I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I saw it when the reviews starting coming in for Dawkins’ The God Delusion. By that, I mean the impression, on reading the reviews, that the reviewers either hadn’t actually read the book, or were seemingly incapable of understanding the words printed on the page in black and white.
And now, with the publication of Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, I’m getting this very strong impression of deja vu.
Here’s Richard Harries, a retired bishop of Oxford, and now a life peer, reviewing the book in The Guardian this weekend…
Harries starts as he means to go on:
First Dennett, then Dawkins and now Hitchens: and of these three recent diatribes against religion, Christopher Hitchens’s is the fiercest.
My dictionary defines diatribe as "an invective discourse; a strain of harsh criticism or denunciation". Well, while I would concede that both Dawkins and Hitchens are both, shall we say, impassioned and florid in their discourse, I would never, in a million years, have associated the term diatribe to Dennett’s urbane and careful reasoning in Breaking The Spell. For Harries to suggest otherwise is my first yellow card, and leads me to wonder whether he has actually read the book in question.
He goes on to throw down a challenge: "But how is it that the majority of the world’s great philosophers, composers, scholars, artists and poets have been believers, often of a very devout kind? Hitchens avoids facing that question by three less-than-subtle sleights of hand."
Just before we get on to examining the three less-than-subtle sleights of hand, I would simply like to observe that in the history of humankind, before scientific truths became established, being a believer was usually the default position. Often because it wasn’t prudent to be otherwise. And I might further add that Harries’ argument is simply a variation on the "nine billion flies can’t be wrong" argument. Just because people believe in something doesn’t necessarily make it true. Ask Prince Charles about the efficacy of homeopathy, for example.
Ok, so now back to Harries’ three points.
First, he redefines in his own terms what it is to be Christian.
Well, I don’t actually read in the Bishop’s review his own definition of what it is to be a Christian, so I don’t see a rebuttal here. Still, moving on. Harries states:
The faith of Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a passionate follower of Jesus if there ever was one, who met execution for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler with the words that for him death was a beginning – is described by Hitchens as "an admirable but nebulous humanism".
This is selective quoting. What Hitchens actually says is:
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them.
So Hitchens is not implying that Bonhoeffer was a humanist, as Harries would appear to want us to believe, but that Bonhoeffer’s stance, while being that of a "brave Lutheran pastor" was similar to that of a humanist.
Moving on swiftly to Martin Luther King, Harries then states:
Martin Luther King, whom he greatly admires, is assessed primarily on the grounds that his religious rhetoric was a tool required to galvanise the Bible-reading South against racism.
Well, actually, I think Hitchens is saying more than that. It is true that he does not feel that King was a Christian, but not in the sense that Harries would want us to conclude. For example:
Christian reformism arose originally from the ability of its advocates to contrast the Old Testament with the New. The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a good mood (the classic attribute of the dictator). Whereas the cobbled-together books of the last two thousand years contained handholds for the hopeful, and references to meekness, forgiveness, lambs and sheep, and so forth. This distinction is more apparent than real, since it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favourite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. … At no point did Dr. King – who was once photographed in a bookstore waiting calmly for a physician while the knife of a maniac was sticking straight out of his chest – even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness ad stupidity. And he even phrased that appeal more courteously than, in my humble opinion, its targets deserved. In no real as opposed to nominal sense, was he then a Christian.
Here is the challenge thrown down by Hitchens, and what does Harries do? He totally ignores it. This would have been the opportunity for Harries to make his rebuttal, and to give us his definition of a Christian. But he is strangely silent. Back to Harries:
Second, Hitchens dismisses most of the great intellectual believers of the past on the grounds that their cosmology was outdated.
I think Harries must have been reading a different version of Hitchens book to the one that I have. I did not find that Hitchens dismissed anyone on the grounds that their "cosmology was outdated", but on examples of their cruelty, ignorance and bigotry, usually based on some holy writ or other. Hitchens does not dismiss people who display rationalist thinking, e.g. Socrates.
Third, he refuses to consider any modern writing that queries his relentless onslaught. Take just one example, his fifth-form argument that religion is the cause of war.
Hallo, we’re in that parallel universe again. Hitchens does recognise that dogmatism is the problem, and that societies such as Stalin’s Russia and North Korea seek to replace traditional religion with a religion of the state. The substrate may be different, but the effect is much the same.
Harries states: "Religion is rooted in our capacity to recognise and appreciate value; in our search for truth; in our recognition that some things are good in themselves". If he had used the word "reason" in place of "religion", then I would have agreed with him, but as his statement stands, I personally find it seriously wanting.
And then comes:
He seems to think that religion is the root of all evil. It isn’t. The problem lies with us, especially when we are organised in groups with a dominant ideology, whether secular or religious. His misdiagnosis is not just a baleful intellectual error, it has very serious consequences in the modern world, where religion is now such a major player.
It seems that Harries believes in some sense that religion is separate from us. I suppose the nature of his job would mean that he has to believe this, instead of the view of Hitchens (and myself) that gods and religion are self-evidently man-made. The fact that religion is still, as both Hitchens and I would concede, a major player in the modern world is not a cause for celebration, but continuing evidence that our brains are still running the original release of their operating system: homo sapiens 1.0, which has been with us from our prehistory.
Harries’ conclusion is breathtaking in its naivety:
Hitchens has written a book that is seriously harmful, not because of his attack on religion, some of it deserved, but because he will divert people away from the real problem: which is we human beings, both religious and irreligious.
Hitchens’ whole point is that religion is something that is of human origin, it does not stand outside of humanity, despite the wish of Harries and those like him. Hitchens ends his book with a clarion call:
Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. … However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of "progress" in a straight line. We first have to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. "Know yourself", said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.
Amen to that.
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