Christopher Hitchens is the famous Atheist author most people are at least a little familiar with. He has throat cancer and is being treated by the best that science has to offer. In an article about his ordeal I read, "Hitchens is badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste."
For a man who has spent his career arguing for the impersonality and accidental nature of the Universe how is it, I wonder, he has a "sense of waste." If his theories of the evolved nature of everything are true how can whatever happens be wasteful.
According to the atheists the evolutionary process uses what it needs to advance its impersonal agenda regardless whether that is Chris Hitchens' cancer to kill him or the ant I just stepped on. It is not waste it is evolutionary progress to die for the furtherance of this impersonal process. To evolve is to be - isn't it?
Why Hitchens would now consider his contribution to the advancement of evolution as a waste is beyond me. What's more, I question how his evolved brain even came up with the concept of waste.
If evolution is true there is neither good nor bad nor is there accumulation nor waste. There is only the process of mindless change.
It seems to me, now that Hitchens has begun to confront his own mortality, that he may have begun to reason differently. Perhaps he might be thinking there is purpose in the universe after all. If that is so, then he will have to confront where that "purpose" comes from. It certainly cannot exist in an impersonal evolved place of gases which spontaneously coalesced from a singularity to make him.
Do you suppose he might, like Anthony Flew, at some point admit he was wrong and admit there is a God? Probably not! Hitchens has a lot of what we Christians call pride (I don't know what impersonal evolved beings call it) to overcome and I'm not sure he would do that.
It would be nice if Christ would call him to belief. That event, along with Flew's deathbed conversion, might go a long way toward changing the arrogant thought processes of the evolved elites who run our Universities in a manner which is now excluding as much Christian thought as possible.
We need to pray for Chris Hitchens - whether he likes it or not.
2 comments:
For a man who has spent his career arguing for the impersonality and accidental nature of the Universe how is it, I wonder, he has a "sense of waste."
You wouldn't have to wonder if you would read the statement from which that quote is taken. It's quite clear when not lifted out of context:
"Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties."
"You said you burned the candle at both ends," Cooper said.
"And it gave a lovely light," Hitchens responded.
"Do you think part of that way you lived is responsible for this?"
"It would be very idle to deny it, and I might as well say to anyone watching, if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so," Hitchens said.....
....I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.....To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
In other words, he feels, quite sensibly, that his choice to smoke has shortened his life and that years he might have had to live will now be lost.
In other words, he's talking about wasted time not existential angst.
Good point David. Thanks
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