Absentee God?
July 10, 2008
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.
