The late Christopher Hitchens liked to frighten little children with horror stories about the evils of religion. Often times he was more narrowly referring to the religion of Islam, but he did not hold back from the “evils” of Christianity, either. Of all the things that offended him, the offence of the Cross of Christ was the most acute. He wrote:
The idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled even C.S. Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition [of atoning sacrifice]. Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans. Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life. [Cited by Tim Challies, quoting from Hitchen’s God Is Not Great.]
Against this, the Apostle Paul provides the counterpoint:
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. [I Corinthians 1: 18, 23.]
Hitchens, despite two millennia of human “evolution”, has not moved one iota beyond or away from the Greeks of Paul’s day. He is stuck in their spiritual time warp. He, like they, still finds the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to be greatly offensive–and in so doing bears testimony to the truthfulness of Scripture. He cannot help himself. Apparently, evolution embarrassingly stopped somewhere along the way.
But Hitchens’s animus is useful insofar that it testifies to this abiding indictment: the crucifixion of Jesus is offensive to all but Christians. To Christians, the Cross is our glory, our power, our hope, and our motivation to love God and His Christ with all our hearts. It represents the very power of God Himself. But to Unbelievers, it is the ultimate insulting offence.
Why? Why should Unbelief find the Cross so offensive? On its own terms, Unbelief is prepared to recognise, even celebrate, the sacrifice of one for another. It concedes happily that Sydney Carton’s sacrifice for Darnay, Lucie, and their child in the Tale of Two Cities was a glorious act. It acknowledges willingly that Evans’s stepping outside into the freezing Antarctic cold to die in the vain attempt to save Sir Robert Scott and his colleagues was heroic, an act of true self-sacrificing love.
More deeply lies another animus. The Cross of Christ is hated because of what it says about the Unbeliever. It testifies to the evil of every man. Worse, it declares that this human evil is not a mere failure, or childish mistake, or bumbling error, or something which will be smoothed out in the endless centuries of evolutionary development. Rather, the Cross of Christ declares that every man is truly and thoroughly wicked. Moreover, it declares that death and eternal damnation is the certain consequence as we, sinners all, are indicted before a holy God. Therefore, the Cross is not just foolishness or silly or primitive or childish–it is hateful, and despicable because of what it says about us. Since it indicts humanity so powerfully, sinful hearts–being true to their nature–attempt to deflect the guilt and the blame back to God.
Thus for Christ’s sacrificial cross, only contempt is forthcoming. While folk may honour sacrifice as noble, not so Christ’s cross. The reason is not hard to find. It lies here: Christ was dying to satisfy His heavenly Father. Therefore, whilst Christ may be noble, God must be a tyrant. Consider this: had Sir Robert Scott asked Evans to lay down his life for his colleagues, whilst Evans might be considered a tragic hero, Scott would be regarded in a very negative light. In the same way, the cross of Christ represents an evil deity. It thus becomes an outrage, a thing to be loathed.
These deeper realities and truths had an ardent witness in Christopher Hitchens. But his rage against the Cross had a deeper, inchoate malevolence that would have been embarrassing to acknowledge. He hated God because he could not betray his own sinfulness–to which he defiantly clung until the end. He was a true scion of Unbelief.
When God confronted Adam after his rebellion, Adam protested that the fault was not his. It was God’s. “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit and I ate.” Adam blamed Eve as the immediate cause of his sin. But he also blamed God as the first and ultimate cause. He implied that if God had not given him the one who was “bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh”, he would never have fallen into sin. Thus, Hitchens (along with all who despise or neglect the Cross as irrelevant) would indict and blame God. If there is anything wrong with humanity, it is God’s fault.
There have been attempts to coat the Cross with saccharin. Unbelief can remake it into a noble sacrifice, a moral example, an heroic act by Christ. But Hitchens could see more clearly than that. He could see that the “problem” with the Cross lay not with Christ, but with the Father–that God would require this of His Son in order to save His people. It is what the Cross tells us about God which offends. But this was not all. His fulminating against God had a deeper motive. For Hitchens, it is what the Cross said about him that was most offensive. When confronted with true moral guilt before an angry God, if submission in humble belief is not possible, the only response left is bitter, sarcastic mockery, which is what he gave out.
As Easter approaches, these things will play out once again around the world. To Believers, the Cross both humbles us into the dust and lifts us to the eternal skies. We cherish the old rugged cross and all it represents–about God the Father, and His only begotten Son, and about us.
But to Unbelievers, the word of the cross will remain as it always has–folly. In this way, even Unbelief testifies to the truth of God and His Christ, despite itself.
Here is a howler from David Farrar of Kiwiblog–betraying his ignorance of recent history. He writes:
Countries that don’t separate religion and state almost always are worse places to live than those countries which do.
So those countries which made a great virtue out of being a-religious such as the Soviet Union, East Germany, the entire Eastern European bloc, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia (which modelled its ideology upon the doctrines of leading French Communists) were great places to live. How anyone could suggest that anyone struggling to survive in the Killing Fields was living in one of the better places in the world beggars belief. And in the present, those nations which still make a virtue out of secularism such as North Korea, Communist China, Myanmar, and Castro’s Cuba remain great places to live? Try telling that to the thousands in North Korea’s concentration camps.
Whatever planet Mr Farrar lives on, clearly it is not the third rock from the sun.
To be fair, Mr Farrar was endeavouring to persuade us that the recently adopted Egyptian constitution was a bad deal. In this we agree. But to suggest that secularism is a better foundation for government, justice and protecting the rights of minorities than religion represents a prodigious non-sequitur and Mr Farrar should know better.
Firstly, the tenets of a particular religion influencing government, law, justice, and rights are materially significant. All religions are not created equal after all. One suspects that the liberally effete Mr Farrar cannot bring himself publicly to criticise Islam and wishes to make his criticism more “principled” and acceptable to his audience. Blame it on religion in general, not on one religion in particular–a favourite misdirection of atheists such as the late Christopher Hitchens.
Does Mr Farrar really mean to imply that there is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian legal tradition or ethic which has profoundly shaped the legal inheritance of most Western countries? If so then his ignorance is breathtaking. If not, then, is he suggesting that teaching people not to steal, murder, and lie in court is a bad thing and minatory to the rights of subjects?
Moreover, is Mr Farrar’s conception of religion so superficial that he fails to see that secularism is intensely religious in its own right. Secular governments make judgements about the nature of life, marriage, death, birth, justice, sin, crime and punishment. All of these judgements impose a set of ethics and morality which call upon ultimate values, mores and truth. Secularism believes that gods and the Living God do not exist which itself constitutes a religious doctrine. Secularism is one of the most intense religions of our day, but dishonestly so, for it’s sleight of hand in denying its own religious character.
Finally, when Mr Farrar suggests that modern secular governments are “better” at protecting the rights of minorities, we suggest in return that he present that argument to the hundreds of thousands of children cut up and torn apart in their mothers’ wombs in this country and whose blood now calls out from the ground for justice and vengeance. It is one of the great monuments to secularism’s achievements. So much for the wonderful religion of secularism. Rather than building a society which is a better place in which to live, it has made it one of the worst places to be condemned to death by lethal abortion.
We have been considering a “reasonable proposition” put forward by distinguished psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey–to the effect that Christian parents who raise their children to know, understand, and believe the Christian faith are committing a form of child abuse. He puts it in the same category as parents performing clitorectomy upon daughters.
Children have a right not to be taught myths and lies, he averred to his audience at Amnesty International. The right to the truth overrides all parental and child rights. It overrides all free speech rights. He will defend free speech rights strenuously, but not in the home, unless children are being taught his particular world-view–which happens to be the dominant world view of our age. Children must be taught and trained in the world-view of scientism, which to materialist and atheist Humphrey is the only truth.
We can see how purblind he has become in his own ideology and secular religion in the following quotation:
Belief systems in general flourish or die out according to how good they are at reproduction and competition. The better a system is at creating copies of itself, and the better at keeping other rival belief systems at bay, the greater its own chances of evolving and holding its own. So we should expect that it will be characteristic of successful belief systems—especially those that survive when everything else seems to be against them—that their devotees will be obsessed with education and with discipline: insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others. We should expect, moreover, that they will make a special point of targeting children in the home, while they are still available, impressionable and vulnerable. For, as the Jesuit master wisely noted, “If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life.”
In Humphrey’s evolutionist world-view the mark of a successful belief system is that it gains adherents. It survives. It is fitter than other belief systems. The key ingredient to survival of dangerous myths like Jesus Christ and His Father, the Living God, according to Humphrey, is that the devotees are obsessed with education and with discipline: “insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others.”
The self-serving hypocrisy of this argument is worthy of note in passing. OK, so the success of a belief system has nothing to do with truth, but everything to do with inculcation. Apparently. So how has atheistic, materialistic scientism been doing, then? How successful has it been? For over one hundred years schooling in the United States and Great Britain and in the West generally has been thoroughly committed to inculcating Darwinian evolutionism into the hearts and minds of students. How has that inculcation gone? Humphrey tells us (although he misses the deadly indictment to his own position and of his argument):
A survey published last year showed that half the American people do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution—if it has occurred—can have taken place without some kind of external intervention. Not only do people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2% realised it involves putting theories to the test, 34% vaguely knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66% didn’t have a clue.
The belief systems of scientism and materialism and evolutionism and atheism are not doing too well, since they are failing to produce a universal population of committed disciples, despite controlling state funded education at every turn. But rather than face up to the implications of the signal failure of atheistic evolution to gain universal traction–which is evidence that his own belief system is inadequate at best, riddled with contradictions and irrationality at worst–Humphrey wants to shift blame to someone else–the parents of children whose households overtly and deliberately reject his belief system of secular atheism. This gets to the nub of Humphrey’s case: public education is failing because parental influence is so strong. Therefore, parents need to be attacked, neutered and controlled.
The first obstacle to be obliterated is home-schooling. The state–get this–the State must outlaw it.
All sects that are serious about their own survival do indeed make every attempt to flood the child’s mind with their own propaganda, and to deny the child access to any alternative viewpoints. In the United States this kind of restricted education has continually received the blessing of the law. Parents have the legal right, if they wish to, to educate their children entirely at home, and nearly one million families do so.
Then, secondly, there are private schools and colleges which must be neutered as well:
But many more who wish to limit what their children learn can rely on the thousands of sectarian schools that are permitted to function subject to only minimal state supervision. A US court did recently insist that teachers at a Baptist school should at least hold teaching certificates; but at the same time it recognised that “the whole purpose of such a school is to foster the development of their children’s minds in a religious environment” and therefore that the school should be allowed to teach all subjects “in its own way”—which meant, as it happened, presenting all subjects only from a biblical point of view, and requiring all teachers, supervisors, and assistants to agree with the church’s doctrinal position.
So the State has to shut them down as well. But it gets worse. Humphrey acknowledges even then–even if home schooling were made illegal (as it is in Germany), and even if all faith-based schools were shut down– it would not be enough to ensure the successful inculcation of his religion of atheism. Parents can influence their children informally, even if they are now restricted to secular atheistic schools to impart the “Faith”.
Yet, parents hardly need the support of the law to achieve such a baleful hegemony over their children’s minds. For there are, unfortunately, many ways of isolating children from external influences without actually physically removing them or controlling what they hear in class. Dress a little boy in the uniform of the Hasidim, curl his side-locks, subject him to strange dietary taboos, make him spend all weekend reading the Torah, tell him that gentiles are dirty, and you could send him to any school in the world and he’d still be a child of the Hasidim. The same—just change the terms a bit—for a child of the Muslims, or the Roman Catholics, or followers of the Maharishi Yogi.
So, its control of parents that Humphrey is after. In the Soviet Union, parents were forbidden to mention anything about the God of the Scriptures to their children. They could not include them in any Christian celebrations or ceremonies. Their children were taken into indoctrination services, such as the Young Pioneers. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents if they conducted any religious practices in the home.
Priests and their families were subject to severe persecution. A priest’s children were barred from middle or higher schools or from state employment unless they renounced and broke off all connections with their fathers. Priests were disenfranchised along with criminals and the insane. They were also denied ration cards, often necessary for survival in periods of shortage. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 180f.]
Why would one connect Soviet totalitarianism and ruthless persecution of Christians with today’s secular materialists? Both alike were and are militantly atheistic. It should come as no surprise, then, that well respected scholars, such as Humphrey openly advocate state control over parents to ensure that all speech in the home conforms to secular materialist atheism. That is why Peter Hitchens speaks of the “totalitarian intolerance of the new atheists”. It is a fair representation.
We are certain of this: materialist, evolutionist atheism can only succeed in human history by the power of the gun. It is an inane, conflicted and barren ideology. It is ultimately irrational. Unable to win and maintain control of hearts and minds by peaceful means it must turn inevitably to the gun and to the power of a totalitarian state to gain and continue control. Dawkins and Humphrey are channelling Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It is one of the great ironies of the decade that Humphrey first gave this speech to Amnesty International–a group ostensibly dedicated to fighting against state oppression everywhere. The fact that Humphrey’s propositions were not publicly repudiated on the spot tells us that they have lots of fellow travellers–in place where one would not expect them.
The course to violent overthrow and seizure of power tends to follow a well-trodden path: demonise something as oppressive, cruel, and destructive. Promise that if the demons were removed, all our problems would dissipate or dissolve into facile solutions. Then, for the sake of peace, the sake of truth, and for the love of fellow men all the principled and courageous must stand up to fight. Right now, the demon is Jesus Christ and His people are the enemy. They are the pathological child abusers of our time . . . or so the propaganda runs.
It is no surprise to learn that militant atheists hate the Christian faith. And hate is not too strong a word. What else can be made of the assertions by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that the act of parents teaching their own children about God and the Christ and the redemption of the world and the judgment to come is an act of child abuse?
Maybe, one wonders, this indictment should be regarded as rhetorical flourish or vivid hyperbole. Dawkins, however, is firmly insistent that his words on this subject are neither hyperbolic nor a literary device in general. He means them in a literal sense. Here is Dawkins’s gloss on his indictment of parents who teach their children the Christian faith:
. . . in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. [Quoted by Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 202. Emphasis, ours.]
Nor was this an intemperate slip, later modified or partially corrected. On a national TV programme he declared,
What I really object to is–and I thinks it’s actually abusive to children–is to take a tiny child and say “You are a Christian child or you are a Muslim child.” I think it is wicked if children are told “You are a member of such and such a faith simply because your parents are.” (Ibid. Emphasis, ours)
Child abuse in modern discourse is considered the most heinous of crimes, worthy of no mercy, exculpation, or defence. It is the secular world’s last mortal unpardonable sin.
But is Dawkins really arguing that were parents to instruct their children in the faith of their fathers they should be criminally indicted and subjected to the most severe criminal penalties? If so–if we are really to take him literally–he must have abandoned reason. To make the crimes of physical or sexual assault of a child the moral and legal legal equivalent of catechising that child in the Christian faith, all the while asserting that one is to be taken literally, can hardly be an advertisement for rationality.
So, since Dawkins is not mentally unstable, and since his assertions on child abuse and religion are not rationally defensible, there must be another explanation. The most likely is that such extreme allegations serve the interests of propaganda. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and their co-belligerents are advocates of a secular, religion-free society. To identify religious instruction of children as child abuse creates a “narrative” that parents are delinquent and punishable for teaching their children about the Lord Jesus Christ, which in its turn provides justification for State regulations and rules.
There have been other empires, other societies which have made such a connection and engaged in similar propaganda. The Soviet Union for one. Communist China for another. Both sought suppression and extirpation of all religion and its replacement with absolute secularism. Both employed a massive effort in propaganda to achieve their goals. Both sought to “rescue” children from the religion of their parents.
Is this really what the New Atheists are about? Is this their end-game? The breaking apart of a parent from a child to ensure that the child is not exposed to the ideas and beliefs of “bad” parents? And to ensure that this happens, of course, the State would have to intrude right into the home: to rule, regulate, listen, monitor, control, and punish. It would have to replace parental instruction with its own.
No, we hear you say. If you allege that against the noble New Atheists you would be guilty of your own hyperbolic excess. No-one is advocating that. No-one. Really? Yes, really.
Unfortunately, it is true. Literally true. No rhetorical devices within cooee. We will take the saga further in our next post.
When once-Christian cultures turn away from the God of our fathers usually a substitute deity occupies the vacuum. This new god is supposed to function as the Living God had in the culture of former generations. People need to believe in something or someone–particularly when former generations professed a living faith in the true God.
The experience of our ancient fathers has been an apt teacher. When the northern kingdom split away from Judea at the passing of King Solomon the northern king deliberately sought to set up a false cult to fill the vacuum created, by throwing off loyalty to God. Baal was the choice. Baal was an idol of power, ministered and institutionalised and made visible through the State.
Similarly in our post-Christian, post-modern world, amidst all the nihilism and dissolution there is one authority, one locus of unity to which the people have repeatedly and persistently turned –Baal, the god and religion of the state.
Peter Hitchens in his book, The Rage Against God documents how Baalism quickly manifested itself in Britain, once Unbelief had spread and taken hold and the God of their fathers was rejected. World War I was one of the most senseless wars of the modern period. Britain had gone to war on a whimsy. There is every reason to see the horrible outcome as an act of divine judgment upon an idolatrous, treacherous people. But Britain did not repent. It doubled down in its rebellion–as is often the case.
Britain wove a narrative of the cult of Empire, of Baal and portrayed the death of hundreds of thousands as martyrs’ heroic selfless sacrifice to defend the nation, the state, upon the altar of Baal. Consider the words of this hymn–one of the most frequently sung national hymns after the Great War:
I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love; The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best; The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
I heard my country calling, away across the sea, Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me. Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head, And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead. I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns, I haste to thee my mother, a son among they sons.
And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago, Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know; We may not count her armies, we may not see her King; Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering; And soul by souil and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace. Cecil Spring Rice.
What is particularly offensive in this hymn is the blending of Baalism with the Christian faith–the admixture of patriotic idolatry using the motifs and terms of the Scriptures and blended with the love and loyalty to King Jesus. The spirit and cunning and ancient guile of King Jeroboam took new life and form in Britain after World War I.
Hitchens observes that there are shrines to Baal everywhere in Britain–in every place, village, even hamlet. The sacrificial deaths to save the State, the Nation are celebrated to this day in outpourings of love and devotion for the nation, for “our way of life”. Hitchens asks:
What is being worshipped in these places? It may counterfeit the majesty of great churches and imitate their mystery and grandeur. But it is not God. It is an attempt to replace God, and attempt that failed. . . . [The narrative was] “the War” . . . had been a heroic period during which our great and brave country fought more or less alone, and with all classes united, against a powerful and wicked enemy–and defeated it to be benefit of the whole world. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 77f.]
All hail King Britain, our saviour and our god. Fast forward to Mitt Romney’s recent absurd Baalist profession of faith: America, the hope of the world!
Elijah confronted the Baalism of the Northern Kingdom head on. He challenged the people, “How long will go limping between two opinions: if Baal is god, serve him. If the Lord is God serve Him.” Many modern Christians in the United States are unable to distinguish between their love of country and their love for Christ. To serve Christ is to die in humble sacrifice for the State. Thus did a former generation in Great Britain once think.
If Christians do not distinguish sharply between devotion to the King of the earth and idolatrous simpering to the idol Baal, the lord, the State, God will blight the land with curses and devastations. As Hitchens warns, referring to the experience of Great Britain:
And the proper remembering of dead warriors, though right and fitting, is a very different thing from the Christian religion. The Christian church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars. Wars–which can only ever be won by ruthless violence–are seldom fought for good reasons, even if such reasons are invented for them afterward. Civilized countries become less civilized when they go to war. And they hardly ever have good outcomes. In fact, I think it safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more to damage Christianity in my own country than any other single force. The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three quarters empty after 1945. (Ibid., p. 80.)
The people of Britain had heard Elijah’s call and had decided that indeed, Baal was god. They limped after him, leaving the churches empty. The “wisdom” of their choice became evident when 200 or so years later they fell into the tender embrace of the Assyrians in 722BC: those that were not impaled were driven out and were thereafter and forever known as the Lost Tribes. Where they and their descendant are, God alone knows. Let every Christian take heed. Let every Christian hear Elijah’s words as a loud warning klaxon.
One potent component of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the author’s ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works. It befouled everything it touched.
We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history. These have not been fictional representations. They are the real article. Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent. Reading these words makes Reagan’s “honorific”, the Evil Empire appear apt. But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization–the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.
Mistrust and surveillance were not the only things that quickly struck me as different about this society. Soviet life, I learned speedily enough, was incredibly harsh and often dangerous. My Russian acquaintances thought my wife and I were ten years younger than we were. We thought they were ten years older than they were.
Life began with harshness. Even for the married, the main form of family planning–in a society that had little room for big families–was abortion, legally unrestricted in the post-war USSR as the need for a vast conscript army receded. In 1990, there were 6.46 million abortions in the USSR and 4.85 million live births. Birth itself was an authoritarian ordeal, with the newborns snatched away from their mothers by scowling nurses in tall chefs’ hats, tightly wrapped like loaves, and denied breast or bottle until the set time came around. You could spot a maternity hospital by the strings hanging from the windows bearing pathetic messages of love or need from wives to husbands . . . .
While tourists and distinguished visitors were taken to the ballet, ordinary male Muscovites (women wouldn’t have dared go there) patronized beer-bars so horrible that I could only wonder at the home life of those who used them. You took your own glass–usually a rinsed out pickle jar–and a handful of brass coins worth a few pennies, along with some dried fish wrapped in old newspaper. You fed your coins into a vending machine, and pale, acid beer dribbled intermittently out of a slimy pipe into your jar. You then went to a high table, slurped your beer (which tasted roughly the way old locomotives smell), and crunched your fish, spitting the bones onto the floor. There was no conversation. . . .
It is absolutely true–I saw it many times–that traffic stopped dead when rain began to fall, as every driver fetched windshield wipers from their hiding place and leaped out to fit them to their holders. Any wipers left in place while the car was parked would be stolen as a matter of course. Petty theft of unsecured property was universal–and universally accepted as normal. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 87, 88.]
Civilization, says Hitchens, is not racially, nor even culturally grounded. It comes from the heart of the populace. After life in the USSR, he concluded that high moral standards cannot be reached and maintained unless they are generally accepted and understood by an overwhelming number of people. He goes on to tell us that he has since seen evidences of Mordor in Britain:
I have since concluded that a hitherto Christian society that was de-Christianized would also face such problems, because I have seen public discourtesy and incivility spreading rapidly in my own country as Christianity is forgotten. The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes. The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seem to me to be a major part of it. (Ibid., p. 91)
Hitchens recounts how the recovery of his faith was a long, slow and gradual affair. Initially, his faith remained intensely personal and private and familial–precisely the kind of faith that secularists insist upon being the only valid and tolerable manifestation of Christianity. They would have cheered him on–a model Christian they would say, as they settled down to tea and crumpets. What jolted him out of this ghettoised Christian faith was his experiences in Russia–and his days of terror in Mogadishu where he was confronted by hell upon earth. He writes:
At this point in my life I had already returned to Christianity, rather diffidently, having been confirmed into the Church of England about seven years before. My reasons had been profoundly personal, to do with marriage and fatherhood, a cliche of rediscovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private, and unique to discuss with strangers. I saw no particular connection, at the time of my return to religion, between faith and the shape of society. I imagined it was a matter between me and God.
The atheist Soviet Union, where desecration and heroic survival were visible around me, began to alter that perception. Mogadishu accelerated the process. I thought I saw, in its blasted avenues, its private safety and public terror, and its lives ruled by the gun, a possible prophecy of where my own society was headed–though for very different reasons. I still think this. (Ibid., p. 92f)
He provides a vivid description of the terror of Mogadishu when life was nothing and terror ruled, bribery and guns one’s only feeble protection. When he eventually got out and back to safety the point hit home. He writes:
Safely back in London, I was shown old pictures of Mogadishu as it had been a few years before. the lineaments of the great wide avenue where I saw the armed trucks were just discernible. But where I had seen mud, gangs, and wreckage, there were Italian-style pavement cafes, smart cars in orderly lines, a white-gloved policeman directing the traffic, well-dressed and prosperous people passing by, even a telephone box, and of course, modern shops and civilized looking hotels.
This was the familiar world that I was used to, and in a short time it had become the miserable urban desert in which I had rightly feared for my life. I am sure nobody ever set out to get from the one to the other. But they had done so all the same and in a very short time. (Ibid., p. 97f).
God has so created the world that religion (or cult) generates culture and culture generates governments. Evil or superstitious religion produces a brutalized or fearful culture and a government which reflects the culture of the day. We will either have God or Baal, Belief or Unbelief, Gondor or Mordor, Jerusalem or Mogadishu.
Every Christian has a duty to reject outright the insistence amongst the Pagans that Christianity must remain private. They only seek the privatisation of Belief more easily to facilitate the imposition of their version of Mordor upon us all.
Peter Hitchens spent about fifteen years of his adult life in open sneering rebellion against God. Then gradually and gently the Hound of Heaven first tracked, then ran him down. His is a wonderful story of the grace and goodness of the Almighty God to a terribly lost man.
Hitchens describes his rebellion against God in the following terms:
The fury and almost physical disgust of the Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf at T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Christianity is an open expression of the private feelings of the educated British middle class, normally left unspoken but conveyed by body language or facial expression when the subject of religion cannot be avoided. Mrs Woolf wrote to her sister in 1928, in terms that perfectly epitomize the enlightened English person’s scorn for faith and those who hold it.
I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. It was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.
Look at these bilious, ill-tempered words: “Shameful, distressing, obscene, dead to us all.” There has always seemed to me something frantic and enraged about this passage, concealing its real emotion–which I suspect is fear that Eliot, as well as being a greater talent than her, may also be right.
This widely accepted dismissal of faith by the intelligent and the educated seemed then to be definitive proof that the thing was a fake, mainly because I wanted such proof. This blatant truth, that we hold opinions because we wish to and reject them because we wish to, is so obvious that it is too seldom mentioned. I had reasons for wanting that proof. . . .
I had spotted the dry, disillusioned, and apparently disinterested atheism of so many intellectuals, artists, and leaders of our age. I liked their crooked smiles, their knowing worldliness, and their air of finding human credulity amusing. I envied their confidence that we lived in a place where there was no darkness, where death was the end, the dead were gone, and there would be no judgment. It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief. It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it. Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p.23-5.]
Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.
Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.
The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith]
Christopher Hitchens is well on his way to canonisation amongst the high priests of Unbelief. That’s expected. There is nothing untoward in honouring those who have gone before, particularly those one regards as exemplars of one’s faith.
He will no doubt enter the secular atheist pantheon as one who kept the faith, stayed true to the end, and who proved up his beliefs with a holy life. (We use “holy” in the root sense of the word–set apart as a servant to one’s truth.) He died a particularly difficult and painful death. We honour him for his courage. But not his stubborn foolishness.
In the final analysis, Christopher, as with all Unbelievers passed over by the Angel of Life, could not give an account of his Unbelief. He could not defend it in a rational coherent manner. It was a belief to be clung to, no matter what. The alternative was unbearable: all things lie bare and exposed before Him with Whom we have to reckon. True, one could cloak the naked emptiness with high moral dudgeon, as a magician obscures the trick. But only the gullible and the willing remain fooled.
Douglas Wilson removes Christopher’s cloak during a conversation at The King’s College.
Atheism and Apologetics – Moist Robots Written by Douglas Wilson Monday, 19 March 2012
So then, Sam Harris has a new little book out, and for such a small book (66 pages), it promises to be a lot of fun. I say this because the book appears to be filled with epistemological obliviousness, cover to cover. The name of the book is Free Will, released by Free Press (heh) in 2012.
“Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have” (p. 5).
Ooo! That was naughty. Shall we tell teacher? No, let’s see if we can handle this ourselves.
Regardless of how naughty it was, how much sense did it make? Harris is arguing the hard determinist position, saying that, given all the material antecedents of a particular choice between the 31 flavors in the ice cream shop, the resultant choice in that shop was inevitable. You weren’t choosing the flavor you wanted as a free decision. That is an illusion. Got that?
We are all just what Dilbert calls moist robots. We go as we have been programed. His whole argument depends on this materialistic reality.
“A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write” (p. 6).
Self scrutiny? What’s that? Serious self-scrutiny? What’s that? Why, you rube, it is what these bundled chemicals that we are provisionally calling “Sam Harris” always do under these conditions and at this temperature. He’s not arguing any more than he is choosing. And you are not following his argument any more than you freely chose to pick the book up in the first place to buy it. If I cannot decide what I think, there is no such thing as “following an argument.” There is no such thing as “arguing.”
Alas, there are only chemicals steeping. And, since we modern deterministic rationalists know this to be true, we have no reason for believing our thoughts to be true . . . but this would have to include the true belief that our thoughts are chemicals steeping. Wait a minute. Playing chess alone, it is pretty hard to checkmate yourself, but I think they have managed it.
These high thinkers crack me up. They apply their worldview convictions to absolutely everything in the cosmos, with the one singular and miraculous exception of the mysterious processes that went into their statement of their thesis. That is being urged upon us because it is “true,” and some of the brighter sophomores in the back row are scratching their heads. The brightest of them have already dropped the class last week and have changed majors over to mechanical engineering.
Is Harris arguing against free will because he has chosen to conform his opinions to the external realities, or is he arguing against free will for the same reason the aroma of onions fills the house whenever the skillet gets to the right temperature? Now get this. He is assuming the former while he is arguing the latter. And he doesn’t even try to hide it. This kind of serenity is hard to come by.
If his book is just the smell of frying onions, then why did I buy it? If it is not just frying onions, then the thesis is entirely wrong-headed, and so why did I buy it? I’ll tell you why I bought it. I haven’t had any fun with deterministic atheism in a little while.
The book is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens — “For Hitch” — and after just one chapter I can already tell you that in terms of intellectual coherence, it will be a worthy monument.
The following article appeared in the New Statesman. The primer reads: “To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and “dramatically peculiar” to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?” How indeed?
Bryan Appelyard reflects upon the strange Islamic-like fundamentalism of the neo-atheists, whom he charges with having all the behaviours of a tyrannical sect. [For our part, we love these militant neo-atheists. They are perfect poster-boys for what happens when men deny God and try to mean it. They are thus “useful idiots”, to employ Lenin’s phrase, because they offer many teaching moments. The neo-atheists are “evangelical”: they want to make other people believe their doctrines, because if not, those people will remain in evil and are evil. Hence the intolerance and tyranny. Remember, atheists have only one means to hand: human power and influence.
To forge ahead militant neo-atheists, therefore, have only one course available if they are to take their own world view seriously. They must exercise force over others–browbeating, cursing, mocking–and, given half a chance, they would use the oppression of the state as well. Has not Dawkins called for children to be removed from the homes of Believing parents to prevent their harm? “Ve vill make you free.” And he believes himself perfectly reasonable and sanguine in seriously advancing the idea.
It turns out that the fiercest attacks of the neo-atheists are reserved for their fifth-column: atheists who are not as serious as they are about the non-existence of the Living God. Eerie shades of Islam, where the harshest penalties are reserved for apostates who do not treat Allah with sufficient respect. These things appear pretty obvious, yet Appelyard and his colleagues remain puzzled. Ed.]
Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.
De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.
This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.
“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts,” wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. “You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy.” Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.
There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, “You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die.”
De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. “To say something along the lines of ‘I’m an atheist; I think religions are not all bad’ has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?”
First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
“There is this strange supposition,” says the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, “that if you’re a Darwinian you have to be an atheist. In my case, I’m an anti-Darwinian and I’m an atheist. But people are so incoherent on these issues that it’s hard for me to figure out what is driving them.”
The neo-atheist cause has been gathering strength for roughly two decades and recently exploded into very public view. Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, was in the headlines for making a speech at the Vatican warning of the dangers of secular fundamentalism, which aims to prevent religions from having a public voice or role. Warsi, a Muslim, subdivides propagators of this anti-religious impulse into two categories. First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the “perverse kind of secular” believer, who wants to “wipe religion from the public sphere” on principle.
“Why,” she asks me, “are the followers of reason so unreasonable?”
As Warsi was on her way to catch her flight to Rome she heard Dawkins, the supreme prophet of neo-atheism, on Radio 4’s Today programme. He was attempting to celebrate a survey that proved, at least to his satisfaction, that supposedly Christian Britain was a fraud. People who said they were Christians did not go to church and knew little of the faith. Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser’s point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: “Oh, God!”
“Immediately he was out of control, he said, ‘Oh, God!'” Warsi recalls, “so even the most self-confessed secular fundamentalist at this moment of need needed to turn to the Almighty. It kind of defeats his own argument that only people who go to church have a faith.”
De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.
“He has taken a very strange position. He’s unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.
“It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him.” I ask Fraser what he thinks are the roots of this ideological rigidity among the neo-atheists. “It coincides with post-9/11,” he says. “The enemy is Islam for them. That was true about [Christopher] Hitchens in an obvious way and Dawkins said something like ‘it was the most evil religion in the world’.
“With Hitchens, it was bound up with liberal interventionism. It is also clearly an Americanisation. It has come over from their culture wars . . . People are pissed off with Dawkins because there is a feeling that we don’t do that over here.” . . . .
After the September 2001 attacks, all the dams of reticence burst and neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology, informed by books such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christoper Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.
These authors became known as the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. It was no accident that their books appeared not just after the 9/11 attacks, but also at a time of neo-Darwinian triumphalism. The Human Genome Project, combined with the popularisation of the latest Darwinian thinking, was presented as an announcement that science had cracked the problem of human life. Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.
It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.” For him, evolutionary psychology plays a large part in this mindset with its loathing of religion. “I think the story is that we are supposed to understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it’s true. But these are just fabricated stories. If you found something with two heads and a horn in the middle you could cook up some story from evolution saying it was just dandy to have two heads with a horn in the middle. It’s just sloppy thinking.”
Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion – or, indeed, the human experience – in scientific terms is futile. “It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love,” de Botton says. “It’s a symptom of the misplaced confidence of science . . . It’s a kind of category error. It’s a fatally wrong question and the more you ask it, the more you come up with bizarre and odd answers.”
The project is also curiously pointless. A couple of years ago I hired a car at Los Angeles Airport. The radio was tuned to a religious station. Too terrified to attempt simultaneously to change the channel and drive on the I-405, the scariest road in the world, in a strange car, I heard to my astonishment that Christopher Hitchens was the next guest on a Christian chat show.
In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. “No,” he replied. I almost crashed the car.
The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.
Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult’s own intolerance. In the Christmas issue of this magazine, Dawkins interviewed Hitchens. Halfway through, Dawkins asked: “Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?” At dinner at the restaurant in Bayswater we all laughed at this, but our laughter was uneasy. The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.
David Bentley Hart has an engaging piece on modern militant atheists (whom he dubs “fashionable enemies”) describing them as “gadflies”.
He laments the good old days when the enemies of the Christian faith in the West had intellectual muscle. He is impatient with the mental laziness and sloppiness on display with folk like Hitchens and Harris and the like.
My own impatience with (their) remarks, I should confess, would probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that, among Christianity’s most fervent detractors, there has been a considerable decline in standards in recent years. . . . (A)t the end of Europe’s Christian centuries, the church could still boast antagonists of real stature. In the eighteenth century, David Hume was unrivaled in his power to sow doubt where certainty once had flourished. And while the diatribes of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes were, on the whole, insubstantial, there were at least marked by a certain fierce elegance and occasional moral acuity. Edward Gibbon, for all the temporal parochialism and frequent inaccuracy of his account of Christianity’s rise, was nevertheless a scholar and writer of positively titanic gifts . . . (D. B. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p.5f.)
In the nineteenth century we come to the greatest and the fiercest critic of Christianity–one with an intellectual rigour and emotional force that still leaves one breathless today. Nietzsche’s hatred of Christianity and Christians had about it an intellectual rigour and consistency and compelling force that is completely absent from effete gadflies such as Richard Dawkins.
The greatest of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche, may have had a somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, and who had enough of a sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the fading of Christian faith would bring about. Moreover he had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was–above all for its devotion to an ethics of compassion–rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis.
Unmistakably, he has Dawkins and Hitchens in his sights at this point. Their life’s great crusade has erected a straw-man parody of the Christian faith and of Christian culture, then mounted it with a self-righteous indignity, pouring out invective, disdain, and scorn on a slur of their own making. An intellectual tour-de-force, indeed. Not so Nietzsche, who had the knowledge and integrity to grasp the nettle that confronted him.
He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with the Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.
He knew that the disappearance of the cultural values of Christianity would gradually but inevitably lead to a new set of values, the nature of which was yet to be decided. By comparison to these men, today’s gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful, less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is.
One cannot maintain Christian ethics and Christian morality without Christian truth, without the Living God and His Saviour, Jesus Christ. This rather obvious thought seems never have occurred to our modern militant atheists. It most certainly was obvious to someone as rigorous as Nietzsche.
Occasional Services – Memorial Homilies Written by Douglas Wilson Friday, December 16, 2011
Scripture says that it is better to go down to the house of mourning than to the house of laughter (Ecc. 7:2). The reason given in that passage is that this enables the living to “lay it to heart.” The death of Christopher Hitchens should in the first place remind us of our own mortality. We should lay it to heart. As Donne so memorably put it, “ask not for whom the bell tolls.” Every funeral is our own. These are issues that affect every last one of us.
Those who hold to the gospel of Jesus Christ must always remember that the good news of Christ is set against the backdrop of the bad news — we are all of us sinners, and we all need cleansing and forgiveness. Christopher Hitchens did not need to come to Christ to have his arguments refuted (although that would have happened). He needed to come to Christ to have his sins forgiven.
There will be a CanonWIRED clip out shortly, in which I caution Christians against two errors — and both of them are errors of speculation. The possibility of last minute conversions must never be turned into actual last minute conversions. No one is wished into Heaven. There have been too many unbelievers preached into Heaven at the funeral, and we ought not to give way to the false tenderness of that impulse. At the same time, the likelihood that Christopher never called on Christ should not be turned into a hard-line dogmatic statement, followed by “good riddance.” No one is wished into Hell either. We ought not to greet the news of Christopher’s death the way he greeted the death of Jerry Falwell’s, for example.
The bad news is that we are all under judgment. The good news is that the one who has faith in Jesus may be forgiven. We must unashamedly declare these terms to the whole world — but declaring the terms of judgment (which Scripture requires us to do) is not the same thing as playing the Judge ourselves. We leave the soul of Christopher Hitchens (and he did have a soul, despite all his arguments) in the hands of God, who will do nothing but right.
All of this is of course consistent with the affection I had for Christopher. Our prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.
Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday night at the age of 62, after a 18-month battle with esophageal cancer. He was a brilliant and entertaining man. He was enormously gifted, and in his final years he took those gifts and used them to mock God, using his considerable wit and sharp tongue to convince as many people as possible to do the same.
When I had a crisis of faith my freshman year at a secular university studying religion, I was deeply convinced that there were only two options: full-blown Christian orthodoxy or atheism. Liberal theology—with its fantasy of rescuing the “kernel” (or essence) of Christianity from the (disposable) “husk” of dogma—had no appeal to me. And this is one of the things I appreciated about Hitchens. He once expressed incredulity at the platitudes of a Unitarian minister who saw the beauty of Jesus’ moral teachings while rejecting his divinity:
I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
He was no admirer of C. S. Lewis, but he did agree with Lewis’s statement about Jesus: “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.” Hitchens wrote:
Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs? Such a person if not divine would be a sorcerer and a fanatic.
He saw the choice before him, and he rejected the Savior.
Hitchens suspected there would be rumors of a deathbed conversion—but even more he feared that he might actually call out to God. Speaking perhaps truer than he knew, he sought to give a preemptive strike against such a possibility, explaining that would not be the real Christopher Hitchens doing such a thing:
Even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)
The section that sticks with me most from the Hitchens/Wilson debate-documentary Collision is the final scene. It is a telling moment, especially given that the subtitle of his bestselling book God Is Not Great effectively summarized the thesis of the book: How Religion Poisons Everything. More specifically, he wrote that organized religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” But in the back of this car with Doug, he reveals a difference between himself and Richard Dawkins:
Christopher Hitchens Has Died, Doug Wilson Reflects
How to think about the death of the outspoken atheist.
Douglas Wilson | posted 12/16/2011 12:00AM
Editor’s Note: Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62. A statement from Vanity Fair said that he died Thursday night at cancer center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer. CT asked Douglas Wilson to weigh in on the life and death of the prominent atheist.
Christopher Hitchens was a celebrity intellectual, and, as such, the basic outlines of his life are generally well known. But for those just joining us, Christopher Hitchens was the older of two sons, born to Eric and Yvonne in April 1949. He discovered as a schoolboy that probing questions about the veracity of the Christian faith were part of a discussion that he “liked having.” His younger brother, Peter, followed him in unbelief. But unlike Christopher, Peter publicly returned to the Church of England, the communion where they had both been baptized.
Christopher spent some time in the 1960s as a radical leftist, but of course that was what everybody was doing back then. Somehow Christopher managed to do this and march to a different drummer, doing his radical stint as part of a post–Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect. He graduated from Balliol at Oxford, and soon became established as a writer, the vocation of his life, one in which he excelled. As a writer and thinker, he was greatly influenced by (and wrote about) men like George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson, while as the same time reserving the right to attack any sacred cow of his choosing—and the more sacred, the better. He is widely known for his scathing attack on Mother Teresa, and when Jerry Falwell passed away, he spent a good deal of time on television chortling about it.
But this was all part of Christopher’s very public rhetorical strategy, not a function of an inability to domesticate a surly temperament. He was actually an affable and pleasant dinner companion, and fully capable of being the perfect gentleman. He was fully aware of the authority an enfant terrible could have, provided he played his cards right, and this was a strategy that Hitchens employed very well indeed. One man who delivers a terrible insult is banned from television for life, and another man, who does the same thing, has people lining up with invitations and microphones. In case anyone is wondering, Christopher was that second man.
A defining characteristic of his life was a willingness to break with the last group he was identified with. Whenever Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies” began to develop, Christopher would be down the road. One of his books was Letters to a Young Contrarian, and that word contrarian appears to describe Christopher’s approach to the desirability of not quite fitting in. After the attacks of September 11, he surprised a number of people with his full-throated support of the Iraq war, and he became a vigorous defender of the Western response to what he identified as “fascism with an Islamic face.” As a result, he soon became identified with neoconservatives (who also supported the war), but he vigorously denied being a conservative of any stripe. At the same time, he found himself on the same side of a significant issue with George W. Bush, for example, while his former fellow leftists were most emphatically not.
I came to know Christopher during the promotion tour for his atheist encyclical, God Is Not Great. True to form, Christopher did not want to write a book attacking God and his minions only to have the release be a wine and cheese party in Manhattan with a bunch of fellow unbelievers, where they could all laugh knowingly about the rubes and cornpones down in the Bible Belt. So he told his publicist that he wanted to debate with any and all comers, and in the course of promoting his book, he did exactly that. I believe his book tour began in Arkansas, and the range of his debate partners included Al Sharpton, Dinesh D’Souza, and numerous others. In response to this general defiance he delivered to the armies of Israel, my agent Aaron Rench contacted Christianity Today to see if they would be willing to host a written exchange. They were, and when Christopher was contacted, he quickly agreed as well.
That online exchange attracted some attention, and the debate was made into a small book (Is Christianity Good for the World?). The short promotion tour for the release of the book was a series of debates that Christopher and I held in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, which were filmed for the documentary Collision.
As a result of all this, we were thrown together in a number of situations. One time we shared a panel in Dallas, and I told the crowd there that if Christopher and I were not careful, we were in danger of becoming friends. During the time we spent together, he never said an unkind thing to me—except on stage, up in front of everybody. After doing this, he didn’t wink at me, but he might as well have.
So we got on well with each other, because each of us knew where the other one stood. Eugene Genovese, before he became a believer, once commented on the tendency that some have to try to garner respect by giving away portions, big or small, of what they profess to believe. “If other religions offer equally valid ways to salvation and if Christianity itself may be understood solely as a code of morals and ethics, then we may as well all become Buddhists or, better, atheists. I intend no offense, but it takes one to know one. And when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow unbelievers” (The Southern Front, pp. 9–10).
Ironically, the branch of the faith most interested in getting the “cultured despisers” to pay us some respect is really not that effective, and this is a strategy that can frequently be found on the pointed end of its own petard. Respectability depends on not caring too much about respectability. Unbelievers can smell accommodation, and when someone like Christopher meets someone who actually believes all the articles in the Creed, including that part about Jesus coming back from the dead, it delights him. Here is someone actually willing to defend what is being attacked. Militant atheists are often exasperated with opponents whose strategy appears to be “surrender slowly.”
G. K. Chesterton once pointed to the salutary effect that the great agnostics had on him—that effect being that of “arousing doubts deeper than their own.” Christopher was an heir of the Enlightenment tradition, and would have felt right at home in the 18th-century salons of Paris. He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it. This worked well, or appeared to, for a time. But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone. “I think, therefore I am. I think.” We pulled out the stopper of faith, and the bathwater of reason appeared undisturbed for a time. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot.
Christopher knew that faithful Christians believe that it is appointed to man once to die, and after that the Judgment. He knew that we believe what Jesus taught about the reality of damnation. He also knew that we believe—for I told him—that in this life, the door of repentance is always open. A wise Puritan once noted what we learn from the last-minute conversion of the thief on the cross—one, that no one might despair, but only one, that no one might presume. We have no indication that Christopher ever called on the Lord before he died, and if he did not, then Scriptures plainly teach that he is lost forever. But we do have every indication that Christ died for sinners, men and women just like Christopher. We know that the Lord has more than once hired workers for his vineyard when the sun was almost down (Matt. 20:6).
We also know that Christopher was worried about this, and was afraid of letting down the infidel team. In a number of interviews during the course of his cancer treatments, he discussed the prospect of a “death bed” conversion, and it was clear that he was concerned about the prospect. But, he assured interviewers, if anything like that ever happened, we should all be certain that the cancer or the chemo or something had gotten to his brain. If he confessed faith, then he, the Christopher Hitchens that we all knew, should be counted as already dead. In short, he was preparing a narrative for us, just in case. But it is interesting that the narrative he prepped us with did not involve some ethically challenged evangelical nurses on the late shift who were ready to claim that they had heard him cry out to God, thus misrepresenting another great infidel into heaven. It has been done with Einstein, and with Darwin. Why not Hitchens? But Christopher actually prepared us by saying that if he said anything like this, then he did not know what he was saying.
This is interesting, not so much because of what it says about what he did or did not do as death approached him, and as he at the same time approached death. It is interesting because, when he gave these interviews, he was manifestly in his right mind, and the thought had clearly occurred to him that he might not feel in just a few months the way he did at present. The subject came up repeatedly, and was plainly a concern to him.
Christopher Hitchens was baptized in his infancy, and his name means “Christ-bearer.” This created an enormous burden that he tried to shake off his entire life. No creature can ever succeed in doing this. But sometimes, in the kindness of God, such failures can have a gracious twist at the end. We therefore commend Christopher to the Judge of the whole earth, who will certainly do right.
Maybe it is just me, but Christopher Hitchens is at his very best when he is making sense. This is something he does, with his usual vim, in a recent article for Slate entitled “Simply Evil.” In it, he makes short work of the kind of anti-Americanism that tried to turn 9/11 into something complex enough for an obfuscating intellectual to puzzle over. He nails those who tried to blame the attacks on “the Bush administration or the Jews.” And for those who held up a simplistic tit-for-tat blowback explanation, Hitchens dutifully pulls their shirts over their heads and rolls down their socks.
And at the same time, Hitchens defends himself ably against charges that he must have turned into a rah-rah Americano by pointing out that he was a named plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the National Security Agency concerning warrantless wiretaps. He also arranged to have himself waterboarded in order to argue persuasively to his readers that such practices did indeed constitute torture. He wrote critically and honestly on the subjects of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and he has formally registered his contempt for the security theater fraud perpetrated, at an airport near you, by uniformed members of the TSA. All this is Hitchens doing what Hitchens does best, and he does it for most of his article. And then, fulfilling the promise of the title (“Simply Evil”), he veers into incoherence at the very end when he only had about two column inches to go. It was like watching a bicycling Tour de Something rider, 50 yards ahead of the nearest competitor, anticipate the finish line by raising both hands above his head, at which point he triumphantly bites it. “The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called ‘evil.’” Evil? Since the 2009 publication of God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens has spent a great deal of energy trying to persuade all of us that the idea of God is a false and pernicious one. But now he ups and calls these bad guys . . . evil. Given the premises, what might the definition of that be? Who determines what is evil and why? By what standard? But there may be a wiggle-room word in there. Hitchens only said they deserve to be called evil. But that generates the same questions. By whom? And whoever that person is, how did he wind up in charge of our moral lexicon? Was there an election? Did I miss a meeting? And what weight does being called evil have? When Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad pass into the same gray nothingness that will swallow the greatest altruists and the sweetest grandmas who ever lived, will those men then care that some people (back where consciousness is still going on) are calling them evil? Sticks and stones . . .
Just Imagine
Evil? Imagine there’s no heaven, Lennon urged us. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us—nothing to kill or die for. If you say things like this, certain other things follow. Hitchens has been in the front ranks of the new militant atheists, and he has made a great show of being the kind of contrarian who is willing to say absolutely anything, provided it only be true. We have to grow up, Hitchens has said. We have to reject outmoded concepts. We have to get rid of the idea that there is a God in heaven, telling us the difference between right and wrong. But if these things be true, then there are other things that follow. For some reason, Hitchens is willing to affirm the premises but will not own any of the obvious conclusions. You cannot throw away your suitcase at the beginning of your journey, and then, as you are nearing the end of the trip, pull out all the things that you packed in it. There may be shrewd ways of avoiding baggage handling fees, but that’s not one of them. If there is no God, then Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have no God. But if they have no God, then it follows that Hitchens is not their god either. And if Hitchens is not their god, why should they care what he calls them? There is no god, and Hitchens is not his prophet. Evil? Unless such men are treated as evil men, there is no justice. And if there is no actual justice (not paper justice, not name-calling justice, but actual justice), then there really is no such thing as evil. If there is no such thing as final justice, then how can we manage to define the concept of injustice? Hitchens wants to call them evil after they are largely out of ear shot. Let us all agree to call Stalin evil. On Hitchens’s account of things, does Stalin care? Hitchens may counter that he fully intends to fight them. He fully intends to treat them as evil, and his article was a call to arms. All right then. Is evil then determined by who wins that fight? Does this fight have a referee? Is there a rulebook? Who wrote it?
Overlooking the Obvious
Hitchens began his article by saying that one of the great lessons of geopolitical punditry, one that should be heeded more by public intellectuals, is the need to not overlook the obvious. But the concept of evil has more than one obvious characteristic. Hitchens rightly points out that its facticity is one of those characteristics. There is such a thing as evil, and there are people who are simply given over to it. Thus far we agree. But another obvious thing about evil is that it is the kind of thing that requires a grounded definition. It is the kind of assessment that requires backing. If someone identifies something as evil, the questions why? and who says? are entirely reasonable questions. And the answer has to consist of something more substantive than simply repeating the charge that it is evil. Hitchens says that 9/11 was a “direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form.” He goes on to say that we should prepare ourselves for the conflict—”Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.” His atheistic rhetoric is full of borrowed theistic words. He sounds like totalitarianism is objectively bad. His approach would seem to indicate that being vicious is a sin. The big lie would be a violation of the Ninth Commandment, of course, but I thought we had explained all that. I for one am glad that Hitchens wants to repudiate the big lies. I am glad that he stands against vicious totalitarian ideas. Thus far I can applaud him. But in order to stand against anything, however obviously bad it is, you must have something to stand on.
Douglas Wilson is the minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. His debates with Christopher Hitchens are documented in the film Collision.
When news of the Norwegian mass murderer surfaced, the chattering classes, the media, and the Commentariat were quick to react. Able quickly to dismiss the canard of Islamic terrorism, the narrative changed. Suddenly, Anders Behring Breivik was a right wing fundamentalist Christian. That has had more sticking traction. At least thirty-six hours. So it will now inevitably go down as cold hard fact.
Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Just last night we were having some family discussion about the tribulations of Rep. Weiner. We were talking mostly about God’s sense of humor. Here was a man who wanted the smart set to run the whole stinking economy, and he can’t even run his own Twitter account. Not only was he not able to run his own Twitter account, he did not seem to have any control over what is appropriate to do with digital images of one’s own briefs, never mind the propriety of how those images came into existence in the first place. All this was risible enough, okay, but look at how long God took to set this whole story up. This is the ultimate shaggy dog story — it went on and on, until it culminated in the exposure of one Weiner.
And so we also concluded, back in this family discussion of ours, that God can be pretty tasteless. Doesn’t God know that there are children down here?
But my takeaway conclusion from our discussion was — how can Christopher Hitchens still maintain that there is no God? I resolved to do something in the morning to chide Christopher. “Do you really believe that this sketch had no writer?” Thus far last night. Continue reading →
Atheism and Apologetics – The Rage Against God Written by Douglas Wilson Monday, May 31, 2010
In Chapter 10 of The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens nails down the loosest board on the side of atheism’s house. So to speak. Unfortunately for atheism, this does not repair the house, but rather causes the whole thing to fall down.
Christopher Hitchens wants to say that our morality is innate, and he thinks that this gives him a non-relativistic basis for morality. But the problem is that our internal workings evolved right along with the rest of us. What happens when our innate instincts evolve into something else entirely? Don’t we have to go with the flow?
Peter is not distracted in this chapter by Christian failures and inconsistencies. This is just what we would anticipate if what the Bible says about humanity is true. Christians sin because they are people, not because they are Christians. God is in the process of saving screwed up people. It is no objection to this gospel-scheme to point out that the people He is saving are screwed up people. Exactly so.
Christianity is without doubt difficult and taxing, and all of us fail to emulate the perfection of Christ himself. But we are far better for trying than for not trying, and we know that there is forgiveness available for honest failure (p. 144).
Or, as the apostle John put it, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.
And of course, to my great delight, Peter brought up the philosopher Heidegger, not in order to laud some incomprehensible pomo-thingy, but in order to point out that he was a Nazi, and had said that “the Fuhrer, and he alone, is the present and future law of Germany” (p. 148). So much for Heidegger.
Returning to the point that morality is non-existent if it is within our capacity to alter or adapt, Peter says this about the atheist pretence to not be able to grasp this point.
I should have thought that those who are serious about their unbelief would be relieved by this logic and glad to concede it. If they know, or are reasonably certain, that there is no ultimate authority and no judgment issuing from some unalterable law, they are instantly and quite extraordinarily free (p. 148).
So why are they so reluctant to grant this “astonishingly simple point” (p. 148)?
Might it be because they fear that, by admitting their delight at the non-existence of good and evil, they are revealing something of their motives for their belief (p. 149).
One last comment. This is not an illegitimate ad hominem, or a form of what C.S. Lewis called Bulverism — showing the reasons why someone might have come to hold to a position, instead of refuting the position itself. What Peter points to here would be appropriate, for example, if a bunch of death row inmates were debating the existence of executioners. Those stoutly maintaining the negative might need to have their possible reasons for doing so pointed out to them. That would not be an unreasonable intrusion.
Atheism and Apologetics – The Rage Against God Written by Douglas Wilson Monday, May 10, 2010
In Chapter 9, Peter Hitchens begins to take on some of the standard arguments advanced by the new atheists. The first, their Goliath taunting the armies of Israel, is the charge that religion is the source of endless conflict. If we want deliverance from strife and sectarian violence, we must have a secular state. And the new atheists are arguing that in order to maintain this secular state, we really need an overwhelmingly secular citizenry. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1441105727&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrIf religious types are free to educate their children, for example, a situation might arise where religious fervor breaks out once again, you guessed it, into sectarian violence.
Among the favorite arguments of the irreligious — one that they almost invariably advance in the opening offensive of their attacks on faith — is this: that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion (p. 127).
Peter then walks us through a number of these conflicts, the ones used as poster children for secularist propaganda, and describes briefly what those conflicts are actually about. He touches on the Thirty Years War (p. 128), Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Middle East (p. 129), Christians and Muslims in the Balkans (p. 132), and Northern Ireland (p. 128). Peter’s summary is a very good one.
The only general lesson that can be drawn from these differing wars is that man is inclined to make war on man when he thinks it will gain him power or wealth or land (p. 127).
Man is a violent creature, and when he turns to violence, he will pick up any available rocks to throw. If those rocks happen to include religious pointy edges, so much the better.
But the secular catechism goes like this. This is the story that the secularists tell us when they are describing how “these gods” brought us up out of the land of Egypt. Our forefathers were wearied with unending religious strife, one of the best examples being the Thirty Years War. Protestants and Catholics fought one another to the point of exhaustion, and in the fullness of time, the idea of a neutral, secular state was finally developed, a state which stepped in and saved us all. Yay. The only problem for this thesis is that it is almost entirely wrong. That war was caused by the rise of the modern state, and the modern state used all the available resources, as they always do. If the Thirty Years War was caused by religion, then how do you explain the Catholics fighting Catholics, and the Protestant/Catholic alliances?
In this chapter, Peter also addresses the dismal record of secularism when it comes to violence and war. It turns out that the elimination of sectarian violence did not exactly head off the possibility of Stalin. And Peter closes the door to any appeal to the lost potential of Trotsky, who was just a thug who died too soon to have his thuggery manifested to the world. The Soviet state was a standing embarrassment to leftists everywhere, and its collapse, Peter points out, has been a great relief to them. Something very difficult for them to explain does not need to be explained anymore. But for people who have read a book, and who remember something about recent history, like Peter Hitchens, that still does need to be explained, and so Peter presses the point.
Peter is exactly right. “God is the leftists’ chief rival” (p. 134).
David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions (Yale University Press, 2009), reviewing 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, laments:
I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys. . . .
A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.
If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any.
What I did take away from the experience was a fairly good sense of the real scope and ambition of the New Atheist project. I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability. . . .
Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum. . . .
But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?
Numerous attempts have been made, by the way, to apprise Dawkins of what the traditional definition of divine simplicity implies, and of how it logically follows from the very idea of transcendence, and to explain to him what it means to speak of God as the transcendent fullness of actuality, and how this differs in kind from talk of quantitative degrees of composite complexity. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.
To appreciate the true spirit of the New Atheism, however, and to take proper measure of its intellectual depth, one really has to turn to Christopher Hitchens. Admittedly, he is the most egregiously slapdash of the New Atheists, as well as (not coincidentally) the most entertaining, but I take this as proof that he is also the least self-deluding. His God Is Not Great shows no sign whatsoever that he ever intended anything other than a rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor. His sporadic forays into philosophical argument suggest not only that he has sailed into unfamiliar waters, but also that he is simply not very interested in any of it. His occasional observations on Hume and Kant make it obvious that he has not really read either very closely. He apparently believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God, literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met his demise. The title of one of the chapters in God Is Not Great is “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does Hitchens actually say what those claims or their flaws are.
On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).
In the end, though, all of this might be tolerated if Hitchens’ book exhibited some rough semblance of a rational argument. After all, there really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. To be perfectly honest, however, I cannot tell what Hitchens’ central argument is. It is not even clear what he understands religion to be. For instance, he denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—has that got to do with religion? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, but it belongs to no particular creed. Even more oddly, he takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries. We all, no doubt, share his horror, but what the hell is his point?
As best I can tell, Hitchens’ case against faith consists mostly in a series of anecdotal enthymemes—that is to say, syllogisms of which one premise has been suppressed. Unfortunately, in each case it turns out to be the major premise that is missing, so it is hard to guess what links the minor premise to the conclusion. One need only attempt to write out some of his arguments in traditional syllogistic style to see the difficulty:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Evelyn Waugh was always something of a bastard, and his Catholic chauvinism often made him even worse.
Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.
Or:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: There are many bad men who are Buddhists.
Conclusion: All religious claims are false.
Or:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Timothy Dwight opposed smallpox vaccinations.
Conclusion: There is no God.
One could, I imagine, counter with a series of contrary enthymemes. Perhaps:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Early Christians built hospitals.
Conclusion: “Religion” is a good thing. . .
The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison. . . .
contracelsum 