Tag Archives: Christopher Hitchens

Atheism and the body/mind problem

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A recent article about Christopher Hitchens quotes him saying: “I don’t have a body, I am a body.” This is a proposition that all atheists would affirm, but how rational is it?

Alvin Plantigna argues for dualism – that the mind and body are separate entities. The argument goes along these lines:

I can imagine a possible scenario where my mind exists separate from my body. I can even imagine that it is possible that my mind continues to exist if my body is destroyed.

I cannot imagine the possibility of my body existing separately from itself; if my body is destroyed, it is gone and I cannot imagine the possibility of it continuing to exist.

Therefore, my mind cannot identical to my body because I can imagine something is possible for it that I cannot imagine is possible for my body.

You can see Alvin Plantigna discussing the argument below and for a formal presentation of it go here.

An exercise in contrasts: remembering an atheist and a Christian

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Christopher Hitchens remembered for how clever he was and, by association, how clever his friends are; a homage to ego:

They came to mourn Christopher Hitchens in the Great Hall of New York’s Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that launched his campaign for president in 1860.

The hall was filled with family, friends and readers; intimates of 40 years’ standing, and those who knew him only from the printed page and stage appearance; all still wounded by a loss that remains fresh at four months’ distance.

Most of the memorial took the form of readings from Christopher’s own works, occasionally enlivened by editorial comment. The biggest laugh was claimed by the writer, actor and gay-rights exponent, Stephen Fry.

Christopher, he said, had condemned as more trouble than they were worth: champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics. “Three out of four, Christopher,” said Fry.

Chuck Colson remembered for the positive influence he had on others – a homage to redemption:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Colson “a fine man whose life proved that there is such a thing as redemption.”

Evangelist Billy Graham acknowledged Colson’s “tremendous ministry reaching into prisons and jails with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ” for three and a half decades. “When I get to Heaven and see Chuck again, I believe I will also see many, many people there whose lives have been transformed because of the message he shared with them,” Graham said in a statement, adding, “I count it a privilege to have called him friend.”

One Andrew Mullins from Georgia tweeted to testify of Colson’s ministry. “The man changed my life in High School. His prison ministry changed other lives, as well,” he said.

 

On hating God

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The ten commandments popped up as part of my regular Bible reading this morning and Ex 20:5-6 struck me:

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“Who”, I thought to myself, “could possibly be stupid enough to hate God?” Even though I now believe atheism to be illogical, I can empathise with being an atheist, since I once was one; being oblivious to God I can understand because even after I thought the idea of his existence was at least plausible, I didn’t want to have much to do with him. But who could hate God? If nothing else, a sense of self-preservation ought to keep one from such folly.

Not so, however. The so-called new atheists don’t so much disbelieve in God as loath him. Christopher Hitchens, shortly before his death, paraphrased the famous C. S. Lewis proposition: “if Jesus isn’t the Son of God, he is a hideous wicked imposter; his words were vane, empty and intended to deceive.” Lewis concluded that Jesus, therefore, was the Son of God, Hitchens that he was…..  a hideous wicked imposter. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al echo similar sentiments.

Blinkered fools!

Christopher Hitchens forgotten but not gone

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Christopher Hitchens donated his body to medical research as part, one presumes, of a striving after a materialist’s immortality:

In accordance with his wishes, Christopher Hitchens’ body was donated to medical research following his death less than two weeks ago; many of his followers have applauded his decision.

If Christians are right, of course, in addition to his pickled body, the real essence of Hitchens is not gone either because it is immortal and endures post mortem.

I can’t help noticing that the number of articles about Hitchens is on the wane and obviously we will hear nothing more from him. His star burned brightly when it was among us, but it is rapidly fading and I suspect he will be remembered, if at all, as a cantankerous gossip columnist for the effete anti-theist as much as anything else.

As the preacher said, “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

Christopher Hitchens misunderstands totalitarianism

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From here:

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

I think Hitchens is correct in defining totalitarianism as the enemy – although, “political enemy” would be more accurate. Where he misses the mark is identifying God as the supreme totalitarian.

In practice, the most evil totalitarians have been godless individuals who, without the restraints that fear of the Divine engenders, cavalierly visited murder and mayhem on their own people.

If the Triune God exists, as I believe he does, far from being a celestial tyrant, he is the creator of human freedom, a freedom which allowed humanity the choice of rebelling against its Creator to the cost of God himself in his atoning sacrifice on the cross.

If God does not exist, if the natural is all there is, the true tyrant is our genetic makeup and the molecules in our brains: they guarantee that no choice we make can ever be free of what they compel us to do.

Christopher Hitchens: on the way out

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Because he is dying, Christopher Hitchens doesn’t make many public appearances these days, but he did manage to attend the 2011 Texas Freethought Convention to receive the Freethinker of the Year Award.

His tenacity to hang on a little longer is overshadowed only by his determination to continue to reject God: by the benighted insights of his overweening ego, to reject God is to embrace freedom.

The closer Hitchens comes to death the more determined he seems to be to revile God’s greatest revelation of himself in Jesus Christ – an act both profoundly foolish and, from my perspective, terrifying.

I’ll miss him; God have mercy on him in spite of his monumental arrogance.

Christopher Hitchens in his foxhole

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Christopher Hitchens received the “Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year” award on Saturday, partly, I suspect, for staunchly maintaining his rejection of God while staring death in the face.

Fairly recently I had a long discussion with a young friend who has just emerged from years of university theological training. He is a universalist (he wasn’t before entering university), believing that all will eventually be saved: anyone confronted by the living God after death, he maintains, would be sufficiently overwhelmed that they would accept salvation – which would come through Jesus Christ. No amount of protesting that this would remove a person’s God-given free will would budge him.

In the case of a person like Christopher Hitchens who is determined to reject God come what may, universalism definitely can’t work since, for Hitchens, being compelled to inhabit heaven with God would be… hell.

From here:

During the convention, Dawkins praised Hitchens for his continuance of atheism even in the face of death and for proving that there were indeed, “atheists in foxholes,”….

[….]

“We have the same job we always had,” he told the crowd, “to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”

If, as Hitchens says, there is no absolute truth then the rest of what he had to say in that last paragraph can’t be absolutely true, including the very next thing he says: there is no supreme leader.

The Epistle of Hitchens to the Atheists

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From here:

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition [sic]. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

…. And don’t keep the faith.

But, of course, Hitchens is keeping the faith:

Faith that a dying organism can bolster the immunity of a randomly assembled conglomeration of molecules – otherwise known as comrades – to a belief in the transcendence which alone offers a remedy for the despair inherent in mortality.

Faith that he, Hitchens is right, that his mind, body, rationality, faculties and voice are subject to no other forces than the material.

Faith that the reasoning abilities he is so proud of, even though they are nothing but the flotsam of a chaotic universe, are, for a mysterious reason known only to himself, more trustworthy than those of Mother Teresa – a creation of the same primordial pandemonium – someone who has earned Hitchens’ undisguised scorn.

Faith that a trust in nothingness is somehow nobler than trust in a Creator.

Faith that the best efforts of medical science to prolong the time that a person struts and frets his hour upon the stage is of consequence when set against eternity.

A wonderful illustration of Psalm 14:1.

 

 

Changing Christopher Hitchens' mind

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Try as I might, I can’t dislike Christopher Hitchens as much as I think I should.

At the very end of the following interview, when asked whether any evidence could change his mind about God’s existence, he concedes that, although none has yet, it is not impossible that some could appear that would.

This admission is refreshingly honest and brings him closer to agnosticism than atheism; perhaps we are seeing a mind concentrated by its imminent demise.