Every few days you see in the news where some atheist group is suing a governmental body or even an individual over some reference to religion that the atheists deem a violation of civil liberties as expressed in the First Amendment. If it seems that atheists have been more visible and vocal in recent years, it’s because they have been.
They are calling themselves the “New Atheists”, meaning they are more vocal, more militant, etc. Of course, “there’s nothing new under the sun” so they largely parrot the Old Atheists, sometimes to their embarrassment.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately on the New Atheists. Mind you, I’m not reading the works of the New Atheists, but I’ve been reading people who have read them and actually had formal debates with them.
Here’s the list of what I’ve read so far:
- God and Science, Coming Full Circle?, by James Molben
- Science and Creation, The Search for Understanding, by John Polkinghorne
- Quantum Leap, by Dean Nelson
- Gunning For God, Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target, by John C. Lennox
- Seven Days That Divide the World, also by John C. Lennox
I recommend all of them, but I’m particularly enjoying Gunning For God, by Irish mathematician John Lennox, which takes on the New Atheists and their ideas head on. When I started down this track I expected to find that the naturalists, as the New Atheists might prefer to call themselves, would present formidable and reasoned arguments from science against Christianity, their main target, that would be a challenge for Christian apologists to answer. What I’ve discovered instead is that New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) offer almost nothing that is new and in fact are largely ignorant of the current state of research into the historicity of the New Testament, for example. Dawkins and Hitchens are dismissive of the New Testament, asserting, without chapter and verse as it were, that it is unreliable and largely myth.
Gunning For God demolishes this position with quotations from atheists, agnostics, theologians and historians who alike agree that the authors of the New Testament, especially Luke, are historians of surprising accuracy and precision whose veracity you challenge at your peril.
I’ll probably say more on this later, but I do recommend these books for anyone who, unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, is interested in actual evidence.
