Apologies for my absence from this thread. Lots of local Presbytery work including our Commission of Assembly last week in which we had to deal yet again with The Fellowship issue - count your lucky stars that The Fellowship is a Melbourne phenomenon only - you can read Barney Zwartz report here.

This week I intend returning to do a review of Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” which was the first of the new atheist books, but very much in the mould of the later books of Dennett Dawkins and Hitchens. I think of Harris as a protégé of Dawkins. I am also reading an excellent critique of Dawkins Harris and Hitchens by John Haught (a theology professor whose heroes are people like Tillich and Barth), “God and the new Atheism” and will use some of his insights in my review.

I saw a fair bit of the Dawkins doco last night - the second in his series against irrationality. It wasn’t bad, in my view.

For a start, I agree there is a lot of silly (un)thinking stuff out there. Secondly, he wasn’t as narky as I’ve seen him before. It is possible for him to disagree profoundly without self-exalting!

One underlying worrying theme - in my perception of it - is that Dawkins seems to absolutise science. He says that science is good, I think he means science is t h e good.

A Brief overview of David Marshall’s “The Truth behind the New Atheism”.

David Marshall previously wrote “The Truth about Jesus and the ‘Lost Gospels’” and last year (2007) had “The Truth behind the New Atheism” published, so clearly a man set to answer each new assault upon orthodox Christian faith, “The Truth behind….”.

The book is competently written at a ‘popular level’ engaging with Dawkins, Dennett and Harris but not Hitchens or Onfray.

Chapter headings include “Does Evolution make God redundant”, “Is the Good Book bad?”, “Is Christianity a Blessing?”, “Or a Curse?”, “Can Atheism make the world better?”. I would say Marshall covers the bases and in so doing treats the new atheists fairly, courteously, seriously, but also is firm in rebuttal. Thus as a an example of the later characteristic in discussing Dawkins’ view that morality is on an ever upward march, particularly with the demise of faith, Marshal contrasts John Wesley’s description of Africans as “capable craftsmen, courteous, moderate and students of the stars” with the Social Darwinians who a century later compared the same people to apes, and justified not just slavery but annihilation. Social Darwinism, including eugenics is definitely avoided and arguably best avoided by Dawkins et al. However, since Dawkins is both so effusive and yet so naïve about the superior morality that flows from the Darwinian framework, it doesn’t do any harm to point out a few home truths.

A constant thread through the new atheist literature is the past wickedness of the Christian West. Marshall does not shy away from such accusations but makes four eminently reasonable points in response: First, the “Christian” West gained the power to rule most of the world. Second we know our own history better, and therefore, so does everyone else. Third, there is a lot of dishonest propaganda going around. Fourth, the world expects more of the followers of Christ. A fifth point could be to explore the extent to which past Christian failures actually were driven by Christian teaching or might have arisen from other factors stemming from human concupiscence broadly understood.

I was pleased to see Marshall make good use of Rodney Stark’s work. Stark is a professor of sociology and comparative religion, not a I believe a Christian, rather more a fellow traveller, though he may now profess Christian faith(?). His books on religion are well worth reading and give the lie to much of the new atheist reconstruction of our Christian past. In “The Rise of Christianity” Stark makes use of contemporary socio-scientific data to provide an accounting for the rise of Christianity from being an obscure first century Jewish sect to replace paganism in the Roman Empire less than 300 years later in the decades immediately preceding the conversion of Emperor Constantine. In “For the Glory of God” and “The Victory of Reason” (some irony here given the new atheists’ charge of lack of reason in religion), Stark shows how monotheism, and Christianity in particular, led to Reformation, science, witch-hunts, the end of slavery, freedom, capitalism and western success. Much of this material blunts, if not destroys key aspects of the atheistic critique of religion.

Review of “God and the New Atheism” by John F Haught.

This is most definitely a book well worth getting hold of, for I found its critique of the new atheists entirely compelling - talk about felling tall timber!

Whereas as John Lennox is a mathematician and David Stove a philosopher, Haught is a theologian, though of a fairly liberal variety whose theological hero is Paul Tillich. I found his interchanging of the terms, “God” and “Meaning, Goodness, Beauty” as somewhat disconcerting but was encouraged when for example he says that Christianity’s God “is unashamedly incarnate; fully enfleshed in the world; and intimately related to its becoming, antiquity, creativity, pain, uncertainty, mortality, weaknesses, and hopes”. Obviously we would want to say more about God, but certainly this strikes a responsive chord.

What Haught doesn’t have any time for on the Christian side as it were, are “creationists, fundamentalists and intelligent design (ID) advocates”. Of course everything depends on what is meant by such appellations, and whilst by “creationists” he clearly has YECs in view, I think he is wrong to lump in intelligent design advocates, but we needn’t fuss over the issue. A key point in Haught’s critique is that the new atheists have decided to debate with such persons and not serious theologians. “This choice of antagonists”, says Haught, “betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditionally mainstream types – which they completely ignore and implicitly reject for their unorthodoxy”.

In my view, that Haught may be “unorthodox” in his theology, does not detract from his critique, which in any case I found to be serious, original (at least for me) and compelling.

The book’s subtitle is “A critical response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens”. I was astonished at his ease in illustrating his points by interacting with these mens’ writing. However he tells us that for many years he ran a course for his students, called “The Problem of God”, in order to expose them to “the most erudite of the unbelievers”. Against those appearing on that course’s reading list, he finds the new atheists poor fare indeed. His chief gripe with the new atheists is well captured in the following two quotations from the Introduction

“Nor is it that the treatment of religion in these tracts consists mostly of breezy overgeneralizations that leave out almost everything that theologians would want to highlight in their own contemporary discussion of God. Rather, the new atheism is so theologically unchallenging. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature. This is not surprising since it is from creationists and intelligent design theists that the new atheists seem to have garnered much of their understanding of religious faith.”

“Occasionally our critics come close to suspecting that there may be a whole other world of relevant religious thought out there, but they want to make things easy for themselves and their readers, so they keep theology, at least in my sense of the term, out of their discussion altogether. Their strategy is to suppress in effect any significant theological voices that might wish to join in conversation with them. As a result of this exclusion, the intellectual quality of their atheism is unnecessarily diminished. Their understanding of religious faith remains consistently at the same unscholarly level as the unreflective, superstitious, and literalist religiosity of those they criticize. Moreover, amid all their justified outrage at religious abuses, they cannot fathom the possibility that folk religion also often rises to heights of nobility, courage, and authenticity that no fair and objective scholarship should ignore.”

There are eight brief but lucid and compelling chapters with suggestions for further reading. The chapters are:

1. How New Is the New Atheism?
2. How Atheistic Is the New Atheism?
3. Does Theology Matter?
4. Is God a Hypothesis?
5. Why Do People Believe?
6. Can We Be Good without God?
7 Is God Personal?
8. Christian Theology and the New Atheism

The book adds up to a mere 109 pages - he comments briefly on why he does not include Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell”: “Dennett’s book is an unnecessarily lengthy argument for a relatively simple, and by no means exceptional way of assaulting religion – in my view this is true of the others as well and in the case of Dennett, I would add “boring” – how I ever slogged through all 448 pages I don’t know. At least Hitchens and Dawkins are entertaining.

What I want to try and do is extract the main points of his critique.

To be continued

In “How New Is the New Atheism?”, Haught likens the new atheists central arguments to a new version of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. Whilst he takes Harris as his departure point (noting that Harris adheres to a very highly edited version of Buddhism – which I might add Harris rather deceptively(?) buries in an obscure footnote towards the conclusion of “The End of Faith”), Haught says Dawkins and Hitchens both make essentially the same set of claims.

Where Buddha’s first evident truth is that “all life is suffering”, our trio with no God and a purposeless universe implicitly acknowledge this truth with their view that the best we can do is strive for a world in which happiness is ensued for the greatest number of individuals. In contrast Christians have always argued that happiness is a by-product of other things, chiefly finding God.

The second truth for Dawkins, Hitchens an Harris is that the chief cause for distress and therefore lack of happiness is faith, particularly faith in God, and so Hitchens says this is what “poisons everything”. Buddha’s second evident truth states that the cause of suffering is greedy desire. Faith is such a “greedy desire”, the fount of great and damaging delusions, the cause of all that is dark and barbarous. Faith according to Harris is “intrinsically dangerous and morally evil, no matter what form it takes in our imaginations”. Why? “Because there is no evidence for it, and in fact “no evidence is even conceivable”. You get a lot of this stuff from all the new atheists. Religion and reason are diametric opposites. Haught summarizes their view this way:

“The seat of faith for them is not a vulnerable heart but a weak intellect. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens consider all forms of faith to be irrational, and abusing reason by harbouring faith in one’s mind is shockingly unethical as well. It is morally wrong to believe anything without sufficient evidence”. (p5)

Whilst Buddha’s third evident truth is that the way to overcome suffering is to find release from clinging desire, for the new atheists, the way to avoid unnecessary suffering today is to abolish faith from the face of the earth. And it is just not faith, but tolerance for faith that must be abolished. The very idea of God must be erased forever from human awareness. Don’t think for a moment that tolerance is part of the new atheists’ creed! How ironic, says Haught, that their own belief system, scientific naturalism,

“would never have established itself in the modern world were it not for the tolerance extended to “freethinkers” by the same religious cultures that gave rise to science.” (p11)

Haught makes the important point that we need to keep hammering away that scientific naturalism is itself a belief system for which there can be no sufficient scientific or empirical evidence. Thus for the work of science to proceed there must be faith that the universe is in fact comprehensible.

The atheists’ version of the Eightfold path of Buddha’s fourth evident truth, is to follow the hallowed path of the scientific method in order to eliminate faith.

Haught finishes the chapter with a reflection on the new atheist definition of faith as “belief without evidence” to say what a poor thing it is.

“… Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, and Dawkins seem like the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world who, having mastered that sphere of being, are now busy inviting those who occupy the admittedly more disorienting world of many dimensions to please come down and live with them in Flatland.” (p13)

He will come back to this point.

To be continued

This is the last of four posts this morning

In “How atheistic is the new atheism”, Haught’s point is that it is a poor substitute for the real thing. He describes them as “soft core atheists”. This is the chapter in which he introduces his “The Problem of God” class and its students and answers his question through what he thinks will be his students’ response to the new atheist books.

Thus his students will understand that the scientism and scientific naturalism of these men is in fact a profession of faith, and one that is in fact self contradictory, for scientism says take nothing on faith, yet faith is required to accept scientism. And the wonder is, says Haught, that

“none of the new atheists seems remotely prepared to admit that his scientism is a self- sabotaging confession of faith.” (p17)

The second point (“the vast majority of”) his students would take issue with is to think how silly for anyone to assert that science can decide the question of God (and this precisely is what they think!). But such claim “makes no sense for the simple reason that scientific method by definition has nothing to say about God, meaning, values, or purpose”. This is a point that needs to be hammered away at.

The third point his students would make and I must say this stood out for me as well when reading their books, is what is the big difference that their atheism would make to our lives and self understanding.

The answer is basically zilch. As Haught says, “the image of human fulfilment that emerges from their writings is one in which our present lifestyles will remain pretty much the same, minus the inconveniences of terrorism and creationists”. I would add two things to this. The first is that they betray their indebtedness to Christian morality but fail to acknowledge the indebtedness. As Stove points out, it is simply not possible to get altruism out of Darwinism to which they all are much addicted.  Secondly, all stamp themselves as men of modern western society in espousing sexual licence. All so ho hum.

The classical atheists – Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre – were a far more rigorous breed, at least on paper. Haught, contra the position of Dawkins et al calls these men the “hard core atheists” for they wanted a much more radical transformation of human culture and consciousness. In contrast, our new atheists want their atheism to prevail

“at the least possible expense to the agreeable socioeconomic circumstances out of which they sermonise”. (p20)

Of course Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre

“also failed to embody the tragic heroism that they thought should be the logical outcome of atheism. They turned out to be very much like the rest of us. Still, their failure actually fortifies the conclusion that at least some of my students arrived at in “The Problem of God” course: a truly consistent atheism is impossible to execute. And if hard-core atheism cannot succeed, it is doubtful that the soft-core variety will make it either.” (p23)

The chapter concludes with a section that having noted how assured and traditional the values of the soft core atheists are, and further noting that if God does not exist and therefore neither do absolute values, asks the question, “can you rationally justify your unconditional adherence to timeless values without implicitly invoking the existence of God?”. According to Haught, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre would all say “it is not possible”.

I think this a major and telling criticism of the “soft core” atheists. They are simply not, to use an old fashioned Australian expression, “fair dinkum”. They are not willing to face up to the natural consequences of removing the creator God from his creation, whether to espouse some form of absurdism (Camus) or nihilism (Nietzsche and Sartre). Attack religion: they can get away with that, but to embrace atheism and its consequences that’s too hard and besides, who would buy their books?

To be continued

The basic thrust of “Does theology matter?” is that the new atheists unveil religion at its ugliest and they do so by choosing their opponents from the ranks of the YECs, and they get away with this because they are writing for theologically uninformed readers. In other words the new atheists avoid real theologians, choosing rather to make sport with Biblical literalists.

The big point in this chapter is that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris being ignorant of theology and at the scientifically literalist extreme themselves bring a “more typically creationist and historically anachronistic mentality” (p30) to their reading of the Bible. I think this is a really good point. The new atheists in aping the literalism of YECs (and they do so because they share the same literalist mindset) are basically being easy on themselves – they save themselves the bother of reading the Bible on the Bible’ terms and they remain totally ignorant of theological discourse whether of the liberal variety that Haught espouses or evangelical theology found in Anglican/Presbyterian/Lutheran/Baptist circles. A major reason for their failure in this respect is there particular version of dualism which Haught deals with in a later chapter.

To illustrate the embarrassing level at which the new atheists as Biblical critics operates, Haught gives a couple of quotes:

“Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that” (here Hitchens, “God is not Great”, p120 is concluding his chapter on the NT. In my own reading of God is not Great I had also highlighted this passage). (p31)

“Harris …. insists that “the same evidentiary demands”—that is, the same scientific standards—must be used to measure the truth status of religious propositions as any others. He wonders why all benighted Bible readers are not as befuddled as he is that “a book written by an omniscient being” would fail to be “the richest source of mathematical insight humanity has ever known,” or why the Bible has nothing to say “about electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe” (Letter to a Christian Nation, 60—61). In thirty-five years of undergraduate teaching I never encountered a single instance where, at least after taking a theology course, a student would be capable of making such a farcical complaint. But Harris, like the creationists he denounces, and unlike theologically informed students, wants nothing to do with an allegedly inspired text that fails to give useful and accurate scientific information.” (p33)

Whilst the Bible contains much material concerning the natural order, great care is required to make sure that we do not try to impress our reading of a particular Biblical text on how we understand a particular natural phenomena. God has given us two books to read: the book of nature (natural revelation) and the Bible (special revelation). Of course we read the first in the light of the second (acting as “spectacles as Calvin put it) in order to gain an interpretive “worldview) but Haught gives two cautionary quotations, one from Augustine and the other from the devout Catholic Galileo to help us avoid inappropriately intruding our reading of Scripture into our discovery of the workings of God’s marvellous creation.

“I should think it would be the part of prudence not to permit any one to usurp scriptural texts and force them in some way to maintain any physical conclusions to be true, when at some future time the senses and demonstrative or necessary reasons may show the contrary” Galileo, Haught gives the citation) p34)

Much earlier than Galileo, Augustine’s De Genesi ad literam had advised readers of Genesis not to get hung up on questions about its astronomical exactness, nor try to defend the literal accuracy of its cosmological assumptions. Otherwise unbelievers are likely to dismiss the biblical writings “when they teach, relate, and deliver more profitable matters.” (p34)

“Yet even today”, says Haught, “scientific naturalists no less than biblical literalists still interpret religious doctrines and Scriptures as though their intention is to solve scientific puzzles”. The difference between the two is that

“Creationists …. can pick up some of the religious challenge of the texts in spite of their anachronistic exegesis. But the new atheists cannot even do this much. They share the untimely scientific reading with creationists, but being also deaf to the clearly transformative intent of the Scriptures, they completely disqualify themselves as interpreters of biblical faith”.  (p35)

Haught concludes the chapter by charging that the new atheists’ parallels to Biblical literalism is basically a way of shrinking the world so as to make it more manageable and manipulable, and further that their main motive is fear of losing control.

Haught lists the new atheists’ set of shrinkages as follow:

• Reducing, or crying hard to reduce, the entire monotheistic religious population to scriptural literalists, dogmatic extremists, escapists, perverts, perpetrators of human suffering, and fanatics.
• Reducing the cultural role of rheology to the systematic underwriting of religious abuse.
• Reducing the meaning of faith to mindless belief in whatever has no evidence.
• Reducing the meaning of “evidence” to “what is available to science.”
• Reducing the whole of reality to what can be known by science.
• Reducing the idea of God to a “hypothesis”

.
I do have one caveat concerning this chapter, and that is, those of my ministerial colleagues who are YECs (and why they are is an interesting question), are by no means exclusively literalist when it comes to the entire Bible. Indeed their literalism comes down to the interpretation of “day” in Genesis 1 as of 24 hour duration and a particular understanding of the Genesis 6-9 flood narrative. So, in this respect, to so characterise my colleagues as Haught has done is dead wrong and indeed somewhat mischievous. But this is a perennial problem in debate: we advance our cause by misrepresenting and/or denigrating our opponent’s position. Any of us can do that. You don’t nee to be a Dawkins or a Haught to do it. 

(Haught’s main opponents are the new atheists, but there are secondary ones: literalists, creationists, ID advocates, and so I suspect evangelicals more broadly defined)

“Is God a Hypothesis?” is dealing with the new atheists’ strategy of proposing that faith in the existence of God is a ‘hypothesis in exactly the same way that scientists make use of hypotheses to bring intelligibility to a particular set of reproducible data, and then by such a stratagem to point out that there is no evidence to support the God hypothesis.

The way the new atheists go about killing “the God hypothesis” is firstly to query that any material evidence exists for God (who in Dawkins’ version is shrunk to a super human, supernatural designer) and secondly to assert there is a far simpler explanation for creation and more particularly biological complexity, viz evolution.

Haught correctly points out that “the idea of God functions as anything but a scientific hypothesis for most believers and theologians” (p42). I don’t know that any believer thinks of God that kind of objectifying way. God is subject, Dawkins, you and I are objects, at least this is how I believe Christians think. Dawkins wants to put God under the microscope when in fact the reverse is true!

Haught puts the matter this way:

“In my interpersonal knowledge, …. the evidence that someone loves me is hard to measure, but it can be very real nonetheless. The only way I can encounter the subjective depth of another person is to abandon the objectifying method of science. To treat the otherness and subjectivity of another person as though he or she were just another object in nature is both cognitively and morally wrong. To take account of the evidence of subjective depth that I encounter in the face of another person, I need to adopt a stance of vulnerability. Encounter with another’s personal depth challenges me to put aside the controlling, mastering, objectifying method of natural science……

Do our new atheists seriously believe, therefore, that if a personal God of infinite beauty and unbounded love actually exists, the “evidence” for this God’s existence could be gathered as cheaply as the evidence for a scientific hypothesis? Even in our ordinary human experience it is other personal subjects that matter most to us, and no amount of scientific expertise can tell us who they really are. Would it be otherwise with God, whom believers experience not as an ordinary “It” but as a supreme “Thou”? If God exists, then interpersonal experience, not the impersonal objectivity of science, would be essential to knowledge of this God. In our everyday existence the love of another person matters more to us than almost anything else, but gathering the “evidence” for that love requires a leap of trust on our part, a wager that renders us vulnerable to their special kind of presence. The other person’s love, moreover, captures us in such a way that we cannot connect with it at all if we try to control it intellectually. (p45)

This chapter has an excellent section on the need for trust in every arena of human activity.

“Trusting that the natural world is intelligible and that truth is worth seeking is essential to getting science off the ground in the first place. We spontaneously trust that our journeys of exploration will be greeted by an ever-expanding field of intelligibility and an inexhaustible depth of truth. ….. (p47)

In relation to the new atheists he has this to say:

“Harris, for example, proposes that the removal of all faith essential if reason is to reign supreme. But he cannot eliminate traces of faith even from his own mind. As he undertakes his passionate quest to divest the world of faith, he first has to believe that the real world is rational, that truth is something to be valued and respected, and that his own mind is of such integrity that it can grasp meaning and make valid claims to truth. This trusting component is usually tacit and seldom explicit, but it is a powerful presence nonetheless. Our expert atheists have obviously failed to notice it even as it drives their own cognitional activity.” (p48)

Haught asks in a way reminiscent of David Stove’s ”Darwinian Fairytales”,

“Since our minds are said to have evolved gradually from a mindless state of nature, why should we trust these same minds to put us in touch with reality? Where and how did they acquire such an exquisite competence, especially given the lowliness of their origins in nature?” (p49)

Theology, he goes on to say,

“can provide a very good answer to why we can trust our minds. We can trust them because, prior to any process of reasoning or empirical inquiry, each of us, simply by virtue of being or existing, is already encompassed by infinite Being, Meaning, Truth, Goodness and Beauty. We awaken only slowly and obscurely into this unfathomably deep and liberating environment and are bathed in it all our days. We cannot focus on it, and we may not even notice it at all since, like fish in a river, we are so deeply immersed in it. But we may trust our capacity to search for meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty because these have already beckoned and begun to carry us away. Faith, at bottom, is our gracious and enlivening assent to this momentous invitation.
…….
The undeniable trust that empowers our search for understanding and truth does not show up in the daylight arena of objects on which scientists can focus. This trust arises from the deepest and most hidden recesses of our consciousness, at a level of depth that we can never bring into clear focus since the very act of focusing cannot take place without it. But even if we cannot grasp meaning and truth in an absolute and final way, we can allow them to grasp us. In surrendering to meaning and truth we are performing an essentially religious act, one in which even the atheist is an unwitting participant.” (p50,51)

I think these are points well made. The only caveat I have with them is the point that given God is always subject, and we object, it is also true that the Bible records God entering human history and the ways that he has done so may be defended according to rules of evidence. So, whilst the Gospels clearly want us to understand that our Lord rose physically from the dead on the third day (so that he left no bones in the soil of Palestine), yet we may also assess for ourselves that the evidence presented for such a resurrection is compelling or otherwise.

When the Apostle asserts “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures”, he immediately goes on to say in effect, “there is abundant evidence to certify the truth of what I am asserting and this is what it is….”. In other words reliable, believable evidence is offered for the flat assertion that “He was raised on the third day”.

Haught provides a concise summary of the new atheists’ explanation of why religious faith is so prevalent despite the non existence of God in “Why do we believe?”. We have met this discussion involving genes and memes before in “The God Delusion” and “Darwinian Fairytales”. In “Why do people believe?”, Haught carries on from the previous chapter.

Yes, faith can be studied with the tools of evolutionary science (I demur), but that’s not the only way to study religious experience.

Thus:

Theology, unlike scientism, wagers that we can contact the deepest truths only by relaxing the will to control and allowing ourselves to be grasped by a deeper dimension of reality than ordinary experience or science can access by itself. The state of allowing ourselves to be grasped and carried away by this dimension of depth is at least part of what theology means by ‘faith’.” (p60, emphasis added)

Haught goes on to raise several points:

1. Surely the prevalence of religious believers must call into question their explanation for th existence of religious belief (I’m not sure this follows)

2. If the new atheists are really serious about ridding the world of faith, they need to “start grappling with major theologians rather than trying to outflank them…. A well thought out military strategy sooner or later has to confront the enemy at its strongest point, but each of our critics has avoided any such confrontation” (p63).

3. In their “very worship of reason and science” the new atheists have succumbed “to the main temptation of all faith, that of idolatry”

The second point needs to be hammered home. The new atheists are simply shirking a real contest.

I have a question, may have been discussed previously.
Just why do you think Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens have sold so many copies of their respective books?

Also, is there a way of finding out how many copies of their books have been sold? I read somewhere that 2 million copies of “The God Delusion” have been sold in America alone.

Just why do you think Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens have sold so many copies of their respective books?

Apart from buyers being interested in the subject matter, either to confirm their prejudices or find out what these guys are saying, I suspect it’s partly because most people think like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens.  If we’re going to commit ourselves to rejecting or accepting the idea that God exists we want solid evidence one way or another.  Whether or not we agree with the arguments these fellows put forward at least we can understand them whereas I doubt that many people can understand what Haught means by the rarified, high-falutin’ abstractions that he uses, and the ones who think they do understand may, I suspect, be kidding themselves.  For instance,

We can trust [our minds] because, prior to any process of reasoning or empirical inquiry, each of us, simply by virtue of being or existing, is already encompassed by infinite Being, Meaning, Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

What does that mean?  How is one “encompassed by infinite” abstractions however noble-sounding they may be?  I have no idea. 

And how can “meaning and truth” grasp us?  It’s not as though either of these abstractions have, or ever can have, arms, hooks or claws wiith which to grasp anything.

This kind of theology might get a fellow a top position at an important university but it will do no real good to the hearts and minds of most of the rest of us, whom God also loves.  Lesser folk, such as myself, want more than important-sounding strings of verbiage.  We want actual evidence that there are good reasons to believe.  And, contra Haught, it *can* be gathered as cheaply as the evidence for a scientific hypothesis, depending on what you mean by ‘scientific’. 

All but one of the apostles suffered martyrdom rather than deny the living Christ and that one was sent to work in a mine for many years as a prisoner/slave labourer.  Is that evidence for a scientific hypothesis that God exists?  Is psychology scientific?  Is history scientific? 

I ask these questions deliberately because I believe the idea of what is scientific and what is not has been obfuscated to the point that we can’t think clearly about the matter any more.  We merely accept what we have been taught and apply the label ‘science’ (with all its connotations of progress onwards and upwards and of life-saving or life-enhancing technologies) to areas of study that having nothing to do with progressing anything onwards and upwards, much less providing any life-saving or life-enhancing technologies.  We are so in awe of ‘scientific progress’ that most of us are ready to believe almost any opinion if it comes from someone in a field of study that has the coveted label ‘scientific’.  So that’s another reason why people are interested in anything D, H and H have to say.

I am very tired of hearing people say that the Bible is not a science book.  Of course it isn’t.  But it is a history book and history, accurately recorded, can have implications for science.  If there is rock art in the Sahara that depicts all sorts of creatures that normally live on grassy plains (and there is) we have reason to think it at least possible that, once upon a time, the Sahara was better watered than it is now.  If the Bible, the word of God, says that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead then, given the evidence of the apostles’ lives and deaths, it’s reasonable to believe that He really was raised from the dead even though, scientifically speaking (and without the aid of high-tech, intensive-care, machinery and drugs), dead people never come back to life and therefore such an event is, in the view of the D, H and H’s among us, impossible. 

Jesus’ resurrection is not a scientific fact in the way most of us think of scientific facts.  But it is reasonable to believe it occurred.  We can say that it is so well attested historically that it is reasonable to regard the resurrection as a fact. 

Now consider that we can say nothing more than that about every singular event that has ever occurred in the past.  Unless there is some historical record of the event in which we are interested the best we can say about what caused whatever artefact remains is that we have an opinion (which may be quite wrong) about what caused it.  The logical fallacy involved is called ‘affirming the consequent’.

We can read what Pliny the Younger wrote about the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD.  There are no documents that record how the Barringer meteor Crater in Arizona was formed.  Those who hoped to make money out of it were sorely disappointed.  There are documents that state how the universe was formed.  To the best of our knowledge they were written, somehow, through God’s agency.  But people who idolise science refuse to believe those documents, not because they’ve been proven wrong but because they’re not ontologically materialist and therefore don’t qualify as ‘scientific’ to those who think that ontological materialism is the same as methodological materialism.  And so we’re left with the Haughts of this world and their condescending, meaningless, but fine-sounding, abstractions.

Just why do you think Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens have sold so many copies of their respective books?

Hi David and all.
I think that people jump eagerly into Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Thiering, Spong and others because they are hoping they are right and that Jesus isn’t Lord of the universe, that there is no God, or at least no God we have to answer to.

David, thanks very much for the trouble you have gone to here.
Very much appreciated.

Steady on Janice.

I quoted Haught on” infinite Being, Meaning, Truth, Goodness and Beauty” mainly to draw out the point that God is subject not object which seems to be an important point vis a vis new atheists. I also included it to give a sampling of his theological position. Sure, it is high falutin and abstract, though the book is clearly written and this quote is about as abstract as you put it as he gets.

We can fault his theology whilst appreciating what I consider to be a competent and telling critique of the new atheists that at a number of points breaks new ground.

I think the reasons for the success of the new atheist writings are quite varied:

1. if you reject religion what is your big meta narrative? The likes of Dawkins give you an alternative - a gnostic alternative that fits with many.
2, the impact of Islamic migration to the west: including 9/11, 7/7, jihad and expressions of hatred, ghettoisation.
3. underlying hatred of Christ and the Christian heritage of the west
4. the challenge to Darwinian evolution from creationists and especially ID, plus the ongoing if not escalating difficulties associated with the theory itself.
5. the failure of the church to die out in the west.
6. the opposition of the Church/Christians to abortion, stem research, eugenics, euthanasia - the cultural revolution of the 1960’s was meant to sweep all before it, and it hasn’t - what was counter cultural and succeeded is now itself under attack and as society crumbles, it will be more fiercely attacked by persons of religion, not helped by the dramatic fall in birthrate that it inspired.
7. And I guess there is that kicking against the pricks, what J Budzsizewski calls, ”the revenge of conscience”.

Any other ideas to what Janice David and I have put forward

What Haught doesn’t have any time for on the Christian side as it were, are “creationists, fundamentalists and intelligent design (ID) advocates”. Of course everything depends on what is meant by such appellations, and whilst by “creationists” he clearly has YECs in view, I think he is wrong to lump in intelligent design advocates, but we needn’t fuss over the issue. A key point in Haught’s critique is that the new atheists have decided to debate with such persons and not serious theologians. “This choice of antagonists”, says Haught, “betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditionally mainstream types – which they completely ignore and implicitly reject for their unorthodoxy”.

It is curious that they want to paint their opponents as YECS literalists.

David Palmer - 18 May 2008 08:49 PM

Any other ideas to what Janice David and I have put forward

I guess these books are part of the “Culture Wars” with agendas consistent with this cultural battle. Unfortunately in this “war”, truth is a casualty, and respect for intellectual opponents can be diminished. Having said that I think this thread is helping Christians to understand the views of the atheist writers so we can hopefully address the issues they raise. (To be honest I feel way out of my depth discussing this stuff though I do find it very interesting).

The New atheists recognise the force of the argument that in the absence of God the Lawgiver, human morality, human society would fall to pieces.

Their response is to flatly assert that morality does not require belief in God, and further that humans would behave much better without faith in God, a position they achieve by careful selection of evidence (including, in the case of Michel Onfray, the manufacture of evidence), demonstrating that believers are a worse breed than non believers. Dawkins goes one step further in asserting that most of us don’t go so low as to make the Bible the source and inspiration for our morality.

As the subtitle to Hitchens’ “God is not Great” puts it, “religion poisons everything”.

In “Can we be good without God” (chapter 6, two more chapters to go), Haught says that Dawkins’ discussion of morality and the Bible is a remarkable display of ignorance and foolish sarcasm, missing out entirely as he does that morality is not the message of the Bible but trust in God, with morality flowing out of God’s promises. Says, Haught,

“What is most lamentable about Dawkins’s discussion is that it completely misses the moral core of Judaism and Christianity the emphasis on justice and what has come to be known as God’s preferential option for the poor and disadvantaged.” (p68)

In terms analogous to Stove’s devastating critique of supposed Darwinian altruism, Haught zeroes in on Dawkins’ argument that we humans have got to be (ie climbed up to be) moral beings not because of any revelations from God but because our genes have so fashioned us in order to procure their own survival into the future. As we have seen previously, the sociobiologists led by Dawkins think that they can trace altruism back to unintended, accidental genetic occurrences that programmed some of our ancestors to be cooperative and altruistic (an incredibly ambitious “faith in their theory” statement!). “Gene survival, not God, is the source of our moral instincts” (p69). The fact that altruism is found in ant colonies, etc, etc only rams home the point – morality is a natural phenomenon.

Haught responds to all this by noting that Dawkins himself knows his theory has problems for as Dawkins acknowledges that a couple may engage in sexual activity while taking precautions to prevent conception. This Dawkins calls a “misfiring”, a “mistake”. In fact “the urge to kindness – to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity” in Dawkins hands are “misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes” (Haught is quoting from “The God Delusion, page 221).

To Haught this all simply illustrates “the logical self-contradiction into which any attempt to give a purely scientific justification of morality eventually leads (p70), and further the entirely arbitrary nature of our moral values in the absence of God.

In going on to note the new atheists catalogue of evils perpetrated by religion, asks,

“is Darwinian natural selection sufficient justification for the moral absolutes that ground the atheists’ sense of outrage against the evils of faith? If so, how can the amoral process of natural selection become the ultimate court of appeal for what is moral?”.

and answers thus:

“Even if our ethical instincts evolved by natural selection, we still have to explain why we are obliged to obey them here and now, especially since they may be evolutionary “misfirings.” Moreover, our immoral instincts, such as cheating, lying, and even killing, may also be said to have been adaptive evolutionary traits. Unfortunately, experiments in social Darwinism have tried to make survival of the fittest the criterion of what is morally right, an approach that has been soundly rejected by every respected ethicist today. Our new atheists will not want to go down this road either.” (p73)

Regarding the latter point, it is worth pointing out that the use of ultrasounds to weed our embryos with Down syndrome, etc looks suspiciously like re-emergence of socials Darwinism.

Haught turns his attention to Harris who argues that reason is to be the arbiter of moral right and wrong. Leaving aside the naiveté of this, why should we trust our reasoning abilities?

Haught comments, again in terms reminiscent of Stove in “Darwinian Fairytales”:

“Harris undoubtedly places enormous confidence in his own cognitional abilities, but a naturalistic worldview by itself cannot justify that presumption. Harris, like Dawkins, fails to explain why he can trust his own mind if its ultimate explanation is the mindless, irrational process of natural selection. If our intelligence can be ultimately understood in evolutionary terms, where and how did it acquire the assurance that leads us to trust it spontaneously?
…..
But his own reasoning faculties should at least have made him realise that it is a leap of faith that has led him to trust in reason—a trust that not everybody shares to the same extent that he does. He has yet to tell us what is so special about his or anybody else’s mind that we should simply entrust ourselves to it.” (p74)

Haught’s theological response to this is that we can trust our search for right understanding because

“our minds have already been taken captive by a truthfulness that inheres in things, a truthfulness that we cannot possess but which possess us.
….
Faith, as theology uses the term, is neither an irrational leap nor “belief without evidence.” It is an adventurous movement of trust that opens reason up to its appropriate living space, namely, the inexhaustibly deep dimension of Being, Meaning, Truth, and Goodness. Faith is not the enemy of reason but its cutting edge. Faith is what keeps reason from turning in on itself and suffocating in its own self-enclosure. Faith is what opens our minds to the infinite horizon in which alone reason can breathe freely and in which action can gain direction. Rea son requires a world much larger than the one that mere rationalism or scientific naturalism is able to provide. Without the clearing made by faith, reason withers, and conduct has no calling. Faith is what gives reason a future, and morality a meaning. (p75)

OK I know this is inadequate but it is a whole sight better than the drivel Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens come up with.