Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Hitchens versus God

If you’ve got a rainy or volcanic ash-blighted afternoon to kill you could do worse than type ‘Hitchens versus Hitchens’ into Youtube and watch Christopher and Peter debate Iraq and God in 14 fun-sized chunks. Chris Hitchens is a brilliant debater – a brilliant man - but he always needs to go too far. This need is pathological but it’s the essential element of his Hitchness so complaining about it is beside the point. It does mean, however, that even when he’s absolutely right he always says something absolutely wrong.

Chris isn’t keen on religion. He hates God and also disbelieves in Him, so at root he only differs from the most tediously predictable atheists in terms of style (for which reason I shouldn’t be surprised if he does eventually change to either a more moderate or more idiosyncratic position if only to escape the consensus; in fact, I’m tempted to speculate that he would be much less hardline if he didn’t reside in the US, where he can still just about provoke a bit of outrage by being so; whereas over here the best way to create a row is to defend God-bothering).

We can divide his position into the atheist parts and the anti-theist parts. Obviously we’re talking about the Abrahamic monotheist faiths here – Hindus don’t get much of a mention. Hitchens does the atheist bit - ie. exposing the absurdity of literal belief in the stuff of the Bible- with great aplomb. Meh. Aren’t we past all that? Really, how many believers operating in Hitchens’ sphere of pontification literally buy it all without doubts that can vary from troubling to severe to total? Hardcore Born-Agains, perhaps, as best they can, but their faith always looks brittle and not much more interesting than any cult or reality-avoidance method.

The sophisticate columnist/debater’s battleground today, surely, is in the question of whether religion, regardless of the truth-value of its tenets, really does Poison Everything. There seem to be three main strands in Hitchens’ anti-theism.

The first is that organised religion is responsible for all of history’s violence and genocide and exploitation and filth and horror and squalor. His response to the Stalin/Mao/Hitler objection is to make a historical argument that Communism and Fascism were supported by various establishment Churches (Papists mainly), and then a philosophical argument that Communism and Fascism are themselves religions anyway. Surely he must feel himself treading from the solid ground of straightforward atheism onto the wobbly wooden bridge of semantic dubiousness here, but he persists with vehemence. The refusal to accept that both God-fearing and Godless humans are perfectly capable of great evil is his most obvious tumble into the Hitchens trap of Going Too Far and harms his seriousness. But that’s a hundred other posts at least.

The second strand of Christopher’s anti-theism is what I would crudely term the Swinging Dick approach. To worship an omnipotent, omniscient God is to be a serf, a sheep, a slave, a sop and a sucker. In other words, to be the opposite of The Hitch, fearless intellectual gunslinger, alone in a cold universe and kickin’ ass. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Hitch has been inside the Total Perspective Vortex; he knew his place in the vast emptiness and liked what he saw. And if being an existential hero just happens to irresistible to the chicks, who is he to argue? The trouble with the Swinging Dick position is that it can lead to contempt; it conjures up the Ubermensch and Ayn Rand, or other unpleasant anti-human follies. This is because most humans are not Swinging Dicks and the Superman is a myth.

The third strand is the problem of evil (or the problem of suffering) which, he argues, makes the worship of an omnipotent God repulsive. Hitch goes for this at full throttle with the case of Elizabeth Fritzl. What could be more disgusting than your worship of a God who sits and looks on with folded arms as Josef Fritzl descends to his cellar once again? Imagine how many times Elizabeth must have prayed, unanswered, while God declined to intervene for 24 years. But this is an ancient problem within faiths and the anti-theist who believes that religion poisons everything should show why the post-God world he wishes to bring about offers something better or at least no worse to sufferers. In the believers’ universe, Elizabeth can at least hope for a better break in the afterlife, and for justice for Josef. In Hitch’s universe even this feeble consolation is denied. Life really is indifferent and there will be no more breaks. Of course, The Hitch can handle the cold truth but then he’s a Swinging Dick.

Hitchens and Dawkins argue that religion needs to disappear for the progress and evolution of humanity, yet the suspicion for an evolutionist must be that religion persists because it is in some way beneficial (Dawkins’ virus theory is wobblier than the Communism = Religion one). If religion could be destroyed it would soon be invented again because humans are not Swinging Dicks and by and large they appear to need some kind of organised Hope in order to function in this sorry imperfect world. Hitchens can’t directly advocate banning religion because he distinguishes his own post-religious utopia from the ‘religion’ of Stalinism by explaining that his is based on the principles of democratic liberal secular humanism. Inherent in that, if it is to be worth anything, is the refusal to persecute people for what they believe. So he must drive religion away by appeal to each listener’s good sense and better nature, with argument and reason, and with ridicule and accusations of evil. Good luck with that. Strange how many of those calling themselves ‘humanists’ want to eradicate a persistent and fundamental part of humanity.

The conclusion of all of which, therefore, is that if the Hitch were here, swinging his dick or otherwise, I would put it to him that while you can be both a humanist and an atheist, you cannot coherently be both a humanist and an anti-theist. Then I would take cover while he commenced kicking my ass.

15 comments:

  1. The God post. Are you trying to up your comment quotient?

    To me, Hitchens is a passionate and eloquent debater, but it is the passion and eloquence of the JCR. Most of us have moved on from his black and white outlook into the unstable, disconcerting, but more believable, world of grey shades.

    At base, he comes across as a university bully. A type that is all too common, and is well represented in literature - Martin Amis, commentary - David Aaronovitch and almost any other intellectual strand. It's fun when you're 18, but a bit puerile, Trotskyist and unuanced when you're north of 30.

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  2. Willard10:50 am

    I think that's the problem I've always had against atheism: they never give us a really valid replacement for religion. It's hard to live with the consolation that, some day, we'll all be reduced to our constituent elements, consumed by worms, contribute to the heat death of the universe etc... It just doesn't help me get up in the morning.

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  3. Quality over quantity every time for me, Recusant. Otherwise I'd just stick "P Z Myers is a jerk" in the post title...

    I take your point about the JCR bullies, but I'm not sure they're 'all too common'. Those Swinging Dicks definitely add to the gaity of the nation; we wouldn't want the world to be entirely grey, would we? But yes, lurking beneath is an awful lot of dross (eg. PZ Myers and his commenters.)

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  4. It's handy having people willing to make extreme points as they set parameters within which I can make my own lukewarm, shades-of-grey home.

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  5. Did you have to go and remind me of PZ Myers?

    The beard. The glasses. The hair. Oh, the horror.

    There, he's now been mentioned three times in this comment thread. His idiotic acolytes should be along shortly.

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  6. 1. Who is PZ Myers?

    2. Atheism is a Christian heresy.

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  7. David;

    1. Exactly.

    But seriously, you have googlemachine don't you? One of the good things about Bryan's blog changeover is that the squllions of deeply unpleasant Myers acolytes have disappeared from these comment archives.

    2. That's your answer for everything to which the answer isn't "Darwinism is trivial."

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  8. I don't know, Brit, I think David is doing us a big favour here. Remember when we used to get all confused trying to identify myriad heresies and worried about whether the guy on the pyre was a real heretic or simply slightly ahead of his time in scriptural insight? David offers us the all-purpose convenience of One Big Heresy. That, plus, ironically, modern science, makes things a lot cleaner and failsafe. All we have to do is slap electrodes on the heathen and see if his heart starts beating fast when someone says "evidenced-based argument". If it does, it'll be "Who is bringing the marshmellows?"

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  9. Well of course Hitchens takes most of shots at the Bible, because most of the audience was brought up with it. If he was to be arguing in front of a primarily Islamic background, he would target the Koran.

    Although he would probably get killed before the night was out.

    Where Hitch, Dawkins et al go off the rails is that, once upon a time, religion really did poison everything. History does not get to the Holocaust without a strong shove in the back from Christianity.

    But that was then. Christianity is no longer capable anywhere of compelling anyone to do anything, which makes it no more, and no less than -- this is hard to overemphasize -- a way for many people to overcome atheisms truly forbidding conclusions.

    Islam, unfortunately, is still poisonous.

    His response to the Stalin/Mao/Hitler objection is to make a historical argument that Communism and Fascism were supported by various establishment Churches (Papists mainly), and then a philosophical argument that Communism and Fascism are themselves religions anyway.

    Yes, of course humans are perfectly capable of great evil, but it seems pretty clear that capability gets cranked to eleven when said humans are pursuing a set of universal propositions for which there is absolutely no evidence.

    Communism, Nazism, and Warmenism are just as much the consequences of religious belief as the Abrahamic faiths.

    It is the nature of the belief that matters, not whether there is some supreme being tossed into the mix.

    Hitchens and Dawkins argue that religion needs to disappear for the progress and evolution of humanity, yet the suspicion for an evolutionist must be that religion persists because it is in some way beneficial.

    Religion doesn't need to disappear, but a good helping of doubt doesn't seem to have hurt things any.

    Its persistence need not require some evolutionary benefit to persist: it could just as easily an emergent property of an organism capable of forming explanations and thoroughly understanding its own mortality.

    Wisdom teeth are not beneficial. They persist.

    David:

    2. Atheism is a Christian heresy.

    If I recall, you are something of a AGW skeptic. That makes you a Gaiatheist.

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  10. Speculating on how miserable those two brothers must have made each other's childhoods distracts me from anything they are saying in those You Tube clips. I suspect Peter came off the more damaged. Of course, that's not the point at all - but the questions they are discussing are probably only marginally more likely to produce clear answers.

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  11. Phew, nicely argued. I guess this Chris Hitchens doesn't think much about why ordinary folk, who unlike him aren't able to make a gravy train living debating in academia or on chat-shows, tend to, as you neatly put it, want "some kind of organised Hope in order to function in this sorry imperfect world". In my experience most humanists these days seem happy to be nihilists: keen to smash what they see as incorrect but without too much engagement in what might happen then.

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  12. I did Google Prof. Myers and couldn't figure out why an obscure associate professor at an obscure mid-western school was the bete noir of English bloggers and commentators.

    Then I saw that he had picked a fight with Appleyard, or vice versa, and all became clear.

    Skipper: I am absolutely an unbeliever in Gaia, other than in the most pedestrian "Earth is a complex system" way. And yet, other people believing in Gaia doesn't particularly bother me, even given the high correlation between belief in Gaia and a wish that billions of our fellows would conveniently die off.

    Understanding that atheism is a Christian heresy has a lot of implications, among those being an explanation of its weird evangelism, western-centrism and arrogant universalism.

    That is also annoys the atheists is just good luck.

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  13. Not just English ones. Peter did a lot of the fighting, I seem to recall. It got pretty nasty.

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  14. And yet, other people believing in Gaia doesn't particularly bother me, even given the high correlation between belief in Gaia and a wish that billions of our fellows would conveniently die off.

    Until the moment Gaiaists can do something about their belief that there is just the right amount of them, and way too many of you.

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  15. Exactly. They can believe whatever nonsense they like, right up until the moment they take action on those beliefs.

    (Except for Truthers. I hate those guys.)

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