Debate Teacher Reacts: Frank Turek vs. Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens’ Opening Evasion and the Rules of Debate

The deist says he can tell what length I should shave off the end of my penis if I'm a boy or have a male child, who I should sleep with, and in what position. And since God doesn't ever directly appear and say, do it this way, it's done for him, and this is really convenient, by human representatives who claim to act in his name.

He's just like, I'm done with cross-exam. Let's just talk to the audience. Do any of you, know? That's pretty funny. Welcome back to another Debate Teacher Reacts happening right now. My name is Nate.

I'm the president of Wise Disciple, and we are a non-profit organization dedicated to giving you the tools to live effectively as Christians in today's culture. I trust that these videos, where we get to sift through the arguments and see which person makes the better case, helps you in that area.

In this particular video, we're looking at Frank Turek versus Christopher Hitchens. Now, this debate took place back in 2008 at the Virginia Commonwealth University, and the topic was, does God exist?

Now, immediately, you have to understand about debates, that means that the two interlocutors who agree to debate must take both the affirmative and the negative positions. And so, Frank Turek has taken the af, or the affirmative, that God does exist, but that means that Christopher Hitchens has to take the negative, which means that God does not exist, and that means that both opponents then have to support and defend their specific alternative position on the issue.

As you know, cross-examination is where it's at, in my opinion. I used to teach my students that in the classroom. It's where you get to shine or suck, like in real time, right in front of people's eyes.

And so, we're going to zoom in on a particular segment that is pretty close to cross-examination, so let's go. Christopher, what is your explanation for.

The beginning of time, space, and matter out of nothing? Well, we don't know, I remember being asked by one of my children once, what was there at the Big Bang? And I said, well, you have to imagine, this shows how poverty-stricken our own vocabulary is, and I suspect how poverty-stricken.

Our own... Okay, so I know that this is an informal debate. It's certainly not as formal as we would find in something where there is a rigid structure of crossfire with like a public forum debate or something like that.

But the bottom line is, he's not answering the question, he's filibustering. And so, Frank Turek should probably gently press him to answer the question more clearly.

The capacity is. In other words, I think there are some things, not that we don't understand or know, but that we cannot. So we're reduced to sort of primitive images. But I said, suppose you could picture all of matter, the whole of matter, condensed into, I got this from Hawking, I think, one of his colleagues, condensed into something like a very small, dense, black suitcase of the kind you see people carrying money in crime thrones.

And it's about to fly open. That's what you'd have to be able... Everything that's ever going to be is inside that. That was the best I could do. And I don't think many people could do, if I say it myself, that much better.

But I was completely unhorsed because the kid said, well, what was outside the suitcase? And I thought, well, I can't do that. And I don't know anyone who can. And that, in a way, would be my whole point.

I don't have to know, you do. You're the one who says you know. Oops. Not me. So the answer from Hitchens' side is,.

I don't know, and nobody can know. It's kind of like a hard agnostic answer. The problem with this is, when you get into a debate and two interlocutors or two opponents agree to debate a particular topic, that means that one of them has to take the affirmative position and the other one has to take the negation.

If Frank Turek is going to say that God does exist, which is, you know, affirming the topic, well, then he needs to support himself with good reasoning. He needs to make an argument. That's what opening remarks are about.

And that's what first rebuttal is, right? But then the opponent that takes the negation side, they need to provide their position, their alternative to Frank Turek, and support themselves with good reasons.

It appears Hitchens is not doing that. Hitchens is taking no position. And that's a big problem because if he doesn't take a position, he's going to lose this debate. The theist and the deist say,.

Oh, come on. We know this is only possible with an author. It's only possible with a creator. It's only possible with a master and commander. It's only possible with a dictator.

You're welcome. I don't need five minutes. Is it is it fair to say, though, that.

If the creation was out of nothing, and that's the common view today, that the being that brought it into existence, the cause, whatever it was...

Don't say being. What ground do you have to say being?

Don't say being, Frank.

From a state of non-existence to a state of existence, you need to make a choice.

No, you don't.

You don't. How does something that...

Where are you getting this choice from?

The choice. How does a... First of all, there was no nature. There was nothing. So if there was nothing, how do you get something from nothing without a cause?

There it is again.

I can answer the same question in the way I did before. How do you get so much nothing from something? You look into the night sky. If you're in, say, the Carmel Peninsula, you can't do it from many parts of Virginia now, but if you are in certain parts of California, as I was recently, you can look into the night sky and see universes blowing up and bursting into flame every night of the week, several times.

They had something and it's all nothing now. Who's the author of that?

I don't know what his strategy is here at this point, but when you are asked a question directly in Crossfire or Cross-Exam, you need to answer the question. If you don't answer the question, you lose Cross-Exam.

It's as simple as that. This is a really great rhetorical move that might work at parties, but in a debate, this does not work. This is not a good strategy.

...mandated that. Who's the creator of that? Who's the dictator who demands that sacrifice?

He needs to answer it.

You're making a rod for your own back here.

The Designer, the Universe, and Heat Death

The fact that things go out of existence, Christopher, doesn't mean that they're not designed. The typewriter is out of existence right now, thankfully, but the typewriter's designed. So the fact that the universe is going to heat death doesn't mean that it didn't have a designer at the beginning, and of course, religious people believe that somebody's going to intervene to stop it before it does go.

Oh, they do?

Even if it doesn't, even if nobody intervenes, if it goes to heat death, it goes to heat death.

Did the religious among you, ladies and gentlemen, understand, I did not, that there will be an intervention to make an exception in our case, that this will not happen to our cosmos, that God will prevent the heat death?

Hitchens is such a master at rhetorical persuasion, turning and appealing to the crowd. He's just like, I'm done with Cross-Exam. Let's just talk to the audience. Do any of you... You know, that's pretty funny.

I had no idea.

I had no idea.

Heaven and new earth will be created. Genesis is paradise lost. Revelation is paradise restored.

Hallelujah. It sounds fatuous to me.

Yeah, the incredulity route and the appealing to the crowd, I mean, it does have its persuasive force, but in a debate still, I mean, he still has not answered the question. So, Turek has the advantage at this point.

Again, how do you get...

I am not the one who has to answer the question.

Yes, you do. Yes, you do, Mr. Hitchens. And there are a number of possible explanations from the side of the sort of naturalistic, materialistic worldview. Why not just provide one of those explanations?

Why not just talk about the multiverse for a few minutes? But see, when you don't answer a question in Cross-Exam, and you just try to turn the tables and say, I don't have to answer this. How do you go in changing the rules of a debate in the middle of a debate?

For those people that are not aware of debate and the structure of a debate, I'm sure that's probably persuasive. But for those of us who know better, you can't do that and survive the debate. And when you don't answer a question, you diminish the value of debate.

The whole point of debate is to be able to wrestle with different positions, different alternative explanations for a particular topic. But that means that you need to hear the alternative proposal from the other side, Mr. Hitchens.

That means he's only doing half the job, which means he's really not doing his job.

But what I'm saying is, let's say there's no intervention. Let's say there's no intervention. We go to heat depth. Does that mean that the universe was not created and not designed?

It doesn't entail that belief, no. But it makes it seem a very capricious designer. Shall we say, rather, as I said, it's an old verse of Phil Grevel's, created sick, commanded to be well. Why would people be told, okay, I can create you, but I'm going to create you with original sin, misery, shame, death of children, disease, and so on, just to see if you can pass a test that would mean I might not send you to hell.

Well, hold on a second, Mr. Hitchens. So now are you taking the affirmative position in the debate? If we acknowledge that the universe is going to go into heat death, does that mean the universe is not designed?

Hitchens says, no, it just means God's capricious. You know, he's impulsive, in other words. So then you agree that God exists? The topic is, does God exist? Be very careful about how you answer. Again, from your position as a rhetorician and a really great speaker, this might be persuasive to somebody, you know, at a party.

But in a debate, you can't concede ground like this.

I don't say that that didn't happen. I say that I'm very glad that the evidence for it is very scanty. And I accuse those who do believe it, and I can't have been surely misunderstood on this point, of having harboring a very sinister desire to live in a totalitarian system.

What is your authority for saying that you know something that I don't?

Christopher, I'm giving a probability argument. As you said before, you can't disprove the existence of God. And you can't prove beyond any doubt that there's a God. I'm giving probability. I'm giving cosmological, teleological, moral, consciousness, reason, mathematics, all of those things I listed before.

It's open. The evidence is open to everybody. And this is related to your 70 ,000 years point that you just made there. From a Christian perspective, God has always had a revelation, even before Christ.

It talks about the fact that God has always had a witness. There's three witnesses. There's creation. Everyone has creation. There's conscience. Everyone has conscience. And there's Christ. Now, Christ, true, only came 2 ,000 years ago.

But his sacrifice...

So the question was, by what authority are you saying you know something that I don't? And Turek is saying, I'm appealing to a cumulative case at this point. The laws of logic, the evidence of creation, our conscience, the evidence of the resurrection, etc.

Let's see how Hitchens responds.

Only came 2 ,000 years ago. But his sacrifice of atonement is retroactive to everybody that lived before him. So he's always had a witness. It is quite convenient, and that is the very nature of God. You're absolutely correct.

Well, I got him to say it. The difference between the theist and the deist is as follows. The deist says, it may not make sense without some kind of designer. The theist says, when I tell you what to do, Christopher, I have God on my side.

The deist says, he can tell what God wants of me, what length I should shave off the end of my penis, if I'm a boy or have a male child, or off the clitoris if it's a female child. He knows through the exactitude what the proportions of that should be.

What the diet should be, what the dietary laws ought to be, who I should sleep with, and in what position. And since God doesn't ever directly appear and say, do it this way, it's done for him, and this is really convenient, by human representatives who claim to act in his name.

So that's why I think your standard of proof should be a great deal higher because

Morality, Conscience, and the Source of Ethical Obligation

What he's trying to argue here is that theists have an insufficient proof for the claims that they make with regard, I assume, with regard specifically to Christian theism. That's not the topic. The topic is, does God exist?

And so his characterization of shifting from deism to theism, I don't know what he's doing. He's not adequately dealing with the things that Turek has said. What he's really doing is he's just polemicizing instead of debating.

That's all this.

Is. The material world is all that exists. That thought that you just mentioned, Christopher, the material world, that all that exists, is that thought material? And if it is, why is it true?

Okay, good. This is a grounding question. Okay, a question of grounding and accounting for objective truth. You know, if there's nothing but matter and molecules, then your thoughts are locked inside your own head and they cannot invade objectively against the outside world.

That makes your thought processes not true objectively, it makes them subjective. They're just locked inside your head. So let's find out what Hitchens has to say.

That sounds like casual history to me, but I mean, I certainly think that everything that I am capable of thinking, saying, feeling, and so forth, does depend on my continued existence as a, what should we say, master of molecules.

Yeah, shoot me in the head and I can't go on like this. And I won't be coming back to bother you, either. Question? Sure. That's funny. Nor am I going anywhere after that's happened.

Wait, but he didn't answer the question, okay? The question was, the material world is all that exists, is that thought material? He answered that part in a roundabout way. But the last part, if so, why is that true?

He didn't answer that question. So, I mean, if you're keeping track here, Turek clearly has the advantage because Christopher Hitchens, number one, hasn't taken a position. All he's trying to do is knock down Turek's arguments.

But then on the other hand, he's not even answering questions. He's just making rhetorical speeches and appealing to the crowd. He's literally looking at the crowd the vast majority of the time, which actually is a really good strategy, by the way.

When you look at your judge as you debate, that's a really good strategy. And I don't wish it otherwise, by the way.

I don't wish it. God gives you what you desire.

Would that be the case? There's no answer.

Why is it that according to you, when God plays God by taking a life prematurely, in the Old Testament, for example, it is a moral outrage, but when you play God by taking a life.

Prematurely through abortion, it is a moral right? That question seems out of place here. The topic is, again, does God exist? Not what is God's character? Not can God take lives and still be considered good?

So to ask this particular question is to take the focus away from the primary objective, and that's a mistake in my opinion. You've got to stick to the topic. You've got to stick to your specific remarks that you made in the opening and all of that.

Um, so in terms of this question being asked, I would actually give advantage to Hitchens. And if I were Hitchens, I would point that out. This has nothing to do with the topic. Okay, this is something else for a different debate.

I feel a responsibility to consider the occupant of the womb as a candidate member of society in the future, and thus to say that it cannot be only the responsibility of the woman uh to decide upon it.

That it's a social question and an ethical and a moral one, and I say this as someone who has no supernatural belief. So your question ought to have been this, how do I have any ethical opinions since I don't believe that I'm created?

Ah, yes, yes, there it is. Very good. Very good. That is a question Dr. Turek could have asked instead, because that is another, that's a grounding question, right? That's an ontological question. Because the question is, if there is no God, then how can you account for something that appears to be best explained by God from the opponent's position?

Then you have to provide your alternative. And Hitchens appears ready to answer that question. I would give points.

To Hitchens on this one. I'm very keen to know how it is that you, in a sense that you dare to say that without a belief in religion, I would have no source for ethical or moral beliefs.

It's not what I'm saying.

You seem to hint at it.

No.

Did he not?

Oh, I'm not saying you don't know morality, Christopher. I'm saying you can't justify morality without a being beyond yourself.

So that, just if I, okay, good. So that if I say that for me it's enough to be willing to love my fellow man and perhaps hope that my fellow man and woman will give me some of the same consideration in return.

And that, after all, the Samaritan, of whom we've all heard, was the only one to help after the priests and the Levites had passed by. And the Samaritan also, though he's talked of by Jesus, can't have been a Christian because he appears in a story told by Jesus, so there can't be any Christianity before that.

Somehow, he knew the moral thing to do is to help his fellow person without a religious instruction.

Yes, that's right.

That's actually the whole point of the parable, though it's not the way it's usually told.

And that's what Christianity teaches. You know morality. It's written on your heart. You don't need the scripture to know right from wrong.

And this was only available to us 2 ,000 years ago.

No, no. You've known it from the beginning of time. Conscience has been on humanity from forever.

Natural Law, Social Contract Theory, and Evolutionary Morality

Yeah, so again, I mean, this is a grounding question what Hitchens has asked. It's a good one. From his position, it's advantageous the way he worded it. But this is a grounding question. And frankly, utilizing the grounding questions here is the key to this kind of a debate.

Because again, we're debating the question of whether God exists. And absent God appearing in the sky, as atheists love to challenge him to do all the time. Then the arguments come back to the best explanation for the features of reality that we experience.

That comes back to grounding questions. And that's why it's key to stay on these type of questions with this topic. Now they're shifting. Turek is talking about, it's almost like Frank Turek and Christopher Hitchens are wandering into the forest, and they happen upon a refrigerator.

They open the refrigerator, and it's fully stocked with fresh food. Frank Turek is essentially saying, where is all this food coming from? And Christopher Hitchens is saying, well, I don't need to answer that because the food just happens to be there.

William Gladstone spent a huge amount of his life, and he was a great scholar of Latin and Greek, showing that every one of the Greek, Socratic, and other moral precepts, all they were were just prefigurations of Christianity.

These are the best the Greeks could do before Jesus arrived. No, no, no. I don't agree with that. Because he couldn't face the idea that these solidarities and moralities and understandings are innate in people and don't require divine permission.

I just have to ask you, if you could do it plainly, which side do you come down on? Do you think we need divine permission to act humanly to each other? No, it has nothing to do with permission.

It has to do with the ontological category known as morality. Where does morality come from? Does it come from the benzene molecule, the carbon molecule, the oxygen molecule? In your world.

View, where does it come from? Right. That's the grounding question. If morality applies to everyone, and we are not locked inside our own skulls with our subjective thoughts, and it is actually wrong to torture babies for fun, then where does this universal.

Standard come from? Suppose that we were having this discussion before the existence of molecules was understood. That's irrelevant. No, it's not. Because the discussion about where does the good come from was being conducted before Lucretius developed the atomic theory, before Democritus and Epicurus, I should better say, understood that the whole world was made up of atoms and molecules.

Before that was known, people were arguing, why do we behave one way to our fellows, and we call it good in another way, and we call it wicked? I don't think you can build in a molecular distraction.

I don't have the molecular problem. You do. That's right. You're a materialist. I'm trying to ask you, where does morality come from in a materialistic.

Worldview? Well, did I not just acquit myself of that charge and say that the argument precedes the knowledge of the atomic and molecular structure? Not that. I think, by the way, that the atomic and molecular structure is irrelevant, and it could be that we might find out.

The answer is, I don't know. That's what Hitchens, for some reason, refuses to say, but he's trying to get around it. I would argue the better strategy as a debater is to simply say, we haven't answered this question yet, but here is why your proposed answer fails, and shift it back.

Onto your interlocutor in Crossfire. There are, who knows, pheromones or other phenomena that do have an influence on our moral conditioning. This still wouldn't, to a morally normal person, relieve them of the responsibility of saying that.

I feel I know what's right. I feel that some of the things my children don't need to be told, they already know.

Let me interject here and just ask the question another way.

Whereas to tell a child, you go to this church, which means you'll go to heaven, but your little playmates don't go to that church, and therefore will go to hell, seems to me to be an unpleasant thing to be saying.

Yes, that is.

Maybe I'm in a minority then. Appealing to the crowd and sort of taking the position of incredulity to then argue against what apparently is tyrannical authoritarianism, it's not answering the question, okay?

The question was, where does morality come from? It's an ontological question. And the fact is, Hitchens won't simply just admit, I don't know, but here's why your answer is insufficient.

Let's call it evil. Where does evil come from?

Religion.

That's a good soundbite.

And to answer your next question, morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes. Humanism according to who? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, who? You're saying that Hitler was a humanist?

Just Hitchens. I've lived to hear it said. Hitchens. In Virginia. Hitler was a Catholic. A human. A human. Hitler was a Catholic, so was Mussolini.

Give me a... How does morality exist? If it's just my opinion against your opinion, and there's no standard beyond.

Both of them had an official political concordat with the Protestant and Catholic churches. Both of them wanted the worship of themselves as well as of God.

So I suppose no evil comes from atheism.

And their third main ally, Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, not content just to be theocratic, was himself a god. So anyone who says that fascism and Nazism were secular is an ignoramus. Why is it wrong?

On a gigantic scale.

Why not say something like the evolutionary answer? Evolution is the source of morality. I think Sam Harris makes that argument. That survival dictates what we think is right and wrong on a moral level.

If he wanted to say that, then Turek could have had that kind of conversation with him, but he's not giving that answer. This is disappointing. I would, up to this point, say that Turek has quite a lead on Hitchens.

If God does not exist, why do all people have a fixed moral obligation to love and not murder? How do molecules in motion have any authority to tell you how to behave? When you do something wrong, whose standard are you breaking?

Who are you displeasing? The carbon atom? The benzene molecule? Who?

This question has been asked. Socrates answered it like this when he was on trial for his life. Accused of blasphemy, by the way. He said that he had an inner daemon, the way he put it. Not daemon, a daemon, a spirit, an inner critic, a conscience would be one way of putting it.

And that he knew enough to know, even when he was making the best speech of his life, that if he was making a point that was somehow dishonest or incomplete or shady, the daemon would tell him, yeah, that was clever, but you shouldn't have tried it.

He knew. Adam Smith called it the internal witness, who we all have to have a conversation with all the time. It's been, C .S. Lewis decided to call it conscience and to attribute it to the divine, but he didn't improve on what Adam Smith said in theory of moral sentiments, or what Socrates said when standing trial for his own life.

It's been sometimes colloquially defined as, why do people behave well when nobody's looking? I don't believe there's anyone in this hall who doesn't know what I mean by that.

So your inner conscience is the source of morality. Okay then, but you're still locked into your skull, subjectively speaking. Social contract theory is a proposed answer to this question, but then you have to swallow the pill of subjectivity.

No actions in and of themselves can be right and good if we are sort of locked into our skulls, but social contract theory is we find enough people to agree. If the government agrees, we make that the law of the land and there we go, right?

Evolution is the answer to why we think certain ways are good and moral and why we think others are not, and it all comes back to survival, but then again, you got to swallow the pill that there is no thing good or bad in and of itself.

When a murderer goes on a killing spree, it's no different than a lion going in nature and killing a bunch of other creatures. But why not do that? Why not just propose those particular... Hitchens should know.

Hitchens should have developed an understanding of the naturalistic, materialistic worldview. That's his side, it appears. Why not do that? Why go on and on and on and not answer the question? Because the bottom line is you lose cross-examination, and that's exactly what Hitchens has done here.

Closing Assessment of the Debate

Wow, this one was difficult to watch because I think that Hitchens actually had many opportunities to give much more substantive answers that I bet you he knew. In his very, very intelligent brain, I bet you he knew the answers, but just refused to do so because he was married to this notion that he didn't have to take a particular position, that he did not have to provide a particular alternative to Turek.

So to show up to a debate and say, I'm not going to choose a position, I'm just going to rebut whatever my opponent says, that means you lose. And that's exactly what Hitchens has done here. He lost. And that kind of positioning wherein you frame the discussion around the idea that you have no belief, so therefore you have no position to defend, it might work at parties, but it will not work in a formal debate structure.

It just won't. And anyone who utilizes that strategy will not survive a real debate. Well, those are my thoughts. What did you think about the debate? Zoom out the whole thing. What are your thoughts?

Let me know in the comments below. If you have any ideas about who you think I should watch and react to next, definitely let me know as well. But in the meantime, I will take a break and return with more very soon.

And I'll say for now, see you later.