Being a somewhat systematic thinker, I’m interested in identifying Hitchens’ premises and logical trajectories. Sometimes he is helpful in this by clearly listing them out. From chapter one, here is the first list…
Hitchens lists four “irreducible objections to religious faith” and then slips in a fifth objection as a “more vulgar and obvious fact” (p4). These are his objections: that,
it [religious faith] wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking
And his fifth vulgar and obvious fact is “that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority.”
I am just beginning his book, so perhaps his perspectives on these premises and his arguments for their inter-connectivity will become more apparent to me. However, I do have a few initial reactions. Because this is a blog and not a book, this will have to be brief and sweeping! (But perhaps a book might be in order.) In this blog post I’m going to address only Hitchens’ first objection, and I’ll plan to pick up the others in later posts.
On misrepresenting the origins of man [sic] and the cosmos: This objection pre-supposes biblical literalism of the kind which denies the validity of science. It is very possible to be a person of religious faith and to take the bible seriously but not literally as well as accepting the trustworthiness of science.
I love the creation stories in Genesis because they are poetic and evocative, not because I think a supernatural being made everything in seven human days. These stories are rich and complex and beautiful and thought-provoking…when read poetically and narratively. If read literally, they lose their meaning. They become flat and simple. XYZ happened. Period. Flat and simple.
On the contrary, Genesis 1 tells a story filled with resonances and implications, images, and evocations. If we engage the stories in this way, they can make us think more deeply about things like chaos and order in nature and in society, relationships and the need for community. Hitchens conveys a respect and enjoyment of literature, but exempts the biblical narrative from the category of literature. Why? Probably because fundamentalists and literalists exempt it from that category, too. But not all people of faith do.
It’s important to remember that controversy has been going on from within the church about literalism since the development of Higher Criticism, also called the Historical-Critical Method of studying texts. There is a long and in-depth discussion of this on Wikipedia under the item “Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.” While there have been Christians arguing for literalism for a long time, there have also been many highly visible Christians, leaders within the Church, arguing against it.
Two famous sermons delievered in 1922 clearly demonstrate this diversity within Christian circles: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was countered by “Shall Unbelief Win?” These sermons show the conflict between “modernism” and “fundamentalism.” (I’m wondering how “post-modernism” comes into play. How is this era different from 1922?)
This first “irrefutable objection” of Hitchens’ is a good critique of fundamentalism (by which I mean Literalism), but not accurately descriptive of “religious faith.”
There are so many things that Hitchens gets right. So far I think the greatest weakness of his book is that he lets the fundamentalists set the terms of the conversation. And he doesn’t acknowledge that. At least not in what I have read so far.