Critique of "God is Not Great" by Christoper Hitchens

[Pat Mustard]

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The following text is my critique of "God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything" by Christopher Hitchens. It is not a very positive critique, but I would be interested to hear people's thoughts!


At the age of 9, Christopher Hitchens was "frankly appalled" when his biology teacher offered the existence of the natural world as evidence for God's generosity and power. As written by Christopher in his book: even though at the age of 9 he knew nothing of biology or the theory of evolution "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences". The reason I mention this rather religious sounding revelation of Christopher's is because I myself had an extremely similar revelation upon hearing Christopher speak in a video [1], in which he offered the following astounding truth claim:

"And we can be as sure as we can probably need be, that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, (...) nor this amazingly complex  billion year period of evolution, we can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and i can be meeting in this room, we are not the objects of either of these plans." (2:55 in the video)

WOW! But how? How can we possibly be sure about that? Given that we are located inside these "plans", how can we possibly see outside of them to know from whence the plans themselves came? Well, i never got to learn how, I was required to take the claim on faith because not the slightest explanation was offered for this astounding truth claim. No facts, no reasoning. Despite as you'll notice if you watch the video, stumbling noticeably with the first 12 words, fully aware I've no doubt that he was over-extending and therefore giving voice to an untruth, Christopher simply moved past the gaping hole in his argument with the successfully un-challenged-by-the-audience self-confidence that only a person preaching to the converted can pull off quite so flawlessly, after quite such an obvious public stumble.

When I saw the gaping absence of fact and reason in his argument, I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that Christopher had managed to get everything wrong in just a single sentence!

In that moment of near religious revelation, I knew then that I simply had to read his book.

In reading the book, one thing comes across for sure - Christopher enjoyed writing this text. It's erudite, playful and clearly finds significant joy in trashing the holy cows of religion, in a restrained British Oxford sort of a way. And why not? I have actually been sufficiently inspired by his writing to adopt a similarly irreverent style and agenda with the present writing, as I in turn cheerfully set out to trash his "critique of religious writings from a more evolved rational perspective" .....from an even more evolved rational perspective.

On the subject of rational perspectives, Christopher is clearly in possession of a good one. His meticulous study of religious statements demonstrates skill in critical thinking, logical infractions and factual inconsistencies are spotted with an eagle eye and recorded for posterity in his book. He surfaces his awareness and understanding of a wide range of abstract scientific concepts: evolution, genetics, physics.

Some things are lacking in Christopher's analysis of religious writing though. Firstly, and most importantly, any sort of analysis is missing from the analysis, Christopher just records his perceptions and mind's interpretations as if he were reporting from an assumed "literal" interpretation of religious writings. Here's the problem with that in a language that might be meaningful to atheists - his analysis of religious writing isn't a scientific, rational analysis of the historic writing. When a rational analysis has been conducted, the analysis leaves behind evidence that the rational analysis took place. Rational analysis is always conducted from a containing theory or a containing set of axioms, if this has in fact taken place then the theory and axioms will be mentioned and discussed in the analysis. Example: i might notice and record the fact that finches found on the Galapagos islands have differences to finches that live elsewhere. This factual reporting of and by itself tells no rational story though, in order to tell a rational story about it I need a container theory. Darwin's theory of evolution is such a container theory that allows me to tell a rational (evolutionary) story about the difference between the finches. Mention of Darwin's theory in my writing is evidence that I've conducted a rational, scientific analysis of the finch difference.

If no mention of axioms or containing theory is made, it's still true to say that an unconscious analysis of sorts may have occurred, it is true to say that Christopher's mind will have scanned the religious texts and extracted meaning from them. It's essentially a "trust my own mind's interpretations without bothering to check the reasonableness of my interpretations" sort of analysis. Using the language of psychology this is called a concrete operational or pre-rational analysis. As an example of the sort of conclusions this thinking style arrives at, if applied to the physical world, concrete operational analysis reveals that the earth is flat, and reveals that the earth is in the centre of the solar system. Because that's how it looks, right? It's obvious to anyone who simply trusts his or her direct subjective perception (and does not bother to look any more deeply into the situation) that the earth is flat and that the sun is going round the earth.

In this "lacking any rational analysis" respect, Christopher's analysis of religion shares certain themes with the biblical analysis of reality. The situation as noted by Christopher is simply reported without justification and explanation, the reader is expected to take the reasonableness of Christopher's interpretation completely on faith. Christopher it seems has missed out on the single key insight of postmodern philosophy and developmental psychology in the last 100 years, which is that there is no "literal" reading of any text, all reading is relative to a particular human perspective and the correct perspective to use to read a text is the perspective of the person who wrote the text.

In the same way that a lack of mention of container theory or axioms evidences a lack of rational analysis, a lack of mention of perspective evidences a lack of consideration of perspective. In fact, the word "perspective" appears just a single time in the entire book, in the following sentence, which is not in connection with his own understanding of the writings he is analysing "Looking back down the perspective of time".

Christopher it seems can take a good rational perspective on the objective world (he understands genetics, evolution, physics) but (with his lack of awareness of human perspective) he lacks the capacity to take rational perspectives on the subjective writings of other humans - he cannot take rational perspectives on human perspectives. An analysis of Christopher's writing from the framework and axioms of developmental psychology (see what I did there?) clearly pin-points Christopher's own level of psychological development. A capacity to take rational perspectives on the objective world accompanied by an inability to apply the same rational perspective to analysis of the writings of other humans points to a level of development corresponding to an early rational perspective from the era of the European enlightenment. Whilst this perspective was an advanced, leading edge perspective when it appeared 300 years ago, human thinking has evolved in dimensional complexity significantly since then - a complex thinker of the modern era has a full extra dimension of cognitive complexity from which to conduct his or her meaning-making.

But nevertheless, Christopher's perspective is a perspective we all go through. In the developed world, a human typically enters this perspective around the age of 12 and many people never actually move beyond it. And within that perspective his writing perhaps has value for people who are attempting to step out of (religious) thinking styles that are even more ancient than Christopher's own rather obsolete enlightenment perspective. Within that context, this is a great book! However, deep thinkers and people at the leading edge of contemporary human thinking may struggle with boredom when reading 300 pages of writing whose greatest intellectual achievement is to notice how primitive primitive people are and how inexplicably nonsensical human knowledge sounds when read from the incorrect perspective of a perspective that is different from the perspective it was written.

In his talk[1], Christopher starts by explaining his basic issue with religion, which is that religion represents a primitive human understanding from the childhood of humanity. This is clearly a valid criticism of the religious worldview, a worldview which of and by itself lacks sufficient explanatory power to understand the modern scientific world. But the same criticism can in a sense be levelled at Christopher's own 300 year old enlightenment perspective which I would argue equally offers insufficient explanatory power in a world of multiple developmental worldviews, worldviews that in the present era have suddenly been pulled very tightly together in the information age of the Internet and global communications. The religious worldview may well be a more primitive worldview than Christopher's, but it is nevertheless still very much in existence on the planet and the evidence suggests it's not going anywhere any time soon, at least - not outside a small handful of developed world countries that are convincingly moving beyond it. Because the modern (developed world) rational worldview and the religious worldview have suddenly been thrust together by technology, it's no longer sufficient to deal with the problems of the resultant clash of human values by laughing at the distant savages from the comfort of knowing that they all live very far away. It may well be great fun and very satisfying to mock other people's primitive beliefs as Christopher does in his book because doing so leaves us feeling smug and superior, but surely at some point we've actually got to find a way to constructively share the same planet with people who may perhaps be more elemental than ourselves. And preferably, without engaging in or attracting the fighting, violence, and suicide bombing which appear to be evidence in the present era of a clash of developmental worldviews.

How should we do this you ask? How about by raising Christopher's agenda to it's own expectations of rationality and conducting a rational analysis of religion that seeks to understand, rather than a pre-rational flat earth analysis that can do nothing more than ridicule and judge. I think Christopher is correct in his final conclusion of the need of a new enlightenment but incorrect in his regressive conclusion that this will be achieved by resurrecting 300 year old European enlightenment perspectives and forcing them down the throat of human brothers and sisters who happen to be at lower levels of development.

>snip<


A PDF of Christopher's book may be downloaded from here:

>snip<

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Your wall of text is so good it's already been put into audio book form. I've even seen an ad previewing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMJxPWAnaFg

Amazing how it captures the essential nature of your argument.