Barry's Blog

Thursday, March 27 2008

What the New Atheists Are Missing...

With the recent spate of books heralding the "new atheism" of our day, Dinesh D'Souza's recent apologia into the theological fracas, What's So Great About Christianity, is a welcome delight. Undeniably, exuberant atheists such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) write with a certain panache, which makes their vitriol all the more persuasive. As Tony Snow notes in a recent review (from Christianity Today, for which I am indebted) of D'Souza's book mentions, "Atheist works tend to combine argument with large doses of bitter biography. Every chapter of Dawkins's book describes unpleasant encounters with believing dolts -- hate-mail writers, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the like. Hitchens recalls murderous fanatics in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Levant, and his blood-chilling encounters with a childhood schoolmarm."

Listen to Dawkins's seething contempt for the God of the Old Testament: "He is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Makes you wonder why these folks are so bothered by a God that they deny exists, doesn't it?

A few of D'Souza's arguments from his book are worth mentioning. First, Hitchens's makes the charge that "religion poisons everything" (he truly is a hater of all religions), lining up in his sights such diverse religious leaders as bin Laden, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Pope, etc. But D'Souza rightly shows how Christian principles involving free choice and human dignity form the basis for democratic political systems built on the belief of inalienable human rights. Such a Christian worldview also inspired free markets in economics and intellectual pursuit. And Christian theologians were arguably the forerunners of modern science. D'Souza also suggests that America's uncommon generosity, particularly in times of crisis, are now taken for granted by the world, a generosity whose traits are derived from the Christian faith.

Another tenet that D'Souza takes to task of the New Atheism is the supposed impossibility of faith and science to coexist. While Darwinian evolutionary theory would chortle at such a thought, D'Souza employs Aquina's assertion that reason and faith actually complement each other. He quotes Nobel laureate Arno Penzias and astronomer Robert Jastrow to the point that even the Big Bang theory leads us "back" to a moment when everything began, with questions more related to faith and theology than hard science. As Jastrow mused in his book, God and the Astronomers, of scientists trying to get back to before the Big Bang: "When the scientists have scaled the last mountain peak, they find a band of theologians who have been waiting there for centuries!"

A third tenet that D'Souza addresses is the broader issue of faith and reason. D'Souza writes: "Religious faith is not in opposition to reason. The purpose of faith is to discover truths that are of the highest importance to us through purely natural means." He then quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Even if all possible scientific questions are answered, the problems of life still have not been touched at all." As Tony Snow remarks in his review of D'Souza's book, "Darwinists may be able to describe how older bees, wasps, ants, and termites help their younger siblings, but they can't explain why Raoul Wallenberg became a martyr for captive Jews."

This is arguably the fundamental flaw of the "new" atheism: it fails as a belief system or creed, because it is essentially a belief system of denial, and puts forth no compelling or satisfying worldview for the way things really are. It may attempt to provide answers for certain intellectual questions and mumblings we have with life, but it cannot reach our hearts. In truth, a consistent atheist is unable to explain love, or offer consolation in a time of grief, nor can he account for the sheer wonder and delight of the blessings and pleasures (yes, even amidst the sorrows) of this human drama that we call "life."

It makes me wonder, can the atheist truly be "grateful" for anything, since everything that happens, literally "under the sun," (to borrow the phrase from the Preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes) is by blind fate and chance?

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
-An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
-An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.

C S Lewis, "On Being Human"

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow