Christopher Hitchens on The problem of evil
Hitchens treated the problem of evil not as abstract philosophy but as a moral indictment of the God hypothesis.
Christopher Hitchens rarely engaged the problem of evil as a formal philosophical argument. Instead, he wielded it as a prosecutorial case — not 'Can God and evil logically coexist?' but 'What kind of celestial dictator would design a world like this?' His treatment was visceral, rhetorical, and devastatingly effective in debate.
Hitchens's signature move was to confront believers with specific, concrete instances of suffering — childhood bone cancer, the Lisbon earthquake, the centuries of human misery before any supposed revelation — and demand a moral accounting. The theodicies offered by theologians struck him as not merely inadequate but obscene: the claim that a child's agony serves some higher purpose was, in his view, indistinguishable from sadism.
His Hitchens's Challenge — 'Name me a moral action or statement made by a believer that could not have been made by a nonbeliever' — is related but distinct. It targets the claim that religion is necessary for morality, while his treatment of evil targets the claim that reality is consistent with a loving God. Together, they form a two-pronged attack: religion is not needed for goodness, and the world's evil is not explained by any version of God worth worshipping.
In debates with theologians like William Lane Craig and Dinesh D'Souza, Hitchens would often return to the same image: a universe in which 99.9% of all species that ever existed went extinct, most of them in agony, long before any human being existed to benefit from the lesson. 'This is the plan?' he would ask. 'This is design?'
“Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing intelligent about the design? That the design shows ill will, if anything?”
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation — is that good for the world?”