More on Hitchens v. God

I've made passing observations on author Christopher Hitchens' views on God over the past 12 months, and with the publication of Hitchens' book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," a raft of commentary has followed in its wake.

To sum up my past observations, Hitchens is very witty and overall an enjoyable character but his arguments--the ones I've encountered, anyway--are unsophisticated.

I ran across this, for instance:

What about the question of morality without God? Al Sharpton spent a lot of time grilling you on that. And it was also a major theme in your email debate with the Christian author Douglas Wilson at Christianity Today.

Weird guy.

Wilson insisted that if you took Jesus out of the equation, the words “right” or “wrong” would have no meaning. Thoughts in the brain would just be a series of chemical reactions, like bubbles in a soft drink. As he put it, “If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is ‘winning the debate.’ They aren't debating; they are just fizzing.”

What he’s saying is that if he ceases to believe in Jesus, he’s going to instantly become an immoral person. It’s a terrible admission to have made! It’s an awful insult to human self-respect to say that. And they don’t seem to understand that they give themselves over in that way. It’s like saying that nothing would stop me from raping you now if I weren’t under the supervision of a heavenly dictator. And I have a higher opinion of myself than that.

(Atlantic Online)

Hitchens' response hints at a rudimentary or worse understanding of the atheist's dilemma in accounting for morality. His characterization of Wilson's argument is nothing less than a mischaracterization of Wilson's argument.

Wilson's argument in that case concerned the notion of the existence of abstractions such as truth.

Indeed, a corollary application of the argument does apply to human perceptions of moral right and wrong, but Hitchens compounds his error by constructing a straw man version of Wilson's argument. Wilson's point (if stretched to encompass morality in particular) isn't that he would fizz differently, but that his fizzing is neither right nor wrong regardless of how he fizzes.

Despite his ability to address the issue with humor, Hitchens' failure to address the real argument points up the typical problem with his polemic. He simply doesn't know the issues well enough to treat them effectively at this point--if we suppose that atheism possesses the means to do so in the first place.