The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution

by Christopher Hitchens

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

This is what I meant when I said the atheistic worldview requires intellectual courage. It requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage.

Her prayers now acquire a special fervour. To what end? Can the consolations of a faith so utterly misplaced outweigh the irony of worshipping a deity this impotent or evil – or, indeed, imaginary?

And indeed, I think it’s quite important that we share with Sophocles and other pre-monotheists a revulsion to desecration or to profanity. That we don’t want to see churches desecrated. DAWKINS: No, indeed not. HITCHENS: Religious icons trashed, and so forth. We share an admiration for at least some of the aesthetic achievements of religion.

Because there is no discourse that enforces humility more rigorously than science. Scientists in my experience are the first people to say they don’t know. If you get scientists to start talking outside their area of specialization, they immediately start hedging their bets, saying things like, ‘I’m sure there’s someone in the room who knows more about this than I do, and, of course, all the data aren’t in.’ This is the mode of discourse in which we’re most candid about the scope of our ignorance.

DENNETT: And now we teach our undergraduates how to manipulate n-dimensional spaces, and to think about vectors in n-dimensional spaces. And they get used to the fact that they can’t quite imagine them. What you do is, you imagine three of them and wave your hand a little bit, and say, ‘More of the same.’ But you check your intuition by running the math, and it works.

And the obstacles, it seems to me, are not that we don’t have the facts or the arguments. It’s the strategic reasons for not professing it, not admitting it, not admitting it to yourself, not admitting it in public because your family’s going to view it as a betrayal. You’re just embarrassed to admit that you were taken in by this for so long. It takes, I think, tremendous courage to just declare that you’ve given that all up. And if we can find ways to help people find that courage and give them some examples of people who have done this and they’re doing just fine

This is a Latin formula which has some history, and I appreciate history.’ Freddie Ayer,fn23 the philosopher, also used to say grace, and what he said was, ‘I won’t utter falsehoods but I have no objection to uttering meaningless statements.’