Hitchens is not God

On the radio I heard Michael Medved interviewing Christopher Hitchens on his best-selling book, God is Not Great. Hitchens espouses atheism and has so far made over $1 million on the book.

I enjoy Medved's general excellence in debate, but in this case I think he was swinging at air (perhaps unavoidable with so trite a gasbag as this guest).

I am waiting for someone to pop Hitchens balloon with two simple logical proofs, namely

1. that reason and science point ineluctably toward God as a rational necessity and
   


2. that macroevolution as a rational and scientific impossibility.

These arguments are time-honored, and those who don't address them count on the ignorance of our contemporaries, who usually have no better basis for accepting atheism or evolutionary theory than jungle villagers have for believing that the tree outside their village is haunted.

Hitchens refers to many philosophers, but probably hasn't either read or understood them, since he simply sidesteps all classical arguments (a la Bertrand Russell). Of course, Hitchens was gullible to have been a Rajneeshi.

You can prove that either God exists or logic does not exist; you can't, however, prove that God does not exist.

For example, we can say of the universe that

• it does not exist - it is an illusion; but if everything is an illusion, then even that contention is an illusion, making everything real - so this argument and reason cannot coexist (Descartes),
  


• it created itself - but then you have to overcome what even Julie Andrews knows, that nothing comes from nothing (Parmenides); if it did, there would have to be some time when it existed before it existed so it could bring itself into existence (again, this argument and reason cannot coexist),
  
  
• it has always existed from eternity past - but the 1st and 2nd Laws (not theories) of Thermodynamics prove that the universe is finite and that its progressive disorder allows us to trace it back to a beginning in time, making this argument logically impossible, or
  
  
• that it came into being at some point in time, which makes it an effect of something, and since, by definition, all effects have causes, the universe must have a cause or creator. But since not all things have causes (only all effects have causes) this creator must be the uncaused First Cause, or God. If the cause of the universe were not uncaused, it would be subject to all the arguments above; therefore to create the universe, the First Cause must be eternally self-existent. The pre-Platonic philosophers worked all this out 25 centuries ago. If the public knew that, they could have saved the millions spent on Hitchens' book.

Hitchens can't answer any of this without babbling, because it would be like arguing that 1 does not equal 1.

You need zero faith to accept the rational necessity for God. To prove there is no God, however, you need faith, because there is no help from either reason or science.

To prove that God exists nowhere and at no time, you have to examine everywhere in space and time and prove that no evidence of God exists there. The task is one of infinite regression.

For example, to prove there is gold in Alaska, you need only go to Alaska, find one nugget, and you're done. To prove there is no gold in Alaska, you have to excavate every square inch of the state down to the earth's core and prove that no gold is there - and you also have to prove that you have not overlooked even one atom of gold in all those tons of excavated earth.

You can prove that the facts of paleontology, genetics, and biochemistry nowhere support the theory of evolution, but you can't prove that evolution is true, which is why it remains a theory, not a law.

You can't logically contend that an Intelligent Designer would choose evolution as a creative method, since evolution is the least intelligent of all possibilities - it involves making billions of mutative errors for every mutative success - and, of course, billions is being generous, since the number really is so much higher as to equal statistical impossibility.

Therefore, chance and evolution are much better partners logically than Intelligent Design and evolution - even though statistical impossibilities make the whole business nothing more than a tribal myth for academics.

You need no faith to disbelieve the theory of evolution, since, in an age of scientific enlightenment, superabundant evidence leads to its disproof. Only a priori conclusions lend the theory of evolution any credence, which, however, requires...faith.

Atheists and Evolutionists are the true Flat-Earthers of the 21st century. When they speak, you can hear banjos playing.