Hitchens demonstrates again here the rhetorical skills that I so admire.
If you like, you can watch the video of D'Souza embedded below or you can trust that my descriptions and transcriptions are honest and accurate.
Among the things D'Souza says:
...I have just published a book about life after death...it's called Life After Death: The Evidence.
Got that? "Evidence."
...The atheist is posing as the champion of reason and science and evidence. I want to beginby showing that on an issue crucial to religion - is there life after death - the atheist is not only AS ignorant, but MORE ignorant than the religious believer.
D'Souza goes on to correctly describe how the atheist will disparage the view of the religious person who believes in life after death because a "holy book" SAYS there is life after death. He correctly describes the atheist reponse that the believer has access to no knowledge that can confirm the existence of life after death.
But what if we were to turn the camera around and say to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett: "Do you believe there is life after death?" They will say no!
Well this is very interesting. YOU haven't been to the other side of the curtain either, you haven't interviewed any dead guys! What information do YOU have that the religous believer does NOT have?! And the answer is none. And so the atheist and the believer are in exactly the same position. Both are making a truth claim and both are totally ignorant. Both are stating a belief on a position on which neither one has any evidence at all.
Dinesh isn't a stupid man, so I can only assume he is aware of what a bad straw man argument this is and is just an intellectually dishonest man.
But Hitchens responds to this dishonest argument more elgantly than I could.
I'm sorry, Dinesh:
Atheists do NOT say "we know there is no God."
We say, to the contrary, no argument and no evidence has ever been aduced that we consider to be persuasive.
There's no reason to beleve in evidence or argument, ontology or science.
The same with the afterlife. Of course we don't say that we KNOW there isn't one. We say that we don't know anyone who can bring any reason to think that there IS.
This is a very important distinction and it is very regretabble that you miss it and I'm sorry to say, Dinesh, that the immediate loser in an argument about things of which we can and can't be certain...where the only thing that IS certain in these laws is the principle of UNcertainty...the immediate loser, the man who has to leave the island (sorry Dinesh, again) right away almost, is the man who says "I already know all I need to know, I already have all the information I need- indeed I've been given it by a supernatural body."
Hitchens video embedded below:
"I can say with reasonable certainty: I don't think all this was undertaken so that one primate species on one small planet could hear the Pope telling them that AIDS may be bad, but that condoms are worse. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, what could be more self-flattering, pathetic, and yes, superstitious than that?"
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