SeN isn’t obsessed with Christopher Hitchens

[drumdude]

Makes me wonder if DCP is the secret proprietor of this rabid Hitchens hate site that I used to follow before Hitch croaked:

https://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/

[malkie]

Makes me wonder if DCP is the secret proprietor of this rabid Hitchens hate site that I used to follow before Hitch croaked:

https://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/

At least it's not called HitchensHitchensLand

[Res Ipsa]

Makes me wonder if DCP is the secret proprietor of this rabid Hitchens hate site that I used to follow before Hitch croaked:

https://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/

At least it's not called HitchensHitchensLand

[Moksha]

Gemli got raked over the coals more often than Hitchens, Anonymous Stalker, and Mini Stalker combined.

[Kishkumen]

I am not a big fan of Hitchens. He is a glib character assassin of religion. Talented, clever, and an excellent performer, but not a serious thinker by any stretch.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Makes me wonder if DCP is the secret proprietor of this rabid Hitchens hate site that I used to follow before Hitch croaked:

https://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/

At least it's not called HitchensHitchensLand

Lol. I think Mr. Peterson is just jelly Hitchens was the affable, witty, bon vivant he tries to be. Again we see Mormonism producing a pale facsimile of the real world - thin gruel, as it were.

- Doc

[Physics Guy]

Hitchens says 75 words about Hoyle:

It is true that scientists have sometimes been religious, or at any rate superstitious. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, was a spiritualist and alchemist of a particularly laughable kind. Fred Hoyle, an ex-agnostic who became infatuated with the idea of “design,” was the Cambridge astronomer who coined the term “big bang.” (He came up with that silly phrase, incidentally, as an attempt to discredit what is now the accepted theory of the origins of the universe. This was one of those lampoons that, so to speak, backfired, since like “Tory” and “impressionist” and “suffragette” it became adopted by those at whom it was directed.)

Hitchens's point in the surrounding pages is that you don't need the God hypothesis to understand reality. In Hitchens's own words:

we have come to the realization that we also know something about the future of our system, including the rate of its expansion and the notion of its eventual terminus. However, and crucially, we can now do this while dropping (or even, if you insist, retaining) the idea of a god. But in either case, the theory works without that assumption. You can believe in a divine mover if you choose, but it makes no difference at all, and belief among astronomers and physicists has become private and fairly rare. [emphasis in original]

So Hitchens indeed represented Hoyle accurately. As a once-prominent scientist with idiosyncratic ideas, Hoyle was a sensible figure for Hitchens to mention in his book, and Hitchens said sensible things about Hoyle.

I wouldn't say that Peterson was exactly lying over this, though. I think he was probably just being foolish and lazy. He hadn't read Hitchens in years; he relied on a list of supposed errors by Hitchens that Peterson found on Reddit. He didn't bother to check for himself whether this supposed error was really committed by Hitchens. In fact, whoever composed that list of Hitchens mistakes got this item totally wrong.

This complete misrepresentation of Hitchens's take on Hoyle probably started with someone knowing nothing about cosmology beyond recent ID rants and therefore assuming that when Hitchens called Hoyle a Big Bang opponent, that was the same as Hitchens calling Hoyle a theistic creationist. Then somebody else who did know more about cosmology, but hadn't read Hitchens, saw that claim that Hitchens called Hoyle a creationist, and pointed out how wrong that would have been about Hoyle. Through the usual lazy meshing of knowledge and ignorance that fills the internet, Hitchens gets accused in a Reddit list of publishing an absurd howler on Hoyle. Nobody thinks, "Hey, that really would have been bizarrely stupid of Hitchens, maybe we should double-check whether he actually said it." Somebody posts that ears are like wings, somebody else points out that pigs have ears, and now it's a fact that pigs have wings, on the internet.

It's bizarre that a BYU professor would rely on such shaky sources as Reddit lists for things he publicly posts on his blog. It's even more bizarre that when somebody challenges Professor Peterson with the relevant primary source (Hitchens's actual book), Peterson brazenly declares that he doesn't remember the book, and cites this Reddit list as an authority.

Peterson even goes so far as to declare that it would be "surpassingly odd" for him to have misrepresented Hitchens in the very same way that a Reddit list did. Um, no, dude. It isn't even a little bit odd, that when you naïvely rely upon flimsy sources you end up parroting silly mistakes. Getting people not to do things like that is why we have universities.

Spending too many years reciting familiar things to unquestioning students can maybe make one forget that. One might get to feel that confirming a statement could never be any harder than recalling the stuff that one has been teaching for so many years. Unfortunately, that's not true. Maybe in your specialty you can still judge truth at a glance, but being right about other things—even not being laughably wrong—is harder than glancing at Reddit.