God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Chapter 6 delves more deeply into the idea that nature follows a conscious design. Hitchens begins by stating that humans are naturally self-centered. He uses this assumption to explain the popularity of astrology as a predictive tool and why luck, or lack thereof, is often cited as a reason for an individual’s fate. Applying this solipsism to religious beliefs, he examines the phrase, “there but for the grace of God go I.” To Hitchens, this phrase is proof that many religious people believe themselves to be the center of God’s plan. The phrase was originally used by John Bradford while watching people about to be executed. If God is responsible for sparing Bradford from execution, and is in fact the master of everything that exists, then God must also have chosen to allow the condemned to be killed.

Hitchens furthers this thought by describing a mine collapse in West Virginia, in which several men were mistakenly reported to be safe but were later discovered to have died. The newspaper headlines reporting the men to be alive claimed it to be a miracle—God had kept the men safe. However, when their death was announced, no one blamed God for the misfortune. Hitchens goes on to give several examples of this type of thinking: When good things happen, God is given credit, but when bad things happen, deities are rarely mentioned.

Hitchens believes that human self-centeredness is the primary reason that many believe in the concept of intelligent design. He gives common examples of creationist arguments. The first, popularized by William Paley, describes a “primitive” human finding a watch in the forest. Even if the person does not know what the watch is, they will assume it to be intentionally built due to its complex nature. Creationists use this metaphor to argue that complex biological mechanisms such as eyes, ears, and the tusks of wild boars could not possibly have occurred by accident. They are too “perfect,” and appear to have been designed specifically to fit a certain purpose.

Hitchens counters this argument by explaining that biology is far from perfect. Humans have a number of pointless parts, such as the appendix and the thin layer of hair that grows in the womb and usually disappears before birth. These vestigial organs are left over from earlier stages in evolution, and, if humans had been perfectly designed by a conscious higher being, they would not exist at all. Hitchens explores the example of the eye in depth. Although it is a complex organ, there are several imperfections and overly-complicated mechanisms that indicate a slow evolutionary progression from primitive eyespots to complex human eyes. To add to this, if God had created humans to be the most perfect being, Hitchens argues that the human eye would be the most sophisticated eye in nature. In reality, many creatures, such as ospreys, have much better eyesight than people.

Hitchens’s arguments against intelligent design focus primarily on Judeo-Christian origin myths, and he offers a number of rebuttals to the stories found in the Book of Genesis, especially the great flood and Noah’s ark. He suggests that huge flooding events related to the creation of the Mediterranean and Black Seas would have created an enduring folk myth that made its way into the Bible. The fact that the story of a worldwide flood is found specifically in texts written in the ancient Middle East, and that the animals mentioned on Noah’s ark do not include creatures found in distant parts of the world, strengthen Hitchens’s view that these stories were based on folk tales from a specific time and place rather than a divinely-inspired account of world history.

The chapter ends with a description of the Burgess Shale, a fossil complex in British Colombia with a huge range of well-preserved creatures that lived directly after the Cambrian explosion. The Burgess Shale fossil record is an indispensable tool for paleontologists looking to learn more about early evolution. One particular creature, called pikaia gracilens, has been identified as the first known vertebrate, and the likely ancestor of all vertebrate animals today. Hitchens imagines a world in which this creature went extinct before evolving into more complex forms. If this particular branch in the evolutionary tree had ended at any point—as the vast majority have—life on earth would look entirely different than it does today.

Chapter 7 covers the origin myths of the three major monotheistic religions, called the Old Testament in the Christian Bible. Hitchens’s analysis is based specifically on the King James Version, the most popular of many Biblical editions published throughout history. Hitchens begins his analysis with the Ten Commandments, the list of laws that were given to Moses by God on the summit of Mount Sinai. Hitchens argues that the commandments themselves are proof that the Old Testament was written by a man, not a deity. He likens the laws to earlier rules imposed by Babylonian and Assyrian kings, especially the commandments that compel believers to recognize no other leader besides God, and to work endlessly except on the single day of rest that God has chosen. Later commandments that ban things like adultery, killing, and theft, seem pointless to Hitchens, as most societies have taboos against these actions even if they do not follow Biblical law. Hitchens sees a particular problem with the commandments relating to covetousness, which places “thy neighbor’s wife” alongside a list of personal property. He believes this to be proof that the laws were written in a patriarchal society that viewed wives as the property of men.

Hitchens is also concerned with what the commandments leave out. If the Ten Commandments are to be taken as God’s most important laws, he argues that God must be accepting of child abuse, rape, genocide, slavery, and other major crimes. In fact, the later passages of the Old Testament uphold this argument, as specific laws about how to trade enslaved people are outlined and many Old Testament stories revolve around the systematic murder of children.

Along with pointing out the similarity between God’s supposed laws and the laws of human society in the ancient Middle East, Hitchens outlines the inconsistencies within the Old Testament texts, especially the stories of Moses’s and the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. Although Moses is often credited with writing much of the text, he is usually referred to in the third person. To add to that, several passages refer to events in the life of Moses as if they happened far in the past, yet religious scholars argue that they were either written by Moses himself or by someone who witnessed the events firsthand.

Despite huge efforts by Christian and Jewish archaeologists to find evidence for Old Testament events, no such proof has ever been uncovered. Hitchens explains that Israeli archaeologists have a particularly strong motivation to find proof of Moses’s life, and are well-funded by the government. After all, conclusive evidence for Moses’s pact with God would greatly enhance Israel’s claim to its territory. Although evidence of some Biblical places and events has been found, neither the archaeological record nor contemporary records from other civilizations reflect the Old Testament story of Moses’s escape from Egypt and arrival in the promised land. Hitchens concludes that the Moses story was made up at a much later date, and has little to no basis in reality.

Chapter 8 primarily details the inconsistencies found within the major gospels of the Biblical New Testament. Hitchens writes that the New Testament is a somewhat random jumble of various texts written by different people in roughly the same time period. Since the New Testament was compiled, other texts have been discovered such as the “Gnostic” gospels, which appear to be from a similar time period as the New Testament. These texts provide new insight into many of the accounts found in the New Testament, and have been denounced by many Christian scholars and orthodox communities despite their apparent legitimacy. Hitchens believes that this is because texts like the Gospel of Judas explicitly denounce the Old Testament God.

Hitchens explains that the New Testament as it exists appears to be largely fabricated to fit predictions made in the Old Testament. He gives the example of Jesus’s birth. In the Old Testament, the messiah was prophesied to be born in Bethlehem, then called the city of David. Since Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth and Jesus was likely born there, several New Testament authors created an elaborate story to fulfill the pre-existing prophecy. Hitchens argues that the virgin birth is similarly manufactured to fulfill an earlier prediction. He points out that Jesus never mentions the immaculate conception, and that Mary does not seem to have any recollection of being visited by the angel Gabriel when she makes appearances in later verses.

Hitchens also points out a number of contradictions in Jesus’s teachings as an adult, as well as passages that suggest he did not have a superhuman understanding of the world. Several passages suggest that he believed in magic, while others show a lack of knowledge about basic agricultural practices. Hitchens makes particular note of a passage in which Jesus resists helping a non-Jewish woman, while throughout most of the New Testament, Jesus is characterized as loving to all. Such contradictory information leads Hitchens to believe that Jesus may have been based on a real person or a number of people, but that his place as the all-knowing, caring son of God is untrue.

While many Christians justify Biblical inconsistency by suggesting that the stories should be viewed metaphorically, not literally, Hitchens rejects this belief. He argues that the New Testament must either be taken as straight fact, or that it is a complete fabrication. He extends a similar argument to the life of Jesus. Some have suggested that Jesus may not have been the son of God but simply a good, moral teacher. Hitchens uses a passage from C. S. Lewis, a devout Christian, to refute this claim. According to both Lewis and Hitchens, if Jesus was a regular person and not the son of God, his teachings prove him to be either an evil manipulator or someone with a mental illness. Lewis chooses to accept Jesus’s divinity as fact, which leads him to accepting the teachings as good. Hitchens, on the other hand, approaches the issue with the assumption that Jesus, if he even existed, was not the son of God. Therefore, if he did exist, he was just one of many “deranged prophets roaming Palestine” (118).