Christopher Hitchens: A man of deep, deep faith

A reader translates an interview with Christopher Hitchens in Brazil's Veja:

Veja: So, your ideal or utopia today is a totally secular society?

CH: Yes. My next book, which I already finished but which hasn't been published yet, will have the title God Is Not Great. The title openly contradicts a well-known principle of Islamic faith, but the book is not just a criticism of Islam. It is against belief in God. I belief that someone who considers himself a radical today has to defend and disseminate scientific discoveries in such areas as cosmology and genetics, for two reasons. The first is to combat racism. We already had the moral abolition of racism, and the discoveries of genetics now brought us its scientific abolition.

Christopher Hitchens apparently has a transcendent belief in the miracle that somehow the random processes of Darwinian selection ended up making every every race exactly equal in everything. That would be like flipping a coin 100 times and having it wind up on its edge every time.

Hitchens is a classic example of Glaivester's great line that a lot of people assume:

"I thought the whole point of evolution was just to deny God. I didn't think it was actually supposed to tell us anything."

As I wrote in Toronto's National Post in 1999 in "Darwin's Enemies on the Left:"

The equal worth of all human souls has been one of the most popular, influential, and beneficial of all Christian beliefs. It inspired many of the great humanitarian achievements in Western history, such as the abolition of the slave trade. Science can neither prove nor disprove spiritual equality -- a defect in a scientific theory, but a blessing in a religious doctrine. By contrast, the literal interpretation of Genesis that the world was created in 4004 BC was eminently refutable, as Darwin demonstrated.

Although the Darwinian demolition of Old Testament fundamentalism was logically irrelevant to the question of whether all souls are of equal value to God, it made the whole of Christianity seem outdated. Thereafter the prestige of evolutionary biology encouraged egalitarians to discard that corny creed of spiritual equality - and to adopt the shiny new scientific hypotheses that humans are physically and mentally uniform. And that eventually put Darwinian science on a collision course with progressive egalitarians.

For Darwinism requires hereditary inequalities...

Darwin did not dream up the Theory of Evolution. Many earlier thinkers, like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and the great French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, had proposed various schemes of gradual changes in organisms. Darwin's great contribution was the precise engine of evolution: selection. Lamarck, for example, had believed that giraffes possess long necks because their ancestors had stretched their necks to reach higher leaves. This stretching somehow caused their offspring to be born with longer necks. Darwin, however, argued that the proto-giraffes who happened to be born with longer necks could eat more and thus left behind more of their longer-necked children than the proto-giraffes unlucky enough to be born with shorter necks.

And what selection selects are genetic differences. In "The Descent of Man," Darwin wrote, "Variability is the necessary basis for the action of selection."

Consider the full title of Darwin's epochal book: "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." It is hard to imagine two words that could get a scholar in worse trouble today than "Favoured Races." But that term is not some deplorable Dead White European Maleism that we can scrape away to get down to its multiculturally sensitive core. Not at all: "Favoured Races" is Darwin's Big Idea. For if we didn't differ genetically, selection could not act upon us.

And the flood of data pouring in since then from genetic studies like the HapMap -- in which Bob Moyzis found 1,800 genes that differ sizably among the major races -- only confirms this logic.

As I wrote six years ago in "Seven Dumb Ideas about Race:"

Much of the Race Does Not Exist cant stems from the following logic (if you can call it logic): “If there really are different racial groups, then one must be The Master Race, which means -- oh my God – that Hitler Was Right! Therefore, we must promote whatever ideas most confuse the public about race. Otherwise, they will learn the horrible truth and they'll all vote Nazi.”

Look, this is one big non sequitur: Of course, there are different racial groups. And of course their members tend to inherit certain different genes, on average, than the members of other racial groups. And that means racial groups will differ, on average, in various innate capabilities. But that also means that no group can be supreme at all jobs. To be excellent at one skill frequently implies being worse at something else. So, there can't be a Master Race. Sports fans can cite countless examples. Men of West African descent monopolize the Olympic 100m dash, but their explosive musculature, which is so helpful in sprinting, weighs them down in distance running, where they are also-rans. Similarly, there are far more Samoans in the National Football League than Chinese, simply because Samoans tend to be much, much bigger. But precisely because Samoans are so huge, they'll never do as well as the Chinese in gymnastics.

It's not a good idea for members of the faith-based community like Hitchens to proclaim things like: Science proves we're all genetically equal, so therefore you shouldn't be beastly toward people of other races. The obvious flaw in this strategy is that eventually people will figure out that you are lying about what the science of genetics says, and therefore, by your own logic, that discredits the perfectly valid second half of your assertion.

By the way, does Hitchens know anything about the history of cosmology in the 20th Century? Two of the most important breakthroughs were extensions of classic proofs for the existence of God -- Father Lemaitre's Big Bang idea is reflective of the Aristotle-Aquinas Prime Mover argument and Brandon Carter's Anthropic Principle builds on the Rev. Paley's Argument from Design -- as I pointed out in "Darwin's Enemies on the Right?"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer