AD#3 Atheist Reason

While Christopher Hitchens is an amusing writer, his approach to argument can only be described as hopeless. To confuse anecdote with data is bad enough, but only Hitchens would seriously attempt to define good and evil by how he feels about things. Even Sam Harris, who is no expert logician, has a metric that can at least be theoretically applied to every individual. It’s certainly informative to know that Hitch was willing to give his flak jacket to a woman and tolerate the proximity of black men in the subway, but how, precisely, are his actions supposed to prove anything related to his assertions about morality, human nature, or the non-existence of God?

But these incompetencies are far from his worst mistake; as to that, it’s hard to choose between his pathetic three-paragraph climax of his ideal secular society and the incredible self-evisceration of the greater part of his book accomplished by his failure to provide any support whatsoever for dozens of the very sort of assertions he himself defined as auto-refuting.

UPDATE – Since the Atheist Demotivators have proved surprisingly popular, I’ve added a permalink to them in the TIA section on the right.