Dear Mr. Harris

“If there is no God, what could possibly be wrong with theocracies? They provide high entertainment value, and they give everybody involved in them a sense of dignity and high moral purpose. They get to wear ecclesiastical robes, march in impressive processions to burn intransigent people at the stake, believing that they are better than everybody else and that God likes them” (p. 7).

“Christianity is injurious, you say, but I would want to inquire why it is bad to be injurious. What standard do you appeal to here . . . Okay, so I am part of a divisive, injurious and retrograde movement. Is that bad?” (p. 10).

Trout in the Punchbowl

Rejecting a proffered explanation is not the same thing at all as saying there is no need for an explanation” (p. 16).

“The evolution of life on our planet, you might say, required many millions of years to accomplish what it has. But if we are talking about matter organizing itself up a cliff face with no pitons or boots at a strenuous climb, additional time only makes the problems worse. Miracles don’t go any better if you roll the tape in slow motion” (p. 17).

Playing to the Cheap Seats

“You do this on the safe bet that most of your readers will not go back and question any of those assumptions. But I think it would be really helpful if someone were actually to do that. Some of your assumptions do not appear to have been asked a question in years” (p. 18).

“But if that is not explicit enough, then let’s talk about sexual slavery of children in places like Thailand. And let’s ask who would be most likely to approve of sexual jaunts to visit the slaves there — your average believer in the Old Testament laws you dismissively cite or people who share your opinions about the reject status of Old Testament law? Are there special airfare rates from San Francisco, do you think?” (p. 21).

“What you need to do is sketch for us the bridge between one set of nerve endings and another, and show us why that bridge of yours creates an obligation that two sets of nerve endings must share” (pp. 27-28).

“So you are saying — as an atheist — that if America’s evangelical Christians all forsook the use of antibiotics because of the genocidal devastation it was causing to the microbes within, you would commend us for the moral advance? Do you promise? Because it seems to me that it would be a golden opportunity for you to dismiss us all as uneducated nutjobs” (p. 29).

So What’s Wrong with Tin Foil Ice Cream?

“I believe that atheism is at its weakest when it comes to finding a decent foundation for oughts and shoulds” (p. 30).

“And would you care to explain why you call Christians fanatics for opposing such slaughter of unborn children, but point to Jains as moral exemplars for protecting bugs?” (p. 33).

“First, in blunt terms, you are prepared to sacrifice the small for the sake of the large, not having learned the important lessons taught by Horton Hears a Who, which is, that a ‘person’s a person, no matter how small’” (p. 33).

“You don’t believe in the human soul in the Petri dish, that’s true enough. But you also don’t believe in the human soul when it is encased in one J.S. Bach, and is busy composing The Bradenburg Concertos” (p. 34).

The Great Jacuzzi of Consumerism

“If pain and pleasure are the real things that count, it would seem that we have side with the bigger tribe because they are carrying around more nerve endings. They would experience more pleasure and the defeated tribe would experience less pain. And after the genocide the defeated tribe would experience no pain . . . I know that you are appalled by this kind of reasoning and say that it does not represent your thinking, which I grant. But I want to know why it does not represent your thinking” (pp. 39-40).

[God] “does not have to fill out a police report down at the station every time someone dies of a heart attack” (p. 40).

Any Reason He Should?

“It is not that theistic totalitarianism is okay with us and atheistic totalitarianism is not. We reject it all because God hates it and will bring it into judgment at the last day. He is not going to wave through the pearly gates all the murderous thugs who did what they did in His name. Quite the reverse” (p. 42).

“But there is no reason to oppose, in the same way, an individualistic atheist who cannot see the logical outworkings of his own position. I am willing to cheerfully grant that there are many atheists that I would be happy to have live next door to me. I would ask them to watch my house while I was on vacation. I would not be compelled to think that as soon as we pulled around the corner, his atheism would compel him to run over and burn my house down” (p. 44).

“Given atheism, morality reduces to personal preferences” (p. 46).

God’s Fast Ball, High and Inside

“The square of the hypotenuse is what it is quite apart from me having indigestion over it. Two apples added to two apples will result in four apples however stern my letter to the editor might be. In short, truth is what it is. And thus far we for the most part agree” (p. 47).

The Asian tsunami “had no more ultimate significance than a solar flare, or a virus going extinct, or a desolate asteroid colliding with another asteroid, or the gradual loss of Alabama to kudzu, or me scratching my head just now. These are just atoms, banging around. This is what they do” (p. 51-52).

“You want to rage but there is no object for your anger. Because above you, and them, is ‘only sky.’ You want to rail against God, but He is not there. But that means He didn’t do it. So who did? There is no who. Only sky above us, and only dirt below. In short, you have no right to exhibit the slightest bit of indignation over ‘the neglect’ that is being shown to these particular end products of mindless evolution. There is no neglect. Nature eats her own, and will do so until every last sun has gone out. Deal with it” (p. 53).

“If the two of us were looking at a news report of the latest atrocity, I would want to say that at some point in the future, in some fundamental way, that will be put right. You want to say, as an atheist, that it will not ever be put right. But you refuse, for some reason, to take the next step and say that there is nothing wrong with it now” (p. 54).

“Did any great civilizations arise by having a higher view of Deuteronomy than you currently do?” (p. 56).

Kerosene the Whole Ant Hill

“Having rejected God, you remain a sentimentalist, with your sentiments miraculously suspended in mid-air” (p. 57)

“Atheism not only casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God (which it certainly does), but it also destroys the very concept of benevolence itself. Benevolence is a chemical reaction that some organisms experience in their bone box” (p. 58-59).

“There is no soundtrack to consistent atheism. No swelling violins in the background, but rather stark, everlasting silence” (p. 59).

“What He did to New Orleans was holy, righteous, just and good. Some of it may have been an obvious chastisement for those who would build a major city below sea level in hurricane country and then attempt to govern it through corruption and vice” (p. 62).

“What you call mercy is nothing more than what happens when you pour vinegar into the baking soda. When we look at a fourth grader’s science fair project, it does not occur to us to pronounce that his paper mache volcano is speaking profound truths, or exhibiting great philanthropy. If this is what you want to claim, then claim it. And if you do, we won’t listen because the next book you write, just like the previous ones, is just the smoke from the chemical reaction down in the hole” (p. 64-65).

“The Holocaust is on the same level as boys pouring kerosene in the ant hill, just for fun, and just because they can. The Christian is the one saying that all this will all be put right. You are the one saying it cannot be put right, and, by unacknowledged implication, that there is nothing wrong with it now” (p. 65).

All Over Tarnation

“As to your assertion that Christians have a deep-seated anxiety over sex, I guess I would counter by suggested that for real sexual angst, you would have to try someplace like Manhattan. Looking around at church, and judging from all the kids, it would seem to me that a bunch of Christians didn’t get the memo” (p. 69).

What Color Are Your Arguments?

“You are certain that Peter did not see Jesus when He rose from the dead. But this certainty of yours arises from your convictions about the nature of the universe, and not because you were in the room with Peter when he started talking to his invisible friend. Isn’t that correct?” (p. 80).

“Show me your arguments for atheism under a microscope. Then I will think about believing them. What color at they? How much do they weigh? What are they made of?” (p. 81).

You Tell Me That It’s Evolution, Well, You Know . . .

“You think that creationists are bereft of any intellectual dignity whatever, and I agree with Malcolm Muggeridge that in retrospect evolution will be seen to have been one of the great jokes of history” (p. 81).

“Well, if your cavalry and ours are going to collide, we might as well do it at full gallop” (p. 81).

“And this is why science advances, as Max Planck observed, funeral by funeral” (p. 83).

“If a scientist studying static from solar flare activity were to discover that all his printouts kept repeating the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, his conclusion would not be that “given infinity and randomness, this was bound to happen sooner or later.” And one strand of DNA is not just one speech from Shakespeare — it is the whole library” (p. 86).

“There are, as you point out, over 350,000 species of beetles. But why this should count as an argument against the triune God of Scripture, I surely don’t know. I am a die-hard creationist, and I think it is the coolest thing in the world that our God created that many different kinds of beetles. What this really means is the God of Scripture is not the tidy god of Plato that philosophers prefer to believe (or disbelieve) in. I am a Christian; I love it when our God misbehaves like this” (p. 89).

Let the Dialogue Begin!

“Nobody counterfeits brown shopping bags, but they do counterfeit twenty-dollar bills” (p. 91).

“We don’t believe that religion is the answer. We believe Christ is the answer” (p. 94).

“All this does is confirm one of the basic tenets of the Christian faith, which is that the human race is all screwed up” (p. 94).

“You want to save the secular democracies of Europe. You want to do it without religion. But secularism, which apparently worships the condom, produces low birth rates, and is consequently in mortal danger of being overrun within the next twenty years. Ideas do have consequences. What does Darwin say about one population replacing another?” (p. 96).

The Ultimate Story

“You write here as though our ‘deepest personal concerns’ have value. As we make ‘ethical’ choices, as we experience something ’spiritual,’ and as we contemplate the horror of human ’suffering,’ you write and say that we have to learn how to speak about these things. I put scare quotes around those three words because I am one set of complex chemical reactions secreting something that I falsely believe to be arguments to another set of complex chemical reactions who falsely believes that he is reading them” (p. 98).

“You are a hodge-podge of neuron-firings looking into an abyss which you only think you understand. You don’t really understand it because you are not thinking at all, but rather doing what chemicals always do under those conditions and at that temperature” (p. 99).

“Given the fact that human beings evolved from primates, as you asserted earlier, is there any a priori reason why a consistent evolutionist wouldn’t cheerfully agree that one race of human beings could certainly be lower on the evolutionary tree than the others? Any reason why, when we get to homo sapiens, magic suddenly intervenes and equality appears?” (p. 100-101).

“We need actual medicine, not the idea of medicine. And this is why we need Christ, not religion” (p. 104).

“He took onto Himself the wrath and anger of God, and He did this so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. He gathered up a world full of hatred, adultery, treachery, rape, murder, envy, genocide, religious hypocrisy, atheism, theft, lying, and all forms of arrogant haughtiness, gathered it all to His chest, and disappearing, sank into death” (p. 106).

“One of the principle failings in atheism is that it leaves us with no one to thank for the countless blessings we encounter daily. This extends from trivial things, like the pleasure we get from pulling our socks up, to more amazing gifts, like food, and music, and marriage” (p. 108).

“May the Lord call you to Himself, on the basis of His kind gospel. But whether He does this or not, if we ever meet, I would love to buy you a beer” (p. 109).