The appearance of the arrogant Antichrist in the Antipodes angered and agitated aboriginal and adoptive Australians alike. It also provoked some thoughtful responses in the 9 October issue of Eureka Street (PDF), including one by Neil Ormerod examining the logical shortcomings of Hitch's alleged claim that he knows God doesn't exist (did he really claim that!? I've only ever heard him claim to doubt it.), which I'm taking the liberty of reproducing below. — Greywolf
Christopher Hitchens' illogical atheism by Neil Ormerod
The age of muscular evangelical Christianity has passed to be replaced by the age of muscular evangelical atheism. The Christopher Hitchens bandwagon was in town as part of Sydney’s ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’. On Saturday night the author of God is Not Great spoke on the topic of‘religion poisons everything’.
Religion, he claims, makes us serfs of God, an omnipresent father-figure who will not go away and let us all grow up. Time to cast off the shackles of belief and stand as adults without the fear of God looking over our shoulder.
Hitchens’ presence caught my attention while driving home, as he was interviewed on ABC Radio by Richard Glover. I was struck by how quickly he spoke, presumably to cover up the gaps in the logic of his position. However the conversation moved on from God to Hitchens’support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; God once more disappeared from the public airways.
Listener response via SMS included some muddled defences of religion as well strident support for the author, but what caught my attention was one SMS that criticised Hitchens for his arrogance. It was impossible to claim to know that God does or does not exist, so it was arrogant for Hitchens to claim to know that God does not exist.
It seemed to me that this caller captured something of the ‘spirit of the age’. For all intents and purposes God’s existence, or non-existence, is viewed as beyond the scope of reason to settle. The existence of God is purely a matter of faith, not reason.
It is interesting to note how far we are from an earlier world view in Christianity where it was clear to everyone that it is possible to know God’s existence through the use of reason, for example through Aquinas’ ‘five ways’ . Indeed not so long ago Vatican I (1869—70) taught that it is possible to know the existence of God through reason. Vatican II repeated this teaching in the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.
The nature and causes of this shift have been exhaustively examined in the major work by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. There are religious, philosophical and political forces at work in a process that took centuries to arrive at our current cultural assumption, that God’s existence lies beyond the reach of reason.
And it is just that, an assumption. Who among us have seen a proof that God’s existence cannot be reached through the use of reason? We generally just take it as given. In fact we’re embarrassed by the suggestion that God’s existence might actually be something one can know through reason.
Religiously, Luther’s split between faith and reason were a major factor; philosophically Kant added intellectual respectability to Luther by declaring God’s existence to be beyond the reach of reason, though still a necessary postulate for practical reason and moral behaviour. But what interests me are the political forces at work.
The post-reformation wars of religion clearly gave God a bad name in the West. Religious belief had proved itself politically divisive and destructive. A new political modus vivendi needed to emerge which would prevent religious rancour from becoming social turmoil.
The Enlightenment solution was to marginalise religion from the public realm, to make it a matter of private choice, not public policy. Whereas the public realm was a realm of reason, the private realm was a matter of individual (and irrational) personal preference.
It was not that God was excluded from the public realm because God could not be known through reason; rather God must be excluded from the public realm, therefore God cannot be known by reason. If in fact God’s existence can be known by reason, then the Enlightenment exclusion of religion from public debate cannot be justified. A God that can be known through reason is a dangerous political idea!
Of course all this is a long way from providing what would once be called a ‘natural theology’. Taylor is not convinced such a project can be successful. He expends a large amount of energy simply trying to show that the exclusion of God does not necessarily follow from other assumptions that ground our culture. Atheism is not the only possibility. How far we’ve travelled from Aquinas’ ‘five ways’!
In the meantime Hitchens and fellow travellers such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) are making a claim for the intellectual high ground. Belief in God is not just viewed intellectually as quaint, but as a sign of intellectual bad will, of clinging to a childish illusion.
Perhaps we need to meet them head on at that intellectual level and revisit the teaching of Vatican I (and II)
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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