God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens

by John F. Haught

Book Overview

In God and the New Atheism, a world expert on science and theology gives clear, concise, and compelling answers to the charges against religion laid out in recent best-selling books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great). For some, these "new atheists" appear to say extremely well what they believe to be wrong with religion. But, as John Haught...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 066423304X
• ISBN13: 9780664233044
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Probably the best response to Dawkins et. al next to South Park

First off, to check my biases at the door: I'm an agnostic, I was raised a nonbeliever, and I remain unconvinced by any religions. Still, it is impossible to escape the fact that many of the brightest minds in history, including a number of avowed atheists, have taken the idea of god extremely seriously and to that end have pursued an understanding of theology and an engagement with religious ideas. Following that example, I have spent a great deal of my life contemplating various religious texts, theologians, and faiths in an attempt to come to an understanding of what religious faith is. The conclusions I have come to about that is that it is not so easily encapsulated in the almost paleolithic theology of american fundamentalists whose biblical literalism is offended by scientific truth. Which is what I find the most disappointing about the high profile New Atheists, which is for all of their lionization of scientific discovery they are wildly uncurious about the idea that they spend so much time attacking. I think I know the reason for this, and it is that they view their work mostly as a defensive maneuver against a very real and very dangerous war on science being waged by a very small but rabid group of fundamentalist christians. Where they have gone wrong, however, is in merely accepting the version of christianity on offer by their opponents uncritically, without asking for themselves if this anemic doctrine is in fact the faith of billions that has gripped most of western civilization for the last 1700 years or so? John Haught in this book makes the short, compelling case that it is not. In doing so, the professor very humanely but I think rightly takes the new atheists to task for failing to understand what it was they were attacking before they set out to attack it. Haught, it should be noted, is an ally in the battle against science having devoted his life to showing how biology and evolution are anything but an enemy of religion and that science leads to truths that persons of faith should embrace rather than fight against. As such, he is uniquely qualified to deal with the arguments on offer from Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, and when he greets their arguments with a shrug and says "so what?" it should give pause to those who think that scientific materialism is a slam dunk for atheists. I think anyone who has read Hitchens, Harris, or Dawkins work on atheism and science should take the time to read this book (and probably Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in order to get a more complete picture of the field. Again, I think these questions are largely unsettled and probably unsettlable, and I think anyone with a real interest in truth, reason, and reality ought to take the time to survey the whole field of battle before they've declared themselves the victor.

Excellent tool for the confused.

This book will assist the confused believer and the soft-core atheist in re-framing the questions on belief in God. You have to engage in the discipline that you are criticizing, which is theology. Anything less is just the rantings of the angry and uninformed. In all of my dealings with this new atheism, I still have not found one reasonable explanation for the ultimate question as to why there is something rather than nothing. A lightening bolt in a soup of mush does not scientifically explain profound complexity in the material world. Nevertheless, this book helps the reader realize the simple fact that the current wave of atheism is not scientific in the least bit. They do not answer the tough questions, and they do not have to, because the have complete control over the argument. No evidence means no existence. Fine for scientists, but how does that fit into the reality of an over-riding need for belief in a higher being that the vast majority of humanity has? There is a question for the ages: why do people need to believe? The atheists make the most grave mistake time and time again in their best-sellers: they do not know their enemy. Their enemy is not a bunch of irrational idiots who believe in voodoo and magic; their enemy is most likely a little old lady who attends church every Sunday to worship a God who created a world that is very beautiful and a people that, at its best, love and create. Their enemy is also thousands of years of theological study and discourse. Ignore this body of work to your own demise. In my opinion the new atheism has met its match in John Haught.

Merits Consideration as the Liberal Response to the New Atheists

In the Introduction Haught argues that a proper understanding of God, faith, and theology is something these critics are woefully lacking in, and as such their critique of Christian religion is "theological unchallenging." (p. xi). Haught argues that when it comes to the Christian notion of God the understanding of the New Atheists "has almost nothing to do with what Christian faith and theology today understand by that name." (p. xv). When it comes to understanding religious faith their views are "at the same unscholarly level as the unreflective, superstitious, and literalist religiosity of those they criticize." (p. xiii). Haught faults them for debating with "extremists" like creationists, fundamentalists, terrorists and intelligent design advocates "rather than any major theologians." (p. xv). As a theologian and philosopher of science, Dr. Haught effectively dismantles what I consider to be a few naïve understandings of the new atheists regarding faith and the scientific method. It's a common mistake that applied and theoretical scientists unaccustomed to understanding the philosophy of science make. Is faith a belief without evidence? No. Do scientists come to their conclusions based solely on the evidence? No. Haught claims there is no way without circular reasoning to establish that every true proposition must be based in empirical evidence. His argument is that if this is the case it leaves room for faith, since science cannot be proved based upon a scientific experiment. So what? What method does he propose to investigate our experience in this world other than science and the evidence? Mysticism? Intuition? What kind of methods are those? And how would someone go about establishing them as methods without reasoning in a circle? What is the exact content to these methods since those who adhere to them come away with different and mutually contradictory understandings of their experiences? I have argued at length in my book on behalf of methodological naturalism, which was first suggested by the ancient Greek philosopher/scientist Thales. This method is the one that has been the most fruitful in history, bar none. That method is all we have. So it's reasonable to think as Barbara Forrest has argued, that since this method has worked so well that philosophical (or ontological) naturalism is a reasonable conclusion to come to, even if we cannot prove such a conclusion by a scientific experiment itself! Haught compares the so-called new atheists with some of the atheists of yesteryear. He maintains that the writings of the new atheists "would never have made the list of required readings." When compared to the "more muscular" atheist writings found in Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, whom he calls the "hard core atheists," the "soft-core" new atheists offer a "pale brand of atheism." They offer a "relatively light fare" in comparison to "the gravity of an older and much more thoughtful generation of religious criti

Some people just don't get it...

Many of the negative reviewers of this book so clearly have their OWN agendas in mind that they simply miss the THREE POINTS Haught was trying to make in this concise little critical tome: 1) that the "New Atheists" aren't really so "new"; 2) that the "old" atheists were more insightful and much more consistent (in other words, the NA's are not very "good" atheists); and 3) That the New Atheists rely on "straw God" arguments and certain presuppositions about both the nature of religion and the nature of reality that are not THEMSELVES "scientific," and thus, are more akin to "religious faith' than they are to genuine scientific inquiry. To those ends, Haught makes his case eloquently and definitively. The negative reviewers need to realize that this book does NOT attempt or CLAIM to be exhaustive (it's only 107 pages, people!), nor does it attempt to "answer" the new atheists with (what for Haught would be) a more "adequate" worldview (for that, you actually have to READ his systematic works on Evolutionary Theology: "God After Darwin," "Deeper Than Darwin," and "Christianity and Science: Toward a Theology of Nature." Only after reading these cogently argued works is one in a proper position to "critique" Haught. The "personal" nature of some of the negative reviews is quite astonishing, and reveals more about the reviewers' LACK of familiarity with Haught's reputation and his rather extensive body of work than they do about Haught himself. For example, reviewer Ross' suggestion that Haught doesn't really "understand" the New Atheists, or the Old ones (like Nietzsche) is laughable when you consider that (in the case of Dawkins) Haught is WIDELY considered to be one of the FOREMOST experts in the science and religion dialogue (equally notable Darwinian Philosopher Michael Ruse calls him, "Our most distinguished writer today on the science and religion relationship"), and (in the case of Nietzsche) has written EXTENSIVELY on the impact of existentialism on religious thought (see Haught's "What is Religion?" for starters). Also, he's been teaching this stuff for 20+ years, and I think some smart-aleck graduate student would have "corrected" his "misinterpretation" of Nietzsche long ago, don't you? Ross also apparently doesn't understand the difference between the way science SHOULD be practiced, and the way that it's ACTUALLY practiced. His idealistic view of "Big science" is quaint and kinda charming. Aside from Kuhn's famous analysis,"Structures," Mary Midgley's classic, "Evolution as a Religion," and Richard C. Lewontin's "Biology as Ideology," two recent books by other "real" scientists, Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics," and Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe" clearly reveal just how political, cliquish, and NON-OBJECTIVE the "business of science" can really be. When Haught says that scientists have "faith" in the "intelligibility of the universe," and that that NAs like Daniel Dennett has "faith" in the truth of the Dogma o

The God of the New Atheism isn't the God that theologians defend

John Haught, eminent theologian and defender of science and religion, takes on the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens in this brief (roughly 107 pages minus the footnotes and other filler), well-reasoned book. Ultimately, the shortcoming of these so-called 'neo-atheists' is that they fail to seriously engage God and the Bible. Instead they unwittingly attack a strawman and call it 'God.' Also noteworthy, as Haught argues, is that the atheists are into their own brand of fundamentalism similar to the biblical literalists. Scientism is the word to describe the approach the neo-atheists take to modern science. Just like their biblical literalist counterparts, the neo-atheists take a monistic approach to questions which answer what the ultimate view of reality. Haught argues that there are different layers to reality where one can accept the scientific method as one level of explanation, and theology as another, deeper level of explanation.