New Atheists
New Atheists – A New Breed of Atheism
They’ve been labeled, the New Atheists. If you’re like me, you’ve noticed this not wholly pleasant, anti-God movement everywhere. Whereas atheists of yore were noted for rational argument through civil discourse, today’s atheists draw on emotionalism and alarmism with a “take no prisoners” appeal. Judging from their rhetoric, the new atheists appear to be angling for an all-out jihad against God and religion.
To awaken the masses from their slumber, Christopher Hitchens asks, “How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith?”
Convinced that religion is a virulent virus that results in child abuse, Richard Dawkins concludes: “I think there’s something very evil about faith.” And any reasonable person paying attention knows that something’s got to be done.
For Sam Harris, whose books have been published in 10 languages, it’s for scientists to destroy religion. More on that in a moment.
The sudden resurgence of anti-God sentiment has caused some to wonder why religious belief is generating such strong hostilities these days. Recently, I was reminded of the answer.
New Atheists – Passionate Dialogue
A few weeks ago, I was engaged in an online dialogue with some religious skeptics. Under discussion were the usual: the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, evidence for the resurrection, and so on. For the most part, the participants were civil, without the animus characterized by the new atheist celebs.
After one of the forums was gaveled, a reader remarked on the intensity of the discussion. It suggested something of real importance; maybe something of utmost importance. Just what, he couldn’t say.
I responded that it was the outrageous claims of a carpenter’s son. For a first century Jew, claiming equality with God and forgiving sins were grounds for blasphemy punishable by death. Even in our enlightened day, such behavior would be grounds for committal to a mental institution or dismissal as a megalomaniac or outright fraud. But with Jesus, there is the confounding issue of his teachings.
As C.S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity, even among critics, the teachings of Jesus reflect the highest standard of morality known to man. Because of their supreme quality, Jesus’ imperatives are best explained not as products of a deluded or duplicitous mind, but of an intellectually competent person who actually believed what he claimed to be true.
And there lies the rub.
New Atheists – A Problem of Cosmic Authority
If Jesus was right about his divinity, then man is not a morally autonomous happenstance, he’s a special creation, a being that will one day stand before his Creator. It is what Thomas Nagel, NYU law professor and self-described new atheist, coined the “cosmic authority problem”:
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It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God...I hope there is no God...I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and is responsible for...the overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind.
Folks like Nagel take pride in being members of the “smart set”—the intellectual caste trusting in the omniscience of human reason. But press them ever so slightly and beneath the patina of intellectualism, you will find the non-cognitive: feelings, sentiments and personal preferences. “Dave” (not his real name) is a case in point.
In an online exchange, I was surprised that Dave shamelessly accepted features of naturalism that lacked validation, or even a means of validation, while rejecting theism for those very reasons. When this inconsistency was pointed out, Dave responded, quite unapologetically, that at least his belief system didn’t require him to go to church, worship, pay tithes, or obey a rigid set of rules. When push came to shove, it was personal sentiments, not rational merit, that decided the question of God for Dave.
New Atheists – The Naturalist’s Fallacy
Typical of the new atheists, Dave criticized the morality of the Bible for promoting things like slavery, racism, the subjugation of women, and condemning children to hell who have never heard of Jesus (never mind some seriously flawed hermeneutics here). He went on to contrast biblical morality—as has Richard Dawkins and other noted skeptics—against the golden rule.
Without realizing it, Dave fell headlong into the naturalistic fallacy: In a world created by colliding particles and shaped by natural selection, there is no right or wrong, only existence. If everything is a product of matter in motion, the “Will to Power,” not the golden rule, is the only life principle. It’s the natural conclusion of Darwinism that the totalitarian leaders of the last century pursued with a vengeance.
That’s not to deny that religion has been a source of violence. But the casualties caused by Christians over 20 centuries dissolve in the shadow of those caused, in just one century, by atheistic regimes. So despite what the new firebrands of atheism suggest, the real danger of religion is not that it promotes violence, but that it takes away hope. Let me explain.
New Atheists – Pop Psychology Meets Madison Avenue
In 1945, Abraham Maslow published his famed hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s ranking, physiological, safety and social needs were on the bottom rung, with self-actualization or, as it was more commonly referred to, “finding oneself,” at the top.
Despite the lack of evidence for Maslow’s theory, self-actualization became the Holy Grail, and “free expression” and “choice” the seductive marketing hooks, for a navel-gazing public. It didn’t take long for Madison Avenue to pick up pop psychology and promise self-discovery to all who affirmed self, followed their instincts and carried American Express.
But Jesus said that our deepest need is not in finding self, but in knowing God—by denying self, following Christ, and carrying one’s cross. He went on to insist that salvation—whether from existential ennui or righteous judgment—is not attainable by human effort, but only by a divine gift. What a blow to our personal autonomy! What an affront to our self esteem!
For those convinced that happiness is found in the sacred quest of self-discovery, nothing could be more threatening. To those trusting in the perfectibility of man and his environment, Jesus is the supreme bogeyman.
New Atheists – Salvation through Science
As the new atheists like to remind us, we inhabit a planet scarred by poverty, disease, crime, pollution, and violence. Without God, these problems are left to man and his ingenuity to solve.
Over the last 200 years, man has been phenomenally successful in harnessing nature through the application of materialistic science. This has led to unbridled confidence that man, through science, will one day overcome the health, social, and environmental obstacles to a utopian existence.
But as new atheist Sam Harris warns in his Huffington Post article, “Science Must Destroy Religion,” “the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.” Harris’s warning is clear. If science is our savior, then anything that impedes it is a threat to our future hope.
For instance, religious doctrines about the sanctity of human life are hindrances to the scientist who seeks cures through research on embryonic stem cells, the mentally incapacitated, the terminally ill, or prisoners. The same goes for the social researcher who believes that population control is essential for socio-economic health. Revealed religion is also at odds with the investigator who believes that the gnawing questions of our existence will be answered in the quest for extraterrestrial life.
To those whose ultimate hope is in the limitless potential of man through science, religion is a danger more menacing than the Black Plague or runaway global warming. Consequently, Harris frets that “Iron Age beliefs—about God, the soul, sin, free will, etc.—continue to impede medical research and distort public policy.”
To meet the threat, Harris urges the scientific community to blast “the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal.” Once religion and faith are vanquished by reason and science, Sam Harris envisions that
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the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu [will] be broadly recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.
Compliments of Regis Nicoll. This article first appeared on BreakPoint at www.breakpoint.org.
Regis Nicoll is a Centurion of Prison Fellowship’s Wilberforce Forum. He is a columnist for Breakpoint, Salvo Magazine, and Crosswalk and writes for Prison Fellowship’s blog, The Point. He also publishes a free weekly commentary addressing the pressing issues of the day.
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