Against Atheism
Peter Hitchens has a review of his brother's book, "God is Not Great" in the Daily Mail. It's well worth a read. He makes two points which are essential. The first speaks for itself:
On the few occasions where Christopher is prepared to admit that religious people have done any good, he concludes that they did so in spite of their faith, not because of it.
He even suggests that the atheist Soviet tyranny was itself a form of religion.
You can’t win against this sort of circular absolutism.
Yet he has this absurdly backwards. Religious and unbelieving people have both done dreadful things, and the worst of them have committed their murders and their tortures in the belief that they were doing good.
Nothing is proved by either side in this argument, by pointing to the mountains of skulls piled up by evil atheists, and evil theists. - Peter Hitchens
The second point is that his brother, along with Richard Dawkins are laying the groundwork for an incredible tyranny of conscience.
There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse.
On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children. - Peter Hitchens
Christopher has admirably debated his views on religion with all comers. The exchange I found most revealing was the one he had with Douglas Wilson at Christianity Today.
Hitchens referred to LaPlace in one of his answers and Wilson wrote one of the most compact refutations of materialism (through reductio ad absurdum) that I have ever encountered.
So if LaPlace is why you think belief in God is now "optional," this appeal of yours actually turns into quite a fun business. This doctrine means (although LaPlace admittedly got distracted before these implications caught up with him) that you, Christopher Hitchens, are not thinking your thoughts and writing them down because they are true, but rather because the position and velocity of all the atoms in the universe one hundred years ago necessitated it. And I am not sitting here thinking my Christian thoughts because they are the truth of God, but rather because that is what these assembled chemicals in my head always do in this condition and at this temperature. "LaPlace's demon" could have calculated and predicted your arguments (and word count) a century ago in just the same way that he could have calculated the water levels of the puddles in my driveway — and could have done so using the same formulae. This means that your arguments and my puddles are actually the same kind of thing. They are on the same level, so to speak.
If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is "winning the debate." They aren't debating; they are just fizzing. You refer to "language in which to write this argument," and you do so as though you believed in a universe where argument was a meaningful concept. Argument? Argument? I have no need for your "argument hypothesis." Just matter in motion, man. - Douglas Wilson
Anyway - start with the first round and read on from there. I'm glad that someone with wits to equal Christopher Hitchens has been put on the case.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Religion
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