New Atheists

The Best Defenders and Defenses of Atheism?

Who are the best defenders of atheism? Where can one find the strongest defenses of atheism?

I get asked those questions from time to time, and they’re good questions, so I’m going to offer my own answers (for what they’re worth) in this post.

First, however, a few observations and caveats. For the last couple of decades, Christian apologists have tended to focus on the so-called New Atheists, most notably the “Four Horsemen” of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. There’s good sense in that. Among proponents of atheism, those writers receive the most attention from the public and media, whether or not they deserve it. They’re the loudest, most entertaining, most provocative, and most influential voices for the atheist cause in the public square. They’ve had a significant impact in promoting anti-religious skepticism and turning people away from Christianity. I continue to hear stories of ‘ex-Christians’ who say that reading The God Delusion or God Is Not Great shook their faith “to the core” and eventually destroyed it. I’m always taken aback by such reports, because I’ve read those books too, and there’s precious little in the way of serious and substantive argument in them. (Dennett is the most intellectually serious of the Four Horsemen, but he doesn’t so much argue for atheism as just take it for granted.)

But here’s the thing: the New Atheists are hardly the best and the brightest of contemporary atheists (despite Dennett’s unironic attempt to self-advertise as “the brights”). Their criticisms of religious beliefs do need to be refuted, of course, but as I’ve said before, that’s low-hanging fruit. The most sophisticated and formidable arguments in defense of atheism, and specifically for naturalism, come from academic philosophers, particularly those who specialize in philosophy of religion. They’re trained in logic and critical thinking. They’ve studied the scholarly literature. They’re well-versed in the arguments for and against the existence of God, both classical and contemporary. They actually know what they’re talking about.

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Atheist Delusions: A Review Rebooted

Ten years ago I wrote a review of David Bentley Hart’s book Atheist Delusions for the Discerning Reader website (which now appears to be on its last legs). Since I’ve seen Hart’s book recommended by evangelical pundits several times in recent weeks, I’m going to reproduce (and thereby reboot) the review here.


Atheist DelusionsAn informative, entertaining, and ultimately unsatisfying response to the historical revisionism of the New Atheists.

In generations past, atheists attacked Christianity by arguing that it simply wasn’t true. Some of their arguments against God were innovative, philosophically sophisticated, and deserved a response (which they duly received). Today’s atheists aren’t satisfied with that approach. They want to persuade us not merely that Christianity is false, but that it is wicked as well. Religion in general—and biblical religion in particular—is an overwhelming force for evil in the world, so they would have us believe. Hence the forthright title and subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’ recent polemic: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This two-pronged strategy of the New Atheists calls for a two-pronged response. The first is to argue (as Keith Ward has done) that there are good reasons to believe in God—or at least to contend (as Alister McGrath has done) that Hitchens and co haven’t given any good reasons not to believe in God. The second line of response is to refute the charge that Christianity has done more harm than good, by marshaling historical evidence to the contrary. This is the approach of David Bentley Hart’s new book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.

Hart’s thesis, in a nutshell, is that the New Atheists (among whom Hitchens seems to be the primary target) have grossly misrepresented the history of Christianity and its positive cultural impact on the world. Part 1 surveys the new “gospel of unbelief” and its apologists, before raising questions about its central tenet, namely, that the world is a better place for the rise of modernity and will become an ever better place if only the modernist creed—absolute human autonomy—is embraced with greater consistency.

Part 2 directly challenges “modernity’s rewriting of the Christian past” with a survey of the cultural battle between the fledgling Christian faith and its pagan rivals. Hart is particularly concerned here to debunk the modern myth that Christianity represented the forces of superstition, irrationalism, intolerance, and violence, whereas ancient paganism represented its polar opposite: love, peace, and a “live and let live” attitude toward minorities. The historical reality is that pagan culture was anti-intellectual, corrupt, oppressive, and bloodthirsty. Against this dark and depraved backdrop, Christianity was a welcome breath of fresh air. Optimistic, liberating, and anti-elitist, it preached the highest standards of moral integrity and generated a cultural environment in which philosophy and science would flourish for many centuries. In short, the greatest benefits of the world we inhabit today can be credited to Christianity’s account.

Unfortunately in Part 3 of the book Hart’s case begins to lose steam, and, in my judgment, to come off the rails. As best I can tell (because it isn’t altogether clear) these six chapters develop the case that our modern conception of ‘humanity’ is “the positive invention of Christianity”; and if this is so, it follows that as our culture abandons its Christianity, it will also thereby abandon its humanity. This would be a powerful conclusion, but Hart’s argument is problematic in several respects. First, it’s hard to distill from the 100 pages of discussion exactly what the argument comes to; what its premises are and how the conclusion follows from them. The burden of the final chapter of Part 3 (“Divine Humanity”) is to show that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation elevated our conception of humanity to the level of divinity, thus infusing humanity with the highest dignity and destiny. This claim, however, turns on a very questionable interpretation of the Incarnation (one that goes well beyond the ecumenical church creeds) and demands rather more precision and argumentation than Hart supplies. Perhaps the argument is more profound and subtle than I’ve grasped; if so, its profundity and subtlety are obscured by Hart’s flowery and meandering prose.

The final two chapters of the book draw matters to a close by casting a pessimistic vision of the society that chooses to pursue Enlightenment values over Christian values and of the ethics and science that would characterize such a society.

While I agree with Hart’s overall thesis—that Western civilization owes a far greater debt to Christianity than its secularist despisers can bear to admit—I must express a number of serious reservations about the book as a whole. As I noted above, Atheist Delusions seeks to expose the crass historical revisionism of Hitchens and his comrades-in-arms. It largely succeeds in this goal. Its author, however, seems surprisingly reluctant take matters any further. Surely it’s not enough to say that Christianity has been good for the world; we also want to say that Christianity has been good for the world because it’s true. Yet one looks in vain for any clear indication that Hart believes the claims of Christianity to be factual claims. If he does, he nowhere shares the reasons for his beliefs. And in the final sentences of the book, Hart speaks of Christians in the third person—an odd grammatical choice for one who dons the mantle of a Christian apologist.

There are other problems that will cause concern for evangelical readers. Hart makes some very questionable claims about Gnostic influences on John’s Gospel (p. 137).  He expresses doubts about the traditional doctrine of hell (pp. 154-55). He mistranslates John 1:1 and makes demonstrably false claims about the New Testament usage of the Greek word for ‘God’ (p. 204). Most worrying of all, however, is that a biblical understanding of the gospel is almost entirely absent from the book. I confess I knew nothing about David Bentley Hart before reading his book, but by the end of the book all the evidence pointed to his being Eastern Orthodox: too low a view of the Bible and too high a view of the Church Fathers; an understanding of salvation as ‘divinization’; all emphasis on the Incarnation and none on the Atonement; the gospel as metaphysical and moral transformation, with justification by faith nowhere to be seen. (A few minutes’ research on the internet confirmed my suspicions.)

For all these reasons, I cannot recommend this book as a tool for evangelism or even for pre-evangelism. That’s a shame, because much of the book is both informative and a delight to read. But taken as a whole, it does not make a case for Christianity that any informed evangelical could endorse.

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The Morality of the New Atheism

When it comes to ethical theory, the apologists for the New Atheism are utilitarians almost to a man, if not actually to a man. They endorse some version of the “principle of utility”: what is morally right is what results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

So what makes people happy? As it turns out, studies consistently show a correlation between religiosity and happiness. (Go here for one recent example.) Religious people typically enjoy happier, more contented, more satisfying lives than non-religious people in comparable circumstances. Yet the New Atheists, by publishing books scathingly critical of religion, are attempting (one assumes) to persuade people to abandon religion. So if the aforementioned studies are reliable, the polemics of the New Atheists — if successful — will most likely reduce the net happiness of the human race. Thus, according to their own ethical theory, they are morally wrong to write and publish their anti-religion tracts.

One might reply that the New Atheists write against religion because they’re firmly convinced that religious beliefs are false, and it’s more important to believe what is true than to believe what makes one happy. This is surely correct, but we should note that this response constitutes a de facto rejection of utilitarian ethics. According to the principle of utility, what’s morally right depends only on what makes us happy, and that principle must apply to our beliefs just as it does to any other aspect of our lives. If certain beliefs increase overall human happiness then we should act so as to promote those beliefs, regardless of whether they happen to be true or false. Rather than opposing what they deride as religious mythology, the New Atheists ought to follow Plato in championing the “noble lie”.

Another possible response would be to argue that although the beliefs of religious folk may well make them happier, those same beliefs make life miserable for everyone else (not least the New Atheists). But as we all know, the non-religious constitute a minority of the world population. Wouldn’t it be morally preferable, on utilitarian principles, for this minority to suffer some relatively minor irritations for the sake of the happiness of the majority? Whatever historical atrocities committed by religious fanatics one might drag up at this point, it would be hard to make a credible case that the total unhappiness represented by these outlying cases outweighs the total happiness enjoyed by the vast number of religious believers in the world as a consequence of their religious convictions. We might also note that the prime targets of religious extremists are usually adherents of other religious traditions, not atheists and agnostics. (The prime targets of secularist extremists, on the other hand, are invariably religious believers, as 20th-century history and current world affairs illustrate only too well.)

So the problem remains. By their own moral lights, wouldn’t the New Atheists do better to suffer in silence?

In fact, they could do even better than that: they could get themselves some religion. Who knows? We might even see them crack a smile or two.

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