Justin Brierley, host of the “Unbelievable?” podcast, which hosts Christians and atheists in dialogue, likes to thank atheists for reviving Christian thinking.
Brierley’s new book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why the New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again is part of a new wave of tomes such as two by Alister McGrath: The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine and Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: Twelve Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity in which a dozen secular thinkers found their way to belief in God through reading criticism of Richard Dawkins. Even Deepak Chopra weighs in with a chapter on “Dawkins and his Delusions” in his book The Future of God.
The “four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse,” Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett were very popular from about 2000 to 2010 but have fallen out of vogue since then.
The new atheism arose because of a perfect storm of events: American fundamentalist criticism of evolution, resulting in a ban on teaching the scientific theory in some schools; ongoing aggression by religious evangelists who considered atheists either foolish or evil; the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center by fundamentalist Muslims; and sex scandals perpetrated by priests and covered up by bishops.
The storm resulted in a counter storm of books by atheist scientists such as Harris and Dawkins, notably Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and writers such as Dennett and Hitchens, notably Hitchens’ God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
However, the atheist counter storm resulted in a counter storm from Protestant philosophers such as William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Tim Keller, and John Lennox.
The new atheism came to be seen as deeply flawed for two main reasons. First, they cherry-picked their approach to religion, straw-manning their opponents by just focusing on the worst aspects of religion. Their simplistic approach to religious faith failed to take into account all the good religions have done for centuries: providing billions of people with deep meaning in their lives, pastoral care during hard times, and building charities, hospitals, schools, and universities around the world.
Secondly, they failed to apply their critical standards to themselves. They only got as far as Kierkegaard’s ethical stage, and have not examined the shadow side of atheism, for example atheist political regimes in Soviet Russia and Communist China that slaughtered millions of people. They did not own their own sin, which Kierkegaard noted, prompts the next stage after ethics, the religious stage.
Part of their problem was that, as Catholic Bishop Robert Barron pointed out, they were rhetoricians, great at arguing their point but naïve about the depths of theological thinking. Also, they were in love with “scientism,” the belief that science has all the answers, an unprovable hypothesis which is therefore rejected by true scientists.
True scientists recognize the limits of science. Science can only answer “how questions,” for example, how we got here through evolution. It is incapable of answering “why questions,” for example, “what is the purpose of my life?” That is a meaning and value question which is in the realm of religion not science.
As Bishop Barron also noted, when atheists try to formulate their values, they usually latch on to “the brotherhood of man” or other values that come from Christianity. So, they unconsciously criticize Christianity with Christian values. This is fair, since any religion is only as perfect or imperfect as the people who compose it. If they do not live up to their professed values, they deserve to be criticized.
In short, the two big mistakes of the new atheists were to unfairly overdo their criticism of religion, and to not look at the dark side of atheism.
Bruce Tallman is a religious educator of adults, spiritual director, and marriage coach . http://www.brucetallman.com
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