Bioenergeia

The impact of the new wave of atheism cannot be understated. Public intellectuals such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens with their atheistic and sometimes antitheistic apologetics have influenced an entire generation of young critical thinkers. Even though much of their direct media exposure has waned in recent years, their rhetoric remains pervasive. Whenever discussions of faith arise, their influence is palpable. Their arguments have framed the debate of theism and atheism for the foreseeable future. Here I would like to peel back the layers of rhetoric and truly analyze and critique the core arguments made from Christopher Hitchens in his #1 New York Times Bestselling book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. With Hitchens especially, his precision as a writer and venomous polemics made for a potent appeal against religion but it is beneath his prose that I aim, from the Orthodox Christian perspective, to expose the foundational weaknesses that underlie his arguments.

His first main assertion of God is Not Great is primarily an attempt to frame the subsequent arguments, namely that religion is man-made and not from a divine source. He identifies instances where religions appear to be influenced by its surrounding culture, and that it is hostile to outside inquiry and therefore should be treated as a human artifact subject to any other criticism of a man-made ideology. While I agree that some primitive tribes and cults opportunistically prey on the naivety of their followers to advance their own interests, this general critique does not apply to Orthodox Christianity. There are individual examples of the Desert fathers such as St. Anthony the Great who lived a life of minimalism and asceticism, subsisting on only sparse vegetation and the Holy Eucharist. The lives of the saints of our Church testify to self-denial, humility, and sacrifice often for little to no recognition until many years after their deaths, commonly as martyrs. This is not to say our faith is true solely because of the way they lived their lives, but it certainly paints a picture of our faith and others being radically contrary to the human instincts of praise, wealth, and safety. These examples illustrate that Orthodox Christianity, contrary to Hitchens’ claim, cannot be reduced to a system designed for the temporal benefits of its founders or its adherents.  

Hitchens builds on this foundation to one of his core arguments, which is that faith is incompatible with the scientific method and faith claims contradict demonstrable scientific conclusions. This is a ubiquitous talking point across all new wave atheists, that faith and reason, religion and science are somehow at odds. The problems with this view are historical and logical, let’s begin with history. If we look at the origins of the scientific revolution which produced the methods we understand today such as the hypothetico-deductive scientific method, we find thinkers such as Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler. All these men were faithful Christians, and this was not an accident of history. These men all believed that because the world was created by a rational creator, it must contain regularity or natural governing laws. This regularity, or even the idea that the universe is not chaotic nor purely entropic is something that was a direct inspiration from Christian theistic metaphysics and is the foundational principle of scientific inquiry. If we didn’t believe the universe had intentionality and order within it, there would be no purpose in doing experiments and generalizing conclusions. In a chaotic universe, nothing would be obliged to conform to previously observed apparent patterns. The connection between Christian theism, the belief in the regularity of nature, and scientific inquiry are directly causal, and this is further illustrated in the example of Scottish Empiricist philosopher David Hume. Hume, like Hitchens and other new wave atheists, believed knowledge only came to us through observations and sense data but made a devastating critique of the scientific method known as the “Problem of Induction”. He pointed out that the very idea of scientific inquiry depends on the assumption that the future will resemble the past: that tomorrow will follow the same laws as today. But this assumption is not something we can ever observe directly. All we ever see are past events, and to assume the same will hold in the future is already to assume what we are trying to prove. For Hume, this meant science rests on a kind of faith in the orderliness of the universe, not on a rational foundation nor direct observation. This is an excerpt from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part II, where he questions the rational basis of induction:

  “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning. Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. Even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding.”

He continues with this shocking conclusion in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part I:

    “…but when we go beyond the evidence of our senses and memory, and form conclusions from the experience of past objects, and suppose the future to be conformable to the past, this belief is of the same nature with the belief of the gods of Homer, who lived like men, married, and engaged in wars and battles.”

David Hume, an atheistic empiricist philosopher par excellence, made the conclusion that the belief in the rational basis for scientific inquiry is of the same nature as “the belief of the gods of Homer”.  Notice that shortly after philosophers such as Hume tried to construct worldviews which defined themselves apart from belief in Christian theism, they conclude that science is no longer a rationally justifiable process. This was not a coincidence but the outworking of their premises. Just as the Christian conviction in a rational Creator naturally gave rise to belief in the regularity of nature and thus to the scientific revolution, the atheist’s rejection of such metaphysical grounding naturally led to skepticism about science’s very foundations. In both cases, the logic of the worldview carried through to its conclusion. This demonstrates that not only did Christianity inspire the scientific revolution historically, but it provides the metaphysical foundation for it as a rational process.

Hitchens then turns his sights on the validity of religious metaphysics. The thrust of his claim (albeit mired by some very uncharitable comments about theologians like St. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas) is that the claims of religious metaphysics, such as the soul, miracles, and the afterlife are not justified with empirical evidence and are better understood by naturalistic means. While this may appear to cut to the heart of the issue, it dances around the deeper question. The soul, by its very nature, couldn’t be observed under a microscope, so of course it can’t be verified empirically as it is known by other means. Implicit in Hitchens’ claim is that we should only believe things that can be verified empirically. He doesn’t come out and say this, because it is much easier to refute than his less falsifiable claim. One could simply ask is the implied claim: we ought to believe things that are known to our direct senses, something that can be known empirically? This is sometimes referred to as the “Peripatetic axiom” (the idea that all knowledge begins with sense data), which collapses under its own premise as the axiom itself can not be known through sensory experiences. We find quickly that empirical knowledge can tell us a great deal about the material world. But to make sense of anything at a foundational level we need to make knowledge claims about things that extend beyond sense experience. Once this bridge has been crossed, however, Hitchens forfeits the grounding of his dismissal of religious metaphysics.

The last broad category God is Not Great covers is influence of religion on the ethics of society. One of his central claims is that religious beliefs are used to justify atrocities that otherwise would have been considered immoral. There are two main issues with this claim. Firstly, there are obvious counterexamples of non-religious societies which commit atrocities that religious people would consider immoral. Notable examples include the Holodomor under the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward under Mao’s China, and the mass killings under the Khmer Rouge. All these regimes directly persecuted religious expression and committed atrocities with death tolls in the millions. Hitchens does attempt to address this rather obvious counter argument by saying that non-religious regimes are just as capable of committing such moral crimes but only when they take on a religious character. This is a reference to a state like North Korea where one could argue the state has a religious disposition towards the Kim dynasty. Making this concession significantly weakens his original argument though. With the concession, his claim amounts to little more than ‘atrocities happen because people act religiously, a tautology that strips the argument of its explanatory power and makes it unfalsifiable.

The second issue with his original claim is that atrocities have also been justified in the name of scientific theories and discoveries. One need not look further than Hitchen’s home nation to see the justification for brutal British imperialism rationalized with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin’s famous work of evolutionary biology “On the Origin of Species” is not as often referred to by its complete title “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. The British Empire, among others, quickly seized on this framing of their geopolitical interests and used it to justify their global domination as the peak of human evolution. Though it is worth noting, this was not the explicit intention of Darwin’s writing about subspecies of non-human animals. This paints a more complex and nuanced view of history than is implied by Hitchen’s initial claim. Namely that human beings can be irrational and destructive for many different reasons, and that the presence of faith alone is too myopic a variable to strongly predict when and where atrocity and chaos may appear.

The New Atheist wave that once enthralled a generation of precocious, intelligent young people intended to remove faith from public life and replace it with reason. But upon examination of a titular work such as God is not Great, their arguments are embodied by a rhetorical house built on a foundation of sand. The Orthodox Church, with its philosophical depth, historical witness, and living saints stands upon the rock. A foundation strong enough to endure the test of time and provide refuge from despair and meaninglessness.