File this under Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone. Authors Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza will debate the merits of the Christian faith at The King’s College next week. The debate, coming October 22 at 7:30pm, will be moderated by World magazine Editor-in-Chief Marvin Olasky.
On D’Souza’s website, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, is quoted saying, “As an unbeliever, I passionately disagree with Dinesh D’Souza on some of his positions. But he is a first-rate scholar whom I feel absolutely compelled to read.” D’Souza’s book, What’s So Great About Christianity, comes out this week.
I could not see anything on this page to comment about unless it is whether D’Souza is a scholar or not. A scholar is someone who is scholarly, who studies a subject in depth. There are plenty of Christian scholars, but the fact that they study Christianity in depth does not make them right, even if they are rightly described as a scholar. If you begin with the assumption that Christianity is true, then you are unlikely to find it false however hard you study it. Dr M D Magee explains at our website, Askwhy Publications, that Judaism and Christianity are explainable perfectly rationally without any need of supernaturalism. We ought to argue from the known to the unknown, not from the unknown to the absurd.