Christopher Hitchens' Best TAKEDOWN of Christianity ✨Part 1/4

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]You're told you're a miserable sinner, who is without excuse. You've disappointed your God in whom who made you and you've been so ungrateful as to rebel. You're contemptible. You're worm-like. But, you can take heart. The whole universe was designed with just you in mind. These two claims are not just mutually exclusive, but I think they're intended to compensate each other's cruelty and ultimately um absurdity.

[00:00:23]Now, if you haven't seen this particular Christopher Hitchens video, I promise you're in for a treat. I would say it's his best performance, his best debate, and his best arguments. Let's keep watching. Thank you, Mr. Hewitt, and Dr. Craig, for being among the very many very very many Christians who have so generously and hospitably and warmly uh taken me up on the challenge I I issued when I started my little book tour and welcomed me to your places to have this most important of all discussions. I can't express my gratitude enough.

[00:00:57]Um And uh thanks to the very nice young ladies who I ran into at the Elephant Bar this afternoon.

[00:01:06]But well, I hadn't expected a posse of Biola students to be um on staff. But where I thought, "God, they're everywhere now." Um Now, what I have discovered in voyaging around the this country and others in this debate and and just debating with Hindus, with Muslims, with the Jews, with Christians of all stripes, is that the the arguments are all essentially the same for belief in the supernatural, for belief in faith, for belief in God.

[00:01:36]Uh but that there are very interesting and noteworthy discrepancies between them.

[00:01:41]And one that I want to call attention to at the beginning of this evening is between those like my friend John Wilson, with whom I've now done a book of of argument about Christian apologetics, who would call himself a presuppositionalist, in other words, for whom really it's only necessary to discover the workings of God's will in the in the cosmos and to to assume that the truth of Christianity is is already proven. And what are called, and they include Dr. Craig with great honor and respect in this, the evidentialists.

[00:02:14]Now, Hitchens is drawing a pretty clear distinction here, even if the terms evidentialists and presuppositionalists seem a little complex. Basically, the idea is either you presuppose the truth of the Bible and God, or you base yourself on evidence. Now, he's going to explain why, even though William Lane Craig claims he's an evidentialist, he obviously isn't. Now, I want to begin by saying that this distinction strikes me first as a very charming distinction and second as false, or perhaps as a distinction without a difference.

[00:02:44]Well, why do I say charming? Because I think it's rather sweet that people of faith also think they ought to have some evidence.

[00:02:50]And I think it's progress of a kind.

[00:02:52]Um after all, if we'd been having this debate in the mid-19th century, Professor Craig or his equivalent would have known little or probably nothing about the laws of physics and biology, maybe even less than I know now, which is to say quite a lot um in its way.

[00:03:11]Um and they would have grounded themselves, or he would have grounded himself, on faith, on scripture, on revelation, on the prospect of salvation, on the means of grace, and the hope of glory, and perhaps on Paley's uh natural theology, uh Paley who had the same rooms, or had had the same rooms later occupied by Charles Darwin, in Cambridge with its um watchmaker theory of design that I know I don't have to expound to you, but which briefly suggests that if a an Aborigine is walking along a beach and finds a a gold watch ticking, he knows not what it's for, or where it came from, or who made it, but he knows it's not a rock, he knows it's not a vegetable, he knows it must have had a designer. The Paley analogy held for most Christians for many years um because they were willing to make the assumption that we were mechanisms and that therefore there must be a watchmaker.

[00:04:04]But now that it's been here's where the um presuppositionalist versus evidentialist dichotomy begins to kick in. Now it's been rather painstakingly and elaborately demonstrated to the satisfaction of most people. I don't want to just use arguments from authority, but it's not very much contested anymore that we are not designed as creatures, but that we evolved by a rather laborious combination of random mutation and natural selection into the species that we are today.

[00:04:37]Uh it is of course open to the faithful to say that all this was now that they come to know it, now that it becomes available to everybody, now that they think about it, and now that they've stopped opposing it or trying to ban it, then they can say, "Ah, actually, on second thought, the evolution was all part of the design."

[00:04:56]Well, as you will recognize, ladies and gentlemen, there are some arguments I can't be expected to refute or rebut because there's no way around that argument. I mean, if everything, including evolution, which isn't a design, is in nonetheless part of a divine design, then all the advantage goes to the person who's willing to believe that.

[00:05:13]That cannot be disproved. But it does seem to me a very poor and very weak argument because the test of um a good argument is that it is falsifiable, not that it's unfalsifiable.

[00:05:26]I think this is an incredibly important point that maybe Christopher Hitchens, being the intellect that he was, thought that he could just say this and move on.

[00:05:34]But you can kind of tell that a lot of the audience members aren't necessarily integrating his point here.

[00:05:41]For most people who haven't studied philosophy of science or maybe haven't thought about logic that much, The idea of something being unfalsifiable intuitively strikes them as good, right? There's nothing that could prove my faith is false. But really, what any honest and rational person comes to understand is that if there's nothing that can prove you wrong, there's no way to know you're right.

[00:06:04]Because everything is just constantly used to justify your belief. Being able to say in advance what would constitute evidence against your own position is actually essential to us making any sort of progress, uh intellectually or culturally. Let's keep watching. This I would therefore this tactic or this style of argument, which we've had some evidence of this evening, I would rebaptize or might I dare say I would rechristen it as retrospective evidentialism. In other words, everything can in due time, if you have enough faith, be made to fit.

[00:06:39]And you, too, are all quite free to believe that a sentient creator deliberately consciously put himself, a being, put himself or herself or itself to the trouble of going through huge epochs of birth and death of species over eons of time in which 99% in the course of which at least 99.9% of all species, all life forms ever to have appeared on Earth, have become extinct.

[00:07:10]As we nearly did as a species ourselves, you I invite you to look up the very alarming and beautiful and brilliant account by the the National Geographic's coordinator of the genome project. By the way, you should send in your little sample from the inside of your cheek and have your African ancestry traced. It's absolutely fascinating to follow the mitochondrial DNA that we all have in common and that we have in common with other species, other primates, and other life forms, and find out where in Africa you came from. But there came a time, probably about 180,000 years ago, when due to a terrible climatic event, probably in Indonesia, an appalling global warming crisis occurred, and the the estimate is that the number of humans in Africa went down to between 40 and 30,000.

[00:07:56]This close. This close. Think about fine-tuning.

[00:07:59]This close to joining every other species that had gone extinct.

[00:08:03]And that's our exodus story is that somehow, we don't know how cuz it's not written in any scripture. It's not told in any book. It's not part of any superstitious narrative, but somehow the escape from Africa to cooler latitudes was made. But that's how close it was.

[00:08:15]You have to be able to imagine that all this mass extinction and death and randomness is the will of a being.

[00:08:21]You're You're You're absolutely free to believe that if you wish.

[00:08:27]And all of this should happen so that one very imperfect race of evolved primates should have the opportunity to become Christians or to turn up at this gym at tonight. That all of the all of that was done with us in view. It's a curious kind of solipsism.

[00:08:44]It's a curious kind of self-centeredness. I was always brought up to believe that Christians were modest and and humble and comported themselves with with due humility. And this there's a certain arrogance to this assumption that all of this all of this extraordinary development was all about us.

[00:08:59]And we were the intended and desired result, and everything else was in the discard. The tremendous wastefulness of it. The tremendous cruelty of it. The tremendous caprice of it. The tremendous tinkering and incompetence of it. Never mind. At least we're here.

[00:09:13]And we can be people of faith. It doesn't work for me. I have to simply say that. And I think there may be questions of psychology involved in this as well.

[00:09:23]It is unfortunately more normal for people to believe that they're the center of the universe and that, you know, there's a supreme being watching them intuitively than for them to think that that's false. Unfortunately, what I think Christopher Hitchens is referring to here is that our base psychology actually accepts the idea of an internal supervisor and an afterlife and a personal plan for all of us. Obviously, if you think about it for a while, you can realize that it doesn't make any sense at all.

[00:09:50]Let's keep watching. Um believe it if you can.

[00:09:54]I can't stop you. Believe it if you like. You're welcome. It's obviously impossible, as I said before, to disprove. And it equally obviously helps you to believe it if if, as we all are, you're in the happy position of knowing the outcome. In other words, we are here. But there's a fallacy lurking in there somewhere, too. Is there not?

[00:10:12]Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure you check out parts two, three, and four.

[00:10:16]Thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.