The most hard-hitting response to atheist Christopher Hitchens available! Continuing his series of responses to the recent atheists, Doug Wilson reaches a level of wit and insight rarely found among even the best of apologetic literature. Doug easily demonstrates the fallacies, prejudice, and irrationality of perhaps the most talented of the atheistic writers today, and shows how Christianity is the only reasonable, solid, and in fact, necessary, alternative.
God Is. How Christianity Explains Everything
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who knew dismantling Hitchens' arguments could be this much fun?,
This review is from: God Is. How Christianity Explains Everything (Paperback)
_God Is._ constitutes a brief (~100 pages) critique by Douglas Wilson of Christopher Hitchens' book, _God Is Not Great_. In my estimation, the slim length of the book is just about right given the inanity of Hitchens' grievances against Christianity in particular and religion in general.
I've been telling people for a couple of years now that Hitchens is not that bright when it comes to matters of philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics, etc.). Write? Few can match Hitchens. Out-think Christianity or other non-naturalistic worldviews? Few can be found in print who have been a more abject failure than Hitchens. All Hitchens has to offer is what Wilson refers to as AIBM, "the Argument for Infidelity from the Bon Mot" (p. 29). So poorly put together are Hitchens' arguments that I would as a common courtesy insist to anyone planning a critique of atheism that they leave _God Is Not Great_ out of the mix. It does for atheism what Pamela Anderson does for PETA - very little in the way of substance and intellectual fortitude, and that's being polite about it. Wilson not only dismantles Hitchens arguments, he does so in the same way Hitchens attempts to dismantle religion - using liberal doses of wit and humor. Here are some samples: - "Religion poisons everything. 'So? Does this offend anyone whose opinion should matter to me? Is there some kind of rule against poisoning everything? Who made that rule? And who died and left that particular busybody king? Get your moralism outta my face, Hitchens.'" (p. 5) - "I am perfectly willing to loan him a fixed scriptural standard so that he might enjoy the pleasure of disapproving of hysterical believers who go off like bottle rockets whenever an atheist is naughty in public. Because that is the only way he is able to enjoy such spectacles - with borrowed standards." (pp. 8-9) - "When you compare abominable theistic societies and abominable atheistic societies, the variables are probably not the thing you want to appeal to in order to account for the constant, horrific result. We need to look for the constant. What might that be? People. People poison everything. The Scriptures give us the reason for this, which is that people are sinners." (p. 12) - "I am glad he chose this argument--since religion poisons everything, let's talk about DDT and malaria. Let's talk about which religious group it was that succeeded in banning a substance that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Was it the Vatican, or Muslim imams, or....No, it was secularists who in one of their periodic and recurring enviro-panics decided to consign countless thousands in the Third World to misery and death. Was this a religious bonehead move? No? Can we still count it, or does it have to go into another book?" (pp. 19-20) - "After the publication of my Sam Harris book, I had occasion to drop in at Richard Dawkins' blog site and say a few things. This involved reading some of the other posts, and it occurred to me that just because the famous atheist is an Oxford don doesn't prevent his rank and file follower from being the kind of audience that Aquinas would not exactly envy. If careful and informed thought were a rich hard wood, we are talking oak veneer for the mobile home bathroom." (p. 28) - "The assumption he makes here is his application of Ockham's razor, which states 'the simplest explanation is most likely.' Hitchens assumes that the elimination of God from the creation of all things is a simplifying move. It may have simplified Hitchens' personal life, but it most emphatically does not simplify our explanations of how spiders figured out web engineering. The fact that a story can be told without appeal to the divine purposes is a simplistic move, but that is not the same thing as a simplifying move." (p. 43) - "...the French may have used the same reasoning method as Hitchens: 'Find a sample size of one, and render general by induction.' In other words, pin the image of one extremist onto the whole religion." (p. 68) - "That is the issue. It is not whether Hitchens is Stalin. Of course he is not. The issue is whether Hitchens has anything whatever to say when Stalin is being Stalin. And he does not." (p. 76) - "...I agree with Hitchens' assessment of why many Westerners have gone the guru route. It appears to be the same motive that persuades a foolish woman to try to clean her living room by rearranging the furniture, or a foolish student to try to improve his grades by buying additional notebook dividers. It promises change without actually delivering it." (pp. 76-77) This is just a small sampling of the zingers that Wilson puts forward in this book. Who knew dismantling Hitchens' arguments could be this much fun? Perhaps the best summary of Wilson's critique is when he says, "As I have noted before, Hitchens is a gifted writer. He has a boatload of vivid adjectives and nouns at his fingertips. But, a boatload of vivid adjectives and nouns does not make up a coherent moral system." (p. 97) Christian readers will surely find this a pleasurable read. Atheists readers might even concede after a read-through that Hitchens hasn't done his homework.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent criticism of atheism... not so excellent defense of Christianity...,
By The Kite (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: God Is. How Christianity Explains Everything (Paperback)
This book is so well written on so many levels. Stylistically, he shows you can still be brilliant without bombarding a reader with every obscure word from the thesaurus(hemhem, Hitchens) and even (gasp!) be personable and humorous. Content wise, his main argument - "So?" - is simply and wisely stated. Many points are made which absolutley require a coherent answer from Hitchens should he want his work to hold water.
This book masterfully shows atheism for what it is - every bit as faith based as any religion. An atheists best argument AGAINSTS god's existence is, ironically, the best argument FOR god's existence... neither is something you can solidly PROVE. Here in lies my personal problem. While both books were highly enlightening in various ways, they never address people like me who are in the "I don't know" category. I have read much good material by many camps of "belief" that excellently disprove the other camp. But even so, they never quite fully defend their own. I would like that. I would like to ask Hitchens, "Why are we innately soulful/moral/spiritual-seeking people? If religion is untrustworthy merely because it's ancient, why are many scientific studies still upheld from long ago that have never been able to be duplicated? If religion merely was an explanation for the less informed, why is it still alive and well in this age of the "well-informed"?" And many, MANY more. I would like to ask Wilson, "Why is god bound to a blood sacrifice? Why would such a good god create people obviously so prone to sin and unbelief? And what is heaven - the taking away of our will so we won't sin or the full knowledge of god so we won't sin... and either way, why didn't he do this in the first place to avoid sending anyone to hell?" And many, MANY more. Again, I walk away from both books with a lot of new and helpful thoughts, but still no solid answers on the purpose of this life.
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Response to Hitchens,
By
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This review is from: God Is. How Christianity Explains Everything (Kindle Edition)
This is an excellent response to Christopher Hitchens. Wilson is witty and lucid as usual. And he takes Hitchens to task in a serious way.
Since this is a response to another book, I'd obviously recommend that you read "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens before reading this (if you are able to stomach it). If you haven't read "God is Not Great", you will get some great tidbits, but of course its never very good to read a critique without reading what it is critiquing. Kudos to Wilson for taking on Hitchens!
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