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Entry: Hitchens' Hubris Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris#2751 Post contents: G.S. -- Yes, thanks for an interesting response. I see I misspelt Scobie, but excuse myself on the ground that I far prefer the conservative Waugh to the (relatively) liberal Greene. Conservatism and theism certainly do seem to foster art in a way liberalism and atheism don't, but I don't regard that as evidence for the truth of theism. Beliefs can be useful without being true and if human beings have evolved to be religious, it's presumably healthy for us to be so, in some sense. Dawkins and Hitchens in fact seem evidence for that: they've filled their God-shaped holes with an ideology allowing them some of the nastier religious comforts: the <i>odium atheologicum</i>, one might say. <i>If you don’t believe in anything, and don’t think that anything transcends the material world, then you might as well drop the moral pose, given that things like love and justice and reason are just memes full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.</i> Not so. Love, justice and reason are independent of God and the supernatural. Right and wrong do not exist by divine command but by necessity: God cannot tell us that murder is good and make it so. And in a Godless universe, 13 is still a prime number. <i>I.e., they find an infinite number of Universes an idea easier to entertain than a Creator.</i> By saying that you actually betray your failure to grasp the nature of God. An infinite number of Universes (X) is indeed an easier idea to entertain than a Creator (Y), unless Y is simpler than X, which standard theology denies. An omnipotent God could create one universe or an infinite number. Therefore, ceteris paribus, by Occam's razor the multiverse is a simpler explanation than God. <i>The Christian faith that you regard with such contempt is the creative font of the great works of culture, art, and literature of Western Civilization.</i> 1) Even if that were true, it's post hoc, ergo propter hoc. 2) It's not true: the Parthenon, Aeneid and very much beside are pre-Christian. 3) Men like Mozart, Milton and Newton would not have been recognized as Christian by the early Church, and were't recognized as such by many of their contemporaries. <i>And it also means no science—there is a reason it is called Western science, and there is a reason it originated in Europe. I’ll give you a hint: Logos.</i> A term from pre-Christian Greek paganism. Plus, science took an awful long time to appear and appeared in a very limited area if we assume that Christianity was responsible for it. Seems to me Protestantism has a much better claim than Christianity and Protestantism was a heresy that would have been stamped out if its Christian opponents had had their way. Sent at: 2008 07 04