Some pages earlier in God Is Not Great, Hitchens also invoked Occam's razor.[8] Michael Kinsley noted in 2007 in The New York Times that Hitchens was rather fond of applying Occam's razor to religious claims,[9] 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".[10]
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"),[11] also rendered as "what is asserted without reason (or proof), may be denied without reason (or proof)",[12] a saying attested no later than the 17th century.[13] Another comparable saying is the legal principle attributed to the Roman jurist Julius Paulus Prudentissimus (c. 2nd–3rd century CE), Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat[14]—"Proof lies on he who asserts, not on he who denies".[15] This principle has traditionally been connected to the presumption of innocence in English law, but in the 1980s philosopher Antony Flew* argued that it was also an adequate preliminary axiom in debates about the existence of God, claiming that "the presumption of atheism" was justified until a theist could come up with good evidence in favour of the existence of a god.[16]
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*This previous atheist later came to the conclusion that reason and intelligence prove the existence of God.
