God is not Great - Book Report

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’ blockbuster God is not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens comes off rather crusty, arrogant and slightly irritable in his interviews - but with a fine sense of humor that can go from raspy to scathing in nothing flat. He comes off pretty much the same way in print.

The book is a fun read, but many of the arguments lack punch - not because they are not well thought out, but because they are not well enough defended. I am accustomed to heavy hitters such as Mark Twain and Carl Sagan taking on religious literalism and mystic pseudo-science (respectively) and building impregnable edifices of thought and evidence to reduce these negative forces to so much warmed-over intellectual rubble. Hitchens trips far more lightly through his arguments - engaging, humorous, but not explored from every angle.

One glaring inconsistency is actually pointed out by Al Gore in the book I am reading now, The Assault on Reason. Several of our Deist founders - the very paragons of the Enlightenment that Hitchens celebrates - remained slaveholders even while writing about universal liberty in the most florid language.

Hitchens never even addresses how mores might have developed in a strictly materialist or secular society. There is no evidence that Occidental culture would have been better off without Christianity than with. I argue in my previous blog entry, “Why I am a Christian”, that Christianity is the fount of our best mores and Hitchens never effectively counters my contentions.

I share Hitchens’ deep mistrust of religious fervor and disgust for the destructive distortions preached in the various names of God. I agree with his contention that scientifically, no recourse to the mystical is needed to explain the universe. By these lights, religion appears to be at best an atavism from the childhood of our species. Hitchens sets forth in his final chapters to prove that religion should be left behind and calls for a new Enlightenment.

But the warning remains from the previous Enlightenment and further, I think Hitchens fails to investigate the nature of human reasoning itself in sufficient depth (or really at all) to prove that we can entrust our future to reason alone, uninformed by any of our long cultural religious traditions. The leaders of the American Enlightenment felt that reason should be the foundation of our culture and their accomplishment is stunning - unparalleled really.

But reason does not exist in a vacuum. Human reason is a product of our emotions, a product of our intellectual frame of reference, a product of preconceptions so ingrained that we most often don’t even see them at work. And we wonder why two intelligent persons with only slightly different backgrounds can look at a moral problem, work their way through it with the best of intentions and the best their intellect can produce and come up with answers so divergent as to be nearly unrecognizable.

It is precisely because reason is such a fragile, derivative, refined human product that it cannot be trusted alone. It is our most powerful tool, but not our only tool. I am far from an advocate of organized religion, but at the same time, some sense of the divine, of our common value, of the sanctity of life and of our environment, some sense of awe and some sense of proportion - a recognition of the twin miracles of our self-awareness and our empathetic compassion, and at the same time, of our relative insignificance are frames we discard at the peril of becoming monsters.

God is not Great. Neither is Christopher Hitchens. But it is a tremendously fun read and if you’re in a bit of a snit about the horrible things Muslims and Christians are doing to each other and worse, the way they behave toward atheists, Hitchens scratches that itch quite nicely.

rbs