what's so great about dinesh d'souza - review

8/8/2019 What's So Great About Dinesh D'Souza - Review

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IWhat's So Great AboutDinesh D'Souza?What's So Great About Christianity, by DineshD'Souza, 2007 Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing,Inc. 348 pages, $27.95 ISBN10: 1596985178ISBN-13: 978-1596985179DINISH D'SOUZA'S BOOK 1W -L4TS SOGreat About Christianity, by and large,seems to be a response to the moreoutspoken and militant atheists, specifi-cally Christopher Hitchens, DanielDennett, Richard Dawkins and SamHarris. The book, however, has theunfortunate tendency to lump all athe-ists together, creating a caricature, astraw man atheist, which D'Souza thenknocks down with great gusto. Forexample, he repeatedly castigates athe-ists and agnostics for designating them-selves as "brights," a term endorsed byDennett and Dawkins, acting as if thisterm had been wholeheartedly adoptedby atheists and agnostics everywhere.Actually, the introduction of the term"brights" was met with a great deal ofcriticism with many rejecting it as rather

TIM CALLAHANStephen Jay Gould, the idea of "non-overlapping magisteria." At the heart ofGould's proposal was the understand-ing that science cannot tell people whatthey ought or ought not to do, whilereligion and philosophy cannot reallyanswer questions about the nature ofthe physical world. In his preface,D'Souza says (p. xiv). "Many Christiansseized upon this distinction with relief.This way they could stay in their sub-culture and be nice to everyone."However, this is not what Gould wasurging. Rather, he proposed that peopleshould not try to invoke religion toanswer questions of science, and thatscience should leave questions of valueand ethics up to religion and philoso-phy. That is hardly an invitation towithdraw from the arena of debate.

Americans by saying that we deservedit because we dress our women likewhores. Leaving aside for the momentthe outrageousness of exacting a deathpenalty in the thousands for offendingthis man's sensibilities, what does hemean when he asserts our womendress like whores? Is he referring toPlayboy centerfolds? Girls in miniskirts?Or is he basing his opinion on theview in the Hadub that no part of thewoman's anatomy should be showingexcept the face and hands? Regardlessof which it might be, the man is usingthe well-worn tactic, often employedby the religious, of shaming our sexual-ity-in this case as a dodge for owningup to an atrocity.

D'Souza might respond that this is,after all, a Muslim, and that he is an


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because, in a way, it might."Implicit in this statement is the

threat of eternal damnation, not basedon whether or not you have lived agood life, but rather whether or notyou have adhered to what my wiferefers to as the "loyalty oath."According to the ethics and ideologyof the "loyalty oath" we're all suchwretches (as in the hymn AmazingGrace) that no amount of decency inhow we live can make up for ourunbelief. Conversely, any degree ofdepravity seems acceptable, so long asyou've confessed your sinful natureand continue to affirm your belief inthe (specifically) Christian god. Is it sur-prising that we take offense at this?

D'Souza delights in the fact thatthere is an upswing in religiosity inthe world, even when those turningaway from secularism aren't Christ-ian. For example, he notes (p. 2):At one time Turkey provided a modelof Islamic secularism, but not anylonger. No Muslim country is goingthe way of Turkey, and in recent yearseven Turkey has stopped going theway of Turkey.

notes on page 32 that scientific illiteracyis widespread. He specifically mentionsthat few high school graduates under-stand the significance of Einstein'sequation (E = rnc-), have a clue aboutphotosynthesis or know what Boyle'sLaw is. I wholeheartedly agree withhim. However, that means that thefailure of secularism to take hold maywell be nothing more than a reflectionof the failure, for whatever reasons, ofthe majority of our population to com-prehend science.

Of course, the science that isspecifically at issue here is the theoryof evolution by random mutation andnatural selection. I must confess that,after having read this book, I can't fig-ure out whether D'Souza supports oropposes evolutionary theory. To somedegree he seems to accept it; yet spe-cific remarks he makes sound liketired old creationist canards. He alsoseems to think that alternatives to evo-lution should be taught either in itsplace or along with it. For example,on page 32 he says, "The well-organ-ized movement to promote Darwinismand exclude alternatives is part of alarger educational project in today's

Isome of the weak points in the theoryof evolution. The fossilrecord is inade-quate, as Darwin himself realized.Biologistsroutinely debate what causedthe Cambrian 'explosion,' and there arecompeting theories and much thatremains to be discovered.I honestly don't know what fossil

record to which he is referring, and Istrongly suspect that he doesn't either.Micro-evolution, as his own example ofdifferent types of finches illustrates, is,in fact, demonstrated, not by fossils, butby living forms. Fossils do specificallydemonstrate macroevolution. As to thefossil record being inadequate,D'Souza's knowledge of it seems con-strained by what was known of thefossil record in the middle of the 19thcentury. When Darwin wrote On theOrigin of Species, no transitional fossilswere known. Shortly after the publica-tion of the book, Archaeopteryx, transi-tional between reptiles and birds, wasdiscovered. Since that time, fossilhunters have discovered so many tran-sitional forms as to put the validation ofevolution, based on these fossils alone,beyond any reasonable doubt. Two of


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Iinstead dearly shows a series of evolu-tionarytransformations.Perhaps it isn't evolution that trou-bles D'Souza so much as the origin of

life, about which he writes (p. 147):In 19 53 there was considerable excite-ment when StanleyMillergeneratedamino acids by sending an electricaldischarge through a combination ofwater, hydrogen, methane and ammo-nia. This excitement subsided when itwas subsequently established that theatmosphere of the early earth wasmostly made up of carbon dioxide andammonia. SoMiller'sexperiment wasnot relevant to showing how life couldhave arisen out of non-life through ran-dom chemical interactions.Moreover,life involves a lot more than the genera-tion of amino acids. The biggest prob-lem is taking simple chemicals likeamino acids and generating proteinsand other essential components of life.The origin of life,biologistFranklinHarold confesses, is one of the"unsolved mysteries of science."But more than 50 years of experi-

ments have been done in the fieldsince Urey-Miller. We now know the

cyanide mixture produced seven aminoacids. 0matter how you cut it, it doesnot take divineintervention,or evenmore than a few days in the lab to makethe basic buildingblocks of life.SinceMiller'sexperiments, other scientistshavefound seventy-fourdifferentamino acidsin meteoritesCindudingall twenty foundin livingsystems),so apparendy organiccompounds have been produced inmany other places in the universe.Somescientistseven speculate that the Earthwas seeded with organiccompoundsfromspace, and that sparked the originof life,although givenhow easilytheyaremade here on Earth,we don't needthismore complex hypothesis.Prothero goes on to say that experi-

ments using a number of differentatmospheric profiles have yielded thesame results. As to D'Souza's objectionthat the production of amino acidsdoesn't equate with producing proteinsor primitive living or near-life systems,he is apparently unaware of the proteinmicrospheres created in the lab bySydney Fox and his associates, whichcarry out many of the functions of liv-ing cells. The objection of creationiststo all of these experiments is that sci-ence has not, so far, created life. In

numbers, if they are off, will not causea re-collapse. So, what could makethings work out right other thanchance or God? As he points out, theexplanation of multiple parallel uni-verses is, as far as we can tell, impos-sible to either verify or falsify. Anotherpossibility is that the structure ofspace, time and matter is such that thisuniverse is the only one that its prop-erties, whether divinely instituted ornot, will allow. Let us say, however,that the anthropic principal inclines ustoward a belief in some sort of god.There's quite a jump from this abstrac-tion to the very personal god ofChristianity. The problem is, how dowe get from god to God?Further, if God intended to make usas beings in his image, then what is thepoint of something as chaotic as thePermian extinction? Before it wiped out90% of all species, the synapsids-theancestors of mammals-were domi-nant. Had there been no Permianextinction, the mammals would haveevolved from the dominant reptiles andassumed dominance themselves in theTriassic. As it happened, though mam-mals appeared about 140 million yearsago, they had to spend more than half


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with mathematician ChandraWickramasinge, a theory of directedpanspermia, by which bacteria andviruses are carried through interstellarspace to seed lifeless worlds. Note thatthis is not a seeding with organic mol-ecules, but with actual life forms.Viruses are used in this theory asagents of evolution, infecting life withtheir new and advanced genes. Andbehind all of this, according to Hoyleand Wickramasinge, is none otherthan God. As for those physicists whosupported the Big Bang all along,such men as George Gamow-alongwith most physicists today-they, forthe most part, remain atheists, not see-ing the singularity as any threat totheir unbelief.

Related to this, D'Souza asserts thatthe Big Bang supports the argumentfor ex nihilo creation as described inGenesis 1. While it is true that inmany of the cosmogonies of ancientreligions the gods either coexistedwith the original chaotic matter orarose from it, there are severalEgyptian papyri antedating the earliesttexts of the Bible in which eitherAmon or Ra was spoken of as the

Genesis 1 with the actual order of cre-ation following the Big Bang (p. 123}The universe was created in a burst oflight fifteen billionyears ago. Our sunand our planet came into existence bil-lions of years later. So light did indeedprecede the sun. The first reference tolight in Genesis 1:3can be seen to referto the Big Bang itself.The separation ofthe day and the night described inGenesis 1:4 clearly refers to the forma-tion of the sun and the earth. Day andnight-which we experience as a resultof the earth's rotation-were indeedcreated much later than the universeitself. The Genesis enigma is solved,and its account of creation is vindicatednot as some vague parable but is astrikinglyaccurate account of how theuniverse came to be.In point of fact, Gen. 1:4 cannot

possibly refer to the creation of thesun, since the sun, moon and stars are,quite specifically, created in Gen. 1:14-16. In any case, birds are created onthe fitth day (Gen. 1:20)-before landanimals, which are created on the sixthday (Gen. 1:24). TIlls is completely outof the order of the fossil record and

Idemocratic and egalitarian in its out-look. Certainly many, if not all, of theseinstitutions and ideas seem unique-ly peculiar to Western civilization,and Western civilization is undoubt-edly Christian. But does that meanthat all these ideas and institutions areChristian in origin? No.

First, Western civilization is not sim-ply the sum of Christianity, Classicalcivilization and the traditions of Celticand Teutonic barbarians. Rather, it is asynthesis of the three and a new entity.Thus, I would ascribe these characteris-tics to the synthesis rather than to anycontributing part of it. Second, if thesecharacteristics are Christian as opposedto having their origin in the synthesis,we would expect them to appear in allChristian societies. Thus, the premisethat their appearance in Westem cultureis attributable to Christianity, as opposedto being attributable to the synthesis, istestable. There are at least two Christiansocieties besides Western Christendomdating from late Roman and medievaltimes. These are Ethiopia, Christianizedca. 330 and subsequendy cut off fromthe rest of Christendom by the expan-sion of Islam, and Eastern Orthodox


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Ipassing a camel through it, it seemslikely that "camel" is the result of ascribal error.)

To some degree, at least one ofthe accomplishments of WesternChristianity-the separation of tempo-ral and ecclesiastical power-was theresult of a happy accident. When theWestern Roman Empire fell, the popewas left as an independent power.While in some need of a protector, he,nevertheless, maintained his independ-ence. Again, it is noteworthy thatecclesiastical and temporal powerdeveloped in parallel systems only inWestern Christendom.While crediting Christianity with allthat is good, D'Souza castigates atheistsas the authors of the greatest atrocitiesthe world has seen. Let us considerone of these: the Holocaust. Allow meto point out that the Christian myth ofthe Jews as Christ-killers fueled cen-turies of intermittent anti-Semitism,culminating in the Holocaust. That theHolocaust was not specifically andexclusively atheist in execution can beseen in the fact that Polish RomanCatholics, while intensely anti-German,were largely indifferent to the plight of

the Polish Jews, and often happilyturned them into the Nazi authorities,while at the same time doing all theycould to sabotage Nazi rule in Poland.Also, most of the mainly ProtestantChristians in Germany had no problemgoing along with Hitler and the Naziagenda. Elsewhere, the Pope failed toanathematize Mussolini. In Spain, oncehe had violently overthrown the lawful-ly elected democratic government andinstituted a dictatorship, Franco grantedthe Catholic Church privileges thatwere later rescinded once democracywas reinstated. To be sure, the atheistdictatorships of the Soviet Union, partic-ularly under Stalin, and mainland Chinaperpetrated atrocities on the same scaleas those committed by the Nazis.

The discussion of human evil,regardless of its source, leads us to thesubject of evil in general and D'Souza'sview of why God allows it. Of course,as beings imbued with free will, wereally can't impute human evil to God.That leaves natural evil, to which herefers on page 278: "So we must askone more time: why do bad thingshappen to good people? The Christiananswer is that there are no good peo-

ple. None of us deserves the life thatwe have, which is a gratuitous giftfrom God." While I may wonder ifD'Souza would say that to a womanwho had just lost her child to eitherTay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis, there is adeeper issue here, a strange internalcontradiction in his arguments. Earlierin his book he argued that humanbeings are made in the image of God.Now he is back to saying that not oneof us is good. I suspect this flows fromthe Augustinian view of humandepravity. My wife pointed out to methat our obsession with depravity maywell be a survival trait, as is an inher-ent pessimism. Focusing on whatthreatens us and our past failuresalerts us to what we need to do farmore than does focusing on the goodtimes and our earlier triumphs. Thus,the Augustinian view that we aredepraved has more of an addictivehold on our psyches than doesRousseau's view that we are basicallygood. For all that, I suspect that themost realistic view is to see ourselvesas finite and equally capable of goodor evil, neither innately good norinherently depraved. T

what's so great about dinesh d'souza - review

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