Choice in Dying

I mentioned earlier that Hitchens does not begin his book with the arguments for the existence of god. There is a good reason for not doing so; namely, that these arguments (or so-called arguments) are of little interest or importance for belief in the kinds of gods that the religions trade in. Religious gods have to be interfering gods, gods which not only take an interest in what is going on here “below”, but also, from time to time, intrude in these goings on in an identifiable way. Take Judaism, Christianity and Islam as examples of this. A fundamental doctrine of each of these religions is that a god has in fact interfered with the workings of nature, not only, as some of them now claim, by twiddling with the knobs of the evolutionary project, but by encountering some human beings face-to-face, as it were, and leaving them not only with the conviction of his existence, but giving them commandments as to how they are to act and to be.

The central event of Islam is the giving of the revelation from God at Mecca by the angel Jibreel (or Gabriel, in his English manifestation) which is contained, now, with divine perfection, in the Qu’ran. Of course, Mohammed had what are imagined to be later revelations from “Allah” — as imaginary as any other supposedly heavenly being – which are accordingly included in the Qu’ran. Some of these later revelations are mere convenience to legitimate ex post facto things like his marriage to more women, including a special dispensation to take as wife a woman who had been the wife of his son, and for whom he had a sexual attraction, as well as other revelations having to do with the murder and enslavement of other tribes. It is interesting that these later, and often much more brutal revelations, are believed to abrogate (or negate) earlier revelations, which are milder and more full of the milk of human kindness. The central event of Christianity is the supposed resurrection of Jesus, for it is on this alleged miracle that the entire weight of Christian doctrine is based. The gospel of Mark makes it clear that the resurrection is the moment of Jesus’ adoption as God’s son, and thus the principal warrant of the incarnation. It was Paul himself who declared that, if Jesus was not raised from the dead, then his faith would be empty and all his hopes would have been for nought. The key Jewish event is God’s covenant with Abraham, and the promise that he would be the father of a great nation, a covenant which is remembered barbarously by mutilating the penises of little boys, and which, with later revelations  assured the descendents of Abraham of their special place in God’s purposes. In each case, the central revealing moment is different, yet essential to the existence of these religions as religions is some event counted as revelatory of supernatural beings and doings. Logical arguments for the existence of god cannot, in any case, manage to live up to these quite particular requirements, which makes of them merely hopeful pointers in the direction of some agency upon which the whole universe is dependent, but no assurance that such agency is either living, personal, or intelligent, or, most important of all, capable of intruding its purposes (supposing it to have any) into the warp and woof of the lives of human beings on a minor planet in a universe of an immensity so vast that it reduces earth to an insignificant, miniscule dot.

It seems perfectly clear, on the basis of what we now know about the evolution of life on earth, that there is at no point any necessity of positing a divine or supernatural being to explain our existence. Though many Christians now claim that they accept the science of evolutionary biology, they hedge their bets at this point, and generally hold that, whatever else can be explained by evolution, the existence of human beings, as conscious, rational animals, cannot be explained by the processes which, they acknowledge, have brought about the incredibly complex bodies with which we are endowed. This in fact contains a contradiction, since they then go on to say that the one thing that evolution cannot account for is consciousness and moral awareness. In doing so they effectively deny what they have already affirmed: that evolution by natural selection accounts for the fact, wonderful as it may be, that consciousness and moral awareness are the product of bodies and brains whose existence is fully explained by evolutionary processes, and that these capabilities are prefigured in the kinds of awareness possessed by animals other than the human, animals like chimpanzees, gorillas, and other primates closely related to human beings. There is simply no basis in science for the religious claim to human exceptionalism. We are products of evolution like every other animal on this planet, and the claim that we are the product of a special intervention by god is, in fact, a rejection of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and this move in the shell game of theological prevarication should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves.

The point is, as Hitchens points out, telling the story of Laplace and Napoleon, that we no longer need the god hypothesis, which can do no good, but can still do a great deal of harm. Not, as Hitchens says, that this hypothesis was ever necessary in order to make sense of life and the world. There have always been doubters and questioners, though most of them, in the ages of faith, came to a sticky end. But, knowing, as we do now, that religion in the past maintained its monopoly over ordinary people by force and the threat of torture and death — as Islam still does – the claim of the religions that they speak for a god or gods is to be regarded with a degree of suspicion whose measurement should be calibrated in accordance with the numbers of disbelievers who in ages of faith suffered the supreme penalty for casting their votes of non placet.

Religion, however, often changes its tune, when it is under threat of irrelevance, as Hitchens says:

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outstretched hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. [67]

We have troubling evidence of the brutality of that religious embargo on doubt and question in the way that Islam is behaving around the world today. A religion which has yet to pass through a reformation, or encounter a period of enlightened thought, Islam reflexively responds to doubts and mockery with threats of violence, decapitation, stoning, hanging, bombing and the menace of even greater harm. The barbaric act of beheading Daniel Pearl on TV, and sharing this barbarity with the rest of the world (as they have shared many others), is a premonitory indication of what lies in store for any who trespass on what they consider holy. We are sometimes told that this is Islamism, a distortion of Islam and not Islam itself, but it has yet to be shown that Islam has ever existed without the bigoted vigilance and violence of its more fundamentalist members, or that there has ever been an Islam without a political programme which concerns the whole of society. The belief that there can be a liberal Islam is something for which evidence is still required; failing that, Islamism just is Islam, and we have been warned, however many Muslims do not share this fascist ideology born from the pages of the Qu’ran.

Hitchens tells us that “if we chance to forget what it must have been like” to live in a society governed religious norms,

we have only to look to those states and societies where the clergy still has the power to dictate its own terms. The pathetic vestiges of this can still be seen, in modern societies, in the efforts made by religion to secure control over education, or to exempt itself from tax, or to pass laws forbidding people to insult its omnipotent or omniscient deity, or even his prophet. [67-8]

Hitchens thinks that even religious people speak with embarrassment of times ”when theologians would dispute over futile propositions with fanatical intensity,” (68) but he seems to overlook the fact that many people consider such disputes, which are ongoing as I write, and still ongoing as you read, these words, not only not embarrassing, but a simple necessity if the world is to bow to the commands of their gods, and to order their societies according to several wills of all these imaginary beings. Hitchens says, of theologians, that “[w]e have nothing much to learn from what they thought, but a great deal to learn from how they thought.” (68) I fear that we will not be able to defeat religion in this way. We still need to attend closely to the what, for the threat of religion lies not only in its failure to base itself on evidence and reason, but on the positive beliefs which animate its adherents and lead them to the harm the continue to do, not only to human bodies and the body of the earth, but to the minds of young and old, who are taught to see within those tortured ideas the truth about themselves and others, and sends them out, in the names of their several imaginary friends, to do battle with the forces of reason.

This is why reason must be given its head in the debates that are ongoing, and why those who oppose unreason must continue to use the tools of reason to undo the apparent rationality of believers. I do not think we can ignore, as Hitchens and other new atheists do, the complex and arcane reasoning of believers. Hitchens moves too rapidly, I think, from a rough consideration of William of Ockham’s argument that it cannot be shown that there is not an infinite regress of causes, for trying to stop it at any stage with the postulation of a first cause which we call god leads on to the question of what is the cause of this first cause.

Thus the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator. [71]

To this Aquinas would have an answer, which is not dependent on tracing back in time to the first efficient cause. Hitchens says that

Ockham himself simply had to fall back on the hopeless position that the existence of god can only be ”demonstrated” by faith. [71]

But faith itself, Hitchens says, ”subject to sharply diminishing returns,” (71) which is why, he thinks, that religion

often doesn’t in fact rely on “faith” at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected “proofs.” The evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments and miracles. [71]

The problem here is that, unless we are prepared to explore the supposed proofs in their strongest form, it is probably best to leave them alone. Contemporary Thomists have worked up these proofs to a pitch of exactitude that demands a response in the same or at least similar coin. The number of atheists who have addressed this reasoning is not small. Michael Martin, Richard Gale, Kai Neilsen, Antony Flew, and J.L. Mackie are but a few of those who have given these arguments serious consideration. It is true that these arguments are extremely rarefied and so dependent sometimes on the precise definitions of words as to make their premises highly questionable, that there is some doubt whether, in the form offered, there is any response that can be made to them, aside from the question why we should tred these well-trodden paths once again. Perhaps this explains why Hitchens does not address them. But in the face of the continued work of believers like Feser and Oderberg we ignore these arguments at our peril. The object is to defeat religion on its own terms, not simply to ignore them.

Hitchens says that

Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. [71]

This is something that he will be discussing in the coming chapters. Notable by their absence, however, are the “cosmological” arguments which are comprised in Aquinas’ “Five Ways,” arguments that play a foundational role in contemporary philosophical theology.  Hitchens discusses in the next few chapters the proofs which he mentions: “arguments from design, revelations, punishments and miracles,” but the major (cosmological or ontological) arguments provided by people like Alvin Plantinga, Edward Feser, and other religious philosophers are ignored. This is possibly the most serious omission from Hitchens’ book. How much this omission subtracts from the value of the book must be considered, and we will come to this in due course. Not everyone is convinced that these arguments require a response. However, it is enough to say here that merely arguing that the posit of a first cause demands the further positing of a cause of the first cause, and so on indefinitely, is not enough to defeat the Thomists. It is only fair at some point to say why, and I will leave this question open in what follows, and merely give my assurance that, before the end of this series, I will address it in a more comprehensive way than the core new atheists have yet done.