Hitchens – God Is Not Great XXXII
Listen to the MP3
In my extended review of Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great,” I have finally reached the last chapter, “In Conclusion: The Need for a New Enlightenment.” Hitchens opens the chapter with a discussion of a quote by Lessing, where he says that given the opportunity to know all truth, he would reject the offer in favor of pursuing the truth, even knowing he would remain thereby in error. Of course this raises the question of why pursue something if obtaining it is not the goal.
But for Hitchens this is not a question of a choice between “All truth” and the pursuit of truth. Hitchens equates knowing “all truth” with faith, and for him the question becomes a choice between faith and reason, faith and modernity, faith and technology, and even a choice between faith and civilization itself.
Of course this is a false choice. I am religious and I certainly do not claim to know all truth. Far from it and I spend much of my time pursuing it. But this error goes to the heart of the atheist’s argument, and so in an odd sort of way it is fitting that Hitchens end his book with this error.
In reality it is not that those who are religious claim to know the truth, are dogmatic, blindly accepting certain truths, lack skepticism, or do not have a passion for inquiry. There are certainly some who are religious who would fit this description, just as there are some who don’t believe in god for whom this would also be an accurate description. Frankly some of the most closed minded and dogmatic people I have run into have been militant atheists. Not all to be sure, but the simple fact is that these traits can be found amongst all groups, atheist and theist alike.
Those who believe in God can seek the truth and can learn and grow just like atheists. As many have pointed out, including a few atheists, science had its roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview and many of the earlier greats minds of science, like Kepler, Newton, and even Galileo were Christians. The real problem is not that we don’t search for truth or look at the evidence, but rather that theists reach different conclusions and consider other possibilities, possibilities that are prohibited in the atheist’s materialistic worldview.
And that is the real problem. Christians make no bones about it, we have a worldview, a framework in which we evaluate the evidence and apply reason as we strive to learn the truth. Atheists claim that this shapes how we look at things and the conclusions that we reach; which is quite true, for that is exactly what frameworks do.
Where the atheists go wrong is that they also have a framework, a framework in which the only thing that exists is the material universe governed by natural law. The atheist worldview shapes how they look at things and the conclusions they reach, just as much as the Christian worldview does for Christians. Frankly, it probably affects them more. While most Christians realize that they have a worldview, most atheists not only don’t, they frequently deny it. For them, they don’t have a worldview that shapes their thinking, they just have reality, and see everything else as wrong, all the while claiming confidently not to be dogmatic, but open minded.
For the atheist, the existence of God, the supernatural, that we have a soul, etc., does not fit into their worldview and so for them, these things not only do not exist, they cannot exist. While they are adept at pointing out problems in the theist worldview, any problem, lack of evidence, or evidence to the contrary for the atheist worldview, is simply ignored with the claim that “we will figure it out someday.” When it is demonstrated that the odds against the things they believe must have happened are unimaginably large, they just cling tightly to the minuscule possibility at they happened, however small. Their worldview permits nothing else. In fact they sometimes reply, as some have with the origin of life, that however small the odds, it must have happened because we are here.
While they are quick to attack religions for their irrational beliefs, often going to the point of casting this as a battle between faith and reason, their attacks are often themselves irrational, which I have repeated pointed out, is the case with Hitchens. The real problem in seeing this as a battle between faith and reason, is that atheists have a distorted definition of faith, which is in reality for them, simply a belief in something that is false. But that is not faith. Faith is trusting something to the point of acting on it. In the Christian worldview, you have faith in God by following his teachings, the first step being accepting Jesus as your savior.
Atheists have faith in their worldview just as much as Christians do in theirs. Which worldview is right? Well I have written two books, Christianity and Secularism and Evidence for the Bible laying out my view of the evidence. On the other hand, as I have show many times here, Hitchens arguments are based on sloppy thinking, errors and irrationalities, and thus hardly provide a firm foundation for his claims.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
