We are in the backstretch now. In his next chapter, Christopher Hitchens gives us a brief historical survey of freethinkers throughout history who found themselves in trouble with the authorities. Men like Socrates, Spinoza and Thomas Paine are an inspiration to Hitchens, and he spends this chapter telling us why.
But he also tells us some other things in the course of his discussion, revealing a good deal more than he can afford to reveal.
He says that one of the things we learn from Socrates — and it is of “highest importance” — is the fact that “conscience is innate” (p. 256). Well, fine, if he wants to locate it like that. But what we really need to know is whether conscience is authoritative. My ability to hiccup is innate, but my hiccups are not authoritative. We need more than a bare assertion. On what basis do we say that my own conscience is a moral arbiter, even with regard to my own affairs? And taking it up to the next level of difficulty, how does an individualist like Hitchens possibly get to a “societal conscience.”
Right at the center of my conscience is the duty I know I have to render thanksgiving and gratitude to God. Is this requirement of my conscience binding on Hitchens? He would say no, but then he would have to say that this is because that duty is not really part of the innate conscience that everybody has. But who is Hitchens to come prying around in my conscience like that? In what way is his conscience authoritative over me?
Hitchens believes (and just asserts) that the dictates of conscience which must be followed are those which require us to pay attention to “mutual interest and solidarity.”
“In this summary of mutual interest and solidarity, there is no requirement for any enforcing or supernatural authority. And why should there be? Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it” (p. 266).
A host of questions arise at this point. If human decency is not derived from religion, but rather precedes it, what would Hitchens think of the statement that religion was therefore derived from human decency? Well, he wouldn’t like that because he believes that religion poisons everything. But note where this leaves him. Mankind, basically good, basically decent, cooked up the mechanisms of religion, the reeking altars of which darken the sun and blacken the sky. And this means that Hitchens, has much as he does not want to, has to give an account of human indecency.
So let’s give it to him. Human decency is not derived from religion, but precedes it. Human indecency is not derived from religion either, but precedes it. Human decency and human indecency both proceed from the human heart. Now, how do we decide between them? Decency might have some evolutionary advantages for your tribe, so long as it is carefully restricted to your own tribe. But spread that decency around too much you might only succeed in getting your little portion of the gene pool wiped out.
So we don’t have religion yet. All we have are certain impulses to what later ages will call the convention of decency along with other impulses that they will call indecency. All we have to decide between them is the overriding impulse directed at the survival of my own DNA. Sounds like what is needed around here is to rape all the female captives.
When Hitchens appeals to things like innate conscience and human decency, doing so as an evolutionary atheist, he is functioning as an illusionist. What he is doing is transparently a trick. Even if a Christian reader doesn’t know how he is doing that trick, it is manifestly a trick that he is doing. And it is a pretty good one, too. He is not pulling a rabbit out of a hat — he pulled three sea otters out of that thing. The sea otters are now lined up on the stage, and we can make out their embossed names on the collars — human decency, innate conscience, and solidarity. But regardless of what you think you have seen, the battered top hat of atheism does not really produce sea otters. Unless you give it 10 million years. Then it is a possibility I guess.
And last, Hitchens quotes Epicurus, in his statement of the age-old problem of evil.
“Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” (p. 268).
This is a very good statement of the problem. But then Hitchens adds that atheism “cuts through this non-quandary like the razor of Ockham” (p. 268). Right. But it only cuts through the “non-quandary” by postulating a universe in which all evil has to be understood as “non-evil.” And Hitchens does this right at the conclusion of a book filled with more expressions of indignant, puritanical outrage than I have read in a long time. “There is no such thing as evil, and those who argue with me on this point are wicked, stupid, or both.”
Hitchens doesn’t cut through the problem of evil with Ockham’s razor. He takes the granite hard problem of evil and daubs at it with Ockham’s pound of wet liver.