Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Imagine that there is a set of holy books in all cultures in which there are a few enigmatic phrases that God or the gods tell our ancestors are to be passed on to the future with no change. Very important to get it exactly right. Now, so far that’s not very different from the actual circumstances of alleged holy books. But suppose that the phrases in question were phrases that we would recognize today that could not have been recognized then. Simple example: The Sun is a star. Now, nobody knew that, let’s say, in the sixth century B.C., when the Jews were in the Babylonian exile and picked up the Babylonian cosmology from the principal astronomers of the time. Ancient Babylonian science is the cosmology that is still enshrined in the book of Genesis. Suppose instead the story was “Don’t forget, the Sun is a star.” Or “Don’t forget, Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes. Mars, you know, that red star? That’s a world. It has volcanoes, it’s rusty, there are clouds, there used to be rivers. There aren’t anymore. You’ll understand this later. Trust me. Right now, don’t forget.”

Or, “A body in motion tends to remain in motion. Don’t think that bodies have to be moved to keep going. It’s just the opposite, really. So later on you’ll understand that if you didn’t have friction, a moving object would just keep moving.” Now, we can imagine the patriarchs scratching their heads in bewilderment, but after all it’s God telling them. So they would copy it down dutifully, and this would be one of the many mysteries in holy books that would then go on to the future until we could recognize the truth, realize that no one back then could possibly have figured it out, and therefore deduce the existence of God.

There are many cases that you can imagine like this. How about “Thou shalt not travel faster than light”? Okay, you might argue that nobody was at imminent risk of breaking that commandment. It would have been a curiosity: “We don’t understand what that one’s about, but all the others we abide by.” Or “There are no privileged frames of reference.” Or how about some equations? Maxwell’s laws in Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Chinese characters or ancient Hebrew. And all the terms are defined: “This is the electric field, this is the magnetic field.” We don’t know what those are, but we’ll just copy them down, and then later, sure enough, it’s Maxwell’s laws or the Schrodinger equation. Anything like that would have been possible had God existed and had God wanted us to have evidence of His existence. Or in biology. How about, “Two strands entwined is the secret of life”? You may say that the Greeks were onto that because of the caduceus. You know, in the American army all the physicians wore the caduceus on their lapels, and various medical insurance schemes also use it. And it is connected with, if not the existence of life, at least saving it. But there are very few people who use this to say that the correct religion is the religion of the ancient Greeks, because they had the one symbol that survives critical scrutiny later on.

This business of proofs of God, had God wished to give us some, need not be restricted to this somewhat questionable method of making enigmatic statements to ancient sages and hoping they would survive. God could have engraved the Ten Commandments on the Moon. Large. Ten kilometers across per commandment. And nobody could see it from the Earth but then one day large telescopes would be invented or spacecraft would approach the Moon, and there it would be, engraved on the lunar surface. People would say, “How could that have gotten there?” And then there would be various hypotheses, most of which would be extremely interesting.

Or why not a hundred-kilometer crucifix in Earth orbit? God could certainly do that. Right? Certainly, create the universe? A simple thing like putting a crucifix in Earth orbit? Perfectly possible. Why didn’t God do things of that sort? Or, put another way, why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?

I think this is a serious issue. If we believe, as most of the great theologians hold, that religious truth occurs only when there is a convergence between our knowledge of the natural world and revelation, why is it that this convergence is so feeble when it could easily have been so robust?

So, to conclude, I would like to quote from Protagoras in the fifth century B.C., the opening lines of his Essay on the Gods :

About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing.Among others, the fact that they are never seen.

This great American writer is as far as I know not an atheist, but he has the novelist’s ability to put an admirable argument into the mouth of an unsympathetic character. Here, Kriegman deals with a frequently heard cocktail-party argument about the supposedly marvelous contingencies that make our existence possible in the first place. (We shall be returning to this point in less literary and less vernacular forms.)

“You go, sweetheart. O.K., young fella, hit me with those theories of yours.”

To Dale at the moment these theories are as hatefully irrelevant and obscure as the exact words being exchanged in the cheerful cacophony of these many rooms of mine, where the word “Bitburg” keeps sounding like a bird chirp. Esther’s closeness, and the ambiguity of their conversation, have tantalized him; his renewed glimpse and scent of the woman-lover, that radiant animal who waits crouching at the head of the stairs, at the end of all these crooked, noisy, obstructed social corridors, have left him dazed. His mind aches like an overexercised body. Yet he politely offers, as on the other side of the world priests peddle candles in the clamor of the weary holy places, the cosmic arguments: the hugely long odds against the big bang’s having worked out so well, the horizon, smoothness, and flatness problems, the incredible necessary precision of the weak-and strong-force constants, not to mention that of the gravitational-coupling constant and the neutron mass, were any of which different by even a few ten-thousandths the universe would have been too explosive or diffuse, too short-lived or too utterly homogenous to contain galaxies, stars, planets, life, and Man.

Kriegman hears all this out with bursts of rapid nodding that bounce his chins on the knot of his necktie and wag the blossoms of the azalea garland he still wears. As if better to understand, he has put on large squarish horn-rims, trifocals; behind their lenses, between sips from his flexible plastic glass of white wine (Almaden Mountain Rhine, $8.87 per three-liter jug at Boulevard Bottle), his small eyes jump and change size as they jiggle among the three levels of focal length. “Well,” he says at last, smiling like a man who even as he talks is listening to a background music with sentimental associations, “nobody denies the big bang has a few wrinkles we don’t comprehend yet, we may never comprehend for that matter; for example, I was reading the other day that even the oldest star clusters show traces of the heavy elements, which is strange because there’s no older generation of stars to have cooked them up and as you know the particle mechanics of the big bang could only have supplied helium and hydrogen, right?”

Dale wonders if he’s supposed to say, “Right.” He foresees that he will not have to say very much.

“Listen, there’s always going to be wrinkles,” Kriegman is telling him with a fatherly gruffness. “This primal fireball et cetera, and all this field theory in those first fractions of a second, we’re talking about virtually incomprehensible events, ridiculously long ago. These astrophysicists are just whistling ‘Dixie’ three-quarters of the time.”