Answering the ‘new atheists’
Lael Weinberger talks to Doug Wilson, author
of Letter from a Christian Citizen
Bestseller lists have recently included a sequence of books written by a small cadre
of articulate atheist writers. The youngest of these ‘new atheists’
is Sam Harris, a 40-year-old graduate student who exploded onto the scene with two
bestsellers in quick succession.
One articulate Christian apologist who has been keeping tabs on the ‘new atheists’—and
providing answers—is Doug Wilson (pictured left), a pastor and Fellow in Theology
at New St Andrews College. He first saw Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation
sitting on a colleague’s desk when it was fresh off the presses.1 ‘The title caught my attention, and I ordered
a copy.’ Harris’s slim, unobtrusive Letter distilled the essence
of the atheists’ case into an easy-to-read format which caught the attention
of the general public in the US particularly. In a matter of months, Doug Wilson’s
rebuttal—just a little longer than Harris’s—was rolling off the
presses.
Fear factor
I asked Doug why the atheists are suddenly so active, and getting so much attention.
‘For many years, atheism has been patronizing to Christian theists—they
would pat us on the head and say, you can be allowed your silly little superstition.
But it’s beginning to dawn on them that they might lose, and they’ve
panicked. They’re worried at the resurgence of conservative Christianity in
the United States.’
by showing up for the debate, the atheist has already conceded
Doug mentioned the political aspect: ‘They are afraid of the political “Christian
right” which they see as a looming theocracy.’ Ignoring, of course,
the atheocracy of the media, schools and courts today. But perhaps even more important,
Doug points out, ‘Another big factor is the resurgence of Intelligent Design
(ID).’ The ID movement has brought new opponents to Darwinism from a totally
unexpected source (far outside the stereotyped ‘fundamentalist’ camp),
and this has shaken the leading atheist figures.2
Beyond ID, atheists are worried because they really are facing opposition from everywhere:
‘The secularists have had control of the accrediting agencies, colleges, and
government schools for decades, and yet most Americans still believe in creation.
It’s heartening to me that although Darwin published his Origin of Species
in 1859, and the secularists and evolutionists have had most of the education establishment
since then, people still don’t believe it.’
Hume vs Harris
Harris and friends like to portray atheism as the rational worldview—the intelligent,
scientific alternative to religion. But as Doug Wilson points out, the atheists,
with their naturalistic evolutionary premises, are actually without a foundation
for claiming a meaningful worldview.
‘It’s very clear reading the writings of the new atheists—Harris,
along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—that these men are firm
believers in scientism. Science is their final arbiter of truth, their functional
deity. The problem is that this involves some very unscientific handwaving. The
philosopher David Hume (himself a sceptic) showed, several centuries ago, that there
is no real way to get from “is” to “ought”. How do I get
from a description of the way things are (the rate of acceleration when
something’s falling, or the way an animal reproduces) to the way they ought
to be? There is no bridge across that gap. Should a human mother care for her children
like a mother deer, or eat them like some spiders do? Science doesn’t give
us ethical information. These atheists are whipping science to provide them with
a worldview complete with ethical stability, but it can’t perform that task.’
It is a tad ironic that atheists, who enjoy slandering creationists as bad scientists,
actually build their worldview by making illegitimate extrapolations from science.
They are pretending that, based on a naturalistic scientific view of ‘truth,’
we can arrive at satisfactory morality.
Letter from a Christian Citizen
Douglas Wilson’s stunning response to atheist Sam Harris’s Letter to
a Christian Nation is a delight to read and savour, whether or not one
has read Harris’s diatribe. Clear and powerful, it gives point-by-point engaging
and compelling responses to these common atheistic arguments.
Available from web bookstore
|
Moral atheists?
Granted, atheists are often moral people. Sam Harris points to this fact and claims
that it shows we don’t need religion. He then turns around to criticize the
Bible as immoral (for example, making the shallow argument that the Bible condones
chattel slavery3). But,
as Doug points out, Harris isn’t being upfront (or is ignorant) about the
source of his ethics: ‘One of the common features of these atheists is a very
high level of moral indignation. But given the premises of their worldview, they
have no basis for their indignation. If there is no God, and everything is really
just atoms banging around, why should it matter which way the atoms bang? Actually,
all of these atheists surreptitiously borrow many of the standards of Christianity
in order to assail Christian belief.’
They must assume the existence of moral standards (for instance, ‘truth’
is an inherent good), borrowed from Christianity, before they can attack the Christian
faith (if truth wasn’t inherently good, why would it matter to Sam Harris
that I believe in a God he doesn’t think exists?). ‘The atheists love
to bring up “scary” passages from the Old Testament, and Christians
often get bogged down trying to defend those passages to the atheist. But what I
like to do, as the first step, is ask the sceptic what his basis is for making the
moral judgment.’
Atheism, the irrational faith
Naturalism (the philosophy that underpins evolution, namely that matter and energy
are all there is) cannot provide ethics; it simply is not capable of providing meaning.
This problem runs deep, undercutting even the basis of rationality itself.4 In the atheist’s naturalistic
worldview, thoughts and reasoning are just the results of chemical reactions in
the brain. ‘A debate and a couple of soda bottles in the front of a room fizzing
are just different types of chemical reactions. The atheist cannot put forward,
within his own framework, a justification for why reasoning is trustworthy, or even
worthwhile. Of course, as a Christian, I believe we can reason as human beings created
in the image of God. But the atheist can’t account for reason if there is
no God. On naturalistic principles, there’s no explanation for why a debate
is more important than the two soda bottles fizzing. So you could say that, by showing
up for the debate, the atheist has already conceded.’5
Defending the faith
By ignoring the atheists, Christians may be missing out on an opportunity.
How well prepared is the church to answer the ‘new atheists?’ ‘It’s
a mixed bag,’ Doug said. ‘Christians aren’t in danger from the
atheists, which is good, but the flipside is that they’re often not in danger
for the wrong reason. I imagine that if you got an average atheist and had him debate
an average Christian from the pews, the atheist would fare better, because atheists
usually know why they believe what they do. I wish Christians were more on the ball
in this area. So what I’m trying to say to Christians is that there really
are better ways to answer the atheists than what the church by and large has been
using.’
By ignoring the atheists, Christians may be missing out on an opportunity. Doug
Wilson is one of the Christians seizing the opportunity: ‘When atheist books
are shooting to the top of the New York Times bestseller lists, our culture
is listening to the discussion about the existence of God, and to the creation-evolution
debate which the atheists always invoke to bolster their case. I wrote my response
to Harris because Christians really have a great opportunity to capitalize on this
interest, to be ready to give answers (1 Peter 3:15) and present the other side of the debate to
our culture.’
Related articles
References and notes
- See also the rebuttal by Holding, J.P., Letter to a Maladjusted
Misotheist, <www.tektonics.org>. Return to text.
- For more on ID and how it relates to young earth creationism,
see Wieland, C., CMI’s views on the Intelligent Design
Movement, <creation.com/idm>, 30 August 2002. Return to
text.
- See 1) Stark, R., For the Glory of God, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, chapter 4, 2003, and the review by Williams, A., The biblical origins of science, Journal of Creation
18(2):49–52, 2004, <creation.com/stark>; 2) Hardaway,
B. and Sarfati, J., Countering Christophobia: A review of
Christianity on Trial by Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Journal of
Creation 18(3):28–30, 2004; <creation.com/trial>;
3) Sarfati, J, Anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce: Christian
hero, <creation.com/wilberforce>. Return to text.
- For further analysis, see Sarfati, J.,
Presuppositionalism vs evidentialism, and is the human genome simple? <creation.com/presupp>
and Correcting a severe misconception about the creation
model, <creation.com/scien>. Return to text.
- Atheists, to their discredit, have never appreciated the rigorousness
of the reductio ad absurdum critique of atheistic naturalism which Doug
Wilson summarized here. For a detailed, scholarly presentation, see Plantinga, A.,
Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford University Press, chapter 12, 1993.
Return to text.
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