Debate Teacher Reacts: Christopher Hitchens vs. Doug Wilson

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Would you sketch that for me on the blackboard, please? Oh, of course. That could be done.

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Trinity can't be done that way. Oh, sure. I'd triangle in a circle. So, the point...

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I'll do it. Now... Hitchens is so incredulous.

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He makes incredulity look like James Dean smoking a cigarette. You know what I mean? And we're back.

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Welcome, everybody. I'm glad you're here. It's time to party. I'm your excellent host, Nate Zala. And this is

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Debate Teacher Reacts. This is the series where I, a former debate teacher, react to theology and apologetics debates.

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And you, you get to pull up your seat with a bowl of popcorn and join the discussion. This is episode...

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Who the heck knows? Of the entire series. I've done a number of these now, and I hope that these bless you in some way.

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All right. Today, we're looking at Christopher Hitchens versus Doug Wilson, the debate at Westminster.

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This debate took place almost 15 years ago now. Let me just say something and then we'll jump in.

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OK, these kinds of discussions are difficult to make videos on. All right. This reminds me of the discussion between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson.

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You know, there is no clearly stated topic right at the outset. There are no clear contentions to identify.

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And it just appears to be something like way more conversational and way less formal. I had to go looking and dig a bit.

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But apparently, this conversation was actually being filmed for a documentary called Collision that came out in 2009.

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So again, this is not a formal debate. And now here's my dilemma. How do

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I adjudicate? I don't know. We'll have to watch and see what happens. But just as a reminder,

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OK, in a formal debate, you have two opponents, right? The two opponents, they take the affirmative and the negative position on a clear topic.

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OK, in their opening statements, each opponent identifies and spells out their contentions based on their position.

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And then they make arguments for those contentions. All right. And then in rebuttals, the opponents challenge each other's contentions.

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How? Because they've taken notes. All right. We call that flow. All right. They flowed their opponent's opening statement.

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And then they respond accordingly. And in cross -examination where the magic happens, in my opinion, they ask questions designed to challenge those specific contentions.

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That is how we draw out what we call clash. OK. And it's understood in more formal debates.

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If you do not challenge your opponent's contentions, you concede them. Again, this is not a formal debate, but there is a form of cross -examination that I found, kind of.

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So let's zoom in right on that segment of this discussion. Let's do it. I believe the drill was to interact for a little bit and then closing statements.

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I would like to make a couple of quick observations and then ask a few questions.

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The observation would be, Christopher and I were talking this morning about whether I believed in the miracle of the

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Gatorine swine that you refer to. And I certainly do accept all the miracles of the

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Bible as described in the Bible. But I mentioned to him the Gatorine swine rule, which is just because a group is in formation, it doesn't mean they know where they're going.

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I don't know if I get the joke. I mean, I get the joke. I don't know how that's any kind of response.

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So the reason Wilson is bringing up the demons going into the herd of pigs is because Hitchens brought it up in his opening.

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So good for Wilson. At least he's addressing things that Hitchens said. Let's see where this goes.

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...out about that is that it's not an either or thing. It's not as though by believing that Jesus did a miracle with the

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Gatorine swine that I'm thereby prohibited from believing that there are marvels to be seen through the Hubble telescope.

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I'm not forced to choose one or the other. I believe that marvels occur on the grand cosmic scale, and marvels occur at levels much smaller than what occurred with the

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Gatorine swine. So God is a macrocosmic God, and God is a microcosmic

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God. He speaks in the great things, and he speaks in the little things.

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The difficulty... So Hitchens brought this up in the first place to kind of contrast two competing ideas.

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Either you are rational and skeptical, and you believe in science, or you believe in superstition and magic like Jesus sending demons into a herd of pigs.

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So that's why Wilson is talking about this. Here. One other thing about this.

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When you think about crossing over the event horizon into a black hole, and you get to the point where you see the future and the past at the same time, or you think about quantum mechanics and things traveling like a particle and arriving like a wave, or vice versa, or the same thing.

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They're both at the same time. That sort of thing. The thing that astonishes me when I read physicists, particularly atheistic fellows who are of evoking a sense of wonder out of their descriptions of these sorts of things, and you heard

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Christopher just do it. They then turn around and say that they have objections to the doctrine of the

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Holy Trinity because they can't make sense of it. Does it make sense to you that you could see the past and the future at the same time, provided you were headed toward a big black hole of nothing?

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Would you sketch that for me on the blackboard, please? Oh, of course. That could be done.

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Trinity can't be done in that way. Sure. I'd triangle in a circle. So, the point—

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How do we do it? Now— Hitchens is so incredulous, he makes incredulity look like James Dean smoking a cigarette.

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You know what I mean? Wilson's comment was pretty good. That's right.

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Draw a triangle in a circle, right? That's good. But you think to yourself, like, where else can we go with this, right?

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And then Hitchens says, have it your way. You know, that's so Hitchens.

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I am a huge fan of Hitchens, like, his political writings. You know, before 9 -11, he made a name for himself as an iconoclast journalist, writing about politics, like, from a more independent position.

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He had a huge problem with the Clintons, and he wrote about that. I actually have one of his books in my library over here.

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It's called Letters to a Young Contrarian. I actually met Hitchens once, very, very briefly, and was a little starstruck about that.

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Now, do I agree with most of what he says? Absolutely not. So, as good critical thinkers, we have to eat the meat and spit out the bones, right?

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I mean, I would have loved to have met Bertrand Russell and lots of people that I disagree with, you know? But at the end of the day,

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Hitchens had a way of disagreeing with you, but also making you like him, like, you know, somewhere in the process.

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And I do like him. I think it's obvious that Wilson has a fondness for him, and that's a great thing to display with our opponents, all right, especially right now in today's kind of culture.

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The point is that there are mysteries beyond us, right? The issue is not whether there are things in the universe that will stagger us and make us go, whoa.

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The issue is when you reflect on what you think is actually going on, when you think, when you reflect on what is actually going on, and you say there's no purpose in this, there's no design behind it, it's just a plain, weird, crazy place.

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I believe that you have taken, removed the aesthetic element.

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You've removed the element of intention. It may be big, it may be crazy, it may be wild, it may be chaotic, but it's not lovely.

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But if it is designed by God, in other words, if all those galaxies that you can see through the Hubble pictures, if all those galaxies, if the

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Crab Nebula and all of those things were put there on purpose by the

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Triune God of Scripture, then you have not only something that's grand and big in scope, but you have intentionality.

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You have what I would call artistry. God is a great artist. Now, here's the difficulty.

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When Christopher, early in his, and this will lead up to my question, when you began with, why would he care?

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Why would God care? Why should I take a solipsistic approach and assume that God would care who

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I slept with? Well, if I said, why would he care who I, and then

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I drew a blank, it's not just, it cannot, you could fill it in with more than who

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I slept with, or who I lusted after in my heart. You could fill it in with who I killed, whose family, family's village

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I destroyed, whose nation I blew up because I felt like it, whose nation and tribe

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I enslaved because it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. Christopher said, when we discovered that we are not accountable, that we can't, we have no court of appeals that goes up to the top with this totalitarian

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God as Christopher sees him, I see a father, he sees big brother, what it boils down to.

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So I see a loving father and he sees the eternal surveillance cameras and that kind of thing.

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And he says, well, if there is no - And thought crime. Thought crime, right. And you have, exactly so.

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So you have, you said, if there is no God there, we might have to abolish slavery by ourselves, right?

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And here's my question. Why wouldn't you say we would have to abolish slavery ourselves or not?

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Well, indeed, the or not is always pregnant there, just as in your remarks just now about how

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God might care about more than just who you slept with, I was picking a trivet example, or by the way, in what position you did so, or on what holy day.

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You wanted to make it more - Or you killed them afterwards. You wanted to make it more serious and said, what about who I kill?

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Well, as no one here doesn't know, there are biblical mandates for killing.

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I hate to have ADD in this moment, but is that a tickle me Elmo, like in Hitchin's pocket?

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And indeed for the killing of nations and for the killing of tribal groups and for the killing of all their children so that their name be blotted out.

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And for, in the case of some luckier groups in the Amalekites, keeping only their young women alive so that, well,

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I think for purposes better imagined than described, so that there is a divine mandate for killing.

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You can be told what to do, and religion is obedience to the divine law. It isn't to say you would behave as an ordinary moral person would expect to behave with a divine warrant to do so.

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No, as any Mormon will tell you, if the head of his church tells him to commit a murder, he has to assume that the head of that church knows better than he does, that it might be for a much higher reason.

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Okay, so Wilson asked a question that, in my opinion, was not very articulate. Okay, which by the way, it's much easier to do what we're doing now and talk about, you know, what should have happened, this should not have happened, and we're far removed from everything than to actually be sitting in front of a crowd of people and the nerves are going and the cameras are rolling, you know, your opponent is next to you and the stakes are high.

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So, I acknowledge all of that out loud for sure, but what Wilson was essentially getting at was, by what standard can

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Hitchens argue for morality? That's the whole point, all right? If God does not exist, morality is no longer objective, then how can

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Hitchens complain about people enslaving other people? That's a good question, and guess what?

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Hitchens didn't answer the question. He did what he usually does, which is immediately change the subject and flip it back around on Wilson.

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Pointing out that an objection also could be turned around against the objector, it's not off limits to do, but as a debate opponent, you need to answer the question.

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...you would do something that no morally sane person would do because he was religious. Now, let us not lose sight of this point, which you have, in our previous discussion, several times conceded.

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If God wanted you to do it, you wouldn't ask the ordinary moral questions, and we know that there are biblical warrants for slavery and for genocide, and so your point that religion conforms to ordinarily understood humanitarianism simply falls, that's the first thing.

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So my question is this, because I don't see us really disagreeing at this point. I believe that it was okay to kill

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Amalekites, right? Because it was not okay to not do it because God told them to kill the

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Amalekites. We would differ on... I've got you to say it. Okay. Happy to say it, and didn't get me to say it.

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No, I know, I know, I know you get a bang out of it. What I actually get a bang out of is what

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I'm going to get you to say next. And that is... These guys, they're equal amounts of cheeky.

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I like it. Neither one of us has a problem with killing Amalekites. I don't have a problem with it because God told him to do it.

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You don't have a problem with it because the universe just doesn't care what happens to Amalekites. No, actually that's not true because what if I was an

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Amalekite? Well, you're not the universe. Well, no, I'm sorry, it still changes everything. Because you're not an

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Amalekite, they're all dead. That is what relativism means. You know, don't you, that it actually is true.

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There are discussions among Israeli rabbis, including Israeli rabbis in the Israeli army, published in Israeli newspapers today.

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Is the commandment to kill the Amalekites applicable to the Palestinian Arabs, Christian and Muslim, or not?

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Is Amalek still with us? Is he the name of our enemy? Are we still enjoined by God to destroy all non -Jews in the greater

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Palestine? This stuff goes on. And if they answer it in the affirmative, you don't mind. This is why

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I feel justified in the subtitle of my book that to no argument does religion add anything that doesn't make it more toxic.

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So, if you're familiar with Hitchens' debates by now, you realize Hitchens was not there to have a formal debate.

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He was there, much like, you know, Sam Harris and some of the other, what do they call it, the four horsemen of the new atheism or something.

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He was there to give a rhetorical lecture, and then in cross -exam, if there was one, he was there to kind of rant extemporaneously against Christianity whenever his opponent challenged him.

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Now, that might be persuasive to some folks, but for the rest of us who know better, like, as a straight -up debater,

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Hitchens is weak. He's all foam and no root beer. So, Wilson challenges him once again on the grounding of the atheist moral claims.

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I don't have a problem with the death of the Amalekites, but then again, neither do you. Why? Because in your worldview, objective morality does not exist.

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And then Hitchens says, well, wait a sec, it matters when I'm the one being killed, and that's relativism.

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What? Like, in no way does that answer Wilson's challenge to Hitchens. As a matter of fact,

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Hitchens agrees with Wilson. He's not the Amalekites, so what does it matter what happens to them?

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Now, some of you are really taken with Hitchens, and you're thinking to yourself, but wait a sec, Nate. Hitchens is, he's empathizing with the

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Amalekites because he doesn't want to be killed, and therefore he doesn't wish the Amalekites, or anyone for that matter, to be killed either.

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That's the golden rule. I understand that. But this is precisely the point. The golden rule is an objective standard of morality.

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Where does that come from if all you have is relativism? That's exactly what Wilson asked, and Hitchens did not answer the question.

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There are some miracles I wish were true. The first one is the best. Changing water into wine for a wedding works for me and also shows,

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I think, a concession by Judeo -Christianity to the influence of Hellenism in the region, which was still quite strong.

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As you know, the Passover Seder consists, really, of people lying around on couches, drinking wine, asking questions dialectically in a

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Socratic manner, bringing the children into the discussion, and so forth. That's an admirable tradition on which to base things.

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I think not enough of Judaism, and certainly not enough of Christianity, is based on that method. But at least the miracle of Cana shows they knew the importance of wine, and they knew they wouldn't sell their religion without that.

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But the gathering swine worries me. There may be a woman who's possessed by demons and devils.

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I don't think such a thing could possibly happen. I don't think women are, or anyone is, demonically or diabolically possessed.

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The Prophet Muhammad believes that our world is surrounded by demons and jinns. They're around us all the time.

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Devils are in the dust, they're in the air. Some very primitive animist tribes believe this, too.

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No decent thinking person can believe it. And even if it was to be the case that a woman was possessed by a demon, you can't make the demon go away by making it go and infect a group of pigs in order to make them commit suicide.

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I mean, in other words, that miracle, if it were true, wouldn't be worth having. It would be a claim that your

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Prophet was a vulgar sorcerer, or was at least trying to impress his followers with vulgar witchcraft and sorcery.

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I leave that point to you. To say that's either true or beautiful seems to me to blaspheme both terms quite badly.

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The closest thing to an agreed -upon topic of discussion are really two categories.

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Truth and beauty. And it appears that both Hitchens and Wilson have an underlying focus on those categories.

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They brought them up in their opening statements, and they're bringing them up again. So, Hitchens' criticism here is,

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Jesus sending the demons to pigs is neither true, because it's unbelievable, nor is it beautiful, because pigs are nasty, and we all know it.

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How is this not true? How can this only be perceived as being ugly?

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We don't get any of those explanations from Hitchens. This is what Wilson's dealing with here.

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With taking the miracle that way, the fellow involved was named Legion. It was a guy, not a lady.

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And the pigs were an unclean animal for the Jews. And when

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Jesus cast the demons out, if you think of it in terms of a simple wonder worker who's out there stupefying the peasants, and you take it as a petty miracle that way, that, whoa, he killed the pigs, then, of course,

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I think you've got a point. The miracle is tawdry and overdone, if that's all you understand it to be.

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But the story ends, it's quite striking, with the people in that village couldn't keep this guy bound.

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He lived in the tombs. And when Jesus cast the demons out of him and the pigs were killed, the people begged

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Jesus to leave that region. They preferred the devil they knew to the devil they didn't know.

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I think there's a commentary being made on the state of the spiritual health and spiritual vibrancy in Israel at that time.

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They didn't want Jesus there messing with the arrangements that they had made, with the accommodations they had made.

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So if you simply assume that... With their demon -haunted world. Correct. In other words, what

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Jesus did was he traveled around casting out demons. And what many people don't realize is that demonism, shamanism, this sort of thing that you encounter still in many parts of the world, that sort of thing was banished, exiled, defeated, and overcome precisely by the

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Christian faith. If you're encountering witch doctors and people who are living in bondage to that kind of thing, whether it's made up as you believe or genuine as I believe, or what is more likely a mixture of both,

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I believe that there's a great deal of superstition mingled in with genuine spiritual problems.

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If you believe that, then you say, look, well, let's look at the scoreboard. Let's look at what has happened, where the

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Christian faith has gone. We have been instrumental as Christians in lifting the clouds of superstition.

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What you glory in, the Enlightenment, I don't think was possible in witchcraft -riddled societies.

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I think it was dependent on the Christian faith. There's an interesting mistake that I think

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Hitchens is making, and I'm trying to think how to characterize it here.

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I think that we are unjustified to say that there is no beauty in an event that takes place simply because we don't see beauty in one aspect of that event.

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So, with the pigs, the pigs going down the cliff, the demons in them, obviously, pigs are nasty, unless bacon.

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Their death is shocking. The Jews consider pigs unclean, but we even to this day, we react appropriately in that aspect of the story,

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I think. It's supposed to be ugly. It's supposed to be disgusting. What makes it beautiful is the state of the man now, that he is free from the possession of the demons, and the mercy of God who granted the man that freedom out of love and concern for him.

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If that story is true, which I think it is, there's the beauty. Senator John McCain is just nominated as his running mate.

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A woman who attends a church in which spiritual warfare and anti -demon tactics are regularly discussed, has been filmed having hands laid on her by what

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I would describe as an animist bishop from Kenya, she may describe as a Christian, who talks about the witches he's expelled from his own area of the highlands of Kenya.

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So how can you say that Christianity has rid us of the nonsensical idea of witchcraft, demonism, and exorcism to the contrary?

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It's the reason why these nonsensical barbaric primitive ideas survive. Now, I hope

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I don't take advantage of you if I tell the audience, with your permission, of a question

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I asked you yesterday and the answer you gave me. I asked Douglas Wilson this. Suppose that a soul,

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I'll call it a soul for his sake, a person is born in Saudi Arabia today, into the Wahhabi theocratic society.

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Would you rather that person became an atheist or join the majority religion of that state? You wanted to tell them your answer.

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I'd prefer he become an atheist. And I thought it was a very honorable reply on your part and I want to press it a little bit.

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Do you believe that Thomas Aquinas, called a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, levitated and flew all around the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris?

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I'm afraid you lost me. I'm a good Protestant. I don't believe it either. You don't think that's true?

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Do you think that Muhammad took a night journey on a horse from the

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Arabian Peninsula to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the horse left a hoofprint before rocketing him up to paradise?

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I'm, you know, I'm not with that either. I don't think so either. So here's my question. Why, how can you manage to say that miracles are only true when they're

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Calvinist? Ooh, ooh, that's a good question.

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It's really a question about the criteria to judge the validity of miracles. But the way that it's worded, it's designed to jab and sting a bit.

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I mean, that's why you saw a second ago there, Wilson is kind of chuckling to himself, you know, that's a good one.

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Although I don't think Hitchens means to say Calvinist exactly. Maybe he meant Protestant or your flavor of Protestantism.

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Still, that's a really good question. Because it's always seemed to me as a secularist, never mind an atheist, that either all religious supernatural claims must be true or none of them are my own position or only one of them is the least probable position of all.

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Right. The one you've decided to occupy. Why is it that the miracle claims are okay made by Calvinists and not by Muslims, other kinds of Christian or Jews?

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By the way, if this were a formal debate, I'd be wondering what this has to do with the main things that Wilson said in his opening statement, which you can actually take a look at.

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I'm leaving the link in the notes below. But this isn't a formal debate.

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So notice the structure of your argument. The structure of your argument is that... How do you think it's got a structure? Well, it does.

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And here it is. The structure of your argument is that you're reasoning from the existence of counterfeits to a denial of the genuine article.

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I believe that there are plenty of spurious Federal Reserve notes printed up by counterfeiters in their basement.

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And I believe that this assertion that this bogus Thomas Aquinas $20 bill and bogus

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Islamic flying horse $20 bill does not obligate me in the slightest to deny the existence of genuine currency.

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I don't see how you can argue from the existence of counterfeits and fakes and knockoffs to a denial of the genuine.

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But I wasn't doing so. You were asking me. No, I was asking on what you found. Your assertion that yours is the only true bill.

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The ones I believe in are the ones I believe in. Yes. For example...

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What? I don't understand the point of the answer. It seems like what

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Wilson is saying is my beliefs are just those, my beliefs. Okay.

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But why you believe in the things you believe in and not the claims of some other religion is the question.

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And his answer, in my opinion, that does not answer Hitchin's question at all.

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I've spent a lot of time on a small point that I think is a big one. You probably or some of you will know of the existence of a of a text called the

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Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It's been, it was originally fabricated by Christian, Russian, Orthodox fascists in the pay of the

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Tsar to try and condemn the Jewish people for a blood libel and a secret government based on conspiracy.

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And it's now the chief paranoid document on the website of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

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And it's had a huge circulation in Christian and Muslim religious circles for a very long time. It's usually described as a forgery.

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If you've ever read about it, you'll have heard of it as a forgery. And it may seem to you a pedantic point, but I don't think it is.

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Whenever I write about it, I say, don't call it a forgery. Why not? A forgery is a copy of a true document.

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Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a copy of a true document. Right. It is a fabrication. It's a whole cloth hoax.

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It's a criminal slander invented out of whole cloth. There's nothing forged about it at all.

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There's no true bill to begin with. Now, do you see the distinction? Yes. Well, why are your miracles, the true bill, and the others are all copies of it?

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Because they happened. Jesus really did rise from the dead, which

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I believe on the same basis... Aquinas believed that. Sure. Muhammad believes some of that.

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The fact that Aquinas didn't fly around Notre Dame does not mean that he got everything wrong. So I believe that I was not there at the

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Battle of Waterloo, didn't see it happen. I accept it on the basis of eyewitness accounts and authorities, eyewitness accounts that I deem to be reliable.

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I do the same thing with George Washington crossing the Delaware. I do the same thing with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

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Now, I believe that you could generate a whole host of Protestant, evangelical

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Protestant miracles that I don't believe in either. I believe that we ought to study it, love the

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Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, love the Lord our God with all our brains. We should look at the evidence and make a determination.

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We shouldn't just say, oh, it's a miracle, it's good, and it serves the cause of the gospel, or it helps keep people in line, or helps inspire them.

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If it's not true, if it didn't happen, we should have nothing to do with it. And I've been in Christian circles for many years, and I've heard all kinds of miracle stories that I don't believe.

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I've heard probably more miracle stories that I don't believe than miracle stories I do believe. But as a

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Christian, I don't believe that I can go into the Bible and pick and choose. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then we of all men are most to be pitied.

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And so it doesn't matter how socially good it is, or bad from your point of view.

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What matters is the truth. And so when I say I believe this miracle occurred, it has nothing to do with,

31:06

I don't accept Hume's argument as an absolute, you know, that you can just rule miracles out.

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I believe on the basis of well -attested miracles with eyewitnesses you believe, that's the most rational thing you can do.

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Yeah, that's what Wilson should have said the first time. I was about to stop and say no further questions, but it's not fair to the great

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Scotsman to say that Hume said all miracles could be ruled out. He simply said you have to ask yourself, if you appear to see the laws of nature being suspended in front of your eyes, which is more likely?

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That they've been suspended in your favor, or that you are under a misapprehension? Right. Because you're not allowed to appoint your own senses, your own impressions, as the arbiter of the natural order.

31:53

And that might lead in the end to a dismissal, but it isn't an a priori one.

31:58

Sure, and I believe that Joseph, when he found out that Mary, his betrothed, was pregnant, he followed

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David Hume's advice to the letter. And he didn't know what the most reasonable explanation was.

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And that sort of thing, it's not that in the ancient world, it's not that people didn't know where babies came from.

32:21

It's not that they didn't know that you couldn't walk on water. It's not that they didn't know that you couldn't change water to wine.

32:27

They knew that as well as we do. Wilson makes an interesting point. It's possible to respect

32:33

Hume's skepticism and still believe in God, right? Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant.

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The baby wasn't his. And what's the first thing he does? He makes moves to divorce her. But then an angel visits him and overrides his skepticism, if that's what

32:49

Wilson is suggesting here. And then Joseph becomes a believer. No, all

32:54

Joseph knew was who hadn't made her pregnant. Right. If we have to be crude about this. Correct.

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And if you were David Hume, you would ask which is more likely, that the fact that he hasn't made her pregnant and she is, is the result of divine intervention, or that a

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Jewish girl could tell a fib. Sure. And Joseph... No, Hitchin centered on the wrong thing here.

33:13

What's more likely, the question that you ask is something like, when your fiancee claims that she was visited by an angelic being, and then this same being visits you separately, on two occasions, as a matter of fact, and communicates the same message that your fiancee told you, what's more likely?

33:33

That's the real issue that needs to be discerned. Now, of the two, I don't think the latter is overwhelmingly improbable.

33:40

Sure. And Joseph was right with David Hume. No religion has ever been founded except with the claim that its founder and prophet was born of a virgin.

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I have the whole list in the front of my book, if anyone... Available at fine bookstores everywhere.

33:56

I have in the first few pages of my book a list... There is no religion from Aztec to Hindu, including

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Buddhism, where the Gautama is born through a slit in his mother's side, where it doesn't begin with a miraculous birth.

34:12

And there's no counterfeit money. You couldn't be in the religion business without claiming that, especially in the greater

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Jerusalem area. And you couldn't be in the counterfeiting business without green paper and numbers in the corner.

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The Quran absolutely attests it. The Quran attests the virginity and motherhood of Mary.

34:31

Sure. It's in the Quran. What could be wrong with that? Nobody counterfeits brown Safeway shopping bags.

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They're not worthwhile. It's not worth it to counterfeit them. If something's worthwhile, all right, if you've got a genuine article, then you've got counterfeits.

34:47

I remember I. F. Stone saying about Mussolini calling himself a socialist and Hitler calling himself a national socialist, he said, that's a compliment of a kind, said my old comrade, red comrade, as he said, nobody bothers to counterfeit bad currency.

35:04

Well, it turns out that they do. But not currency they believe to be. It turns out that things, the ironies of history and the cruelties that reality practice on us as a suffering species.

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Yes, actually, people will go great lengths to say, I'd like to deal in this bankrupt currency.

35:24

It can happen. And it has, as you've just shown. I don't know why

35:31

Wilson felt the need to offer that last little qualifier.

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You know, oh, it's only counterfeited from something that's worthwhile. I mean, I think I get where he's coming from.

35:44

He wants to suggest that counterfeit religions exist because there must be a true religion, much in the same way that counterfeit gods exist because there must be one true

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God. The problem with that statement is all by itself, without some time to add to it and explain what you mean, so to speak, you end up setting yourself up for what

36:05

Hitchens just did. Hitchens just slapped back by saying, well, there are bad copies of bad ideas.

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Just because you find copies doesn't mean the original is a good idea or even true. And he's not wrong.

36:18

Boy, I'm struggling to adjudicate a discussion like this. I just don't think there's enough here to judge.

36:26

You know, having said that, let me make a few observations. All right. Nobody can outdo

36:32

Hitchens when it comes to rhetorical flourish. All right. You can't say it better. You can't express it better than Hitchens.

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When he communicates something, it's an art form in itself. It doesn't make him right.

36:45

I'm just talking about rhetorical forms of communication. Nobody outshines Hitchens. Wilson comes pretty close at times, but there's only one

36:54

James Dean on that stage, and it's Christopher Hitchens. So he definitely shines in that regard. And he even got the better of Wilson on a couple of occasions, in my opinion, because Wilson either did not answer the question well, or he gave an answer that was insufficient.

37:10

On the other hand, when it comes to substance, such as the philosophical questions that Wilson posed, the grounding questions,

37:18

Hitchens almost never answered those questions. He just slipped right back into polemics and rhetoric.

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There were a couple of moments where Wilson got the better of Hitchens purely because Hitchens either did not answer the question or he was being philosophically inconsistent based on his own worldview.

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Now, I think there's more weight within the category of substance than I do rhetoric, okay?

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Even though rhetoric is extremely important to a debate. And you know what? I think that's basically what I can say at this point.

37:47

These are my observations, and I'm just gonna leave it there. You have what you need to decide. You tell me who won this debate.

37:55

Was it Christopher Hitchens or was it Doug Wilson? Let me know in the comments below. As always, if there's a debate that you want me to react to, let me know in the comments as well, preferably more formal debates so I can actually properly judge these, please.

38:08

But I do enjoy watching discussions like these too, okay? Anyway, that's it for me.

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I'm gonna saunter off and take a break. But in the meantime, I will say ta -ta and bye for now.