Taking the Hitchens challenge

In his introduction to the new book "The Portable Atheist," Christopher Hitchens issues his now-familiar challenge to theists: "Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer."

He obviously sees this challenge as the silver bullet that finishes off any and all defenders of religious faith, boasting in the book how he's used it in debates with believers across the country and is still waiting for someone to answer it. He exults: "As yet, I have had no takers."

Well, as someone who has written and argued in various forums over many years for the truth claims of the Bible, I am more than willing – as a Christian – to take up the challenge. Not that there's anything particularly challenging when it comes to Hitchens' logic here. He knows that in a philosophical debate of any kind, the skeptic (in this case Hitchens) must give the presumption of truth to his adversary. He must presume that the philosophy or worldview he is opposing (in this case the Christian faith) is in fact true, and then debunk it on that basis (on the basis of its own claims) if he is to cast any doubts upon its veracity.

In the case of Christianity, if its claims are true, then the greatest moral law of all is to love the Lord God with all of one's heart, mind and strength. That's something an unbeliever, by self-definition, could never do. The Bible tells us that it is impossible for a person to even say "Jesus is Lord" in spirit and in truth unless the Holy Spirit is the motivating force behind it, in which case the person has already accepted God and received the Spirit.

The good news is that an unbeliever can say "Jesus is Lord" with conviction and love God in truth if he becomes a believer – but, then again, if any ethical act or statement were completely unattainable by any single person, then God would be guilty of making it impossible for that person to obey and follow Him, which would make God by nature unjust when in fact He is perfectly holy and therefore perfectly just.

Hitchens' point, of course, is to demonstrate that a divine imperative is not necessary for the purposes of morality or the common good. He believes that something he calls "human solidarity" will serve just fine in providing a moral framework for life, apart from any notion of (or certainly obeisance to) God.

The problem is that "human solidarity" as Hitchens envisions it simply does not exist. That's why we're fighting a global war on terror; when untold millions of people around the world believe it is not only acceptable but virtuous to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of innocent men, women and children in an unprovoked attack, we know that we cannot rely on any inherently human impulse to tell us how we should live. There must be an ultimate standard outside ourselves, a higher law.

Hitchens would point to the homicidal use of those hijacked airliners and say: "That's religion for you." To which true believers like myself would respond: "No, Christopher, that's false religion for you." He doesn't seem to understand there's a difference, nor where his goal of "human solidarity" would take us.

Without an objective standard of right and wrong, of good and evil, of truth and falsehood, such concepts become utterly meaningless. They simply cannot exist in a Darwinian, chance-plus-time world where men are no more than animals walking upright. In that kind of world, the world of Hitchens and his fellow atheists, every moral choice becomes a matter of individual interpretation and personal preference.

Indeed, without an objective standard by which we are all governed and to which we are all accountable (that is to say, absolute truth), then how can any one person or any group of people authoritatively say that what any other person or group of people think, say or do is wrong? The obvious answer is: they can't. They would have no objective basis for doing so.

Dostoyevsky put it best when he pointed out that if there is no God, then everything is permissible, because without God there is no absolute truth, and without absolute truth there is no objective standard. Everything from child rape to murder to genocide would be justifiable as "survival of the fittest" or a modified version of it (say, "desire of the strongest"). No one would be able to say with any certainty if Hitler was one of the great leaders of all time or one of history's worst fiends, and there would be no moral basis for denouncing the Holocaust. As Christian philosopher Dr. Norman Geisler explains, in a Darwinian world free from all absolutes, arguments over the Holocaust would come down to this: "Some people like Jews, some don't."

This is precisely what we find on our university campuses today, where the veneration of God has largely been vanquished and relativism rules. Rather than some vague notion of "human solidarity" flourishing on these campuses, what you find instead is a prevailing mentality of "what's true or good for you is not necessarily true or good for me, and it's certainly not true or good for everyone." In other words, anything goes.

Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias tells of a time he spoke at a university in defense of truth and was accosted afterward by a group of angry students who insisted there is no such thing as absolute truth. Zacharias challenged the leader of the group by asking him, "If instead of giving a speech today, I came out and cut a newborn baby into pieces on the stage, would that have been wrong for me to do?"

The young man thought for a moment, realizing that if he said it was wrong he would be acknowledging the existence of truth. Then he tellingly replied: "I may not have liked watching you do it, but at the same time I can't say that it would have been wrong."

That's what we're dealing with today, on our college campuses and in the culture at large, and it is why Hitchens' empty promise of "human solidarity" will never suffice.

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Tom Flannery writes a weekly political column called "The Good Fight" and a continuing religious column called "Why Believe the Bible?" for a hometown newspaper in Pennsylvania. His opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and Christian Networks Journal. He is a past recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for Outstanding Opinion Journalism from News Corp/The New York Post, in addition to winning six Amy Awards from the Amy Foundation.