Atheists and Snow

It is snowing outside, and that officially makes me a sad person... I woke up this morning and was so excited to look out the window and see the beautiful sun, the grass, and the people bustling about trying to get to class, and all I saw was a much unwanted winter wonderland.

In my research writing/critical thinking class, we have been reading various articles and discussing them, and one of the articles we read last week was an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens book, "God is Not Great- How Religion Poisions Everything." Consequently, it was extremely interesting to find this email from Stand to Reason in my inbox this morning."

The "New" Atheists
There has been an attack on religion.

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great--How Religion Poisons
Everything
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell--Religion as Natural
Phenomenon
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Sam Harris, The End of Faith--Religion, Terror, and the Future of
Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation

These guys are really angry.

There's really nothing new about the "new" atheism,
except the attitude. The new twist: Theists are dangerous.

"Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to
the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate," writes Richard
Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. "Religion is capable of
driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to
qualify as a kind of mental illness."

According to Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, religion is so
bad it should be eradicated just like slavery was eradicated: "I
would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating
religion in our time do not seem good. Still the same could have been
said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth
century."

These writers have tremendous emotional appeal.

Two aspects of dealing with these new aggressive atheists (both are
hard):

1. The argument
2. The interplay, the gamesmanship, the footwork

Regarding number two: I can dispatch a good portion of Christopher
Hitchens's analysis of religion with one statement:
Ridicule (or sneering, or swearing) is not an argument. Hitchens
regularly employs ad hominems, red herrings, hasty generalizations,
ridicule, and fallacies of all sorts.

The argument is a little different. The details and claims are
important. You have probably heard this statement thrown around
pretty regularly today: More wars have been fought and more
blood as been shed in the name of religion than anything else. It is
the greatest cause of evil in the world.

Here are four quick points to correct the record.
http://www.str.org/site/R?i=qYTe6NSYQH5s3fxkwPQF5w..

First, the crimes themselves have often been misconstrued or
exaggerated.

Second, the greatest evil in the world has actually come from those
who deny God's existence.

Third, Christianity cannot be held responsible when Christians do
un-Christian things.

Finally, Christianity's real record of good is without peer in
world history.

Christianity, properly understood, is a cause for good and not evil in
the world. The problem isn't religion; it's religious
error: either false religion, or true religion improperly or
inconsistently applied.

This evidence gets to one of the standard argument that these new
atheists put forward. But to stand against them you need the skill of
an ambassador to see through the smokescreen of their attitude.
Employ the tactic "Just the Facts, Ma'am" when the critic makes
factual claims. Often, it's easy to correct these with a little
research.

I recently spoke about the "new atheists" at The Masters Series in
Christian Thought and offered an approach and rebuttal to both their
attitudes and arguments.

Don't be "steamrolled" by the aggressive attitude and overstated
claims. Focus on the argument and claims they offer. I'm
confident if you practice the skills of a good ambassador, you can
show that Christianity is rational and good.

Greg Koukl