Sometimes he just sounds stupid, and inexcusably ignorant of what he's talking about, yet he seems to have studied his subject, or at least he says he has, and I know he's NOT stupid, so how to explain this? (after writing this I went and read some of the reviews of his book and found many of them describing it as shallow and sophomoric, which fits my take on his talks and debates.
Google page of reviews and criticism of Hitchens' book, God is Not Great.
Nov 4 OR 5:
The problem of debate for a Christian with unbelievers always comes down to the fact that we're talking from and about two entirely different realms of existence, the supernatural and the natural, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, and that purely intellectual argument is carnal while a Christian's effective tools are not carnal.
For Hitchens there is no supernatural, no Holy Spirit, no ability to know anything except through the physical senses and natural reason. He just about deifies rationality, as do most unregenerate intellectuals. He does claim to appreciate the "transcendent" -- as things of awe and wonder -- but his chosen examples of the height of awe and wonder come from the material cosmos, which he finds to be far "more majestic than the burning bush." [Actually, even an atheist could object to the philistinism in such a comparison. I already touched on this in the previous post.]
In principle the supernatural can be proved, such as by miraculous events or the appearance of beings from the spiritual realms, though people have been known to deny the proof of their own experience too; but it appears that God has reasons not to make it obvious in any case. As Pascal said, God gives enough light to guide those who believe, but enough darkness to blind those who don't. Faith is the way we discover the Kingdom of God and it can't be discovered any other way. Even if God leads us through things of the flesh to the things of the spirit, as He often does, we do GET to the things of the spirit and things look very different from here than from there. The quickened spirit of the believer apprehends the things of the Spirit whereas the natural man cannot know these things, so the natural man argues from what he knows and since he can't apprehend God he can only deny His existence -- that is, a certain type does that; some have more humility and at least try to consider that they might be wrong and that those who speak of this other kingdom may possibly know something he doesn't know. Hitchens is not of this type.
Miracles and other intrusions from normally invisible other realms may dazzle us with evidence for the existence of those realms, or even for the existence of God, but in themselves they reveal nothing about salvation or the Kingdom of God.
It takes some of us a long time to learn that this is the basic problem. We keep butting our heads against the wall of the unbeliever's natural blindness. We don't understand it: what we see with our New Creation spiritual eyes is so obvious it seems we ought to be able to persuade by simply presenting the facts. Isn't the Bible just OBVIOUSLY the word of God? Can't you point to so many of its qualities that just scream that truth? Aren't its writers just OBVIOUSLY honest, just OBVIOUSLY God-inspired? It doesn't work that way in most cases. Sometimes it's out and out pearls to swine to make such arguments.
The natural man can't detect God in the world of his senses or intellect, and he also apparently can't tell the difference between religions either, or doesn't want to. Hitchens definitely doesn't want to. He says it's all easily enough explained on the basis of his flatly asserted unsupported dogma that man created God, whereas if God made man this proliferation of religions is inexplicable, especially if you add that man is made in God's image -- that would make God schismatic or even schizophrenic (ha ha). Now, this is all very clever but it is nothing but a logical game he is playing with himself and is about as far removed from the reality as you can get. But it seems utterly hopeless to find any way of showing him that.
His explanations are staggeringly out of the blue speculative wild guesses imaginative lacking any sort of evidence, sheer stab in the dark psychoanalytic brainstorming. He has NO idea what motivates people, he just makes it all up to suit his pet philosophical position, which is basically Evolution. [[[[[Just the way evolution has NO idea what happened in the past but makes it all up on the basis of some very flimsy bits of physical evidence that are far better explained by the Creationists.]]]]] Asked how he explains so many people's gravitating to religion, he simply trots out his evolutionistic one-size-fits-all psychoanalysis and says it's "fear of death." It's not that he's actually heard anyone admit that as their motivation, it's not that he's actually seen that in their behavior. It's not that he can make a case for it on any known ground of psychological reality that one can come to believe something because of fear of the opposite, or the other idea that anyone can come to belief simply by wishing that belief were true. If that were the case many atheists who say they wish it were true wouldn't be atheists any more. No, he doesn't derive it from the believers themselves at all, but entirely from his theory, his unsupported dogma, that says religion is false. In one of the talks he actually characterizes believers as PRETENDING to believe because it makes them feel good to believe. Can he really think that the martyrs down the centuries who died hideous deaths for their Christian belief did that for something they didn't REALLY believe in? Burned at the stake? Stretched on the rack? Bound to a stake and slowly drowned by the incoming tide? And much much worse. But I guess he thinks he believes that. He's just a lousy psychologist then, no sense of how people work. Such a view of believers certainly would create a jaundiced idea about their mental capacity, lead to terrible prejudice and bigotry against us.
It's both frustrating and interesting to watch him spin his delusional explanations about what religion is. The irrational impulse to religious belief, which he also characterizes as the "species'" first stab at philosophy (he asks us how we know God's will; how on earth does he think he knows such things that he pontificates on with such adamant certainty?) Anyway religious belief will never die out according to him because it's (lamentably) latent within us, it will keep reviving in fundamentalist form because "we are a poorly evolved mammal species and we are subject to these delusions." This basic irrationality is still within us and won't ever be completely eradicated because of that. He so wants us to evolve into the rational creatures he believes we could become and should become but he has to acknowledge that we probably won't. Religion has too much of a pull on us, this dreadful dreadful dangerous irrationalism from the babyhood of the species.
Poor man, no wonder he drinks so much.
He goes for the most hackneyed of all bits of debunkery, that religion belongs to the infancy of the species, before we knew anything about how the physical world operates. So we invented gods to explain it all. This is nothing but a thin plausibility built on his irrational belief in evolution, without a shred of actual evidence to support it, but he treats it as absolute dogmatic fact that the human race did in fact invent gods and did so for this reason. At least believers have the written word of God to explain mysterious and distant things to us. All he has is the speculations of modern human beings thousands of years removed from the people whose mental set they so arrogantly pretend to know so intimately. (He thinks any claim to know the mind of God is arrogant, but we at least do have a written testimony that claims to reveal the mind of God to us through communication between God and the spirit of man, and that's a lot more evidence than the evolutionistic construct has. Scientists have no written testimony of any sort, no actual evidence of any sort, they have only their own mental machinations and they construct whole historical and psychological realities on this and this alone. Who's arrogant?)
{sorry, I see I'm pretty repetitive in these notes. If I had the ambition to make this into a polished essay I'd wait before posting it but I don't and yet I think i got some good things said here, so again I'm sorry but rough as it is I'm going to post it and maybe try to clean it up some later.}
Explaining the physical world is so far from the motivation for religion it's sort of stupefying to contemplate that explanation. Besides, since we now CAN explain the physical world so well, which is another huge part of his argument, shouldn't that take care of this irrational tropism to inventing gods? Oh but I guess there's also that fear of death thing. Exit unexplainable universe, enter personal fear of death. In any case if he can come up with an explanation that has some plausibility, however slight, in the context of his own irrational belief in evolution he's happy.
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AN HONEST UNREGENERATE INTELLECTUAL OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE KORAN AND THE BIBLE, but he treats them both as equally evil.
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His talk, The Moral Necessity of Atheism Part 1 of 8 parts
OOPS, A FACTUAL ERROR:
He makes a strange error: At the beginning of part 5 of this talk, he says Billy Graham preached in the National Cathedral after 9/11 saying that "all those who had died in those buildings had gone straight to heaven." I have some problems with Billy Graham's theology but that statement is simply not something I can imagine him making. So I looked it up and found that he didn't say ALL went to heaven, he says only many did. Here is the link to Graham's sermon, where he says "And many of those people who died this past week are in heaven right now and they wouldn’t want to come back. It’s so glorious and so wonderful. And that’s the hope for all of us who put our faith in God. I pray that you will have this hope in your heart."
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What bothers ME about Graham's statement is the phrase "faith in God," since it's not true that anyone can put their faith in any conception of God and expect to go to heaven. When he does finally mention Jesus Christ he specifically says he is speaking "for the Christian now."
Here in this majestic National Cathedral we see all around us the symbols of the Cross. For the Christian, I’m speaking for the Christian now, the Cross tells us that God understands our sin and our suffering, for He took them upon Himself in the person of Jesus Christ our sins and our suffering. And from the Cross, God declares, "I love you. I know the heartaches and the sorrows and the pains that you feel. But I love you."
The story does not end with the Cross, for Easter points us beyond the tragedy of the Cross to the empty tomb that tells us that there is hope for eternal life, for Christ has conquered evil and death, and hell. Yes, there is hope.
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It is perhaps a little odd that someone whose arena is literature wouldn't recognize that the intellect, ideas, emotions, intuitions perhaps, are everyday functions that belong to the nonmaterial realm that is sometimes taken to define the limits of human spirituality, and at least make use of these as examples of the KIND of thing religion is about; would therefore know that "God is a spirit" and know that a spirit could not possibly be evidenced by anything material, from galaxies to black holes. What about the Biblical description of God as invisible? God is invisible Spirit.
During the few months when I first believed in God but didn't yet know anything about Christianity, I liked the expression Universal Mind to describe God, and I still don't think it's false. It says essentially the same thing as God is a Spirit. God is a Mind. God is a Person, a Consciousness, a living Being. An invisible Being. Hitchens will refer to God as if he recognizes that He is a Person and yet he'll pretend to shoot down the possibility of His existence with some argument about black holes.
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And he makes no distinctions, religion is religion, and it's all eminently hateable, all destructive of what he considers to be the highest human values.
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Article about the Hitchens brothers touching on their mutually irrelevant criticisms: [the brother's calling Christopher a seeker IS fatuity, I agree, but then so is attributing belief to fear of death, primitive irrational wishful superstition and incomplete or sloppy evolution, as is all interpretation of others' motives that is based on mechanistic theory rather than knowledge of the person himself.
There is maybe nothing more irritating and alienating than somebody's insisting that you feel or think a way that you simply do not. That was a great deal of the problem with Freud's psychoanalysis. He may or may not have gotten it right much of the time but the method itself allowed him at other times, and other analysts with much less accurate intuition, even utterly blockheaded inability to grasp another's mental or emotional state, to tell people what their unconscious REALLY desired on the basis of nothing but mere theory, and of course with impunity as it couldn't be proved one way or the other, it merely demands that the person acquiesce in the interpretation.
I suppose this is akin to Hitchens' strenuous objection to believers' claims to know the mind of God. But this is not a fair comparison, as we CAN know the mind of God because He Himself has told us his thoughts on various subjects. We aren't guessing, we know God through His word and prayer. We derive our conviction from study of God's own communications, we are not reduced to theoretical psychoanalyzing of God. But Hitchens himself -- both Hitchenses apparently -- IS reduced to such insupportable theorizing about the motives behind his opposition's beliefs.
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This is really also all that the "science" claimed in support of evolution amounts to as well, nothing but an imaginative interpretation of quite scanty facts that lend themselves at least as well to other interpretations. What they have IS interpretation and not hard evidence. They multiply scientific facts as if they amount to evidence but those same facts are usually equally open to alternative interpretations, are not better evidence for evolution than for creation.
We ARE pattern-making animals as Hitchens observes, and it is this habit or capacity or need that has erected the entire edifice of evolutionary theory on nothing but the basic IQ ability to place physical structures in morphological homological sequences.
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HE EXPLAINS US AWAY, THE BELIEVERS IN GOD, WITH HIS COMPLETELY INVENTED THEORIES ABOUT WHY WE BELIEVE, HOW RELIGION IS A PRIMITIVE FIRST STAB AT UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD THAT BEGAN IN THE INFANCY OF THE "SPECIES" AND HOW WE'RE MOTIVATED BY FEAR OF DEATH AND NEED FOR COMFORT AND SO ON, EXPLANATIONS SIMPLY PULLED OUT OF THIN AIR. THEN, HAVING REDUCED OUR BELIEF TO IRRATIONAL SENSELESSNESS HE FEELS FINE ABOUT KEEPING OUR VOICES OUT OF THE BODY POLITIC, SHUTTING US UP ABOUT EDUCATION IN THE SCHOOLS, SHUTTING US UP IN OUR EVANGELISTIC EFFORTS, FINE IN OTHER WORDS ABOUT VIOLATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTION OF OUR RIGHT TO THESE VERY EXPRESSIONS OF OUR BELIEF. TALK ABOUT OPPRESSION AND TYRANNY AND INTERFERENCE WITH PERSONAL FREEDOMS.
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