In the January 5 Wall Street Journal, Sam Schulman detected a proliferation of public atheists, and decided it wasn’t their arguments but their tone that was new to him. Why did this Enlightenment Brigade charge at believers with the saber-rattling of “contumely and condescension”? In any case, he wrote, their books don’t contain “a single point you didn’t hear in your freshman dormitory.”
John Derbyshire took this tack in his New York Sun review of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation: “Here are the knottiest conundrums of theodicy presented as if they never occurred to anyone at all before last Tuesday.” True, Harris’s tract addresses little that curious men haven’t grappled with at some point—though Aquinas never asked, as Harris fatuously does, why the Bible fails to predict the popularity of the Internet.
The trouble is, pace Schulman, the globe teems with religious people who will never see the inside of a freshman dormitory, who would be at best stupefied and at worst inflamed to violence by even the flimsiest of Harris’s gambits. One shudders to think what they’d do to Christopher Hitchens, whose new God Is Not Great brims with objections to religion—some provocative, some “faltering and childish . . . partly because no religion can meet them with satisfactory answers,” and some merely faltering and childish.
Think back to the dorm: the pious Student Council man, fresh off the Corn Belt; the artful hippie, out to gull coeds with his Kama Sutra and psychedelic pajama pants; the faith-shakingly dull “philosopher” who believes in God, “just not a bearded guy on a cloud.” Now imagine that there’d also been a godless, martini-pickled savant in command, to varying degrees, of history, literature, philosophy, theology, science, and humor. Imagine that even his mockery made you whet your argument and return to the chopping block, ready to slice and dice.
That seems to be the aim of Hitchens’s book, which is both more polite and more wounding than the dubious harangues of his co-irreligionists. “Immortality is not a gift,” said the repentant Village Atheist in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. “Immortality is an achievement;/ And only those who strive mightily/ Shall possess it.” Substitute truth for immortality and you have the crux of Hitchens’s argument.
Religion, he contends, is transparently man-made, and offers truth it can’t claim to possess. Knowledge of our world is sought more fruitfully by scientific inquiry. Our “ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.” One may accept any of these propositions without denying God’s existence, an invitation to more timid readers to engage them fearlessly. Nobody has anything to lose, as God must go on existing or not regardless of the outcome of this debate.
Sam Harris hopes to do away with religion, but Hitchens “would not prohibit it even if [he] thought [he] could.” Of course, religion isn’t going anywhere. Michael Novak wrote in National Review that “questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia.” Put aside the many times in history when Christianity, for one, has sought to restrict those questions: Many believers today are neither interested in questioning themselves nor in tolerating the curiosity of others. It’s those poor souls who ensure that books like this one remain provocative and not simply redundant.
The critical query, if one accepts that religion is either wholly or partly man-made, is: What motivates those unbending believers who refuse to admit it? “It can be stated as a truth,” Hitchens writes, “that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of unbelievers.”
Hitchens makes this claim with history and experience on his side. “Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’” he reminds us, he’s seen violence motivated by faith in “Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad.” This is no proof of anything; man puts science and technology to wicked uses, too, and their works are on daily display in each of those B-list locales. But suppose that faith, far from being abused, encourages all that violence?
Hitchens goes off in many directions to “prove” this proposition. As a literary critic he makes sport of the Old and New Testaments, as well as the Koran and the Book of Mormon. Yet his real enemy, ever in the crosshairs, is certainty. Certainty, not “marvelous claims,” gives its license to the Grand Inquisitor, the suicide bomber, or the preacher who warps and terrorizes children with his putrescent descriptions of eternal punishment. Of Father Arnall in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hitchens writes:
It is easy to see that the priest’s words are designed precisely to frighten children. In the first place, the images are themselves childlike. In the torture section, the very devil himself makes a mountain shrivel like wax . . . . When it comes to the picture of a unit of time, we see a child on the beach playing with grains of sand, and then the infantile magnification of units (“Daddy, what if there were a million million million squillion kittens: would they fill up the whole world?”) . . .
To teach children such things without absolute certainty is an unjustifiable moral and emotional assault. One may argue that Father Arnall is only a character, or that the Catholic Church no longer teaches such things (many other churches surely do), but this is to pretend that the suffering of our forebears means nothing, that it says nothing about the system of worship and instruction that permitted it. Such a view is incompatible with the compassionate faith that Hitchens invites his readers to defend. Yet someone as wise as Michael Novak can still write (again, in National Review):
Finally, atheists . . . have always been a spur to Biblical self-understanding, by raising questions, doubting, throwing down insulting or even respectful intellectual challenges. It was from the pagan intellectual class that many of the early Fathers of the Church (Origen, Clement of Alexandria, St. Augustine himself) came to Biblical faith, and they usually remained in close dialogue with their unbelieving peers, much to the benefit of their own understanding of their faith.
This language—“a spur to Bibilical self-understanding”—admits that such understanding develops over time, but forgets that at any point on the line, what you saw was what you got. One day the Catholic Church teaches that infants who die unbaptized cannot commune with God; another day (April 20, 2007, in fact) a theological commission argues that maybe they can. It’s unlikely that the mothers of those infants are interested in the “intellectual challenges” they present.
Hitchens recalls the words of Tertullian, an early Church Father: Credo quia absurdum. If one believes something “because it is absurd,” he ought at least to allow that others will disbelieve it for the same reason. Philosophers have credited many absurdities, but those less frequently served at the pleasure of states and armies. Whether one joins Hitchens in insisting that “the metaphysical claims of religion are false,” one might start by pointing out that these claims don’t need believers in order to be true.
To put it another way: If one acknowledges, along with Derbyshire and Novak, that there is a progression or evolution in effect, one should agree to proselytize more humbly, and to advise constant and vigorous confrontation with even the most obnoxious of secular challenges. If one can’t meet those, does one really deserve to meet one’s Maker?
Hitchens shouldn’t be let off so easily, either. He’s shaved with Ockham’s razor, and he knows that, as he wrote in an article about Mother Teresa, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence . . . what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” What shouldn’t be dismissed is that a world prepared to sneer at man’s religious inclinations is one dramatically impoverished.
If religion’s metaphysical claims are man-made, its moral claims are, too, and plenty of those even Hitchens admits are true. The religious impulse is proof that man isn’t only interested in being moral; he’s also interested in what forces compel that morality. Forget the origins of the universe. Hitchens is right to reject the prima causa proof, which can be infinitely regressed: “What caused what caused the Big Bang?” The provenance of morality, to say nothing of man’s insatiable, sometimes murderous curiosity about it, is more bewildering. Paul Johnson took a stab at it in the London Spectator:
Shakespeare had a God-like ability to penetrate to the heart of things which seem to us intractable. After pondering painfully over space, time and the universe, I have a reassuring feeling that the solutions are more likely to be found by poets than by scientists. For it is imagination which forms the bridge between humanity and God.
Imagination, while showing itself to be valuable, never claims to be fact. Insofar as religion emanates from imagination, and doesn’t claim to come from burning bushes, angels, golden tablets, or blinding lights, it escapes the most important of Hitchens’s objections—not that it particularly cares to. Religion may yet be a gift from God, but interpreting and using it for good is an achievement, one for which it’s our privilege alone to keep on trying. To that end, Hitchens is guilty only of kicking up this quintessence of dust and seeing, or trying to see, what it’s really made of.