Reading materialist atheist like chewing glass?

Friend Edward Sisson writes to say, “While researching an entirely different subject, I came across this post by blogger "Shannon Love" of "Chicago Boyz" in 2006, tearing into a Richard Dawkins book. His treatment of the practical effects of atheism, and comparison of religion to atheism, is all the more effective because he declares himself to be an atheist.”

As in:

I keep losing my personal heroes.

Richard Dawkins is one of the century’s great evolutionary theorists and someone whose work I really admire. His work revolutionized the way scientists thought about evolutionary theory. I think I can safely say that I have read everything that the man has written in every major forum. So, as an atheist myself, I looked forward to Dawkins weighing in on the subject of religion, from the perspective of an evolutionary theorist, in his new book, “The God Delusion”.

This weekend I made it to my local bookstore, grabbed a copy of the “The God Delusion” and sat down with a cup of coffee to read it immediately — even before buying it. Imagine my shock and even horror to discover that Dawkins’ book is trite, facile and just plain, well, dumb.

[Shocka! How so?]

Atheists reflexively repeat the mantra that religion causes oppression, war and general cruelty of all kinds, while asserting or implying that atheism does not. Dawkins falls right into this mindless argument in the opening paragraphs of the book and never lets up. (Reading someone like Dawkins making such a pompous, counterfactual argument is like chewing glass.)

Kid this smart wasted on atheism.

He adds,

“The God Delusion” is a trite, shallow unimaginative book. It is not intended to evangelize to non-atheists, but instead preaches to the choir by vomiting out all of the conceits and prejudices that atheists hold in common. As a defense of the atheistic world view it is a pathetic failure. Coming from one of the century’s great scientific minds, it’s just sad.

News, Shannon: He isn’t one of the last century’s great scientific minds, just a Darwin dogmatist with a good writing style. Glad you are not making anything depend on him.

I COULD make this stuff up, sure, but ...

I could make this stuff up, but then I’d feel responsible if readers split their guts laughing:

Religions are 'Scams,' Atheist Group Declares in Alabama Advertisement


Published January 03, 2011 | FoxNews.com


A new advertisement in Alabama by a national atheist group is reportedly declaring religions to be "scams."


The Huntsville ad -- produced by the American Atheists -- displays the message "You know they're all scams" alongside pictures of religious symbols, such as Islam's crescent moon and star, the cross and the Jewish star, according to the Christian Post.


The billboard also claims that the national group has been "telling the truth since 1963."


The American Atheists define "scam" as a fraudulent business scheme or ploy to intentionally mislead a person, usually with the goal of financial gains, the Post reports.


According to the group, "all religions make lots of promises about an afterlife that doesn't exist."

For more, go here.

The friend who sent it to me commenrts,

I love that last part: "According to the group, "all religions make lots of promises about an afterlife that doesn't exist.""

Presumably they've established this scientifically, so perhaps someone can point us to the scientific research studies in the relevant peer-reviewed science journals that report these findings. Right?

Right. They have ben telling the truth since 1963. Ain’t nobody beat that record.

Materialist atheism as a fringe movement?

Brights (materialist atheists) don’t shine so bright?

A group of friends was trying to figure out who the world’s top twenty atheists are. This turned out to be more difficult than we had at first realized, because garnering a bunch of headlines doesn’t make a person or group influential, as such. That can be sheer “What next?” value.

Whatever is next obliterates what went before.

Anyway, one friend, Laszlo Bencze, who has reason to think much on these things, wrote thoughtfully,

What is most interesting to me about the names being presented as the top 20 atheists is how unrecognizable they all are. They are all people buried deep in academic obscurity. Even the name of Christopher Hitchens which is famous in our microworld is unlikely to draw a nod of recognition from even one person in a hundred at your typical shopping mall.

Yes, unless he attributes a healing from cancer to a miracle. My friend goes on:

What I make of this fact is that atheists don't really appear to have much influence in society. They are fringe players who attract the attention of bright college kids, journalists, and movie directors but there's not one of them who gets noticed as much as even a second tier Hollywood star.

Indeed, he thinks that the movers and shakers (“a large swath of actors, columnists, TV producers, ad agency types, and screen writers” and other schmoozers and shakers?) of this world in fact believe approximately as follows:

I believe in a god that is not a person but kind of like some sort of force that fills up the universe and makes sure that nice things sometimes happen to nice people like maybe a great sunset every so often. This is not the sort of god who goes around telling people what they can and can't do and sometimes it makes mistakes that it's real sorry about which is why it sent Jesus who was a real good man although you can't really live the way he said you should because it's impossible except it's a good thing to try.

I believe god helps us be true to ourselves. The point of life is to be true to yourself always and never do anything that anyone else wants you to do unless you're also being true to yourself when you do it. If you're not true to yourself that's what causes most of the trouble in the world.

I believe that god created the world except he didn't do it by pointing at things with his hands like that famous picture shows. He used evolution to make everything and it worked out pretty well except that there's too much violence in nature and way too much in humans, which is one of god's mistakes.

I believe that god is so sorry he screwed up the world the way he did that when you die you will go to heaven which will be like kind of a fun party with all the people hugging and bouncing around in a really bright, pretty place with flowers and friendly bees and a perpetually blue sky with some fluffy clouds. When anyone dies they go up there and get to look down on what's going on back on earth so they can enjoy little league games and cheer for the Superbowl. And shoot even if it's not like that at least it's a quiet place with soothing music and gentle touching like massage therapy. Basically I guess heaven is whatever you want it to be.

I believe that the only people who don't make it to heaven are the really mean ones like Adolf Hitler and serial killers and a couple of people I know who used to be friends of mine but screwed me over royally. They're the ones that get back what they dished out. I guess you could call the place where they get theirs hell but I don't know how long it lasts; maybe it's a billion years or so and then they all disappear.

Hmm. Not a creed I’d like to take into a total whiteout. I could almost stand the Brights, except for their self-righteousness.

Professor Antony Flew dies at 87

Roy Varghese has just notified me of the death of Professor emeritus Antony Flew, the rationalist philosopher who died on April 8 aged 87, spent much of his life denying the existence of God until, in 2004, he dramatically changed his mind.

Here is Britain’s Telegraph’s obituary.

I feel lonely now. I remember sitting in the window seat at the U rez in about 1968, studying Flew. He really made people think.

Varghese is kind enough to thank me for contributions I have made to the discussion - essentially defending Flew.

For the record, here are some of them:

Flew calls Dawkins a bigot - and I would say he has a pretty good case. On that point, also here.

New atheists vs the ex-atheist

Response to hit review of Flew’s “There IS a God” in The New York Times.

Antony Flew: Is emotion really better than reason in religious matters?

Antony Flew: The authorship controversy

Antony Flew: Author or puppet?

Antony Flew: Is he too old to believe in God?

Why lifelong atheist Antony Flew decided there must be a God

Atheism and pop culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia?

I had computer problems last week, hence no blogging.

In "God vs. Science Isn't the Issue", William McGurn (Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009) notes,

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today's advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view "outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia."
.
The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris's aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

A couple of thoughts:

- Whoever said God vs. science was an issue? The whole idea was invented and is kept alive by materialist atheists, whose comments about "dementia" tell you something worth knowing.

- I have noticed that working scientists tend to be humble in the face of the facts, which is a good place to begin any type of true knowledge. The practitioners of scientism, by contrast, behave like cult members.* Recently, I was listening to one of them hold forth as an after-dinner speaker, proclaiming that on many science stories there is only one side. Well, that's all right then; we can all just mindlessly shout in unison. Oh wait. Cue the pop science press on any subject to do with neuroscience. It is genuinely hard to imagine a neuroscience story so stupid they wouldn't run with it.

- Francis Collins is, in my view, one confused puppy about some issues about which Christians generally have not been confused. So if even Collins is being attacked - when he agrees with the materialists that there can be human lives that don't matter, that humans can do whatever they want with - what does it tell you?: A materialist elite will attack theists even when they are trying to make nice by throwing away key reasons for being a theist.

- Lastly, William Jennings Bryan was not a dogmatist. He had been secretary of state for the US in World War I, and he knew that Darwinism played a role in the notion, prevalent among Germans of the day, that they were born to rule, due to "evolution". He did not want similar ideas taught in publicly funded schools in Tennessee. However, the textbook used there featured eugenics quite openly. As a once textbook editor myself, I can assure you that statements made in the text Scopes taught from (Hunter's Civic Biology) would just never appear in any textbook in Canada today. Lawsuits, and probably hearings as well, would follow.

Bryan's approach was unwise, in my view, because it would be better to just edit that garbage out of the textbooks than make a law or try a teacher over it. But Bryan has been unfairly caricatured, as above, as a foolish fellow, when he was in fact concerned about a legitimate problem. One that - it should be admitted - few others were even trying to address.

Most important, al this tells you what governance by a materialist elite is like (= reasons for not voting for them and not cutting them any slack).

*Not to be confused with religious people generally, who often have the good sense to be confused, divided, or uncertain until they have had an opportunity to weigh the matter in the light of a long tradition - millennia, maybe - of difficult problems.

Materialism and popular culture : The "better world" files

I am told that, in Idaho - the home of excellent potatoes - the American Humanist Association ran a successful ad announcing "Don't believe in God? You are not alone," and in the fall another saying "Want a better world? Prayer not required."

Hmmm. Well Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot didn't believe in prayer either, but they sure had ideas for a "better" world. Too bad it wouldn't include you or me.

I guess we would just be "other losses."

PS: The only way we can have a better world is this: We each must get up every morning and say: I am the biggest problem in my own life. I am also the only person who can fix that problem. I cannot force anyone else to be a better person. But if I start working on my own problems today, the world might be a little bit better by nightfall.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

The angst of atheist parents: How to keep kids from finding out about God ...

Here Danny Postel investigates for the New Humanist (July/August 2009) about raising kids without religion.

My sense is that it usually won't work. What happens is that the kid assumes that local prejudices run the universe. But a smart kid soon realizes that that ain't so. So what does run the universe? How about this?

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse

Without excuse, that is, for actions which they themselves sense to be wrong. It's not completely cheerful, but it is a way better bet than trying to shelter kids from this stuff.

An event I did not happen to attend: British atheist graces Toronto

The author of The Six Ways of Atheism advises,

Venue: The Bond Place Hotel (Oxford Room), 65 Dundas Street East, Toronto.

Time: 10.00 am (Toronto time) Friday, 5 June, 2009

Journalists and media wishing to interview Geoffrey Berg on an individual face to face basis may request such an interview slot of 15 minutes with Geoffrey Berg in Toronto for lunchtime or afternoon on Friday, 5 June. Interviews exceeding 15 minutes, if granted, will be charged for.

The Bond Place is a nice little downtown hotel, but I am not Crimestoppers, and can't pay anyone to tell me what they think they know.

Here are Berg's attempted logical disproofs of the existence of God. They don't make any sense to me, but I will leave critique to others, more knowledgeable.

Religion: There is atheism, ... and then there is materialist atheism ...

A friend wants me to contribute to the Atheism is Dead blog. I will try to do this, as I have time (though I never seem to have a lot of that).

For the record, my own view is that materialist atheism is indeed dead. As I explain here, the things that materialist atheists needed to happen have never happened - and that's why their idea is dead.

There are, of course, non-materialist atheist traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, which are not at all threatened by the demise of materialist atheism in the West.

Materialist atheism is a pretty low-class show, to begin with. Materialist atheists want you to believe you are an animal, not really responsible for what you do. Bears fight, and so do people ... and it's all the same thing in the end. Is it?

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have been atheists who nonetheless thought that humans are morally responsible. Typically, they belong to traditions where we must work off our sins in a future life. So if you want to spend this life using and abusing everyone and everything around you, fine - but according to them, you will work it off in another life. There is no free lunch in those traditions, as there is in materialist atheism.

Anyway, I just want it on the record that I have far more respect for traditional atheists, agnostics, and deists- among whom were some really major Western philosophers - than I do for the current crop of "We're just the 98% chimpanzee"crowd. All I can think of to say is, "Speak for yourself, Bud."

In fact, as a traditional Christian, I would say - in criticism - that that is exactly the problem with non-materialist atheism. There is no grace. Grace is not a free lunch. It is, for example, a father going out to meet his wayward son, when the latter has chosen to return.

Philosophy: God is not dead yet - but some haven't gotten the memo

Here's a really interesting article in Christianity Today by philosopher William Lane Craig on the revitalized debate over the existence of God.

The revitalization owes something, to be sure, to Antony Flew's conversion from atheism to theism, but there is more, as Craig explains,

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

Actually, some of us had sort of noticed that. Of particular interest to readers of this blog would be the "moral argument" for God's existence,

A number of ethicists, such as Robert Adams, William Alston, Mark Linville, Paul Copan, John Hare, Stephen Evans, and others have defended "divine command" theories of ethics, which support various moral arguments for God's existence. One such argument:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

By objective values and duties, one means values and duties that are valid and binding independent of human opinion. A good many atheists and theists alike concur with premise (1). For given a naturalistic worldview, human beings are just animals, and activity that we count as murder, torture, and rape is natural and morally neutral in the animal kingdom. Moreover, if there is no one to command or prohibit certain actions, how can we have moral obligations or prohibitions?

Premise (2) might seem more disputable, but it will probably come as a surprise to most laypeople to learn that (2) is widely accepted among philosophers. For any argument against objective morals will tend to be based on premises that are less evident than the reality of moral values themselves, as apprehended in our moral experience. Most philosophers therefore do recognize objective moral distinctions.

One of my favourite books, actually, has always been C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which demonstrates the existence of an objective moral order that human moral orders very imperfectly imitate.

Atheism: Its attractions for science bigwigs

Mathematician and author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (and of much irrepressible mischief) David Berlinski explains for Pajamas Media the attraction of atheism for science bigwigs,

It takes no very refined analytic effort to determine why Soviet Commissars should have regarded themselves as atheists. They were unwilling to countenance a power higher than their own. Who knows what mischief Soviet citizens might have conceived had they imagined that the Politburo was not, after all, infallible?

By the same token, it requires no very great analytic effort to understand why the scientific community should find atheism so attractive a doctrine. At a time when otherwise sober individuals are inclined to believe that too much of science is too much like a racket, it is only sensible for scientists to suggest aggressively that no power exceeds their own.

Many might be tempted to dismiss such a view from a clergyman but Berlinski is an ironic agnostic. Here’s a sample of his approach from his book page at Amazon:

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated.

I found his book both hilarious and sobering, and will link to the review (when I write it - soon).

Amateur atheism: Best leave it to the pros?

Catholic philosopher John Haught recently had an article in Christian Century entitled "Amateur Atheists: Why the new atheism isn't serious"

It's well done and suggests his new book, God and the New Atheism , from which it is adapted, will be worthwhile.

For example,

For many years I taught an introductory theology course for undergraduates titled "The Problem of God." My fellow instructors and I were convinced that our students should be exposed to the most erudite of the unbelievers. Our rationale was that any mature commitment that intelligent young people might make to a religious faith should be critically tested by the very best opponents.

The recent books by Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris and Christopher Hitchens would never have made the required-reading list. Their tirades would simply reinforce students' ignorance not only of religion but also of atheism. The new atheists do little more than provide a fresh catalogue of the evils wrought by members of the theistic faiths.

Similarly, Time Immortal responds to The Rational Responders, an amateur bunch of atheists if ever there was one:

I don't usually cruise atheist websites all that much — few enough of them are designed well enough for my tastes, and at any rate I don't much enjoy having to switch off large portions of my brain just to be able to successfully navigate through one irrational tirade after another. That said, for some reason I decided to check out theRational Responders website. Their byline reads: "Believe in God? We can fix that." And yet, reading through their list of ‘frequently asked questions' (and some of the rest of the site), I was tempted to think instead of Chesterton's remark regarding Ingersol: "almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."

(Note: Chesterton did NOT invent that phrase. Check out Acts 26:26-29, written two thousand years ago, where something similar was happening.)

Some people might think that Haught, Time Imm, (and me) are a bit hard on the New Atheists. But their widely noticed complete lack of any new ideas in atheism (as opposed to new books) is troubling for several reasons:

1. When people seek more influence in society without having new ideas to offer, it's hard to see the benefit to the society. The reason they didn't have much influence before is that we'd heard it all before and were not persuaded. Is that our fault or theirs?

(2) I believe that displaced anxiety about politicized Islamic extremism drives some of this anti-religious stuff. The extremists are clever, determined, and dangerous opponents. Whether you are a Muslim, a Christian, or an atheist, if you wish to oppose them, you will need a carefully thought out strategy.

Some people hide out from this problem by attacking Christian fundamentalists and promoting a mostly meaningless scare about people who believe in God in general.

As we pointed out in The Spiritual Brain, the born-agains have widely disparate views, as Zogby Poll recently discovered when they enterprisingly asked Democrats, not Republicans, if they considered themselves born again, and sure enough, lots of them did.

Anyway, more from Haught, comparing the great atheists of the past to their current dwarfish representatives:

The classical atheists, by contrast, demanded a much more radical transformation of human culture and consciousness. This is most evident when we consider works by Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. To them atheism not only should make all the difference in the world; it would take a superhuman effort to embrace it. "Atheism," as Sartre remarked, "is a cruel and long-range affair." Like Nietzsche and Camus, Sartre thought that most people would be too weak to accept the terrifying consequences of the death of God.

By contrast, the recent atheist authors want atheism to prevail at the least possible expense to the agreeable socioeconomic circumstances out of which they sermonize. They would have the God-religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—simply disappear, after which we should be able go on enjoying the same lifestyle as before.

Nope. That won't happen. My neighbours routinely mention God when they want to explain why they do something that is not obviously rewarded in some self-centred or family-centred way.

Actually, I was giving a talk last night and found myself saying,

If you go by science evidence, there was never a worse time to be an
atheist than the last 100 years.

The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is essentially a creationist theory. BANG!! And there it is. A universe
unfolding.

Quantum mechanics put an end to the idea that everything could be controlled by iron laws of nature. The human brain, as well as many other systems, is at bottom a quantum system. These systems are not governed by iron determinist laws.

Antony Flew, the world's best respected academic atheist, decided that there is a God in 2004, on account of the language of the human genome.

Shouldn't genome mapping have confirmed atheism, rather than killing it? Shouldn't it have found the fabled "God gene" (that doesn't really exist)?

Look, be an atheist if you must. I wouldn't want anyone sitting in a church who honestly doesn't want to be there. I have enough respect for religion not to force it on anyone.

But don't try telling me that your convictions are based on evidence from science.

North America undergoing religious revolution? No way!

Touted changes in the American religious landscape seem more
apparent than real, at least to me. According to an Associated Press story, reported by Eric Gorski in the Kansas City Star, a Pew Foundation study of 35, 000 American adults found that

- mainline churches are declining. (Well, of course they are. They have entirely forgotten what they are supposed to be doing.)

- many people change religious denominations. (Especially people fleeing mainline denominations, I expect. You only need to listen to one sermon about why you shouldn't care whether or not you have a soul ... And if you are not gone already, you are a fool. Go now, go now. )

Only four percent of Americans are agnostics or atheists, according to Pew. That sounds abut right.

Here's a demographic fact worth noting: You always get a much higher proportion of people saying "I have no use for organized religion" than people saying "I am an atheist."

That's easy to explain. People who have no use for organized religion include a large number who just want to be left alone. Period. They don't want to join an atheist league, wear buttons, prosecute court cases, wave picket signs ....

They really do just want to be left alone. And I can but hope they will be.

The worst aspect of some forms of atheism is to replicate all the problems of a church without any of the benefits.

Pope blames world's worst woes on atheism

It should not surprise anyone particularly that Pope Benedict XVI, in his second encyclical, blames atheism for the world's worst woes, just as the recent spate of popular anti-God books blames religion:

Pope Benedict XVI strongly criticized modern-day atheism in a major document released today, saying it had led to some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" ever known to mankind.

But in his second encyclical, Benedict XVI also critically questioned modern Christianity, saying its focus on individual salvation had ignored Jesus' message that true Christian hope involves salvation for all.

I am SO glad, as a Catholic Christian, that someone (and imagine, it is the Pope, of all people) is speaking up against the irrelevant Jesus-hollering that has defaced so much recent evangelism in his 76-page document. (I haven't read it yet, but I am hardly surprised that he would say things like these, and I certainly look forward to reading it.)

Look, I am personally a Christian and I believe that Jesus is the answer, but if you can't be bothered to define the question, how do you know if I am right or wrong?

Hat tip fellow Catholic journalist David Warren, who didn't himself notice this till some friends forwarded it to him. I didn't know till he forwarded it to me. Just shows you what sinners we Catholics are. We were drinking heavily in assorted low-class pubs when the news was announced, okay? Glad that's cleared up.

New York Times spin: Elderly ex-atheist Flew is just senile.

Dinesh D’Souza, reporting on the recent attempt to minimize the significance of Antony Flew’s conversion from atheism to some sort of belief in God, based on the intelligent design of the universe, comments:

Imagine if one of the world's leading Christians--say C.S. Lewis a generation ago, or Billy Graham now--were to reject his religious beliefs and become a atheist. It would be big news! The New York Times would be all over it, for sure, and the question would be why a man who has devoted his life to God would now turn against Him? In sum, the focus would be on what were the reasons for the conversion and on what's so bad about Christianity.

Contrast this with the New York Times' approach to the conversion of philosopher Anthony Flew. Flew has been, for the past half-century, the world's leading advocate of atheism.

[ ... ]

When a major figure like Flew switches sides, the New York TImes goes into mafia-style intellectual hit mode. They selected Mark Oppenheimer of Yale, who visited Flew in England and wrote a long article in the November 4, 2007 New York Times Magazine suggesting that Flew converted because he is, well, senile. The basic idea is that Flew has lost his mind and can't remember anything, and when Christian apologists like Varghese were nice to him Flew basically surrendered to them and let them write his book.

The only evidence that Flew has lost his mind is that he's 84 years old. A man of 84 naturally loses some of his memory, especially for names, but this does not mean he has lost his marbles. Flew's own writings of the past few years are all entirely coherent and employ sophisticated philosophical vocabulary.

Well, of course, Dinesh. They had to find some way to minimize the significance. If Flew had been 48, instead of 84, they would say it was a midlife crisis. If he had been 18, they would have said ... well, you can write it yourself.

To my mind, the significance of the Times' cheap shot is that that’s ALL they can come up with. Definitely more from me later.

Why atheists are doomed if they are right, but not if they are wrong

In “The future of atheism: Damned if you do; damned if you don’t”, English teacher Alan Jacobs comments on the infinity of silliness that modern atheists have come up with to try to explain spirituality. He shows why atheism, is, well, doomed:

... if the evolutionary account of religious belief that many atheists are now promoting is correct, then atheists don't have much of a future. Their own arguments, plus some elementary demographic data, show that their position cannot become dominant. The only real chance that atheism has to flourish is if it's wrong.

[ ... ]

Perhaps my thought experiment has gone awry somewhere—I am not convinced of its correctness—but I am sure of one thing. After having spent a great deal of time and energy trying to come up with an evolutionary explanation of religion, atheists now need to turn their attention to a still greater puzzle: What's the evolutionary explanation for atheism?

Seriously, the biggest problem, as we detail in The Spiritual Brain, is that there is NO consensus among materialists on whether religious belief is in fact an adaptation or a glitch. They know for sure they don’t like it, but so? That’s hardly a foundation for a discipline, only a lobby group.

Atheism features incoherent accounts of religion, spirituality, lawyer argues

Lawyer David Opderbeck comments on the claim that babies are born 100% atheists: Apart from the fact that babies don't really either believe or disbelieve anything,

... this statement seems to contradict what many contemporary atheists believe about religious experience. Contemporary atheists such as Dawkins tell us that people have in some ways been hard wired by evolution to be predisposed to religious belief. This observation, the notion of religion as a meme, allows them to suggest that the God of religious belief isn't "real," but rather is a false belief that at one time enhanced survival value but that does not correspond to reality. They of course suggest that this belief can and should be elided now that they have supposedly explained its provenance. But then, if this account of religion is even partly correct, it cannot follow that "all babies are born 100% atheists." It would be more accurate, under the hard-wired / meme view, to suggest that "all babies are born with varying degress of predisposition towards receptivity to religion memes."

But he also notes that the atheist position tends to become incoherent at this point:

On the one hand, religion is like a malicious virus, that takes advantage of its host without benefitting the host; on the other, it is rooted in social behaviour that conferred survival advantages and became hard-wired in the hominid biochemistry; on yet another hand (yes, three hands,) it is a "meme," a mysterious, unobservable, immaterial entity that was originally incorporated into a human memeplex -- another mysterious, unobservable, immaterial entity -- because of some survival value. ... )

Of course, he means materialist atheism. Non-materialist atheism is a different matter altogether.

My ChristianWeek faith and science column: Are we living in the twilight of atheism?

This summer I was reading Oxford historian Alister McGrath’s lucid Twilight of Atheism (2004), which tackles modern atheism’s rise as well as its fall. Twilight was written before the current anti-God crusade but - nicely fulfilling McGrath’s thesis - the crusade exudes an unmistakable air of desperation, remarked by many observers. Indeed, atheist science historian Michael Ruse broke ranks and endorsed McGrath’s more recent book [with his wife Joanne], The Dawkins Delusion. He announced that zoologist Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion - one of the crusade’s trusted weapons - "makes me embarrassed to be an atheist."

McGrath’s historical analysis sheds some light. He identifies three thinkers as founders of modern materialist atheism: Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), Karl Marx (1818-83), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939. Why these founders? Feuerbach was the first to treat God simply as a construction of the human imagination, essentially replacing theology with religious studies. In other words, when we ask why people believe in God, we do not entertain the idea that God has revealed himself in some way. God does not actually exist, and therefore the causes of belief are sought in society or nature.

Marx took the further step of prescribing a specific cause - unjust social conditions. He reasoned that belief would naturally wither away under communism. When it didn't, communists were forced to conclude that believers were merely perverse, so persecution was inevitable. Then Freud took things a step further still. He asserted that belief in God arises from unconscious illusions. Believers are not even voluntarily wicked, they are merely mentally ill.

Formerly an atheist and now a Christian, McGrath considers atheism’s most creative period to be the 18th century. In those days, many thinkers yearned for atheism - harnessed to science - to liberate them from oppression by established religion. Indeed, he notes, the main reason atheism did not capture the heart of English-speaking North America was not that our society was in the grip of a zealous religious right but that we did not establish a government-mandated church.

I myself would put it like this: Religious freedom inoculates people against atheism as a mass movement because it privatizes grievances with religion. One might add that the United States today is - all at once - the world’s science leader, a conspicuously religious nation, and strongly secularist. Go figure.

Atheism flourished in the salons of 19th century Europe, where intellectuals morphed into a secular priesthood.. Then it ran aground in the late 20th century. Why? Not lack of confidence; until fairly recently, atheists were sure they were going to win. Not lack of resources; both atheist doctrines and attacks on spiritual traditions have poured forth from novels and newspapers for a half century. And not lack of reach, either. Muslim friends tell me that their key difficulty in getting conservative Muslims to stop listening to violent radicals is that so often third world modernization schemes are permeated with atheism. So then why didn't the atheists win?

McGrath offers some interesting ideas. First, atheism did not start out as materialist. Indeed, atheist poets such as Shelley and Keats hated materialist reductionism and affirmed transcendent ideas. Such ideas can form the basis of a moral system, as they did for Plato and Aristotle. But as atheism gradually became synonymous with materialism, grounding a moral system became increasingly difficult. Morality comes to be regarded as simply an evolved behavior that is not grounded in any greater truth. Not surprisingly, atheist regimes in the twentieth century murdered on a historically unprecedented scale. Then, as modernism gave way to post-modernism, atheism lost any right it ever had to be humanity’s Big Story - because there is no longer any Big Story. Much of Europe is now in a recovery phase dubbed “post-atheism.”

In other words, McGrath says, atheism wasn’t so much disproven as shown to be cruel and unworkable at best, irrelevant and unproductive at worst. Its rise and fall provides lessons for thoughtful churches. Convincing ourselves and others is not the goal; we need to commend ourselves and our Lord to people who do not otherwise accept any obligation to believe our message (Colossians 4:5-6). The story of atheism also provides a warning for prophets, religious or otherwise. Fifty years ago, who would have thought that post-atheism would better describe European society than post-theism? Trustworthy prophets should have a better track record.

(Note: I blogged on this before), but this is the more formal look at McGrath’s Twilight of Atheism book that I promised to post.)

Other posts: Dawkins on the need to curb religious liberty.

At the end of this post are links to other reviews of McGrath’s book.

Roger Scruton weighs in on the anti-God crusade

I see where Roger Scruton has weighed in on the anti-God crusade, offering his own approach to religion, as helping people make sense of key moments:

It is from such moments, replete with emotional knowledge, that religion begins. The rational person is not the one who scoffs at all religions, but the one who tries to discover which of them, if any, can make sense of those things, and, while doing so, draw the poison of resentment.

It's not my brand, but hey, enjoy.

Bumper stickers from the world of militant atheism

At least they are more obvious than the Darwinfish logo.

For many years I assumed that the Darwinfish was - well - ANTI-evolution.

What fish wants feet? What feet want fish attached to them? I assumed that a Christian group had thunk that one up to attack materialist evolution theories.

Actually, too many of the linked slogans suffer from the same problem. They assume you already know and care about the sloganeer's issues. If not, tahellwitcha!

For example, the "Santa will save me" jibe. Hey, at my age, Santa CAN'T save me. I'M Santa, whether I have money or not.