By Dani Garavelli

You would think, wouldn’t you, that one of the principal attractions of atheism would be the complete absence of schisms. Where the devout always seem to be working themselves up into a frenzy over some obscure theological point, non-believers can glide through life, absolved, as they are, of the need to negotiate the terms of their disbelief. If there’s no God, there is no message. And if there’s no message, then there’s nothing much to argue about.

Despite this, atheism was last week rent by disagreement, proving that the need for petty, internecine squabbling runs deeper in the psyche than the need to find meaning in existence. The question that is dividing its leading proponents is how much they should be evangelising about their lack of faith. Should they adopt a live-and-let-live approach to the religious? Or should they be shouting their atheism from the rooftops in an attempt to get all the blinkered throwbacks to see the light?

In the live-and-let-live corner are the “old” atheists led by US professor Paul Kurtz, who founded the Center for Inquiry three decades ago to offer a positive alternative to religion. Kurtz – who built alliances with religious groups over issues such as opposing creationism in schools – lit the kindling for the argument when he called the decision to celebrate Blasphemy Day with a contest encouraging new forms of blasphemy a betrayal of the civic virtues of democracy.

In the opposing corner are the new, In-Your-Face atheists – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and PZ Myers – who see it as their duty to launch constant attacks on the faithful. Within their ranks, there is a kind of competitiveness to achieve ever greater degrees of non-belief. Myers once drove a rusty nail through a consecrated communion wafer and posted it on his website.

It’s the new atheists, of course, who are in the ascendancy. Their noisy denunciation of religion seems to capture the zeitgeist, even though the vitriolic rhetoric they use has more in common with the clergymen they oppose than with the liberal secularism of our age.

As regular readers of this column may know, I am not hugely devout, my faith, at its lowest ebb, being based more on a desire for God to exist than on an overpowering conviction that he does. If I were to lose the last vestiges of it and become an atheist, I suspect the most liberating aspect would be the prospect of jettisoning, once and for all, any association with the intolerance and invective that has blighted some sections of my own Church for so long. So it strikes me as odd that so-called movement atheists should adopt the very tactics they claim to abhor in religionists to further their own cause.

Like missionaries in Africa, they trample over other people’s beliefs in an attempt to replace them with their own “superior” world view. They dislike the way some churches put up The End Of The World Is Nigh posters to try to boost numbers, so they slap up their own message – “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” – on the side of buses, even though, for some people, the thought of life as one long struggle with a big, black hole at the end of it, is not cheering, but deeply distressing.

They complain about parents indoctrinating their charges, but set up atheist summer camps, which encourage “scepticism”. “It is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions,” Dawkins has said. Uh huh. And I think you’ll find most children of non-believers also tend to be non-believers.

For all movement atheists are forever going on about their own intelligence, they seem singularly unable to distinguish between organised religion and personal faith, ridiculing both with equal vehemence. I mean, by all means criticise individual religions: Catholicism for its tendency to cover up child abuse; Protestantism for its rejection of fun; Islam for its sometimes dubious treatment of women. There are plenty within those creeds who would agree with you. Feel free to criticise the short-comings of individual practitioners too: there will always be those who don’t practise what they preach (although many more are doing their best to live good and loving lives).

But bear in mind believers don’t have a monopoly on ruthlessness; or arrogance or mean-spiritedness, as Dawkins so ably demonstrates. Here is a brilliant man who uses his intellect to put other people down. Here is a man so convinced of his own rightness that he treats all who disagree with him with contempt. It’s almost as if he considers himself infallible.

Mocking what is sacred to other people – by drawing Jesus with nail polish dripping from his wounds instead of blood, for example – doesn’t seem sophisticated or useful, it seems childish; like spoiling someone’s else’s toy because you don’t have one of your own.

The refusal of movement atheists to accept that faith and intelligence are not mutually exclusive, undermines their credibility. But even if they were right: if all believers were sad, pathetic and deluded, I don’t see what would be so clever about snatching away their comfort blanket.

The urge to strip away the meaning others invest in life is a brutal one, which is why a schism which benefited “new” atheists would be very bad news indeed.

At its worst, “movement” atheism is more than the passive non-belief in the existence of God. It’s a cult which has all the nasty trappings of religion, except the deity. It’s a form of secular fundamentalism every bit as bitter, as poisonous and potentially sinister as the doctrines it hopes to replace.

By C.S. Lewis Society

Prof. Thomas Nagel, a self-declared atheist who earned his PhD. in philosophy at Harvard 45 years ago, who has been a professor at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton, and the last 28 years at New York University, and who has published ten books and more than 60 articles, has published an important essay, “Public Education and Intelligent Design,” in the Wiley InterScience Journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 36, issue 2, on-line here (fee for access US $29.95).

Prof. Nagel’s paper is a significant and substantial opening, at America’s highest intellectual level, that encourages all intelligent, educated, informed individuals — particularly those whose interest in this issue derives from intellectual curiosity, not the emotional advocacy excitement for any side — that it is legitimate as a matter of data, science, and logic, divorced from all religious texts and doctrines, to consider that intelligent design may be a valid scientific approach to understanding how DNA and the complex chemical systems of life came to attain their present form. Prof. Nagel’s article is well worth the price to put it in the library of any inquiring mind.

As anyone who has watched TV’s Crime Scene Investigation knows, scientific investigation of a set of data (the data at the scene of a man’s death) may lead to the conclusion that the event that produced the data (the death) was not the product of natural causes — not an accident, in other words — but was the product of an intelligence — a perpetrator.

But of course, the data at the crime scene usually can’t tell us very much about that intelligence. If the data includes fingerprints or DNA that produces a match when cross-checked against other data — fingerprint or DNA banks — it might lead to the identification of an individual. But even so, the tools of natural science are useless to determine the “I.Q.” of the intelligence, the efficiency vs. the emotionalism of the intelligence, or the motive of the intelligence. That data, analyzed by only the tools of natural science, often cannot permit the investigator to construct a theory of why the perpetrator acted. The mental and conscious processes going on in the criminal’s mind are outside the scope of the sciences of chemistry and physics.

Thus it is obvious that scientific methods can lead to the conclusion that an intelligence did something, even if those same methods cannot tell you who specifically did it, or why they did it. Everyone who has read or watched a Sherlock Holmes story knows this.

Prof. Nagel applies this principle to the evolution/intelligent design debate. Assuming, for purposes of argument, even though he himself is an atheist, to label the intelligence “God,” he says “the purposes and intentions of God, if there is a god, and the nature of his will, are not possible subjects of a scientific theory or scientific explanation. But that does not imply that there cannot be scientific evidence for or against the intervention of such a non-law-governed cause in the natural order” (p. 190). In other words, Sherlock Holmes can use chemistry to figure out that an intelligence — a person — did the act that killed the victim, even if he can’t use chemistry to figure out that the person who did it was Professor Moriarty, or to figure out why Moriarty did the crime.

Therefore, Prof. Nagel says, it potentially can be scientific to argue that the data of DNA and life points to an intelligent designer, even if science cannot tell you the identity of the designer or what is going on in the designer’s mind.

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In 1992, the historian of science Frederic Burnham said the God Hypothesis “is now a more respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last one hundred years.” I’d go even further. More than just being respectable, I’d say that the God hypothesis is forceful enough to warrant a verdict that He’s alive and well.

Stephen Meyer, quoted in The Case for A Creator (2004)

By William Lane Craig, Ph.D. 

Back in the mid-1960’s Time magazine ran a cover story for which the magazine’s cover was completely black, except for three words emblazoned against the dark background in bright, red letters: “IS GOD DEAD?” The article described the then current “Death-of-God” movement in American theology. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it seemed that the news of God’s death was premature. At the same time that theologians were writing God’s obituary, philosophers were re-discovering His vitality. Just a few years after its “Death-of-God” issue, Time carried a story with a similar red on black cover, only this time the title read, “Is God Coming Back to Life?” Indeed, so it must have seemed to those theological morticians of the sixties. During the 1970’s interest in philosophy of religion continued to grow. By 1980, Time found itself running a major story entitled, “Modernizing the Case for God,” which described the contemporary movement among philosophers of religion to refurbish the traditional arguments for God’s existence. Time marveled,

In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.[1]

According to the article, the noted American philosopher Roderick Chisholm believes that the reason that atheism was so influential a generation ago is that the brightest philosophers were atheists; but, he says, today many of the brightest philosophers are theists, and they are using a tough-minded intellectualism in defense of that theism.

This volume of Truth attempts to bring to its readers some of those defenses of theism from several of its brightest minds as well as critiques from some of theism’s leading detractors. In this Introduction, I hope to assist the reader by explaining a bit of the debate in which the various contributions find their context and by offering some commentary of my own on a few of the contributions themselves.

I.

One of the most exciting developments in the field of religious epistemology has been the move, spearheaded by Alvin Plantinga, to defend the rationality of theistic belief not based on argument. According to Plantinga, belief that God exists is what he calls a “properly basic” belief-that is to say, is not based on inference from other beliefs but is rationally warranted in the circumstances of one’s immediate experience of God. Now it must be confessed that such a view is not entirely new-as Roy Varghese notes in his interview with Plantinga (see Table of Contents), much the same sort of religious epistemology has been long espoused by Hick, Mascall, and others. Why then has Plantinga received so much attention for his efforts in religious epistemology? The answer, I think, is two-fold: (i) Plantinga, unlike his epistemological fellows, develops his case fully within the context of and in informed dialogue with the currents of contemporary analytic philosophy. Thus, he rather felicitously presents what he calls the “Reformed Objection to Natural Theology” as a critique-groping, implicit, and inchoate as it may be-of the position of epistemological foundationalism. With that, Plantinga springs into the mainstream of contemporary epistemological debate. (ii) Plantinga’s position as one of America’s major philosophers ensured that whichever avenue he explored subsequent to his epochal Nature of Necessity would be followed with great interest. Having already made important contributions in the philosophy of religion concerning the ontological argument and the problem of evil, Plantinga’s handling of issues in religious epistemology could be expected to be intriguing and fruitful.

Already in God and Other Minds, Plantinga had made a first foray in the direction of the rationality of theism not based on argument by maintaining that if it is rational to believe in the existence of other minds besides one’s own, then it is rational to believe in God.[2] For the analogical argument for other minds is parallel to the teleological argument for God’s existence. Though both arguments succumb to the same failing, it is still rational to believe in other minds and hence, pari passu, in God. James Tomberlin pointed out that Plantinga’s argument assumes that belief in God is basic, that is, non-inferential,[3] and in his subsequent work this was precisely the line that Plantinga took.

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By Stan Guthrie 

Let’s face it: Atheism is in. Not since Nietzsche have disbelievers enjoyed such a ready public reception to their godless message—and such near-miraculous royalties. But even that hasn’t put them in a good mood. Snaps Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (although not, presumably, the pronouncements of atheists), “Many of the teachings of Christianity are, as well as being incredible and mythical, immoral.” A feuding Richard Dawkins suggests that believers “just shut up.” Apparently, they didn’t get the tolerance memo.

Other authors—including Douglas Wilson and Francis Collins—have quite capably refuted the new atheist shtick. But remembering Bertrand Russell’s famous essay, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” here is a Reader’s Digest version of why I am.

Creation: The universe, far from being a howling wasteland indifferent to our existence, appears to be finely tuned through its estimated 13.7 billion years of existence to support life on this planet. Tinker with any one of scores of fundamental physical laws or the initial conditions of the universe—such as gravity or the cosmological constant—and we would not be here. As physicist Paul Davies has admitted, “I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact.”

Beauty: Beethoven’s Ninth, a snowflake, the sweet smell of a baby who has been sleeping, and a sunset beyond the dunes of Lake Michigan all point to a magnificent and loving Creator. And isn’t it interesting that we have the capacity—unlike mere animals—to gape in awe, to be brought to tears, before them? Truly did David say, “What is man, that you are mindful of him?”

New Testament Reliability: Compared with the handful of existing copies of seminal ancient works such as Homer’s Iliad, the New Testament’s provenance is far better attested. There are thousands of NT manuscripts in existence, some made within mere decades of the events they report. Scholar F. F. Bruce said, “The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.”

Scripture: Unlike other religious texts, the Bible gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly of its heroes: Abraham, Jacob, David, and Peter among them. Further, Scripture’s message rings true. It has been said that human depravity is the only religious doctrine empirically verified on a daily basis. And the Bible’s gracious solution to our predicament, Christ’s atoning death on the Cross, uniquely emphasizes what God has done, not what we must do, for our rescue.

Jesus: Christ’s life and teachings are unparalleled in world history, as any Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim—or atheist—worth his salt will admit. Napoleon reportedly said, “I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity.”

The trilemma: C.S. Lewis, commenting on Christ’s claim to divinity, said: “You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Resurrection: After the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty. His formerly despondent disciples then turned the Roman world upside down with the message that Christ had conquered death. And they were willing to die for it. The best explanation, according to N. T. Wright and other scholars, is that Christ rose from the dead.

Progress: Despite some horrific incidents perpetrated in the name of Christ, freedom and prosperity generally have followed Christianity. Sociologist Rodney Stark said, “The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.”

Testimonies: While many Christians have behaved badly, Christ specializes in turning sinners around. What other faith can boast of a Chuck Colson? A John Newton? A William Wilberforce? Then there are the innumerable soup kitchens, universities, hospitals, and orphanages founded to the glory of Christ. While many atheists are moral, how many such institutions has the atheistic ideal—uncoerced by Communism, which is itself a perversion of Christianity—produced?

My experience: Finally, as a forgiven sinner, I testify to an imperfect yet growing sense of God’s peace, presence, and provision since receiving Christ more than a quarter-century ago. Despite occasional setbacks, my faith has deepened and strengthened, whatever life brings.

And that includes the angry rantings of atheists.

Book review by John Jay Hughes

As they look down from the heights of our culture, writers at the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and much of the professoriat on both sides of the Atlantic contemplate the sorry role of the Catholic Church in 20th-century history. In July 1933 the Vatican, always more comfortable with dictatorships than with democracies, helped Hitler consolidate his power by throwing overboard the Catholic Center party, which had defended the rights of German Catholics since 1870, in order to conclude a Concordat with Nazi Germany, thus becoming the first international power to recognize Germany’s new Führer. In Italy the Church welcomed Mussolini’s racial laws. The Church’s centuries old anti-Judaism furnished justification and encouragement for Nazi anti-Semitism, which culminated in the Holocaust. Welcoming Hitler’s crusade against Soviet Communism, the wartime pope, Pius XII, remained silent in the face of Hitler’s Final Solution, thus meriting the title of “Hitler’s Pope,” the man co-responsible for the death of six million Jews.

In Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to al Qaeda, his masterly survey of religion and politics from the end of World War I to the present day, British historian Michael Burleigh shows what serious students of twentieth century history have long known: every one of these widely believed assertions is false. Though a Catholic himself, Burleigh does not spare criticism of Church leaders when he finds it merited. The previous holder of prestigious academic appointments on both sides of the Atlantic, aversion to what he calls “the left university” has led him to prefer free-lance authorship.

The Vatican and Hitler

Far from being a “pact with Hitler,” the Concordat was a defensive treaty guaranteeing Church rights. Why was it needed? Emergency legislation enacted shortly after Hitler took office on January 31, 1933, enabled him to suspend the Weimar constitution, thus rendering its guarantee of religious freedom null and void. During the three months of negotiations which preceded treaty’s signing, the Holy See tried repeatedly to find a way for the Center party to continue its activities. It abandoned the attempt only when the party dissolved itself on July 4, leaving the Nazis the sole party still in existence in Germany.

Nor was the Vatican the first power to sign a treaty with Hitler. That honor belongs to the Soviet Union, which concluded trade agreements with the Reich in May 1933. Church leaders were realistic about the Concordat’s supposed protections. “With the Concordat we are hanged,” Munich’s Cardinal Faulhaber remarked. “Without it we are hanged, drawn, and quartered.” In Rome the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII), told the British minister to the Holy See that he had signed the treaty with a pistol at his head. Hitler was sure to violate the agreement, Pacelli said - adding with gallows humor that he would probably not violate all its provisions at once. Between September 1933 and March 1937 Pacelli signed over seventy notes and memoranda protesting such violations, culminating in his draft of the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, called by Burleigh “an immensely astute critique of everything that Nazism stood for.”

Burleigh calls Hitler “a lazy, dilettantish autodidact rather than a systematic thinker … a cavernous blank behind the impassioned postures … rabidly anticlerical, rarely missing an opportunity to make snide and vulgar comments, in private, about the pope, priests and pastors. His sallies into theological matters were unimpressive, the musings of a saloon-bar bore.” The Führer’s Fascist ally, Mussolini, by contrast, was “a virile and omnipresent figure: fencing, riding, skiing, or wrestling submissive lions and tigers in the zoo. … Like Hitler, Mussolini was also a ‘workerist’, although in common with the Führer he had successfully avoided honest toil most of his life.”

The Church’s response to Mussolini’s racial laws was unequivocal. “It is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism,” the aged Pius XI told a group of Belgian pilgrims in September 1938. “Spiritually we are Jews.” Both the pope and Pacelli materially aided Jews affected by the Italian racial laws, finding some of them jobs in the Vatican, helping others to emigrate abroad.

Uninformed Criticisms

Critics who claim that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was the logical consequence of the Church’s anti-Judaism seem unaware that this argument was regularly advanced by the Nazis and Fascists themselves, only to be as often refuted by Church spokesmen.

Six months after Pacelli’s election as Pope Pius XII, he issued his first encyclical, Summi pontificatus. The New York Times called it “a powerful attack on totalitarianism and the evils which he considers it has brought upon the world. … It is Germany that stands condemned above any country or any movement in this encyclical - the Germany of Hitler and National Socialism.” The head of Hitler’s Gestapo agreed: “The encyclical is directed exclusively against Germany, both in ideology and in regard to the German-Polish dispute” - a reference to the pope’s explicitly expressed sympathy for Catholic Poland, then at the beginning of its long agony at the hands of Nazis and Soviets alike. If Vatican Radio soon ceased broadcasting accounts of these atrocities, this was in response to pleas from bishops in Poland, who reported that the broadcasts had provoked reprisals which worsened the suffering of their people.

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By John Clayton

Of all the lessons that I present concerning the existence of God and of all the material that I try to make available to people to learn about God’s existence, the present lesson, “Why I Left Atheism,” is the lesson in the series that I frankly do not like to present. I guess none of us like to look back in our lives to a time when we made poor judgments and foolish mistakes–when we took rather really idiotic positions–and admit this, especially to people we are not well acquainted with. I present this lesson, however, because it is my fervent hope and prayer that perhaps by exposing my mistakes and by pointing out the things that were a part of my early life, some who might be following the same paths (to a greater or lesser extent) might not make those same mistakes. Someone once said that nobody is totally useless; if we cannot do anything else, we can at least serve as a bad example. That is sort of my situation. I am hoping that by presenting these materials and telling you something about my early life, some of you may be able to recognize the lack of wisdom and perhaps the poor judgment that is involved in rejecting God and living a life that demonstrates such a rejection.

Most of the time when I speak to religious groups or to people who believe in God, someone will ask me somewhat incredulously, “Well, were you really an atheist? Did you really not believe in God?” I want to start by asserting that the answer to that question is a very affirmative “Yes.” At one time in my life, I was totally and firmly convicted that there was no such thing as God and that anybody who believed in God was silly, superstitious, ignorant, and had simply not looked at the evidence. I felt that believers in God were uneducated and were just following traditions, superstitions, and things that really made no sense to a person who was aware of what was going on around them. Of course, that kind of life and conviction led me to do and say things and to be something that was really very unpleasant. I lived a life that was immoral and which reflected a lack of belief in God. I lived in a way that was very self-centered and that satisfied my own pleasures and desires regardless of whether or not other people were hurt in the process of what I was doing. In the process of doing this, I did a lot of things that affected me through my whole life. It is because of this that I present these materials hoping that perhaps some of you will not make the mistakes and suffer the consequences that I have suffered. I cannot clearly remember all of the events that took place or the proper sequence of events because I was not taking notes. I never expected that I would be trying to recall these things, much less tell someone else about them. Still, I can recall in a general way much of what happened, and I am very sure of the concepts. The concepts are what will be most useful to you.

I guess the reason that I was an atheist is the same reason that many of you are believers in God if you are. That was because I had been indoctrinated in that particular persuasion. My background, the variables that were exposed to me as a child, led me very strongly in that direction. Just as many of you believe in God because your parents believe in God and because they instilled this belief in you, I also questioned, challenged, and rejected God because that was the kind of indoctrination that I received as a child. I can remember my mother saying to me as a child something like, “Do you really believe there is an old man, floating around in the sky, blasting things into existence here upon the earth? Do you really believe that crummy looking structure on the corner could be something beautiful called ‘the church?’ Do you really believe that there is a hole in the ground that I am going to be thrown into and burned eternally if I do not live just the way some preacher thinks I ought to?” Of course, I could not conceive of these things as a child and did not know enough to realize they are not what the Bible teaches. Consequently, I came to believe that anybody who believed in God was just silly, superstitious, ignorant, and unlearned. You may wonder how it would be possible for a person coming out of this type of background and kind of learning situation to become a strong believer in God today, devoting his life to trying to help people to understand that there is a God in heaven and that the Bible is His literal and verbally inspired Word. It is the purpose of this booklet to try and point out at least some of the things that entered into my acceptance of God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible as God’s Word.

My high school career was one in which I grew quite rapidly academically. I enjoyed science and decided that I wanted to be a scientist of some kind. I entered Indiana University majoring in the field of physical science. It was actually at this point that one of the great changes that occurred in my life took place. I enrolled in a course in astronomy at the feet of one of the great astronomers of our day. In that particular course, we were studying the problem of origins–the creation of matter from nothing. As we discussed this particular subject, we went into all those theories that are in that particular material. We talked about the big-bang theory, the quasistatal theory, the continuous generation theory, the planetessimal theory, etc.

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