God, guns and gumption; plus 'Why atheists hate God'

Gotta share a couple of columnists from Townhall.com this morning. First Doug Giles writes about his top three interests that give calm to his soul in these trouble times: God, Guns & Gumption.

In these times of uncertainty in which everything that can be shaken will be shaken, I’m not banking on big government wet-nursing me into Nirvana. I believe this suckulus package spawned by the Obama administration is going to leave the Americans who are looking to it as the grand societal salvo more disappointed than Lisa Marie was when she finally locked lips with Michael Jackson.

Nope, I’m fixing my hopes in the coming nightmare on God, guns and gumption. That’s my stimulus package. What’s yours?

Then Frank Turek explains why atheists hate God in Sleeping with your girlfriend.

Certainly the new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have problems with cosmic authority. Hitchens refuses to live under the “tyranny of a divine dictatorship.” Dawkins calls the God of the Bible a “malevolent bully” (among other things) and admits that he is “hostile to religion.”

It’s not that Hitchens and Dawkins offer any serious examination and rebuttal of the evidence for God. They misunderstand and dismiss hundreds of pages of metaphysical argumentation from Aristotle, Aquinas and others and fail to answer the modern arguments from the beginning and design of the universe. (Dawkins explanation for the extreme design of the universe is “luck.”)

Instead, as any honest reader of their books will see, Hitchens and Dawkins are outraged at the very thought of God. Even their titles scream out contempt (god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The God Delusion). They don’t seem to realize that their moral outrage presupposes an objective moral standard that exists only if God exists. Objective morality—as well as the immaterial laws of reason and science—cannot exist in the materialist universe they attempt to defend.

In effect, they have to borrow from a theistic worldview in order to argue against it. They have to sit in God’s lap to slap his face.

While both men are very good writers, Hitchens and Dawkins are short on evidence and long on attitude. As I mentioned in our debate, you can sum up Christopher’s attitude in one sentence: “There is no God, and I hate him.”

Despite this, God’s attitude as evidenced by the sacrifice of Christ is: There are atheists, and I love them.

Good stuff. Read both of them.

Who lit the fuse to set off "The Big Bang"?

Got a couple of hours to consider the most fundamental question in the universe, who laid the zillion tons of dynamite and lit the fuse for the Big Bang? Watch the below video from CrossExamined Blog between Christian author Frank Turek and atheist author Christopher Hitchens as they debate the origin of the universe and whether God had anything to do with it.

Frank Turek writes the short version here at Townhall.com, including this teaser:

When I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens recently, one of the eight arguments I offered for God’s existence was the creation of this supremely fine-tuned universe out of nothing. I spoke of the five main lines of scientific evidence—denoted by the acronym SURGE—that point to the definite beginning of the space-time continuum. They are: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Expanding Universe, the Radiation Afterglow from the Big Bang Explosion, the Great galaxy seeds in the Radiation Afterglow, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

While I don’t have space to unpack this evidence here (see I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist), it all points to the fact that the universe began from literally nothing physical or temporal. Once there was no time, no space, and no matter and then it all banged into existence out of nothing with great precision.

Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist? from Andrew Ketchum on Vimeo.