I
What's So Great About
Dinesh D'Souza?
What's So Great About Christianity, by Dinesh
D'Souza, 2007 Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing,
Inc. 348 pages, $27.95 ISBN·10: 1596985178
ISBN-13: 978-1596985179
DINISH D'SOUZA'S BOOK 1W-L4TS SO
Great About Christianity, by and large,
seems to be a response to the more
outspoken and militant atheists, specifi-
cally Christopher Hitchens, Daniel
Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam
Harris. The book, however, has the
unfortunate tendency to lump all athe-
ists together, creating a caricature, a
straw man atheist, which D'Souza then
knocks down with great gusto. For
example, he repeatedly castigates athe-
ists and agnostics for designating them-
selves as "brights," a term endorsed by
Dennett and Dawkins, acting as if this
term had been wholeheartedly adopted
by atheists and agnostics everywhere.
Actually, the introduction of the term
"brights" was met with a great deal of
criticism with many rejecting it as rather
pretentious and not particularly descrip-
tive. (Ironically the reason for seeking
an alternative term such as "bright"
came from the negative connotations
that have been attached to the term
"atheist" by believers. On hearing the A
word, most people, I suspect, see
visions of the late Madalyn Murray
O'Hair.) He also seems determined to
lump all atheists together with the 19th
century philosopher Friederich
Nietzsche, even though probably few
of us share any aspect of his philoso-
phy. In point of fact, most atheists
aren't militant about what they don't
believe and are, in fact, conditional
atheists, i.e. quite ready to look at evi-
dences of the divine, yet so far uncon-
vinced.
For all his antagonism against
Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and
Harris, he seems to share their antipa-
thy toward the truce proposed
between faith and science by the late
TIM CALLAHAN
Stephen Jay Gould, the idea of "non-
overlapping magisteria." At the heart of
Gould's proposal was the understand-
ing that science cannot tell people what
they ought or ought not to do, while
religion and philosophy cannot really
answer questions about the nature of
the physical world. In his preface,
D'Souza says (p. xiv). "Many Christians
seized 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 was
urging. Rather, he proposed that people
should not try to invoke religion to
answer questions of science, and that
science should leave questions of value
and ethics up to religion and philoso-
phy. That is hardly an invitation to
withdraw from the arena of debate.
Be that as it may, D'Souza is right
that Dawkins, et al. comprise a cadre of
militant atheists with a marked antago-
nism toward religion. He complains of
atheists (p, xvi) "They have been flog-
ging the carcass of 'fundamentalism'
without having to encounter the horse
kick of a vigorous traditional
Christianity." But I have news for
D'Souza: that is no carcass. That horse
is far from dead. The militancy of peo-
ple like Dawkins is, I suspect, a
response to the very-much-alive forces
of Christian fundamentalism and
extreme Islarnism. We experience these
forces in America in the form of repeat-
ed attacks on evolution and attempts to
teach young-earth creationism along-
side Coreven in place of) science in
our public schools. In his documentary,
Tbe Root of all Evil?, Dawkins inter-
views, among others, a man who was
a Jew, but converted to Islam. This
man justified the 9-11 slaughter of 3,000
14 NUMBER 1 2 008
Americans by saying that we deserved
it because we dress our women like
whores. Leaving aside for the moment
the outrageousness of exacting a death
penalty in the thousands for offending
this man's sensibilities, what does he
mean when he asserts our women
dress like whores? Is he referring to
Playboy centerfolds? Girls in miniskirts?
Or is he basing his opinion on the
view in the Hadub that no part of the
woman's anatomy should be showing
except the face and hands? Regardless
of which it might be, the man is using
the well-worn tactic, often employed
by the religious, of shaming our sexual-
ity-in this case as a dodge for owning
up to an atrocity.
D'Souza might respond that this is,
after all, a Muslim, and that he is an
apologist for Christianity. Fair enough,
and I will not argue with him if he
asserts the ethical superiority of
Christianity over Islam. One might also
point out that this man does not even
represent most Muslims, that his outra-
geousness represents nothing more
than a lunatic fringe. However, we
nonbelievers repeatedly encounter
such egregious behavior among the
faithful. Often, those claiming to be
among the Christian "saved" are gratu-
itously rude and loutish. Sometimes it's
only their casual arrogance that
offends. Or perhaps it's the cosmic
death threat. D'Souza writes (p. xvi):
Death forces upon you a choice that
you cannot escape. You must choose
God or reject Him, because when
you die all abstentions are counted
as 'no' votes. So, if you are wonder-
ing if this book is an invitation to
convert, it is. I hope you will read it
as if your life depended on it,
 because, in a way, it might."
Implicit in this statement is the
threat of eternal damnation, not based
on whether or not you have lived a
good life, but rather whether or not
you have adhered to what my wife
refers to as the "loyalty oath."
According to the ethics and ideology
of the "loyalty oath" we're all such
wretches (as in the hymn Amazing
Grace) that no amount of decency in
how we live can make up for our
unbelief. Conversely, any degree of
depravity seems acceptable, so long as
you've confessed your sinful nature
and continue to affirm your belief in
the (specifically) Christian god. Is it sur-
prising that we take offense at this?
D'Souza delights in the fact that
there is an upswing in religiosity in
the world, even when those turning
away from secularism aren't Christ-
ian. For example, he notes (p. 2):
At one time Turkey provided a model
of Islamic secularism, but not any
longer. No Muslim country is going
the way of Turkey, and in recent years
even Turkey has stopped going the
way of Turkey.
I must point out that one of the
secularizing reforms enacted by Ataturk
Mustapha Kemal was universal suf-
frage. Will the return to religion in
Turkey result in taking the vote away
from women? Certainly, the state of
women in the rest of the Muslim world
does not offer us much hope that a
resurgence in faith there will be egali-
tarian in nature (see, for example, Hirsi
All's 2006 book The Caged Virgin).
D'Souza points out that secular-
ism's earlier optimism about the
inevitable decline of religion, resulting
from the advance of science, has not
been borne out by history, and that
religion is alive and well in a scien-
tific age. Having friends who are
regular church-goers and whose kind-
ness and decency is obviously wedded
to their religious views, and having
been in churches that are obviously
communities of healthy, loving peo-
ple, I understand that these institutions
aren't going to vanish in the face of
the advancement of science. And
how scientific is our culture? D'Souza
notes on page 32 that scientific illiteracy
is widespread. He specifically mentions
that few high school graduates under-
stand the significance of Einstein's
equation (E = rnc-), have a clue about
photosynthesis or know what Boyle's
Law is. I wholeheartedly agree with
him. However, that means that the
failure of secularism to take hold may
well be nothing more than a reflection
of the failure, for whatever reasons, of
the majority of our population to com-
prehend science.
Of course, the science that is
specifically at issue here is the theory
of evolution by random mutation and
natural selection. I must confess that,
after having read this book, I can't fig-
ure out whether D'Souza supports or
opposes evolutionary theory. To some
degree he seems to accept it; yet spe-
cific remarks he makes sound like
tired old creationist canards. He also
seems to think that alternatives to evo-
lution should be taught either in its
place or along with it. For example,
on page 32 he says, "The well-organ-
ized movement to promote Darwinism
and exclude alternatives is part of a
larger educational project in today's
public schools." He then selectively
quote Dawkins and Hitchens, thereby
implying that the motive behind teach-
ing evolution in public schools is part
of a radical atheist plot. This is sheer
nonsense. The reason to exclusively
teach evolution, without alternatives, is
the same as the reason to teach two
plus two equals four to the exclusion
of any alternatives that might claim it
actually equals five. In fact, any "well-
organized" movement to teach
Darwinian evolution has been in
response to creationist attempts to
either ban or dilute the teaching of
evolution. D'Souza's own knowledge
of evolutionary science is quite suspect,
as can be seen in these two quotes
from the book, both on page 145:
While the fossilrecord shows evidence
of microevolution Conetype of finch
evolves into another type of finch),
where is the evidence for macroevolu-
tion Conespecies evolves into a differ-
ent species)? The critics [William
Dembski, Jonathon Wells,Michael Behe
and Philip Johnson] have exposed
I
some of the weak points in the theory
of evolution. The fossil record is inade-
quate, as Darwin himself realized.
Biologistsroutinely debate what caused
the Cambrian 'explosion,' and there are
competing theories and much that
remains to be discovered.
I honestly don't know what fossil
record to which he is referring, and I
strongly suspect that he doesn't either.
Micro-evolution, as his own example of
different types of finches illustrates, is,
in fact, demonstrated, not by fossils, but
by living forms. Fossils do specifically
demonstrate macroevolution. As to the
fossil record being inadequate,
D'Souza's knowledge of it seems con-
strained by what was known of the
fossil record in the middle of the 19th
century. When Darwin wrote On the
Origin of Species, no transitional fossils
were known. Shortly after the publica-
tion of the book, Archaeopteryx, transi-
tional between reptiles and birds, was
discovered. Since that time, fossil
hunters have discovered so many tran-
sitional forms as to put the validation of
evolution, based on these fossils alone,
beyond any reasonable doubt. Two of
the most recent discoveries are particu-
larly worth mentioning: Tiktaalik and
Westlothiana. Tiktaalik, often referred
to as a "fishibian," is midway between
lobe-finned fish and amphibians, while
Westlothiana occupies a position mid-
way between amphibians and reptiles.
You can find out about these two tran-
sitional forms, along with many others,
in Donald Prothero's 2007 book
Evolution, What the Fossils Say and
Why It Matters (see also my review in
this issue). As for the Cambrian "explo-
sion," Prothero explains (p. 169):
Only after several more steps do we see
the full Cambrian fauna. In short, the fos-
sil record shows a gradual buildup from
single celled prokaryotes and then
eukaryotes to multicellularsoft-bodied
animals to animals with tiny shells,
and finally, by the middle Cambrian,
the full range of large shelled inverte-
brates. This gradual transformationby
logical advances in body size and skele-
tonization bears no resemblance to an
instantaneous Cambrian explosion that
might be consistentwith the Biblebut
I instead dearly shows a series of evolu-
tionary transformations.
Perhaps it isn't evolution that trou-
bles D'Souza so much as the origin of
life, about which he writes (p. 147):
In 1953 there was considerable excite-
ment when Stanley Millergenerated
amino acids by sending an electrical
discharge through a combination of
water, hydrogen, methane and ammo-
nia. This excitement subsided when it
was subsequently established that the
atmosphere of the early earth was
mostly made up of carbon dioxide and
ammonia. So Miller'sexperiment was
not relevant to showing how life could
have 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 like
amino acids and generating proteins
and other essential components of life.
The origin of life, biologist Franklin
Harold confesses, is one of the
"unsolved mysteries of science."
But more than 50 years of experi-
ments have been done in the field
since Urey-Miller. We now know the
primitive atmosphere of the earth was
not likely to have been made up of
ammonia and carbon dioxide. Since
even the sunlight reaching Saturn's
moon Titan is sufficient to split ammo-
nia into nitrogen and hydrogen-along
with generating photochemical smog
there-the picture of earth's early
atmosphere has been revised to one
that is a mix of hydrogen, nitrogen,
methane, carbon monoxide, carbon
dioxide and water vapor. In any case,
Miller's experiment used an atmos-
phere made up of nitrogen, ammonia,
methane, carbon dioxide and water
vapor. Once again, D'Souza's science
reporting is outdated. One reason the
excitement over Urey- Miller did not
die down is that it is just one of many,
using different atmospheric models,
that have produced amino acids. As
Prothero summarizes the research Cp.
148):
later experiments produced twelve of
the twenty amino acids found in life.
Another experiment with a dilute
~(~lnel VOLUME
cyanide mixture produced seven amino
acids. 0 matter how you cut it, it does
not take divine intervention,or even
more than a few days in the lab to make
the basic building blocks of life.Since
Miller'sexperiments, other scientistshave
found seventy-fourdifferentamino acids
in meteorites Cindudingall twenty found
in livingsystems),so apparendy organic
compounds have been produced in
many other places in the universe. Some
scientistseven speculate that the Earth
was seeded with organic compounds
from space, and that sparked the origin
of life,although given how easilythey
are made here on Earth,we don't need
this more complex hypothesis.
Prothero goes on to say that experi-
ments using a number of different
atmospheric profiles have yielded the
same results. As to D'Souza's objection
that the production of amino acids
doesn't equate with producing proteins
or primitive living or near-life systems,
he is apparently unaware of the protein
microspheres created in the lab by
Sydney Fox and his associates, which
carry out many of the functions of liv-
ing cells. The objection of creationists
to all of these experiments is that sci-
ence has not, so far, created life. In
other words, even though we didn't
even discover the structure of DNA
until the 1950s, the failure of evolution-
ary scientists to produce an actual life
form in the laboratory means that the
whole thing must have been a miracle.
Despite D'Souza's seeming ambiva-
lence concerning evolution, he claims
that it supports the idea of an intelli-
gent designer behind it all (p, 153). As
further support for the existence of a
god, he cites the anthropic principle
and the "six numbers" that have to be
exactly right for the universe to be the
way it is, capable of supporting life.
What alternatives do we have to this
fine-tuning other than chance or God?
Of course, if certain of the six num-
bers (strength of the charge of the
proton, for example) are off, any uni-
verse with a particular number off-kil-
ter will collapse back into a singularity.
So maybe the universe did come out
wrong for some of these numbers and
kept re-collapsing until it finally came
up right. However, some of these
14 NUMBER 1 2 008
numbers, if they are off, will not cause
a re-collapse. So, what could make
things work out right other than
chance or God? As he points out, the
explanation of multiple parallel uni-
verses is, as far as we can tell, impos-
sible to either verify or falsify. Another
possibility is that the structure of
space, time and matter is such that this
universe is the only one that its prop-
erties, whether divinely instituted or
not, will allow. Let us say, however,
that the anthropic principal inclines us
toward a belief in some sort of god.
There's quite a jump from this abstrac-
tion to the very personal god of
Christianity. The problem is, how do
we get from god to God?
Further, if God intended to make us
as beings in his image, then what is the
point of something as chaotic as the
Permian extinction? Before it wiped out
90% of all species, the synapsids-the
ancestors of mammals-were domi-
nant. Had there been no Permian
extinction, the mammals would have
evolved from the dominant reptiles and
assumed dominance themselves in the
Triassic. As it happened, though mam-
mals appeared about 140 million years
ago, they had to spend more than half
of their total time on Earth to date as
tiny animals scurrying under the feet of
the dinosaurs. If God intended to make
us as conscious beings, and if mam-
mals are the likely choice to produce
intelligent life, why waste time with the
dinosaurs and the 75 million year
detour? In fact, why would a divine
designer resort to such a clumsy tool as
mass extinctions in the first place? If the
anthropic principle points toward a
god, mass extinctions point away from
a god, or at least suggest a god who
doesn't give a damn.
D'Souza also cites the Big Bang as
pointing toward God, and portrays
physicists as frantically seeking a way
out of accepting the fact of the Big
Bang and its implications of the
divine. Specifically, he refers (p. 120)
to Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and
Fred Hoyle, as coming up with the
steady state universe to support their
atheism. This argument is bizarre for a
number of reasons. One is that Fred
Hoyle eventually developed, along
with mathematician Chandra
Wickramasinge, a theory of directed
panspermia, by which bacteria and
viruses are carried through interstellar
space to seed lifeless worlds. Note that
this is not a seeding with organic mol-
ecules, but with actual life forms.
Viruses are used in this theory as
agents of evolution, infecting life with
their new and advanced genes. And
behind all of this, according to Hoyle
and Wickramasinge, is none other
than God. As for those physicists who
supported the Big Bang all along,
such men as George Gamow-along
with most physicists today-they, for
the most part, remain atheists, not see-
ing the singularity as any threat to
their unbelief.
Related to this, D'Souza asserts that
the Big Bang supports the argument
for ex nihilo creation as described in
Genesis 1. While it is true that in
many of the cosmogonies of ancient
religions the gods either coexisted
with the original chaotic matter or
arose from it, there are several
Egyptian papyri antedating the earliest
texts of the Bible in which either
Amon or Ra was spoken of as the
self-begetting, self-existing creator of
all that exists. A hymn from the 18th
dynasty (ca. 1540-1290 BCE), antedat-
ing the existence of ancient Israel,
speaks of an almighty god above all
other gods:
God is from the beginning, and He
hath been from the beginning; He exist-
ed when nothing else existed, and what
existeth He created after He had come
into being. God is the eternal one, He
is eternal and infinite;and endureth for-
ever and aye; He has endured for
countless ages, and He shall endure to
all eternity.
So, contrary to D'Souza's assertion
of the uniqueness of the Bible's cre-
ation account, there was in Egypt, well
before any of the source documents of
the Bible were written, the concept of
'a self--existing, eternal god, who creat-
ed the world ex nihilo. Along with
asserting that the Bible is unique in
terms of a deity who creates previously
non--existing matter, he indulges in an
attempt to rationalize the details of
Genesis 1 with the actual order of cre-
ation following the Big Bang (p. 123}
The universe was created in a burst of
light fifteen billion years ago. Our sun
and our planet came into existence bil-
lions of years later. So light did indeed
precede the sun. The first reference to
light in Genesis 1:3 can be seen to refer
to the Big Bang itself.The separation of
the day and the night described in
Genesis 1:4 clearly refers to the forma-
tion of the sun and the earth. Day and
night-which we experience as a result
of the earth's rotation-were indeed
created much later than the universe
itself. The Genesis enigma is solved,
and its account of creation is vindicated
not as some vague parable but is a
strikinglyaccurate account of how the
universe came to be.
In point of fact, Gen. 1:4 cannot
possibly refer to the creation of the
sun, since the sun, moon and stars are,
quite specifically, created in Gen. 1:14-
16. In any case, birds are created on
the fitth day (Gen. 1:20)-before land
animals, which are created on the sixth
day (Gen. 1:24). TIlls is completely out
of the order of the fossil record and
makes a complete hash out of trying to
shoehorn science into Genesis 1 by
way of a day-equals-age rationalization.
I must say that I wonder at the degree
of D'Souza's sophistry in this instance,
particularly in that there is already a
Christian doctrine, called the "doctrine
of condescension," that neady disposes
of any conflicts between the Bible and
science. According to this view, God
condescends to speak to people in the
language they can understand.
Therefore, he says the sun rises and
sets rather than telling people who
don't have telescopes that the earth
turns on its axis.
Moving on to the meat of his argu-
ment-the impact of Christianity on
Western civilization--he makes the fol-
lowing claims: Separation of church
and state is an innately Christian institu-
tion (pp. 50, 53); Christianity is the
source of romantic love (p. 59) and
capitalism Cp.63); Christianity is implic-
itly opposed to slavery and was also
the source of the women's suffrage
movement (pp. 70-73); and is implicidy
I
democratic and egalitarian in its out-
look. Certainly many, if not all, of these
institutions and ideas seem unique-
ly peculiar to Western civilization,
and Western civilization is undoubt-
edly Christian. But does that mean
that all these ideas and institutions are
Christian in origin? No.
First, Western civilization is not sim-
ply the sum of Christianity, Classical
civilization and the traditions of Celtic
and Teutonic barbarians. Rather, it is a
synthesis of the three and a new entity.
Thus, I would ascribe these characteris-
tics to the synthesis rather than to any
contributing part of it. Second, if these
characteristics are Christian as opposed
to having their origin in the synthesis,
we would expect them to appear in all
Christian societies. Thus, the premise
that their appearance in Westem culture
is attributable to Christianity, as opposed
to being attributable to the synthesis, is
testable. There are at least two Christian
societies besides Western Christendom
dating from late Roman and medieval
times. These are Ethiopia, Christianized
ca. 330 and subsequendy cut off from
the rest of Christendom by the expan-
sion of Islam, and Eastern Orthodox
Christianity, centered first in the Byzan-
tine Empire, then in Czarist Russia.
Neither Ethiopia, nor the Byzantine
Empire, nor Czarist Russia developed
separation of church and state, capital-
ism or any democratic institutions.
Particularly with respect to capital-
ism, D'Souza's argument that it is a
uniquely Christian institution hardly
squares with the teachings of Jesus or
with the organization of the original
Christian church. After all, it was Jesus
who, in Mark 10:21, told the rich
young man that to inherit eternal life
he had to sell everything he owned
and give the money to the poor.
When the young man's countenance
fell and he went away sorrowfully,
Jesus told his disciples that it is easier
to pass a rope through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of God. (The Greek
words for "rope" and "camel"-kami-
los and kamelos respectively-are
almost identical. Since passing rope
through the eye of a needle makes for
more literary and logical sense than
I
passing a camel through it, it seems
likely that "camel" is the result of a
scribal error.)
To some degree, at least one of
the accomplishments of Western
Christianity-the separation of tempo-
ral and ecclesiastical power-was the
result of a happy accident. When the
Western Roman Empire fell, the pope
was left as an independent power.
While in some need of a protector, he,
nevertheless, maintained his independ-
ence. Again, it is noteworthy that
ecclesiastical and temporal power
developed in parallel systems only in
Western Christendom.
While crediting Christianity with all
that is good, D'Souza castigates atheists
as the authors of the greatest atrocities
the world has seen. Let us consider
one of these: the Holocaust. Allow me
to point out that the Christian myth of
the Jews as Christ-killers fueled cen-
turies of intermittent anti-Semitism,
culminating in the Holocaust. That the
Holocaust was not specifically and
exclusively atheist in execution can be
seen in the fact that Polish Roman
Catholics, while intensely anti-German,
were largely indifferent to the plight of
the Polish Jews, and often happily
turned them into the Nazi authorities,
while at the same time doing all they
could to sabotage Nazi rule in Poland.
Also, most of the mainly Protestant
Christians in Germany had no problem
going along with Hitler and the Nazi
agenda. Elsewhere, the Pope failed to
anathematize Mussolini. In Spain, once
he had violently overthrown the lawful-
ly elected democratic government and
instituted a dictatorship, Franco granted
the Catholic Church privileges that
were later rescinded once democracy
was reinstated. To be sure, the atheist
dictatorships of the Soviet Union, partic-
ularly under Stalin, and mainland China
perpetrated atrocities on the same scale
as those committed by the Nazis.
The discussion of human evil,
regardless of its source, leads us to the
subject of evil in general and D'Souza's
view of why God allows it. Of course,
as beings imbued with free will, we
really can't impute human evil to God.
That leaves natural evil, to which he
refers on page 278: "So we must ask
one more time: why do bad things
happen to good people? The Christian
answer is that there are no good peo-
ple. None of us deserves the life that
we have, which is a gratuitous gift
from God." While I may wonder if
D'Souza would say that to a woman
who had just lost her child to either
Tay-Sachs or cystic fibrosis, there is a
deeper issue here, a strange internal
contradiction in his arguments. Earlier
in his book he argued that human
beings are made in the image of God.
Now he is back to saying that not one
of us is good. I suspect this flows from
the Augustinian view of human
depravity. My wife pointed out to me
that our obsession with depravity may
well be a survival trait, as is an inher-
ent pessimism. Focusing on what
threatens us and our past failures
alerts us to what we need to do far
more than does focusing on the good
times and our earlier triumphs. Thus,
the Augustinian view that we are
depraved has more of an addictive
hold on our psyches than does
Rousseau's view that we are basically
good. For all that, I suspect that the
most realistic view is to see ourselves
as finite and equally capable of good
or evil, neither innately good nor
inherently depraved. T