After he came across my stuff on the Internet, Gary contacted me and suggested getting together for lunch.  And so we did.  While reminiscing about the old days, I told him that I was still grateful that he’d taught me to play tennis.  He was surprised to hear that I still played.  But his surprise was nothing compared to mine when he said that he was grateful that I’d introduced him to good books and great music.  Quite honestly, I hadn’t realized I’d done that.  Unlike his teaching me tennis, it wasn’t something I’d set out to do.  But he assured me that I was the first person he’d ever known who read Steinbeck and Dickens, Salinger and Dostoyefsky, Hugo and Twain, Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman, and who listened to classical music. 

It had never occurred to me back then or at any time since that I was anyone’s role model.  In fact, the only time I ever set out to influence anyone’s taste in books was with my son and, in spite of or perhaps because of my efforts, he’s always hated reading anything but a hand of cards.  As for music, the only kind he ever seemed to like was the sort that people of my generation refer to as a lot of very loud noise. 

Actually, my own taste in music, as with books, is pretty eclectic.  Along with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, I enjoy Puccini, Copland, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Barber, Prokofiev, Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin, Arlen, Kern, Sondheim and Loesser.  I also have a soft spot for the best of those guys who have enhanced so many movies with their dramatic scores; people named Steiner, Waxman, Korngold, Bernstein, Legrande and Morricone.           

But it was only in the past year that I discovered and fell in love with yet another musical genre; namely, country western.  It happened quite by accident.  When I’m in my car, I tend to listen to talk radio.  But on weekends, guys like Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Miller, thoughtlessly leave me in the lurch, forcing me to fend for myself.  Well, some months ago, after station-surfing all over the AM dial and finding that the only topics under discussion seemed to be computers, vitamins and investment opportunities, I bit the bullet and switched over to FM.  It was there I discovered a country western program, and there I stayed.           

If it didn’t sound so grand, I would say that I’d had an epiphany.  For, I truly had no idea that there were still songs being written today that were not only melodic, but came equipped with lyrics you could understand and that did not appear to have been copied off a bathroom wall. 

Driving to and from tennis today, I heard about an hour’s worth of songs, and never heard anything about pimps and hos and killing cops.  Instead, I heard love songs about husbands and wives, and celebrations of fathers, mothers and even siblings.  Hard to believe, but in 2008, there are people busy writing and singing songs in tribute to grandparents, to teachers who made a difference, to soldiers and even, if you can believe it, to America.           

There are songs, too, about unrequited love, about friends who have passed and about spiritual redemption.  I even heard a clever and touching song in which a grown-up is writing a letter to his 17-year-old self in which he tries to reassure the boy that even though it seems like the end of the world because his girl friend has dumped him, things will eventually turn out just fine, although he understands that for kids that age, it’s awfully hard “to see past next Friday night.” 

Many older people lament that life in these United States has gone to heck in a hand basket, and they long for the good old days when friends and family seemed to matter more, when people married and stayed married to their high school sweethearts, and when loving your country wasn’t dismissed as a cornball emotion. 

Well, I’m here to tell you that the old days aren’t entirely dead and gone.  They’re actually alive and well, and as I recently told Gary, you’ll find them on your FM dial.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is a kind of celebrity, even among Christians because he is an interesting character. If anything, he was warmly embraced by a crowd who generally disagreed with him even as he hurled the worst insults at God, which we consider the holiest, highest being imaginable. This is the demonstration of class and restraint I’ve noticed from a conservative Christian culture that has a much better record of tolerance than the liberal non-Christian culture.

While most of us are familiar with Christopher Hitchens, many people may not know of his opponent Dr. William Lane Craig. I simply call him, “The smartest living Christian.” Like Hitchens, Dr. Craig makes a good living at debate. Dr. Craig is a brilliant logician and eloquent advocate of the faith. He is an “evidentialist” in that he argues for the existence of God based on evidence not presupposition (which is another popular form used in debate).

I assumed Dr. Craig would win the argument and would show superior technical skills, but I didn’t know if he could beat Hitchens’ presence. In modernity, having the right arguments isn’t enough. More than ever, we are accustomed to disengaging our rational center to embrace an artful presentation. Every Republican should be woefully aware of this by now given the last election. Substance alone doesn’t cut it, so Dr. Craig’s greater challenge was to bring a presence to the room that might win over the heart, because I think he’s got a lock on the mind.

The event was moderated by radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who managed a quick introduction of Hitch’ and Craig but barely managed to exit the stage. He tripped on his way down, attempted a mid-air correction, contorting like a drunken baby deer having a seizure in a potato-sack. Just as his feet hit the ground he tripped again, never quite giving the audience the satisfaction of completely eating it, but Hugh is famous for having a huge dissatisfied audience. After 15 minutes of flailing on the stage he managed the near impossible task of finding his seat with his life in tact. (I’m kidding, of course. I consider Hugh a valued friend and someone I deeply respect and admire.)

The debate began with Dr. Craig’s opening arguments. He made a challenge to leave our bias at the door. Impossible, I know, but he claimed that the debate would be fought on philosophical arguments. He would rule out bad arguments, offer the historicity and logic of his good arguments, then challenge Hitchens to make a positive argument for his own atheism. This demonstrates Craig’s adherence to formal debate tactics. He doesn’t take his positions based on emotion or preference, he uses argument and reason and follows the evidence.

Dr. Craig’s evidence is presented in 5 different lines of argument:

1. The Cosmological Argument; Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. God is the best explanation for that cause.

2. The Teleological Argument; The fine-tuning of the universe is so improbable that law or chance aren’t adequate explanations. God is the best explanation.

3. The Moral Argument; If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. Rape isn’t just culturally unacceptable, it’s actually wrong.

4. The Resurrection of Jesus; The vast majority of historians generally agree that the tomb was empty. Separately, the vast majority of historians generally agree that Jesus appeared to people post-mortem. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” is the best explanation of these facts.

5. The Immediate Experience of God; Belief that God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded in argument.

Christopher Hitchens opened with an argument that Dr. Craig had the obligation to prove God exists with some amount of certainty. The burden isn’t on the atheist in the debate to show God doesn’t exist. His position is simply that of a skeptic. Given the idea that God either does exist or does not exist, Hitch thinks doubt is the better position. He alluded that it is also the more humble position.

Hitch doesn’t claim knowledge that there is no God. He claims ignorance, though he avoids calling himself an agnostic. Because he doesn’t know and Dr. Craig claims to know that God exists, the disadvantage goes to the one who says, “I know.” He says that given the stakes are so extra-ordinary (ie judgment, Heaven and hell, dying for one’s faith, killing in the name of God) the evidence provided by Dr. Craig wasn’t extra-ordinary enough to prove a God exists.

The most common argument made by Hitchens was that the world contained so much cruelty and brutality for most living creatures across most of existence that a good God didn’t seem likely, and that if He did exist that He had a lot of bloodshed to answer for. He gave examples of the pre-Christ and even pre-Jewish people who died without ever knowing the one true God. That their lives were lost in ignorance and that only recently does God come on the scene to save some. Hitch returned to this line of reasoning so many times that I’d say it was his core reason for disbelieving God.

Hitch went back to how our belief that God should personally be so concerned with us that we should have the benefit of being born post-Christ to enjoy salvation was a form of solipsism. “It’s all about us.” he said, “Everything else was wasted, but at least we’re here.”

Throughout the rest of the debate, be it the rebuttal, the conclusion, the question/answer, Hitchens returns to this classic problem of suffering, and mocks believers for finding selfish meaning in the midst of evil; “You’re a worm but take heart, it’s all made for you.”

The debate was over two hours of complex arguments and rabbit trails, but it was Dr. Craig who refused to go off track from the argument at hand. Hitchens got a lot of laughs, even with his blunt jokes against God and Christians. Dr. Craig managed a good laugh by stating that the 10 steps necessary in the universe to produce evolution consummates a miracle. Hitchens’ smile of disbelief looking over his glasses at the audience was gold.

William Lane Craig

Hugh Hewitt concluded the event with a final question: “Why do people come out over the question of God’s existence?” Hitchens believed it was because theocratic threats around the world are getting more coverage and is on our minds. Dr. Craig said that it was because the fruit of Godless modernity is being rejected and people are looking for answers.

But in my opinion, though Dr. Craig won the argument (he was the only one who even presented a formal argument), Hitchens won the debate. It’s not the argument of the debaters, it’s the condition of the audience that wins the day. While few of Dr. Craig’s arguments are dispersed through culture, even religious culture, I’ve been raised on most of Hitchens’ arguments. Dr. Craig’s arguments are true and well-reasoned by difficult to comprehend on a first hearing. Hitchens’ arguments are what we’ll find spoken against God on prime time television, at the water-cooler, I’ve even heard some of them on Animal Planet. Culture generally makes Hitchens’ argument by default. And it’s easier to claim the skeptic’s nothing than affirm the something of God…even when I think the most robust argument is self evident to all of us…we’re here.

I think if there were atheists in the audience on the brink of salvation that Dr. Craig’s well-argued positions would find little purchase. Opposite that, the room of Christians would likely have a large segment of doubters, and the cultural arguments against God presented by Hitchens would likely change more minds in my opinion.

So are debates judged by the merit of the arguments or the embrace of the audience? In this all important subject, I think the effect on the audience is the preferred measurement. But the evening left little doubt to most of us that Hitchens did not make a case for atheism at all. He barely even acknowledged his own atheism which was oddly refreshing. It reminds me of G. K. Chesterton who said, “Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.”

What’s more important is that the debate took place at all. The modern idea that discussions about God (especially for God) should be removed from the public square, education or even casual conversation is the worst position of all. It is good for these atheists and Christians to make a case for what is perhaps the most important question any of us will consider.

Does God exist?

A digital war has broken out, and the conservative movement is losing. Read the comment sections of right-leaning blogs, news sites and social forums, and the evidence is there in ugly abundance. Internet hooligans are spewing their talking points to thwart the dissent of the newly-out-of-power.

We must not let that go unanswered.

Uninvited Democratic activists are on a mission to demoralize the enemy – us. They want to ensure that President Obama is not subject to the same coordinated, facts-be-damned, multimedia takedown they employed over eight long years to destroy the presidency – and the humanity – of George W. Bush.

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way – all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its “idealism” in a most cynical fashion.

The ends justify the means for them – now more than ever.

Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing “Internet trolls” to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that’s called “vandalism.” But in a political movement that embraces “graffiti” as avant-garde art , that’s business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people’s property in pursuit of electoral victory.

Hugh Hewitt’s popular site shut off its comments section because of the success of these obnoxious invaders. Breitbart.com polices nonpartisan newswire stories for such obviously coordinated attacks. Other right-leaning sites such as Instapundit and National Review Online refuse to allow comments, knowing better than to flirt with the online activist left.

During the Clinton impeachment scandal, a new group out of California called MoveOn.org employed a plan to get its members to dial into right-leaning talk radio shows with scripted talking points falsely claiming that they were Republicans. They said they would never vote for the GOP again if the case against Bill Clinton was pursued.

Rush Limbaugh was the first to isolate these “seminar callers,” whose mission during the Lewinsky mess was to fool the listening audience into believing they were outraged conservatives willing to cut their ties to the Republican Party if the GOP-led Congress continued

Eleven years later, “seminar callers” abound and call screeners are trained in the art of weeding them out. But the filtering does not always work. down the impeachment path.

You can read the column in full here.