Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology)

A Response to Contemporary Challenges

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781493400225
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

In recent years the Christian faith has been challenged by skeptics, including the New Atheists, who claim that belief in God is simply not reasonable. Here prominent Christian philosopher C.Stephen Evans offers a fresh, contemporary, and nuanced response. He makes the case for belief in a personal God through an exploration of natural "signs, " which open our minds to theistic possibilities and foster belief in the Christian revelation. Evans then discusses why God's self-revelation is both authoritative and authentic. This sophisticated yet accessible book provides a clear account of the evidence for Christian faith, concluding that it still makes sense to believe.

1
Who Are the New Atheists, and What Are They Saying?

From the earliest periods of the Christian church, God has called some to defend the faith against the attacks of unbelievers. In the ancient world early Christians were variously accused of being atheists (because of their rejection of local gods), superstitious (because of their acceptance of miracles, such as the resurrection of Jesus), and subverters of the social order (because of their refusal to worship the emperor and their inclusion of people of all social classes in their communities). Such writers as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen responded to all these charges and more. Many apologists have taken 1 Peter 3:15 as providing a kind of charter for the apologetic enterprise: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have.” Peter may not be referring directly to what has come to be known as apologetics, but this verse does seem to imply that Christian hope is not baseless or groundless. A person who possesses Christian faith can approach the world with an attitude of hope regardless of what transpires in this world, and this hope is one that is reasonable, at least from the perspective of faith. Recently, a number of writers, often collectively called “the New Atheists,” have loudly claimed that Christian faith is anything but reasonable. What should the church say in response to such claims? I shall try to answer this question in this book. In this introductory chapter I must first say something about the New Atheists. Who are they? What exactly are their accusations against religious faith in general and Christian faith in particular?

The “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheists

A host of writers could be included under the label of the New Atheism, but I shall limit my discussion to four of the best-known writers: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, a quartet sometimes described as the “Four Horsemen” of the movement. (Though perhaps one should say that the Four Horsemen are now only a trio, since Christopher Hitchens passed away from pneumonia stemming from cancer in 2011.) Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist now at Oxford, first came to public attention with the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, a popular work in evolutionary biology that proposed that an organism should be thought of as merely a way that genes reproduce themselves.1 Dawkins later argued in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) that the universe is fully intelligible without resort to any intelligent design or cause and in The God Delusion (2006) that religious belief is not only irrational but positively harmful.2 Dawkins is unafraid to voice his contempt for biblical faith: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”3

Christopher Hitchens, educated at Oxford, was a British leftist (Trotskyite initially) who made a living as a journalist, writing for The Nation, The New Statesman, and a variety of American publications, including The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. Besides his regular work as a journalist, Hitchens wrote a series of mostly biographical books, some on figures he admired (George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson) and others on figures he detested (Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, no less). Hitchens acquired some notoriety by deserting his leftist friends and giving whole-hearted support to the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, even if he deviated from his leftist political views, he nonetheless remained consistent to the end in his vehement opposition to religious belief. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything expresses his view that religion is not only false but pernicious, a cancer that right-thinking people should try to extirpate, though Hitchens is pessimistic that this is possible in the foreseeable future. Hitchens is probably even more quotable than Dawkins and is similarly unafraid to voice his outrage that religion persists in the contemporary world: “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made.”4

Sam Harris received a PhD in neuroscience but is best known for his vociferous attacks on religious belief. His books include The End of Faith (2005) and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), a short response to criticisms of the first book.5 Harris has recently written The Moral Landscape (2010), in which he argues (naively) that ethical questions can and should be answered scientifically, and a short book entitled Free Will (2012).6 Harris’s attacks on religious belief, like those of Dawkins and Hitchens, do not focus solely on fundamentalism or extremist forms of religion. He thinks that even moderate forms of religious belief are destructive and harmful to our civilization: “We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism; it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”7

The last of the “Four Horsemen” I shall briefly describe is Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University best known for his work in the philosophy of mind and on free will, particularly with respect to the question of whether artificially constructed machines could ever be said to be conscious. Although Dennett’s views in philosophy of mind, like all such views currently on offer, are controversial and hotly debated, he has won a reputation as an accomplished and influential philosopher in this area through such works as Brainstorms (1978),8 The Intentional Stance (1987),9 and Consciousness Explained (1991).10 (Though I respect Dennett as a philosopher, I cannot resist passing on a standing joke among philosophers that Dennett should have called that last-mentioned book Consciousness Explained Away.) In 1995 Dennett shifted from narrow issues in the philosophy of mind to broader questions about a naturalistic worldview by defending the power of Darwinism to explain just about everything in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.11 He moved toward explicit criticism of religion in Breaking the Spell (2006), which on the surface is simply a call for the scientific study of religion but (as the title implies) suggests that such study will break the hold that religion has on the minds and lives of people.12 After the publication of Breaking the Spell Dennett participated in a memorable exchange with Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished Christian philosopher, and the exchange (including replies from each to the other) has been published as Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (2011).13

The New Atheist Claims

What do these “Four Horsemen” have to say to us? What, if anything, is new about the New Atheism? In some respects, little is new in the attacks on religion mounted by these four thinkers. There are frequent denunciations of religion as outmoded and primitive and grand claims that religion is “unscientific.” Religious beliefs are described as simply preposterous for a scientifically educated person; in fact, Harris claims that if the kinds of beliefs held by religious people were not widely shared, they would be regarded as evidence of mental illness. However, there is little in the way of detailed arguments to back up such grand ...