Wednesday, May 5, 2010

"The New Atheists" and Low-Grade Intellectualism

I think it is easy for believers to be unduly intimidated by the arguments and pronouncements of the "New Atheists" (e.g., Christopher Hitchens). We seem to start with the assumption that they have logic and reason predominantly on their side. But if all truth is God's truth, and if God really does exist, then that can't be the case.

More specifically, David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions (Yale University Press, 2009), robustly critiques the inferior intellectual efforts of recent atheists in his review of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists.

Justin Taylor points to these excerpts:

'How long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for? . . .

'A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

'If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any. . . .

'I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.'

(You can read the entire review at First Things)

1 comment:

Michael White said...

The primary attack mode of most Atheists seems always to be to belittle the intellectuality of Believers. My answer to those who assume that intellectuality and Christianity are mutually exclusive and that faith which is not predicated on prior materially ascertainable 'proof' is merely a confession of immaturity and/or simple-mindedness is to point them to the work of C.S. Lewis, and in particular, his circuitous path to belief. His dogged refusal to abandon his faith even in the face of the tragic loss of the love he waited most of his adult life to find is an example that still makes my own trials seem somehow trivial and my doubts and failures much harder to excuse.