Testing The Christian Apologists

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SAM HARRIS (Aramis) is a neuroscientist, moralist, author and enthusiastic exponent of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (a martial art most noted, I am told, for its close grappling and ferocious ground fighting). He is equally trained and proficient in forms of meditation that an Englishman of my caste finds incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing. I can’t even say the word ‘mindfulness’ without blushing. Harris’s influential books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation were followed by a later book and subsequent highly popular podcast series called Waking Up, which focus on his great interest in exploring how morality and spirituality can flourish outside religious teaching.

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DANIEL DENNETT (Athos) is a philosopher. Perhaps the best-known philosopher alive. A few years ago, that would have been like calling someone the best-known fluid dynamicist alive or the most famous coleopterist the world has ever seen, but these days philosophy and its branches are hot. More people are choosing it as an undergraduate subject, it seems, than ever before. As a UC Berkeley alumni magazine headline neatly phrased it, ‘Philosophy’s Popularity Soars: Devotees Find It’s More Than An Interesting Path to Poverty’. Professor Dennett writes on the mind, evolutionary biology, free will and much else besides. His book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon caused plenty of fluttering in academic, intellectual, religious and political dovecots. His co-authorship with Asbjrn Steglich-Petersen of The Philosophical Lexicon has alone guaranteed him eternal glory. Like Einstein, Noah and the Kennedys, Professor Dennett is a keen sailor.

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RICHARD DAWKINS (d’Artagnan) is responsible for introducing evolutionary biology and Darwinism to generations. His books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, never out of print, continue to inspire, inform and amaze. As the first holder of Oxford University’s Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, he acquired a worldwide reputation as a sceptic, ‘passionate rationalist’, ‘proud atheist’, and witty exposer of charlatanism and fakery couched in pseudoscientific language. In all that time, he has pursued an academic career as a leading ethologist and biologist. He gave our language the word ‘meme’, and in his work as a scientist has hugely expanded our understanding not just of the genotype but of the whole evolutionary package that makes life, the phenotype. His Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science stands as a global cynosure for free thought.

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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Porthos) was— and how it will always grieve me to have to use the past tense— a journalist, essayist, polemicist, contrarian, debater, political historian, author and thinker. His preternaturally fluent articulacy, breadth of learning, extraordinary recall, diablerie, sauciness, and panache raised his mastery of debate to a level unmatched in his lifetime. We are fortunate that this child of the 1960s and ’70s did at least make it into the YouTube era; many of his coruscating flagellations of the dim-witted, malevolent, ill-informed and unprepared live on in cyberspace as well as in the pages of his many articles, essays, and books.

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