Replies to Christopher Hitchens, Part 1: Introduction

Those of you have been following this blog have no doubt noticed the absence of new posts since shortly after Easter. This is primarily due to a little fellow named William Lloyd Fox, who was born into our family six weeks ago. Needless to say, the first six weeks (or the first two or three months) after having a new baby (and a second child, at that) offer precious little time for writing. I have, however, found the time to do a little reading, and am finally returning to the laptop to try to send a few thoughts out into blog world.

I recently purchased a copy of Christopher Hitchens' anti-religion, anti-God diatribe god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Although I anticipated, naturally, that I would not agree with Hitchens' thesis, I did expect that such a famed atheistic intellectual and debater would have crafted a careful and scholarly work, which would require serious thought on the part of the reader, and call for a thorough examination of the arguments presented within the text. However, I did not find this to be the case. At all. The book is decidedly unscholarly, chock full of errors, illogical, biased beyond acceptability, frequently assumptive, and little better than an ill-conceived, bitter, vitriolic attack on religion.

There  are two ways of dealing with this book. The first is to simply leave it alone. The sheer volume of (often) glaring errors and illogical deductions that are scattered across the landscape of its text may lead one to assume that it does not even merit a reply. The second approach is to publicly (and for the public good) expose its errors and dangerous implications. I have chosen the second course, and wish to write a series of replies to Mr. Hitchens.

I believe that the book deserves a response for at least six particular reasons:

1. It is a "popular" book. This is not a dense and ponderous tome of philosophical thought that will be read only by a few sagacious intellectuals. It is a controversial, but wildly popular best-seller. In all fairness to the author, Christopher Hitchens is an extremely well-educated, well-traveled, and highly intelligent journalist, author, and foreign correspondent. He is also an entertaining and powerful rhetorician. I can only imagine the negative impact it may have on the thoughts and souls of its wide readership, many of whom may be completely unaware that its arguments hang on the merest threads.

2. Hitchens does not stand alone. This book is but one part of a secular, atheistic iceberg. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other champions of the "new atheism" represent a serious trend in modern thought. They cannot be ignored.

3. god is not Great obscures countless fields of study that relate to history and human behavior. Hitchens' absurd argument that religion is, and has been, the sole responsible cause of nearly all violence, oppression, superstition, ignorance, abuse, and other evils in human history, has the effect of swiftly dropping a thick, dark curtain across the stage of inquiry. Hitchens leaves little room for a serious examination of human nature, or the possibility that various economic, political, and philosophical ideologies may also to be to blame for the various evils just mentioned. No, religion is at fault, end of story. End scene, the curtain comes down. This a perilous distortion of reality, and leaves us with the following assumptive (and conceivably dangerous) result: if religion were done away with, the advances of science, reason, and human evolution would naturally lead us toward an increasingly more perfect state. This monstrous implication cannot be ignored.

4. Hitchens' philosophy inflicts great damage on reason, critical thinking,  and place of both in history. The author's view of history is evolutionary (and influenced by dialectic, given his Marxist leanings), which, coupled with his antitheism, tends toward discounting the great religious intellectuals of the past. The book itself is a minefield of illogical deductions, and unreasonable assumptions/conclusions. Hitchens would have us believe that only modern secular atheists are enlightened (and presumably we should include him in this "enlightened" category), possessed of greater knowledge and clarity than those who went before, and that human history (with religion taken out of the picture) will steadily advance towards a utopian enlightenment. This charge, too, must be answered.

5. The future implications of Hitchens' work must be considered as well. Since religion is the root cause for nearly every evil in the world, must we not question the possibility that many in the future (in spite of Hitchens' supposed "tolerance") will see fit to destroy religion with whatever means? This is a serious question which also must be addressed.

6. One of the most pernicious aspects of Hitchens' work, is that the attack on God and religion may now be considered not only a personal choice, but an actual moral good. To me one of the most unsettling parts of the entire book is the back dust cover. It has the usual snippets of praise one would expect to find on the back flap of a book; and under the heading "Praise for Christopher Hitchens", appears this comment from The New Yorker: "An intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause for righteousness." When the attack on religion has come to be seen no longer as immoral, nor a reasonable alternative to belief, but actually an act of "righteousness", then in our generation we see a time when good is deemed evil and evil is deemed good. For this reason, if for no other this book must be answered. 

It would be impossible to answer every spurious charge found in god is not Great within the framework of a few short blog posts. Nor would it be possible for me to find the time to research every error contained in it. I have no desire to spend a year or two writing on only one topic! However, over the weeks to come, in a series of eight to ten posts, I hope to address a number of serious problems with Mr. Hitchens' book. These posts will probably be interspersed with essays on other topics (again, I have no desire to spend all my time writing on this decidedly unpleasant book!), but stay tuned for more installments!

Until then, God Bless!