Theology for the Masses

Honzo December 18th, 2007

A little while ago, I posted a short bit about Hitchens’ reply to a speech that Romney, a presidential candidate who happens to be Mormon, had given. Wuzzdem had made a nice little parody of Hitchens’ reply that tickled me a bit. During the course of writing that post, I claimed that Hitchens’ had strawman’ed Romney.

Gringo contested this claim in a comment on the post, asking me to clarify how exactly how Hitchen’s strawman’ed Romney.

Notice what Hitchens’ complaint was in the bit that I quoted;¹ it is the claim that God choose to reveal itself to the world via “few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater.” By doing so, he is claiming how God should be acting. It is one thing to claim divine revelation, i.e. that something has revealed how it acts; it is another to claim that you know, based on reason, that something must act a certain way. Hitchens is casting onto god, as a proof of its existence, the requirements that it act as Hitchens himself would act, i.e. choose another way to reveal itself to the world than how Christians and Mormons claim it has. This is a classic anthropomorphism, the attachment of human qualities onto non-human entities.

Hitchens’ anthropomorphism is especially ironic because Hitchens and the new atheists often criticize the “religionists”** for anthropomorphizing god. Yet, here Hitchens is doing so and uses this to discredit tenets of Romney’s faith. The question is not whether people of faith anthropomorphize god, but that Hitchens himself will only accept a god that is like him.

Having established that Hitchens is anthropomorphizing god,² is there a strawman in his comment? I think that there is. His sarcastic attack on the claims of Romney’s faith (and the claims at hand overlap with mine here) is based on how Hitchens’ anthropomorphism, not on Romney’s claim of a revealed God. In order to avoid a strawman, Hitchens must argue from the claims that Romney’s faith makes when he is critiquing his system of thought. That is to say, one must consider the whole of a worldview, not just take potshots here and there. Romney’s faith, and mine, describe a revealed God that consistently chooses those that are powerless, those that are oppressed, to be recipients of His revelation. Therefore, it would come as no surprise to anyone that actually listens to the claims of Mormonism that God would reveal himself to “few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater.”

Because Hitchens argues against the validity of Romney’s faith on the basis of Hitchens’ idea of what god must be like instead of how instead of actually using Romney’s claims of what God is like, he argues about his opponent’s position without actually using his opponent’s position - classic strawman.

[cross posted at H/J]

1. I am only concerning myself here and in the previous post with the bit that I quoted. Neither here nor in the original post did I claim to do a complete treatment of his reply; it was just something that came to me as I was relying the post from Wuzzdem. However, I do think that this comment is indicative of most of Hitchens’ attacks of Christianity. To put it as Stephen Prothero said, “What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself.” [↩]
2. Notice that any group given an “-ist” on the end, when the group does not designate itself as such, clearly demonstrates that those receiving the suffix are silly, stupid, and generally unworthy of respect. [↩]

• Culture , Nature of God
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