Bad faith effort: Christopher Hitchens phones in a polemic against religion.

• Author: Baumann, Paul
• Position: On political books - God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything - Book review

God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens Twelve, 294 pp.

It will come as no surprise to those who watch cable TV, or who read Vanity Fair or Slate or the Atlantic, that Christopher Hitchens is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. For years the indefatigable Hitchens--political columnist, ardent biographer of George Orwell, and self-styled scourge of liberal correctness--has fulminated against assorted political errors and villains du jour. The object of Hitchens's current rage, however, is a little out of the ordinary; in fact, it is by definition out of this world. Yes, Hitchens has finally set his sights on the ultimate culprit: he has put God, and all who profess a belief in such an infuriatingly elusive and paradoxical entity, in the dock.

In his most recent book, God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens joins the cadre of proselytizing atheists currently cross-examining religious texts and traditions in an attempt to demonstrate both the superiority of science and secular humanism to religion, and the gross delusion of those who insist on perceiving a transcendental presence in the world. Hitchens himself experienced a kind of conversion in recent years, abandoning his column at the Nation in a well-publicized spasm of apostasy from the left to emerge after 9/11 as a pugnacious defender of interventionist foreign policy in general and the war against Iraq in particular. Indeed, if we are to take Hitchens at his word, his new book was written to combat the resurgence of superstition and religious fanaticism exemplified by the rise of Islamic jihadism--and also to some extent by Christian evangelicalism, Jewish millennialism, and Hindu fundamentalism. Hitchens says he is out to defend "secular pluralism and ... the right not to believe or be compelled to believe." This defense, he warns, "has now become an urgent and inescapable responsibility: a matter of survival." (It isn't clear just who is forcing Hitchens to disavow his atheism.)

A work that sets out a rigorous defense of such basic human rights might be urgently needed, but this book is certainly not it. Instead, what Hitchens serves up in God Is Not Great is a mishmash of didacticism, innuendo, chest-thumping bluster, rhetorical legerdemain, misinformation, and smug demagoguery. God, he proclaims, does not exist, and consequently all religions are bunk. "Monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to the fabrication of a few nonevents." Religious traditions have primarily been responsible for "stupidities and cruelties," "ignorance and superstition," and so on.

Where to begin with a book that is so comprehensively wrongheaded, riddled from cover to cover with errors and misconceptions? I'll start with its author's nearly evangelical fervor about Darwin. Hitchens insists, with overbearing certainty, that human life is the accidental product of a random, purposeless process, and only our "vanity" and fear of death cause us to think otherwise. Like the Darwinist popularizers Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), he dismisses religion as an infantile fixation, a remnant of "the childhood of our species." It is time for the deluded to grow up and embrace the self-evident truths of science, especially evolutionary biology.

As many philosophers have pointed out, however, Darwinism cannot explain the origin of the universe, the origins of life, or the existence of the laws of nature. Nor can Hitchens's dogmatic materialism explain consciousness, free will, intentionality, or the fundamental intersubjectivity that characterize our everyday...