CXVII: BR: "Why God Won't Go Away" by Alister McGrath

The topic of New Atheism has been addressed previously on this blog, perhaps somewhat indirectly during a time when I did some research into the claims that were being made. In that post, reference was made to Alister McGrath and some of his works written arguing against the claims of New Atheism.

McGrath has come out with another book on the subject: Why God Won't Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty? In it, McGrath attempts to summarize the situation, condition, and challenges with New Atheism as of 2010: the four main protagonists for New Atheism, the existence of a virulent web community advancing New Atheist views, the works written by the four protagonists, the issues as they relate to religion/belief, reason, and science, along with some concluding comments regarding the waning influence of New Atheism.

For someone who is relatively new to the challenges posed by New Atheism, this book is a great primer to understand the situation. If one has already read works by McGrath on the subject, they will find a nugget or two of different arguments perhaps not seen in other works, but on the whole, McGrath has written much more comprehensive, poignant, and explanatory books on this subject. The Dawkins Delusion? and The Twilight of Atheism dig deeper than Why God Won't Go Away; nevertheless, for a basic introduction to the issue, Why God Won't Go Away is a good start.

On the greater philosophical level, I fear that this book is a continuation of the trend for Christian authors to keep beating a dead horse and keep controversies alive in the name of apologetics. This is not to criticize the substance of the work nor the need to aggressively defend the faith in the face of the assaults of New Atheism; yet, as with The da Vinci Code, so with New Atheism. Much of society has moved on from this particular permutation of atheism; New Atheism never really said anything new; one cannot help but conclude that the mission of New Atheism has all but ended in utter failure. If that's the case, why keep providing them a fresh audience with these books? Perhaps it would be better to shift away from New Atheism per se and focus on the challenges of atheism in general.

McGrath does well in restraining himself when it comes to his descriptions of New Atheism and its sheer hypocrisy. He provides the evidence that New Atheism, on the whole, represents a group of people who believe in their own superiority, refusing to listen to any other perspectives, utterly convinced of their own rightness, thoroughly unwilling to subject their own views to the critical scrutiny to which they subject other views, hyper-simplistic in viewpoint to the point of being laughable, and being quite caustic, condemnatory, and dare it be said, hateful, of that which they have denounced as condemnatory and hateful. The conclusion is inescapable: many New Atheists share the same basic view of the world as the fundamentalists which they despise, merely with a different set of assumptions and ideas. Little wonder, then, that New Atheism has been seen for what it really is, and has been soundly rejected by most on either side of the God issue.

One will be hard-pressed to find a theist with a more sympathetic view toward atheists and some of their arguments than McGrath; he is willing to concede that some arguments made by atheists pose challenges, but wants the same hearing for theistic arguments. He does well at showing in the book how existence is more complicated than the triumphalist Enlightenment view can allow. The book has great value for the analysis of reason, science, and belief within it alone.

New Atheism seems to be on an irreversible decline; good riddance. But believers do need to come to terms with the effect they might have on people who have heard various tidbits in news reports. However directly or indirectly, many have absorbed a lot of the ideas promoted by New Atheists, and a lot of our cultural assumptions about existence, religion, and science are shared by the New Atheists in their tirades. We must learn how to expose the fallacies of the worldview constructs that undergird the triumphalist scientism that is so rampant and which passes as intellectually serious in much of society. We need to expose just how complicated knowledge, proof, reason, belief, and existence are, and point people back to a view of God and themselves that is rationally respectable yet without need to always defer to reason. To these ends McGrath has done us many favors in pointing the way forward; let us press on in our service to our Creator!

ELDV

*--book received as part of early review program