Hitchens's razor

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence". The razor was created by and later named after author and journalist Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011). It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.

Analysis

The dictum appears in Hitchens's 2007 book titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The term "Hitchens's razor" itself was used by atheist blogger Rixaeton in December 2010, and popularised by, among others, evolutionary biologist and atheist activist Jerry Coyne after Hitchens died in December 2011. Some pages earlier in God Is Not Great, Hitchens also invoked Occam's razor. In 2007, Michael Kinsley observed in The New York Times that Hitchens was rather fond of applying Occam's razor to religious claims, and according to The Wall Street Journal's Jillian Melchior in 2017, the phrase "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" was "Christopher Hitchens's variation of Occam's razor". Hitchens's razor has been presented alongside the Sagan standard ("Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence") as an example of evidentialism within the New Atheism movement.

Use in atheism criticism

Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony (2010) argued that despite the use of Hitchens's razor to reject religious belief and to support atheism, applying the razor to atheism itself would seem to imply that atheism is epistemically unjustified. According to Antony, the New Atheists (to whom Hitchens also belonged) invoke a number of special arguments purporting to show that atheism can in fact be asserted without evidence.

Criticism

Philosopher C. Stephen Evans (2015) outlined some common Christian theological responses to the argument made by Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and the other New Atheists that if religious belief is not based on evidence, it is not reasonable and can thus be dismissed without evidence. Characterising the New Atheists as evidentialists, Evans counted himself amongst the Reformed epistemologists together with Alvin Plantinga, who argued for a version of foundationalism, namely that "belief in God can be reasonable even if the believer has no arguments or propositional evidence on which the belief is based". The idea is that all beliefs are based on other beliefs, and some "foundational" or "basic beliefs" just need to be assumed to be true in order to start somewhere, and it is fine to pick God as one of those basic beliefs.

See also

• Alder's razor – A philosophical razor devised by Mike Alder
• The Demon-Haunted World – 1995 book by Carl Sagan
• Evil God Challenge – Thought experiment in philosophyPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Falsifiability – Property of a statement that can be logically contradicted
• Hanlon's razor – Adage to assume stupidity over malice
• List of eponymous laws – Adages and sayings named after a person
• Sagan standard – Evidentiary standard for extraordinary claimsPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Russell's teapot – Analogy devised by Bertrand Russell
• Philosophical razor – Principle that allows one to eliminate unlikely explanations

References

External links