Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Twilight of Atheism

Marvin Olasky recites examples of the hyperventilations found in the anti-God books of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens and then notes this:

So why, despite the evidence, are authors such as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens so doctrinaire in their denunciations? Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath offer a reason in their book, The Dawkins Delusion: "Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded."

Alistair McGrath wrote an earlier book which he titled The Twilight of Atheism and in which he expands on the idea that atheism is a dying belief system. It's a good book, offering as it does a helpful historical overview of the rise and decline of atheism, and well worth a read.

One evidence of the intellectual feebleness of the atheist's position is the form that their argument almost always takes. They assert that belief in God is intellectually untenable and then they support that conclusion by trotting out all sorts of irrelevant eccentric religious beliefs that people hold. Arguing that belief in God is nonsense because some religious expressions are absurd is like arguing that physics is quackery because there have been scientists who have believed nutty things.

Yet that's the kind of argument that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens offer. But it's all they've got so they have to go with it and hope that if they wrap an empty argument in enough stridency a lot of people will be impressed.

RLC