“We have gathered in our chairs to hear Hitchens give the lecture that he now needs to deliver. The flyer caught my attention the moment I saw it. ‘The Atheistic Basis for Moral Absolutes.’ I am all ears, and am actually starting to fidget in my seat. In a world where we can speak confidently …
Which Is Not the Same as Having Good Aim
“Someone with a large vocabulary is never without a rock to throw, so long as he has a mind to throw it” (God Is, p. 52).
The PHI Index
“The ancient Hebrews had Ten Commandments, and one slim volume of commentary on those commandments. Go to the nearest law library and ask to see the regulations that you, enlightened modern man, live under. They will show you shelf after shelf of big fat books, and the incoming regulations will, on a daily basis, far …
Where the Simplifying is Wanted
“Hitchens assumes that the elimination of God from the creation of all things is a simplifying move. It may have simplified Hitchens’ personal life, but it most emphatically does not simplify our explanations of how spiders figured out web engineering” (God Is, p. 43)
Venting the Spleen
“The way Hitchens glibly pronounces the body full of vestigial leftovers is something that the continued development of medical science should have taught us to quit doing. Ignorance of function does not not mean there is no function. As my wise grandmother used to say, ‘Never celebrate vestigialness prematurely” (God Is, p. 42).
How Fumbling in the Dark Got Us the Eyeball
“In the long developmental journey from the first three light sensitive cells to the eye of the osprey, what percentage of that time was the eye closed for remodeling (and therefore possessed of that condition that scientific laymen call blindness)? And, during those periods of blindness, what evolutionary advantage was conferred such that remodeling continued …
Vaudeville in the Natural Sciences
“I am afraid that Hitchens does not really respect his creationist adversaries. He is glad that the courts have protected Americans from ‘the inculcation of compulsory ‘creationist’ stupidity in the classroom’ . . . Now I understand a fierce uppercut, and I actually respect the ability to deliver one. But you really shouldn’t write things …
Something Always Was, Right?
[Answering the objection of the infinite regress, “who created the creator?”] 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 …
Medicine Kills
“For Hitchens to point out all the problems in the world and blame them on ‘religion’ is like writing a book attacking ‘medicine,’ that well-meaning endeavor which has killed its untold millions. But to get this result we have to define medicine as ‘anything that comes, promising relief, in bottles or any other container.’ That …
Related in Their Turn to the Primordial Bicycle
“To argue that the Ford Taurus evolved from the Model T because they each have four tires is a dubious procedure. Maybe four tires is just a good idea, and anybody who wants to build a car should use it. Maybe a pig liver does the same thing that a human liver does, and for …