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Hitchens's razor
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Hitchens's razor
Hitchens's razor is a general rule for rejecting certain claims of knowledge. It states:
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
The razor is credited to author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, although its provenance can be traced to the Latin Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur ("What is freely asserted is freely denied"). 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.
The epistemological dictum appears in Hitchens's 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The term "Hitchens's razor" itself first appeared (as "Hitchens' razor") in an online forum in October 2007, and 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. William Ockham devised a principle of economy, popularly known as Ockham's razor, which relied for its effect on disposing of unnecessary assumptions and accepting the first sufficient explanation or cause: "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity." This principle extends itself: "Everything which is explained through positing something different from the act of understanding can be explained without positing such a distinct thing."
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.
Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony 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.
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Hitchens's razor
Hitchens's razor is a general rule for rejecting certain claims of knowledge. It states:
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
The razor is credited to author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, although its provenance can be traced to the Latin Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur ("What is freely asserted is freely denied"). 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.
The epistemological dictum appears in Hitchens's 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The term "Hitchens's razor" itself first appeared (as "Hitchens' razor") in an online forum in October 2007, and 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. William Ockham devised a principle of economy, popularly known as Ockham's razor, which relied for its effect on disposing of unnecessary assumptions and accepting the first sufficient explanation or cause: "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity." This principle extends itself: "Everything which is explained through positing something different from the act of understanding can be explained without positing such a distinct thing."
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.
Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony 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.
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