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Christopher Hitchens: Atheist without a First Cause
By Miguel Guanipa (05/08/07)
In the epic quest for an answer to the vitally important question of God's existence, the determined and rather eloquent skeptic Christopher Hitchens has, in his latest book: God Is Not Great, finally come around to a very un-climactic answer; and it is in the negative.
In his own words, Mr. Hitchens spurns the alleged benefits of any form of deity worship by declaring that “Religion poisons everything”, which also happens to be the subtitle of his book.
The fatal weakness (and there are several) in Mr. Hitchens’ argument is laid bare as he unwittingly arms his alleged adversaries by making the case for the very principle he claims to oppose - namely dogmatism of any kind – while he simultaneously attempts to deflect attention from his own paradigm of scientific dogmatism, by defending his fellow Atheists who “do not rely solely upon science and reason, but distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason” (italics mine).
Since he affirms that all religions fall under the category of that which contradicts science, derisively labeling them as being “ultimately grounded on wish-thinking”- which suggests that they also outrage reason - he implicitly counts on the trusty template of scientific certainty alone to emerge as pre-eminent; thus he fails to convincingly advance the notion that, unlike his religious opponents, he “(does) not hold (his) convictions dogmatically”.
There are also obvious limitations imposed by this type of allegedly unbiased truth verifying methodology. Should a type of systematically un-testable event (such as the resurrection) not rise to the litmus test of standard scientific inquiry or fail to meet the rigorous criteria of that discipline alone, he still feels intellectually obliged to abide by it when examining and eventually ascertaining or debunking the validity of every category of evidence available.
There is nothing wrong with having rigorous standards for determining certainty in reality, but we can not discount the existence of God by philosophically sifting the evidence through one grid of inquiry or simply because we have arbitrarily chosen to attribute unintelligible forces behind empirically unexplainable occurrences to every conceivable first cause other than a personal being.
Hitchens himself condemns this kind of dogmatic absolutism by scolding the faithful with the admonition that “the person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” Naturally, as an Atheist he is exempt from claiming “divine warrant” for his own certainty of God’s nonexistence; if he did he would be undermining the very argument that he is making. But how he arrives at the conclusions of which he claims to be “morally certain” will remain one of those unsearchable mysteries which, evidently, not even divinity will be allowed to parse.
Yet when Mr. Hitchens’ arrives at his all enveloping testimony that religious faith “wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos” he forgets that one must command a certain level of omniscience with respect to all of observable nature and yet unexplored boundaries of existence in order to plausibly make such a claim; quite a feat for a mere human – and I hope Mr. Hitchens counts himself as one.
But since Christopher Hitchens is flesh and blood, and is counted among the best in terms of what the global coalition of hardened skeptics has to offer, I doubt that religious believers have anything to fear from him or his posse.
In the end Mr. Hitchens furnishes his readers with one of the main reasons why the world is not as densely populated by Atheists as they would like to believe; the problem of self-contradiction. This is the inevitable curse of the wandering atheist; and as such Mr. Hitchens certainly falls into that ditch quite a few times, such as when he claims to “respect free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake” and then declares that the stupidity of believers “combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate”.
Thus Mr. Hitchen bears the heavy burden that every Atheist must carry in his lonely pilgrimage, and that is to be oxymoronically engaged in confirming the absence of God. The irony of this presumed emancipated condition as a free thinker is that if Mr. Hitchen’s mind was truly open, perchance it would occasionally nudge him to discern God’s often undeniable presence.
It is perhaps as a way of mitigating the pain from carrying such a burden that Mr. Hitchens has in the past found solace in the bottle; in fact he has claimed that one of his favorite Bible passages is John 2:1-11, where Jesus turns water into wine.
Thus given the insufferable acrimony that permeates Mr. Hitchens’ latest work- I will deign to offer him the following piece of advice: Never drink and Write.
http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/31244/?imw=Y
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