Christopher Hitchens on Palin and the Fruit Flies.
Christopher Hitchens and I in D.C
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Losing of Progress by Christopher Hitchens
From Slate
It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.
If you follow the continuing argument between the advocates of Darwin's natural selection theory and the partisans of creationism or "intelligent design," you will instantly see what I am driving at. The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones. How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication":
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
His defenders, such as Michael Shermer in his excellent book Why Darwin Matters, draw upon post-Darwinian scientific advances. They do not rely on what might be loosely called "blind chance":
Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …
Hold it right there, says Ann Coulter in her ridiculous book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. "The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye become a complex eye? The interesting question is: How did the 'light-sensitive cells' come to exist in the first place?"
The salamanders of Planet Earth appear to this layman to furnish a possibly devastating answer to that question. Humans are almost programmed to think in terms of progress and of gradual yet upward curves, even when confronted with evidence that the past includes as many great dyings out of species as it does examples of the burgeoning of them. Thus even Shermer subconsciously talks of a "pathway" that implicitly stretches ahead. But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have?
Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be Coulter or her patrons at the creationist Discovery Institute. The most they can do is to intone that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty. I wrote to professor Richard Dawkins to ask if I had stumbled on the outlines of a point, and he replied as follows:
Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don't think I have seen it written down before.
I recommend for further reading the chapter on eyes and the many different ways in which they are formed that is contained in Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable; also "The Blind Cave Fish's Tale" in his Chaucerian collection The Ancestor's Tale. I am not myself able to add anything about the formation of light cells, eyespots, and lenses, but I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?" It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Christopher Hitchens Debate God
Some reviews of the debate:
The 92Y Blog has a video excerpt from the evening, and we asked bloggers in attendance for feedback. Looks like God took a beating of Biblical proportions:
Felix Salmon: "I can't recall ever seeing such a lopsided debate -- if 'debate' is the mot juste, which it really isn't. Boteach didn't even attempt to defend his side of the motion, preferring instead to bash Hitchens's book; he ignored substantially everything that Hitchens said. His logorrhea was an embarrassment, especially when it became obvious that he had no strategy at all: all of his points about evolution, for instance, even if they had hit their mark (which they didn't) did nothing to bolster his purported cause. In any case, he was disqualified on account of Godwin's Law so many times that Hitchens would have won by default even if he didn't win overwhelmingly on the merits."
Rex Sorgatz: "Rabbi Shmuley Boteach proved, once and for all, that god is not dead. He's just exceptionally boring."
Neal Ungerleider: "Here's the thing... despite both Hitchens and Boteach being annoying, self-righteous egomaniacs, there's a difference between the two. Last night's debate taught me that Hitchens is an intelligent, annoying, self-righteous egomaniac. I wish I could say the same for Boteach. However, he still didn't convince me on the non-existence of God. Sorry, Hitch."
Lilit Marcus: "Thanks, Shmuley Boteach, for caring more about selling copies of your latest book than about making people who believe in God not come off like complete morons."
Phoebe Maltz: "I found myself wishing the rabbi could make one coherent point, not just evoke the Holocaust every two seconds, only to call Hitchens 'not a Nazi, but.'"
Sara Ivry: "Boteach’s repeated use of the name 'Christoper Hitchens' really made me think of the Bill Murray segment of Coffee and Cigarettes where RZA and GZA keep calling Bill Murray 'BillMurray,' as if one word. It made the whole debate seem particularly absurd, but at least brought back the good days of Wu Tang."Daniel Radosh: After the way Hitchens treated Boteach, it was a little hypocritical of him to chastise God for condoning bloodbaths. To see the rabbi reduced literally to incoherent sputtering was almost sad, but then again, he had no one to blame by himself. Declaring that Steven Jay Gould, author of the classic essay 'Evolution as Theory and Fact,' did not believe in evolution, was probably not the wisest strategic gambit. I think the exchange that best captured the evening came when Boteach accused Hitchens of 'character assassination,' and Hitchens retorted, 'you should be more concerned that your character is committing suicide right here in front of everyone.'"
David Kelsey: "In a strange twist demonstrating that this debate was not personal in the least, both men argued that the other’s moral decency proved his own point. Boteach argued that morality came from religion generally, and Judaism’s influence specifically. 'It’s our morality he is embracing,' insisted Boteach. But Hitchins countered that, 'Religion borrows its morality from us, not us from religion.'”
Jeff Bercovici: "Hitchens wiped the floor with Boteach to such an extent that it was actually Hitchens who lost, in a sense, just by showing up. Lost stature, that is. He should be debating his equals, not publicity-hungry TV rabbis."
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The Truth About Mother Teresa - Christopher Hitchens
The saintly adoration poured on those thought to be 'better' than the common folk of the land, is to me, a sad indication of how those who wish to appear morally superior because of a belief, actually lack the common morals of those who look up to them. When a simple and fault filled person is elevated to a position beyond their actual means, it appears its only a matter of time before the complete need for demagoguery sets in. Interestingly enough after this program was made, letters were unearthed that mother Teresa had written.
Within these writings she confessed her inability to believe in god and a complete emptiness in what she did. She was by her very own admission a fraud. We should all take note that if the one person thought to be most saintly in the recent past did not actually have any deep experience relating to her God, physically or metaphysically, then it is fair to concede that others in her position are similarly left without the godlike experiences they profess, or if they do experience some other worldly state it is that of person suffering from a mental condition like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, in which hearing voices or hallucinations are part of the condition.
Aristotle actually theorized that there was no sixth sense, if only people had paid more attention to him than the shambolic contradictions of the bible. Sorry if what I am saying is a little verbose but I just wish to portray my thinking on the subject accurately.
Bah, Hanukkah - Christopher Hitchens
The holiday celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 3, 2007, at 11:57 AM ET
High on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that "it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." How do such fatuous pieces of folk wisdom ever get started on their careers of glib quotation? Of course it would be preferable to light a candle than to complain about the darkness. You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn't have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis. But at this time of year, any holy foolishness is permitted. And so we have a semiofficial celebration of Hanukkah, complete with menorah, to celebrate not the ignition of a light but the imposition of theocratic darkness.
Jewish orthodoxy possesses the interesting feature of naming and combating the idea of the apikoros or "Epicurean"—the intellectual renegade who prefers Athens to Jerusalem and the schools of philosophy to the grim old routines of the Torah. About a century and a half before the alleged birth of the supposed Jesus of Nazareth (another event that receives semiofficial recognition at this time of the year), the Greek or Epicurean style had begun to gain immense ground among the Jews of Syria and Palestine. The Seleucid Empire, an inheritance of Alexander the Great—Alexander still being a popular name among Jews—had weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith. I quote Rabbi Michael Lerner, an allegedly liberal spokesman for Judaism who nonetheless knows what he hates:
Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.
But away with all that, says Lerner. Let us instead celebrate the Maccabean peasants who wanted to destroy Hellenism and restore what he actually calls "oldtime religion." His excuse for preferring fundamentalist thuggery to secularism and philosophy is that Hellenism was "imperialistic," but the Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea. Had it not been for this no-less imperial event, we would never have had to hear of Jesus of Nazareth or his sect—which was a plagiarism from fundamentalist Judaism—and the Jewish people would never have been accused of being deicidal "Christ killers." Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism's bastard child in the shape of Christianity. You might think that masochism could do no more. Except that it always can. Without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity, on which it is based and from which it is borrowed, there would be no Islam, either. Every Jew who honors the Hanukkah holiday because it gives his child an excuse to mingle the dreidel with the Christmas tree and the sleigh (neither of these absurd symbols having the least thing to do with Palestine two millenniums past) is celebrating the making of a series of rods for his own back. And this is not just a disaster for the Jews. When the fanatics of Palestine won that victory, and when Judaism repudiated Athens for Jerusalem, the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.
And, of course and as ever, one stands aghast at the pathetic scale of the supposed "miracle." As a consequence of the successful Maccabean revolt against Hellenism, so it is said, a puddle of olive oil that should have lasted only for one day managed to burn for eight days. Wow! Certain proof, not just of an Almighty, but of an Almighty with a special fondness for fundamentalists. Epicurus and Democritus had brilliantly discovered that the world was made up of atoms, but who cares about a mere fact like that when there is miraculous oil to be goggled at by credulous peasants?
We are about to have the annual culture war about the display of cribs, mangers, conifers, and other symbols on public land. Most of this argument is phony and tawdry and secondhand and has nothing whatever to do with "faith" as its protagonists understand it. The burning of a Yule log or the display of a Scandinavian tree is nothing more than paganism and the observance of a winter solstice; it makes no more acknowledgment of the Christian religion than I do. The fierce partisanship of the holly bush and mistletoe believers convicts them of nothing more than ignorance and simple-mindedness. They would have been just as pious under the reign of the Druids or the Vikings, and just as much attached to their bucolic icons. Everybody knows, furthermore, that there was no moving star in the east, that Quirinius was not the governor of Syria in the time of King Herod, that no worldwide tax census was conducted in that period of the rule of Augustus, and that no "stable" is mentioned even in any of the mutually contradictory books of the New Testament. So, to put a star on top of a pine tree or to arrange various farm animals around a crib is to be as accurate and inventive as that Japanese department store that, as urban legend has it, did its best to emulate the Christmas spirit by displaying a red-and-white bearded Santa snugly nailed to a crucifix.
This is childish stuff and if only for that reason should obviously not receive any public endorsement or financing. The display of the menorah at this season, however, has a precise meaning and is an explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason. As such it is a direct negation of the First Amendment and it is time for the secularists and the civil libertarians to find the courage to say so.
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