Hitchens is in for a rough go
Cardinal George Pell — the Archbishop of Sydney — is slated to debate Christopher Hitchens at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
As someone once said: this should be good.
In his address, titled “Without God We Are Nothing,” Cardinal Pell plans to speak about secularism as a “minority sport and a temporary phenomenon” that only survives “by attacking Christianity or living off Christianity’s moral capital.”
The communiqué stated that the prelate will respond to the anti-theist address by drawing on his own faith and scholarship, as well as the example of scientific figures.
In a preliminary description of his presentation, Cardinal Pell stated, “Science by itself cannot provide an answer to the God or atheism options. To make such enquiries we need to engage in meta-physics.”
Pell is a strong speaker and a highly learned man — a force to be reckoned with, in addition to being a very orthodox Catholic shepherd. One can only imagine that he will mop the floor with Hitchens, who will no doubt be reduced to spewing invective and paedophilia jokes in place of offering actual debate (his usual drill when he comes up against a superior opponent).
And the point he makes above is key: whether one posits/accepts the existence of God or not, one cannot look to the empirical sciences to provide justification for one’s position, until and unless one can establish beyond reasonable doubt that things do not exist which are beyond the ability of empirical study to detect due to limitations in either the scope or means of such study. To put that more plainly, unless one can establish beyond doubt that empirical detectability is a necessary criteria of every extant thing, one cannot look to science and empirical study alone in forming any opinion about God. Theist or atheist, one must leverage metaphysical principles to completely address that question.
The audience will hopefully be reasonable enough to follow that logic. I have little hope that Hitchens is possessed of the same capacity, however.
(hat tip)
No Comments Comments Feed
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
The comments are closed.