God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Hitchens admits that in the early history of humanity, religion was an inevitable consequence of society’s desire to understand and interpret the world. When early people saw anything that appeared to be outside the natural order, such as an eclipse or a river seemingly changing direction, their tendency to attribute the event to a higher power was understandable. Modern science has allowed people to understand things like cosmology and tidal systems, though, so there is no longer any reason to seek truth in a conscious god or gods.

Hitchens believes that the origins of religion are tied to humans’ solipsistic nature. People naturally see themselves as the center of their own universe. Thus, gods were created as a more powerful version of people, and world histories were created that centered humans as the most important part of the universe. Today, it is known that humans are a very small part of the universal picture, and evolution has proven that our existence is largely a coincidence. For these reasons, Hitchens views continued belief in human-like gods as willful ignorance and as laughably self-centered. Through an exploration of the history of miracles and prophets, Hitchens suggests that religious people may actually understand that their beliefs should be relegated to the past even if they do not admit it.