Parallel Reading 1

I've started a project to read in parallel
     Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great
     Peter Hitchen's The Rage Against God
Since the two brothers are both very well educated and accomplished, yet reach very different conclusions about God and Religion, it should be interesting to let them comment on each other.

My impressions of Christopher's first chapter:

     "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."

     The buzzwords are "scientific" and "rational."  Scientific here does NOT mean using the scientific method.  It does not mean running experiments in your own life and carefully collecting the data.  Those kind of activities are reserved for scientists.  What it does mean is reading books that popularize science for the layman (Dawkins, Darwin, Hawking and Crick are mentioned specifically) and being informed and inspired by them.  Rational here doesn't mean a mathematically rigorous use of logic (either inductive or deductive).  There are no Syllogisms, no recognition of Axiomatic foundations or Well-formed Propositions.  Rational just means "free-inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake."  It is as much a shared cultural attitude about what things are right-thinking and what things are not, as it is anything else. 
     He explicitly counters a frequent charge that atheism is a kind of faith - "And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers, our belief is not a belief.  Our principles are not a Faith."  He then very quickly makes some very non-scientific assertions that sound awfully, well, "faithy."

"no statistic will ever be found that...we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful...In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way." 

"We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion."

Oddly enough he reminds me a great deal of a writer whom he finds "dreary and absurd" - C. S. Lewis.  Like Lewis, what we have is not so much a closely reasoned argument - say a philosophic paper whose conclusions had darn well better be warrantable under close peer review.  What we have is rhetoric.  A chatty, lively sharing of ideas and attitudes he hopes we find persuasive.  The difference between Christopher and Jack (as Lewis's friends knew him) is that Jack knew exactly what he was doing, and Christopher does not.  Jack knew he was trying to communicate a point of view from inside himself in hopes that another might find it resonating or at least understandable.  Christopher is under the illusion that he is proving something.

Even more than Lewis, he reminds me of Freud (whose Interpretation of Dreams I'm about a third of the way through now) - The cocky certainty, the assuming of the mantle of science and rationality without its rigors; the charming style; an unmistakable undertone of narcissism.  I really don't think he would have been too disappointed during his lifetime to have been classed with Marx and Freud, who (in Christopher's own words) "were not doctors or exact scientists.  It is better to think of them as great and fallible imaginative essayists."