Justified True Belief

(●) The journalist who turned the case against God into a public performance, and made a generation of Christians learn to answer out loud. + Christopher Hitchens was not a philosopher and never claimed to be one. He was a reporter and an essayist, a man who filed copy for a living, and he had spent thirty years writing about wars, dictators and politicians before he came, rather late, to the subject that made him famous. When God Is Not Great appeared in 2007 he was fifty-eight. Within a year he was on a stage somewhere in America almost every week, arguing with pastors, priests, rabbis and philosophers in front of paying crowds. He belongs on a Christian apologetics shelf for a simple reason. More than most critics of his generation, he decided the argument should happen in public, in front of anyone who cared to buy a ticket, and he would go anywhere to have it. The debates he provoked are still watched, and the answers Christians gave him, some good, some poor, are part of what apologetics in English now sounds like. A reader who meets him only through the rebuttals never learns why the rebuttals were needed in the first place. One fact about him is worth holding on to. The man who told audiences that religion poisons everything spent the last months of his life on friendly terms with the evangelical pastor he had toured with, and thanked by name the Christian doctor who helped direct his cancer treatment. He did not soften the argument. He simply refused to let it settle who he could be fond of.

(●) 1949 AD: Born in Portsmouth to a career naval officer and a mother who was determined he would rise above the service. + Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on 13 April 1949 in Portsmouth, the great naval town on England’s south coast. His father, Eric Hitchens, whom the family called the Commander, had served through the war aboard HMS Jamaica, one of the ships that helped sink the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst in the freezing dark off Norway on 26 December 1943. It was, his son liked to say, a good day’s work, and about the only thing in his father’s life that the son never argued with. Peacetime was thinner. The family moved from base to base on a small salary, and it was his mother, Yvonne, who decided the boy would be educated out of that world. She spent money they did not have on boarding school, and when her husband objected she settled it, as her son tells the story in Hitch-22, by saying that if there was going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher was going to be in it. A brother, Peter, arrived in 1951. The two would spend their adult lives disagreeing in print, Peter as a Christian and a conservative, Christopher as neither, and for some years they were not on speaking terms at all.

(●) 1967 AD: At Oxford he joined the revolutionary left and learned that an argument is something you win in a room. + He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1967 to read philosophy, politics and economics, and then threw himself at the politics rather than at the reading. He joined the International Socialists, a small revolutionary group on the far left of the British Labour movement, sold their newspaper, marched on Grosvenor Square, where the American embassy stood, against the war in Vietnam, and was arrested more than once. He came away in 1970 with a third-class degree, near the bottom of the Oxford honours scale, and no regrets he ever admitted to. What he did acquire there was a trade. Oxford in those years ran on the argument conducted aloud in front of an audience, in the union chamber and in other people’s rooms late at night, and Hitchens turned out to be unusually good at it: quick, unembarrassed, and better read than his opponents expected. He also began the double life that his friends found funny and his enemies found damning, marching with the far left in the afternoon and dining with Conservative members of Parliament in the evening. He always insisted the two were not in tension, because you cannot argue with people you refuse to eat with.

(●) 1973 AD: His mother died in Athens, and he flew out alone to identify her body. + In November 1973 Yvonne Hitchens was found dead in a hotel room in Athens, in what the Greek police treated as a suicide pact with the man she had left her marriage for, a former Anglican clergyman named Timothy Bryan. Her son, then twenty-four and working as a young journalist in London, flew out to deal with the police and the undertakers. He learned afterwards that she had tried to telephone him several times, and that he had not been at home to take the calls. He wrote about that failure for the rest of his life and never once made it sound smaller than it was. There was a second discovery, years later and of an entirely different kind. In 1987 Peter introduced a Jewish girlfriend to their maternal grandmother, Dorothy, and the old woman observed that the young lady was marrying within the faith. That was a strange thing to say about a marriage to Peter. Then she explained what she meant, which was that Peter was Jewish too. Peter passed it on. What Yvonne had kept from her husband and her sons all her life was that she was Jewish, and so, by the reckoning of Jewish law, which traces descent through the mother rather than the father, were her children. Hitchens, thirty-eight, took the news with something close to delight. He had spent his career writing about the twentieth century’s persecutions, and he found that he had been standing inside one of the families they were aimed at without knowing it.

(●) 1981 AD: He moved to America and made a career of prosecuting the powerful and the admired. + After ten years in London journalism, most of it at the New Statesman, he moved to the United States in 1981 on an exchange between the New Statesman and The Nation, settled in Washington, and from 1982 wrote the Nation column that ran for twenty years, joined by a second home at Vanity Fair from 1992. His method was always the same: pick someone protected by reputation, then go through the record. The most notorious of these campaigns was aimed at Mother Teresa, who was then about as close to untouchable as a living person gets. A television film for Channel 4 in 1994 was followed the next year by a short, savage book arguing that the Missionaries of Charity, the order she had founded in Calcutta, ran a cult of suffering rather than a medical charity, and that its founder had taken money from dictators and swindlers and given absolution to both. Then came Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state under Nixon and Ford, whose conduct in Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor he laid out in 2001 as a prosecutor would. Then Bill Clinton, and that one cost him something. In February 1999, while the Senate was trying the impeachment case against the president, Hitchens signed an affidavit, which is a written statement sworn to be true, saying that his friend Sidney Blumenthal, a White House aide, had described Monica Lewinsky over lunch as a stalker. The affidavit went to the House managers, the congressmen prosecuting the case in the Senate, and it mattered because it appeared to contradict what Blumenthal had told a grand jury under oath. The friendship ended, and much of literary Washington decided that Hitchens had informed on a friend. He never apologised for it, and it followed him for years. He was also, throughout, drinking a great deal, which he wrote about openly and defended lightly: enough at lunch to help the afternoon along, he said, and never enough to slur the copy. The disease that eventually killed him is not caused by that habit alone, but he did not pretend the habit was innocent.

(●) 2001 AD: After the eleventh of September he broke with the left he had belonged to for thirty years. + The attacks on New York and Washington settled an argument Hitchens had been having with himself for years, and settled it in a morning. He judged that what had flown into the towers was a religious totalitarian movement, that it was the same enemy he had been writing about all his life in a new costume, and that the American left’s instinct to look first for American guilt was a moral failure. He began using the word Islamofascism, which he meant as a claim rather than as an insult: that the movement behind the attacks wanted what Europe’s fascists had wanted, one doctrine, one leader and no dissent, and had simply arrived wearing a religion. He made the case for war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and he did not stop making it when the case went badly. The cost was most of his old world. He gave up his Nation column in the autumn of 2002; friendships with Edward Said, the literary scholar he had once edited a book with, and with others cooled or ended; the young readers who had loved him for hunting Kissinger now found him arguing alongside the administration that Kissinger had served. He became an American citizen on his fifty-eighth birthday, 13 April 2007, at a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. And then there is the episode that tells you the most about him. He had said in print that waterboarding was not torture. Waterboarding is an interrogation method in which a man is strapped down, a cloth is laid over his face, and water is poured onto it until he feels himself drowning, and the argument at the time was over whether that counted as torture or merely as pressure. In 2008 Hitchens went to North Carolina and had it done to him for a magazine piece. He lasted a matter of seconds. Then he published the correction in Vanity Fair under the title Believe Me, It’s Torture. It is the clearest evidence on the record that he could be moved by facts he had not wanted.

(●) 2007 AD: God Is Not Great made him one of the most visible unbelievers in the English-speaking world, and he spent four years on debate stages. + The book came out in May 2007 and went to the top of the American bestseller lists within weeks. It came three years after Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and a year after Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and the four men were quickly labelled the New Atheists. What was supposed to be new about them was not the arguments, most of which are older than the printing press, but the manner. They refused the old courtesy by which a religious claim, unlike any other claim, was to be handled gently and not pressed in public. On 30 September 2007 the four sat around a table in Hitchens’s Washington apartment for a filmed two-hour conversation that circulated as The Four Horsemen, a nickname taken, with some relish, from the four riders of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation. What separated Hitchens from the other three was the touring. He accepted almost every invitation, including invitations from people who thought he was doing the devil’s work, and much of the debating was done in churches and Christian colleges in front of audiences who had come to see him lose. He argued with the philosopher William Lane Craig at Biola University, an evangelical school outside Los Angeles, in April 2009; with the Oxford mathematician John Lennox; with the Roman Catholic writer Dinesh D’Souza; with Rabbi David Wolpe; with Tony Blair in Toronto in November 2010; and with his own brother Peter in Grand Rapids in 2008. The strangest and warmest of these was a running exchange with Douglas Wilson, a Reformed pastor from Idaho, which began as a magazine debate, became a short book, and ended with the two of them on the road together for a documentary called Collision, filmed on the tour that took the book through New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

(●) 2010 AD: Cancer of the oesophagus was found in June, and for the eighteen months left to him he wrote about dying until he could not write. + He collapsed in a New York hotel room in June 2010, on the first morning of the tour for his memoir Hitch-22. The diagnosis was cancer of the oesophagus, the tube that carries food from the throat down to the stomach, and it was already advanced. It was the same disease that had killed his father. He was sixty-one. He cancelled the tour, started chemotherapy, and kept writing. What he wrote is the most useful thing he left. The Vanity Fair columns collected after his death as Mortality report the year from inside: the loss of his voice, which he minded more than anything else, since talking was what he was for; the well-meant advice from strangers; the etiquette of being visited; and the language of battling cancer, which never fitted what was happening to him, since a man sitting still while a bag of poison empties into his arm is nobody’s idea of a soldier. On 20 September 2010 a group of believers organised a day of prayer for him. He treated it with a good deal more courtesy than his readers expected. He refused to be churlish about anyone’s kind intentions, and observed that if the praying made the praying feel better then it had done some good. He also announced, in advance and repeatedly, that any reported deathbed conversion should be disbelieved. He died on 15 December 2011 at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, of pneumonia brought on by the cancer, aged sixty-two.

What He Taught

(T1) Religion is man-made, and the marks of its makers are all over it. + Pick up an old map, the kind drawn before anyone had sailed past the edge of it, and you can see exactly how much the mapmaker knew. The coastline is confident where his ships had been and becomes decoration where they had not. Hitchens read the religions of the world the way you read that map. Every faith, he argued, knows precisely as much astronomy, biology and geography as the people who founded it knew, and no more, which is what you would expect if the faiths were made by those people and not delivered from outside. He pressed the point with a historical question he thought believers never faced honestly. Human beings have existed for something on the order of a hundred thousand years. On the Christian account, for almost all of that time heaven watched infant mortality, famine and tribal slaughter with folded arms, and then intervened decisively about two thousand years ago in one province of the Roman Empire, in a language most of the species could not read. He did not think that story looked like a rescue. He thought it looked like a story told by people who did not know how old the world was. Two things about the argument are easy to miss, and Christians answering him have often missed the first. It is not an argument from science, whatever it sounds like. It is an argument from the shape of the evidence, which means it cannot be answered by disputing a laboratory result; it can be met only by evidence of the same kind, evidence about what the texts contain and when they were written and what their authors could and could not have known. The second thing is that Hitchens meant every word of it about all religions equally. He held that they were versions of one untruth, and he was as hard on the faith of his own ancestors as he was on anyone else’s.

(Q) "Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody ... had the smallest idea what was going on." + Source: Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, chapter 5, "The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False" (2007). The words left out name Democritus, who reasoned his way to atoms with nothing but his head. Hitchens is not saying that religious people are stupid; he is saying that the religions were composed in the infancy of the species, and that they read like it. The next sentence in the book says so outright: it comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species.

(T2) Whatever is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. + This is the line of his that has outlived him, usually under the name other people gave it, Hitchens’s razor. A razor, in philosophy, is a rule of thumb for cutting away claims you do not need to consider, the way Ockham’s razor tells you not to multiply explanations beyond necessity. Hitchens’s version is about who owes the work. Imagine a man at your door saying there is a dragon in his garage. You do not have to prove there is no dragon. He has made the claim, so the evidence is his to produce, and until he produces some, you may go back to your dinner. Hitchens held that religious claims stand in exactly that position, and that centuries of respectability had quietly reversed the burden, so that the unbeliever was somehow expected to disprove what had never been shown in the first place. Christian thinkers have answered this in two quite different ways, and the difference matters. Some deny the rule, holding that belief in God is properly basic, reasonable to hold without argument in the way that trust in your own memory is reasonable without argument; that is Alvin Plantinga’s line. Others accept the rule and take the burden up, arguing that the evidence is exactly what Christianity has always offered: a crucified man reported alive by named witnesses within living memory. Both replies were put to Hitchens on stage. He preferred the second, because it could be examined.

(Q) "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." + Source: Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, chapter 10, "The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell" (2007). The thought is not original to him. It puts into English an old maxim of the courts and the schools, quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur, what is asserted without proof may be denied without proof. He used it in almost every debate he gave afterwards, and it has been quoted back at him about as often, since a good deal of what he asserted about religious history was itself asserted briskly (T5).

(T3) Human decency comes before religion, not from it. + Hitchens had a standing challenge that he put to every religious opponent he faced, and it came in two halves. Name a moral statement made, or a moral action performed, by a believer that could not have been made or performed by an unbeliever. Then, he would say, think of a wicked statement made or an evil action performed precisely because of religious faith. The first question, he claimed, had never once been answered in his hearing. The second answers itself before the audience has stopped laughing. Behind the challenge sits a serious claim about where morality lives. No human society, he argued, has ever survived without rules against murder, theft and perjury, which is lying under oath, and none could have; a tribe that let all three go unpunished would not last a generation. Those rules were therefore in place long before Moses came down from Sinai with the commandments, and on Hitchens’s reading the commandments record them rather than invent them. He thought the evidence for this was written into our reactions: solidarity with the suffering, shame at cowardice, disgust at cruelty, all of which arrive earlier than any catechism and are found in people who never had one. Christian readers should be careful about which part of this to dispute. Scripture itself teaches that pagans who never had the law can do by nature what the law requires, because its work is written on their hearts (Romans 2:14-15), so the observation that moral knowledge is universal is not a difficulty for Christianity but a prediction of it. The real disagreement is one layer down, and it is about what makes a moral claim true rather than about who knows it. Hitchens never thought that question needed an answer beyond human solidarity, and his opponents never thought human solidarity could carry the weight he put on it.

(Q) "Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it." + Source: Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, chapter 18, "A Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational" (2007). The two sentences close a paragraph on Kant’s rule that a man should act as though the maxim of his action were to become a general law. Hitchens reads that rule as a summary of mutual interest and solidarity, and his point is that such a summary needs no enforcing authority above it.

(T4) A God who watched everything and could never be appealed against would be a dictator, and worship would be servility. + Here Hitchens went further than most unbelievers are willing to go, and it is the part of him that Christians most often miss. He did not merely say that God does not exist. He said that if the Christian God did exist, the news would be bad. He called himself an antitheist to mark the difference: an atheist reports that the throne is empty, an antitheist is glad of it. The picture he used came from his reporting. He had been to North Korea, and he described a state where a dead man is the head of government, where praise of the leader is compulsory from birth, where thanks must be given for food that never comes, and where the citizen is watched sleeping and waking. That, he said, is what a divine monarchy would look like, with one difference that makes it worse: the North Korean at least gets out at death. A celestial dictatorship claims the rest of your existence too, and no appeal lies from it. He would end by calling the whole arrangement the wish to be a slave, the desire that there be an unalterable and unchallengeable authority able to convict a man of thought crime while he is asleep. Opening against Tony Blair at the Munk Debate in Toronto in November 2010, one of a series of set-piece public arguments staged twice a year in front of a paying hall, he called what is installed over us "a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea." It is worth stating what the picture leaves out, because that is where the answer lies rather than in denying that tyranny is bad. Hitchens has described a sovereign who commands and observes. He has not described the God of the New Testament, who takes the form of a servant and is executed by the state he made (Philippians 2:6-8), and who tells the men under his authority that he will not call them servants any longer.

(Q) "I’m not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful." + Source: Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books, 2001), page 55. Written six years before God Is Not Great, in a small book of advice to a student who had asked him how to live as a dissenter. The position was not a late conversion; the bestseller only gave it a wider room.

(T5) Religion poisons everything, because it lets ordinary people do what they would not otherwise do. + This is the subtitle of the famous book and the weakest of his arguments, and the two facts are connected. The claim is that faith does not merely coexist with cruelty; it supplies the permission, because a man who believes he is carrying out heaven’s orders has been relieved of the ordinary human check on what he is doing. His illustration opens the chapter called Religion Kills. A week before the eleventh of September 2001 he was on a panel with Dennis Prager, one of America’s better known religious broadcasters, who put to him what he called a straight yes or no question: alone in an unfamiliar city at night, seeing a group of men walking towards him, would he feel safer for knowing they had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens answered without leaving the letter B. He named Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad, six cities he had reported from, and in every one of them, he said, he had watched men do violence to their neighbours because their religion had told them what those neighbours were. The trouble with the word everything is that it makes the claim impossible to test, and Hitchens knew he would be asked about the atheist regimes of the twentieth century. His answer was that Stalinism and the cult of the Kims are religions in everything but name, complete with a sacred text, an infallible leader and a promised future, and that mankind’s appetite for such things is the disease rather than the cure. It is a real answer and not an evasion. It also costs him the argument he wanted, because if a state without a God can produce the same result, then what poisons everything is not religion but something older that religion is one expression of. That is a good deal closer to the Christian doctrine of sin than he would have liked.

(Q) "Religion poisons everything." + Source: Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, chapter 1, "Putting It Mildly" (2007). It is the last sentence of the opening chapter and it is printed on the cover as the book’s subtitle, and he repeated it at the end of one indictment after another. He never withdrew it.

(Q) "As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be ‘me.’" + Source: Christopher Hitchens, "Unanswerable Prayers", Vanity Fair, October 2010, collected in Mortality (2012). He filed the notice while he could still write, and put a parenthesis after it: bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications. Some of the Christians who had argued with him respected the notice and reported nothing. One of them, four years after the funeral, did not, and Christians have been arguing about that book ever since.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He put the question in front of audiences who had never seen it argued, and Christians had to learn to answer in public. + Before 2007 a Christian could go a whole life without hearing the case against faith made well. Hitchens changed that, and he did it in the places where Christians actually were: college chapels, church halls, Bible colleges, radio programmes with a believing host. Thousands of young Christians watched their first real debate because he was in it. The answers came from several directions at once. William Lane Craig met him at Biola University in April 2009 with a formal case in five arguments and pressed him on which premise he denied. A premise is one of the numbered claims an argument is built out of, and the method is to lay them out, ask the other man which one he rejects, and then defend that one. It is a style Hitchens had little practice at, and it does not reward a good speech. John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, took him on the history and the science. Douglas Wilson answered the moral challenge (T3) by asking what account of the universe made Hitchens’s own outrage anything more than a preference, a question Hitchens found easy to deflect and hard to lose interest in. Dinesh D’Souza took the historical ledger. And his brother Peter, who had gone the other way, wrote The Rage Against God in 2010 partly as a reply. The lasting effect was not that anyone won an evening. It was that the exchange existed on the record, at length, with both sides audible and neither edited by the other, which is the only condition under which an honest reader can decide anything.

(†) The Christians who knew him best remembered a man who kept the quarrel and the friendship in separate rooms. + Douglas Wilson, the Idaho pastor who debated him more than anyone, once told a Dallas audience that if he and Christopher were not careful they were in danger of becoming friends, and wrote after his death that in all their time together Hitchens never said an unkind thing to him except on stage, up in front of everybody. Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and is an outspoken Christian, advised on his experimental treatment as a friend; Hitchens wrote about him by name in the Vanity Fair columns collected as Mortality and called him one of the greatest living Americans. When believers held a day of prayer for him in September 2010 he answered that he did not mean to be churlish about any kind intentions, and asked them not to trouble deaf heaven with their cries on his account unless it made them feel better. None of this was a softening. He went on saying in the last year of his life exactly what he had said in the first year of the book, and he put the warning about a deathbed recantation into print while he was still lucid enough to mean it. That is the context for a claim made four years after his death, when Larry Alex Taunton, an evangelical who had also driven him around America, published The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, describing private Bible reading between them and a man closer to belief than he let on. His widow Carol Blue said he had lived by his principles to the end, and Steve Wasserman, his friend of thirty years and the executor of his estate, called the book a shabby business built on conversations nobody else could check. Wilson, who had spent as many miles with him, read it the other way and thought Taunton had made his case. The fair summary is the one his own words support: he read the Bible constantly, he liked the company of believers, and he did not believe a word of it.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the caricature of faith, the picture of God, and the ground under his own outrage. + Hitchens deserves the courtesy of a straight answer rather than a gentle one, since that is the courtesy he extended. - Faith as belief without evidence. This is the definition his whole case runs on, and it is not the one the New Testament uses. Luke opens his Gospel by telling Theophilus, the man he addressed the book to, that he has investigated everything carefully from eyewitnesses so that his reader may have certainty (Luke 1:1-4). Paul stakes the entire faith on a public claim and lists the witnesses, most of them alive and available for questioning when he wrote (1 Corinthians 15:3-6). The Bereans, the synagogue congregation in a Macedonian town Paul passed through on his travels, are praised rather than rebuked for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul said was so (Acts 17:11). Christians are told to be ready with a reason for the hope they hold (1 Peter 3:15). A faith that invites the burden of proof is not the faith his razor was built to cut (T2). - The celestial dictator. The God he described commands, watches, and cannot be appealed to. The God of the Gospels comes in the form of a servant and is executed by the authorities of the world he made (Philippians 2:6-8), and tells the men under his authority: "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15:15). And the invitation Isaiah records is not a demand for silence but the opposite: "Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord" (Isaiah 1:18). Whatever else is wrong with Christianity, the charge of a regime that forbids questions is aimed at something else. - The ground of the outrage. Hitchens was right that unbelievers behave well and that moral knowledge is not the church’s property (T3); Scripture says as much (Romans 2:14-15). But his best work, the books on Kissinger and on the Missionaries of Charity, is not a survey of preferences. It is an indictment, and an indictment assumes a law the accused was really under. Human solidarity explains why we care about cruelty; it does not explain why cruelty is wrong for those who feel no solidarity at all. That gap is where the moral argument for God does its work, and he never closed it so much as declined to stand in it. - What the poison is. His answer on the atheist regimes concedes the important thing (T5). If a state that abolished God reproduced the cathedrals, the heresy trials and the martyrs, then the fault being described is not a fault of religion but of the species, which is precisely the Christian diagnosis, and the reason the gospel is offered as a rescue rather than as a better ideology. He was, for all of it, a serious opponent, and Christians should want more like him rather than fewer. He read the texts, he went to the places he wrote about, and he said in front of a hostile crowd what he had said to his friends. The church is not damaged by that kind of critic. It is damaged by not having an answer.