Hitchens: He's no Dawkins or Harris
by MikeGeneIn our comments section I am encouraged to add Christopher Hitchens to "TT's list of official bogeymen." Of course, there is no such list at Telic Thoughts, as this is just a way to frame valid criticisms of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. But, since I'm the type who is often willing to play along, I checked out a review of Hitchens's new anti-religion book.
He makes his case in the elegant yet biting prose we have come to expect from him. His style is erudite (he cites Richard Dawkins, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas in a span of three pages) yet manages to be accessible to the casual reader. He is at once funny and mean spirited, sniffing at the absurdity of the Bible's "minor miracles" and dismissing as buffoons all who would disagree.
Hitchens is the reincarnation of H.L. Mencken, the penultimate social critic of the first half of the 20th century, who used words like gunshots and considered most Americans "boobs." Of course, reincarnation is another notion that could induce paroxysms in both of them.
Hitchens' quarrel with God is too complex to invite summary, but it can be fairly said that he considers religion just plain childish.
"It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species," he writes, "and it is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs. Today, the least educated of my children knows much much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion."
But Hitchens is not satisfied to merely refute religion. He must also demonize it as "an enemy of science and inquiry," as "subsisting largely on lies and fears," and as "the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism and tyranny." Hence the book's subtitle, "How Religion Poison's Everything."
And he does mean everything. As he would have it, religion foments hate and war. It justifies the torture and murder of "heretics" and "infidels." It represses healthy human sexuality. By discouraging contraception and encouraging reliance on prayer instead of medicine, it is even bad for your health.
Okay, so make fun of the Bible, call people names, describe religion as infantile, and invoke the Fear Card. It sounds like we have a mixture of ad hominems, chest-thumping, and sociological claims backed up with rhetoric and cherry picking. There doesn't seem to be any reason to take Hitchens seriously here at Telic Thoughts.
On the other hand, the problem with people like Dawkins and Harris is that they think it is very important for people view them as scientists. This is because they want very badly to be seen as Ambassadors of Science, falsely teaching that science has somehow addressed the existence of God and (surprise!) determined that God does not exist. In essence, these guys have a socio-political agenda and a metaphysical axe to grind, and they want to shroud it in the lab coats of Science because they understand the propagandistic appeal of such framing.
Furthermore, both Dawkins and Harris posture as Objective Judges when they criticize Intelligent Design, yet we now know they are closed-minded individuals with a big agenda. Thus, they are not really qualified to pass judgment on Intelligent Design. Since their minds hear "God" when "ID" is spoken/written, and they hate God and religion, they cannot think about this issue as a serious, open-minded investigator. They are, of course, entitled to their own personal opinions, but there is no reason we should take them as anything more than that.
April 30th, 2007 at 9:53 am
In my view, Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins are three peas in a pod. None of them really merit any serious intellectual consideration. Mainly because they don't take religion seriously enough to warrant a serious response. Ever since the Enlightenment, science has been used by materialists as a hammer to beat religious people over the head with. But that hammer has been getting smaller and smaller, and people can now see what materialism really is: a parasite which can not exist on its own, but must latch on to its host to survive. Materialism needs the authority of science to appear credible.
What I find really interesting is how antiquated the atheists' arguments are. They haven't been updated for centuries. Hitchens, for example, is using the old "if they just knew more about nature they wouldn't be religious" premise. Newsflash: decades of the study of religion from a historical, sociological, and philosophical view has invalidated this premise. Its obvious to anyone that cares to take this subject seriously that religion has to do with human, metaphysical and existential questions, not scientific ones. Religion is not some sort of pre-scientific attempt to understand how the world works in a proximate and instrumental sort of way.
Some of the most religious societies in the past also knew quite allot about how nature works. Enough to create feats of engineering and architecture that still astound us today. Technology and religion have always existed side by side. It has only occurred to some moderns to pit the two against each other. Primitive people knew enough about how agriculture worked to develop technology for producing crops; that didn't prevent them from also performing agricultural-religious rituals. And of course, religion is alive and well in our oh-so-mature scientifically sophisticated society.
What is it with the atheists, do they fail to see that time has elapsed between the Enlightenment and the present moment? How do they manage to be so out of touch with reality?
Comment by Brian Killian — April 30, 2007 @ 9:53 am
May 6th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Three interviews with Christopher Hitchens:
The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart
Charlie Rose
Lou Dobbs
The first one is a bit disappointing. Hitchens is obviously drunk and not on top of his game.
He's his normal eloquent self in the second two videos.
Comment by keiths — May 6, 2007 @ 6:20 am