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Concept
Hitchens's razor
Summary
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 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.
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 inter alia by 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. Michael Kinsley noted in 2007 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 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 also been called "a modern version" of the Latin proverb quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur ("what is freely asserted can be freely deserted"), also rendered as "what is asserted without reason (or proof), may be denied without reason (or proof)", a saying attested no later than the 17th century. Another comparable saying is the legal principle attributed to the Roman jurist Julius Paulus Prudentissimus ( 2nd–3rd century CE), Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat"Proof lies on he who asserts, not on he who denies".
Official source
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