I met Christopher Hitchens once, when I went to his protest-in-support of Denmark. We have all heard of his condition, and apparently it has occasioned some discussion.
The writer somehow misses Hitchens' own remarks, which are worth reprinting.
Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts. It’s, I’m afraid to say it’s almost as well-founded an idea. I mean, I don’t, they don’t know whether prayer will work, and they don’t know whether I’ve come by this because I’m a sinner.I don't hold it against any man that he believes what he believes; I don't know how much control he has over it in any case. It strikes me that atheism is as likely to seem rational and right to some, and wrong to others, in just the way that Nominalism and Realism seem right or wrong, emphatically, to different people, across centuries. It may be that the truth is neither, but that human minds cannot reach it; and so we need both perspectives to fence off the strange area where the truth lies.
That is a more radical claim than it may seem on its face. Logic requires one or the other to be true: either "Fairness" is a real thing in the world, or it is a name we give to a concept we have; or even stronger, either God Is or Is Not. That last can be written in symbolic modal logic, in the strongest possible way:
Pv~P
That is, "It is necessary that P is the case, or that not-P is the case." For P and ~P to both be true is a logical contradiction; it cannot logically be the case that God both does and does not exist, or that Realism is both false and true.
If I say that it is not true that God exists, nor is it true that he does not exist, I'm saying something that appears to be logically impossible. One of us should be right, and the other wrong. Yet I'm not sure that is how it is. Logic is a feature of human consciousness, and consciousness remains one of the great mysteries. It is not at all clear to me that it is what it appears to be; indeed, scientific evidence shows us that our experience of consciousness is different from reality. Logic is also based heavily on conventions of language, as Peter Abelard, Gottlob Frege, and others have explored. Logic therefore may not be the reliable guide that we believe it to be.
If it is not, however, that leaves us with little else beyond faith. I have a great faith in natural theology -- in trying to understand God's purpose by examining the truth, as well as it can be established by science, of the world we are in. Yet I also think it is rational to have faith in a God that is and is not: perhaps he is in ways we do not expect, and therefore is not what we do expect.
Or perhaps it is even more difficult: one of those things of which we cannot speak, and must therefore avoid. If that is so, we may differ on these questions with no harm, and indeed, possibly with great good.
All of which is to say: May God save Christopher Hitchens. He may have to walk the valley alone, but at least he can do it in the knowledge of friendship. That is only what we will want when -- so soon -- we walk in the valley ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment