Atheism is Dead

One of the many things the world needs today:  A better class of atheists.  Seriously.  This is the subtext of David Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.  And, in this respect, Hart is entirely correct.  Why can't the modern world have atheists of a higher intellectual caliber?  Once upon a time, there were really intelligent atheists--Marx, Freud, Nietzsche.  Those guys are worth reading.  Now we get Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and those guys...well, just try reading their books.  Just try.  I think the only people who could read those books for profit or pleasure are those who have never, and I mean never, once read a theologically literature writer.  The new wave of atheists set up straw men for children and then work really hard to knock down those straw men.  Sometimes, they even manage to do so.

Hart's book is a merry romp through the historical idiocies of the New Atheists.  These atheists are guys who seriously argue we would all be better off if Christianity had never existed.  Really now?  In their rush to glorify the pagan past, they seem to have forgotten to discover just how, well, nasty and brutish those pagans were.  And in their rush to denigrate all things Christian, they seem to have forgotten to find out just what Christianity introduced to the world.  Set aside the theology of Christianity--who would argue against things like hospitals, the abolition of slavery, and equal rights for all men?  But, the New Atheists can't be bothered with historical accuracy--which is why Hart's job is, to be honest, not terribly difficult.  One senses throughout that Hart really wishes these New Atheists would present an argument somewhere, anywhere, that he might actually have to, you know, work to dismiss.  (And, don't even get Hart started on the philosophical failings of the New Atheists.)

I ran into this same phenomenon a few years back.  I was engaged to provide the response to Charles Freeman, who was talking about his book, The Closing of the Western Mind.  To do so, I read the whole of Freeman's book--not just skimming it to see if there was anything good in it--I read it with attention to detail.  It was palpably silly.  I am by no means an expert on the early church, and yet, the historical inaccuracies were painfully obvious.  I was thus terribly amused to run across this in Hart's volume:  "In 2003, for example, the amateur historian Charles Freeman published a volume called The Closing of the Western Mind that is an almost perfect compendium of every trite caricature of early Christianity devised since Gibbon departed to his long home....Along the way, Freeman provides a few damning passages from the church fathers (always out of context and without any mention of the plentiful counterexamples found in the same authors), attempts long discourses on theological disputes he simply does not understand, continually falls prey to vulgar misconstruals of the materials he is attempting to interpret, makes large claims about early Christian belief that are simply false, offers vague assertions about philosophers he clearly has not studied, and delivers himself of opinions regarding Christian teaching that are worse than simply inaccurate."  I wish Hart was exaggerating there for comedic effect, but he isn't.  I cannot even begin to covey my disappointment with that book--here I was, all set to participate in an interesting discussion about the whether Christianity did in fact cause a closing of the Western Mind, only to discover that the argument on behalf of the proposition wasn't really even worthy of debate.  Nor was it at least humorous (where's Voltaire when you want him?).  Dreary prose coupled with facile argument.

But, the one virtue of Freeman's book came in the introduction.  He writes, "This book is dedicated to my wife Hilary, with my love.  While I have been dealing with the complex and often stressful relationships between Christianity and pagan society in the fourth and fifth centuries, she, in her work as a psychotherapist, has been dealing with similar tensions in the minds of her clients.  So our concerns have often overlapped."  That passage, more than anything else I have ever read, explains the New Opponents of Christianity--they see historical study not as, you know, history or something like that, but rather history is simply a means of psychotherapy.  The goal is not to understand the past; that would be too, well, boring.  The goal is to help liberate their readers (or clients if your prefer) from their obsession with Christian morality (read: Christan sexual norms, for the most part).

[I should note that Freeman is not an atheist.  He does believe in God--that nice warm, fuzzy God who likes everything that Freeman likes.  Freeman also thinks Dawkins is rather silly.  It's sad when even the set of authors who are broadly making the same arguments find each others' work to be puerile.]

So, Hart's book is good, but it is really unfortunate that it needed to be written.  The New Atheists aren't really worthy of Hart's attention, but it is nice to know that somebody took the time to write this book.

And, if you want to get a nice flavor of Hart's book, you can read his essay in First Things.