Sean Hannity vs. Christopher Hitchens vs. God

I just watched Christopher Hitchens and Sean Hannity "debate" whether God exists. Sean Hannity made the very mistake I mentioned in my last post: he told Christopher Hitchens that it takes a greater leap of faith to believe that everything existed always than it takes to believe that God created it all.

This is an uncaused cause argument. Here's why it's a bad argument. Everything that we know of was caused by a set of events. God is said to be something which causes everything to happen but which itself was not caused by anything. No one has ever seen anything happen that wasn't caused. The atheist makes no claim about the origin of the universe. It's just kind of weird that it's here. No faith is involved. Atheism isn't in the business of accounting for the beginning of the universe. That shit's left up to physics, which tries to reconstruct the beginning based on the relationship of the positions of all the bits of matter in the universe and the speed and directions at which they seem to be moving. Several different theories are offered to describe the present shape (and probable future and past shapes) of the universe. Atheism has precisely dick to do with those theories except insofar as they don't take account of a Creator, at which point those theories become more or less probable explanations of the distribution of matter in the universe as we currently observe it.

Here's the error that Hannity makes: he says that atheists think that something came from nothing. Hannity mischaracterizes atheism. He expects that it should provide a tidy origin story, just as Christianity does. He does not recognize that "God created it all" only pushes the debate back to the question "Well, then, smart guy, who created God?" Atheism as a doctrine makes no cosmological claim apart from the claim that there is not a single deity in existence. It does not require a leap of faith.

In fact, the term "leap of faith" was coined by Kierkegaard in the 19th century to explain the only way that a person could possibly believe in Christianity, as there was absolutely no evidence that would incline a reasonable person to do so.

Merely saying "X caused it" doesn't explain anything, because any reasonable person who is interested in figuring stuff out is going to want to know what caused X. And that holds even if the word in place of "X" is "God".

I want to make it clear that I do not expect any better from Sean Hannity. I have no intention to be employed by Newscorp. or Sean Hannity (and in fact I'd like to avoid those fates, if possible), so I guess I can say that he doesn't strike me as being a very reflective or intelligent guy, and I don't expect any better of him. Sean Hannity has consistently met my expectations of him.