Understanding of atheism of Christopher Hitchens

This thesis deals with the understanding of atheism of Christopher Hitchens, one of the most important representatives of the new atheism, who passed away in 2011. The most important reason why we chose Christopher Hitchens in our study, is that even though Hitchens' works were not translated into Turkish and despite his death, his thoughts and discourses continue to have an impact. There is no significant work in our country that mentions Hitchens. Therefore, in this study, we have included not only Hitchens' understanding of atheism, but also his life story, where we can find clues to his tendency to atheism, and the criticisms directed at his understanding of atheism. We stated that these criticisms were directed not only from the theist wing, but also from the atheist wing, and that Hitchens had a large audience of critics as well as a large following. In the first part of our thesis, we have included the general biography of Hitchens and introduced his works. In the second part, which constitutes the main part of our thesis, and we convey Hitchens's understanding of atheism and his perspective on religion, we discussed and evaluated Hitchens' approach to God and religion issues, his defense of atheism, his handling of agnosticism as a problematic view, and his attitude towards moral issues. In the last part of our thesis, we conveyed and evaluated the criticisms directed at Hitchens in particular and against the new atheism movement in general by the theist and atheist community. Our aim is to present the views and criticism of Hitchens, who defended atheism with his popular works in the globalizing world and started to be known in our country, on the issues of religion and God in general.