Christianity Today has an interesting debate between our sometimes JLF speaker Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson.
“Is Christianity Good for the World?”
It is well worth reading here, and this is a sample to whet your appetite.
Hitchens: I cannot, of course, prove that there is no supervising deity who
invigilates my every moment and who will pursue me even after I am
dead. (I can only be happy that there is no evidence for such a ghastly
idea, which would resemble a celestial North Korea in which liberty was
not just impossible but inconceivable.) But nor has any theologian ever
demonstrated the contrary.
Wilson: You conclude by objecting to the sovereignty of God, saying that the
idea makes the whole world into a ghastly totalitarian state, where
believers say that God (and who does He think He is?) runs
everything. I would urge you to set aside for a moment the theology of
the thing and try to summon up some gratitude for those who built our
institutions of liberty. Many of them were actually inspired by the
idea that since God is exhaustively sovereign, and because man is a
sinner, it follows that all earthly power must be limited and bounded.
The idea of checks and balances came from a worldview that you dismiss
as inherently totalitarian. Why did those societies where this kind of
theology predominated produce, as a direct result, our institutions of
civil liberty?
