January 10, 2007
Without God, Gall Is Permitted
10:09 pm | Naturalism | Apologetics | Comments: 0
Sam Schulman has written a worthwhile commentary on the new atheists:
Without God, Gall Is Permitted
What is new about the new atheists? It’s not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won’t encounter a single point you didn’t hear in your freshman dormitory. It’s their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote–both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.
…
For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it. The reviewer of Dr. Dawkins’s volume in a recent New York Review of Books noted his unwillingness to take theology seriously, a starting point for any considered debate over religion.
The faith that the new atheists describe is a simple-minded parody. It is impossible to see within it what might have preoccupied great artists and thinkers like Homer, Milton, Michelangelo, Newton and Spinoza–let alone Aquinas, Dr. Johnson, Kierkegaard, Goya, Cardinal Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr or, for that matter, Albert Einstein. But to pass over this deeper faith–the kind that engaged the great minds of Western history–is to diminish the loss of faith too. The new atheists are separated from the old by their shallowness.
The Art/Science of Anime/Manga
9:58 pm | Anime | Comments: 0
January 9, 2007
Urbana 2006 - Chad Thompson
2:37 pm | Homosexuality | Comments: 0
January 7, 2007
Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student
8:50 pm | Announcement | Comments: 1
Open letter calls on Local Churches/Living Stream Ministry to Renounce Doctrines
8:43 pm | Announcement | Apologetics | Comments: 0
December 29, 2006
Urbana 2006 and Mission through the Lens of AIDS
9:43 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 2
December 9, 2006
December 10th: International Human Rights Day
9:29 am | Announcement | Comments: 0
December 2, 2006
On the Alleged Paganism of Christmas
9:37 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0
August 15, 2006
Nick Pollard on the place of worldview in postmodern apologetics
4:35 am | Emergent Church | Apologetics | Comments: 2
August 12, 2006
Spencer Burke, A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity, and Early Fallout
11:09 pm | Emergent Church | Comments: 3