God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

By Rich Bordner

Another "New Atheist" book I've read (see The God Delusion for another review) is God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens.

Folks say Hitchens is a great writer. Even those who adamantly disagree with him praise his use of rhetoric. In fact, I haven't read one reviewer, Christian and non, who doesn't mention his talent for writing.

However, I have to disagree with them. This book is not written well. It is incredibly difficult to figure out exactly what Hitchens is arguing most of the time. When I knew his thesis, it was extremely hard to ferret out his exact argument. Kinda like pinning jello to a wall. He routinely made so many leaps in logic that by the time I figured out I'd been had, he was already six points down the road. He regularly employed loaded language without a rational back-up; that is, its one thing when you use strong words and show how they apply. It’s quite another when you use strong words and just leave them hanging out there, as if self-justified.

This is houdinery, not good writing.

Here's one example. On page 5, he says,

"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake."

He wants us to apply different standards to his...whatevers...--they aren't "beliefs," excuse me--than we apply to religious belief and faith. Sounds sweet. Nice try, but I don't buy it. Douglas Wilson puts it nicely (actually, sarcastically...you get my point):

"In this notable expression of high sentiment, Hitchens declares that he distrusts anything that outrages reason. And just before this, he delivered himself of the zen-mystery that "our belief is not a belief." Okay, so he has faith in certain of his principles, but this faith of his is not like our faith in our principles because ours are ... wrong. His faith in his principles is not faith at all. It is something else. It is confidence, yeah, that's it, confidence. Con fides. With faith. And his beliefs are not like our beliefs, not at all. No, his beliefs, which are not beliefs, are based on certain beliefs about science and reason."

Hitchens uses big boasts, only to not come through on them. After trotting out an objection to religion via an assertion he many times says something like "this, is absolutely irrefutable." Then he just moves on.

He often used the word "proof" to describe mere assertions and claims. A philosophy class or two would help him a lot in his sloppy use of jargon.

I guess I'm just supposed to accept his word. After all, as with Dawkins, he speaks with a British accent, and that makes him authoritative. Right?

Here's an example. While talking about the objections he had to religion as a child, he said:

"If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister... With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner? Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic? These faltering and childish objections are, I have since discovered, extremely commonplace, partly because no religion can meet them with any satisfactory answer. But another, larger one also presented itself. (I say 'presented itself' rather than 'occurred to me' because these objections are, as well as insuperable, inescapable)…" p3

In what follows, there's no attempt to actually show that the objections actually were insuperable… whatever that means. I had to look it up (it means, "incapable of being overcome."). He does that (use big words needlessly) all the time. While reading the book, I had the inclination that he was trying to intimidate me in his use of big words like this...anyway...I kept waiting for the hammer to come down...and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Until I finished the last page.

Similarly, straw men are his favorite target. Like Dawkins, he's fond of attacking caricatures.

Blurring key distinctions is his favorite tactic. He lumps all religions into one category, "religion," and he ignores important differences. He uses the bad example of particular religious people (I admit, there are many quality examples of evil amongst religious people. The Christian church is not immune to this critique. Also, some religions are false and evil) and paints all religion with that brush. Because a Muslim blew himself up in a suicide bombing, I have blown myself up too.

He quotes verses in the Bible that he says show God to be morally reprehensible, but he gives little effort at exegeting fairly. Sometimes merely quoting the verse and a few comments diced with loaded words are enough for him to show how evil God is (for better treatments of such verses, go to www.christian-thinktank.com).

Speaking of evil, yet another glaring weakness: he claims that the evil acts of religious people are evil, and that we have a moral obligation to fight such totalitarianism. But, as an atheist, how does he ground such an obligation? Where does this obligation come from in a world of physical atoms governed by physical laws?

This is much different than saying "all atheists are immoral" or "atheists don't believe in morality." I admit that atheists can be moral (sometimes they are more moral than Christians!), and they can know what is right and wrong (kinda... another blog for another day). No doubt there. What I doubt is that, if God really doesn't exist, *is* anything moral? What does "good" mean? It has no meaning! He works on borrowed capital.

Melinda at str.org puts her finger on this when she says,

"Hitchens says religion is evil, and he does mean evil and sin. He freely uses moral language to pin the blame right where he believes it belongs, but he never explained how he, as a materialist, can use moral language and mean them as moral terms that all mankind are beholden to. Hitchens also identifies himself as a humanist. He expresses great faith in the natural abilities of man unhindered by the manipulation and superstition of religion to progress to a fully rational, scientific existence. He says at one point, apparently justifying his use of morality, 'Ethical imperative is derived from innate human solidarity.' I take from this that he believes morality is the store of human experience. It's an interesting story, but he gives no actual argument for any of his claims."

Doug Wilson comments,

"David Hume had a mighty hard time figuring out how to get across the chasm from is to ought. Mr. Hitchens must have figured out how to do this, because he has gotten from the is of repeatable experiments, and the is of the law of identity, to the ought of "Thou shalt not poison everything." This is a stupendous breakthrough. And Mr. Hitchens needs to do this whole math problem on the board, in front of the class, and Mr. Hitchens needs to show his work."

"Hitchens points out that some believers respond badly to his kind of bad boy atheism, and this is something I grant. In fact, I am perfectly willing to loan him a fixed scriptural standard so that he might enjoy the pleasure of disapproving of hysterical believers who go off like a bottle rocket whenever an atheist is naughty in public. But that is the only way he is able to enjoy such spectacles -- with borrowed standards. When believers panic or hyperventilate over the monkeyshines of men like Hitchens, they are displeasing Jesus. But are they displeasing the mindless process of time and chance acting on matter, which is all that anything or anyone actually is? Well, it turns out, no. In Hitchens' view, according to his premises, Christian hypocrisies (a source of amusement to many for millennia) turn out to be just another big dud in a universe of big duds. The infinite concourse of atoms supplies us with nothing more than an endless supply of dropped punch lines."

That is, he calls things with irreducible moral terms, like "evil," but he never explains how his atheism can ground such a use of language.

Finally, religion is even to blame for the crimes of atheists, for their regimes functioned in a religious way: nice trick. Religious people can't even point to the good examples of other religious people in defense of their case; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, for example, acted contrary to Christianity's doctrines and therefore Christians can't look to him for help. Melinda Penner writes,

"The beautiful thing about Hitchens' case, such that it is, is that he can't lose. 'What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine.' Any and all counter-examples are snatched away as anomalies from the religious system and practices, forced confessions of faith, or professed Christians acting against their religion (as he defines it). In Hitchens' accounting even Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't motivated by his Christianity because what made him great was actually in contradiction to what the New Testament teaches. According to Hitchens, the New Testament teaches that forgiveness is withheld until a price is exacted, but King forgave completely and in advance of the actual sins. So he wasn't a real Christian, or at least his virtuous actions were not examples we can cite. The most collosal example of this convenient arrangement is that even the evils of atheism can be laid at religion's feet. After all, he claims, religion is the original totalitarian system. Atheist totalitarian regimes are a cheap knock-offs fostered by the negligence and sins of religion."

Note the convenient strawman: The NT holds that forgiveness is withheld until a price is exacted. There is no attempt to prove this is so; Hitchens just helps himself to this assertion, and then moves on.

In conclusion, I can see how this book would perhaps bamboozle some Christians and give confidence to some atheists. He starts out fast and hard, and never lets up. His style can leave you a bit befuddled and intimidated, wondering what happened. But a careful, slow, thoughtful reading should have the opposite effect.

Review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

By Rich Bordner

To be an atheist is all the rage these days. Or at least that's what you'd gather by a selective viewing of media shows. Since September 11, 2001, a new batch of particularly aggressive and media-savvy atheists have cropped up in popular culture. Their books are selling well. In fact, some of them have stayed pretty long on the NYT best-seller list.

So recently I decided to read three of those books.

The first one I read was The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a very well known biologist and advocate of naturalistic science (the idea that science must be wedded to a worldview that holds that the physical world is all that exists.). He's an Oxford fellow, and we all know that those who speak with a British accent and hail from Oxford are darn smart and therefore should be listened to, so I was anxious to see what all the hubbub was all about.

Dawkins' project in the book is to convince us that religion is not only irrational, but immoral and bad for society.

The first two chapters of his book deal with some preliminary considerations (Did Einstein believe in God? No, when he said we would "know the mind of God" in the future, or "God does not play dice" he was using the word "God" in a very poetic, metaphorical sense.) and terminology. The main parts of his book, though, are chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3 he engages in "deck clearing." He takes a look at the arguments traditionally raised for God's existence and finds them seriously wanting. Chapter 4 is the lynchpin of his book. In that chapter, he advances a positive intellectual case for atheism; that is, he advances an argument *for* atheism. After all, the title of that chapter is "Why there almost certainly is no god." Bold title.

After that, he has to do damage control. Religion has traditionally served as the root of many important things (like morality, wonder, happiness, etc), and Dawkins now has to explain how those things can exist in the absence of religion. In Chapter 5 he tackles the widespread existence of religion itself: if it’s all just a sham, then why is religion so prevalent all over the world? Chapters 6 and 7 deal with morality; he advances an evolutionary explanation of morality and explains how we do not get our morality from the Bible. Chapter 8 details the damage religion has done to society, while he takes on the subject of a religious upbringing in chapter 9. He ends up saying that a religious education is "child abuse." I am not exaggerating.

He ends the book in chapter 10 by claiming that a proper wonder of the physical world can fill the inspiration gap left by religion.

So that's his project. What do I think?

I was very disappointed. After reading his book, I find Dawkins is hard to take seriously.

There are many things I could focus on. For example, I could focus on how his evolutionary account of morality is no "account" at all. The "morality" he ends up with is not morality but something completely different: a by-product of our evolutionary past. He only explains how we "behave" in a way that we call "moral." This is a far cry from real morality. Morality is a deeply true feature of reality that we must submit to in our behavior. It prescribes our actions and attitudes. Reducing it to behavior that our genes have programmed into us is not morality, for it guts morality of things like obligation. Anyway...

Since chapters 3 and 4 are the main parts of his book, I'm going to focus my comments on those places. If he fails in those chapters, the rest of his book is a bust. That is, if he doesn't dispatch with the arguments for theism and if he doesn't succeed in convincing us that atheism is a rational position to hold, then he hasn't "cleared the deck" for an atheistic understanding of reality in all the other key places. Religion is still the king of the hill.

As I mentioned earlier, in chapter 3 he takes on what he says are the main arguments for the existence of God. However, he ends up attacking several conveniently erected straw men instead. I'm a philosophy student. I've trafficked in that area for 10 years now. I deal with these things, and I didn't recognize many of the arguments he addressed. He didn't even acknowledge the best arguments; he acted like they didn't exist. Where was the Kalam Cosmological argument? Where was the Moral argument? Where was the Argument from Consciousness?

Nowhere to be found.

He only interacted with one major Christian philosopher (Richard Swinburne), and he only interacted with him limitedly. He quoted him out of context and therefore set up yet another caricature. He pretended all the others (William Craig, J.P. Moreland, Paul Copan, Gary Habermas, Albert Mohler, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Paul Moser, etc, etc, etc) simply do not exist. When he did quote a Christian, most often it was either from one of his angry detractors (who send him letters), the "men on the street" who call him when he's on the radio, or unsophisticated preachers and priests.

The arguments he did address were weak. He made them even weaker by making them into straw men. These are arguments that very learned men spent their lives expounding, defending, attacking, and thinking over. Mostly, Dawkins merely summarized them in a few lines, no more than a paragraph, then dispatched them in a few lines.

Let me give two examples. One "argument" he dispatches with is the "argument from beauty." He summarizes it like this: "I have given up counting the number of times I receive the more or less truculent challenge: 'How do you account for Shakespeare, then?' The argument will be so familiar, I needn't document it further. But the logic behind it is never spelled out... Obviously... Shakespeare's sonnets (are sublime). They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn't. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Shakespeare. (p. 86)"

That's it. No premised-out argument, no attempt at charitability. This might do for a small blog; but a popular-level book that is purporting to come from a sharp, keen mind? He must be more responsible.

There actually have been attempts to spell it out. Even if there weren't, it wouldn't be difficult for Dawkins to think it through. The argument, in its bare form, goes like this:

1. There are autonomously aesthetic objects (Shakespeare, for instance, or Beethoven's music, or the smell of a rose, etc). Defining "autonomous": There are objects with aesthetic properties that do not depend upon subjective experiences... they are real objective aesthetic properties. These objects have aesthetic properties no matter how people respond/whether or not people recognize these properties... NOT: beauty is in the eye of the beholder... BUT: the object ITSELF IS beautiful, no matter who views/sees it.
2. There must be some explanation for these aao's.
3. The explanation for the existence of aao's is either natural or non-natural.
4. If the explanation for the existence of aao's is natural, it can be given in terms of the natural sciences (chemistry, biology, psychology...laws of nature)
5. The existence of aao's cannot be given in terms of the natural sciences.
6. The explanation for the existence of aao's must be non-natural

You can continue to carry the argument out in a way that leads to a supernatural/God explanation being the best explanation.

Now, that's a world of difference from Dawkins' caricature. For starters, the thrust of this argument is that beauty is an objective property (like morality, consciousness, etc) that calls for an explanation. Some explanations are better than others. The explanation theism gives is much better than the one naturalism (atheism) gives. That's much different from asking "what accounts for Shakespeare" and it’s much different from snarking that "Shakespeare is sublime if God exists and sublime if he isn't." Yes, but there still needs to be an explanation...Dawkins is changing the subject.

Even if you don't think the argument is successful ultimately, the point is that it’s much better than what Dawkins gave.

Secondly, he gives what he calls the "argument from Scripture." The title he gives the argument is bad, for starters: it leads the reader to believe that the argument's thrust is derived merely from something being written in the Bible (like those who say, "It’s in the Bible, God said it, and that's that.")...which is a straw man...but anyway.

First, he only gives five pages to a subject that people have written VOLUMES on...and most of Dawkins' treatment is ridicule and fluff, not actually a précis.

Secondly, in this section, he deals with two purported "contradictions" in the Bible, and there is no attempt to even mention some of those who have answered those challenges. People have written answers to these "contradictions" for centuries, and for Dawkins to pretend they don't exist is irresponsible at best, dishonest at worst.

Third, he says, "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus' life. All were copied and recopied, through many different 'Chinese Whispers generations' (see Chapter 5) by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas. (p. 93)"

That's it. No attempt to let SCHOLARS who have thought otherwise have a say. In fact, he gives the impression that all "scholars" agree with his assessment.

This is just bad.

Anytime someone does this with the arguments against his case and won't address the most powerful arguments against him, its a major red flag. I had trouble trusting Dawkins on anything after reading this sham.

On to chapter four. In this chapter, he gives a positive argument for the NON-existence of God. One big problem with this chapter is that he only gives ONE argument, and he pretends like it’s a "silver bullet." He pretends that it’s a knock-down argument against theism that can't be defeated. That should tip you off: anytime someone only has ONE argument for his case, he's hurtin'. If you do that, it had better be a pretttttttty doggone good argument.

Another thing about chapter four: He derides those who make metaphysical (as opposed to scientific) claims and speculations, but he makes metaphysical claims and speculations of his own... see, for example, his talk of the "multiverse" on page 145, which has absolutely zero empirical evidence confirming it.

All this should tell you that the rest of his book is highly suspect.

In conclusion, he promises big things, but never comes through. He relies heavily on caricature, ridicule, name calling, and loaded language, but has little substance. There are better defenses of atheism out there.