The Rage Against God Read online

  The Rage Against God

  The Rage Against God

  how atheism led me to faith

  Peter Hitchens

  ZONDERVAN

  The Rage Against God

  Copyright © 2010 by Peter Hitchens

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  ePub Edition MARCH 2010 ISBN: 978-0-310-41259-5

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hitchens, Peter, 1951-

  The rage against God : how atheism led me to faith / Peter Hitchens. p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-310-32031-9 (hardcover)

  1. Apologetics. 2. Christianity and atheism. 3. Hitchens, Peter, 1951-

  4. Hitchens, Christopher. I. Title.

  BT1103.H58 2010

  239’.7-dc22

  2009053282

  * * *

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Miles Coverdale version of the Bible (1535). Quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version.

  Page 72: “On Passing the New Menin Gate,” from Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, © 1918, 1920 by E. P. Dutton; © 1936, 1946, 1947, 1948 by Siegfried Sassoon. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 /DCI/ 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

  “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.”

  “Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof?”

  (JOB CHAPTER 38)

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Half Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part 1 A Personal Journey Through Atheism

  Chapter 1 The Generation Who Were Too Clever to Believe

  Chapter 2 A Loss of Confidence

  Chapter 3 The Seeds of Atheism

  Chapter 4 The Last Battleships

  Chapter 5 Britain’s Pseudo-Religion and the Cult of Winston Churchill

  Chapter 6 Homo Sovieticus

  Chapter 7 Rediscovering Faith

  Chapter 8 The Decline of Christianity

  Part 2 Addressing The Three Failed Arguments of Atheism

  Chapter 9 “Are Conflicts Fought in the Name of Religion Conflicts about Religion?”

  Chapter 10 “Is it Possible to Determine What Is Right and What Is Wrong without God?”

  Chapter 11 “Are Atheist States Not Actually Atheist?”

  Part 3 The League of The Militant Godless

  Introduction

  Chapter 12 Fake Miracles and Grotesque Relics

  Chapter 13 Provoking a Bloody War with the Church

  Chapter 14 The Great Debate

  Epilogue

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Publisher

  Share Your Thoughts

  Introduction

  “Thine adversaries roar in the midst of thy congregations.”

  (THE 74TH PSALM)

  Only one thing comforts me when I look back at the carnival of adolescent petulance, ingratitude, cruelty, and insensitivity that was my Godless period. I was at least not doing it to fit in with the spirit of the age. I held all my radical positions when they were not yet fashionable, and it was necessary to be quite determined, or perhaps just arrogant, to hold them. I got myself disliked and disapproved of by the very kinds of people who nowadays would be orthodox supporters of “diversity” and secularism, precisely because they are orthodox.

  I did what everyone else of my generation was not yet doing. Alas, I still am doing what everyone else in my generation is not yet doing. When I am in church in England now, I notice that it is people of around my age (I was born in 1951) who are mostly absent. There are plenty who are older than seventy or younger than forty, but very few in between. In the United States, I suspect that a great defection of the same kind is now under way in the college generation and that those now in college, or having recently left it, are more hostile—or perhaps worse, indifferent—to religion than any previous American generation. One orthodoxy is giving way to another, as happened in Britain. To explain this, I will have to explain the curious thing that happened to the Christian religion in my country.

  In explaining this, I will describe influences I believe have operated on my brother, Christopher, much as they have affected me. It is not for me to say how similar our experiences may have been. We are separate people who, like many siblings, have lived entirely different lives. But since it is obvious that this book arises out of my attempt to debate religion with him, it would be absurd to pretend that much of what I say here is not intended to counter or undermine arguments he has presented in his own book on this subject.

  My book, like all such books, is aimed mainly at myself. All polemical authors seek to persuade themselves above all. I hope the book may also be of some value to others, perhaps to believers whose friends or family members have left Christianity or are leaving it now or are enchanted by the arguments of the anti-religious intellects of our age. What I hope to do in the pages that follow is to explain first of all how I, gently brought up in a loving home and diligently instructed by conscientious teachers, should have come to reject so completely what they said. I had some good reasons for refusing some of it. My mistake was to dispense with it all, indiscriminately. I hope to show that one of the things I was schooled in was not, in fact, religion, but a strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it—a counterfeit that can be detected and rejected while yet leaving the genuine truths of Christianity undamaged. That counterfeit still circulates, in several forms, especially in the United States.

  I want to explain how I became convinced, by reason and experience, of the necessity and rightness of a form of Christianity that is modest, accommodating, and thoughtful—but ultimately uncompromising about its vital truth. I hope very much that by doing so, I can at least cause those who consider themselves to be atheists to hesitate over their choice. I also hope to provide Christian readers with insights they can use, the better to understand their unbelieving friends and so perhaps to sow some small seeds of doubt in the minds of those friends.

  I then intend to address the fundamental failures of three atheistic arguments. Namely, that conflicts fought in the name of religion are always about religion; that it is ultimately possible to know with confidence what is right and what is wrong without acknowledging the existence of God; and that atheist states are not actually atheist. Beyond this, I harbor no ambitions to mount a comprehensive rebuttal of the arguments of such
prominent atheists as Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, or my brother, Christopher.

  I am, of course, concerned especially about Christopher. His passion against God, about which he used to say much less, grew more virulent and confident during the years while I was making my gradual, hesitant way back to the altar-rail. As he has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more certain that we cannot know such a thing in the way that we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not. I think it is better by far to believe. I do not seek to thunder as he does, or to answer fury with fury or scorn with scorn. I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by the failure of atheists to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. I do think that they have reasons for their belief, as I have reasons for mine, which are the real foundations of this argument. It is my belief that passions as strong as his are more likely to be countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time. I am grateful, even so, for the opportunity to challenge his certainties.

  It is also my view that, as with all atheists, Christopher is his own chief opponent. As long as he can convince himself, nobody else will persuade him. As I hope I shall make clear, his arguments are to some extent internally coherent and are a sort of explanation—if not the best explanation—of the world and the universe. Although he often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributes purpose to the universe, and swerves dangerously round the problem of conscience—which surely cannot be conscience if he is right—he is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.

  The difficulties of the anti-theists begin when they try to engage with anyone who does not agree with them, when their reaction is often a frustrated rage that the rest of us are so stupid. But what if that is not the problem? Their refusal to accept that others might be as intelligent as they, yet disagree, leads them into many snares.

  I tend to sympathize with them. I too have been angry with opponents who required me to re-examine opinions I had embraced more through passion than through reason. I too have felt the unsettling lurch beneath my feet as the solid ground of my belief has shifted. I do not know whether they have also experienced what often follows—namely, a long self-deceiving attempt to ignore or belittle truths that would upset a position in which I had long been comfortable; in some ways even worse, it was a position held by almost everyone I knew, liked, or respected—people who would be shocked and perhaps hostile, mocking, or contemptuous if I gave in to my own reason. But I suspect that they have experienced this form of doubt, and I suspect that the hot and stinging techniques of their argument, the occasional profanity and the persistent impatience and scorn, are as useful to them as they once were to me in fending it off.

  And yet in the end, while it may have convinced others, my own use of such techniques did not convince me.

  Part 1

  A Personal Journey Through Atheism

  CHAPTER 1

  The Generation Who Were Too Clever to Believe

  “Down with it, down with it, even to the ground.”

  (THE 137TH PSALM)

  I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967. I was fifteen years old. The book did not, as I had hoped, blaze fiercely and swiftly. Only after much blowing and encouragement did I manage to get it to ignite at all, and I was left with a disagreeable, half-charred mess. Most of my small invited audience drifted away long before I had finished, disappointed by the anticlimax and the pettiness of the thing. Thunder did not mutter. It would be many years before I would feel a slight shiver of unease about my act of desecration. Did I then have any idea of the forces I was trifling with?

  I was engaged at the time in a full, perfect, and complete rebellion against everything I had been brought up to believe. Since I had been raised to be an English gentleman, this was quite an involved process. It included behaving more or less like a juvenile delinquent, trying to look like a walking mountain range, using as much foul language as I could find excuse for, mocking the weak (such as a wheelchair-bound boy in my class who provided a specially shameful target for this impulse), insulting my elders, and eventually breaking the law. I haughtily scorned those adults who, out of alarm, concern, love, or duty, sought to warn or restrain me. Nobody can say I did not take my new anti-beliefs to their logical conclusions—hence the decision to finish the job and outrage my religious upbringing by incinerating Holy Writ.

  In truth, it was not much of a Bible as Bibles go. It was bound in shiny pale blue boards with twiddly writing on the cover, and it was illustrated with soppy pictures of Christ looking—in C. S. Lewis’s potent sneer at stained-glass sentimentality—“like a consumptive girl.” Even so, it was the real thing, the proper 1611 Authorized Version, reasonably thumbed by my wide-eyed childish self in scores of Scripture classes, a gift from my parents and until that moment treated with proper reverence and some tenderness. But this was my Year Zero. All that had to go, especially if it had any sentimental associations. We were all free now, and the Bible was one of the things we had to be free of.

  At that moment I knew—absolutely knew—that it was the enemy’s book, the keystone of the arch I wished to bring down. I knew that there was no God, that the Old Testament was a gruesome series of atrocity stories and fairy tales, while the gospels were a laughable invention used to defraud the simple. And I joyfully and clearly understood the implications of all that, just as W. Somerset Maugham’s hero, Philip Carey, understands the meaning of his atheism in the autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, only more so:

  Not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty he had reached to his own cleverness. He was unduly pleased with himself. With youth’s lack of sympathy for an attitude other than its own he despised not a little Weeks and Hayward [fellow students] because they were content with the vague emotion which they called God and would not take the further step which to himself seemed so obvious.

  He was free from degrading fears and free from prejudice. He could go his way without the intolerable dread of hellfire. Suddenly he realised that he had lost also that burden of responsibility which made every action of his life a matter of urgent consequence. He could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously, he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.

  I smugly congratulated myself (as Philip Carey does in this interesting passage) on being able to be virtuous without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I know now that proper virtue is easier to lose, and harder to find, than I thought it was then. I rather think I imagined this was a tremendously original thing to do and a shrewd blow at the dull believers who needed to be scared or bribed into goodness. This is one of the principal joys of the newly fledged atheist, and a continuing joy for many rather experienced non-believers. In this, I was like Arthur Koestler’s peasant who over long years perfects an ingenious invention—a two-wheeled vehicle with a saddle, pedals, and a chain—and then rides it proudly into the city to register the patent, only to discover thousands of people already riding mass-produced bicycles.

  But my excitement was undimmed. There were no more external, absolute rules. The supposed foundation of every ordinance, regulation, law, and maxim—from “don’t talk after lights-out” and “give way to pedestrians on the crosswalk,” to “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” “Thou shalt do no murder,” “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”—was a fake. Praying was a comical folly, hymns were so much wailing at an empty heaven, chu
rches were absurd buildings in urgent need of conversion into something more useful, or of demolition. Anyone could write a portentous book and call it Scripture.

  Enlightened self-interest was the evolutionary foundation of good behavior. I did not have to do anything that I did not want to do, ever again. I would therefore be “happy,” because I was freed from those things whereof my conscience was afraid. My conscience was in any case not to be relied on where my desires were stronger or my fears greater than its promptings. I could behave as I wished, without fear of eternal consequences and (if I was cunning and could get away with it) without fear of earthly ones either. And I could claim to be virtuous too. Unlike Philip Carey, I did immediately recognize that some of the virtues could now be dispensed with, and several of the supposed sins might turn out to be expedient if not actually delightful. I acted accordingly for several important and irrecoverable years.

  A Braggart Sinner

  That is pretty much as far as my personal confessions will go. My sins are unoriginal. The full details would be tedious for most people, unwelcome to my family (who have enough to put up with anyway), and upsetting for those directly affected by my very worst behavior. Let us just say that they include some political brawling with the police, some unhinged dabbling with illegal drugs (less damaging than I deserved), an arrest—richly merited by my past behavior but actually wrongful—for being in possession of an offensive weapon—very nearly killing someone else (and incidentally myself) through criminal irresponsibility while riding a motorcycle, and numberless acts of minor or major betrayal, ingratitude, disloyalty, dishonor, failure to keep promises and meet obligations, oath-breaking, cowardice, spite, or pure selfishness. I believe that nothing I could now do or say could possibly atone for them.