God let down by Tony Blair

A few weeks back there was a public debate in Toronto about the role of religion in public life. Speaking on behalf of God was former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair; opposing him was the writer (and sadly, current cancer victim) Christopher Hitchens. The BBC News channel chose to show the debate, with virtually no advance billing, early in the evening of New Year's Day. Shame, because it was well worth watching.

The participants offered an interesting contrast. One was an important political thinker, a former leftist yet a supporter of the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the author this year of a well-received autobiography with a slightly naff title*. The other was Tony Blair.

A vote taken among the invited audience after the debate showed Hitchens as the clear winner. Watching the broadcast, it was impossible to disagree. Blair's argument in favour of religion basically boiled down to a repeated assertion that religious people do good things for other people. Since nobody could deny that atheists and agnostics also do good things, it was hard to see what this was supposed to prove. Even the behaviour of the two participants worked in Hitchens's favour. When Blair was speaking, Hitchens took copious notes in order to frame his rebuttals, whereas when Hitchens had the floor, Blair sat smirking and gurning in his usual style.

A better debater might well have scored more heavily at Hitchens's expense, because his bog-standard modern atheism prompts many questions. For example:

- If it's laughably primitive to believe in heaven because nobody has ever seen it, how come it's at the cutting edge of science to believe in billions of parallel universes, or in dark matter and dark energy, all of which are equally unseen?

- How did consciousness evolve?

- Given that nature is driven by the survival of the fittest, where do human moral attitudes come from?

You, good reader, no doubt have your own ideas about these things, as do I. The sad part of the Hitchens-Blair debate is that because of Blair's inept performance, such questions were never aired.

* "Hitch-22". Blair's doorstopper was called "A Journey".