Comes now Christopher Hitchens in his new book, God is Not Great, and he thwacketh us believers upon the mazzard.
The book promises to be an engaging read; Hitchens writes fluidly and well, and he knows how to go over the top rhetorically, but not by too much. More on this shortly. His rationalism is much in evidence, but he does not write like so many other atheistic rationalists — men who believe that the authority of reason (all rise!) necessitates a turgid kind of book that acts like it was put together by a committee of certified public accountants trying to write a phone book. As though that were a rational thing to do.
But Hitchens promises better than this. His prose is hale and hardy; he recognizes and appreciates good writing elsewhere, and he uses it consistently himself. And it is a good thing too, because it appears that this is all he has.
I need to change the subject for just a moment, but I am not really doing so. I do have a point here. Suppose you went to see some fantastic illusionist, and he did something remarkable, like levitate himself. His beautiful assistant with insufficient clothing — and this might have something to do with the success of the trick — comes out on stage and passes some metal hoops every which way around the floating body. Jeepers, you think, and head on home scratching your noggin. When you get there, you find yourself in a discussion with your cousin who used to do a small time illusionist act of his own down at the local Ramada Inn, and he explains to you how the trick is done. He doesn’t have to be a big time headliner — he just has to have enough experience to be able to explain how such tricks are pulled off.
I am the Ramada Inn guy, only drop the illusionist aspect now. I write a lot, like Hitchens, and I know how to put a sentence or two together. I believe I also know how to make a metaphor crawl up your back and make an unpleasant smacky noise in your ear. Or, more pleasantly, to get a couple of cute zephyrs to fool around with your hair on a warm spring day. Here, pick a card, any card.
To get right to the point, I can tell exactly what Hitchens is doing, and how he is doing it. As we work through his book together, I am going to point it out for you. But do not think that I will do anything so trite and rationalistic as object to his use of rhetoric, or wordsmithing showmanship. “That’s just rhetoric,” is a simplistic objection. Rhetoric is not to be thought of as the M&Ms or sprinkles that you use to decorate the top of your frozen yogurt. It is not a mere flourish to adorn an otherwise bleh argument. Rhetorical abilities are an essential part of argument itself, and this is why when someone like Hitchens (obviously gifted in this) turns those abilities against God, he is revealing more than he knows. Or perhaps not . . . Hitchens begins by trying to take away that possible response. Those who point out the “sins and deformities that animated” Hitchens to write this are revealing that they are the ones with the problem (p. 1).
As just mentioned, Hitchens is unlike other atheist writers in his ability to write. But in one sad fact, he is just like them. He is morally indignant. Instead of taking refuge in the (comparatively) strong fortress of nihilistic relativism, and laughing at all the poor blinkered dopes who still think that truth and beauty are still ambulatory in this sorry world, Hitchens (like all these other recently published guys) calls us and raises us ten. “You have puritanical indignation at our unbelief? Well, watch this.” And the atheist, a complex chemical reaction according to the best contemporary science, uncorks with scathing observations on the hypocrisies of other complex chemical reactions. Hitchens does this in the first five lines of his book, and shows no sign of letting up. Given his premises, it is like being indignant with a tornado, or vegetable soup, or sand on the beach — but Hitchens does it. They all do it.
This is a point that I have made before in my interactions with Harris, and with Dawkins, and with various others before them. I am happy to make the point again, and it should not distress any of us that I am doing so. An argument is like a tool; you put it down when the job is done, and not when you are tired of holding it. When atheists stop suspending their moral indignation from their invisible sky hook, then I will no longer amuse myself by pointing out their levitation trick. I can answer Hitchens on this point with an argument condensed into one word. Not only so, but I will condense it into a word with only two letters in it, three if you count the question mark. So?
Religion poisons everything. So?
The fact that the argument can admit of such elegeant economy does not mean that it cannot be expanded. Here watch this. Religion poisons everything. “So? Does this offend anyone whose opinion should matter to me? Is there some kind of rule against poisoning everything? Who made that rule? And who died and left that particular busybody king? Get your moralism outa my face, Hitchens.” Now this response should not be confounded with anything so juvenile as a Bronx cheer. It is an argument, not a raspberry.
When Hitchens says that religion poisons everything, he says this as though it were a bad thing. He doesn’t show that it is a bad thing. He doesn’t prove that it is a bad thing. He doesn’t demonstrate that it is a bad thing. He just rummages around in all the old Sunday School lessons from his upbringing, hidden in a shoebox in his attic, blows the dust off his best sanctimonious judgmentalism, and declares that we all have to submit to the Word from his attic. “Thou shalt not poison everything.” Sez who?
Lots of people think lots of things are bad, and not all of them are, and who are they to tell me what to do anyways? Some are right, some are wrong, and others are simply incoherent. Let’s start with those who are simply wrong. They tell me that Allah is the one true God and Mohammad is his prophet, and I have to drop everything and do just what they say. I am a Christian and so I believe this is an error — but at least it is coherent. If Allah were God, we should do what He says.
An incoherent approach would go something like this: There is no God; there is no fixed standard of morality overarching all of us, and so we must all pull together and submit to the resultant fixed standard. I don’t get it either.
If Hitchens is merely saying that Christians frequently don’t meet the standards of their own Christian faith, he is doing nothing remarkable. If he is pointing out such internal inconsistencies, then he is welcome to add his voice to the long and honored line of prophetic denunciation. There is nothing in that approach that the prophet Amos wouldn’t be good with. But this is not what he is doing. He is assuming that Christians are offending against a standard that overarches believers and non-believers alike, and that standard is clearly obligatory on everybody. Now, pretend I am a simpleton. Hitchens went up these stairs three at a time, and I must have missed something. Explain it to me slowly. “God does not exist. Therefore all people have a fixed moral obligation to not poison everything because . . .” What goes after that because? Because the universe doesn’t give a rip? Because in two hundred years, we will all be dead? Because moral conventions are just that, social conventions? Give me something to follow that because that is derived from the premises of atheism, and which clearly and compellingly requires non-atheists to submit to it as well. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
The assumed standard (inevitably) has to be the result of mixing reason and science together in some magical way. He doesn’t argue for it, but he does assume it. Hitchens wants unbelief to be in a class by itself. No rented square footage in the marketplace of ideas for him.
“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake” (p. 5).
In this notable expression of high sentiment, Hitchens declares that he distrusts anything that outrages reason. And just before this, he delivered himself of the zen-mystery that “our belief is not a belief.” Okay, so he has faith in certain of his principles, but this faith of his is not like our faith in our principles because ours are . . . wrong. His faith in his principles is not faith at all. It is something else. It is confidence, yeah, that’s it, confidence. Con fides. With faith. And his beliefs are not like our beliefs, not at all. No, his beliefs, which are not beliefs, are based on certain beliefs about science and reason.
David Hume had a mighty hard time figuring out how to get across the chasm from is to ought. Mr. Hitchens must have figured out how to do this, because he has gotten from the is of repeatable experiments, and the is of the law of identity, to the ought of “Thou shalt not poison everything.” This is a stupendous breakthrough. And Mr. Hitchens needs to do this whole math problem on the board, in front of the class, and Mr. Hitchens needs to show his work.
Hitchens points out that some believers respond badly to his kind of bad boy atheism, and this is something I grant. In fact, I am perfectly willing to loan him a fixed scriptural standard so that he might enjoy the pleasure of disapproving of hysterical believers who go off like a bottle rocket whenever an atheist is naughty in public. But that is the only way he is able to enjoy such spectacles — with borrowed standards. When believers panic or hyperventilate over the monkeyshines of men like Hitchens, they are displeasing Jesus. But are they displeasing the mindless process of time and chance acting on matter, which is all that anything or anyone actually is? Well, it turns out, no. In Hitchens’ view, according to his premises, Christian hypocrisies (a source of amusement to many for millennia) turn out to be just another big dud in a universe of big duds. The infinite concourse of atoms supplies us with nothing more than an endless supply of dropped punch lines. But the puritan Nathaniel Ward had more to feed on than this; he said he had only two consolations in this life — the perfections of Christ and the imperfections of Christians.
But not all Christians are threatened in the way Hitchens describes. There are believers who are secure in their faith, and who respond to atheistic blow fish faces on our windows with the appropriate amusement. We are out here. There are many of us. And if you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Jap . . . no, wait, wrong groove.