The “New” Atheists

The Following is from Stand To Reason

The “New” Atheists

There has been an attack on religion.

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great—How Religion Poisons EverythingDaniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell—Religion as Natural PhenomenonRichard Dawkins, The God DelusionSam Harris, The End of Faith—Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation

These guys are really angry.

There’s really nothing new about the “new” atheism, except the attitude. The new twist: Theists are dangerous.

“Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” writes Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.

“Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.”

According to Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, religion is so bad it should be eradicated just like slavery was eradicated: “I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century.”

These writers have tremendous emotional appeal.

Two aspects of dealing with these new aggressive atheists (both are hard):

1. The argument
2. The interplay, the gamesmanship, the footwork

Regarding number two: I can dispatch a good portion of Christopher Hitchens’s analysis of religion with one statement: Ridicule (or sneering, or swearing) is not an argument. Hitchens regularly employs ad hominems, red herrings, hasty generalizations, ridicule, and fallacies of all sorts.

The argument is a little different. The details and claims are important. You have probably heard this statement thrown around pretty regularly today: More wars have been fought and more blood as been shed in the name of religion than anything else. It is the greatest cause of evil in the world.

Here are four quick points to correct the record.

First, the crimes themselves have often been misconstrued or exaggerated.
Second, the greatest evil in the world has actually come from those who deny God’s existence.
Third, Christianity cannot be held responsible when Christians do un-Christian things.
Finally, Christianity’s real record of good is without peer in world history.

Christianity, properly understood, is a cause for good and not evil in the world. The problem isn’t religion; it’s religious error: either false religion, or true religion improperly or inconsistently applied.

This evidence gets to one of the standard argument that these new atheists put forward. But to stand against them you need the skill of an ambassador to see through the smokescreen of their attitude. Employ the tactic "Just the Facts, Ma'am" when the critic makes factual claims. Often, it's easy to correct these with a little research.


Recently Greg Koukl of Stand To Reason Ministries spoke on this subject:

You can purchase the MP3 files of the lecture at this link: Atheist

If anyone listens to the lectures please write a review of them and post it in the comments section here or e-mail me at: tsrk30@sbcglobal.net