Next week, The King’s College is hosting a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza, whose new book, What’s So Great About Christianity?is out this week.  Hitchens is doing a lot of these debates, and it’s promising to see something like the rebirth of the Lyceum around the United States.  I like the idea of anyone traveling around debating things with people: it evidences an ability to discuss ideas in public, an appetite for it in the culture, a belief that there’s a thing called Truth that’s hard to get at but still there.  In short, there’s a lot of good coming out of Hitchens’s road show this past year. 

Some enterprising young seminary or PhD student ought to catalog and chronicle the debates into book form: like the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  It’d make a good contemporary primer for the atheist argument and the theistic answer.  The arguments are not new, but the fervor is.

D’Souza writes today in the Christian Science Monitor about one fundamental atheistic argument and its counter by Kant: namely, the argument that the material world is All That Exists and/or All We Can Know.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?

While Kant’s counterargument is murky and walks dangerously close to the precipice of agnosticism and postmodernism (those guys love Kant), he’s just saying what Believers have been saying for a far longer time: If material reality is all that exists, then what is love but chemicals, and what are you but a compost heap?