The Hitchens Guide to the Galaxy

It's boom time for atheist polemics. Last year we had the implacable Richard Dawkins with "The God Delusion". Almost (and deservedly) unnoticed, the lightweight AC Grayling followed with "Against all Gods" (how can you take someone seriously if he lifts his title from Phil Collins??). Now Christopher Hitchens is weighing in with "God is not Great". There are three long extracts from the book on Slate.

I don't always agree with Hitchens's politics -- and judging from the fact that he has mutated from a leftie to something of a neocon, neither does he. But he is a good writer, and clearly a man of integrity. His anti-religious views are strongly held, and he is at his best when describing, in fascinating historic detail, how the message of the main religions may have been muddied by the intervention of man (though it's not clear why that's God's fault). But the main thing that emerges from this book, and from Dawkins', is that on the biggest question of all -- is there a God? -- any answer you choose can be no more than a matter of faith.

Others can and no doubt will carry out a complete exegesis of Hitchens' book. For myself, I was brought up short by the very first paragraph of the first extract on Slate. Hitchens outlines his four "irreducible objections to religious faith", of which the first is "that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos".

Whoa there big boy!! What exactly is the truth that you choose to believe instead? The latest version of the "Big Bang" theory that I recall reading suggested that the universe expanded from a blob of matter smaller than a tennis ball to its current size in less than a trillionth of a second, which certainly makes God look like a bit of a slacker for spreading the job out over six days, then taking a rest. Or maybe Hitchens is a fan of string theory, which is the current favoured way of unifying the laws of physics. The math of string theory only works if you postulate the existence of at least eleven dimensions, or large numbers of parallel universes. One practitioner denied that it was a completely untestable hypothesis, saying that it could be put to the test if one had a particle accelerator as big as the Milky Way! It's hard to see how choosing to believe this kind of stuff is any different from believing that God created the whole thing.

The simplest formulation I have ever seen for the most basic of metaphysical questions is "why is there something, rather than nothing?" Your answer to that, and mine, and Dawkins' and Hitchens', will never be susceptible to scientific proof. While you wait to find out the answer, whether you seek wisdom and solace in string theory or the Sermon on the Mount is entirely up to you.