God or no God?

A couple of notables came to St. Louis to debate the existence of God, who may or may not have been in attendance. For the Saint Louis Beacon, Harper Barnes reports on the existential throwdown at Powell Hall between Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens:

D’Souza said “the new atheism is a rebellion against morality.” Hitchens, although saying he was quite comfortable being thought of as part of “the old atheism,” replied that atheism was instead a rebellion against a vision of a “tyrannical and sadistic” God.

D’Souza brought up the so-called “wager” proposed by the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal: If you say you believe in God and you are wrong, what have you lost? But if you reject belief in God and you are wrong, you will be lost. Hitchens responded, “What kind of deity is this that says, ‘If you bet wrong, you are going to be tortured for eternity’?”

And so it went. Pared of its sometimes impressive rhetoric, and of skillful and entertaining arguments on both sides, the whole debate could probably be reduced to the usual endpoint of most such debates: faith. Both men admitted that they could neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, although each said that the preponderance of evidence was on their side. Both said they had chosen to believe as they did.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the debate, sponsored by a Christian organization called the Fixed Point Foundation, was the reductionist definition of God - for purposes of discussion alone, of course - as specifically Christian. Saves time, I suppose.

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