{"id":57,"date":"2008-05-09T05:00:28","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.consider.org\/blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2008-05-09T05:00:28","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T11:00:28","slug":"hitchens-god-is-not-great-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/2008\/05\/hitchens-god-is-not-great-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Hitchens – God Is Not Great III"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This week I return to my extended review of Christopher Hitchens, \u201cGod Is Not Great<\/a>,\u201d Similar to Dawkins and Harris, serious problems abound in the early pages of the Hitchens\u2019 book. Many are simply statements of personal opinion with at best questionable background or support, such as his claims that \u201cReligion spoke its last intelligible or noble, or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism.\u201d (p 7)<\/p>\n

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Other statements go straight to the heart of Hitchens critique. An example of the latter can be found in his claim that \u201cthe believer still claims to know! Not just to know, but to know everything.\u201d(Author\u2019s emphasis) This would be a valid criticism if it were true.\u00a0 But it is not. In fact not only does this fail as an accurate description of religion in general, or even of Christianity in specific, it would be hard to find believers who would actually make this claim.<\/p>\n

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Now a few paragraphs later, Hitchens does qualify this statement somewhat, by restating this criticism as \u201cthe sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have the essential information we need.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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While this is a somewhat more defendable statement, its open ended nature, and the general context of the discussion leads to the conclusion that Hitchens is still referring to essential information about everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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One problem with this restatement is that \u201cessential\u201d is a somewhat relative term as there are many degrees of essential.\u00a0 Ask someone what essential knowledge is to live in the United States, and you will likely get completely different answers than if you ask someone who lives in a third world country. Essential knowledge for one, such as how to grow food or find it in the wild, may be completely irrelevant for someone who buys their food at a market.<\/p>\n

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Yet, if one tries to provide some definition to Hitchens\u2019 use of \u201cessential knowledge\u201d either his argument disappears, or the definition is invalid.\u00a0 If \u201cessential knowledge\u201d is defined as the knowledge needed for our relationship with God, then I would say that this not only applies to Christianity, but that it has a biblical warrant.\u00a0 Jude 3 speaks of \u201cthe faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.\u201d\u00a0 In the Bible we have all the knowledge that we need for our relationship with God. But even here, there are few Christians that would say that we know everything there is to know about the Bible.<\/p>\n

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But a view of \u201cessential knowledge\u201d limited to our relationship with God renders Hitchens\u2019 argument somewhat empty, has he spends a great deal of time contrasting this belief in \u201cessential knowledge\u201d with all that we have learned in science. \u00a0While we have learned a lot with science, Hitchens would hardly argue that a more detailed understanding of Gravity or knowledge of quantum mechanics is needed for salvation. Thus an understanding of \u201cessential knowledge\u201d limited to our relationship with God renders his argument a non-sequitur.<\/p>\n

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Hitchens needs believers claiming to know everything about everything because it justifies what would otherwise be a major inconsistency in his argument.\u00a0 Hitchens is highly critical of the pre-scientific beliefs of early believers and he sees this as a reason why religion as a whole is to be rejected today.\u00a0 For example he says \u201cAugustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman [may have] been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and will be no more of them tomorrow.\u201d(p 7)<\/p>\n

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Yet when it comes to atheists, such erroneous beliefs are explained away by Hitchens, for earlier atheists were \u201cgreat and fallible imaginative essayists.\u201d\u00a0 Atheists don\u2019t claim to know everything about everything, so it is ok if they made mistakes in the past, as that is part of the learning process.<\/p>\n

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This distorted view of religion can be seen in much of Hitchens\u2019 criticisms, such as when he asks \u201cHow many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to \u2018fit\u2019 with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities?\u201d (p 7)\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Though I would drop the slanting found in words such as \u201cneedless\u201d and \u201ccontortion,\u201d pretty much the same could be asked of atheism. Just look at the assumptions and efforts they go through trying to explain how life started, some even going to the point of arguing that life was brought to earth by aliens from another planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The history of Christianity can be seen as a people striving to come to a better understanding of, and relationship with, God.\u00a0 This journey has been full of missteps and even back steps, of wrong turns and dead ends, but on the whole has been marked by a better understanding; and the fruits of this have been seen in what I would argue have been great advancement made by society that came out of Christianity, from the birth of modern science, to the origin of Human Rights, from end of slavery, to the advancement of civil rights.<\/p>\n

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Throughout the world Christians working through their churches are ministering to those in need, not only in their local communities, but around the world. They have been, and continue to be a tremendous force for good.<\/p>\n

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This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity<\/a>: a Faith Based on Fact.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen to the MP3\u00a0\u00a0 This week I return to my extended review of Christopher Hitchens, \u201cGod Is Not Great,\u201d Similar to Dawkins and Harris, serious problems abound in the early pages of the Hitchens\u2019 book. Many are simply statements of personal opinion with at best questionable background or support, such as his claims that \u201cReligion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,14],"tags":[1071,1074,123,456,525],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"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=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consider.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}