Why was Christopher Hitchens wrong?

How Hitchens wasted precious time focusing on the wrong battle

Photo by Alex Bunardzic (2021)

I spent some time binging, watching as many videos featuring Christopher Hitchens as I could find online, and also reading many of his books. I became seriously fascinated by his eloquence, by his erudite approach to thinking, and also by his acerbic sense of humour. It really is quite a treat to watch Christopher debate with many of his opponents. I must admit that watching him debate tends to give me a natural high, a high one typically gets when observing a virtuoso at work.

It is that much more hurtful to me to see such brilliant man waste such immense intellectual capacity on shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, why even bother to engage in silly conversations with people whose livelihood is closely tied with religion? Isn’t it painfully obvious that those people would never ever allow themselves to admit that their religion is not perfect? Or, as Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

So, to watch debate after debate where Hitchens is so brilliantly debunking so many facets of various religions, is an exercise in frustration. There is a saying that we cannot wake up someone who is pretending to be sleeping. That’s exactly the frustration one feels while watching Hitchens unfurl his pearls before the proverbial swine.

Why was Hitchens doing that?

I must admit it’s unclear to me why would Christopher Hitchens, a brilliantly intelligent man, waste his breath on such debates that could at best be described as passe. Instead of dredging the remnants of the embarrassing past, wouldn’t it be much better if he were to focus his razor sharp intellect on more progressive things?

To be honest, I have spent many years, nay decades, working with all kinds of people and meeting all kinds of people from all over the world, and never, not even once did I encounter any semblance of religion. Of course, had I chosen to mingle with clerical people, which is to say with people who make their living preaching some religious doctrine, it would’ve been a different story. But why would I do that? Not being interested in things that used to be important in the times before we had science and technology, there is really no reason for me to revisit such archaic worlds.

But Hitchens, for some strange reason, decided to make it his life’s calling to lurch from one inane, thick skinned priest/rabbi/imam to the next one, speaking in his loud voice at them, not getting anywhere. Why? Obviously, nothing can be gained by doing that. Dull, thick skinned people will not all of a sudden become sharp and sensitive (especially not if, as Sinclair pointed, their livelihood depends on them remaining dull and clueless). Such people are a write-off when it comes to sophistry and rational thinking. So why bother with them?

I think (and I’m aware that this thought is a stretch) that Hitchens got besotted by his intoxication with science. He didn’t seem capable to look beyond science, and because of that, he felt that religion is the main enemy of scientific way of thinking.

However, although religion is indeed anti-science, nothing is gained by lambasting religion. To attack religion in the twenty first century is to basically get caught while punching down. Yes, we can all laugh at people who believe that the Earth is flat, that a son of God was born from a virgin mother, and so on. But in reality, noting is gained, nothing is clarified by pointing out such ridiculously inane beliefs. We can do better than that.

It is amazing to me that a man of such intellectual capacity would get caught in such a stupid trap. We have lost such an amazing thinker to the frivolous world of cheap, base diatribes against the flimsiest of human concepts — religion.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

To get a closer look at the entrapment Hitchens apparently fell into, we need to first take a quick look at science. What is science? In a nutshell, we could say that science is an intellectual discipline that aims at explaining observable phenomena. There is one peculiar aspect of that discipline — it starts from the categorical premise that the only way to properly describe and explain some phenomena is by ruling out any and all mental factors. What that means is that science outright bans intelligent design. For science, any natural phenomenon is an outcome of completely blind, random processes.

The starting premise of science, then, is the fact that the most likely state of the world is chaos. The likelihood of something being somehow ordered is always much lower than the likelihood of it being unordered, random. Science defines that likelihood by the concept called entropy. Chances are always greater that some part of our world is going to spontaneously get messy than they are that it is going to spontaneously get neat and ordered.

That approach, of course, is diametrically opposed to religion, which claims that the world and all phenomena in it are created by an intelligent, all knowing, all powerful supernatural person. Science negates such explanation, and insists that there is no intelligent observer nor is there an intelligent intervener who designs the phenomena.

So, on one hand we have a primitive system of thought that defers all explanation to a higher being whose superior intelligence has designed and built everything. On the other hand, we have another primitive system of thought that defers all explanation to a random process which produces endless variety of phenomena by pure chance.

Both systems are falling short of satisfactory explanation. They are pitted against each other in a futile tug of war. An intelligent person would not stoop down to that debasing dog fight. So, why was Hitchens doing it?

I’m afraid to say it, but it looks like Hitchens, in his haste to prove how inane all religions are, managed to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater when he followed the scientific creed and categorically denied the role mental factors in the order of the world. Of course, he was right in adamantly denying the existence of a supernatural person (a heavenly daddy), who takes personal interest in every human being and listens to their prayers. But just because such possibility is easily refuted, it does not automatically mean that there is no place for mind the enter the picture. By insisting that mind is a mere epiphenomenon that happens by random chance, Hitchens found himself entrapped in an old fashioned, nineteen century view of science. A lot of scientific discoveries have happened since those days, and sadly an intelligent man as Hitchens was, somehow failed to pay attention to those developments.

Which is truly a pity, as I am sure had he abandoned his prolonged but unprofitable and toxic fight with religions, he would’ve gifted us with much more profound insights.