{"id":136,"date":"2009-02-13T17:11:08","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T23:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.consider.org\/blog\/?p=136"},"modified":"2009-02-13T17:11:08","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T23:11:08","slug":"hitchens-god-is-not-great-xxxi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/2009\/02\/hitchens-god-is-not-great-xxxi\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitchens – God Is Not Great XXXI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listen to the MP3<\/a><\/h2>\n

In\u00a0 my extended review of\u00a0 Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great<\/a>,” I have come to chapter 18, A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational.\u00a0 The chapter struck me as a very strange chapter, for it left me with the feeling that Hitchens lives in somewhat of a fantasy world, where atheists are a small but noble underground valiantly fighting in the face of great odds against some dark and evil empire.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Hitchens view of history is a very black and white one, where everything bad is in some way connected to religion and anything good must be the result of something other than religion.\u00a0 Thus Hitchens writes, “When we read of the glories of \u2018Christian” devotional painting and architecture, or \u2018Islamic’ astronomy and medicine, we are talking about advances of civilization and culture.” (p. 254)<\/p>\n

As much as he likes, Hitchens cannot have it both ways.\u00a0 He cannot have religion “at all times and in all places” subjecting non-believers to “ruthless suppression” (p. 254) on the one hand, but a completely absent force when it comes to the “advances of civilization and culture”\u00a0 on the other. \u00a0People are much too complex to allow for such a nice, neat compartmentalization of their various and diverse aspects of their lives.<\/p>\n

A good example of this is Galileo, whom Hitchens mentions as one who “might have been unmolested\u00a0 in his telescopic work if he had not been so unwise as to admit that it had cosmological implications.” (p. 255)\u00a0 Hitchens contrasts this with those \u00a0did kept “their innermost thoughts from the scrutiny of the godly.” (p. 255)\u00a0 Yet the story of Galileo is not so straight forward and simple as atheists like Hitchens seem to believe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Dava Sobel has written in her excellent book “Galileo’s Daughter,”\u00a0 Galileo “remained a good Catholic who believed in the power of prayer and endeavored always to conform his duty as a scientist with the destiny of his soul.”\u00a0 (p. 11-12) \u00a0As I point out in Evidence for the Bible<\/a> “Rather than a conflict between science and religion, or even between science and Christianity, the conflict was at best a conflict with the Catholic Church”\u00a0 as his works “were published and studied by protestants without conflict.” (p. 85)<\/p>\n

Rather than the titanic struggle between faith and reason that atheists like to claim, this was more an issue of a bureaucracy attempting to maintain its hold on power, as this occurred during the Protestant Reformation. \u00a0Even within the Catholic church Galileo had many supporters.\u00a0 His primary opponents were the Aristotelian professors who were driven more by conflicts between Galileo’s discoveries\u00a0 and the teachings of Aristotle than any conflict with the Bible.<\/p>\n

Similar problems plague many of Hitchens’ other examples.\u00a0 Hitchens sees “the original collision between our reasoning faculties and any form of organized faith” in the trial and death of Socrates.\u00a0 For Hitchens the matter is simple he was “indicted for godlessness and knew is life forfeit.” (p. 255) But like Galileo, things are not quite so simple.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the decade\u00a0 leading up to his trial, the democracy of Athens was twice over thrown for short periods by pupils of Socrates. When the democracy was restored for the second time in order to resort peace a general amnesty was issued; an amnesty that many must have been unhappy with given the numbers that had been killed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rather than religion as the driving force, the trial of Socrates was driven more by a mixture\u00a0 of an attempt to prosecute Socrates despite the amnesty that had been granted and fear that his continuing to gather young students around him without any change in his teachings would spawn yet more attempts to overthrow the democracy of Athens.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Much of\u00a0 Hitchens’ accounts are so vague as to be hard to judge.\u00a0 For example, writing about Gibbons, and his monumental work “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” he simply says that Hume “warned him that there would be trouble , which there was.” (p. 267)\u00a0 Exactly what he means by “trouble” and what kind of\u00a0 trouble Gibbons faced is not stated.<\/p>\n

One source of the problems was the fact that Gibbons argued that Christianity was a cause of the downfall of Rome, a view that other historians have since questioned.\u00a0 Frankly it is much more likely that the growth of Christianity was a result, rather than a cause of the downfall of Rome. Yet it would seem that in Hitchens’ world, while atheists are completely free to attack, criticize, and ridicule the views of theists, theists must not respond less they be seen as part of some “ruthless suppression.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Again this is not to argue the opposite, that the history of Christianity is all good.\u00a0 But Hitchens’ black and white approach to these questions hardly supports his claim to be on the side of the rational.<\/p>\n

This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity<\/a>: a Faith Based on Fact<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen to the MP3 In\u00a0 my extended review of\u00a0 Christopher Hitchens book “God Is Not Great,” I have come to chapter 18, A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational.\u00a0 The chapter struck me as a very strange chapter, for it left me with the feeling that Hitchens lives in somewhat of a fantasy world, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,7,14],"tags":[70,1074,123,163,169,205,234,235,240,249,494],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}