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Christopher Hitchens - The Atheopic Principle

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Some atheists cannot seem to make up their mind as to whether Judeo-Christianity is to be besmirched because it reduces humanity to lowly, wretched sinners or because it exalts humanity to made in God's image unique creatures.

Either way, Judeo-Christianity is to be besmirched; on this atheists agree, but why remains a subject for atheism's cognitive dissonance.

On October 11, 2007 AD at 5:30 pm "A debate, dialogue, and discussion" took place between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath which was entitled "Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World" (find the transcript here, find the video here).

I wanted to consider a few statements made by Christopher Hitchens:

Well they don't in and of themselves, but I just would submit the likelihood that what Edwin Hubble saw through that telescope, the red light escaping at speeds that none of us here are really capable of imagining towards the ultimate expansion and collapse of the universe-that all that happened so we could be sitting here is to me in the very, very highest degree, improbable.

That a process of evolution by natural selection just on our own tiny little planet which in its own tiny little solar system is the only one on which life can be supported, everywhere else just in our little system, all the other rocks are either much too hot or much too cold to support life as is much of our planet which we know has for a long time been, not recently either, on a climatic knife edge and which is still cooling, only one, and on this planet, 99.8 percent of every species that ever evolved died out. This is an extraordinary way I think to make sure that Homo sapians come to Georgetown.

It is the, only the most extraordinarily self-centered species, could imagine that all this was going on for our sake, that's why I don't like people saying that their religious faith is modest or humble. It's the reverse, it's unbelievably soliphistic and that's why you get people apparently abject, much too abject for my taste like Mother Teresa. Oh, I'm so humbled I can hardly bother to feed myself, but out of my way because I'm on a mission from God. No, this is arrogance, as a matter of fact, and it claims to know what it cannot know.

I could say that Einstein was right when he said the miracle is, of the natural order, the miracle is there are no miracles. Understand this paradox: the natural order doesn't interrupt itself. The sun doesn't stand still at midday. God doesn't catch a child as a kid falls out of a window or heal lepers around him and none of that ever happens.

There are some points worth dissecting however, since Christopher Hitchens plays one tune compulsively I will make reference to posts which already cover the topic at hand.

I believe that this qualifies for the label of an argument from personal incredulity: he finds it incredulous, peppers it with emotive and disjoined assertions and concludes that we are just here and that's all and the proof is that here we are and that's all-which is the very pinnacle of atheistic philosophy.
Whether we are incapable of imagining the speeds at which the red shift occurs and that Christopher Hitchens decided that it is "very, very highest degree, improbable" that this has any anthropic meaning is subjective.

His reference to "our own tiny little planet which in its own tiny little solar system is the only one on which life can be supported_" was the premise of my essay post Atheism and the Cosmic Insignificance of Humanity and Everything. He fails to note that the Bible beat him to that punch millennia ago. Yet, he comes to one conclusion while the Bible comes to another-his conclusion does not necessarily follow from his premise.

Furthermore, the point of humanity's insignificance when compared to the cosmic scale is quite the coincidence because that it exactly what one protein, in one DNA strand, in one cell, in the nail of my left pinky toe said about the rest of my body.

The statement that "99.8 percent of every species that ever evolved died out" I have dealt with in the essay New Atheism - Further Evidence of Its Deleterious Effects. Extinction rate has nothing to do with asserting either creation via intelligent design nor it-just-happened-to-happen-ism. Engineers know all about parts that are designed to wear out; why could not the intelligent designer also employ this design feature? Because to Christopher Hitchens it is extraordinary? But this is merely another argument from personal incredulity.

The statement about creation occurring "for our sake" and that it is a fallacy to correlate religious faith with modesty or humility was dealt with in my essay The Quadripartite Equine Riders. This, again, is an argument from personal incredulity because it would not be immodest or not humble to believe that the universe is going on for our sake if it is going on for our sake-it would be a mere statement of unbiased fact.
However, even according to the anthropic principle the purpose of the universe is not restricted to our sake since we do not know what other purposes the creator may have. In fact, the anthropic principle is about life in general and not just human life in particular.

FYI: astronomer Hugh Ross, Ph.D. has provided a PDF file with some of the fine tuning in the universe at this link.

Note that Christopher Hitchens and those who share his anti-supposed-hyper-anthropocentrism outlook have not escaped that which they condemn (activist atheists rarely do) as they also hold to concept of the hyper exaltation of humanity as being the pinnacle of evolution.

Certainly, Christopher Hitchens replaces the concept of miracle with luck, guidance with chance, design with happenstance, etc. Yet, his view holds that human beings are the pinnacle and even though there is no purpose towards design still; the universe, the Solar System, the Earth and all of the minutia related to them-from the natural laws, to orbits, positioning, etc.-all happenstantially came to produces us.

Note also that this is not so much a statement about the human nature or that of, let us say, the truly born again (rather than referencing generic "religious" people) as it is a psychologically revealing statement about Christopher Hitchens' own nature, apparently. There is no logical and not necessarily an emotional relation between exaltation and lack of humility. In fact, biblically speaking; humility follows from exaltation.
From Moses asking God, "Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?" (Exodus 3:11 - I detailed Moses' scientist like reactions to this event here) to Isaiah stating, "I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple_Woe is me! For I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:1, 5) and John the Baptist stating of Jesus, "There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose" (Mark 1:7). Humility is evidence in true believers and is commensurate with the very concept of meekness.

Now, Christopher Hitchens has certainly thoroughly criticized Mother Teresa but is he really asserting that she was full of herself, immodest or not humble?
Furthermore, I do not recall that there is any Darwinian constraint against lack of humility or modesty. Are Christopher Hitchens' condemnation based on some atheistic morality? Is it a pet peeve? Who knows; he is simply behaving in a typical atheist fashion; he deals out condemnation without a premise and considers his own outrage as justification.

Question: how do Christopher Hitchens and Albert Einstein know that "there are no miracles"?
Answer: they do not.

Note, however, that he stacks the deck of his argument; he qualifies it thusly, "the natural order doesn't interrupt itself."
Firstly, we should ask "How do you know"? Perhaps there are as of yet undiscovered natural laws or rare and unexpected combinations of known laws interacting in manners that would cause nature to interrupt itself.
Secondly, no one claims that the natural order does interrupt itself but rather claim that it is logically sound that God, who invented the natural order, can and does interrupt it at will. This was one of the points I made in the post On Natural Laws and Miracles ; just as an engineer can fine tune and turn an engine on and off, or change the RPMs God can do likewise with His creation because He is outside of the engine.

That "none of that ever happens" is clearly a worldview-adherence-well-within-the-box-atheist-groupthink-assertion. For, how does, or how could, he know that none of that ever happens?
He could investigate each and every miracle claim and conclude that a miracle did not occur. He can somehow gain knowledge of each and every time that, for instance, a child did not fall out of a window and determine that God did not stop the child from falling.

Clearly, such research is impossible to accomplish. Thus, he must rely on his chosen worldview which tells him, a priori, that none of that ever happens. He possesses a defeater for any and every miracle claim and it is a view that is forced upon him by his atheism: miracles do not happen.

How does he know that miracles do not happen? Because there is no evidence for miracles happening. And why is there no evidence for miracles happening? Because miracles do not happen. But can nothing count as evidence of a miracle? No, because since miracles do not happen evidence for the occurrence of a miracle is impossible.
You see the problem? This anti-freethought view would cause one to deny the evidence even if they personally witnessed a miracle.

As one time atheist C. S. Lewis stated in his response to David Hume's arguments against miracles:

Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely "uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have.

Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.1

As usual, Christopher Hitchens, as a debater, is clever, charming, funny, emotive, condemnatory, exiting, and assertive but as usual piled fallacy upon fallacy until he builds a tel of phantasmagoric proportions.

  1. 1. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1947), p. 123

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