Hitchens vs. Dembski, Roger Olson on Arminianism, E-mail Questions

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And good morning and welcome to the Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning.

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We will be here on Thursday as well, and then we're headed to St. Charles, Missouri, Covenant of Grace Church, 11th consecutive year.

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I need to inform Pastor Van that according to bylaws of his church, anyone who is invited for more than 10 consecutive years to speak there automatically becomes an elder at the church.

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They're not aware of that. But no, 11 years now in St. Charles, at least 10 of those have been the first weekend in December.

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I have not seen the inside of my own church the first weekend in December for about a decade now or so.

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And it doesn't look like it's going to be uber cold there, but it was pretty cold here. It got down to freezing at my house anyway, so that's pretty nippy.

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And then straight from St. Charles to Detroit, and we will be on the

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Aramaic Broadcasting Network Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the

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Jesus or Muhammad Marathon. I have noted that I may be on with certain individuals with whom

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I have some interesting disagreements. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in that.

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It could be an interesting conversation. Today on the program,

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I want to start off listening to portions of the Christopher Hitchens William Dembski debate, and then

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I've got a comment that I wish to make on the concluding remarks of Roger Olson in his recent article claiming that Arminianism is

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God -centered. And then we'll probably start taking your phone calls. Oh, and I know that Rich has some email questions that he wants to get to as well, and then taking your phone calls toward the end of the hour, 877 -753 -3341, or dividing .line

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on Skype. I listened on Saturday and then listened again yesterday to the recent debate that took place evidently before a younger audience, as low as seventh grade.

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So junior high and high schoolers, I think, made up the bulk of the audience, which makes the applause quite interesting in listening to this one.

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The debate between William Dembski and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is back on the debating trail.

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We will see if anything ever comes of our invitation to him to debate again.

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That debate had been canceled due to his cancer, but that cancer has not in any way slowed him down as far as his debating and certainly has not changed his hatred of the

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Christian faith in any way, shape, or form. This was an interesting debate to listen to in the sense that when

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I first heard Dembski begin his presentation, I was at least a little bit encouraged.

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He did not seem at all to be cowered by Hitchens, and he went after him pretty strongly.

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He didn't drop his presentation to the level of his audience, and he went after him on some areas where he obviously has some little extra music we had playing.

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Oh, hey, you can preview that stuff, man. You can find out if there's something there. All right, so I turned the music off.

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That just sounds terrible. It just sounds like the ocean roaring in the background whenever we bring that up, so we got to do something about that.

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I don't know if the cable's bad or just what it is. Anyhow, he started off fairly strongly.

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He went after the areas that he's strong in, intelligent design and things like that.

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Then I just got the feeling, and this is something that I've seen happen more than once now. Christopher Hitchens sort of changes the order around a bit.

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Instead of taking audience questions, they take one question, and then they start going back and forth, and that's when the wheels fell off.

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You have to be ready to go toe -to -toe with Christopher Hitchens. You have to know all about his objections, and you have to have a firm foundation and apologetics to take this guy on.

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That's just all there is to it. How many Christopher Hitchens debates do we have to hear before we realize the necessity of addressing this man presuppositionally?

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It's just absolutely necessary. He is very good at rhetoric, but you have to be prepared to expose the rhetoric for what it is, rhetoric and nothing more than rhetoric.

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In the cross -examination or in the interaction period is when the differences between an evidential approach to apologetics and a presuppositional approach became very, very clear.

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Then the debate ended with a whimper. I'll play it.

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I do not know why. Dr. Dempsey concluded a debate on the existence and goodness of God.

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With a brief, shallow and irrelevant defense of things that had nothing to do with the debate at all, leaving

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Christopher Hitchens a wide open opportunity to finish the debate with a flourish.

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He gets the last word, and it was just, oh, it was one of the worst endings of a debate that I've that I've ever heard.

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And we'll listen to that painfully. But let's start actually after the opening statements in the period of cross -examination.

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I wanted to point out that you can be extremely intelligent and yet really blind to things. And there's a little bit of an irony in using the term blind here.

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Hitchens is talking about the eye. And I mentioned this in my sermon Sunday night.

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Here is Christopher Hitchens demonstrating he really does not understand the processes of even

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Darwinian evolutionary theory, let alone what intelligent design entails, what the real issues are.

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He just doesn't get it. Listen to this. Let me just take the question of the eye.

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I think Dr. Dempsey said I was obsessed with it. That's absolutely not true. It's simply that Darwin himself doubted at first that the eye could have evolved given its complexity.

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And because the eye is the example most commonly brought up. So I thought, okay, in my book, I'll take the most complex and the most difficult and the most well -known example.

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And you can look at my book or you can look at a very brilliant chapter in Richard Dawkins' book,

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Climbing Mountain Probable. Beautiful short chapter on the 25 different evolutions of the eye and the different ways in which it's taking place.

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I have contributed to this because I'm not a scientist. Only one small thing, but I'll give it to you anyway.

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You may have seen, you should have seen a wonderful series made by the British Broadcasting Corporation called

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Planet Earth. It's the greatest photography of the natural world you'll ever see. It's absolutely extraordinary.

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And in one very fascinating case, they go to Indonesia, which has the largest caves we know underground on Earth, which have a whole series of life forms inside them.

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Many of them not fully understood or explored yet, including a large number of life forms that we do already understand that fell into those caves when they were formed and ceased to live on the

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Earth's surface and in the sunlight and started to make their lives underground. They are more or less exactly the same as they would be if they had remained where they were.

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But I noticed the salamander, the beautiful Indonesian lizard.

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Everyone's seen one in a zoo. There it was. It had been living for, David Attenborough told us in the program, x millions of years away from the sunlight in a cave.

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It had eyes. No, it didn't. It had perfectly eye -shaped indentations, exactly where the eyes used to be, like a little sketch or outline of an eye, but no socket.

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The socket had gone. The eye itself had gone. All you could see was the vestigial. It had adapted.

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It had decided to lose its eye. Most of our studies are about how people got hold of eyes. Dawkins's is the best one, whatever

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Dr. Dempsey may say, of the different ways in which different creatures got different eyes. But no one until your humble servant, because I wrote off to my friends and my enemies and said, has anyone noticed this before, had thought, now how do animals lose their eyes?

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The same way they got them, by not needing them anymore, by adapting away. If you live underground in the wet, in the dark, it's a big hazard to your survival to have a wet, useless spot that can't receive any light, two of them on your face.

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It can pick up infection. It can make you vulnerable. You lose it. It takes millions of years, but you'll lose it.

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Now, there's the presentation. There's the thinking. Now, Dempsey did jump on this, and rightly so, very briefly.

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I think he should have done a little bit more. But if you hear that and you heard him say, well, how did it lose its eye?

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The same way it gained it. No, no, and triple no.

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That is so illogical. It is amazing to me that Christopher Hitchens can make such a statement.

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He clearly is not thinking through this in any way, shape, or form. Of course, when you're sitting there talking about Dawkins books is beautiful and all the rest of this stuff.

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I mean, he's hardly an unbiased observer. But just on any basic level, creating out of nothing through the manipulation of the genetic structure of an animal, something as complex as an eye.

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And if you've never studied its structure and all the different kinds of structures there are, the glial cells and all the neuron connections and the need to be able to interpret what the eye sees and all this incredibly, not just complex, but interactive stuff.

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And then you have to remember, you can only do that one step at a time because that's how evolution allegedly works. And so you have to create stuff that has no reason way earlier in the process.

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So it has a reason later in the process, but you can't have any direction and it has to be completely random. And it just boggles the mind that men, knowing what we know today, can continue to believe these things.

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But all of that aside for a moment, it is something completely different to create such a thing than having such a thing in existence to get rid of it.

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Because certainly if all of a sudden you no longer need something, then natural selection would select for those that have smaller and smaller eyes until the eye no longer exists.

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But that's completely different in getting rid of something than in getting something.

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That's a simple matter of gene regulation and so on and so forth. It's the same example he uses of the elephants and the tusks.

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That elephants with shorter tusks are now beginning to predominate in Africa because the longer tusks get shot.

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Yeah, that's called natural selection. It's a part of the genotype of the species to begin with.

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That's not Darwinian evolution that creates such things. That's a completely different mechanism.

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And he does not know the difference between them. And no matter how many people have explained it to him, evidently, he is not interested in hearing these things.

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Like I said, at some point, the conversation started where they start going.

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Actually, they were asked one question and then they start going back and forth, back and forth. They only answered one question.

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And it was that kind of interaction where Hitchens excelled and Dembski did not.

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And so there's a number of things I want to listen to here. I will try to keep it as brief as possible. But this is the main thing

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I want to do today. Then I do want to look at the Roger Olsen thing and then and get to the email questions as well.

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We'll just see how much we can cram into the hour. Only a few verses later than the Ten Commandments.

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So God instructs the children of Israel to kill everyone of the other tribe, the

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Amalekites, the Midianites, everybody, all the men, all the children, and to leave only the manageable women alive.

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Now, this is obviously one of Hitchens' favorite examples. He has used it over and over and over again.

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And it would it would strike me that if someone were to be debating him on these subjects, it might be a good idea to know that and to maybe head off some of his favorite examples at the pass, shall we say.

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Certainly, if we were to debate, is the New Testament evil or is the Bible evil? I would certainly want to try to head off a number of these objections in my opening statements.

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But be that as it may, here is his objection. If you make any reference to the law of God and specifically the

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Ten Commandments, he's going to do two things. He's going to say, well, you know, in the same section you have the command to genocide.

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No, you don't. You have the command for God's wrath against a sinful people to be brought to bear by other sinful people who are at least called to follow after God's law.

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You see, for some reason, and I don't know why, the vast—well, I do know why. I'll take that back.

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The vast majority of Christopher Hitchens' opponents will not publicly affirm the wrath of God.

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It might be right there in Romans 1. It might be right—the wrath of God is being revealed.

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It might be right there, but we are so afraid of talking about the wrath of God and affirming the wrath of God that we won't talk about it, won't affirm it, won't say anything about it.

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That's going to come up here because now he's raising specific issues, biblical issues.

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And this is where theology matters and determines you're apologetic. And this is, like I said, where the wheels came off because you have to have a firm foundation upon which to respond to these types of things.

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That is an instruction that's very frequently repeated, by the way, and invariably carried out.

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When Thomas Paine pointed that out in The Age of Reason a couple of centuries ago, there was a

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Welsh bishop who wrote in complaining to him saying, the Bible does not say those women were kept for immoral purposes.

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You're free to believe that if you wish. If you're going to bring up rape and evolution and the way that humanity actually behaves, under divine instruction,

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I'm pointing out here, you must stop saying what I meant to correct you from saying earlier, that what I attack is what people do in the name of religion.

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No, they don't mistake religion when they obey commandments like this. What I object to is what's in the original instructions.

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These are instructions for rape, genocide, and slavery. They are instruction manuals for it.

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They are not instruction manuals for rape, genocide, or slavery. They're instruction manuals for how to live in God's light, in God's law, and what happens when you do not.

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He will not address the behavior of these people because, from his perspective, that can't be a part of the

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Old Testament revelation. Those people just weren't advanced enough to even recognize a moral system.

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They were just these individuals who were slaves, and he hates the concept of slavery to God.

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That's all Christopher Hitchens is, when you boil it all down, is a hatred of God's sovereignty,

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God's control of his life. He knows, and his current condition has reiterated to his mind, that he is not in control of his own destiny, and he hates it.

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How to behave like a slave yourself, just to come. I want to be careful here because the topic of the debate was the existence and goodness of God.

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I mean, we weren't talking about Christian theism, but I mean... Now, there you go, right there. The debate is about the existence and goodness of God, but we're not talking about Christian theism.

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You can't do that. There's only one God who exists, and it's the Christian God.

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And if you're going to be a Christian, you can't make that distinction. I'm sorry, you can't do it.

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It's impossible. You just gave up the debate. It is impossible for a

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Christian on biblical grounds to defend a God other than the God of the Bible. How can you do that?

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I've never understood it. I mean, I hear people trying to do it all the time, but I don't get it. And I think here we are at, obviously, a

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Christian church. So let's talk a little bit about this. I mean, certainly, if we're going to do this, we have to get into a little bit of Christian theology.

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One thing that's very clear in Christian theology is that this is a broken, fallen world.

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And in a broken, fallen world, there are often no good, no optimal solutions.

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And I think we can see this even in human context. The dropping of the

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A -bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Difficult decision.

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Do we do it? We did it. Not to do it means, meant probably losing hundreds of thousands of American lives.

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So there was, the problem is that in a fallen world, there is no perfect optimization strategy.

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And it seems to me that God, in dealing with a fallen world, is often confronted with a a trying to get the best of some bad options.

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That there's, again, where theology matters. If you've got a

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God who's just, you know, trying to work through the best of the bad options, you don't have a decree.

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He's not accomplishing his purpose. His wrath has really no basis now, because it's not a part of his purpose.

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It's not a part of redemptive history. See? Theology matters. If you don't have a biblical theology, you're going to end up defending the indefensible.

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And I think one thing, you know, it's funny that the Amalekites keep coming up. The Jews decimated or annihilated them.

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But the thing is, the Jews also turned against themselves. They probably fought as much against themselves as they fought against other people.

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Irrelevant. Irrelevant. Irrelevant to the objection that was raised.

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Irrelevant to the biblical context. Irrelevant in toto. And I think the young people sitting in front of him can tell he's now backpedaling.

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Up to this point, at least in the first give and takes where he had prepared statements, he was on the attack. Now, Hitchens is on the attack, and he is backpedaling big time.

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And sometimes in divine judgment, when the concubine and judges was dismembered because of this, the

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Benjamites, Benjaminites, almost the entire tribe of Benjamin was destroyed.

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God is a just God. And he's not bound by the same rules that we are.

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He makes the rules. And the fact is, we all die. And this is a decision by God.

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I mean, the way the world is structured. Why do we have this death? Why is it a broken and fallen world? Ultimately, Christian theology teaches that this is as a result of human rebellion against God.

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So you've got this whole system of theology. Christopher Hitchens. If you do not have God's sovereignty, then human rebellion against God becomes something that God either didn't see coming or couldn't do anything about.

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It somehow becomes an authority above him. And Hitchens is going to mock this, and I think appropriately so.

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Again, theology matters. Looks at that. He's aware of it. And he's not going to have a part of it.

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But there is the whole system that comes to you.

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And it does. The alternatives, it seems, if you're not going to go with a theistic position, a

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Christian theistic position, or some other position. Maybe you don't find that one. But then it seems that you're confronted with an atheistic position, which has its own problems.

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I think the indignation that Christopher Hitchens feels.

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And the thing is, I applaud probably 80, 90 percent of his book, the hypocrisies, the problems that he finds.

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No question about that. But on what basis does he do that? And I don't think he can do it on an atheist.

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I think often one gets this. See, there he's trying to be a presuppositionalist. But his theology isn't sufficient to substantiate his recognition that he needs to address this presuppositionally, nor does his apologetics.

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The sense that he comes in, it's hit and run, all these faults that he can find, problems that he can find with religion.

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But he has an atheistic worldview, and that has problems of itself. In a fallen world, no worldview is going to be perfect.

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No worldview is going to be perfect. How about the worldview that God himself reveals in Scripture?

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Maybe that's going to at least be accurate to our experience. That also blew me away, because in essence,

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Dembski said to this audience, well, you know, we've all got problems. I mean, it's a mess everywhere, and we're the problem.

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And I'm like, well, yeah, that's really not the best way to end a debate. It's not going to cover things.

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I mean, that's the problem. And so we do have a problem of evil. We have a problem with good.

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We have lots of problems. We have lots of problems. There's—that's really—I would not suggest that's how you want to finish your presentation before someone else gets to continue on, is to say, well, we all got lots of problems.

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Like I said, at this point, that's where the wheels fell off. We can either go back to questions, or you can continue on.

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Do you have a response to that? Well, in an evolutionary mammalian world, also, quite obviously, there is no perfect solution either, as I've said.

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That's—I hardly need to say it. Once you've described that that's what we are, imperfectly evolved mammals on a short -lived planet, people now object to that, though it's true, and there's all the evidences in its favor.

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We are poorly evolved mammals on a short -lived, rather endangered planet. By the way, the very phrase, poorly evolved, is ridiculous within a neo -Darwinian micromutational evolutionary theory.

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There's no such thing as poorly evolved. He's using—he cannot help but borrow from a theistic worldview to identify this as poorly evolved.

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In other words, not as perfect as we would like. In comparison to what? Because remember, evolution cannot have—it cannot be teleological.

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It cannot have a direction. It has to be random by very nature. And so the very essence of that statement is a little bit silly.

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People say, well, if you believe that, that's depressing, nihilistic, makes things seem so random and capricious, and so on.

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Well, yes, but is it true or not? And what is true of your view? What is true of your view, sir?

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Well, you've just said that God invents—makes—a human species, takes a brief look at it, and decides, it's in rebellion against me.

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See? Hitchens can see this stuff. He can see when people are inconsistent in their theology.

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It doesn't know how it's done this, but that's his verdict. You're in rebellion against me. For one thing, you've broken the rule

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I gave you, don't think for yourselves. Yeah, right. You deliberately went and looked for knowledge.

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That's not what she was doing at all. Gross misreading of the

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Genesis text. Now you're in rebellion. Now you're going to suffer. Now there's nothing that won't happen to you.

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I made you, and I can break you. And I will. I'll flood you. I'll plague you.

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Now, what is this? This is like being a terrible insect or rodent in the laboratory of a cruel and stupid person.

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And what could be more—what is more nihilistic? What's more nihilistic and alienating than that?

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It's all summarized in one line, if you wish. To believe what Dr. Dempsey believes and his co -thinkers believe, you have to consider yourself created incurably sick, and then ordered on pain of death and eternal torture to be well.

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Now that's really what Christopher Hitchens believes, and no matter how many times it has been explained to him that that is not the case in any way, shape, or form.

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That it is completely misunderstanding the centrality of God and salvation. It's completely misunderstanding the federal headship of Adam, the federal headship of Christ.

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He doesn't care about any of those things. He's going to keep repeating that until his dying day, unless, of course,

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God has mercy upon him. But again, you have to have a sound, biblical, consistent theology to respond firmly to such an assertion.

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This is not morality. Actually, the first question that was asked is the most important question.

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We could do this question only, couldn't we? But I think we probably should have another one. Dr. Demske, would you like to respond before we move on to another question, or we'll save that for the closing?

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Well, I think, again, we have— Come on, dive in. There's a mirror that's at play here.

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I mean, what poisons everything? Is it religion? I would say get a mirror and look at it.

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We all poison everything. We're sick, yes. But I would say not incurably so.

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In fact, the cure is there. According to Christianity, in Jesus Christ.

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So it's not—and it's interesting. I mean, in a lot of these discussions,

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Christopher has not brought this up, but I mean, he has a real problem with the vicarious atonement, as he calls it, or substitutionary view of the atonement.

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But what's interesting, it seems that he always omits that in God becoming human in Jesus Christ, that God has established solidarity with the human condition.

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This was actually, in my own conversion, the thing that was the turning point. I mean, I was raised in a largely secular home.

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And let me skip over the rest of that and get to Hitchin's response to that.

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From a distance. Missionaries who live in— And a chance.

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But what about visiting with the one who created Shakespeare? I mean, there's going to be— We'll get there eventually here.

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Here we go. Which it's not, unfortunately, for you. And the reason it'll never triumph is because it insists on shackling its—

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I missed it. Come on. —itself to the— Ah, come on. It's right there. I can see it.

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We'll have to listen to a little bit more of Demski before we get to him. He's the creator of everything. So, I mean, wouldn't you want to visit with Shakespeare if you could get a chance?

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But what about visiting with the one who created Shakespeare? I mean, there's going to be no boredom in heaven because we're—

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I mean, if the earth is exciting, how much more exciting is the one who created everything? So this is the Christian perspective.

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I think, yeah, there is harshness there in the scriptures. There are Malachites in a lot of things.

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But what would you like? Would you like a sanitized Bible in which there was nothing like this, in which we eliminated all of this?

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Because all the carnage that we see in the scripture is there today. And it's done in the name of religion, and it's done in the name of secular, atheistic principles as well.

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Now, to catch that, there's harshness in the name of religion. I'm not sure if I'm going to find this part, but he talks about he doesn't really like the idea of hell, and there's exclusivicity in Christ, he doesn't like those things.

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That's Demski speaking. And I'm just like, you don't? You don't like the idea that God has actually provided one way of salvation in Jesus Christ?

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I mean, he's under obligation to provide many ways? Is that the idea? I mean, there's just—it just got worse and worse as time went by.

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But I wanted to get to Hitchens' statements here. We do because we're created sick. But, I mean, look, as some of you may or may not know, in the early

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Christian years, there were many leaders of the early church who thought that Christianity should be a new religion, which it's not, unfortunately, for you.

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The reason it'll never triumph is because it insists on shackling itself to the terrible books of the

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Jewish Old Testament. Now, great Christian thinkers like Marcion was the best known. There were

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Marcionite churches all over the Middle East. Now, I hope you hear what he's saying here.

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He does not have any concept of how intimately connected all the New Testament documents are with the

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Old Testament. He clearly just doesn't care or doesn't realize those are the earliest documents or whatever. So he's saying these great

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Christian leaders who were the Gnostics—yes, the great enemies of the Christian faith, the

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Gnostics—he's now identifying as the great Christian leaders who want a whole new religion that had no connection to these terrible, horrible

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Old Testament books. Which, again, somebody needs to say to him,

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Sir, your ignorance of this is astounding. How can you make such a statement when the

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New Testament books themselves, the earliest books we have by any stretch of the imagination, long before any of these

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Gnostic works, are intimately connected with the Old Testament themselves, the

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Old Testament texts themselves? There's no possible way to come up with the Gnostic worldview.

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From the writings of the Apostles, the Lord Jesus Christ, it's not possible. It's not there. But he doesn't get challenged on that either.

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Just for the study and worship of the message of the Nazarene, but it was decided no. The whole

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Nazarene story had to prove, had to reverse -engineer and prove the truth of the Old Testament books as well.

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And with this insufferable burden, you've saddled yourself with an unbelievable and wicked religion. Unbelievable and wicked.

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It's a prettier sometimes thing. But I think there are deformities to the pure Christian religion too, and he mentioned the name

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I give to one of them, a doctrine that I think is strictly immoral, the idea of vicarious redemption.

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Now though I say I don't think there's any historical definite proof of this person's existence, because all the accounts of him are so discrepant, there are so many of them that it's enough to persuade me that there must have been some such figure.

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And it's not that unlikely that there'd be a charismatic rabbi wandering in a region that was hungry for messiahs and kept on hoping to find them.

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It's not at all unlikely that there was one, or that he would have got in trouble with the Romans, and been, as people were who get in trouble with the

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Romans, very harshly treated. This does not prove, it doesn't even suggest, that his birth was divine, or that his father was

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God, or that his mother was a virgin. None of these things are remotely provable. They're not even really arguable.

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They can only be asserted. Of course, just on a logical basis, he just went from historical existence to the existence of miracles, and of course he precludes any evidence of the miraculous into the historical process, and therefore you couldn't prove any miracles in history anyway.

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So it's somewhat of a charade to even use this type of argumentation. Suppose they are.

33:39

I then have to be told that the torture and human sacrifice of somebody, which if I'd been present, it would have been my duty to try and prevent.

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Now to catch that, the torture and human sacrifice of somebody, nothing about the voluntariness of it, nothing about the fact that Jesus said it is necessary, nothing about the fact that he made himself of no reputation, that he gave himself for a...

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No, no, no, no. We will not represent the New Testament accurately. No, no, no.

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We will have to twist it, because we are twisted ourselves. That is the essence here.

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Which I did not ask for, over which I have no control, that took place thousands of years according to some, before I was born, commits me, and I have no choice in the matter.

34:27

No, it does not commit you to anything. You are committed by the fact that you were created by God. You are committed to God's law by the fact that you are created in his image.

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That's what he misses here, because he's going to say that, well, and if I reject this, I'm going to go to hell.

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No, you're going to hell anyway, sir. You are under the wrath of God. The commitment is in your creatureliness.

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That's where the commitment is. And that my sins are forgiven by this human sacrifice.

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No, your sins are not forgiven by that human sacrifice. Your sins have not been forgiven because you have not believed in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. The message of the New Testament is, if you have not believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, the wrath of God abides upon you. Your sins have not been forgiven in any way, shape, or form, sir.

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And it's not just a, quote -unquote, human sacrifice. It was the self -giving of the God -man.

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A very different thing, because human sacrifice, that's happened many, many times. Someone sacrificing someone else.

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This is self -giving on the part of God himself. What's wrong with that? If I like you enough or love you enough,

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I can pay your debt. I say there was a folly on your part, but I'll pay it for you. In extreme cases, people have been known to volunteer to take other people's place in prison.

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Or even, one of two very famous cases, on the scaffold. They'll say, I'll do that for you. I'll do it for love or I'll do it for suffering humanity.

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But that's the most they can do. And it's not bad. What they can't do is take away your sins.

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Why? He will never answer that. Because to answer that would be to have to address who

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Jesus was. And he rejects who Jesus was. But then tries to provide an internal critique, ignoring the assertion of who

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Jesus was and why he came. Because that would be to take away your responsibility. No, it would not be to take away your responsibility.

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Your responsibility is there. You're already under the wrath of God. It would be to graciously, as the judge against whom the sin has been committed, showing mercy and grace.

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That's what it is. I can't say you didn't steal or lose that money that I'm having to pay now. I can't say that this course of folly didn't get you into prison.

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And nobody is saying that you didn't commit sin. What they are saying is there was a great exchange that took place where my sin is imputed to him.

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His righteousness is imputed to me. And since he is the judge against whom the sins were committed, upon what basis do you say he cannot do so?

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He did. And now look what you're doing to me. I can't relieve you of that. I can't wash you white as snow and make you new again.

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It's more than can be promised and more than should be promised. No, you cannot. That's true. Christopher Hitchens does not have the capacity, does not have that ability.

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But God does. This is a spiritual thing. This is an exercise of power.

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Vicarious redemption is scapegoating. It's throwing your sins onto an animal. It's an old primitive practice from the

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Middle East. It doesn't deserve the attention of civilized or thoughtful people.

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So anyway. And that was not a thoughtful criticism of it, was it? In no way, shape, or form.

37:32

Okay, time's going quickly. We got to get to the audience questions. So I wanted to get to the conclusion real quick, because I told you it was absolutely one of the most painful things

37:42

I've ever listened to. I don't know what the motivation was here. But Dembski was given the opportunity to give a five -minute closing statement.

37:50

He obviously had it prepared. And for some reason decided to just, well, let's listen.

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And briefly, in God is Not Great, Hitchens portrays her as a self -serving hypocrite.

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In the audience today is my good friend Mary Poplin, a professor at Claremont. She was in Calcutta with Mother Teresa when

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Hitchens came out with his book against her. Recently, Poplin published Finding Calcutta, in which she recounts her time with Mother Teresa.

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Poplin writes, quote, and Poplin and the nuns, they were reading your book while she was there.

38:51

Hitchens also accused Mother Teresa of receiving the best in health care when it was not available to the poor.

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However, I took an offer to her from a colleague's brother who was involved in developing a new pacemaker to replace her old pacemaker with a new and improved one.

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She said she could not accept it, but she would accept it for the poor. She also refused another medical offer.

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When I called and repeated these offers upon her becoming more ill a few months after I left, and that was close to her death, she again refused and asked for prayers instead.

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My impression is that she mostly received good health care when she was too ill to fight it.

39:30

And I think I'm going to leave it there rather abruptly. I think in my rhetoric course, I would wrap things up.

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But I'm going to give Mother Teresa the last word. So that's where I'll leave it.

39:45

And that was it. A rambling defense of Mother Teresa is how you finish a debate on the existence and goodness of God, knowing that the guy is now going to speak up who wrote a book on this subject.

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It's going to be painful, but we need to see what happens when, well, when this happens. Oh, well.

40:18

Well, Mother Teresa was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

40:24

She was not a friend of the poor, as she claimed to be. She was a friend of poverty, preached it as a good thing, as a gift from God, something to be welcomed along with other kinds of suffering, wasn't interested in alleviating it, was a friend of the rich, took money from the

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Duvalier family in Haiti, one of the most obscenely bloated dynastic dictatorships in history.

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Took money from Charles Keating, the man who robbed Americans blind through the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Stolen money.

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All to build convents in her own name. More than 200 of them around the world in order to found an order that bore her name.

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This is not modesty either, nor is it humility. It doesn't exhaust my critique of her either.

41:09

We all know there is a cure for poverty. It's a rudimentary one. It does work, though. It works everywhere for the same reason.

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It's colloquially called the empowerment of women. It's the only thing that does work.

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If you allow women some control over their cycle of reproduction, so that they're not chained by their husbands or by village custom to annual animal -type pregnancies, early death, disease and so on.

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If you will free them from that, give them some basic health of that sort, and if you're generous enough to throw in perhaps a handful of seeds and a bit of credit, the whole floor, culturally, socially, medically, economically of that village will rise.

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It works every time. Mother Teresa spent her entire life campaigning against that outcome.

41:57

She said that contraception was equivalent to abortion morally, and abortion was morally equivalent to murder.

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She was entirely against the only thing that cures poverty. I would say that her preachments led to an enormous increase in the amount of poverty, ignorance, filth and disease in the world.

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And I would further add, without embarrassment, that it's off those things that the Roman Catholic Church has always fed and made its living.

42:23

Otherwise, there'd be no need for the Protestant Revolution, which brings us here today. And believe me,

42:33

I've barely started with that terrible person. Now, as I said before, you can be an atheist in anything you like.

42:41

You can be an atheist in the Marquis de Sade. You can be an atheist and be a great humanist.

42:49

I mean, most of the missionary work, people work done by Médecins Sans Frontières, for example, by Oxfam, by many other people in the stricken parts of the globe, which

42:58

I've visited, done by people who are not doing it to proselytize for their faith. They're not doing it handing out

43:04

Bibles surreptitiously. They're not doing it for any such reason. They're doing it for its own sake.

43:09

That's a beautiful humanism, and I admire it. I even think it has a slight superiority and there's no hidden agenda to it.

43:18

But I'm not going to have Nazism called secularism, if you don't mind. I'm a prisoner of what

43:23

I know here. I know too much about it. I've read Mein Kampf, for example, which most people have not, where Hitler says several times, starting very early on, that he's doing

43:33

God's work in exterminating the Jews. He went on saying that.

43:38

The Vatican was shown the book. In those days, they would ban any book they didn't like the look of. They were one of the great book -banning organizations in the world.

43:46

They didn't ban the book that was written by the leader who made his first political treaty in Germany, with them and their church, and outside Germany between his dictatorship and the

43:57

Vatican. If you wanted to take your oath, well, you didn't have to want to, you had to, if you were in the German army or in the

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SS, to take your oath to the Führer, which was compulsory, you took it like this, I swear by almighty

44:07

God, undying fealty. Around your belt, if you were a soldier in the Nazi army, you had to wear a buckle that said,

44:14

Gott mit uns, the German for God, on our side. Like every other form of totalitarianism and fanaticism, this is religious in itself, and it was not as it was in some other countries, the

44:29

Christian right in power, but it was the Christian right subsumed into a party that involved various other terrible mutations too.

44:38

So I just have to defend myself, it seems to me, on these two matters. I'll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier, why don't you accept this wonderful offer?

44:49

Why wouldn't you like to meet Shakespeare, for example? I mean, I don't know if you really think that when you die, you can be corporeally reassembled and have conversations with authors from previous epochs.

45:01

It's not necessary that you believe that, in Christian theology, and I have to say it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me.

45:07

The only reason I want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him any time because he is immortal in the works he's left behind.

45:16

If you've read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment. But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations and for blasphemy, for challenging the gods of the city, and he accepted his death, he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps

45:34

I'll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true, could always go on.

45:49

Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that's the only conversation worth having.

45:55

And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don't know. But I do know that it's the conversation

46:01

I want to have while I'm still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way, is an offer of something not worth having.

46:16

I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet, that I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom.

46:35

I wouldn't have it any other way. And I'd urge you to look at those of you who tell you, those people who tell you at your age that you're dead till you believe as they do.

46:45

What a terrible thing to be telling to children. And that you can only live, and that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority.

47:01

Don't think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is.

47:07

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

47:13

Thank you. So there you go. There you have

47:20

Christopher Hitchens closing. No lame defenses of Mother Teresa or anything else. Of course, here is a man who just contradicted himself in almost every word he said.

47:30

He claims to have no certain faith, and yet he operates on such a dogmatic faith that he can see beauty in Richard Dawkins and cannot see anything in Scripture that is beautiful at all.

47:43

His blindness is truly amazing. And it's sad to hear because he's such an intelligent man, obviously an intelligent man.

47:52

He's enjoyable to listen to outside of the fact that sadly most of the time what you're listening to is pure blasphemy.

47:58

But he is a man who has been given a great intellect and very clearly a demonstration that great intellect does not lead you to God's truth.

48:07

Now, Mr. Pierce, we have pushed it pretty late here. I apologize. Don't know if we're going to get to calls, but I didn't promise we were going to in the first place.

48:14

We'll keep trying. But you have some questions that you said you wanted to air today as well.

48:22

I do. And the first question is from Robert. And Robert says he was speaking with a professed anti -Calvinist.

48:30

And in the course of the conversation, they said that in Luke 22, 32, where Jesus is praying that Peter's faith would continue, that continuing was in doubt because the verb, and unfortunately, because of my email program here, when you try to put foreign languages in, it just comes up.

48:46

Mine works just fine. But to fail is the verb in question, was in the subjunctive mood and that means that it's only a possibility, not a certainty.

48:59

The gentleman says that he looked and looked to find what he could on this, but really didn't get anywhere.

49:05

Wallace's grammar on page 469 talks about eris subjunctive with, and gobbledygook is now in my script again, in primary clauses only, and this particular construction occurs in the subordinate clause.

49:17

And so I was unsure how relevant this information was. It's not relevant at all because obviously this is called a hinnah clause.

49:24

I have prayed for you, and then you have hinnah. That, all it's telling you is what the substance of Jesus' prayer was for.

49:31

And whenever you have people saying, oh, well, that's in the subjunctive, so therefore it's not necessarily, it's not the indicative, and therefore it's not a fact and it might not happen.

49:39

Such a person knows zippity -doo -dah about the Greek language and there are books filled with that kind of ignorance out there.

49:47

I pointed this out in Dave Hunt's abuse of the subjunctive. When you have a hinnah clause, you simply look and you go, oh, in order that, and it's telling you, in this case, what the content of the prayer was.

50:00

Now, the question that has to be answered is, are Jesus' prayers answered or not? And I think that's fairly straightforward, though there are many theologians today that would say not necessarily.

50:12

I think for most Christians, you go, well, duh. So, no. Okay, the next question is actually very easy, but we do get this question a lot.

50:22

So, I wanted to throw this out and that is, I was wondering. I get this all the time.

50:28

I cannot tell you how many times I've answered this question. This is Levi and he says, I was just wondering what application

50:33

Dr. White uses on his Mac to convert text to speech, PDF. PDF, Word document, et cetera, et cetera.

50:41

Also, are there other text to speech software that he knows about? I'm constantly on the move and can't sit down and read things for very long.

50:49

Text Speech Pro, Google it. Text Speech is one word. Pro is the program that I use on my

50:56

Mac. I'm very thankful that I got this earlier this year. I think it was in March, as I recall. I remember downloading it in a hotel room.

51:05

I was in New York. It was when I was with Bartolucci, is when I found it.

51:11

And there are certain voices that you can buy that it installs that are a little bit better than the

51:16

Mac voices. I even bought a British voice. For example, if I was going to read a

51:22

Christopher Hitchens book, I would have a British voice do it. Or when I had Colin Smith's papers, I would have a

51:28

British voice do it because he's a Brit, so it sounds better. But I was going to, and I forgot to,

51:33

I apologize. I was going to copy a file over so I could play you a section because people always say, but is it understandable?

51:42

I don't want to listen to electronic voices. It sounds like... I understand that. That's not what these sound like. These are excellent voices.

51:49

It's very understandable. Yeah, sometimes it will mispronounce something, especially theological terms, but I've never had any problem with that.

51:56

And it is a huge boon to me. That's the only way I can get as much stuff covered as I do.

52:01

Well, I know a number of our listeners would prefer that you maybe find a way to purchase a British voice for when you do your...

52:08

Oh, oh! But let's move along now. Robert writes again.

52:16

Robert writes again. Sorry, folks. That's the end of the Dividing Lines today. The host just took a spear through the chest.

52:24

It says, Dr. White, I've been speaking with someone who says that Jesus was chosen among other candidates,

52:31

I guess, to be the Savior because of passages like Isaiah 42, 1, here is my servant whom

52:36

I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. I will put my spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations.

52:45

How can, he asks, can Jesus be chosen unless there was something to choose from?

52:51

There's absolutely no reason to even begin to assume that there were multiple servants from whom to choose.

52:57

That would assume that God cannot choose a singular, unique individual, and Jesus was singular and unique.

53:03

So the question itself just has a really, really, really bad foundation to it right at the start. Well, that's it on the questions.

53:09

While we have a moment left, real quick, I do want to mention that we have combined the entire

53:16

Steve Gregg debate that took place in April of 2008. That was five episodes, five hours of dividing lines simulcast with Steve Gregg's show,

53:25

The Narrow Path. This has kind of been basically put into one unit and is now available on the website.

53:35

I was just listening to portions of this, found it, once again, almost a year and a half, more than a year and a half later, amazing some of the positions that Steve Gregg took, including the portion

53:46

I was just listening to on the third episode where he flat out basically denies that men are born with original sin.

53:55

That just blew my mind. Not too unusual. It does lead me, very quickly, I might try to get to at least one caller here.

54:01

I'm not sure if I can get to it, but I kept saying I was going to cover the Olson statement and I didn't, and I apologize. Let me very quickly mention something because it sort of dovetails with the

54:11

Steve Gregg thing. Roger Olson, one of the better -known Arminians of our day, posted an article a couple days ago called,

54:18

Arminianism is God -Centered Theology. Very long article. And he rightly points out that the old

54:23

Arminians were not open theists. They were not people like many Arminians today who have almost no view of God's sovereignty at all.

54:33

Our criticism always has been that, well, that may be, but they didn't hold that together appropriately.

54:38

They emphasized man's freedom over God's sovereignty. But I couldn't help but chuckle at the conclusion that Olson offers, because it just undermines everything he just said and illustrates what we have said all along.

54:49

Listen to his conclusion to his article. I conclude with this observation. The difference between Arminian and Calvinist theologies does not lie in man -centeredness versus God -centeredness.

54:59

True Arminianism is as thoroughly God -centered as Calvinism. A fair reading of classical Arminian theologians from Arminius to Thomas Odin cannot avoid finding in them a ringing endorsement of the

55:08

God -centeredness of all creation and redemption. The difference, rather, lies in the nature and character of the

55:14

God who stands at the centers of these two systems. The God who stands at the center of classical high

55:20

Calvinism of the tulip variety is a morally ambiguous being of power and control who is hardly distinguishable from the devil.

55:29

The devil wants all people to go to hell, whereas the God of Calvinism wants some, perhaps most people, to go to hell.

55:35

The devil is God's instrument in wreaking havoc and horror in the world for God's glory. The God who stands at the center of classical

55:43

Arminianism is the God of Jesus Christ, full of love and compassion, as well as justice and wrath, who voluntarily limits his power to allow creaturely rebellion, but is nevertheless the source of all good for whose glory and honor everything except sin exists."

55:59

Now, if I wrote anything on my blog where I said that the

56:05

God of Arminianism is indistinguishable from Satan himself, would I ever hear anything but that?

56:11

See, the Arminians can rip and shred and cavil and insult and just go on like this, and they're just allowed to do it.

56:21

But if we dare say almost anything, man, I couldn't believe the number of people all upset by even responding to people on the dividing line and pointing out that they've made basic fundamental biblical errors.

56:34

There's just a massive double standard that is involved here. We'll go just a minute or two long.

56:40

I want to at least try to get Denver in here. Sorry, Sean. I'm just not going to be able to. That's just too huge a topic on Skype to get to in a few minutes, but Denver's been waiting for over 40 minutes now.

56:50

So let's talk to Denver. Hello, Denver. Hey, I appreciate you getting me in.

56:57

I actually was calling for something else and didn't realize the dividing line was going on. But you had covered the parable of the farmer with Norman Geisler just recently.

57:09

And it's funny, because what you just said is exactly where I think the heart of the issue is. It's the character of God.

57:15

And when you change the analogy that he's giving, it sounds like he's still blind to how sub -biblical the nature of our sin and our rebellion against God is.

57:27

And I wondered if a better way to hold the mirror up and see the man -centeredness of their thinking is if you just simply change who's in the pond.

57:37

And one of those boys represents the fallen angels. Because God never sent salvation or a savior to the fallen angels.

57:46

And Geisler's analogy folded his arms and just watched him drown. That's true. That's true.

57:54

I wish there was some way to get Norm to listen to the corrections that we have attempted to offer.

58:02

But as you can tell by the response that was given, I do honestly believe that from Dr.

58:08

Geisler's perspective, to even merit my response with him reading it himself or seriously interacting with it is to give me way too much respect.

58:19

You need to understand that part of this is simply to disrespect me. Part of his defense of Erick Canor has been simply to disrespect me as well.

58:28

So I don't know what it would take. It would take someone older than him with a bigger name than him but even then, he has defended this for so long now that I don't know that whatever you put in the pond or whatever illustration,

58:40

I tried to make the change to the king and instead of just the good old boy farmer and so on and so forth.

58:48

Yeah, I thought that was great. Yeah, when you've defended the almighty nature of man's autonomy for as long as Norm Geisler has,

58:58

I don't know that there's any hearing a correction of it after a while. I... That's a scary thing to say.

59:06

When you talk about the character of God, according to Geisler's perspective, it's not all loving if he doesn't try to save all of his creatures equally, or his man.

59:16

But does it ever occur to them that he never extended salvation to the angels? And so what does that speak to his character?

59:23

Maybe somebody will ask. I would... I think that's an excellent question to ask. I could guess a response but the problem is his response would have to borrow from my own response.

59:34

In other words, I guess his response would be that there is a difference between God's love for the angelic realm and that of the human realm, but that immediately introduces a distinction in God's love which his view of omnibenevolence denies to begin with.

59:47

So I don't know. I don't know how he'd respond to it. Good question. Very good, Denver. I appreciate that.

59:52

Could you recommend... I'm only a three -year -old Christian in December and I love your work.

59:59

I cannot thank you enough for what you've put out. What books could you point me to for presuppositional understanding of apologetics?

01:00:09

Well, we make available a book called Always Ready which is really, really good on that subject.

01:00:16

And if you look at Jamin Huebner's blog, he's one of my bloggers. If you just put in his name, pull up his blog,

01:00:26

I think he has a pretty extensive bibliography listed either in his blog or on the website itself on that particular subject.

01:00:34

But if you start with Always Ready and move up from there, I wouldn't suggest starting with Van Til, for example, because he just wasn't a good writer in English.

01:00:47

It wasn't his native language and a lot of people find it very difficult to follow. But there have been a number of people who've interpreted Van Til and Always Ready, I think, is one of the friendliest introductions.

01:00:56

Gets your feet wet, gets you a foundation. Then you can move on from there to start looking at Bonson and Frame and people like that and move up to Van Til from there.

01:01:05

Thank you so much. God bless. Thanks. Thanks for calling. God bless. Bye -bye. All right. Thanks for listening to Dividing Line today.

01:01:12

We'll be back again on Thursday, Lord willing, with your phone.

01:01:17

We'll try to take more phone calls. I wanted to try to get through the Hitch and Demske thing again because theology matters.

01:01:24

It determines how we do apologetics and there is a reason why the responses we give to unbelievers sound so differently depending upon what we believe.

01:01:36

Theology matters. It's so easily illustrated. But anyway, thanks for listening.

01:01:42

We'll be back on Thursday. See you then. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

01:02:45

If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O. Box 37106,

01:02:52

Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the World Wide Web at aomin .org,

01:02:57

that's a -o -m -i -n -dot -o -r -g, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.