Gary Wolf has a very interesting essay at Wired in which he discusses his wish to join the ranks of the militant anti-theists who have come to be called the New Atheists and why, ultimately, though he is no theist, he declines. Wolf interviews three exemplars of the New Atheism - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett - and sympathetically elaborates on those interviews in the essay, explaining what he found agreeable and what he found to be disagreeable.
Any theist, particularly any Christian theist, who wishes to engage the culture apologetically would do well to read Wolf's account. It's a fascinating story, told with gentleness and apparent sincerity. It's a narrative that is probably common among intelligent, college-educated moderns. It's also a story which poses challenges to those who would have such people as Mr. Wolf come to believe that, in the words of Francis Schaeffer, He is there and He is not silent.
A couple of passages from his interviews struck me as noteworthy for what they revealed about the vacuousness of atheism. Consider, for example, this from the section in which Wolf meets with Richard Dawkins:
"I'm quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism," Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street.
I don't know if Wolf intentionally juxtaposed these sentences, but if he did it was as brilliant as it was subtle.
I doubt Dawkins would have worried about his bike being stolen had he left it in an Amish neighborhood, or a Mormon town, or in the parking lot of any evangelical church which takes it's Christian faith seriously. But "the virtues of atheism" being what they are he worries because his bike is situated in the middle of a campus upon which those virtues are extolled and embraced. It is because atheism offers its votaries no grounds whatsoever for, say, the virtue of honesty that Dawkins is concerned about his bike being stolen. And yet this is what he wants the whole world to be like.
"How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"
"Manifest" falsehoods? It's philosophically absurd to say that God's nonexistence is "manifest." Moreover, if society is justified in preventing parents from teaching their children theism why would they not be justified, in a society that believes that atheism is a manifest falsehood, in preventing parents from teaching their children that there is no God. No doubt Dawkins would be outraged should an effort be made to pass such legislation.
...the weak-minded pretense that religious viruses are trivial, much less benign. Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them.
Dawkins evidently wishes to make it illegal to take one's children to church. He's apparently unaware of studies such as the one discussed here which show that children raised in religious homes, on average, are far better off than those which are not.
In any case reading Dawkins reminds me of a passage from Noam Chomsky who once wrote that: "If we don't believe in the freedom of expression for people we despise then we don't believe in it at all." Dawkins is a classic totalitarian who wants to micromanage every aspect of peoples' lives including what they say in front of their children. If he lived seventy years ago he'd have doubtless been a Stalinist.
the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible" - and here he pauses to indicate that sensible should be in quotes - "the 'sensible' religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism.
Here Dawkins is correct. The "war" is between naturalism and supernaturalism. It's between materialism and theism. It's a philosophical struggle, and it's a shame that having enlisted in the battle he's still allowed to trade on his standing as a writer of science books to give him standing as a philosopher. His writings on the question of God's existence have absolutely nothing to do with science and everything to do with a metaphysical preference that he wishes to persuade everybody else to accept.
Richard Dawkins is an interesting, and tragic, person to watch. Having become obsessed with eradicating Christianity he has willingly embraced the role of village atheist and is making himself, a once accomplished writer of important books on biology, a bit of a laughingstock.
We'll have more on Wolf's journey in Part II tomorrow.