Readings from The Portable Atheist: Christopher Hitchens

As some readers know, my wife and I are converts to the Catholic Church. A prodigal son and daughter, my wife and I had wandered far from “The Way and The Truth and The Life” before grace shocked us out of our spiritual torpor. Looking back, we realize our spiritual malaise largely stemmed from our absorption in American secular culture. We’d discarded the Christian faith of our parents and abandoned ourselves to the cheap, fleeting, distracting entertainments of modernity.

Like many of my friends during my unbelieving years, I justified my behavior by painting myself as an intelligent nonbeliever, brighter than the millions who bowed down daily to a God who was just a figment of their imagination. However, because I had briefly taken theology and philosophy classes at a Christian liberal arts college, I never fully committed to atheism, but not for lack of trying. At times, I wanted to be viewed as intelligent and “courageous” as New Atheist writers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. (I know: to be young rarely means to be wise.).

Why Read Christopher Hitchens and the New Atheists?

Many authors, including Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart, have written persuasively about the incompetent arguments of the New Atheists. One might think their popularity would have abated by now, but that’s not the case. Sam Harris, for example, hosts a popular podcast titled Making Sense, and Christopher Hitchens’ book The Portable Atheist remains a top seller on Amazon. Something more profound is going on within the culture, which I will touch on later. But because these thinkers remain popular and persuasive to many, I want to engage with their ideas and explore Catholic rebuttals.

So, to honor those principles, this is the first essay in a series of articles that will study different excerpts from the anthology The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. I might not write about the anthology every month, but I will periodically return to the collection and discuss one of the excerpts.

For this first essay, I want to examine Christopher Hitchens’ introduction to the book. Hitchens passed away from cancer in 2011, but his books, including the bestseller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, continue to influence millions. His introductory essay in The Portable Atheist encapsulates many of his common objections to religion in general and Christianity in particular, so it’s worth studying.

Christopher Hitchens’ Introduction to The Portable Atheist

Hitchens’ introduction, as entertaining as it sometimes is, makes a lot more spurious claims than truthful ones. Whenever he discusses the meaning of the word “God,” for example, it is clear he doesn’t know what the rich philosophical and theological tradition actually means when referring to the word “God.” For instance, Hitchens writes:

Let us grant the assumption of the religious. Someone or something was indeed “present at the creation,” and gave the order to let matter explode and then let the evolutionary process begin on this planet.

Hitchens goes on to mock this idea, but his working definition of God is wildly false. God is not a “someone or something” and does not “give orders” like a drill sergeant, and that is because God is not, as Hitchens thinks He is, another item within the universe. Throughout the essay, Hitchens seems to think that all religious people believe God is some Zeus-like figure who exists on an obscure planet in space and performs voodoo magic on the cosmos.

Later in the essay, Hitchens spends an entire paragraph comparing people’s belief in God to belief in the tooth fairy, a common argument of the New Atheists. However, according to the Catholic Church and other world religions, God is not another changeable item within the universe like a planet, a table, a person, a tree, etc. Instead, based on sound philosophical deductive arguments, God is the name we give to the eternal, unchangeable, transcendent source of all that exists within time and space.

To not understand this basic concept of God is inexcusable, especially from someone who considers himself an intellectual. In a similar vein, I may not be an expert on physics. Still, if I wanted to argue for or against the accuracy of the big bang theory, I would presumably read and study the opinions of experts in the field, not, let’s say, a collection of essays about the big bang written by high school juniors who failed their AP physics exam.

But that is the kind of mistake Hitchens often makes in his essay: he refers to ignorant people’s beliefs instead of wise people’s. For instance, he argues that religious people are enemies of science, which is absurd. Does Hitchens know that Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest, was also a famous physicist who theorized about the big bang? Does Hitchens know that Gregor Mendel, a Catholic priest, was a founder of the modern science of genetics? Those are just two of the many religious people who have contributed significant scientific advances to mankind.

Christopher Hitchens, Violence, More Science

Hitchens, not surprisingly, also argues against religion by pointing out violent acts committed by religious people. However, that is not an argument. Some Christians have been violent; some have been heroically charitable. Neither proves nor disproves Christianity; it only proves that people, and this shouldn’t shock anyone, at times act hypocritically.

Atheists have also been violent. Some of the most violent regimes of the twentieth century were consciously atheist and committed abominable atrocities. Unlike Hitchens, I would not point to those facts and then claim that all atheists behave like intolerant totalitarian dictators. But that’s the kind of splashy yet empty rhetoric Hitchens employs throughout his essay.       Another dubious claim by Hitchens is that religion was our first failed attempt at science (an obvious equivocation error) and that many religious people today are trying to drag us back to our prehistoric roots:

We did not know that we lived on a round planet … we did not know of our close kinship with other animals … we imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous …. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.

I laughed out loud after reading that section again. His accusations, like many others in the essay, are simply false. For example, many intelligent religious people knew that the earth was round in the ancient and medieval periods. We did know of our close kinship with animals (Aristotle defined us as thinking animals, for instance). And I doubt there are many today who believe thunder portends evil, just as I confidently believe most people don’t think sinister Olympian gods can wield lightning. But again and again, these bogus and fallacious claims are scattered throughout Hitchens’ essay.

Not that I don’t sometimes agree with Hitchens. When he laments about the preachers who believe God punishes the sexually immoral with floods and earthquakes, I concur. But I am a religious person who abhors religious violence and extremism, so I am not sure why he carelessly attributes extremist ideas to all religious people.

Why Do These Arguments Convince So Many?

Why did I ever take any of these arguments seriously? And why do so many others today? One can answer those questions in many ways, but one reason is that many in our culture have unconsciously accepted a myth. The Enlightenment brought us science and reason, so now we are emancipated from the superstitious ignorance of religion. Combine that myth with growing ignorance of our Christian faith’s philosophical and theological tradition.

It doesn’t take a professor to see that many young Christians will turn away from Christianity when hearing the rhetoric of Hitchens and company. No one, after all, wants to be told they are stupid, but that’s how religious people are thought of and portrayed, not only by pseudo-intellectuals but also in many other aspects of our culture. For instance, lots of vitriolic political rhetoric is aimed at Christian caricatures. In film and television, stock characters often portray Christians as hypocritical killjoys.

And I lived in this anti-Christian milieu, far from any prayer life or church life for virtually all my twenties, so I followed along, scared to dissent, with most of my friends who ignored religion altogether or dismissed it as a vast practical joke. I was young and wanted to appear clever and wise to my peers. That meant conforming my beliefs to their popular secular beliefs.

Out of pride, it was hard for me to admit, even after finally recognizing the vapidness of a lot of secular culture and the shallowness of popular atheist arguments, that I was becoming interested in Christianity again. To many of the lay people I associated with, I might as well have admitted that I wanted to start basing my life decisions upon midnight consultations with an Ouija board.

Conclusion

Through Grace and after years of struggle, I recognized my ignorance and eventually converted along with my wife. In my first article for Catholic Stand, I wrote about that conversion: “Why I Remain Catholic.”  However, I know that a lot of my atheist brothers and sisters, many of them decent people, were not as fortunate as my wife and me. So, what can be done? That’s a big question. I won’t pretend to have all the answers, but I can point out two things that have helped me, my wife and my two children.

The first is knowledge if it’s the acquisition of knowledge without the intent to hurt one’s intellectual opponents. We can, for instance, study our Catholic faith and the beliefs of people who disagree with us. We can attend Mass with our children and talk with them about the Mass and our faith in general. And we also need to live out our faith in joyful humility; we need to be examples to the secular world of what Christian living looks like. This is easier said than done, I know. I pray daily for that grace, and I succeed some days better than others.

Above all, we must seek the strength to endure no matter the difficulties we inevitably face. After all, today, I am a grateful Catholic, but the culture that formerly pulled me away from the faith is the same culture I confront daily. May you and I, brothers and sisters, pray daily for grace, wisdom, and courage.

Amen.

Sources

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, edited and with introductions by Christopher Hitchens. Da Capo Press, 2007.