Hugh Hewitt's Faith

I'm driving home after an enormously stressful day at work.  My conservative buddy calls me up on the way, so I pull over and take the call.  (Unlike Maria Shriver, I'm ready to concede that the no-cell-phone-while-driving law applies to me.)  He tells me that he's listening to this really interesting interview with his man Hugh Hewitt and my man Richard Dawkins.  I try and find it myself, but the station my buddy is listening to in Los Angeles is just not coming in very clearly up here north of the Santa Susannas.

But it turns out that there is a transcript of the interview available online.  And it is mostly a very good interview indeed.  I have to take what I know of the personality of both men and infer when they are being humorous with one another -- like when Dawkins complains that he feels like he's being cross-examined by a lawyer, and Hewitt responds that he is a lawyer, and Dawkins makes a big show of complaining about that.  I assumed that they were joshing with one another, although it's possible that they weren't because swords had been drawn at that point.

The bulk of the interview, appropriately enough, is about evolution and the evidence for it.  Only towards the end does Hewitt take on Dawkins' atheism, and then it gets a little bit ugly and less intelligent.  Frankly, on both sides, for a while, when Hewitt tried to argue that Dawkins unfairly dismisses contemporaneous evidence of Jesus' divinity and miracle-working -- a subject upon which I have recently done quite a lot of research myself, so Hewitt looks to me to be making an attack on a false premise.  Which does not excuse Dawkins from taking the bait and reacting badly to it.

But the better exchange between the two came towards the end, when the subject of suffering and imperfections in the world were discussed.  Dawkins has the easier position, I think -- a world without an intelligent designer does not need to apologize for the existence of suffering; suffering is a byproduct of natural selection which inherently requires competition for scarce resources resulting in harm to individuals.  Hewitt, however, argues that suffering and imperfections (for instance, flaws in the human eye like the blind spot and image inversion) may be part of a design to the universe that is orders of magnitude more subtle than the simplistically beneficent designer that Dawkins might have hoped for:

HH: Do you read any fiction at all?

RD: Of course.

HH: What’s the most complicated bit of fiction you’ve read? Like War and Peace?

RD: Yeah, what’s your point? What point are you making?

HH: That complexity in design, and counterintuitive steps, et cetera, don’t disprove the idea of genius at work. Genius at work often works through complexity and through misdirection.

RD: I think that what you’re kind of saying is that God made the world look as though it had evolved in order to test our faith, when it didn’t evolve.

HH: No, not test our faith. I’m saying that the world has been made as it is to allow for faith, because if it was made too easy for the simple-minded, it would simply be routine, and everyone would believe, and then there would be no faith.

RD: That would be a pretty unpleasant sort of God. I think, I would say you’re welcome to believe in a kind of God who would do that, but it’s not the kind of God that would appeal to me.

HH: Well, it’s not about what appeals to us, it’s about what is. And you also write that a beneficent designer might, you’d idealistically think, minimize suffering. But not if the soul was infinite, and suffering was necessary for its wisdom.

RD: No, that’s true. I, once again, you’re welcome to that belief, if that’s what you want to believe. There’s a far more parsimonious explanation for suffering, which is natural selection.

Now, here's where there is some real interesting stuff going on.  Hewitt's position (which I disagree with) is relatively sophisticated -- the soul is infinite, or has infinite potential, but cannot  grow and mature and become fully-realized without suffering of some kind.  And, just because we might want the creator to have designed the universe in such a way as to have minimized suffering does not mean that the creator necessarily is that way.  These are intelligent and worthwhile points -- assuming that one concedes a) the existence of a creator in the first place and b) the existence of souls in at least human beings.  Hewitt also has no trouble conceding evolution and the idea of an old Earth; he is not married to the idea of Biblical literalism, which strikes me as a smart thing for a believer to do -- understand the history and allegory of the holy book, and use it as a tool from which one can extract moral guidance and advice for how to live one's life.

The act of faith he describes as necessary for the soul to self-actualize is something that sounds like it is quite sophisticated, complex, and most of all, difficult to do in a complete or meaningful way.  If he has done it, and found happiness in it, good for him.  And I also like that -- at least in this exchange -- neither Hewitt nor Dawkins dumb down their arguments, and indeed they both short-circuit a number of the predicate "baby step" arguments and propositions that I've heard so many tedious times before.  They get right to the meat of it.

Now, I think ultimately, the creator that Hewitt is describing ultimately boils down to being a God of the Gaps.  Science will eventually whittle that God of the Gaps down to pretty much nothing -- most of the origin story in the book of Genesis, for instance, is reduced to the creation of clever self-replicating chemical processes.  But Hewitt's notion of what faith is has intellectual appeal to me because the act of faith is something that seems very difficult to me indeed.  It is not as simple or as easy as driving your car down the road and "having faith" that the other driver isn't going to hit you -- an explanation that has been offered to me on more than one occasion by more than one well-intentioned but hopelessly simplistic missionary.  It dovetails with other notions that I have about Christianity when practiced well -- it is a difficult and demanding moral code, it requires a strong personal commitment by the Christian, and it is something that one must internalize because wearing it on your sleeve is entirely beside the point of the exercise.

So, it reminds me that there is much about my religious friends I can admire despite not sharing their faith.  And at the end of the interview, one is left with the impression that there is some respect between the interviewer and interviewee, which is rare enough that it leave a nice taste in the reader's mouth.