The “world that is the case” is the red sliver in this chart, according to NASA. Get used to it! |
I persist in considering myself an agnostic, based on (if nothing else) the latest discoveries of astrophysics regarding the Dark: namely that “dark energy” and “dark matter,” about which we know precisely nothing except how much of each there is, together comprise about 96% of the universe. Given this situation, it seems absurd to claim that one knows whether or not there is a deity or multiple deities. I suspect there are none. I suspect the Dark is the Source, the Ground of Being, from which everything that is arises and to which it returns. “The world is all that is the case,” Wittgenstein wrote, and he was correct, though I think Paul Éluard put it more beautifully: “There is another world but it is in this one.” The world that is “the case” is largely dark to us—dark energy, dark matter—which means there is no telling what possibilities may be realized in it.
That said, I have to confess a great pleasure in watching avowed atheist Christopher Hitchens go about his work of pummeling, with his bare-knuckled intellect, various self-styled theomorphologists. In this particular case, he addresses a debate opponent who blamed atheism, in the person of Charles Darwin, for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party. We may know next to nothing about the universe beyond our paltry 4% of reality, but we do know something about history. Enjoy!
Ultimately, Hitchens is no real fan of the Imagination (with the capital "I")—the power-source Blake wrote about. If anyone ever penetrates beyond the 4% it will be someone drawing on the source, whatever we happen to call it by then….
I think Hitchens enjoys the advantage, as do many celebrity-atheists, of never having to propose something 'in place of' what he easily dismantles. A clever chap he is. It's presumably much easier to navigate deftly between the rocks than find an entirely different route.<br /><br />He pokes holes in arguments like a college debater but paradigms-well, that's a different matter