Rage against God by Peter Hitchens

Peter has chosen to tackle the God question to counter his brother (Christopher’s) god denunciation of his famous book ‘god is not great’, by taking a very personal view of religion to begin with. Peter began to reach out to God in his thirties after having lived in the godless Russia for years. Most of his arguments are pretty good denunciations of the atheist arguments spearheaded by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. It is interesting that both rival brothers seem to be heavily influenced by the cultures they lived in, one in a authoritative Russia and the other in a free-er capitalist and still thriving USA. peter’s arguments about Communism being atheist in nature do make a lot of sense. But Peter failed to answer one of Christopher Hitchens rendition on Blaise Pascal’s famous wager, often used by the religious to sell faith in God. In the argument put forth by Blaise Pascal,which goes something like this, 'it is in one's best interest to believe in the existence of God, as it is a rational assumption and does no harm, and the possibility of eternal punishment in hell outweighs any advantage of believing otherwise.' Christopher Hitchens response was that if someone chooses to invoke Pascal's wager in order to follow religion then it demonstrates two aspects, one that it portrays a very cynical god, one who does not seem to care about proper intent, and the other aspect is about the hypocritical follower, who chooses to follow without fully believing. Hitchens did not want to believe in man made interpretations of religion, instead choosing to lead a life of constant quest, in an attempt to achieve absolute faith. And in case he did die before achieving this allusive faith and found that his scepticism was wrong and God does exist, then he would choose to argue his case in front of God by claiming that all his life he had been assiduously searching for His signs but failed to do so mainly due to the pathetic nature of arguments put forward by His followers and apologists. For me Pascal’s wager is a very weak argument used by the religious apologist. I prefer to use Christopher’s deduction as it is more attractive, filled with desire and motivation for knowledge.