Hitchens V Turek - VCU - 4 of 15

One of the many problems with the religious, and indeed of the religious, has been its image and self-image as something rather solemn, manly, polychrome, and righteous. How many times have we heard the descriptions of our current situation wrought with end of days language as though the dominant deserve salvation and the weak things of the earth deserve the least of these?

In my studies of the deleteriously religious, I have come across many people like Frank Turek. They gargle out of their arguments something that sounds like science. Their words feel like a publication of some sort. Yet there is something missing... awe, I know what it is: correspondence. When I hear the words of an apologist, my mortal flesh wants to agree. I want to know that there will be a god, somewhere, stopping the results he/she/it set in motion some 20 billion years ago. I want to know that the entropy he/she/it instilled in nature when he/she/it decided to bang the Big Bang will be stopped and made to not destroy my planet in the end.

Did you hear Turek in response to Hitchens demand for an explanation on the destruction of cosmos? In simple terms, this is how the argument went down: Turek said that though destruction and desolation can be found throughout the universe both by entropy and by collision, there will be an exception in our case, in the end of days. Hitchens quotes Omar Khayyam not in this instance, but does so later to try to show the ridiculousness of the arguments held in the religious arena:

And do you think that unto such as you,
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew,
God gave the secret, and denied it me?—
Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.

Khayyam gives us good reason to question the origin of the fundamental beleifs of the religious. Like fossils, like carbon-dating, like germ theory of disease, and like the Big Bang, most ideas hardly ever enter the religious domain without a large degree of sacrifice of previous belief or of authority by way of apology. By these means any truth that will ever be brought forth from the scientific domain will also be highjacked and unfalsifiable. God decided to commence the Big Bang? God no longer walks like a material maniac in the case of Job, he is an immaterial being... and thus the religious cloud anything clear. They destroy simplicity and beg to bring their parishioners into obscurity.