{"id":2993,"date":"2008-09-25T17:48:24","date_gmt":"2008-09-25T21:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=2993"},"modified":"2008-09-25T18:50:54","modified_gmt":"2008-09-25T22:50:54","slug":"responding-to-neo-atheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2008\/09\/responding-to-neo-atheism\/","title":{"rendered":"Responding to Neo-Atheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Thinker<\/a> | Rick Richman | Sep. 21, 2008<\/p>\n

Neo-atheism has had a very successful publishing run over the past several years, with best-selling books by Christopher Hitchens (“god is not great”), Sam Harris (“Letter to a Christian Nation”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”), among others. But this year there has been an equally impressive counter-phenomenon. Three recent books, written from three widely divergent perspectives, have responded to the arguments of neo-atheism with both intellectual force and literary grace.<\/p>\n

In April, David Berlinski, a secular Jew and well-known skeptic of Darwinism, who holds a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Princeton and has written widely on mathematics and science, published “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.” The book defends religion by attacking atheism’s attempt to enlist science in its cause. <\/p>\n

The book is written with Mr. Berlinski’s characteristic literary verve. To a Nobel Prize scientist’s argument — offered at a conference on “science, religion and reason” — that “for good people to do evil things, [it] takes religion,” Berlinski responds: “Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?”<\/p>\n

“If memory serves,” he writes, “it was not the Vatican.”<\/p>\n

Last month, Michael Novak, a Catholic scholar who holds the Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, published “No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.” Mr. Novak believes the country needs a respectful dialogue between believers and unbelievers, and he has effectively produced one in book-length form, setting forth the arguments of the neo-atheists with extraordinary respect and civility before presenting his own views. <\/p>\n

He has written a humble book, all the more powerful for its humility. Even at age 74, after a lifetime of religious study and writing, he acknowledges he cannot be certain that what he believes is true. But he has set forth a case for religion that is all the more compelling for its serious treatment of the other side. <\/p>\n

This month, Rabbi David J. Wolpe, named earlier this year by Newsweek at age 49 as the number one pulpit rabbi in America, published “Why Faith Matters.” It is a book in a class by itself, because it combines both intellectual force and lawyer-like accumulation of historical, statistical and other evidence with something equally compelling — the power of personal example.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Thinker | Rick Richman | Sep. 21, 2008 Neo-atheism has had a very successful publishing run over the past several years, with best-selling books by Christopher Hitchens (“god is not great”), Sam Harris (“Letter to a Christian Nation”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”), among others. But this year there has been an equally … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-in-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}