Fides Quaerens Intellectum

As I continue to work my way through the Hitchens book god is not Great (2007), I’m simultaneously trudging through a recent work by one of Hitchens fellow New-Yorkers, Rev. Tim Keller. It’s pretty clear that Keller, pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, churned out The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008) at least in part due to the rise of the growing corpus of literature coming from the leaders of the New Atheism, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and yes, my favorite “new” atheist club-member Christopher Hitchens. One of Hitchens arguments against the probability of the existence of an omnibenevolent God is captured in the title of his second chapter, “Religion Kills.” Citing numerous examples of religiously-motivated violence from the street wars between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast to the 9/11 attacks in his own back yard, Hitchens concludes that the “true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to recognize it have forfeited their right to exist?” (31). Setting aside the minor challenge Hitchens has with logic–and in this case the composition fallacy (i.e., a fallacious argument claiming that what is true of a few parts of the whole MUST be true of the whole itself), Keller humors Hitchens and agrees that “Religion ‘transcendentalizes’ ordinary cultural differences so that parties feel they are in a cosmic battle between good and evil” (55). Yes, Islam is the reason for much present-day terrorism, not to mention the never-ending contest between Israel and Palestine. Keller points out, however, that non-religious wars have been as plentiful as religious ones. Beginning with the French Revolution which jettisoned religion for human reason, we can point to the Communist Russian, Chinese, and Cambodian regimes of the 20th century–all of which rejected organized religion and belief in God (55). Keller then asks if we can with confidence conclude the source of killing is religion itself, or is it something else in the darkness of the human heart–as he suggests it is–that “expresses itself regardless of what a society’s beliefs might be” (56)? Hitchens will have to find another way of making a necessary connection between religion and killing.