Hitchens doesn't need God because he can wash away his own sins...and smoke while doing it!
Frege striking the pose that earned him fame as a beard model
Christopher Hitchens says early in his book God Is Not Great:
There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
I highlighted the third point because that is what I want to address, though I provided the whole quotation simply because it is interesting. Furthermore, I’m only interested in his comment that religious faith is the “result” of “dangerous sexual repression”.
Now, let me begin by admitting I haven’t read all of Hitchens’ book. Quite honestly, I don’t want to spend the money on it when I can buy much better books. (This cuts across religious beliefs: I don’t buy a lot of Christian books because I have other books I want to buy.) Also, I don’t find his book very interesting. I did quickly read through a few chapters today, and the impression I came away with was that the book was hard-hitting only in its rhetoric, not in its logic. Once again, this impression is the result of only selectively reading; maybe I would feel different if I read the whole book. As far as arguments against religion, I think others have done a much better job, even if I don’t find their arguments wholly persuasive.
Now, back to the Hitchens’ quotation. The way I understand his point is that he is making a Freudian point. That people’s religious tendencies are the result of sexual repression. I could be mistaken in the exact details, but it seems evident that he believes it an object to religious faith that it originates in a psychological problem, i.e., sexual repression. And, furthermore, when he says “religious faith” I understand him as talking about a religion, not simply one person’s faith.
I, as much as anyone, am glad that British men have withstood the assaults of German men at important times over the past century. But, on this occasion, I must applaud as a German man defeats a British man.
Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, philosopher, and logician in the late 19th and early 20th century. His book, The Foundations of Arithmetic, is very thought-provoking. (Of all the philosophers I have read, he stands with Bertrand Russell and William James as the clearest writers. Frege is better than these two at laying bear the structure of his arguments, and his prose doesn’t suffer in doing so.) One of the things he does in the book is to combat psychology’s encroachment upon logic and philosophy. It is from those passages that I provide the following quotations:
Never let us take a description of an origin of an idea as a definition, or an account of the mental and physical conditions on which we become conscious of a proposition for a proof of it. A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse the two. We must remind ourselves, it seems, that a proposition no more ceases to be true when I cease to think of it than the sun ceases to shine when I shut my eyes.
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We suppose, it would seem, that concepts sprout in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their birth: we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the nature of the mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.
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[A]lways…separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective.
The truth or falsity of a proposition doesn’t depend upon the psychological reasons one comes to believe it. Whether religion grew out of sexual repression doesn’t matter to whether religious beliefs are true; whether a person believes a religion solely because of sexual repression doesn’t mean that that religion is false.
This isn’t a difficult thing to grasp. But it is maddening how often a discussion of the truth or falsity of a religion turns to a discussion of the psychological reasons for a person holding religious beliefs. Christianity can still be true if every Christian in America adopted the faith because they hate homosexuals, or because they want to preserve the old culture, or because they fear death, or because they want to make their parents proud, or because they want to fit in socially–the psychological reasons for their belief shouldn’t be confused with the logical reasons for *what* they believe.
Maybe someone doesn’t think that there are good logical reasons for Christianity and doesn’t think it’s true. Okay…fine. Attack religion through logical arguments, not though assertions about Christians’ psychological states. If you want to talk about psychological states, understand that you are only criticizing an individual’s reasons for holding a belief, not about the logical foundations of *what* they believe in. Hitchens’ four objections are directed against *what* Christians believe, and it is here that he makes his error in his third point.
Let me end by an example: many people learn basic arithmetical truths from their parents or teachers before they have any other reason for believing these things. Our parents tell us 2+2=4, and without know why that is we simply accept it as true. If I were trying to disprove that 2+2=4, wouldn’t it be futile to say that these people only believe it because their parents tell them it’s true and they want to please their parents? Of course it would. This, I assert, is what Hitchens is (erroneously) doing by claiming that an objection to religion faith is that it is the result of sexual oppression.
Tags: atheism, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Frege, Philosophy, Religion
