“When someone stands up and says, ‘I am a person of faith,’ they shouldn’t get respect for it. They think that’s a respect-producing statement: ‘I am a person of faith.’ In other words, ‘I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.'”
Christopher Hitchens
The late Christopher Hitchens was no intellectual slouch, to be sure. But, it doesn’t take much reasoning and logic to admit all worldviews are faith-worldviews: atheism, agnosticism, naturalism, and humanism all require a great deal of faith in rejecting the biblical worldview.
At its root, those who hold to Hitchens’ worldview:
- willingly ignore the overwhelming evidence for the existence of the God of the Bible;
- conveniently forget that anything outside the physical/natural realm can be neither proven, nor disproven, hence;…
- they fail to recognize that, while they accuse Christians of not being able to prove our worldview, neither can they prove theirs. They’re exercising faith. It all comes down to evidence. In a courtroom, the evidence (I didn’t say proof) for the existence of God is indisputable as much as it is overwhelming.
Those opposed to a biblical worldview are free to believe whatever they choose. And I deeply respect them for that. Further, I am strongly pro-science. I hold to a biblical worldview not in spite of science, but in light of science. But, truth be told, science/naturalism is impotent to discover all that is true in life i.e. objective morality, objective beauty, human consciousness, metaphysics.
Andy Bannister rightly claimed,
The claim ‘only science can discover truth’ is self-refuting, as the statement itself cannot be verified using science.
Praveen Sethupathy, Professor of Physiological Genomics and Biomedical Sciences at Cornell, asserted,
“Science is necessarily agnostic with respect to anything outside the natural realm. It neither accepts it, nor refutes it.”
In other words, no one can claim, “Science has proven there is no God.” This is not a scientific claim; it is a philosophical claim.
Back to Hitchens.
Then there’s the hypocrisy.
While expecting others to respect his worldview, he disparages and insults the billions of people who do hold to a biblical worldview.
As for Hitchens’ claim, it’s one thing to say, “Although billions of people throughout history have held to some level of religious faith, I choose not to.”
But to self-righteously condescend those who hold to a different faith-worldview than you betrays one’s agenda.
Hitchens’ offers no argument in favor of his worldview. His objective is to shame those who disagree with him. This is not only lazy scholarship, it’s mere bullying.
When sharing our worldview it behooves us to be able to intelligently, and respectfully, defend it.
Taking cheap shots at others simply makes one look juvenile. A common tactic by attorneys: when the evidence is against you, attack the witness. Hitchens is attacking the witness.
Yale Law School grad, and former Legal Editor for the Chicago Tribune, Lee Strobel, cautioned,
“To continue in atheism, I’d need to believe nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I just didn’t have that much faith.”
After a person posted the quote by Hitchens cited at the beginning of this blog, Jordan Peterson responded to Hitchens’ quote below. Think deeply, nw
