God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion
By Christopher Hitchens
Atlantic Books £17.99, 307 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

In two years’ time we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. A year later we will mark 400 years since Galileo observed four moons orbiting Jupiter and concluded, as Copernicus did before him, that the earth was not the centre of the universe.

These two events destroyed humanity’s understanding of how we and our world came to be. It is extraordinary that literalist religion survived them – but it has. As Christopher Hitchens observes in God Is Not Great, people still attempt to subvert Darwin’s findings with the notion of “intelligent design”, while fundamentalist Islam threatens our lives.

Hitchens knows his scripture. He loves “the splendid liturgy of the King James Bible”. He was married the first time by a Greek Orthodox priest and the second by a gay rabbi. But now all he wants from religion, he says, is that it leave him alone.

Except that he cannot leave religion alone. He loathes it. He notes in gory detail its practitioners’ sins, from the sodomising of boys to genital mutilation to complicity in mass murder. Religion, he says, poisons everything. This book is not only a polemic against literalism; it is an attack on any accommodation between religion and science, faith and progress.

He cites as evidence the story of God (or, as he prefers, god) instructing Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, only for an angel to stay his hand. Hitchens’ fascination with this disturbing tale is not surprising. How could a loving deity order such a thing? Others see it differently. Many have argued that child sacrifice was common at the time and the story of Abraham and Isaac was an instruction to end it. Similarly, Hitchens describes the Old Testament’s “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” injunction as ”brutish and stupid”. Many scholars regard it instead as a warning against excessive vengeance. Hitchens is either unaware of these views, which would be surprising given how much else he knows, or he prefers not to mention them because they might demonstrate that religion can advance human progress too.

Some of the fights he picks make sparkling reading – his assault on “intelligent design” in particular. But the problem with Hitchens’ thesis that religion poisons everything is how to explain those who use it to do good. How does Hitchens account for Martin Luther King? Here’s how: King was not really a Christian. Really? Well, at no point did King suggest that those who reviled him would be punished in this world or the next. “In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian.” Let’s leave aside the possibility that King’s lack of interest in revenge came from the Gospels; instead, let’s use the tools of a thinker Hitchens himself commends: Karl Popper.

Popper said that for any theory to be scientific, it had to be falsifiable. Is “religion poisons everything” falsifiable? Potentially – all we have to find is something that religion did not poison, and see how the theory stands up. Martin Luther King didn’t poison everything. Ah, says Hitchens, he wasn’t religious. Any student of Popper recognises this dodge: it is an ad hoc hypothesis, designed to explain away uncomfortable facts that refute the theory. (I notice that Hitchens doesn’t try the King trick on Desmond Tutu. But then Tutu is still alive and we can imagine his response to any suggestion that he is not a real Christian.)

What of godless people who do evil? Unlike some, Hitchens does not claim that Nazism was Christian, but he devotes pages to the churches’ complicity with the Nazis and how few clerics stood up to them. All true, but the Nazis remain responsible for their crimes whoever collaborated with them, and their godless atrocities far exceeded anything the godly have done.

As for Stalin, Hitchens writes, look at “the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics”. Remind you of anything? Hitchens says that Stalin understood his people’s religious superstitions and mimicked them. So King wasn’t really religious and Stalin was. If that sort of intellectual and moral shabbiness is to your taste, this book should be too.

Michael Skapinker is editor of the FT’s Weekend edition.