On Mon­day night faith and athe­ism got a ver­bal work­out. Famous­ly vit­ri­olic colum­nist Christo­pher Hitchens (a for­mer lib­er­al best-known in recent years for his staunch sup­port of the war in Iraq) faced off against Rev­erend Al Sharp­ton in a dis­cus­sion mod­er­at­ed by Slate edi­tor Jacob Weis­berg. Hitchens is a vehe­ment non-believ­er and the new author of God is not Great (also avail­able on iTunes). Suf­fice to say that the debate between him and Sharp­ton was col­or­ful. That should come as no surprise–what makes it worth lis­ten­ing to is that it was also rea­soned and intel­li­gent.

You can read a tran­script or lis­ten to the debate (RealAu­dio only), which was held at the New York Pub­lic Library.

The two celebri­ty pun­dits saved their best moment for last:

“I’d encour­age peo­ple to buy the book,” Mr. Sharp­ton said. “I don’t
believe what it says, but it’s well writ­ten. He’s a very elo­quent and
well-versed per­son.”

“That’s extreme­ly hand­some of you,” Mr. Hitchens replied.

As an aside, Hitchens recent­ly appeared on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight. In the inter­view above, you can get a lit­tle more insight into Hitchens’ think­ing.

When­ev­er you put athe­is­m’s most promi­nent spokesper­son on Fox News, you’d expect the fur to fly. But that’s not how it turned out. The fur end­ed up stay­ing on the cats when Bill O’Reil­ly inter­viewed Richard Dawkins, author of the best­selling The God Delu­sion, this week, as you can see above.

Over the past two days, NPR’s Fresh Air has devot­ed two pro­grams to inter­ro­gat­ing whether reli­gion and sci­ence can co-exist. On Wednes­day, air time was first giv­en to Richard Dawkins, the famed Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar of evo­lu­tion who, with his recent pub­li­ca­tion of The God Delu­sion, has launched a vig­or­ous defense of athe­ism. As you could well imag­ine, Dawkins (iTunes — feed — stream) is hard­ly will­ing to make accom­mo­da­tions for reli­gion, and he’s com­fort­able liv­ing in a world where Dar­win­ist thought solves prob­lems that reli­gion itself usu­al­ly tries to sort out — that is, the basic hows and whys of exis­tence. It has been said that Dawkins comes off as being as zeal­ous in his athe­ism as his reli­gious coun­ter­parts are in their faith. But no mat­ter how you look at him, you have to admire his abil­i­ty to make an art­ful argu­ment .… and also his sense of humor. Yes, he claims half in jest to wear an “Athe­ists for Jesus” t‑shirt. (See a pho­to here.)

Next, on Thurs­day, Ter­ry Gross invit­ed Fran­cis Collins (iTunes — feed — stream) onto the show. Collins is a geneti­cist, and not just any one. He is cur­rent­ly the direc­tor of the Nation­al Human Genome Research Project, and he most notably led a team that cracked the human genome back in 2000. He is also an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, and, again, not just your aver­age one in that he accepts the valid­i­ty of evo­lu­tion. Hav­ing recent­ly pub­lished a new work, The Lan­guage of God: A Sci­en­tist Presents Evi­dence for Belief, Collins is sub­tly look­ing to steer a mid­dle course, to find ways to let reli­gion and sci­ence co-exist and not let the one under­mine the integri­ty of the oth­er. How well the argu­ments hang togeth­er is an open ques­tion. But it’s nonethe­less gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing to hear how he’s think­ing things through. And cer­tain­ly it’s worth lis­ten­ing to Dawkins and Collins’ inter­views side by side. This is NPR at its best, and, yes, I’d gen­tly chal­lenge one of our read­ers to find any­thing on Fox News that’s on an equal­ly intel­li­gent plane. (See the user com­ments at the bot­tom of this page.)

See our com­plete lists of Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts, or our larg­er Pod­cast Library.  Email a friend and let them know about Open Cul­ture.

Intel­li­gence Squared (iTunes  Feed  Web Site), a new series of NPR broad­casts, has a rather unique
for­mat. It brings Oxford-style debates to Amer­i­ca, and it fea­tures lead­ing thinkers tak­ing dif­fer­ent posi­tions on hot-but­ton issues of our day. (You can get more pre­cise infor­ma­tion on the for­mat here.) There will be eight debates in total, all record­ed live, and each one revolves around three pan­elists argu­ing for, and three against, a “motion,” such as “We must tol­er­ate a nuclear Iran,” “Free­dom of expres­sion must include the license to offend,” and “A demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed Hamas is still a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion.” And then there is the provoca­tive top­ic of the most recent debate, “Is Amer­i­ca Too Damn Reli­gious?” This debate (see bios of par­tic­i­pants) was held at the Asia Soci­ety in New York City in Feb­ru­ary, and you can catch the full debate here (Real Play­er) or a con­densed ver­sion here (mp3).

See Open Cul­ture’s Pod­cast Col­lec­tions:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School)