Christopher Hitchens
What’s puzzling about how Hitchen’s thinks is that he doesn’t seem to think that he holds a faith about ultimate reality. Faith seems to be something most everyone else is afflicted with, but not him. About Einstein: “It is quite clear … that he put his ‘faith,’ as always, in the Enlightenment tradition.” About totalitarian systems: “whatever outward form they may take, [they] are fundamentalist, and, as we now say, ‘faith-based’.” When describing the great loss he felt after forsaking Marxism, he says that he writes “as one whose own secular faith has been shaken and discarded, not without pain.”
These statements are scattered throughout the book, as are many statements that directly or indirectly reveal what he himself believes to be ultimately true. Early in the book he mentions “[t]he argument with faith,” and it is his construction of that argument as a secular atheist that we get in the book. Evidently, however, Hitchens does not see what he’s doing as an argument from faith. Very early in the book, on page five, he tries to get round the implications of his (non-Marxist) secular faith as faith by making this point “about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not belief. Our principles are not a faith.” One wonders if this usually careful thinker understands that he has pulled the wool over his eyes with those two sentences, or why he has not seen that they contradict a statement he makes in the middle of the book when dissing miracles: “it takes a certain ‘leap’ of another kind to find oneself asserting that all religion is made up by ordinary mammals and has no secret or mystery to it.”An argument with faith is an argument from faith.
What I’m on about is this. An argument with faith is an argument from faith. Hitchens seems to think that leaning on secular materialism sans Marxism somehow sets him free from the implications of holding an ultimate faith assumption. It ain’t gonna happen. It isn’t even that atheists make a leap of another kind in their assertions about the nature of life’s big questions. It is a leap of the same sort. It is a leap of faith, albeit the object of faith is different than that of believers. For all arguments against faith are arguments ultimately from faith, spring how they may from an atheist.
And, yet, Hitchens seems not to have bricked himself completely in yet. Although one may sense in his rhetoric, such as in the clear denial that his belief is not belief, attempts to fully dissociate himself from whatever existential anxiety he faces at times over his deep faith in secular materialism, he has left himself a few air pockets, such as this one. When he writes about “the unquenchable yearning of the poor and the oppressed to rise about the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent,” in the same breath he continues: “For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned.”
On the other hand, when Hitchens offers a generous, heart-on-sleeve glimpse into how his atheistic faith emerged, it is difficult for readers not conclude that he has indeed quite abandoned any notions of anything other than the existence of a strictly material world. He begins with a story from his childhood about “a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith, named Mrs. Jean Watts.” When he was a boy of about nine, attending a school on the edge of Dartmoor, Mrs. Watts was taught Hitchens lessons about nature and the Christian scripture. I can imagine, having visited a friend who lived one step from Dartmoor until her death, the young Hitchens and his fellows thrashing about the fantastically otherworldly beauty of the shrubby moor with Mrs. Watts. Hitchens writes that he liked Mrs. Watts, an affectionate and childless widow who had a friendly sheepdog. The “pious old trout,” he writes, “would invite us for sweets and treats after hours to her slightly ramshackle old house near the railway line.”
Although he doesn’t say how he fared under the spell of the nature lessons while on walkabout through the purple moor grass, bracken ferns, dense gorse, and yellow flowering heather, we are told that he frequently “passed ‘top’ in scripture class,” where he excelled in looking up assigned verses from the Old or New Testament, and then telling the class or the teacher, orally or in writing, what the story and the moral was. “I used to love this exercise…. It was my first instruction in practical and textual criticism. I would read all the chapters that lead up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it, to be sure that I had got the point of the ‘original’ clue…. However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said, ‘So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the tress and the grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple or orange, how awful that would be.'”
Hitchens then tells of his “conversion” (my word, not his). “I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. The secrets of the genome were as hidden from me as they were, at the time, to everyone else. I had not then visited scenes of nature where almost everything was hideously indifferent or hostile to human life, if not life itself. I simply knew [his emphasis], almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way round.”
The adult Hitchens looks back on this knowing moment and gives it the high register of an “epiphany” (his word for it). Recognizing that he does not “remember everything perfectly, or in order” after it, he writes that he began to notice “other oddities” about religion (some he briefly describes). Then came a time when he was “presented with” what he took to be a huge objection to religious faith, which for him evoked a decisive knowing moment about the existence of God. The headmaster, who led the daily services and prayers, “was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one evening. ‘You may not see the point of all this now,’ he said. ‘But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones.’ Again, I experienced a sheer stab of indignation as well as disbelief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible. I was nearing thirteen, and becoming quite the insufferable little intellectual. I had never heard of Sigmund Freud — though he would have been very useful to me in understanding the headmaster — but I had just been given a glimpse of his essay The Future of an Illusion.”
Of this transformative period of his life, before his “boyish voice had broken,” Hitchens writes early in chapter one that he had concluded that religious faith “wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos ” and “is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.” This is how he thinks in god is not Great, and it reveals his rejection of what is traditionally called faith. But it is gradually replaced by another faith, another belief in what is taken to be the ultimate source of all reality, secular materialism, as it is typically called today. This faith is the basis of the book’s argument against religion.
Atheists, like Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all religionists, hold deep faith commitments, and it is not uncommon for some people to reach those commitments through a series of soul-stirring personal experiences during childhood that eventually come to be interpreted with a certain ultimate meaning. In Grand Rapids, after giving us the wink that we were dealing with “a dreadful old atheist,” Rushdie shared how he arrived at his. He grew up in a Muslim home in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his grandfather “was a devout believer and his father was a scholar of Islam but not religious.” The home was a model of intellectual openness and “friendly to lively debates about religion,” in which the young Rushdie was free to vent his agnosticism and never received answers that he considered sufficient to justify the horrible violence occurring nearby, year after year, between Muslims and Hindus in the name of their religions.
At age 14, he was sent from Bombay to Rugby School in England. There, Rushdie had his own decisive knowing moment. He explained that everyday in Latin class (I think it was; apologies for reconstructing this from scribbled, handwritten notes) he would get completely bored and stare out the window across the green to “the ugliest chapel I had ever seen.” After considering this ugly sight for many weeks he asked himself, What kind of God would let his followers build such an ugly house to him, and why would God want to live in such an ugly house? “After class I ate a ham sandwich for the first time in my life,” he told us, “and there were no thunderbolts. That day I became a disbeliever in God.”
