For a couple of years it seemed like the new atheists were going largely unanswered. But now there are several good books rebutting their claims, among them John Lennox's God's Undertaker and Tim Keller's The Reason for God. The latest addition to this literature is Michael Novak's new book No One Sees God. It is a wise and important book.

Novak is a friend of mine and a former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute. He is known for his books celebrating the morality of free markets, notably The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. As a theologian who has written on subjects from Aquinas to existentialism, Novak is well equipped to consider the metaphysical claims of the new atheists.

One of Novak's especially attractive qualities is his ability to find common ground with his opponents. Here he begins by conceding to the atheist that "we are all in the same darkness." No one-not even Moses or Abraham-has set his eyes on God. Novak rejects the certitudes of both the religious fundamentalist and the militant atheist. He intends to explore what he calls "the dark and windswept open spaces between unbelief and belief."

For Novak, life raises bigger questions than the ones answered, and answerable, by science. Ultimately we want to know not merely how things work but also: why are we here? What is our purpose? What is our final destiny? Novak credits religion with addressing the largest moral questions, not only "what is it good to do?" but also "what is it good to be?" and "what is it good to love?"

Novak expresses admiration for some of the leading atheists, notably Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. (He seems less enamored with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.) Modern atheism has its virtues, such as an emphasis on truth over good feelings, and also on honesty and courage in facing the realities of life. Even so, Novak finds it puzzling that these atheists make so little effort to understand how God is experienced by the believer.

"For a believer," Novak writes, "It does not take a prolonged thought experiment to imagine oneself an unbeliever." The believer knows full well where the atheist is coming from. By contrast, Novak suggests, atheists like Hitchens seem to have no empathetic understanding whatsoever of genuine religious conviction. They have no sense of what belief must be like from within.

Novak's point is that this shortcoming makes them poor analysts of religion. All critical reading requires a certain measure of suspended belief. This is as true of the strange but captivating world of Dostoyevsky as it is of Shakespeare's moral universe. When we read Macbeth, for instance, we have to be able to plunge into Shakespeare's world, ghosts and all. No understanding of Macbeth is possible if we begin with rude dismissal, "Of course the whole premise is complete nonsense."

Novak is surprised to discover that in the entire literature of the new atheism "there is not a shred of evidence that the authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own atheism." This is not simply a matter of refusing to apply the vaunted virtue of skepticism to one's own philosophy. It is also a matter of giving an account of why such a tiny minority of people in our culture have embraced vocal atheism. If atheism is so obviously convincing, Novak asks, why are so few people drawn to it? The new atheists offer no answers; indeed, scarcely any of them even raise the question.

Novak likens Hitchens to Thomas Paine, that fiery pamphleteer and partisan of the American Revolution. Novak notes, however, that despite his hostility to Christianity, Paine understood that such concepts as the dignity of man and human rights depended on man's special place in God's creation. Indeed the Jacobins of the French Revolution imprisoned Paine after he warned them that their atheism would undercut the basis of their declaration of human rights. Hitchens seems blissfully unaware of a whole tradition of scholarship, from Tocqueville to Jurgen Habermas, that identifies Christianity as the essential foundation of some of the West's most cherished institutions and values.

In a 2005 lecture in on "Religion in the Public Sphere," Habermas raises a question that is central to Novak's inquiry. Habermas shows that the very idea of toleration is a gift that religious thought has bequeathed to modern secular society. Then he asks: are secular people willing to acknowledge that toleration is always a two-way street? In other words, if religious people are expected to be tolerant of unbelievers, shouldn't secular people learn to be tolerant of their fellow citizens who are believers?

This argument has important implications. If Habermas and Novak are right, the public square should not be viewed as the property of secular citizens. Rather, it is the common ground on which believers and non-believers communicate with each other. It makes no sense to exclude religious convictions from the public sphere if secular convictions are granted full access. An uncritical "separation of church and state" must give way to a shared domain in which all citizens have the right to express their heartfelt convictions.

Proclaiming "nothing is sacred," atheist P.Z. Myers took the Christian eucharist, pierced it with a rusty nail, and threw it into the garbage. Then he posed his action on the world wide web.

Who is Myers? He's a biology professor at the University of Minnesota and a close ally of Richard Dawkins. In fact, Dawkins has praised Myers, conducted public conversations with him, and I count several links to Myers' articles on richarddawkins.net. Dawkins also urged his fans to write in support of Myers.

Myers rose to semi-fame, or perhaps I should say notoriety, when he praised University of Central Florida student Webster Cook who stole the eucharist from a church and held it hostage. Apparently figuring that such antics were more likely to gain attention than his own relatively undistinguished scholarship, Myers decided to get into the act himself.

On his blog Pharyngula, Myers wrote "It's a Frackin' Cracker" and said that if someone would send him a eucharist he would "show you sacrelige, gladly and with much fanfare." Myers' desecration was widely viewed on the web and raised much comment, much of it infuriated--but we can assume that this was Myers' intention.

Asked whether he cared about injuring the feelings of Christians, Myers professed surprise. "I've got so many people writing me and saying that I have seriously hurt them. But what have I done? I have thrown away a cracker."

This would be like someone burning a cross and then saying, "I cannot understand why all those black people are upset? All I did was set fire to a piece of wood." If a child did it, you can possibly say he was innocent. But when a professor acts this way, isn't malevolence the obvious explanation?

The National Catholic Register caught up with Myers recently and asked him the source of his hostility toward religion. "Religion has been selling everybody a bill of goods for so many years. It's about time somebody spoke up and said it's a load of nonsense."

Asked whether Christianity deserves credit for founding the first Western hospitals, universities and even scientific breakthroughs, Myers said, "No. People made those contributions to Western civilization."

But werent' those people Christians acting on their religious convictions? "That's like saying that because for so many years people got smallpox, smallpox is to be credited for all the virtue men have done."

Here we see Myers' thought in all its glorious idiocy. No, Myers, the two are not even comparable. Smallpox has nothing to do with the building of Gothic spires and astronomical observatories and setting up institutions like Harvard and the Red Cross. Christianity was a powerful motivating force in why people did those things. You can find all this out by opening up a history book.

The problem with people like Myers and Dawkins is not that they are complete morons. It is that they are biologists who know something about one thing but pretend that they know a lot about other things. Consequently they come across sounding like morons. Have pity on them.

"Christian God? Jewish God? Or no God?" This was the topic of a very lively Orange County debate between atheist Christopher Hitchens, the Jewish radio host Dennis Prager, and me. The debate was held in the spring at the Bat Yahm Synagogue, and the audience was predominantly Jewish, with a fair representation of Christians and atheists.

This debate is finally online, and you can watch it here.

One might think that this three-way format would benefit Prager and me, because we were the two theists against the atheist. But Hitchens, who is perhaps the most supple debater on the atheist side, did his best to drive a wedge between Prager's position and mine.

For instance, Hitchens hammered Prager on the history of Christian anti-Semitism, leading Prager to make one of the most extraordinary defenses of Christ that I have heard, a defense even more remarkable for its synagogue setting.

Hitchens also tried to get me to dispatch all the Jews in the audience to hell. Aren't you claiming--he asked--that your religion is exclusively true and everyone else's is false? I noted that all three of us on the podium were claiming some form of exclusivity. After all, if Hitchens is right about his atheism it follows that all religions in the world are false. So Hitchens is just as much of an exclusivist as any religious fundamentalist.

Moreover, I noted that Christianity is the only religion that holds another religion, Judaism, to be true. That's why Christians essentially incorporated the entire Old Testament into the Christian Bible. While I believe that Christ is "the way, the truth and the life," I for one am not willing to judge anyone or expel anyone from heaven.

Hitchens on the other hand has said that he doesn't want to go to heaven, which he views as a kind of celestial North Korea. I suspect heaven is full of people who chose God and prayed to Him, "Thy will be done." Hell is reserved for those who by their own free choice refused God and to whom God eventually said, "Thy will be done."

I notice that after posting all my early debates on his website, Richard Dawkins has stopped featuring my recent debates. This is perhaps an indication of how the atheists are faring. Of late I also haven't heard any of these guys call themselves "brights."

If Hitchens can't get the job done, who can? While the pusillanimous Dawkins won't debate me, at least Hitchens keeps trying. My re-match with him is on September 10 in St. Louis, and tickets are available here.

Is there morality without God? This was the topic which I debated with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer on the Riz Khan show on Al-Jazeera Monday. The segment is now up on the web and you can watch it here.

No, I haven't signed on as an Al-Jazeera regular. But the producers of the Riz Khan show on that network seemed a bit disappointed when Richard Dawkins agreed to appear on their show but then threw a tantrum when he found out he was scheduled to debate me. Instead Dawkins insisted on separate segments, with him going second, so that I wouldn't have a chance to challenge his arguments.

Singer is a much braver soul, and truth be told, he strikes me as more articulate and versatile than Dawkins. I suspect the only reason Singer isn't more of an atheist hero is because his social positions are so controversial. Basically Singer has declared that newborns have no rights and can be killed off during the first few weeks of their life, and he would vastly liberalize the rules for infanticide and euthanasia. Singer and I will be debating all this on December 3 at Princeton University. By all means come, but perhaps you should leave the grandparents at home.

In the Al-Jazeera exchange, Singer echoed a theme sounded by some of the street interviews: we don't need God to be good. And in this sense, who can disagree? Of course atheists can be kind and truthful and keep their oaths and contracts. No one is saying that Christians have a monopoly on virtue, or that unbelievers are incapable of it.

Rather, the deeper point is that morality seems built into human nature, and it doesn't have an adequate Darwinian explanation. Singer, an ardent Darwinist, admits this. He said on the show that evolution tells us what we are but it doesn't tell us anything about how we should be. Dawkins too writes that he is Darwinian in his biology but anti-Darwinian in his ethics. According to Dawkins, biology programs selfishness into our genes but we can rise above all that and behave unselfishly. Yet as I pointed out on the show, ants and cheetahs cannot do this. It makes no sense to say, "Bad cheetah! You shouldn't chase after that nice antelope." So where do we evolved primates get this other capacity that frequently operates against our self-interest? This is at least worth reflecting on.

One caller provoked Singer's derision by suggesting that even atheist philosophers get their morality from religion. Singer responded that this was factually wrong. He noted that John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham weren't religious. True, but their utilitarianism is based on the principle of equal respect for human beings, and that is a principle that came into the West because of Christianity. Singer attempted to deny this. He tried to locate this Western egalitarianism in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but he offered nothing to substantiate this far-fetched claim. If there were historians watching the show, I am sure they were shaking their heads. Certainly the American founders didn't get "all men are created equal" from the sayings of Epictetus or the meditations of Aurelius. By their own account, they attributed our egual dignity and our inalienable rights to the "Creator."

I'm looking forward to exploring this topic in greater detail with Singer on his home campus in December. But before that, I have my third debate with Christopher Hitchens coming up September 10 in St. Louis. As Hitchens himself put it, all our debates are different because each time we get better at countering what the other guy said the last time. If you'd like to find out more and get tickets, you can do so here.

Sigmund Freud is no longer the revered figure he once was. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that Freud is no longer routinely assigned even in psychology curricula. In a way, Freud is following the downward path of that other great totem of the last couple of centuries, Karl Marx. It's hard to believe so many intelligent people spent their lives studying these two thinkers. Intellectuals, we have to conclude, are often fatally attracted to far-out theories that tease the mind but that bear little relation to what's actually going on in the world.

Marxism worked well in academic laboratories and only failed miserably when it was actually tried. Similarly for decades Freud spun out his elaborate theories, and they sounded so scientific and so modern and so avant garde. Depression? Well, that's because your sister abused you when you were four, and you have concealed from yourself the memory of it, but if you do hundreds of hours of therapy, you can excavate the source of your anxiety, and by coming to terms with it you can slowly overcome it. But today when you go to the doctor and are diagnosed with depression, he gives you a pill and you feel better. No need for most people to visit the therapist's couch.

Freud also argued that what we are secretly attracted to, we make into a taboo. Freud explained the "incest taboo" by saying that we secretly want to have sex with our mothers and our sisters, and so we repress those feelings and outlaw them. In Freud's words, "The strength of the incestuous wishes can be detected behind the prohibition against them."

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker pointed out the shortcoming of this theory. Pinker notes that by Freud's logic the fact that humans are averse to eating cow dung shows that we secretly want to eat it. Pinker's point is that there are sound evolutionary reasons both for avoiding cow dung and for avoiding incest. The former is unhealthy and attracts disease-carrying insects; the latter results in biological abnormalities. So natural selection produces humans who avoid both. Once again, Freudian fantasy is replaced with a much more plausible scientific alternative.

I've been reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion, where Freud makes the case that religion is a form of "wish fulfillment." Freud writes that for the individual "life is hard to bear," and beyond this there is "the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found." And so to "make helplessness tolerable" man invents God and religion not because they are true but because we wish them to be true. " For Freud, one may say, Christianity is adult Disneyland. We forget that Freud is the author of this portrait of religion that is widely espoused in our time.

Well, let's examine this Freudian explanation in an entirely secular and rational way. Imagine a bunch of people who have gathered in a room because they want to avoid life's difficulties--sickness, suffering, death--by making up a religion that will make them feel better. I can entirely see how such a group would come up with the concept of heaven. Heaven is a place where there is no suffering and no death. Eternal bliss would surely fit into my wish-fulfillment scheme.

But I don't see why this group would come up with the concept of hell. (We are not talking about why priests might later use the concept to enforce doctrinal obedience or institutional loyalty. We are talking about why wish-fulfilling humans would invent the concept in the first place.) Hell is not only worse than sickness but also worse than death, because death is merely the end, while hell implies eternal separation from God.

I also don't see why seekers of wish-fulfillment would come up with Christian morality. Who needs the Ten Commandments or other such rules which make our lives more difficult by asserting a series of "Thou Shall Nots"? Even Christians recoil from the severe demands of their ethical code. Recall the church father Augustine, who kept putting off his conversion to Christianity, praying to God, "Make me chaste, O Lord, but not yet." In other words, a project of wish-fulfillment would seem to dictate a much more libertine social morality than the one we find in the Old and New Testaments.

Bottom line: Judaism and Christianity, not to mention the other great religions, hardly look like they are the product of mere wishful thinking. In fact, they posit a God and a moral universe that makes some fairly stern demands on humans. It's almost wishful to think that God does not exist, so that we can escape those demands. This is a point that does not seem to have occurred to poor Sigmund Freud.

What is the source of that liberty, equality and fraternity that are now the guiding principles of the West, if not the modern world?

Historians note the anomaly that these principles originated and developed only in Western civilization. In this sense, they are not universal. Of late, however, these principles are being exported to the rest of the world. One may say they are Western in origin but universal in their application.

But where do the principles come from? With the death of Heidegger and Sartre, Jurgen Habermas is now regarded as perhaps our leading living philosopher. Habermas is also an atheist. Yet when Habermas found out that the European Union in its charter gave full acknowledgement to ancient Greece and Rome, but none to Christianity, he erupted in learned outrage.

Habermas's argument is that it is philosophically illiterate to locate the roots of the West in Athens but not in Jerusalem. In fact, Habermas argues that Jerusalem--by which he means Judaism and Christianity--is far more responsible than Athens for the modern principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. In "A Time of Transition," Habermas writes:

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.

Habermas's point is that there is too much arrogance in contemporary atheism. Even the atheist is standing on mountain erected by Christianity. How ungrateful it is to scorn the mountain that is still holding you up! How ridiculous the posture of the man who cannot acknowledge the very foundation that sustains him from below!

This is what Christians mean when they say that America is a Christian society. This is not a call for theocracy or "rule of the priests" but rather a call for a public acknowledgement of the historic role of Christianity in shaping our institutions, our values and our culture. The opinions of several leading Supreme Court justices on church-and-state issues would benefit greatly from a slight familiarity with the history that Habermas is talking about.

Habermas's argument would have struck a chord with the greatest atheist of modern times, the philosopher Nietzsche. Nietzsche argued that if you want to get rid of the Christian God, at least have the honesty and the guts to repudiate the Christian ideals of human dignity, human equality and human liberty.

Yet our village atheists want to have it both ways. They want to reject God but preserve at least certain core aspects of the Christian legacy. Nietzsche would have had nothing but scorn for these little men of unbelief, Lilliputians hurling their tiny javelins at the Christian God while they continue to live off His inheritance.

My Youtube exchange with Richard Dawkins on Al-Jazeera is finally up on the web. You can watch my segment here and the subsequent Dawkins segment here. This is the famous "debate that never was." And that's the real pity. Dawkins insisted on appearing separately from me and being interviewed after me. This way he ensured that I could not rebut anything he said on the show. Fortunately I have an AOL blog where I can carry on the conversation.

Dawkins made some good points, noting for instance that evolution does not rely on mere "chance," but he also made some obvious blunders. When a caller pointed out that World War II was motivated in substantial part by a "survival of the fittest" ideology, Dawkins pretended to be completely baffled. He proclaimed the caller's reference "absolute nonsense." Yet Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler provides extensive documentation that the Nazis repeatedly invoked Darwinian evolution and that Nazi doctrine used "survival of the fittest" as a virtual recruiting phrase. So Dawkins is either historically ignorant or wilfully obtuse.

Here I want to address Dawkins's response to my argument that the effect that is the universe requires a causal explanation. It seems unreasonable in the extreme to say that even though nature had a beginning, somehow nature is the cause of itself. So God is the name we give to the supernatural being that is the cause of nature as a whole. Dawkins argued: "This leaves open the question of where did the creator come from?" Since the creator is this "great big complicated thing," what good does it do to invoke one complex thing to explain another? "If you postulate a designer you haven't explained anything." Basically what Dawkins is saying is that there is no point in using complex explanation A to account for complex phenomenon B if you cannot account for A.

This is a fallacy. We can see this by applying the logic to evolution itself. The logic of evolution is a "great big complicated thing" with all its elements of replication, natural selection, mutations, genetic drift, and so on. Yet it is invoked to explain another complicated thing: the exquisite fit between living creatures and their surroundings. How reasonable would it be to argue: "We are invoking one complicated thing, namely evolution, to explain another, namely living things. Yet this leaves open the question of where evolution came from. We have no idea how and why evolution originally started. Since we cannot account for evolution, our explanation is useless. Simply to postulate evolution is to explain nothing." This is precisely Dawkins's argument regarding God, and here we can see how it boomerangs on evolution!

But consider the argument itself more closely. Is it really true that Complex Explanation A for Complex Phenomenon B only works if we can give a full account of A? Actually it is not true. Gravity may account for why objects fall at a certain pace, but this does not require that we give an account for where gravity comes from or why it exists in the first place. If we find various signs of intelligent life on another planet we can conclude that there are aliens on that planet without having any idea of who created them or where they came from. In summary, the best explanation for something does not require that we also provide an explanation for the explanation.

The problem I think for Dawkins is that his trademark snorts and sneers only work against televangelists who do not do much more than hurl Bible verses at their opponents. When he is confronted with history, philosophy, and logic, Dawkins seems to have very little to say. And perhaps this explains his peculiar insistence that I be given no chance whatever to respond to his statements on the Riz Khan show.

I appeared Monday on the Riz Khan show on Al-Jazeera with Richard Dawkins, and guess what? We had a civilized three-way dialog. No one erupted into Hitler-type yells. The Gestapo didn't show up, nor the Inquisition police, to drag Richard Dawkins from the studio. Host Riz Khan interviewed me for the first half of the show on the compatibility of Darwinism and religion, and on the issue of how to teach evolution in the schools. Then Khan interviewed Dawkins for the second half, mainly on why he encounters resistance to evolution and also why he rejects arguments for God as the creator of the universe.

Unfortunately Al-Jazeera hasn't yet posted the show on the web, so I'll withhold comment on Dawkins's central argument until I can link to it. But I do think that there is something on which everyone who sees the show can agree. Dawkins's excuses for not debating me (Dinesh is a "creationist" or Dinesh uses Hitler-style "yells and shrieks") are utterly absurd. Why won't Dawkins simply admit he's afraid? I don't really mind a coward as long as he's an honest coward.

I'm not the only one befuddled by Dawkins. So is evolutionary biologist and atheist David Sloan Wilson. Several months ago Wilson wrote a savage review of Dawkins's The God Delusion for Michael Shermer's magazine Skeptic. Basically Wilson said that Dawkins is supposed to be an expert about evolution but his book fails to examine religion from an evolutionary perspective. Rather, Dawkins insists on faulting religion based on claims--theological, philosophical, historical--that lie entirely outside his area of knowledge. No wonder that Dawkins's one-paragraph "refutations" of the likes of Aquinas have an amateurish, even juvenile, quality.

Wilson argues that a true scientist would develop a hypothesis about religion and then test it to see how it holds up. For instance, against Dawkins's and view that religion is a kind of destructive virus, a culturally transmitted epidemic that may benefit its parasitic carriers (the preachers) but certainly not those who succumb to the infection, Wilson offers a rival hypothesis. Wilson's view is that "religious groups are products of cultural group selection....A given religion adapts its members to their local environment, enabling them to achieve by collective action what they cannot achieve alone or even together in the absence of religion. Even though elements of religion often appear bizarre, irrational, and downright dysfunctional to believers, when examined closely most of them will make sense."

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson offers the case study of the Calvinists in sixteenth-century Geneva. At a time when factionalism and internecine conflict was rending the social fabric of the city, Calvin and his deputies introduced the Ecclesiastical Ordinances. Wow, do they sound harsh! Fines for dancing and jail for gambling are only the beginning. Yet Wilson surveys a wide body of historical scholarship that concludes that "there is little doubt that Calvinism was instrumental in solving the problem of factionalism and helping the city of Geneva survive as a social entity."

How? Basically Wilson found that morals are the key to restoring social morale. (The two terms "moral" and "morale" are connected by more than the similarity of their sounds.) Wilson writes, "I was especially impressed by how the mechanisms for preventing cheating extended to the leaders in addition to the rank and file. The head of the church was not a single individual but a group of pastors who made decisions by consensus. Calvin shared all the duties of a pastor, despite his enormous additional workload as primary architect of the religion. Double accounting methods were used to prevent the inappropriate use of charitable funds. The egalitarian spirit of Calvinism is perhaps best illustrated by the duty of caring for dying plague victims. This life-threatening task was decided by lottery."

Wilson concludes, based upon this data, that at least in this one important case, the Dawkins view is wrong and his hypothesis is vindicated. The Calvinist leaders were not out to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is simply wrong to say that they got ahead while everyone else suffered. Rather, the opposite is true. Calvinism's dour doctirnes of original sin and predestination contributed to an unprecedented identification of leaders and followers and caused the introduction of checks and balances to curb the suspect tendencies in human nature. To put it in blunt evolutionary terms, Calvinism was socially adaptive.

So what does Dawkins have to say about all this? The short answer is: nothing. Dawkins wrote a lame response to Skeptic, noting that he didn't purport in his book to be using an evolutionary understanding of religion. This would be like a doctor saying, "Well, I wasn't claiming to be giving a medical opinion." I suppose Dawkins considers it normal for an evolutionist to ignore his own field and dispense folk prescriptions based on a cursory persusal of other disciplines. I hope that Wilson does not invite Dawkins to debate this issue. What excuse will inventive Richard come up with this time?

Dear Richard,

We're both scheduled to discuss issues of Darwin and God on the Riz Khan Show on Al-Jazeera on Monday, July 21. Viewers who are interested can watch the show live here. The segments will also be posted on Youtube and I'll link to them.

But a few hours after I mentioned our forthcoming debate on this blog, you posted a comment on your website essentially accusing me of making the whole thing up. So first you accuse me of having a Hitler voice, and now you accuse me of misrepresentation.

Here's what happened. Al-Jazeera contacted me a while ago, asking me to appear in a point-counterpoint format with a leading opponent. I said I was writing about God and atheism, and suggested I appear with a prominent atheist. They chose you. Then the producer Zeresnaey Abraha confirmed that you were ready to do it. Late last week I got a studio notice from Al-Jazeera giving me the time for me to arrive at their rented San Diego studio. The other guest was listed as "Richard Dawkins" and your studio details at Oxford were given.

Apparently when you found out that the two of us were booked on the same show, same segment, you rushed to the producer to insist that we appear separately. Your pretext according to Abraha was that you have a long-standing pledge not to debate "creationists." I can understand that you don't want to give legitimacy to people who flatly deny evolution or who insist that the earth is less than 6,000 years old. The only problem with you invoking this pledge is that I believe in evolution and am not, nor have I ever been, a "creationist."

Apparently the format now is that we will each be interviewed separately. So technically it's no longer a debate, although it is most certainly an exchange of rival ideas on the same topic. It's a pity that we cannot engage each other directly.

To be honest, I find your behavior extremely bizarre. You go halfway around the world to chase down televangelists to outsmart them in an interview format that you control, but given several opportunities to engage the issues you profess to care about in a true spirit of open debate and inquiry, you duck and dodge and run away.

If we debate on the Riz Khan show, a format comparable to ABC "Nightline," you cannot seriously think I will drown you out with Hitler shouts. And if I tried that in an academic setting I would make a complete fool of myself. I have done several debates with your fellow atheists Michael Shermer and Christopher Hitchens (and have just scheduled my second debate this fall with Peter Singer) because all of them have consistently found me a serious and worthy opponent. Hitchens told me in Las Vegas that each time our debates are different because both of us adjust to what the other guy said the last time around. This is how knowledge is tested, through the process of critical exchange, isn't it?

You are supposed to be the public champion of science and reason and enlightened discourse. This is basically what your title at Oxford says, right? This is why the Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi is paying your salary, isn't it? So are we to believe that despite the seriousness of the issues involved, issues that engage your whole life's work, you won't even stand up and defend your views even in a hospitable setting like Oxford or any other venue of your choice?

Many years ago I read The Selfish Gene and was deeply impressed. What especially struck me was your intellectual audacity, your willingness to jump into a big debate and take on the big questions, and of course your literary eloquence. If you are so confident that your position is right, and that belief in God is an obvious delusion, surely you should be willing to vindicate that position not only against Bible-toting pastors but also against a fellow scholar and informed critic like me!

If not, you are nothing but a showman who takes on unprepared and unsuspecting opponents when you yourself control the editing, but when a strong opponent shows up you manufacture reasons to avoid him. Somehow, I would have thought the author of 'The Selfish Gene would be made of sterner stuff. .

My Las Vegas debate with Christopher Hitchens continues to attract attention and comment. If you'd like to read an account of the debate, you can do so here.

Also on Monday July 21, at 4.30 pm Eastern time, I'll be debating Richard Dawkins (yes, Richard Dawkins!) on Al-Jazeera (yes, that Al-Jazeera). This is a noteworthy development because Dawkins has so far refused to debate me. But now we're appearing together on the Riz Khan television show, which I understand has some 25 million viewers worldwide. If you want to watch Monday's debate live you can watch it here. The segment will also be posed on the web and I will link to it on this blog.

I also hope that, upon seeing for himself that I am not a Hitlerite kind of speaker, Dawkins will summon up the courage to step into the public arena with me. Like one of the atheist commenters recently said on Dawkins's own website: all the best spokesmen for unbelief have gotten a whipping from this D'Souza guy and it's now up to Dawkins to try and redeem the reputation of atheism.

Given that my thoughts are currently focused on how to deal with Dawkins, I'm going to post here on a question that seems to mystify him and many other scientific atheists. These fellows wonder: if there is reasonably good evidence for evolution--as, by the way, both Dawkins and I believe there is--why do around 50 percent of Americans refuse to accept it? The conventional wisdom among Dawkins and others is that Americans oppose evolution because they are religiously committed to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.

But there is a much better explanation of why Americans reject evolution: the idiotic claims of leading champions of evolution who are promoting an atheist agenda. Consider Dawkins himself, rebutting the claim that there are significant "gaps" in the fossil record. Dawkins concedes that there are such gaps, but then writes this: "The gaps, far from being anoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect."

In other words, the absence of evidence for evolution is itself proof that the theory is correct! This is so bizarre that it makes one wonder what the presence of evidence might do to this theory. Would a complete fossil record without gaps be evidence against Darwinian evolution, as we hear that Dawkins and his fellow biologists "exactly" and "positively" expect that such evidence should not be present?

Dawkins finally puts his cards on the table by saying of evolution: "Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available." And if Dawkins is dismissed as a crank, here is Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker making the same point. "Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

We have here the weird spectacle of so-called scientists who are so wedded to a theory that they cannot even imagine it not to be true. This is a level of dogmatism that would embarrass any theist. Even the strongest religious believer can imagine the possibility that there is no God. So how can these self-styled champions of reason adopt so closed-minded an approach?

The short answer is given by Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, who in a 1997 essay in the New York Review of Books makes a revealing admission: "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant proises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment--a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation for the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori commitment to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

And you thought I was making this stuff up! No wonder Americans are skeptical of these apostles of skepticism. They are peddling their own metaphysical dogmas in the name of science, even though few are as honest as Lewontin in admitting it.

Modesty is one of my great virtues, and that is why I am always worried when people praise me too much. I'm starting to become concerned I'll end up like that atheist megalomaniac Nietzsche, whose autobiography Ecce Homo contains such chapter titles as "Why I Am So Wise" and "Why I Write Such Good Books."

This past weekend I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas. Hitchens is probably America's leading atheist and is widely regarded as unbelief's best debater. Richard Dawkins raves about Hitchens' oratorical prowess. Entering the debate, the odds seemed stacked against me: the organizers warned me that the vast majority of the 1,000 libertarians in the audience would be in Hitchens' camp.

Yet when the debate was finished the moderator called for a vote on "who won the debate." By a show of hands, I did! In order to be magnanimous, I said that what really mattered was how many people were on each side prior to the debate. But Hitchens burst in to say that he would have lost anyway! Later several atheists came up to me and said that although they were rooting for Hitchens, they had voted for me because they felt I had prevailed decisively.

I also spoke at a special luncheon event at FreedomFest. My talk was introduced by atheist Michael Shermer, the eidtor of Skeptic magazine and author of Why Darwin Matters. Shermer commented that with the passing of William F. Buckley, I am one of the leading defenders of conservatism and freedom in America. He also added, "Whatever your beliefs, you should read Dinesh's book What's So Great About Christianity. It is the best defense of Christianity that has ever been published."

In addition to dealing with atheist accolades, I also have to contend with the same from fellow conservatives and Christians. The July-August issue of the American Spectator contains a review of my book written by Matthew Kenefick. With the title, "C.S. Lewis, Move Over," the reivew begins this way: "In his new book What's So Great About Christianity Dinesh D'Souza stakes his claim as one of the great Christian apologists." The review ends thus: "In any case, D'Souza has written a book that both G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis would have appreciated and that perhaps even Billy Graham and Pope Benedict XVI could agree is a masterpiece of modern apologetical writing destined to set the standard for years to come."

With comments like this, I am in serious danger of getting a big head and losing my reputation for self-effacing modesty. I suppose I should take consolation from the fact that I have some vitriolic detractors on this blog. But what credibility do these poor fools have with their unimaginative insults and wishful "Hitchens owned you!" declarations? Then an audience biased in favor of Hitchens votes me the winner and Hitchens himself admits that he lost the debate!

Atheists like to think of themselves as akin to champions of the round earth, confronted by religious ignoramuses who keep insisting that the earth is flat. But is it even conceivable that a round-earth advocate should lose a debate to a flat-earth advocate? To put the question differently, if atheists are truly the party of reason, and believers like me are truly the party of "blind faith," how come reason keeps getting its butt kicked?

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.

What happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas. On Friday July 11 the libertarian conference FreedomFest will have, as its featured event, a debate on "Christianity, Islam and the War on Terror" between Christopher Hitchens and me. The media will be there, and the organizers also expect to have the debate up on the web. (Just in case Richard Dawkins is listening, I'll have to remember not to use Hitler-style shrieks and yells.)

In thinking about this debate, I'm reminded of an argument that Hitchens made in our New York debate last October. At that time I did not know how to answer his point. So I employed an old debating strategy: I ignored it and answered other issues. But Hitchens' argument bothered me.

Here's what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let's say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man's horrible condition. After all, cave-man's plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn't really care.

Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, "It's time to get involved." Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn't bother with China or India or Persia or Egypt. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.

Here is the thrust of Hitchens' point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?

I'm going to answer this argument in two ways. First, in this blog I'm going to show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted. Second, in a future blog I'll reveal how Hitchens' argument backfires completely on atheism. For today's argument I'm indebted to Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

An adept numbers guy, Kreps noters that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.

"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."

I have to agree with Kreps's conclusion: "Sorry Hitchens. And Hallelujah."

The philosopher Leo Strauss once spoke of the reductio ad Hitlerum. By this he meant the promiscuous tendency of people to try to score a debating point by comparing their opponents to Hitler. The form of the argument is something like this: "My opponent doesn't like strawberry ice cream. Hitler didn't like strawberry ice cream. My opponent is just like Hitler." Strauss's point was that the reductio ad Hitlerum is the mark of the lazy and illogical mind.

Sure enough, here is Richard Dawkins employing the reductio against me in a recent comment on his website richarddawkins.net. Referring to me and a conservative rabbi named Boteach, Dawkins writes: "It occurs to me that people like Boteach and D'Souza may be honestly unaware that they shriek and yell in such an unbecoming way. Maybe this is just what preachers of a certain kind do. So people who profession is to preach, or who live their lives surrounded by preachers, just don't hear their ugly yells and shrieks as we do. They have become so inured to the preaching style of yelling that the resemblance to Hitler passes them by.

"I'm not suggesting that Boteach and D'Souza have literally damaged their ears. But at a higher cortical level they may have become desensitized through years of preaching, and exposure to preachers, so they don't hear, and literally and honestly don't understand, the strong resemblance to the hideous vocal style of Hitler. Once again, I need to emphasize that the comparison with Hitler is limited to vocal style. Of course nobody is suggesting that either Boteach or D'Souza have similar opinions to Hitler, or resemble him in any other way at all.

"But imagine listening to a Boteach speech or a D'Souza speech or a Hitler speech with no knowledge of English or German. I suspect that you'd hardly notice the difference. Contrast it with a speech by Christopher Hitchens. The voice is strong, even a little thrilling. But there's no hysteria there. The words match the content: measured, thoughtful, strong and powerful but never hysterical."

Had this not appeared on Dawkins' website, I would have thought it parody. But who can bring himself to laugh? Does Dawkins have any idea of how gross it is to compare a rabbi to Hitler on the sole ground that both men had a tendency to raise their voices? If this isn't anti-Semitism at the very least it shows a shocking disregard for what the Holocaust means to Jews. Perhaps the kindest explanation is that Dawkins has a pathological hatred for the clergy, and Boteach is a rabbi.

I, on the other hand, am a scholar and author. Dawkins, who knows this, weirdly insinuates that I am a preacher or spend most of my time with preachers. This couldn't be further from the truth. I have been a secular writer for 20 years and mostly I speak to university audiences and business groups. Moreover, the atheists I debate, like Michael Shermer and Peter Singer and Christopher Hitchens, routinely tell me how effectively I use wit and repartee and rhetorical understatement and learned analogies to make my points. Far from using "yells" and "shrieks," the only time I can recall even raising my voice was during my debate with Daniel Dennett, and this was not because I was upset but only because the microphone was not working properly.

I suspect that Dawkins has come up with this pathetic reductio ad Hitlerum in order to justify his cowardice in not debating me. "I can't debate Dinesh because he will use his Hitler voice to shout me down." Isn't the real problem that Dawkins has used his zoologist's credentials in order to wander into fields (physics, astronomy, history, phiosophy, anthropology, theology) where his knowledge is embarrassingly limited? I suspect he's worried that in a debate I will exposure his ignorance and make him an international object of ridicule.

Why not prove me wrong, Richard? Come out from under your desk and take me up on my invitation to debate. I promise to speak in whispers!

And here's some news from our Department of Atheists Who Aren't Wimps: On Friday July 11, I will debate Christopher Hitchens at the big libertarian conference Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. Our topic is "Christianity, Islam and the War on Terror." For more information go to freedomfest.com or simply click here.

There's an item on BoingBoing about a recent AP report that at certain cemeteries, hymns have been almost entirely replaced by secular songs as funeral music. And not secular like "Happy Birthday," but like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Highway to Hell." Among the top picks: "My Way" and "Wonderful World."

We've noticed this trend. We were at a wake once and the mix included - no joke - "Don't Get Around Much Anymore." Personally, we'd go for a little "Farther Along," or "Amazing Grace," but to each his or her own.

Anyone have any song requests, or any crazy funeral music anecdotes to share?