A Response to Professor Millican's Response

My responses to Professor Millican's contribution on an earlier thread are interleaved with that response below. The exchange begins with the Professor's opening words. My rippostes are marked with asterisks.

 

Dear Peter (or "Mr Hitchens" if you want to be formal), You're very thin-skinned! When I say that what you believe might - on your own principles - be of interest to a psychologist, but not to someone who wants to know the truth about God's existence, I'm just indicating the subject regarding which your belief - on those principles - provides relevant evidence (because you make belief a matter of choice). You respond that this is "just rude", but it isn't even the least bit insulting - I said "psychologist", not "psychiatrist", and there was no implication whatever that your wish for God to exist is irrational.

 

***No doubt, though Professor Millican did elsewhere suggest my position was irrational, and is about to do it again (see below) .  I don’t mind at all if the Professor wants to be rude. I am, as many contributors have cause to know, quite ready to be rude myself when I think the occasion justifies it, and I am happy to repeat my general rudeness to the God-haters who infest the comments slot here. They are boring, mainly because they assume a superiority they don’t possess, and so don’t respond to anything said by me or anyone else to whom they believe themselves to be superior.

 

In this case,  I just doubt whether it was very helpful to the Professor’s argument to make what looked suspiciously like a jibe.  I do wish people who don’t know me would stop calling me ‘thin-skinned’. If I suffered from any such problem I would have gone into hiding long ago.

 

The Professor continues ‘Indeed this is a psychological truth about me as well as you! Later, you suggest that an "accusation of irrationality ... is intended to be mildly abusive". Such sensitivity makes me wonder if a psychiatrist might be the appropriate recourse! (That's a joke - if you have a sense of humour.)

 

**It is famously well-known among my critics that I have absolutely no sense of humour, and that I am an imperialist racist fascist homophobic sexist bigot (have I forgotten anything here?).It would therefore obviously be best for the humorous Professor to proceed on this basis.

 

The Professor continues :’But for avoidance of doubt, I think that someone who forms their beliefs on the basis of wishful thinking is, indeed, *irrational*: if that's abusive, then live with it, because it's true.’

 

***Now, that’s talking. ‘You’re irrational. So there. Nah. It’s true’. I’ve always loved the way professors turn out to be just like schoolboys, once they get going. We popular journalists, of course, are all gentleman philosophers, deep down.

 

 

The professor again:’ For someone so sensitive to potential rudeness, you're surprisingly rude to others - calling them "boring God-hating fanatics". You also suggest - without any evidence - that those of us who are sceptical about God must be evil people motivated to evade justice.’

 

***I deal with the issue of rudeness above.  I feel it is time that the smug, self-satisfied attitude of the God-haters was countered with a bit more self-confidence by my side. When the recording of this debate is available, readers will be able to see , for instance, a childish mockery of Christian worship smirkingly performed by one of the anti-God speakers (not the Professor). I don’t think there is any reason why believers should put up with this sort of thing, or leave its authors without something to remember us by.  

 

 

 

I don’t think I use the expression ‘evil people’. That is the professor’s phrase. And his careless invention of a statement I haven’t made gives us a point by which we can enter his misunderstanding.

 

Christians do not believe that they are good, nor do they believe that non-believers are evil. They recognise that all human creatures are capable of good and evil, and that , except perhaps for a few saints, all humans who have lived any time at all have long catalogues of irrevocable wrongdoing behind them, much of it known only to them (and in the view of Christians, to God). The Christian (and this is why the jump from Deism to Christian theism is so common) is consoled by the extraordinary sacrifice of Christ himself, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation for the sins of the whole world. This can only be grasped by those who understand the nature of the world before Christ, and the habits of pagans (particularly their fondness for sacrifices, sometimes including sacrifices of their own children). Christianity ended sacrifice. That was one of the most important things about it, and the reason why the pagan religions (already demoralised and weary) were so thoroughly displaced by it.  There is an interesting essay to be written on the revival of something strangely like sacrifice and of idol-worship  in the modern Godless civilisation (the sacrifice of children for worldly gain , either through abortion or abandonment in nurseries is striking, as is the worship of the motor car and of celebrity).

 

But I’ll leave that for another time. The point is that the operation of Divine Grace allows the Christian to confess, acknowledge and if possible atone for his wrongs, and to seek and obtain forgiveness for them . There are disputes about the operation of this forgiveness, but it is essential to the Christian faith.

 

The unbeliever, often unschooled in Christianity, or even taught to be, or just resolved to be, contemptuous of the idea of vicarious redemption, just has his guilt and his conscience. Conscience, of course, is an awkward concept for the Godless. They have experienced it, but they cannot consistently believe that it reflects any absolute measure of good or evil, since no contortion of evolutionary theory can provide a convincing explanation of such a thing.

 

They are left only with a feeling that they do not wish at any stage to be presented with an account for the things whereof their consciences are afraid.

I will not here catalogue the myriad things which modern urban people do to unborn children, infants,  schoolmates, elderly parents, wives, girlfriends (I find the great majority of militant God-haters are male),  work colleagues, subordinates, shop assistants, fellow-passengers on public transport,  neighbours, other road-users, all the time. But there is a large burden of guilt, and if it cannot be lifted from their shoulders by Grace, then some other solution must be found. Often it takes the form of public virtue, aggressive left-wing self-righteousness about racism, the third world, Barack Obama, Yugoslavia, the middle east, you name it. But it doesn’t solve the problem, only pushes it away. The atheist has the same guilt as the Christian. He just has nowhere to put it. And the longer he lets it fester unacknowledged, the more he hates the idea that it might be important, let alone judged.

 

Just as the man who seeks justice for himself comes in time to realise that in this case he must expect justice to be done to him, the person who does not want justice done to him comes to dislike the idea of it in general. The lawbreaker comes to loathe the law.

Where the justice is divine, and resides in eternity, there is a simple solution to this. Abolish God and eternity. You can do so by declaring they don't exist. Nobody can prove you wrong.

 

 

Professor Millican says :’ You imply that you "perfectly well" know this accusation to be "accurate because it once applied to me", but his is ridiculous: even if you were as obnoxious as you said you were on Thursday night, that implies nothing whatever about the rest of us.’

 

*** Oh, I think we are all pretty similar, though I concede that I am probably worse than most people.

 

Professor Millican then says ‘It would also be extraordinarily arrogant to claim - just because you are unswayed by any evidence less than a proof (as you apparently admit) - that therefore your opponents are subject to the same limitation.

 

***It is not a question of being ‘swayed’. This isn’t about being swayed. It is about a decisive allegiance to an immensely potent and influential view of the world and of life. But at the same time it concerns an issue where proof is not available. I cannot think of any matter of comparable importance where the crucial decision cannot be taken on the basis of knowledge, and/or of probability measured by an assessment of objectively-measurable facts. I should hope anyone would be subject to the same limitation. There’s also the point of what on earth evidence is in this case. The professor barely touches on this decisive  question (below). If you prefer belief, you will find evidence of God’s existence everywhere from dung beetles to DNA. If you don’t, you will find evidence for His non-existence in the same places.

 

The Professor again:’ To come to the intellectual content of what you say, I fully agree that: 1. there can be disagreement about what constitutes evidence. 2. the force of evidence is impossible to quantify. 3. "evidence is not a synonym for proof". But I disagree when you say that because I consider traditional theism to be "very unlikely" rather than "utterly impossible", I should be counted as "agnostic". If so, I should be counted as "agnostic" about whether there are invisible aliens on Mars, and many other things I consider vanishingly unlikely (but not "utterly impossible").

 

***Oh dear, he does disappoint me. This is such teenage stuff.  It’ll be Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy next. Professors are supposed to do better than this. The existence or non-existence of invisible aliens on Mars would explain nothing currently unexplained. An eternal creator outside time, by contrast, answers the deepest questions of the universe, though not necessarily in a way the professor finds pleasing. Surely he knows that many notable scientists ( I think especially of Professor Polkinghorne, an ordained minister of the Church) are religious believers. John Lennox explained rather eloquently the other night how compatible belief is with science. Leave me aside. I'm just a jobbing scribbler.  Shouldn’t learned people show more respect for each other than to argue in this tickle-minded way? It is the explanatory power of the idea of God that has made it so influential, among many people far more learned than the Professor.  Can’t he just acknowledge this and drop the giggling, 19th century smugness?

 

The Professor writes ‘ You seem to be saying - please explain if I have this wrong - that there are essentially three assessments that could be made regarding any proposition: (a) It's certain; (b) It's certainly false; (c) It's a matter of choice. This seems to me to betray a lack of grasp of probability: that it's possible for something to be very or even *overwhelmingly unlikely* without being certain.’

***Wrong, not of ‘any’ proposition. Only of any proposition where proof is impossible, but where a choice, if not absolutely essential, is pressing, important and influential over every aspect of our lives. I cannot at the moment think of any proposition which answers to this description, apart from the one we were discussing at the Oxford Union the other night. I’m not saying there isn’t one, just that I can’t think of one.  

The Professor :'This seems to me to betray a lack of grasp of probability: that it's possible for something to be very or even *overwhelmingly unlikely* without being certain.'

***As I keep saying, his view of what is 'overwhelmingly unlikely' is subjective and not measurable in any independent, objective way. I don't share his view, because I am inclined towards belief. He doesn't share mine, because he is not inclined towards belief. This is quite a boring fafct. The interesting matter for discussion, as I keep saying, is why we differ.

If Professor Millican needs more than 500 words to rebut this, he can of course be exempted from the limit.