Kevin Myers writes a weekly opinion column in the Irish Independent and in recent pieces he has been addressing the controversial new book from Christopher Hitchens,-God Is Not Great-.There seems to be an anti-Theist fashion in publishing at the moment with Richard Dawkins -The God Delusion- still topping the bestsellers list.While Myers has a personal regard for Hitchens and lauds his book as a "brilliant contemplation upon the role of religion in human society...",he also compellingly exposes the rational inconsistencies in his just published polemic.Below I have drawn from two articles penned by Myers,edited for space constraints.
THE TAJ MAHAL
A Random Act ?
CHRISTOPHER Hitchens, Part II. The admirable Ian O'Doherty - who reviewed Christopher's book, 'God is Not Great' on Saturday - in an earlier column fired a brief broadside at colleagues who, he alleged, supported 'intelligent design'.
That is the theory that the maker of the universe, using some early Mrs Beeton recipe, put the ingredients of the cake of creation into the primordial oven, and gave it a few million years at 'low'.
If he included me as such a believer, he was wrong. I don't believe in 'intelligent design': I merely say that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, I cannot rule it out. I certainly don't accept Darwinian theories of evolution, as currently posited, but nor do I exclude the possibility that they can be refined to explain life on earth.
Centrally, I cannot see how 'evolution' was accidentally able to create hundreds of proteins, any molecule of which consists of maybe 1,000 different amino-acids, in precisely the right sequence. Now, if I were to visit the Taj Mahal and declare it was caused by various minerals randomly falling into place, I would probably be considered a suitable candidate for sectioning - not dangerous, but to be given a glass of warm milk and a couple Digestives last thing.
But the accident theory is how evolutionists explain the emergence of proteins: and that is before we even infuse those protein molecules with life, without which they instantly decay. And then, of course, there is DNA, which enables proteins to reproduce themselves: now where, unassisted, did that come from? …
Moreover, 'evolution' is still a theory which depends on more than rational analysis. …
What do I believe in? I, a weak, wimpish agnostic, don't know. I will not, a priori, rule out God, because to do so is to repeat the sin of the theists, who a priori have ruled Him in. Nor can I accept one of Christopher's key declarations: Religion poisons everything. If he means this literally, then it is manifestly not true: it has not poisoned him, he who was raised with Christ's name, has it? Did it poison Shakespeare, Schiller or Bach, those great laureates of the human spirit? No, what poisons the world is life itself: for even single-celled creatures attack and kill one another. …
But here is the paradox. Rulers who believed in a Divine Creator have tended to create gentler societies than have atheists. The twentieth century was the first in which various avowedly godless states came into existence: and robbed of the inhibitions caused by a belief in the afterlife, the most astonishingly lawless regimes in world history emerged. The Aztec society which removed a heart each dawn from a teenage ribcage to lure the sun-god from his couch, the Dahomey chieftain who daily dispatched a child to the afterlife to enquire after the health of his ancestors. Why, these were positively vegan compared to the godless butchers of the 20th century, the fine fellows who variously supervised human affairs from the Rhineland to Vladivostok, and from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the South China Sea. Their victims can be measured, not in the modest hundreds but in the hundreds of millions. The world has never, ever seen anything like the evil triumphs of the totalitarian secular states of the 20th century. Which is not an argument in favour of the existence of god, merely one in favour of the belief in one: it is the social utility of a theistic faith which is appealing, not the fictions which lie at its heart. …
WE all know of the evils that the various churches have done, from the child-rape orgies by Catholic paedophile priests in our own lifetimes, with the perhaps even more reprehensible - cover-ups by the hierarchy, to church complicity in massacres from Croatia to Bohemia, in this century and almost every century beforehand. But such evils are as nothing compared to those performed by the ideological secularists who rejected god, and for whom the commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, was simply a vapid, bourgeois piety.
That is the theory that the maker of the universe, using some early Mrs Beeton recipe, put the ingredients of the cake of creation into the primordial oven, and gave it a few million years at 'low'.
If he included me as such a believer, he was wrong. I don't believe in 'intelligent design': I merely say that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, I cannot rule it out. I certainly don't accept Darwinian theories of evolution, as currently posited, but nor do I exclude the possibility that they can be refined to explain life on earth.
Centrally, I cannot see how 'evolution' was accidentally able to create hundreds of proteins, any molecule of which consists of maybe 1,000 different amino-acids, in precisely the right sequence. Now, if I were to visit the Taj Mahal and declare it was caused by various minerals randomly falling into place, I would probably be considered a suitable candidate for sectioning - not dangerous, but to be given a glass of warm milk and a couple Digestives last thing.
But the accident theory is how evolutionists explain the emergence of proteins: and that is before we even infuse those protein molecules with life, without which they instantly decay. And then, of course, there is DNA, which enables proteins to reproduce themselves: now where, unassisted, did that come from? …
Moreover, 'evolution' is still a theory which depends on more than rational analysis. …
What do I believe in? I, a weak, wimpish agnostic, don't know. I will not, a priori, rule out God, because to do so is to repeat the sin of the theists, who a priori have ruled Him in. Nor can I accept one of Christopher's key declarations: Religion poisons everything. If he means this literally, then it is manifestly not true: it has not poisoned him, he who was raised with Christ's name, has it? Did it poison Shakespeare, Schiller or Bach, those great laureates of the human spirit? No, what poisons the world is life itself: for even single-celled creatures attack and kill one another. …
But here is the paradox. Rulers who believed in a Divine Creator have tended to create gentler societies than have atheists. The twentieth century was the first in which various avowedly godless states came into existence: and robbed of the inhibitions caused by a belief in the afterlife, the most astonishingly lawless regimes in world history emerged. The Aztec society which removed a heart each dawn from a teenage ribcage to lure the sun-god from his couch, the Dahomey chieftain who daily dispatched a child to the afterlife to enquire after the health of his ancestors. Why, these were positively vegan compared to the godless butchers of the 20th century, the fine fellows who variously supervised human affairs from the Rhineland to Vladivostok, and from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the South China Sea. Their victims can be measured, not in the modest hundreds but in the hundreds of millions. The world has never, ever seen anything like the evil triumphs of the totalitarian secular states of the 20th century. Which is not an argument in favour of the existence of god, merely one in favour of the belief in one: it is the social utility of a theistic faith which is appealing, not the fictions which lie at its heart. …
WE all know of the evils that the various churches have done, from the child-rape orgies by Catholic paedophile priests in our own lifetimes, with the perhaps even more reprehensible - cover-ups by the hierarchy, to church complicity in massacres from Croatia to Bohemia, in this century and almost every century beforehand. But such evils are as nothing compared to those performed by the ideological secularists who rejected god, and for whom the commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, was simply a vapid, bourgeois piety.
Kevin Myers
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