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FIRST RESPONSE: Reviewing a best-selling Atheist: Christopher Hitchens |
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Written by Don Williams
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First Response: July 2007
Reviewing a best-selling Atheist: Christopher Hitchens
By Don Williams
Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (12, New York, 2007) has captured national attention. The New Yorker calls him, “An intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause for righteousness,” the Village Voice says he is “America's foremost rhetorical pugilist,” and the L.A. Times describes him as “Political and literary journalist extraordinaire.”
Because Hitchens is a journalist with a pugnacious pen, his book is a romp through well-known religions and their exotic variants. He offers little-known slurs, telling anecdotes and a line of argument that entertains no counter-arguments, except to quickly put them down. Here is the naturalist, secular worldview at full throttle. With wit, energy and flashes of rhetorical sparkle, Hitchens has a wide readership. Because of his sheer popularity, he deserves a response.
Reading Hitchens is like watching the British Prime Minister answer Parliament's questions on C-SPAN. The point is not reasoned argument (although Hitchens claims to enthrone reason). The point is thrust and parry, jab here and duck there. In nineteen relatively fast-moving chapters, Hitchens mercilessly slays the dragons of all religions, metaphysics, the argument from design, the Bible, the Koran, Mormons, miracles, eschatology, ethics and a host of sub-topics such as circumcision (“child abuse”). For Hitchens all we have is the natural world and reason (where reason comes from, he doesn't say). Put them together and atheism is the result.
Here is the heart of his argument: “There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism [self-absorption], that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” (p.4)
Having said this, Hitchens has restated points made generations ago without crediting their authors. This makes him sound fresh and new to the uninitiated. The questions of origins, of course, in modern dress is Darwin's The Origin of the Species. All that we know is the product of unguided evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. The question of maximum servility is Marx's thesis that religion is the “opiate of the people,” used to enslave them through the ruling classes. The question of “dangerous sexual repression,” takes us to Freud, along with religion being “grounded in wishful thinking,” our infantile need for a father-figure projected on the blank screen of the universe.
Hitchens now romps through his selected “evidence” to prove his points. Again, he relies upon science (undefined) and reason “because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.” (p.5) Perhaps unintentionally, however, throughout, Hitchens “outrages reason” by never seriously considering alternative points of view and their supporting evidence. Again and again, he puts down towering historical figures with an epitaph. For example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's faith muted into a “nebulous humanism.” C. S. Lewis is “dreary and absurd.” (p.7) Billy Graham is guilty of “opportunism and anti-Semitism.” (p.32) “Luther was terrified of demons.... Muhammed...thought, as did Jesus, that the desert was pullulating with djinns, or evil spirits.” (p.64) “Augustine was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus...” (p.64) “Sir Isaac Newton...was a spiritualist and alchemist of a particularly laughable kind.” (p. 65) Mel Gibson is “an Australian fascist and ham actor.” (p.110) And on Hitchens goes. Such jabs cannot be answered with reasoned, historical argument or evidence: “Stop and consider this.” To slow the rant with facts is to risk the boredom of true scholarly debate and alternative points of view. This will never make it in our “O'Riley Factor” “Nancy Grace,” sound-bite era.
While professing belief in evolution (making humans or “human mammals” just a link in a long chain), Hitchens then irrationally absolutizes his own place in this history, claiming to have given up the infancy of religion for the maturity of adult atheism. “It [religion] comes from the brawling and fearful infancy of our species and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs).” (p.64) But isn't Hitchens' whole book an “attempt to meet our inescapable need for knowledge”? Hopefully, he finds some comfort and reassurance in the arms of his wife and children, if not God. Are these really “infantile” needs or human needs experienced throughout a life-time?
Since evolution goes on without humans uniquely made in God's image, how can Hitchens know that atheism is not still “childhood?” Or, perhaps it is just “adolescence.” Hitchens is guilty of absolutizing his own relative place in his evolutionary scheme. This is the pride (and blind side) of modernity. The only way to avoid this is for the real absolute to come from the outside, exactly our claim that Jesus Christ is that absolute: God in human flesh. As Herbert Butterfield, the Cambridge historian, put it: Hold fast to Jesus Christ and leave everything else open.
Ranting along, Hitchens declares, “Belief among astronomers and physicists has become private and fairly rare.” (p.70) But is this so? In 1916 scientists were asked if they believed in God – specifically in a God who actively communicates with humanity and to whom one may pray expecting an answer. 40% said they did. 40% said they didn't and 20% weren't sure. The same exact survey was given 80 years later in 1997. Those who said they did not believe in an active God had risen only 5%, to 45%. Those who said they did remained stable at 40% (Reported in Alister and Jonna McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion?, pp.42-43). 40% is hardly “fairly rare,” especially after the full weight of the secular, tragic 20th Century is factored in.
But what does Hitchens have to say specifically about Christianity? Of course, he goes after its founding documents. The New Testament is “a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right.” (p.110) And this is his judgment on the single most influential book in the world! “Crude carpentry” (The Gospels?) turns out to be historical/theological masterpieces. “Long after its purported events” turns out to be within the range of eyewitnesses. (See now Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006) “Improvised attempts to make things come out right” turns out to be the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which had no theological or historical precedent in Judaism (It only saw the dead raised corporately at the end of history, rather than one man raised in the middle of history. See N. T Wright, The Resurrection and the Son of God, Fortress Press, 2004) Hitchens continues that the four Gospel writers, “Cannot agree on anything of importance.” (p.111) Respectfully, we ask, has he really read them?
The older “source criticism” of the Gospels alone proved that Matthew and Luke use large parts of Mark (along with another special shared source). This alone demonstrates that they substantially agree with him. But then again, Hitchens seems to surrender the whole game when he asserts “the highly questionable existence of Jesus.” (p.114) Really? Highly questionable? His enemies didn't think so. If we had no New Testament or Christian church (now embracing a third of the world's population), we would still know that Jesus existed from the Jewish historian Josephus, the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius and the Babylonian Talmud. But don't bother Hitchens with these facts as he romps on through his revisionist history.
I am out of space to continue the argument. But, let me say this. Hitchens is exasperatingly fun (and depressing at the same time) to read. He attacks “religion.” So did the greatest 20th century theologian, Karl Barth, when he said, “All Europe is baptized and all Europe is going to Hell.” True evangelicals and Kingdom people also see “religion” (humans looking for God) as our last defense against the living God himself. Christianity is not a religion; it is a relationship with the living God through the grace of his Son alone.
As the philosopher J. P. Moreland would say, Hitchens lives in a “thin world” of nature and reason, rather than in a “thick world” of divine dignity, calling and purpose which transcends our little lives. While he charges religion's eschatology with smashing up, ruining and bringing to naught everything, except the elect who are “gathered contentedly to the bosom of the mass exterminator [God]”, he offers no alternative for this distortion. Rather than God, Hitchens' nature will be its own “mass exterminator” when the sun overheats and boils our earth. But there will be no bosom for the elect – reason will be silenced by endless darkness.
This must result in “thin living.” The Christian vision, however, is the recreation of the whole universe in the New Heavens and the New Earth where decay is banished and righteousness reigns. This, however, is no opiate or projection of our infantile fears. This vision is grounded in historical fact – the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead which inaugurates and anchors the whole new creation. Would that Hitchens could see beyond the church that battered and bored him and look into the face of Christ himself. In the words of Bishop Stephen Neill, Jesus is “vulnerable because of his friends,” but “invulnerable in his person.”
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First Response 
