As anyone watching the best-seller lists knows, atheism is big business. There seems to be no end of books touting the end of faith. A common theme in all—Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett—is that atheism is inherently rational and religion is irrational. Disbelief in God is a sign of humanity's intellectual maturity. Belief in God is a vestige of humanity's passion-filled childhood when it was ruled by fear, hate, and ignorance.

“It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail,” declares Sam Harris.

So one would expect to find cool, calm reasoning in the spate of triumphalist atheism books now flooding the bookstores. Well, frankly, the caliber of the atheists’ arguments generally tend to be rather disappointing—long on emotion, short on logic. But that is nothing new. Despite the touting of atheism as purely rational, the truth is that atheism is more an emotional response than a reasonable conclusion.

How far back shall we go? How about the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-271 BC).  Epicurus argued that our lives are ruined by the continual dread of the gods, either zapping us in this life for crossing their entirely fickle wills, or if we escape that, torturing us in Hades after death. The cure? Epicurus invented a universe in which the gods couldn’t exist. He was the first atheist to use materialism to god-proof the cosmos.

Atheists tell us that it was human fear that created religion. But for Epicurus, fear of the gods created atheism.

But fear isn’t the only emotion that creates atheism. Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Charles Darwin’s “bulldog” Thomas Huxley, said candidly of his atheism,

"For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever."

For Huxley and friends, the desire for sex untethered to morality demanded that God be cut loose from the world.  Happily, as Huxley noted later, he realized that this was an intellectual error.

But our present-day atheists appear to be making the same mistake.  Richard Dawkins seems especially cranky that Judaism and Christianity have moral prohibitions in regard to sex—so much so, that to a proposed set of Atheist’s Ten Commandments, he offered an amendment commanding us, “Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else and leaves others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business).” Not very catchy, and definitely hard to chisel in stone.

And Christopher Hitchens? “Clearly, the human species is designed”—by evolution, mind you—“to experiment with sex.” Indeed, Hitchens assures readers, “The relationship between physical health and mental health is now well understood to have a strong connection to sexual function, or dysfunction.” In other words, inhibited sex makes us dysfunctional; it is downright unhealthy. “Can it be a coincidence,” Hitchens complains, “that all religions claim the right to legislate sex?”

Nature demands complete sexual experimentation; religion demands moral restrictions on sex; therefore atheism, which denies the divine and hence divinely-mandated moral laws, is natural, right, good, and true. So goes Hitchens' logic.

One has cause to wonder if the libido is steering his argument to a pre-determined conclusion.  But sexual desire is not the only emotion driving atheists’ arguments. Witness the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel, who confessed in The Last Word to a “fear of religion itself.”

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world."

That’s about as clear of an expression of Theo-phobia as one could want. The “cosmic authority problem.” Perhaps that is the source of atheist Richard Dawkins' zeal in his defense of Darwinism? One only wishes that he—and Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—were as candid about the emotional source of atheism as Thomas Nagel.

The apostles of atheism are mad as hell, and their not going to take it any more.

There has been a spate of books, TV shows, NPR interviews, magazine stories and the like involving one or more of the angry atheists. Sam Schulman of the Wall Street Journal has had about his fill of them. On Friday January 5th of this year he wrote a column in the WSJ entitled "Without God, Gall is Permitted" The sub-caption reads "Modern atheists don't have any new arguments and they lack their forbear's charms." He does not cover angry agnostics (whom Stephen Colbert has famously called atheists without 'testicles', though he used a choicer epithet). Were we to add them to the mix we could brew up a Texas Pete sort of stew.

But why exactly do atheists have their knickers in a knot these days? I mean it's not like they have ever been the majority in the landscape of humanity. Indeed, from what we can tell they have always been a tiny minority. Maybe that's why they are so angry. I mean we are supposed to be not only in the age of reason, we are supposed to be in the space age, 'boldly going where no one has gone before'. And maybe this is one reason for the proud an's contumely. They just can't understand why people are still bothering to believe all this 'religious stuff'. Their attitude is so very different from that chronicled in John Updike's 'In the Beauty of the Lilies' where someone gradually loses their faith, and ends up sad about it. Nope, the attitude of these folks is "Flame On!" to borrow a phrase from one of my childhood Marvel Comic heroes. And 'me thinks they protesteth too much.'

Ben Witherington

Without God, Gall Is Permitted

Modern atheists have no new arguments, and they lack their forebears' charm.

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 religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by blunt materialism. Most of all they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it....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 Neibuhr 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 ones by their shallowness."

Sam Schulman
Wall Street Journal

Richard Dawkins fumbles to explain Newton, man of science and faith.

Richard Dawkins considers religious believers to be infected by a kind of ‘mind virus’. But how does he account for Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist for a millennium? Dawkins considers this argument from ‘admired religious scientists’ to be deeply flawed. He insists that Newton lived in an age when atheism was not an easy option. His very public pronouncements of belief were deceptions. But anyone reading Newton, such as the manuscripts calculating the exact date of the apocalypse, on display for the first time ever this week in Jerusalem, knows his faith was genuine and based on considerable thought. Still, Dawkins seems obsessed on showing that people of faith are either mentally limited, emotionally deranged, or, in the case of his hero Newton and based on no evidence whatsoever, a closet atheist.

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