The Iris Murdoch quote is probably impossible to argue with on its own terms..but, that said, there is plenty of scientific evidence now to suggest that human beings are wired by evolutionary selection to believe in the supernatural.

The simplest way to put this: take 10 atheists. Take 10 fanatical muslims. The atheists are one team, the Muslims the other team. Put both teams on a deserted island and leave them there until one team is left standing. Which team will be left? I'd put my money on the Muslims, although if a couple of especially savage atheists are included in the team, they might take out a few Muslims before it's over.

This is a dumbed-down version of what evolution has accomplished. Belief in the Supernatural is a survival adaptation gone horribly wrong. It worked great in early human history. And you could probably make a case that it still works pretty well. Although in a world of 6-billion people, and counting, that particular survival adaptation doesn't seem too practical, especially when so many religions command us to be fruitful and multiply--yet another excellent adaptation in the prehistoric world, but a lousy one in this world. Lousy for survival of civilization. Still useful for survival of individual DNA.

Since our DNA just wants to make more DNA, and get into the next generation, its brute force approach works. Badly, messily, but it does work. Unless, of course, population pressure results in nuclear war. Even then, though, some will survive, and reproduce, just as religion, and biology, command.

(anthropomorphizing DNA is a bad metaphor, but handy withal)

When Ghenghis Mugabe Jr. is President of the United States, and he launches a pre-emptive nuclear attack on China for the last of the fossil fuels, you can bet your last dollar he will be praying to his God, whoever it may be (pace Jay Hanson, who deserves credit for Mugabe Jr., if not his praying ways).

In the end, religious people are more likely to get their DNA into the next generation. Period. The responsible atheists are far more likely to be killed off, or they simply won't reproduce, and they won't get their DNA into the next generation.

You have to think Big Picture here. In the Big Picture, belief in the supernatural is almost certainly selected for.

You don't inherit your religion in the DNA..but you do inherit a strong inclination for some belief in the supernatural...hence Murdoch's observation, which is where I came in.

Of course, there is no God. Period. But our DNA doesn't give a shit about that.

Having followed Hitch's writing and pronouncements on 9/11 and the Middle East, I am dis-inclined to follow any further. He is indeed a reconstructed conservative, a curmudgeon and an atheist. Being a novice curmudgeon and lapsed atheist myself, I should find Mr Hitchens' writing of interest, but over the last decade I believe he has become a Camille Paglia style of public intellectual.

That is to say, his view is always the right view, even if the argument is emotive rather than substantive.

Smart young things who want to change the world become staid old things powered by their hubris. Their deftness of expression and breadth of experience disguises their desire to always win the point.

I think Hitch is one of these.

"Religion is the imitation of the adult by the child."

Slate featured some excerpts from Hitchen's book in which he addresses Islam as follows:

There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all. It initially fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or special creed, and is forever identified with their language and their impressive later conquests, which, while not as striking as those of the young Alexander of Macedonia, certainly conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will until they petered out at the fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being "born in the clear light of history," as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings.

It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

Very well said, Hitchens.

By the way, full points to anyone who can identify the source of the quote in my first line.

God, who?

In an interview in New York Magazine, Hitchens described the differences in his opinion and Richard Dawkins' as such:

"I don’t think Richard Dawkins would mind me saying that he looks at religious people with this sort of incredulity, as if, 'How possibly can you be so stupid?' And though we all have moods like that, I think perhaps I don’t quite."

However, it can be argued, Hitch's condescension towards the religious is even more insidious than that of the evolutionary biologist (that guy seems like he doesn't care to know anything about religious beliefs). In the chapter titled "Does Religion Make People Behave?", he dismisses the idea that religion can be a driving force for benevolence. He argues that Dr. Martin Luther King, whom he admires as compassionate and open-minded, was "in no real sense as opposed to nominal sense... a Christian."

He continues and says that Gandhi, through his "rejection of modernity" and glorification of the primitive Indian village, actually retarded and distorted the liberation of India. Finally he calls one of the greatest modern populists "an obscurantist religious figure." Hitchens says that if the hapless but "secular" Nehru and the British had been left to take care of the situation, it would have turned out better for all parties and could have resulted in a unified Indian-British stance against fascism.

Never mind the fact that, in this section, Hitchens comes off as an apologist for British Imperialism - it is clear that his admiration for downtrodden people (and the people who try to relate to them) goes only as far as their religious beliefs. By not willing to concede, that for some people, religion serves as an effective moral and ethical compass, Hitchens betrays his pity for those who believe in a higher power. I'd like to paraphrase Graham Greene and say that pity is the worst form of condescension.