(2009) Filmmaker Darren Doane's disjointed documentary of a series of debates, which took place at a variety of venues in the fall of 2008, between author (God Is Not Great) and journalist Christopher Hitchens and conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson, grew out of their earlier book, Is Christianity Good for the World?, formed from their correspondence throughout the spring of 2007.

Though he's often labeled as an "arch atheist," Hitchens, a public intellectual who writes regularly for Vanity Fair and The Atlantic Monthly, describes himself instead as an anti-theist, declaiming of the "wicked cult" of Christianity: "It cannot be believed by a thinking person."

Equally articulate with a very likeable personality (unlike his opponent, he's shown with his large family) Wilson, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, offers the lyrics of John Lennon's song "Imagine" - "Imagine there's no heaven/ It's easy if you try/ No hell below us/ Above us only sky" - as unimaginable for himself.

Often the arguments are academic but not without biting wit and occasional moments of humor. According to Hitchens, one or the other must in the end admit "real moral defeat."

Hitchens confronts Wilson by asking: "Is it not the case that with God anything is permissible?" In Scripture, for example, God commands his chosen people to commit genocide, infanticide, and rape against the Amalichites and Canaanites. Hitchens levels the accusation of immorality against Christianity with its "substitutionary atonement," abolishing personal responsibility for individual bad behavior with wishful thinking and "throwing your sins on somebody else," making a scapegoat of Christ.

Only after at least 98,000 years of God's indifference to mankind's existence does he show compassion. Even this belated concern for his sentient creatures requires "compulsory love" and absolute fear under a "totalitarian system" in return for eternal reward.

In response, Wilson states that every world view requires certain standards: one must "stand somewhere to get anywhere." Referring to a hierarchy of truths, Wilson alleges that Hitchens, lacking his own vehicle ("no car of his own to drive") to criticize Christianity, has co-opted the ethics of Christianity for this purpose.

His faith is "a gift of God," says Wilson, explaining that one cannot without divine grace discover God, and truth is God's revelation. To demonstrate God's relationship to a mortal person, he makes use of an analogy of a prisoner chained to a wall in a cell, unable to move about, to the jailer, who can at will touch the prisoner's nose. Unwittingly, Wilson seems to reinforce Hitchens's view of God as a tyrant.

Religion was "the first and worst" attempt by people at understanding the world and themselves, says Hitchens; in the centuries since then, science has far surpassed these early myths and superstitions. There's no comparison between the awesomeness of images taken from the Hubble space-telescope and a Stephen Hawkings description "over the lip of the event horizon" in a black hole with the Bible's "sorcery and cheap magic," such as a fictional burning bush in the desert. If not for rebels, religious stories would have prevented scientific knowledge.

Wilson appears to accept a theory of evolution, though he says that the universe and life display a divine design of intentionality and artistry. "God's Law reveals His nature and His character," remarks Wilson, which Hitchens - though noting how Scripture portrays God as occasionally capricious, inept, inconsistent, and cruel - neglects pointing out God's own words: "For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me." If Christianity had followed the teachings of the 2nd-century theologian Marcion of Sinope, Hitchens suggests, the awful baggage of the Old Testament could have been dispensed with.

The basis of morality, Hitchens affirms, is "the brotherhood of man" in its bonds of solidarity with common interests and family ties; supernaturalism is superfluous to humanity. Without God, complains Wilson, there can be no ultimate justice or final direction to an eternal purpose and destination. While Hitchens says that all moral issues must remain forever unresolved, Wilson asserts that his critic writes and acts as if some things are totally resolved: "There is no God."

Neither man is willing to entertain any doubt about the certainty of his convictions, though Hitchens says in the backseat of a car to Wilson, if he had the power to eliminate every trace of religious belief from the face of the Earth, he would ultimately refrain, sparing at least one believer.

A central point of Hitchens's argument is that human beings possess an innate awareness of right and wrong. Morality did not originate with a list of rules on stone tablets. Long before Moses came down from the mount with God's Ten Commandments (which, by the way, are not presented altogether consistently in two different places in the Bible), most people already knew that murder, adultery, and theft were wrong.

Yet in his recently published memoir, Hitch-22, the naturalized British-born American man of letters reveals himself to have been a committed socialist during the '60s but a sympathizer of neoconservatives today and an adamant advocate for the Bush/Cheney administration's invasion of Iraq. Unlike agnosticism, absolute belief in either a godhead or atheism is an act of pure faith.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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