The New Atheism, and the happy literature it inspires

I recently read Alister McGrath’s extravagantly short response to Dawkins, The Dawkins Delusion? I have very little to say about it. Like other scholarly responses, McGrath gets a lot of mileage from easily pointing out the various ways in which Dawkins is ignorant of philosophy, history, and religious studies. This is probably valuable for those readers who believe Dawkins to be a trustworthy expert on these topics. As for positive contributions, I would say McGrath doesn’t give us that much. He hints at his own work on the relationship between theology and science, but one would have to follow the bibliography to really know what McGrath thinks, which he systematically lays out elsewhere.

For some reason Dawkins is the most popular target among the New Atheists (consisting primarily of Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, and secondarily people like Victor Stenger). I suspect this is because Dawkins is 1) the most spiteful and 2) the most prone to wander around outside of his competency. I doubt he’s the most influential, because arguably Hitchens reaches a much wider and diverse audience. My favorite short critiques of Dawkins so far are the articles by Plantinga and Eagleton. There is at least one person who has focused primarily on Dennett and cleverly so, David Bentley Hart.

Two new books on the New Atheism that I look forward to reading, both published by Yale University Press, are here and here. The Eagleton book has been reviewed in the NYT.

I am very pleased that the atheist movement has caused otherwise narcissistic Christian and church-friendly scholars to come out of hiding and write things that people will actually read. At first I was worried that we’d have to settle for barbie dolls like Lee Strobel who, although he is not one of the top five people I want to punch in the face, may as well be. In fairness, there is at least one book from the “popular” category that I think is very good, Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. I concur with this article, which calls Keller’s book the “best of the ‘Mere Christianity’ wannabes.” So far, I think this is true. Keller’s book is notable for a number of reasons. There are many virtues present in Keller’s work, and I’ll just mention two. First, unlike Lee Strobel and sometimes Ravi Zacharius and always Rob Bell, it doesn’t make you want to throw up. But more importantly, Keller draws from just as wide a range of disciplines and sources as does, say, Hitchens. I’m not being intellectually snobbish with this preference for true literacy; on the contrary, I think presenting a genuine case for a universalizing system in a published context requires it. A presentation of the Gospel of this sort must fit within a real narrative that interacts with the culture, because that is where the text is being released (it’s not confined, say, to a single interlocutor, or a familiar congregation, etc.). Cumulative five step deductive demonstrations by people like William Lane Craig will always come off as artificial, and not quite cutting to the issue, when standing next to real narrative disbelief. I think we can speak of a “narrative atheology,” and the proper response to it is narrative theology. I don’t even mind bastardizations of narrative theology, as long as it’s on the right track.