Debating God with Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair

If God should ever need a new press agent, He (or She) could not do better than the organizers ofthe Munk Debates.

Not only can they pick their venues (cushioned seats, Lindt chocolates at the door) but, even on a topic as sleepy as religion in the secular West, they know how to draw a crowd.

Granted, celebrity helped. Friday evening saw a virtual battle of the intellectual blades: Christopher Hitchens, arguably the Western world's most articulate atheist, versus Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who now runs a faith-based foundation and is a recent celebrated convert (to Catholicism).

The debate, over whether "religion is a force for good in the world," was held in the gleaming Roy Thomson Hall, a well-upholstered theatre usually reserved for classical music.

Tickets were $60 on average but scalpers (yes, scalpers) were insisting on many times that amount (unconfirmed reports of $500) outside the door.

The illustrious businessman Peter Munk, the founder of the debates, even made a little fun of his audience for paying so much. But he promised them their money's worth, which his organizers went on to deliver.

Full disclosure: CBC Radio Onewas a media partner in the event and will broadcast an edited version on Ideas, which I am currently preparing, on Dec. 15.

The bigger surprise

As regular readers will know, I am an old hand at atheist books, lectures and the like. And this was a good one energetic, entertaining, with more than a few moments of genuine feeling and illumination.

It was also remarkably respectful.

I have seen Hitchens in the past employ his withering wit to gut his opponents and their arguments. But here, there was just a smidgen of contempt, not for Blair in any way but for religion itself, a contempt Hitchens usually reserves for fanatics.

If you have attended these New Atheist debates in recent years, what you would have heard on Friday for the most part were "best summary" arguments.

They included Hitchens's witty declaration that humans have turned God into a vain, madcap despot, who is so obviously insecure that He needs constant praising and praying to.

The punchline: God's rule can be compared to the kind of divine despotism that you would find in a place like North Korea, which had the audience chuckling.

Hitchens, who is battling esophageal cancer, was sharp as a tack. Don't submit to archaic doctrines and impossibly outdated texts, he declaimed. Use your reason and your humanity instead.

He had arranged his chemo treatments so he would be up to the match and not fatigued.

And for this audience anyway, Hitchens won the argument with Blair by a vote of 68 to 32 per cent, though bothimproved their positions from a pre-debate poll.

The two accomplished humanists an aisle over that I spoke with thought Hitchens trounced the former PM. But for me, Blair was the bigger surprise.

Love and sacrifice

Granted, we all see these things through the prisms of our minds and sympathies.

Still, I was touched by Blair's heartfelt concessions to Hitchens's argument. Blair, too, dislikes fanaticism. But it was very clear that his version of religion is a generous one. More importantly for Blair, an open, generous religiosity is a human necessity.

That led him to remind us of the elephant in the great secular hall: Religion will not disappear anytime soon, he pointed out. You can't reason or wish it away.

Sure, he argues, work on it, reform it, open it up. Keep bringing people of different faiths together (even as Hitchens pointed out that it was religion that helped divide people in the first place, citing Northern Ireland and the Middle East).

To the argument that religion is based on fear of a nasty afterlife (or bounties for the faithful), Blair answered that the faithful he meets are not swayed by visions of reward or Hell. Their credo is "love, selflessness and sacrifice."

It was almost as if both men had different models in their heads of just what constitutes the religiously minded.

Hitchens conceded that religion can bring people together in community. But he quickly turned the argument around.

Go to church, synagogue, temple or mosque, if you want to. Just don't tell me what to do, he said. Don't try to dictate your faith and its precepts to me.

Imperfect primates

Blair had repeatedly addressed this point with his warnings about fanaticism and dogmatism.

But this issue led unexpectedly, for me, to the best part of the evening Hitchens's defence of the idea of awe, of the "numinous," that mysterious power associated with spiritual longing.

It is rare for an atheist to approach this territory of mystical feeling. But in his many guises Hitchens is also a fine critic of the arts and has been open to expressions of the sublime in what the best music and literature has to offer.

For him, the idea of transcendent or numinous feeling (he used those exact words) doesn't mean this experience has to translate into belief in a supernatural entity. It's an existential condition, he argued, located in minds like ours, "imperfect primates living in an unimportant part of the universe."

Of course, for a religiously minded person such as Tony Blair, the entire notion of the transcendent is wrapped up in the splendour of living in a created universe with a panoply of laws and conditions so exacting that they have astonished some of the greatest scientific minds of our times, people like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

One thing both debaters agreed on: That both visions of humanity, the atheist and the religious, must rely on a certain amount of humility.

In this season of cheer and heightened religiosity, let's hope they can spread this gospel of prudence to their faithful, ever eager to continue this debate outside the polite confines a concert hall.