An Absentee God?

[Guest]

 

 

 

An Absentee God?  Dinesh D'Souza

 

In my debate with Christopher Hitchens in New York last October he raised a point that I did not know how to answer. 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 sapienshas 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 Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere.

 

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, I'm going to show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted. Second, I'll reveal how Hitchens' argument backfires completely on atheism. For my first 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 notes 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."  But actually Hitchens’ plight is worse than this.  As I pointed out in a recent three-way debate with Hitchens and radio host Dennis Prager, Hitchens’ argument poses a far bigger problem for atheism than it does for theism.

 

To see why this is so, let’s apply an entirely secular analysis and go with Hitchens' premise that there is no God and man is an evolved primate. Well, man's basic frame and brain size haven't changed throughout his terrestrial existence.  So here is the problem. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. Besides some cave paintings, no real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization.  Both the wheel and Egyptian hieroglyphics are only 5000 years old.

 

Imagine a disputed event in court where numerous eyewitnesses gave evidence of the same fact and stood by their testimony so firmly that they would be willing to endure life imprisonment or even the death penalty rather than say the contrary.

 

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, agriculture, 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 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 biblical account of creation.

 

Edited April 12, 2015 by Guest

[Guest]

R.I.P. Hitch hope you're in Heaven.

[Gabriela]

Interesting piece. Thanks, Josh!

[Nihil Obstat]

Interesting argument. Went in an unexpected direction.

[Guest]

I was listening to a Hitchens debate last night and like the author of this piece I was troubled by Hitches argument. It's one of the good points he made. He gets destroyed on other arguments. He has nothing to refute all of the fine tuning arguments. Although this objective seems more then valid. So I googled and found this refutual. Does anyone agree that God perhaps supernaturally put Adam and Eve in the human race at a later time? And that the humans before didn't have souls? Is this heretical to entertain this?

Edited April 12, 2015 by Guest

[Guest]

For some reason it won't let me space properly when I posted. Tried to edit but no luck.

[Ice_nine]

No Josh, I don't think it's heretical. Actually it's a way to reconcile what we know about evolutionary biology and genetics with monogenism. Or so I've heard. There's a long scholarly article that I couldn't quite trudge all the way through but it explains what I'm talking about http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/kemp-monogenism.pdf

I don't really know anything of the doctrinal soundness of said author or said document but from what I remember it seemed legit so, there's some reading for ya!

[Guest]

Thank you will check this out. God bless.

[Guest]

 

[Guest]

Phatmass is acting up. I didn't post the above video in this thread. If a Mediator of Meh could delete it I would appreciate it. 

Edited April 12, 2015 by Guest

[Era Might]

I don't like his argument for a number of reasons, but mainly it's idea of "savage man" as opposed to some "historical man." He throws in human activity as some mark of a divine origin, but just because man has achieved or created something doesn't mean it was good. He mentions dramatic plays, for example, but what are dramatic plays but man's attempt to express his position in a world he is tragically caught in. We create all kinds of social customs, governments, civilizations, but as Thoreau wrote, one generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. Are the outcasts of our society (prisoners, alcoholics, homeless, depressives, abused kids) any much different from so-called "savage man," lost in a world that they will die in, tragically, unwept for, without any hope. I don't think Job much cared about Egyptian pyramids...he suffered, and that was the will of God, to be accepted as a mystery.

[veritasluxmea]

Interesting article and it raises some good points, but my understanding was God didn't "abandon" early humanity. He was bringing salvation through the Jews and as much as possible the primitive religions (for example I've heard that Job was a gentile). 

[Ancilla Domini]

Interesting article and it raises some good points, but my understanding was God didn't "abandon" early humanity. He was bringing salvation through the Jews and as much as possible the primitive religions (for example I've heard that Job was a gentile). 

​My understanding was that He was waiting for the "fullness of time." The Roman Empire provided the known world with relative peace and travel was easy (or at least possible), which must have aided in the spreading of the Christian faith.

(I haven't read the article yet, btw.)

Edited April 14, 2015 by Ancilla Domini