"God is Not Great"

I was at Borders the other day, where I spend a good deal of time studying in the cafe. Nearby, a teenage girl was reading the much-discussed diatribe by Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great.

For those who are not familiar with the book, Hitchens is one of those authors who has contributed to the growing genre of atheist polemic, the foremost example being Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Like the The God Delusion and Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Hitchen's God is Not Great is a lengthy rant about the ridiculousness of religion, the stupidity of believers, the danger of religious organization, and a few mumblings about scientific progress.

The purveyors of the New Atheism have chosen polemic as a primary means of discourse because they feel it is the only proper way to engage religion. Rather than coolly discussing the matters at hand, which would put believers on an even playing field as partners in dialogue, they have chosen to ridicule their opponents in order to demonstrate their utter contempt; religion and its adherents, they argue, are so stupid as to deserve nothing more (or less).

But the fact is that they have instead open themselves to ridicule. To take just one example from Hitchens's book: at one point he manages to confuse the words 'canonical' and 'synoptic.' On page 117 of the paperback edition he writes "In order to resolve this... dilemma, reverse-engineering is again applied, this time much more recently than the frantic early church councils that decided which Gospels were 'synoptic' and which were 'apocryphal.'" As anyone who knows anything about biblical studies can tell, Hitchens is far out of his game here. The opposite of 'apocryphal,' meaning 'hidden' and thus not included in the canon, is 'canonical'- belonging to the canon or 'authoritative rule' of Scripture- not 'synoptic,' a technical literary term used to categorize the first three canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, on the basis of their structural and material similarities. These are more-than-basic terms in biblical studies, and his inability to use them properly demonstrates nothing except his complete incompetence in discussing religion. He simply has no business opening his mouth on the subject.

At another point he propounds to discuss the traditional arguments for theism, but he never actually gets to that point. Instead, he levels ad hominem attacks against ancient and medieval philosophers. In his fifth chapter, The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False, Hitchens ridicules Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Maimonides on the basis of their false beliefs concerning the scientific and social world- the growth of the human embryo, the structure of the solar system and the cosmos, the equality of ethnic groups and races. If they were wrong about this, how much more were they wrong about metaphysical truths. Or so goes the argument.

This, of course, is nothing more than marching forward behind the shield of the Enlightenment and modernity, which claims against the ancient and medieval premoderns and the contemporary postmoderns that all information is of a lone and rather bland type; there is only empirical observation and facts.

Yet as the ancients knew, and as postmodernism is teaching us anew, not all knowledge- or ways of knowing- are equal. The great philosophers of classical antiquity and the great theologians of the early, medieval, and reformation churches were encumbered by an egregious inability to properly understand the world due to their disregard for hypothesis, experimentation, and repetition. But the scientific method is not the only way of knowing.

Philosophers and theologians have made idiotic mistakes when they apply philosophical or theological methods to studying the empirical, visible, verifiable world. Yet in the case of the former, the ancient philosophers made enduring observations about the nature of logic and the structures of mathematics- and both, as a result, the nature and structures of being. Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, and others who applied their minds unaided by scientific observation made contributions to mathematics- and thereafter science- that endure to the present day. Aristotle might have believed that women were mutants and slaves were not persons in the strict sense, but a syllogism is no less a hard and fast reality of the structure of existence for those gross inaccuracies.

Hitchens- like theologians before him!- is right to point out where theologians have made terrible errors and justified unspeakable horrors by straying from the bounds of theological inquiry and trying to force all of reality into a theological mold. Reality is too messy for that.

But Hitchens would do well to remember simply that: not all knowledge is verifiable by hypothesis, experimentation, and repetition. Scientific knowledge is the analysis of facts that are part of a wider reality of truths, and understanding the knowledge is pluriform because it represents a pluriform reality is the first step toward keeping both science and theology within their proper bounds. Maybe then, Hitchens and his ilk would be forced to actually discuss the merits of theologians speaking on theology rather than engaging in silly name-calling.