..."
Somber at 11:49AM on Jul 11th 2008
Somber, you are thoughtful and careful, did you mean this literally? And if so, I think you are way way off the mark.
oneblood at 12:01PM on Jul 11th 2008
78. Dear DD,
Apparently you never read "2001". Clarke rules!
P.S. And more apparent is that YOUR species wasn't part of the experiment.
Robert at 12:04PM on Jul 11th 2008
79. Somber, let me clarify. It seemed like you were implying that belief in the unseen (whatever is ascribed to it and for whatever reason) is not even generally universal.
oneblood at 12:07PM on Jul 11th 2008
80. Oneblood: There is no consistency in religion what so ever, particularly if you look at religions beyond the judeochristian tradition. The most primitive 'shrines' are more than three hundred thousand years old, containing bear skulls in African grave sites. But from those simplistic roots there is a bafflingly convoluted system of faith and belief that simply contradicts the notion of a singular universal entity. The egyptian phaeroh was a god, as was the emperor of rome and Sumer. Asiatic traditions had mixes of supernatural spirits and a great celestial bureaucracy. Australian faiths believed in a mystic space called the dream time.
There is one constant however, in all religions, and that is not that they reflect any universal characteristic in God but that they reflect the values of the culture that invents them. The phaeroh and caesar were autocratic figures wielding great power. Religion was just another tool of control. The celestial bureaucracy reflected the culture of what has always been the largest population culture on the planet. The norse gods were just like the norse. The Aztec gods just like the Aztecs. Either God likes playing pretend in a great number of disguises, or else God and Gods are simply social inventions; tools used to modify behavior in society.
Somber at 12:18PM on Jul 11th 2008
81. I must say however much I side with him on certain theological areas, I have never seen a more self-congratulatory Christian than Dinesh D'Souza.
oneblood at 12:18PM on Jul 11th 2008
82. 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
xxx
According to what I learned decades ago in physical anthropology, cro magnons were indeed h. sapiens, but they were much larger on the average than modern humans. They were only one of three competing branches of hominid in existence at one time.
Interstingly, tiny hominid species that are separate from h. sapiens appear to have survived in isolation on indonesian islands until I think about 13,000 years ago.
This is very newly found evidence but it's already generated a very informative television program going into the physiological picture in layman's terms with good illustrations.
As to any 'debate' regarding evolution it must be framed in genotypic evidence or it's wholly obsolete.
Genomes are completely known now, and the development and sharing of genetic traits and the evidence of their evolution is all molecular and very sound physical biochemistry, not metaphor.
Religion hasn't accepted this yet but they have no more choice than they did about celestial mechanics or flight.
It would be helpful for religion to adjust to reality. I doubt it will change him much, but Thomas Gassett is at least going in that direction. I don't see anything bad about that at all - if religion is sound it has nothing to fear from scientific advancement or informed subjects.
Clif Kuplen at 12:19PM on Jul 11th 2008
83. Oh crap, Dinesh was right all along! This video gives cast iron proof that the progress of man was divinely inspired:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
I'm going to lunch to clear my head.
Mokele Mbembe at 12:21PM on Jul 11th 2008
84. Somber: Hitchen's argument is that there is no God at all. One example of rhetorical evidence towards that argument is God's apparent absenteeism.
PV: There isn't any "apparent absenteeism." Why is nature functioning as nature and example of "absenteeism"? The objection is without merit. If God should have decided to elevate humanity to a higher level 10,000 or 1,000,000 years ago, who cares?
Somber: If he does, however, then he should be able to conclusively prove what was changed, and when.
PV: That's a fine discussion to have, but it's not any sort of objection against Theistic evolution.
Somber: If God truly is a universal being then it is a change that should been seen in all primitive societies.
PV: History of civilization doesn't go back very far. So, that could be a key marker of the dawn of a new era.
Somber: Or, if God is truly selective, it should be observable in the archeological records of the ancient hebrews
PV: The dynasty of the Hebrews is certainly an observable and remarkable phenomenon all its own, but that's a different discussion.
Somber: 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.
PV: But that's not the argument being discussed. Hitchens assumes for the sake of argument that some major evolutionary leap did occur, and then asks **what kind of God would allow the prior state to go on for so long?**
It's a non-objection, any way you slice it.
preteristvision at 12:26PM on Jul 11th 2008
85. Incidently, Oneblood, I do not deny that neanderthals were human. Nor do I deny homo erectus' humanity. Nor homo habilis'. Indeed, I can see the most primitive echoes of humanity in the sign languages of Ko Ko the gorilla. I give each period of human development its due and don't sneer at neanderthals for beind cave men or naked apes. Likewise I do not fault homo erectus for not possessing fire. They were having a hard enough time surviving, but they did and I'm glad of it.
Incidently, you were correct in that all faiths require belief without evidence, but that is like saying all birds have feathers. It hardly addresses the width and depth of the topic in question.
Somber at 12:25PM on Jul 11th 2008
86. Somber,
Would you feel it beneath yourself to go to Vegas and pound this dipshit into the ground for once and for all?
I'll bet we could all chip in for you.
P.S. Love your literary stuff.
Aloha!
Robert at 12:25PM on Jul 11th 2008
87. Consider that some ape man speices walked this Earth for as much as five million years and their brains remained the size of a grapefruit. Apes still living in trees began to grow larger brains, and then suddenly we have modern man. Clearly, this is not a story of evolution, it's the hand of God.
Thomas J Gassett at 12:26PM on Jul 11th 2008
88. Thomas aren't we descendents of plains apes?
JefFlyingV at 12:33PM on Jul 11th 2008
89. Goddess1: But Judaism didn't vanish
PV: The Old Testament Judaism did. It went poof at AD 70. Extinct.
Goddess: And their original unchanged covenant which they believe to be intact and true is still alive with the Hebrews today.
PV: No. The priestly class, the sacrifices, the Temple, the tribes all went poof at AD 70.
Goddess1: This would have also disappeared if the Christians didn't attach themselves to their history and god.
PV: It was their history and god. The "christians" were a bunch of Hebrews who lived in Israel and obeyed the old law until they got the premonition that the old law and dynasty was going to go extinct. They hurriedly sounded the apocalyptic doom and began establishing the New international Judaism that they believed was to survive the doom as the dynastic successor. As we all can see, history uniquely vindicated that one messianic apocalyptic movement.
preteristvision at 12:35PM on Jul 11th 2008
90. DD, your narcissism never fails to amuse me. It also scares me a bit. Fortunately, most seem to see your complete lack of logical skills, which you continue to emply despite chronic misuse. Hence, your repetitious blog and your continued whiny insistance that you be viewed as a scholar. This seems to feed your need for attention, but in reality has turned you into a court jester of academia.
web jones at 12:35PM on Jul 11th 2008