Christopher Hitchens Analysis

In Christopher Hitchens’ saying “What which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” Hitchens’ is claiming that if you do not have evidence to support your claim it should be disproved automatically. In other words, evidence to Hitchens is the necessary condition to substantiate the knowledge. To try to understand Hitchens’ intention, I make an assumption that this statement may have derived from his disbelief mostly in the area of knowledge of faith. However, at a closer inspection, one can interpret the word “what” in a saying in a much larger context than in the area of faith, and thus proving that his saying may need more thorough investigation especially in other areas of knowledge. Another key in his saying

Similar to the pursuit of philosophical knowledge, the core principle of the pursuit of Ethics is based on logic.The discussion of whether abortion is ethically correct, for example, depends on one’s sense of emotion, intuition, both of which are navigated by the use of reasoning for proper construction of arguments. If one claims that abortion is morally wrong without any reasonable arguments to support it, then such claim is not considered an area of Ethics in the first place. This shows that evidence, or rather the use of reasoning, is required to prove that abortion is morally wrong or morally right, and therefore, in the same manner with Natural Science, one can dismiss the unsubstantiated claim without using any

However, when the areas of knowledge includes the subjectivity as a method of acquiring knowledge, i.e. in many parts of Human Sciences and Religions, the way of knowing therefore requires subjective perception, either instinctive, emotional or spiritual, and thus should still be open for discussion either to support or negate a claim. In my view, the absence of evidence in one claim does not justify the dismissal without evidence when it concerns with the areas of Human Sciences and