Admittedly, I was disappointed several weeks ago when a scheduling conflict prevented me from having the opportunity to meet the well known atheist and anti-theist Christopher Hitchens. He was in town promoting his newest book, a memoir, entitled Hitch-22.
Despite Hitchens’ formidable reputation as “Public Enemy #1″ amongst theists, especially evangelical Christians like myself, I’ve always liked the guy.
Granted, his worldview and mine are worlds apart but his personality is, to me, something like a magnet. He’s a “bad boy intellectual”–a cross between … say … James Dean and Noam Chomsky … maybe. Anyway, I’ve always been struck by his charisma, though I’ve never been impressed by his ideas. I know a lot of other folks are immediately turned off his by his brash and brazen demeanor but, in a strange way, I admire his audacity and one-of-a-kind flair.
He uses language well and is honestly persuasive and passionate. His mind is as quick as his tongue and his wit is quicker still. More often that not, Hitch is downright funny. Droll and dry? Definitely. But I crack up whenever I read his clever and carefully nuanced articles or hear him respond with an absolute zinger in debate.
But while Hitch would be a great guy to sit down and have a beer with, I’d think twice before hiring him out as a philosophy tutor. His vehement critique of theism just doesn’t hold up against any careful examination or real intellectual scrutiny. In a review of Hitchens’ most important work, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Yale journalist Mark Oppenheimer wrote:
It was with sadness that I read God Is Not Great, which I hoped would be a thoughtful summa against religion, one with which great religious minds could do battle, just as Bertrand Russell and Father Copleston squared off about atheism on BBC radio in 1948. It is an intellectually shoddy and factually inaccurate rush-job, written with blithe ignorance of what his antagonists actually believe. Completely certain that there is no rigorous thinking in favor of religion, Hitchens is almost gleefully ignorant of important scholarship that would disprove his case.
And from a Christian perspective, another review of Hitchens’ book points out his specific intellectual fatal flaws. These include: (1) ignoring reasonable Christianity, including its rich intellectual heritage as manifested in the work of guys like Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Edwards, Chesterton, Lewis, Schaeffer, Plantinga, Moreland, Craig, and others; (2) misunderstanding the theology of design and the fall; (3) dismissing positive Christian contributions throughout history and across cultures; and (4) disregarding the rationality of miracles and the validity of biblical scholarship.
So, for all these reasons and more, I cannot embrace what Hitchens’ believes. But all that said, I still would have liked to have met him when he was in town that day; hence, my disappointment.
But that disappointment was displaced by sadness upon hearing the recent news that Hitch had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and that his prognosis was not good–is not good.
A few days ago, Hitchens published an article in Vanity Fair on the “Topic of Cancer.” In it, he gives a candid description of his experience of being taken “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.” Particularly striking is the way Hitchens talks about his treatment, especially his experience of chemotherapy. Simply sitting around attached to a slowly emptying “poison bag” or “venom sack,” as he refers to it, is a demoralizing process for Hitch. He would much rather see himself as a battling warrior fighting against an awful enemy. Instead, he said he feels “swamped with passivity and impotence … like a sugar lump in water.” Now, some may consider these reflections cynical or pessimistic, but I don’t read them that way. I think he offers an honest and accurate glimpse of what it’s like to find oneself lost in a land that is not home; a land of malady, not wellness.
But in that land, Hitchens’ stubbornly refuses to take a second look at his map, or even consider an alternative route. In an interview with Anderson Cooper that addressed Hitchens’ illness and disbelief in God, he was asked whether or not “there might be a moment when you want to hedge your bets.” In other words, “Is it possible that someday you might feel compelled to seek spiritual redemption?” Here’s how Hitch responded:
If that comes it will be when I’m very ill, when I’m half demented either by drugs or by pain and I won’t have control over what I say. I mention this in case you ever hear a rumor later on—because these things happen, and the faithful love to spread these rumors, “On his deathbed. . .” Well I can’t say that the entity that by then wouldn’t be me wouldn’t do such a pathetic thing, but I can tell you that “Not while I’m lucid, no.” I can be quite sure of that.
This kind of response is yet another example of Hitchens’ intellectual carelessness and arrogance. He’s already made up his mind, and apparently, closed it up too. End of story. He’s foreclosed on possibility. This is hardly a mark of intellectual or epistemic virtue–character traits necessary for making sound judgments (e.g. attentiveness, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, fairness in assessing evidence, etc.). Perhaps Hitchens’ hard heart has hardened his head as well.
Methodologically speaking, Hitch’s worst problem is not that he’s decided against belief; but that he’s decided he never will believe no matter what. So it seems that his beliefs are not so much the product of careful, open, and rational examination; but rather, of biased resistance to or suppression of truth (this is a common move atheists make as Jim Spiegel points out in his compelling book The Making of an Atheist). Hitch only sees what he wants and is prepared to see, nothing beyond his own predetermined line of sight.
Indeed, Hitchens is lost within a land of malady. But that’s got nothing to do with his cancer.
