The humorist Alan Coren was told by his publisher that if he wanted to write a bestseller it should be about sport or pets. So he wrote a book called Golfing for Cats. Today I suspect his publisher would tell him to attack religion. Atheism sells.
First The End of Faith by Sam Harris was a success in the US. Then came Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and A. C. Grayling’s Against all Gods. And now Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great is high in the charts both sides of the Atlantic.
There have been, of course, various ecclesiastical ripostes, usually that atheism is itself a faith and you can have secular fundamentalists as well as religious ones. This is fine if we enjoy knockabout polemics, but if we are honest, it’s not good enough.
There is a story told about the 1st-century Jewish teacher Yochanan ben Zakkai. A Roman challenged him about a Jewish ritual. Pure superstition, he said. Not so, said the rabbi, and gave him an answer that made sense in terms of his questioner’s beliefs. The Roman went away satisfied. But the rabbi’s disciples said: “You answered him. What will you answer us?”
That is the real question. Atheism does not come from nowhere. Agnosticism and indifference do; people drift, religion ceases to inspire, there are other things to do. Atheism is different….
Thanks, Kendall, for posting this. I’ve read Dawkins, Dennett, et al and have been trying to help my Philosophy students to think through what sort of response they call for from the church. Obviously one can point out errors in their thinking, like ad hominem attacks, unfounded materialist reductionism, sweeping generalizations and ignorance of both theology and history. But Sacks rightly points out that that kind of apologetic response only addresses one of several issues. When we give the reason for the hope that is within us, we need to do it in more than words. I once heard John Bowen (author of _Evangelism for Normal People_) say (I am paraphrasing) that our words ought to be not just the reason for the hope within but a verbal explanation of the life we live. Our words and our actions ought to be consistent with one another and with the Gospel.
We cannot just ignore our differences but the tragedy of this struggle in the Anglican communion is that it distracts us from our unique ministries. Our ministry to atheists should be our greatest strength.
My own atheistic tendencies are kept in check by the inspiring testimonies I hear from Christians in other parts of the world. Narrow minded dogmatics statements live me cold and the TEC is irrelevant.
I would love to see a blog dedicated to this one area.