I have never met an atheist who did not accept the scientific method, which explains why the god hypothesis fails for these people.
Young woman attempts to convert wizened philosopher. Engraving by W. Ridgway after Daniel Huntington’s 1868 painting, “Philosophy and Christian Art.” Public Domain.
Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens died of cancer of the esophagus in 2011. One fear of dying that he expressed before that inevitability was that some Christians would claim he had a deathbed conversion to their religion, as happened with other prominent freethinkers, such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Paine. Sure enough, something of that has come to pass.
Larry Alex Taunton, called a “creep” and “religious fanatic” by writer Nick Cohen in an article in The Guardian, claimed in his book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist, that Hitchens may have been on his way to conversion when he died. Taunton’s claim is based on several months of traveling with Hitchens discussing Taunton’s Christian beliefs and reading from the bible. Hitchens’ interest in certain portions of the bible seems to be the only evidence that Taunton can muster to support the claim. If only there had been a bit more time, suggests Taunton, perhaps there would have been a full-scale, public conversion.
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