Oxford historical theology professor and scholar Alister McGrath (under whose lectureship I was once given the privilege to sit when I was still a seminary student) might have gotten it wrong when he announced more than 5 years ago that atheism was already a spent force and a dying philosophical belief system. Or he might have been correct, at least, at that very point in time, but only until atheism was able to recover from its near-death condition. And great indeed was its recovery, for lo and behold, Christian theologians and apologists are currently engaged in a close fight with a new brand of atheism this side of the story of this so-called postmodern age.
McGrath now actually finds himself right at the forefront of the intellectual side of this battle in the academy, aggressively dealing most particularly with Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, which amazingly took only a short period of time to gain popularity in the American soil. McGrath later answered Dawkins' book with his own The Dawkins Delusion? (in collaboration with his wife Joanna).
Of course, this new brand of atheism is not Dawkins' monopoly. We also hear today three other popular voices in the godless world of atheism - the literary critic Christopher Hitchens (who is not ashamed to call himself a firm believer in the already deteriorating philosophical values of the Enlightenment [thanks to postmodernism!]) with his book God is Not Great, the skeptic writer Samuel Harris with his The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett with his Breaking the Spell.
What then is "new" with this new brand of atheism?
What makes the atheism of these four gentlemen new is their somewhat anti-intellectual approach to handling the issues surrounding the hypothesis of God's existence. According to most observers, some of whom are also atheists, this new brand of atheism amounts to a kind of regress towards fundamentalism that departs from the more scholarly oriented approach of classical atheism embraced by the likes of A. J. Ayer, J. J. C. Smart, Stephen Jay Gould and Bertrand Russell, which was once also adhered to by the former notorious atheist-turned-deist-turned-theist Anthony Flew. Worth mentioning is the fact that Flew, who died at the age of 87 on April 8 of this year, was actually the one who introduced an innovative approach to doing philosophy with the presuppositions of atheism in mind. (This being the case, he must have all the right to be called the real new atheist, but of course only until, in obedience to Socrates' advice to "follow where the argument leads," his conversion to deism, and shortly thereafter to theism [though not the theism of the Judeo-Christian faith but one that resembles the Aristotelian model]).
One does not have to think twice to conclude that the new atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett is indeed more of a lower class expression of the atheistic school of thought rather than an improved version of it. This must have been the case, for the new atheists appear to be rather unwilling to deal with the issues put forth by the God hypothesis head on at the more gentlemanly academic manner. Instead, they rely more on delivering rhetorical statements rather than offering intellectual arguments to debunk the God hypothesis.
Not welcomed by the media
To the surprise of many both in the academic world and the popular culture, even the media did not welcome the new atheism, considering the fact that media personalities have almost always been hostile to the conservative wing of Christianity. Taking a look at the criticisms thrown by these media personalities against the new atheism are after all not without any valid reason, some which are listed as follows:
Adam Kirsch of the New York Sun wrote on February 8, 2006 that Daniel Dennett missed “the actual substance of religious experience.”
Jim Holt of New York Times noted in October 22, 2006 that Dawkins failed to “appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be.”
On October 26, 2006, Washington Post's religion writer David Segal wrote that Harris’s writings are “straight out of the stun grenade school of public rhetoric."
In an article dated January 7, 2007, the Chicago Sun-Times and Huffington Post blogger R. J. Eskow called Dennett and Dawkins “fundamentalist atheists” who “use scientific thought in much the same way religious fundamentalists use sacred text - as the source for unquestionable and rigid truths that can't be challenged.”
Harris, said Steinfels of the Times on March 3, 2007, failed to “engage religious thought in any serious way.”
On May 24, 2007, New York Sun columnist John McWorther complained that the new atheists are so negative, which led him to conclude that their impact will only be able to "elevate the rancor in our public discussion."
The Miami Herald's described Dawkins as “the world's foremost evangelical atheist,” as he denounced the evils of religion “in tones that resemble the giddy zeal of a tent revivalist.”
It must be added that not a few journalists also detected the new atheists' incompetence in dealing with theology and religion, which, closely examined, basically emanates from their lack of knowledge of these disciplines of thought.
The new atheism's anti-God billboards
Only recently, the American Humanist Association (AHA) has been reported to have already joined the new atheists' fundamentalism by sponsoring a series of anti-God billboards in the Moscow, Idaho area. "In Good We Trust," says one, obviously attempting to replace the United States' national motto "In God We Trust" found in the the US currency. As Jennifer Riley of The Christian Post reports, "Besides the billboard with the Godless national motto, AHA has four others in the Moscow area. The other billboards read 'Don’t Believe in God? You are Not Alone,' 'Want a Better World? Prayer Not Required,' 'Million are Good Without God' and 'No God? No Problem!'"
References:
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York, NY: Viking, 2006.
Harris, Samuel. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
___________. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Haught, John F. “Amateur Atheists,” Christian Century (February 2008): 22-28.
Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Hatchette Book Group USA, 2007.
Lightman, Bernard. “Beating Up On the New Atheists,” Religion in the News. 10 (Sum-Fall 2007):2-4.
McGrath, Alister, and Joanna Collicutt McGrath. The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. London: SPCK, 2007.
McGrath, Alister E., and Neil Brennan. “The Twilight of Atheism.” Christianity Today. 49, no. 3 (March 2005): 36-40.
Riley, Jennifer. "Humanists Unveil 'In Good We Trust' Billboard." The Christian Post, April 13, 2010.
"Some Reasoned Responses to the New Atheism," ExploreFaith.com.
Spaulding, Mike. "The New Atheism: Another Skirmish with a Twist." International Society of Christian Apologetics, 2009
Comments
Edwin, you make me laugh.... Frew was mentally ill in his last years. Only a sick mind can accept theism!
Atheism is spreading everywhere! Because it is the truth! Science is a great tool for discovering the truth. You forgot to mention Richard Dawkin's latest book "The Greatest Show on Earth" that shows the reader why evolution is a fact!
You are delusional.
Get Real People, there are no gods.
To accuse Flew of mental illness when he abandoned his first love with atheism is an old dirty trick employed only by those who have found themselves ill-equipped to answer the gravity of the questions raised by the sudden change of allegiance of their ablest and most formidable compatriot. It's kind of taking a detour to avoid the logical and moral implications of the surprised conversion of this former notorious atheist, who for half a century had proved himself most likely one of the best minds, if not actually the best, the godless world of atheism has ever produced. The truth is, Flew's alleged mental illness when he left atheism has already been disproved. To ignore such a matter of fact amounts to being dishonest and coward.
My appeal to the new atheists and their followers is let's play the game according to the rule. For goodness' sake, please be civil and gentlemanly. Do not throw mud at your enemies so you do not get your hands dirty while you also lose your ground at the same time. Please stop resorting to rhetorics and start doing your homework by listening to Socrates' advice to follow the argument where it leads.
We are gaining grounds not you. You are spewing garbage and lies more than ever today because your blind faith is dieing to the reality and truth of science. There are no gods!
Proof of evolution - you look like a neanderthal!
Even if someone on their deathbed converted to a religion, that does not automatically discount credible arguments against the existence of a diety they had argued prior to conversion.
I feel theists losing their grip on being the center of attention and you can just sense the desperation oozing from their publications. They are trying to hold on the a phantom moral highground. Like Edwin's dumb, pointless and a waste of pixels artical
"In Good We Trust," says a humanist billboard. But can we really be good without God?".
Religious spewers rarely were the avocates of good yet held power due to the human condition of fear of uncertainty. They prey (funny the dual usages of prey eh?) on the weak, the young. They can't get away with it any more. Is the pope in prison yet? No, Should he be? most likely yes.
Whew! The new atheists are behaving like the old religious fundamentalists and are content with mindless rhetorics instead of dealing with the multi-faceted issues raised by the God hypothesis with an open mind. Are they not freethinkers as they project themselves to be? If so, why are their minds enslaved to a way of thinking that gives no room to contrary opinion? They are even driven by hatred. You can sense their burning anger consuming their sanity with the way they react to those who are positing philosophically valid arguments that point to the possibility of God existence.
Want some proof? Try to search the web and there you'll find in forums after forums the new atheist fanatics who keep on cursing believers in God, even wishing their death. I now understand why the more respectable atheists and skeptics did not hesitate to express their disappointment and embarassment with the new atheists.
We ask for equality of justice. That includes people who protect child abusers. Faith should provide no protection against human law. Fade quickly mysticism and tyranny, you won't be missed.
Of course, every one of us desires justice & equal treatment, except maybe those who violate the rights of others. Let's face it, there have always been violators in every community, religious or secular, and they must be brought to justice. But I think wholesale condemnation against a particular community of people is unfair, especially on the part of the innocent members of the said community.
Speaking of tyranny, let us not create the impression that all the tyrants in history are religious. Some of them are, but many of them are not. Remember most particularly those who wasted no effort to impose their own set of rules by force to masses of people in the name of a godless ideology. Hitler, who was inspired by Nietzsche, is a classic example. And there is Stalin, too, and Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot, among others. They illustrated the full implications of what a godless worldview is able to accomplish against the rest of humanity.
Hitler was Catholic and so was Mussolini. The Vatican stayed quiet during the final solution, was that divine inspiration? You are obviously ready to follow these abhorrent abominations in condemning vast swaths of the human race, including children, to suffer for eternity in fiery pits (forgetting that that isn't your job to determine who's in and who's out for what reason and why). The attack on children by asking them to determine whether they want to agree with immoral guidelines or face an invented hell is an act of cowardice and has its ramifications, i.e being kicked out of the intellectual arena, and sprinting headlong into influential decline. Your so kind to yourself by posting your own articles around the net to generate hits.
"One does not have to think twice to conclude that the new atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett is indeed more of a lower class expression of the atheistic school of thought rather than an improved version of it."
It really doesn't take much to make a comment this deluded, it takes much more to put your reputation on the line and sit on stage and debate with any one of these figures. A lot safer than sitting at a computer,quote mining and filling in the gaps with drivel. Since 9/11 the calculus of risk with regard to religious influence has changed. this pretty much explains the current activity of the new atheists. Talking snakes LMFHO
A careful look at the life stories of both Hitler and Mussolini will make one conclude that both were followers of Friedrich Nietzsche, the foremost preacher of the "God is dead" gospel, when they committed their heinous crime against humanity."
"In 1834, 100 years before Hitler, a poet named Heinrich Heine assessed the mood in Germany and concluded that only the cross of Christ was holding back the Germans' 'lust for war.' The prediction was even more remarkable because Heine was a Jew, a man who nevertheless believed that only Christianity could tame what he call 'brutal German joy in battle.'
Heine, who possibly did not understand why the cross has supernatural power, called it talisman, an object with magical power that held aggression at bay in the German nation. And should the cross be broken, he said, the forces of brutality would break out and the world would be filled with 'terror and astonishment.'" - a quote from Erwin Lutzer's "Why the Cross Can Do What Politics Can'
Sadly, majority of Christians, especially the Germans, were deceived by Hitler during his regime. However, much of the accusations thrown against Christians are oftentimes unfounded. First, a few of them have indeed drifted from the faith & even committed crimes like those committed by tyrants & criminals, but many of them have remained faithful & have proved themselves to be good, responsible citizens of their countries. Second, it must be noted that when fallen believers commit a crime, this they do in contradiction to the very nature & character of the faith they profess that calls them to live a life that is pleasing to God. Not so w/ the atheists. When they commit a crime, this they do as a result of the logical implication of embracing a godless worldview. It doesn't necessarily mean that all atheists are bad. It simply means that being bad in atheism does not violate any moral principle at all in the absence of a transcendental moral law Giver in the person of God.
Direct question. In your view, can a non-christian have moral standards?
Scientists have found that persons who are religious are not like the rest of us: they think differently, they are, chiefly, in denial of reality. And, as Andrew Jackson said over 200 years ago, Ridicule is the only weapon against unintelligible propositions. There is nothing left to do but laugh at the idiots.
Thanks for you comment, Kasia. However, I find it somewhat misled if not misleading. First, you seem to create the impression that ALL scientists believe that religious people are deluded when it's really not the case. That may have been what the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris would like us all to believe. But there is no such a concensus in the scientific community. In fact, more than 40% of scientists today (most whom holding doctorates from prestigious academic institutions in their own respective fields of expertise) are believers in God. I challenge you to do your homework for you to see yourself.
Second, I'm afraid that you may have misquoted the former President Andrew Jackson. Jackson himself was a Bible believing Christian, a Calvinist in particular. He even said that the Bible is the rock on which the American Republic rests.
@Kasia. One more more word. If in your own brand of atheism the only response to idiots is one of ridicule and hatred, I have good news for you. In Christianity the only legitimate response to even the worst of unbelievers is compassion and love. This in some cases may include persuasion by means of reasoned argumentation, but the end-goal of it is not to win an argument but to win an unbelieving person towards faith in Christ in view of an impending judgment that awaits those who prefer to live outside of the will of God.
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