Time Immortal

From P. Z. Myers to Richard Dawkins, one struggles to find an iconoclast of atheism who is willing to actually stick his neck out and display a little courage.

In the case of P. Z. Myers, well…it’s been two weeks, and he still hasn’t made good on his threat to desecrate a Eucharistic host. And he sounded so defiant, so confident, earlier this month!

In the case of Richard Dawkins, well…he just doesn’t have the stones to debate an intellectual equal. Oh, he’s fine against two-bit televangelists. But he seems to be attempting to do everything in his power to avoid having to go up one-on-one against the likes of .

These are good events to see transpire; they give hope. After all, many people have wedded their own philosophical views to the tripe that the likes of Dawkins, Myers, Christopher Hitchens, and other “New Atheists” churn out; that such tripe can be shown up for what it is so easily, and that its proponents can be shown up as cowards so consistently, suggests that in the long run, this new atheism won’t last.

In that, it is rather like most other heresies the Church has had to endure.

Evidently, Christopher Hitchens posed a question to Dinesh D’Souza, who came back with a rather surprising answer that very handily turned Hitchens’ supposed point back around to incriminate atheism just a little bit.

This seems to be a popular tactic (Vox Day uses it as well), and one which can be applied fairly consistently. But what I was struck by was not the reversal itself, but rather the numbers involved.

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 suppose some will be tempted to attempt to argue against this by complaining that God’s timing is still suspect — why not incorporate the other 2%? D’Souza doesn’t quite deal witht this objection, but he does note that for most of humanity’s approximately 100,000-year run thus far, we haven’t had a lot to show for ourselves. Major social and technical advancements began five or six thousand years ago; for over 90,000 years before that, humanity (as far as we can tell from what historical evidence can be found) lived primitively.

In light of that, God’s timing of His revelation, and especially of His gift of redemption, not only encompasses the vast majority of people who have ever existed, but also more or less coincides with a leap forward in human knowledge, a sort of awakening — as though man’s eyes were suddenly opened.

Or as though, as D’Souza notes, a soul was suddenly breathed in, because at last mankind was ready to know and become more.

Dinesh D’Souza talks about his debate with atheist Peter Singer, who is an advocate for what could be called “post-term abortion” and, bizarrely, animal rights. Singer’s arguments in favour of abortion and the legalization of infanticide are infused with comparisons between the unborn (or the newborn) human and different animals at similar stages of development. Working from the conclusion that, “at any stage of pregnancy,” the “calf, the pig, and the much-derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus,” Singer demonstrates what D’Souza terms an exploration of “the consequences of living in a truly secular society, devoid not only of the Christian God but also of Christian Morality.”

And indeed, I would argue that Singer’s various assertions are certainly, shall we say, logical outcomes of atheist thought, especially as applied to morality. If, after all, the human being is just another animal driven primarily by instinct, then things like abortion and infanticide aren’t rights, nor should they be illegal — they’re just facts of being, about as strange in humans as they are in other species that are sometimes known to eat or kill their young in certain circumstances.

And indeed, as both D’Souza and Singer point out, some human societies — certain African animist tribes, for example — practice that reality, occasionally killing unwanted children.

One could go into a lengthy discussion of how Singer’s reasoning is also self-destructive, since it bestows on the religious majority the “right” to remove, by any means necessary, the irreligious element within its midst free from legal or moral consequence. It is fortunate for Singer, then, that he is ultimately incorrect.

But I’m not going to elaborate on that point, because something else struck me today which I would prefer to remark upon. As noted, Singer and D’Souza mention that certain African tribes — who adhere to primitive, animistic religions — engage in child-murder and infanticide on occasion. One is led to believe that the ancient (pagan) Spartans also engaged in such practice.

And indeed, in modern times, while most atheists do not slaughter their own children when some perceived “need” for it arises (save in cases of abortion, of course), the same cannot be said, it seems, for many who follow the Islamic faith. And yes, I know that honour killings are supposed to be a cultural thing, not a religious thing. Heck, a day after this story was printed, the same newspaper (the Guardian) ran a story denying the link between Islam and honour killing.

And yet:

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.

…

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his Religion,’ he said.

Now let’s do a little compare-and-contrast, shall we?

Here’s Peter Singer:

“My colleague Helga Kuhse and I suggest that a period of twenty-eight days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others.”

Here’s Abdel-Qader Ali, father of the murdered girl:

‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her.’

Do I perceive an agreement between the ideals of these two men, at least in passing?

I know that Christianity has its share of example of followers of the religion who have done horrible things. But equally, I observe that nowhere in mainstream Christian thought is the topic of when child-murder is and is not permissible ever brought up; murder, in all its forms, is as immoral now as it was in Jesus‘ time, and for good reason.

And I can’t help but think that the further one gets from Christ, the more tolerable the idea of allowing murder, even the murder of one’s own child, becomes. For all his barbarity, Abdel-Qader Ali murdered his daughter in response to a perceived transgression. For Peter Singer, no motivation would need to be stated, and no transgression required, to justify the act.