Thanh Hai Tran's Web Log in Vietnamese ... with some English here and there.

...not to mention: rude and obnoxious.

So, a few days ago, Christopher Hitchens went on the CBC Q program,


and again he posed this challenge: "Tell me of a moral statement that can be made or a moral action undertaken by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer." Mister Hitchens' contention, of course, is that you don't need God to be able to determine what's right and wrong.

Arguably, the challenge is no more sensical than if he were to ask us to show him a jagged line and try to convince him that it is not jagged at all but is in fact a very smooth line. That is to say, it is non-sensical until you enlarge your perspective. I'm thinking of fractals.

On the one hand, the answer is incredibly simple, if you're a believer: the ultimate moral action that you could undertake is to worship God, because He is the source of all morality. But, on the other hand, if you're are a non-believer, you and I will probably have very different opinions as to what's moral and what's not. So the challenge is doomed to begin with. Sometimes the two sets of opinions do overlap, however. I'm trying to allude to a fact that it was the influence of Christianity that lead to the abolition of the practice of cannibalism in Fiji in the nineteenth century. I'm not entirely sure whether this fact says more about Christianity versus other pagan beliefs rather than believers versus non-believers, but nevertheless it's interesting to note.


Looking at Hitchen's challenge from a different perspective, consider the Penrose stairs, which seems like a geometrical contradiction in nature: it's forever going up or forever going down depending on which direction you start walking.


If you're mathematically inclined, you've probably already realized where I'm going with this.

You don't need God to determine what's right and wrong?
Imagine, if you will, that your universe is restricted to only 2 dimensions, and you encounter Penrose's stairs. And you say: "hmm, it looks like a loop. I'll take a stroll around this loop and get some exercise." Your neighbour tries to warn you, saying "Don't do it, for if you do it, you will surely die." But you say, "Ahh, that's rubbish. I'll prove to you that I won't die." And you walk, and when you take that extra step at one of those corners, you fall off the edge of your universe and die. And as you're falling, you discover that, although your neighbour may not have fully understood what he was saying, what he said was true.



I believe that any attempt to convince militant non-believers, like Christopher Hitchens, to believe will result in utter failure, unless a miracle happens. These people are talking from a completely different, and often contradictory, rule book. There are some truths that you know through your senses. Other truths, you know through reasoning and experimentation. Yet another class of truths, you may only know through revelation. Some day, science may probably prove all of the revealed truths of religion, but--considering the immensity of the universe--likely not in yours or my life time. So in the mean time, what are we believers to do? We continue to believe, and we use people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, as motivation to test, check, and understand more about our beliefs.

Yes, as rude and obnoxious as they are, in the end--and by this, I don't mean to sound arrogant in any way, shape or form, because I'm fairly certain they are a lot smarter than me--they probably do serve a useful purpose, for themselves and for society.