"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡
Hitchens denigrates the analogy of unguided evolution to a whirlwind creating a jumbo jet out of the parts found in a junkyard as a “creationist sneer,” neglecting to tell his readers that the analogy was made famous by Fred Hoyle, an astrophysicist, who calculated that the odds of certain key life-producing enzymes arising by chance alone were 10 to the negative 40000th power.
One thing on which Hitchens is right (though hardly original.) Physicists, in their old age, have a tendency to become bad philosophers. Science and faith can be compatible, but faith is not a therefore from anything in science.
The vision of the world offered by Hitchens is also far more likely to lead to moral nihilism than that offered by Benedict.
Absolutely.
Hitchens, for all his malice, is strangely naïve: he imagines that we can gleefully tear up the taproots of our civilization and still continue to enjoy its fruits.
Well, even Hitchens resulted from a thought of God, eh?