ATHEISM’S NEW CLOTHES
Exploring and exposing the claims of the New Atheists
By David H. Glass. Apollos. 319 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 1 844 745 715
David Glass sets out to answer the claims of the New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and others who proclaim an uncompromising atheistic creed which vehemently rejects religious belief of all kinds.
Glass has a difficult task, as the topics he needs to address range widely and raise questions of great depth.
Nature of faith
After outlining the rise of New Atheism, Glass focuses on the nature of faith and the New Atheists’ claim that it is necessarily irrational. He expounds four classic Christian views of faith and concludes that it is the New Atheists’ view of faith which is itself irrational and not based on evidence. The following chapters centre on the relationship between science and faith: does science undermine belief in God and what evidence for God is there? Glass argues that the very existence of the universe and the fact that it had a beginning, together with the order and fine-tuning that the universe displays, as well as the fact of human consciousness, provide satisfactory evidence for God.
He examines in some detail Dawkins’s response to the argument from design (the ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit’, where Dawkins argues that a designer must intrinsically be even more unlikely than the thing which he is supposed to have designed, because more complex).
Origins of religion
Glass then turns to examine New Atheist arguments about the origins of religion. New Atheists cannot deny that many people are religious and, if there is no satisfactory evidence to support religious belief, this fact needs to be explained. The New Atheists attempt to do so on a variety of evolutionary suppositions, which Glass explains and answers. In what is perhaps the best chapter, Glass then addresses the important issue of morality — if there is no God, how can there be any obligation to observe any moral standard? Again, the New Atheists believe that they have come up with answers to this, but Glass exposes these as entirely inadequate.
The Bible and the resurrection
The final three chapters explore the implications for New Atheism of biblical revelation and of the resurrection of Jesus and conclude with a comparison of life, its meaning and purpose, with and without God.
Glass’s book is a tour de force in the range and complexity of the issues with which it seeks to deal. It is a very useful source for helping to understand the arguments which the New Atheists make and for assessing those arguments. However, I have some reservations. The book attempts so much and its themes are so large that Glass can often only outline the main arguments on either side. Individual chapters provide useful introductions to their subject matter, but the interested reader will usually have to look elsewhere for deeper engagement. Personally, I would also have preferred a more robust defence of a non-evolutionary account of creation than Glass seems prepared to provide.
Some difficulty
Apart from the closing chapters, where specifically Christian doctrines are addressed, Glass’s responses to the New Atheists’ arguments tend to be at the rather more general level of ‘Christian theism’. This poses some difficulty, in my view. Some, at least, of the New Atheists’ attacks on religion are not entirely false insofar as they apply to religions other than Christianity. We would agree, for example, that other religions are superstitious, have an inadequate view of faith and are not based on sufficient evidence. Our contention is for the Christian God as he reveals himself in the Christian Scriptures and for the teaching of those Scriptures specifically on the questions that it addresses. Only the robust proclamation of those unique truths ultimately provides a satisfactory response to the claims of the New Atheists.
Robert Strivens,
Principal, London Theological Seminary
