It used to be possible for believers to have a brain, but no more. This is because our ancestors lived in the blackest of ignorance, and theologians like Aqinas or Maimonides were just playing cards with the hand they were dealt. Ya know?
I said in an earlier post that I was going to point out some of Hitchens’ rhetorical funny business, when he substituted it for argument. He does that here like an expert, fluffing himself up like one of those puffer birds, and the song is almost like a chortle.
Back in the day, nobody “had the smallest idea what idea what was going on” (p. 64). You know, like we do today. Now we know lots and lots about the “natural order,” like gravity n’ stuff.
“Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion . . . All attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule for precisely these reasons” (pp. 64-65).
But Hitchens doffs his hat to the medieval ignorati anyway.
“The scholastic obsessives of the Middle Ages were doing the best they could on the basis of hopelessly limited information, ever-present fear of death and judgment, very low life expectancy, and an audience of illiterates” (p. 68).
In distinction to the audience that Hitchens is privileged to have, all proud graduates of our government school system. You know, illiteracy and functional illiteracy have not gone away — what has gone away is the money we spend fighting illiteracy. After the publication of my Sam Harris book, I had occasion to drop in at Richard Dawkins blog site and say a few things. This involved reading some of the other posts, and it occurred to me that just because the famous atheist is an Oxford don doesn’t keep his rank and file poster from being the kind of audience that Aquinas would not exactly envy. If careful and informed thought were a rich hard wood, we are talking oak veneer for the mobile home bathroom.
But Hitchens also has this complaint. It appears that the medieval period of faith built a bunch of imposing edifices, but do you know how they did it?
“And also if humanity had not been compelled, of pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion” (p. 65).
This is to be distinguished from the way we do it today. We enlightened modern ones pay virtually no taxes at all, and if we voluntarily opt out of the benign tax system of the modern state, nothing off-putting happens at all — perhaps a letter of sweet admonition from the head tax guy, reminding us in a friendly way that our government needs our continued voluntary compliance. But however firm his letter might be, there is certainly no hint of the “extremely agonizing consequences.” All the imposing edifices we build are funded by car washes, bake sales, that kind of thing.
This is a chapter that has a title “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion are False.” Now with a title like that, one would expect a little argumentation (and, to be fair, there might be some in coming chapters), but here we find little more than what might be called the Argument for Infidelity from the Bon Mot (AIBM). Turns out that Laplace was one time talking with Napoleon, and when asked why the “figure of god did not appear in Laplace’s mind-expanding calculations” (pp. 66-67), he replied with “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.” Well, you kind of had to have been there.
But Laplace’s claim that he had no need of that hypothesis was still “cool, lofty, and considered” (p. 67). God does not exist because one time a really smart guy unloaded a witticism on a general.
Hitchens denies that our awareness of the absence of God began at some dramatic moment, “such as Nietzsche’s histrionic and self-contradictory pronouncement that god was dead” (p. 67).
“Nietzsche could no more have know this, or made the assumption that god had ever been alive, than a priest or witch doctor could ever declare that he knew god’s will” (p. 67).
What this shows, besides the fact that Hitchens doesn’t understand Nietzsche at all, is that he does understand the presence of a rival, a real competitor. Nietzsche is one of those unbelievers who was quite capable of writing a compelling sentence, just like Hitchens. If it is true, as Joel McDurmon argues, that we are seeing The Return of the Village Atheist, this is one of those cases where one gunslinger says to another that “this town’s not big enough for the both of us.” The opera of unbelief was not written for two sopranos.
I said earlier that this chapter didn’t really have any arguments, but that is not quite right. There is one, a cute little puppy.
“Thus the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator. Religion and theology and theodicy . . . have consistently failed to overcome this objection” (p. 71).
The reason we can’t overcome it is because it is not a proper objection. Unless there is a known principle excluding the eternality of anything at all, there could be no basis for such an objection. And were we to cook up such a principle, we would find that it excluded, not only God, but the possibility of us having a universe at all. Something is eternal. That something is either God as we believe or it is matter, stuff, as Hitchens believes. If infinite regresses are incoherent, and any stopping point to head off that regress is always arbitrary by definition, then how’d we get here? Under the influence of various drugs, modern physicists have postulated the explosion of everything out of an “almost nothing,” but their departmental supply offices have not been able to assemble enough drugs to get them to assert the primordial kablooey from absolute nothing. Yet. Anything but God.
“If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings more ‘miraculous’ and ‘transcendent’ than any theology” (p. 71).
I swear, it’s as though Hitchens has never even heard of epistemology. Over there, we have a bunch of dopes just believing stuff, while over here, under a florescent lab light, wearing our white lab coats, we just know things.
Although not in the sense intended, he is quite right that this is a “miraculous” and “transcendent” business. You see, Hitchens doesn’t believe in things by faith. He just engages in the harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration. So, it would appear to me that he has faith in the efficacy of inquiry, proof, and demonstration. What is this faith based on? Well, Hitchens cannot answer the question because his faith in these things is so absolute that the question itself appears to him to be gibberish. It has never occurred to him that the process of reason can itself be examined and questioned. What are the preconditions of a reason that is reliable and trustworthy, and does Hitchens’ materialistic conception of the universe provide us with those preconditions? Not even close.
Atoms bang around. Some of them bang around in my skull and generate feelings of love for Jesus Christ. Some others, doing exactly the same kind of thing, bounce around in Hitchens’ skull and produce an opposing sentiment. Neither of us thinks the way we do because our claims are true, for pity’s sake. There is no possible way to draw a correlation between my chemical reactions and the outside world, or his chemical reaction and the outside world. I type because my brain burbles. Why does Hitchens type? God only knows.