www.tothesource.org has video of Dinesh D'Souza's recent debate with Peter Singer. Nigel Cameron has a summary:
I have debated life and death with Singer. In this latest debate, Dinesh d’Souza tackled him on his denial of the existence of God. Thousands gathered in a gym at Biola University’s campus outside Los Angeles to watch the show. Singer is not simply a theoretician; he defends infanticide and euthanasia, and regards the “sanctity of life” as a mistake. He is something of an extremist. It might be unfair to call him a fundamentalist utilitarian. But if I were being unfair that is what I would call him. He drives widely-held liberal ethical views harder and further than anyone else in the public arena.
Is there a God? D’Souza opened with the 20th century’s litany of atheist crimes – far worse, he noted, than whatever crimes can be attributed to religion, even including the Inquisition, 9/11 and Islamist violence. Hitler and Stalin and Mao and the rest had demonstrated the bankruptcy of their atheist tenets. Singer countered that the debate was not about the bad things that atheists do, but whether God exists at all. Yet he too focused on evil to make his case – the classic case against God, that asks how a world so beset with pain and suffering could have been made by a God who is good. As an add-on he instanced the way in which the Old Testament presents a God who commits and approves genocide; and the New presents a Jesus who expected his Second Coming to happen any time (and was therefore wrong).
D’Souza laid out his rationale for theism: the universe had a beginning; the “laws of nature” had (as Stephen Hawking has said) to be just-so in order for life to arise and flourish. Singer countered that the universe may have had no beginning; that if God made it then where did he come from?; and that scientists do not all agree with Hawking’s contention.
And the debate flowed on, with questions from the audience – some from Christians wanting to underline D’Souza’s case, some from Singer fans, and yet others from unpredictable directions. What did Singer think of the idea that suffering in animals (a big theme of his in his argument against a good God) can be explained through reincarnation - justice winning out as creatures come back to atone for sins in past lives? Singer laughed this off as an incredible theory, and asked what it would mean for a kangaroo to die of thirst because it had been Hitler in a former life. D’Souza called Singer to account for this easy dismissal, and argued that a major theme of all religions is that of cosmic justice: that fairness will, in the end, win out; that what seems unjust in the here and now will one day be set to rights. As Singer noted, atheists don’t find evil to be a problem that needs to be explained; they do not like it, but it is just there.
Did either side win? If I were grading the debaters, I would give them a draw. They were both spunky without being aggressive, and the tennis match of Q and A was well balanced as arguments were raqueted across the podium. Their theme, the greatest theme in the world, was not resolved by a knockout blow. And the audience was reminded, perhaps, that when Jesus debated the Scribes and the Pharisees, and Paul the philosophers on Mars Hill, however compelling their case for belief, they could not compel its acceptance. Some joined the believers; some did not.
So it should not come as a surprise that many leading men and women of our day – the cultural elites who set the pace in our nation and shape the lives we lead – are not people of faith. As Singer pointed out, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two greatest philanthropists in history, are not believers. It is all too easy for Christians to take the view that the unbeliever is not only wrong, but stupid; that the arguments all flow one way; that apologetics, properly done, will sweep all before it. Which is, of course, nonsense – else Jesus and Paul, the Great Debaters of the first century, would have won the world at their first encounter. The unbeliever can make a good case. He can argue back, probe the logic of belief, raise the hard questions like Job did (as D’Souza pointed out), long, long ago.
That’s why we have to debate. We are not afraid of the facts; not perturbed by the skills of those with whom we disagree; not unwilling to trade argument and explanation with the smartest minds and the shrewdest tongues. The assumptions of our once-Christian culture have begun to shift. Time was when it was hard to be an atheist, as the Christian mind was embedded in the culture. Now it is the believer who finds it hard to get a hearing, and harder still to make our case.
But make it we must. We talk too much to ourselves, and too little to the wider world. We have no option but to raise our voices and articulate dissent in a society whose defining terms are now post-Christian. Like the dissidents in Soviet Russia we must not be silent. World and church alike must hear our voice, until like that evil empire the godless structures of the secular mindset begin to crumble as we state, and keep on stating, the truth of Jesus Christ; in season, and out of season.
